Ch 12--Turtle Mountains

Chapter 1
The Turtle Mountains: English Teacher
Minot, 1972-2001

The Turtle Mountains, like the Killdeer Mountains to the west, are what geologists call “erosional outriders.” They don’t come from the massive thrust faulting associated with the coastal ranges and Rockies, but from differential weathering. According to some nicely written research by John Bluemle, the area that is now the Turtle Mountains was—five or six million years ago--part of a broad plain that sloped to the northeast. The bedrock is part of Cretaceous and Paleocene Formations, all covered by a thick layer of glacial sediment from ancient ice ages. The area drained north to Hudson Bay, as did the Missouri River.

Then the land around it began to erode. No one knows why. There may have been a localized uplift, or a just few centuries of heavy rain. Something protected that 1000 square mile patch of land. In the case of the Killdeers, we know what that something was: a layer of limestone from the Cretaceous seas. But core samples has not yet found such a layer in the Turtle Mountains. Sometimes resistant layers of sediment leave no trace of themselves except an idiosyncratic prominence.

But unlike the Killdeers, the Turtle Mountains were re-glaciated, beginning about 2 million years ago. The last of those ice sheets, the Wisconsonian , began to recede only 16,000 years ago. The glacier as it flowed scraped up millions of tons of earth and rock and then worked its way underneath that debris so that when rising temperatures stopped the glacier’s flowing, it was covered by a thick layer of mud and gravel that slowed the melting process. For at least 3,000 years trees and grass grew in that layer of slurry on top of the ice. Eventually though, heat penetrated deep enough to melt away the ice, leaving what are called “dead ice moraines” and giving the land the peculiar hummocky character conducive to forming small lakes such as MacArthur.

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The spring my marriage was ending, I was graciously offered a chance to replace a retiring colleague in English, and I leaped at the chance. After an 8-year hiatus, I was going to get to do what I had trained to do, and I was going to get to do it at the same time that my private life was starting over. So at the age of 42, I came back from Montana to my a new office and a new job and to bevy of divorced women eager for a social life and not averse to a second marriage.

I gratefully moved into a rented duplex at 805 5th Ave. NW,right by the river. I put the mattress on the floor on one bedroom and se up beds up in the other bedroom for my sons to stay when they visited. I used the couch to partition off the living room and create a little study space by a southern window overlooking the river. I hung a Swedish ivy from the ceiling near the desk, and it did quite well. I cleaned the bathtub every time I used it and vacuumed every weekend. My landlady complained about the oven, but I thought I did pretty well.

I threw myself into all work I had been assigned and all the work I could volunteer to do. What my son said at a difficult time in his life was true of mine: I needed a lot of distractions. I had been elected the previous spring as President of the Faculty Senate. I was serving as senior warden at the church.

As I tried to work my way back into my field, I took on any kind of academic hackwork I could get. I wrote abstracts of academic papers for something called Abstracts of English Studies until it very sensibly ceased publication in 1991. I reviewed books for a short-lived periodical called American Poetry. I reviewed books for North Dakota Quarterly, published at the University of North Dakota. The abstracting work I hustled up myself, but the reviewing assignments I got through friends who thought I might enjoy that work, and I did.

I even studied Greek. Before I even left with the boys in the U-Haul, I had enrolled in New Testament Greek at the local Bible college. It met at 8 a.m. and ended just in time for me to drive across town to my first class. I took it for credit and I remember rising at 2 a.m. to walk the floor chanting the declension of Greek adjectives on the night before the exams.

I had a leg up in the course because my mother used to recite the Greek alphabet for me. For some reason it stuck, and I can recite it yet and, with a little brush-up, write it out. When we went to Greece in 2001, I could generally read the Greek names of the stores, if the tour bus were moving slowly enough. I have as ordination gifts, the MacReynolds interlinear Greek New Testament and the Rogers Linguistic and Exegetical Key to the Greek New Testament and Zondervan’s Exhaustive Concordance, edited by Goodrick and Kohlenberger. This book includes the numbers assigned to each English word by James Strong, a 19th century Methodist layman. Those numbers refer to words in Greek that are defined in the back of Zondervan and also found as a Greek concordance in the back of the MacReynolds interlinear. Between those three books, I can get some sense of the Greek behind my the texts I preach on. And it almost always helps.

In addition to looking into the Greek behind the key words in a Bible text, I often look up those same words in my American Heritage Dictionary, that gives the Indo-European roots of a word, if they are known, and then discusses those roots in a section in the back. Bless the editors. How anyone is willing to live without that apparatus is beyond me, for it allows one to find related English words and to peer into the minds of the Indo-Europeans who lived about 7,000 years ago in the area of what is now Romania. They had the enviable task (assigned in the bible to Adam) of assigning words to things based on some characteristic of the thing itself.

Thus when I had to preach recently at a vigil I pointed out to my bemused audience that word “vigil” comes from IE roots meaning “lively” and is thus related not only to the word “vigilante” but also to the words “witch” (and thus to “wicked”) because witches were thought to raise the dead—that is, to make them lively. Etymology is one more window in the Great Connectedness of life, which shows up everywhere once we begin to look for it.

METHODS

My basic assignment was in English Education—the “methods person,” responsible for preparing prospective high school English teachers, the same position I had considered at Oregon College of Education and had been offered at Marquette College in 1972. In that assignment, I taught Literature for Adolescents, Literature for Children, Approaches to Grammar, History and Development of the English Language, Methods of Teaching English. I was also to supervise student teachers in their field placements. Except for my time on the firing line in Upward Bound, I had no high school teaching experience. Except for one graduate grammar class in the summer of 1969, during the six-day war in the Middle East, I had no training in any of these things. I did not have the certificate that I was training students for. It was preposterous, really. Even a cursory search would have turned up people better qualified than I was. Accrediting boards now would never stand for it.

But it was still the era of the good-old-boy network. Most of the senior administration were the President’s hunting buddies. I didn’t hunt, but I was known to be hard-working, uncomplaining, reliable, adaptable. I had paid my dues. My kind does not inherit the world, but we keep it going for the poor, who according to scripture will inherit it, presumably after if it gets into a shape where they might want it.

But I threw myself into the task, working harder than someone might who had experience and training. I walked across campus to take, for credit, most of the courses that would have qualified me for the secondary certificate, though I never student taught and so never got certified. No one locally complained about my lack of credentials. The accrediting boards winced a little when they came around, but they always passed us.

As I had in Experimental College and in all my teaching assignments, I learned the new material day by day as I taught it. I especially liked the courses in grammar in the history of English. I had always liked x-raying a sentence to find its skeleton. Even in high school, I enjoyed diagramming sentences, as I enjoyed proving the Pythagorean Theorem. I still diagram a sentence now and then for pleasure. I also took savage delight in pointing out that no study had ever demonstrated any connection between the teaching of formal grammar and any improvement in reading or writing. Most of our grammar teaching in grammar school is left over from the days when schools taught Latin. To learn a foreign language, especially a dead one, you really do need to know what a predicate nominative is, but people learn their native language in a different way, so such knowledge is of no practical use, though it can provide esthetic pleasure. “But,’ I would say, “people expect you to know how to do this, and besides, it’s fun.”

Along with traditional grammar, I taught structural grammar and transformational grammar—analytic techniques that had come on board in the 50’s and 60’s. The ones who could do it caught on quickly, and the ones who could not caught on not-at-all, though I dragged them through the tests with endless help-sessions and generous grading curves. Grammar skill, more than any other skill I know, seems inherent, or else learned in the cradle.

In the Development of the English Language course, I got to fly over the centuries of British History, revisiting the timelines I had learned in graduate school: Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, Elizabethans, Jacobeans, Americans, Augustans, Victorians, each of them twisting the syntax in interesting ways and leaving nuggets of vocabulary behind that you could unearth, like fossils. It was some of the same thrill I felt when I studied chemistry and could sometimes imagine I glimpsed the tiny wheels turning at heart of things. I used to think that if I could have started over, with a different kind of brain, I would have majored in linguistics.

