Remembering a mentor.

Early in Sigrid Nuñez’s lovely, lyrical novel The Friend, which takes the shape of a memoir by a woman writer, the narrator recalls her friend, a literary mentor, an older man, who has committed suicide and bequeathed her a Great Dane named Apollo, in this way:

“When you came back you would sit down again to work, trying to hold on to the rhythm that had been established while walking. And the better you succeeded at that, the better the writing. Because it’s all about the rhythm, you said. Good sentences start with a beat.”

That passage called to mind a literary mentor of my own, an older man, a professor and a novelist. We met, of all places, in New York City, in the 1990s, during a jury trial of a man accused of selling drugs, held in a courthouse near the bottom of Manhattan. During the jury selection process, I was asked by the defense attorney what I did. “I’m a graduate student in English at NYU,” I replied. A few jurors later, another potential juror, a man, spoke up from the row behind me. “I’m a professor of English up at Columbia.” My head swiveled around, and he grinned at me, pointing to me and then himself. Meaning, We’ll talk.

His name was George Stade, and we became friends during that week-long trial. Subsequently, we would have coffee together on occasion, and quite early on, he told me whenever he had an important new lecture to prepare, he’d take the 1 or 9 subway, the red line, all the way down to Wall Street and then walk back up the length of Manhattan. By the time he returned to Columbia at 125^th, he had his new talk pretty well thought out, and he’d sit down and put pen to paper. It occurred to me later that there is a reason that iambs and trochees, dactyls and anapests (remember those from high school English class?) are called poetic feet. We walk in iambs, like Shakespeare wrote, da-dum, da-dum, favoring one foot just slightly. (I know that on days when my plot is so snarled that I quake inwardly, thinking I may need to scrap the novel altogether, the only way out of the tangle is to go for a hike in my beloved Arizona desert.)

Although George received a prestigious teaching award at Columbia, he was not universally loved. At one time, he was perceived to be part of the “old guard” at Columbia, resistant to including women, ethnic minorities, and gay people into the department. Perhaps needless to say, that attitude does not align with my values. But I found this odd because to me, he seemed broad-minded and quite liberal in his views; however, we all evolve, and I might have come to know him after the controversy. I know first-hand from our conversations, he was willing to be influenced, willing to change his mind.

 George found me some of my earliest paid writing gigs. First, a chapter in a book on rereading, edited by a former student, David Galef, who was teaching at U Miss. Because my PhD dissertation was on Victorian literature, George tapped me for two introductions for Victorian novels—Hard Times by Charles Dickens and The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope—in the Barnes and Noble Classics Series, for which he was the Editorial Director. He dropped into my lap projects such as one-off essays on Eavan Boland, Robert Browning, and other poets. He had far more faith in my writing abilities than I did, and much earlier; his encouragement was a monumental blessing.

We kept in touch for several years after I left New York, with the occasional birthday or holiday card. I still had one of his novels on my shelf and two books that he loaned me, which (regrettably) I never returned. In recent years, I would think of him, but I shrank from googling his name because I was afraid of what I might find. Last week, after I read that passage in Nuñez’s The Friend, I thought, I need to know—and if he’s still alive, I’ll write to him. Googling his name, I found the New York Times article with the headline: “George Stade, Scholar-Novelist Partial to the Popular, Dies at 85.”

I felt a hollowness, a sinking inside my chest, a stab of regret and sorrow and missing him, as I read that he had passed away of pneumonia in 2019. I knew he’d have been proud that I’ve just published my fourth book. It had been he who had given me some validation and self-confidence, which must be in the backpack of every traveler treading the road toward success. And though I had, of course, thanked George over the years for the opportunities he gave me, I’m ever so damn sorry I didn’t tell him so again before he died. So I’m going to send this to his two daughters, whose email addresses appeared in his obituary.

My public service announcement for the day is this: if you have ever had a kind or benevolent teacher or mentor, write to them today and thank them. It costs very little in terms of time or effort; most people can be found on Facebook or Google. There is only upside, for both of you.