Thank You, Prof. Beatty, for a Lesson in Passion

I went to see “Dead Poets Society” at the La Paloma Theatre in Encinitas.

La Paloma is a “second-run house.” It gets movies only after they’ve played to exhaustion at the shopping center theaters.

That’s fine with me. The delay cleans out the teen-agers and double-daters who make up the contemporary movie market.

The crowd was fortysomething and thereabouts, the North County mortgage set. Kids at home with the sitter, arm around the wife, grabbing a fistful of shoulder pad.

“Dead Poets Society” is a coming-of-age movie, with Robin Williams starring as John Keating, a full-spirited English teacher at a stuffy prep school in New England, circa 1959. Naturally, he’s a threat to the other faculty.

My own John Keating wasn’t like Robin Williams at all. He never jumped on top of a desk or organized soccer practice.

His name was Ernest Beatty, a Southerner who had studied literature at Harvard, an Episcopalian with a divinity degree. He was

tweedy and ironic, and he told a funny and melancholy story about missing a chance to have breakfast with T. S. Eliot after Mass.

He introduced us to Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Conrad. We were 19-year-old dormies devouring the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.”

He told us a secret: All good poetry, at one level or another, is concerned with the physical urge. In another class, a different professor offered a corollary: All good novels, at one level or another, are concerned with the history of the novel.

The choice of genres seemed clear-cut to me. Thank you, Professor Beatty.

I discovered primal rhythms in “Kubla Khan.” Professor Beatty said he wanted to have my paper published. Instead he dropped dead that summer in San Francisco.

A rival faculty member, rather smugly I thought, told me he died of “booze and pills.” After two decades, I checked recently with the medical examiner.

The cause of death was listed as premature coronary arteriosclerosis (he was 34); no alcohol or drugs were found. Apparently the grave provides no relief from academic bitchiness.

I had other good professors. The spring I studied Chaucer, buildings on the Berkeley campus were being burned and gassed.

We moved from classroom to classroom, like clandestine pilgrims, and finally found refuge off campus in a church basement. It takes a special knack to entice undergraduates to wade through a phalanx of National Guardsmen to discuss “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.”

After seeing “Dead Poets Society,” I called Professor Paul Saltman, the noted biochemist at UC San Diego. He’s an award winner both for teaching and scholarship.

Students at USC and UCSD’s Revelle and Muir colleges have honored him as an outstanding professor. At 6-foot-5, he doesn’t hide his light under a bushel.

I asked him: 1. Did you have professors like John Keating? (I wondered if Eng-Lit had a monopoly.) 2. Are there still professors like that? (I wondered if they’ve been trampled in the rush to business and medical schools.) 3. Can professors be taught the art of charisma?

His answers: Hell yes, hell yes, and no, but you can try.

He listed a string of influential teachers, stretching from his elementary school in Los Angeles to his graduate work at Caltech.

“I was saved from the family furniture business by James Bonner, who taught chemistry at Caltech when I was a senior,” Saltman said. “He grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, biochemistry is the greatest thing going and it’s where you belong.’ ”

There are still Bonners on campus, although the research-oriented system does not reward them as it should, Saltman said.

“They have an absolute passion for teaching and an absolute demand for excellence, both in themselves and their students,” he said.

He said that good teaching cannot be taught. But it can be nurtured through example. Good teaching cannot be faked.

“I can only personify what I am and what I do,” Saltman said.

I like that. John Keating might have said it. Ernest Beatty, too.