Setting Out

I was getting out of UC Santa Barbara as an English major with a pretty good grade average. What was the next step? (This was 1965, Viet Nam war time.) There was only one patriotic thing to do--serve my country. So, I applied to grad school. With Milton, I figured I'd serve best by standing (or sitting) and waiting. Actually, I managed to stay one step ahead of the draft. College undergrads had been exempt; I moved on to grad school just before undergrads became un-exempted. I had the same luck over the next couple of years. I got married just before unmarried college students got tagged; I had a kid just before married but childless men got tagged.

So, there I was, applying to three grad schools: UC Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale. My dad thought I should open up the field, but I said, naw, if I can't get into one of those three, I don't want to go. I might have changed my mind, but I got accepted at Berkeley and Harvard. Yale said no. Harvard said no to financial assistance, so I targeted Berkeley. One of my profs at UCSB assured me I'd find great people and dogs at any of the three, so I was satisfied. I didn't even know at the time what a splendid reputation Berkeley had.

All of the academic stuff aside, Berkeley had one other advantage: my wife's parents lived there, and they vowed (and carried through on their vow) that they would help with baby-sitting. So, up we went.

There are plenty of tales to tell, but I'll just mention that when I got to my first job, at a university in downtown Detroit, one of my colleagues (a PhD from University of Michigan) told me he expected that I'd be really arrogant because I had graduated from Berkeley. If I had known how others regarded me, I might have thought about being arrogant. But when I first went into the classroom on that job, I was more concerned that I couldn't think of anything I actually knew, though I had at that point been through ten years of college. A very kind colleague assured me that I knew far more than my students, which was true--but I felt that I truly started learning when I got out on my own and began to identify the areas where I felt inadequate. I had read lots of novels and poems and some criticism, but minimal history and history of ideas. That was where I had to turn my attention.

I was young (28) and enthusiastic. The first time I went in to teach an evening Shakespeare class, many of the students were older than me. One man, probably in his late fifties, seemed offended that I was teaching and wanted to know what my qualifications could possibly be. What can one say to a question like that without sounding arrogant? I identified my provenance as matter-of-factly as I could. He didn't return. Maybe he thought he'd been cheated with a new grad student. But we all made our way through, and I went on to teach many more Shakespeare classes, only giving Shakespeare up since I've been at institutions where Shakespeare is not such a staple of the curriculum, or I have to share literature classes with other colleagues also eager to remind themselves why they found literature an attractive specialization in the first place.

I was also young and bearded. After all, I came from Berkeley. In another class that first year, the discussion drifted into FBI and CIA spying on student protests. A student in the class jokingly pointed out that thmost hippie-looking person was the most likely to be the undercover agent. Everyone looked at me. I was suspicious-looking enough to be denied an apartment on the East Side in Detroit--the building owner was a liberal-loather: he knew I taught at the university, it came out in our rather antagonistic interview that I was from California (Berkeley, no less), and that clinched it. The university had a reputation for being a nasty communist breeding ground, and I just didn't have anything going for me in that interview, especially when the first rule I was given for being a resident in his precious building was that I could not operate a still. A still? A still? I had only heard about those in movies. How did he come up with that? Stills were off in the backwoods. He would have been closer to the mark if he'd threatened me about growing marijuana, which friends of mine did in their basements or attics. (That was then; this is now. All basements and attics I am currently familiar with have been purged of such antic husbandry and are the repositories of toy trains and household refuse not refusable enough yet to be junked.)

But there I was, new-minted scholar, taking up my first posting in a destination as far from life as I had known it as any given to a French Foreign Legionnaire.

I had an apartment a couple of blocks away from the sacred treasure of the conservative building-owner. Another block away, it was dangerous to walk at night. One night my car (a Volkswagen Van which had not been completely unloaded) was broken into. I came down to go to school in the morning and the windows were smashed. What was missing? Nothing. All I had in the car were boxes of books. The crooks must have taken one look at those and scratched their heads. The books were from grad school--unreadable to a normal person. They were unfenceable. They must have decided to cut their losses and go steal someone's car radio. By the way, this VW van--I had to buy it. I was from Berkeley, after all, and had a persona to forge and maintain. So there I was in Detroit, where any word about hippies must have come on newscasts, and I didn't make much impression with my nifty vehicle. The department chair--an otherwise not terribly distinguished person who played the horses--had a Mercedes and a mousey manner, but a funny sense of humor.

Another thing about the VW van: my wife, who was at that time in the process of becoming an ex-wife, hated it. To me, it stood for independence. I no longer had to borrow the family car from her. For her, it stood for my independence--she no longer had control over when and where I could drive. Belated ha-ha to her. Funny how you save these things up. What was I waiting for to do my crowing? The internet and blogging: in 1970, all I could do was keep stupid journals, which piled up here and there. You know what? Years later, I read them. I thought--ack! These are awful! Who is this depressed, miserable character? They were boring and trite. Mope mope mope. And what's worse, at the time, I didn't know how to spell "mope," so all they had was Mop Mop Mop, not even Raggedy Mop.

What did I pack? If'd known about Jack Kerouac at the time (I know, I know, how could I have lived in the Bay Area and not known about Jack Kerouac? Hey, cut me some slack, Mack. I was a Milton "scholar," and not only was I in a pretty esoteric area, I was in an esoteric area of Milton: his prose writings, doing highly detailed stylistic analysis. What did I know from Jack Kerouac? I had barely learned to eat Chinese food and drink the occasional Manhattan.) Anyway, if I'd known about Jack Kerouac, I wouldn't have packed anything: I'd have hitchhiked back to Detroit. Fortunately, my ignorance protected me, and I packed next to nothing, but everything that was important: drums, vibes, lps, books, clothes, trombone. Sadly, I left behind a daughter, with whom I am in close touch now, but I was off with the essentials to the desolations of the north. Like Gawain--off into the terrifying and unknown, hoping not to lose my head.