Meet – or reconnect with — retired Chapman Professor of English Gordon Taylor as he reminisces on his time at TU and shines a light on his life since retirement.
How long were you at The University of Tulsa? When did you first arrive and when did you retire?
I served as an active member of the English faculty at TU for 36 years. I arrived in 1976 with my late wife Tatiana (she passed in 2016) and young son Jonathan from the University of California, Berkeley, where I’d been an assistant professor.
At TU, I took up an appointment as an associate professor in what was then a new and administratively separate graduate program in modern letters, focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary-cultural studies. In 1982, this program was reunited with the undergraduate programs in English, and from then until 1992 I served as chair of the recombined department. I was appointed Chapman Professor in 1992 and taught courses, mostly on American literature, until I retired in 2012.
What brought you to TU?
What led me here is that my family and I had a choice. The English department at Berkeley had supported me for promotion and tenure, but there are levels of review beyond the department, things became more complicated and I thought I should look around to see what other opportunities might present themselves. Which is when I found TU and the new graduate program and decided to apply.
I was invited for an interview, which was interesting and encouraging, and that’s when it really all started. I had the option to stay at Berkeley for another year and perhaps repeat the whole process, but it was an easy decision to accept the offer from TU. Tatiana had MA degrees both in English and in library science, and we were interested in opportunities that might exist for us both. After we had arrived and were settled, she took up a job as a cataloguer for McFarlin Library’s Special Collections and University Archives.
What led you to a career in teaching English? What inspired you to become a professor?
Coming from an academic family — my dad was a math professor at UCLA — I was drawn in this direction (if not to mathematics!) but also felt unsure it was the right one for me. In high school in Los Angeles, I was influenced by an English teacher and the ways in which she encouraged us to read and write about literature. That wasn’t a determining flash, but it was definitely a point of ignition.
In college, English grew on me, due not least to some other fine teachers. The decision to pursue advanced studies was similar: the current in which I was somewhat adrift gradually became one in which I felt more purposefully afloat. There were moments of uncertainty even in grad school at Berkeley, but things finally crystalized more specifically in terms of American literature in a seminar taught by Henry Nash Smith, with a project that would become my dissertation.
How do reading and the written word influence your daily life?
I’ve often said that while I was the professor, my wife was the real reader, particularly in the range and scope of the things she read. Whatever was on her desk or nightstand tended to be more various in subject matter compared to my reading. I think that’s had an osmotic effect on me over time. It could occasionally lead us to focus together on something; for example, on writing related to the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia (Tatiana was Italian, born in Trieste, but her father was from Croatia).
More lately, especially in retirement, it continues to lead me in different directions, prompted by books on my shelves still unread (by me). I also oscillate between reading old favorites – Henry James or Edith Wharton, for example, or books from the Vietnam era — many of which I taught many times, and new things of various types. Currently, I’m enjoying Donna Leon’s mystery novels set in Venice.
Did you have a favorite course you taught at TU?
This is a tough question. So many of my courses were fun to teach, and sometimes, whether at the graduate or the undergraduate level, they refracted with one another. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century and contemporary surveys and courses that focused on particular authors such as Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and others were great. I also taught special topics courses, such as African American Autobiography or the Vietnam War and American Culture. In my later years, I taught for a course for Film Studies on Western movies and another on war films.
If I had to pick a favorite course today, it would be the one where I paired teaching James and Wharton. While on the surface they seem narrow in the range of their socio-economic interests, they depicted America from the post-Civil War years into the early twentieth century undergoing fundamental changes in its social, economic and intellectual outlook.
As a professor, you’ve taught a range of literature. What was one favorite book you especially enjoyed teaching?
This is another tough question. Thinking about this leads me to consider which books I continue to reread the most. Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady; Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” from Dubliners; William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!; Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; Albert Camus’s La Peste; Graham Greene’s The Quiet American; Joan Didion’s Democracy; and Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods come to mind, among others.
If I had to pick, though, I would say Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for the incredible beauty of its language and the power of feeling without the loss of focus on the horrors, or a sense of the ongoing consequences, of slavery.
How has retirement been?
Retirement is going fine, and Tatiana and I were able to enjoy it together for a time. The freedom to read whatever I want, whenever I want, is a luxury. And I look forward, post-pandemic, to traveling to visit Jonathan and his partner in Brooklyn, or favorite places, such as New Orleans and Santa Fe; perhaps even Paris and Trieste.
I’m still in touch with some former students and colleagues. I’ve volunteered on and off as a mediator for the Tulsa County Court. I’m continuing to study Italian, which I began years ago when Tatiana and I started going to Italy. My current Italian group on Zoom, which has remained together with our retired professoressa after a series of classes at Tulsa Community College, has become a welcome famiglia of sorts during this year of lockdown. I continue to tinker a bit with a couple of scholarly loose ends, specifically ones that have to do with Tim O’Brien and Joan Didion, but on a small scale.
If the question was “Do I miss teaching?” the answer is “yes and no.” I don’t miss grading. I do sometimes miss writing comments or marginal observations (having learned over time to do so more economically!). That’s not so much grading as teaching, in a way, just a dimension of communicating with students. Sometimes I miss not being in more frequent touch with more former students, yet I certainly do enjoy the ones I do see or hear from, and the same goes for my former colleagues.
There are lots of good memories of teaching and of my overall career, and especially of all my time at TU. I get a little pang when something reminds me of those pleasures and satisfactions. On the other hand, it’s great to be out of the stricter parts of the schedule and the more mechanical aspects of an institutional system. I don’t disavow being a professor; in some ways, I still am one. But I don’t really want to do that in a large-scale way anymore. I’m happy with post-professorial life, let’s put it that way!