'The Professor': Inspiration to Generations

Editor's note: Sam Speedie '99 composed the following profile of William Alfred, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities Emeritus as a tribute to the legendary playwright and scholar -- known to legions of his students as "the Professor" -- who tutored the author's father as a graduate student nearly 30 years ago, and who has mentored Sam since he came to Harvard in the fall of 1995. The piece is a narrative recapturing events that occurred over many separate visits to Alfred's Cambridge home, merged into a single encounter.

By Sam Speedie '99

Special to the Gazette

My favorite time of the Massachusetts year to stroll down Athens Street is in the glory of fall, when the leaves are crisp and bronze but have not yet quit the trees. The antiquated sidewalk, barely wide enough to allow for the passage of a single pedestrian, seems a nostalgic throwback to some other time, when human frames were a bit more modestly proportioned and the automobiles roaring by were more a novelty than a standard.

And just when I begin to wonder whether I've overshot my mark (though I've been to this address at least a dozen times in the past three years), there stand the wooden plank steps, coated with surprisingly resilient white and gray paint, and the door.

The door is something special; it reinforces my conviction that I am visiting a place more than slightly at odds with the present times. It is composed of heavy, stained oak; a glass doorknob protrudes in the manner that you'd expect of a sitting room in some Victorian novel. And at low center, the dusky-bronze plaque announces but one, solemn-sounding word: "Alfred."

I ring the doorbell, and after a few moments of standing on the porch with my hands shoved deep in my pockets, I hear a gentle rattling from inside. A few seconds later, the door opens wide enough for the Professor's face to appear. It is the sort of face that seems to reflect all the accumulated wisdom of an age: His eyes do not focus on anything in particular, as much as they absorb everything that surrounds him. He is clearly tired, but by no means disillusioned. His eyes do not at first recognize my face, but his ears immediately prick up at the sound of my voice, which has melded into merely one note among the chorus of thousands that have become familiar to him over his half-century at Harvard.

He smiles, a wide, unabashed smile, and motions me to come in, his throaty voice echoing the gesture. I step into the scholarly lair of William Alfred.

It should be said, if no philosopher has yet coined the phrase,

that persistence is the bedrock of greatness. I ponder this as I take a seat across from the Professor, just as my father did some 30 years ago. As usual, Alfred is dressed impeccably in a vest, suit, and perfectly knotted tie, though in his strained Irish lilt he tells me, "It's too cold to go out today." Next to the carved marble fireplace, I notice a stack of books some two feet high, the Professor's personal reading list for the month. The topics range from the role of the saints in forming modern religious symbolism to a biography of James Agee written by Harvard's own Robert Coles.

"Agee did a collaboration with the brilliant photographer

Walker Evans a great many years ago," the Professor says, noticing that my eye has fallen on a volume of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. "It was Evans' idea, you know, to go into those ramshackle houses, to live among the families and develop relationships with the people who would be his subjects. They would stay just long enough that the families would become accustomed to them; then, when there was a difficult or dramatic moment, Evans would take the photograph, and it would be as if the people had no idea that he was actually there. That was his definition of truth."

After we wander into a conversation on the Second World War, the Professor is stirred by some memory that brings him back to Evans.

"Do you know, I was leafing through that collection of Evans' work, and I found a picture he took of the ticket window at the train station in Kingston, Rhode Island. Now I remember that very well, because after I was released from duty in the war, I returned to New York only to discover that my mother had moved to Rhode Island. I had sent a cable from where I was last stationed, in Mississippi, but she'd already left by the time it arrived. After I returned to New York, it took me a few hours to reach her on the telephone. So I took the train there, to Kingston, and waited by the ticket window for my mother to come pick me up. At last she arrived, and those dogs of hers skated ahead of her and tumbled over my feet like waves. I was standing by the very ticket window that Evans photographed."

Vivid snapshots in time, colored with measured portions of eloquent description. That's the William Alfred formula. Those qualities shine through in the metered language of his '50s Off-Broadway hit, Hogan's Goat, an ode to relentless ambition and power politics with an ethnic flavor in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. These conversations in his warm, antique-laden sitting room affect the listener with the same sensation.

Alfred is a man who seems inextricably bound with history, in the minds of his students and admirers. In a rare interview with Harvard Magazine in 1994, actor Tommy Lee Jones '69 -- the Professor's best-known pupil and a rather recalcitrant man -- said: "My best teacher, ever, was William Alfred." Later in the same interview, the Professor himself recounted the memory of watching "Tommy Lee, this strapping young man, standing on my back porch and jingling quarters in his hand till the squirrels came down the trees and crept up towards him."