In the Methods Course, I continued to preach the gospel of “naturalistic learning” at the same time preparing the students to teach in the “real world.” I was the great apostle of the Integrated Teaching Unit, in which the holy trinity of literature, composition and grammar were blended together in the study of something at least potentially interesting for its own sake: The Civil War or the World of Egypt.

Imitation was my other hobby horse: writing assignments that made the students model the literature they were reading. Without ceasing I praised books of Kenneth Koch, especially one called Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? that shows how even very young students can produce valid poems by modeling on the forms of even the most obscure modern poems, for example John Ashbury’s “Into the Dusk-charged Air.”

But somewhere along the line I lost my revolutionary zeal. As my students in the 60’s might say, I sold out. Or I grew up. It might have begun when I took those courses in education to earn some credibility as a Methods teacher and had to confront the only pedagogy on which a methods course CAN be based: the idea that a teacher’s job is to articulate goals for students (often called “outcomes”) and then help them achieve them. But in my days as a romantic and revolutionary teacher, I had never felt it important to articulate goals. In fact, I think I felt it was important NOT to. Maybe I assumed they were self-evident. Maybe I thought that there was a deep magic embedded in the process and that it might be destroyed by exposure to crass analysis. Maybe I was just so focused on following the energies (my own and the students’) of each class hour that I had no time left over to be self-conscious about what I was doing.

At some point in the 80’s I hammered my guilt into an essay eventually published in English Education in 1985, under the title “Dualism in the Teaching of English: What I Learned from Education Courses.” The reference to the article is buried very very deep in the citations you get when you google me, but I don’t feel it is a bad piece of work.

I made a special crusade against teaching formal grammar in high school and calling it composition, which was widespread at the time. I understood why. Until early in the 20th century, colleges taught Greek and Latin, and in those languages you really do have to know what a predicate nominative it, so it was natural that when English replaced classical languages as the entry point for university studies, people would go on teaching about predicate nominatives and the objective case and the subjunctive mode.

Besides which, the impossible papers loads made it impossible to do anything else. A single high school teacher might teach as many as 150 students in day. Reading even a paragraph by each one even once a week is an unmanageable task. But it is manageable to take last year’s grammar exercises from a file, have students do them in class, exchange papers for the grading and record the results in a grade book.

I taught alternatives to that. I preached the gospel that students can write every day even if the teacher can’t read it all. There is peer editing; there is the journal. You have to try. And it seemed to me that our graduates did try. When I began teaching Composition in 1979, I had many students who did not know what an essay was, who claimed to have never had to turn in any writing longer than a sentence in 12 years of public education. By the time I retired, it seemed to me that things had gotten better, that more students entering college at least understood that writing is a messy process, that much of writing is simply enduring imperfection, trying different things until something decent happens along.

From that bully pulpit of the Methods course, I continued to preach the romantic doctrines that I acquired in the depths of the 1960’s—that all authentic language derives from a need to communicate, that arousing that need and sustaining it will solve most of the rhetorical, technical, and stylistic problems that arise in any particular case, willy-nilly. I had found it true in my own case, and I could document it in autobiographies of Albert Camus and Henry James. The difficulty was that many students did not seem to be Camus or James or even budding versions of myself.

This was a problem I never solved. The difference now was that now I had found Jesus, I was no longer agonized about the hopeless ambiguity of teaching English. During my years of teaching from outside the faith tradition, I had to put all my eggs into whatever basket I happened to be carrying around at the time. My identity depended on my succeeding at my every task. If I was an English teacher then salvation had to come through teaching English. I had to find out how to do it right, or at least convince myself that the way I was doing it was the right way and other ways were wrong. All endeavors were matters of the soul. Once I put my soul where it belonged, in the custody of my religious faith, teaching writing was just how I made my living. I tried to do it as well as I could, to be as kind as I could, as conscientious as I could and leave the ultimate judgment of my success to history, to my supervisors, and ultimately to God.

COMPOSITION

Another part of my work was my old friend, Composition also known as the rock-pile, or what-pays- the-bills. In every University in the land, students are required to take one or two terms of written composition as part of their general education. Thus in 11 weeks (16 under the semester system) we were to accomplish what in medieval education was called the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic. (The rest of the core was then assigned the modern version of the ancient quadrivum, which had been arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music).

When I began teaching Composition in 1965, the reigning model was based on something called the modes. I remember description, narration, exposition, classification, definition, and persuasion. This probably worked as well as anything else, but even the students sensed the category confusion: description and narration are techniques, classification and definition are logical operations, persuasion and exposition are genres or perhaps purposes. In the real world, no on ever sits down to write an essay in “definition.” Nor can pure examples of each mode found, so half the essays in our readers could have served as well in one category as another. For each mode, we presented students with models and asked them to produce their own essays. Each essay received two grades, one on “content” the other on “mechanics.” Mechanical considerations were analyzed using a code that was found on the end-papers of the Handbook. Beside a comma splice, for example, one might write “23b”. In theory, students would turn to chapter 23, section b, be enlightened in the matter of comma splices and sin no more. For all I know, it might have sometimes worked, but I never saw any evidence of it, either in my own classes or in the published research.

That was the first term. Second-term Composition was a mish-mash that included a dose of formal logic with Venn diagrams and technical analysis of logic errors such as the “undistributed middle.” In the third term, we led them one more time in a series of elaborate steps through the labyrinth called The Research Paper. This was for the students who met certain minimum scores on standardized tests. The one who didn’t were diverted into various levels of “bonehead” English and drilled in usage and punctuation isolated as far as possible from any actual writing.

What was missing was something I learned slowly to call authenticity, or power, or voice: that something by which even barely literate writing could seem mysteriously alive. Even in the worst papers, one could often find a paragraph or a sentence that seemed to issue from a deep part of the writer’s personality. I learned to call this the “spirit” of a piece of writing and to seek it out in every paper I read and to encourage students to tap into whatever it was that led them to write that particular sentence and to find ways for that spirit to pervade the rest of the writing task. The style is the man, said Matthew Arnold, quoting, I believe, Sainte-Beuve. That won’t suffice by itself as a writing pedagogy, but any writing pedagogy has to include it.

That was the 60’s when I was young and all things were possible. But then I went off to graduate school where I taught what I was told to teach, and then to the Experimental College where we taught on impulse. So by 1979, I had lost contact with my field. To restore the connection, I wrangled some money to attend a 10-day workshop in Detroit, in Composition Theory. Inner Detroit was in those days essentially in lock-down. We went through three bolted doors to get to our dorm rooms. Every store-clerk sat in a cage behind iron bars. Policy against going out except in pairs did not keep me from traveling alone on the bus to Tigers games in the magnificent, decaying Tigers Stadium, where good seats cost under $3.00.

In my classes, I found a lot had changed. The latest mantra was “process not product.” Students were not to be badgered unduly about comma splices or labeling different levels of their outlines-- at least not right away. Rather, the mysteries of composition were divided, like Gaul, into three parts: Invention, Arrangement, and Style.

Invention, about which Aristotle had much to say that had all been neglected, received the most attention. Students were to be led gently through heuristics--elaborate schemes for “generating ideas” also called brainstorming. These were often based on interesting theories and could be sort of fun. In one, you put your idea” in the center of page and then drew lines coming out of it, connected to balls enclosing related (or potentially related) ideas, which went on branching until you had covered the page with God’s plenty of “things to say.” Another scheme, drawn from the work of Kenneth Burke, had students asking a series of questions about one’s topic: Who does it? What is done? Where it is done? Why is it done? For what purpose? How it is done? Once you had covered enough pages with these exercises, you were ready to consider how it might be arranged and then finally how it might be put into Sentences.

