2

FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS, I could do my last tinkering on “Troubled Sleep.” Then once I got my teaching under way, I’d take up my favorite pen and, on unlined white paper in permanent black ink, I’d attempt to handwrite the opening sentence of A Long and Happy Life. First and last sentences have been absolutely crucial for me, then and now. And while I didn’t know the right words yet, I knew what my characters were doing with their bodies—Rosacoke was on the back of her boyfriend Wesley’s motorcycle. She was forcing Wesley to take her to the church where her black friend Mildred was being buried, dead in childbirth. A funeral is hardly Wesley’s idea for a fine summer Sunday; so he’s speeding up on the bumpy dirt road and loudly passing the numerous cars of the funeral procession, including a pickup truck with the coffin. The clear look of their bodies in my mind—the young white couple’s—tells me who they are and how they each feel: Wesley exuberant yet silent, Rosa ashamed and cowed. Now I only had to carve out that one sentence, but first I had to learn how to teach my first class.

So in mid-September—still sweltering weather with no air-conditioning on Kerley Road—I resumed modified academic dress, the American version. With the first-day-of-school nerves I’d always experienced since entering first grade, I drove to campus for the formal beginning of my life as a teacher. In a new light-blue seersucker suit and my Merton College tie, I parked in a faculty-assigned spot on Duke’s Georgian redbrick East Campus. In the West Duke Building I’d been assigned a kind of milk-carton office, very small but very tall. The building’s local fame was that it continued to house not only a sizable portion of the English and philosophy departments but also the laboratory of the world-famed parapsychologist J. B. Rhine (when I first reached Oxford and said the word Duke, everyone would immediately say “Ah, Dr. Rhine!” and with serious interest).

Rhine was then by far the best-known member of the Duke community—many would have said the most notorious (he’d attracted visitors as distinguished as Aldous Huxley and Arthur Koestler). Having died in 1980, Rhine is now a far less noted man than he was in my early faculty days; and his field is subject to widespread rejection for what are now thought of as scientifically questionable methods. In fact even in my own student years, I seldom heard a good word spoken about Rhine’s work by my teachers; and while I never met the man and am uninformed about his work, I directed many lost campus visitors to his office. More than a few of them told me of the urgency of their need to tell Dr. Rhine of a personal experience of ESP—extrasensory perception. And more than one described to me, before I could slip away, a ghostly manifestation of some kinsman long years after his or her death.

*        *        *

Waiting in my pigeonhole that starting day in ’58 were the first of many years of even more nervous-making revelations—the names of my students for the coming semester. In that precomputer era, we learned the number and names of our students by way of packs of small registration cards. In the Duke of the late 1950s, almost all freshman classes were segregated by gender (that they’d also be all-white was a long-foregone conclusion); and since my office was on the Woman’s College campus, all the names for my two classes of freshman English were female—eighteen women in each of two sections.

A quick flip-through showed no names I recognized. I’d already got my free textbooks and had been glad to learn that, in the fall term, we’d be reading prose which might prove especially congenial to my own writing hopes. We’d start with an anthology of essays—such brief but worthy chestnuts as Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” and E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake.” Then we’d lead our charges into three unquestioned cornerstones of modern fiction—Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

It was considerably too early in the development of the male American psyche for me to consider how unremittingly male those long fictions were—there’d be no Edith Wharton or Willa Cather, no further Woolf. But the structure of the freshman course was radically new for Duke. Once weekly a senior member of the department would lecture to all the freshmen, divided into large groups in various big lecture halls on the men’s and women’s campuses. The lecturer would give an overview of the book under consideration. The point of assigning the mass lectures to senior professors, we were told, was to give the freshmen a view of our stellar performers in full action, thereby tempting them into an eventual English major. Alas, the chairman’s faith in the senior members’ ability to lecture clearly and arrestingly was misplaced; and within a year more than a few lectures were assigned to promising younger members.

