Scene 1. Here’s Jean Agnew in the New York Times Magazine in 1987, in the opening scene of an article by Mark Silk entitled “The Hot History Department.”

“A GOOD PORTION OF THE PRINCETON HISTORY department usually turns up on Friday mornings in the seminar room deep in the bowels of the Firestone Library. But one Friday last October, the place was jammed and the air was alive with anticipation. Jean-Christophe Agnew, a Yale professor, had ventured into the weekly Shelby Cullom Davis Seminar, a lion’s den in which many a historian has been torn apart, to question the very concept that has made the Princeton department the most interesting, lively and controversial in the country: its use of cultural anthropology to interpret the past.

“Specifically, Agnew was troubled by the influence of Clifford Geertz, reigning anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Study, just down the road, whose writings and teachings have played a central role in Princeton’s ethnographic approach to history. Agnew’s paper, ‘History and Anthropology: Scenes From a Marriage,’ explored how the adoption of Geertz’s focus on the symbolic significance of events limits a historian’s ability to account for conflict and revolutionary change. After a few opening remarks by the author, the seminar’s eminence grise, Lawrence Stone, turned to Geertz.

“What the anthropologist had to say astonished the crowd. In pointing up the difficulties it posed for historical explanation, Agnew had grasped his work extremely well, said Geertz. Suddenly, any attack on Agnew became an attack on Geertz. The ensuing discussion proved to be one of the least satisfactory in the history of the Davis Seminar.

‘It was anticlimactic,’ says Agnew, who was himself disappointed.”

The passage I return to in “Scenes from a Marriage” is not one of Jean’s characteristic silk knots of irony and layered indirection but instead one of its straight-ahead summations: “It may well be true that we all understand our lives in our own terms, but we certainly do not live them as such. The world constantly resists our categories, leaving us to close the gap–instrumentally as well as symbolically–between our terms and its own. A history that would attend only to the visible efforts of mind, however materially envehicled, and not to those resistances, ultimately impoverishes our understanding.” I don’t agree with everything in this essay, which is par for the course when it comes my fondly remembered grad school professors, but I regard this part of it as words to live by.

That’s especially so, for me, because it applies as well to the relationship between English and history. The resistance he’s talking about here isn’t “resistance” in the usual form I encountered in grad school–resistance by adequately theorized goodguys against the forces of late capitalism or some other mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash of an abstraction–but rather the resistance of the world as it is to the meaning you try to impose on it with feats of imagination or interpretation. The passage endures for me–and explains why, for instance, I write so much about boxing–because it maps the gap between how things can be perceived or close-read to mean and how things work, who owns what, who gets to do what to whom.

Scene 2. Here’s Jean Agnew in the New York Times again, though not in the magazine, in 2014. Sam Tanenhaus, writing about American Studies, visits a lecture in Jean’s undergrad Formations of Modern American Culture course:

“‘From Theology to Therapy’ examined how the transition happened in the late 19th century, weaving together the sermons of the Congregationalist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, the Wild West fiction of Owen Wister, the philosophy of the psychologist William James, the ‘mind-cure’ preachments of the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and the caricatures of Thomas Nast.

“In the space of 75 minutes, Dr. Agnew reconstructed a vanished era and showed how seemingly unrelated developments — the transformation of the sermon into the sales pitch, the rise of psychology and of accredited medical professionals, the emergence of feminism — overlapped to create a cultural transformation.”

You can taste Tanenhaus’s satisfaction, his sense of repletion. I remember that feeling. I didn’t TA for FORMAC, but I attended all the lectures, and therein lies a story about some subsequent, more coded appearances by Jean in the New York Times Magazine.

I loved graduate school–six years served up on a platter, in excellent company and with health insurance, to be interested in things and try things out. And, weirdly, it also turned out to be the high school experience I never had: I got better grades, I was in a band, I had a girlfriend, I was on the basketball team and we won the championship.

But I was disgruntled a fair amount of the time in my classes. Much of this came from the usual feeling of being an impostor, of being intimidated by how high-powered the other students seemed, of sensing a mysterious logic that animated others’ thinking. A lot of this was just the anxiety of entering a field. I would write down a list of the words I didn’t understand on the first blank page of each book I read for seminars, then I’d look up those words, and that wouldn’t really help, and I’d get more disgruntled.

The antidote, it turned out, was going to undergrad lecture classes. I attended all the lectures for at least one undergrad class every semester I was here, and it was better if I wasn’t TA’ing the class, so I could just shut up (which I was overjoyed to do) and pay attention to both the content and the craft lessons in how to explain things.

I’ll confess that I was extra-disgruntled in Jean’s consumer culture seminar. Everybody else seemed to be pretty confident that they were having a conversation about X, and I wasn’t clear on how to solve for X. I wrote down more mystery words on the first page of the books for that class than for any other. But I became ecstatically undisgruntled when I started attending FORMAC lectures. Like Sam Tanenhaus, though in a non-Saul Bellow-overrating way, I was taken by the breadth, depth, and virtuosity of argument–150 minutes a week of explaining the hell out of all kinds of things and showing how they fit together, and it gave me serious joy. And, as just about everybody else who has seen those lectures has remarked, their formal elegance was a big part of the pleasure. We all became framing-device aficionados, and later at the Anchor we’d go over them like Deadheads comparing notes: “Remember the time they played Uncle John’s Band and it went into Franklin’s Tower? Remember the one that starts with the picture of the immigrant kid sitting on a barrel and holding a cucumber? And then it turns out the calls are coming from inside the house?”

Eventually I went off and got an academic job and started writing for the New York Times Magazine, doing the part of American Studies that always appealed to me the most–telling stories about people living the consequences of history. I pretty quickly came to understand that the opening scene of a story could do an enormous amount of work. If set up right, it could raise all the main problems and themes of the story, everything that demanded spinning out and analyzing in the scenes and stepbacks that followed. Profiling Jeremy Grantham, Wall Street’s leading eco-doomsayer, we begin in a Panera in Boston’s financial district, where he’s explaining the concept of Peak Everything. Profiling Kacey Musgraves, new-model Nashville diva on the rise, we begin with her on stage at the Ryman Auditorium, the mother church of country music, singing a song about kissing girls. Get the opening scene right, and the rest of the story rolls out and opens like a flower with an engine.

I got to thinking at some point about where I’d learned to do this. I didn’t have any training in journalism, so I mostly cobbled together craft lessons by reverse-engineering other people’s work and what editors did to my drafts. But the art of the opener seemed to come naturally, instinctively–until I recalled that I did, in fact, have plenty of graduate training in the framing device, courtesy of the acknowledged master of the form.

So, Scene 3, more sightings of Jean Agnew in the New York Times Magazine: pretty much every time I write a story, if you know how to look. That’s how a graduate education works: you get what you need, even if you don’t know what you may need it for. I had no clear idea of what I was doing at his FORMAC lectures. I just saw that here was a guy who really, really knew what he was doing, and that if I shut up and paid attention I might learn something useful.

Carlo Rotella, director of American Studies at Boston College, spent a significant portion of his graduate school years feeding the ball down low to Jean-Christophe Agnew, whose unstoppable moves in the post resembled those of Kareem-Abdul Jabbar seen through the wrong end of a telescope.