Albert Spaulding Cook


Albert Spaulding Cook was a noted American literary critic, poet, classical scholar, teacher and translator. He taught Classics, English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Western Reserve, the University at Buffalo and Brown University, as well as at various universities abroad.

Early life

He spent much of his early childhood in Ohio and in Massachusetts. In the late 1930s, his family moved to Albany and in 1940 settled in Utica, New York. His parents separated when he was fourteen, his mother at first remaining in Utica and later moving to New York City, and his father moving to Boston. A brother, two years his junior, pursued a career in radio.

Education

While in high school, Albert Cook ran the school's literary magazine, won an Atlantic Monthly student essay prize, and edited an anthology of Utica area poets. Some of his schoolmates, among them Aaron Rosen and Edwin Dolin, remained lifelong friends and collaborators; another, Carol Rubin, eventually became his wife. A gifted linguist from his earliest years, he learned Latin and taught himself Greek in high school; by the time he reached college, he was proficient also in French and German; he later added Hebrew and Russian. At the peak of his career, he spoke four languages and could read ten.
In 1943 he enrolled in Harvard College, where John Hawkes and Robert Creeley were among his classmates. His formal studies were chiefly in classics, with Arthur Darby Nock, Werner Jaeger and John Finley among his teachers. He interrupted his undergraduate career in 1943-1944 with a brief stint in the armed services, but was discharged for health reasons after six months. In his senior year, he was awarded the Garrison Prize, as well as the Bowdoin Prize in Classical Greek and Latin and the John Osborne Sargent Prize for Latin Translation. He also published various poems under the pen-name of "Charles Hamilton Sorley". At his Harvard graduation in 1946, he delivered the Latin commencement oration.
Rather than proceeding immediately to graduate school, he lived for some months in poverty in the village of Sainte-Rose near Montreal, where he perfected his French and began drafting a series of works, including his first book, The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean, which was to launch his career. He at this time also experienced a religious awakening which led to his conversion from liberal agnosticism to Anglican Christianity.
He returned to Harvard to complete his master's degree, chiefly under the mentorship of the renowned classicist Eric Havelock, and continued as a Harvard Junior Fellow, envisioning an eventual career outside academe as a lone wolf writer of poetry, drama and fiction. A prominent member of a group of young Harvard writers that included L.E. Sissman, Norman Wexler and Richard Wilbur, he founded the little magazine Halcyon, publishing work by himself and his friends alongside contributions from Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, Allen Ginsberg and e.e. cummings. He also began working with Boston's Tributary Theater, which staged his translation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. In a revised form, this version of the play was several times republished in later years. Elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows, Cook continued to work on a variety of projects, and began publishing work in The Partisan Review.
He married Carol S. Rubin on June 19, 1948 and in the following spring took up residence on a Junior Fellow Study Grant in the Saint-Germain neighborhood of Paris. While in France, Cook attended lectures by Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan.
His three sons were born in the years following his return and in 1951 the family moved to New York City. Still determined to become an independent writer and reluctant to commit to an academic career, Cook supported himself and his family by various odd jobs, from encyclopedia salesman to museum accountant, until fiscal rescue arrived once more in the form of a Fulbright grant to France.

Career

Financial necessity finally persuaded him to accept the offer of a teaching position in the University of California at Berkeley. Told early on that his contract would not be renewed, he spent the remaining time of his teaching stint in learning Hebrew, before securing another Fulbright Fellowship, this time to Munich.
When the Fulbright grant ended a year later, he accepted the offer of an appointment at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. By this time, his works of criticism had gained a substantial reputation; also, his first volume of verse was published by the University of Arizona Press, and several of his plays were performed by experimental theaters in Cleveland and elsewhere. Two years later he was appointed Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford.
Meanwhile, in 1963, he assumed the chairmanship of the English Department in the University at Buffalo, a formerly private university which had just then become a flagship research institution of the State University of New York. His mandate was to substantially expand the Buffalo English department and to turn it into a cutting-edge, world-class literary institution. He was given free hand to hire and fire, and to bend or break conventional academic rules at his discretion. He used this freedom not only to hire a hugely distinguished faculty, but also to democratize the department by encouraging the breach of conventional barriers among period specialties, or between creative and scholarly, young and old, tenured and untenured, and even teachers and students. His presence was especially strong during the two sensational Buffalo Festivals of the Arts in 1965 and 1967, transpiring during a politically and ideologically explosive decade. He also instituted a vigorous program of illustrious visitorships, usually during the summer sessions, which in the fifteen years of his tenure featured John Berryman, Jorge Luis Borges, Basil Bunting, Anthony Burgess, Kenneth Burke, Noam Chomsky, Leonard Cohen, Robert Duncan, Richard Ellman, William Empson, Henri Foucault, Robert Graves, John Hawkes, Roman Jakobson, Randall Jarrell, Hugh Kenner, Frank Kermode, Doris Lessing, Dwight Macdonald, Norman Mailer, Howard Nemerov, Frank O’Hara, John Crowe Ransom, Adrienne Rich, Louis Simpson, Tzvetan Todorov, John Updike, Richard Wilbur, Evgeny Yevtushenko and many others. When a more conservative University administration took over he continued to give generous support to academically adventurous initiatives that benefited a younger generation of faculty and graduate students destined for distinguished later careers. His reformation of the Buffalo English Department was viewed by many as the single greatest achievement of his career.
However, by the late 1970s, increasingly sidelined by an unsympathetic new University administration and hampered by tightening fiscal restraints, he accepted the offer of a distinguished professorship at Brown University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. As an Emeritus, he kept energetically publishing and guest-lecturing until his sudden death of a heart attack a decade later. The at Brown University was established in his honor.

Academic positions

Criticism and literary theory