One such senior lecture, on The Great Gatsby, was so appallingly bad that I returned to the trailer foaming mad; and in my furious attempt to drive a picture-hanging nail into the concrete-block wall, I broke the nail. It flew into my left eye with the near force of a bullet. I fell to the floor, covered the eye with my fingers, and slowly drew back a handful of blood. It was late afternoon but I phoned a local eye hospital which urged me to come in before it closed at five. By four-thirty I’d managed to get the Beetle within three blocks of the hospital when a sudden great jet of what seemed black octopus-ink flooded the vision of the wounded eye. But I managed to see a doctor who told me to return home and lie flat on my back for a week. Otherwise the retina might detach and the eye be ruined. My brother came out and helped me with cooking and other chores, and at the end of a week the doctor took another look inside the eye and sent me home for a second week of lying down. After two weeks I was allowed to return to my teaching; and though I experienced unnerving flashes of light for years to come—and floating black blood cells—the eye slowly repaired itself. And I never allowed myself thereafter to react so realistically to a senior lecturer.

Once past the mass lecture, in any case, we junior instructors would meet with our two sections separately and lead a more detailed discussion of the book (or essays or stories). Then we’d assign a topic related to the book, and each student would write her best effort at a five-hundred-word theme. Then—and here was the truly demanding part for the instructor—we’d hold private twenty-minute conferences with each student. With the student at our elbow, we’d read, discuss, and grade each theme. There’d be ten themes per term—10 times 36 students, thus 360 themes per term x 20 minutes per theme = 120 hours of conferences per term. And those were hours that could well be fraught with student unhappiness, not to mention tears, if the instructor disliked a particular theme.

Even at best, a twenty-minute conference could feel infinite if the student wasn’t already a semi-competent talker about books and the difficulties of prose composition in midcentury American English; and since I was determined (for the sake of my writing) to do all my teaching on a three-day weekly schedule, I could stagger home exhausted after that many hours of conferences. What was most demanding from me in those private meetings was not the total time spent but the new skills required by every such contact. The first required skill was mere attention. As a man with no children of my own, I had to learn quickly how to sit and listen sympathetically, but not without misgivings, to a young person’s self-explanations. Then harder still I had to learn to explain my misgivings and, finally, the grade I gave a particular piece of work at the end of the conference.

And in those days of seriously uninflated grading—ah, the rigors of outright honesty about the quality of student work!—my explanations often had to justify a grade of D or F, even to the hypercourteous students of those days. (In contrast, fifty years later such low grades are all but unheard of in the humanities in most American universities; and the present higher grades almost never reflect a significant improvement in the quality of student intelligence. A teacher awarding such grades now, even when they’re entirely justified by the quality of the student’s work, is likely to find that his or her classes have grown massively unpopular—classes that almost no one will take.)

*        *        *

My third class would generally prove my favorite—Representative British Writers, a course required of all English majors. In those days we thought we knew who the major British writers were (I still think many thoughtful readers do, though I’m not sure representative is the word for a series of writers, at least three out of four of whom were geniuses). In my first year we divided the fall semester among Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Since our students were mostly sophomores and juniors, they were no longer separated by gender; and the classes were often a good deal larger than the handily small freshman classes. From the start I’d concentrate on drawing my students into group discussions of the poems and plays. And because of my Oxford experience of such talk, I sometimes succeeded, though I’d find almost invariably that a small clutch of the students would simply refuse to commit themselves to speaking aloud, and in the presence of their peers, to the slightest opinion or question. Even five decades later, I usually find that ten percent of a class will simply refuse to engage in class conversation, even when they’ve been told at the start of the term that my evaluation of their part in class dialogue will constitute, say, a third of their final grade (I always specify that any student who has difficulty with such contribution should discuss the problem privately with me, and we’ll make special efforts to ease the difficulty; very few of the silent ten percent ever come to discuss the problem).

Those early freshmen, however, would absorb far the greater portion of my energy. My first class met in another tall, but enormous, room in the same building with my office—a nineteenth-century limestone survivor of old Trinity College which had preceded James B. Duke’s vast endowment and then named itself after his father, in understandable gratitude—and my first set of eighteen girls were banded in the midst of the space in the jittery uncertainty of novice college students (we called them girls or boys then with no sense of insult). My own nerves would have been even more high-strung if I’d thought the students knew it was my own first day of teaching.

