Harbingers of Books to Come: A Texan's Literary Life

1952.

PREFACE

Over the years , my librarian wife kept pleading with me to make a list of all my publications. María’s sister once asked her why in the world she ever decided to become a librarian when she could have been anything she wanted, from doctor to lawyer to psychologist. Her reply was, and is, that her role in life is to bring order out of chaos. Even though she has tried her best with me and my messy desk, tables, bookshelves, and folders or loose sheets filled with notes, typed copies, and endless revisions, not much has changed in such an unruly state of affairs, and yet a list of my published writings did emerge as a result of her insistence that I sit down and compile one before I could no longer remember what I had published, where or when. For Christmas 1995, I presented María with the finished product, but as time went by there were more appearances of my work in magazines and journals, pieces reprinted in anthologies, and additional books. And so, as I continued to update that first bibliography with later publications, it occurred to me to add a brief account of the origins for each of my printed books. That brief account slowly evolved into the present autobiography, to which I now append this preface by way of an apologia.

French jazz critic Andrè Hodeir has written that the examination of an artist’s work with an eye to its origins is useful only insofar as one is already convinced of the artist’s merits. Although I cannot claim that as a writer I have created on an imaginative or intellectual scale anything that merits this autobiographical record and a detailed list of my writings by titles, places of publication, publishers, and dates, my work has been rather eclectic in terms of genres and contents and has been to some extent trailblazing. But even if the present or any future generation of readers may not consider my life and writings worthy of this autobiobibliography, I yet found María’s assignment and my subsequent reminiscences not wholly pointless nor entirely self-serving.

My first college English professor, Dr. Francis Abernethy, mentioned, in some now forgotten context, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Not long afterwards, I picked up a copy of the sculptor’s story of his life and art and began a reading that would take me as far as page 308, in the J. Addington Symonds translation, published in 1927 by Black’s Readers Service Company. Years after I had first opened Cellini’s memoir, I continued to recall its beginning, with his assertion that all men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand; but they ought not to attempt so fine an enterprise till they have passed the age of forty. If my various writings may not resemble excellence, this chronicle that I offer at age seventy, of their sources, creation, publication, and reception, represents in but one other form an expression of my indebtedness to those whose lives, artworks, and/or teachings I have tried to emulate or pay tribute to through my own efforts as editor, anthologist, versifier, translator, reviewer, and devoted fan.

Only in 2007 did I notice a sentence quoted on the cover of María’s paperback copy of A Year in Thoreaus Journal: 1851: Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? This sentence, taken from Thoreau’s journal for October 27, 1857, is followed by another that reads: "The real facts of a poet’s life would be of more value to us than any work of his art—I mean that the very scheme & form of his poetry (so called) is adopted at a sacrifice of vital truth & poetry. Although I may have falsified my life in writing about it, especially in my poems, I can say categorically that I never intended to do so, as did James Dickey, which may be why his poetry is more imaginative than my own. Nevertheless, the memory will often reshape and reemphasize certain facts without one realizing it, making them representative of a time and place as seen from a later date, or as one may need to remember a particular period or ambience. In Thoreau’s 1851 journal, he declares that the poet writes the history of his body." It was hard for me to imagine writing a history of my own scrawny frame, and yet how ungrateful could I be, since my ambulatory limbs have gotten me around for all these years. Not only this, but how forget the miraculous lips, teeth, tongue, lungs, and hands that once played my trumpet, the fingers that still press my piano’s keys and the right foot its pedal, or the incredible eyes and ears that have made possible the books read and the music heard, as well as the observation of and conversation with those that I have looked at, listened to, learned from, and even loved.

Another statement by Thoreau that drew my attention in the 1851 journal is his assertion that just as murder will out so will a man’s reading. Along with Thoreau’s notations and ruminations on his everyday walks, he himself reports on a wide range of works, from Whitman’s deep diving bibles of India, and Homer and Virgil’s classic epics, to Darwin’s visit to the Chilean island of Chiloé, where, also in 2007, María and I spent a magical week. But whereas Thoreau’s seeing and saying were focused on and fostered by his local fields, waterways, and flora, I will only incidentally touch on landscapes that I have often observed or have only known in passing. However, like Thoreau, I too will speak of my reading, primarily in relation to my writing. Partly the reason for reviewing my career as a writer and translator is because it remains so unbelievable to me that I have come to produce as much as I have; the prospect of publishing twenty-five books between 1962 and 2009 would have seemed almost unthinkable at the time that I wrote and saw into print my first effort, now fifty years ago.

My trail of publications began at age twenty, with an essay on the music of Charles Ives, which appeared in 1959 in the first issue of Pulse, the student literary magazine at then Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont. Some ten months before the Ives essay was published, I had begun to write poetry, and from early on I wrote poems about music. Later, as an editor, I would solicit others to write on music, both classical and jazz. But it never occurred to me to write critically on music again until over thirty years after the appearance of my essay on Ives. Only in 1993 did I develop an article on Texas jazz guitarist, trombonist, and composer-arranger Eddie Durham, and from that time on I wrote frequently on jazz history, including two book-length studies and one collection of essays, as well as editing a volume on bebop. Yet poetry, in both original and translated forms, would remain my principal concentration both as a writer and as editor, critic, and anthologist of Texas and Chilean poets.

