A Lifetime in English Studies

WILLIAM BLISSETT A Lifetime in English Studies I Now retired from teaching, I am often asked what I chiefly miss, and candonr compels the answer, 'the sound of my own voice holding forth in the classroom,' to which I hastily add, 'the antiphonal sound of my students putting up resistance or adding their own insights, at first feeble, later spirited.' A.S.P. Woodhouse used to say, with his great laugh: 'two years ago I gave up thinking, a year ago I gave up reading, this year I gave up writing, and so I am ready to say something about education.' In the first half of my space I want to name half a dozen of my teachers - 'On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled' - who in their different ways knew what they were doing and gave me some notion of what I in turn should be doing. In the second half I will outline some tactics in the teaching of poetry that I hope someone will continue. I will conclude on a note of pride and alarm. Our great early teachers are not always in our own special subject or interest, where the precocious student is usually far ahead of the class and sometimes ahead of the teacher. Here are two names, unknown to all my readers: Blanche Tilton, Reggie Hammond, neither in English studies. Miss Tilton used to admit, with mock humility and regret, that she just missed being a native daughter of California and that she was not strictly a '4ger. Though born in 1849, she was brought by her parents to California , in a covered wagon, in 1850. Lean and ageless, like a humorous upright lizard, she taught algebra in Emerson Junior High School, Pomona . She was not bossy or fussy, but she was certainl and her ascendancy in the classroom was complete. She knew what was in mankind and never took a wooden nickel. She saw me through my weakest subject. Reggie Hammond, a young man who was to die young, taught biology in Victoria High School. He loved his subjectl and day by day made us see its vastness, its coherence, its wonder. He conveyed a sense of a field opening up, a territory, a world; and this prepared me for Northrop Frye/s great insight that literature is not an aggregate of texts in chronological order but a verbal universe. These two fine teachers seemed to take their greatest satisfaction not in teaching the specially gifted student but in persuading the average student to respect the subject and to do better than average work. The details and results of such effort are in UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 64, NUMBER 3, SUMMER 1995 A LIFETIME IN ENGLISH STIJDIES 355 their nature unmernorable, almost invisible, except to the Recording Angel. My other names all belong to the field of English literature. The first is the Principal of Victoria High Schoot H.L. Smith, known as 'the Wolf because of his grey hair and swift stalking movements and (by way of opposite) his easy affability. Harry Smith knew the course of study not by rote but by heart: he would recite and teach poem after poem as he prowled round the classroom, and having assigned the major parts in Macbeth, scene by scene, to members of the class, he would take all the minor parts (and correct misreadings) himself, hardly glancing at the book. This impressed upon me one of my deepest convictions - that literature is not the notes we take about literature, or what we say about literature, or history or theory or political m'oralizing, but a 'making,' an art generally and typically a spoken art. Rhetoric is the common teachable aspect of poetry, and the last two of the five parts of rhetoric are memoria and pronunciatio, complete possession of what you have to say and the ability· to deliver it with full effectiveness. Harry Smith also impressed on us that literature is something you come back to. He taught the whole course, rapidly, largely by having us read it aloud, before Christmas, and then went through it all again, with comments and discussion in the spring term. Many years later...