The Best of Pickering

by Sam Pickering

Overview

Praise for Sam Pickering:

"Pickering has all of Thurber's humor, and he writes as well as E. B. White. He writes with passion, wit, and a strange personal note of self-mockery; he is humanely educated, wise, and capable of a wide range of stylistic effects."
----Jay Parini

". . . he writes in the tradition of Montaigne hammering together a ramshackle affair of surprising nooks, crannies and additions-all under the same roof."
---The Oxford American

"Pickering has the natural essayist's intimate yet distanced take on the world that combines a devotion to particulars . . . with a near-indifference to the status- and achievement-mongering that marks modern life."
---Publishers Weekly

"Pickering writes with the sensitivity and craft of a poet, finding meaning in the commonplace and ordinary."
---Library Journal

"Pickering's genre is unique, but I'm not sure anyone else can write this stuff. I can live with that, as long as Pickering himself continues to wend through the forests, classrooms, airports, billiards championships, hometown parades, and his inner world of Tennessee gags and characters."
---Hartford Courant


His writing is as unique and recognizable as the music of Mozart, the painting of Picasso, or the poetry of Dickinson. Yet most Americans likely know Sam Pickering, the University of Connecticut English professor, from the movie Dead Poets Society. In the film, Robin Williams plays an idiosyncratic instructor---based on Pickering---who employs some over-the-top teaching methods to keep his subjects fresh and his students learning.

Fewer probably know that Pickering is the author of more than 16 books and nearly 200 articles, or that he's inspired thousands of university students to think in new ways. And, while Williams may have captured Pickering's madcap classroom antics, he didn't uncover the other side of the author-Sam Pickering as one of our great American men of letters.

The Best of Pickering amply demonstrates Pickering's amazing powers of perception, and gives us insight into the mind of a writer nearly obsessed with turning his back on the conventional trappings of American success-a writer who seems to prefer lying squirrel's-eye-level next to a bed of daffodils in the spring or trespassing on someone else's property to pursue a jaunt through joe-pye weed and goldenrod. Indeed, Pickering's philosophy, at least on paper, may very well be "Now is the only time."

If you haven't met Sam Pickering before, prepare to be surprised and delighted by these wry and sometimes self-deprecating essays that are witty and elegant and concrete yet wander widely, and include Pickering's well-trod fictional Southern town of Carthage, Tennessee, full of strange goings-on. This definitive collection of the best of Pickering is a must for Pickering fans and a fine introduction for the uninitiated to one of our greatest men of letters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472024346
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	12/22/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	503 KB

About the Author

Sam Pickering is Professor of English at University of Connecticut in Storrs. He's the author of more than a dozen books of essays, including Trespassing, The Blue Caterpillar and Other Essays, and The Last Book. He is married and has three children.

Read an Excerpt

THE BEST OF PICKERING

---

By Sam Pickering

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Copyright © 2004 Sam Pickering
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11378-1

---

Chapter One

Celebrity

TWENTY YEARS AGO MY FATHER attended the Swan Ball, a dance held to benefit Cheekwood, a center for the arts in Nashville, Tennessee. Arriving shortly before Father, a newspaper reporter and an accompanying photographer settled into place at the foot of the long spiral staircase near the entrance to Cheekwood. "When anyone important appears, I'll tell you," the reporter told the photographer just as Father started down the stairs. "I took my time on the steps, and the girl looked at me," Father said later, "but the camera didn't click." Rarely has a Pickering been thought newsworthy, and although I have written hard for fifteen years, few cameras have pointed my way. What attention I have received has usually been inaccurate or embarrassing, lending itself more toward notoriety than importance. Last fall I spoke at a potluck supper sponsored by the Friends of the Mansfield Library. The crowd was large, well over a hundred people, brought out in part, I am afraid, by a flyer announcing that the speaker was the author of children's books and a religious novel. When my mother died two years ago, her obituary stated that she was a native of Hanover Courthouse, Virginia, the daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. John L. Ratcliffe, the wife of Samuel F. Pickering, and then, horrorof horrors, "the mother of the noted essayist Samuel F. Pickering, Jr. of Storrs, Connecticut." My God, I thought, what will people think? I imagined old friends at breakfast tables flipping through their papers and stopping to read Mother's obituary. "Jesus, Varina, look at this," I could hear Jeffrey saying; "Sam's trying to sell books on his mother's grave." "Huh, that doesn't surprise me," Varina would answer, taking the paper away to read it; "he always was a scoundrel. He may have fooled you and those friends of yours for a long time, but he never fooled me."

