Remembering Richard Mitchell, Part 3

I'm encouraged to see that a few people are reading my blog (thanks to Mark and others for the links). I can't post as often as I'd like, but please continue to check in from time to time.


Once he told us about the only time that he tried marijuana. A former student of his had paid him a visit after returning from Vietnam. Upon leaving the office, the soldier gave Mitchell a “gift.” He said he thanked him and immediately hid the joint in his desk.

Later, while sitting in his office with time to kill, Mitchell decided to give it a go. He said that as he lit the joint, he half expected the FBI to burst into his office and arrest him. But they never showed. As someone who rolled his own cigarettes, he said his first reaction was to wonder why people would smoke something that tasted so horrible.

He then went to have lunch with a colleague at a Glassboro diner. He said he’s always been a picky (sometimes he brought his own food when he went out to dinner with others), extremely light eater, but on this occasion, he found himself ordering seconds. In the middle of a particularly engaging conversation, Mitchell said Attila the Hun walked up to the table. After briefly stopping his conversation, he greeted the warrior, then continued talking to his friend (he said that neither he nor his colleague ever mentioned that lunch afterwards).

That evening he had to do a show in Philadelphia (I have no idea what show and welcome any information that anyone might have about it). It was raining and the night was foreboding. He mentioned a particularly ominous Sunoco sign that had since been torn down.

He didn’t say much about the show, except that he felt it was the best show he had ever done (at least he thought so that night), though he has no recollection of what he said.

That was his first and only experience with marijuana.

Remembering Richard Mitchell, Part 2

Mitchell did his Masters thesis on Theodore Dreiser. One day he told us a little about his work.

He had gone so far as to visit Dreiser’s house (I guess it had been converted into a museum). When he was being examined, one of the teachers was so impressed with how much he knew about Dreiser that he asked, jokingly, whether or not the color of the wallpaper in the author’s living room played into any of his fiction. As he had just explained the significance of the plastic ornaments on Dreiser’s front lawn, he said, the wallpaper was no problem.

(I thought Mitchell was joking about this. Then I studied English in graduate school. I discovered that seemingly trivial pieces of information do in fact find their way into the essays and theses of students and professors.)

But the most interesting part of his Dreiser studies was what he called “The American Tragedy Experiment.” Mitchell wanted to see if it was possible for Clyde to really navigate through the woods in the dark like Dreiser describes in the book. So he tried it. He went to the lake in New York were the murder took place, waited until it got dark, and then took off in Clyde’s direction. He couldn’t have a flashlight, he told us, because Clyde didn’t have one.

After a few hours of walking, he was convinced that Clyde couldn’t have made that journey. He stopped and waited for daybreak.

When he arrived in the town the next morning, he struck up a conversation with one of the townsfolk. Mitchell explained what he had been doing and was surprised to find that the person he talked to, who seemed like an ordinary workingman, knew the novel and the story on which it was based.

Mitchell told the guy that Clyde’s journey was impossible, but as he was explaining himself, he told us, he had a revelation. He wasn’t able to complete his journey because he had no dead girl to run away from. What he had to do, he said, was take a girl to the lake, drown her, and then see if he could make it.

He never said if he tried the experiment a second time.

Preface to Further Entries about the Underground Grammarian

I've spent the last week or so jotting down what I remember from my classes with Richard Mitchell. I'll be posting more entries soon. But there is a short encounter that I had with him that is useful to keep in mind.

After class one day I went up to his desk for a little talk. He often took a student or two outside for a cigarette after class. I don't remember what I was going to ask him, probably because I never got to ask it. Before I could say anything, he picked up a note that was on his desk.

"What's this?" he asked himself, even though he was the one who put the note there before class began.

After looking at it for a moment, he crumbled up the note, dropped it in the trash, and muttered, "Him again."

We walked out of the classroom and I asked him who wrote the note. He told me that some pain-in-the-ass had been bothering him for months. He said that the man was writing a book about great thinkers of the 20th century, and that he wanted some biographical information to include in the book.

"But I'm not going to tell him that," (he emphasized the word "that").

"Well, then what are you going to tell him?" was the most logical reply I could think of.

At this point our paths diverged. I stopped and he continued down the hall.

"Lies! Lies! Lies!" he yelled, his back to me, while laughing a devious laugh.

(I wonder what happened with that book.)

I'm not sure how much of what Mitchell said in his classes was "Lies! Lies! Lies!" As a teacher myself, I've come to believe that teachers have to say the right thing to students, even if that's not the true thing. He never talked about this, but I think he made the same distinction. You'll see what I mean when I post a few more entries.