naomi shihab nye

How did I get so lucky? From 1970-1974, my entire university sojourn, I worked as the student assistant for Dr. John D. Brantley, then the chairman of the English Department at Trinity University in San Antonio. He had a simple pleasant office with big windows on the first floor of the now-vanished red brick Northrup Hall. His view opened onto a great green lawn of graceful trees and pathways. I worked at a table in the outer room adjacent to his office, alongside his secretary, and a few sturdy plants. This was the best thing that happened to me in college.

For a few hours every day, I hovered in the domain of Dr. Brantley’s goodwill and laughter. A more chipper, good-natured human being never existed: I cannot recall him ever losing his temper with anyone or being testy in any way. This seemed remarkable to me as his days were filled with interruptions, worried students dropping by, official meetings and reams of paperwork, mountains of mimeographed copies, countless phone calls and letters from people in other states wanting jobs in his English Department as well as his own classes to teach, stacks of student papers to write his thoughtful remarks on, etc etc.  Yet he never seemed sour or put-upon, nor did he ever complain, except in a purely joking manner. A sense of being “too busy” to speak to anyone never occurred to him, though surely he must have considered barring that door more than once – a student or another professor would enter his office, the door would close, and within moments, gales of laughter would come rolling forth, the air would lift, I would continue typing another “Thanks but no thanks” letter to a graduate student in Omaha seeking employment, and believe that everything was, or eventually would be, okay. 

It was the open-hearted mood of all those days.  Learning was energy, we were all engaged in the process, delight glittered in Dr. Brantley’s face as he teased and challenged us to larger thinking.

He never “talked down” to anyone. A sense of human respect, an enthusiastic appetite for reading and writing and conversing, was Dr. Brantley’s perpetual mood and tone.  (Having worked since then as a visiting writer on various campuses where too many professors of English keep their doors closed and seem to be burdened by competitive and haughty gloom, I realize now what a gift this was.)

He received an endless stream of “desk copies,” new novels to read, in his mailbox, which always excited him. He generously passed on books of poetry to me, including the anthology NAKED POETRY, my favorite, which expanded my reading life forever (the first time I’d read W.S. Merwin, for example). These books that first were his remain on my shelves today, stamped with Dr. Brantley’s name. He rhapsodized about some of his favorite authors (John Barth, for example) so warmly and intelligently, I felt uplifted to be in the company of someone for whom literature truly was a changing force. Being in his classes was pure joy and pretty hard work. No one slid by. He challenged my opinions and agreed to let me do an entire “individual study” semester on Jack Kerouac, though he was not particularly a Kerouac fan. He marveled when Stella Kerouac invited me down to Florida and celebrated the letter I received from Graham Greene’s secretary as warmly as if she had written to him. He even invited me to work with him during the summers at the annual  Journalism Institute for high school students at which he passed out a single page of suggestions to earnest young poets. “Never trust anyone over thirty” was on the list, but I didn’t believe it, though I was the one handing out the pages. He was over thirty and we could all trust him.

To be in the company of someone of such pure integrity and pleasantry for years was like standing firmly in the beam of a radiant lighthouse, soaking up the light, knowing it could mysteriously guide you forever because now your cells were permeated with it.

The other professors in the department, Drs. Bill Spinks, Bates Hoffer, David Middleton, Frank Kersnowski, Marguerite Davenport, Kenneth Staggs, Karl Kregor, and the writer Robert Flynn were likewise brilliant, encouraging, terrific, energetic, friendly, funny, humane-- as if Dr. Brantley had miraculously created a force-field of great professors all around him simply by being who he was. Not a dolt or a creep among them. He would not have taken credit for anything either, but there is no doubt, as a principal mysteriously establishes the mood of a school, that Dr. Brantley created a legendary era in the history of Trinity University and the free-spirited discourse of that period of time in culture, generally, was echoed and enlarged by the spirit in his halls.

John D. Brantley, whom some of us ended up calling Dave, loved his family deeply, spoke of them often, and extended that family to include all of us. Just the other day, 29 years since I graduated, we got together and ended up talking a little poetry alongside everything else and the dialogue was as vital and helpful as if we had been hanging out in adjoining offices all these years reading and thinking. Maybe that is the magic of our best teachers: we tune into them and stay tuned as long as we live. I never liked John Barth as much as he did, nor did I convince him that Jack Kerouac was one of the most shining stars of the 20^th century, but we had a great time jabbering about it all, day after day. 

To all those hundreds of you job applicants who received the meticulously typed “Thanks but no thanks” letters, I’m sorry you didn’t get to be in his company too.