Grendel, Fedora, and a Big Fat Hit: William Alfred is Still 'Just Folks'

The classic image of an English teacher invariably includes his having 'something in the drawer' that he's been reworking for years. 'I know I've got a play in me yet,' the stereotype says, but of course it never comes out.

Just a scant year ago, Professor William Alfred was a normal Harvard English professor, noted primarily among undergraduates for his sonorous Old English recitations, his passionate lecture gesticulations, and his exasperation with the microphone of Lowell Lec. There were some rumblings about a play in-the-works but nobody paid much attention.

Now the play has become Hogan's Goat (try getting tickets on a weekend), Alfred has been lionized by the New York critics, the national magazines are delirious (imagine a professor writing a Hit), and East Side hostesses are fighting to get the new playwright at their dinner parties. Suddenly Harvard's master of Beowulf has taken on a whole new dimension, and what with Hollywood pounding on his Athens Street door, there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. Will success spoil William Alfred. Will he toss away his fedora, his anecdotes, his Wiglaf?

Walking down Athens Street in a grey topcoat, flanked by a worried tutee and an energetic black dog, William Alfred doesn't look like a playwright. The subject is Andrew Marvell. "Read 'The Garden' again," he says to the tutee who scampers off in the direction of Leverett Towers. He walks into his house, patting the dog in the process. "Bye, Sparky," he says closing the door (which, incidentally, he rescued from an old Beacon Hill mansion because it was such a "lovely door"), then winks with his gaminlike eyes and says, "Watch him start barking again." He does. Mrs. Murphy, the housekeeper, is in a tizzy. There's the matter of his schedule book and then she is so pleased that he has given her a signed copy of his book and --.

Professor Alfred must believe that a man's home is his castle. 31 Athens Street is a combination of Classical Greek, Continental Renaissance, American Comfort, and William Alfred. The white walls ("It makes everything much brighter, doesn't it?") are covered with illustrations of Greek figures, portraits of colonial women, a sea-scape, some French impressionists, and the Brooklyn Bridge. On one table are three stacks of the book Hogan's Goat (just out) and on another a copy of Life with its Alfred feature. "Did you see what they did to me?" he asks, chuckling at the magazine. "How about that come-hither look by the church door?" And then William Alfred sits down, lights a meerschaum pipe, and begins to talk.

"It was all Lowell's fault. I was fiddling around with it too long, so he tricked me -- took it to the American Place Theatre and then told me they wanted to produce it. Well I rewrote the thing again in August and then we had a million things to do -- picking the cast and so on, but it was a wonderful experience. We expected four weeks for a run -- now I guess it's played over 150 times." At this he sighs as if in disbelief. "Oh, opening night I just went to bed. I thought if they like it, someone'll call me up, and if not I didn't want to know about it any sooner than I had to."

But Someone Called

Someone called, of course, and the rest is Off-Broadway history. William Alfred clearly enjoys, if somewhat uneasily, his new role, but he looks at the whole affair with the same irony and good-natured humor that mark his opinions on nearly everything else. It is easy to see why the press has taken to Alfred for h is, as his Irish ancestors would say, a "grand guy." His good taste is always tinged with a humorous saltiness that seems to deal pretension a wallop. He is a native Brooklynite who doesn't hesitate to use the work "kid" but who is a recognized scholar in English, a playwright who isn't concerned with finding his own identity because he's too busy writing about those of his characters, a celebrity who laughs at the thought of being one. He is somewhat of a modern-day Mr. Bennet with his mixture of "quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve, and caprice." Nothing escapes his easy wit -- the world, his critics, himself. There is a definite gleam in his eyes when he speaks of his bad reviews. "They were ferocious in Women's Wear Daily. It ended up by saying something like 'the question is why Mr. Alfred chose to produce this play. We don't know, but let us forgive and by all means forget.'"

He can give an uncanny impression of being 'just folks.' When asked about his success, his first answer is, "One very nice effect is that people I hadn't heard from in years suddenly began to write and I love that, you know. I even had a letter from someone I hadn't seen since Manila in '44." On the subject of his traditional hat he says, "When I was kid in New York everyone over 21 wore a hat, unless you were a creep." And when he thinks about the recent movie offers and his agent's maneuverings, the shuddering reaction is, "I never had two nickels to put together and when she calls to say she's turned down $100,000 it packs me in ice."

Showgirls and Chorines

But the naturalness is never naivete. When he says of a successful play, "It's all luck" he says it as one who knows the ins and outs of the New York theatre world, the hard work as well as the element of chance. He admires entertainers tremendously. "My mother liked theatrical people and they were always around the house - not the big names, of course, but they had it in their blood. I remember in particular one family in Flatbush -- one was a showgirl. A showgirl considers herself much above a chorine, you know. There's world of difference."

But if the world of Off-Broadway seems an improbable setting for Al fred, the world of Anglo-Saxon epics would appear even more so. Why Beowulf for a would-be dramatist? "I deliberately chose it to be that way. I wanted to go into a field where I wouldn't be too self-conscious about modern literature. I didn't want to use all my energies explaining dramatic techniques rather than doing them." He switched to Anglo-Saxon thesis work after abandoning an 18th Century project. "I was supposed to edit the papers of an 18th Century Earl who was a friend of Swift and Pope. But they usually consisted of 'I dined with Mr. Pope and Dean Swift last night. I was in my usual good form.' Absolutely nothing about Swift."

Novels and Basketball

His decision to write plays shows the same kind of early uncertainty (even though he now claims he's "hooked on playwriting"). He first wrote poetry because one of his teachers at Brooklyn College "sold his baby grand and started a poetry magazine" but in 1946 did a translation of Agamemnon "which was no good" partly because it was half-translation and half-play. It was after this that he then began to write for the theatre in earnest and has stuck to the form ever since. It was suggested to him once that Hogan's Goat was really a novel but "I know as much about writing novels as about playing basketball." If anything, he feels Hogan was close to movie form and hence his confidence that it will easily be adapted: "I'll just have to take an awful lot of words out."

Despite the recent press build-up, Alfred is characteristically serious about his teaching, which still has top priority. "My teaching is my business and my students' -- not the newspaper. I know less about education than about drama, for heaven's sake. It's really getting he has some definite opinions on the subject. "The first thing is never underestimate the intelligence of the student. I think it's important to try to break down the sense of the course as something done for the sake of the university and make it for the student himself." He says he uses anecdotes to point out the human effect but confesses that sometimes, "I tell them just because I like them." It was at this point in the discussion that he put away his pipe. "One of my students got me to try this pipe -- said it smoked like an angel. Brother, was he lying."

Next year Alfred takes a sabbatical from Harvard and already his calendar is filled with teaching stints the country and with less academic projects such as openings in Dublin and London for Hogan and ("in the