Tyche
To the goddess Tyche I probably did yield
early in life. I have long since resigned myself beneath her
sway, as all creation must. Nor have I found it contradictory to
link the terms “creation” and “chance." The distant majesty of an
ultimate Creator does not at all preclude more immediate, flighty
deities like Tyche. True, our Dustbowl theology did vehemently
reject her, finding blasphemous any suggestion that mere trial and
error governs all life and growth and choice in the State of
Texas. But I did fear and revere and love God, so who
was I to quibble about His workers, or their tedious progress? As
to my own understanding, I just hoped it would not maliciously deceive
me quite beyond redemption.
Christmas of 1938--times were still hard in
Gainesville--I got a bicycle so large that I took many a distant fall
before I mastered it, but the bike was quite distinctive for its
durable
construction, so that, about five years later while riding on a street
in
Houston, I was startled to see another just like it--and so was the
rider of that bike, an unusually beautiful boy named Jan
LeCroy. Jan was actually pretty far from home at that
moment. Although we never attended the same school, he came often
to my house, and we took long bike rides together. After the war,
his family moved to Hot Springs and mine to Texarkana, but we continued
to meet, we hitch-hiked together between Hot Springs, Texarkana, and
Houston. Our parents resided in separate worlds. I heard
that Jan had received an appointment to Annapolis, and as it turned
out, my mother had a cousin with political connections who was able to
obtain for me an appointment not to Annapolis, but to West Point.
Although I had by this time finished two years at the University of
Arkansas, I accepted the “free education," and in the summer of 1950
became a freshman at the United States Military Academy. I
resigned from the Academy in time to return to the University of
Arkansas for the fall semester.
I would very much like to know what that
episode tells about the boy. What I am able to remember is acting
under compulsion and resolve during the weeks (or months?) it
took me to convince my superiors that I did indeed wish to
resign. I remember my dread at the merits and demerits regime,
perhaps feeling that I could not cope with it. The place itself
of course seemed desolate, but surely I had become accustomed to
loneliness; I think my experience there was not much different from at
the University of Arkansas, where I had spent my freshman and sophomore
years. I have wondered what might have become of me had I stuck
it out in the military. West Point has proved a powerful
launching pad for careers--as did Annapolis for Jan--but for me it
might not have worked out quite so well--entirely aside from my
doubtful character. The Korean war began that very summer I
entered West Point--it was used by my superiors as a powerful argument
against my resigning: they said I would just be drafted and sent
to Korea. Did I understand the gamble I was taking? Does
the risk show my eagerness to get away? I remember only using a
razor blade to remove the stripe from my gray wool pants, and scuffing
the mirror polish off my shoes as I at last walked down the stairs to
the exit.
The conscription law in those days allowed
college deferment. In early 1953, in order to demonstrate to the
Texarkana draft board that I was making progress, I prettied up a
seminar paper from the University of Illinois, submitted it as a
Master's thesis to Arkansas, made a special trip back to Fayetteville
to take my oral examination, and proudly sent the diploma to Texarkana
to show my draft board I was making progress. Almost by
return mail, I received my reclassification to 1-A--the first category
for the draft. Well, I made a special trip to Texarkana in order
to explain that I had not yet completed my studies, but had just wanted
to
apprise them of my progress. I was brusquely informed that the
entire draft board had resigned in protest against college deferments,
to which they strongly objected. As a consequence, a new board
was now sitting, my new classification (to 2-A, I believe) had been
approved. --All of which does not really address the question as
to whether I made a rational decision to give up the prestigious West
Point degree, launching pad to fame and power for so many of my
generation.
At age nineteen to twenty, a young man is most
subject to the luck of the draw, for better or for worse. But
youth, like a plant raising her head in blossom, longing for
surrounding life, is also subject to the same inner structures that
brought her here. She is wistfully seeking where seed cast to the
wind can take root in strange soil and at last open their potential to
the wide world before higher gods. My notion was to attend the
University of Arkansas for one more year, then go on to law
school. After two further years (that was the way it was in those
days) I would receive both my J.D. and B.A. in June of 1955. "Man
proposes, God disposes."
Study
Tyche had bent the twig in the simplest way
imaginable. One day in the spring sun of 1951, I stood on the
steps of Old Main at the University of Arkansas, probably smoking a
cigarette. I was joined there by J. Wesley Thomas, a glorious
bass baritone, somewhat husky, with thinning auburn hair. His
general bearing and good-natured stoic acceptance of things may have
been reminiscent of my father--and indeed Wesley Thomas became one of
those men who, like Frank Haile and Russell Jones, showed a benign
interest in me without demanding any response at all, merely offering
their existence as a kind of model should a young man need one.
