In loving memory of a polymathic UVA professor who cared deeply about culture and about his students.
In loving memory of a polymathic UVA professor who cared deeply about culture and about his students.
I t has been well-documented that good college professors are increasingly rare. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, I once called Paul Cantor, one such professor, at about 1 o’clock in the morning with a stylistic question about an essay I was writing for National Review Online. I emailed him beforehand to see if he was awake. He was, of course — watching a boxing bout from the Sixties. “I’ll be up for another hour or so,” he told me. “Boxers don’t fight like this anymore.”
Known to many as perhaps the greatest Shakespeare scholar of our time and a giant of American literary criticism, Paul Cantor passed away at the age of 76 on February 25. Cantor once wrote of the late Harold Bloom that “rarely does a literary critic display the kind of genius and creativity characteristic of the famous authors he analyzes.” He applied it to Bloom, but I apply it to him. Paul Cantor, as I encountered him, was a sage of intellectual creativity who found beauty in the humblest parts of our culture. He saw Lord Macbeth in Vince Gilligan’s Walter White, The End of History in the Worldwide Wrestling Federation, and Alexis de Tocqueville in South Park. Not only did Cantor expertly assess the intellectual creativity of his analyzed authors; he also embodied a creativity all his own, examining culture with epistemophilic zeal until the final days of his life.
Over the course of his long academic career, Cantor amassed a polymathic body of knowledge, the likes of which I have rarely, if ever, encountered in another person. He was born in October 1945, on the heels of the Second World War, and grew up in New York City, taking advantage of its offerings. The era’s burgeoning culture and academia assumed an efficiency much like that of the just-ended war. Coupled with a newfound credence in American freedom, this set the background appropriate for Cantor’s multifaceted academic development. While he would tell you his first love was mathematics, he was invited to attend Ludwig von Mises’s legendary seminars while still in high school and accordingly developed a love of Austrian economics. Throughout his career, this interest would work its way into various aspects of his scholarship, both literary and otherwise. He went on to attend Harvard, where he studied under Harvey Mansfield and learned the ideas of Leo Strauss, adding additional layers to the depth of his knowledge. There, he eschewed the Keynesian-thinking Economics Department and the analytic Philosophy Department. Instead, he chose English. In this study, he was able to draw together all of his interests. He completed his Ph.D. in English, then began his career as a professor at Harvard, eventually coming to UVA in 1977.
In literature, Cantor made his intellectual home. While he is perhaps best known for his scholarship on Shakespeare, he also studied science fiction, with a particular focus on Romanticism and novels of empire. He wrote prolifically, including various books on Shakespeare, economics, and pop culture, and hundreds of essays on everything in between. He also served on the National Council for the Humanities from 1992 to 1999. His pedagogy was unmatched. He taught with a humorous vigor that conveyed to his students the bifurcation of the Shakespearean worldview — that human life is, at its core, both tragic and comic. And he stressed that the experience of literature was really about just seeing this. He harbored a righteous disdain for academic bureaucracy and was a tireless crusader for the restoration of academia to its proper forms.
When I first took his class, I was in my third year of college. I had essentially given up on the idyllic image of the university that is sold to millions of college applicants every year. I had imagined formative instruction rooted in seminar-style conversations, robust relationships with professors, and an altogether more thorough education. But massive lecture halls, aloof professors teaching essentially as a side job to research, and ultimately the Covid-19 shutdown ended up being my reality — for the most part. Paul Cantor was a notable exception. On the syllabus day of Professor Cantor’s Fiction of Empire course, he stayed 45 minutes after class just talking about course material with me. During Covid, he would drive to UVA’s Grounds and meet with me outside of his office, talking not only about his class, but also about boxing, Dutch painting, Plato, personal anecdotes, Better Call Saul, Walmart, Outkast, and really anything else that fell under his vast umbrella of knowledge. When school moved to Zoom, he would regularly stay on the video meeting more than two hours after class, telling stories and talking to students about anything they cared to discuss. As I knew him, Paul Cantor was the enduring image of what academia should be, and in his dedication, he was one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever known.
Conservatives tend to count academia among the primary threats to their efforts, and rightly so. But they also often discount those teachers and academics who fight their battles from inside the walls of universities. Cantor was an excellent image of such a teacher. He adhered strictly to his ideas of truth and reality but made a career of challenging academic paradigms. He was, in that sense, both liberal (in the proper sense) and conservative, and I think that is a part of what made him so great. It’s also important to recognize that to be a conservative in academia is, in fact, both liberal and revolutionary, and requires a degree of erudition and poise that Cantor possessed in spades. His work on Shakespeare alone should be, and is, considered among the greatest examples of scholarship that the past century has produced. But it is only a fraction of what he left behind for the world. To him, Shakespeare was a brilliant lens through which to examine humanity. So it should be to all of us. But Cantor had a uniquely insightful understanding of the Bard, who played an essential role in Cantor’s own courses.
While I can’t claim the ability to rearticulate Cantor’s profound understanding of the human condition, I can briefly discuss it as he presented it to me. He was particularly fascinated by the dichotomy of heroes and villains, and by the struggles and weaknesses of the characters he knew so well; accordingly, they became the instruments of his broader instruction rather than the objects of his impartial examination. In this, he found ostensibly pure heroes, both in literature and in real life, to be utterly risible. He presented this humor without the slightest hint of cynicism, but rather with the knowing smile of caution. In fact, Cantor discussed the downfalls of man in a completely uncynical way; he found that man’s shortcomings were only a better cause for redemption.
He taught this message with an appropriate balance of apprehension and excitement. He was, at the same time, fascinated both with Silicon Valley and Mary Shelley, a most befitting disposition for a teacher of the modern age. With this disposition came his persevering respect both for the ancient books of the Western Canon and for The Simpsons.
Cantor once told me that, of all his writings, he was perhaps most proud of the aforementioned obituary he wrote for Harold Bloom. I didn’t understand it at the time, but now, as I try to capture the man Paul Cantor was, I am beginning to comprehend just how difficult such writing really is. I hope that in such an attempt, I’ve been able to convey even a small bit of his brilliance.
At his core, Paul Cantor was kind and cheerful. He had countless friends, from Allan Bloom and Bill Kristol to his Charlottesville neighbors, and his students revered him. His merciful understanding of literary characters revealed itself in his treatment of his friends and students. I recently dug up an old email from him, in which he reprimanded the students of his Science and Literature course after only three of them submitted paper topics in a timely fashion. It is worth quoting in full:
If you don’t want to work with me on your paper, I guess that’s your prerogative. Leave the whole thing to the last minute and come up with a classic one-draft wonder. “In the immortal words of Clint Eastwood: “Go ahead: make my day!” …I know you can’t imagine that a professor would do something with YOUR benefit in mind; you probably think that my idea of a good time is collecting paper topic paragraphs on a random Thursday. But actually my life is going to bumble along pretty well whether I get paper topics from you or not; it’s your life I’m trying to give a boost to. I’m not going to nag you any further about paper topics, but if you think about the situation, you’ll see that I’m only trying to help you!
His words reflect the experience of teaching thousands of 19-year-olds. More than his mind, his ideas, and his words, it is that charisma and kindness I will miss the most. Just as he bemoaned of those boxers, I respond in kind: Teachers just don’t teach like Paul Cantor anymore.