Aside from music, the topics of my writings have included Texas history, my wife’s native Chile, my wife herself, our children, my teachers, and the many persons and events that have drawn my attention or moved me at a particular time and in a particular place. Always it has simply been the need to write that has stimulated my exploration of most every subject or theme that I have ever taken up. Even though it was music that first affected me deeply, beginning as a band and orchestra member at Beaumont’s South Park High School, I discovered during college that I had more of an aptitude for writing about music than for performing it. The first recognition that I received as a writer came in late 1962 when I won the Eleanor B. Weinbaum prize for a poem entitled An Afternoon of Debussy, based in part on Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun, but originally prompted by the sight of a mother and her newborn child.

My bibliography clearly indicates a dual obsession with music and poetry, and in compiling my list of publications, this came as no surprise. And yet the compilation has documented more fully even for me that these two topics or activities have held an enduring attraction over the entire period of my literary life. Relatedly, the bibliography has revealed that both subjects that I first took up have proven inexhaustible in their ability to inspire and enlighten me. Later, my investigation of my own geographical region would become central not only to my own writing about music, friends, mentors, and the places and poetry of Texas, but also to my promotion of other Texas poets. Consequently, music and Texas, as fields of concentration, have furnished the subject matter for the majority of my writings and publications. In turn, Texas magazines and presses have understandably provided the main outlets for my work, which has been focused largely on my native state, its towns and cities, and its musicians, poets, and historical and contemporary figures.

As for a third obsession—my long-standing support of the poetry of Chile, through translations, reviews, and critical writings—the bibliography also documents my abiding enthusiasm for the works of several generations of Chilean poets. My first book-length effort in the field of translation was an anthology of twenty-two poets of Chile, published in 1972 by Road Apple Review of Wisconsin. But my advocacy for Chilean poetry would only gain a measure of recognition in the United States, and more so in Chile itself, with the publication in 1999 of my full-length collection of translations from the Spanish of Enrique Lihn; my 2001 participation in an international homage to the grand Chilean antipoet, Nicanor Parra; appearance in 2006 of my translation of Oliver Welden’s Perro del amor, my translations contributed to the historic bilingual anthology, Poéticas de Chile/Chilean Poets on the Art of Poetry, issued in Chile in 2007; and at the beginning of 2009 the release of my translated version of Parra’s Discursos de sobremesa as After-Dinner Declarations.

The list of my published translations from Chilean Spanish now stretches across more than four decades, and in this respect the bibliography traces the gradual steps that led to a substantial body of work, comparatively speaking. One service rendered, then, by a bibliography is to mark the development of a writer’s raison d’etre over a considerable span of years; so that to look through such a record at the many almost incidental publications, and to see them accumulate to a rather sizable number, suggests that one did aspire, if unconsciously or half-consciously, to an achievement that has finally come to fruition. In itself, such an overview makes the self-creation of a bibliography a fully gratifying undertaking for the compiler, but hopefully it will be welcomed by anyone interested in seeing how publications are built up over a prolonged period of time.

One feature of my bibliography that may seem uncalled for is its inclusion of excerpts from critical reviews for each of my book publications. This may strike a reader as excessively egotistical, especially when a review happens to be favorable. Any positive notice is, however, almost always offset by negative press, so that there is no attempt to hide the adverse views or to engage solely in self-gratulation. I am reminded in this regard that Dr. Samuel Johnson lamented that he had not kept all the pamphlets written against [him], as it is said Pope had. I would be less than candid to suggest that I was not anxious with each publication to learn of its reception. Although I have always been sensitive to criticism and have rarely sought comments from colleagues or fellow writers prior to publication (which surely would have been the wise thing to have done), I have never been discouraged enough by disparaging reviews either to stop writing in the ways that I have long tended to write, or to give up writing altogether.

I cannot deny that I thrived to a certain extent on praise, but its impact was always short-lived, in the sense that kind words about a publication could not make the next project any easier. Praise did move me to do more and hopefully better work, but adverse criticism or, much worse, very little or no response at all, did not deter me. What buoyed my spirits most was when a reviewer or critic understood my intentions and expressed his or her understanding in words that I would have chosen or would have liked to have used myself. Writing is a lonely pursuit that even the slightest encouraging comment in print can make less solitary, since it furnishes one with a sense of being in contact with even a limited audience. Aside from reviews of my books, rarely has anyone offered any commentary on my work, especially my poetry collections. In so many ways, then, the critical notices included here represent almost the only responses from readers that I have received and constitute probably the only acknowledgment that my attempts at communication had made it through. Even if some readers have not considered my writings to be worth their time or attention, others have found a positive side here and there to a poem, essay, translation or book-length study, and this has always made me feel that my efforts had not gone for nothing.

To the many periodicals and presses that saw fit to publish my writings I remain profoundly grateful. Each magazine issue and each book holds for me a special meaning, since each summons up the time when that particular essay, poem, or volume was written, appeared in print, and filled a need to have it seen in public. Even so, it was the pleasure of creating each work that ultimately meant the most to me. I am still rather astonished when I recall the many pieces that in some ways I cannot quite conceive that I ever wrote. For the compulsion that brought on my creative urge, I maintain the most humble gratitude. Discontented so often yet determined to find the exact word, the appropriate form, the telling phrase, the appealing rhythm, and the harmonic sound, I look back on when and how each piece came about—after so many false or fumbling starts, so much seemingly hopeless, intractable subject matter—and find that the sheer memory of having written such work is for me a font of unending gratification.

