The Creators, Part 4

The Book Of Eulogies
by Phyllis Theroux

(Page 4 of 4)

"His was a granite passion... rooted in the conviction that writing was a vocation in the most humble sense of that word...."

JOHN HERSEY
(1914-1993)
by
Bernardine Connelly
(1964- )

An American writer, John Hersey was the son of missionaries to China. His work, both fiction and nonfiction, centered on man's inhumanity to man. Notable among his many works is his first novel, A Bell for Adano, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Hiroshima, a nonfiction account of the effect of the bombing of that city.

Bernardine Connelly is a short-story writer and novelist.

My name is Bernardine Connelly, and I was one of John's students during his last semester at Yale. John was a great and a passionate teacher. He did not jump on desks or chain-smoke himself into feverish monologues. He did not hide fifths of bourbon in his file drawers or carry on any of the eccentricities that one might envision when linking the words passion, writing, and teaching. Because those are the trappings of ego, not passion, and in John's teaching there was none of that. His was a granite passion, a constant passion, a passion rooted in the conviction that writing was a vocation in the most humble sense of that word, a calling, and that great writing can and should try to improve the world.

John did not write in the semesters he taught. In addition to teaching his classes, each week he met individually with every student to review the previous week's papers. Every student, every week. He critiqued your paper in pencil and in conference would file through his comments patiently, making sure you understood them, and then would neatly erase the marks he'd made, as if to say, I'm gone now, it's up to you, get back to work.

John taught his course by using models. We studied and wrote from these models the way art students draw from the Old Masters. We wrote personal essays based on the wondrous depiction of Achilles' shield in Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Iliad, and profiles of Yale professors based on Gorky's portrait of Tolstoy. But there is no question that the model we clung to was his. We wanted to know about Hiroshima, about May Day, about how he was going about writing The Call. A few students even took to speaking in that Hersey cadence, the soft but sure footfalls on every word, and that little twitch at the back of the neck when he was making an important point. But, in the tradition of truly great teaching he shook off the copycats and sent us all out to find our own voices, and our own calling.

He made sure we understood the difference between striving for fame and striving for excellence, a near impossible task considering that most of us were convinced that in any minute we would be receiving the first Pulitzer for college reporting or perhaps the first O. Henry awarded to a short story published in a campus quarterly. He rid us of our desire for fads and left us with the universals: that when language breaks down, violence enters, and that a writer speaks for those who have no voice.

"Who will take my father's place... in this daily practice of the language of the tribe? Anyone who wishes. He said once the field of writing will never be crowded — not because people can't do important work, but because they don't think they can."

WILLIAM STAFFORD
(1914-1993)
by
Kim R. Stafford
(1949- )

Poet William Stafford was the consultant to the Poetry Division of the Library of Congress in 1970-1971. Stafford's son, Kim, is also a poet and director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

MY FATHER'S PLACE

A few days after my father, poet William Stafford, died, I was sleeping alone at the house of my parents when something woke me at around 4 A.M. My mother, who was away, had told me of this effect, for she, too, had been wakened since his death at my father's customary writing time. As I opened my eyes, the moon was shining through the bedroom window. But that wasn't it. The house was still, the neighborhood quiet. The house wanted me to rise. It was the hour, a beckoning. There was a soft tug. Nothing mystical, just a habit to the place. The air was sweet, life was good, it was time.

I dressed and shuffled down the hall. In the kitchen, I remembered how he would make himself a cup of instant coffee and some toast. I followed the custom, putting the kettle on, slicing some bread my mother had made, letting the plink of the spoon stirring the coffee be the only sound, then the scrape of a butter knife. And then I was to go to the couch and lie down with paper. I pulled the green mohair blanket from the closet, turned on a lamp, and settled in the horizontal place where my father had greeted maybe ten thousand mornings with his pen and paper. I put my head on the pillow just where his head had worn through the silk lining.