Anne Tyler when I first knew her, in the Duke Gardens in the fall of 1958. She’s sixteen years old and already endowed with the gifts which made it such a pleasure to teach her—though teaching is hardly the word. In retrospect, I can see that—at age twenty-five—I was far more nearly a kind of household steward for the start of a career that was longing to start. In her Raleigh high school, which had been mine also (seven years earlier), she’d thought of painting as a likely life’s work; but when she reached Duke and began to respond to a few vague suggestions offered by her freshman composition teacher, the powder trail of prodigious feeling which had waited silently within her ignited and burnt its way forward. When I recently asked her if the dress she’s wearing in this picture might not have been a little conservative for the late 1950s, she told me “The dress I am wearing was made by my mother, who made every single one of my clothes until I went away to graduate school, at which point I found out that I was actually two sizes smaller than the dresses she had been sewing for me all those years.” The spit curl, however, was entirely in fashion, as was—and is—the thoroughly winning smile.

From the moment I sat at the desk and looked up with my best imitation of the unsmiling authority that had always impressed me in a teacher, a particular young woman caught my attention. She sat at the head of the row on my right, and she faced me with the same grave self-possession I was struggling to show her—a beautiful clear face, long black hair, and dark eyes. I opened my stack of cards and began to call the roll, asking the girls to tell me which of their given names they preferred and where they’d grown up. In those days I almost never had to ask for help in pronouncing their names—then they were at least ninety-nine percent Anglo-Saxon—and unlike my present students, they’d almost all grown up in a single town (unless they were “army brats”).

The imposing girl responded to the name Anne Tyler with a surprising blush—“Anne is pronounced Anne, and I’ve lived in Raleigh since I was a child.” I nodded and decided to wait for our first conference before revealing my own Raleigh connections. As I moved on through the name cards, I couldn’t have known what a vivid stroke of beginner’s luck I’d just been dealt.

*        *        *

Our reading began with the previously required anthology of essays, and my first assignment to the students was a theme on the subject of their very earliest memories. I asked them to describe as honestly and pictorially as possible—in however many words proved necessary—the oldest moment they thought they’d preserved. I told them that my own first memory appeared to be very brief but clear—a sunbath in the yard of the house in which my parents were renting rooms; I was three or four months old and heard the approach of a grazing goat who’d soon begin to eat my diaper. The majority of my freshmen women brought me descriptions of moments from around age three—normal enough, as I learned from psychologist friends. But Anne Tyler gave me 150 words describing a shaft of light that fell on her crib when she was some six months old (I’ve convinced myself I can still see the half-page, though I didn’t save it).

When she came to my office for her first conference, I learned several interesting things. First she’d spent a good part of her late childhood and adolescence in her parents’ house, only two blocks from my own parents’. She was sixteen years old now, when most of her fellow freshmen were eighteen. And she was a graduate of my high school in Raleigh—Needham Broughton High, widely acknowledged as the best public high school in the state—and there she’d studied with my own remarkable English teacher Phyllis Peacock, a woman marked by an outlandish but ultimately irresistible intensity of love for her subject (I’ve noted that Mrs. Peacock had been crucial to my decision at age sixteen to pursue a life of writing rather than painting).

It turned out that Anne had been similarly tempted; and even here in her first days of college, she still possessed a strong urge to draw and paint. Her brief description of such an early memory struck me, not so much by its few clear words of evocative prose as by the remarkable earliness of her small scrap of memory. (It would be years before I learned, and oddly from Anne’s eventual husband—Taghi Modarressi, a psychiatrist who was himself a distinguished Iranian novelist—that an unusually well-stocked early memory was characteristic of dedicated writers. He even suggested that the act of writing might be a form of relieving, and unburdening ourselves of, the pressure of such memory.) That early in our acquaintance then, Anne Tyler and I shared several important things in our past experience; and our meetings could proceed with an ease that was not always native to freshman conferences, despite the fact that I was then nearer to the age of my students than to most of my teaching colleagues.

*        *        *

As my two freshman classes continued to read from the volume of essays, my next assigned subject for the theme was the production of an actual essay. I mentioned some possible subjects, most of them no doubt characteristic of my own recent concerns and maybe a little morbid for young women of such apparent good health and spirits. I suggested for instance an essay about their first encounter with death, a grandparent’s funeral maybe. And while I don’t remember any other single piece from that week’s crop of thirty-six essays, I do recall Anne Tyler’s. In fact I still possess a copy.

