‘Stop: You have to listen to this’

Enoch Brater was destined for a quiet life, a thoughtful life, swimming in the deep still seas of British and American literature. He was working on his dissertation at Harvard in the late 1960s, exploring the impact of World War I on the British novel, a topic that charmed him with its languid intersection of his interests in literature and history.

Then one of his mentors, a leader at the Loeb Drama Center where he worked in his off hours as a managing director, asked him to lecture on the difficult Irish playwright Samuel Beckett for a course the professor was teaching.

It was the beginning of a seismic shift that would upend Brater’s life, a love affair that would lead to a 50-year career at the University of Michigan, to long discussions about current events with famed playwright Arthur Miller in his Burns Park living room, to teaching in every country in Europe and a smattering of others besides.

“I know you very well. This is going to work for you,” the drama professor told him then.

“Oh. OK,” Brater remembers replying.

‘I just went totally  nuts’

It was a challenge, meant to be a learning experience, leading a modern drama class of 200 students through some of the more challenging material in theatre. Beckett was a well-known Irish novelist, playwright, and poet, and his work was not always the most accessible.

Brater tackled it diligently at first, then enthusiastically, and finally rhapsodically, plunging into and expounding upon the material to anyone that would listen, and far past the point where some stopped — listening, that is. He read everything: the fiction, the novels, the criticism.

“I just went totally nuts,” Brater says. “I became a total convert. My friends started avoiding me because, walking across Harvard Square, I’d say, ‘Stop. You have to listen to this.’ And I would read them a passage and they’d say ‘Ohhh-kay,’ and they’d cross the street and be very polite.”

He went to his dissertation directors and told them that he was dropping his former project to work on Beckett. (They responded, “Oh my god, Enoch, we had so many hopes for you!” he jokes.) But once he made that decision, he never looked back. He had always loved drama and the theater as an avocation, a hobby, staffing summer productions of Shakespeare in New York’s Central Park. He had never thought about combining his love of performance with his literary side… until suddenly he could think of nothing else.

Setting the stage

Brater was enthralled by the concept of plays as literature meant to be performed. He resonated with Beckett’s savvy understanding of just how little you could put on stage to set a complete scene in the minds of the audience. In “Waiting for Godot,” for example, the enormous concept of waiting for something that never comes — “liberation, enlightenment, self, you name it, what are you waiting for?” Brater asks — rests neatly upon nothing more than a tree, a rock, and a country road on stage.

That started his “adventure of being the responder to Beckett’s later works,” he says, which he wrote about at a time when very few people did. Sometimes inscrutable, sometimes nonsensical, always challenging, Beckett was a force in modern literature, and Brater was his translator, bringing the angular Irish angel to earth in courses, papers, and books. He sought to help mere mortals understand the enormity of Beckett’s impact.

“To this day, he is the foremost scholar of Samuel Beckett,” Professor Deborah R. Geis of DePauw University, one of his former graduate students, says simply. Her words are backed up by Brater’s colleagues around the country and around the world.

“Enoch’s reputation is large in New York, in London, in Paris,” wrote Nicolas Delbanco, Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at U-M, in remarks he gave at a recent celebration of Brater’s career. “All over the world, it seems, his work is influential, and I hope you know how much he matters.”

But Brater isn’t just a scholar, says Geis. She describes him as kind and loyal, wickedly funny and deeply irreverent, and a great mimic. Delbanco says Brater invited him to the celebration by saying, “You’re the only one who knows me from way back when. All the others are dead.”

The perfect place

Way back when, Brater joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. He accepted an invitation three years later to come teach at U-M after nominating a student for graduate study here. He had always wanted to teach, even as a child, and was delighted to discover that he adored it — and that he was good at it. Michigan was the perfect place for that, he says.

(Taking that job had a huge impact on local politics: His wife Liz Brater, who moved with him, would go on to become Ann Arbor’s first female mayor in 1991, later serving in the Michigan House of Representatives and Senate.)

As a spokesman for modern drama in the English department, Brater was part of the designated entourage whenever playwright Arthur Miller came to campus. Much like that first encounter with Beckett, what started as an academic duty swiftly led to a deeper relationship and study.

Miller, a Michigan alum, couldn’t have been more different than Beckett. His works, including “Death of a Salesman,” were written “from the sidewalk,” where everyone could understand them, Brater says. Miller’s demeanor was unpretentious, his approach clear and transparent and based on current events. But the enormous impact on literature and drama were the same as Beckett, even if the language was different.

Miller time

Over the years, Brater and Miller spent long hours in Brater’s Burns Park living room, settled into comfy chairs by an upright piano, chatting over drinks or snacks or dinner, surrounded by haphazard stacks of books and copies of the New Yorker.

“Miller is a very uncomplicated person, and he used to escape from all that brouhaha,” Brater says. “He’d come over to my house and we’d just talk. Of course, we talked about theatre and his work. He was very devoted to Michigan.

“He said, ‘I never wrote a play that somebody sitting on a train next to me wouldn’t be able to understand,’ and that was so remarkable, that sort of immediacy of theatre. Unlike Beckett, Miller doesn’t need an Enoch Brater to explain the play to an audience. Everyone gets it.”

Brater spent 50 years at Michigan explaining playwrights to almost 10,000 undergraduates, graduate students, and adults in his classes here and abroad, from his popular Shakespeare courses (“Sometimes I would teach a course just on Hamlet for the whole semester — that sounds crazy, but it always fills up”) to leading the University’s programs abroad in Florence and London for four and eight years, respectively.

He started a book series on theatre at the University of Michigan Press from a variety of sought-after authors, which won the first-ever Excellence in Editing Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Former executive editor LeAnn Fields says that even after he stepped down as editor, the series continued to run strong, attracting the field’s top scholars and winning prizes.

“He was an ideal series editor,” Fields says. “He was not only a well-respected scholar with an international following and editor of the top journal in his field, but was also savvy about academic publishing trends here and abroad.”

‘Everyone wanted to be here’

No matter where he went to teach and for how long, Brater always came home.

“I liked Michigan immediately, from the day I came to this campus,” he says. “Everyone wanted to be here. You know what I mean? The faculty, the students, everybody thought this was a great place. It was a very positive attitude. It was, I thought, compared to the schools I had gone to on the East Coast, very unpretentious.

“I remember being shown the library here. I said, ‘This is the best library I’ve seen since I was at Harvard.’ The librarian said, ‘Young man’ — because I was quite young then — ‘we think it’s better than Harvard.'”

He laughs. “I think that’s true about Michigan. It really is a place where people don’t spend a lot of time worrying about, ‘Why aren’t I elsewhere?’ You could be elsewhere, but why would you?”

That’s why, now that he’s retiring at age 80, he has no plans to change what he does.

“As Beckett says, we go on,” Brater says. “One of the nice things about being a college professor in the humanities is that your life doesn’t change all that much when you retire. You just continue reading and writing and enjoying the things that you’ve always enjoyed.”

He pauses and smiles, a wicked glint in his eye. “And you don’t have to go to any committee meetings.”

 

(Lead image: Enoch Brater interviews Arthur Miller via video in 2000. Brater is the Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Dramatic Literature, professor emeritus of English language and literature, and professor emeritus of theatre. Image credit: Martin Vloet, courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.)