These were mostly men born around the turn of the century, the last of
them being Ernst Philippson. I remember realizing that neither
Philippson nor Thomas had
really taught me much about our field of study, but that I had
learned from them something more important: the posture of a
scholar. I believe that young males, by nature, are not good
learners (although they may make dangerously proficient
followers). They are apt to be led by a "male bond," probably
older than humanity. It certainly goes back farther than
humankind's awareness of fatherhood, back to an epoch when all the
mature males in the clan, especially of course those closest to the
mother, were likely to succor, then recruit their juniors. I
never developed close ties to any of them, even to Professor Thomas,
who was nearer my age than the others.
As we stood there before Old Main, Thomas was
probably not yet forty. Right after finishing his Ph.D. degree in
1942, he had attended the Army language school for Russian and then
become an officer in the Navy. After the war he had got a job at the
University of Michigan, then come to Arkansas in hopes of building a
graduate program, perhaps with a comparative slant together with his
friends from English, Claude Faulkner and Duncan Eaves. Thomas
wanted to know whether I might be interested in teaching beginning
German the following fall. In those days that was called a
graduate assistantship: a small stipend paid to graduate students
who took on an undergraduate teaching assignment. Since I was
only in my junior year, graduate standing seemed well beyond my reach
in that spring of 1951. But the Goddess had already been long at
work, indeed for centuries.
As is well known, the Protestant Reformation
did truly have its inception as an attempt at reform. The Church
in the 16th century was a monolithic, comprehensive bureaucracy with
extensive enforcement powers. The reformers translated the Bible
out of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin and popularized it as sacred
guide. This tactic for reform had certain edifying consequences
both for the corrupt Roman Church and for those who were driven out of
it; and in subsequent centuries it spawned endless back-to-the-Bible
movements among the many new sects. Most far reaching was their
personification of God
in accordance with the tales in the Old Testament. Brooding
Calvinists determined that since God knew it
all, then the future of each individual soul clearly had to be
pre-ordained. One Calvinist leaning group recognized that if John
the Baptist had totally immersed Lord Jesus, then no mere sprinkling
could suffice lesser mortals. In England, a group of these
"Baptists" noticed that the Old Testament Sabbath fell on the seventh
day of the week, hence not on a Sunday at all. These Seventh-Day
Baptists, after the Great Awakening in America, established some of the
first schools along the western frontiers. One such school
happened to be attended by my mother. At a one-room school in
Roberts, Arkansas, she had finished McGuffy's Sixth Reader, containing
texts beyond most college graduates today (and some professors); she
was now ready for higher things at Fouke's new Seventh-Day
School. A very handsome young missionary straight from China
named Henry Gideon Fitz Randolph taught her and her classmates a
foreign language, German. When, nearly forty years
later, her son was asked his choice for the foreign language
requirement at the University of Arkansas, what else could come to his
mind than "German"?
What else could I know? My teacher
turned out to be a Mrs. Garcia, her main language, Spanish. I
found the learning materials, standard fables and simple literary texts
(Evans and Rösseler),
mildly interesting. The close
attention required by a new language revealed more about the poet's
work than I had been accustomed to heed.
I remember coming to a theory
at about that time, that one cannot really appreciate work in one's
native language at all until one has wrestled with another
language. With
this conviction, I was no doubt delighted to come upon Goethe's
aphorism, "He who knows no other language does not know his own,
either." I do not recall feeling any special attraction to
German, but the mental changes effected by language learning did
constitute an important experience in my life. This in contrast
to the mortifying dullness of English
literature, as well as of history, political science,
even mathematics. I remember finding some classes, psychology for
example, to be parodies on themselves.
One college course from
which I can remember learning something was Goethe's Faust in English
translation, taught by a palsied old German named Dr. Alfred
Lussky. He was a member of that generation who had been brought
to America about the turn of the century by a sincere mission.
Such men understood teaching German as nothing less than introducing
untutored young barbarians to Western Civilization. Of course,
precisely such hybris had during my own lifetime doomed the German
people and devastated their homeland, but I did not make the
connection. I went ahead to take a course from Wesley Thomas
where we actually read and discussed in German. I believe there
may have been only three of us in the class: Kenneth Ober (of
whom more later), some pretty little girl whose name I forget, and
I. I do not remember Thomas as an inspiring teacher, but the
material--poems and Novellen from German Romanticism--was my first
acquaintance with the charms of literature. It was at this
juncture that Tyche arranged our conversation on the steps of Old Main.
It turned out that I could indeed obtain
status as graduate student by the fall semester if I could advance,
before then, to within fifteen hours of graduation. I enrolled in
summer school for enough credits to bring me within the crucial number,
thus in the fall there was room for one graduate course. As a
graduate stludent,
I could also be given a class to teach. Among my students were
veterans who had recently been stationed in Germany, no doubt even
intimate with Germans, and who were much amused at a teacher who came
to class on Tuesdays and Thursdays in military uniform (as a freshman I
had weaseled out of required ROTC, and could not now get my B.A.
without making up the deficit). My own knowledge of German
scarcely went beyond the current lesson, I was a nervous chain smoker
who once dropped a flaming matchbook on the lectern (used in the next
hour by Professor Thomas), but I did for the first time in my life set
out to learn.