Look Homeward, Angel

With all that's going on with the imminent release of my brother's book, you have to appreciate a bride and groom with decidedly literary leanings. This past weekend I traveled to Avondale, Pennsylvania for the wedding of Victoria Zunino and Matthew Flickinger. While we had discussed schedules and motels and such prior to the wedding, I had no idea that Tori and Matthew were such avid readers. Great books were evident everywhere, from the handmade signpost pointing the way to great literary destinations (Elsinore Castle, this way; La Mancha, that way) to the table place cards modeled after library check out slips. (These were really clever: the "checkout" dates actually corresponded to important milestones in Tori and Matthew's relationship.)

I loved all of these little details, not for their photographic potential, but because, in an earlier life, I was an eager English Lit major. Back in 1980, amid the supremely ugly buildings of the State University of New York at Binghamton (Tony Kornheiser, an alumnus of the earlier incarnation of SUNY-B, Harpur College, once referred to the architectural style as "neo-penal"), I began my studies. Most of my friends were political science majors, the only other honorable pursuit for those of us who had no interest in becoming computer geeks. ( I still smile when I think that every single paper I wrote over four years was on a Smith Corona typewriter. It's hard to even fathom a computerless education today.)

My English career at SUNY-B was happily all over the map, sort of like my photography. Though I would fail Chaucer four times in four years--we all need our personal Waterloos, right?--I still, to this day, enjoy reading Middle English, if for nothing else but the beautiful lyric meter. I was more of a Southern Lit guy, devouring Flannery O'Connor's "The Violent Bear It Away" and much of the Faulkner canon. (Okay, nobody devours Faulkner. Like Joyce, you survive it.) Though he would be dead by my second year--killed in a motorcycle accident--I have vivid memories of John Gardner, the author of "Grendel" and "The Sunlight Dialogues," waltzing around campus, wearing his signature black cape and smoking a Sherlock Holmes pipe.

But without a doubt, the professor who had the greatest impact upon me was John Hagan. With his too-tight bow ties and his knack for spitting on students in the first row, Professor Hagan was the amalgamation of every geeky English prof one's imagination could ever conjure. He commanded absolutely, positively no respect in a classroom but boy did he love literature. I'll never forget the day we started reading Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe's masterpiece. Professor Hagan was reminiscing about sipping lemonade with Wolfe's surviving brother on the steps of the old Asheville boarding house. I looked up and saw that he was crying. I'm not quite sure that anyone else noticed--most of the class was asleep at this point--but I'll never forget it. It was, speaking of Elsinore Castle, a true Hamlet moment: "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?" It was the first time I realized that one could be so passionate about something that it could bring you to tears.

(A year later, my Faulkner professor, John Pindell, would be similarly faced with a room of sleeping students. In a rich Southern accent, I remember him sighing, "My mama always said 'Don't teach anything you love. Your students won't love it as much as you and it will break your heart.'" That one would stay with me, too.)

In 1992, twelve years after Profesor Hagan's class, I was driving cross country with my sister, Jennifer, and we found ourselves stuck near Asheville, N.C. We made a visit to Thomas Wolfe's boyhood home and I sent Professor Hagan a postcard. I wanted him to know that he had made an impact, that someone was listening after all. Long since retired from teaching, his response to me, on a manual typewriter missing a third of its keys, is something I still cherish.

So here's to John Hagan, the horn rimmed prince of SUNY-B.

Matt