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University of California • Berkeley

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Josephine Miles
POETRY, TEACHING, AND SCHOLARSHIP

Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library

JOSEPHINE MILES
JULY 1974

Regional Oral History Office University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

University History Series

Josephine Miles
POETRY, TEACHING, AND SCHOLARSHIP

An Interview Conducted by
Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun
in 1977 and 1979

Copy no. /
Copyright (c) 1980 by the Regents of the University of California

TABLE OF CONTENTS — Josephine Miles

PREFACE

INTERVIEW HISTORY ii

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY v

INTERVIEW I — 7 July 1977
Childhood

High School 18

University 27

INTERVIEW II — 15 July 1977 34

Study at Berkeley 41

Poetry Groups 48

Ph.D. and Los Angeles 62

INTERVIEW III — 21 July 1977 76

Beginning to Teach 76

Courses and Students 95

INTERVIEW IV — 28 July 1977 108

English Department 108
Publishing and Research

INTERVIEW V — 4 August 1977

Public Contexts 139

Developments in Poetry 149

INTERVIEW VI — 11 August 1977 170
Writing Poetry

Values and Standards 182

INTERVIEW VII — 18 August 1977 194

Committees 194

INTERVIEW VIII — 25 August 1977 200
University Professors, Readings, Journeys
Neighbors and Family

Arts and Other Ideas 236

INTERVIEW IX — 22 February 1979 246

Winding Down 246

APPENDICES

Excerpts from "Bibliographical Introduction to Seventy-five 262

Modern American Authors" September 1976. Gary M. Lepper

News Release from Office of Public Information, 1/24/73. 266

Josephine Miles awarded title of "University Professor".

Program: The Sixty-third Annual Faculty Research Lectures, 268

Lecturer for 1976, Josephine Miles. Subject, "Where Have .
Goodness, Truth, and Beauty Gone?"

Article from The Monday Paper, October 13, 1978. "Miles Honored 272
with Top Award for American Poet."

IMAGES OF CALIFORNIA. A Session with Josephine Miles, Poet; 273
A Report and Interpretation. By Jim Hughes, March 22, 1979.

List of Ph.D. Dissertations - Josephine Miles Director. 280

"A Profile of Josephine Miles", by Katharine Livingston, 1973. 281

UNIVERSITY HISTORY SERIES LIST 328

INDEX 331

INDEX — Books by Josephine Miles discussed in the interview 344

PREFACE

Under a continuing grant from the University of California, Berkeley
Foundation, the Regional Oral History Office has been conducting a series of
interviews with persons who have made a significant contribution to the
development of the University of California at Berkeley. Many of the inter
views receive additional support from University departments and offices,
special alumni groups, and individuals who wish to honor a particular
memoirist. A list of University History interviews is appended including
an earlier group conducted in cooperation with the Centennial History Project,
directed by Professor Walton E. Bean and later by Verne A. Stadtman, Univer
sity Centennial Editor. The University History interviews have also
benefited greatly from the expert advice and assistance of Richard E. Erickson,
Assistant Chancellor, Development; and J. R. K. Kantor, University Archivist.

The oral history process at the University of California at Berkeley
consists of tape-recorded interviews with persons who have played significant
roles in some aspect of the development of the West. The purpose is to
capture and preserve for future research their perceptions, recollections,
and observations. Research and the preparation of a list of proposed topics
precede the interviews. The taped material is transcribed, lightly edited,
and then approved by the memoirist before final processing: final typing,
photo-offset reproduction, binding, and deposit in The Bancroft Library and
other selected libraries. The product is not a publication in the usual
sense but primary research material made available under specified conditions
to researchers.

The Regional Oral History Office is under the administrative supervision
of Professor James D. Hart, the director of The Bancroft Library.

Willa K. Baum, Department Head
Regional Oral History Office

Harriet Nathan, Project Director
University History Series

February 1980

Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library
University of California
Berkeley, California

INTERVIEW HISTORY

Josephine Miles 's academic career can be outlined briefly in this way:
B.A. University of California at Los Angeles, M.A. and .Ph.D. University of
California, Berkeley, Professor of English at the University of California
at Berkeley, and University Professor. Beyond that however, she is a teacher,
scholar, and poet of unusual success in each field of endeavor. The effec
tiveness of her teaching is indicated by the accomplishments and loyalty of
her students. The effectiveness of her scholarly work and her poetry is
indicated by the list of honors and awards they have brought her. Her biblio
graphy indicates the scope of her work and her remarkable industry.

Because of her outstanding career, suggestions that Professor Miles be
asked to create an oral history memoir came from many sources within and out
side of the immediate University community. The idea was mentioned to her
some years before actual discussion of such an interview began early in 1977.
At first she considered delaying it until after her retirement from the Univer
sity English Department in 1978, then agreed to make time for it during the
summer vacation period in 1977. Consequently, the primary series of interview
sessions was held weekly beginning on July 7 and ending on August 25, of that
year. To those eight sessions was added a ninth on February 22, 1979. Between
the eight and ninth sessions she had retired from teaching, had an illness,
won a major national poetry award, and had experienced some change in routine
and circumstances, as she indicated in the interview.

The interview sessions were held in the living room of Miss Miles 's home
near the University campus, a comfortable and hospitable room reflecting
Josephine Miles 's own attitudes. The interviewers had known her for some years
and welcomed the opportunity to interview her. As can perhaps be deduced from
the interview, they admire her and enjoy talking with her. Nevertheless, Miss
Miles 's attitude toward the interview was entirely professional, and she shaped
it, through her taped conversation and her editing of the transcript, to the
final result that she considered proper. Her candor, her intellect, and her
wit are evident throughout.

In editing the transcript, Miss Miles deleted a few passages, added
several, and made minor word changes, but it remains in general, close to the
narrative and discussions as taped. Some rearrangement of the sequence with
in two sessions was necessitated, however, by a recording error which required
Miss Miles 's recapitulation of one section of her reminiscences. And, dis
satisfied with the section headings made by the interviewers in editing the
transcript, she made those which are used here.

Many of Josephine Miles 's friends contributed informed suggestions for
subjects to be discussed, among them Geraldine Knight Scott, Mel G. Scott,
J. R. K. Kantor, and Robert Hawley. Marilyn White of the Regional Oral History
Office undertook bibliographic and other research and checking, Lee Steinback

ill

transcribed the tapes and final typed the manuscript, and Mr. Kantor, Univer
sity Archivist, proofread the final work.

Individual friends and admirers of Miss Miles joined a number of organi
zations in making this interview possible.

Ruth Teiser
Catherine Harroun
Interviewers

January 1980

Regional Oral History Office

486 The Bancroft Library

University of California at Berkeley

DONORS TO JOSEPHINE MILES ORAL HISTORY PROJECTS

James S. and Mildred Ackerman

Associated Students of the University of California

The Bancroft Library

Robert E. Beck

California Association of Teachers of English

Arthur W. and Finette Foshay

Catherine Harroun

Dr. James D. Hart

Stephanie Opid Holton

Helen Schevill

Geraldine Knight Scott

Mel Scott

Ruth Teiser

Luella Winkler Topping

Katherine Towle

University of California, Berkeley Foundation

University of California, Berkeley, Department of English

Names listed as printed on checks

JOSEPHINE MILES

1911:

1932:
1934:
1938:

1940-43:

1943-47:

1947-52:

1952-

1973

1978

Born

B.A., University of California, Los Angeles campus
M.A., University of California, Berkeley campus
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley campus

Instructor, University of California, Berkeley
Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Professor, University of California, Berkeley
University Professor of English z •*

University of California

1958-60: Chairman, Campus Committee on
Prose Improvement, Berkeley
campus
1963-64: Member, Committee on Research,

Academic Senate, Berkeley campus
1968-71: Member, Committee on Privilege
and Tenure, Academic Senate,
Berkeley campus
1968-71: Member, Chancellor's Committee

on the Arts, Berkeley campus
1970-71: Member, President's Conur.ittee
on Search for Chancellor,
Berkeley campus

Administrative Service:
Professor Emeritus

Honors and
Awards :

Memberships

Phelan Felloe in Writing, 1937-38

Research Fellow in Literature, American Association of

University Women, 1939-40
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1948-49

Judge of National Monroe Award for Poetry, 1950
Judge of National Shelley Award for Poetry, 1951
Judge of National Gauss Award for literary scholarship,

1953-54
National Institute of Arts and Letters Grant for Poetry,

1956

Blumenthal Award for poetry, 1959

Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 1965
D.Litt., Mills College, 1965

Fellowship, National Foundation on the Arts, 1967-68
Commendation, California Association of Teachers of

English, 1970
Fellowship, Academy of American Poets, 1978

James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Assn.,, 1975

American Society for Aesthetics

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Society for Aesthetics and Art History

Linguistic Association

Modern Language Association

Phi Beta Kappa

INTERVIEW 1—7 July 1977

Childhood

[begin tape 1, side 1]

Teiser: You were born in Chicago, June 11 —
Miles: Nineteen eleven.

Teiser: You said that you had worked out your family background at one time
in a — family tree, was it?

Miles: My father was the youngest of nine children, and the eldest, or the
second to the eldest, named Herbert, when he was retired had nothing
else to do. He went over New England reading gravestones, and he
worked this out. So he sent me a copy, and I copied that down onto
a small piece of paper, which I periodically lose and then find
again. So I do know a little bit about what he discovered. Would
you like to have me tell about that?

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: Well, the two names in our background that connected were John Chipman
and Hope Rowland. They met on the Mayflower. [Laughing] Then Chipman
was the main line that my uncle traced down to where I think it was
Sarah Chipman married William Odber Smith. (I don't think you're
supposed to switch like that, from masculine to feminine line, but
that's what my uncle did.) This was after maybe, I don't know, four
or five generations.

After the Mayflower, they lived in Providence and they were
merchants, I'm sure the very worst type of sugar-triangle merchants.
Then they were Tories, and when the Revolution came they all went up
to Canada. So they were Canadians, and William Odber Smith was a
druggist, a pharmacist in Saint John, New Brunswick. My father,
though American, was very loyal to Canada.

Miles: Then, Ella Victoria Smith, who was something like Smith's daughter

or granddaughter, married somebody by the name of Frederick Billing,
who was I think recently over from England — another English visitor.
But my grandmother married — I'm getting this mixed up, I guess.
[Pause] My great-grandmother it must have been that married four
times. One of her other husbands named Miles adopted Frederick
Billing, and so from this my grandfather's name was Frederick
Billing Miles.

They had nine children. The eldest stayed in Toronto and was a
minister, and then Herb, the one that did the research, lived in
North Carolina, was a businessman. There were three daughters, one
of whom was married to somebody by the name of Todd. My father was
the youngest and always felt a little weighed down by this family
lineage. He lived around the corner from my mother around — somewhere
the street names I remember hearing about are Thirty-second and
Calumet and Cottage Grove Avenue in Chicago; those are familiar names,
anyway. He used to pursue her to school and stick her pigtails in
the inkwells, and there are many long stories about how obnoxious my
father was through the years. [Laughter]

Teiser: What were your parents' first names?

Miles: Reginald Odber Miles and Josephine Lackner Miles. They I guess had
a very nice group of friends, and I guess he went with one of her
friends. They knew each other for maybe twenty years and were
engaged for maybe five, because he had no money (he never went to
college — he never even finished high school) and he was out looking
for work. He finally got some little money as an insurance agent,
and then they were married. My mother, meantime, had been teaching
school in a private school in Cleveland. She had had a career in
education. She had got a scholarship from school, a scholarship to
the University of Illinois, but my grandfather wouldn't let her go
there because that was oil money, Rockefeller money. So she finally
went to the University of Chicago, which is [laughing] Rockefeller
money too, but it was near home. I think the fact that she was
going to be nearby made a difference.

Teiser: Was that grandfather given to acting on principle?

Miles: Very much so. My mother's side of the family were Germans from

Bavaria and Prussia who left Germany at the famous time when they
were rebelling against too much dominance. They were, while not
related to Carl Schurz, they were part of the Carl Schurz group that
came over. I think four brothers named Lackner came to Milwaukee,
and they were coppersmiths; they had been coppersmiths in Bavaria,
so you can guess what they did in Milwaukee. That was sort of fun;
apparently they just all worked for one of the big beer barrel
companies.

Miles: My mother's relatives, I'm not sure — I guess they came a little

later. They seemed to just quietly come to Chicago or Wisconsin.
Their name was something like Grossenheider; Julius Grossenheider
married Matilda Hoevener. I remember my great-grandmother's name
was Matilda Margareta Dorothea Hoevener Grossenheider! My grand
mother, Louise.

One of the brothers, Joseph, was the father of my grandfather,
whose name was Ernest. Ernest went to the University of Wisconsin,
studying to be a doctor. The story is that he was drafted to come
down to Chicago to inoculate people after the big fire. There I
guess he met my grandmother. (This may be a fusion of incidents,
but just so it gets to be in the story.) He settled down in Chicago
as a doctor. Their parents stayed with them, and the parents were
very dominantly German and didn't want the children even to learn
English. So my mother, at the age of five, ran away from home in
order to learn English. [Laughter] She went to the local
kindergarten. So her portrait is one of general independence and
quest for knowledge and curiosity, and so forth. My father's
portrait is one of enjoyment and teasing and love of sports and
general humor, and a kind of independence not related to academe
(which he always made fun of) . They were very much in contrast as a
couple. So that's where I got born. [Laughter]

My father was then doing pretty well in insurance and was sent
by the Connecticut Mutual to start an office in San Francisco, and
manage an office in San Francisco. So we came out on the train when
I was nine months old, and we lived up here on Le Conte, rented a
nice old brown shingle flat on Le Conte. We were here for four
years. The second two years we had a house on Claremont Court, and
my two brothers [Richard and John] were both born here. A lot of
our nice early childhood memories go back to those four years.

But then they sent my father to a supposed promotion to be head
of the office in Detroit. That didn't work out so well because by
that time I had really harrowing arthritis, and so I didn't do very
well in Detroit. I had been born with a dislocated hip, and they
hadn't known about this. One of the bones of contention in my
family was that my grandfather, who was a pediatrician, didn't
notice it for nine months. So it was set here by a method called a
Lorenz method, which was experimental, I guess. I guess it would
have worked all right, except that I got a cut — an intern gave me a
cut when he was changing a cast, and he covered it up with a cast
and it got infected. That supposedly — though nobody really knows —
is where I got the arthritis, and that developed here [in Berkeley].
But apparently, maybe at least, the cold of Detroit made it a lot
worse. So then I had a really bad time when I was, say, four and
five and six and in there.

Miles: Then we did go back to Michael Reese Hospital, where my grandfather
was working, and we went to other hospitals and so on and so on.
Finally, they said there's nothing to do but let me be happy in a
warm place, and we could go to either Miami or San Antonio or Palm
Springs. My parents didn't know any of these three, so they just
closed their eyes and chose in the dark. I've always been glad they
chose Palm Springs. So that's where we went then, when I was about
six and my brothers were four and two.

Teiser: My, that was a responsibility to uproot a family and —

Miles: Very hard. But because they said I wouldn't possibly live. So that
there was no point of saving a life, but just letting me be
comfortable. Yes, it took a lot of nerve. I think it was very nice,
in the sense that my father had turned from being a really big-shot
businessman, overworking, to being with the family a lot on the
desert. We had a very good, quiet half-year on the desert, and the
hot springs did me a lot of good. But the sad part was that nobody
had very much good sense about what to do after that. So my
arthritis did go away, and I rode all over the desert on what would
be politely called today a tricycle, but in those days unfortunately
was called a kiddie car. Do you remember when it was called a
kiddie car?

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: A little wooden contraption. I loved that independence, and I would
just scoot between the mesquite bushes out on the desert and get
lost, and had a really fine time. But I got stiff to the shape of
that kiddie car. Then they decided I was okay, and we went back to
another office insurance job in Chicago. When the winter came, I
got stiff again, and then also I couldn't get unbent from this
position. Then we had to start all over on how to unbend me, and
then I went through, until I was about twelve, a series of casts and
operations and various drastic methods because the doctors there had
just got out of World War I, and what they'd learnt about orthopedics
was very drastic, not very adaptive to a small kid. We had to pull
up again — very sad — and come from Evanston to Los Angeles. We
rented a house in Los Angeles. My father took up a new and
relatively minor insurance job for him, and we struggled along for
a while. I didn't get any better.

After a summer at Balboa, we came up here to a specialist named
Sherman, and I got a huge floor to ceiling cast. Then we went and
lived in L.A. , a very charming little house on a street called
Latona Avenue, which is a wonderful little street. It was a one-
block street, and it turned out to have on it the most amazing group
of people. My father just found it because the house cost I think
$1500. It had a beautiful view of the Pasadena Hills. Just a
beautiful place in general.

Josephine ("Jo") Miles, 1915

Jo and her brothers

Keniston Avenue, 1926 or 1927
standing from left: Richard, Jo,
Josephine, John; seated: Reg

Miles:

Teiser:
Miles :

Teiser:
Miles:

Teiser:

Miles :

Teiser:

Miles:

On that street lived one of the editors of the L.A. Record, which
was a really fighting liberal paper, by the name of Reuben Burough;
and Madeline Ruthven, who was a scenario writer; and Francis Beebe,
who wrote the Tarzan stories for the movies; and the cartoonist of
Krazy Kat , and various other —

Oh, one of my heroes I

Really? I should have known. He never spoke to us, see; he never
became a friend. But we admired him very much. And also very nice
assorted kids, especially Welda Dower who became a very good friend
of mine. We roamed the hills. I had by that time a wheelchair, and
this great little character pushed me all over the hills in return
for my telling her stories. We'd push the chair off the tops of the
hills and roll down after it. It survived. So everything got very
happy around that time. We lived there for about four years. Do
you want me to go right on from there?

Yes. How old were you then?

We left there when I was twelve. There was a school right at the
end of the street — the Latona Avenue School. A lovely place. My
brothers went there too. The L.A. school system sent home teachers
up to teach me. By that time I couldn't sit, but I could stand or
lie. My mother couldn't teach me how to write; I read all right,
but I had to have a teacher to teach me how to write. Then
gradually I got a wheelchair and they let me come down there to
school — I mean, a very broad-minded principal, a lovely woman by the
name of Mary Nagel, and lovely teachers. I can emphasize this
without sounding Pollyannish because when we moved to the Wilshire
District, the school there said that I couldn't possibly come; it
would be too much trouble. The Latona Avenue School really was rare.
I did get an education from ten to twelve.

Let me go back and come back up to this point. How old were you
when you learned to read?

I was probably around four.

How did you happen to, do you remember?

To learn to read? Well, I looked at the page and I said, "Hmra. I
know what this says. It says 'Chicken Licken (or Little?) says the
sky is falling1." And, sure enough, that's what it said. [Laughter]
I'll put parentheses to this: Two years ago, when I was in
Riverside, which was a very favorite stamping ground of ours when
we were a little older, I had a real memory binge, and I wrote down
a lot of these little things in poem form. They're not good poems,
but I might show them to you some time if you wanted to see them.

Miles: As you say, you're not interested in anything that's already
written down, but this was one of the things that I started
thinking about and I wrote down — I must have written down about
fifteen or twenty remembrances of my youth and my past —

Teiser: I didn't mean that we weren't interested in anything that was

written down. I meant that you needn't say anything that's on the
record, in print.

Miles: Yes. But anyway, another thing that I remember — this was in Detroit.
Well, in Berkeley, when I was four, I still remember being very
excited with some books called The Twin Books, the Dutch Twins and —

Teiser: When you were four?! Had anyone read to you?

Miles: Oh, of course I couldn't read those. They were read to us.

Teiser: When did they start reading to you, do you know?

Miles: I must have been three or four. My mother, see, was very — I didn't
mention all about my mother's education. She worked with John Dewey
in Chicago. After she got her B.A. in Chicago, she went to Colonel
Parker's School, which was a liberal, permissive education Deweyan
school, and Dewey was there. Dewey lectured and she went to his
lectures, but actually it was Colonel Parker that made the school
structure. So she was very gung-ho about methods of teaching and
learning and stuff, and I'm sure she read to us just as soon as we
had ears. She wasn't fond of poetry, but she did read things like
A Child's Garden of Verses and ballads. There was one book she read
out of called Poems Every Child Should Know, which was the source of
my poetry. Then these Twin books she read to us. That's all I
remember, except I loved to have those read to me.

Then in the East, in Detroit, when I was so really very sick,
she read to us a lot of [laughing] Bible stories. I guess she
thought it would be good for me to have a little religion before I
left. She had been a great seeker religiously. Her father had been
orthodox Lutheran, and she had rebelled against that. She had been
going around to Unitarian, Congregational churches. She had gone
with I think a young Unitarian theologian for a long time who
everybody said was just her type, which they didn't think my father
was. So she belonged to the Unitarian church in Detroit, and she
read us all these marvelous little red books of Biblical stories
which I remember.

I remember them so vividly because I was so resentful of the
whole religious picture, I mean of little aphorisms like "God helps
those who help themselves." I felt I was working hard enough and I
wasn't getting enough help from anybody. [Laughter] So my whole tour
with religion was rather argumentative. I just kept saying, "I think
somebody can do better by me than they are doing."

Miles: Another thing that I remember is that a cousin that I had gave me a
red balloon. I was delighted with it, of course. But for some
reason she said to me, "That's a balloon, and you spell it b-a-
double 1-double o-n." Phew! It was just like the world exploded
for me.' "You mean you can spell things?" I don't know why I was so
amazed. But that was really much more exciting for me than the
actual reading I did at that time too. And I do know — I still
remember the book with Chicken Licken in it, and Chicken Little,
and the trolls. A marvelous little book. We don't own it any more,
unfortunately. But that was my reading book, which I read because
it had been read to me so often. But that balloon thing! I don't
know why that was so exciting. Oh! I couldn't believe it. It was
the rhythm of it that was so interesting to me, not just the fact
that you could spell, B-A-DOUBLE L-DOUBLE O-N. Oh wow.

