by Nels Nelson
"Emily is the only woman I've been able to remain interested in for more than two weeks at a time," acknowledged Patrick D. Hazard, the mad English professor of Beaver College--not seriously and at the same time deeply serious. And then he pleaded, "Please don't lose Emily in all of this bull-----."
Emily is Emily Dickinson, the reclusive Amherst eccentric and all-time great American poet, whose 150th birthday anniversary is today. The no-less-singular Hazard, 53 going on 18--the eternal enfant terrible of the Glenside, Montgomery County, campus--has pressed her into service as the centerpiece of another of his endearing public paeans to neglected U.S. literary heroes.
It is a measure of his sincerity and his depth as a gentleman in camouflage that this flaky, witty, scatological, unbuttoned, brilliant and intellectually fearless man should offer his secret life, skewered and quartered on a platter, as a shill for Emily--and yet be concerned that Emily get first billing.
Hazard's most celebrated resurrection to date was his 1974 rehab job on Walt Whitman's decrepit Camden tomb. His zeroing in on Dickinson for the current ritual event ("In this country we have our superbowls, our Miss America pageants, our Presley days--but we don't have nearly enough serious rituals") is significant, for they are soulmates under the skin.
Emily of Amherst questioned the established order as no other woman of the 19th century did. Pat of Beaver is the terminal intellectual gadfly of the expiring 20th century.
Where the parallel parts is that Dickinson rarely left the house and Hazard is just as likely to be recording English-writing Africans reading their poetry in Senegal or sailing with the cod fleet out of Labrador or laying plans for a national quilt bank in Philadelphia or clambering aboard the first planeload of legitimate Havana-bound tourists to pay personal court to Cuba's "No. 2 writer," Eliseo Diego, as he is likely to be tending his scholastic flock.
The prevailing rumor about Patrick D. Hazard is that he is a scion of great wealth dedicated to bringing his quirky fantasies to life with obscene doses of money. For the most part, the report is false. Hazard's not filthy rich. According to the subject, moreover, what special resources he has had available to support his literary notions are nearly exhausted.
The story of Hazard's folly begins 50 years ago in Battle Creek, Mich.
"My father, who was the manager of a furniture store, split when I was 3 with his secretary. He became a very successful real estate dealing in Las Vegas. He certainly put a twist in my life.
"My mother had to go to work teaching school, and my brother and I were sent off to a Catholic boarding school. I recently visited my old first-grade teacher, Sister Felicia. She, in actual fact, was probably my mother."
At the age of 12, Hazard entered Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit ("I was really heavy on being a priest; I got kicked out of the seminary at 16 for smoking in the Gothic tower at midnight"). He graduated from a Motown public high school, second in a class of 432; won a full scholarship to the University of Detroit, took an M.A. and a Ph.D. at Cleveland's Western Reserve University and married a fellow grad student who bore him three remarkable children and from whom he was divorced in 1970.
For the next dozen years, Hazard, a specialist in mass communications as they relate to academia, swept cometlike through the academic firmament--a Ford Foundation grant here, a Carnegie post-doctoral fellowship there, a Time-Life advisorship or an Encyclopedia Britannica consultancy in between.
At Penn in the late '50s he set up curricula and recruited staff and faculty for the newly consecrated Annenberg School of Communications. Later he was situated briefly as director of international studies as the East-West Center of the University of Honolulu. In 1961 he came to Beaver as the English department's chairman, a post he relinquished after eight years ("I was just no good at the details of pleasing everybody").
Hazard some years ago experienced "a kind of epiphany" while discussing what he calls "the terror of the status system" with an old friend, sociologist David ("The Lonely Crowd") Reisman.
"I told Reisman I deeply believed that the only way to deal with the American status system is to ignore it. Once I did that, I felt tremendously free. That's really been the key point of my own personal liberation. When you depend on where you are for what you think of yourself, you're a slave. That liberation energized everything I've done since.
"Once you say, 'They can't touch me,' they can't. 'Much madness is the divinest sense,' That's the opening line of a poem by Dickinson about people who demur, who have their own thing.
"The reason American literature is so important to me is, it has shaped my character. I learned how to live by reading and reflecting on Dickinson, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville. Melville best understood the contradictions of a mass society that cons itself into illusions that threaten to destroy it. Watergate and every bit of s--- that came down from it is all adumbrated in his novella, 'The Confidence Man.'"
A not-inconsiderable factor in Hazard's liberation was his long-decamped father, who died in 1971 leaving him $100,000.
"It's almost gone. And I've enjoyed losing every bit of it. Oh, some of it I gave to my children. And they wasted it--from my point of view. I think money is manure: It either helps things grow or it stinks."
Among the lingering monuments to Hazard's largessez-faire days is his Centre for Internationalizing the Study of English (which he once described as "basically, me and a checkbook"). "My interest at this moment is all of the literatures in English which have grown up since World War II, in Africa, in the Caribbean, in Oceania."
The not-quite-impoverished Hazard goes on, meanwhile, tripping through academia with the greatest of aplomb--a Puck of the mind in a T-shirt and a backpack and utterly shorn of button-down, woven-in-Ireland-by-peasants thinking.
From Philadelphia Daily News, December 10, 1980
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