In February I received a letter addressed to "Samuel Pickering, Jr. writer," writer being printed in red and circled by two black lines as thick and gloomy as mourning bands. Inside the letter was a note reading, "God loves you very much. You are precious to Him" and then a tract entitled "A Rock Through The Window." "Your heavenly Father," the tract stated, "wants to deal with you as His beloved child, not as a guilty delinquent." I had spent a quiet, and in this world what passes for the same thing, a moral winter, indeed a quiet last decade and so I paid little attention to the tract. Still, the sender might have known me better than I knew myself. In April I traveled to a conference in Arkansas to discuss "Parents and Children in Southern Autobiography." The conference was solemn, and the talks and audience thoughtful, at least they were until I spoke. As I climbed the stairs toward the stage, a noisemaker began wailing, the sound rising shrill then snapping off in a cackle of laughter. For late morning the audience seemed oddly alert, and I wondered why until I reached the lectern. Spread open on the lectern was a Playboy magazine, the centerfold pink and creamy and looking like a mound of overly ripe cantaloupes. For a moment I paused, taste buds pricking delinquently; but then buckling appetite about with thought, I closed the magazine and began lecturing. In truth I did not pause long, for at forty-seven I was not the trencherman I once was, the boy who long years ago ate seventeen ears of corn at one sitting. Indeed since marrying Vicki I have bought groceries at Shop Rite, avoiding natural food stores and in matters personal preferring the institutional and the packaged to the organically grown.

Recently attention paid to my writing has changed slightly, becoming at times almost serious. In an article a writer mentioned my "aristocratic impulse." "Too bad," Vicki said when I read her the phrase, "too bad it's only an impulse." In March the wife of the president of the University of Connecticut interviewed me for a newsletter published by the regional arts council. At the middle school one Saturday morning we met in her new silver Subaru station wagon, and she taped our conversation while our children practiced soccer on a nearby field. Last winter Bill Berry, an old friend, wrote an essay recalling his days in the graduate college at Princeton. He sent me an early draft in which I often appeared as aggressive and frivolous, once eating a lunch of flowers in order to startle the stuffy and the boring. Still, Bill also recalled that I often ate with "a severely afflicted friend who had great difficulty eating and speaking." He said I befriended those less fortunate than myself and while my friend struggled to speak I "focused on his face and understood the words that most did not watch form." Until I read Bill's draft I had forgotten those meals but I was glad he brought them back, for what seemed insignificant twenty years ago now struck me as important. At eight, Francis my older boy is ashamed of me. Indeed I sometimes think he despises me. Perhaps someday, I thought, he will read Bill's article and decide that maybe, just maybe, his father wasn't so bad. Alas, Bill's editor made him cut the article, and when the essay appeared, the lunch of flowers remained, its stems coarse and silly, while the meals with my friend had been mowed and had fallen away to be lost in the mulch of time.

Family stories matter to me. I want my children to have a sense of their history. I hope they will be able to think beyond self and see themselves as part of a community, not simply of a present but of the past and of a future. If they recognize the influences of the past, perhaps they will see ties in the present and realize that they have responsibilities for the future. And so for me, the most important attention my writing has evoked has been private, not public, appearing in letters, not magazines. On the jacket of my second collection of essays was a sketch of my father's home in Carthage, Tennessee. While browsing through a bookstore in Nashville, a woman from Carthage saw the jacket and recognized the house. She bought the book and later wrote me about my grandmother "Miss Frances" and recounted the history of the house: that Miss Frances sold it to the McDuffees in 1950 and that in 1976 they sold it to the Gammons who moved it off Main Street down the hill toward the river, after which they built a grocery store on the site. In that second collection of essays I mentioned attending Ransom School in Nashville. When a neighbor on Eastwood read that, she sent me a copy of the Ransom School song, noting that we were fellow alumni. The song is innocent and optimistic. "There is no school like John B. Ransom School," the song bounced along to the tune of the "Washington and Lee Swing."

We do our lessons 'cording to the rules. We can read and write and cipher, too. And we do just what our teachers tell us to. We have a Mothers' Club that's hard to beat. They gave us sidewalks so we keep dry feet. They gave us flower beds and shade trees, too. Shade trees, too-Ransom sch-ool.

