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C HAPTER 29 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 A Fortunate Fall My FIRST WIFE GOT WHAT SHE WANTED, THE ABILITY TO SEEK A NEW AND better life, as she has been able to continue doing in her next six marriages scattered over forty years, and I got what I wanted in reference to that first union. The cost was great. My children and I were apart, save for frequent visits and summer stays with me, for the next three years. But at the end of that period, I was able to rescue them from living with that mother judged so suitable for the care and rearing ofoffspring by the good Christian judge ofthe domestic court ofmetropolitan Nashville. Everything was happening to me and mine at once in late 1971 and most of 1972. Life came in salvos, thoroughly and rapidly. The divorce was filed and granted, Iachieved true financial bankruptcy, I was not recommended for tenure by a majority of the senior professors of the Vanderbilt English department , and I moved into a small apartment near the house where my children lived with their mother. In that small apartment, I had a telephone on which I began to receive calls from a number ofwomen who knew my new status, and a call from Robert Daniel, the chairman of the English department at Kenyon College, who was looking for a Romanticist. I was just the man for all those expressions ofinterest , and I devoted myself to proving my qualifications for that romantic label, broadly defined. In my trip to Ohio for the job interview at Kenyon College, I was picked up at the airport by a college driver for the fifty-mile journey from Columbus to Gambier, and I stared out the car window all the way to Kenyon at the drifts of snow and the desolation of the fanus and bleak villages. The scene both comforted and appalled. After finishing my study at Illinois, I had promised myself I would never live again in the Midwest, and here I was, even deeper into the landscape this time, and glad of it. 117 118 HOME TRUTHS The South had proved to be much more complex culturally at the level of defining people at, in, and aroW1d a place like Vanderbilt, and I had failed to negotiate successfully the hidden shoals, rocks, sunken wrecks, and sudden drop-offs ofthose deceptively warm seas. Ohio would be easier, I knew, and my brand of redefining and recasting reality would go down well in a place as small and innocent as Kenyon College. After all, that was where John Crowe Ransom had sought refuge after being driven out of Vanderbilt. He had prospered and accomplished, and he was still alive there in the village ofGambier. Icould do the same on a lower level, I told myself. I knew I could. After dinner at the chairman's house, meetings the next day with department members, students, and administrators, I was offered the job. A month earlier, I had already been offered an appointment at a higher rank and a higher salary at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, but there was no doubt about where I would go. I had had my fill ofSouthern academe , and the difference in prestige between Kenyon and Southern Mississippi was obvious. I have always wanted more and better certification of my worth, ever since my purgatory in Polk County, Texas, defined with immaculate clarity for me by AW1t Rosalie's grudging gift ofthose four pieces of light bread my mother made me beg. My hW1ger cannot be satisfied. So I was going to Kenyon, and the response ofthe senior members ofthe Vanderbilt English department to the news was sweet. Kenyon was an "other Eden" in their eyes, the place where Ransom landed after the expulsion from the Garden, where he founded the Kenyon Review, taught Robert Lowell and Peter Taylor and a distinguished army ofother poets, novelists, and critics. Duff was going there. Duff, the one with no people. The one married to and now divorced from that crazy woman who acted strange at social functions. Duff, with his long hair, his ill-clad children, and his perverse interest in Nigra lit. He, that one. As BrotherJames, back in the Camp Ruby, Texas, Baptist Church might have said, "Vengeance is mine, thus saith the Lord." Soon after I moved to Gambier all my belongings in two boxes and on a clutch of wire hangers, I remarried, this time to a woman I had...

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