Remembering Bink
A poem in an old issue of The New Yorker evokes an author’s reminiscence of a beloved English professor who represented a world of sophistication, rigor, and effervescence.
When I retrieve the December 20, 1969 issue of The New Yorker from the magazine’s web archive, I encounter a poem by Bink Noll, my first English professor and senior thesis advisor. His words invoke his voice; his voice invokes his presence; and his presence invokes his world.
Credit: Beloit College Archives I met Louis “Bink” Noll in English 190, the introductory course for majors at Beloit College, where you learned to read both more carefully and more broadly, where you were expected to look up not only words but allusions, where the introduction of Marxist and Jungian ways of reading reminded us that we weren’t in high school anymore.
This was no Dead Poets Society, and Bink Noll was no Robin Williams melodramatically reciting Keats and Shelley while acolytes carried him on their shoulders. Bink was too WASPish for that — he kept the cable knit and oxford cloth industries in business. He was not given to speeches or systems. He was more conversational than bombastic, more arch than evangelical. Bink was a good teacher not because he felt he had to save his students from the philistines, but because he was a grown-up who cared about teaching and literature.
My experience of Bink’s poem in The New Yorker is inseparable from my experience of the man — and they are both inseparable from the reasons I came to Beloit. The December 20, 1969 issue was both deeply typical and sharply particular.
An illustration of a Christmas tree fills the cover of that issue: it’s cheery but muddy, the energetic 1960s morphing into the entropic 1970s.
Open the magazine and you immediately notice the ads. A couple beams at each other on a verdant lawn behind a Pontiac so regal it has a prow. Cartier earrings alight like butterflies, cologne splashes from an upturned bottle, bracelets cascade from a slender arm, cinnamon-topped eggnog brims a silver cup.
The ads are interspersed among the Goings On About Town, which lists more things to do in New York in a week than I could do in a year. Under the heading Discotheques And Such, Aux Puces on 70th E. 55th St. is described as “small and sybaritic.” They play records. Some of the records — such as Beverly Sills singing “Revolution” — are “oblique” and the patrons are “glossy and contented.” Dubuffet and Gorky exhibit in the galleries.
The New Yorker was an education. The ads taught me that the good life was stylish; the Goings On About Town taught me that life brimmed with art and nightlife and music and movies; the Talk of the Town, that the good life means navigating complexity. Interspersed through it all were the cartoons, which convinced me that intelligence could be surprisingly whimsical. For me, the purpose of college was to get closer to this world.
I discovered Bink’s poem “Angel,” an island in the midst of a John Updike story. It begins, with the history of his family’s Christmas tree:
The dusk we bring the spruce in is like last-year’s or the year-before’s, many darkening backward to one obscure when a man first hammered the first stand on …
But then it quickly enters a present-day Christmas, a family striving to find meaning in its rituals, “to help holiness show itself.” It isn’t easy. The angel on the tree “ sings not nor plays her harp nor preens. ” Then, sandwiched between everyone’s wistful insistence that this is “the prettiest yet,” is a painful truth:
Not one innocent is left whose wish has come true tonight.
Finally, the poem ends in a sweet, unsparing melancholy:
… we’re afraid to admit what has happened to what we once were …
the shelter the house was, when first we moved, is not what the house is now.
I think I would love the poem even if I hadn’t known its author. It deftly conveys the sadness of Christmas when the idyllic celebrations of childhood have evaporated. The most present character is the absent wife and mother.
“Angel” was particularly resonant for me because our family had its own sad Christmas story. After my father passed when I was in eighth grade, Christmas changed. We moved from the large old house in the country to a smaller house in town, and the holidays contracted with my brother’s departure for Vietnam. Christmas had once been boisterous with the seven of us gathered together. Now, the celebration was just me, my mom, and sometimes an adult sister or a cousin who lived in town. The celebrations became more cursory; the presents less abundant; the aftermath heavier.
But resonance and relevance only take a poem so far. Art must also be artful. Because I had Bink Noll as a teacher, I can appreciate his craft as a poet. The poem’s art lies in its dry treatment of subject matter that’s usually candied with sentimentality. The language is simple. In the first line, the average word length is fewer than three letters. For the first fourteen lines, there are no words a child could not grasp. But the language is also impersonal. I imagine that “A man hammered” refers to Bink. His children are “they.” The poem aches with negatives: “sings not, nor plays her harp, nor preens,” “we don’t even hear,” “not one innocent.” The syntax is complicated; it’s built with clauses not words: “the dusk we bring the spruce in” is the subject of the first sentence; “then on which branch which ornament hangs best” is the object of another. Enjambment further fragments the poem, isolating “afraid,” creating the pivoting, astringent effect of a violin solo. All this builds to the last line, which repeats all these strategies — the simple diction, the complex syntax, the abundant negations, and the discomfiting enjambments:
… each one’s eyes show That the shelter the house was, when first we moved, is not what the house is now.
By refusing nostalgia, the poem reveals loss.
