I first met Jim Corder in the Fall of 1969 when I enrolled at TCU to take an M.A. in English. He was department head; later, after I was long gone, he would become dean of the College of Liberal Arts and associate vice chancellor. I went to TCU for practical concerns: it was close to my family home in Mineral Wells where my mother still lived, and it was also fairly proximate to the woman I was dating in Wichita Falls. I intended to stay just long enough to earn my degree and inch farther away for doctoral studies. I didn't leave TCU until 1975, deciding at last and having completed more than 120 graduate hours that it was time to make my way in the world. Jim Corder was largely responsible for my having stayed those years at TCU, and he was also instrumental in my leaving.
In the early '70s graduate students still kept a healthy distance from their teachers. Faculty were, after all, allowed in the faculty center to drink coffee and chat; we were not, a prohibition which curiously ended when my cronies and I departed. But it was understandable. In 1969 I was not the polished academic people mistake me for today. I was naively unaware and unconcerned about such things as departmental politics. Although I took twelve graduate hours in each of my first two semesters, I largely spent my afternoons shooting snooker in the pool room in the basement of Reed Hall, three floors below the English Department and through which faculty routinely passed on their way to the student center. My graduate student friends and I noticed their derisive looks as they went by. Maybe it was their unease about being in a pool room, although Mr. Finley, the polite part-time minister who ran the place, insisted we call it a recreation room. But we suspected all faculty, all adults, deplored us. So when we could, as we did at last, induce one or two into a game, we took much delight in trouncing them thoroughly on the tables.
We never felt that kind of disapproval from Jim Corder. I'd like to think it was because we had come to college much as he did - from humble rural upbringings and with a penchant for athletics and competition of all sorts. When I learned that Jim, then in his forties, was still playing competitive softball, I took for a while to calling him "coach." Other graduate students objected, thought the appellation disrespectful, but Jim knew better. Graduate school itself is necessarily agonistic and the search for jobs afterward even more so. I called Jim my English coach because he was; he taught me to improve my skills without losing love for the game. It was an endearment he was not uncomfortable with. Later he would write, "we forget that education should be first of all concerned with the free spirit of free citizens. We forget that all of us are first men and women, and in our schools move instead to train students as if they were first lawyers, management entrepreneurs, doctors, English scholars, chemists, accountants" (LWT 31).
Despite such informalities, most of us still observed the protocol of leaving faculty alone. We fantasized that their lives were more exciting than ours, although most surely weren't. Moreover, since Jim was department head, he had additional chores and responsibilities, and his time was more important than ours. I hope I didn't add to those burdens. I probably didn't. In my six years there I remember scheduling only two appointments with him. One, in my first year as a teaching fellow, was to seek advice about handling a particular troublesome student; in those days we didn't have a director of composition, and I was never offered specific instruction to help me teach freshman composition. Jim Corder was my resource, and I remember his succinct advice. After I had outlined my frustration at being unable to rehabilitate, redeem, or reform the miscreant, Jim said, "Don't worry. Life will flunk him." I don't know what became of the student, and fortunately I no longer recall his name, but I like to think that Jim was right.
I scheduled the second appointment to compliment a faculty member, Betsy Colquitt, who had just completed teaching her first graduate seminar. Although she worked us relentlessly that term -- we read dozens of books and were assigned two essays the last week of the course -- it was a marvelous semester. Jim, of course, was delighted by my report. He told me he couldn't remember a student's ever coming in for such a blithe purpose. Neophyte that I was, I didn't realize how rare such joyous occasions are in academia. Having been a department head and dean at three universities myself, I now know. Words of praise work well for the living as well as the dead. And while I'm happy in this moment remembering Jim Corder, I'd be happier still celebrating his living friendship.
Jim's eighteenth century class at TCU was a popular one, and I came to understand why. Jim's lectures were encouraging and insightful but extremely informal. He seemed to speak off the cuff as he went, his bandanna and unlit pipe close at hand. Despite the casual nature of Jim's remarks, every week or so I'd type my handwritten notes. In the second month of the semester, I discovered how meticulously outlined the course actually was. At semester's end I accused him of this formality, of actually preparing and organizing lectures but not wanting us to suspect him of such. He was tickled that I had noticed, and he confessed his disingenuousness; he worked harder than he wanted us to know. Jim was always self-effacing. When he attended meetings of teachers and scholars, he modestly wore no name tag, in part because he hated telling eager graduate students in other departments that he had no jobs for them in his. Other people's feelings mattered to Jim, and we should all wish such sensitive caretakers.
A few weeks before I headed to the MLA conference in New York in 1974, fortified by a small handful of interview invitations in a lousy job market, Jim Corder wrote me outstanding personal letters of support. When he wrote Harry Crosby about a vacancy in Boston University's Department of Rhetoric, he claimed that I knew a great many things -- structural linguistics, Noam Chomsky, Kenneth Pike, tagmemic structures, and other recondite matters. When Jim showed me the letter he'd sent, I grew panicky. I told him I knew very little about those matters he said I did. The interview was a mere two weeks away, but Jim told me I still had time to learn. And I did. Fueled by my anxiety, I spent hours in the library and at home reading arcane books and articles. I even prepared a synopsis of what I had read for Jim. "Fascinating," he said. "This is really useful; I've never even read these things myself."
