Line 2: Faces

During the first weeks of my freshman year in college, I shared some of what looked like poems with my new English professor, Dr. John Thatcher French. It was the only way I could think of impressing him. My teammates—I was on a basketball scholarship—warned me he was a hard ass. He’d failed students for as little as a comma splice, they said. He’d been a naval intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, he was a horse trainer, a Faulkner scholar, a chain smoker, and lapsed Yankee. Dark haired and square jawed with an abrupt baritone, he had the look and bearing of R. Lee Ermey, the actor who played the infamous drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. I don’t remember an especially enthusiastic response when I showed Dr. French my poems, but when a poet named Fran Quinn visited campus that October, he set up a poetry conference for the two of us. It was the first time I met someone who lived as a poet. I knew poets roamed the earth. I’d heard rumors, growing up, that the poet James Dickey ran fat, drunk, and naked through some woods not far from my house, but I never saw him or met anyone who saw him. And in any case, no one I knew would have been impressed to meet a poet. No one in my family knew I was writing poems. I didn’t know what to make of Fran Quinn. He was probably in his forties at the time. In the light of certain memories his hair was silvery blonde, other times I remember it as a yellowish silver; he had a round face with a mild bewildered look or he had a saggy face with a quizzical sadness. It may have been the blue baseball cap he wore that skewed his age and demeanor. He didn’t seem especially poetic. He wasn’t Beatnikish, professorial, or hung over. We sat alone in Dr. French’s office. Dr. French had smoked probably three cartons of cigarettes a day over a span of twenty years in that office. Fran Quinn shuffled through a stack of fifty or so pages bound by a large binder clip, reading his poems to me. He shared his own work perhaps as a way to disarm me, but it didn’t comfort me. I thought it was strange that he didn’t have a book. I showed him the best of my altogether terrible poems. He must have offered encouragement. Quinn asked if I’d heard of Robert Bly. I hadn’t. I told him I liked Gwendolyn Brooks. I asked what he thought of James Dickey. Not much. While Quinn spoke—maybe he was talking about Robert Bly again—I scanned Dr. French’s wall of books. As best as I could tell, the measure of an educated man was what he’d read, not what he’d written. French had read all of William Faulkner plus lots of books about Faulkner; all of Mark Twain plus lots of books about Twain; most of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne: dead white writers. He taught what he knew to us. Once in the middle of reading Molly Bloom’s sprawling soliloquy in Ulysses, he began to weep right there in front of our class. That’s still among the most shocking and lovely moments in all of my college education. Another time in my sophomore or junior year, when he was too hung over to teach a chapter of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, he lay his rumpled head down on his desk and asked me to teach it. I don’t know that I would call the moment a boy decides he will become a teacher a coming of age story. There’s no drama to it. I was the first in my family, the first of all my grandmother’s children and grandchildren to go to college. I did not go into the army as both my father and stepfather had. I was tall enough to get a basketball scholarship to a small liberal arts college surrounded by...