George Stade
George Stade
We all remember each and every one of our truly outstanding teachers. One of mine, George Stade, died last month. Stade taught my two favorite courses at Columbia--modernist fiction and popular fiction. The syllabus for his modernist fiction was literally impossible--a race through the greatest English-language novels from Conrad on--but it's still surprising to me how much of it was retained by my scattered brain, especially his lectures on Conrad and Joyce's "Ulysses." His populist fiction course was almost impossible to get into and the first of its kind--we worked through the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Bram Stoker, and Mickey Spillane. Like most people who appreciate serious fiction, Stade backed into a love for serious literature from an early passion for what is usually considered pulp trash, and for that reason he saw significance in it instead of apologizing for it. Stade was a tall, lanky former football player gifted with eloquence and a natural charisma not based on histrionics or cheap classroom tricks. He also wrote three novels of his own and served as the chair of the English Department for many years. He was Kate Millet's advisor on her PhD thesis that became the feminist manifesto "Sexual Politics," but he became embroiled in sad controversy due to his prickly insensitivity to that movement. George Stade had a rare gift in his passion for literature and his ability to share that with young people, and it's not an exaggeration to say that I got a lifetime of benefit from having been in his classrooms.