She called it “The Galax,” and it describes an event from Anne’s childhood when she and her three brothers lived with their idealistic parents in a quasi-pacifist community called Celo deep in the North Carolina mountains. In the short piece Anne joins a group of mountain women for a foray through woods to gather wild galax, an evergreen vine which they’ll sell for Christmas decoration. With remarkable subtlety, for such a young writer with so few words allowed, Anne clarifies the degree to which she differs so profoundly from these embedded mountaineers. When I’d read the theme several times, and gone over it with her in conference, I acted on impulse and told her that, thereafter, when I assigned theme subjects to the other class members, she was secretly to feel free to write whatever she wished. It was my first impulsive move as a teacher and one that, most obviously, I’ve never regretted.

If only I’d kept copies of her work in the course of that freshman experience, I’d have an instructive and compelling portrayal of a gifted apprentice writer’s rapid self-discovery and growth. And if I’d done discreetly what one of my colleagues has done throughout his equally long career—that is, photographed each student for future reference—I’d have another picture of the engaging woman Anne Tyler was becoming. In the absence of an early photograph, however, I attempted to preserve that memory in a poem which I wrote shortly after a visit to Baltimore in 1995 (the last time I’d see Taghi alive—that good man was dying of lymphoma); and here are the opening lines of my memory—

Thirty-seven years ago this month,

You entered the first class I ever taught—

The gray-eyed Athena, straight as a poplar.

Tall, dark-haired and far more gifted

Than a tasteful billionaire’s Christmas tree . . .

To have had the pleasure of such a presence—with the mind that moved it—in the first class I taught seemed, in my tyro’s innocence, almost normal. How was I to know that it wouldn’t happen often? Time, though, would tell me what an initial godsend I’d had—a gift of sufficient richness to constitute one of the ultimate reasons for my spending, throughout my life, a part of each year at a teacher’s desk. An unmitigated appetite for hope—not money, surely—is the fuel. Anne Tyler would graduate from Duke in only three years at age nineteen, but she’d be a member of one other class I’d teach.

*        *        *

In my second year back at Duke, I was asked by a stingy-hearted colleague (not Bill Blackburn) if I’d teach his writing course for a semester while he was on sabbatical. Maybe a better descriptive word is parched—once he returned, he failed to offer so much as a word of minimal thanks for my work, only the flat assertion that he’d never have his course taught again in his own absence. Well, I’d taught it with great pleasure; and (for what it was worth to them) two of the students went on to become world-respected novelists. My colleague had no such luck, ever.

In the expectation of an interesting semester, I silently divided those older writing students into two sections. Those with whom I hadn’t previously worked were in one; in the other I assembled an especially promising group of students with whom I’d either worked previously or had known well. Anne Tyler was prime among the group I already knew—as were Fred Chappell and Wallace Kaufman, among three or four others. That second group would meet for one extended evening each week at Fred and Sue Chappell’s apartment near the Woman’s Campus. I’d met Fred in 1954 during my last undergraduate year and had published his first story and at least one of his early poems in the student magazine which I was editing then. When I was in England, Fred’s drinking ran him afoul of the deans; and he retired to his home in the Carolina mountains. There he married his girlfriend Sue, who accompanied him on his successful return to Duke. They gave the class a warm welcome each week, and the group proved as remarkable as I’d hoped.

I’d often begin the evening by reading a few pages from whatever I’d written that week, and we’d discuss my problems before moving on to their work (given the closeness of our ages, I had no trouble in getting them to speak candidly about my faults). As we moved on to their work, we witnessed the start of Fred Chappell’s always moving and frequently hilarious fiction that reinvented his own memories from a boyhood life in a large Appalachian family. Wally Kaufman had begun to deal, in stories, with his world of blue-collar north-shore Long Island. And in the course of the term, Anne completed a short story that still seems to me astonishing. It’s called “The Saints in Caesar’s Household”; and while it would appear in the student magazine, and years later in a creative-writing textbook, it’s never appeared elsewhere (Anne has always resisted collecting her short fiction).

When she’d given me the manuscript at the end of a previous meeting, I’d gone straight home and read it in my trailer bed with climbing excitement. I’d known this girl was good, but now she’d taken a long stride onward. When she read it aloud at the next class meeting, the other members sagely granted the strength of the story; but no one was prepared to say—or perhaps to see—what a first-rate thing she’d made: first-rate, I knew, by any standards. It was the first adult writing class I’d managed, but raw instinct prevented my trying to tell the whole class how high the story stood.