Nothing can match the thrill of discovering that an idea, which one began with or came upon in the process of revision, has found at last a form that satisfies—if not fully, at least to the extent that one gives thanks to whatever powers of creativity made possible its conception and execution. Of course, no writer, I suspect, is ever thoroughly happy with his work, and this is clear in my own writing when I compare the early publication of a piece with its later version or versions. I see this perhaps most fully in my Memories book and my María poems, where every piece has undergone some type of reworking, at times quite extensive and prolonged. There are so many passages that still leave me believing that with more patience I might have gotten them right. Nevertheless, there continues to survive for me—despite my being less than happy with certain words, phrases, lines, and stanzas—a ceaseless pleasure in just knowing that I did the work, and that for anyone who should care to know of the provenance of my writings and their whereabouts in print, this autobiography offers a partial recall, and the bibliography provides a complete record from 1959 up to 2009.

Two notes seem necessary as to the memoir’s tendency to depart frequently from a straight chronological timeline and to its stopping, in one sense at least, with the year 1976. The departure from a strictly year-by-year narration has resulted from a simple desire to indicate the relationship between literature that I read, music that I listened to, events in my life, and persons that I have known and learned from and my own writings that derived from all such encounters. Consequently, with each period of my career, after revisiting what I have considered key moments, I have often fast-forwarded to the effects a particular experience had in later years, in terms of my readings, writings, and publications. That is, I have been interested above all to credit the influences on and the inspirations for my books from one time period to another, even though this has meant jumping ahead or, as one of my titles has it, backtracking. While my leaping about necessarily disrupts the continuity of the narrative and may frustrate those expecting a memoir uninterrupted by so many digressions, I felt that it was essential to do so in order to achieve my aim of making connections between my social, academic, and personal life and the resultant writings and publications that by and large came decades later. Hopefully, the relevance and relativity of each detour along the way may come clear and justify the disjointed and confused nature of these my erratic recollections.

As for ending with 1976, long before publication of most of my books, I have done so for a number of reasons. First, since I constantly look forward to and make observations on publications that followed from experiences prior to the bicentennial year, I deemed it redundant to go back over the periods in which my writings would largely appear in book form. Second, it was in 1976, ten years after María and I had married, that our odyssey from house to rented house ended when we settled in Austin. It was in the Capital City that we raised our children, found permanent jobs, and enjoyed for the first time the feeling of being at home, even though María would still miss her native Chile. It was also in Austin that I wrote what I consider to be the most ambitious among my collection of modest works. During our thirty-plus years in Austin and Cedar Park I would see the fulfillment of my aspirations as a writer, made possible in many ways by my return to Texas, after ten years outside my native state, and to my renewed association with The University of Texas at Austin. As the nation celebrated its 200th anniversary, I would begin a period of sustained writing, while first working as a professor, then for a time as a shoe salesman, and thereafter as an editor and a lecturer, and through it all loving and living with my faithful muse.

BEAUMONT, FORT WORTH & ALTUS

Apart from the exams and essays written to satisfy school requirements, my first work of unassigned writing was a love poem in the sonnet form. With the creation of that sonnet I could not have known that I had just entered into a lifetime of literary endeavor. Dating from the 1959 spring semester of my sophomore year at Beaumont’s then Lamar Tech, now Lamar University, my sonnet was dedicated to Cary, a trumpet player who was then studying, as I was, with Professor Richard Burkart. One day after Cary had left her practice room in the Music Department’s old, dilapidated army barracks, I sneakily placed my handwritten, unsigned piece in her horn case. Once Cary discovered and read the sonnet, she told me, when I happened to be hanging around, that the clarinet player, on whom she had a crush, must have written her a poem. I did not say anything at the time, but eventually she learned that I was the poet. Since I did not retain a copy of that inaugural poem, I can say nothing about its contents, other than the one detail that remains in my memory: Cary’s use of pumpkin-colored lipstick.

In the fall of 1958 I had taken the first half of British Literature from Dr. Robert Nossen, chairman of LamarTech’s English Department. In the course we had read the Petrarchan sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey, and in writing of Cary I found the sonnet’s traditional form congenial to my need to express a romantic infatuation. Although my first attempt at poetry did not attain its intended aim, which was to impress Cary with my affection and intellection, I so enjoyed writing the sonnet that I would compose poems from that time on, unperturbed by that first and every subsequent rejection. Some fifteen years later, I would return to the Cary episode in Music History, a piece included in my 1976 collection, Lines & Mounds. According to Freud, one’s earliest memories come from between the ages of two and four. After I was born in Fort Worth, on July 18, 1939, my parents rented the north side of a duplex at 3104 South Jennings. Although the duplex was demolished to make room for a parking lot that now occupies the west corner of Jennings, at its intersection with Berry Street, a family photograph shows me with my mother and father on its front steps, a door and brick porch walls behind us. As for the duplex’s interior, I can clearly recall the icebox in our narrow kitchen, and can see the iceman arriving with a block of ice held by tongs and resting against his back on a type of brown-leather vest hanging from his shoulders. Some twenty-five years later, because of that icebox and iceman, I could visualize more fully the lyrics to I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town, a song recorded in 1942 (just about the period of which I am speaking) by Jimmy Rushing and the great Count Basie Orchestra. One verse of the Rushing-Basie blues concerns the singer’s urge to move to a place where the iceman would not be coming around and messing with his wife or honey, and furthermore, his plans for buying a Frigidaire, the invention that spelled the end for home-delivery ice.

