I came to Carleton to teach American literature and American Studies in 1991, ostensibly to “replace” Wayne Carver as he retired. I quickly realized that no one could possibly take his place. I first met Wayne in a Chicago hotel room in late December 1990, as a part of my MLA interview for the Carleton job, and was immediately taken by his mild manner, his wit, and his kind interest in my writing and research.
I’ll never forget my campus visit in January of 1991. The “Desert Storm” invasion began during my stay on campus and Wayne was visibly upset by our country’s involvement in what looked at first to be an extended war in the Middle East. I went to dinner with him and some other faculty members the night after the invasion had been announced and he told us all some dark anecdotes about his own time in the army in World War II and ended, with tears in his eyes, saying “and that’s why I hate war.” I was deeply impressed by his candor, his humanity and his deep sense of integrity and I remained impressed by those qualities in him for the next 24 years.
We shared a love of the American West and I dedicated my collection of essays, Reading the West (1996) to Wayne, “a native son of Utah,” noting that during my first year at Carleton he gave me a paper placemat from the Outlaw Inn in Rock Springs, Wyoming (Restaurant, Saloon, Pool, and Drive-In Liquor Store) that featured potted biographies of Cattle Kate, Poker Alice, and Big Nose George Parrotti. He had quickly helped me understand “that I wasn’t in Princeton any more.”
My time on Second Laird overlapped with Wayne’s for only one year. But in subsequent years our friendship grew and deepened. For one thing, I came to understand a bit more about just how extraordinary a teacher he was. I went to a lecture he gave at Reunions in the early 1990s entitled something like “Rambling Thoughts and Unfinished Digressions on Plain City, Utah and Other Important Matters.” He spoke to a standing-room-only audience of over two hundred people in Olin Hall, all of them completely entranced by Wayne’s wry wit, his unexpectedly arch asides and his gentle manner. I would say it was “a command performance” except that it didn’t seem like a performance at all. Wisdom, humor and genuine emotion all simply welled up naturally from some unseen temperamental spring in him, although he probably would have added, like Mark Twain in Roughing It, “I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter.”
I always loved Wayne’s rumpled, good-natured, besieged and slightly exasperated demeanor. His grades were notoriously late in being submitted (when grades were turned in on a paper sheet, not submitted electronically). When I organized a panel of emeriti English faculty in 2007 and mentioned time limits for speaking, he warned me that “I can hardly clear my throat in ten minutes.”
When I took an interest in the Carleton Miscellany, he began sending me random letters and bits of information about the magazine. “I have closets within closets,” he informed me. He called his researches in his files “pearl diving through the brackish dishwater.”
Between 2005 and 2008 I used to meet Wayne regularly for coffee in Goodbye Blue Monday (his “office hours”) to discuss the Miscellany. Those meetings are some of the fondest memories I have of him. Two hours would slip by in the blink of an eye as our conversations would wander far beyond the topic at hand to include discussions of colleagues present and deceased, rural baseball in Utah, Minnesota winters, Tiny’s hotdog stand, and confusions about new technology (Wayne said he knew he was in trouble when his computer first told him that it had “downloaded his update.”).
On one occasion we met at the coffee shop and then drove out to see Erling Larsen’s homestead in the country. On other occasions Wayne would introduce me to friends and acquaintances. (Half of the people in Blue Monday on any give Tuesday morning fell into the latter category.) And always the conversation was marked by Wayne’s extraordinarily detailed memory, his razor-sharp intellect and his inimitable sense of humor, which kept me constantly amused and entertained.
Wayne’s sense of humor is very difficult to describe, in part because it was often warm-hearted, annoyed and ironic all at once. It is almost impossible to reproduce in its purest form, his conversation. Like any great humorist, his sense of timing was acute. You can actually hear it in a note he sent me about one of his short stories: “After I replied to your note . . . I looked over those war stories in Plain Song — trying to find a typo that has bothered me for 15 years. It is not there. It still bothers me.”
One or two other examples from his emails bring his sensibility to life. In describing his experience editing the Miscellany he wrote, “I once got an author into the table of contents and the contributors’ notes but left out his poems. I took some heat for that. Editors, apparently, are supposed to think of everything.” This was followed a moment later by the following: “These italics mean nothing. Maxwell just walked across my key board and there they are. I don’t know how to get out of them.” Even when he was indisposed he was able to redeem a mood by his way of describing it, as in January of 2007, when he notified me that “I am in the clammy grip of a Vast Indifference to all earthly vanities and have done nothing with my rough notes and archival documents since our [emeriti] panel. . . . I’ll keep you posted on anything I manage to get done. We will not need a special courier for this small task.”
Yes, I’ve known since first meeting Wayne Carver that there would be no replacing him; but I’ve known there would be no forgetting him either. To adapt some of his own words, in his memorial tribute to Erling Larsen in 1976: Twenty-four years – “and no it was not enough. There is never enough time. But we don’t need to know everything. We knew we were friends. What else is worth knowing? He was a dear friend to us all. . . . [and] our hearts can say it now, . . . ‘Think where man’s glory most begins and ends / And say [our] glory is [we] had such friends.’”
— Michael Kowalewski
April 20, 2015
Comments
Mike,
Your piece is lovely, lovely, lovely. Thank you for sharing it. As an English grad '68 and someone who kept in touch with Wayne during his decline, your thoughts were a comfort.
Carolyn
A very nice remembrance, Mike. Wayne was a gifted conversationalist of the highest order. As one of those who delighted in seeing him at Blue Mondays, I'll miss his humor and his capacious memory. Thanks for sharing this.