I suspected it was my complex duty not to discourage any of the other gifted students by praising one of their number disproportionately. But later, privately, I told Anne what I thought and asked her if I might do what Eudora Welty had done for me some four years earlier—submit the story to Diarmuid Russell. With her sometimes unnerving self-possession—or was it genuine shyness?—she only said “Yes.” So I sent the story off and Diarmuid responded Yes in his own laconic way. He never managed to sell that one story, but in only a few more years he’d sold Anne’s first novel, and one of the most successful careers of the past five decades in American fiction had begun. With no false humility whatever, I can add that I make no claim to have taught Anne Tyler anything significant about narrative writing. The fact that, despite the eight-year difference in our ages, we met in parallel starting-gates may have produced a certain mutual excitement in those early years; but if so, that effect was benignly accidental, not managed by me. It might even have helped us both more.

I can recall, for instance, that in the summer after our first year’s work together, Anne sent me a new short story. I can only guess that it had something to do with a young man and woman at a dance (maybe I’m wrong). I know that I wrote back in response, and I know that—once she’d left Duke and completed a year’s work in Russian studies at Columbia—she returned to campus and worked for a year as a cataloguer of Russian books. I saw her a few times then at student parties, and I met the young Iranian resident in psychiatry at Duke Hospital whom she’d ultimately marry. But I don’t recall seeing her privately. My apprentice teacher’s sense—learned from Professor Blackburn—that a responsible male teacher must be very circumspect in his dealings with female students rather absurdly hindered my early relations with Anne, who spent all her college summers very near my mother’s house where I could have seen her often (four years later, that same excessive circumspection affected my dealings with Josephine Humphries, the next greatly gifted student with whom I worked).

*        *        *

The friends who were roughly my age in those first years back in Durham consisted mainly of two couples—Dick and Charlotte Quaintance and Bill and Marie Combs. Dick and Bill were a few years older than I and had essentially completed work for their doctorates at, respectively, Yale and Harvard. Each of the couples had two children; and while it appeared—unostentatiously—that Dick might have a little money of his own, all of us seemed strapped each month to make it through till payday (we’d often borrow a dollar or two, from whichever one of us was still afloat, to feed ourselves till then).

The Quaintances and Combses provided almost all my social life—weekend dinners, with good food and drinkable cheap wine, that would last till two or three in the morning. Our gatherings were further fueled by intense but ultimately laughing discussions of the novels and poems we taught and the films we saw (the best of the Ingmar Bergman films, for instance, were opening then with powerful frequency); and all our meetings were seasoned with sometimes hilarious, occasionally heartbreaking accounts of the students we were learning to know in the exhausting yet somehow exhilarating hours of conferences.

It’s more than interesting, in retrospect, to consider that most of those close friends were either from the northeast or the Midwest; yet the subject of civil rights—and specifically of Duke’s all-white student body—seldom arose in our conversations. Was the explanation as simple as the fact that virtually all of us had simply settled, long since in most cases, into an acceptance (however sad) of the realities of segregation? Surely we were not that massively indifferent to so great an injustice. Still, the only one of us whom I can recall as participating in any of the peaceful marches and demonstrations that occurred regularly in Durham was Bill Combs, who’d been reared in Mississippi. And our undergraduate students showed less interest in the civil-rights movements than we, a great deal less—though there was none of the obviously vicious environment of governmental resistance to oncoming change that one heard of from the deep South. For that, we had the complex history of North Carolina to thank and the governorship of Terry Sanford (and ours was a state which had lost more men than any other Confederate state to the Civil War).

As for social companions, I don’t recall a single “date” with any woman but Dorothy Roberts, the phenomenally capable secretary of the English department. She’d begun that job in the late 1940s and, with only a single assistant (an older woman who primarily typed and filed), Dot Roberts did, with impeccable professional pride, the job that’s now done by some five or six employees. She was some fifteen years older than I; and she tended to contribute excessive talk to social situations, small or large; but she was good-looking and unquestionably loyal to any man or woman who earned her respect (her standards were old-fashioned Southern but high—she hailed from south central Virginia and had graduated from the University of Richmond). Starting shortly after my return to Duke and continuing till she retired from the department in the late 1980s, she was my frequent partner at lectures, dinners, whatever. To the best of my knowledge, no one thought we were lovers; and neither of us forged that appearance, not once in the thirty-odd years of our devoted and affectionate friendship.