Credit: Beloit College Archives
I knew Bink the teacher before I knew Bink the poet. He was a member of an exceptional English department. Besides being solid scholars, they were devoted teachers in the distinctive way that is possible at a small liberal arts college. They taught their subjects, but they also embodied a sensibility. John Rosenwald was hippie-ish in his lifestyle but rigorous in his analysis. Yes, he had an unfortunate penchant for crawling across floors with Robert Bly, but he also made clear “The Wasteland” for me and, twenty years later, when I asked him to read my submission to an MFA program, he generously provided the most incisive commentary on my stories (they lacked “narrative momentum”). Tom McBride — sharp-tongued, quick-minded, compact, and rumpled — spoke like a Shakespeare character, in muttered asides and sonorous soliloquies. Denny Moore could have played a detective in the mid-century “entertainments” he wrote. He loved the American Literature he taught as much for its American qualities — its optimism, its practicality, its jauntiness — as for its specifically literary ones. Marion and David Stocking had scholarly areas of focus — Marion received the Keats-Shelley Distinguished Scholar Award — but their defining passion was the Beloit Poetry Journal , which they detached from the college in the 1950s so they could publish what they wanted. When I submitted a too clever, dryly scholarly, unfocussed explication of a text — a footnote passing itself off as an essay — for Marion’s 20th Century British Literature class, she wrote across the top of the paper: “This isn’t a game. D+.” She spoke for the whole department.
Bink wasn’t my most influential teacher. Tom McBride, who transformed Strunk and White’s Elements of Style into a kind of martial art, affects my sentences far more profoundly. Though Tom had a greater influence on my prose, Bink had a greater effect on my life.
Long before I knew that he published in The New Yorker (the book version of “Angel” wouldn’t appear until I was four years out of college), Bink embodied The New Yorker . He wore his hair 1950s neat. He was fit. He favored the aforementioned cable sweaters layered over oxford shirts, and looked like a Connecticut stockbroker. At the end of the semester, he invited his students to his Victorian house at 805 Church Street for Princeton milk punch.
Bink gave his children the greatest graduation gift ever. He told the older ones they had to wait, and when the youngest finished college, he presented them all with tickets for a cruise of the Greek Islands, accompanied by Oxbridge classics professors. When I heard this, it expanded my sense of how I might live my life.
We met in his office about my poems, which were awful, and about my fiction, which was worse. I loved his office. His schedule, posted on the door, blocked out the middle of the day for “regimen.” A framed print of a Chicago Institute of Art exhibit loomed behind him, as we sat at his desk. The impression was of a life conscious and curated.
It felt like Bink represented a world, complete and stable and connected, but I eventually realized he was very alone. When I first met him, I hadn’t arrived at the adult understanding that there are few true insiders and even fewer people who think of themselves as insiders. The New Yorker was as much a refuge and a fantasy for Bink as it was for me. He was an Easterner. Raised in affluent New Jersey, he followed his degree from Princeton with a masters from Johns Hopkins and taught for a while at Dartmouth. The journal entries I found in the Beloit College archives reveal an earnest young man who took the bus with his friends to Manhattan to experience classical music concerts and restaurant meals. In Beloit, he was an exile. The struggling town on the Illinois-Wisconsin border circa 1979 must have felt a world away from his East Coast haunts.
When I first met Bink, his sexuality was unclear, distorted by my cluelessness, clouded with assumptions, a clash of signifiers. He was a father of three who spoke with fussy effeminacy. Sometime during my time at Beloit, his male partner would quietly move in with him.
Credit: Beloit College Archives In this muted prairie town, Bink painted his Victorian home vivid oranges and yellows which led his friend Tom McBride to say, “You could make a case that it’s not a travesty.” With decades of hindsight, I think it could also be viewed as a discreet coming out by a man who made very precise, very anxious calculations about how gay he could afford to be. How many male couples lived in the small-town Midwest in 1980?
He was also a man of the 1950s at a college that was nostalgic for the 1960s. In an issue of The Round Table of that era, a sophomore declared that sitting stoned in the kitchen of an off-campus house, listening to “Our House” by Crosby Stills Nash and Young on a Sunday night was how he wanted to spend eternity. That quotable sophomore embodied a sensibility which distrusted polish, irony, understatement, and smartness. In other words, it was a sensibility that distrusted just about everything about Bink. It didn’t allow for the way those qualities can pressurize emotion, as they do in “Angel.”
Bink was beloved by the faculty, and although he was at odds with the prevailing undergraduate culture, I don’t think I was the only student who valued what he brought to the campus and the classroom. Bink’s life suggested that the promise I saw in The New Yorker — the promise of sophistication and rigor, clarity and effervescence — could infuse my own life. And that changed my life.
“Angel” by Bink Noll
Credit: Courtesy of Between the Covers Rare Books, Inc., Gloucester City, New Jersey.
The poem’s text
ANGEL
The dusk we bring the spruce in is like
last year’s or the year-before’s, many
darkening backward to one obscure
when a man hammered the first stand on
and tilted the tree up this stairwell
so its top showed on the second floor
and secured it like this, with packthread.
While we help holiness show herself,
carols play, albums once more dug out
for this hour—or hour and a half:
the strings of lights first, then on which branch
which ornament hangs best, then tinsel
until the angel, the same creature
substantiates on time but sings not
nor plays her harp nor preens.
The carols sing.
While they sing words we don’t even hear,
we repeat “This is the prettiest yet.”
Can we recall? Not one innocent
is left whose wish has come true tonight.
We sit in a circle on the floor
as before. Our grown-up faces glow
in the pink redundant radiance
spilling generously from our guest
who we’ve coaxed back because we’re afraid
to admit what has happened to what
we once were or at least to say so
or quite let go,
though each one’s eyes show
that the shelter the house was, when first
we moved, is not what the house is now.
Bink Noll
Christmas, 1969
805 Church St. Beloit, Wisc., 53511
