Literary Tripping

During the academic year 1967-68, I directed the Beaver College London program based in South Kensington, with classrooms at City of London College in the Moorgate area. I had taught summer school in London in 1966 so we knew our way around the big city. The kids were safely parked as day students in the American School, and the college had provided us with a suitable flat in the Maida Vale district. I taught only one course each semester, the first comparing British and American writers (e.g., Dickens and Twain), kind of an Ur-International English Lit course, the second on the Real Thing, Caribbean, African, Australian and so on. The highlight was a reading by the Robert Frost of Australia.

I also had to organize orientation trips. The second was a lark: met them at Prestwick, bussed them to Scottish TV in Glasgow to see a Richard Hoggart based documentary on the decline in the servant class in Britain and a film on the great Scots poet, Hugh Macdiarmid. Then lunch in Cumbernauld, the planned town, where dessert was a lecture on Macdiarmid by Alexander Scott of the University of Glasgow. Edinburgh for a new play on Aberfan, the Welsh coal mining village that had been ravaged by a landslide of slurry. Next Berwick on Tweed (Beaver's iconic Horace Trumbauer's Castle is a gloss on the city's Alnick Castle.)

Then Newcastle on Tyne, where the most famous Geordie poet, Tony Harrison, laid it on them in a one man slam. Coventry, for the Cathedral en route to Liverpool. There they were treated to a Beatlesque version of a medieval morality play at Everyman Theatre. (God: Everything is wuuunderfull.) Alas, as the booker of hotels, I am ashamed to say I goofed there. Hooker City. I had signed up for a hotel with very red lights. But the hostess was accommodating. No moral crises! Ive never seen students more eager to get down to business viz.arriving in London where they could start crawling the pubs.

One of perks I took as the director was to fashion trips of my own, with and without students. Our first was to the Belfast Festival. I asked the director there if he could recommend a poet who would let me record a chrestomathy of Northern Ireland's poets so that students who couldn't afford the trip could take a trip with my Uher tape recorder. The poet arrived on time. He looked strange to me. Kind of like a hulking farm boy,with cow shit still on his boots. He began to read the work of his peers, Paul Muldoon, James Simmons.

Good stuff, until he got to his own! Digging, for example. It turned out to be Seamus Heaney, of whom I had heard nary a line, nay word, up to them. He was stupendous. Later in 1970 I would take him on a week long trip along the Atlantic coast. A serendipitous encounter. We began at Trenton State, where a lively Mick, Fred Kiley, had replaced me when I went on to Penn. Then we went to the Young Mens Hebrew Association in Philly to screen the London Weekend Television film about him, Heaney in Limboland. (He had not yet seen it! So there was a double buzz that night.) Then we took the train to D.C. and signed him into the Poetry Center at the Library of Congress. Next door is the Supreme Court. As the County Derry farm boy ogled the coffered ceilings of that splendid structure, he whispered to me like an altar boy in church. Is this where they had that big decision about segregated education? Yes, Seamus. That was the place.

Then we flew to Columbia, South Carolina where it was Seamus desire to palaver with James Dickey,its most famous poet. He was being snooty and wouldn't meet us. His loss. Our gain was a delightful evening with the English Department colleagues of Morse Peckham, a former Penn friend of mine, at the University of South Carolina. Can't win them all in Academe. Finally, we flew on to Atlanta, put him up in John Portman's showplace of a hotel, the Peachtree Plaza, so he could rest for his reading at the National Council of Teachers of English Convention. It bugged me that the audience there was merely the Miltonic fit audience though few. Seamus, of course, went on to Berkeley, Harvard, and eventually Stockholm for the Nobel Prize. But for those seven luminous daze I was his Virgil! It never happened for me with a better poet.