the real tin thing

my teacher died

An old teacher of mine died recently. It was not a huge shock: he had entered hospice last year. When I found out I wrote him a note thanking him for being my teacher. I don’t know if he ever read it but really I hope he had ways of spending his time in hospice that were not reading email. The last time we had corresponded was in 2022, before my big medical crisis, because he was going to lead a seminar for the class of 2012 at our ten year reunion. I told him I would be there. Obviously, I wasn’t there. I kept meaning to explain what had happened but I was sick for a long time. I forgot. So it wasn’t a huge shock, no. It has had many aftershocks, though.

I mentioned this teacher a bit ago because he was the one who told me not to use phrases like “the fact that” or “the nature of.” In general, he was somebody who did really shape my ways of thinking, not only about writing, where I do think of his advice daily, but how I wanted to be. He was easy-going, but not a pushover; kind, but cranky; California casual, but a stickler for rules at the same time. He was also generous. He doggedly believed well of people while being principled and unafraid of conflict.¹ After I graduated I worked in a café and when he wandered in I was sure he was going to be disappointed to see me at a minimum wage job instead of some entry level professional job. Instead, he invited me to Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t think it ever occurred to him to feel disappointed in me.

He had ways of being encouraging that sometimes sounded like he was dumping cold water directly on you, a quality I did not try to imitate because I already possessed it. When I wrote my senior year paper, he was my advisor, and he told me, you should win a prize for this but you won’t because it’s about Gulliver’s Travels and not Hegel.² A story I often tell about him was that we met up once after graduation and he called me and left a message on my phone when I was on the train to go see him. The message said, you have to call me, I don’t text. So I called him. He said, where are you? I told him I was on the train. He wanted to know if I was in the quiet car. I said, no, I was in a normal Amtrak car. (As indeed I was.) He said, if you’re in the quiet car, you shouldn’t be talking on the phone. I said, I know but I’m not in the quiet car. He said, I’ll see you at the station, but you had better not have been talking in the quiet car.

If you never met him, though, I think you would find this story makes him sound irritating. To me what makes it a sweet memory is the way it combines his characteristic openness with his time and his resources—picking me up at the station and taking me out for a nice lunch—with his persnickety temperament.

What else? He went to Oxford on a scholarship and left with a deep hatred of England. He hated England with a ferocity that you associate with people from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. He hated anything that reminded him of Oxford and the English, like Dorothy Sayers, though he loved Tolkien who he felt would one day be a canonical author. He told me not to waste my time trying to read Edmund Spenser, the subject of his never completed dissertation. In fact, his tastes could be very unpredictable. He was the only teacher of mine who I really wanted to be able to give a copy of my finished book and I had no idea what he’d make of it—if he would think it was good or if he’d think I’d wasted my time. Now I won’t know. He probably liked the Earthsea books. But I don’t know. I never asked him.

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The other day I was looking for a poem to think about and I ended up flipping through a copy of Sylvia Plath’s poems. I was brought up short by the opening of “Waking in Winter,” a piece from 1960:

I can taste the tin of the sky—the real tin thing.
Winter dawn is the color of metal.…

The real tin thing. I knew what she meant, about the winter dawn. I kept going back to those two lines and finding new aspects I appreciated: the unbroken line of monosyllables in the first line, for instance. That tin is an alloy, and a cheap alloy,³ and one we often use to dub things fake and perhaps childish (“tin soldier”), such that it might be more dignified to be fake anything than a real tin thing. I’ve thought of these two lines every time I’ve looked outside.

What did my teacher think of Sylvia Plath? He must have said something, at some time, and yet I don’t remember. Easy to imagine him dismissing her. Easy to imagine him championing her. Easy to imagine him somehow doing both at the same time. (Actually, that one feels the most likely.) Whatever he thought of her poetry, though, he probably had some sympathy for her as an American trapped in England.

I had to stop looking through the Plath poems because I was in a frame of mind where I saw very clearly the way the world in her poems feels bleached, artificial, and insufficient. It was a little too much how I’m feeling already. I’m so sick of losing people and losing things.… still, it isn’t going to stop. These days I’m so depressed I don’t even feel sad. But even though I hadn’t talked to him in three years, now that he’s gone I find myself wanting to say—what do you think of that, the real tin thing? He would have had something to say. What do you make of that, I want to ask him. What do you think it means—the real tin thing.

1. He once protested a lecturer by reading out a prepared statement at the question period after the lecture, which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but where I went to school that kind of thing was absolutely not done, not ever. Where I went to school it was consider gauche to read the news, edgy to subscribe to a paper or a magazine. What I was told about his statement was that he stressed that he had nothing against the lecturer as an individual but felt his university was complicit in war crimes. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if that was what he said, but it sounds like him.

2. But I did win. :)

3. update: I know what he would have said now. It is, “tin is not an alloy, please look things up before you say them,”