My Generation: Collected Nonfiction, Page 3

  In later years, after leaving Christchurch and college, I became the good friend of several of those who had attended the great preparatory schools of New England. In all truth, it must be said that the potential for a good early education must have been somewhat larger at these richly endowed schools, with their splendid libraries and other resources, than it was at Christchurch; but I emphasize that word “potential” in the realization that at Christchurch, for those of us who had the determination—and most of us did—it was possible to overcome the handicaps and obtain an excellent preparation for college while in the process having a good time. Most of my friends who went to those venerable Northern institutions with names like Andover and St. Paul's did not seem to have a good time; so often their descriptions of school life are bleak, cold, impersonal, resembling a bearable but monotonous servitude rewarded later by glorious times at Princeton or Yale. At Christchurch I remember we worked as hard as anyone else to get our learning, but we also enjoyed ourselves. And I say that with memory uncontaminated by false nostalgia. Nothing warms my heart more than the recollection of those little sloops we sailed down on this matchless river. Certainly there are few schools in America that have proximity and access to a waterway of such magnificence. It mattered little to us that some of the boats were ancient and badly caulked and waterlogged and had been known with some frequency to sink sedately beneath the waves, even in the middle of a race; they were our boats and we loved them. Sailing, like the other sports, gave us ravenous appetites, and this leads to another obvious delight: the always tenderly prepared meals of Mr. Joseph Cameron, who of course is now an almost global legend. Could anything be more incongruous, more preposterous than the idea of any institution of learning where the food was consistently palatable and often superb? While my Ivy League friends still complain thinly and bitterly of soggy Swiss steaks and glutinous mashed potatoes, I recall cheese biscuits and pastries and delicately grilled fish, fresh from the river or the bay, which would have caused a French chef to salivate with envy. Christchurch may not have been in those days a well-heeled place, but it had a warm and golden ambience, and life was sweet, and we ate like kings.

  [From Styron's commencement address at Christchurch School, May 24, 1974.]

  William Blackburn

  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.]

  Almost a Rhodes Scholar

  In the winter of 1947 it appeared that I was on my way to becoming a Rhodes scholar. During the period after World War II when I went back to continue my studies at Duke University, I had applied myself with considerable passion to what was then, as now, known—I think unhappily—as “creative writing,” and it became about the only academic discipline in which there was descried that I had any talent at all. However, my promise was such that my late teacher, Professor William Blackburn—God bless him—determined that it might be a good idea to apply for a Rhodes scholarship on the basis of my writing ability. I was a graduating senior, an English major, impoverished, with nothing much looming on the horizon in the way of a livelihood after my midyear graduation a month or so hence. Professor Blackburn—who had himself been a Rhodes scholar—was, like most Rhodes scholars, an ardent Anglomaniac, and was able to beguile me with visions of all the delights that a year or two at Oxford might offer: studying Old Norse and Middle English in the damp and drafty rooms at Merton College—a place which, he said, one grew fond of; reading Keats and Hardy under the tutelage of Edmund Blunden; drinking sherry and eating scones, or picnicking on plovers’ eggs and champagne, as the pale lads did in novels by Aldous Huxley; having one's own fag—whatever that meant; going down to London for weekends; enjoying summer vacations in Normandy or boating along the Rhine. Another attraction: one would be paid a reasonable stipend. Whatever its defects (and I could not see many), it mostly sounded perfectly wonderful, and so I was quite acquiescent when Professor Blackburn urged me to try out for the preliminary competition—that of the state of North Carolina, held in Chapel Hill. I was a little apprehensive; my grades had not really been outstanding throughout my academic career, and I had been under the impression that “Rhodes scholarship” and “outstanding” were virtually synonymous. No matter, said Professor Blackburn; the new policy of the Rhodes selections placed much less emphasis on scholarly achievement than previously; candidates were beginning to be chosen far more for their promise as creative talents, and therefore I stood a very good chance. Well, it turned out that he was right. I submitted the manuscripts of several short stories. To my astonishment, out of a field of more than twenty I was one of two students to win the competition from North Carolina. The field had been loaded with hotshots, too: straight-A scholars from Davidson and Chapel Hill, an accredited genius from Wake Forest, a magnificently proficient German linguist from Duke. What a heady and vainglorious triumph I felt—and what a victory it was for the creative spirit! I was so exhilarated that day when I heard the good news that many hours passed before sober reflection set in, and I began to wonder just how much of my success had been determined by the fact that Professor Blackburn, my beloved and idealistic mentor, had been chairman of the selection committee. Anyway…