My dad loved ragtime. He had a small Victrola and all those
funny old records of that time; they were all war songs. This fitted
into this too — it was this rhythmic thing that had something to do
with it too.

I remember when we lived in Palm Springs we lived right next
door or right near one of those corrugated iron garages where they're
always beating on the corrugated iron. Rather rhythmically they were
fixing cars and stuff. I just remember that I thought they were
playing "Keep the Home Fires Burning" on this garage. So anyhow, I
began seeing rhythms in sounds that I heard. So that's my literary
history. [Laughter]

Teiser: That's fascinating.
Miles: It was exciting.

Teiser: You said that your mother couldn't teach you to write, but you did
learn to write then when you went to the school?

Miles: They sent a teacher up. This was a school system that had home

visitors. The first teacher they sent up was to teach me to make
pine needle baskets. (This was one of the lesser successes of the
L.A. school system.) [Laughter] She was a very nice person — I guess.
But I sure wasn't good at pine needle baskets. She brought the pine
needles, she brought the raffia, she brought the enthusiasm. And I
did make six pine needle baskets. But that didn't go too well.

Then finally they sent me a teacher to teach me how to write —
penmanship. It was easy once she got me — I think I did it quite
fast. I don't know; I think it was that my mother's writing was
rather old-fashioned and Germanic. There were a lot of letters that
I'd never seen anywhere, and I just felt a little too wary of it.
Or maybe I just needed — the Parker system was what I got, and that
was a real system. Real simple.

Teiser: Did that open up anything to you then?

Miles: Handwriting? Let me think. No, it actually didn't. I mean, I did
a lot of — but that [not being able to write] hadn't held me back.

The first poem that I wrote, I remember, was when we first were
living in L.A., and it was 1918 or the beginning of '19. It was a
celebration of the return of the soldiers from the war, and I wrote
a poem about that. "Soldiers are coming over the sea..."

Teiser: Do you have a copy of it?

Miles: Yes, I have a copy.* I think I printed that; either I printed it or
my mother printed it. But I remember sitting at the kitchen table
and licking the pencil an awful lot. I think maybe I printed it.
But I didn't feel held back by my lack of script. [Laughter]

That's another part of the literary scene, that when I was at
Evanston — let's see. What is the sequence here? Yes. A year
before I wrote that poem, when I was in Evanston one beautiful
summer, there was a family of girls next door, and they tried to get
me interested in the Saint Nicholas magazine. It was a very
interesting resistance; I just would not be interested. I'd love to
know why. I just thought it was too hard for me. They did all the
jokes and puzzles. Do you know what the Saint Nicholas looks like?

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: Well, you'll know, then, what a great thing it was. I'm afraid to
look at it again. So these little girls, who were maybe nine and
ten while I was seven and six, they showed me all this stuff and
they lent me copies, and I diligently avoided reading them. It was
so fascinating to know why — I just don't know.

But that next Christmas in Los Angeles, my parents gave me for
Christmas two magazines. One was the John Martin's Book, which was
much younger, which I loved.

Teiser: Oh, I loved that.

*Soldiers are coming
Over the sea

Coming to their land so free
Coming to the land of flowers
Coming to the land of snow
Coming to some happy hours
No war, No.

Harroun: We had that too.
Teiser: Maybe Saint Nicholas was too old for you.

Miles: I was going to say — and then Saint Nicholas again. I think just
those six months did make a big difference. I don't know why my
mother persisted on Saint Nicholas, but anyway that little amount of
time did make a difference. So that really started me off being
serious about writing, because they would assign — they would say
that "for three months from now the topic will be 'Neath Spreading
Boughs'," let's say. Well, I didn't dig this situation for months!
I would write a poem on the current topic and send it in. I guess
I probably printed these myself, and I probably did three or four of
these during this winter and spring of '19. They sent them back and
explained that I was supposed to look ahead and see what was going
to happen next. So when I got in this cast and we moved to Los
Angeles the second time from Balboa, and I had nothing else to do,
everybody trotted out their Saint Nicholas thing and said, "Why
don't you try for the three months ahead now?" So I did, and so I
got a silver badge, which sounds pretty sensational. That was my
serious writing contribution's beginning.

Teiser: Did you save all of your poems that you had submitted?

Miles: Yes. I didn't then, but we had a sitter — I had to have a nurse in
those days, a very wonderful woman by the name of Miss Babcock,
about whom I've written a poem called "Doll." She was terrific.
She was a theosophist. She was very good at just not pushing or
pulling or anything, but she would just save these things. So I do
have them. I'm sure my mother or I wouldn't have saved them. My
dad — the first time I got a check, the first thing I wrote that I
got money for ($1.70) — my dad would have saved the check [laughing],
not the story but the check. That was a couple of years later.

Teiser: Did you go on writing poetry, then, after that?

Miles: Yes.

Teiser: You just started and didn't stop?

Miles: Yes. Also anything else you want to mention that was in the Saint
Nicholas — mystery stories, rabbit stories, what have you.

Teiser: You wrote a lot.

Miles: I wrote a lot. And wrote plays. This lovely school, this Latona

Avenue School, they were going to have a — I forget the order, which
was which — they were going to have an opening of a new building, and
they asked me to write a play to help celebrate the opening of the

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Miles: new building. It was Thanksgiving time. So I wrote a play about
Thanksgiving. They were wonderful — no pressure. I even have a
review which Reuben Burough of the Record wrote of that, in which
he very nicely and ironically reviewed the whole thing, and sort of
suggested that there were other people beside me involved [laughter],
putting on the staging and the whole thing, but nevertheless
mentioning that I was the author of the piece.

Then you were able to write a playable play.

Yes, it was a playable play. It really was.

Had you read many playable plays, and seen many?

If I had, they were in the Saint Nicholas , is all I can say.

Had you been to the theater?

Nope. Oh. No, but I know what happened there. When I was so sick,
in Evanston, my mother had belonged to a play reading group, a
neighborhood play reading group. In the dining room was a dining
room table with a white cloth over it. I would get in under the
white cloth with my kiddie car — it sounds kind of impossible
[laughing] that I was that little, but I guess I was — and they
would sit around the table and drink coffee and read plays. This
was just marvelous, of course. And guess who that was they were
reading? It's amazing to think. It was Eugene O'Neill, and this
was the beginning of the Provincetown Players. So those gals were
really up on things, this little neighborhood in Evanston. That's
where my parents were hoping to live forever, until they had to pull
out of there because of the winter snows. But it was a lovely place.

Teiser: And you dug Eugene O'Neill at that early age?

Miles: Oh, did I dig Eugene O'Neill: He had a play called Oil. It's about
a wife that goes crazy. The husband is a sea captain, and he takes
his wife. You're not supposed to take your wife on the ship, but
she wanted to go very badly. They got stuck in the ice up north
some place, and she goes crazy. Oh, it was sublime for a little
six-year-old. [Laughter] Just marvelous. Yes, I guess that's how
I got on to the play situation.

Plus the Beebes. When we lived on Latona, then we had this
Tarzan of the Apes man doing scripts; we were all in the swing of
that too.

Teiser: Did you read the scripts, or did you talk to him, or-

Miles: No, but we did an awful lot of play-acting. The Beebes had huge
boxes of clothes to dress up in. They had three children and we
had three children, and we just had infinite numbers of performances.

Teiser: Ah.' That's where you had practical stage experience.

Miles: That's right. You're right, you're so right.

Teiser: You didn't have people entering and exiting at the same time. [Laughs]

Miles: I realize now what is going to be difficult in oral history is to
stay back there because not more than two months ago I met an old
lady eighty-some years old who was one of the directors of the
Pasadena Community Playhouse. She and I shared memories, just this
recent time, about the Pasadena Community Playhouse that would
really chill your bones — how could we both remember all this! It's
so hard to stay back there because as I was a child and lived near
the Pasadena Community Playhouse, it's not that I ever went, really,
but that I heard about the plays and the actors from my parents.
Like Androcles and the Lion was one of those. And then we put on
Androcles and the Lion. She was in Androcles and the Lion (and this
was like, say, 1920). She became one of the directors of the
Playhouse. I just have a feeling that there are all these marvelous
strands that go through.

I met her down at a trailer court in Laguna. [Laughing] She
was living in a trailer court in Laguna.

Okay. Where are we now? At Latona Avenue School.

Teiser: I stopped you at the age of twelve and said let's go back.
Miles: So we leave Latona Avenue School —

Teiser: Yes. After that, you had not been able to go to school for two

years?

Miles: That's right, yes.

Teiser: You were studying at home, then?

Miles: Yes. Oh, it was so negative! You have no idea. My mother said to
the principal down there, "Well, maybe she could do some writing at
home, and you could write her, correspond with her. A teacher could
write her about other — you know." So well, yeah, okay, if she wants
to. So my mother decided I could write — they were studying
California history, so my mother decided I could write a play on
California history. I spent that whole winter in this new house in
the Wilshire suburbs writing this damn play on California history,

Miles: which we then tendered to the Wilshire Crest School. (No, that's
not the name of it. I've blocked out the name, maybe Windsor.
Anyway.) And they just never even mentioned it! Never even
acknowledged the receipt of it. I just stress it because so much
of my life was so happy that it's just incredible to me how it was
not the run-of-the-mill; it was just luck. There was nobody in that
school that was pleasant to me, or that would let me get through the
eighth grade or anything.

This was all out in the sticks, out toward Wilshire and La Brea.
My father bought a house out there because he thought that when the
Third Street streetcar came through, there 'd be a big real estate
boom. (I mention this because this forward seeking was like my
father.) And the Third Street streetcar still hasn't come through.
[Laughter] There has been a boom, but that didn't do it.

Teiser: Let me go back and pick up another thing before I forget it, because
it relates a little to this. You said your father would have kept
your first check for $1.70. How old were you when you received that
great sum?

Miles: This Miss Babcock — this was on Latona, when I was, say, eight to
twelve, maybe I was ten — she had her eye on this little magazine
that printed children's work, besides Saint Nicholas. It was done
by the Beacon Press; I forget what it was called. I don't think it
was Youth's Companion; I never cared too much about Youth's
Companion. But it was another children's magazine that she got for
me at the library. They just asked children to write things and
hand them in. I did, and they paid me for this, to my surprise.
That really delighted my father. It's not that he was so mercenary;
it's just that he felt that my mother was so theoretical that it was
necessary for him to be practical. This was what he kept stressing
all the time — being practical.

Teiser: What was the piece?

Miles: It was called "The Princess Who Could Not Dance." A very sad little
story deal. I have a faint feeling that a lot of it was copied from
some place else. I have a feeling that it was not original, and
that I sort of remembered it from some place, and I've always
wondered where that was. But I've always had a soft spot in my
heart for plagiarists [laughter], because I'm sure I didn't make up
that thing from cover to cover. [Laughter]

That reminds me, though, of another important thing to mention —
good things in Los Angeles — is that, both on Lucille Street, when I
was seven, and Latona later, all during those five years, the public
libraries near our house were absolutely angelic about helping my
mother pick books for me to read, finding out what I liked and then

Miles: sending more. My mother would take a trip down and they'd find out

what I liked and then they'd send me more. I kept reading this way —
really constructive. I was very opinionated. One time one of the
librarians wrote me a little note and said I hadn't liked one book
that she'd ever sent me. [Laughter] She just wondered why we
differed so in our opinions. I thought that was so nice of her. I
don't think I wrote her back, but I sent a message by my mother what
was wrong with her choices. I had a great fondness for her.

Also, Madeline Ruthven, the scenario writer that lived on our
street, came up and read to me. About a year or two I was flat on
my back in this head-to- foot cast, and she came up and read to me.
A total stretch of utter boredom. She was reading me Melville (and
I guess I was nine or ten) , and she read Omoo, Typee, Moby Dick —
thank God I got out of that cast before she got to Pierre! [Laughter]
But that must have done me good, and I'm sure that some love of the
classics crept in.

Teiser: [Laughter] Maybe just fortitude.

Miles: Oh, what a funny choice.

[end tape 1, side 1; begin tape 1, side 2]

Miles: I would like to bring in one point about reading aloud. My mother
read aloud to us all this time, till we moved to the Wilshire
district. And so my brothers were on this too. It was kind of
interesting because they didn't like it anywhere nearly as much as
I did, but they did like it. We tended, because of the majority
rule, to hear an awful lot of boys' books rather than girls'. I had
hardly any girls' books because it was two to one. We had the
Treasure Island kind of thing, but I didn't get much of the girls'
book kind of thing until later. They didn't like poetry, either.
So she mostly read, I guess you'd say, classics of the Treasure
Island kind.

One other thing I should mention because it should not be put
aside from my literary history, that I was very eager to be an opera
singer, and I wanted to write the opera songs that I sang. My friend
Welda Dower, who lived down the street, was a year or so younger than
I am. Welda played the piano, and she had a music book with songs
in it like "Beautiful Dreamer" and "Tenting Tonight" and "La Paloma,"
and we really went to town on those songs. [Laughter] So she would
play the music and I would make up the words. None of those ever
got written down because her mother felt that the words weren't as
good as the music, and that I should improve before we wrote them
down. But we had an awful lot of fun doing this, and I really
wanted to compose words to music. That was my major ambition, not
only then but all through even college, with the big bands. You may
be glad to know that I was a contributor to the words and lyrics of
the big band of Ted Fiorito.

Teiser;
Miles:

Teiser :
Miles:
Teiser:
Miles :
Teiser :
Miles:

You were?

Yes. He never actually played any of them, but he kept thanking me
for sending them. [Laughter]

Both words and music?

No. See, Welda gave me the idea of using other, old tunes. Then
we'd adapt — we'd get new words that we thought were more interesting
than the old words for the old tunes. Then I would take some of Ted
Fiorito's tunes and give them new words. Pretty awfully done, but
still, he was a very nice person. He was playing at the Coconut
Grove, which was near our house, and the two or three times that I
did this, he would write me little notes saying, "These are very
nice words. They don't quite fit our needs, but keep on trying.
Love, Ted." [Laughter]

Thrills!

Pretty nice, huh? [Laughter] So that was my movie star stage.

Did you see movies much?

Yes.

You were in a movie environment.

Yes. On Latona, which was in the backwoods area in South Pasadena,
the movies hadn't really hit yet, and we saw very few and they were
very crummy. Indeed, that's when my father felt we should move from
there, that it was an area that would not grow and improve, and so
indeed it hasn't. It's mostly paved over now with the freeway,
though the corner store where we bought penny candy is still there.

Last month I was going down the hall at Irvine, and to the
fellow that was pushing my wheelchair I said, "Where did you grow
up?" He said, "I grew up around Sycamore Grove in South Pasadena,
and nobody's ever heard of it, on Avenue Forty-three," and I said,
"That's where I grew up." Coming toward us in the other direction
was a professor who said, "What did I hear about Avenue Forty-three
and Sycamore Grove? That's where I ^rew up." Isn't that an
interesting coincidence? That was this hole-in-the-wall place, a
place where Chicano squatters squatted in the river bed, in the dry
arroyo.

So it was a very interesting area, and my father was right to
leave it and to go to the Wilshire district, but it was a terrible
wrench for all of us, just a terrible, terrible wrench. So that
gets us back to the movies and when I'm fourteen, because now we did

Miles:

Teiser:
Miles :
Teiser:
Miles:

Teiser:
Miles:

Teiser:
Miles:
Teiser:
Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

go to the movies because we had nothing else to do. Now suddenly
we had no friends, no nothin'. So we went to the movies, because
we were now near Hollywood and the Ritz Theater and La Brea and
Wilshire.

You and your brothers were quite companionable?

Yes.

Liked to do the same things in spite of the little gaps in age?

Yes. There wasn't too much we could do together, but that was the
thing we did do together, was go to the movies on Sunday afternoon.

And listen to stories, be read to.

Oh, that's true. When we were still on Latona, my father had the
boys help him with the yard work. It was always very awful because
he always lost his temper. But then as a reward, after dinner, he
would take us to Grauman's Egyptian Theater. It was a big event!
I remember now. In other words, there was no movie near us, but
we'd go way over to Hollywood. So, yes, the Egyptian and the
Chinese Theater were absolutely major events in our lives.

But then more when we went together, just my brothers and I in
the Wilshire district. When we were in our teens, we went just to
the local theaters. That's just when talking was coming in. This
wasn't the big epics kind of thing, but this was more Clive Brook.
Remember Clive Brook?

Yes.

Really neat English comedy.

Did the movies influence you in any way?

I can't think how. [Laughter] I've written a lot of poems about
movies, though. But I don't think I have a very cinematic mind; I
don't think I'm all that visual. On the other hand, I don't think
the movies are very much interested in — what would you say? — low key
dialogue, which is what I'd be interested in. [Laughter]

I'm just thinking again of your lyrics for Ted Fiorito. I'm
curious that you should have picked that up. Well, I suppose
perhaps not, in view of your father's ragtime and —

It was very much my father. It was also Welda, my good friend. But
she had to practice the piano every day. And the fact that we both
thought we had beautiful voices, and we would get together with this
book of songs and sing them together. Oh, it must have been a nest
of singing birds. [Laughter]

Miles: A sad part — oh, a really sad part was that in school they never
really learned that I couldn't read music for this very reason.
They would teach us "do, re me so, fa me so, la so," and that would
be the way to read the notes that went with that tune. But I would
just learn that immediately, and they didn't know I didn't know what
I was reading. And I never have learned to read music, and it's
been a really mental block in my life. So now I should jump ahead
and tell you how I didn't learn to read music when I was on
sabbatical a few years ago. You don't want me to do that now, do
you?

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: You want to do it now? Well, when I took my sabbatical, since I

couldn't go to Europe, I would go onto the campus by another gate,
so that nobody would know I was there. One of my sabbaticals was
to learn how to read music. It was very hard to find a course that
was easy enough, because I didn't have piano. That was one big
thing — the problem that I couldn't play piano. My brothers didn't
want to; if we'd had a piano around, it would have been nice, but
they wanted sports.

Finally, the wife of a colleague and I, who were both looking
for something very, very easy, found the really depth of simplicity
in the whole Music Department, a course for teachers, Music 110,
taught by Jack [John M. ] Swackhamer, a really nice guy. He did it
by voice. So he would just have the students sing, sight-sing the
notes, and sometimes go up to the piano. He gave a lot of little
quizzes, which I faithfully took. The most I ever got was 40 percent,
but that was not too bad, considering the mental block I'd built up

I cannot hear the difference between a high note
If I say "do re" I don't know which is higher and
At the end, he wanted us to compose a tune to our
own words. I had loads of words waiting for tunes, but I'd never
composed a tune, you see, as I said before. So I had these words
that I was very fond of. I had a kind of tune in my mind, but I
didn't know how to get it onto paper. This was one of the most
exciting things I ever did — it was kind of like Helen Keller
[laughing], except it didn't work out so well.

All night long I tried to think what would be the right notes
for those words, for what I was trying to do. I didn't really
believe in tonic and dominant. In the Music Department, people are
always saying, "Obviously you can't end there," and I would want to
say, "Why can't you obviously end there?" I didn't have any of the
conventions. So I decided I'd start with three's and I would have a
beginning and ending on three instead of on one. I thought it would
sort of float.

all those years,
and a low note,
which is lower.

Miles: I'd wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "Oh, but that

seventeenth note in there, that can't be that; that has to go more
down . "

Anyway, I finally got this thing down on paper and handed it
in. When it came back to me, Jack had marked it in red and said
that it was very interesting, and he said, "It has a floating
quality. I don't know if you realize that." Well, that was very
complimentary. He said, "It's not really orthodox enough to do much
with. It's kind of a fragment and one doesn't quite know where it's
going." Well, it was all okay. I agreed that was about the best I
had done. He marked one place as being very bad, which I knew,
another place as being very good, which I was thrilled by.

I was reading this, and I was in a department meeting of ours.
Somebody tapped me on the shoulder, and here was Bud [Bertrand H. ]
Bronson sitting behind me, who is a very revered and austere figure
in our department, and one of our elder statesmen and, as you
probably know, a really marvelous musician and an authority on the
ballad. He said, "What's that piece of music you're looking at,
there?" I said, "Oh, Bud, forget it," and I put it in my book. But
he reached over, took it out and looked at it, and chuckled during
the rest of the meeting.

Then he got up and came around after the meeting and said,
"This little thing of yours reminds me of something. I don't know
whether you know it or not, but it has very many of the qualities of
another well-known piece of music." I said I didn't know. He said,
"Well, I'll sing it to you," and he hummed this beautiful thing.
Oh, I loved it! Tears came to my eyes, and I said, "Bud, you know,
you're a very sardonic man, but this was pure kindness, pure
sympathy. What is it?" He said, "The Japanese national anthem.
[Laughter] Isn't that funny-sad?

Teiser: [Laughter] How curious!

Miles: I thought that was good. I was so taken aback. You couldn't get a
better character study of Bud Bronson than that story, because it
has all the sympathy but all the barb in it too. It was a real
shock for me, but it was funny. I think that's the last thing I've
done with words and music.

