Stepping Stones by Dennis O'Driscoll

Stepping Stones by Dennis O'Driscoll

Author:Dennis O'Driscoll [Dennis O’Driscoll]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571258864
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2009-03-17T04:00:00+00:00


9

‘The books stood open and

the gates unbarred’

Harvard

Some years before Station Island was published, you began working in Harvard College on a contract that required you to teach one term each year.

The initial contract, starting in spring semester of 1981/2, was for three years, but I’d already spent the spring of 1979 in Harvard as a guest lecturer in the English Department. Robert Lowell died suddenly, you remember, in 1977 and Elizabeth Bishop was compulsorily retired that same year on grounds of her age, of all things. I arrived on a one-off basis in 1979. That was how my Harvard life began.

In other words, you’d been back in Dublin for a couple of years before you received the invitation to take up a more permanent position?

Exactly. That came sometime in the spring or early summer of 1981. By then, people in the Harvard English Department had known me as a colleague, had heard me talk and read, and would have had a chance to read the students’ reports on the workshops I’d conducted. But there was no formal interview. What was being offered at that time was a part-time contract, not a tenured position.

Did you regard this as an honour?

I did regard it as an honour. And also as a release. By that time, the Carysfort job had become a big drag. We were operating a full three-year course and there was now a graduate component; I was head of department, doing lectures and seminars, marking essays and exams, but also taking on tutors, involved with curriculum matters and college board meetings and all the rest of it. It was mid-July by the time I got myself clear in the summer; by early September I was back on duty for the repeat exams. The Harvard offer basically said: here you can be yourself as a poet all the year round, except that you’ll have to teach poetry workshops in the springtime. On the other hand, this entailed my going away on my own, leaving Marie with the family; not a simple thing to decide, although the fact that we had lived en famille in Cambridge for that half year meant that everybody had some idea of the life and the friends I’d be going back to.

Marie was ready and willing for the change, but two things decided us. The first was an offer by her sister Claire to step in for a couple of weeks every year to let Marie over to Harvard for a holiday. But the second was equally important – a dream I had on the night before I was to give my decision to the department chairman: I was in the desert, it was getting dark; suddenly in front of me, there’s this cliff with a sort of lean-to constructed against the face of it, somewhere to shelter during the night. Next thing then, next dream-frame, it’s a sunlit morning, the cliff has gone, and I’m standing on the banks of the Suez Canal. What I’d taken



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