I arrived at the University of Kansas less than a month after I got married, a year and a half after receiving my M.A. from the University of New Mexico. I was already behind.
My office was in Wescoe Hall, the famous building on Jayhawk Blvd that served as the Humanities Building, a large cement structure that had been destined to be a multi-story parking garage in the middle of campus. The story was that they ran out of money and abandoned the project, capping the building at 3 stories high, including two stories below ground. The building was slowly sinking and sliding down the hill. One day the door to an office might close, and the next the door jamb and door were misaligned and could never close. Most of the offices were on the interior without windows, the perfect place for a legion of graduate students teaching freshman-sophomore English.
I shared my office with two other graduate students, who were secretly dating and later married, two of the kindest people I ever knew. My office was next door to Professor Caruthers, the resident Faulkner-Hemingway, Baseball Literature, and Comedy professor. His interests were the one of the draws of KU for me. I could leave Hemingway by the side of the road, but Faulkner would always ride in the front seat with me. As for baseball, this L.A. boy bled Dodger blue.
As I got settled, I met Caruthers, a portly man of good nature. He asked about my background and I launched into a story about my Faulkner professor at San Diego State University.
I told Caruthers as straight as I could. “He was just the worst. We practiced close reading and listened as this egotistical boor held court, smoking cigarettes from the doorway. There wasn’t much discussion, just his pontificating.”
Caruthers leaned back onto his heels and raise himself up as he drew in a breath, looking down the bridge of his nose at me.
“That would be Jim Hinkle.” (He paused.) “He died last month.”
Mouth, meet foot. Caruthers softly chuckled at me, dishing on one of his respected professional colleagues, and we became good friends.
In recounting this Hinkle story, I did some research on many of the professors I had. I was educated by greatness. Louis Owens, who was the professor who got me into English, was a promising Native American novelist and established Steinbeck scholar who introduced me to The Waste Land and waste land literature. One of my professors was the student of one of the top 20 linguists of the 20th century. Another was one of the earliest female full professors in history. I put my Ph.D. committee together by choosing professors who worked in fields in which I would test. What I assembled was a group of 5 full professors, deans, department directors, and endowed distinguished professors. It was an intimidating list.
Hinkle may have been the most famous of them all, his story is legendary in Faulkner-Hemingway circles, but of course I didn’t know that at the time when I took his class.
I wrote the stories of many of my professors to include in my memoir, but ultimately I cut them. They’ll find a place in another book. I offer my story about Jim Hinkle to you here, the most arrogant, egostistical professor I ever had, the teacher who taught me how to read literature closely.
This excerpt is from my first full draft of my memoir and has since been excised.
I kept my complete collection of William Faulkner’s novels and stories in various editions, always occupying one shelf. I had a modernist critical bent (Faulkner, not Hemingway, fueled my soul), until I learned about English language studies. As an undergraduate, Professor Owens introduced me to Faulkner with The Sound and the Fury. I read Benjy’s book and couldn’t recall a thing I had read in those first 90 pages. I threw the book and left a dent in the wall of my childhood room. I picked up the novel and immediately started again. When I had finished, I gleaned a brilliance that no one in my eye could ever surpass, maybe Garcia Marquez, maybe Melville, each and all geniuses. But Faulkner will always remain my first literary love. Ah, Faulkner . . .
. . . pompous, arrogant, that wednesday night course, three hours of lecture in a class with rapidly dwindling attendance until only a half a dozen of us remained, junior year at san diego state, Professor Jim Hinkle held court, stood in the doorway and blew cigarette smoke into the hall, bragged about his seven professional athlete children or that they had all earned phds or both, we didn’t discuss literature, he lectured, taught us to read closely (Hinkle has since become legendary in the Hemingway and Faulkner worlds, having endowed scholarships to conferences, he memorized The Sun Also Rises, took him 8 hours to recite, abd from Harvard, he had two subjects – Hemingway and Faulkner), we read two slim but no less important Faulkner novels, Go Down, Moses, and The Hamlet, took a quiz each week, he’d choose half a dozen questions, and without giving us a piece of paper, we had to listen intently as he stood in the doorway:
“Find the pronoun on line 3 of page 67. Find the pronoun on line 5 of page 67, and lines 15 and 16. Trace those pronouns to their referents. You may, of course, use your books.”
nobody could do this in week 1, of course, but his disgust at our inability to simply follow the referents of pronouns in Faulkner’s writing – “by your sheer inability to read” – was clearly apparent, by week 4, we had improved, or as so many did, dropped out, learned the Hinkle method the art of close-reading and annotating while he smoked cigarettes in the doorway, we puzzled through the text, no tenure because he hadn’t completed his ph.d. but he was a long-term lecturer, not in danger of losing his job, don’t think he really cared if he was fired or not, made himself indispensable in his office, sat in an overstuffed leather chair and stared at the ceiling, an open copy of a Faulkner book face down in his lap and another held open with one hand, eyes to the ceiling glancing at the text and then eyes up again memorizing textual differences, his office a typical long-dwelling English department faculty mess with card catalogs and file cabinets lining the walls and stacks of papers strewn everywhere
told us that he had contacted the Faulkner library in Oxford, Mississippi to tell them that he had memorized Go Down, Moses along with its manuscript variants, so in case there was ever a fire, a barn burning, and all copies happened to be lost, he could recreate the book for them, due to attrition, one of the remaining apostles, I earned an “A” in Hinkle’s class, he the most arrogant prof. I ever had
six years later at KU, armed with my master’s degree, placed in an office next to Dean Carruthers -- Faulkner, Hemingway, Baseball lit, and theory of comedy expert -- a kindly man, stood leaning slightly back and looked down the bridge of his nose at me as if he were judging, asked about my background, and I proceeded to tell Carruthers the story about my Faulkner professor at san diego state with full orchestration and five-part harmony and stuff like that and drew twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows of my annotated text and about the insane quizzes and the close reading and about how he stood in the doorway smoking and bragging about his children, this arrogant s.o.b.
Carruthers leaned back on his heels and looked at me, bemused. I saw him hold back a smile, this scrawny new ph.d. student he had just met dishing on a professional colleague and with a straight and serious face, Carruthers said
“That would be Jim Hinkle. (pause) He died last year.”
I blanched more than a DuBois in New Orleans as Carruthers stifled a chuckle at my expense. I felt foolish but the worst had been done and having known Hinkle himself, he understood why I stood by my story.
Despite, or maybe because of, Hinkle’s arrogance, I learned how to read literature well.
Carruthers invited me to lunch, and we became good friends.
That’s all for today. It’s time to look up more agents to query. The weather is still insufferably hot, and our time in Atlanta is short. Time to start packing boxes and figuring out how to get rid of this furniture! It’s August, the month of our departure. I’m looking forward to this move more than any I think I’ve ever taken. Heading back to the West coast seems more like going home even though I’ve never lived in the PNW. Still, it’s more familiar than other places I’ve moved, like Connecticut and Atlanta. Even the Santa Cruz area, though I had never lived outside of southern California, seemed more like home - being California.
Time to light out for the west, as someone once said, so’s I don’t get too sivilized.
Stay safe out there. Hydrate!
Until next time, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!