The bare facts:

1.  United States Air Force, 1954-58, duty station: Headquarters, 4th Allied Tactical Air Force, Trier, Germany.  In Trier I discovered Canada.  We shared our mission with the RCAF, the pre-De Gaulle French Air Force, and liaison representatives from the German Air Force.  I was surprised to find Canadians so civilized, so well read, so sensitive to our American ignorance.  My first best adult friend was Hugh Douglas Strachan, once a lad in Winnipeg, Manitoba, who was, while we were doing our service at the headquarters, transitioning.  He was ceasing to be Hugh Douglas Strachan, Anglican Canadian.  He was becoming Bernard Strachan, Roman Catholic Canadian. 

 

1.  University of Wisconsin, Madison, BA, English major, 1958-62.  I remember first a deluge of brilliant foreign films, then a steady pour of masterpieces: Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Godard.  At the same time, I was on a wild ride through 19th century American literature, mostly in courses taught by John Enck, on Emerson, Whitman, Henry James principally.  He looked like Popeye’s Pappy, bent over in that geriatric posture, grumpy, challenging you.  John Enck was also confronting the massive continuing front of foreign film, had strong opinions and interesting theories.  He sent me to see Antonioni’s L’Avventura the day it arrived in Madison.  How Jamesian it was, a slow pour, careful construction.  My senior honors thesis was on John Enck’s Henry James.  I’m sure the letter he wrote for me caught somebody’s attention at Stanford. 

 

1. Stanford University, Ph. D. in English and the Humanities, 1962-66.  I had two seminars with Ivor Winters reading poets like Barnabe Googe and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, counting the feet in a poetic line, seeing a poetic syllogism unfold, one semester as his graduate teaching assistant.  I admired the bellicose old warrior, humorously (silently) tolerating his cruel dismissal of Walt Whitman, his derisive attack on romantic and post-romantic poetry. “In Defense of Reason,” his big book, defends reason where and how it is attacked in American literature, Walt Whitman again getting a lot of accusation.  I had two seminars with Irving Howe and wrote my best graduate paper in his seminar on early modernism, ten pages, on Isaac Babel’s “Red Cavalry.”  His seminar on Mark Twain deconstructed Mark Twain, text by text, and there wasn’t much left standing at the end, several novels, a lot of sketches and essays.  My dissertation dealt with the figure of the cynical amoral demagogue in 19th century American political fiction. 

 

1. State University of New York at Buffalo, 1966-2015.  My books are: Of Huck and Alice, Humorous Writing in American Literature (1983) and White Robe’s Dilemma, Tribal History in American Literature (2001).  In the 90s I did a series of essays on cultural topics for the Arizona Quarterly: “Jackie Gleason and fat comedy,” “Bob and Ray: radio station as world,” “Gertrude Stein’s notwithstanding in Tender Buttons,” and in the Iowa Review, “Humor’s Brick: George Herriman’s Krazy Kat.” 

 

1. In the 90s I was also doing Civil War studies, won a Guggenheim to work on Civil War photography, wrote an essay on Confederate discourse, what it is, where it is, wrote two essays on Lincoln’s early and late speeches, several essays on William Faulkner’s troubled fiction in the nineteen forties.  In this Faulkner moment, I wrote my own local history, “Grignon, the sad tale of a haunted house,” which is, I think, my best piece. 

 

Of late I have returned to Roman Catholic topics, see “American Saints” in Salmagundi (2018) and “Bernadette Soubirous: Super Star” (2020), www. NeilSchmitz.com.  Pope Francis and I are the same age.