Jim Corder knew that "we can't be what we are and become what we should be" (32), and he applied that caveat to himself as well as to me. He knew "a good future has to be made . . . and it's always a good teacher who makes the future for us" (34). "A good teacher," he wrote, "can teach us that it is splendid to be human together. . . . A good teacher can teach us that change did not cease when it reached us, that we can go into a new world clasping to our memories what was dear in the old, but expecting to make magic hereafter" (35).
So I guess without lifting a cue he snookered me, and, when I interviewed with Prof. Crosby (he and Jim knew each other only by their professional reputations) he had a similar response. I was eager to share my new-found knowledge with Crosby, but he had prepared a list of forty questions for each candidate and was taping each interview. I tried to insinuate what I had learned into every question. After the sixth question he stopped taping. Moments later the reason became evident: like Jim he hadn't read this material either, and he offered me a job precisely because I had. When I returned to Fort Worth, Jim was as happy for me as I was for myself.
I didn't stay long in Boston. When I had the opportunity to move to New Mexico with a nice raise, I did. A year later I produced the first issue of New Mexico Humanities Review, a periodical I edited for thirty-seven issues in sixteen years. When I told Jim about the project, he said he would send me something. I knew about his textbooks and rhetorical criticism, but I didn't know he was also engaged in the secret life of an essayist and poet. Lucky for us he was.
Over the years I published his work frequently, and his first essays became the basis for Lost in West Texas, still one of the most evocative books around. Jim told me I was the first to print his personal essays and poems. He probably felt safe in that they would reach my literary journal's very limited audience. The crux of those essays and poems is, as he says in Yonder, the struggle for identity as "old worlds go and new worlds come" (23). While the essays have been collected, the poetry has not, though they certainly ought to be.
He rewrote parts of "Scenes from the Thirties" in prose for Lost in West Texas. Here's how it originally read:
"Scenes from the Thirties"
1.
The troubleshooter down at the mill
Didn't want any pissant dollar and a nickel man
Telling him what to do. Or how.
He made a dollar fifteen.
That was per day, you understand.
2.
For a while there,
We had enough dust blow in
To make a new county every year.
We didn't used to be this high
Above sea level, you know.
3.
If it rained some, we'd have a little cotton.
If we had a little cotton, the gin would start up.
If the gin did business, the oil mill would run.
We'd fire up along in September, early October.
First thing, you know, we had to gin the seeds
All over again.
To get that little bitty fuzz off--
We called it linters.
The linters got baled up just like cotton
And sold for padding and cheap mattresses,
But mostly went to munitions plants
To make gun powder and packing.
Then we'd hull the seeds,
Roll them, and put them in the big old cookers,
And then they'd go, all cooked and soft,
Into the row of presses,
And the hydraulics would squeeze the hot oil
Right out of them.
The caked seeds got broken up
And sold for cow feed.
The oil went off somewhere to turn into Crisco
--Linters, seed, and oil,
We used those seeds plumb up.
I tell you,
You take a cold baked sweet potato,
Or a biscuit,
And dip it in that hot oil on a raw noon,
And you'd get well and fat real quick.
4.
When there was rain just right,
The cotton would hold out,
And the mill might run seven, maybe eight months.
Other times, we shut her down in three.
Then the mill boss would loan us the truck
--You know, had the big bed with slat sides--
And we'd all pile in that thing
And go forty miles to Rotan.
Rotan was a fair-size place.
That's where we went,
Everybody in that big old truck,
To sign up for unemployment pay.
5.
Then there'd be days and weeks and months
of domino games,
In the back of the drugstore,
On the porch at the grocery,
in the shade alongside the filling station,
Days and weeks of down at last to hunkering and figuring, men
shooting marbles by the mill's south wall.
By and by somebody would get up,
Stretch from the morning's work, and say,
"Time for the noon whistle, boys,
Mama'll have dinner on the table."
Two poems about the death of his parents are especially touching. Both died in the same year. "Tuesday, May 17, 1988 - Wednesday, May 18, 1998" is about his father.
"Tuesday, May 17, 1988 --
Wednesday, May 18,1988"
1. Selecting a casket
When I was young, I'd watch
the grown folks at hard times --
say when Grandpa died in '38 --
and they'd talk quietly,
working out the solemn things
that waited to be done,
and I remember wondering
when you learned how to do
such things as waited to be done.
Bronze with beige lining?
Or blue with light blue?
I turn around scarcely once and find myself
alongside my sister, beside my brother,
talking quietly,
working out the solemn things
that wait to be done,
remembering that no one taught me how,
wondering if mostly, system notwithstanding,
and philosophy, and master plan,
and cost accountability,
we mostly do jackleg work,
waiting until we learn
while no one teaches us.
2. Questions
He didn't wait until I asked him all
the questions that I meant sometime to ask,
but didn't know to ask.
