Marjorie Kaufman: The Pleasure of Reading
You could say Marjorie Kaufman operates in the no-cliché zone. Ask the MHC professor emeritus of English about her love of literature and you get this response: “If you use terms like ‘love of literature,’ I’ll gag on what you are writing.” Press her for the plainspoken translation, and Kaufman explains, “I take pleasure in reading the good stuff.”
Not only does Kaufman derive great joy from reading and discussing books, but she insists that it’s all she really knows how to do. So it isn’t surprising that at age eighty-five, she is the driving force behind three “literary groups for grownups,” as she refers to her peers.
Every other week she meets for two hours with fellow devotees of the printed word at Loomis Village, a retirement community in South Hadley; at Jones Library in Amherst; and the Council on Aging, also in South Hadley. The last is a poetry writing and appreciation group. She has encountered some inspired work from “genuine poets” in the group who have already produced one book of verse and are working on another. “I want to get their poems out in the world,” she says.
Kaufman, a Milwaukee native who did her doctoral dissertation on Henry James at the University of Minnesota, arrived at Mount Holyoke in 1954 not planning to stay very long. She didn’t believe in private colleges or gender-segregated education. “I’m not sure I even believed in New England,” she said. “But Mount Holyoke surprised me; it wasn’t the spoiled, plate-painting student body that I expected.” Most of her career was devoted to teaching American literature.
Kaufman is slightly dyslexic, something she didn’t realize until late in her career. “I’m a very slow reader,” she says. “Therefore, I need writers to work as hard at writing as I do at reading,” Kaufman says. “Henry James rewards my slowness ... he writes for someone who reads all of the words and broods between the period of one sentence and the capital of the next.”
The groups she leads now give her a “reason to be,” Kaufman says. Initially, some participants thought she would lecture, but that’s not her style, she says. “So what I did was to ask if anybody wants to read. I mean it, I’ll read with anybody, anywhere.” —Eric Goldscheider
Photo by Donna Cote
