* * *
Soon after my liberation from the draft—and numerous discouraging visits to country landladies with airless garage apartments to rent—Professor Blackburn phoned me one evening at Mother’s and said that he’d seen a promising ad in that day’s paper—a trailer/house combination on the edge of Duke Forest. There’d been no further details in the ad, though in his paternal way, Blackburn had already phoned the listed number and got directions for seeing the place if I was interested—he clearly thought I should be. His own hunch fired my hopes in the matter.
In an hour I’d got to Durham, collected Blackburn, pushed on west of town, and entered the dense dark that surrounds (and still encloses) the west side of the university—seven thousand acres of evergreens and hardwoods. With some initial difficulty we found the landlord’s house at the junction of two dirt roads just on the edge of Orange County, four miles from campus—the southwest corner of Kerley Road and Cornwallis. Henry May proved to be a talkative middle-aged alumnus of Duke and a teacher in a local junior high (we didn’t yet say “middle school”). From the moment we arrived, he assumed I’d already rented his property—he thought it was that irresistible. And in deep dark anyhow, it was. The dwelling itself was thirty yards from the house where he and his wife lived.
It consisted of a faded blue pre–World War II trailer (maybe ten yards long with a built-in bed and a convertible sofa); then a three-foot-long connecting passageway led into a brand-new pale-green cinder-block house that sat parallel to the trailer and contained a small living room with a salvaged car-seat sofa, built-in bookshelves; a kitchen with a sink, a stove, a shower stall, a toilet; and outside was a separate garage. There was no air-conditioning, and the only heat would come from a huge oil burner in the living room—two matters that seemed of little importance to a recent dweller on Sandfield Road. I couldn’t yet see the alleged adjacent pond or the nearby woods, but the rent and Mr. May’s confidence in me turned the deal. I’d pay the monthly sum of forty-five dollars, less than ten percent of my monthly check; and I could move in tomorrow. A few days earlier I’d gone down to Charleston by bus and rescued my car. Amazingly it had survived its own Atlantic crossing with literally no scratches, and the customs duty turned out to be small.
Next morning then I loaded a few things at Mother’s and began to move myself into the first freestanding house of which I’d be the master, however bizarre its architectural components. I awarded myself a long walk in the ample, and amply promising, adjacent woods (Mr. May had purchased more than a hundred acres, on a schoolteacher’s salary during the Depression); and that night Blackburn opened a bottle of Almaden Pinot Noir, baked two large potatoes, and broiled a thick sirloin in his bachelor apartment near campus. That was the launching of a friendship that built on our old teacher-student days, our 1956 week in London, and would become an enduringly supportive and unintentionally draining long-term experience.
In Raleigh I’d busied myself, harvesting from Mother’s excess a sturdy worktable, a few dishes, minimal eating and cooking implements, plus sheets and towels. My cousin Mildred Drake cheerfully volunteered to make the plain curtains for my several windows; and a day or two before I’d teach my first classes, I hung my English-acquired drawings and etchings, and laid out my sizable table. Though I could only hope for it then, it would be the surface on which I’d write all my first book and a good part of the second and third. I especially liked the fact—and read it as a good omen—that the table had been a family dining table for numerous years.
Then I set down my short stack of completed fiction. It consisted of “Michael Egerton,” “A Chain of Love,” “The Anniversary,” “The Warrior Princess Ozimba,” and the last story begun in England—“Troubled Sleep”—which lay uneasy, awaiting the last light touches for completion. Thin as the stack might be, I still believed in the goodness of what I’d achieved so far (and I still didn’t know that it’s, in many ways, more difficult to write a good short narrative than a long one—a novel). To the right of the stack, I aligned a few filled fountain pens. It had always been crucial for me to have an orderly desk—orderly to a fault, with the various items of my work laid out in parallel spaces to one another as if I might go blind in the night and be forced to fumble next morning for some way to write a few lines till I found someone who could take dictation.
The view from my trailer/house in Orange County, North Carolina in one of the oddly frequent snows of the late 1950s. I’m back from Oxford, living in the country four miles from Duke where I teach full-time. I’m also writing my novel A Long and Happy Life; and that job is greatly benefiting from the woods around me and the nearby pond. Small as it is, it nonetheless harbors a ferocious snapping turtle, a loyal great blue heron, foxes, raccoons, deer, and other wildlife. In the far distance of this picture, the hillside will eventually become the site of the house which I’ll buy in 1965 and where I’ll live and work ever since—much the most enduring residence in all my life.
2
FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS, I could do my last tinkering on “Troubled Sleep.” Then once I got my teaching under way, I’d take up my favorite pen and, on unlined white paper in permanent black ink, I’d attempt to handwrite the opening sentence of A Long and Happy Life. First and last sentences have been absolutely crucial for me, then and now. And while I didn’t know the right words yet, I knew what my characters were doing with their bodies—Rosacoke was on the back of her boyfriend Wesley’s motorcycle. She was forcing Wesley to take her to the church where her black friend Mildred was being buried, dead in childbirth. A funeral is hardly Wesley’s idea for a fine summer Sunday; so he’s speeding up on the bumpy dirt road and loudly passing the numerous cars of the funeral procession, including a pickup truck with the coffin. The clear look of their bodies in my mind—the young white couple’s—tells me who they are and how they each feel: Wesley exuberant yet silent, Rosa ashamed and cowed. Now I only had to carve out that one sentence, but first I had to learn how to teach my first class.