Oh no no, I didn't. That's right. During Cambodia, Jack
[Swackhamer] asked me to write some words to a piece that he wrote.
I did, and that was very thrilling. The kids rewrote a whole
concert to protest Cambodia. All the pieces were new; they just
didn't do anything they had been planning. The chorus did this
piece, with my words and his music. I was sitting next to a
colleague of Jack's who told me the whole thing was no good, but I
was in seventh heaven — I thought it was beautiful! [Laughter]

Miles:

Teiser;
Miles:

Oh yes, that's right — he wrote the music to my words, by the way.
Yes, he turned it around.

So I guess that's the end of the story of my music career. A
very important story in my life, feeble as it is.

It's not really so separate from —

No, no. All these strands keep going through.

So now you want me to go back to when I'm fourteen?

High School

Teiser: Now back to fourteen.

Miles: We lived near a new junior high school where my brothers went to,
but it was too far for me to get to. So I was sort of stymied out
there in the oat fields. It was interesting because they were
building new little gerry-built houses, and the sound of hammering —
just a sense of construction going on. But it clearly stood out as
a depressing year for me. I was supposedly taking exercises, taking
trips over to the other side of town to get some exercises, which I
was sure weren't doing me any good. By this time I had braces on.
I had plenty of energy, but I didn't like the exercise, I didn't
like the trip on the streetcar (my poor mother lugged me on the
streetcar, on the bus), and I was doing this writing for this school
and I knew they didn't care. I was thirteen, and nothing seemed to
be adding up in any direction.

Then we went down to Coronado Beach for the summer, which we
had done before. We stayed in a place called Coronado Tent City.
Were you ever there?

Teiser: I've seen pictures of it.

Miles: Yes. There's a hotel. They ran this tent city down on the strand
below the hotel, and they had hotel service — linen service and so
forth — every day. The cottages were made out of palm thatch and
canvas, and they had little tents behind if you wanted to cook,
which my mother did. Very delightful, simple, informal summers.
Nice and warm. These did me a lot of good. I learned how to swim.
Again, I couldn't learn from my parents.

My father's idea of how to teach you to swim was to hold your
face down in the water until you struggled enough so that you'd come
up for air or something. After a few bouts of that, we quit. But

Miles: we got a college student to teach me, who taught by teaching how to
float, and I learned actually to swim about a hundred yards, the
side stroke. She would help my mother during the summers, one of
the best of our many-odd mother's aids.

Across from us lived a family (I don't remember their name at
the moment. [Added later: It was Schuck]) They had two daughters
who, by coincidence, were going to L.A. High, which was about two
blocks from where we lived, and where my father had been aiming for
all along when he bought this house, because he thought eventually
we could all go to L.A. High. Well, these two girls were going
there now, so they took me under their wing. They said, "Sure, she
ought to go to L.A. High. She's smart enough to go to L.A. High,
even if she hasn't been through the eighth grade."

That seemed to be just idle chatter. But when we went back,
it turned out that one of these girls was on what was called the
Girls' Senior Board, which was an elected, very august group of
senior girls, and she had mentioned it to the girls' principal, who
called my mother up and said why didn't my mother come over and
check it out, and maybe I could come there. Wasn't that good?

So I was rescued from my ivory tower, and she said that she
could let me into L.A. High on the basis of these papers that I'd
saved, the stuff that had been printed, the Saint Nicholas stuff
mostly.

One big thing I had won. My eighth grade teacher, the one I
was pulled away from when we moved, was a kind of old battle axe,
a marvelous kind of teacher you read about, with a shirtwaist and
that stiff, ironic presence. She gave me a magazine called The
Bookman. Did you ever see The Bookman? It was a rather stylish,
Clifton Fadiman type of thing of the twenties. She brought this to
me and said, "Why don't you read this? There's a contest in here
for young writers under eighteen, on favorite books that they might
have."

Again, I avoided this, I resented this magazine — it was too
hard for me. After all, it was an adult magazine. But I did
finally settle down and write that favorite book thing, and I won
it. So this really did impress Miss Wolverton.

Teiser: What was your favorite book?

Miles: Oh, come on, now. Don't ask me that. [Laughing] This is

embarrassing. It was called Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard.
I really did love that book. It's by an English writer; I can't
say her name, which is very bad of me. [Added later: Eleanor
Far j eon] The prize was another book, and what I asked for was The
Three Musketeers. It showed that I had grown up slightly between
twelve, thirteen, and fourteen.

Teiser: That impressed the high school?

Miles: Now this was high school, yes. I guess I went four years to L.A.
High, '24 to '28. They didn't let me skip a grade, but there were
freshman subjects given (I guess that's the way it was). I can't
remember whether I was there three years or four, but I know I had
to take all the beginning stuff, which normally I would have got in
junior high, like algebra and beginning Latin or beginning French,
and grammar and all those things. This vice-principal wielded a
certain amount of power over me, which I had a hard time with. She
thought, since she'd let me in, she could make me take a real
classical course, which I wouldn't have chosen. So this way I
willy-nilly got a lot of college preparatory work done — except they
didn't make women take math in those days, which they should have.
Now they realize that's a great difference between women and men in
education, in jobs today.

Teiser: I didn't realize that.

Miles: Oh yes. There are some beautiful statistics on the subject. It's
right there, after algebra and geometry, that women get sidetracked
into low-paying jobs forever after. That was okay with me; I
wouldn't have been an engineer anyway.

Teiser: Did you like Latin and French?

Miles: Well — let's see. I didn't like English; teachers were very

sentimental. I loved chemistry — mostly the nature of the teacher.
I didn't like Latin very well until I got just a marvelous — the best
teacher I ever had. His name was Dr. Walter Edwards, and he taught
Latin and Greek. I took everything he taught.

Teiser: Greek too, did you say?

Miles: Yes. The story was that he had a Ph.D. and that he preferred

teaching high school students. I don't know what actually was the
story. I think he had dyspepsia, and maybe he just didn't have the
health to teach in college, or maybe he didn't publish enough.
Anyway, we accepted the idea that he liked us better than college
students. He was such a marvelous man, and not in any way that I
can define. He was not encouraging or enthusiastic; he just assumed
that you were very interested and the stuff was very interesting,
and you would do an awful lot of work and he would do an awful lot
of work. We published a Latin paper called The Nuntius, and every
body would write in Latin for that. It was just a kind of quiet,
crabby assumption that things would go on in this way.

Miles: In my Virgil class, there was — I can't say his name quite, but he
became editor of the Christian Science Monitor — Kevin somebody —
Hendricks? He was editor of The Nuntius. John Cage, the famous
music guy. And a man who's a demographer at Berkeley, in history
and sociology, Woodrow Borah. So there were four of us, just
contemporaries there, who turned out to keep on working very hard
in the literary world. So it must have been a pretty good class,
and he probably did get quite a bit of work out of us.

Teiser: You were reading Virgil in high school?

Miles: Yes. We read Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, beginning Greek. So I was going
to be a classics major. When I got to college, when I went to UCLA,
a very nice man there, who taught all those things, did not inspire
me any at all, and demanded memory work, which I didn't have. So I
quit being a classics major overnight. But it shows —

Teiser: You really were, through high school, going to be a classics major?

Miles: Yes.

Teiser: What were you going to do with it?

Miles: I didn't know! I didn't have any career plans. I don't remember

talking about career, even with my brothers either; I think we just
talked about schooling at that point. I don't think the job market
was quite as oppressive as it is now. I don't ever remember
thinking about what any of us would do with these things. All I
remember is that my dad would say, "You must get away to college.
You must go somewhere to college where you get away from home and
get some new experiences and somebody else can help you beside your
mother. The boys must go to Stanford." Those are the only things
I remember at that level.

Teiser: Your mother had a great deal of theoretical education, and he still
wanted education for all of you — the best.

Miles: Yes, despite the fact that he made fun of it.
Teiser: Stanford was expensive.
Miles: Was it really?

Teiser: Pretty expensive for most people. It was for your family [speaking
to Harroun], it was for my family.

Miles: Really, was it? In the thirties? This would have been '28, '29.
Teiser: Oh, yes! You were in the class of '29, were you? [to Harroun]

Miles: You must have been there before Dick and John were. Two things:

One was that my brothers ran a laundry business there, and so they
earned quite a bit (it was easier to earn money then) . And secondly,
it was the Depression, and everything was so rock-bottom anyway that
my mother didn't know where the next nickel was coming from because
my father had died in February of '29, which was like a month before
the crash. When things went into probate, my dad was feeling pretty
well off, and feeling that he had done pretty well by us and could
get us to college. But when things came out of probate, which was in
that fall, we had nothing. But my brothers were on their way to
college and —

Teiser: By then were they established there?

Miles: Well, no! Mother just thought she'd be phoning and having them come
home any minute. But that money was funny money. You know, I mean
you kept eating on less and less, you kept spending less and less,
and they kept stringing along on their laundry. They never even
borrowed from Stanford. I know she didn't have much to give them.
It was curious. Many people have said that they don't remember what
they lived on. But dividends persisted.

We do remember as we reminisced about it, one big event was that
whoever was home, like in the summer — I know my brother earned a
dollar a day for a long time on an ice truck, one of my brothers,
and my mother got up at five o'clock to take him to work. This kind
of thing, you know. Our big event was to go out to dinner on Sunday,
and that dinner cost a dollar, and that we just ate for hours. So
you see how different. [Laughter]

I sort of skipped over high school here, but I guess that's
enough.

Teiser: Let's go back to high school a little more. You didn't like English
classes, but did you participate in any other literary journals
besides the Latin one?

Miles: Yes. I was involved in the literary stuff. The high school was

divided by floors. The sciences and the languages were on the second
floor (I had to climb up one flight of stairs), and English and
History were on the third floor, which was really very hard for me
to get to. I could climb stairs then with help, but it was awfully
hard. So I postponed as much of English as possible and did a lot
of languages and sciences — whatever I could on the second floor.

I remember writing a poem at the end of my junior year which
was called "To Dr. Edwards, on Going to the Third Floor." This said,
"I am going now to the third floor/Where sniffing flowers gracefully
is the thing to do." I'll spare you the rest of it, but anyway that
was my attitude. Everybody up there was just very appreciative and
symbolic.

Miles: There was a woman, to whom I'm always unfair, who had studied at

Columbia under Hughes Mearns, creative writing. He was one of the
first to stress teaching creative writing to children, and free verse.
I've never looked into that book. I took her course in creative
writing, and somehow it was unfortunate; I was rebellious against it.
I did show her my work. My mother kept thinking she should see my
work, and I took the course. But I sat in the back with the boys,
i and we would make fun of all the poetry about sentiment. We kept

telling her, "Why don't you let us play 'Muddy Waters'?" Finally she
said, "If you wish me to, I will leave the room, and then you can
play 'Muddy Waters'." And we all said, "Hooray!" [Laughter]

This is nothing that I think of with great pride. On the other
hand, I still do resent the kind of teaching that she did, which was
so sentimental.

The other influential teacher was a sorority woman who stressed
college excellence and getting to college and being a Theta and
getting all A's, and was a really wonderfully rigorous teacher. She
was our senior teacher, and she taught Beowulf and Chaucer and
Shakespeare wonderfully well. This is where all my friends and I
were together, and we worked on the literary magazine and the
literary annual — no, that's right — we didn't work on the paper, we
worked on the annual.

I remember it was my idea that instead of having all us A
students in the interview, we should talk to the kids that never got
into the annual. They were represented by those who were always
found off-bounds smoking at some place like Marchetti's or something,
which was down on Vermont Avenue and supposed to be a very bad place
to be found out of bounds. My idea was we interview these guys. So
we had rather a struggle over that annual.

My best friend, a friend who was editor, was both pulled in my
direction and pulled in Miss Lavayea's direction. That was a very
interesting tension between lady-likeness, which Miss Lavayea was
always stressing, and having fun, which I was stressing.

Teiser: You were on the having fun side.

Miles: I was on the having fun side. The girls in that high school were so
nice. I belonged to the rival club, not to my best friend's club,
not to Miss Lavayea's club, but to a rival one called Scribblers.
[Telephone rings] So these were literary clubs, definitely.

Teiser: Who won? Did you interview the boys off-bounds?

Miles: Yes, we did. But it was all toned down; it was milk and water by the
time we got through with it. But we did do it, yes.

Teiser: What was your friend's name?

Miles: Which friend?

Teiser: That you were just saying — your best friend who was in the other club?

Miles: Her name was Franklyn Royer. Her name is now Franklyn Bradshaw.
Just to show how my theory is that things extend in curious ways,
she's coming to see me on Saturday. I see her maybe once a year or
something like that. She's retired from teaching, and her husband
is retired from editing, and they live in Los Angeles. I saw her
when 1 was down south, and she's a really interesting person still.

A lot of my senior year in high school — I mention this because
I suppose it was literary, and I suppose I wrote a lot — but it was
so sort of torn between a lot of this feminine club rivalry kind of,
people hurting people's feelings. I had some friends that were kind
of light hearted and satirical. I was known in my high school
senior year as being just much too cynical for my own good. You
know, I was about as cynical as Snoopy [laughter], but that's the
way they put me down there so I wouldn't make too much trouble.

(While this is on my mind, I suppose I might as well go into it.)
Then my dad said, "You need to get away and get with a more lady-like
society. You should go to Scripps and have a girl help you there,
and get away from home." So we went out to Scripps and looked it
over. I was all applied and inned and accepted and went out to see
the dean and see the place. I took one look — do you know what Scripps
looks like? Well, it's got a nice, high wall and a bunch of banana
trees — Spanish cloister kind of thing. I said, "No. Uh-uh." Then
cried.

Teiser:

Miles:
Teiser:

This was on the way to the desert where we camped a lot. All
during this time, my father was a great camper and swimmer. We were
either always at the desert or the beach. They thought being at
Scripps would be nice because they could stop and see me on the way
to the desert. I really didn't buy this whole picture. I remember
the sense then of making a real decision that day that I just
definitely wasn't going to Scripps, I was going to UCLA.

So I went on to UCLA with all my friends.

I'm going to tell you that you've been talking for an hour and a
half and —

Can I talk for fifteen minutes more?

You certainly can, but I don't want you to be too tired,
give you a chance to stop if you feel like it.

I want to

Miles: Miss McKinney [the housekeeper] has to leave at a certain time, and
I have to be ready for her to leave. So that's my only barrier. I
have to stop at five to five.

Teiser: I'll stop you when this tape runs out, which will be about ten
minutes.*

Miles: All right.

So we all, us literary people, traipsed out to UCLA, which was
still on the old campus at Melrose and Vermont. We had a nice bunch;
there were about four women and three men, three boys, who were good
friends and worked on literary stuff. We graduated [from L.A. High]
together and had a nice graduation party. The next day we had to go
and take the Subject A exam at UCLA.

I remember that it was famously said that the high school
literary people always flunked the exam. I was so curious as to why
this should be. Here was this lovely auditorium. The sun was
filtering in, and this nice professor was explaining to us. They
handed us the list of questions. It came over to me, and it was
absolutely clear why the literary people flunked — because the two
alternatives for topics we were to write on were, one, "Music in the
Home" (which I knew all my friends were going to write on, and which
I by this time had learned to avoid), and the other was "The Uses of
Science," about which I knew very little. But obviously I knew that
I could pass. In other words, it seemed so funny to think with all
the trouble we've had about — and I've been involved with Subject A
ever since all these years — it was so obvious then, and it's been
obvious ever since, how much trouble is made by teachers not
understanding what they are handing a student'.

So all my friends fell for this absolute trap, which was music
in the home (which wasn't meant to be a trap, of course), and they
all did flunk, and I passed. I said, "The uses of science are
fourfold." Now, I didn't know any more about what the fourfold was
going to be than the man in the moon. But I just sat there chewing
my pencil till I thought of four, and then those were four paragraphs.
So I was a clear thinker.

Teiser: But the people who chose music just waded around formlessly?
Miles: That's it — just waded around.

*But the interview was actually continued on another tape.

Miles: We might get over with, in this short time, something that goes with
high school. A very hard part of my life was that my father had very
high blood pressure and felt that he should get compensation from his
insurance companies for his disability, and that he should retire; he
couldn't work any more — that's what the doctor said. The insurance
companies didn't want to give it to him because it would make a
precedent, because he didn't have anything visibly wrong with him and
high blood pressure wasn't understood in those days (I guess it still
isn't, too much) .

So we went through, in my high school years, very, very
difficult illness by my father and persecution by the insurance
companies. (I'm sure if I had more time, I would take too much time
with this, so I won't.)

It was a real cops and robbers thing. They rented a house that
we had for rent, and they took me out for rides and pumped me. It
was a real spy story. We would drive to the desert, and they would
follow in another car, and report on what my father was driving, how
fast he was driving. We finally had a trial, at which my father won.
But then the lawyer laughed at him and said, "Well, just collect.
Collect from the Aetna Life Insurance Company."

So that made kind of a running accompaniment to two or three of
my high school years, where I would often go to high school in tears,
as would my brothers too, because my father would have been so sick
the night before, and my mother wouldn't know what to do. He'd be
determined to fight this battle and talk to his lawyer and — oh my,
it was very hard. Yet all the time we'd keep going away on these
holidays, to beach and desert, where he would feel better and he
would relax.

Very briefly, what happened was that finally a young lawyer —
this lawyer that won the case was so bad, but a new young lawyer
sent him to Johns Hopkins. There was a very famous psychiatrist
there by the name of Adolph Meyer, and then Meyer wrote a letter to
the Aetna Company saying that he would hold them responsible for my
dad's life. So he was paid up, and that's probably where we did get
the money to send the boys to college, except that, as I say, much
drained away in that crash of '29. But my father did die within a
year. In other words, we didn't get much money because that was
supposed to be insurance that would go on with a disability. Having
won his case, so to speak, and having settled down and felt happier
for about a year, he did have a massive stroke and died. At the
beginning of our college lives, we were left with, in a way, a kind
of peace and quietude because it was wonderful not to have those
terrible headaches around us all the time, but on the other hand
with a tremendous empty space, and then also with my mother's
responsibility financially and so on, that she couldn't cope with.

Miles: Women in those days were just laughed at in terms of jobs. She

would then have been in her forties, and they paid no attention to
her teaching record. She tried to go back to UCLA summer school and
get teaching work, and everybody just laughed.

So that's kind of a sad theme that runs through. I don't know
how it affects the literary scene at all. I just really don't know.
Yet I think it's important to mention because it colored our lives
very much. It probably brought my brothers and me closer together
too.

Teiser: Let's start next time with UCLA.

Miles: Okay. We were supposed to get there today. [Laughter]
[end tape 1, side 2]

University

[begin tape 2, side 1]

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:
Miles:

Now back to UCLA,
take Subject A?

What happened to these other kids? They had to

They had to take Subject A, all these literary people.
Was there no objective test that pulled them up?

I can't remember, but the essay test was what really counted. It
still should. It's all such a farce they didn't do well. But we
should have been prepared, we'd been taught so well. But the
question wasn't — I mean, a kind of inoculation never took place to
what is clarity, what they wanted — I don't know, it's hard to explain.
But they're still doing it.

Anyway, this was on the old campus, a marvelous old place.
Whenever I find people who went there, we always get sentimental.
It was ivy-covered and small, and green lawns, and had quite an old
university atmosphere.

Not at all like Scripps.

Absolutely not. It absolutely looked like an adult spot. That
could have been a hard year for me because my friends were rushed to
sororities and everything, whereas I didn't have any sorority
function. So I just went to classes. But they would take me to
lunch and tell me all their troubles. lLaughter] So I had a really

Miles: very nice year, whereas they didn't; some of them were miserable.
In fact, Franklyn left UCLA and went to Arizona where she could go
into a better sorority. The sorority problem just ate them all up.
But I've always thought it was very nice that they sort of bridged
things over for me.

Teiser: Where did you live?

Miles: Where did I live? Oh, I was at home. My parents felt this wasn't

good for me, to live at home. But the alternative was that we got a
boy — well, that was very nice too. My mother was going to drive me
over, which was not a good idea. I was sitting in Dean [Charles H.]
Rieber's logic class, and the boy who was sitting next to me, with
whom I fell just totally and utterly in love, turned out to be
president of the DU house. He said, "Why don't the DU's help you
through college? It would be a good job for them, and it would be
good for you." I said, "Great." So he said, "Okay. What's your
address? I'll send one around tomorrow." From then on, I had boys
helping me*, and he just started that out, just like that.

The first one's name was Clarence Sansome, and I fell in love
with him too. I had two tremendous admirations there. Clarence,
however, was suspended or failed or something for using the word
"raspberry" in a comic article he was writing; that was considered
off color. So I lost him for a while, but later he came back.

They drove me out there, and then I'd have lunch with my friends,
Roberta Denny, Dorothy Ayres, Frances Williams, Franklyn Royer. I
just found college so exciting in the sense of — not literary, though —
it was just exciting in terms of geology and astronomy. I had a
professor from Lick Observatory up here, an interesting geologist.
Ralph Bunche was there; he was a T.A. in political science. Just
all these doors and windows were opening.

Then we went on to the new campus, which was just two, three, or
four buildings, dusty, Mexicans ploughing the ground, not much in
town. But this lovely ride out every morning with these nice boys,
nice to talk to, interesting. I think that year the boy played on
the football team — Frank Lowe helped me — and we talked a lot about
the football team. Of course that was great. I used to go to the
games .

Then I did send in some poems to the campus literary magazine,
and they were accepted. A fellow by the name of Armine Mackenzie was
editor of the literary magazine, and he accepted the poems and told

*For a list of helpers, see Appendix.

Miles: me I was a very good writer. I had a feeling the world was mine,

and I admired him very much too. I fell in love with everybody all
over.

That's just about all that happened. The English courses
weren't all that great, and an advisor had told me not to take
English — take everything else but English. I took that seriously.

Teiser: On what basis?