Some sixty-five years later, in writing my verse biography of Texas trumpeter Kenny Dorham, I listened to a jam session recording of the jazzman performing in Paris with Charlie Parker, the legendary bebop saxophonist. During Parker’s solo he seems to work into his chorus the theme of I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town, and in hindsight I could detect, or invent, a connection between my childhood iceman and my becoming a poet and historian of jazz. In this instance I may be playing fast and loose with the facts, but from here on the intent will be accuracy of recollection, even though I so enjoy invention in poetry and improvisation in jazz.

Facing Berry Street and backing up to our wooden garage and chicken pen was the home of Rosie, a little girl of my own age, which at the time must have been between three and four. A photograph survives of Rosie and me seated on the back porch of the duplex, clearly taken during the war years, since in the snapshot I am wearing a small boy’s soldier dress uniform and a brimmed military cap, which for a male child must have been popular and patriotic wartime apparel. Along with Rosie, or probably for her, I performed certain mischievous acts. Naturally we must have played doctor and patient in the buff, as I seem to recall, or fantasize that we did. It seems to me that we may have gotten caught, but maybe not. What we did do that is vivid in my memory is to catch one of my dad’s bantam roosters, place it in a trunk in the garage, and cover it with rocks. At the end of the day dad could not find the rooster with our other chickens, and asked me if I had seen it. Having forgotten all about the rooster, I ran to the trunk, removed the rocks, and fortunately found the poor creature still barely alive.

Another episode with Rosie was but the first instance of my youthful pyromania. Together she and I started a fire that burned a huge hole along the bottom of one wall of the garage, and would have destroyed the entire structure had it not been extinguished—by whom or how I cannot recall. A few years later I would set Johnson grass ablaze on the nearby railroad right-of-way, when the local firemen in their red engine came and doused the flames. Although I don’t believe that a girl was involved in my second conflagration, I may have set it to impress Betsy, the youngest of the Rawls sisters, who was about my own age of four or five when we moved across from her home on May Street, just the next street east of Jennings. At 3017 May, my parents had rented a house owned by my grandmother Keetch. Next door, on the south side of us, lived my Aunt Irene and Uncle Alvin Shepherd, at 3019, in a house also owned at the time by my grandmother, who lived next door to my Aunt and Uncle at 3025. Life on May Street and my relations with the Rawls girls, especially Betsy, are recounted in the San Gabriel section of Austin, which forms part of my Memories of Texas Towns & Cities of 2000. Also, the Rawls girls, along with their horses, are the subject of my short story, Palominos & Paradise, one of a group of May Street stories that I entitled Cowtown Sketches, after the epithet for Fort Worth.

In later years, I happily found a less destructive means of channeling my passions and exhibitionism, by writing poems and short fiction on my love objects, in Freud’s scientific phrase. But after the poem for Cary in 1959, it was not until 1966 that I would write another poem expressly for a love choice: a poem for my wife-to-be, entitled Air! My second and Waller- and Pound-inspired love poem appears in Place, my combination of prose and poetry written in imitation of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All. (A poem in doubt & REDOUTE, my first collection of 1962, is entitled to sandra, but I remember no one by that name, and from the contents of the poem it seems more like a criticism of a female’s conversation than any serious love affair.) Air! of 1966 would be followed by an ongoing series of poems devoted entirely to the love of my life, all bearing her name in their titles, such as María’s Birthmark, María’s Sewing Machine, and María’s Voices. Yet even after María and I had married I would commit another inflammatory act on writing in 1968 my firebrand letter to the editor of the Hobbs News-Sun. But perhaps none of my incendiary shenanigans was so outrageous as my boyhood pyromania, and certainly not so potentially destructive. As the children’s saying goes, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, and I certainly hope that my published writings have never brought real harm to anyone. Still, I must confess that my letter to the Hobbs newspaper did have detrimental effects on the lives of a number of community members, including my colleagues at New Mexico Junior College. But more on that episode at the appropriate time.

Growing up in Fort Worth and attending George C. Clark Elementary, which is still in operation, I was always, it seems, attracted to the girls. After my parents purchased for me a Schwinn bicycle with longhorn handlebars, I began to ride the bike to school, which must have been in the third grade. One day, pedaling home on West Shaw Street by Our Lady of Victory, I crashed what my dad always referred to as my wheel into the front of an oncoming car. Fortunately, the driver had seen me looking away and had all but stopped by the time that I rode right into his grill and fell against the ornament on the front of his hood. Instead of watching where I was going I had been ogling the girls who were walking home from the OLV Catholic school, wearing their dark blue uniforms and carrying their nifty leather satchels. On another occasion I remember riding my wheel west on Berry Street to visit a classmate who had invited me to her home. No accident that time, but usually my love affairs ended in rude collisions.

In winter 1949, before I began the second half of the fourth grade, we moved to Altus, Oklahoma. There my big heartthrob was Janet, whom I knew about the time that I was finishing the sixth grade. At the time my parents and I were living in the house that had been built for us in a new section of town, at 908 E. Sycamore. Some months after the completion of our house and we were living in it, Janet and her family arrived to take possession of their own newly finished home, just down the block where more houses were slowly going up. With her olive-complected skin, Janet appeared to me exotic and exceedingly beautiful. At the local Five and Ten, I purchased a bottle of cheap perfume and gave it to her as my first gift for the other gender. Together in the late afternoon she and I would sit on her back steps until with dusk her mother would call her into the house. But then something occurred that turned Janet against me—possibly a difference of opinion as to her brothers, who were always hanging about and teasing us. Afterwards, she, her brothers, and my brother Tommy and I would chunk rocks at one another. Anger had replaced my amorous regard, as it can with rejection in love, but never again would I resort to violence after a failed romance.

