To Heck With Nostalgia

I hated school. I'd dropped out of high school twice, flunked out once and backed into college by playing football at Tilton Junior College. College was something I had to do, like getting a haircut or wearing a tie, it wasn't something one enjoyed. (8)

I was only in Durham for four weeks but I applied for admission to UNH--if I came home. (8)

In January, 1946 I arrived back in Durham, surprised to have survived combat--and the leaves in between--excited, awkward, eager, worried and still in uniform. The paratroops had not prepared me for classes in which names such as Aristotle brought understanding nods from other students, but I was allowed to study writing--a rare opportunity then--although writing and American lit courses couldn't count for major credit. (9)

Today I worry that UNH has become a school to educate the children of the middle--or upper-middle class--but it wasn't then. Most of our parents hadn't been to college or high school. Most of us, like myself, were desperate to get into the middle class. (9)

I went to school winter and summer, took extra courses; I arrived in January 1946 and had my last classes in January 1948. (9)

Looking back, I realize how much I was changing by those fast-passing, jam-packed months of reading and writing and talking, always talking... Daggett, Bingham, Towle, Hennessey, Rideout and others loved to argue. Ideas didn't lie flat on the pages of their books, ideas leapt into the room, they shouted, argued back, grabbed each other--and us--by the throat. My teachers had a contagious enthusiasm about learning that made me read assigned books and unassigned ones. And when I wrote--nothing but short poems then--Carroll Towle, puffing away on his corncob pipe in his tiny office at the end of Murkland Corridor, would take what I wrote--and me--seriously. (9)

I had come to UNH by accident, a soldier assigned to be tested, looking for girls. I had returned as a veteran wanting a membership card in the middle class. (9)

I was astonished by the call [from Bingham, with the offer to come teach at UNH]..I had never thought of myself as a person who would become a teacher. In fact, Dr. Bingham had asked me to stay on and teach twelve courses a year for $900 after I was graduated, and I had been insulted. Not by the money but by his not realizing I was a writer, not a teacher. (10)

But in 1963 I was older, I had become a writer and teaching sounded interesting--and easy.
I was wrong. I've worked far harder teaching at UNH than I did in supposedly high-powered national journalism. (10)

My teachers in durham had taught me to respect and listen to the individual student, to delight in diversity, to be myself and reveal my feelings and my opinions honestly as well as whatever learning I had accumulated. (10)

But sitting in my own conferences with young writers I felt the ghost of Carroll Towle and heard his chuckle at a word--or line--that delighted. He was an enthusiast, no apology. And so am I. (10)

I can lecture--and I confess taht I have--but I have done my best teaching as I have listened to my students teach themselves, cheering them on and being careful not to get in their way. (10)