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Harry Slochower taught at Brooklyn College, not at Harvard, not at Texas U. or Georgetown U. or Berkeley or Yale, but at Brooklyn College when it was still housed in scattered buildings all over downtown Brooklyn, when you might arrive in Harry's class soaked to the skin because you'd walked nine blocks in pouring rain from gym class in Joralemon or wherever; listening to him, wet as I was, my brain caught fire, and in no time at all I had steamed dry without even noticing how and when my clothes and my skin had parted company and each gone back to their places.
Who could be bothered about such trivia as physical discomfort or a good chance of pneumonia when one was breathlessly watching Harry Slochower, shock of red hair, blazing blue eyes, energy compact, mostly dangerously contained and restrained while he was giving you your chance, tossing out a question, asking who had noticed such-and-such a detail (in The Magic Mountain, Faust, Hedda Gabler, whichever) and what did you make of it? The nature of the question was always such as to give the student a cue, an idea, a bit of support; he was never interested in what you didn't know, only in seeing what—given his obviously benign and joyous and co-conspirative interest in working out this fascinating jigsaw puzzle with as much as possible of your help—you might come up with; so you were desperately eager to help find the next piece, or at least be seen to be searching for it in the right direction.
In Harry's class, you simply couldn't afford to be stupid because it meant being out of it, out of the fun of it, and to get in the fun you had to do your reading so that when the time came that Harry had given everybody his chance, peppered the room with his leading questions and provocative hints, and gotten his quota of responses that showed all the good will in the world but nobody seemed to have gotten to the