Marvin Kalb: The Year I Was Peter the Great: 1956 - Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia

In this way, armed, my brother attended class. The assignment was Dubliners , of course, which Goodman insisted that his students study with the ferocious dedication of Talmudic scholars. “You’ve all read ‘A Little Cloud’?” he asked, referring to one of the short stories in Joyce’s collection. “What is the key word in this story?” Goodman’s question hung over his students. He glanced mischievously from one student to another. “The key word,” Goodman repeated. The silence was churchlike. Then, from the back of the room, came “the word,” uttered by my brother. “Little,” Bernie volunteered. It was an educated guess, but it was also the right answer. Goodman, rather than praising his student, felt the need to belittle him. “Someone must have told you,” he snapped. “You could never have figured it out yourself.”

Like so many other students who looked in the mirror and thought they saw a budding writer, I had heard about Goodman and English 12 from Bernie and others, and I summoned up the courage to enroll in his course. I had good grades, and I was accepted. I could not allow myself to miss this challenge, even though, in truth, I had premonitions of unhappy days.

If Goodman had a dream, unrealized after many years of teaching, it was that one day he would be able to create another James Joyce, another writer who would astonish the literary world. He had had modest success. Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, and Chayefsky were graduates of English 12, but he could not escape the larger truth, noted in a eulogy at his funeral—he had produced far more journalists than “writers,” and he died a disappointed man.

In my time with Goodman, we focused on “A Little Cloud.” It was the story of two old friends, Thomas Chandler and Ignatius Gallaher. Chandler, wrote Joyce, is “slightly under the average stature.” Not surprisingly, he is often referred to as “little Chandler.” Gallaher, on the other hand, “had got on.” Goodman loved this phrase, analyzing each word for hidden meaning, as though, taken together, they conveyed the power and majesty of the First Commandment. Eight years before Gallaher had left Dublin, like so many other young Irishmen, including Joyce, to become a journalist in London. Now he is back for a brief visit.

The two friends meet for a drink at a downtown bar. Gallaher is, in Joyce’s hands, a sophisticated man of the world. Little Chandler, by comparison, lives a cramped life in a small apartment with his wife and infant son, all the while dreaming of the poet he might have become if he were not in fact a humble law clerk living on a tight budget. Gallaher dazzles Chandler with tales of cosmopolitan life in the big cities of Europe.

“Is it true,” Chandler asks, “that Paris is so… immoral, as they say?” Gallaher, a cigar cocked out of a corner of his mouth, smiles. “How dull you must find Dublin,” he replies. Soon thereafter he departs, leaving Chandler to go, not to Paris or London, but back to his “little” apartment, dazzled by his friend’s descriptions of “rich Jewesses” with “dark Oriental eyes.”

I read “A Little Cloud” a dozen times at least, praying I could extract a few nuggets of wisdom from Joyce’s rhythmic linking of words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs—wisdom that I could then apply to my storytelling. Was it possible, I wondered, that Goodman thought I could become a “writer”?

Our responsibility as students in English 12 was to summon inspiration from Joyce’s writing and guidance from Goodman’s teaching, and then demonstrate both qualities in three short stories that we wrote for the course. Our final grades were based totally on Goodman’s judgment of our stories.

I spent more time thinking, planning, worrying, and writing these stories than anything else I did in college. Well, almost anything else in college. I wanted my stories to appeal to this “teacher of teachers.” I wanted to become a writer who would be admired by Goodman, a “living legend,” as he was often described at alumni gatherings.

What was Joyce’s secret? Clearly he wrote about what he knew intimately. He unmasked the souls of Dubliners. He used short sentences. He favored artful verbs. He seemed like a Hemingway in style, a Dostoevsky in his brooding insight. I thought that I was not indulging in a wild fantasy when I imagined that I could write a story that the other students would like and Goodman would at least accept as a stepping-stone toward a career as a writer.

But what was my story?

At the time I was among the relatively few City College students who lived on campus. There was only one dormitory building. It was called Army Hall, and it stood on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 137th Street like an unwanted child from a Charles Dickens novel. Immediately after World War II, Army Hall became home for hundreds of veterans who returned to school as the grateful beneficiaries of the GI Bill of Rights. It was a gloomy place. My roommate, Mark Maged, a happy warrior from Brooklyn, described it as “an overwhelmingly depressing Victorian orphan asylum.”

For me, Army Hall was depressing for a reason having nothing to do with its architecture: it was a breeding ground for mice. Rarely was there a day when I did not see a mouse or even a rat racing through its dark corridors; and if there was a mouse, there was almost certain to be a cat trying to catch it. Often I found reason not to return to Army Hall for meals until late at night, preferring to work in the library or in the offices of the college newspaper.

Eureka! Was there not the beginning of a tale here? I began thinking about “A Little Cloud.” How would Joyce have handled such ingredients: a student living in a dormitory that seemed more like a World War II battleground for mice and cats, wanting to study but afraid to stay in his room, painfully conscious of his guilt seeing his parents sacrifice so he could remain in college. Like any budding writer, I paced the floor, certain in my extreme naiveté that if I paced enough, I’d come up with a plot. It had happened with other writers, and it would happen with me.

And suddenly it happened. A plot popped into my mind. I needed two main characters—me, a shy student with an inordinate fear of mice, and my friend, a psychology student, a basketball star, an Army Hall resident. Over occasionally edible hamburgers, which sold for twelve cents each, the two friends delved into the dark corners of my guilt, my conflicted feelings about home and Army Hall, my parents. I put together a story of fear and emotion, of guilt and conflict, and of an underlying honesty that I felt even Goodman could appreciate. I considered calling it “A Little Obsession”; but then, anticipating criticism that I might have been excessively influenced by Joyce or fearful of Goodman, I decided on a clever alternative—“A Small Obsession.” This was good stuff, I concluded with unjustified confidence. I even imagined that the New Yorker would make a bid for it.

I was dreaming, of course. When my turn came to read my story to the class, I rose with no small measure of trepidation, caused by Goodman’s questioning the worthiness of my title. (“Were you trying to pass yourself off as another Joyce? Come on,” he muttered disparagingly.) I proceeded to read “A Small Obsession.” Goodman had retreated to the rear of the classroom, mumbling to himself. Every now and then he would interrupt and ask a provocative question, but most of the time he just paced. My fellow students listened with what seemed like genuine interest; and when I finished, they applauded. Their questions reflected a genuine curiosity. One asked whether I had deliberately fashioned my story after “A Little Cloud.” Another wanted to know whether my main character’s obsession with mice was really my obsession with mice. A third student rose to say he thought it was the best story he had heard all semester.