The grace note of this column did not sound till years and years later.
I cannot remember at which university I was speaking, but it chanced to pass that I recounted the story contained in this essay. Now that I think of it, I may again have been lecturing at Ohio State, where I’d first told this story twenty years after it went down. And a woman in the audience raised her hand to ask a question; and when I recognized her, she said, “I work in a B. Dalton bookstore in” and she named a town, “and I was at the checkout counter one day, reading one of your books, when a tall, elderly man came up to pay for his purchases with a credit card.
“I took his card, not looking at it,” she went on, “and I laid your book down with the cover facing him, as I rang up the books he’d picked. He looked at your book, and asked me, ‘Do you read this person’s work much?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I like his writing quite a lot.’ And he got a really hateful look on his face and mumbled something unpleasant, including a few mild curses like, ‘Damn him,’ and I was surprised, but he signed the credit card voucher, took his bag of books, and left.”
She paused a moment, smiling up at me on the stage, and concluded, “It wasn’t till that evening, when I was assembling the vouchers and the cash for deposit, that I finally saw the name on his slip. I was here the last time you spoke, and I remembered the story you told about that professor who told you that you had no talent, a Dr. Shedd. And the name on the voucher was Dr. Robert Shedd.”
(Why do I now think, in 1989, that it may have been James Shedd—originally, and in the woman’s story—rather than Robert? Well, it was one or the other.)
Apparently, Shedd was still an obscure teacher, now at an even less prestigious college than OSU. But damn him with a really hateful look was his persistent fate.
As Dorothy Parker said, “Living well is the best revenge.”
This has been in aid of asserting that I am a self-made man…thereby demonstrating the horrors of unskilled labor.