Miles: Well, he was the math advisor, and he just told me that. You know,
you sit at a trestle and the kids go through, and you tell them
things. He told me, "If you want to write, don't take English."

Teiser: Judging from the fact that you were a writer?

Miles: Yes. I told him I wanted to be a writer, I guess.

Teiser: Did you consider yourself a writer by then?

Miles: I don't know. Maybe I did. It sounds as if I might've.

Teiser: You'd written by then more than most people write in their whole
lives, I suppose. [Laughing]

Miles: I hadn't printed anything anywhere, though, except in the high

school annual. But this math man just said, "If you're interested
in literature, take other stuff." I don't remember thinking of
myself as a writer, but maybe I did.

So I took a lot of interesting courses in other fields. I even
remember making a bet with a boy that I could pass an accounting
course if he could pass an English course. We did things like that.
I took accounting. Just funny stuff. Just had a lot of fun.

Then, in my junior year, it turned out that there were upper
division clubs. One was the Women's Honorary in English, and one
was called the Manuscript Club, which was coeducational. I remember
going to class, dropping a pencil, and this boy who was walking by
me picked it up, handed it to me, and said, "We want to ask you if
you'll become a member of the Manuscript Club." Oh! He's a good
friend of mine still, and he's just retired from teaching at Fresno.
But that was so marvelous. And the women asked me to belong to this
women's club [telephone rings] —

Now I was sort of plunged into both Women's Honorary kind of
thing, which had a nice sorority feeling; we were just nice as
friends, as women. But we also put on plays and read Shakespeare
and talked about books. There was not much inventive writing. I
don't remember anybody much that was an original writer; maybe one
or two.

Miles: The Manuscript Club was full of goofy people. We would meet at night
at people's houses all over the area — Santa Barbara, down the coast,
driving to hell and gone. We came back now to the Pasadena Playhouse
scene; we went to a lot of plays in Pasadena. I just remember those
last two years about being in a car, talking our heads off about
literary things, putting out not too much writing, but talking a lot
about writing. So that's really about all there is to say. I think
I had some poems printed, and I think I won a $5 prize. I don't
think I sent anything out. I don't think I had any sense of the
outside world of literature. I don't think I read many magazines.
I don't think I'd ever heard of T.S. Eliot, though it was now 1930.
I can't imagine who we read. We were reading maybe Edmund Spenser.
It was very un-hip. I think I was reading Walter Savage Landor, and
one of my good friends was reading Pierre Loti. We were kind of
esoteric about things. Oscar Wilde was very influential still,
Swinburne was very influential. Los Angeles was not exactly up on
things, because this was '29, '30, and '31. We should have been
aware of Eliot and..

Teiser:

Miles:

The magazines were rather unhelpful. My mother took a magazine
called The Outlook, and there was some current stuff in that. But,
as I say, I can't remember that we were very exploratory, but of
ourselves. We'd read things to each other, and that whole sort of
thing.

Were any of the faculty people friendly with you?
socially?

Did you meet them

That was just coming to my mind. Since there was no graduate work at
UCLA, the faculty was rather aloof. We weren't the substitutes for
the graduates; they just didn't have graduates. When we came to the
point about going to graduate work, I had no idea that I wanted to.
(That answers your early question.) I simply didn't want to be a
student or a scholar or a writer or anything. I think I wanted to
read books and write poetry and have my friends.

I asked my favorite professor, "What should I read in the next
years after I've graduated?" He said, "Just plunge yourself into
[George E.B.] Saintsbury." I can't imagine a less helpful suggestion.

Teiser: [Incredulous] Saintsbury?!

Saintsbury.
you see.

But he was thinking of Saintsbury as an aesthetic critic,

My friends, then, had to think of jobs. They finally went up to
Berkeley. Oh, I know — I then was supposed to have some operations,
which I had put off till I was twenty-one. The surgeon wanted to do
them when I was twenty-one. So I was committed to a year of hospital

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

and operations. That was another not too happy year because the
operations didn't work very well and, as you know, the therapy is
kind of a drag. My brothers were away, and my friends were away.

I did, however, start reading books then of a new type that got
me interested in scholarship, like [William] Empson's Seven Types of
Ambiguity, and novels of Kafka. I probably grew up a little bit in
that year in terms of my reading, because I began thinking about
poetry in a different way, so to speak. A man by the name of Owen
Barfield wrote a book called Poetic Diction that I was crazy about.
That too has had interesting later repercussions. There are now in
the world, and in Berkeley, and in Santa Cruz, Barf ieldians, who
consider themselves a rare breed. Just a few people in general have
read Owen Barfield and been inspired by him.

Had you then, in that year, been reading and thinking along such
abstract lines, along such theoretical lines?

That year, you mean?

I mean until that year.

No, no. This was a big thing. I don't remember much of that,
our college, we had a major English three-hour, six-hour
comprehensive that we worked towards for two years, where we were
supposed to know all of English literature. It was that kind of
thing, you see. The history of English literature was our guide —
it came up to Hardy. So, to come into the new —

Maybe he was pointing you in the direction you later took when he
suggested Saintsbury.

Maybe that was at least a step forward. But fortunately I didn't
take it. [Laughter] But yes, I got into a more modern world. I
went down to the L.A. Public Library when I could; part of the time
I could walk, and part I couldn't. I went down to that wonderful
L.A. Public Library, which I could get into by the back ramp. So I
started educating myself, reading down there. Then my friends came
home and said, "Well, Berkeley's not very good. We knew more at L.A.
than we know at Berkeley, but you'd better come up there. You're
just languishing down here, so you'd better come back with us."

So I did, which was very, very hard on my mother because she
didn't want to come up here. She had a world in the College Women's
Club. Yet by that time there was no real way for me to try to break
away from family; I needed her and she needed me by that time.
Furthermore, my brothers were at Stanford. So that conspired to
help me break away from UCLA, which was good. I'm very glad I didn't
get stuck in Southern California without a sense of — the next year

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Miles: they did start graduate work at UCLA, and they were awfully hard on
their new people. My friends who stayed there took years and years,
and gruelling courses to get through. Whereas, we came up here and
again had a very good time. And we were pretty good because we had
had this very hard comprehensive. So we all got our master's in one
year, which was considered unusual here. Not that we did all that
well.

To go back to your doing well, you were Phi Beta Kappa, were you not?

Yes.

Were you selected in your senior year, or before?

No, it was in my junior year.

You were getting good grades down there —

My mother was a Phi Beta Kappa, and she kept getting letters from
them. So we just threw this one away, because she didn't pay much
attention to them. [Laughter] I didn't know I was Phi Beta Kappa
until it was almost too late [laughing] because we threw this thing
away. I might have been looking for it in my senior year, but I
certainly wasn't in my junior year. A lot of these writing people
were already Phi Beta Kappa, so that it was no great change; it was
almost the same group of friends. That was when I had the bet with
my friend that he could pass English and I could pass accounting.
But the true blue merit showed up in that we both passed!

I needed good grades because I got very impatient with certain
courses, and some courses I just didn't do well in.

Teiser: Like what?

Miles: English. [Laughter]

Teiser: The perfect qualifications for an English professor! [Laughter]

Miles: Right, right. So UCLA was — I'm just so glad it happened because it
was a very liberating and freeing influence in terms of friendships
and all types of people, much more varied people than I'd known in
high school, very strange people, strange problems — it was just a
fine, human place to be. But I think I learned more myself in the
following year, though I wasn't so happy doing it.

Teiser: Were you writing that year too?

Miles: Yes. That's when I think I started writing fairly seriously. When I
came up to Berkeley, it was that work that people at Berkeley looked

Miles: at, and it was that work which, so to speak, made my literary

friends at Berkeley. From then on, the writing that I did was more
of a kind. That's what I feel~I haven't looked back to see if
that's true.

Teiser: Was it published?

Miles: Now there you have a new story. The story of Ann Winslow is a
beautiful story.* That should start a new time.

[end tape 2, side 1]

*See page 49.

INTERVIEW II — 15 July 1977
[begin tape 1, side 1]

Teiser: There were a couple of things that we were wondering about, from

things you spoke about last time. One was, you said that when you
were a youngster being read to, because you had two brothers, you
heard mostly boys' books. Then, you said. Did that imply that later
you went on to reading girls' —

Miles: Yes. When I could read by myself, I gorged myself on all the Betty
Barton in the Andes kind of things. In Coronado, where we spent the
summers for about five years during those years, as soon as I was
able to walk around on braces, we would go into town. There was a
marvelous little library in Coronado. You know that great Carnegie
free library thing? Well, here was just a model — one small building
in a little park, one aisle straight down the middle to the back,
where sat a little old librarian in a green eye shade. On either
side were shelves, maybe twenty shelves on each side; one was
fiction and one was nonfiction. I would always turn toward the
fiction side, and she would always say, "Tsk, tsk, tsk," from down
the back aisle. [Laughter] I read just series after series after
series, when you do, around nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Just really
ate up series of girls' books. [Tape off for a moment]

When I went to L.A. High and had this rather free program,
because I was not in any special grade level, I spent a couple of
hours in their library every morning, just reading. That was so
exciting because these were semiadult books, and I could wander
around this big room. There were books there for high school
students, but they were at the level of — oh, who would you say?
Well, Jack London and — who was the woman who wrote The Bent Twig?
I know Fannie Hurst was one (that's not the one I'm trying to think
of). Ruth Comfort Mitchell is the name that comes to me, but there's
a better name. So I read these more adult, I suppose — who knows why
they were in that library? Maybe because they were considered easy.
But Fannie Hurst was very exciting, and The Bent Twig person — Dorothy

Miles: Fisher — and James Cabell, and lots of names I forget now because I
never went on with them later. But I would just go around the room
picking out all these strange names, and these would mostly still be
fiction. That was great.

After having all these, until I was about eleven, I suppose,
having all these books brought to me or read to me, the independence
of walking around a room and picking them myself was just out of this
world. Really fine.

When I was at UCLA, the library was unavailable physically; it
was just too hard to get into. So it was not till when I could use
the downtown library that it got very exciting again. That was a
wonderful place, that downtown library in Los Angeles.

Teiser: You mean UCLA had closed stacks?

Miles: No, no. I just mean it had a lot of stairs. They didn't build it
personally for me, that's all.

Teiser: I see. You said that one of the reasons you didn't like your English
in high school was that the teacher was sentimental.

Miles: Most of them were.

Teiser: How do you define "sentimental" in that use?

Miles: Most of the teachers that I related to English were — it's hard to
think of the right terms, except in that poem to Edwards quoted
earlier [p. 22] where "sniffing and sniffing thoughts is the thing
to do" — appreciative, isn't this lovely — the traditional thing, you
know. Fading into the sunset, symbolism, all that kind of thing.
It wasn't a direct observation of what was going on in the text, but
immediate overresponse, and so on. Whereas the Latin professor, Dr.
Edwards, was so good because we didn't sit around talking about how
great it was — we just read it. That was what was so good. Let it
speak for itself, in other words.

Teiser: Does that fit in with your high school reputation as a cynic?

Miles: Yes, that's why. I kept fighting back on this. They would say,

"The stars in this poem indicate aspects of eternity," and I would
say, "The stars in this poem indicate stars." This was considered
cynical. [Laughter]

Robert Frost was very nice on this later. He was here visiting,
and somebody said to him, "Isn't your apple-picking poem really about
death, Mr. Frost?" He said, "Boy, I know how to spell death:
d-e-a-t-h." That was my attitude in high school.

Teiser: After our last interview, off the tape, you were telling us about
the fact that when you sought admission to UCLA, the dean of women
said that it would be impossible. Would you tell that again?

Miles: When I decided to fight the battle of the big university, along with
my friends, instead of going to a small college, I went with my
mother out to see the dean of women, because that was the tradition,
since the dean of women at L.A. High had let me in and had been the
one that had helped me. I did the same thing at UCLA, but the dean
there said she wouldn't advise it because I'd have to ask too many
favors, and she thought it was right that I should go to a small
college where I could be protected. So I was weeping heavily as I
went out the gate. The cop had let me in, and so this cop — I guess
he was waving us on and then he sort of stopped and said, ''What's
wrong? Why are you crying?" I said, "Because the dean of women
wouldn't let me come here because I'd ask too many favors." He said,
"What favors do you have to ask?" The ones that were on my mind, of
course, were very trivial; it was just a matter of registering. I
said, "I'd have to stand in line to get registered, and I'd have to
get permission to drive on the campus." He said, "You get somebody
to stand in line for you, and I'll let you drive on the campus."

So he did, for the rest of the four years. In other words, I

guess he reported this to the police authorities and nobody ever

bothered us. A friend did stand in line. Later I was invited to
talk at some YWCA party and met the dean of women there, and she

literally said, "What are you doing here?" which I thought was very

funny. (UCLA was already so big that she hadn't even noticed. Oh,
she probably had.)

But it was curious. I have to speak in tribute to the cops,
since I had so many fights with them during the sixties. [Laughter]

Teiser: I think I said something about the fact that persistence pays, or
determination pays, and you responded with a larger —

Miles: Generalization? [Laughing]
Teiser: What was it you said?

Miles: Oh, well, this is a common thing to say: I think determination

probably makes room for luck. I did have some determination, and
I certainly had an awful lot of luck.

Harroun: Do you remember the name of the dean of women at UCLA?

Miles: Let her be nameless. [Laughter] I'm sure she was a very good dean.
Deans of women were never the thing I got along with best.

Teiser: You said that, I believe it was, that as an undergraduate at UCLA

you were somewhat impatient with the English courses. Did you say
that?

Miles: Well, let me see. That isn't quite the way I would put it. As in
high school, I don't think the English Department was the best
department at UCLA. After all, aside from the poetic and sentimental
side of English in high school, we had very good college preparatory
work from this senior teacher that I said was so involved in
hierarchy and so on. But she was a very good drill master. We
really read Chaucer, Beowulf, Ruskin, and so forth, with great
intensity and thoroughness, and learned how to write about them.
UCLA was using young men getting their master's at [U]SC, for
instructors in freshman English. One of them read The Rubaiyat to
us all term, for example; there was a lot of slack in that. There
was a woman in sophomore English who graded us on how well we pasted
up our notebooks; I didn't paste up my notebook very well, so I
didn't do too well for her.

There were two or three very stunning teachers there, one of
whom I missed by sort of accident, and that was Carlyle Maclntyre.
He was a poet and a very good poet. But by the time I could have
taken him, I didn't because my friends were all taking him, and he
said to them that I had some reputation for poetry but nobody could
write a poem who couldn't take to the road. So I felt sort of
abolished from his cosmos. That was the days when people did say,
"He's a poet. He's worked on freight trains and garbage trucks and
has had experience."

I took this very seriously, and I felt that I was in a sense
doomed by not riding the freights. This was the slight early
Whitman-Pound side of poetry at UCLA, and I really missed it. It's
too bad, because I just felt put off by this guy.

Then there was this really stunning lecturer from Harvard whom
we all worshipped. Very good. (Do you want names of these people?)

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: His name was Alfred Longueil. Every lecture was a treat. These

friends and I in these two clubs that I belonged to would faithfully
go to his classes and take everything that he taught. He did a
beautiful job. Probably the most famous person was Lily Bess
Campbell, who was a Renaissance scholar, in tragedy. Again, I
didn't get into her good graces very well; I wasn't a Renaissance
scholar in tragedy, and I wrote poetry which she thought was kind of
a threat to scholarship. The very nice woman who taught creative
writing — well, these two women didn't speak to each other. I didn't
want to get caught on either side of that trap, so I just took both
of their courses steadily. Also Carl Downes, a true teacher.

Miles: There was no "in group" because, as I said before, the undergraduates
didn't function as graduates there; nobody paid all that much
attention to them. Miss Campbell was nice to us, and she invited
some of us over to lunch and talked about our future. When I said
I might do graduate work, she said by no means; she said I was
interested in poetry and you shouldn't mix up those two. The nice
lecturer, Alfred Longueil, said, and everybody sort of said, "Don't
mix up poetry and scholarship." And so, of course, would Maclntyre
have said that. So there was a pretty unanimous feeling. I listened
to them, and I didn't plan to do graduate work. But, as I said, my
friends went up to Berkeley to get MAs or to teach or whatever, and
perhaps to get PhDs. Then after a year of a couple of leg operations
which didn't work out, I think the person who most encouraged me to
go to Berkeley was my doctor, because he wanted me to get out of the
moping state I was in and just get out of there. He noticed I had
done well with education in high school. He was a very humane man,
John C. Wilson. He was head of the American Orthopedic Society. He
wasn't a butcher type, as some of my earlier doctors had been. He
very humanely said — just honestly said, which they probably wouldn't
do today because of malpractice suits — that the second operation he
did he shouldn't have done, it was too experimental, it didn't work
on me, and so on (it was on my other hip). So I was really
discouraged, because these were the operations that were supposed to
have put me back into commission so that I could get up and down, and
so on. So I felt pretty stuck, and he said, "You'd better go with
your friends up to Berkeley and study because at least you can study."
That was the advice counter to what I had from all the academic people
who were so intelligent about it. Lily Bess Campbell said, "If you
go anywhere, don't go to Berkeley." They considered at UCLA that they
were very professional and scholarly and that Berkeley was rather
aesthetic, critical, and so on — criticism in the sense they didn't
think much of. She said if I went anywhere, I should go to either
Harvard or Chicago. That was impossible because of the weather.

Looking back, it sounds like a pretty terrible dilemma. But
when you're young, I guess, you've just got to take action. I was
aided by the circumstances that my brothers were at Stanford and my
mother thought it would be nicer to be nearer to them. And my
friends were very helpful and encouraging. That is why I went into
some sense of doing scholarly work. The more serious nonsuperficial
or nonpractical reason is that I got excited by these books I'd read
in this year I was at home, and suddenly knew now what I would like
to ask to study, and that is the function of language in literature
as Owen Barfield had talked about it in his book called Poetic Diction
and as Empson had talked about it in Seven Types of Ambiguity. So
now I knew really something I wanted to study, and that was naturally
important.

Teiser: These were the two central books. Were there others at the same time?

Miles: Maybe John Livingston Lowes's Road to Xanadu. And I. A. Richards.
Teiser: Were you reading poetry too?

Miles: Well, you see, this is an interesting question. I was in a curious
kind of limbo because UCLA really hadn't caught up with the modern
world of poetry. We were very well trained in Shakespeare and
Renaissance drama and Spenser. In the Renaissance course we read
no John Donne whatsoever, which shows that they hadn't even caught
up with new trends in old poetry. I was in a very good scholarly
world from UCLA — I mean, in a sense of literary history (sources
and analogues was always the big question). But I had my own
makeshift world as far as modern poetry went.

I had bought for myself some years before a book that meant a
great deal to me and probably conditioned everything I did for years.
It was called the Home Book of Modern Verse by Burton Stevenson.
Then I imagine that there was an awful lot of fairly easy lyrical
poetry in that book. So that's the poetry I was still reading. I
was a little stuck there. I had read all the standard — I mean, you
know, the people in high school, and we'd heard — Vachel Lindsay had
come to read to us, and I knew about [Carl] Sandburg and I knew about
[Edna St. Vincent] Millay, which I didn't like at all (she was my
teacher's favorite), and so on. I mean, I knew the modern world,
but I suppose the only living connection I had with it was that I
still took this magazine, The Bookman, which my eighth grade teacher
had started me out on. They had poems often in The Bookman which I
really loved. They were by people who today I would not consider
very good; they were people of too easy lyrical a turn. One name
I think was maybe Dana Burnet, is what occurs to me; I'm not sure
that's right. I can still say some of these: "Here all the
valleys now are dim with sleep/And roadways have forgot the feet of
men." It's that kind of poetry — much like what we heard yesterday.*

Teiser: [Laughter] By the lover of Millay.
Miles: Right! You put two and two together.

There were others I remember. Lynn Riggs was a poet I liked

very much. Lynn Riggs later wrote Green Grow the Lilacs, which

became the basis for Oklahoma! So you see there was that kind of
musical lyricism.

*At a reading by Martha Bacon Ballinger, held in the English
Department lounge .

Miles: My reading was not very sophisticated, and my writing too then was
rather a kind of my own because I wasn't writing in any particular
context. I didn't know any poets but my friends who were poets; we
were all ignorant together, so to speak. I think I had met
Hildegarde Planner, who lived in Altadena. I think we had lunch
together. I liked her work very much (I can't remember whether I
liked it then or later.) But for that year, I don't think I learned
much about poetry; I learned more about literary criticism. But I
wrote quite a lot. People like Margaret Widdemer and Sara Teasdale
. and Elinor Wylie. [Interruption]

Teiser: You were discussing the poets whom you were reading, and having
lunch with Janet Planner —

Miles: Hildegarde, her sister.

Teiser: (Sorry.) How did you happen to meet Hildegarde Planner, incidentally?

Miles: My L.A. High teacher took me to a meeting of the American Pen Women,
a lunch of the American Pen Women, and she was reading there,
lecturing. So she was very nice to me, and I always liked her work
very much.

Teiser: But there seems to be an indication in what you say that you were
recognized as a young poet —

Miles: By this L.A. High teacher, yes. She belonged I think to some Los
Angeles group, and I think she sent a poem of mine to a magazine,
where she had a friend, called Lyric West. But my sense was that —
how do I say it? I had no sense of poetry in that city or around
me. I was very, very upset by those upholstered League of American
Pen Women people, and I was fighting back for some reasons; I'm not
sure what they all were. But as I say, I didn't like the kind of
poetry my teacher liked, and I didn't like that luncheon at all.
Hildegarde Planner was okay. I didn't have any real sense of what
was going on in poetry. I had heard of Poetry magazine and I did
send some poems to Harriet Monroe during that year I was at home,
and she sent them back and said, "These are interesting. Send some
more." You talk about my determination. I mean, that killed that
right there.' I would never have dreamed of sending another poem to
Poetry magazine. That was just total rejection as far as I was
concerned.