What should I write? There was no sign, only a feeling of generosity in the room. A streetlight brightened the curtain beside me, but the rest of the room was dark. I let my gaze rove the walls — the fireplace, the dim rectangle of a painting, the hooded box of the television cabinet, a table with magazines. It was all ordinary, suburban. But there was this beckoning. In the dark of the house it felt as if my father's death had become an empty bowl that was filled from below, like the stone cavern of a spring that brimmed cold with water from a deep place. There was grief, and also this abundance. So many people had written to us saying, "Words cannot begin to express how we feel..." They can't? I honored the feeling, for I, too, am sometimes mute with grief. But words can begin to express how it is, especially if they can be relaxed, brimming in their own plain way.

I looked for a long time at the bouquet of sunflowers on the coffee table beside the couch. I remembered sunflowers are the state flower of Kansas. I remembered my father's poem about yellow cars. I remembered how, the night before, we had eaten the last of his third summer planting of green beans. For a time, I thought back to the last writing my father had done at this place, the morning of August 28. As often, he had begun with a line from an ordinary experience, a stray call from an insurance agent trying to track down what turned out to be a different William Stafford. The call had amused him, the words had stayed with him. And that morning, he had begun to write:

"Are you Mr. William Stafford?"

"Yes, but..."

As often, he started with the recent daily news from his own life, and came to deeper things:

Well it was yesterday.
Sunlight used to follow my hand.
And that's when the strange
siren-like sound flooded
over the horizon and rushed
through the streets of our town...

But I wasn't delving into his writing now, only his writing life. I was inhabiting the cell of his habit: earlier than anyone, more ordinary in this welcome, simply listening.

The house was so quiet, I was aware distinctly of my breathing, my heart, how sweet each breath came into me, and the total release of each exhalation. I felt as if my eyes, too, had been "tapered for braille." The edge of the coffee table held a soft gleam from the streetlight. The jostled stack of magazines had a kind of sacred logic, where he had touched them. Then I saw how each sunflower had dropped a little constellation of pollen on the table. The pollen seemed to burn, so intense in color and purpose. But the house — the house didn't want me to write anything profound. The soft tug that had wakened me, the tug I still felt, wanted me to be there with myself, awake, awake to everything ordinary, to sip my bitter instant coffee, and to gaze about and to remember. I remembered how my father had said once that such a time alone would allow anyone to go inward, in order to go outward. Paradoxically, he said, you had to go into yourself in order to find the patterns that were bigger than your own life.

I started to write ordinary things. And then I came to the sunflowers, and the spirit of the house warned me this could be told wrong if I tried to make something of it. It's not about trying. It's not about writing poems. It's not about achievement, certainly not fame, importance. It's about being there exactly with the plain life of a time before first light, with breath, the streetlight on one side of the house and the moon on the other, about the worn silk, the blanket, and that little dusting of pollen from the sunflowers.

My head fit the dent in the pillow, the blanket warmed my body, my hand moved easily, carelessly with the pen. I heard the scratch on paper. If this was grieving, it was active in plain things. I found myself relishing the simplest words, mistrusting metaphor, amused by my own habits of verve with words, forgiving myself an occasional big thought:

... to pause at the gate to take
off the one big shoe
of his body and step forward light
as wind...

I could forgive myself because there was this abundance in time and place and habit. And then I had a page, I closed my notebook, and I rose for the day. There was much to do, but I had done the big thing already.

Who will take my father's place in the world of poetry? No one. Who will take his place in this daily practice of the language of the tribe? Anyone who wishes. He said once the field of writing will never be crowded — not because people can't do important work, but because they don't think they can. This way of writing beckons to anyone who wishes to rise and listen, to write without fear of either achievement or failure. There is no burden, only a beckoning. For when the house beckons, you will wake easily. There is a stove where you make something warm. There is a light that leaves much of the room dark. There is a place to be comfortable, a place you have worn with the friendly shape of your body. This is your own breath, the treasuries of your recollection, the blessings of your casual gaze. What is this way of writing, of listening easily and telling simply? There is the wall, the table, and whatever stands this day for Kansas pollen in your own precious life.

Copyright © 1997 by Phyllis Theroux

About the Author

Phyllis Theroux is the author of California and Other States of Grace and Nightlights: Bedtime Stories for Parents in the Dark. The founder of the Nightwriters seminar, she is a magazine columnist, children's book writer, and was a regular essayist on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. She lives in Ashland, Virginia.