And He's All, Like

At length, I got to take Geoffrey Hill's seminar on Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is an obscure topic even in the Religion and Literature program of a major university with a seminary program and a Department of Religion and people running around growing their hair out to be poets and playwrights and mystics and indigents. There were nine of us, including Professor Hill, and we met in his large, scholarly edition-lined office, strewn with miscellaneous volumes of the OED and the bones of saints and so forth.

Hill's persona as a teacher is wonderful: he was funny, modest, hospitable, at great pains to be kind to us, well aware that we were intimidated and eager to impress. One of his great gifts, I think, is an ability to draw down the powers upon his own person with great magisterial acts of erudition, eloquence, and immolating scruple--and then to stagger aside with Vaudvillean nimbleness so that the bolt redounds back upon The Tradition or The Obscure Almighty or strikes a wall, leaving clown-shaped hole.
We were starting one session and Hill was laboring to find the particular page of the particular Hopkins poem we had prepared. Which wasn't easy because he had read the pages clean out of the shitty OUP edition of Hopkins we were working with. And I'm realizing that this is a story about making a fool of oneself and being let off the hook.

So he's looking through these rubberbanded-together pages for the poem and we're all preparing our stuff until the whole thing goes on just past the point of endurance, which for me is never very far. And so I ask, "Have you been reading that book in the bath?" Stupid. Stupid. A half-hopeful fuck. He looked up at me through his eyebrows and said in his best prophetic growl, "NO, Mr. WULF." Then glaring at his scattering pages, "I ONLY read MISTery novels in the BAHTH." Two beats. "And the MOD-uhns." So great.

This was such a gift to me. Both because to me what is truly funny has either a note of kenotic condescension or elective folly. And this was both.

The last time I saw Geoffrey Hill was when I dropped in on him at his house in Boston--again vastly inappropriate and misjudged and near-desperate--to give him a volume of theological essays to which Eliot had contributed an essay on revelation and which he had inscribed to some local priest. Even as I found it in some long-closed dusty bookstore far north on Massachusetts Avenue, I knew it wasn't for the likes of me. And Professor Hill invited me in, and he asked me how my daughter was, and I asked about his youngest daughter. We talked for a few minutes about what it's like to raise children knowing that depression is likely to be among the things they inherit from you. He looked so much older than he had just a few years before. I was leaving Boston and knew that I would likely never see him again. I had no words for the kindness I owed him. More than that, for the sense that I was somehow in his lineage, or could be.

We made it back to the door. I said, "Thank you, Professor Hill. I may not see you again."
He smiled and said, with something that was not irony but more like faith in the presence of enormous and fearlessly-reckoned odds, "We'll see each other again. If not here." And I left.

And that was it. That is the tone that he can summon on a broad range of topics until it becomes an article of faith that seems very close about his every line. Maybe that's something of what a poet is.