September 10, 2019: Six Degrees of Separation

In the fall of 1976, a couple of momentous things happened, at least as far as I was concerned: I joined the faculty of Auburn University, and Stephen Spender came to Auburn. He was a prominent English poet, and, working in the 1930s, he knew everyone of literary note, which is the point of this post.

As a first-year instructor, I was appointed to chauffeur Mr. Spender around. I doubt that this was a rite of passage, though; at least one faculty member was disgruntled that I was allowed so much time with one of the important figures of the 20th century (I’m not going to recount it here; that’s what Wikipedia is for.)

I picked him up at the little airport that served Auburn. He had been in Gainesville, at the University of Florida, and had flown to Atlanta, then to Auburn. He was a tall man, six and a half feet, I’d judge; he wasn’t substantially overweight, but a 67 year old poet is generally not running marathons. He unfolded himself from the little plane—OK, I’m fully aware that “unfolded” is the hoariest of clichés, but that’s what it looked like—and he was a little ashen-faced, another cliché, but that he was.

It was a pleasant couple of days. I would pick him up at his motel (in those days, Auburn was woefully short of livable hotel space, probably still is) and drive him to speak to a gathering in a conference room. He was tired; at one point, like a stoned rock star, he thought he was still in Gainesville. He would look around bewildered at a circle of faculty and leading students, and then he’d find me in the group and give me a smile full of gratitude and relief—ah, there’s that fellow after all. I’ll probably never meet someone like that again, much less feel so relied upon. Once when I knocked on his motel room door, he said come in, and I did, and he smiled at me so sweetly. He was reading a book about Hitler.

It was November, 1976, and America was electing a new president. A senior faculty member had hosted a gathering. It was kind of a notable evening: we were in the company of Stephen Spender, and Jimmy Carter was winning the presidency. The gathered group, a majority of all of the liberals in Alabama, was thrilled. Spender impressed everyone by asking, “If Cook County goes for the Democrats, won’t Carter win?”

He gave one reading that was magical. The room was absolutely jammed, but not because the redneck scions of Alabama cared about poetry. The School of Arts and Sciences awarded one credit hour if a student attended a certain number of cultural events; for some reason, probably that Spender’s reading was earlier in the week and thus not interfering with fraternity parties, the room was packed. I was worried, thinking that the kids wouldn’t know enough not to talk to each other. At least it was 1976, before cell phones.

Yet when he began reading, the silence was complete. He read “One More New Botched Beginning” a gorgeous poem, and when he finished, the applause filled the room immediately and loudly, as though they had all attended hoping to hear this poem and were delighted. For once I was proud of our dopey kids.

I was less proud when the senior faculty and I took Spender to dinner one night, then the only passable restaurant in Auburn, a seafood place, the name of which escapes me. It was dark, and it probably set the places with paper napkins. Spender had a glass of red wine with his shrimp. That socialist didn’t give a damn about social niceties!

At some point, the talk turned, as it often did, to whom everyone had met. It’s a sad kind of game, trying to one-up your colleagues. I wonder how many of the six or so had already heard these stories from each other. The funniest part of this exchange was that the only celebrity I remember being mentioned was pretty minor: Someone said, “I met Rilke’s daughter.”

Finally, someone thought to ask Spender, just casually, as if expecting a no, “Did you ever meet Yeats?” William B. Yeats, the Irish poet of the early 20th century who is widely considered one of the best poets in the English language. For what it’s worth, I am in thrall to Yeats.

Spender was eating, his head bent over his dish, but he raised his eyebrows if not his head and said, “Oh yes, I met Yeats.”

Utter gloom and a dead silence descended on the table. Spender had just dropped the biggest literary name, not that he had intended anything of the sort. The subject was changed, and passive voice is appropriate here as no one wants to know who felt so ashamed that he/she felt compelled to move on.

But why so? Why didn’t someone ask, “Oh, what was he like? How long did you talk? What did you talk about?” No, just gloom that they had not met Yeats.

Why? Why did they think they were even allowed to have pretensions? Rilke’s daughter indeed. It would have been more notable if someone had met the cockroach who was the model for Kafka’s in “The Metamorphosis.”

Further, Spender knew not only Yeats, but James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and many more down the ladder: Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Mary McCarthy, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and, to cap it off, T. S. Eliot.

What this means, of course, is that I am two degrees of separation from all of those people. As someone who spent his youth being wowed by their work, I’m very proud of having shook the hand that shook Yeats’, Joyce’s, Woolf’s, Thomas’s, and Eliot’s.

I wonder on occasion why the other faculty members were so dispirited that Spender had met Yeats. To have met the man who knew the man who wrote “Among Schoolchildren”, among other breath-taking works? I don’t mean to sound like a nerd, but that’s cause both for celebration and for gazing at your hand.

Mr. Spender died in 1995. I’ll always treasure the time I got to spend with that gentleman.

When it was time for him to leave, he gently asked if I could drive him to the Atlanta airport rather than his taking the tiny plane back; he said he wanted to see the countryside. Well, he just wanted to stay out of that scary little plane. I was thrilled to have another couple of hours with him. I asked a graduate student to come with me, Kenny Likis, and it was a good idea: he engaged Mr. Spender in better conversation than I could. I’ll never forget it. I’ve virtually shaken Yeats’ hand. My dinner companions were depressed, but I’m still thrilled.

Stephen Spender