Although Janet was never to appear in any of my poems or short stories, I would write about the bicycle crash caused by my staring at the parochial girls, and that piece first appeared in my Taking Stock of 1973 and later in the Fort Worth section of the Memories book. After Cary the coed had induced my first attempt at verse, other young women would enter my life and writings, but always each romantic attachment turned out badly, for one reason or another—mostly because I was obviously not Mr. Right. Despite my many heartaches and disappointments in the Cupid line, I had found in 1959, without quite knowing it, a responsive and lasting companion in my reading and writing of poetry. But even before I would begin to develop fully this relationship, I had already received vital encouragement as a writer from my freshman English professors.

In the fall of 1957, which marked the beginning of the space race with the launch on October 4th of Russia’s Sputnik, my professor for the first half of freshman English was Dr. Francis Abernethy. One day in the hallways of Lamar, Ab, as he was known to his colleagues, told me that I was a good man. No one had ever spoken to me in such terms before, and it was most heartening to hear, though unclear why Ab had made the comment. I supposed that it might have been because he considered me a good writer, but if this were so, it was quite surprising, since in high school I certainly never thought of myself as in any way proficient in writing. In Teachers at South Park High, part of my Backtracking of 2004, I would note that our senior English teacher had not approved of my essay on snuff, and even told me that I would flunk out of college and never amount to a thing. So that on receiving a B for my first paper in Ab’s class, I was rather astounded, because English, I knew, was rumored to be extremely difficult for freshmen. A couple of years down the road, Lloyd Lejeune, a friend from high school and a fellow trumpet player, with whom I had often gone camping, was then taking the second half of freshman English for the third time. Lloyd was majoring in engineering and was quite bright, but he just could not write to the satisfaction of his English professors. He asked me if I would help him with his paper on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and I was happy to do so. The result was that Lloyd earned a decent grade and passed the course, which could have indicated to me that I had a future as an editor, but I am certain that the idea never occurred to me in the least. In fact, my nearly twenty years as a journal editor only came about as an alternative line of work.

Today, in spite of the many books that I have written, I recognize that at best I am just a passable writer. As Paul Christensen has accurately observed of my critical writings, they are merely a yeoman’s efforts. In promoting for the most part my home state’s fellow writers, I have, as Paul has also noted, utilized no more than a serviceable prose style. Magazines and presses may have published my essays and books for their content more than their form, more for their timeliness than any engaging ideas or lasting diction, and for certain I do not believe that I ever cast pearls before swine, nor that one day my mustard seed, the least of all seeds, will grow into the greatest among herbs, and … a tree … the birds of the air [will] come and lodge in the branches thereof. I know that I have neither thought deeply nor inventively enough. Even so, I am satisfied that I have not stood idly by nor hidden my dim little candle under a bushel, out of a sense that whatever light I had to offer was not worth letting shine. Even the agnostic writer can recur to a revival sermon and song.

One of the great moments of my writing life would come in 1996 when Ab published my essay, Bebop, Hard Bop, and Beyond: The Texas Connection, in the Texas Folklore Society series that he edited for over thirty-five years. Also, in Ab’s three-volume history of the TFS, he would include in his bibliography an essay that I published in The Texas Observer, entitled Notes on a Native Son: The Work of Harry Ransom. But most gratifying of all would be Ab’s use of a folk expression in congratulating me on the publication of my Texan Jazz, writing to say that I had placed my mark high on the tree. To me there was nothing like receiving the imprimatur of what I consider one of my lifelong teachers. Ab appears in the third section of my poem entitled Jazz God & Freshman English, a portrait of him that has always pleased me. Not to repeat the entire matter of that poem, I will only say that in 2007 Ab remains the same energetic, entertaining, and enlightening figure as the one that he cut in class when he would appear in his workboots and outdoorsman outfit, though always with a dressy necktie. In addition to playing folksongs on his guitar, Ab would allude to a melange of authors, from Cellini to Mickey Spillane, opening up a world of literature that from then on I would consciously begin to explore.

When I was probably still a freshman, or perhaps a sophomore, Ab gave a talk to the local Unitarian congregation, and knowing that he was speaking, I attended the service, if that is what their church meetings are called. Only a couple of other times in my life would I ever go to a Unitarian gathering, but on those occasions it was to hear a performance of Mozart’s Requiem, or to listen to Slim Richey and His Dream Band perform Django Reinhardt-inspired Western Swing. As I recall after almost fifty years, Ab’s talk was a very candid history and assessment of the Unitarian doctrine and form of worship, if Unitarianism can be considered anything other than independent thinking and an appreciation of the here and now, in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. Ab ended his homily by telling the congregation matter of factly that their religion followed Jesus as a man rather than as God, and he hoped that they were happy with it.

