The Snow Man: A Brief Afterword

Abstract

Dick Thompson is a scholar. He is a friend. I cannot speak with greater authority than Bob Lamb about his scholarship. I cannot speak with greater authority than Len Neufeldt about his friendship. I could speak of the years we spent writing Neutral Ground together, but of what use? We had an idea. It grew through sweat and serendipity. We labored over it for a while. It was published and we turned to our various separate projects. There are stories that might be told, but they would be no different than the stories the contributors to this volume could tell a hundred different ways. They are good stories. When Dick lived in West Lafayette and taught the hell out of American literature and changed Poe studies forever and built retaining walls out of railroad ties to landscape his home and was a model of decency, he had a dining room adorned with a print of Jesus on the cross. It was a signed and numbered print by some artist whose name I’ve forgotten. It was an abstract portrait-lots of harsh black brush strokes, hints of thorns and pain. It was beautiful. We stood in front of it one day and stared at it for a moment. We saw the same thing, but we saw different things. I saw a portrait of strength, suffering, and defeat. Dick Thompson saw these things, but he also saw the gentleness, the feminine lines, whispers of something else. I tried to see what he saw. I’m not sure I ever did. Maybe once or twice. We never spoke of that particular portrait again, but every time I walked past it I would slow my steps to catch another glance. Literature-great literature-is like Jesus on the wall. Dick Thompson knows this. He sees the harsh lines and the gentle curves. The black marks on a cream background. He sees the suffering and the gentleness. The albatross framing the penguin. The apotheosis from out of the ocean perishing. I learned something about what it meant to be a scholar the day Dick Thompson and I were mulling over a couple of his ideas about nineteenthcentury intellectual history and he turned to me and said that I should challenge his theories. Don’t accept them. Work them over. Toss them out if they don’t work. I tested the theories. They worked. Among graduate students at Purdue, Dick Thompson had a reputation-a mystique. It had something to do with high standards, with intellectual rigor, with respect for the profession and for the true capabilities of the human mind-the things that sometimes scare graduate students, I suppose. Those of us who know Dick Thompson’s infectious smile, easy laugh, and unflinching humanism would sometimes remind him of his reputation among the graduate students. He always acted bemused by it, but he wasn’t. Not really. It was part of the landscape garden he walked through. Wallace Stevens once wrote, “One must have a mind of winter / To regard the frost and the boughs / Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.” In his scholarship, in his teaching, in the way he reads a poem, Dick Thompson is Stevens’s snow man. The snow man as romantic ironist. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville-fiery ice crystals in Thompson’s garden. Forget Sapir and Whorf and the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax-Thompson knows the language of snow.