September 23, 2022

Early yet, the sun slanted. Cold last night. I wish I had shut more windows. Dread of rehearsal last night. I was ill and short of breath, but when I got there I had fun, and the various minor pains went away. Let that be a lesson to me. Will be the only bass at Pride (eight baritones, for instance), which means I will scream myself hoarse. I live in a world where there seems to be little use for Pride, though I do understand that ten miles beyond city limits it’s still the 50's. 

Reading. I do not understand why people thought Lowell was a major poet, or even a good one. Because he was a beautiful youth? Because he suffered? Because he knew the right people? Article in The New Yorker about Elizabeth Hardwick, concerning whom I feel the same bemusement. Some people are foreordained for a measure of notoriety, a condition not affected by actual achievement. She was part of the generation that made students think that good writing is the inevitable outcome of hard work (it isn’t) which was necessary to establish Creative Writing as a paid academic discipline. I thank them for that, as it made my life easier. She was one of those whose eminence was based on eminence, so far as I can see. Maybe just the elevation of the name “Elizabeth Hardwick,” which must perforce belong to an eminent person. Had I taught in a graduate university, my influence might have been different and greater, but also my teaching style might have been altered in ways I wouldn’t necessarily find pleasing. I was seldom challenged by my students, so my growth had to come from inside. That, in the end, was well. Did I challenge them? Is there any way of knowing? Even while it strove to be a real university, UNCA’s emphasis was on the encouragement of local kids to be the best they could be, with little thought to whether that was “good enough” in the great world. I agreed with that, and still do. I was a teacher more than a critic. I was an encourager, one who found something to praise in each work and hoped that lack of praise elsewhere would get the point across. I think that was my nature, and would have remained unchanged wherever I was. My approach to academic classes would have been different had my students been better prepared, but surely I gained something from starting at the beginning each time. The bitterness at the end of my career probably colors all remembrance. I was probably a greater success than I think I was, or, if a failure, one with less influence than might be feared.

Had I been a handsome young Brahmin named Geronimo Millstein, I’d be living in a New York penthouse now, with NYRB articles being written about me.