On a more personal note, Ab would invite me to his home, or perhaps I just dropped by his house on my own. My memory is that he wanted to talk to me about a career as a teacher. Before Ab broached the subject, I had probably not thought of teaching, and afterwards I don’t believe that I ever did so until I discovered that there didn’t seem to be anything else that I could do with a degree in English. When Ab spoke to me about teaching, he seemed genuinely interested in selling me on the benefits of the profession, which he said included summers off. As it turned out, during my twenty-six years of part-time teaching at Austin Community College, where just to make ends meet I would teach fall, spring, and summer night classes, along with selling shoes or working full-time jobs at the University of Texas at Austin, I only remember once that I could even take the family on a two-week summer vacation to the East Coast, and only because I taught an extra class at ACC in the spring of 1988. Ab was honest in telling me that the pay for teachers was not so great, but he said that the real compensation came from associating with intellectual colleagues, which would certainly prove to be a saving grace, along with the opportunity of working with students, especially those who were eager to learn and could teach the teacher a thing or two. Although I would make it a point throughout the years to stay in touch with Ab and other of my teachers, who meant and still mean so much to me, almost none of my own students would do the same for me. One exception in particular would be Charles Behlen, of whom more in due order.

In common with all my English professors at LamarTech, Dr. Robert Nossen made an enduring impression through more than just the literature that he taught. In the second half of freshman English, Bob Nossen mentioned in class that he had recently begun taking flute lessons, and it startled me that a grown man of thirty-nine would want to study an instrument in his old age. As with so many of my experiences in college, hearing my professor speak of his lifetime learning had in no way an immediate effect, but it did etch in my mind the fact that he remained curious and active even though up in years. On turning forty-five, I myself would begin taking piano lessons, holding up in my mind Bob Nossen’s example of it never being too late to learn. Almost forty years after studying with Bob and shortly before his death in 1997, I contacted him in South Korea, where he was then on leave from his position as associate provost at the University of Pittsburgh. In his late seventies, Bob was a visiting professor at the Kangweon National University, still broadening his horizons, as well as those of students of a distinct and distant culture.

Bob Nossen wore his pants at the length that is referred to as high waters, and the slight bulge of his belly made the fly of his pants too tight and the flap never to lie down flat. But he, like all my other English professors, was not a bit worried about how well his clothing fit; rather, he was concerned first and foremost with the life of the mind. With respect to his teaching, I recall the time in class that he told of a former student of his who had been determined to learn how to write; to this end, the student had purchased a roll of butcher paper, and little by little he would unroll the paper on the floor of his apartment and write, write, write. Jack Kerouac did something similar in typing his On the Road on a scroll of tracing paper, and A.R. Ammons used an adding machine tape for his book-length poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year, backgutt[ing] it all / the way out / of the typewriter, / rewinding the roll to take it with him on a family trip. I know also that Charles Olson would scribble on the walls of his home in Gloucester and there pin up drafts of his Maximus Poems. As I would report in 1983, on editing The Library Chronicle for the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, Robert Lowell had written as many as sixty versions of a single sonnet among the poems in his archive at the HRC. Even if I myself would never adopt any such strategies, I nonetheless did pick up the lesson from Bob Nossen that writing required application and perseverance.

One day in the spring semester of 1958, Dr. Nossen ordered me to see him in his office after class. I could not think what I had done wrong. Was my writing for the second-semester freshman essay course so bad that I was going to be reprimanded? No, the chairman just wanted to tell me that he had discovered that in my first semester at Lamar Tech I had been an English major. This was true, for I had started out in English, but merely because I had heard in high school that English was a good, well-rounded course of study. However, after I had been advised to sign up for Sociology and earned a D in the subject, I changed my major the next semester to music. Not only had I been depressed on reading of a little girl locked by her parents in a closet until she was a teenager, but I was mystified by mores and other such sociological terms, which we had to define on exams. And yet, as I soon realized that second semester, I did not have any real talent as a musician, and I also began to feel that the education course required for teaching music in public schools was a waste of my time. I found as well that the music curriculum did not appeal to or challenge me as much as courses in English and History. Consequently, when Dr. Nossen said that he wanted me back in English, I did not hesitate to return to the fold, and never once regretted doing so.

On taking Dr. Nossen in the fall of 1958 for the early period of British Literature, I wrote my first college research paper. The topic was the reason for Dr. Samuel Johnson’s great fear of death, which the chairman might have suggested or assigned, although I may have chosen it myself after our readings in the 18th century. Not coming up with much to work with in the Lamar library (surely because of my own lack of research skills), I decided that I needed to go to Rice University in order to find information on my quite abstruse subject. Taking a bus to Houston, I there visited the Rice library and pored over some decaying leather volumes, only to come away, as I recall, no wiser than I had arrived. I refer to the dead-end, as it were, of this research project in my poem entitled A Little Something for William Whipple, addressed to one of my most admired professors at Lamar and included in my Footprints, 1961–1978.

In the 1990s, more than three decades after having taken a dozen years to read Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson a little at a time, I finally finished this greatest of all literary biographies. In the Life I ran across many examples of Johnson’s fear of death, and perhaps these would have aided me in writing a better term paper. But to have read my unabridged, 1200-page Modern Library edition of the Life would not have been possible in one semester. I was, and still am, a slow reader, but then any great book should not and even cannot be speed-read. In Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, the author quotes what he takes to be a passage crucial to an understanding of Dr. Johnson’s work as the most important literary critic before or after him. The passage in Boswell that Bloom cites, and that I had partly underlined and starred on page 366 in my copy of the Life, is a comparison of the Doctor’s fear of dying with a mighty gladiator battling wild beasts in a Roman arena, driving them back into their dens, but not killing them, for they were still assailing him. Although Johnson asserted that a man must accept death and not whine, should only concern himself with living, not the act of dying, which lasts so short a time, the great Doctor may never have been able to follow his own advice.

