Remembering Richard Mitchell, Part 1

I just got an email from Mark Alexander. He runs the site that has all of Richard Mitchell's writings. He's working on Mitchell's entry for Wikipedia and he's compiling remembrances from people who knew the man. Here's the first installment.

Richard Mitchell was the most important teacher I ever had. The best think he taught me was that I had a lot to learn, about reading, about writing, about living. After my first class with him (Masterpieces in Western Literature, Spring 2000), I started to fill in the deficiencies in my education. I’m still working on it.

I took Adolescent Literature with him in the Spring of 2001. I didn’t need the class, but I wanted to see if I could improve on the less-than-stellar work I had done for him in the first class.

I anxiously awaited the return of our first essays. He was not very punctual about returning essays. I think he said he had left them at a friend’s house for a week. He didn’t give me my essay, but instead told me to see him after class. I had been feeling pretty good about my work, but this request scared me so much that I remember little of his lecture.

After class he led me to a small seminar room, windowless and barely large enough to hold the table and chairs. He followed me and closed the door behind him. The room got smaller. Then he handed me my paper and I saw, in his barely legible handwriting, A+. He called it “one of the best undergraduate papers he had ever read” (I wrote his exact words down as soon as I left the building. I refer to them often, especially when my writing is going nowhere.). He asked what my plans were after graduation, and I told him I was applying to graduate programs. He said that was a good idea. In fact, he told me he had planned to “kick my ass” if I had answered otherwise.

For some strange reason, there was a stack of original issues of The Underground Grammarian in the middle of the desk. He asked if I knew who put them there. Having never been in that room before, I didn’t have the slightest idea. I told him that I had read them all online and learned a great deal about writing in the process, but had never seen an original. So he grabbed a stack, gave them to me, and sent me on my way.

I think I was one of only a few students in his classes who took him for anything other than a crazy old professor. Having him as a teacher was my most important experience in college, but most of my classmates probably don’t even remember his name. I became a college English teacher 3 years ago, and remembering Mitchell has helped me cope with many an uninterested student. It seems like I’ve never stopped learning from him. I probably never will.