Richard Poirier died last week at age 83. The New York Times paid tribute with a long obituary and an appreciative essay. Poirier was a "distinguished man of letters" and also a Professor of English.
In 1960, as the juniorest and least-sophisticated graduate student in the history of the universe, I enrolled in an AmLit course taught by Poirier. Fifty years later, I can affirm that it was the single course in my graduate career in which I performed the absolute worst -- both in the instructor's judgment and in my own. I'm still embarrassed at the woeful mess of a paper I offered him. I remember little of it, except its incompetence and the recollection that I used the phrase "a writer of his ilk" -- I can't remember to which I writer I referred -- and that Poirier wrote a longish exasperated note explaining to me that I did not have the standing to treat any American author with disrespect. However, the honest-to-goodness reason why I did so badly in the course was that Poirier expected his students to think -- and thinking was not an area in which I was gifted. I had discovered early in my educational career that my memory was far superior to most of my contemporaries, that I had an ear for language, and that I had a moderately fluent prose style. But I never, ever, possessed a logical, orderly, or penetrating intelligence. (I could remember sentences and phrases and whole poems, but not arguments or chains of reasoning). My skills were sufficient for literary study -- indeed I doubt that I could have managed an academic career in any other discipline.
In fact, I did rather well in studies with most of my graduate-school professors -- distinguished and learned gentlemen all of them -- who were so happy to encounter facility that they didn't notice the want of brain.
It is curious that some of the most profoundly learned of my professors were the least adventurous of thinkers. I remember, for example, Douglas Bush, now a mere trivia question, but a most renowned scholar in his day, whose superficial, fey, conservative, neoChristianist-pixie observations on Spenser and Milton I duly recorded. for two endless semesters, learning absolutely nothing of worth or value.
Poirier was more serious. Only 35 (I was 21), he was thinking deeply about the qualities that made American literature distinctive (I believe that he was in the process of formulating the ideas that came together in A World Elsewhere). He was an intellectual rather than an academic. It would have been wise for me to have listened carefully to him. I might have learned something.
It's shocking to me that the young, dashing lecturer whom I remember so clearly could be so old, so dead -- but ther's no denying that half a century has slipped away since I last listened to his rumbling voice.
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