I never called him that, but he would like it. For the 7 or 8 years we knew each other, he was always "Professor Whalen," even though he suggested to all his students to call him by his first name. I don't know why I didn't. Coming from the very stuffy Faculty of Philology at Belgrade University where all the professors addressed you with "vous" and dug a kilometer wide moat around their medieval personas, perhaps I found such immediacy unexpected though welcome. In fact, the whole situation in Terry's classes was for me unfamiliar and strange; our graduate seminar consisted of exactly three people besides him: Mike Catano, Aaron, and me. I whimsically associated such luxurious "space" given to my disbelieving student-intellect to explore, exchange, and examine, with the boundless Canadian physical space instead with a different approach to teaching. In any case, there we were, once a week, sitting in the long rectangular classroom in Dalhousie's old English Department houses, four people (sometimes three if Mike failed to show up), talking boisterously, delicately, tirelessly (Terry's down-to-earth laughter resounding underneath his snow-white moustache)... about Larkin. The whole seminar on just one poet -- even more luxury! That's when I knew I was in love with poetry, with words becoming alive, growing fingers and touching right in the middle of some soft inside spot where it hurt and tickled and sang and stormed in me. It was mine, poetry, even before, but now I was its.
And how I loved meeting up with Aaron before or after Terry's class in the rickety Grad House, with a tall mug (of dubious cleanliness) of coffee on the small round table, and a copy of Larkin's Collected Poems (the yellowish edition with a retouched sketch of his bespectacled head as the centrepiece, which made me understand immediately why Larkin said once he thought he looked like "a bald salmon"). We could sit there for hours, watching the light change outside, and fight (with a passion) over what this or that Larkin line meant.
To take this story to its proper beginning, I have to say that Philip Larkin and I go a long way back, longer than my Canadian life. At this point, I have to bring in my friend Gordana. Gordana and I studied together at Belgrade University's Faculty of Philology in the 90s, and hated -- politely, of course -- its stuffiness, always looking for some "unstuffy" things to do. So, for example, we agreed, with exhilaration, to speak English on the streets of Belgrade, and even in public transport, where tired, homebound, and tightly squeezed Belgraders in packed buses gave us curious, puzzled and suspicious glances. We also attended any damn cultural event in the British Council, conveniently located at the back of our Faculty building, on Belgrade's main pedestrian street. And it was here, during a lecture given by some distinguished guest from Great Britain (was he Scottish? I'll have to ask Gordana) that Larkin's name made its first appearance in our lives. The first contact was thus established, but Larkin remained just a (remembered) name for a few more terms, until we reached our final year at University, and began studying contemporary British literature. Larkin was back, and he was back to stay: my final paper, in the very last exam I took at the Faculty of Philology, was an analysis of "Church Going" which earned me 10 out 10 and glamorously closed the Belgrade chapter of my education. Four years later, I was sitting in that rectangular graduate classroom at Dalhousie and joyfully dissecting Larkin into the minutest pieces with Terry, happily abandoning my original plans to write my doctorate on Emily Dickinson.
And so I embarked merrily onto the four-year journey through the doctoral programme, with Terry at the helm of that ship, his deep voice and the playful moustache a surety that we'll keep afloat in the rough seas. He was any graduate student's dream supervisor: the one that gives you all the freedom, yet at any point has things under control and can place them resolutely in the big picture. He let me have my summer of pre-thesis innocence after the comprehensive exam, when I spent whole days barefoot on the sun-scorched deck at the back of the house, reading anything I could lay my hands on: Aristotle, Steiner, Derrida, Sartre, Faulkner, Eliot, Orwell, Dostoyevsky... Miraculously, these random bits and pieces seemed to have entered into a chemical reaction somewhere in my brain and fused through a process of synthesis into a peculiar, custom-made instrument I then applied to Larkin. And when I was ready to start, Terry was there all the way, even when he wasn't there. One whole term he spent teaching in the Gambia, so I would send him chapters and sections in emails, and he would send back meticulous comments with references to particular lines on particular pages, never omitting to make it sound like just a regular chit-chat.
When he got sick, we met one afternoon in the Grad House to discuss our "work strategy." He told me without beating around the bush that the doctors were giving him a year at most, but that he didn't intend to go that soon, that, if need be, he could work from his bed and supervise my thesis. To be on the safe side, we agreed (as if this was a perfectly ordinary planning session) to have a second, plan-B, supervisor. Just in case. (John Baxter then admirably performed that role, tactfully not meddling too much but keeping track of the progress in case he needed to jump in at any point).
Being a "medical odd-ball," as he used to say proudly, Terry did see me through all the Ph.D. hoops all the way to the defense. In spite of gradual deterioration, he insisted on remaining passionate and vehement about Larkin, and on shielding me, in many subtle ways, from the occasionally cruel and blood-thirsty academic jungle. The day of the defense must have been difficult for him as one of my Readers on the Committee was a man who twenty-odd years before wrote a scathing review of Terry's very first book, and with whom he hadn't been on good terms (after the defense, though, I saw them walking away together, and later found out they had exchanged some earnest explanations).
The last time I spoke with Terry was on the phone a year and a half later, the night before I left Halfax for Montreal, all my things already shipped, and a contracted ball of anxiety sitting heavy in my stomach and tripping up my heart into peculiar palpitations that plagued me from time to time. He must have been quite unwell by then, and our phone conversation was a rather formal parting, neither of us knowing what exactly to say to the other. What happened after I left the salty sweet air of the Maritimes behind, was a long, too long, eternal silence, which still hangs in the air, unbroken. I didn't call or write, and even though a few months later I had a copy of my newly published book ready for Terry, I never sent it until it was too late -- one of those things that stays and smarts forever, and longer. (The true meaning of "never" and "forever" becomes apparent only when someone close to you dies)
These days I am teaching Larkin, and thinking of Terry. And marvelling at "the million-petalled flower/Of being here," and how it knows its flowery business, and how it gathers regret and thankfulness, and makes them bloom before, during, and after.
This one is for Terry.
Larkin contemplating a puddle in front of the new Library building during construction. Hull, 1958.