The whole modes thing from the 60’s had been rethought by smart people such as James Kinnavy, who was distantly related by marriage to my wife, and who was one of the teachers there at Detroit. His book, Theory of Discourse became my Bible for teaching composition. In it, he develops a version of something he found in Aristotle , a simple but powerful concept called the “rhetorical triangle:” Writer, Subject Matter, and Audience. Writing could then be sensibly divided into three kinds, each assigned to a corner of the triangle. Writing that focused on the Writer and done primarily to get things off one’s chest could be called expressive. Writing that focused on the subject matter, done primarily to explain complex things to someone who wanted to understand them, could be called Expository. Writing focused on the Audience and done primarily to change someone’s opinion or move them to some course of action, would be called Persuasive. (Kinneavy smuggled in a the modernist concepts of text and a literary aim by putting them in the center of the triangle.) Thus all of writing could be seen in terms of two triangles: Expression, Exposition and Persuasion; Invention, Arrangement, and Style.

I was instantly converted and used some version of these concepts in all my Composition teaching until I retired 22 years later. Whether I had a week to teach people how to write, or 16 weeks, I still had them write three papers: expressive, expository, and persuasive. In each case, we considered the matters of Invention, Arrangement, and Style appropriate to each kind of writing. The papers passed through as many drafts as I had time for, all of which I read myself, though I used “editing groups” half-heartedly when that fad came along. I could read for “content” fairly quickly and the matter of grading deferred, even to the end of the term when all three papers could be handed in as a “portfolio,” thoroughly edited with the benefit of a semester’s worth of hammering on the comma splice.

When I became English Coordinator, I wrote it up in something called a Composition Handbook. Veteran teachers probably never read it and went on doing what they were comfortable doing, but new hires, desperate for a place to begin, read it. Of all the department manuals and handbooks I churned out over the decades, this one probably had the most effect.

Of course I did not—probably could not—produce a shred of evidence that students learned to write any better than they had in 1965 when we covered their papers with cryptic numbers and letters from the endpapers of Harbrace Handbook. I was often jealous of my colleagues in math or even in history—fields with definable content. In mathematics, students can solve quadratic equations or they can’t. Among the ones who can’t, most can be taught, step by step. A simple test will tell you when they have learned it. Even my wife, Joanne, who taught reading to students with learning disabilities had it easy. There are simple tests to see how well students read. After some controversy in the 80’s, reading pedagogy more or less agreed on how reading can be taught step-by-step. But in composition, I never found the step-by-step. I could demonstrate improvement, sometimes astonishing improvement, in individual papers, but I was never sure I could say that students were better writers at the end of my courses, or whether they had just learned to respond ad hoc to my suggestions and encouragement and nudges and become more cunning at making their way through the obstacle course I set for them.

Writing is and always will be something of a mystery. Parents who read to their children classics for 20 minutes a night probably do more to teach literacy than college English teachers ever do, no matter what their pedagogy. Still, I have a sense that my generation of teachers had a beneficent effect. Invention, Arrangement and Style really was a better idea than the silly modes.

I also continued to research and write the house organ called Inside MSU that I had started during my years in journalism, with the encouragement of a crafty vice-president, Joel Davy.

WOMEN

Nevertheless, Sundays were long days. Sunday mornings I would walk to church if the weather were fine and then come home, put music on the cheap stereo, make some lunch and tell myself the bachelor life was not so bad. On Sunday afternoons, Public TV ran a series of filmed short stories, one of them called “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” based on a story by Katherine Ann Porter. It was about an old lady on the last day of her life, making a cake and thinking uncontrollably about how she had been abandoned at the altar by her lover, though she had made a decent enough life with a decent enough man. As I watched it, I began unaccountably to weep--most immediately for my mother’s death and then for the loss of my marriage and my sons and then just for the general brokenness of things. This went on for a couple of hours, until the floor was deep in soggy Kleenex. Sometimes grief can be a gift.
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Then came Sunday nights. One of my students-become-friends lost his marriage about the same time, so he would come over and watch Monty Python with me. After it was over, the only thing on was Soccer from Germany. It seemed to us as sat there at 11:00 at night, watching those meaningless games, that we were the two loneliest men in America.

And that was true, despite the bevy of divorced women. It turned out the divorce books were right about one thing. It was not hard to find for divorced people—at least for divorced men—to find companionship. Thirty-something women with two teen-agers seemed to spring up everywhere. The novelty was momentary pleasant, but then all the miserable uncertainty of the high school dating years came back, doubled by the complications of sex.

I remembered how miserable high school romance could be. Except momentarily, two people who are dating are never at the same level of commitment: One or the other is always wanting more, or less, Someone is always pulling away while someone else is reaching out. Someone is always being dumped. Sometimes those roles can reverse in a week or a day or an hour. Consequently the relationship is being perpetually renegotiated. Both parties are always asking—silently or aloud--“ where are we?” In high school, we didn’t even know how to talk about these things, so all we could do (between bouts of hormonal glow) was suffer. As adults we could talk about it, but it was still a miserable way to live. However, it helped me think about romantic relationships as I moved into my second marriage.

I had to conclude that for me at least, there is no such thing as “casual sex.” Telling myself there was didn’t work. Acting as if there were didn’t work. In a normal human being , sex by its very nature produces commitment, because it can produce babies to which one has responsibilities. One can take precautions, of course. But no precaution is perfect, and the deep parts of your brain do not process precautions. Monogamy is programmed in. One can wall off normal feelings until they atrophy--what in the1960’s people called “getting over your hang-ups.” Do often enough in enough areas of your life and you become a monster

I concluded that relationships can’t be based on feelings. Leonard Cohen has a line in a recent album: “I don’t trust my inner feelings; inner feelings come and go.” At some point in every relationship, whether it’s with a person or an idea, one has to make an intellectual commitment. One has to say “For better or worse.” One has to choose. You make the choice using the best data you have and you go with it. There may be moments of doubt or regret, but if you can ride those though with gritted teeth, they will pass and the relationship will emerge stronger than it was before.

If you go into a relationship with the idea of staying with it “as long as it’s working out,” you can be sure there will come a time when it is not working out. In a marriage, there are terrifying moments when spouses have to remind themselves that the most important thing about their relationship at that moment is not their frustration and rage and despair but the simple fact that they are married. The public commitment made in a marriage contract builds a wall around the couple; it creates an arena in which they do battle rather than fleeing.

Joanne and I met each other when our youngest sons were best friends. Without our knowing it, our marriages were failing at the same time. When we discovered we were both alone, we began dating in January of 1980, traveled together that summer and were married that fall, 16 months after my final separation. Ten years later, we might have “moved into together” as most couples do now. I don’t think we even considered it, and I’m grateful. To my brother and my father, it seemed pretty quick. Both issued gentle warnings, but to no avail. I was sick of the dating scene, and our courtship left her torn between me and her children. The most practical option turned out to be the most moral one, as it does more often than we think. My second marriage, on Nov. 28, 1980, was certainly the best thing I could have done and, except for my conversion, the best thing I ever did. Joanne has turned out to a wonderful wife—competent, energetic, supportive, creative, good-humored, and passionate. Our marriage has been much blessed.

With Joanne’s help, I have found a way to live in the mountains again, for we have a little cabin in the Turtle Mountains, less than five miles from the Canadian border, on a muddy little lake called MacArthur. These mountains are so low that you do not see them until you are ten miles away. Then they rise up out of the plains like the hump of a whale that has surfaced to breathe. The ascent will not even cause a car to labor. The descent is more dramatic especially on a fall evening when the farmers are burning off the stubble and turning the landscape into a smoky inferno.

Like almost everything that is gracious, or comfortable, or even interesting in my life, the lake cabin was my wife’s idea. I probably would not have it except for her continual advocacy and my lingering memory of my father’s refusal to buy my mother even a decent washing machine, let alone a lake cabin.

GENERAL ED

I also continued my assignment as Chair of the General Education Committee, a group I had more or less founded myself. As anyone in academia knows, General Education (a.k.a. Liberal Education or The Core) is rough territory. It is simultaneously the site of high philosophy and vicious turf wars.

On the level of high philosophy, it is what the Greeks called Liberal Education—education appropriate for a “liberated” man, that is, one who was not a slave. Over my teaching career, I probably wrote a half-dozen pamphlets explaining the purpose of General Ed. None have survived, which is kind to too bad because I put a lot of work in to them. In them, I tried to make a connection between “liberal” in the sense of one who is not a slave, and “liberal” in the sense of being “liberated” from the shifting winds of public opinion as revealed by the media and in the clichés of small talk.

