This is an extension of my July 6 post that included my 1977 essay on Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, where I explained how the mark York University professor Ruth Grogan gave it began the confidence in my writing that I’ve never lost, despite six decades of rejection by the traditional publishing industry.
Since writing that post, I did some research on Ruth Grogan.
She began teaching in 1968. This was intriguing to me, for 1968 was a watershed year. It was the peak year of the ’60s pop music explosion, the Vietnam war was at its height, about to erupt with the Tet offensive in January ’69, and it was the year that both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. An unforgettable year.
It was the year I returned in spring from Mexico, still in a trance from exploring that country, then worked four months underground in a mine in northern Ontario (the photo here is from my mining certificate). At the end of 1968 I returned to Mexico.
In a piece on the York website, written in response to her retirement in 2004, there are severthere there is a quote from Ruth Grogan about how it felt starting out in 1968:
I was the type of student who was under the illusion she didn’t need professors. …. So when I first started teaching in 1968 I didn’t know why students were sitting in front of me. “Just go the library.” I thought. You don’t need me.
But she soon learned why students needed her, and reading her account of the subsequent years it became clear to me that she always cared deeply about them.
Once in a conversation as I was sitting in her office in 1977, she told me she liked having me in her class because I challenged her with questions and arguments. She said the students of 1977 just accepted everything she told them. She missed the argumentative students of 1968.
To be fair to the students of ’77 though, I have to say they were still good students, just of a different kind. They may have been quieter, or more passive that way, but they were still thinkers. I was 31 years old in 1977, so a bit removed from them, though one of them became a close friend who I would be happy to see again.
When asked about the value of studying literature in 2004, retiring after 36 years of teaching, Ruth Grogan said it is,
about more than simply getting a job. It’s about opening to Life.
When I left York in 1978 to return to accident/personal injury investigation work (I needed the money), I was asked more than once if going to university for three years hadn’t been a waste of time. I just smiled and said it wasn’t a waste of time at all. I didn’t try to explain it, because how do you explain to such people the treasure chest of jewels that you have just had to close and leave behind?
In my coming book, Autism Dreaming, I say at one point that the study of literature is a school of psychology. I could have added that it is also a school of history, of sociology, of economics (Balzac), of war (Tolstoy), not to mention other things. Only in the study of literature, which I consider a science, are you open to all of life.
That’s why I’m still writing about it. Besides writing novels, I like writing about those written by others.
Alan Conrad 