I was never close to Fr. Galdon. Even though I took at least five courses under him, he was always a teacher to me, and never a friend or a confidant. The guys in our Ateneo freshman English class, school year 1976-77, used to joke, perhaps not inaccurately, that Fr. Galdon was always closer to the girls in the class. He would give them additional marks if they came to his class wearing skirts instead of the usual slacks. If memory serves me right, the Assumption girls—Candy Monserrat, Liza Lesaca, and Miel Esteban—and Tina Infante were Fr. G’s favorites. The mestizas.
Looking back, though, I realize that I didn’t mind at all, because he was such a good teacher, and that was more than enough.
I was sixteen years old when I first experienced being Joe Galdon’s student. In the summer of 1975, I had the privilege of being one of those chosen to represent Xavier School at the Ateneo Junior Summer Seminar. I remember very little about those two months between junior and senior year in high school, except that every morning, I looked forward to going to the Ateneo just to sit in Fr. Galdon’s English class. I cut classes a lot that summer, but I never missed a single class of Fr. Galdon. Thirty five years later, I still remember two revelatory pieces we took up: Nick Joaquin’s novella, Candido’s Apocalypse, and Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie. As a result of that class, I went on to read all the other plays of Tennessee Williams, and I decided that I would go to the Ateneo for college, if they would have me.
As luck, fate or providence would have it, I did get accepted to the Ateneo. Even more fortunately, by the second semester of freshman year, I was back with Fr. Galdon in two classes: poetry and composition. During the next four years of college, I took at least two (possibly three) other courses with him. Fr. Galdon’s death yesterday made me think of him in a way that I haven’t for a very long time. And when I think of my debt of gratitude to Fr. Galdon, I realize I can express things quite simply. First, he taught me how to read. Second, he taught me how to write. Third, he taught me how to teach.
First, he taught me how to read. I think the title of a book by Robert Alter captures well what Fr. Galdon taught me: The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age. Fr. Galdon was an unabashed humanist in his approach to literature. There were no ideological readings of literary works; no cultural studies-based analyses; no post-colonial deconstructions of the work of dead white males. In class, we read dead white males and dead white females, as well as living writers of different colors, and he always asked us to look for the SHE: the “Significant Human Experience”—not, heaven forbid, a “moral lesson,” but what the work revealed about the grandeur and the misery, the complexity and the ambiguity of the human heart and human existence. And in the process, he showed us how to delight in the peculiar beauties of poem or play, essay or narrative. It was
Fr. Galdon who introduced me to many a great work of literature. In his class on classical criticism (which I confess I remember very little about), he made us read Horace and Longinus, Tasso and Alexander Pope. In the course on classical drama, I read Aeschylus’s Oresteia for the first time and still recall the frisson of excitement I felt when, at the end of the trilogy, the Furies are renamed the Eumenides (“the Kindly Ones”), and the dark, barbarous history of bloodshed and vengeance finally finds resolution in justice, reason and civilization. In that same class, we also read Euripedes’ The Trojan Women and I still recall being overcome by the power of its depiction of the unspeakable atrocities of war: the child Astyanax hurled off the battlements of Troy ; the noble Hecuba, bereft of all she loved—kingdom, husband, children, grandchildren--being dragged off to be the slave of the scoundrel Odysseus. In that freshman poetry class, Fr. Galdon introduced us to Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress, T.S. Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi, Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess, W. H. Auden’s Museé de Beaux Arts, and that glorious Shakespeare sonnet that begins, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” among so many others. This was heady, potent stuff to fill the minds of teen-agers with, teen-agers still so blissfully, stupidly unaware of life, its depths, its impending heartache. As if reading were not enough, he made us memorize. I realize now that most of the poetry that I still know by heart were poems that Fr. Galdon obliged us to memorize: Macbeth’s soliloquy (“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . .”); A.E. Houseman’s “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now” and “With rue my heart is laden”; most amazing of all, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, which speaks to me more powerfully now at 51 than it did when I was 17:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Second, Fr. Galdon taught me how to write—or at least, how to write with a little more clarity, a little more simplicity, a little less pretentiousness. Among the things I learned: Always use simple words, rather than “big” words. Try to use concrete words rather than abstract ones. (I remember he used Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics to My Favorite Things as a writing exercise to stimulate concrete thinking and communication). Don’t be “OA”—which I suppose meant, don’t be pretentious or inauthentic to yourself or to the experience you are trying to communicate. (I recall the mortification of receiving compositions checked by Fr. Galdon and finding a red circle around some offending patch of prose, accompanied by the dread letters: “OA.”) Seek to communicate significant human experience.
Third, Fr. Galdon taught me how to teach. His striking resemblance to Bob Hope was a good start, but along with it, he brought an engaging classroom manner. There were never dull lectures from Fr. G, who was something of a performer, almost larger than life, in the classroom. His classes were always inter-active, dialogical, deeply involving, funny and fun. Yet he made us work hard: a quiz every blessed class, to aid fallen human nature and ensure that we read the works he assigned; regular compositions, at least once a week, I believe. He worked hard too: every quiz, every composition meticulously corrected and promptly returned. And his standards were high. I remember bemoaning why the masterpieces I poured my soul into ended up so often with a lousy, surely undeserved “7” or “8” (out of “10”); the occasional “9” for a composition produced a glow of pride that lasted for days. When, four years out of college, as a Jesuit regent, I taught my first English classes in Xavier University High School, so much of what I had experienced from Joe Galdon as a teacher I sought to bring to my own students. And now, after almost two decades in the classroom as a teacher myself, I still reverence Fr. Galdon as a teacher nonpareil.
When the news came last week that Fr. Galdon was dying, I confess that I was happy for him. I don’t remember exactly when the dementia began. All I know is that this once vibrant, intelligent Jesuit had become unresponsive, inaccessible, zombie-like. I suspect it’s been almost a decade, and it was painful to see. But I was relieved to know that this diminished half-life would soon come to an end. And yesterday, 15 March 2010, it did.
As I said, I never became close to him, even after I became a Jesuit. I read his homilies with profit and admiration, but I never really benefited from his ministrations as a priest. He was always a teacher to me. But, that was more than enough. He taught me—and so many others like me—how to read, how to write, how to teach. He honed our abilities; opened our imaginations; deepened our humanity. For these precious gifts, thank you, Fr. Galdon. May you now enjoy the fullness of life.
