Fred Chappell, My Noble Friend - The Greensboro Review (original) (raw)

Fred has been one of the warmest and most constant literary friends and mentors of my life.

I first became aware of Fred at Duke, where we both entered the world of the inimitable writing teacher William Blackburn. In 1962-63 I was in Blackburn’s narrative writing class under duress, practically forced there by my writer father. To say I had little confidence is putting it mildly.

Fred had taken the class a couple of years earlier—though, as the story went, Blackburn told him not to bother showing up, but to stay home and write. Blackburn often said that Fred was the most gifted student of his career. Now Fred was in graduate school in English, working on a concordance to Samuel Johnson. (We can all be glad he didn’t pursue that line of work.)

Fred was publishing haunting stories in The Archive and his first novel, It Is Time, Lord, was to be published the next year, in 1964. I remember being very excited and impressed.

Fred was in his Rimbaud period then. He was an impressive smoker. He wore a leather jacket—or seemed to wear a leather jacket even if he didn’t—and hunched slightly forward as he walked, as into a just-tolerable wind. From afar he looked brilliantly melancholy. I saw him at Blackburn’s parties but was too shy to speak.

A couple of years later we met at UNCG, where I was a member of the first MFA class. Fred was hired in 1964, my second year in the program. Although he wasn’t teaching writing yet, he helped me more than he can perhaps believe. I was studying with Peter Taylor—a masterful writer of short stories who is sadly neglected these days. Peter praised my work, which of course delighted me, but he kept a distance and had no interest in teaching revision. My pieces came back without a mark on them, for good or ill. (He sent one of my stories to Andrew Lytle at The Sewanee Review. Lytle said it was a pretty good story but not good enough for Sewanee. Peter seemed puzzled but did have any advice about my story.)

One night at a party not long after I’d published a story in The Coraddi, Fred came up to me and said—in response to the story but without prelude, and as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation: “A phone call in the middle of the night is frightening, isn’t it?”

This had a radical effect. He had carried my story around in his head. He had entered the story and in a kind way let me know what was interesting about it: that phone call. The rest of the story was stilted and artificial, I realized, although he didn’t say so. I thought of this conversation many times as I was writing in later years, brushing away what I knew at heart wasn’t good and paying attention to what was driving me.

I began to get acquainted with Fred and Susan at their lively parties. Fred said I was “a happy drunk.” Often prominent visiting writers were guests at the parties. I remember talking with Allen Tate about Madame Bovary in the Chappells’ living room before a large Betty Watson nude that hung above the mantel.

Pretty soon the Pickwick workshop was in session. I remember going there with Fred and Bob Watson and Jim Applewhite and a horde of students and other would-be writers. There was no idle chit-chat. The subject was writing, by the greats: Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Flannery O’Connor. Although Fred wore his erudition modestly, he seemed to have read everything. Not only were these conversations a major part of my education, the Pickwick sessions established a friendly, grounded writing community which sustained me in memory for many a year.

In my effort to try to get to know Susan and Fred better, I once told Fred I’d like to invite the two of them to dinner. After a dramatic pause, Fred poked his head forward and said, “What would you cook?” I wasn’t taking Fred’s impish sense of humor into account. I felt as if he had seen right through me, and into my kitchen, with its bare cabinets and cold stove. I never did have them over for dinner in all these years, in spite of many meals at their house.

Another story from those days: I had to drive from Greensboro to Raleigh in my little VW, I don’t recall why. Nor do I know why Susan and Fred were in the car with me. I’d had an accident on that highway not long before and was very anxious about driving. Fred sat right behind me, leaning forward, his eyes on the road, helping me drive by force of sympathy and will. (Perhaps also by fear.)

The next year, after I had graduated and was teaching in Japan, Fred did actually help me stay alive. One of my teachers at UNCG, a Fulbright professor from a college in Tokyo, had invited me to come teach there. I had blithely accepted, in spite of having no Japanese language nor much knowledge about the culture. That October, soon after I arrived, my mother called to tell me that Randall Jarrell—a family friend and my teacher at UNCG—had killed himself. Between Randall’s death and my starkly unfamiliar surroundings, I was seized with agonizing homesickness and culture shock. Except for the teaching, which I loved, I felt that I was going insane. I don’t know how or why Fred started writing to me—perhaps someone told him I was in difficulty—but he did write, letter after letter, even when I didn’t write back. Salvation is perhaps not a hyperbolic word.

Many years later, when I was taking a writing workshop with Doris Betts, to work on a story that was threatening to become a novel, she invited Fred to address her classes. It was a riveting talk. The line that stayed with me, that I internally referred to again and again, was “Be true to your material.” I realized that I was indeed working with my material, a tale set in a convent orphanage in Nova Scotia where my grandmother had been raised. I dove deeper, and kept going and going until I finally finished the novel and it was published. Fred wrote one of the first reviews of Felice.

I began teaching at NC State University, and Fred and I invited each other to give readings. Susan drove a hard bargain about the honoraria but I managed to dig out the full amount; it helped that I was head of the readings committee. Fred wrote many recommendations for me; he said we’ll be writing recommendations in our graves. I taught I Am One of You Forever many times in my fiction workshops.

A couple of years ago Fred wrote an essay about my work—the four novels—for The North Carolina Literary Review. He arrived at a conclusion that surprised me. He said that all the characters in my novels are either orphaned in some way or abandoned, living in solitary pain like the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors whom I wrote about in Plum Wine). Even my characters living in Nova Scotia, Illinois, or North Carolina are hibakusha. This hadn’t occurred to me. I was deeply pleased by the revelation.

I have lately read through much of Fred’s writing—poems, novels, stories. I am happily awash in Chappellese. I didn’t do the reading to make comments about it, but I want to mention one thing that struck me again and again: the juxtapositions of the celestial and the quotidian, the spectacular ease and fluidity of the transitions.

In addition to being a magnificent writer and an influential teacher, Fred has a deep kindness and sweetness. He is a noble friend.

I am so grateful to you, Fred. I can’t imagine what my writing life would have been without your generosity and stalwart friendship.