Good Advice Received During My Freshman Year

In September, 1976, after matriculating to my freshman year, I asked the first Literature professor that I ever met to read a handful of poems I had brought up with me, composed during my senior year in high school. The several poems consisted of about a total of four hundred unrhymed lines, much of it in blank verse imitative of John Milton's, as his was the first poetry I seriously studied. I handed him the bound sheaf of pages with the humble statement that, "These are probably not very good." He immediately handed them back to me. "I don't need to read them," he said, "because they are probably not very good." I was shocked. He explained: "You asked me to take time out of my day, or several days, to read these, even though I am teaching a full course load and have administrative duties within the department. But you, yourself, have already judged them as 'probably not very good.' If you, the poet who wrote them, think so little of them, why would I need to bother with them?" He laughed at my stunned incomprehension, and agreed to read the poems anyhow. I never, ever, have said such a statement to anyone else, and never will. And, by the way, he returned the poems to me several days later with the judgement that they were, in his words, "colossaly boring." Then he gave me the first priceless reading recommendation I ever received---to read The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot: a poem, so the professor described, that would seem, upon first reading, like a nightmare turned inside out and upside down from which I would not be able to wake up during the reading. I have never found a better description than that of Eliot's great poem; and that advice led to the next twenty-four months of an intense study of all things Eliotic; such that, while yet a sophomore, I was advising those seniors literature majors who chose to write their senior papers on Eliot; and my Junior year, I was admitted to the Eliot seminar, a restricted course, invitation only, closed to freshmen and sophomores, and only offered once every three years. During my sophomore year, I wrote a rather gushy letter to Valerie Eliot, the Poet's second wife and widow, telling her that I, too, was an aspiring poet and how much his work, and his high-church Anglican Faith, meant to me. Another literature professor, who taught the restricted Eliot seminar, told me the letter would never be answered. I mailed it anyhow, in November of 1977. A reply arrived in February, 1978. Mrs. Eliot paitently answered my several questions, and concluded the letter with these words---"I enjoyed what you told me about yourself, and send cordial good wishes for your work." The letter had been scented with lilac perfume (lilacs are repeatedly present in Eliot's poetry). To this day, I believe Mrs. Eliot personally typed this, rather than dictating it to one of her clerks at the publishing firm of Faber & Faber. I knew, from close readings in Eliot's biography, that Valerie Fletcher had been hired by Mr. Eliot as his secretary at Faber; that his only complaint was that her typing required a good many erasures on the finished drafts of his correspondence. When a friend of mine and I held the letter upward to my room's overhead light, we saw that the thin paper presented several erasure marks---about one per line through the body of the letter. When I showed it to the professor who had tried to discourage me, he reacted rather smugly---and from that day commenced a huge rivalry between us. I learned later, confidentially (and since all parties to the confidence are, with the exception of myself, dead, I feel know compunction to preserve the confidence), that the professor had, some years ago, approached Valerie Eliot in Faber's office in London, and had exchanged some severe words with her, consequently any further access to Eliot's papers or Mrs. Eliot's knowledge of the Poet's final days. Later, during the seminar, that same professor spoke very unprofessionally to me more than once---even shouting at me, once, to "Shut up" when I suggested that Vivienne Eliot, the Poet's first wife, had been as much of (if not more of) an influence on The Hollow Men (1925) as she had on The Waste Land (1922). Because it is well known how much inspiration she contributed to the earlier poem, and that she glides through the lines of Ash Wednesday (1927) which originally carried a dedication to her, it follows that her influence must be present in the middle poem as well. The professor's response to my suggestion was so ferocious that several of my classmates urged me to file a charge of harrassment against him with the department Chair. I did not. I was later told that he had been mostly offended by the idea that I, during my sophomore year, had received a personal, cheerful, and helpful letter from Mrs. Eliot while he, who possessed a PhD (his dissertation examined one of Eliot's plays), could not get past the receptionist at Faber's. Even the most callous frat boys, and some of the very lovely upperclassmen on whom I had some very intense crushes, were moved by the letter's last paragraph, "I enjoyed what you told me about yourself, and send cordial good wishes for your work." To receive that kind of blessing from the person in whose arms Eliot expired and from whose embrace he stepped into Heaven, meant more to me than even the conferral of my B.A.

Starward