So I was really inexperienced and really unrelated, and I just
didn't have a sense that there was poetry in that town, except for
what my friends and I were writing.

Teiser: Did you have a sense that there was elsewhere?

Miles: Oh, not too much. The Bookman was it. I would cut poems out of The
Bookman and I made a kind of collection, and I knew that the writers
who were in my anthology, my Burton Stevenson, I knew they were alive
and writing.

Oh yes — another thing I did, I remember now. I sent a batch of
poems to John Farrar, who was editor of The Bookman — this was my
Bible — and said, "Are these any good? Would you consider these were
good poems?" He said, "Well, they aren't yet but they probably will
be some day. Why don't you put them away in your desk and let them
rest for a while," whatever that meant. It was a nice enough letter,
but again it closed a lot of doors for me. So I made these little
tentative attempts, but they weren't anything very much.

In a way, I stress this because the contrast with Berkeley was
so great. When I got to Berkeley, suddenly everything and everybody
was just in on the act up here, writing.

Teiser: This was what you didn't know existed, really?
Miles: Yes.

Study at Berkeley

Teiser: When you came to Berkeley, you were going to study English?

Miles: Yes.

Teiser: You were going to get a master's?

Miles: Yes.

Teiser: Were you going to get a Ph.D. too, do you think?

Miles: Not especially. I was doing this pretty blind. I agreed with my

doctor — I wanted to get away from the town. And I wanted to be with
my friends, and they encouraged that. So I'd just give it a whirl.
It was just really a little adventure, that's all; a chance to get
unstuck.

Teiser: You had lived, of course, in Berkeley earlier. Did you still have —

Miles: That was another good motive too: I was eager to get back to

Berkeley. I had always loved it, remembered, had good remembrances
of it, yes, marigolds, brass, Chinese dishes.

Teiser: Had you had associations with university people at all when you
were here earlier, in any way?

Miles: I was three years old when I was here. [Laughter]
Teiser: Oh, I'd forgotten that.

Miles: I went to something called the Partheneia, which was dancing in the
Eucalyptus Grove in Greek costumes, which was supposed to be very
famous. I remember being present in that. Yesterday, Martha
Ballinger said that she too was terrifically impressed by that when
she was a child.

Of course, my family knew people who were connected with the
university — not necessarily university, though. So when we came
back up here, my mother knew — the only one I guess was May Cheney,
head of the appointment services. She was related to a whole lot of
Cheneys in Chicago. Bishop Cheney was the one that I was christened
by. There was that tenuous little connection.

May Cheney was a little discouraging after my first year here
(I didn't do very well, and I didn't like it very well). She said,
"Well, did you get all A's?" I said, "No, I didn't. I hardly got
any A's." She said, "Then don't bother to stay, because you have to
get all A's here if you're going to get anywhere." She was kind of
the horse's mouth, but it was a little discouraging too.

Teiser: Did you say you got your master's in just a year?

Miles: Yes.

Teiser: So although you didn't get all A's, you still worked hard?

Miles: Well, I was so well trained from UCLA — we all were. There was a
group of maybe five or six of us. Do you want their names?

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: They were good people. There was Earl Lyon, Jim Wortham, Clair

Hamilton, Bob Orem, Howard Crofts, Jewel Holder, Mary Alice Jaqua —
just a group of five to ten people. We had all studied for this
comprehensive at UCLA together, which was a six-hour comprehensive
that we considered very hard, and we'd spent a year studying for that
together. I mean, it was easy enough; the master's was just more of
the same.

Teiser: You were strong in the history of English literature. You'd had
those basic courses —

Miles: That was good old UCLA. They're still good on that; they're still
very strong on that.

Teiser: What more was required of you here for a master's, or was that
about it?

Miles: That was it — just an hour and a half oral exam.
Teiser: Did you have to write a thesis at that time?

Miles: No, just course work and this oral exam. I didn't do too well in

the oral exam, but we all did well enough. We were not, any of us,
terribly impressed by this master's because, as I say, we felt we'd
learned it all already, and we didn't feel we learned all that much
more here. This is not Berkeley; I'm describing our arrogance and
defensiveness, and we were arrogant and defensive. The courses
that we felt were where you learned the most and were hardest and
best were in medieval studies. We had very distinguished professors
here — J.S.P. Tatlock for Chaucer and Medieval Latin, and Arthur
Brodeur for Anglo-Saxon. The people from UCLA who had preceded us,
an earlier generation, were in that field. I again was making
wistful attempts to get modern, so I said I wouldn't go in for that;
I would go in for Modern American.

Here again, I did not hit it off with the big shot in American
literature. His name was T.K. Whipple. I never can quite say why
I don't hit it off with people. I think part of it is just that
they fear that I'm going to ask favors. I think that's kind of a
reaction that some people have. I think when I didn't do a good
essay for him, a good study of American literature — and I didn't
know how at all; I had no idea of graduate study — when I didn't do
a good essay for him, I said, "Why is this a B and not an A?"
Instead of teaching me how to write a research paper, he just said,
"I thought you were going to put up some kind of protest here."
That was sad, because I was really very thrown back by that. It
took me a long time to find anybody to teach me how to do graduate
work. That really took determination, because they weren't very
much involved in teaching people how to do anything; they just
expected them to learn how to do it by the seat of their pants. It
was too alien to me.

Teiser: In a sense, then, although Berkeley opened up a great deal, you
still felt rebellious?

Miles: Very, yes. And my friends were too. Most of them didn't stay.

Marjorie Thorsen, which is a name I didn't mention before, who was
my most admired friend, if not closest, was rebellious about the
whole year. Many of my friends had wanted to work for the movies
when we went to UCLA. We had all gone every Friday night to the
Filmarte Theater to see — I forgot to tell you this before when you
were talking about shows — we all went to the Filmarte to see the
foreign films. It was early Russian stuff. I also forgot to
remember to tell you before, one aspect of the movies that — you

Miles: asked was I influenced by the movies. Well, no. But a marvelous
thing, when we were little children, we watched movies being made
all over town — we sat for hours watching Harry Gary jump his horse
over a rickety bridge and land unharmed, and we watched Francis X.
Bushman and Theda Bara make love on a rock for hours. [Laughter]
I was thinking of influence, and this wasn't influence as far as
I know, but it was tremendous entertainment when we were kids.

Teiser: Let me just ask you another question before you move on from this.
Not very many people are given young the insight into movie-making,
or anything else, that you would have by seeing things remade and
remade and remade until they were right. Most children don't have
a concept of how things are arrived at in that way. Did you think
that that stayed with you?

Miles: That's very perceptive, and very important. Where I became conscious
of it is the way my friends differed from people up here, or got
along with people up here, in terms of criticism. We were all
thoroughly imbued with criticism now in our own sense of criticism.
"Well, let's go to this thing called Old Siberia at the Filmarte
Friday night, which is supposed to be absolutely terrible, to see
how they handle that scene where the cossack comes down that road."
In other words, that famous buggy going down the stairs in Potemkin —
this was something we were aware of. That shot, which is now a
famous shot, I remember talking about when we came out of the
Filmarte. So my friends were very oriented to this. I don't know
whether they'd watched films being made as I had earlier, but they
wanted to write for the movies.

Marjorie went back and got a job answering the phone at MGM,
and she worked herself up to head of the reading department, which
was a very big job. Later she got married and went back to the
East Coast, leaving all that interest behind.

But that was an alternative to many of us, and Marjorie threw
over a scholarship here for going back and doing what a lot of us
had wanted to do anyway, which I wanted to do too, except I didn't
know how. (My niece, Jody, just won a UCLA award for film!)

A couple of other friends went back and became principals of
grammar schools. Some of them went back into social work. There
was still a lot of that in the thirties, with the Depression. Clair
Hamilton went into real estate in Lafayette, a second home for us.
I think only Jim and Earl stayed on. Earl was determined to get a
PhD. Jim didn't know, finally went to Princeton. I was just sort
Of floating.

Mary Alice was the daughter of the president of Scripps, and
her father wanted her to do this, so she was doing this sort of for
him, I think, and was really not wanting to.

Miles: So we were not the most enthusiastic bunch you could imagine; we
were just sort of slaving away. Earl Lyon, who was very, very
poor, had to make a world for himself, I guess, and he loved
scholarship — he loved music even more — I think he was the earnest
one, the one that sort of held us together, mostly by being very
critical of everything we did. We never did things well enough.

So we gradually all learned to work hard, those of us who
stayed, to get out of the modern field, where we didn't know how
to operate, and to get into medieval studies, and to work on the
Medieval Latin Dictionary. It was quite a stepping into cold water
that we all had to do there.

We're there talking about the scholarly side. I could go on
with that a little further, or I could also say that there was
another side to my life, which was poetry. Which would you rather
have me do at this point?

Teiser: Whichever you think follows better.

Miles: Maybe I could just say briefly that, to go a little further fast,
at the end of my first year I was really so uninterested, and I
didn't know what to do. I guess it was inertia that kept me here,
plus the fact that everybody said, "You've taken all the trouble to
move up here, and the house in L.A. is rented, and you sure can't
go back horns right now." So I decided to even take a course in
summer school just to cheer myself up. I had this lovely Professor
Willard Farnham. He thought of summer school as teaching teachers,
and there wasn't much point in being very hard; he just told
everybody to do something they'd like to do. I decided to study
George Meredith, who was a poet I liked. I apparently did that
well— at least he was perceptive to see that I cared, and he was
very, very comforting and nice about that paper. That was the first
kind word I'd had up here, really. Well, no, that's not fair:
J.S.P. Tatlock, the medieval man, wanted us all to work on the
Medieval Latin Dictionary, and I didn't want to get trapped in that.
He said, "Look, the only future for you is to do research somewhere.
You might get a job on this dictionary and be a dictionary worker."
Great, great! I couldn't have cared less. I still wasn't thinking
about money or work because my father had left his will to my mother
to say that I should get all the money there was in the family so
that I didn't worry about working and so that my brothers didn't
have to be responsible for me; that they were suppoed to be
absolved of all responsibility for me by not getting any money,
which I think is good psychology.

So at none of this time did I have any sense of, "I've got to
earn my living," even with the Depression, because I was cushioned
by the family structure here. I didn't want to work on the Medieval
Latin Dictionary, and I said, "Oh no, Mr. Tatlock, I'm only

Miles: interested in poetry." So this nice man, big shot as he was, came
up to my house with a whole stack of terribly obscure medieval
Latin poems that he'd unearthed from the Rolles Series and so on,
so I could be happy working on his dictionary but doing poetry,
which was really charming. I'm telling you this because you see
how colossal our arrogance was, that though I did that, I never
really did take him seriously.

In my second year, then, however, I did plunge in more to this
whole business of trying to do what I wanted to do, which I was
doing so badly, which was just to talk about the language of poetry.
Arthur Brodeur, who was the other big man in the medieval field,
said, "What you propose is nonsense." I don't know whether he or I
said, but we made a bargain that I was supposed to work the first
half of the term on what I wanted to do — this was some study of
medieval poetry — I should do a paper for the first seven weeks on
what I wanted to do. Then if he saw no merit to it, he would tell
me and I would do another paper his way, in order to get a grade.

So we did that. That was really, I think, fascinating, and
very broad-minded of him, and he was not a broad-minded man. So I
did this paper, and 1^ felt that I did very badly, that I didn't find
out what I wanted to find, it was all impossible, I just didn't know
where I was at, it was a swamp. He said, "You're right — it's no
good. Let me tell you what to do now. Do this whole material my
way." I did, and it was fascinating. I got all excited about doing
it his way, which was the orthodox way, and he was very much
impressed with the paper. He gave me an A and said, "This is just
fine, great, great."

In other words, I finally got happy by giving in to this,
collating of four Morte d'Arthurs. This was the first time I'd
really done the scholarly method, because the summer school was just
a sort of pleasant essay. Now I had two steps in a good direction.
Now we were all still to be medievalists.

[end tape 1, side 1; begin tape 1, side 2]

Miles: So we all worked away on this. It was all languages and chores and
languages and chores. We had fun by going to San Francisco and
doing all those great things that you could do in San Francisco for
50C an evening in those days, like Italian restaurants and good-time
music. But we all worked very hard. These boys, Jim and Earl, were
so hard up for money. They were getting $50 a month, and they had
to live on that, as teaching assistants. So we did everything very
sparingly.

Then a shift came for me in that I took a seminar from Merritt
Hughes, who left here and became pretty famous as an editor of the
Milton concordance; he went to Wisconsin. Now I could combine

Miles: interest and method for the first time. He was helpful. We had
a wonderful seminar with awfully good people in it, including
Francis Drake, and Barbara Gibbs from Stanford, who belonged to the
whole [Yvor] Winters school, and others of her friends. It's that
thing you come to graduate school for — the excitement of what you
can call professional work as distinguished from amateur. That is,
the amateur, which I had been for so long, was just liking things
and doing them my way. But this professional — you know, relating
to a whole hard-working field. Hughes was very good at telling us
how to do this.

Hughes did say that we would never work among the big timber;
that that had all been worked over, and all we could do was work
among the underbrush. That was his sense of scholarship in the
mid-thirties, which is interesting because it didn't turn out quite
that way. So working among the underbrush in seventeenth-century
poetry, we did some fascinating stuff.

I knew that was good work, and so I wrote him a note and asked
him if I could do a dissertation with him. I really wanted to.
Well, he didn't answer me and didn't answer. So, kind of despair
set in. I figured I still hadn't learned how to do it right, I
guessed, and so on.

Then one day he came up to me. I was sitting in the car
waiting to go home. I remember so vividly he came up to the car
and said, "I didn't answer you because my whole life was in doubt.
I've been considering this position at Wisconsin, and I didn't know
what to say," and so on. I said, "Well, I guess I'll go back to
L.A. because I don't know who to work with here, and I don't want to
get trapped in all this medieval research forever." I felt that it
would have been rather too clerical for me. He said, "The man to
work with here is somebody named B.H. Lehman." I said, "Oh, him!"
like that because he taught the modern novel and I had no part of
that. He was also supposed to be sort of a playboy and a
psychoanalyst, and a lot of things I wasn't interested in.

He said, "Don't say, 'Oh him.1 He's the man around here that's
got the energy to make something of this department, which is still
struggling out of years of depression and lack of money and lack of
leadership. He's going to be the leader, and I'm just telling you
this way ahead of time. I would suggest you go and take a seminar
with him and work with him. While he knows nothing about what you
want to do in poetry, he will listen — and he will help you."

This was a great message. I then went and asked Mr. Lehman
If I could work with him and he said no. He said I wasn't mature
enough; I just didn't know where I was at yet. Come back later.
Even so, somehow I had a feeling I could eventually convince him,
so that didn't discourage me too much. Then I don't remember quite

Miles: what happened. I was still working along in other courses, and

maybe three months later, at the beginning of the fall or something-
I don't remember — he wrote me a note and said he'd read some poems
of mine in the New Republic and decided I was now mature enough to
take his seminar. That began a long many years of working
together.

Poetry Groups

Miles: This might bring me back, then, to poetry. Is that an okay
transition?

Teiser: That's a swell transition. [Laughter]

Miles: Now I go back two years or three years to 1933 again, when I came
up in the fall of '33. Some friend — I guess maybe Earl or Jim or
somebody — had shown some of my poems to a fellow graduate student
named Francis Drake, who had liked them. He was a poet here and in
the Yvor Winters group here with Howard Baker.

When I came to town, Francis Drake, after maybe a couple of
weeks or a month, called me up and said, "I'm a graduate student
here at Berkeley, and I would like to invite you to join our poetry
group." Well, this was old familiar stuff, and I said fine. "We
work with Yvor Winters and Howard Baker, and I must tell you frankly
we feel you're a good poet and we'd like to have you join the group,
but you're going to have to change your style a good bit to feel
comfortable in this group."

Again with this arrogance that I look back on with such dismay
and amusement, and which I always remind myself of when I talk to
graduate students who are the same way now, I said, "Thanks anyway,"
and hung up. So that didn't pan out, and I'm really glad it didn't
because I would 've had to change my style. And I would 've
enthusiastically because those were fine people. I would have got
very much caught into that, and I just am glad I didn't.

Then, there was a younger group of young professors on campus
that weren't in this hoity-toity graduate stuff at all. They weren't
teaching graduate courses; they were teaching freshmen and stuff.
We called them the Boy Critics, and their names were [Gordon]
McKenzie, [James M.] Cline, [James R. ] Caldwell, and [Bertrand H. ]
Bronson. As you know, most of them have since become well known,
and were a great quartet.

Miles: We graduate students — not only me, but the rest — we never even gave
them the time of day. You know how graduate students are to young
instructors — nobody could be lower. So we didn't even speak to
these gentlemen because we were so busy cultivating Arthur Brodeur
and J.S.P. Tatlock, and T.K. Whipple, who were the three big men,
all of whom were very good and outstanding in the whole country but
who represented a tradition that was different.

Jim Caldwell was married to Katherine Caldwell, whose mother
was Sara Bard Field, who was married to Charles Erskine Scott Wood.
That was a whole literary group, related to the New Masses, to
Robinson Jeffers, to the Benets, to liberalism in the Bay Area, to
George West and Marie West and the fighting newspaper in San
Francisco, the Call-Bulletin. George West was editor of this.
Which reminded me of my old friend on the Record in Los Angeles,
my neighbor. (That was a bit later.) Anyway, that was a whole
working group of friends, good friends.

Jim Caldwell read some of my poetry, maybe through Francis
Drake; I don't really know. Jim invited me to his house. I think
he was the sponsor of a little poetry club on campus that was
rather struggling and not very active, and he was trying to
resuscitate it. So he invited this group and me to his house. We
read that evening some poetry. I don't remember whether Francis
Drake, who was the real leader in poetry here, also came to that
or whether he limited himself to the Winters — I think he was in
both.

Anyway, that evening was very exciting because this particular
group liked my poetry, and Jim and Kay [Katherine Caldwell] liked
it. I remember Kay passing me a cookie and saying, "This is the
first time that I've really thought that I wanted Jim to work in
poetry around here, because it's not the thing to do; you're
supposed to be a medievalist. But now I think maybe, after hearing
all you people, poetry has a future at Berkeley." That was
exciting and fun. This was still all in my first autumn here.

But, you see, it developed so separately because it was never
really part of my chore of figuring out how to do the graduate work.
And it burgeoned at a much faster speed, so that everything opened
up in poetry right then, early. It was different from the
scholarship, which took me about three years to figure out.

Teiser: Where does the Ann Winslow story fit in?

Miles: It could come right now, it could come right now. In my Anglo-
Saxon class, which was filled with people that we from UCLA all
said, "There's nobody here that we even want to say hello to,"
because they looked so grubby — everybody looked so grubby to us I
We were more Hollywood types, you seel

Miles: One of the grubbiest was a woman named, indeed, Verna Grubb. She
was a little lady, all sort of wirey, with her hair skewed up in a
knot on the top of her head — just looking like a cartoon. She came
up to me one day in the Anglo-Saxon class and said, "I hear you
write poetry." I said yes. She said, "Can I see some of it?"
My attitude was, "So why bother?" But I brought her some, and she
said, "This is very good." I said, "I'm glad you like it." She
said, "I have decided to start a magazine called College Verse. I
don't think enough time is spent on young writers in this country,
and I'm going to spend some time and edit this magazine called
College Verse."

I'm so angry with myself that I never found out more about her —
who she was, where she came from, why she had these ideas, what her
backgrounds were, how much she had done before she came to Berkeley
Cshe came here to get a master's). I simply wasn't curious, which
is maddening, because I was fighting her off all the time because
none of us felt that Verna Grubb was a very important part of our
life.

She then also organized this poetry club that Jim Caldwell was
sponsor for, and he wasn't too thrilled with having Verna Grubb
organize his club either. She was humorless, she was just a
grinding little lady pushing things through that nobody wanted to
push through. She was really fascinating. I often have thought I
would try to write about her, except we all ignored her so much.
We related to her only when she related to us. Fascinating thing;
we just never learned about her.

She developed this poetry thing into an every other Friday night
thing or Monday night thing or something, at Senior Women's Hall.
We invited speakers. We immediately had the Stanford people up.
Winters read his poetry, and Janet Winters read her poetry, and
Kenneth Rexroth. Immediately we were in the soup — I mean everything
was circulating. Jim was pretty breathless, but he went along with
it. He taught a class in poetry then, and I went to that class, as
did Jeanne McGahey. I don't think I took it for credit.

Teiser: Was this an undergraduate class?

Miles: Yes, it was an undergraduate class. As a graduate, I think I just
audited. But he was a very, very fine teacher. We met at the
Caldwells' house now and then, and that was always nice to have that
feeling of knowing somebody in the faculty.

Then Verna Grubb announced she had changed her name to Ann
Winslow because it was a prettier name [laughter], and that she was
going to do an anthology of modern younger poets. So we all said,
"Oh, come off it." The College Verse was bad enough, and we didn't
like the work in it too well either.

Teiser: She had actually published it, then?

Miles: Yes. I don't know whether this was volume one that we saw, or

whether she'd already done it — I'm vague about that, I'm sorry to
say. She wanted us all to be in it, and we didn't want to be in it.

Teiser: Were you not in it?

