Photo
credit: John Movius, 2004
Biography
Excerpts
from Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, volume
29, edited by Joyce Nakamura
"The
record: I was born in Minneapolis at Abbott Hospital near
Loring Park on August 2, 1934....After a brief stint on active
duty in the navy, I entered Yale College in the fall of 1951.
I joined the NROTC; I left it by transferring to the AFROTC;
I had grown passionate about my education and soon dropped
AFROTC as well.
"I
graduated with a B.A. in English in June 1955 and was drafted
by the army on September 12, 1955....
"I
studied German at Harvard Summer School and in September 1957
entered the Harvard Graduate School in English, earning an
M.A. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1963. While a graduate student,
I attended Robert Lowell's poetry workshop at Boston University;
later I worked with Archibald MacLeish....In 1963 I joined
the faculty as a full-time instructor in English. In 1967
I went to Japan as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University
of Tokyo and returned a year later to a position on the English
faculty of Brown University. Before going to Tokyo I had met
Virginia Scoville in Cambridge. In 1969 we were married and
we moved to Bennington, Vermont, where I would teach at Bennington
College. A daughter, Clare, was born in 1976 when we lived
in White Creek, New York, and a son, Nathaniel, in 1980 when
we had returned to Bennington....
"The
days of learning as a pupil became days of learning as a teacher.
It was my privilege to be part of that clan: colleague and
thus—at Bennington—friend of Bernard Malamud,
Georges Guy, Phebe Chao, Ben Belitt, Arturo Vivante, Claude
Fredericks, John Gardner, Philippe Denis, Nick Delbanco, George
Garrett, Harry Mathews, and many more....
"Like
Yeats's midforties, mine were a dry time; unlike Yeats I lacked
even a publisher. But in the eighties, however it came about,
I began to write again with a fresh lease on my vocation and
new access to my muse. The publisher Alfred A. Knopf took
me on and eventually published three books....
"In
a long perspective, the situation does not matter, the telos
only does, and that is the enduring trade. Think of a man
in his study, surrounded by books, looking at them—like
a cat with unfocused stare crouched under a peony bush—wondering
whatever had they meant to him, things he once read, loved
ones, loved things and days, and what he had been about. At
the bottom of the garden of years, what is time? What matters
but a few facts and loved ones held; or a mind, on the long
frayed track of memory, running in the dark?"
Curriculum
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