In those pamphlets, there was much I could not, or at least did not, say. For example, I didn’t try to describe how I felt in 1955 when I first heard Dave Brubeck and started reading T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and later, when I read my way, purely for pleasure, through a collection of Plato’s dialogues. I knew I felt enlarged, uniquely and fully alive, simultaneously lifted up and anchored, connected to something permanent, something that could be called great. I knew what Keats felt, the thing he described in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” where he compares himself to “stout Cortez” (actually Balboa) when he climbed a tree in Panama and first gazed out upon the Pacific Ocean, “silent, upon a peak in Darian.” I don’t know when I first heard the phrase “knowledge for its own sake,” (used first by Rousseau and later by John Newman), but when I did, it was as if it had always been in my head, radiating force from some hidden place, and the same is true of Matthew Arnold’s phrases that I read in graduate school: “The best that has been known and thought,” and “to see life steadily and to see it whole.”

My pleasure was enhanced no doubt, by knowing the books that made me feel this way were also the books that one found on lists of Great Books. These were the books one “should” enjoy, and here I was enjoying them, ever the good little boy, complying with authority, but effortlessly, joyfully.

In the midst of the anti-hierarchical chatter of the 60’s, I had tried to repudiate my pleasure because I thought it might by just an “in-group” thing. That is, I thought my pleasure might be coming from snobbish delight in being part of a vast conspiracy by a ruling group who kept themselves in power by drawing up these lists of great books and then assigning menial work to those who could not read them or would not pretend to. I would try to reject my deepest feelings and feel guilty about the time I had invested in my education. I would try to align myself with the great proletariat who delighted in simple pleasures accessible to everyone.

But I could never sustain that attitude for very long. I was always driven back on the idea that some things are more worth knowing than others, that some things should be known by everyone, and not just because their teachers happen to take pleasure in knowing them. Everyone should read Plato, just as everyone should eat vegetables and clean their teeth take regular exercise. It’s part of being human. It’s not that someone who has read Plato is better than someone who has not, but that anyone who has read Plato is better than he or she was before. I wanted to believe more, that anyone who has read Plato really cannot sink below a certain level morally. For years I struggled to find a way to prove this, but I don’t think you can. Herman Goering, Hitler’s minion, held a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.

Nevertheless, I was drawn to books that tried to explain the connection between virtue, happiness, and reading: Castiglioine’s The Book of the Courtier and Thomas Elyot’s The Booke of the Govenor (both from the 16th century), Mathew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University, Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy, anything by Lewis Mumford, dense overviews of ancient culture such as Werner Jaeger’s Paideia, and Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition and Will Durant’s six-volume Story of Civilization, and the wonderful six-volume paperback Mentor Philosophers Series (now published by Meridian books), and to Edith Hamilton’s magnificent trilogy: The Greek Way, The Roman Way, and Mythology. Some of these I had purchased over the years from used bookstores. Others I checked out from the library for whole terms and eventually bought from the used books outlets on the internet. I keep them on my shelf and read in them from time to time. Whenever I could find a list of great books, I photocopied it and kept in a file. When I go to the library, I still like to walk by the multi-volume edition of Great Books done by Robert Hutchins and his colleagues at the University of Chicago, and I have even dipped into the unreadable and misguided survey that accompanies it, Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon.

I designed a little one-credit course called Introduction to General Education and shepherded it through the various academic hurdles—something I was good at. I gave the students excerpts of Aristotle and Matthew Arnold and tried to share my enthusiasm for those texts. The burden was too much and the committees skeptical of the results. After a few semesters I gave it up.

The last few years of my teaching career, I used my clout as Chair to have Integrated Humanities added to my teaching assignment. I sometimes felt as if all my teaching had been leading to that task. I loved racing through the centuries at break-neck speed, seeking connections among music, art, philosophy, architecture, literature, and history. I loved making great sweeping generalizations, explaining how stained glass was the “inevitable” art form of the middle ages because illiterate peasants standing in a cathedral could the see “eternal” light of the sun coming “through” the glass, just as they had been taught to observe God’s eternal love shining “through” earthly forms—in contrast to the “modern” medium of painting where “everything” is on the “surface,” whatever that might mean.

Or how it was “inevitable” that Lutheran Protestantism, with its emphasis on sin, would spring up in the harsher, colder climate of Northern Europe and give us “dark” Rembrandt and Durer, in contrast to the great ”sunny” forms of Raphael or a Michelangelo that “inevitably” arose in the sun-drenched Mediterranean. These were not new ideas, of course, I got them from Humanities textbooks, the ones I taught from (that the students were supposed to read) and the dozens of others I got free as examination copies, that I cribbed from, and that I keep handy on the shelf today.

Of course, it was facile and superficial, but it was also seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. It was getting a perspective that allowed one of make connections. It was establishing what Matthew Arnold calls “touchstones.” It was getting in hand those great cultural landmarks by which one is supposed to be able to find one’s way through any wilderness. I was doing in my 60’s what ideally I should have done in my 20’s, what ideally everyone should do in their 20’s. And here I was, teaching 20-year-olds, giving them, free and clear, what I had had to mine out of solid rock for more than 40 years.

I was so grateful to be teaching these things that I could overlook how much of the time the students did not seem as grateful as I thought they should be or as I imagined I would have been if I had been given the same opportunity at their age. In fact, I have to say that for most students, the gospel fell on deaf ears. With study guides and careful reviews, I made it possible for nearly anyone to get enough of the essentials into their head to pass my exams. On their class evaluations, students noted my “enthusiasm,” but only one in ten had any clue what I was being enthusiastic about. On bad days, I thought that if a person’s eyes don’t light up at the sound of the words “learning for its own sake,” perhaps they probably never will. Perhaps General Education is a calling, and some people are called to do it on behalf of the community, just as some are called to carpentry or any other trade.

I stayed on the General Ed Committee for years, fighting the good fight through several curriculum changes. When the University converted to semesters, the whole thing had to be thought through again, now with the national dragons of assessment and accreditation breathing down our necks. Universities all over the country were called to define their general ed courses in a way that would make the teaching “assessable,” that is measurable or at least documentable. Most did that by trying to define content—asking what knowledge and skills are essential or “basic” to other learning. The result was mostly endless wrangling or mind-numbing assessment by “portfolios.”

I had what I thought was a better idea. I was flying back from a professional conference in Minneapolis when it suddenly occurred to me that general education is not so much content as perspective. Anything can be general ed if it can be learned within certain contexts, namely historical, cultural and esthetic. I called them strands and in ten minutes jotted down the basic idea: We study something historically when we learn how the content evolved. We study something culturally when we learn how other cultures treat the same content. We study something esthetically when we to learn how beauty and excellence are defined in that area. I wrote it up on a one-page memo to the Committee and resigned, figuring that if the idea were good enough, it would survive without my advocacy.

It did actually, probably less because of the elegance of the idea than because it allowed each department to keeps its traditional share of the credit load while still providing at least the appearance of coherence and rationale. That was about 1991. They held firm for more than 15 years, though I heard recently they are being re-designed to meet today’s sterner standards. I wish the redesigners luck.

ADMINISTRATION

Within a couple of years after I starting teaching “real” English again, the Humanities Division created discipline-based departments (for political reasons, called “programs”), and I was named as the “coordinator” for English. So I was unexpectedly hoisted back in the administrative saddle again, as I had been at Columbia Basin. I often said I was born to be a middle-level administrator, having two essential gifts for that work: an endless capacity for mind-numbing detail and a prose style perfectly adapted to the office memo. I could manipulate the complex matrices required to schedule dozens of sections each term, meet deadlines, manage a budget. By nature and by military training, I respected authority, though my colleagues called it toadying up, and worse. When a senior administrator or an accrediting board announced a new idea, and my colleagues grumbled and undermined, I not only tried to implement it, I tried to believe in it and usually did.