This may be as good a time as any to recount a relevant fact—the fact that, in all my life, I’ve lied only once about my sexual proclivities. In fact it was to one of my old college friends that I told—I still believe—the only lie I ever told about my sexuality. I later declined to answer the question from a very few others whom I thought had no right to ask it, but I lied to no one else, and that was long ago.

Late in our senior year, one of my closest friends came to the office from which I was editing the student literary magazine and quietly said, in private, that he’d heard a disturbing rumor from an acquaintance of ours—the claim that I was queer. Since the acquaintance had no firsthand knowledge of me or any of my actions, I was puzzled as to the origins of the rumor (especially since, till then, my very low total of sexual acts would have shamed a robust Chaucerian friar). It was the first time I’d faced the rumor; and in response—and in the barest minimum of words—I lied. I said I was not; and I never corrected the claim, not to that friend. It would be another twenty years before any number of queer Americans felt safe in openly discussing their exotic sexuality. To have advertised it in the 1950s or early ’60s would have endangered anyone’s hope of a stable career, not to mention his standing with kinfolk and friends—or the police.

*        *        *

Otherwise I spent increasing amounts of evening time with Fred and Sue Chappell. Slowly I was learning that Fred was very close to being the best-read young American I knew (better than I); and finding an early and near-supreme literacy at the roots of his rural fiction and intensely intellectual poetry—all in a man who was ready to talk till dawn, as his long-suffering wife Sue poured us endless coffee—was a genuine help to my prevailing solitude. At least once a week also, I’d accept an invitation from Bill Blackburn and join him for a sirloin steak, a huge baked potato, and salad—served atop the desk in the living room of his four-room apartment.

By now Blackburn was in the vicinity of sixty, was entering his second decade of bachelor life, and the loneliness was plainly drilling in on him. The extremes of mood which I’d watched as his student were even more vivid at close range. Belly laughter at his own fine jokes could turn in a moment to indigo silence. After a long wait, he might rise and refill my wineglass, put a record on his turntable—a succession of Monteverdi madrigals, say—and we’d sit in a further bottomless quiet through a rapt half-hour of a kind that I’d never experienced with any other music-loving friend.

Even at a public concert, one friend might whisper a comment to the other but not with Bill. If anything had replaced the missionary-parent religion of his childhood, it was music. To him the notes and voices that poured from his state-of-the-art speakers mattered most desperately. Few of his friends can have more nearly shared his love of a certain kind of music than I (Fred Chappell would later be another), but the unbroken solemnity of the listening sessions eventually grew hard to endure. They were never as hard to attend to, though, as his steadily delivered opinions of our departmental colleagues.

Almost anyone who knew Bill Blackburn intimately in the final two decades of his life was aware that he descended slowly but with no turn-back into what can only be called grave clinical paranoia. Many of his colleagues—most of whom, I came to realize, thought of him with wary admiration and slightly bemused affection—were, he came to feel, his sworn enemies, dedicated to destroying his good name in our community and, somehow, to endangering his employment at the university (despite the fact that, tenured full professor as he was, he could only have been fired under extremely rare circumstances).

Maybe his long immersion in the literature of the lethal courts of Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, and Elizabeth the Virgin Queen had left him with more of a sense of viperous dark corridors and daggers-to-the-gut than was healthy. When I felt that I knew him well enough to attempt to lure him into a chuckling dispersion of his outlandish fears, he repeated that his own father had died “mad.” In fact he often catalogued for me his other close kin, still alive, some of whom he described as mentally disturbed—including his ancient mother who lived in a retirement home just down the block.

I met the old lady several times—she was then in her nineties—and was compelled to agree that, despite considerable charm and the remains of a girlish beauty, she appeared to be advancing into religious mania. Blackburn had told me that, upon learning of his divorce, she’d torn from her New Testament and mailed to him, with no further comment, the page on which Jesus most firmly precludes a broken marriage. (The incidental fact that, in all these pages, I’ve not yet referred to him as Bill reflects the fact that, after a six-year acquaintanceship, he’d never once asked me to call him by his first name. And the moment when, after three more years, I seized the nettle and addressed him as Bill—on one relaxed evening over drinks—was awesome. I’d weighed the wisdom of such a move well before making it; and now that I’d dared it, the coldest of chills afflicted my spine as I met his all-but-glaring gaze—was it the furious How dare you? he implied or a plain sad surprise? I’d never know but Bill it remained from that night onward.)

