No Saltless Pumpkin

As the late Dean Gauss of Princeton stands revealed in a posthumous The Papers of Christian Gauss, edited by his daughter Katherine Gauss Jackson and Hiram Haydn (Random House, $6.00), the man is a little hard to pin down. In literature he was something of an eclectic (though he disliked the cynicism of books like Ben Hecht’s Erik Dorn); in philosophy he described himself facetiously as an Integralist; in politics he would have called himself a democrat (small d), an internationalist and a liberal, words which cover a multitude of confusions. But in spite of a certain lack of intellectual contour and definition Dean Gauss had something that is as necessary as it is rare in an educator. That “something” was the ability to spot the possibility of excellence in a student, plus the strong desire to nurse the excellence along without putting it into leading strings that kill the sense of self-reliant experiment.

Dean Gauss’ particular quality comes out most strongly in the long section of his papers given over to “Correspondence with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson.” With Fitzgerald he seems to have had a sort of semi-indulgent relationship; he deplored some of the more obstreperous manifestations of Fitzgerald’s energy, but was afraid that if “Scott” were to become a soberly responsible citizen his work would lose the “charm and excitement” that derived from “a childish (no adverse implication) sense for the wonder of the world.” He hoped that Fitzgerald could some day develop an ironic view of the “Long Island nincompoops” who disported in such books as The Great Gatsby, but he would never have urged the cultivation of such a view to the extent of interfering with Fitzgerald’s “sense for the significant detail, the rhythmically concordant phrase and sensuous connotations of imagery.”

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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As the late Dean Gauss of Princeton stands revealed in a posthumous The Papers of Christian Gauss, edited by his daughter Katherine Gauss Jackson and Hiram Haydn (Random House, $6.00), the man is a little hard to pin down. In literature he was something of an eclectic (though he disliked the cynicism of books like Ben Hecht’s Erik Dorn); in philosophy he described himself facetiously as an Integralist; in politics he would have called himself a democrat (small d), an internationalist and a liberal, words which cover a multitude of confusions. But in spite of a certain lack of intellectual contour and definition Dean Gauss had something that is as necessary as it is rare in an educator. That “something” was the ability to spot the possibility of excellence in a student, plus the strong desire to nurse the excellence along without putting it into leading strings that kill the sense of self-reliant experiment.

Dean Gauss’ particular quality comes out most strongly in the long section of his papers given over to “Correspondence with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson.” With Fitzgerald he seems to have had a sort of semi-indulgent relationship; he deplored some of the more obstreperous manifestations of Fitzgerald’s energy, but was afraid that if “Scott” were to become a soberly responsible citizen his work would lose the “charm and excitement” that derived from “a childish (no adverse implication) sense for the wonder of the world.” He hoped that Fitzgerald could some day develop an ironic view of the “Long Island nincompoops” who disported in such books as The Great Gatsby, but he would never have urged the cultivation of such a view to the extent of interfering with Fitzgerald’s “sense for the significant detail, the rhythmically concordant phrase and sensuous connotations of imagery.”