After a few years a coordinator, I was picked, out of the blue, to serve as “division chair” in humanities, replacing a genial man who had done the job for 17 years. I oversaw programs in English, Foreign Language, Integrated Humanities, Speech and Drama. I did that for eight years, beginning in 1989. It was enrollment boom so I kept busy hiring part-time teachers until we had almost 40 staff altogether, all of which had to have office space, desks, classrooms, toilet paper, chalk, and a sympathetic ear.

That work had its drawbacks. At a conference on being an academic chair, I heard one chair say that when he became a Chair he only had to give up three things: his teaching, his scholarship, and his family. He didn’t mention friends, but I added that to the list. I watched conversation grow hushed when I entered the room, as I felt the air turn chilly between me and colleagues that I had taught with for 15 years, and I considered friends.

Part of it was the times: the witty, ambitious, black-Irish Dean who installed me a chair had been hired to bring the college, kicking and screaming, into the late 20th century. What had been a little laid-back red-brick college (and a Teachers’ College before that) had to be retooled to meet a new age of accountability. Standards of teaching, scholarship and service, with quantifiable criteria were drawn up and pushed through the Senate.

Chairs were in the middle, forced by the new criteria to give “unsatisfactory” in scholarship to teachers who had been told for years that they were doing a fine job. The whole thing was badly handled. At the very least, older teachers should have been grand-fathered in. Eventually, the black-Irish Dean left, saner heads backed the system off a notch or two, and things settled down. I had cooperated fully in getting us into the mess but in my defense, I can say I helped get us out of it. I argued for a de-quantified evaluation instrument that would use “English sentences” to describe as fully as I could each faculty member’s strengths and weaknesses. I encouraged the new Dean (Dale Elhardt) in his efforts to loosen the bond between pay raises and annual evaluations. Pay raises necessarily became more “subjective” but everyone knew they were anyway and it worked better to have the subjectivity out in the open.

But it wasn’t just evaluation that soured the barrel. There is, in any institution but particularly in Academia, an endemic suspicion of hierarchy. Now I would call it a sub-set of original sin. Many faculty cannot pronounce the word “administrator” without a sneer. They are inclined to label every decision“ stupid,” even though most decisions are driven by simple arithmetic: finite resources of money, space, and time have to distributed among infinite needs.

Then there’s the problem of autonomy. People, including myself, are drawn to college teaching for the best of reasons, but also for the worst-- because they want to be left alone to putter in the library and to relish the nearly absolute power they have in the classroom. I offer one example: For most of my 36 years of classroom teaching, I tried to get teachers to accept what seemed to me a reasonable principle: that multiple sections of the same class (namely, Freshman Composition) should have roughly the same content and the same standards and use the same textbook. Regarding textbooks, I was never able to do that--not as a teacher, not as a department coordinator, not as a division chair. When I retired I was offered the job as interim Dean of Arts and Sciences for one year, and I almost took it just so I could force English teachers to use the same text books in multiple sections of the same course. It is well that I didn’t. I probably would have failed there too, and left a legacy of bitterness behind.

As Chair, I taught half-time, assigning myself pretty much the courses I wanted to teach. I was happy to turn the Methods courses over to someone more qualified and to cut the Composition to a minimum. I kept my Humanities course and my literature. Those were either genre courses (novel, poetry, drama) or “survey courses”(American Lit I and II, Brit Lit I and II). For the genre courses I reduced five years of training in New Criticism to a list of terms I called the “Big Seven”: Plot, Character, Setting, Theme, Point of View, Tone, and Style. I distinguished sharply between theme (the “aspect of human experience being explored in the work) and “moral” or “message” or “point” (a generalization or exhortation unique to the story). I described the seven things as a series of vertical planes intersecting at the center of The Work. By focusing on one and then another of the planes and then on their interrelationship, the work could be made the “dance” or to “glow,” which was the purpose of it all.

For the period courses, I tried to create a sense of the flow of culture-- culture as a meandering river, fed by rivulets here and there, sometimes meeting other major streams with catastrophic results, entering one watershed or another different enough to produce a change in character of the water. I could remember the first time I learned to think chronologically, when I was studying for my M.A. comprehensive exams in my parent’s bedroom, staying there with Judy before the boys were born. In an instant, I caught the whole vision of British Literature, the systole and diastole of expansion and contraction as Renaissance gave way to Jacobean and Classic to Romanic. In my methods courses and in my role as coordinator, I worked endlessly to produce matrices and charts that would encapsulate these things. With a friend and colleague, Tom von Gunden, I worked dozens of hours on a various lists of literary masterpieces. We loved debating whether Thomas Pynchon should replace Ralph Ellison in the modern novel slot, or if we could shrink the type enough to include them both.

I loved finding convenient touchstone dates. Chaucer died in 1400 (almost); Dryden died in 1700; Queen Elizabeth died in 1603; Galileo died in 1564, the same year Shakespeare was born; Cervantes and Shakespeare died the same day, in 1616. Beethoven, Hegel, and Wordsworth were all born the same year (1770). All this I eventually pulled together into an English Majors Handbook. It included a detailed guide to pre-internet library techniques, a list of canonical works and a guide through the bureaucracy of student teaching and certification. The idea of a canon was already under attack and library research was giving way to the internet, so my colleagues quibbled or turned up their noses, and the handbook was never distributed. But I ran across a copy of it in the files the other day and read it with some pleasure. If a decent handbook lands in the forest and no one reads it, does it make a noise?

BEN AGAIN

By the late 80’s, the agreement my father made with his caregivers was starting to unravel. He needed more care than they could give him, and he was giving them more supervision than they wanted---though perhaps not more than they needed. My brother and I flew to Montana for this crisis and that, and we tried flying Dad out to North Dakota to visit, but without much luck. In the fall of 1988, we finally moved him to Minot into our home. Joanne and I gave it everything we had, and Dad tried too. Loss can have a mellowing effect and Dad had lost two wives and a 200-cow spread the past ten years. The worst of his moodiness and temper seemed to have gone away while his story telling blossomed. He even displayed a verbal wit I had never seen before.

We had some good evenings over the next nine months, but in the end it was too much, so we moved him to a local nursing home close enough to the college so I could walk there on my lunch breaks. His mind wandered but his wit seemed to grow. On one visit, we asked him how he was doing. He thought a moment and then said, “How would I know?” He wore his cowboy hat every day, each month lower on his head as the tissue shrank between the plates of his skull. One day, after almost a year and a half, I knelt beside his wheelchair to say good bye after our lunch together. Unexpectedly, he seized my hand and began to stroke my face, looking wordlessly into my eyes for a long time. The next day, he began refusing his pills. When they ground them up and put them in liquid, he spit the liquid out all over the caregiver’s uniform, so she had to go home to change. It was as sensible a thing as I had ever seen him do, and I resolved to make that my model when the time came. He died a week later, in March of 1991, of liver failure, three days before his 88th birthday.

I felt I had forgiven my father everything, but for my brother, who drove over for the death watch, the hurt ran too deep. When Ben’s arms waved about in what I took to be death spasms, Bill thought that he was being waved off or that Dad was pulling his hand away and muttered, “See, he’s still rejecting me.” I was heart-broken for my brother, and I still am. I had fled the ranch emotionally when I was 15 and physically when I was 17. But my brother stuck it out all through high school, all through college and several years afterwards, majoring in agriculture, coming home on weekends to help with the haying, living in the ranch house and then a trailer nearby, waiting for his chance to run his own spread. That chance never came because my father, who had been holding on fiercely since he barely survived polio at the age of six, could not, as he approached the age of 70, let go.

It must have been terrible for my mother, though she shared none of it with me, so I only knew what I gleaned from my brother’s occasional agonized letters. I should have been more responsive, but I had small children and a raft of troubles of my own.
Finally, in the mid 70’s, my brother made a clean break, married a wonderful girl and was admitted to graduate study at Cornell where he earned a Ph.D. in animal genetics. I had no money even to come for the wedding.

