UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave
Kevin O’Brien
There’s a scene in the novel Catcher in the Rye in which Holden Caulfield is taken in by a teacher who appears to be trying to comfort him and offer him refuge, when in fact this teacher tries to molest him. There are more than a few real life characters like that, men who can only be described (as Caulfield describes them) as phonies.
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This long New Yorker article on a man named Berman who is alleged to have been a sexual abuser and a kind of cult leader is hard to read. It’s hard to read because I had a mentor who, in the 1970’s, was also a kind of cult leader and who was said to have abused a number of girls over the course of his career, and who, like the English teacher described in the New Yorker article, used his charismatic personality and a penchant for mind games to fascinate and manipulate his fawning followers.
But it’s helpful to read things like this for at least one reason.
Some men are simply frauds. Sometimes it’s good to realize that certain authority figures are not the least bit interested in exercising their authority for the good of others, but for their own sordid and sick interests. This can be true with priests and bishops, and it can be true for English teachers and cult leaders. In the same way that some abusive priests don’t give a fig about God except in so far as He can serve as a cover for their behavior, some dilettantes don’t give a fig about art or literature except in so far as it can make them feel superior to others and control them.
Scott Rosenberg, a 1977 graduate who became a co-founder of Salon.com, took Berman’s class and struggled with the contradiction between Berman’s authoritarian approach and his love of art. In an essay for the class, Rosenberg wrote, “I have read a modest amount – not a great deal but enough to be able to judge works for myself. I enter a class in which the teacher tells me my opinion is worth nothing … the teacher himself seems to be deciding who the ‘great’ men are, what the ‘great’ works are, and all other matters of ‘greatness’.”
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