Send Them Summer

I didn't meet Hansford Martin until my senior year in college.  He was new to the school, and in the last year of his life.  Hansford taught writing courses, and I was excited about taking classes in Short Story Writing and Screenwriting.  By that time, I had a lot of things in my mind, and I desperately wanted to find a way to express them.  When I heard there was a new writing instructor I enrolled the next day. 

The first day of class was confusing at best.  We were all dutifully seated, wondering how long we had to wait for this new teacher, when he sort of slid into the room.  He was in his sixties, wore a dirty wrinkled blue suit with no tie, was no more than five foot four, and weighed about a hundred pounds.  His posture was poor, and the papers and books he carried in were tattered and in disarray, stained from smoke and other noxious things I supposed.  He deposited his load on the desk unceremoniously and walked to the board.  He scrawled his name up there and turned to us - we had no idea what to expect.  I knew in about five seconds that he was gay, and that he was in very poor health.  He was flamboyant I guess, but not buoyant, he was erudite and he was broken, he was superior and he was in the gutter.  He was still a force to be reckoned with though as one glance, one pithy criticism could send us all home meekly, no one ever got something over him or past him.  I didn't know if he didn't care, was above it all, or just that much smarter, that much more enlightened that the rest of us.  He was the center of his surroundings without really trying.

Hansford gave us assignments, and he gave them back smelling of smoke and often stained with beer.  He wrote very little, but what he did was either the source of great pride or humiliating defeat for his would be authors.  At times, he would single us out, usually with good news, and we would be stars.  He knew good writing, and he knew how inspire students to work to achieve it.  I never missed a class.  

One late evening, I stumbled across Hansford in a local bar, drinking in isolation, chain smoking and looking listlessly out the window.  He seemed glad to see me, and beckoned me over to his small table.  I was honored doubly, not just with his attention, but to be able to drink with this great man, great mind.  Drinking after all was a very important part of my manhood those days, and seldom did my intellectual and course interests collide.  We drank and I listened.  Nearly thirty years later, I would learn who he really was, rather who he had been.  

He told me he never thought he would end up in a small college in the middle of Oklahoma.  He didn't regret it, just acknowledged his fate.  He told me he didn't like to write anymore, but occasionally was pleased by his student's writing.  He told me I was a big clod, that I wrote clumsily, but that there was a small glimmer of promise there, something good and honest about my writing.  He told me to be myself and to write as I wanted to.  He told me that had been his mistake, not staying true to himself, that and alcohol.  We sat there for several hours, an odd curiosity I am sure.  Recently, I saw his ghost on screen as Sir Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters, the biopic of director James Whale's last few years.  Hansford was Hansford in any environment he graced, or disgraced.  

He died a few months later, shortly after I had finished both courses.  He taught me little about the mechanics of writing and everything about my own voice.  He taught me how to write confidently, and to defend what I produced, as long as I had diligently created it.  Most of all, he taught me how to look past a man's appearance, his sexuality, his age, or his status.  He taught me how to be honest with strangers, and he taught me other things.  I saw in him myself in later life, and I began to cast off the shroud of self-destruction I had begun to weave.  He had opened up and betrayed any sense of romantic sacrifice I might have held, showed me the waste of a life I would have liked to have maintained in mine longer. And he saved mine I think.

*I discovered a few years ago that Hansford had been a very promising writer in the forties and fifties. He had written for major magazines and had published some very brave and controversial novels about homosexuality in the war.  I think that bravery cost him greatly, and I lament the fact that I met only the shell of the man.