Johnson’s dread of death, which Bloom finds central to understanding the great critic, had stayed with me as something of a lifelong enigma. And although any man wonders and worries about death, I had found no answer to the question posed for or by me as to why such a wise and profound thinker like Johnson would have considered death so intimidating. Bloom’s answer is that Johnson was horrified by the thought of annihilation more than death itself, and that, in order to go on living, [he retreated] from the consciousness that induce[d] the horror. Bloom says the same of Leo Tolstoy, concluding that the Russian was moved not so much by a commonplace fear of dying or death as by his own extraordinary vitality and vitalism, which could not accommodate any sense of ceasing to exist. Relatedly, in Bloom’s chapter entitled Freud: A Shakespeare Reading, the critic quotes what he calls a magnificent sentence by the father of psychology: Eternal wisdom, in the garb of the primitive myth, bids [Lear] renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of dying. Likewise, Bloom sees Johnson as finally making friends with the necessity of dying, and his fear of death as having compelled him to seek perpetuation through his writings. All these are intriguing hypotheses, and may in fact solve the conundrum. For me it was intriguing simply to find a major contemporary critic like Bloom still pondering the long fear of death of the only true Doctor of Letters.

Dr. Johnson and Tolstoy’s desire to go on living and writing is one that I can entirely understand from my own life and writings, even though mine should not even be mentioned in the same breath with those of such literary masters. But regardless of the relative merit of my minor efforts, they would become over the years something that I needed, and to think that I might not be able to finish a piece that I had begun, especially an extended work, was, if not a horrifying fear, a very real concern on at least two occasions. On January 31, 1985, when I entered St. David’s Hospital for hernia surgery, from having helped a friend move a couch up two flights of stairs, I was rolled into the operating room slightly sedated, in which state I told the doctor that I hoped that I would wake up because I had to finish my poem on Austin. One of the worst ice storms hit the city while I was under anesthesia, but I did come to and did, that same year, complete my epic.

In 1997, when I would turn fifty-eight, I worried that I might not complete my Memories sequence because my grandmother Oliphant had always said that the Oliphant males all die young. My brother Tommy had died at twenty-four in a Green Beret training accident, my father at fifty-eight of colon cancer, and his father before him at fifty-nine of tuberculosis. To die before age sixty was to me a statistical possibility, even though María and our children dismissed my suggesting such a thing as pure melodrama. But once I was past those three score years, I felt a definite relief, and now, at ten years beyond my father’s age on his death, I feel fortunate that I have had the opportunity to see the completion of so many writings that otherwise would only have remained in my head. I am hopeful that I may live to finish other literary projects, but at this point I am not rapacious, nor am I ungrateful for what I now consider a generous allotment of time.

My term paper on Dr. Johnson stands out for me not only because it was my first, but because it represented, contrary to my expectation, a beginning, not an ending. As with so many other literary, musical, and personal encounters in my life, the one with Dr. Johnson would continue for decades after I had turned in my research paper and received its grade, however low I suspect that may have been. In 1991, as the editor of The Library Chronicle, I would work with Dr. O M Brack, Jr., a respected Johnson scholar. Dr. Brack contributed an essay to a special issue of the Chronicle published as a festschrift in honor of Professor William B. Todd, a renowned bibliographer at the University of Texas at Austin (hereafter UT-Austin or just UT). The essay by Dr. Brack concerned Samuel Johnson as an editor, and paid homage to Dr. Todd, with whom Brack had studied in 1962, as I had in 1964. In June 1996, María and I would visit Johnson’s boyhood home in Lichfield, Pembroke College at Oxford where he studied for one year, and the house in London in Gough Square where for nine years he worked to compile his famous dictionary of the English language. Never could I have foreseen when I took Dr. Nossen’s class at Lamar Tech that it would cast such a lengthy, influential shadow down through my life. Surely this is true of many persons in many careers and professions, but it must especially be the case with authors, since everything that we learn keeps coming back to illuminate our readings and to inspire our writings. In this instance, it is also as if my reading of Dr. Johnson and my work with his scholars and bibliographers had devolved upon me the preparation of an inventory of my own lesser publications.

Unlike Robert Lowell and other writers whose manuscripts are archived at UT’s Humanities Research Center, I never set out to save the drafts of my writings, not thinking them to have any future interest or value. In the early years the thought that my work would have a posterity of readers never entered my mind. Only much later, when I began to correspond with other Texas poets and to publish their work in books and anthologies, did it occur to me that I should preserve their correspondence and other materials related to my publication of their writings. This led in 1975 to the creation of my Prickly Pear Press archive at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where, along with other poets’ letters and typescripts, I began to deposit certain versions of my own work that had survived or would survive in notebooks, as well as the handwritten manuscript of my Texan Jazz of 1996.

The question arises, then, why this autobiography, why my own bibliography? Are they for a posterity of readers? I doubt it, truly. As with all my writing, I took on this task largely because I have always been inclined to look backward. In my 1973 chapbook, Taking Stock, I quote as an epigraph a sentence from a John Graves essay that was included in the 1972 book entitled Growing Up in Texas, published in Austin by Bill Wittliff’s Encino Press. The Graves sentence seemed to sum up my collection of poems, and for me it still epitomizes my tendency to reflect on the past, whether of places, people, or my own thoughts and actions, which here include when, where, and what I wrote and published. This then is the sentence: They used to tell about a bird that flew around backward because he didn’t care where he was going, he only wanted to see where he’d been. Like the bird, I have long taken pleasure in revisiting and considering through my writings the meaning of my experiences and how they have affected where I have ended up.

