University of Michigan

 

 

Ben's been asking for more stuff about my early life, and it turns out Paul had no idea I'd planned to become a professor of English Literature. So here's a little more early history:

I wasn't quite eighteen when I started college. I had no idea what I really wanted to do. For a while I thought I wanted to become a geologist. Unfortunately, in historical geology labs we were required to identify fossils, all of which looked a lot like rocks to me. I took a course in geographic cartography, drew some maps, and enjoyed doing it. Then I took a course in historical cartography that I loved. That course was where the title for my personal web came from: "Imago Mundi," Latin for "image of the world." The final exam was oral. The prof whipped out a map and asked me to date it. It was a T&O map (google it), but it was printed, so it had to be from later than 1440. I guessed 1500 and aced the exam. At that point I thought I wanted to be a cartographer.

In most of my other courses I goofed off. But I always did well in English literature classes, mainly because I could write (and think, which is no small thing). In my second year at University of Michigan I took a great course in English lit from a guy named Frank Fletcher. We read and critiqued Hudson's romantic, sexy, but by comparison, frothy novel, "Green Mansions," and compared it with Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage," which was unsexy and painful to read but much more substantial.

Then we got into poetry, which was Frank's favorite thing. He introduced us to T.S. Eliot with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and suddenly I was hooked. I'd been writing trivial doggerel since early high school, but a light flashed on as I grasped what you could do in a poem. I started cutting classes, spending hours on end in the Men's Union (yeah, that was before political correctness trashed the campus) reading and writing poetry. We were required to write a poem for the class. I wrote several, and Frank read the one I turned in — "Metamorphosis" — to the class. Suddenly several girls in the class were interested in me, a development which, since I essentially was a loner with no money, I hadn't a clue how to exploit. I sent Metamorphosis and a couple other poems to some "little" magazines and they got published. "Metamorphosis" is a long way from a great poem, but it's not bad for a nineteen year old.

Frank sort of took me under his wing. I took at least one more course from him, and we frequently had lunch together at the Union. He introduced me to other poets, like Dylan Thomas, and critiqued a bunch of my poetry. I took several more lit courses, but finally, when it became clear I was going to have to walk the rice paddies of Korea if I didn't make a decision, I volunteered for Aviation Cadets, got accepted, and at the end of that semester, bailed out of U of M. The rest is history (to coin a cliché).

It's a damn good thing I didn't become a professor of English lit. Looking at what professors of English lit are doing now and have been doing for several decades, it's clear there'd have been fistfights in the halls and maybe a shootout or two. I was much more suited to a military career where you learn to think straight or end up dead.