April 30, 2009
Remembering Robert Heilman through a life of letters
In the summer of 1947, Robert Heilman, then of Louisiana State University, visited Seattle to discuss joining the UW as chairman of the English Department. He wrote to friends as he mulled over the resulting job offer.
“I didn’t know until I got to Seattle how big a hand you had in my being there,” he wrote gratefully to LSU colleague Robert Penn Warren, whose 1946 novel All the King’s Men had recently won the Pulitzer Prize.
“(T)hey sent for me, dined, tead and drank me for two and a half days, sent me back home, and now tell me the job is mine if I want it,” Heilman continued in fine humor. “I haven’t it formally yet but have one semi-official letter and two private ones, please come, now that we know you are a good guy. One of these letters, from a guy I never heard of until a week ago, begins, ‘Dear Bob.’ It’s the F-a-r West I guess.”
A faithful, frank and entertaining correspondent, Heilman’s exchanges with colleagues, proteges, fellow critics and others are compiled in a new book from University of Washington Press titled Robert Heilman: His Life in Letters. Culled from thousands of letters, the expansive volume was edited by Heilman colleagues and correspondents Edward Alexander and Richard Dunn, both UW professors emeritus of English, with the help of doctoral student Paul Jaussen.
The three editors will discuss the book with Gary Lundell of UW Libraries Special Collections at 5 p.m., Thursday, May 7, in the Allen Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.
Heilman enjoyed his trip West, and wrote to Cleanth Brooks of Yale not unlike an explorer reporting on the frontier: “Seattle is a pleasant city — all ups and downs, with lakes scattered around, and various snowcapped mountains visible when the clouds are right. …The climate ranges from a rainy winter of the Louisiana sort to a pretty good summer in which 85 constitutes a hell of a hot day. The state in general has plenty of clean and rocky streams and is heavily wooded with evergreens of different sorts.”
He liked the UW English Department more than he had expected to. “(T)he general situation is good … the democratic situation within the university is strong,” he told Brooks, adding, “I think it is fair to say they are interested in literature, but fall somewhat short of being aggressive about it.”
But he asked Brooks, “Can I swing it? Can I get on with that mass of heterogeneous personalities without getting into a hopeless series of animosities?” And, more cynically, “Can I attract, and then put over on the local boys, the kind of men I would feel essential to giving the department at least potential distinction?”
Heilman answered these questions for himself: He took the job and led the UW Department of English for 23 years, guiding it through decades of change and expansion until his retirement from the chairmanship in 1971. A clear-headed correspondent virtually until the end, Heilman died in 2004 at the age of 98.
Over his long career, Heilman wrote nine books of criticism and essays, including several studies of Shakespeare, and edited a dozen others. With Brooks he wrote a popular textbook titled Understanding Drama.
The book of his letters was started by Edward Alexander, who Heilman hired in 1960. The two would become friends years later, but Alexander said a book of letters was not Heilman’s idea — such a request would have been “wholly out of character.” Alexander later brought in Richard Dunn, like Heilman a former longtime chairman of the UW English Department. Graduate student Paul Jaussen’s organizing and technical help grew so great, the two extended him a co-editor credit.
In the book’s introduction, Alexander — not one for empty praise — calls Heilman “the only great man I came to know during my 44 years in the academic profession.”
Amplifying this in an e-mail, Alexander wrote that Heilman was “a man of great moral poise, the embodiment of conscience in intellectual and professional life … he was called ‘the last of the great chairmen.'”
“He made Washington a national center for poetry, showed courage and ingenuity in defending academic freedom against yahooism from both right and left, (and) nurtured and protected the ailing Theodore Roethke. His voice and language and wisdom — on subjects ranging from literature and language to sports and rail travel and education — are still things of power,” Alexander wrote.
Dunn said Heilman had “an exceptionally poised public presence … He was a man of great courtesy and dignity, as the letters themselves show — a man with a twinkle in his eye, and that translates to the page very often.”
Reviewing Heilman’s decades of letters for publication was an enormous task. The book also provides both sides to many letter exchanges, which required the editors to access many different archives and collections. “Once it dawns on you that the UW archives are for the most part letters to Heilman,” Alexander wrote, “there begins the gargantuan task of searching the archives of countless libraries all over America, and even in England and Israel, for letters by Heilman to the hundred or so correspondents represented in our book.”
Those correspondents included Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Bishop, Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley, Joseph Epstein, Tess Gallagher, Bernard Malamud, John Sisk, Wallace Stegner, Lionel Trilling, William Carlos Williams and Mark Van Doren as well as the UW’s Charles Johnson, Solomon Katz and, of course, Roethke.
There was much discussion among the editors of which letters to include, Dunn said. “We wanted to do a book that would have certain motifs through it, picking up the major strands of importance we felt in the individual’s life.”
For Heilman, one of those major strands was the New Criticism, which argued that works could be understood by their structure and text alone, minus elaborate historical and social context. “It’s called Close Reading today,” Dunn said. He said other strands included Heilman’s literary criticism, the chronology of his own writings and professional work, and the history of the UW English Department during his administrative leadership.
A gargantuan task indeed. “To give you some idea,” Dunn said, “the Press originally asked for something around the range of 400 pages and we ended up with 1,200. They were gracious and flexible.” The resulting volume is a whopping 796 pages long.
To Jaussen fell the job of transcribing and organizing and formatting the original material. “The next task was annotating it, which was more or less collective” and which often involved “detective work,” Jaussen said.
The letters reveal a department administrator with a capacity, as Dunn said, to appreciate “the quality of people who worked in areas quite unlike himself — for instance, creative writers.” Despite not being so inclined in his own writing, “he could spot very good creative writers who would be very good creative writing teachers. He built that program single-handedly at first.”
Alexander readily agreed. “In a profession where old prejudices usually stick to the mind like pitch, Bob was an admirable exception to the rule. As a chairman he did not need to insist on his authority … because his very bearing and stature exuded authority and commanded respect.”
Even the closest of colleagues will learn something new in the process of editing so much personal correspondence. Alexander said he was amazed that “this man who seemed so wholly at ease in addressing audiences large and small, actually lost sleep in preparing for public occasions and would rehearse his lectures to get timing and cadence just right.”
Dunn said he was surprised “at the thoughtfulness he put to virtually every aspect of his work, no matter to whom he was writing. He was so totally responsive to the many demands upon him. And the amount of time he was able to give to his own work, his own research, was pretty astonishing to those of us in the modern university, where the day to day demands are so heavy.”
Robert Heilman: His Life in Letters, then, helps retain the memory of a man who looms large in UW history as well as twentieth century literature. To Alexander, Dunn and Jaussen, it’s more than worth all the long work.
Alexander wrote, “It just struck me that, in a country where historical amnesia is a national disease, even so extraordinary a figure as Heilman might be forgotten without some memorial that would convey his very self and voice.”