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a work from 1888 on a socialist Utopia from the perspective of the year 2000, sold millions of copies, and in the spring of 1960 I would read excerpts from this book in a class taught at UT by Dr. Mody Boatright. Bellamy’s title phrase has long appealed to me, since the practice of looking backward allows one to review one’s life without the uncertainty that in the process of living it may have proved quite excruciating. The second time around one knows how it will all come out, which makes it less painful and permits one to savor the experience at a cool, objective distance, including moments when it all might have seemed hopeless but turned out not to be. On one hand, uncertainty adds a spark to life that can energize and drive one to seek certitude in the midst of confusion and despair. But if looking back without anxiety and impatience may eliminate the tingle, retrospection can replace it with the exhilaration of watching the larger picture unfold; it also enables one to appreciate more fully whatever achievement may have followed from, and may now outweigh, any frustrations and disappointments, which in the present can even add to the pleasure of reliving those former days.

Starting in the 1970s, whenever I would put together a collection of my poetry for publication, I would gather the typed copies of poems in flex binders, and in many cases those binders still exist. One to me very fortunate example of a poem that survived in such a binder, but had not been included in any of my books, is Of ‘Guernica’ for Solo Viola by William Penn. Written during the academic year of 1974–75, while I was teaching at Voorhees College, a black school in Denmark, South Carolina, my poem on Penn’s Guernica resulted from hearing his composition performed on National Public Radio, and the piece remained in a binder for almost three decades without my having remembered it. In 1984 I would meet Bill Penn at UT-Austin, but if I mentioned the poem to him at that time he did not, later on, recall that I had done so. Bill and I worked together on two articles that he wrote on film music for The Library Chronicle, both of which won ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards. Only around 2003 did I come across my poem on Bill’s Guernica, and finding that the piece still worked for me, I included it in my Backtracking of 2004. When I tracked down Bill in Tucson, Arizona, and sent him a copy of the poem, he informed me that Larry Dutton, the young violist who had performed his composition on radio, had gone on to a distinguished career in music. Not only did my poem survive, thanks to the binder, but it made possible my awareness of the violist’s subsequent history, and it also brought to my editorial work with the composer an even more personal connection. As I have discovered repeatedly over the years, writing extends one’s contacts in life in many unexpected, even unintended, yet felicitous ways, other than, or in addition to, the satisfaction of seeing one’s work in print.

In writing my book-length poem on Austin and retyping it almost endlessly, I kept for a while my many typescripts with handwritten changes, but eventually I discarded them as merely taking up valuable space in our undersized home. Once I had purchased a computer in 1994, I never attempted to keep copies of drafts, just the final versions, which would be the only ones that I would save. In many ways I have lamented the end of printing from handset or linotype text and the discontinuation of hot-lead galley proofs, which I began my editing career by reading and correcting. Even so, the computer has proven a marvelous technology, making possible the simple transposition of passages through electronic cutting and pasting, which eliminates the need to retype numerous drafts, as I recall having to do as many as four or five times in editing thirty-page scholarly articles. Yet even though the computer is an extraordinary, time-saving device, it has meant the loss of many steps in the creative process previously visible through the preservation of drafts, corrected galleys, and revised page proofs. At times I would alter poems after publication and then later find that I preferred the original version, which fortunately was preserved in a printed book, whereas computer alterations disappeared into the ether net. Whitman tinkered with his poems for decades, and at times readers much prefer earlier versions of his Leaves of Grass, which happily survive in his various printed editions. My interest in all of this is basically academic, since in no way would I compare my own work with that of a Lowell or Whitman.

Among my other Lamar professors was Dr. Winfred Emmons, whose second half of British Literature introduced me to Blake and Yeats, and whose Chaucer course I would later find such a total joy, as alluded to in my poem entitled In Memoriam: Winfred S. Emmons. Win, as Dr. Emmons was called by his colleagues, talked and laughed as if his jowls were full of banana or baked potato. But on reciting poems from memory, he could convey the sheer fun and mental charge that he obviously got out of the thought and art of writers whose works he so greatly admired. It was in Win’s British Lit class that we read Blake’s poems on the Satanic mills and child labor, the religious snare of the golden chapel polluted by the serpent’s jaws, which drove the narrator to lie down in a pigsty’s protective mud, and above all the revolutionary innocent view that the little black boy, more than the white, could bear God’s beams of love. Wordsworth’s Michael I found most moving, and María and I would, in May 1997, climb in the Lake District to the actual site of what Coleridge calls the pastoral poem’s divine sheepfold, and in Grasmere I would view the original manuscript. But it was in Yeats’s great poem, The Second Coming, that two lines struck me like the light on Paul’s Damascus road, and led to my conversion to poetry as a truth-seeking creed: The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

My toughest critic was Dr. William Whipple, to whom I showed some of my first attempts at verse. Like the sonnet for Cary, none of the pieces that I shared with Bill Whipple has survived, although my poem entitled A Little Something for William Whipple records his rigorous reactions to my early efforts. It was Bill’s exacting examinations of my texts that spurred me on to greater heights. Also, at the time I was highly impressed by the poetry that he himself was writing and publishing. I still own Bill’s posthumous collection, The Oregon Trail Diary, issued in his honor in 1978, the year after his death at age sixty. Sadly, to me, my poem for Bill Whipple only appeared in print in 1977, too late for him to have seen it, even if I had known where