I am long past wondering if teachers have affected my life. That is the way it is. Some to a greater extent, but all of them have. All of them still do. Last night I had a dream about a favorite English professor. In it, I ran into him outside Kuykendall Hall, the UH Mānoa English building, and thanked him for helping me with my PhD dissertation.
Then I told him I would see him in class later that day. He said, “Good, I want you to teach it. We’re discussing Carver.”
This is based on a true incident. Back in the ‘80s, in one of the courses I took with him, I stopped by his office the morning before a class to ask about an idea I had for a paper. As I was getting up to leave, he told me that he wanted me to conduct the class that afternoon. And we were going to discuss Raymond Carver.
What do you say, right? At this point you run to the library and read up on Raymond Carver, glancing at the clock every few minutes to gauge how much more you might be able to cram into your brain about him given the time remaining.
I can’t remember how the class went, but I must have done a passable job. He did, after all, consent later on to work with me on my dissertation.
After I woke up this morning, I launched into my daily reading of email, Facebook, various news publications, some poetry or fiction, and then I jumped into my daily writing exercise.
So as I was typing along, spellcheck popped up a word, suggesting the first name of that professor as a substitute for the word I’d miss-typed. I smiled, recalling the dream I’d had a few hours before.
Now as part of my daily writing practice, I consult, among other things, a list of quotes from various literary figures, and, lo and behold, who should show up on this list but Lionel Trilling, one of this professor’s favorite critics.
Well, three times is the charm. I went to my bookshelf and pulled out Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination – a book, I might add, that this professor gave me.
Opening it to a randomly selected page, I read this: “On all sides James is being given the serious and joyous interest he longed for in his lifetime.”
The James referred to is Henry James. Many might know him best, if at all, for his novella, The Turn of the Screw.
Upon reading this about James, two things leaped to mind. First, this professor wrote his doctoral dissertation on James. This is a daunting challenge for anyone who has attempted to navigate the long and winding road that is James’ preferred prose style, not to mention having to tackle his extensive body of work to know the man’s writing well enough to write a dissertation.
Second, it was this professor who first introduced me to James. In an earlier class I took from him, we’d read a collection of short stories titled after his most famous one, “The Figure in the Carpet.”
I immediately fell in love with James when I read his short stories – although they are rarely “short.” Now, when I write my stories, I’m always torn between my two stylistic heroes, Ernest Hemingway and James. Hemingway famously employs shorter sentences, whereas James infamously pieces together sentences that build clause upon clause into a staggering maze of meaning you may have figured out once you’ve woven your way through them.
For the past several hours I’ve been living in a world jam-packed with memory and coincidence. The memories have been happily relived, and the coincidences have been intriguing. It feels as if I’ll be running into this professor very soon.
Lanning Lee 