Remembering Richard Mitchell, Part 6

I got this story second hand from another professor at Rowan University.

In a previous post, I told the story about how Mitchell once told me that I had written one of the best undergraduate papers he had ever read. That moment meant a lot to me. But I haven’t written about my final meeting with him.

When I graduated from Rowan, I spent a year studying philosophy at Temple University. I didn’t like it and I wasn’t sure what to do with my academic future. Hoping for advice, and longing for a return to earlier years, when things were so much simpler, I went to Rowan one morning to talk with Mitchell. I went to find out if I could audit his class the next semester. I also wanted to know if he had any recommendations for graduate school. But really I just wanted to hear him talk again.

I waited for him outside of the classroom. Class had ended, but he was talking to a few stragglers about gardening. He described himself as a gardener’s assistant (his wife, he said, was the real gardener). I had heard a version of this story before. He said his wife used to make him go to flower shows a lot. Listening to him talk brought back memories that were only a year old, but filled me with the same fondness of childhood memories like when my grandmother used to take me out for hamburgers at the Five and Dime. Special feelings, you know?

I’m not sure what I expected when he walked out of the classroom. Something short of throwing his arms around me, but more than what actually happened. I asked if I could talk to him for a few minuets, and he said gladly, provided I didn’t mind if we did it outside where he could smoke. There was no recognition in his face. I told him I was his student for two classes, I told him what the classes were, I told him what books we read. He remembered the books and said he vaguely remembered me. Not what I would expect for someone who wrote him such a good paper (I couldn’t bring myself to try to remind him of that for fear that he wouldn’t remember). I asked how the semester was going, and he said he had just read a paper that was so good he wanted to keep it and use it as a sample for future classes. I guess he would keep it with mine.

He wasn’t able to give much advice because he stopped paying attention to graduate schools well before he retired. But talking to him again was well worth it, even if it shattered an illusion.

Now to the second-hand part. Two years ago I interviewed to teach a couple of English classes at Rowan as an adjunct. I spent most of the interview talking with the department chair about Mitchell (she hired me, but I had to back out to accept a full-time high school job, which I quit after five months). Towards the end I told her about my disappointment at his not knowing me. She told me not to worry. She said that, towards the end of his life, he had done some things that were difficult to explain. As he had the reputation for being eccentric, no one paid much attention (I recalled one day in class he asked us a simple question. No one answered, so he walked to the door and yelled, “Help! Someone has replaced my students with zombies! Help! Help!” No one so much as peaked into the room). But after he died, people started to talk to each other about him.

She told me that one day he had sat in on another teacher’s class. The teacher wasn’t an English teacher and didn’t even know Mitchell. He sat in the back taking notes. At the end of class, he proceeded to savagely critique her lesson. She complained, but everyone chalked it up to Mitchell being Mitchell. That was the only story she told me, but there were presumably others.

The point, she said, was she suspected that he had been ill for longer than anyone knew. He got sick for the final time around the Thanksgiving break, and then he died just before New Year’s. She wondered if his sudden illness had anything to do with some of his inexplicable behavior. Maybe that’s why he didn’t recognize me. Or maybe she said that to make me feel better.