Harvard Diary/ That Red Wheelbarrow

...In fact, Coles drives a BMW, but the mimic's plaintive tone, overwrought and tortured locution, and discursive remarks that combined the routine with the disastrous, were all ridiculously apt...

...And on the other hand: [Flannery] O'Connor knew that the poor, the uneducated, can also be thoroughly impure, as wretched spiritually as the rest of us who are far luckier...

...Insistently, intelligently, he disturbs middle-class complacency, but he offers no alternative, leaving the morally serious reader merely discouraged...

...This life, in Coles's vision, is rather dismal: On our way to another planet or layer of the unconscious or new social structure, we of this century don't worry about the dread every man is heir to, nor do we consider envy, passion, and hate things that will always plague man, however lovingly and scientifically he is reared, and in whatever social, political, or economic system...

...A few years ago, before starting a lecture on the "Literature of Social Reflection" (a course for Harvard undergraduates that dwells on suffering and sacrifice in life and literature), Robert Coles was preempted by a prankster from the Harvard Lampoon...

...What he is, is a conservative by temperament, with a vague sense of obligation to liberalism...

...The frequent references to Augustine are not casual after all...

...Throughout, Coles emphasizes the predicament of a Christian in a secular community, with inevitable political implications...

...These articles might have been compiled more selectively, to less redundant effect...

...They can follow the example of their professor's contrition, as he expounds on his dilemmas and failings as a physician, a teacher, and a Christian...

...Necessarily, said Plato, the Fates can never be thwarted, and they cannot be thwarted today, even by a million computers and consulting rooms...

...This book is largely a jeremiad about "the modern, agnostic, liberal sensibility" (known in more polemical parlance as "secular humanism"), as codified in the social sciences—especially psychology...

...Yet the class did not laugh...

...Irrespective of admiration and affection, it is natural that Coles, who can sermonize broadly on the slightest pretext, devotes so much space to Williams, whose minimalist verse lends itself to the most profuse elaboration...

...the bestselling series has stretched to five volumes, including Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers and Eskimos, Chicanos, Indians...

...Coles does not perform literary psychoanalysis, though we might expect him to...

...On the other hand, he is frankly anti-Communist and suspects that "Christian socialism" is more socialist than Christian...

...in this book he treats the practice only skeptically or derisively: by its "reductionism" it fails to comprehend human integrity, demeaning the patient and deceiving the doctor...

...The room filled with applause...

...Except for practitioners of self-help quackery, Coles could be the best-known psychiatrist in America...

...And he puts no faith in liberalism as a remedy for the evils of capitalism, or as a bulwark against totalitarianism...

...Coles espouses intellectual humility, but he has deemed it worthwhile to reprint for posterity seemingly every word of literary commentary he has published...

...Here he would seem to be squarely in the liberal camp, but he is following an older tradition: his humility is on the authority of the Gospels...

...For example, although his primary affiliation is with Harvard Medical School, he has undertaken the commendable and quixotic mission to teach Bleak House and The Great Gatsby at Harvard's law and business schools, respectively...

...They include the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the philosopher Sister Edith Stein, who were killed by the Nazis...

...While he tries several times to evoke the impression of Jesus "as He walked Galilee," and to contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation, Coles does not appreciate what Chesterton sensed: that "there was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth...

...In Coles's own words: "The preacher is flawed in precisely the respect he denounces during his sermons, and the doctor is ailing even as he tries to heal others...

...His monologue recounted a fanciful highway pile-up, ostensibly witnessed by the professor on the way to work in a Volvo...

...The ailing Dr...

...The professor walked in, obviously bewildered, and the Phool ended his bit...

...Necessarily, our lot is assigned...

...Certain words, phrases, anecdotes, and quotations recur so often that they obscure what is often astute moral reasoning...

...The Phool (an initiate into the Lampoon) walked to the front of the class and performed an uncanny imitation...

...He vehemently disavows the practice...

...Throughout the book, as though anticipating this objection, he intones against "narcissism" (perhaps 100 times in 352 pages) and, almost as often, the very "scrupulosity" with which he dwells on it...

...To be sure, Coles also celebrates those who lived their biblical three-score and ten, more or less, such as Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr...

...students who are mesmerized by the talk of psychological "stages" or "phases" and "behavioral patterns" and "complexes...

...Yet the most inspiring stories are of those who made the supreme sacrifice, or who at least died before their time...

...A socioeconomic fact become an existential one...

...Did Christ promise every poor person admission to heaven...

...Harvard Diary is a collection of columns that originally appeared under that title in the New Oxford Review, a monthly published by Roman Catholic laymen (Coles is an Episcopalian...

...In total, Coles has written more than two dozen volumes on psychiatry, social problems, literature, and religion...

...Coles, of course, has no hope of martyrdom...

...who have suffered meaningfully in service to others, or to a higher cause, or to both...

...and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth...

...He decries the arrogance and selfishness of his "ilk," a recurring word by which he means, variously, "the intelligentsia," psychiatrists, "well-educated and successful Anglos," or simply the affluent...

...we have to contend with our flaws, live with them, and all too often be destroyed by them...

...Several times he invokes Freud's admonition to alienists to "lay down [their] arms" on the artist's terrain...

...in the senior citizens magazine, 50 Plus...

...More than twenty years ago, with a study of black and white children in the South during the civil rights movement, he began Children of Crisis...

...The rapturous style in which he memorializes the fallen is reminiscent of Catholic devotion to the cultus of a martyred saint...

...He laments the vicissitudes of a market economy no less than the "spiritual poverty" that afflicts the most prosperous capitalists...

