Fall in Love

When he was teaching about Sam Johnson, Professor Chauncey Tinker seemed a good deal like the great Samuel himself. He was a crisp and courtly figure, far from the "man of most dreadful appearance" Boswell wrote about, but he spoke in coffee-house prose, and like Johnson, he knew how to command attention. For more than 25 years, Chauncey Brewster Tinker's Yale classroom was one of the two or three most popular on campus.

"I shall be remembered," Chauncey Tinker once remarked with a wave of his hand, "for my students. These are my jewels." Last week, four years after his retirement from teaching, old (72) Professor Tinker knew just how rich in jewels he was. Thirty-seven of them, who had gone on to become professors themselves, had written a book in his honor and handed it to him at a dinner. Appropriately, the book was a collection of their own scholarly essays on Tinker's Century. The title, affectionately lifted from Tink's old course, was The Age of Johnson (Yale University Press; $5).

Boy on the B. & M. Chauncey Tinker got his first glimpse of Johnson's Age as a Yale undergraduate, class of '99. Before that, he had lived the peripatetic life of a minister's son (Maine to Colorado), and his great ambition was to be a conductor on the Boston & Maine railway. After Yale, he taught one year at Bryn Mawr and fell in love with a student--"a very beautiful girl." She married someone else, and Tinker settled into bachelordom.

Two years later, back at New Haven, he began his teaching of 18th Century literature. He found it easy to follow the rule he gave would-be scholars: "You must fall in love with your subject." In time, he came to know as much about Johnson and Boswell as any man alive. His own boots, including the Tinker edition of Boswell's letters, were milestones in 18th Century scholarship, outdated only by the further probings of Chauncey Tinker himself. It was he who, tracing the leads all the way to Ireland in 1925, first confirmed the existence of the great cache of Boswell papers that had been stored for decades at Malahide Castle (TIME, Nov. 29).

Polished Performance. As a writer, Tinker was never as prolific as he wished to be. Blinded in one eye when a boy, he had to guard his sight carefully. Once, when he thought he might lose it entirely, he began memorizing great chunks of poetry to be able to go on teaching. He looked upon teaching as an exacting art, and worked upon each lecture as if it were to be his first. Every lecture was a performance. Settled in a chair by his desk and crooking his neck around to peer through his one good eye, he seemed to be talking freely and offhandedly. It was hard for his students to realize that he had polished and memorized nearly every word the night before. He never gave exactly the same lecture twice.

Though students jammed his courses, he was not an easy master. He railed against the tardy ones, was ruthless in dealing with lazy thinkers and sloppy writers. Yet after classes, students knew they would find friendly counsel in his rooms. There hundreds have gone--from Sinclair Lewis to Yale's President Charles Seymour ("At last a president," sighed Tink when Seymour was named in 1937, "that I can call by his first name").

These days, Tink no longer teaches, but refuses to think of himself as retired. He still keeps his old routine, living in his apartment at Yale's Davenport College, surrounded by his books and Boswelliana. He is oddly chipper on foggy days ("It reminds me of London"), but whatever the weather, he still takes his daily stroll across the campus, stopping to chat with the Davenport gatekeeper, and then going on to Yale's great Sterling Memorial Library where he has been keeper of rare books ever since 1931. One of his objects, already far advanced under Tink's supervision: to give Yale's library the finest collection of Johnson and Boswell books in the world.

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