‘A great teacher is a great artist’: a tribute
A month ago, while doing the New York Times’ Spelling Bee, I enjoyed a moment of satisfaction keying in “denouement,” good for 10 points. I screengrabbed it with the intention of sending the image to the person who introduced me to the word.
Among the many wonderful teachers I had over the years, Dr. Coleen Grissom was the dean. She was a legend at Trinity University in San Antonio, serving there from 1958 to 2019. Grissom died last week at 89. While the gravitational center of her legacy resides on campus, the breadth of her influence extends wide: branches that sprout offshoots that sprout greenery.
Her class on 20th century fiction was transformative for me. For better and perhaps worse, it is the reason I do what I do. On the first day of class, she presented a clutch of words with which she hoped we’d become familiar. I remember “verisimilitude” on the list. And I remember “denouement.”
I had, by senior year at Trinity, spent ample time with the canon, a byproduct of being an English major. I feel like we should all be enrolled in literature classes again at 50 to appreciate better the works we partially understood decades earlier.
But Grissom’s syllabus wasn’t concerned with the past. It was a field in bloom. I wish I could remember all the titles, but a few: Toni Morrisons’ “Beloved,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses,” Susan Sontag’s “The Volcano Lover,” Peter Hoeg’s “Smilla’s Sense of Snow.”
The canonized classics were the canonized classics. They’d find their way to your bookshelf. Her class seeded an affinity that grows 30 years later. When I picked up Kaveh Akbar’s new “Martyr” over the weekend, Grissom was on my mind, even though we’d not discussed the book.
Her class was neither a revision of the canon nor a condemnation of it. It simply asked if there might be benefits in a broader guest list, the sort of approach that could kindle a creative restlessness in her young charges.
More than advocating for a particular title, Grissom encouraged reverence for the discussion of these works. The environment she established felt not like requisite reading. It felt nevertheless like required reading simply because her manner invited buy-in from us.
Disqualify the true essentials that carry us — family, friends . . . perhaps cheese. I struggle to name any one cultural thing I’ve felt such reverence for as each hour spent in her class.
Thinking about Grissom reminds me that she wasn’t alone in nudging me along. I found great encouragement from Robert Flynn, Trinity’s novelist-inresidence, when I was there. He scribbled in one of his books, “To Andrew, who soon will have his own book.”
He was better at fiction than fortunetelling.
I remember two high school English teachers fondly. Bill Hannum spoke with crisp diction, sported the occasional bowtie and drove a Saab. I was unaware professors might drive Saabs. He might as well have been a rock star to me. “Goddamn good work,” he told me about a “The Great Gatsby” paper.
Maybe that was the first real nudge.
Allen Carleton Phillips. I wish you could, as I did, hear him say the name “Jocasta” in his syrupy Virginia accent: ZhohKAHSsstuh. Three syllaauthor. bles, as dictated by the letters, but the third hung in the air. When he said “Ophelia,” the “O” was a vortex.
ACP would not simply return essays and term papers. First he required an independent interrogation: meetings were one on one, our papers soaked in red. As if the red marker weren’t sufficient to catch one’s attention, his hands had been blown to bits at Normandy. They’d criss cross your shoddy work as he pointed to his notations.
He was a man you sought to impress.
Discussion of scars makes me think of a paper written for Dr. Grissom on “Beloved.” The first draft has faded from my mind as do other things from 30 years ago. But I recall I’d written some overarching essay about Morrison’s book.
“I’ve already read the book,” she told me. She pointed to paragraph circled in red and urged a second draft in which that — an observation involving a metaphorical use of trees — was the focus.
Had Dr. Grissom only given me “Beloved” and said, “Off with you . . .” I’d still be in her debt. She nudged me to look into corners, and report back what I found.
She once assigned each of us to report on a short story and its Simple enough, though she strictly forbade the use of biographical information on the author. Everything had to be extracted from the text.
I drew Tobias Wolff ’s “Hunters in the Snow,” another trailhead for me to an author I follow three decades later. When Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” was published, I expressed to her my affinity for the story. She replied with the story’s final line: “Short’s the best position they is.”
Her year-end letter felt like a map to places previously unmapped, a lengthy scroll of her reading that loomed taller than mine even though I was, at least for a few years, working in the book publishing business and therefore tasked with actually reading daily.
Her death may be the worst thing to happen to the book publishing industry since the internet.
When I returned to Texas 20 years ago, I thought I’d see more of her, but sometimes the three hours between Houston and San Antonio feels like 30. But because the San Antonio Express-News is a sibling publication, I’d have the occasional story run there. To hear from her about something I’d typed was a singular validation.
At some point during my four years at Trinity, there was a student art exhibition that made a collage out of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” and some printed pornography. I don’t know how I recall the title. The curation of memories is a curious puzzle not easily solved. But it was “Tawdry Shells and Cheese.”
Upon graduation, I gave her a copy of Sendak’s book devoid of penises. “Tart,” she said. “And warmly appreciated.”
She referenced the book before I moved to New York, telling me, “Your supper waits for you there.”
I wish I had a better denouement here. One in which I sent off that Spelling Bee screengrab instead of meaning to do so. So, instead, I’ll offer up a quote that Roger, a teacher friend, posted as a comment on a little post I made about Dr. Grissom. The quote is from John Steinbeck.
“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist, and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”