The following reminiscences were intended to be a supplement to Eleanor Dickey’s scholarly biography of Mabel to appear this spring along with a collection of her new and previously published Thucydidean studies (Thucydidean Narrative & Discourse, Michigan Classical Press). Ultimately, we decided that their personal tone ill suited the scholarly essays but that they were too good to consign to oblivion. We are grateful to their authors for permission to situate them on Mabel’s memorial blog.
Eleanor Dickey
Rick Hamilton
Gwen Davis (fiction writer)
Providing reminiscences about Mabel Lang is hard to do with any restraint or moderation, as she made such a phenomenal difference in my life.
I arrived at Bryn Mawr at sixteen, already intimidated by those who knew their way around academe. Because I saw Miss Lang as truly formidable, I elected not to study Greek literature, one of the options offered would-be English majors. I regretted it often, though I thought it had been the sensible choice, because of my concept of who she was.
Some years after my graduation, then president Pat McPherson invited me to spend a weekend as Alumna-in-residence, so I got to lunch with the faculty, including Dr. Nahm, a philosophy professor, who had not read any of my published novels, but said he understood I wrote ‘soft porn.’ That evening, President Pat gave a dinner party for me, at which Harris Wofford, a former president, told me never to apologize for the sexuality in my novels, asking if I had ever read Plato’s Symposium. Shortly after that Mr. Wofford got into a debate with Mabel Lang, “Was Socrates guilty of Civil Disobedience?” I called my husband in California at 3 A.M. in the morning, weeping with joy, saying: “Can you imagine a conversation like that at a dinner party in Beverly Hills?”
When I returned to California, I read Plato’s Symposium, and had a notion for a play—what the women were doing while all those heavyweight Greek men were drinking and thinking about Eros. Pat said “Tell Mabel.” “I’d like to write a play about what the women were doing next door,” I said. “Upstairs,” corrected Mabel.
Shortly after that, sadly, my young husband died, and to restore myself, I went back to Bryn Mawr to write the comedy, under Mabel’s aegis. She gave me on-the-job training in ancient Athens. “How do I learn about the a-GOR-a?“I asked. “A-gor-A,” Mabel corrected. “Go to the stacks and look under DF287.” The next time we met, she sent me to B385. “Scholarship,” she said, “is knowing where to look.”
During the next several, remarkable weeks, with her encouragement and patient guidance, I wrote the play, with occasional songs. At one point, she said to me, “When future generations of scholars study this work…” a single sentence that salved and expanded a battered writer’s soul. Throughout my career I had based my happiness on acceptance here and now. It had never occurred to me that my work might survive and mean something later on. It was a kind of academic epiphany.
When the play was all done, I took Mabel a little basket of flowers in her Dickensian office, piled to the ceiling with books, to thank her. “But I should be giving something to you,” she absolutely trilled, “I’ve never done anything creative before.” And with that she took the basket and actually danced around the room. It was one of the great moments of my life.
She is more than a teacher. She is a force for joy of the mind. You can’t judge a book by its cover, especially when it’s in Greek.