Among the essays in the book was a sketch of Father, and after reading it a woman who worked for the Travelers Insurance Company in Nashville wrote me. She wanted, she explained, to tell me "how he appeared to the clerical workers." She never met him outdoors, she recounted, when "he didn't remove his hat." The staff benefited from his "gentlemanly instincts," she recalled, saying, "One of the first things I ever heard about him was that he would never say anything improper to a lady or allow anyone else to," noting that "this was mighty valuable protection in the days before corporations had sexual harassment policies. He was all the protection we needed, and if you had a problem, you went to him. Some of the managers were afraid to make waves, but he wasn't." This past June I received a letter from the press which was publishing my next book. "Here," it read, "is another marketing questionnaire that we'd like to have you fill out for Stiff Life." Unfortunately Father's gentlemanly instincts have run shallow in me, becoming at best only impulses, and I wrote back that although I was flattered I had not lost the reputation of my vigorous younger days, the title of my book was more detumescent, Still, not Stiff Life. Although I did not recognize it at the time, the letter was a harbinger of raucous days of attention and celebrity. In April I received a letter from Tom Schulman, a former student of mine at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville. I myself attended MBA, and before going to graduate school and just after leaving Cambridge, I returned and taught English there for a year. I was twenty-four and Tommy was fifteen, a sophomore. The students were bright and generous, and I had a marvelous time, but the year like the meals with my friend at Princeton had dropped out of thought until Tommy's letter reminded me of it. He had written, he said, a screenplay "inspired in part by your teaching" and he urged me to go to the film, saying I would enjoy seeing "how what you taught affected at least one of your students." The name of the movie was Dead Poets Society, probably a zombie film I guessed at the time, appropriate enough, I thought, for the teaching profession in which being one of the walking dead was often more an asset than handicap. Still, I was proud of Tommy. I liked him enormously at MBA, and happy that he was doing well, I wrote and told him so. When he replied that being my student "had a profound effect" on his life and that I "reached out with an approving smile and an unconcealed joy that inspired self-confidence and happiness," I was touched, so much so that I kept the letters, not for myself but for Francis in hopes, of course, that someday he would see them and think better of me.

The end of the semester rush of papers and examinations began, and I soon forgot about the movie. The second week in June, however, Bill Weaver, my closest boyhood friend, telephoned from Nashville, saying there was a rumor going around that I was the model for John Keating, a character, he explained, in a movie about a prep school and played by a comic actor named Robin Williams. Years ago, I told Bill, I taught Tommy Schulman, the screenwriter, at MBA, but, I stressed, the film could not contain much of me. "Well," Bill answered, "I'm going to the movie tonight, and I'll let you know." Late that night Bill telephoned. "It's you," he said, "all your mannerisms, and I have called the paper." The next day a reporter from the Nashville Tennessean telephoned and interviewed me. I repeated to him what I told Bill: that whatever there was of me in the Keating character had to be small, and he assured me he would dig about thoroughly before writing a story. Several days passed, and then on June 22, a half-page article appeared in the Tennessean. Headlined "Robin Williams, meet Dr. Sam Pickering, Jr.," the article had pictures of Tommy and me in the upper right corner, and then down in the lower left, taken from the MBA yearbook for 1966, a picture of me sitting cross-legged on my desk, reading and declaiming. That morning the telephone began ringing, mostly friends from Nashville wanting to discuss the movie. Because my children had chicken pox when the movie showed in Willimantic, I hadn't seen it, so I took the occasion to renew acquaintances and ask about family doings. One man said he was soon leaving with his children for a vacation on the dude ranch where Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms; another's older daughter was working on Cape Cod while the younger went to sailing camp in North Carolina and his son studied language in France. That night a cousin called, and when she said, "I can't tell you how proud I am," I suddenly realized that matters were out of my control. This past spring three literary agents wrote, asking to represent me. Knowing that I often described my children, one sent a picture of his daughter, a smiling brown-eyed little girl wearing a blue dress and eating a chocolate bar, actually a Hershey bar with almonds or so it appeared when I examined the picture under a hand lens. Although I am sweet on Hersheys and children, I declined the agents' offers to represent me, explaining that I valued controlling my affairs more than I did money.

Now caught up in the popularity of Dead Poets Society, I was losing control. Moreover I started doubting my teaching. Tommy was not the only student to write last year. On my desk was a postcard from Portugal. "Played a little in a Metro Station in Lisbon with a couple of Rastafarians," George wrote, explaining that he planned to work his way across Europe as a street musician. "Now," he continued, "I'm sharing a room in the home of a sweet old Portuguese couple with an insane German girl. The day we got here after renting the room she says that maybe it's not good that we sleep in the same bed and the next day on the beach she is lying there next to me, completely naked!" What sort of effect, I asked myself, had I had upon George. Whatever it was, it smacked more of lecterns in Arkansas than it did of profundity.