Years after I failed in my attempts to calm his view of a mere English department, Bill’s widow—who’d been an ideal second wife in his final years, though he inexplicably refused to see her in his last days in Duke Hospital—told me about finding recent journal notes in which, shortly before his last illness, he recorded crouching to hide in a neighbor’s backyard while he was out for an afternoon walk. He’d retired honorably from teaching several years earlier; but now on his walk he’d suddenly caught sight of a department colleague approaching in the middle distance. It was someone he’d long regarded as his supreme vicious enemy. Bill tried to hold his ground and walk on ahead, but finally he couldn’t bear the encounter, so a man of his former unshakable dignity ducked aside and hid his tall frame in a painful crouch behind a row of dense shrubs and stinking garbage cans.

Yet when I spent many hours beside him in Duke Hospital in 1972, as his death from cancer bore down hard (the tumor had gone from a salivary gland to his brain), he raised his swollen head off the pillow as I was ending one of my visits and said “I don’t see how you stand this.” I’ve still never known what he meant by this. Was it the sight of his agony which I visited twice daily, his face contorted by the tumor that by then had wrenched his features almost unrecognizably, the onerous teaching duties which I’d sometimes told him about, my writing; or was it mere life, the long life he’d known by then? He died, soon after, at only seventy-three—a brilliantly generous and almost endlessly tormented life.

In a group of younger friends, Bill could overcome an innate shyness and begin to rouse the joviality which powered his most winning charms. I’ve known few men more capable than he of entertaining an entire room of assorted friends when he could be persuaded to launch a few of his splendidly narrated comic recollections from sixty years of life in the middle South or his early childhood in Persia. But again, when I spent the frequent evenings alone with him over dinner in my early years of teaching, his disdain for our colleagues—and his patent fear of them—began to prove contagious. John Knowles would say to me years later that “No illness is more contagious than madness.” And a fledgling instructor like me, in the first years of his hope to spend at least part of his life in teaching, almost began to suspect that the corridors of a university might be as densely lined with stilettos and poison rings as any Florentine palace in the days of the Medici and their mortal enemies.

Still I maintained our friendship—partly because I had a lot of evenings on my hands, partly because I genuinely liked Bill (even in most of his unpredictable mood swings), partly because he offered paternal affection and wisdom, but above all because he seemed unhurriedly confident that I could become a writer and might fulfill his hope that I’d produce, as Styron and Guy Davenport had, fiction of serious quality. Yet he never made me feel that his friendship depended upon my success as a writer.

It would be years before I discovered that it was my publication of a successful first novel that led Bill Blackburn, most mysteriously, to end our friendship for a number of years. At that painful point, Styron assured me that, when his own first novel was published, he’d undergone an identical rejection from Blackburn. However long Styron and I discussed that shared reality (and we often did), we never understood it. Surely neither of us was aware of having intentionally neglected or offended so generous, though notoriously sensitive, a man whose early encouragement we never ceased to acknowledge.

Any attempt to explain the connections between Blackburn’s prevailing dread and fear of sudden abandonment by those closest to him is doomed to textbook psychologizing. In some sense his suspicions and eventual terrors were among the fuels that powered, first, his comprehension of the poetry and prose he taught incomparably for so many years and, second, the hunger that preceded the love he invested in those students in whom he sensed a potential for good writing.

He was by no means the only teacher I’ve known whose work was fired by personal qualities that caused him or her great enduring pain and sometimes undermined his chance of endowing a given student with the very strengths he intended to give—Bill’s intensity, for instance, frightened off several gifted young men. In fact I suspect that few of my lifelong teaching colleagues, myself included, would claim to have escaped entirely such painful contradictions. Whether or not teaching is more conducive to such miseries than, say, a career in law, medicine, or the priesthood, I can’t begin to know. I do know that I’ve never been befriended—and in the first decade of our friendship, so generously helped—by another human being who was as near prone as William Blackburn to an immovable certainty that the ground beneath him was as treacherous as any dark marsh and that the thickets on every side were populated with alleged friends plotting his shame and swift downfall.