My Generation Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 Iached. 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. BillBlackburn 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