May 6, 2011
President Stewart, Dean Reynolds, Faculty and Administrative Colleagues, Students, Family Members, and Friends:
I have taken the title of my remarks today from James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Dr. Johnson attended Pembroke College, Oxford. Boswell writes of him, “Being himself a poet, Johnson was peculiarly happy in mentioning how many of the sons of Pembroke were poets; adding, with a smile of sportive triumph, ‘Sir, we are a nest of singing birds.’”
In the context of Hamilton, I interpret Johnson’s metaphor to point out that we are a community of writers. I want today to celebrate the fact that Hamilton College is a place where writers have always thrived and grown and flourished and supported each other, a place where every student can feel that her work takes part in an extended conversation with the many writers who have come before and will come afterwards. To emphasize this relationship, the cover of Essentials of Writing: The Hamilton College Style Guide – the booklet we give to each incoming student – displays portraits of nine of Hamilton’s writers, from Ezra Pound (class of 1905) to Kamila Shamsie (Class of 1994). I’d like to talk about some of my memories of some of the writers I’ve known in the Hamilton community.
When I arrived here in 1972, just two people taught creative writing at Hamilton: David Rigsbee, who taught poetry; and I, who taught fiction. Kirkland College had a larger community of writers. Bill Rosenfeld, who directed the creative writing program at Kirkland, arranged a weekly Writer’s Salon in the Kirkland Coffeehouse, where both students and faculty could read recent work or work in progress, share it with one another, and hear responses. The writers who came regularly to these salons included, in addition to David, Naomi Lazard, Tess Gallagher, and Natalie Babbitt.
Natalie Babbitt was already an established author of poetry and fiction for young readers. She had already published six books, although she had not yet written Tuck Everlasting, the book for which she’s best known now. On occasion, after the salon ended for the evening, she invited the faculty members of our group to her home, the Kirkland College president’s house on Harding Road, for a drink and conversation.
My own children were young at that time, and I have happy memories of reading to them from Natalie’s books, particularly Phoebe's Revolt, a narrative poem she wrote and illustrated. It is the story of an eight-year-old girl in 1904 who rebels against wearing the frilly dresses her family and society expect her to wear. Instead, she wants to dress as her father does – “simple white and sober black/Unornamented front and back.”
Part of what makes this book so much fun is Natalie’s couching her narrative in bouncy tetrameter couplets, breezily enjambed. Here’s a brief selection, in which Phoebe’s mother and aunt try to persuade her to be like a well-behaved cousin:
They spoke, while Phoebe made a face,
Of Phoebe’s little cousin Grace –
How mild she was, and how polite,
How charming in her pink and white.
But “Prissy Prig” was Phoebe’s name
For little Grace, and when she came
To visit as she often did,
Then Phoebe often ran and hid.
In these lines, the author’s characteristic voice emerges in the contrast between the stately movement of the first four lines, which express the adults’ point of view, and the rebellious energy of the last four. Natalie’s work is often about the private world of children and how adults misunderstand it.
Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri poet, joined the English department at Hamilton in 1987 and served on our faculty until 1993, when he left to take a position at the University of Massachusetts. Having been educated at the Universities of Kashmir and Delhi, and at Penn State and the University of Utah, Shahid was completely cosmopolitan. “English is my native language,” he used to say, “but Urdu is my mother tongue.”
Those of us who knew Shahid were deeply affected by his personal charm. He had a gift for friendship. He was an excellent cook who took pleasure in food; and his pleasure was vastly increased when he could introduce his friends to the food of his native Kashmir.
Some writers try to avoid attention, regarding privacy as a necessary condition of their work. John D. MacDonald, the author of the Travis McGee mystery series, who lived here on College Hill Road in the late 1940’s, was disgusted by his neighbors’ interest in him. He wrote,
We discovered that we were the unwelcome targets of an avid and undisciplined curiosity. It is a mistake, unless you have an actor’s flair and a poseur’s inclinations, to be The Writer in a small community.
Shahid was no poseur, but he did have an actor’s flair, and he had an open and entirely undisguised love of attention: he loved people, and he loved it when they loved him – and they did love him. I remember his returning to Hamilton to give a reading here in the Chapel in 1998 to great applause. I said to him after the applause ended, “Shahid, they love you as much as you love the moment.”
My favorite of Shahid’s poems is this one, “The Dacca Gauzes”:
The Dacca Gauzes
Those transparent Dacca gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dew:
a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. “No one
now knows,” my grandmother says,
“what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.” She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from
her mother’s dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.
Years later, when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys
were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.
In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,
and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,
my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only
in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.
One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.
In this poem, Shahid relays to us the vivid sense-memory his grandmother transmitted to him, encapsulating a piece of the colonial history of India in a story of four generations of his family.