The following day I received only one call from Nashville, an invitation to attend the MBA spaghetti supper. Both the Willimantic and Hartford papers, however, obtained copies of the article in the Tennessean and interviewed me over the telephone. I wasn't home when the reporter from the Hartford paper first called, so she talked to Vicki. Whom had we told about the movie, she asked. On Vicki's saying, "No one. Sam had nothing to do with the movie," the reporter paused then asked, "What is it like being married to an eccentric?" "Eccentric?" Vicki responded. "Sam's not eccentric. He's normal, very normal, so normal in fact that he's abnormally normal." That, I am afraid, ended the conversation. The following day, though, articles about the movie and me appeared in both the Willimantic Chronicle and the Hartford Courant. In the English department late that afternoon a colleague greeted me, saying, "You are certainly becoming notorious. I went to the podiatrist today to have my ingrowing toenails chopped out, and when I told the receptionist I taught at the University of Connecticut, she asked, 'Do you know Sam Pickering?'" I smiled; no longer did I have the leisure to think my way into doubt or embarrassment. On the twenty-eighth Vicki and I and the children were leaving Storrs for our farm in Nova Scotia. Little chores clogged my hours, and I didn't have time for celebrity. The chimney on the house was collapsing inward, and that morning Mr. Brown examined it and estimated the cost of repairs. Mr. Brown was a fine mason, but he wasn't young, and when he talked to me, his false teeth slipped. Pushing them back up into the roof of his mouth, he explained, "I forgot to put the cement in this morning." "Oh, Lord," I thought, "suppose he forgets to put the mortar between the bricks when he rebuilds the chimney." At lunch Vicki informed me that only one key to the house was left. For most people getting keys is easy. Our house, though, was once owned by the university and the locks on the doors take keys, the blanks of which are sold only to the state. To obtain new keys necessitates obtaining a work order, and work orders are issued only for state buildings, not private houses. "I'm sorry. I don't know how you can get new keys without replacing all the locks on your doors," a sympathetic woman told me. "I leave for Nova Scotia the day after tomorrow," I said; "I can't replace the locks." Four hours and six telephone calls later, I had nine keys, too many for Vicki's liking but just the right number I think.

That night while I was gathering things to be packed, a reporter from the Associated Press called. Saying he had read the piece in the Courant, he asked to interview me. I explained I was leaving for Nova Scotia in two days but said that if he could be at my house at two the next afternoon, I would fit him in between getting a haircut and mowing the grass. He arrived on time, and we spent a genial hour and a half talking first about teaching, then about writing, and finally our children. Just after he left, his photographer appeared, and for thirty minutes I posed around the yard: on the front stoop, leaning against a hickory tree, and finally on a rock near the children's swing set where mosquitoes dropped on me like leaves in the fall, big mosquitoes with black and white, candy-cane-striped legs.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from THE BEST OF PICKERING by Sam Pickering Copyright © 2004 by Sam Pickering . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

\rrhp\ \lrrh: Contents\ \1h\ Table of Contents \xt\ \comp: set page numbers on page proofs\ Copyright page Introduction Part I: Dead Poets Stuff Celebrity Representative Part II: Messing About Messing About Near Spring Getting It Magic Trespassing Part III: School Matters Pedagogica Deserta At Cambridge Occupational Hazard From My Side of the Desk Part IV: Bookish Matters Book Tour Road Warrior Split Infinitive Selecting a Past Composing a Life Picked Up Part V: Familial Essays Faith of the Father Son and Father Still Life Patterns Pictures The Blue Caterpillar After the Daffodils The Traveled World \eof\

Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:

Editorial Reviews

Pickering (English, Univ. of Connecticut), the acclaimed author of numerous books of essays, was the model for Robin Williams's memorable character in Dead Poets Society. These two collections of essays certainly display his erudition, but their appeal stretches far beyond the esoteric or academic. Highly autobiographical, The Best of Pickering offers more than two dozen essays that explore a wide range of his most-beloved themes (e.g., nature, student days, being a parent). His lively imagination pulls the reader from the vividly real to the imaginative as we are introduced to his make-believe world of Carthage. Although somewhat unexpected at first, this whimsical parallel to the everyday quickly becomes comforting and often very amusing. Waltzing the Magpies, which includes previously unpublished essays on a year he spent teaching in Western Australia, focuses on the familial and the natural, and of course, on the cultural differences between Australia and the United States. However, this collection is not so much a chronological travelog as a rambling account of a life broadly similar to Pickering's life as a professor in the United States. In this way, small, peculiar differences are made to stand out in colorful relief. The relaxing pace of life that Pickering enjoyed in Australia is so well conveyed that the reader is lulled into an enjoyable peace. It is evident from both collections that Pickering delights in documenting the minutiae of life. At first this may strike the reader as a little pedantic, but one soon becomes charmed by Pickering's gentle, sometimes gleeful, humor and then frequently moved by his wisdom and thoughtfulness. The writing, while carefully penned and showing great skill, is never pretentious and is entirely suited to the subject matter. Both collections should enjoy a wide interest in both public and academic libraries.-Rebecca Bollen, North Bergen, NJ Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal