Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [53]
After the Howard Norman panel, David Swerdlow, a poet and professor from Westminster College, in Pennsylvania, was heard to lament, “If a panel for Howard Norman, why not one for Stan?” The wife and other panel members took up the call, and, by the end of the conference, plans were being made to honor Plumly with a panel on his work at the next AWP conference in Austin, Texas, the following year. Plumly is a leathery old coot who still has all his hair. He has a maverick’s swagger and a youthful twinkle in his eye. The legion of individuals who have gone forth from his classrooms bent on writing well and forever is most impressive, almost spooky. I meet them everywhere. I will tease him when we meet that all his former students, when they hear his name, suddenly turn cold and glassy-eyed and repeat verbatim in a droning lifeless monotone, “Stanley Plumly is the greatest teacher in the world. Stanley Plumly taught me everything I know. I would be nothing today without Stanley Plumly,” and the old boy geezes himself into a coughing fit, as his middle-aged and twenty-something acolytes alike nod automatically in agreement. Why his book of criticism, Argument and Song, is not required reading is a mystery. His publisher wouldn’t even run a paperback edition.
I wasn’t a good student. My home life growing up wasn’t conducive to study or intellectual pursuits. In our house, if you were caught sitting reading a book you were accused of doing nothing. Wasting your time. That’s just the way it was. The bathroom was the only safe place for reading. Dickens, Ian Fleming, Ray Bradbury, Herodotus, Steinbeck, Bierce, Orwell, Rod Serling, and countless Civil War and WWII historians and I spent a lot of time in the john together. I’m not complaining. I had a fascinating childhood full of adventure and wonder. And I wouldn’t trade it. But I had to be careful not to let the vocabulary stretch out too ostentatiously around the house.
Also, the aging WWII generation didn’t understand dissent. They took contradiction of authority as a personal insult, and they reacted accordingly. Thoreau to them was a filthy hippie, not a man of great intellectual courage. My father was a Depression Era Republican, mad as hell at “do-gooders” and liberals of any and all stripes, who found a savior in Barry Goldwater, and later Ronald Reagan. My mother was a Franklin Roosevelt/Pierre Trudeau liberal, and a Jack Kennedy Democrat. Things around my house could get loud and unpleasant.
It wasn’t that my parents were unintelligent. They were very intelligent, but my mother thought the display of too much intellect phony or pretentious, and my father thought the only serious topic for conversation or concern centered around money. All else was bullshit, and he would tell you so. My mother read history and lots of it. Although she didn’t complete high school, she must have had some readers among her family growing up, because she would quote Shaw, Voltaire, Franklin, Gibbon, and Jefferson all the time, without always knowing the source of her aphoristic wisdom. People of that generation and those previous had those sayings on the tip of their tongues, sayings like “I don’t agree with what you’re saying, but I would defend to the death your right to say it,” and “Youth is wasted on the young.” The wisdom is what they drew their strength from, and those little quotations, like their prayers, were what they used to cope with a world of very few mercies. When did Americans