Miles: No, no. Oh, you didn't ever say no to her. I mean, you might say
no five times, but the sixth you gave in. We didn't want — JE didn't
want and I think some of the others didn't want to be in a college
verse [publication]. We were now graduate students; we wouldn't
bother with college, and so on.

She was going to do this anthology, and she was going to write

to leading teachers of English and poets all over the country and

ask for nominations. Then she was going to write to the names, and

they were going to send their stuff, and she was going to assemble

an anthology and get somebody to publish it. This all seemed to us
so absurd.

However, I remember a year or two later being up in her attic,
which was really an attic — you could hardly breathe up there it was
so low-ceilinged. She had manuscripts spread out all over the floor
of this place, manuscripts staggering from pile to pile. These were
the manuscripts that people had sent her. This process had worked:
These English teachers and poets had sent her names, she had written
them, they had replied (showing how desperate everybody was,
because they knew nothing about her) . She had meantime got an okay
from Macmillan to publish it, and she was now making up the actual
paging.

I apologized to her. I really said, "I can't believe what I
see in front of me. I can't believe you pulled this off, and I think
you're terrific."

I have it in front of me*, and I might read you some of the
names of these unknowns that she pulled out of the hat in 1935. If
I just quickly read you the — would you like to have me do that?

Teiser: Yes, yes!

*Trial Balances, Ann Winslow, ed.
1935.

New York: The Macmillan Company,

Miles: George Abbe, Ben Belitt, Anna Bennett, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles
Butler, Martha Champion, J.V. Cunningham, James Dawson, Reuel
Denney, Chloe Doubble, Helen Goldbaum, Beatrice Goldsmith, Alfred
Hayes, Philip Horton, C.E. Hudeberg, Lillian Inke, Hortense
Landauer, Milicent Laubenheimer, Robert Lowe, James McQuail,
Josephine Miles, Clark Mills, W.R. Moses, Kerker Quinn, Theodore
Roethke, Muriel Rukeyser, Winfield Townley Scott, Don Stanford,
Cyrus L. Sulzberger, Jr., Lionel Wiggam, and T.C. Wilson.

Now, there's about forty poets, and over twenty of them are
widely known today, so widely known that they have long
bibliographies. How did she do it?! I think that's absolutely
miraculous. When you think of all she rejected! I mean, she got
hundreds more. But she must have had just some wonderfully
instinctive, driving taste.

And then, furthermore, she wrote and asked leading critics and
poets to write introductions to these (that's what sold it to
Macmillan) , and for a wonder they accepted. Mine was introduced by
Jessica Nelson North at Poetry magazine, to whom she [Ann Winslow]
had sent some of my poems from the previous year, which they had
published. She started doing that; she started going around saying,
"I like these poems. Let me send them to Poetry — " or New Republic
or wherever. And then they would be accepted! It was an open-
hearted time for writers. I think maybe things were sort of dead
in L.A., and it wasn't all my fault. Maybe they had been briefly
up here too. I'd have to do more study to find out (this is what
I was interested in yesterday). If they were reading the Iliad to
themselves, maybe things weren't popping exactly up here either
[laughter], in the wake of the Witter Bynner era.

Teiser: [Laughter] You're talking about members of the English faculty at
Berkeley who were reading the Iliad for recreation.*

Miles: At the same time, at the same time, you see. Maybe things weren't
exactly quick and popping then. There must have been some reason
why all the gates were open to us, besides just her energy.

So Macmillian did this, and these very nice people wrote these
introductions. As you might guess, Marianne Moore did one for
Elizabeth Bishop; Wallace Stevens did one, William Carlos Williams
did one— they were all so generous. And these are fun to read now,
looking back. I guess Yvor Winters — well, you know, all sorts of
people. It was a very thriving little thing.

*Mrs. Ballinger had mentioned that her father, Leonard Bacon, and
another faculty member had often read the Iliad together.

Miles: This book came out and was very well reviewed. Then a particular
break happened to me, which was a little embarrassing because I
think it was too close to home, Sara Bard Field said she liked
these poems. She was a judge on the Shelley award, which is a
national award, and she proposed my name to the other two judges.
I don't know who they were, but they accepted this nomination, which
I'm sure they wouldn't have thought of all by themselves. So I got
the Shelley award that year for the poems that are in this book. I
think that was pretty flukey, but nevertheless it was a big help.
That was in '35. A big help, that is, in getting my first whole
book published, which was then in '39, and that Macmillan.*

So that's how easy that was. Isn't it funny how some things
are hard [laughing] and other things are easy? You just never know.

Teiser: Was it easy, or was it just that it was cumulative?

Miles: Well, I don't think much had accumulated, though. I came up here
with a few poems, and I came up here with a lifelong habit of
writing. But it was all fairly juvenile. I did win this $5 prize
at UCLA for our literary magazine, and that poem is in here, "Sea."
So it was fairly adult. But I didn't have much to go on, like
publication or acceptance or associates or anything like that. It
seemed pretty much out of the blue, I would say, when I got here —
that is, the recognition and the circulation.

Ann Wins low sent some poems to [William Rose] Benet at Saturday
Review, and again I think maybe there was a little in-group clout,
because the Benets were great friends of the Caldwells. I later met
Benet at their house. And to be treated as a "poet" was just really
heady and very interesting and exciting. It didn't help at all with
my scholarship, however, [laughing] as you know.

Then, even more exciting, she sent — the best response that I
enjoyed the most was Malcolm Cowley at the New Republic. He accepted
a batch of poems and wrote me a wonderful letter. That was really
tops for me. I think Scribner 's accepted some, and various other
places, I don't remember.

Then Hildegarde Planner was made a visiting editor of poetry
for the New Republic. She asked for one of mine, and that sort of
brought our friendship back into play.

Now you'd better ask me a question because I'm at this peak of
success [laughing] and I don't know where to go from here. [Laughter]

Teiser: I'm surprised that the Winters group was so important in Berkeley.

*Lines at Intersection.

Miles :

That's because of Howard Baker,
doing graduate work.

Howard and Dorothy Baker were here

Teiser: I see.

Miles: Howard was very loyal to Winters.

Teiser: And I believe in the interview by Rob Wilson in the Daily Californian
of February 1, 1974, you spoke of the collision, or the contrast or
whatever, between the Berkeley people (your group) and the Winters
people.

Miles: No, it wasn't that. Berkeley was more of a mixing ground. The

contrast or the clash — I don't know what I said there*, but you can
read it to me if I deny it this time — the contrast was between
Rexroth's group in San Francisco and the Winters group. That
developed a little later; I'm not quite sure of the date — maybe in
the forties.

Let's see. What did I know about San Francisco in the thirties?
I don't think I knew much about San Francisco in the thirties. I
don't know who was over there and who was active. Maybe Rexroth
was. But San Francisco versus Stanford was the contrast.

Berkeley was all mixed up, because we had not only the Bakers,
we had Lincoln Fitzell, who was kind of a Winters-ite. Then the
other side, of course, was Colonel Wood and the Caldwells, and this
relation to the Benets; I guess that was the San Francisco people.
And George West and his wife, though that, as I say, came a little
later.

That San Francisco group was radical politically and, as I say,
they published in the New Masses. They published the free verse
Whitman tradition, which Winters wasn't fond of. The Colonel and
Sara Bard Field, his wife, were I think rather loyal followers of
Whitman. She was also a rather loyal follower of people like Edna
St. Vincent Millay and Genevieve Taggard and Sara Teasdale. In
other words, she also had a more crisp, lyrical style, so that she
was part of those two groups as they sort of intersected — a kind of
woman's group and a kind of liberal group. She published two or
three books, as I remember, through Random House, and was really a
strong representative — I mean, if I were ever doing an anthology of
early twentieth century poetry, she would be, I would say, an
important part in it, partly because she's herself and partly
because she's very typical of a way of writing which the Yvor
Winters group, which was just developing down at Stanford at that

*For what Miss Miles did say, see the copy of this article in the
Appendix.

Miles: time, was opposing. They talked about those long, loopy lines as
being careless and sloppy. They talked about Jeffers as not being
the best model. There are these conflicting values.

Philip Rahv in the Partisan Review once wrote an article
called "Paleface and Redskin," saying there were two traditions in
American poetry or literature, and Redskin was the Indian-Whitman
tradition, Paleface was the T.S. Eliot-rather anemic library
tradition. Though Sara was ladylike, a recluse to some degree at
"The Cats" [the Woods' estate at Los Gatos] with her husband,
nevertheless she belonged, charmingly enough, to the Redskin
tradition. She had been a suffragette and chained herself to lamp
posts, and was a real fighter, and followed in the Whitman line
that her husband followed in.

That was the scene I came in on, and in all its changing
forms, that's still the scene. That is, in the fifties, what we're
talking about with Sara and the Colonel is what Allen Ginsberg
renewed. As you notice, he was able to renew it in this area,
because this area is always rather receptive to it. Whereas other
writing going on in this area in Ginsberg's time, in the fifties
and sixties, was a much more conservative, neat, and controlled
style.

I don't want to overdo this, but since you raised the question,
it is kind of interesting. I mean, I don't like dualisms; I don't
believe in things being split in two. But what I do believe in —
I think that a lot of vital action is taken in rejection of things,
and so you often do get one mode that's kind of fighting another
and thriving just because it's fighting it. These aren't really
dualisms, but they are leading trends and then minor oppositions
coming in which they themselves grow. Those can change from time
to time.

The neat tradition (these names are — I should have thought of
more constructive ones) would be something like the haiku tradition,
as one kind, or the Yvor Winters tradition, as another kind. Or
Jim Caldwell's tradition or — who are people writing now? Leonard
Nathan writing now. Or a lot of the middle range of poets today
writing. James Wright, [Richard] Wilbur, say. There's a kind of
control to their forms.

Then if you take, on the other hand, Robert Ely and the
surrealists and the whole Spanish-American tradition, that would
again be on the other side.

So, without forcing it, you do get the pull and tug between
kinds of control and kinds of widening out, exploration of new
ideas. So us chickens were just wandering around in here in the

Miles: middle, in Berkeley. Berkeley didn't have a center. We met with
all of them, and we wrote these various ways. Through Barbara
Gibbs and that seminar, I got to know J.V. Cunningham. I think
she was married to him at that time. They were putting out a
magazine called the Magazine. Achilles Holt, and so on. That
whole group was strong right then — Don Stanford and — you can tell
me the names. One of them, Charles Gullans, teaches at UCLA now.
One is Alan Stephens at Santa Barbara.

I remember later when J.V. Cunningham was editing poetry for
the Chicago Sun he wrote me and said, "I'd like to print some stuff
from California except, as usual, the stuff in California is so
loose and sloppy, and the lines are so long, and it takes everybody
so long to say anything." I wrote back and said, "Yes, most of the
papms that I know, or the friends that I have are writing that way."
I sent him I can't remember now what; I don't think he did print
any of it. But that's the way that tradition continued. The long
line versus the clipped line, if you want to be really oversimple
about it. But Winters came over here and read to us, and so did
Janet Lewis [Winters]. So we weren't quarreling with them. They'd
come up and talk to us. But Berkeley was just — Winters always said,
"Why is Berkeley such a mess?" That was his attitude. But we
weren't coalesced as opponents or anything like that.

Later Rexroth did sort of stand up against him. Then, in the
forties, we developed that whole different set of poets that was
related to San Francisco, under Rexroth, like Tom Parkinson,
Robert Duncan, Philip Lamantia, Madeline Gleason, James Broughton,
and that brings in a whole other sector. They were the ones that
welcomed Allen Ginsberg when he came. That's the San Francisco
poets. Also the activists — Rosalie Moore, Jeanne McGahey, Robert
Horan. Berkeley was always a little too academic for the San
Francisco poets and not academic enough for the Winters poets. So
we were always a little bit in the middle.

Teiser: But you yourself went your own way. You were not writing in a group,
really, and nobody else was writing like you.

Miles: I don't feel that I was in a group, no. Tom Parkinson has often

wisely said that this was a good thing; that except for the Winters
people and a certain fidelity to Rexroth, we've never had factions.
We didn't have factions or feuds — everybody has accepted everybody.
[Michael] McClure has asked me to read at his class, I've asked
McClure to read at my class, and you know how different we are!
It's a really nice general openness about poetry. When you hear
about all the fights and factions in New York, say, on the whole I
think we have been able to avoid that.

Teiser: Your speaking of reading poetry, was there a tradition — for

instance, did anyone read poetry at UCLA when you were there?

Miles: Read aloud, you mean? You mean having readings?

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: I can't think of anything farther from their thoughts.

Teiser: When were you first aware of poetry readings here?

Miles: In this club that Jim Caldwell and Ann Winslow worked on.

Teiser: As I remember, the method of reading of Winters and Cunningham and
so forth —

Miles: Was rather crabbed. [Laughter] Well, yes, that took a long time.
When we did read at this club — by club I mean it was about a
hundred people that would meet there — we'd stand up and read a
poem and sit down; it was that kind of thing. There wouldn't be
readings, except when Winters came, or some visitor. Then he
would read for a longer time.

I see now. You mean "reading" in a special sense of how to
read the stuff aloud.

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: It was assumed that a poet was not a good reader of his own work,
and that it was rather a curiosa to listen to a poet read, because
we knew he would be bad. Winters was not good. Jeffers was not
good. Nobody thought of themselves — I thought of myself as
absolutely terrible, and I don't know anybody who felt he was a
good reader. Except the tradition there was the Vachel Lindsay
tradition, and then I'd had that at high school. (By the way, we
had Frost come and do that, and Sandburg. But that's very special.)

In about 1940, Harvard published a list of a series of
records called Harvard Vocarium — I think it was about then — and I
bought all those for my poetry classes. We would play them, and
they'd come over here on an afternoon and we'd run through these
Harvard Vocarium records with the point, "You're not going to hear
a good reading, which we don't know what that is, but you're going
to hear the poets' voices and that'll be interesting." Williams
was very dry, cummings was rather interesting in an odd way,
Elizabeth Bishop was really dry, Marianne Moore sort of impossible,
and so on. We didn't have yet any [Wallace] Stevens.

Maybe this is an example of when things got exciting: Some of
my students were over in a record shop in San Francisco — and I
think it's records that did this; the kids were going more to
record shops — they were in a record shop in San Francisco, and the

Miles: man who was running the thing or the counter said, "Here's a

curiosity. Here's a record of James Joyce reading 'Anna Livia
Plurabelle' ." Well, James Joyce was already, was very, very big
and important to the students. He played the record, and as he
took it off the machine he dropped it and it broke. He broke a
slice out of it, so that there were still a few lines around the
center that were operable. One of my students asked him if he
could take that part home and bring it to the class. That was the
golden nugget of our class for five or six years. [Laughter] We
would play the little inner grooves of that Joyce record! I think
that's the first example of what you're really asking: When did
reading become a kind of treasured thing? Because he read
beautifully, so interestingly.

Now when I play a whole real Joyce record, I get ho-hum, yawn,
yawn. The kids couldn't care less, because he was old fashioned,
the recording is old fashioned; it's not in stereo, you know. It's
funny to think how much these meant to us and how now they've all
been wiped out by stereo.

An interesting thing is that Robert Duncan, who grew up at
Berkeley but was a little anti-alma mater (and I use the word
advisedly), also felt that my poetry class was too alma mater, and
he would kind of ride herd on this so that I didn't spoil any of
the good possible students coming along. He and Jack Spicer would
always come over when we had our poetry records here, because I
would say, "Listen, now listen. Doesn't William Carlos Williams
have a tin ear?" That made them furious, because they felt that
William Carlos Williams read his stuff beautifully.

That has been a major development — [Robert] Creeley, you know,
and this sort of Williams tradition of reading where you're sort of
choppy and effortful, which I didn't care much for. But they
wanted to be sure that my students were not subjected to my tin ear,
and so they sort of chaperoned Williams through my classes
[laughing], all during the forties and fifties, or however long we
went.

Later, of course, recording increased immeasurably, and now we
have all sorts of poetry. The big poetry reading, as I remember,
began in the forties at — you can help me with the name of this
gallery. Madame —

Teiser: Marcelle Labaudt, Madame Lucien Labaudt.

Miles: Madame Labaudt. That gallery is the first that I remember. Madame
Labaudt had poetry readings there that we crossed the Bay to listen
to. Robert Duncan was again a leader, Madeline Gleason, Jim
Broughton was very important. Those were very exciting. Then when

Miles: did the Poetry Center start? Ruth [Witt-] Diamant and the Poetry
Center brought Dylan Thomas out, you'll remember, and that made a
big difference.

Teiser: This is the Poetry Center at San Francisco State?

Miles: Yes. And we had Dylan Thomas here too twice, and that was extremely
exciting. So I'm sure he did much to foster the —

Teiser: You didn't consider Dylan Thomas retrogressive?

Miles: We_ didn't? No! No. But that's a good point, Ruth. I think he

was, but at the time we didn't know it. I think the reason he was
hailed with such total abandon by us all was because he wasn't all
that new and he wasn't all that hard to take. He was just new
enough so that we could feel he was new and just love him dearly,
because it wasn't hard to adapt. He just really swept the town.

Teiser: It seems to me his poetry is almost made for reading aloud, while

so much of poetry, particularly contemporary, is hard to understand
in a single reading.

Miles: Imagism, yes. Imagism wasn't meant for it. On the other hand,
something like Creeley, who's loved as a reader, but his poetry
doesn't look as if it was meant for reading aloud. But that very
chore-like ef f ortfulness is for him part of the pattern.

Teiser: I just wonder how much poets have written for the page and how much
they've written for the ear through this period — just what the
effect the popularity of so-called poetry readings have had upon the
actual creation of poetry.

Miles: Probably quite a bit. This relates to something again that would
take us backward. It's very complicated and I don't even know how
to talk about it too well. But yesterday, when we listened to
Martha Bacon Ballinger's talk, she said that her father was
interested in metrics in the twenties, and that she was still
interested in metrics. Well, I think that was an era of being
interested in metrics. I was too young to say I was interested in
metrics, but I was certainly interested in aloudness, or in sound of
the Vachel Lindsay type.

I think this went back to the tradition of [Charles Algernon]
Swinburne. Swinburne was very alive at UCLA in 1930 in many ways.
That is, he was really an operating, critical force, through Oscar
Wilde and Housman. And that sound! I thought there was nothing
greater in the world than the sound of Atalanta in Calydon. In the
Saint Nicholas I think a great deal of the poetry was very
interestingly metrical, with lots of dactyls and anapests; that is,

Miles: with a lot of that lyrical skipping sound that began, according to
George Stewart, with Coleridge and "Christabel."

Somebody should do a really interesting, exciting book on
anapests and dactyls and this whole lyrical skipping quality of
poetry up until imagism, and of course, through imagism and after,
because it didn't just die when imagists hit it. But Pound
certainly put a big brake on it, and Eliot still has got it very,
very strongly but pretended or sort of implied that he didn't; that
is, people didn't treat Eliot as a lyricist, they treated him as a
free verse writer.

But free verse was a great blow to this anapestic-dactylic
tradition. In high school, I was excited by the Saint Nicholas
tradition, and Walter de la Mare, A. A. Milne, Kipling — these are
what our ears heard, and that's what I like — the strongest beat
possible. The poems I memorized were like that, like G.K.
Chesterton's "Don Juan of Austria." I could rattle that thing off
with all its whatever-they-were (it's triple beat — dactyls).

This never did get squashed in me, and I've never been able to
be a free verse poet. That has put me apart, really, from a lot of
people a lot of the time, because I just cannot write free verse.
I don't even want to. And I've done lots of experiments with stress
verse and so on, and I don't write metrical verse, I guess. But
whatever I do, it's got much too strong a beat for an awful lot of
modern poets.

This leads into reading, in the sense of Pound and the
imagists, remembering that they all were still influenced by their
grandparents and still were being pretty lyrical — as Martha
Ballinger was saying, when she talked to Richard Aldington, she
found that he was just lyrical all over the place. (By lyrical, I
mean stressing a song-like quality.) And that they didn't get away
from that all the way they intended. But more and more through the
century we have, until we've come to something like Ginsberg, which
is a strong, chanting beat, and it isn't little songs at all.
That's what it shifted to, and a strong, chanting beat is for
rendition, for the more bard-like rendition. So it was Thomas and
Ginsberg and his whole bunch of friends and relations and
descendants who have stressed the chant as distinguished from the
song.

Teiser: Thomas?

Miles: Dylan Thomas; he was very strong on the chanting side.

You asked about other visiting authors — a subject in itself!
I think I remember Vachel Lindsay at high school — a lively chanting
auditorium full of students! Little at UCLA except Mary Austin, very

Miles: impressive when I was a freshman, and a Scots educator speaking on
Burns and asking for the power to let others see us as we see
ourselves — very impressive to me too! Then at Berkeley I just
missed a very famous visit by T.S. Eliot, but heard a charming
James Stephens who stretched his wings and crowed, and a very sober
Thomas Mann. Many of our visitors, tired after circuits of reading,
weren't sober and weren't as articulate as Dylan Thomas, so I can't
tell much about them. One evening [W.H.] Auden spent much time at
the faculty club reminiscing about plumbing facilities he had known,
and when my helper helped me up to leave, he insisted on helping me
too — so we flew, me off my feet, through a forest of dining tables
to the back stairs, down which Auden fell, while my helper got hold
of me just in time. Not daunted, Auden came to say goodbye, and we
had a nice correspondence after that.

The [Stephen] Spenders stayed for a year, and I went to keep
Natasha company while she practiced, all the doors closed, the piano
reverberating, stirring resonance. Once as Natasha was fixing
"vegs," a job she hated, we were asking Stephen about his editorial
work, and what would be his ideal coup. An article by Hitler, he
said, which surprised me.

