Louis Rubin, “My Most Unforgettable Teacher”

This talk was given as a segment of HUU’s Jan. 26, 2014 Sunday service about teachers. It followed reflections by educators David Lane on his work with JMU student teachers, and Mary Hahn on her years teaching in Rockingham County schools.

I’m not a teacher. I have huge admiration for teachers, including my husband Robin, my son Eddie, and, as an education reporter, all those I met who keep helping young people learn while weathering SOL’s and all trends thrust upon them. I discovered long ago I couldn’t be them. Remember a ‘’60s game called “If you were a book, who would you be written by?” When I was starting my work life, my answer might have been William Golding, whose characters in his bestseller reminded me of some students I got as a substitute teacher. (That was Lord of the Flies. I hope that, no thanks to me, those kids’ lives have turned out well.)

Golding had been a writer-in-residence at then-Hollins College – one among scores of famous writers, including Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, brought to that campus by Louis Rubin – subject of my tribute, who died this fall, three days short of 90. As a publisher; author of more than 50 books; and mentor to countless writers, Louis is credited with making Southern literature a respected scholarly field. Last year, the visiting author for what has become Hollins’s Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Writer-in-Residence Program was Natasha Trethewey, national poet laureate.

So it seems amazing Louis corresponded with me for more than 40 years!

He talked to our classes about great works having universal application, with the intriguing example of the Japanese devouring translations of William Faulkner. I think that’s where I first consciously learned to appreciate how stories can go deeper than the limits of literal experience, into what Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

When Louis explained Huckleberry Finn’s “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” moment, I learned how a great story challenges without preaching. When Huck refuses to betray his friend Jim, a runaway slave, he chooses between the “morality” he’s been taught and his own conflicting, decent instincts.

A classmate, then, who did become a college teacher recalls when her first class with Louis, teaching Proust, felt like expecting to be seated at a banquet but instead being ushered into the kitchen to see the food being cooked. His approach inspired her work.

At our “girls’ school”/later to be “women’s university,” Louis encouraged us to have it all – careers, families, everything. Follow our talents, hopes and dreams to the limit! Nothing new now (and some may call it too much work), but then, worlds were opening.

Creative writing seminar met Wednesday evenings in Louis’s basement. Third house on the right on Faculty Row. (If American literary sites received blue plaques, like in the U.K., the basement entrance to that otherwise nondescript mid-century rancher would deserve one at least as much as the ancient, picturesque cottage-like schoolhouse so-marked in Salisbury where Golding taught, perhaps to early prototypes of Ralph, Jack and Piggy.) Those of us who read and discussed our work in the Rubin basement ranged from faculty and graduate students, down to sophomores. The ranks included Annie Dillard, Lee Smith and Henry Taylor.

The year my class graduated, 1967, Louis moved on to UNC-Chapel Hill. He remained incredibly generous with the time he gave ex-students. His comments on our work could be tough but could be lavish in praise.

His son Robert hiked the Appalachian Trail (as did my son Eddie). After I’d told Louis about reading Robert’s book on that hike, Louis answered, “He’s a much better writer than I am.” This winter Robert said Louis had valued his work “much higher than it probably deserved, but I imagine that’s true of most of us. He was a generous soul.”

For Louis’s memorial, recalling his and his wife Eva’s Unitarian wedding (a match that would last more than 60 years), his brother said the couple rolled their eyes when the minister recited “the night has a thousand eyes.” (I Googled the phrase and found there have been at least three different songs with that title. I wonder if the one quoted was an 1895 poem; might it have appeared in an early UU hymnal?)

Before academia, Louis’s career was journalism. He wrote a memoir about that, optimistically titled An Honorable Estate. He was city editor in Staunton, and worked for the AP with our friend Jim Geary. In 1956, after graduate study at Johns Hopkins, he became associate editor at the Richmond News-Leader. Years later when I asked Louis about his career there, at a time when I’d become uncomfortable with the biases of those I worked under, he told me about waking up and growing disgusted with the Richmond paper’s crusade against school integration. He moved to Hollins soon after that. He said his reasons for the move were complicated. Of course, journalism’s loss was Hollins’ gain.

He liked to repeat a quote by H.L. Mencken, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Louis was pragmatic. He honored his Jewish heritage, but didn’t do mysticism or theology. Yet in his final illness, we heard he told a visitor (when he was quite alert), “I’ll see you again. There are other worlds, you know.” He’s buried in a family plot at Temple Beth Elohim, in Charleston, S.C., where he grew up.

Some obituaries called Louis “curmudgeonly.” He had that side, especially while going deaf – but it doesn’t capture him. Just before the long strange trip that would land me in Harrisonburg, while driving my old heap on a job search, I blew off a forecast of heavy snow. In March? No way. So I blundered head-on into The Blizzard of March ’93. Spun 360 on the interstate. No fun, but it made a good story later. Here’s Louis’s response to my report, from a letter I’ve saved these 20 years: “As for your escapades on icy roads, you’re fortunate to have emerged so harmlessly. Next time you had better listen to the weather bureau; they called that storm, and predicted how bad it was likely to be, several days ahead. These days they are quite accurate. What I do every November is have a set of steel-studded snowtires put on my car’s drive wheels. They can handle ice… The only cost is having them put on and taken off. Moreover, they have the fortunate effect of keeping the ice and snow away from these parts; it hasn’t iced up or snowed in three years.” In the same letter, he gave me a job-search tip that I wonder now why I didn’t follow.

Sometimes I think calling a memorial a “Celebration of Life” is euphemistic, but Louis’s “wake” two weeks ago at Hollins felt like a true celebration. I wish he could have heard what we all said, and even what I’m telling you now – and no doubt, made corrections.

–Chris Edwards