So in mid-September—still sweltering weather with no air-conditioning on Kerley Road—I resumed modified academic dress, the American version. With the first-day-of-school nerves I’d always experienced since entering first grade, I drove to campus for the formal beginning of my life as a teacher. In a new light-blue seersucker suit and my Merton College tie, I parked in a faculty-assigned spot on Duke’s Georgian redbrick East Campus. In the West Duke Building I’d been assigned a kind of milk-carton office, very small but very tall. The building’s local fame was that it continued to house not only a sizable portion of the English and philosophy departments but also the laboratory of the world-famed parapsychologist J. B. Rhine (when I first reached Oxford and said the word Duke, everyone would immediately say “Ah, Dr. Rhine!” and with serious interest).
Rhine was then by far the best-known member of the Duke community—many would have said the most notorious (he’d attracted visitors as distinguished as Aldous Huxley and Arthur Koestler). Having died in 1980, Rhine is now a far less noted man than he was in my early faculty days; and his field is subject to widespread rejection for what are now thought of as scientifically questionable methods. In fact even in my own student years, I seldom heard a good word spoken about Rhine’s work by my teachers; and while I never met the man and am uninformed about his work, I directed many lost campus visitors to his office. More than a few of them told me of the urgency of their need to tell Dr. Rhine of a personal experience of ESP—extrasensory perception. And more than one described to me, before I could slip away, a ghostly manifestation of some kinsman long years after his or her death.
* * *
Waiting in my pigeonhole that starting day in ’58 were the first of many years of even more nervous-making revelations—the names of my students for the coming semester. In that precomputer era, we learned the number and names of our students by way of packs of small registration cards. In the Duke of the late 1950s, almost all freshman classes were segregated by gender (that the
y’d also be all-white was a long-foregone conclusion); and since my office was on the Woman’s College campus, all the names for my two classes of freshman English were female—eighteen women in each of two sections.
A quick flip-through showed no names I recognized. I’d already got my free textbooks and had been glad to learn that, in the fall term, we’d be reading prose which might prove especially congenial to my own writing hopes. We’d start with an anthology of essays—such brief but worthy chestnuts as Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” and E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake.” Then we’d lead our charges into three unquestioned cornerstones of modern fiction—Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
It was considerably too early in the development of the male American psyche for me to consider how unremittingly male those long fictions were—there’d be no Edith Wharton or Willa Cather, no further Woolf. But the structure of the freshman course was radically new for Duke. Once weekly a senior member of the department would lecture to all the freshmen, divided into large groups in various big lecture halls on the men’s and women’s campuses. The lecturer would give an overview of the book under consideration. The point of assigning the mass lectures to senior professors, we were told, was to give the freshmen a view of our stellar performers in full action, thereby tempting them into an eventual English major. Alas, the chairman’s faith in the senior members’ ability to lecture clearly and arrestingly was misplaced; and within a year more than a few lectures were assigned to promising younger members.
One such senior lecture, on The Great Gatsby, was so appallingly bad that I returned to the trailer foaming mad; and in my furious attempt to drive a picture-hanging nail into the concrete-block wall, I broke the nail. It flew into my left eye with the near force of a bullet. I fell to the floor, covered the eye with my fingers, and slowly drew back a handful of blood. It was late afternoon but I phoned a local eye hospital which urged me to come in before it closed at five. By four-thirty I’d managed to get the Beetle within three blocks of the hospital when a sudden great jet of what seemed black octopus-ink flooded the vision of the wounded eye. But I managed to see a doctor who told me to return home and lie flat on my back for a week. Otherwise the retina might detach and the eye be ruined. My brother came out and helped me with cooking and other chores, and at the end of a week the doctor took another look inside the eye and sent me home for a second week of lying down. After two weeks I was allowed to return to my teaching; and though I experienced unnerving flashes of light for years to come—and floating black blood cells—the eye slowly repaired itself. And I never allowed myself thereafter to react so realistically to a senior lecturer.
Once past the mass lecture, in any case, we junior instructors would meet with our two sections separately and lead a more detailed discussion of the book (or essays or stories). Then we’d assign a topic related to the book, and each student would write her best effort at a five-hundred-word theme. Then—and here was the truly demanding part for the instructor—we’d hold private twenty-minute conferences with each student. With the student at our elbow, we’d read, discuss, and grade each theme. There’d be ten themes per term—10 times 36 students, thus 360 themes per term x 20 minutes per theme = 120 hours of conferences per term. And those were hours that could well be fraught with student unhappiness, not to mention tears, if the instructor disliked a particular theme.
