And Still I Gladly Teach (Plus a Little Tribute to Chapel Hill)

Out to Pastoral

by John Idol

BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—4/25/11—I had no intention of giving up teaching when I left Clemson University after 31 years of mentoring undergraduate and graduate students in the English Department. No way. For I had already enjoyed teaching a few classes of adult students in Clemson’s elder-hostel program.

Surely, I reasoned, without bothering to research what the Chapel Hill-Durham area offered by way of elder-hostels, many opportunities awaited me in my new home.

One thing I knew for sure was that Chapel Hill’s Retired Seniors Volunteer Program (RSVP) would offer me a place to teach. The ground rules simply involved my tendering a proposal, showing proof of my credentials, and displaying an eagerness to work with senior citizens. I was quickly and warmly embraced, beginning a relationship with the Chapel Hill Senior Citizens’ Center that brought me a Bronze Star for dedicated service after ten years of teaching.

Not boxed in by guardians of academic turf as I had been at Clemson, I offered courses on my own favorite authors, choosing, mostly, to explore short stories by American writers or poems by Metaphysical and Cavalier poets. Naturally, Thomas Wolfe and Nathaniel Hawthorne appeared on my list, for they had been central in my scholarly writing and editing.

A selection of Wolfe’s short fiction pretty much got a blanket thumbs’-down from my students. Hawthorne fared better and, over the years, I covered most of the tales in his three volumes of short stories and sketches. (How Wolfe fared in an honors class at the University of North Carolina I will address in a later column.)

Hawthorne’s stories treating the Puritan past of New England stimulated the liveliest discussions, especially “Young Goodman Brown.” Students interested in history, theology, and psychology found much in the tale to probe.

The foregoing sentence also applied to the Flannery O’Connor stories covered in a later course. Shocking as it is in its climactic moment, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” left a distaste for O’Connor for some students whose religious convictions differed markedly from hers. Put in crass terms, I found O’Connor a hard sell.

Not so Eudora Welty and Mark Twain. Hearing Welty’s taped recording of “Why I Live at the P. O.,” and Hal Holbrook’s masterful telling of passages from Mark Twain’s most humorous tales, delighted everyone. A special treat for the Welty course was the visit of the author’s long-time friend, Elizabeth Spenser, who lives in Chapel Hill and agreed to come to class to share some details of her friendship with Welty. Here, as a tribute to Chapel Hill, I’m pleased to add that many students in my classes at the Senior Citizens’ Center were writers or assistants to writers and thus contributed significantly to the success of my courses.

I’m thinking particularly of William Harris Hooks, the author of more than 50 books for children and young adults and advisor to publishers and television networks on programs for children. After a successful career in New York City as a dancer, choreographer, and writer, he’d retired to Chapel Hill, continuing to write and to lead classes on writing. He signed up for a half dozen of my classes and encouraged his circle of friends to do the same.

Among Hooks’ friends were two women who’d been assistants to the playwright Paul Green. They had stories to share of Green’s relationship with Thomas Wolfe, for Green had openly talked of his Carolina days with the author of “Look Homeward, Angel.” Here was stuff to perk up our ears! Along with my students, I began to feel a part of a greater literary community, a justified feeling since, in that class and others to come later, were published poets and fiction writers as well as authors or would-be authors of memoirs.

Who would not gladly teach in such an environment? Who would not store up vast treasures of psychic income? I was beginning to see why Chapel Hill is called “The Southern Part of Heaven.”

Through a friend in Thomas Wolfe Society, I learned that no course on Wolfe would be offered by the University of North Carolina in the centennial year of Wolfe’s birth, 2000. I volunteered to lead a freshman seminar for honor students, stipulating that psychic income would be all I required to do so. University policy dictated that I be a paid member of the staff as a visiting professor, so I happily accepted the appointment, with the understanding that my pay would be returned to the university for its scholarship program. Who, at my age, would want pay for an opportunity to share Wolfe with Carolina’s brightest?

The ten students who signed up for the seminar—a demanding course, due to my plan to cover Wolfe’s major novels and several of his shorter pieces—made me glad I had volunteered. I submitted four of the essays done for the class for consideration by the Wolfe Society’s student essay award. The one written by Erin Sullivan won and was published. She later went on to undertake a research project at Harvard on the editing of “The Party at Jack’s” by Elizabeth Nowell for magazine publication. That project resulted in another published article for her—as an undergraduate. More psychic income for me; a step up the academic ladder for her as she puts her doctorate to work in England.

One of my friends in the UNC English Department alerted the director of Duke University’s Institute for Learning in Retirement of my work with senior citizens in Chapel Hill. A relaxed luncheon with its director led to many courses for it and its successor, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Duke offered a small stipend, a little more than the cost of gas required to drive from Hillsborough to Durham, but, hey, I was not in the game of teaching for money. It was time, I thought, to give back to a society that had nurtured me.

Here, for retired teachers, engineers, lawyers, medical doctors, nurses, and a whole array of other professionals, I had the pleasure of sharing Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Kate Chopin, Katherine Ann Porter, John Donne, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and a smattering of Cavalier poetry.

And here, I taught many students who’d missed courses in undergraduate literature due to taking classes required to qualify for entrance into professional programs—medicine, law, engineering. Here were students genuinely grateful to fulfill a longing to understand more about human nature and the role of literature in providing a rounded education. Their joy in learning was reward enough for me.

Here, in short, were people I gladly taught.

And here, where I live now, in a retirement center in Burlington, North Carolina, I will soon offer a pilot discussion of “Young Goodman Brown” to see whether there’s enough interest among fellow residents to launch a series on short fiction and poetry. I’ll keep you posted.