My time and his
had come apart. He couldn't wait, and I
I couldn't call the questions back, or him.
His mother's death prompted "Learning the Local Economy."
"Learning the Local Economy"
Sometimes, when money's running low or out,
just when I guess there'll be no more, just al-
ways less or none, just then's when I surren-
der prudence -- shop, you know, lay by the things
I've got to have, and hope they hold until
it's over, shop (or order): extra pants,
another shirt or two, some handkerchiefs,
just one more perfect pipe.
Sometimes I know
you, Mother -- still, just when I think I do,
I'm mostly wrong.
I do remember stacks
of cans and boxes, food put by in back
of bedroom closets, food to last, to hold
a while when money's gone those early years,
and when my father died two years ago --
a while before, as planner, you deci-
ded you would die -- we cleaned the house to sell,
I thought I understood: I thought I knew
just why it was we found the hats you'd bought
for him, those new, still blocked felt hats, still nice,
still new, still boxed. They'd keep him pret-
ty, so you thought, until the end, the way
he was to you, still pretty to the end.
His first bout with cancer prompted a reflection on his own mortality in "A Little Oncology Suite," a poem in three parts.
"A Little Oncology Suite"
1. A need to know
I think I have a need to know--I'll take
whatever notice might be given, say
a day, perhaps an hour--beats Hell just what
I'd do if time would let me beat infirm-
ity, escape to Aspermont or Spur
to hide so they'll not have to care for me.
And even if still physically sure,
I think I have a need to know--might take
a week--just when I'll lose my wits, go mean,
turn cranky, ornery, forgetful, weird.
Beast Hell just what I'd do if time would let
me beat dementia, go hide somewhere
so they'll not have to care for me.
Some days
I think I'm late and just don't know: it's come,
and I'm in trust already, unaware,
disabled, through, unseeing, over, done.
2. Heliotrope haiku
Mostly, I don't think about
chemotherapy.
most days, it doesn't pay.
Some days, we meet
down at the clinic
for our ritual poisoning.
We sit in a nice lounge
in nice chairs with nice stools,
and they enter us.
When the needle's
in the back of my hand,
medicine drips from three bags.
Sometimes, a brown streak
goes up my arm,
following the poison inside.
The first week,
they dripped so much heat
into my blood,
I got a sunburn.
Other days,
we take solitary pins
to grant us better nausea.
I take three a day
for three days--
standard for me, not for another.
By the second morning,
staring at my breakfast pill,
I think I won't.
Meanwhile,
any bump or scrape
I think's a mortal lesion,
first of what's left.
Counting syllables
stands in well enough, sometimes,
for contemplation.
3. Assignment
Be damned if I can get it straight, decide
they're real, events and incidents these last
three months.
Things weren't supposed to happen now,
or not to me: indignities behind
my back with fingers, barium at flood,
a colonoscopy with sweet forget-
fulness, then cancer, chemotherapy
(we gather at the clinic, sit, shoot up,
get brown streaks up our arms, take pills and use
some days expecting we'll throw up, go bald,
except I was).
Things weren't supposed to come
just now or not to me.
No, not to me
at all, for I, you see, had other chores
and heavy cares. My job, you see, was wait-
ing, watching, being strong and well while
all the others died, while all the others died.
I'd live, you see, be strong, go on, while all
the others died.
I thought it was my job--
though sometimes, late at night, I thought it was
my punishment, to watch the others die.
Counting syllables does sometimes pass for contemplation, for Jim knew that "language is what lets us be human. It is the great gift that lets us be what we are and hope to be, but even this great gift will not extend our capacities infinitely. Language comes out of us a word at a time; we cannot say everything at once. . . . Two words cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Language enforces a closure: we must say one thing or the other; we cannot get both said at the same time. . . . We cannot make all that was into is. Whatever we can get into our heads we will make into a narrative that will be our truth until we learn again" (51).
One of the personas Jim adopted in his poetry was that of Boone Bilberry, a character from his Jayton childhood. As he says in Lost in West Texas, "When I first went to school, my family lived in a town that claimed some 750 souls in population - that doesn't include Boone Bilberry, who, according to the Baptists, didn't have a soul" (25-26). The last section of "Boone Bilberry's Small Journey Down" is called "He Prays":
6. He prays
I've tried for stroke and heart attack. My bod
-y won't cooperate. My pulse is slow
and steady, pressure's normal on to low.
I doubt I'll sag or bust or blush toward God.
I thought I'd catch a cancer, thought a fight
inside would loosen oncogene and let
me rot toward death: I'd strain and heave and get
a tumor, die soon if I did it right.
I've had no luck. I guess my hope's unheeded.
I've prayed, but can't catch cancer when I need it.
It is surely a measure of Jim's irony, contrariness, and self-deprecation that he thought he might be soulless. The good teacher is always "self-luminous"; he helps us "make a future brighter than any we can now imagine. And then the rest of us will not be alone and frightened by a mournful, moaning wind in a small rock house in a dark and lonesome country" (35-36).
For me Jim Corder made a lonesome country a little friendlier.