[Robert] Frost and [Carl] Sandburg were pros as readers. Frost
could hold the whole Harmon Gym in the palm of his hand — "Think of
the Gods, think of the Titans," he said — "you remember the Titanic?"
Pure Frost. W.C. [William Carlos] Williams was old and ill when he
read, but sterling. Marianne Moore was lively, on the tip of her
toes to eight hundred students, illustrating rhythm with a fork and
pie plate, going on to hear Rexroth read to jazz somewhere in the
city. [Kenneth] Burke, [John Crowe] Ransom, [May] Swenson came, Al
Young, and Michael Harper.* Some came to my class and were
unforgettable in their grace. [Galway] Kinnell for one, and Roethke,
and Robert Peters. [Richard] Eberhart, Muriel Rukeyser, [Robert]
Lowell, and [William] Stafford were old friends and came more often.
The San Francisco group — [Gary] Snyder, [Robert] Duncan, [Michael]
McClure, [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti, [William] Everson, [Robert]
Creeley, later [Stan] Rice, laid them in the aisles, as did many of
the later benefit readings when the great names were taken over by
lesser but often talented and popular and experimental ones.

One other celebrity I enjoyed was Imogen Cunningham. Her
friend and mine, Griswold Morley, suggested she take my picture and
she arrived with all the briskness described in Elvis Richey's
essay, sitting me with a book and photographing flat out. I liked
the result, but Griswold said no, so she insisted on coming again
and tossing over me that very cape which Richey mentions, sort of
making me up — quite a contrast! We met various times, at the
Minerva Restaurant, at Blanche's, at Intersection, at friends', and
I felt I belonged to her in some way. In her downright way she was

*Added later: [Leopold Sedar] Senghor, [Jean] Genet, [Pablo] Neruda,
[Jorge Luis] Borges!

Miles: not mannered; she was fun, unlike many photographers I've met. I'm
not easy to picture, so only a few, like my cousin Estelle and niece
Jody and friend Betty Guy, and you interviewers can make it easy.

Oh, another remembrance I was thinking of — when I was about
nine I was reading a lot of adventure stories and told the family at
dinner that the natives threw their old and lame into the river. My
mother said not to overgeneralize; my father said some natives; one
of my brothers said some rivers. I remember each of us seemed
pleased with the way this came out.

[end tape 1, side 2; begin tape 2, side 1]
Teiser: Do you have a full bibliography?

Miles: Yes. Two or three people have made them, just as exercises, at
various schools.

Teiser: Do you have copies of them?

Miles: Yes, at the bottom of a barrel some place. [Laughing]

Teiser: It doesn't look as if the University library has all your work.*

Miles: An interesting point I can make there: The University library

couldn't care less about my work until Jim [James D.] Hart, because
the head of The Bancroft was a Spanish historian or something. I
couldn't even give them my stuff for years. It's only when I was
able to force it on Jim Hart [laughing] that I got some stuff in the
University library.

Teiser: He's wonderful at collecting material.

Ph.D. and Los Angeles

Teiser: Back to when you were working on your Ph.D. When did the idea of
your present dual career occur, or did it occur? Did it just
develop?

Miles: No, that is a really wrong concept. I never had a sense of a dual
career. When all these people in Los Angeles said, "Don't go up to

*This is an error; copies of all Miss Miles' s major works were later
found to be in the University library. See page 176.

Addressing a high school teachers'
group at John Swett High School,
Crockett. March, 1965

Photo by Ruth Teiser

Photo by Imogene Cunningham

Josephine Miles reading notes at interview of August 11, 1977

Photo by Catherine Harvoun

Miles: Berkeley and do graduate work; you write poetry, and that's enough."
I didn't think of that as a career and I didn't want to. I mean, I
had no desire to ever make poetry a career. I just wanted to write
poetry as an avocation or whatever you want to call that. You know,
as an avocation or — what's the word? — vocational [laughing], as a
recreation. I never wanted to do anything to systematize it in any
way, even to the degree of writing book reviews. I never had any
idea of wanting to be working in the literary world, and I was
quite defensive about that. So that's one reason I guess I did do
scholarship, because it felt far enough away from poetry that it
wouldn't intrude.

When I read the books that got me interested in analysis of
poetry in a scholarly way, that still felt far away. It was a way
of reading poetry to understand something about it, which I hadn't
understood before; that is, a sense of how an individual
individualizes himself in his use of language. It was this whole
interest in language that started growing up. But they were quite
separate in my mind. I mean they were intentionally separated in
that, whatever I did with my life, I didn't want to mix poetry up
with it in the sense of my writing.

So when I came up here saying, "I want to analyze the language
of poetry" (and nobody particularly knew how to help me do it), I
thought of that as quite technical. But I didn't have any
technique, and that was what was so hard because scholarship wants
a technique, but they didn't have any technique in this direction.
It was hard to invent one and nobody, as I say, was very good at
helping me because they didn't know what I was talking about in the
first place, and I wasn't very articulate.

Jim Caldwell, for example, who was so nice in poetry, said,
"Well, I don't know what you're talking about, and I certainly
wouldn't want you to work with me because I don't think you can do
what you're talking about."

This man Ben Lehman, whom Merritt Hughes recommended to me,
had some tremendous ability to listen and convert into practicality.
So I did a paper for him, when we finally got to our seminar. This
seminar now was all my old friends. This seminar had five people in
it, and it was a delight. For a year we had this seminar with Jim
Wortham and Mary Alice Jaqua, Bob Orem, and me, and a guy who later
became editor of Sunset magazine, Ken Cooperrider. We would meet at
Ben Lehman's house and read papers, and I kept struggling with this
seminar paper on Wordsworth's language.

They all kept saying, "Oh, no. You should write about
Wordsworth the man." And Ben said, "When are you going to get
around to writing about Wordsworth the man?" I said, "I don't want

Miles: to write about Wordsworth the man. He's a dumb man! I want to
write about Wordsworth's language." I'd already tried this, you
see, with Merritt Hughes in the seventeenth century, so I'd had
some practice there, and Wordsworth didn't fit the seventeenth
century at all. The questions you could ask about the seventeenth
century you couldn't ask about Wordsworth. This baffled me, and it
still baffles me, in that there's a student at Berkeley now — working
for someone else, not me, because I told her not to — who wants to
compare seventeenth century and nineteenth century lyricism. For
some reason, they're noncomparable in very curious ways.

So I was stuck with this, I remember, one whole summer. I did
nothing but work on this, and got nowhere. But gradually I
developed this idea that, very strangely enough, what Wordsworth
apparently is doing is talking about his feelings, which is what
imagists don't want you to do. Imagists just want you to imply,
present, not discuss. In other words, the tradition I had been
raised in, and the current tradition, was to imply rather than to
discuss. Wordsworth was discursive and discussed.

A book like George Moore's Pure Poetry talks about the poetry
of the present as being pure because it presents. He gives Wordsworth
as an example of how not to do it. So that was helpful.

So I wanted to ask the question, "What did Wordsworth think he
was doing? If we all agree that poetry shouldn't discuss and make
statements, what did Wordsworth think he was doing? Why did he
think it was okay?" This developed into a study of his statement of
feeling and why he was so explicit on his feelings. Wordsworth had
almost a formula, which was, "I listen to a bird sing, it makes me
feel very happy, and that makes me feel that the world is unified."
This kind of very bad but sort of basic summary that I'm giving of
the way he thought was interesting psychologically and went back to
Locke and the psychologists of the eighteenth century.

Now, I suppose, in a way, interestingly enough, I could say
something that hadn't occurred to me before. But now, in what you
might say was my fourth year of study at Berkeley, scholarship and
poetry did come together, not so much in terms of my writing of it,
but the understanding of it, in that I took a lot of seminars in
philosophy from Will [William R. ] Dennes and Stephen Pepper. They
were talking about eighteenth century philosophers, and those were
a very interesting background for Wordsworth. So I began seeing
how people thought, and things began to jell a little better for me.
I suppose the Middle Ages had been too far away.

I had read one marvelous book on the Middle Ages called the
Rhetoricians of the Thirteenth Century, edited by E. Faral, which
I do want to mention because I ran into that when I first came to

Miles: Berkeley and it was kind of a landmark in my life because it was

such a gold mine of difficult material. That was usable too even in
relation to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

So I started studying all of Wordsworth's poetry, and more and
more methodically saying how he stated his feelings — metaphorically
or literally or exclamatorily or in question or whatever. I
developed a method for doing this which involved counting, because I
wanted to show actual proportions, that he did very little else but
just state literally. I worked away on this in various forms. I
think I rewrote (speaking of determined) — Ben Lehman had me rewrite
one chapter on this thirteen times. I just never thought I could
get it clear enough, because I was always writing it too poetically.
I was always sort of dreaming away, and I was always using figures
of speech that led me down deceptive paths. He was patient enough
to really teach me to try to write this analytically, which I didn't
know how to do; I'd never learned freshman composition. All this
struggle through my graduate years had been that I really didn't know
how to do what I wanted to do, and nobody even listened to what it
was I wanted to do. So I had to learn their way, but that wasn't
satisfactory to me. So he was good not only for me but for others
in this way.

Then, while I was working on this, which would be a dissertation
gradually, I also took a seminar from — the Young Critics start now.
We petitioned to have our Young Critic friends to teach seminars.
Bud Bronson did one which was in the eighteenth century which was
just marvelous. So that came together too. The others found they
didn't like it; Jim Cline was miserable in the one he taught. But
the other two did some, but especially Bud did this first eighteenth
century one. And again there were people from Stanford and we all
worked very hard. It was really exciting.

Teiser: What aspects of the eighteenth century — just poetry?

Miles: Every aspect. He took it decade by decade, which I'm sure

influenced me later. He said, "Okay, now, there are ten of you.
Each of you pick one aspect of this decade and report on it." Like
the architecture, the music, the pottery, the social conflicts, and
so on, differently for each student for each next decade. This was
all chore work that we did, but it was chore work that we learned to
do well. I learned tremendously much how to do things in there. He
later used this for a massive bibliography of eighteenth century work.

At the same time (this would be 1935 to '36) I think I might now
mention something in relation to poetry, which I skipped over. There
was a new spirit in poetry in the land, relating to the seventeenth
century, to historicity, through Eliot and John Donne. Eliot was
having this influence. The Southern Review was established by Huey

Miles: Long and by Robert Penn Warren and by Cleanth Brooks. Anyway, good
people on the Southern Review. In 1940, the Kenyon Review was
established to follow. But anyway, the Southern Review wrote and
asked me for some poems. This was a big thing because it was going
to be a big new magazine, and very handsome and good looking and
full of zing and so on.

I sent them some poems, and they accepted them with enthusiasm.
That pushed me way, way over into a new world of poetry, which was
the seventeenth century. Strangely enough, I would define that as
falling in love with [W.B.] Yeats — a kind of metaphysical tradition
of Yeats and George Herbert and John Donne. I'm not sure how much
this changed me, but it certainly meant a lot to me consciously. It
was somewhat under their influence and the influence of another kind
of poet; I'm not quite sure who these would be. W.R. Moses was one
I used to correspond with. Clark Mills was another. I think this
happened to me more than it happened to my other colleague poets.
I don't think it happened to Elizabeth Bishop or so on.

Oh — I know. It happened to the next generation much more than
to me. It happened at Kenyon College, it happened to John Berryman,
Robert Lowell — that group. That's where it happened, with Ransom.
Some of the Winters people went along with some of this too. So for
me, consciously it was a big step. I don't know, as I say, actually
how it worked.

Then Ben Lehman decided to get married and go to Europe, and
that sort of pulled the rug out from under me again. So we decided
this time we would leave Berkeley and go home, and I could work on
my dissertation there if I wanted to — with some sense that maybe I
wouldn't, you know. My mother had had a very good time in Berkeley
because she was active in a club that she enjoyed, and she worked
very hard in the League of Women Voters. So by now she was
reconciled to Berkeley. But we still had this house that we owned,
and my brothers were now back there. There seemed no point in
staying here since there was nobody to work with, and I didn't know
whether I'd ever finish this thing, and just a lot of things pushed
us away .

I took my qualifying exam a little early (that's the big hurdle
that we had in those days) —

Teiser: Was that a written exam?

Miles: No, it was a three-hour oral,
hard to study for.

Teiser: Was that your final oral exam?

It was very easy to fail and very

Miles: Well, they still had a final in those days. Now it's the last one.
So I took that a little early, I forget the date, somewhere around
'36, the fall of '36 maybe. I took that, and I passed it rather
miserably because, for one thing, as I complained to them later,
they didn't ask me questions past about 1400. They just got stuck
in the Middle Ages. That was kind of unfair since that was not my
field. But I passed. I think only one man didn't want to pass me,
and that's because I didn't have the right answer to "What's the
theme of King Lear?" I said it was something like regal dominance,
and I was quoting — this is sort of fun, I think — I was quoting what
I'd learned from Lily Bess Campbell, the great Lear authority at
UCLA. I still remembered this "regal dominance."

Well, the professor here thought it was ingratitude, which I
gather is sort of a nineteenth century idea of the thing. [Laughter]
Regal dominance was just like a red flag to a bull for him; anybody
who said that King Lear was regal dominance, and didn't say it was
ingratitude, just couldn't pass that exam.

They finally stood around in the hall for a while and talked
him into letting me pass if I would go and let him give me a lecture
on ingratitude. That was kind of cute, because of the personal
conflict [laughing]. My UCLA training never worked very well up
here. They didn't agree, even on a subject like that. [Laughter]

My brother had just got through something at Stanford, a
master's degree in business administration or something. So we went
over to Julius' Castle and drank more martinis than we should' ve. I
remember, driving home, we confided to each other the point that
maybe other people didn't know it, but both of us really knew
everything — nothing left to learn! [Laughter] The problem might be
that our total knowledge wouldn't be appreciated, but it was clear
that we had everything there was to know.

So we went back home, dragging our theses behind us, and tried
to rescue this poor little house that had been wrecked by the renters
since we'd been gone. It raised the interesting question, which
everybody here raised to me — you can't go home again. People up here
don't go back there. You can't go home again. You talk about L.A.
still as home, but you can't go back there. UCLA was now a new place
because it was starting a graduate school and I didn't know anybody
in it, and your friends are all in social welfare or something, and
it didn't seem like a very good idea.

I had a talk with Ben Lehman and he said, "You should finish
this dissertation. After all, I'll be back from Europe some time.
I don't know when. Also, I never brought this up before, but it's
nonsense for you not to try to teach." I said, "Well, nobody has
ever said that before. I've never done it, and I've never tried to."

Miles: He said, "There's no reason why you shouldn't teach. When you get
your dissertation done, we'll work on getting you a job." That was
the end of that. I didn't take it too seriously because he was the
only one that said this.

But I did go home again, and it turned out to be one of those
happy surprises. I recommend one can go home again. I just had a
terribly good time for a couple of years, from '36 to '40, really
four years. We did over our house with the help of a nice young
architect and made it pleasanter to live in, and it was exciting to
do too. We went a lot to the Hollywood Bowl. My UCLA women friends
were still interesting. They were all working. We'd get together
every Saturday afternoon for lunch. We gave ourselves the name of
the Little Thinkers, and we would get together Saturday afternoons
for lunch at some restaurant, and we'd spend the whole rest of the
day and night talking, reading. These had been friends at UCLA,
and we still were reading — guess! Modern poetry? Absolutely not.
We were still reading Shakespeare. They never did climb out of that
UCLA syndrome.

Later I sent them Accent, which was a little magazine. They
never accepted. They were still historians in their approach. But
this was delightful to go back to that. They were great people.
Jewel Holder Brandt — some of them had been up here — was in social
welfare. Some of them were teaching. I can't remember who all was
doing what. But ever since, even when I go back now, they have all
just been so important in their fields. When I go back, I get
excited all over again about what those women are doing. They've
become authorities on geriatrics or insane asylums or ESP or politics
or psychedelics. They are a wonderful group.

It's a strange thing when I say "are" — most of them died within
the last couple of years, right after they retired. I've kind of
lost them. Oh, it's really amazing how few are left. Anyway, in the
past, just recent years, even going back there, it's been so
exhilarating. A really lucky group.

Anyway, that turned out to be fun, and I finished my thesis with
no trouble whatsoever, where I had just got kind of tired of it up
here. I shouldn't say "no trouble," but I mean I rattled it off.
Ben was away and I wrote to Jim Caldwell and said, "Okay, I'm sure
I've studied enough of Wordsworth here to be true about what I'm
saying. He's written fifty-three thousand lines, and I've done
thirty-two thousand thoroughly. Don't you think that's a fair
proportion?" Jim wrote back — typical academic side of Jim Caldwell,
academic side of poets — wrote back and said, "It's absolutely useless
unless you do all fifty-three thousand lines."

Miles: So I spent months and months getting up every line — and, you know,
no recognition there was such a thing as sampling in those days.
So I did all fifty-three thousand lines, put them in another chapter.
Then I got a letter from Ben Lehman saying that he had come back to
Berkeley and his marriage was on the rocks (he was married to Judith
Anderson, you know) — or, no, I shouldn't say that; it wasn't yet on
the rocks; she was still there. But that I should hurry up and come
up there and get my degree and work on teaching.

At least I thought I'd better come up and get the degree. It
was the time of the World's Fair here, and that was fun too. We
stayed at the Durant Hotel and went to the fair a lot — or that was
a year later — and passed my dissertation chapters around to
everybody, and everybody thought they were okay. Certainly no
trouble with the dissertation. So that was okay. Then it was a
terrible job, of course, to get it typed and collated and this and
that, and proofread. I spent hours in the library in the stacks
looking up footnotes. Merritt Hughes had been very scornful of my
footnotes because I tended to put down the page that preceded the
page it was on. I mean, for some reason I would read the left-hand
page number rather than the right-hand page number. So I had to be
awfully careful about my footnotes.

It rained the whole time; went to Wing King's for a five o'clock
35C dinner. Got all that chore done and got that thesis in, and got
four wisdom teeth pulled because I never expected to come here again
and there was a nice dentist here. So I got my wisdom teeth pulled
and my thesis done at the same time, and went home for good, because
I thought they were crazy about the job situation.

Ben and others said, "No, we'll get you a job at Mills. That's
a nice, quiet school, and you can come and go there. Or Occidental,
which is down your way, if you insist."

Meanwhile, I had decided that what I would do, going back to
J.S.P. Tatlock, is I would be a research scholar and work at the
Huntington [Library], I got an entree to the Huntington. I was
going to go out there, commute, three days a week. I knew the
research I now wanted to do, in nineteenth century pre-Raphaelites,
and I was just going to chug away at the Huntington until I got some
books done. I wasn't thinking about money, but I was going to be a
scholar. I had developed this protective line at Berkeley because
I enjoyed graduate study more than my friends did because they had
to get jobs. I would say, "Look, try to be a little more like me:
Just try to do it because it's interesting. Try not to always
worry about the job." I tried explaining, "You have time to read
this book. It's an interesting book. Don't feel it's not going to
be bread and butter." This was a kind of protection thing — that I'm
a research scholar. I'd picked up this phrase. So I went to the
Huntington to do this.

Miles: I hated the Huntington. The Huntington was all the things I'd been
fighting all my life. There it was again, all this pomposity and
guarded snobbery and so on. That's not fair to the Huntington;
when I'm off-balance, that's the way I feel things are. I worked
out there three days a week, and the pages would come up to me and
say, "You say you want the following seven books. Now, five of
these are unopen and uncut. Do you really want them that much?"
I didn't have enough confidence to say, "Yes." I'm glad I didn't,
because they're probably still unopened and uncut, and they've
gained an infinite amount [laughing] of monetary value that way.
But that side of bibliography didn't interest me, you know.

So I struggled along with the Huntington. This was a settled
thing that I was supposed to do, and it clearly wasn't working out
well. Jim Wortham now had become an instructor at Occidental. He
said, "Oh sure, we'll gradually get you in. I'll take you to a
bunch of concerts over there, they will get to know you, and then
we'll get you into Occidental." Earl Lyon had been a professor at
the University of Utah and was now at Fresno. At Utah he'd met
Lila Brimhall, who was one of the great Utah families, who was an
actress. She came down to act at the Pasadena Community Playhouse.

All the lights went on again for me, which meant the Pasadena
Community Playhouse, and I remind you that I wrote a play for the
Latona Avenue School. Now I suddenly realized that was my career,
to write plays, not to do research at the Huntington.

Jim and Earl and Mary Alice and I went — I don't know how this
fits into the Little Thinkers, but every Saturday matinee — in summer
probably — we went to the Pasadena Playhouse to hear the plays and
hear Lila. Lila was an absolutely marvelous, dynamic actoring-type
woman who did the mother roles. She was the size of a barrel, with
a loud booming voice, a great enthusiasm for life. We'd go to the
plays and the matinees, and then we'd go out to dinner with her,
and just had tremendous fun.

Gradually it occurred to me that maybe I could study playwriting.
My friend Marjorie Thorsen was now head of the MGM reading department,
and she said, "Well, you need more practice. You've never written a
line in your life. Why don't you write some plays?" The way I could
do this was to listen in on rehearsals at the playhouse.

Meantime, something I've skipped in all this is that in the
summers we had a cottage on the outside of Malibu, the side that
doesn't cost. Our cottage cost $50 a year rent on the land, and $300
worth of lumber, as my father built it. So it was a very sleazy,
unenvironmentally acceptable cottage. But we loved it dearly, and
we spent a lot of time down there. I thought I could go down there
and write my plays.

