MENTORS, MUSES & MONSTERS by Elizabeth Benedict

Author:Elizabeth Benedict
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FREE PRESS
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE SCHOLARS AND THE PORNOGRAPHER

Carolyn See

Dame Helen Gardner and George Newton Bowlin Laws—it seems funny, but very good to me to see them in the same sentence.

I first saw Helen Gardner, brilliant scholar, denizen of Oxford University, later to be made a Dame on her learning alone, at UCLA. She was so smart and so dazzling in the way she taught that she made your eyes water. You left the huge class at UCLA, when she was a visiting professor and still hadn’t quite achieved her “international reputation,” and there you were in bright, glaring sunlight, staggering about as if you’d seen For Whom the Bell Tolls at an afternoon matinée; Gary Cooper had just sent away the beautiful, bewildered Ingrid Bergman so that he could “blow the bridge” in Civil War Spain, but he’s told her their love was so strong that they would always be together…. And so she fled and Cooper faced an honorable death that meant something, and there you were, in an iffy neighborhood in West Hollywood facing a long walk home as a little kid, but it was okay because the walk would give you time to dash away your unseemly, twelve-year-old tears, and try in some way to measure the highest meanings of love and death and art and sorrow, and the regular, usual glaring world we mostly have to live in. (And, yes, I know, it was a corny movie, but I was only twelve!)

At UCLA, coming out of Helen Gardner’s Modern Poetry class, after an hour of “God’s Grandeur,” I was twenty, still plagued with watery eyes, and only had ten minutes in the harsh California sun to get over my damn self before my next class, to get over the secret, occult, glimmering meanings of “The world is charged with the grandeur of God/It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; / It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed …” I would have died of embarrassment if the students all around me—sniffling, dabbing their eyes, forgetting to talk—hadn’t been in much the same condition. Helen Gardner was a stunner, a class act; she held the keys to the kingdom, and she was offering them to us Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from eleven o’clock to noon.

Outside of having much the same build as Dame Helen, a little bit short, a little bit stumpy, a wide pleasing face with a constant smile, sometimes attentive, sometimes absent, George Laws had nothing to do with her. He was born in the early part of the twentieth century to a hard-luck family who made their home in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas, Texas. They had fled Virginia after the War Between the States. Word was, they were descendants of Pocahontas, and they lived about as poorly as she had. George’s brother died at seventeen, after he cut his finger on his first day at work in the Dallas sewers. His sister would die soon after and his father (after reportedly killing someone in a gunfight) drank himself to death with some dispatch.

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