Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
2. I heard a lot about the amazing Doris Betts when I was an undergraduate at UNC-Chapel Hill in the mid-1970s. But I was a shy poet and never made my way into her fiction classes or her office – which means that I first made her acquaintance through her books, possibly the best way to meet a writer. Once I read Beasts of the Southern Wild, whose short stories astonished and thrilled me, I was a Betts fan. I’m not sure when we first met in person – probably later that decade, during my mercifully brief graduate student career at Carolina – but our connection was immediate and deep. We were both working-class kids from the western part of the state who had transferred to Chapel Hill as juniors and felt like we’d landed in paradise. I was lucky enough to have Doris as my guide and colleague and confidante when I came back to UNC in 1990 as a lecturer in creative writing, then (thanks, in large part, to her advocacy) as a tenure-track assistant professor. I watched, and listened, and learned from her example how the department and the university worked, how to take teaching seriously yet continue to write, and above all, how to be a public servant at a public university. This all sounds much more dry than it was. Every minute with Doris was a blast; on the page and in person, she was dazzling – smart, feisty, hilarious, provocative, tenacious, and fearless. Her fierce dark eyes pierced, sparkled, didn’t miss a thing. Nobody was tougher or more tender. She sent the most entertaining emails ever, and her notes – written with one of her many fountain pens, held in a hard-working, ink-stained hand – were a treasure. I especially loved how she would sometimes sign them: “More to come.”
right Illustration of “the bat poet” by Maurice Sendak found
in the Randall Jarrell Papers of the Stuart Wright Collection [#1169-005], East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J.Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC
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3. I went to the Chatham library’s website to confirm the sale and found a twenty-page list of “special titles” to be offered from the personal collection of Doris Betts. There was plenty of prose, an intriguing range of fiction and nonfiction, but I was mostly interested in poetry and saw two signed Czeslaw Milosz books. Of course any poet would love to have those, but they had particular interest for me. He had been a visiting scholar at UNC one semester, and Doris and I and some other writers shared an epic lunch with him in May of 1991, which I remember as The Milosz Monologue – not uninteresting, but totally one-sided. Had he signed those books that day? And his poem “Meaning” (beginning, “When I die, I will see the lining of the world”) had been printed in her funeral leaflet, surely at her request, over “In Loving Memory / Doris Waugh Betts / June 4, 1932–April 21, 2012.” But were a couple of poetry books worth the forty-five minute drive to Pittsboro? I was about to decide No, and close the booklist when I saw the item that stopped my scrolling hand, and very nearly my heart: Jarrell, Randall illustrations by Maurice Sendak THE BAT-POET Macmillan Publishers inscribed & signed by Jarrell on front endpaper $20
What? A copy of my favorite book in the world? Not only signed but inscribed (to Doris?) by its author, near the end of his too-short life? How could I not go? Copyright © 2014 by Maurice Sendak Estate; reprinted with permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC. All rights reserved.
Every minute with Doris was a blast; on the page and in person, she was dazzling – smart, feisty, hilarious, provocative, tenacious, and fearless.
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