A Lion of Lang and Lit

The Never-Flagging Passion of Professor Peter Sourian

The Bardian
Quarterly Alumni/ae Magazine of Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York)
Spring 2009
pp. 18-19

By Mikhail Horowitz

Years ago, a new member of Bard’s faculty was introduced to Peter
Sourian. Upon being told what Sourian taught, the young man was taken
aback: `You don’t look like an English teacher!’

Indeed. There’s not even the faintest whiff of the academic about
Sourian, who has taught literature and writing at the College with
undiminished vigor for what seems like a geological epoch. A big,
craggy, bearlike man, he looks more like a former pugilist (which he
is not, contrary to rumor) than a sage who is able to discourse on the
novels of George Sand, or the films of Eric Rohmer, or the causes and
effects of the French Revolution ` and sometimes all in the same
sentence. By his own admission, he tends to `talk too much, envelop
people, and rant ` but for some reason I manage not to do that in the
classroom.’ And his long list of literary achievements
notwithstanding, the classroom is Sourian’s true arena ` the place
where he has inspired, infuriated, intellectually contended with, and
made an indelible impression on more than four decades of Bardians.

`As a teacher he could be very sympathetic and laid back, but he would
always call you on your weaknesses,’ says Chelsea Leigh Doyle ’05. `If
he thought a paper of mine was not up to the standards he expected
from me, he would let me know and give me a chance to try again. He
was always right, too!’

That last remark would no doubt rankle Sourian. `I tell you, I’m not
always right,’ he says, pointing his finger at an imaginary
student. `I warn you ` what I tell you in class, bury it under a tree,
the way hunters do in the spring, and then dig it up in the winter.’
The implication being that if it stinks, get rid of it, but if it
doesn’t, use it.

A visit to Sourian’s home on New York’s Upper East Side flannel shirt
rolled up at the elbows, his large hands as animated as birds, he held
forth on his long tenure at Bard and the joys and terrors of teaching,
with hearty good humor and an easy, unimpeded flow of literary and
historical allusions. The apartment, where Sourian has lived since
1938 ` and, since the late 1960s, with his wife, Eve, who teaches 19th
century French literature at the City University of New York ` was
renovated many years ago by his father, Zareh, and architect who
painted `when he couldn’t get work.’ His father’s oils ` sensuous
land- and seascapes ` vie for the visitor’s wandering eye with
religious icons and Asian, Greek, and Middle Eastern antiquities, as
well as a noble old Chickering piano that Sourian says he plays on
occasion, `pretending I can’t hear.’

Sourian arrived at Bard in 1965, a year that saw the College swell to
500 students from 320 at the beginning of the decade. `There were more
new faculty that September than the previous entire faculty,’ he
recalls. Today, he retains a fierce loyalty to his remaining
colleagues from that time, among them Luis Garcia-Renart, Robert
Kelly, Terence Dewsnap, Stuart Stritzler-Levine, and Justus Rosenberg.

`When I got here, literature, theater, and the arts were dominant at
Bard. There was a kind of innocence here,’ he says. `It was the only
place I applied to, perhaps because, as one friend told me, `It’s the
only place that would dream of having you.”

Forty-three years later, it’s hard to imagine Bard without him. Over
that span, Sourian has taught courses that cover the literary
waterfront ` the novel, poetry, short fiction, cultural reportage `
all of which echo his own multifarious career as a man of
letters.. Sourian has written six novels (three published; three in
manuscript), plays, short stories, book reviews and critical
commentaries on other media (he was The Nation’s television critic for
five years), and even poetry en français, in alexandrines and
other classical F his literary work, the critic Hrag Vartanian has
noted, `Sourian’s writing reveals a pensive soul that is always
looking for truth. His work is the record of this search for the
genuine and it is filled with quiet moments of surprise that appear
when he finds it in unexpected places. The fact that he has been able
to live a full life in words that chart that journey is a credit to
his intellectual energy and a testament to his curious mind.’

Sourian’s career as a teacher has been an extension of that search for
the genuine, and the passion that fuels that search has never
flagged. If he at times appears to be an overly demanding taskmaster
in the classroom, it is because he cares so much ` about literature,
about intellectual honesty, and about his students doing the very best
work they are capable of. Though some students may be put off by his
candor, the serious ones recognize it as a form of respect, and
appreciate it.

`I found that a lot of writing workshops at Bard were hampered by this
need for everyone to be incredibly polite to everyone else,’ says Adam
Janos ’06. `No one was willing to offer a really harsh critique `
unlike Peter. He can be very un-PC. He’d say something like, `This
story is very contrived ` and what a stinker of a final line! You
really dropped the ball on that.’ I don’t take criticism very well,
but it never really bothered me coming from him, because he was always
ready to lay it on the line.’

For his part, Sourian is well aware that coming down hard on a
fledgling writer’s poem or short story is very different from giving
the same student a bad grade in biology or math.

`In literature, yes, you are talking about his or her baby ` yet if
your criticism is implicitly informed by a passion for the subject,
that’s not being a crank,’ he insists. `I think I’m a pretty tolerant
teacher. And if you’re a tolerant teacher, no amount of harsh
criticism is going to decrease your pedagogical value.’

That `passion for the subject’ has ensured that, whatever else they
may be, Sourian’s classes and seminars are never boring.

`At the first meeting I attended of his Fiction Workshop, he talked
about the `show, don’t tell’ rule,’ remembers Amelia Cass ’05. `He
said that it’s sometimes better to `tell.’ He got up to demonstrate
the action of coming into the room. First he simply walked in and sat
down, exp at in a story such an entrance was probably best told
plainly: `Peter entered the classroom.’ Then he got up and went out
again. We heard him before we saw him, but it didn’t lessen the effect
when he appeared in the doorway crawling on all fours like a
gray-haired, long-legged toddler, somewhat clumsy, but moving
surprisingly fast. When he’d made it back into his chair, he told us
that an action like that ought to be `shown,’ but we didn’t really
need to be told.’

In 2000, some 35 years into his life in Annandale, Sourian was
presented with the Bardian Award, an honor bestowed upon veteran
faculty members by the Bard ` St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae
Association. Sourian’s longtime colleague, professor of English
Benjamin La Farge, concluded his written tribute for that year’s
Commencement program thus: `Peter is incapable of condescending to his
students.¦ [He] is always eager to engage his friends, students,
and colleagues in a never-ending conversation about the questions that
concern them from day to day. To engage in that conversation with him
is to speak with a moralist who never grows tired of trying to think
well, a man for whom thinking well is the only morality.’ Those words
capture the essence of Peter Sourian, both as a teacher and as a man.