Academic life was the escape route for both of us, but for my mother there was no escape route, or none that she chose. She told me about those years only once—about my father’s repeated threats of suicide, even his stalking the house with a rifle in his hand until she would cry out, “If you are going to shoot yourself, for God’s sake just do it and stop torturing us both.” I thought of Kurtz at the end of Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness: “The horror, the horror.” She would flee occasionally to a neighboring ranch, where Mary Bolick would advise her to get out, but she always went back. As my brother put it once, “She signed on tough.”

THEORY

Sometimes people or agencies would challenge me to state the purpose of my work. I was inclined to say, “Look, I do this because I was lucky enough to find a job where I could support my family doing work I like. I paid thousands of dollars in tuition and gave up tens of thousands in lost income to learn how to do it well. If you want to know why it should be done at all, go ask the people who hired me. Now butt off and let me get back to work.” Such answers might ward off an outsider, but they won’t do in the long dark night of the soul when one yearns to feel that his life’s work “fits” somewhere, that what we do for a living is part of some larger and scheme of things. I wanted to earn what the diploma on the wall of my study said I had a doctorate in: The philosophy of English. I wanted to know what literature was, what it was good for, how it could justify itself.

Having spent many years reading Modern literature as an eloquent confirmation of skeptical views, I now had to struggle to reconcile my new orthodox faith with the dark works of Twain and Hemingway and Faulkner, who never set foot in a church, with Emily Dickinson who caused a scandal with her rejection of Amherst piety, with Wallace Stevens who believed in beauty but not in God. I got some short-term relief from a book by Cleanth Brooks—called The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren. Brooks was the great high priest of New Criticism, yet it turned out he went to church, the Episcopal Church. I did not even need to read the whole book; it was enough to skip around and see that it could be done.

But Brooks’ approach seemed a bit facile. Deeper waters beckoned, and so I began reading, trying to get caught up in my field, but trying to ask Pilate’s question: What is Truth? I got the library to lend me a little corner of an office where I could amass miniature collections of books on literary theory, esthetics, and theology. When Minot State built the new library in 1992, faculty could get a study carrel, wonderful space with a desk and shelf space and even a window. I would flee to these spaces whenever I could find a spare hour. I paddled about in the ocean of post-modernism criticism much as I had paddled about in the smaller lake of New Criticism, enjoying myself but with only the foggiest idea of what was going on. In one paper I wrote for my colleagues, I described myself as the “Pooh Bear of Literary Criticism, humming a little hum and thinking it might be time for a little something.”

I was like Rip Van Winkle awakened into a new world. Deconstruction was just one of a whole host of critical strategies that had burst on the scene in the 1970’s while I was trying to negotiate a failing marriage, feed my kids and keep my job.

Borrowing a term from a historian of science named Thomas Kuhm, literary critics declared the reign of a new paradigm. Its chief feature was fragmentation. Before there had been only New Criticism. Now there was Deconstruction, Structuralism, Marxist Criticism, Hermenutics, Semiotics, Postcolonial Criticism, Psychoanalysis, Reader Response Theory, Cultural Studies, Feminist Theory, and Queer Theory. The old trilogy of Character, Plot and Theme had been replaced by the new trilogy of Race, Class, and Gender. The old gods of Wellek and Warren and Wimsatt and Burke and Ransom and Eliot and Empson and Tate, now yellowing on my shelves had fallen. The new gods had names like Horkheimer and Adorno, and Habermas and Barthes and Cixous and de Man, and Foucault, and Gramsci and Rorty and Fish and Eagleton and Gadamer. I dipped into books by all of these, using as a guide two magnificent reference books The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, both edited by people I had hardly heard of but who seemed to know everything.

This whole cluster of new approaches generally went under the heading of Theory, a word sometimes used interchangeably with postmodernism, shortened in conversation to “po-mo.” It had first been used in 1947 to describe certain trends in architecture, but now it began to show up everywhere, even in Newsweek magazine.

The term postmodernism naturally raised the question: What was the modernism that current trends were “post” to? Since 1956, when I heard Dave Brubeck play “Melancholy Baby,” I had sensed that modernism was the great dragon guarding the golden horde, from whom I would have wrest the secrets I needed to make sense of my life. I still did not have an adequate definitions of it, though I made a start when I came to understand that the word had two meanings. It could refer to a distinct cultural movement that began in the 1890’s and crested between the wars—Monet and Van Gogh passing on into Eliot, Pound and Yeats, Stravinsky, Picasso. Or it could refer to the whole shift in worldview at the end of the middle ages, when Galileo found wrinkles on the moon and was put under house arrest for saying the earth went around the sun. For the moment, I finessed the problem of modernism, thinking that if I could discover what postmodernism was, I might be able to reason backwards to a definition of modernism.

Slowly I sorted out some of the features of the new paradigm that the zeitgeist had put in place between 1965 and 1985 and in the process found ways to articulate the premises of the old paradigm.

When I began teaching, individual authors were the coin of the realm. They might reflect their times, but they also shaped and transcended them. Authors were self-conscious and reflective. Readers could discern the “intent” of art works, even if the author had not stated it, or had been mistaken. We did not often use the word “genius” but it hovered in the background. Individual authors wrote “masterpieces”—towering structures of dizzying complexity, unity, and coherence. They created “worlds,” and by reading their books we as readers could be lifted up into those worlds, inhabit them at least for the time we were turning the pages, and with luck, even beyond. A great work of art was autonomous, a Thing unto Itself. Literature was a separate kind of discourse, a high haven from the endless chatter of everyday talk. We were to focus on the intrinsic components of literature, the complex interplay of images. The meanings of poems arose from our repeated readings of them, the intensity of focus, not from things we knew about the author. Art told truths if not The Truth. Those truths might differ from scientific truths, but it they were truths nevertheless. Disagreement might be endless, but it was not therefore meaningless. Art was the opposite of politics.

In the 60’s, we did not often need to ask, whether writing and teaching literature were moral activities. We did not feel called to defend our work. If we did, a couple of answers sufficed. One of them ran in a straight line from to Phillip Sidney in the Renaissance and on it the Victorian period, where it vanished. That was; literature is moral because (properly read) it provides apt models for behavior. I was always uneasy with this argument. For one thing, I had spent many years accepting Nietzsche’s invitation to pass beyond good and evil, or praying with Roethke for the death of common sense—which seemed to include conventional morality. For another I had dipped feverishly into dangerous authors, like the Marquis de Sade, whom I had to admit wrote very well but who were obviously moral swine. For another, The “goodness” of the prose in George Eliot or James Joyce always seemed to me more to the point than the goodness of their characters or the moral lessons of their plots. For yet another, Literature that set out to make conventional morality attractive was inevitably second-rate stuff. And finally, there was Herman Goering, sitting there in the middle of history with his Ph.D. in comparative literature, burning Jews. The skeptics seems to hold all the cards.

Another answer from the past that worked a little better, that I got partly from Ezra Pound, partly from I.A. Richards, was that I was teaching “reading,” and the skills one learns in reading literature can—yea verily do--transfer to the “real world.” Literature is complexly organized and to the extent we study it well, our minds become complexly organized as well. That is: Studying literature has to do with grasping subtlety, with discerning tone as well as meaning, with picking up inferences, and drawing implication, with seeing “layers” in discourse. If you can learn to close-read a passage in Dickens, you can learn to do the same when you are talking to your wife or to your boss, and that talk can be more effective as well as more fun. I found it pleasant to believe that—until a nagging voice would remind me that there are plenty of people who are very good at picking up inferences who never read anything more complicated than a newspaper

I was convinced that literature was moral all right, not in the conventional sense of modeling good behavior, but in different sense, a sense that I could not put my finger on. I wanted to say that esthetic integrity is a kind of morality and one ultimately reconcilable with orthodox faith. But I could not say what kind.

A few things seemed clear about the new paradigm. Art, like everything else was “socially constructed.” It was not clear whether we readers were also socially constructed. Logic would dictate so, but the theorists also seemed bent on liberating the readers, training them to “see through” the author’s “intent” to the social forces that were like puppeteers pulling the authors’ strings. Critics were happy to practice what even they called the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—theories of interpretation that claimed to reveal an author’s political intent, even if it ran counter to what had been stated or assumed by the author himself, by his contemporaries, and even by ordinary readers in the current times.

