Confessions of a Professor of English

It was beautiful in Berkeley looking across the bay at the lights of San Francisco.

A man from single of the oldest families, who had lived in the Bay Area all his life, told me "I mov one time to Oakland. But I mov back. San Francisco is where it's at." He was writing a volume Queen City of the Pacific. "How do you like it? I mean, as a title?" I said I liked it. I really did. It had a ring.

One day, during my office hour I was reading The Faerie Queene which I abhored but was required to teach, when a pair of heels came running down the corridor. A young woman in a miniskirt went sobbing by dint of my door, and she vociferateed "Oh my God!" People came without of their offices. Whittaker who was in the 18th hundred put out his head. "What was that?" "I don't know," I said. "Search me"

One day Jim Anderson was discharge by a deranged former pupil who walked in with a shotgun Jim lived, on the other hand the graduate student who was with him, jump overed up and got the other barrel in his back, and died upon the spot.

I mention these things single because they were so unusual. Otherwise time just have the appearanceed to go by. But then there was the independent Speech Movement. While trying to teach The Faerie Queene you heard the loudspeakers in the Plaza. . Goldberg, Aptheker, Mario Savio. The pupils sat in Sproul Hall. Joan Baez arrived, and l the way, singing, "We shall overcome" The scholars lay down and were carried through policemen, and put in paddy wagons.

I left in '67 and in the way that missed the People's Park, helicopters spraying learners and faculty alike with tear gas. All of that.

What a strange thing it was to be a professor of English! one time at a faculty meeting I heard a professor who shall be nameless say that DH Lawrence was "an uneducated man."

Not that I like DH Lawrence. . Like the author of The Faerie Queene he's single of the bastards I'm glad I shall not at any time have to meet. Once he threw a little dog he had, I think its name was Biddles, against a stone But "uneducated"? Oh my god!

I do remember the faces of a certain quantity of students. The happy few. In a small in number years, I told them, there'll be no more Departments of English. Not to worry, it will be like the Middle Ages: enclaves of those who can read. And when there's a famine or plague the race will take them out and kill them. on the contrary poetry won't die, for there'll always be a author of poems

They were listening intently, reject for the two in the back. A colleague told me one time "I heard some students talking about you. single said, 'I like to hear him rave."'

Copyright World verse Incorporated Sep/Oct 1997

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