How is it that this man, so easy in his time-accustomed role as eloquent storyteller and human store of this century's history, is as judicious in knowing when to impart his wisdom as when to sit silently and watch his students find their own answers? This, to me, seems the mark of a great teacher.

Whatever that subtle skill may be, the Professor began honing it very early on in life. His first pen pal, as it happens, was the renowned novelist Gertrude Stein. Alfred, a devoted follower of Stein's, was reading a magazine interview in which she'd forgotten the name of a children's book that had made an impression in her youth. The young Alfred had written to Stein with the book's title. Thus began a correspondence that lasted until Stein's death some 20 years later. After recalling some witticisms she'd tried out on him, the Professor recounts the final letter he received from Stein.

"I knew she was sick -- she said she hadn't been feeling well in her most recent letters -- and there was a period when I didn't hear from her. But then I received the final letter I was to receive from her. I shall never forget how it ended. It said, 'Always, always, always, Gertrude Stein.' Isn't that beautiful?"

The day begins to draw short, and something, it could have been the rattling of a loose windowpane in the frigid wind, induces the Professor to ask me if I want some tea. Again I recall that Harvard Magazine piece, where the interviewer remarked on "the breakfast tea flavored with lemon, served in a flower-encircled china cup," that Alfred had given her. So our conversation moves to the big kitchen next to the Professor's study, at the rear of the house. As he moves around, carefully placing biscuits on a china tray (I defy anyone to find a single human being today other than a Scottish, English, or Irish grandmother who would do such a marvelous thing) and brewing the tea in a blackened iron pot, the Professor engages me in a conversation on Lillian Hellman.

"Do you know her?"

"Little Foxes, right?"

"That's right. Lillian wrote the play, and the famous actress Tallulah Bankhead originated the role of Regina. I first saw it done on the stage in 1940."

"I just finished reading an interview that John Guare conducted with Stockard Channing (Class of '65). Did you know that she's doing the play at Lincoln Center next summer?"

"No, I didn't know that. Susan -- that's her real name, you know -- is a wonderful actress. She was here in the late '60s with Tommy Lee, and with John Lithgow, and my great student, Timothy Mayer. Now he was a wonderful director. Such maturity in his work." This allusion to the renowned "Golden Age" of Harvard theater immediately has me hooked.

"Did they all do shows together?"

"Oh, yes. And one summer, they all stayed here and another boy. . . I forget his name . . . came over from M.I.T. and they did a summer stock season together. Three plays in the Agassiz, one after the other. I wish I could remember his name . . . that boy was a wonderfully intense actor."

"James Woods?"

"That's it. That was a memorable summer." I can't resist asking an obvious question.

"Who do you think was the most talented of all the great actors who were here at that time?" He looks at me cagily. By this time I have a steaming, fragrant cup of tea curled in my hand, and the Professor and I are sitting opposite each other at the oak breakfast table. I am thoroughly engrossed.

"Well, they all had a tremendous complement of talents. John Lithgow is one of the most extraordinary stage actors I've ever seen. Lord, what presence he had on stage! I hear he's doing quite well with television, but how wonderful it would be to have him back in New York. And Susan, with her beauty and spunk, she could stand up to any of them. Have you seen the film of Six Degrees of Separation? She's still so beautiful."

"But Tommy Lee . . . I remember seeing him in a performance of Everyman in the Loeb. Tommy Lee played the character as a revivalist preacher. And at the end, as he was descending into hell, the entire chorus began singing 'Amazing Grace.' Just imagine, this thick-shouldered figure descending slowly through the floor, his head bowed, with that ghostly chorus whispering around him." The Professor looks up with a fond, wistful smile.

"When the lights came on, there wasn't a single dry eye in the theater."

The shadows begin to grow long, as do the pauses in our conversation as the images the Professor had conjured flicker through both our imaginations. Until finally he looks up at me, smiles, and I hasten to say that it really is time for me to go and he says, yes, I'm getting a bit tired, and he leads me slowly to the door with a beautiful shawl drawn around his shoulders, carefully unlocks the double-bolted door and stands aside to allow me to pass.

Standing outside on the steps, the image of my father as a 24-year-old graduate student in 1971, coming to this very place to take tutorial on Beowulf, floods into my consciousness. My father stands on the steps with me, waiting to say his goodbye. Ten thousand men and women of Harvard stand there as well, the faces that were the symbols of this extraordinary man's 50 years of dedication to his work and his students. Professor Alfred's kind and fair Irish face beams gently at me from the darkened hallway, as he begins to close the door.

"Take care of yourself, sir."

"Thank you, son. God bless you."