A corollary was that everything was political. All canonical literature was to be read anew to find (most of the time) that it endorsed a repressive social order or (occasionally) that it had managed to subtly ally itself with the marginalized. Great authors were, willy nilly, part of class struggle, for or against the oppressed classes. The older ones, if they were white and male, were generally against. Shakespeare was on the side of order, approval of Tutor stability, alarmed by the mob, whether violent, like the ones in Henry VI, part I, or foolish, like the ones in Julius Caesar. Feminist critics lamented Jane Austen’s apparent complicity in the genteel culture of the 19th century, or saw her satire as more incendiary than it had been seen heretofore.

The canon was be opened up to literature from the Third World, from minorities, from women. Students were to be enlisted in the great class struggle. Professors were called to be agents in a great class warfare. We were called to enlist students in the Final Struggle on behalf of the oppressed, trying (through our privileged position in the hierarchy) to establish an anti-hierarchical utopia. The journals were awash in articles describing the frustration of the young professorate as it tried to blast the students out of their smug materialism, their limited focus on degrees and jobs.

Popular Culture, which had been anathema or just entertainment in the 60’s, was now to be taken seriously--if anything was. Art was to be dragged down off its pedestal and made to muck around with all the other made objects—comic strips, advertising, sit-coms, even what clothes we wore. A critic named Roland Barthes was teaching us how us how to “read” fashion and make-up and social gestures with the same kind of subtle attention I had been trained to bear on a sonnet by Shakespeare.

Skepticism was rampant, often implicit, sometimes explicit. This assumption that Truth existed and that we could at least approach it was now described—or dismissed—as “logocentric thinking.” In its place was a new world view that stipulated in advance the impossibility of finding the Truth, because all texts were ultimately indeterminate. Only the most honest po-mo writers recognized the self-contradiction at the heart of their position—that when they said there is no Truth, there were stating a Truth. Besides being self-contradictory, their assumption ran counter to my adopted religious faith. To say that God exists, as I now did, was to say something very much True, and from it followed any number of Truths that I was willing to live my life by, if not (at this point) to die for.

To these various shifts in the paradigm there seemed to be two possible responses—hard and soft. I had troubles with both. The soft response was to say, since there was no Truth to be found, we should all relax and enjoy ourselves, and what could be more enjoyable than reading literature? Literature, like everything else was a game, a way of passing time in interesting ways. A critic named Bakhtin called for reading in the spirit of the “carnivalesque.” Richard Rorty advocated neo- pragmatism, a philosophy associated with John Dewey, which Rorty traced back to my old friend Nietzsche, who called it estheticism. I was all in favor of the old estheticism espoused by New Criticism which seemed high, hard, and disciplined, but this new version seemed self-indulgent and show-offy.

“Hard” theory, on the other hand, emphasized the class struggle. If art were produced by social forces, then whoever could seize control of those forces could make the kind of world they wanted, presumably on behalf of some larger good. The world was a mess because bad people had their hands on the levers. There had been a conspiracy to keep things that way, and High Art was part of that conspiracy. The high-flown search for Truth had been a distraction from the true quest, which was to eliminate social classes. This view of things was articulated most sensibly by Terry Eagleton and more stridently by a legion of faux Bolshevik professors who seemed to have taken over all the professional journals. When I ran into extreme statements of the doctrine, I felt intrigued but also betrayed. How could I, as a Christian, be against efforts to help the oppressed? On the other hand, how could I spit on all the knowledge and skill and assumptions that I had spent a lifetime acquiring?

Some of my old guiding lights from the 60’s were still alive, old men reading the same books I was. They were understandably defensive and fulminated against the new breed, calling them heretics or nihilists. I understood why, but I wasn’t at all ready to join them in dismissing the whole po-mo enterprise. For one thing, I was still a professional. If this was the direction my field had taken, it was my job to understand it as best I could. For another, the new breed were very smart people and at least occasionally generous of spirit. When I read Terry Eagleton or Habermas, I felt power in the words, just as I had once felt power in the words of Ransom or Tate. And finally, my religious faith allowed me to be curious about these things without needing to take sides. If all truth is God’s truth (though seen in a glass darkly) and if all human enterprises contain some of God’s truth, then I was free to sift through modernism, post-modernism and whatever else might come along, looking for the truth consistent with orthodox Christianity as I understood it.

In the mid-80’s I began pulling my reading together into academic papers and over the next 15 years or so, produced more than 20 of them.
A few I placed with obscure journals and the rest I delivered as conference papers, either for my colleagues on campus or at a the annual meeting of a regional association called The Linguistics Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota. The Linguistics Circle was a great blessing, a place where faculty could deliver papers of uneven quality in a supportive atmosphere. Unlike the high-pressure national conferences where the long knives are out, all proposals were accepted. Many of the same teachers came back year after year, some of them sweet and gentle men and women with capacious, agile minds. I think especially of Ben Collins and Tim Messenger, who never published a book of scholarship but who every year gave witty, informed papers and offered conversation that I looked forward to all year.

I am not sure how I did that work. It did not seem like a great effort. When the call for papers came out each spring, I rummaged around in the things I was teaching and thinking about and chose a topic to dwell on. As the fall deadline approached, the papers grew. Sometimes I would still be polishing them in the motel room the night before I gave them. Once I had to talk from notes that I could barely read because I had written them out with a right hand damaged playing street hockey with my oldest grandson. But they always got done.

In all these papers, I was in pursuit of the goal implied by the direction my life had taken: to reconcile Art, Faith, and Science. Certainly, I did not do it in these papers, but I have not given up yet. This memoir is part of the work and perhaps its most ambitious motive.

As I look through those papers now, most of them still strike me as readable, carrying a modest load of scholarship fairly gracefully. Many of them are idiosyncratic or even self-indulgent, addressing topics that are probably more intriguing than important. They are content to make interesting assertions and finesse the work it would take to establish them in a rigorous way They are self-deprecating, perhaps to a fault. Certainly they have been criticized on those grounds by friends who insist that if I would just stop apologizing (however lightheartedly) for the limitations of my research, it might well be less limited, and it certainly would be less irritating. I know the gesture is partly self-protective: I want no one to level a criticism at me that I have not already leveled at myself.

In some of the papers, I tried to take the postmodern ideas and turn them on their head. Instead of arguing against the skepticism that seemed to lie at the heart of new thinking, I tried to argue through it to arrive at conclusions compatible with orthodox faith. For example, in 1999, after teaching a senior seminar on Whitman and Dickinson I presented a paper on Dickinson, called it “A Certain Slant of Light: The Presence of Absence in Emily Dickinson.” In it, I developed an insight that I acknowledged getting from a book called Emily Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation, a book I never would have read if I had not been asked to review it for North Dakota Quarterly. It suggests the deep affinities between Dickinson and Jonathan Edwards, the 17th century preacher who remains America’s premiere theologian. Dickinson famously refused to make the conventional statement of conversion, which has made her a poster child for secular readers. But I argue that her faith was greater, not less, than that required by conventional piety--so much greater that she felt her belief would be dishonored by a simple pledge.

I assume—but do not prove--that volumes of Edwards sat on her father’s shelves and that she found there two ideas that Edwards had himself taken from John Calvin: God’s absolute sovereignty and man’s absolute dependence. Between us and God, there is a gap that we call an abyss, or an absence, or an emptiness. To Calvin, and Edwards, and Dickinson, this gap is so compelling that it becomes a positive presence, and we may legitimately talk about the Presence of Absence. This Presence is (I argue) the central image in her poetry, which I document with a close reading of several poems, particularly “There’s a certain slant of light” and” A bird came down the walk.”

