Mark Van Doren at Work                          19

much time in his office, on committees, and in the work of the
University as any one of us. The coming and going of students
and the daily traffic of business kept him occupied, but he never
seemed busy. If he came in with an armload of blue books from
an examination he had just given, he sat down and began reading
them, and I am fairly sure that he did not get up until they were
finished. Even at that sometimes depressing job, however, he
seemed relaxed and genial, as if he were doing a crossword puzzle
or playing a game of solitaire.

He was a great teacher and scholar, yet one sometimes had the
feeling that in that life he found what some people would call
recreation and relaxation to enable him to support the strains and
tensions of the secret life of the writer. Some find restoration and
recreation in mountain climbing or skiing, some try to find it,
usually unsuccessfully, in idleness or dissipation, but A^an Doren
seemed to find it quite as much in teaching and study as in his
forestry or gardening. Whatever he did had to be done well, had
to be done expertly.

We shall learn little from the Autobiography or from the Jour¬
nals as to his struggles or conflicts. He certainly has encountered
as much stupidity or foolishness as anyone does, but he does not
waste time writing about it. His occasional support of unpopular
persons or public issues caused him to be slandered and lied about
in journals of immense circulation, but this too he let pass without
a word.

Usually a man who is so self-contained, so sure of himself, is
likely to be rather thorny and self-righteous, but if a single word
were to be found for Van Doren, it would be the word genial.
He likes to talk and he talks well and wittily, but he causes other
people to talk, too, and talk better sometimes than they had known
they could. One is aware, however, that he has also the life apart,
the life of the artist, of the writer. This is not something to talk
about, it is something to do. In the manuscripts we can at least get
glimpses of how the work is done.