Even at best, a twenty-minute conference could feel infinite if the student wasn’t already a semi-competent talker about books and the difficulties of prose composition in midcentury American English; and since I was determined (for the sake of my writing) to do all my teaching on a three-day weekly schedule, I could stagger home exhausted after that many hours of conferences. What was most demanding from me in those private meetings was not the total time spent but the new skills required by every such contact. The first required skill was mere attention. As a man with no children of my own, I had to learn quickly how to sit and listen sympathetically, but not without misgivings, to a young person’s self-explanations. Then harder still I had to learn to explain my misgivings and, finally, the grade I gave a particular piece of work at the end of the conference.
And in those days of seriously uninflated grading—ah, the rigors of outright honesty about the quality of student work!—my explanations often had to justify a grade of D or F, even to the hypercourteous students of those days. (In contrast, fifty years later such low grades are all but unheard of in the humanities in most American universities; and the present higher grades almost never reflect a significant improvement in the quality of student intelligence. A teacher awarding such grades now, even when they’re entirely justified by the quality of the student’s work, is likely to find that his or her classes have grown massively unpopular—classes that almost no one will take.)
* * *
My third class would generally prove my favorite—Representative British Writers, a course required of all English majors. In those days we thought we knew who the major British writers were (I still think many thoughtful readers do, though I’m not sure representative is the word for a series of writers, at least three out of four of whom were geniuses). In my first year we divided the fall semester among Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Since our students were mostly sophomores and juniors, they were no longer separated by gender; and the classes were often a good deal larger than the handily small freshman classes. From the start I’d concentrate on drawing my students into group discussions of the poems and plays. And because of my Oxford experience of such talk, I sometimes succeeded, though I’d find almost invariably that a small clutch of the students would simply refuse to commit themselves to speaking aloud, and in the presence of their peers, to the slightest opinion or question. Even five decades later, I usually find that ten percent of a class will simply refuse to engage in class conversation, even when they’ve been told at the start of the term that my evaluation of their part in class dialogue will constitute, say, a third of their final grade (I always specify that any student who has difficulty with such contribution should discuss the problem privately with me, and we’ll make special efforts to ease the difficulty; very few of the silent ten percent ever come to discuss the problem).
Those early freshmen, however, would absorb far the greater portion of my energy. My first class met in another tall, but enormous, room in the same building with my office—a nineteenth-century limestone survivor of old Trinity College which had preceded James B. Duke’s vast endowment and then named itself after his father, in understandable gratitude—and my first set of eighteen girls were banded in the midst of the space in the jittery uncertainty of novice college students (we called them girls or boys then with no sense of insult). My own nerves would have been even more high-strung if I’d thought the students knew it was my own first day of teaching.
Anne Tyler when I first knew her, in the Duke Gardens in the fall of 1958. She’s sixteen years old and already endowed with the gifts which made it such a pleasure to teach her—though teaching is hardly the word. In retrospect, I can see that—at age twenty-five—I was far more nearly a kind of household steward for the start of a career that was longing to start. In her Raleigh high school, which had been mine also (seven years earlier), she’d thought of painting as a likely life’s work; but when she reached Duke and began to respond to a few vague suggestions offered by her freshman composition teacher, the powder trail of prodigious feeling which had waited silently within her ignited and burnt its way forward. When I recently asked her if the dress she’s wearing in this picture might not have been a little conservative for the late 1950s, she told me “The dress I am wearing was made by my mother, who made every single one of my clothes until I went away to graduate school, at which point I found out that I was actually two sizes smaller than the dresses she had been sewing for me all those years.” The spit curl, however, was entirely in fashion, as was—and is—
the thoroughly winning smile.
From the moment I sat at the desk and looked up with my best imitation of the unsmiling authority that had always impressed me in a teacher, a particular young woman caught my attention. She sat at the head of the row on my right, and she faced me with the same grave self-possession I was struggling to show her—a beautiful clear face, long black hair, and dark eyes. I opened my stack of cards and began to call the roll, asking the girls to tell me which of their given names they preferred and where they’d grown up. In those days I almost never had to ask for help in pronouncing their names—then they were at least ninety-nine percent Anglo-Saxon—and unlike my present students, they’d almost all grown up in a single town (unless they were “army brats”).
The imposing girl responded to the name Anne Tyler with a surprising blush—“Anne is pronounced Anne, and I’ve lived in Raleigh since I was a child.” I nodded and decided to wait for our first conference before revealing my own Raleigh connections. As I moved on through the name cards, I couldn’t have known what a vivid stroke of beginner’s luck I’d just been dealt.
* * *
Our reading began with the previously required anthology of essays, and my first assignment to the students was a theme on the subject of their very earliest memories. I asked them to describe as honestly and pictorially as possible—in however many words proved necessary—the oldest moment they thought they’d preserved. I told them that my own first memory appeared to be very brief but clear—a sunbath in the yard of the house in which my parents were renting rooms; I was three or four months old and heard the approach of a grazing goat who’d soon begin to eat my diaper. The majority of my freshmen women brought me descriptions of moments from around age three—normal enough, as I learned from psychologist friends. But Anne Tyler gave me 150 words describing a shaft of light that fell on her crib when she was some six months old (I’ve convinced myself I can still see the half-page, though I didn’t save it).
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