That last poem, incidentally, had come unbidden into my mind when Joanne and I visited the Dickinson home in 1989 and saw the walk where she might have seen the bird she describes so clearly and with such compelling metaphysical implications. That visit convinced me that genius can soak itself into the floor joists and plaster of a place and that visitors can breathe it in. I have felt it at Dove Cottage in the Lake District and at New Place in Stratford and at Sam Johnson’s house in London and on the islands of Iona and Lindisfarne and at Tiger Stadium where Ty Cobb played baseball. Pilgrimage is a legitimate form of worship and perhaps the best justification for travel.

In the same spirit of reconciling Theory and Faith, I had done the Absence thing before in a 1990 paper sub-titled “The Appeal of Deconstruction,” where I actually defended deconstruction, an esoteric form of literary criticism associated with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. He was one of the speakers who presented papers at a landmark conference at Johns Hopkins in 1966, the year my first son was born, when I was teaching junior college and still secure in my belief that New Criticism was not only the latest thing but the final thing.

Deconstruction is both a method and a philosophy. As a method, it extends New Criticism to the nth degree. Where New Criticism had close-read the text to reveal “tensions” that were ultimately to be resolved at a higher level, Deconstruction close-read the text so as to reveal its contradictions, and thus its ultimate instability. As a philosophy, it shared the basic postmodern proposition that there is no Truth with a capital T. Though I had come to Jesus, I was not offended by such a notion. As I put it in the paper:

I want to call attention to the well-known fact that deconstruction grows out of Sassure's attention to non-being, to "gaps," to nothingness. Theories of nothingness, and related ideas of death, the absurd, sin, have concerned philosophers since Parmenides and poets since Sappho. Thinking about nothing, is, of course, usually a way to think about something. But sometimes it is a powerful way, and perhaps even the only way, to think about something. For example, theologians since St. Paul has recognized that one of the ways we come to God is through awareness of Sin. When we come this way, we approach God through non-God. We approach ultimate reality through ultimate non-reality. Sassure's insight that the phoneme cluster "t" "exists" because of the "space" that distinguishes it from "p" and "g" seems commonplace, but it resonates with other insights, such as that by Emmanuel Levinas who talks about" an unrecoverable past," an "absolute past," a "deep formerly." I call this the language of Eden, what Northrop Frye in The Great Code calls the one true myth, the myth of a lost paradise which can be glimpsed but not recovered, which lies beyond our grasp yet remains in our consciousness as a guide and hope, what someone called “a living dream that pervades our wakefulness.”

That leads me to a general principle that Christianity, rather than being one truth among many, may be seen as a way of interpreting all truths. That is, we may shine the light of Christian thought on any fact or subject or experience, no matter how sordid, no matter how tangled, misguided, wrong or even perverse, and find truth in it. Many great systems, such as Marxism, claim to have this explanatory power, of course, but Christianity, has unique power to be generous toward the things it analyzes, for only Christianity uniquely begins with the observation that God created all things and found them good. At bottom then, all things are good simply because they exist, and whatever badness they have is a perversion of their “basic” membership in the category of created things.

After I finished these papers, I often made a vow to “take the next step,” to convert them from 10 page conference papers to 24 page articles which could be submitted to a serious journal and which might in turn launch full-length books. But the prospect of doing the reading that would get me even in hailing distance of an these larger projects was, and remains, overwhelming.

There are two ways to look at that. One could call it a failure of nerve, a failure to “pay the price” it would have cost to do that work, and to say that people who do take the next step are those who are willing to pay that price. The romantic idea that excellence is something to be earned at great cost is a dangerous one. Roethke, the alter ego of graduate school years, surely believed it, and I undertook to study him partly because I did too. But from my new perspective, it began to look tainted.

When I ran across it in an essay by Annie Dillard, it struck me with enough force that I wrote a little piece about it and eventually got it placed in a magazine published by Towson State University in Maryland. They wrote me a glowing letter that I kept. Dillard’s essay was called “Transfiguration.” In it, she describes how she went camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains to read Rimbaud and how a female moth flew into her candle and died, but before the moth’s wings could be consumed, they filled with wax, so that her wax-drenched body acted as a wick. The symbolism is subtly handled but obvious: By sacrificing herself, the moth becomes part of what drew her to her death, but in her self-immolation, she brightens the light by which one self-immolating writer reads another, so the three of them become a trinity of self-sacrifice in the name of Art.

Later, she wrote another essay called “How I Wrote the Moth Essay—and Why.” They were published together in the Composition anthology we used in the 80’s. In the follow-up essay, Dillard talks about her teaching, about telling her students that they must be prepared to make the kinds of sacrifices the moth made. She asks them, “Which of you want to give your lives to be writers. . . . You can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broad-axe.” I called my essay, “Going at Your Life with an Broad-axe: An Open Letter to Annie Dillard.” In it, I acknowledged that no young writer could read her lines without hope and commitment leaping up in their heart: “Yes, I will. Here I am. Send me.” But I also acknowledged that no older person (meaning myself) could read them without twinges of guilt and regret: “Yes, I chose safety, family, complacency. I lacked the nerve.” Or, as one of the female characters says in Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, “ I could have been as great as George Eliot, but I had six children and no time to write.”

Then I went on to describe some of my students to whom I gave the same advice. They went at their life with a broad-axe. Some took drugs and died. The ones who lived forswore children, monogamy, a career. Instead, they wrote--books even. Those books sat unpublished on their shelves, and now the authors seemed to be entering their middle age bitter and impoverished, without the comfort of retirement, or companionship, or grandchildren. I asked Annie Dillard, in effect, would she give the same advice now? Or would she say what a Barabas said in Marlow’s Jew of Malta: when asked to name his sins, he admits that he has committed fornication but adds: “but that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead”?

Would she acknowledge that for every Gauguin and every Sherwood Anderson who left their wives and children for art, there was at least one Wallace Stevens or Charles Ives or Bach, who held jobs, raised families, and did immortal work besides? And would she acknowledge that for every Gauguin and Anderson, there were six Joe Doakes who shunned regular work and families and never published anything.? Would she feel bad that she had given such romantic advice? Or would she say that the advice she had given was, in the end, harmless, because the students were already committed, by nature or destiny, to do what they were going to do? Perhaps some of them had the broad-axe in their hand when they came from the womb and could not drop it they wanted to. For others, would not the axe slip from their grasp, no matter how many times they picked it up? I knew, and I suspect my readers knew, that I was not just asking about teaching but about my own life, my own failure to become a Writer with a capital W.

Eventually, I sent a copy of the published essay to Annie herself and got back a 7-page hand-written reply, which I keep in the fireproof lock-box with the insurance papers, our living wills, the family photos, and our passports. She said:

I guess the wench is dead. I was thirty, trying to decide whether to write books or accept the stunning offers of fame, fortune and travel that people were making me daily. Exhorting my students, I preached to myself and made my choice which I still have to make 8 times a day.

Then she describes herself as “going at her life with a dental pick,” finding a balance between work and family, just like the rest of us. I read later that she had converted to Roman Catholicism. I’m guessing she has not done anything since to rival Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but I would not blame the church for that, nor (I’m guessing) would she.

Well, the defense rests, though uneasily. I remain deeply suspicious of Faustian bargains, which are far more likely to end with Faust damned as he is in Marlowe’s play, rather than saved as he is in Goethe’s version. You could say that I tried out for the role of Faust and luckily did not get the part. I did, for a time, experiment with ruining my personality in order to do higher-level work. I nearly succeeded in ruining my personality, but I did not do any higher-level work. As my mind cleared, I remembered Virginia Woolfe’s devastating but sympathetic description of Professor Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, where cognitive power is compared to the alphabet. The professor is described as being able to think “only up to K” no matter how hard he tries. And I thought again of what Keats says in his letters: “If it does not come as naturally as the leaves to a tree,” it may be best if does not come at all. “

The work God wants done may in rare cases cost us our life, but it will never cost us our personalities. It seems more sane to conclude that I simply was not given that combination of intelligence and ambition and discipline that separates even a fairly good professor at Minot State from an ordinary one at the University of Michigan and those people from the giants—the Douglas Bushes, the Northrup Fryes. Despite all my misguided efforts to be something great, I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing.