Dziuk

My mom told me several weeks after I wrote this essay that Claude Dziuk had died. Google failed me but I eventually found an article stating that he died in December. It makes me feel worse about the introductory paragraphs of this essay but still I find I have said all I had to say.

For ever and for ever farewell, Cassius!
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile.
If not, why then this parting was well made.

Minnesota Public Radio plays all the time. It is the simulation of an adult conversation that holds back the madness of spending all day every day with a baby for company. Don't get me wrong - he's good company. The best. But the conversation is... lacking.

Lately there have been a lot of sponsored plugs ("this programming is brought to you by...") for the last performance to be put on at the Guthrie Theater's original location. It is Hamlet, my favorite play and (as they endlessly repeat) the first play ever performed at the Guthrie. Every time I hear it I think about the man who introduced me to that play, Claude Dziuk.

I can't say it without sounding completely callous, and probably shouldn't even try. I couldn't tell you if Dziuk is alive or dead at this point. I know he would be in his late seventies. I was told a number of years ago that he had Alzheimer's, a cruel fate for a man who lived by and for the life of the mind, and the thought of him robbed of that mind scares me enough that I don't even want to think about where and how Claude Dziuk really is right now. I guess that's probably pretty typical. What looks like callousness is really just cowardice and I bet not many of us would rush to make a correction if the latter gets mistaken for the former by the passing observer. What do I care, nobody reads this and that's sort of the point, but nevertheless. Just to think about it really gets me down. Dziuk was unmarried and childless. If he is in a nursing home with one or two marbles left rolling around who knows who sees him if anyone. Should I feel good about the intent to laud him with a few nostalgic paragraphs when I have no intention of seeking out the man himself, and that purely out of fear, fear of confronting the awful reality of mortality and its merciless antecedents? I should not and I do not.

And then again I do not feel that bad. Of the man himself if there is life left there is little of it by any measure, and it is what it is for him and there isn't anything I can do about it. Dziuk was an influential teacher in my late high school existence which means he knew me a little for nine months, at a time that was certainly a sort of gestation for me as a person. He certainly would not know me now. And did I ever really know him? I visited him a few times after I graduated and we had perfectly cordial conversations. It seems like he had a good decade of retirement before his health really began to decline and while he deserved more (I think he was one of those people who deserve to live to be a thousand) I doubt the average man can hope to expect more. Our lives are brief. We are but a passing shadow.

That stinks of justification but there's no use trying to say anymore about that aspect of this. All I really wanted to do was remember Claude Dziuk for a little while.

Dziuk was a definite personality at my high school. I went to a good public school, populated in my years by a solid teaching staff that included a number of really standout educators. Dziuk was a student favorite and the kind of guy prematurely nostalgic alumni would reminisce about. He had a lot of personality and charisma, he told good stories, and had (to my small town boy's eyes) credentials of a cosmopolitan and traveled man that stood out in an insular and provincial town. He never married, as I said, and lived his life in a small house that he owned within the city proper of an agricultural town of around 6,000. Other than the stories he told about his past and his travels, I couldn't tell you much about his life. I think about this now, I didn't then. When you are a kid you take grownups on face value, you don't think of them having a secret life, a personal life, the same way you do. Now I am old enough to wonder at the man behind the teacher persona. I wonder how he was viewed in the faculty ecology, if eyes were rolled at the bombast and theater in his manner, if his bachelor status got discussed in the town, if there was in fact something to talk about. None of that matters to me, but it must have to him, and maybe now nobody knows what it was for him, truly nobody but God. The same waits for every single one of us, it's just a matter of time.

Dziuk was the Senior English teacher, though he styled his class more as an introduction to the Humanities, and in the end, while he got a great deal of solid teaching, most particularly in literature and composition, done in the classroom, what it really was was his platform to proselytize his gospel of humanistic literature and art, of travel, and of something I don't know a simple term for. Of taking the human experience seriously, as viewing one's own life as something singular and significant and a part of a great and storied tradition. Kids read and discussed a number of books (including the intermittently controversial Catcher in the Rye), studied and read aloud large chunks of a number of plays, heavy on Shakespeare. Endured a short section on the Holocaust, his thesis on evil, and far enough out of the character of a high school English curriculum that I wonder at it now. A section on the Renaissance, including a sort of crash introduction to art history and a slide tour of Florence. Whatever else might be said of the curriculum, thinking back I'm still impressed by how much he packed into a year. On top of this he managed to arrange field trips to theaters, concert halls and museums for some direct experience of art out there in the world.

In between Dziuk told stories of his own life. Particularly about his many travels, primarily to Europe, and earlier experiences when he took his first or one of his first teaching jobs, in the Middle East. It's been a long time but I believe it was in Lebanon. We kids encouraged the stories, partly because they were genuinely interesting and partly because it beat working. Dziuk, I think, genuinely enjoyed spinning yarns, peppered with liberal and unapologetic hyperbole and tall tales. I suspect he used stories to appease restless students between bouts of learning. And there was an unquestionable moral instruction intended, something that could only be described as humanism. As I write this it seems to me to read on paper as a caricature of some conservative's PC nightmare, but he really wasn't like that at all. Dziuk was of an older school than that, with at least as much in common with Harold Bloom as with Noam Chomsky.

My senior year was Dziuk's final year before he retired from teaching. I'd heard about him from my brother and sister, five and six years older than me, and I'd been looking forward to having him as a teacher and felt lucky to have gotten into his last class just under the wire. And Dziuk pulled out the stops for his last year: it seemed the school could hardly say no to him and he took students out to dinner theater at the Chanhassen, a hijinxy and overstaged adaptation of Candide at the selfsame Guthrie that kicked off this reverie, to see art at the Institute and the Walker, to hear the symphony at the Ordway. He made a believer out of me, I read literature on my own for the first time, Dostoyevsky and Huxley, Dickens and Whitman and Hardy. The experience permanently raised my standards and I could never after stomach the mass-produced genre garbage I'd been consuming indiscriminately and at a shocking pace (two or three fat sci fi or fantasy paperbacks a week) for the past half decade.

I haven't yet managed to be successful, frugal or inventive enough to travel the world much, though Dziuk certainly made me feel like it was essential, and it certainly owes something significant to him that I still want to, somehow, someday. For me it was the start of something I've carried since. I do not think of myself as a humanist, but its essence is humanism, maybe nothing more than seeing that we are part of a tradition that transcends the usual categories, nations and race and eras and sectarian religion.

We could use more of this these days, I think.

Dziuk seems to me now a creature of another age, something pre-postmodern. Would that be modern? It sure doesn't feel to me like the humanities have done very well at the hands of the age that was born in his lifetime, as he presented his Shakespeare and his classic novels of English Literature, his European Renaissance, his program of horizon-broadening European travel. Even to a backwards and anachronistic partisan like me it sounds old-fashioned now, and I wonder what if anything has replaced it out there in education land.

Dziuk barely registers on the internet. Yet I have to believe he has a legacy in the minds of a great many more former students than me. I am living a very different life than I ever imagined when Dziuk put a bug for art and travel in my ear at eighteen, home with the baby, the opposite of a world traveler. Even so his influence still lives in my life every day. This is the nearest thing to immortality anyone gets in this world.