  The regional competition for the Southeastern states was held a few days later here in Atlanta—indeed, within the very bowels of this hotel where we are all meeting. I was twenty years old and the trip marked several “firsts” for me. The era of air travel, for instance, had not then really arrived in all of its dynamic and stupendous actuality; it was not yet really part of the matrix of our national existence. I had flown several times on military planes in the Marine Corps, but my trip to Atlanta from Durham was my first experience with a commercial aircraft. It was an Eastern DC-3, and I got slightly airsick, though my malaise may have been compounded by the truly visceral excitement which now agitated my every waking hour; I was racked with visions of Oxford in the mists of fall, of pubs and golden yards of foaming ale, of pretty Scottish lasses with that weather-rouged flush on their creamy cheeks, and of myself, winning my honors with a thrilling exegesis of The Faerie Queene. But then—Atlanta! Down through the clouds our plane made its descent. And here was an airport—imagine!—about the size of the Greyhound bus station in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and then, a leisurely, halting taxi drive by way of a bumpy two-lane highway through a sleepy Southern city where Peachtree Street was thronged with Negro vendors and the air was still haunted by the ghosts of Sherman's departed legions, and finally, the Atlanta Biltmore, its lobby filled with potted palms, cuspidors and salesmen from as far away as Moultrie and Al-benny.

  There was also something intangibly sinister about the place—something that troubled me even as I went through the check-in proceedings—until at last I realized what the problem was: behind nearly every potted palm, at every portal and exit, there lurked a uniformed fireman. I hope that my memory of this detail does not cast a shadow over the present assembly, but the fire alert was due to a terrible catastrophe that had struck Atlanta only a week before my arrival. In one of the worst fires in Atlanta history—and the greatest conflagration in Georgia since the burning of Atlanta in 1864—the Hotel Winecoff, only a few blocks away, had been destroyed, with the loss of over a hundred lives. The presence at the Biltmore of all this firefighting muscle caused me to seek for a striking metaphor, but I had to settle for the homely and rather imperfect one of the barn door being shut after the horse has run away; so many firemen should have allayed certain basic anxieties about nocturnal safety (I'm not exaggerating too much when I say that there seemed to be firemen enough around for one to spend the night with each and every guest), but their presence inexplicably made me more nervous, and that night I went to bed in a deep unease, worrying about my interview the next day, and waking hourly to the smell of imagined combustion.

  The next day—the day of the interviews—was nearly interminable, lasting, I recall, from very early in the morning until eight or nine in the evening. During those long hours I had time to sit and fret miserably on one of the couches on the Biltmore mezzanine, to read, to chat with a few of my thirty or so competitors, and in doing so, to take stock of my chances. I felt profoundly intimidated. These young men comprised the intellectual elite—no, the super-elite—of all the colleges and universities of the Southeast; they possessed, I was certain, staggeringly high IQs, had burnt countless gallons of midnight oil to achieve scholastic mastery. They were, in short, the flower of their generation, and win or lose, I was proud to be counted among them. Hooray for Cecil Rhodes! Hooray for Oxford! I thought. The hours dragged on. Even in some of the darkest trials of my officer candidacy in the Marine Corps I did not suffer such suspense, such spasms of anxiety, such despair mixed with forlorn hope. How sweet it would be, I thought, munching on my ham-and-cheese sandwich, to row for old Balliol, to hit a wicket or swing whatever is swung at cricket for Oriel or All Souls. I thought of the Lake Country, Cornwall, Westminster Abbey. I can recall now nothing of my own interview, only that I seem to have acquitted myself with dignity and aplomb; I think it must have lasted half an hour or more. It was long past dark when, fatigued with the bone-stiffening fatigue that only such mise
rable waiting can induce, we sat and watched a committee member—himself quite haggard—emerge from the conference room and slowly read the names of the dozen winners. My name was not among them. The relief—no matter how painful the undergirding of disappointment—was immediate, almost blissful. And I felt some small twitch of solace—albeit solace mixed with puzzlement—when, after extending routine thanks to all, the committee member singled me out, requesting that I stay behind after the other candidates had dispersed. What on earth was this? I wondered, with a deft surge of hope. Was I to be given some secret, heretofore unrevealed and unannounced consolation prize? A watch? A Bible? A set of the OED?