...41...

...In this Pulitzer Prize-winning series, which constitutes his major scholarly contribution, he combines techniques of ethnography, oral history, and psychoanalysis in long but readable first-person accounts, illustrated with diagnostic crayon drawings by the children...

...Coles fulminates on the distortions and abuses of that discipline as a "faith": The result is everywhere apparent: parents who don't dare bring up their children, from infancy on, without recourse to one expert's book, then another's...

...These are not remarkable opinions, except at Harvard...

...As Bruce Bawer put it recently in the New Criterion, "[Williams] makes it THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 easy for critics to look more important than the poems they're writing about...

...at least he curses his own luck, continually...

...But his own prose, free of jargon except between ironical quotation marks, does not justify departures from the language of his discipline...

...At his worst, he commits labored, homiletic diction: "How ought one live this particular life we happen to have, and what does it mean, actually—if anything...

...A favorite of Coles is the mystic Simone Weil, a refugee in England during World War II, who hastened her own death from tuberculosis by choosing to eat only as much as her compatriots in occupied France...

...Indeed, Coles monopolizes this book with more than his share of "Augustinian self-scrutiny," a quality that he praises in Williams, Weil, O'Connor, George Eliot, and George Orwell...

...Coles appreciates the subtlety of Dickens's social vision: that the well-off are themselves victimized and corrupted in their oppressive relationship with the oppressed...

...He is cursed by luck...

...Instead of a distinguished practition- er of this ineffectual profession, Coles would rather be a novelist or a poet...

...It is not hard to think of him, who is disillusioned with his privileged circumstances and who eulogizes his heroes with such vicarious fervor, as a Walter Mitty of moralists, lapsing into fantasies of self-sacrifice and grand suffering...

...He elicits a sense of guilt from his students and teaches them to assuage it confessionally...

...After a moment's silence a woman rose and proclaimed: "We love you, Dr...

...As the basis for his reflections on moral, social, and political matters, Coles prefers fiction and poetry to the cut-and-dried social sciences, because literature "does not shun or try to conceal this life's paradoxes, inconsistencies and contradictions...

...Not that Coles defends psychoanalysis under any circumstances at all...

...Though tempered by tolerance and erudition, it is THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 mostly pessimism—which Chesterton called Luther's corruption of Augustine—that infuses these books...

...John's College in Annapolis, Maryland...

...He calls himself "a social conservative, a political liberal, an economic populist or egalitarian...

...He gives in to verbosity and vagueness...

...women should be free to raise their own children, not forced to seek respectability in careers...

...the last one so far is Privileged Ones, about the children of affluence...

...He employed the professor's pacing and a characteristic mannerism, tugging at his sweater...

...Most troubling is the virtual absence of humor...

...This book's title is a reference to Williams's famous poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" ("So much depends...

...On the so-called social issues he is less ambivalent: abortion is "an affront to the Lord...

...And as he envies the poor their spiritual advantages promised in the Sermon on the Mount, he must also envy the punishing respect that victims of conscience enjoy...

...he urged the younger man to study medicine, and corresponded with him until the older man's death...

...Williams was something of a mentor to Coles...

...The painfully earnest tone is never relieved by the "mocking sense of humor with respect to itself" that Coles misses in scholarly life...

...These are Coles's heroes, more or less saints...

...for homosexuals to identify themselves culturally and politically by their sexuality is "abhorrent...

...poverty...

...That Red Wheelbarrow is a collection of his book reviews and longer literary essays from the pages of publications as diverse as the New England Journal of Medicine and the American Poetry Review...

...His emotional range is between anxiety and resignation, with a few oscillations toward despair or ecstasy...

...He points out that, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee spared the impoverished tenant farmers an examination of their racism, and portrayed them as sinless...

...Necessarily, says [Cormac] McCarthy, the dark is out there, waiting for each of us...

...In the moral wasteland Coles surveys, individuals stand out who have acted in fidelity to their principles, and in defiance of blatant oppression or insidious conventions...

...In an age that lacks a moral authority, Coles serves as a professional conscience of the professional class...

...In the Coles literary pantheon, William Carlos Williams is the most revered...

...grown-up people who constantly talk of an "identity crisis" or a "mid-life crisis...

...elderly men and women who worry about "the emotional aspects of old age," and those attending them at home or in the hospital who aim at becoming versed in steering the "dying" through their "stages" or "phases" .. . The worst influence of this "secular idolatry" is that it distracts well-meaning clergy from spiritual duties, in order to cater to the temporal needs of their flocks...

...The articles concentrate on religion and moral philosophy, through a variety of topics: exemplary lives (Dorothy Day, Edith Stein), current controversies (abortion, pornography, school prayer), and eternal questions (God's grace, wealth vs...

...40 HARVARD DIARY: REFLECTIONS ON THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR Robert Coles/Crossroad Publishing/$16.95 THAT RED WHEELBARROW: SELECTED LITERARY ESSAYS Robert Coles/University of Iowa Press/$24.95 Francis X. Rocca his recent cover story--i`Grandparents: Can They Love Too Much...

...He resents the constraints of the psychoanalytic vocabulary, which cannot convey ambiguity and irony...

...And though he is nothing like the advice columnists and radio shrinks, who make casual diagnoses and prescriptions, Coles has written for their same vast audience: for instance, Francis X. Rocca is a graduate student at St...

...At his best, Coles shrewdly assesses the honesty and fairness of his favorite writers...

...Coles's agonizing never reaches a conclusion...

...These authors are the guests of a solicitous host, who nevertheless repeatedly interrupts them, and steers the conversation inevitably to himself...