After he left Hamilton, Shahid developed a malignant brain tumor that eventually took his life. My last memory of him is of his voice – an interview with him by Jacki Lyden on National Public Radio in July of 2001. His disease had affected his ability to read and his short-term memory, so that his brother Iqbal had to help him. But his spirits were characteristically high, and his poetic gift was still apparent. After the interview ended I found I was in tears.
A Hamilton writer whose work I’ve known throughout his career is Peter Cameron, of the Class of 1982. I first encountered him in a course in fiction in 1979, the spring of his first year at Hamilton. He had written poetry before coming to Hamilton, but I believe my course was the first time he had written fiction. It wasn’t long before I recognized that here was an extraordinary talent. Two things struck me about Peter’s writing: first, the feeling of listening to voices – the voices of his characters and first-person narrators. Peter invested his characters’ words with multiple meanings, so that although their utterances were like those of people in real conversations, a reader understood things about them that they could not understand, or could not express, about themselves. Second, I was impressed by an unusual attention to detail in his writing – details of human interaction, of the ways in which people signal, often unconsciously, their thoughts and feelings.
We see this use of authentic voices in Peter’s novel The City of Your Final Destination. A graduate student, Omar Razaghi, has spent the night as a guest in the house of people he has not previously met. Having slept late, he awakens in the morning and finds the house empty, but there is a note on the kitchen counter. It reads:
Dear Omar,
I am in the garden, which is through the courtyard and down the gravel path, behind the oleander hedge. Caroline is up in her studio. It may be best if you come find me.
Why, he wondered, would it be best to find Arden? And did this mean he was meant to go find her, or only to find her if he were inclined toward company? I won’t think too much about this, Omar thought. I’ll just go find her, like a normal person would, after reading this note. I will behave like a normal person for as long as I possibly can.
Omar is a normal person, but he is in a situation that is new to him. Peter’s ability to track Omar’s thoughts depends on his attention to details of cognition.
Since graduating from Hamilton, Peter Cameron has published eight books – six novels and two collections of his short fiction. Two of his novels have been made into films: The Weekend, with Gena Rowlands and Brooke Shields; and The City of Your Final Destination, a Merchant-Ivory film with Anthony Hopkins, Laura Linney, and Charlotte Gainesbourg.
Most of us may not expect to be published writers of poetry or fiction, but all of us know that writing will be a part of our lives, and all of us benefit from being part of a community of writers. All of you students have been writing continually since you came to Hamilton, and you will continue to write after you graduate. I just heard about a Hamilton alumnus who was interviewed for the Peace Corps. When the interviewer asked about his academic credentials, he said he had a B.A. degree from Hamilton. The interviewer then moved to another topic. The alumnus asked, “Don’t you want to know about my major and what I did at Hamilton?” “No,” replied the interviewer, “it doesn't really matter what you majored in. Because I know you graduated from Hamilton, it saves me 10 more questions because now I immediately know that you know how to think critically, write, and present your ideas.”
When we started the Writing Center at Hamilton in 1987, we knew we wanted to have computers for students to use for word processing. Hard as it seems now to believe, most students then did not have computers of their own. As I visited writing centers at several other institutions, I noticed that some had placed their computers in enclosures, so that writers who used them would have privacy and shut out distractions. This seemed to me to embody a misconception about writing – the idea that writing was best done in privacy, that writers needed to be alone to work. I had observed students working in the computer center and knew that they liked to ask one another for advice or to share their work, so I arranged that in the Writing Center the tables would be next to each other and the students who worked at them would have no barriers between them. “Writing is a social activity,” I said, and that sentence became a kind of motto for the Writing Center, a place where writers can share their writing with one another and can discuss their writing. The Writing Center at Hamilton is the nucleus of one community of writers.
Creative Writing courses at Hamilton and elsewhere are always taught as workshops, in which students are expected to respond to one another’s work. But I believe a similar expectation should apply to other courses. Depending on the course, I either urge or require students to show their work to other members of the class and to acknowledge the help they receive. Because writing is a social activity, writers need their work to be seen by more pairs of eyes than their own.
And yet there is a paradox here: writing is a social activity, yet good writing expresses a personal vision in an individual voice. Pedestrian writing tells us what everyone already knows, and inauthentic writing tells us what someone else thinks we want to hear. Good writing arises from one writer’s insight and reflects that person’s thinking. And the most difficult part of writing is often to figure out what we really mean. Collaboration with others can help each of us discover our meaning and express it in a personal voice. So my advice to all of us – myself included – is this: “Own your topic. Know what you think. If you know your own thoughts, you can say something worth hearing.”
I hope I have. Thank you.
