Visiting Critic

It took a visiting professor to put his finger on a glaring deficiency at Dartmouth.

Michael Meyer (pronounced "Meer"; he's of Polish descent), who came to the College for the fall term as visiting professor of drama, is well known in England as a director, playwright, biographer, novelist, and translator. A roly-poly fellow with white hair and beard, ruddy cheeks, twinkling eyes, he looks like Santa in a brown turtleneck. Although he went to Oxford, taught English literature for three years at the University of Upsala, is fluent in three Scandinavian languages, and is a leading expert on Ibsen and Strindberg, he insists he is not an academic.

His comments on academia as found at Dartmouth College are stringent: "I think the students here are lively and nice, except for a few tiresome women's libbers. I'm afraid I don't suffer fools gladly. Hopkins Center is well equipped and is staffed by efficient people. The Warner Bentley Theater [where Meyer directed a highly successful student production of Strindberg's difficult A Dream Play] is fine to work in. The New England autumn takes one's breath away. But: The extraordinary thing about this institution in the wilderness is that the College has no faculty club, an appalling lack. There is no place to meet one's colleagues and exchange thoughts. When I was teaching at the University of British Columbia, I would meet interesting chaps and women in the faculty dining room.

"Dartmouth is not a good place for strangers. In the apartment above me is a Professor Thomas Hodgkin from Cambridge and his wife Dorothy, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. We have been three extremely lone souls.

"I'm naturally gregarious, but I've felt most desperately cut off at Dartmouth. In my first six weeks I spent exactly four evenings away from Choate House and met only two or three professors outside the Drama Department. I'd expected the College to make some use of me other than teaching drama. After all, I did know Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, Beerbohm, Orwell, and I've worked professionally with Lord Olivier, John Gielgud, Alan Bates, Vanessa Redgrave, Peter Ustinov, Ingmar Bergman.

"For a bachelor, being at Dartmouth is like being Robinson Crusoe without a Girl Friday. At Oxford, even if you're left to yourself, there's so much to do and London is an easy train ride away. In Hanover, even the cinema is hopeless - AnimalHouse for six weeks, things like that. But there has been one advantage - I've learned to cook. After tasting all that Hanover restaurants have to offer, I decided my own cooking couldn't be worse. Now in the evenings I cook fish or grill the odd chop."

This visitor who has been lonesome at Dartmouth is eminent in his profession. His translations of Strindberg's works made him the first Englishman to be awarded the Gold Medal by the Swedish Academy in 1964. His 900-page, threevolume biography of Ibsen won him England's Whitbread Prize for Biography in 1971. Lunatic and Lover, his play about Strindberg, won the Best New Fringe Play prize at the Edinburgh Festival this year. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1971 and a Knight Commander of the Order of the Polar Star in 1977.

Meyer admires our theater; he thinks Americans put on the best musicals in the world. "But," he adds, "American television is awful. The ads come so often and everyone looks as though he is wearing false teeth. I've watched a lot of it, sitting there in Choate House. I enjoyed the baseball and football matches. Can't understand the commentaries, of course, but I can follow the contests. And the news programs are good. I liked listening to that well-known gentleman, Walter what's-his-name, during the election."

As his stay at Dartmouth draws to a close, Meyer is anticipating his return to London, especially to "seeing my 10-yearold daughter Nora and to going to my clubs - the Garrick and the Savile - where I'll converse with friends, and to visiting once again a good restaurant. That will be nice."

Jerry Lathrop, with one of his "collections," a Kenneth Noland oil-on-canvas entitled "Shallows."