William Blackburn cared about writing and had an almost holy concern for the language. I realized this the first time out, with a brief theme in which we were required to describe a place—anyplace. In my two-page essay I chose a Tidewater river scene, the mudflats at low tide; attempting to grapple with the drab beauty of the view, groping for detail, I wrote of the fishnet stakes standing in the gray water, “looking stark and mute.” A pretty conceit, I had thought, until the theme came back from Blackburn covered with red corrections, including the scathing comment on my attempt at imagery: “Mute? Did those stakes ever say anything?” This was my first encounter with something known among grammarians as “the pathetic fallacy.”
A certain precision, you see, was what the professor was after and I was lucky to be made to toe the line early. Also, it was not a permissive era. Blackburn graded his themes with rigid unsentimentality. That theme of mine, I recall, received a D-minus, and through discreet inquiry I discovered that it was the lowest grade in the class (I think the highest was a C). Chastened, I began to regard Professor Blackburn with apprehension and awe, and both of these feelings were heightened by his redoubtable appearance and demeanor. A large, bulky, rather rumpled man (at least in dress), he tended to slump at his desk and to sag while walking; all this gave the impression of a man harboring great unhappiness, if not despair. Nor did he smile effortlessly. There was something distinctly cranky and dour about him, after so many teachers I had known with their Ipana smiles and dauntless cheer. He was ill at ease with strangers, including students, and this is why my first impression of Blackburn was one of remoteness and bearish gloom. Only a remarkably gentle South Carolina voice softened my initial feeling that he was filled with bone-hard melancholy and quiet desperation. For several weeks it seemed to me impossible that one could ever draw close—or be drawn close—to such a despondent, distant man.
But before too long my work got much better, and as it did I found myself able to strike through the Blackburnian mask. Possibly because I was so eager to meet his demanding standards, I sweated like a coolie over my essays, themes, and fledgling short stories until my splintered syntax and humpbacked prose achieved a measure of clarity and grace. Blackburn in turn warmed to my efforts—beginning to sprinkle the pages with such invigorating phrases as “Nice!” and “Fine touch!”—and before the term was half through I had begun to acquire a clutch of B's and A's. More importantly, I began to know Blackburn, the great-hearted, humane, tragicomical sufferer who dwelt behind the hulking and lugubrious façade. One day to my astonishment he invited me to lunch. We went to an East Durham restaurant. The beer was good, the food atrocious. He spoke to me very little of writing, or of my own efforts (which did not bother me, my A's were enough praise and this terrible lunch sufficient accolade), but much about reading. He asked me what I had read in my lifetime and was patient and understanding when I confessed to having read next to nothing. Most gently he then informed me that one could not become a writer without a great deal of reading. Read Thomas Mann and Proust, he said, the Russians, Conrad, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans. Perhaps, he added, I would like to sign up, next semester, for his course in Elizabethan literature. We were a little embarrassed and uneasy with each other. Occasionally there were blank silences as we munched on our ghastly wartime hot dogs. In the silences Blackburn would give a heaving sigh. All his life he was an expressive sigher. Then he would begin to rail, with marvelously droll venom, at the Duke University administration bigwigs, most of whom he regarded as Pecksniffs and Philistines. They were out to smother the Humanities, to destroy him and his modest writing class; they were Yahoos. He got superbly rancorous and eloquent; he had an actor's sense of timing and I laughed until I ached. Then he grew more serious again. To write one must read, he repeated, read…
Blackburn readily admitted that there was a great deal of logic in the accusation, so often leveled at “creative writing” courses, that no one could actually be taught to write English narrative prose. Why, then, did he persist? I think it must have been because, deep within him, despite all doubts (and no man had so many self-doubts) he realized what an extraordinarily fine teacher he was. He must have known that he possessed that subtle, ineffable, magnetically appealing quality—a kind of invisible rapture—which caused students to respond with like rapture to the fresh and wondrous new world he was trying to reveal to them. Later, when I got to know him well, he accused himself of sloth, but in reality he was the most profoundly conscientious of teachers; his comments on students’ themes and stories were often remarkable extended essays in themselves. This matter of caring, and caring deeply, was of course one of the secrets of his excellence. But the caring took other forms: it extended to his very presence in the classroom—his remarkable course in Elizabethan poetry and prose, for instance, when, reading aloud from Spenser's Epithalamion with its ravishing praise, or the sonorous meditation on death of Sir Thomas Browne, his voice would become so infused with feeling that we would sit transfixed, and not a breath could be heard in the room. It would be too facile a description to call him a spell-binder, though he had in him much of the actor manqué; this very rare ability to make his students feel, to fall in love with a poem or poet, came from his own real depth of feeling and, perhaps, from his own unrequited love, for I am sure he was an unfulfilled writer or poet too. Whatever—from what mysterious wellspring there derived Blackburn's powerful and uncanny gift to mediate between a work of art and the young people who stood ready to receive it—he was unquestionably a glorious teacher. Populate a whole country and its institutions of learning with but a handful of Blackburns, and you will certainly have great institutions of learning, and perhaps a great country.
I deeply miss him, because ultimately he became more than a teacher to me. He became the reason why, after the war was over, I returned to Duke and why, too—although at this point the university and I were on mutually amicable terms—Duke acquired a meaning to me beyond the good times I enjoyed there and its simple power to grant me a bachelor's degree. Bill Blackburn had become a close friend, a spiritual anchor, a man whose companionship was a joy and whose counsel was almost everything to one still floundering at the edge of a chancy and rather terrifying career. It helped immeasurably to have him tell me, at the age of twenty-one, that I could become a writer—although I am still unable to say whether this advice was more important than the fact that, without him, I should doubtless never have known the music of John Milton, or rare Ben Jonson, or been set afire by John Donne. In any case, he was for me the embodiment of those virtues by which I am still able to value the school he served (despite bearish grudges and droll upheavals) so long and so well. Surely over the years the ultimate and shining honor gained by a university is the one bestowed upon it by a man like William Blackburn and his love, requited and unrequited, and his rapturous teaching.
[From Duke Encounters. Duke University Office of Publications, 1977.]