Miles: Then somebody suggested, "Why don't you talk to Gilmore Brown,
who's head of the Playhouse, and see if he'll let you come and
listen to rehearsals," which seemed like a beautiful idea. So I
applied to that and asked him. None of them had ever thought of
that. They did have trainees in acting, but they'd never had a
trainee in writing.

This started a whole new thing I was going to do. Now where
am I in time? You asked me to think about — oh yes, now I'm home
with my Ph.D. , right? You asked me about a fellowship I had.

Teiser: Yes, the Phelan Award.

Miles: That was not that Phelan. It was just a local campus Phelan. It
was just $500, to write poetry.

Teiser: Oh, it wasn't the full year of writing.

Miles: No, no. But I know what I did do. Yes, I know. Before this

playwriting bit, or during the same time, I decided to apply for an
AAUW fellowship because George Potter, who was a very nice man here,
suggested I should write a — he was on my dissertation committee and
he said that it was clear that a certain book should follow that
dissertation, which was very creative of him and very good, and I
agreed. So I wrote, since I was going to be back in L.A. , to apply
for an AAUW fellowship to write this book. Lily Bess Campbell, who
was still at UCLA, supported me in doing this. (By the way — well,
I won't go into that. I was going to say that for a while I thought
of finishing up my Ph.D. at UCLA, but they figured out [laughing]
I'd have to do it all over again.)

Anyway, she supported me in that. I guess a woman by the name
of Helen White was on the AAUW. I got the fellowship and wrote that
book during that year of '38 to '39, or '39 to '40, I guess roughly
maybe both. Anyway, I met Helen White too, who was at the Athenaeum
during that time, and had a nice talk with her about scholarship.
She didn't think I could get a job. She thought that was foolish of
those gentlemen up at Berkeley to think I could get a job. I mention
this because this was as a whole true of women, and I've never quite
understood why that was.

I did an interview. Ben Lehman — this is a very strange
afternoon. I came up to visit (this is maybe when I went to the
World's Fair). Ben Lehman asked me to come up to have an interview
with Aurelia Henry Reinhardt of Mills. The Occidental College thing
hadn't worked out. Ben had a lot of influential friends, and he
persuaded Remsen Bird to interview me for a job at Occidental.
Remsen Bird couldn't have been more unhappy, and so he spent his
time talking about scandals in various literary families he had known.

Miles: We didn't talk about me at all, or jobs, or anything. He said, "Get

in touch with me later." Well, it was embarrassing, very embarrassing.

They also made me go to May Cheney and get a dossier made up,
which was very embarrassing because she didn't think I should try
this. I don't know what it was about the women; I've never understood
that.

Anyway, Ben had a party for me and Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, and
Judith Anderson was the hostess. That was really some party, with
Judith Anderson's two dachshunds, and me in a hat, and a lovely fire
and great refreshments. Otherwise, it was very, very chilling, the
put-down by Reinhardt. So Ben, having seen with his own eyes that I
wasn't sabotaging myself, but something wasn't going too well in this
interview bit, decided that maybe they should give me some practice
at Berkeley so that they could say that I could teach because
everybody said, apparently, as he told me later, that I was too
delicate to subject to the rigors of teaching. That was the phrase
that they all used.

I also had an anthropologist friend by the name of Martha
Beckwith. I don't know whether this was then or later, but anyway
she thought I should teach at Smith. She persuaded the head of the
English Department at Smith to interview me, who used the same
phrase, though this was a couple of years later — that I was too
delicate to subject to the rigors of teaching.

Ben decided that they should subject me to those rigors and
then prove that I was still alive. But he didn't want to do this
too drastically, so first of all he persuaded Earl Lyon, who was at
Fresno, to let me come and teach a few classes at Fresno. Well
obviously, I mean, you know I could teach. I mean, this was
something I had no doubts about personally at all; I just had
doubts that anybody would be interested. But I didn't have any
doubts. I had plenty to say to Earl's classes, and they had plenty
to say to me, and we had no troubles whatsoever.

That was very good of Earl to help me out on that, and then he
reported to Ben Lehman that it was okay. I don't know what the whole
story is. Part of the whole story is that Carlyle Maclntyre had been
transferred to Berkeley because he'd had a fight with Lily Bess
Campbell. He'd been transferred by Robert Gordon Sproul, and as I
understand it, they figured that if they could have one poet in the
department, they could have two poets in the department. Oh yes,
and my book [Lines at Intersection] by this time was published by
Macmillan, and it had been actually reviewed in Time magazine, and
I don't think that did any harm. That was an odd — I don't know who
did it. Anyway, now I could be called a poet, and they could say
they'd like to have two poets in the department, representing
different schools of thought, the Whitman school and the John Donne
school (which is the way they looked at it).

Miles: So they worked on this. Will Dennes in Philosophy was very, very
helpful, and Jim Caldwell, and so forth. I don't know how they
worked it out. It took some finagling, I imagine, but they decided
to ask me for a year. You probably wouldn't believe this, but one
day in the mail, one morning in the same mail there was a letter
from Gilmore Brown of Pasadena Playhouse saying that yes they would
allow me to come there and be an apprentice in playwriting if I
would promise to come regularly every day, and a letter from the
English Department at Berkeley asking me whether I'd like to come
and try teaching for a year. Long pause. That was such a vivid
experience to me. I just sat there looking at those two letters.
I don't know what you think about these two roads, but for me there
was no problem. It wasn't that I wanted to do one equally to the
other, or vice versa. By this time, I was so imbued with what I'd
been spending my time on, versus what would have been a wild and
woolly experiment, that I didn't hesitate. So I decided to come to
Berkeley.

My poor mother! Here we went through this all over again —
selling the house, coming up here again. It was really hard on her;
that move was really hard on her. Both of us had renewed all our
friendships, very good friends in Southern California, so we both
felt very, very sad about leaving that time. But I just decided,
"This is something I've got to try."

Gilmore Brown bought our house at the beach, which was funny.
That was purely coincidental. We had an ad or something, and he
answered the ad. So I got to meet him; I'd never even met him up
till then. Mother gave him an A-frame pipe to put on the chimney,
and I've never forgotten the gingerly way Gilmore Brown handled
that A-frame. So that was the end of Gilmore Brown and Pasadena
Playhouse.

Though I might jump ahead to say that in the 1950s I did write
a couple of plays, and one of them was staged at Cal, in the Studio
Theater, in a triptych. Three of us had written one-act plays, and
Bill [William I.] Oliver staged them as a triptych. Mine was called
House and Home or something like that, some domestic title. They
were a really big success. The whole series was a success. They
kept renewing them, which they normally don't do at Cal. People
standing in line way down to Oxford Street. They put mine on KRON.
KRON came, and I went over to KRON and watched them adjust it to
television. It was just a major event — 1960 I think this was — a
major event in my life! And also wiped out all regrets and
hesitations I might have had, because I realized I couldn't stand
the strain of seeing people interpret my characters their way. I
would have been absolutely chicken in the drama. As much as I loved
what Bill did, and as much as I loved the results and what KRON did,
and all the applause and all the success, those weren't my characters.
I was spoiled by the fact that you don't know what readers are doing
with your poetry. Oh, it was torture!

Miles: So that was a happy ending to that.

Teiser: Lucky you didn't write for the movies. It would have been worse.

Miles: Wouldn't it have been! Oh, I often wondered what I would have done.
Maybe I could have strengthened my heart. I still am friends with
a young man and woman who played the major parts in my play. They
teach at Irvine now, and I go to see them every time I'm down there,
and they still laugh about this. They knew they weren't doing it
my way.

Teiser: That rounds out your career as a playwright. [Laughter]
Miles: And it brings me on the verge of coming back to Berkeley.
Teiser: My word! What an exciting few years those were!

Miles: Weren't they! Yes, very tense, very intense. Of course, I'd

bottled up quite a bit, just as in that year I'd had at home when I
was lying on my back all that time. I suppose I had a lot of energy
saved up. My leg had got well enough so that I could walk about the
way I do now. Well, I shouldn't say that because I was much
stronger until these last ten years. But I mean I had about the
same kind of motion. I could walk around the campus — with help —
and I could go shopping in Oakland, and things like that. So I did
have lots of energy and a certain degree of —

Teiser: Independence?

Miles: — ways to spend that energy. The word "independence" I've often
thought of, because independence today, especially in relation to
disablement, means physical independence or personal independence.
It's very curious, but really, neither of those crossed my mind
very much. I never really got a break on the physical independence.
The doctors that I'd had that put me into hospitals with stretchers
and paraplegic devices were so awful that I was scared off of that
and I never came back to it at a more advanced stage. The most
advanced state I ever came back to was just some physical therapy.
But I never got any encouragement in that direction, and as far as
the personal, I think the death of my father and the fact that my
mother couldn't get a job and was so interested in the League of
Women Voters and all that meant that it was perfectly easy for us
to live together and for her to help me, which she did till she was
eighty. We always got along. We didn't agree on interests or
approaches on things, but we really got along very well. So that
kind of dependence didn't bother me, and my mother gave a sense of
her own freedom very earnestly and gallantly.

Miles: My independence began to be, to get enough money, to earn enough

to be independent that way, and to give my brothers the money that
my father had left for me. That was fun — to be able to pay them
back. What should have been by theory inheritance, I was able to
pay that back. So that's the way my sense of independence went.
But it's funny, isn't it? Today I'm almost embarrassed when I think
how little I've done with electric wheelchairs. I feel a little
gap in my life that I haven1 t cooperated with this whole mechanical
world more.

Teiser: Just think — you might have used a calculator too on counting words
in Wordsworth.

Miles: Oh, I went very deeply into that when I was teaching here. George
Potter, who was then chairman, said at one point, "You use
concordances so much, and so much counting, you ought to be able to
handle this sixty-three shoeboxes of cards for the Dryden concordance
which Guy Montgomery left when he died." That led me into years of
studying computers, and I did make a computer concordance. (This
is later. We'll come back to that.* That's much later.) But yes
I did, I did go into that kind of machinery.

[end tape 2, side 1]

*See page 124.

INTERVIEW III — 21 July 1977

Beginning to Teach
[begin tape 1, side 1]

Teiser: Did you ever correct papers or work as a teacher's aide?

Miles: No. As I explained, I guess I never wanted to push into that area
and be rejected; I don't know. Then my father's attitude was so
nonpressurized, that is, that I wouldn't work, that I just never
did. I don't know. I would 've liked to; it wasn't that I didn't
want to. But I used to explain to my friends how lucky I didn't
have to because I could be interested in things in an altruistic
way and didn't have to apply everything to meal ticket and job
getting and so forth, and that was true. When I really got
interested in the work, I could do a lot that I never would have
had time for if I'd had to do more teaching assisting and all those
things. Looking back, it's rather absurd because of course now
everybody has to teach in practice. But not in those days. I just
felt too much on the fringes of things. I was having a hard enough
time getting anybody even to accept my papers, much less correct
other people's papers. [Laughter]

Teiser: George Stewart, in his book on the English Department,* said that
when he started teaching, they just said, "Go ahead and teach."
Nobody told him what to do or anything.

Miles: That's true. The first batch of papers I had as an instructor

I really didn't know what to do with, and I asked George Hand, who
was head of freshman English, if I could read a batch of his papers
to get the drift, idea. He was really shocked and very angry. He
said that the way he corrected his papers was none of my business.
We younger — this was now in 1940 when I was first teaching — we

*The Department of English of the University of California on the
Berkeley Campus. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1968.

Miles: younger instructors (really I was the only instructor, but the

teaching assistants and I) would get together and correct papers.
It was not done in the department. The department was very, very
lofty; it didn't bother with us chickens very much.

Mr. Bronson, until his retirement, I think he really felt that
any ostensible open discussion of ways and means of anything was
obscene. It was just not the gentlemanly way you worked!

Teiser: At Stanford, what little experience I had there, which was about
this same period, I think nobody in the English Department would
have told anybody how to teach because that would 've sounded as
if they were in the Education Department, and that was anathema.

Miles: That's part of it. Well, to tell you the truth, that probably

influenced me. This first sophomore teacher I had at UCLA, who was
so big on pasting straight — she was the woman for teacher education.
By one of those ironies, the way you do it — well, no education
[courses] in method for me ever, because she was so bad, I thought,
that I steered clear of education from then on.

Teiser: I think there was a legitimate split, wasn't there, between method
and subject?

Miles: Well, I don't know. To me it's not legitimate, at all. I think it
was just unawareness of method, or assumption of method in a
limited way. It was interesting. It was ironic because Bud
Bronson was one of the great pioneers in new methods, in the use of
computers in his ballad studies. They never have been followed up.
He was a pioneer without a following, and I think this is why. I
mean he did a beautiful job. The other day I met him and begged him
to tell somebody about this. It's published and it's known now, but
he always felt it was something he just knows, pretty weird stuff,
and he wouldn't talk about it much. Very strange.

Teiser: Let me go back to the possible teaching at Mills.

Miles: I think that's when the Lehmans realized that they weren't going to
get me into a select women's college. I think before that they
thought, or he thought, that I'd been stalling or preventing
something in that way, but I think then he realized that it wasn't
my doing; that they were really taking a line about this "too
delicate to teach" that they really believed.

A nice aftermath of that story is that they later got a woman
to be head of the English Department there who had polio.

Teiser: They also gave you an honorary degree.*

*Litt.D., 1965.

Miles: Yes. So in one sense the next generation sort of benefited from my
experience.

Teiser: Then you were speaking of teaching at Fresno. How long did you
teach there?

Miles: Oh, that was just a day or two.
Teiser: Oh, you mean just a day or two?!?!

Miles: Yes. My friend Earl Lyon, Ben Lehman asked him to invite me to a

class. So I just went up and spent a couple of evenings in Fresno,
as we often did because it broke the journey between here and L.A.
So I went over to his classes I guess one nice, hot, summer day in
May, or something like that. Went to a couple of classes. They
were lots of fun, because he was a very nice, humane person, and
the classes were very lively. So there were no problems.

Teiser: Did you talk to the class? Did you teach them — ?

Miles: I forget what I talked about. You know, the best thing to do with
a bunch of people is to throw a couple of ideas into their midst
and then let them develop them. That's what I usually do. I forget
now what it was all about.

Teiser: But by the end of it, you were experienced. [Laughter]

Miles: Yes. Well, you know, they proved I didn't fall off my chair or

something like that. Or I think that Mills people and other places
maybe thought the students might be afraid of me; that the students
would be panicked or something — who knows? It was kind of
experimental .

The first class I was going to teach, it was very nice when
they did start me out at Berkeley when I came up in the fall of
1940 to try it. They just said, "Bring a box of books and a suit
case, and don't plan to stay because it may not work." But the
nice thing was they gave me a regular load. I mean, they just
didn't give me one class, they gave me four classes! [Laughter]
Two on Monday, Wednesday, Friday afternoon, and two on Tuesday,
Thursday, and Saturday morning at nine o'clock. That was the
program they gave the new people, and I thought that was really
smart of them.

I remember my first class was going to be Monday at two, or
something like that. Jim Caldwell just accidentally dropped by as
I was eating lunch and said, "What are you going to do in your first
class?" I said, "I have no idea." He said, "What are you going to
teach for your first class?" That was a freshman IB, and I said,

Miles: "I'm going to start out with Hamlet," and he said, "That's a good
idea. A good way to start Hamlet is to ask the students to read a
little of it aloud and see if they're getting the meaning
underneath the words, so to speak." I thought that was just so
nice of him to just drop by like that — "I was just walking by and
thought you'd like to talk about your first class." Wasn't that
great?

I wasn't really afraid or anything, but I did question a bit.
It's true, my brothers said, "No, Jo, you can't teach because you
can't control the students. It needs a heavier hand than you have.
You have to be able to stand up and kind of walk over and lean on
them before they'll stop reading the Daily Calif ornian." [Laughter]
So mainly we did think it wouldn't work.

I did have a little consciousness of this back row, which in
those days the football team would sit in and also would read the
Daily Californian during the hour. So I worried a little bit about
that, but not too much. I asked a couple of fellows in the back row
to read the first scene (that's the "Halt! Who goes there?" scene
in Hamlet) and, as Jim Caldwell well knew, they read it very wrong
because they were just reading words on the page. As I well knew,
they were smart enough to realize themselves that something had
gone wrong, so one of the other guys in the back row said, "Hey,
wait a minute. That doesn't make any sense." So they themselves
went back over it and read it again right. When you're lucky,
that's what you get for a good class, and it was a very good class.
I had no more problems.

The back-row syndrome lasted maybe eight or ten years, and I
had a little bit of trouble in the oath controversy: the boys in
the back row would go around challenging people on their attitudes
toward Russia. So we had little classroom fights about loyalty and
so on, but it wasn't anything very much.

Then, after the war, when the new paperback texts started
coming out, it was a whole new world. I really think that was a
revolution, when we didn't have to read out of these big old black
texts, and anybody, even a fraternity brother, could buy a nice,
new paperback. You'd get challenges from the back row, "Well, that's
not what Bosanquet says," or "That's not what Berenson says." (Those
were a couple of new paperbacks.) So no more back-row problems.

I got a little ahead of what you were asking.

Teiser: It's much to the point. The first classes that everyone is given

are compulsory. Were those boys in the back row there because they
had to be?

Miles: Yes, 1A and IB. I had it for a couple of years; I forget how long.
For two or three years I just taught freshman English 1A, IB. Two
of each.

Teiser: Everybody had to take it?

Miles: Well, not everybody, but certain colleges and departments required
it, enough so that there was a huge load. The English Department
was very fine in asking all its faculty members to teach freshmen,
rather than pushing them off on a special crew. That has been one
of our great redeeming features ever since.

Teiser: From what I hear, you must have always had rapport with students.
You must have never felt that there was any particular gap.

Miles: I think that's true. I've had a couple of classes, one way back

somewhere in the fifties, and one last quarter, which I just didn't
get along with at all. I don't know why. It's just kind of a
chemistry. I don't mean "at all," but it was just hard going, and
they weren't particularly illuminated by each other or me, or me by
them. Just pulling in different directions. But as I remember,
two out of all those years is not too bad. I mean many students
didn't like me, but that's more individuals. As far as the class
goes, the class went all right. The first poetry class I taught
was maybe about the third year. One of the kids in the class was a
potter or something. Anyway, she made me a little figurine which
the class got together and gave to me as a present. That seemed to
indicate that we were friendly [laughing] , and — shows the other side
too — it was a picture of a very recalcitrant horse, like Pegasus
(like that old drawing on Poetry) , with his feet braced backwards,
all braced backwards, but his nose kind of over the brink, and I
(or a figure of sort of a peasant woman) behind him, with hands flat
up against his rump, just pushing with all my might. And this was
called, "You can lead a horse." [Laughter] So I guess that covers
the situation.

Teiser: In your poetry classes, I can see how your students might have been
of a mind and could get together for such a project. In your other
classes, did you feel that you generated among them by your
teaching a certain group feeling?

Miles: Well, hmm. It takes a certain amount of time to get a class to a
point where it does work together. But I don't think you can
generate it. You may make the occasion for it. I don't think you
could create it where it didn't exist in any class. In other words,
maybe it takes three or four weeks. My criterion would be when,
before class, in the five minutes or so when everybody's gathering
for class, if they were all talking to each other about the material
of the class, they then had got together. And of course that doesn't
happen right away, or usually doesn't happen right away. Then I
would just be there, and often they would just keep on talking. So
then they were self-starting.

Miles: But there again I had a certain amount of great luck in that, I
think in one of my 1A classes, there were two of the brightest,
smartest, best people I've ever had. They sort of taught that
class with me. It wasn't that they were painfully above the rest;
it was just that they were marvelous people. I've lost track of
them now, but I have kept in touch with a lot of those students.
Since I've taught about five thousand students, I hate to think how
many [laughing] I still know the whereabouts of.

At the end of 1A, I suggested that they not take IB from me
because I felt that I didn't know all that much that they could
spread it over a year. I thought they might as well go get
somebody else. Perhaps this was a hidden slyness on my part. It
now makes me laugh to think. At the time it was perfectly generous,
as far as I knew. But the thing is that these students went on to
IB and were terribly good, and guess who got the credit! [Laughter]
I think I probably developed more of a reputation for being a good
teacher because they came to me that way; it wasn't that they
learned that much from me.

Teiser: And did you still carry remnants of the conclusion that you and

your brother had arrived at, that you knew everything in the world?

Miles: I think that was mostly that night. Yes, that was mostly that night.

Teiser: [Laughter] It's easier to teach if you feel you do.

Miles: Oh — you mean because you're not defensive about things?

Teiser: Well, no. I mean if you feel yourself omniscient, I'm sure that —

Miles: There's a kind of teaching that you might relate to that, but that's
not the kind I ever did, where you lecture and tell them things.
Now that we have evaluation of classes, we have one teacher in our
department about whom the students say over and over and over and
over, "He's afraid of students. He's afraid of discussion. He
doesn't like to talk about anything but Shakespeare. But he's so
great on Shakespeare, who cares?" Now, that wouldn't be me; I
would never be that great on anything, but on the other hand I
wouldn't be afraid of discussion or talking to the students either.
I have less often taught informational survey courses and more often
taught writing courses or reading courses or courses where I was
trying to teach the students how to do something well, and that's
different.

When the war came along in the forties, then I had a good
opportunity to teach different people's courses as they went off to
war. So I taught a lot of courses I otherwise wouldn't have taught.
I was not very good at that, because I was supposed to be telling

Miles: them all about American literature. But I was more, again, trying
to teach them how to read an American poem or something.

I remember, on one mid-term, in a class of eighty or so
students, one of the questions I asked was, "Describe the poem
'The Chambered Nautilus'." I got eighty blank papers. That was
not an orthodox question in that time. You were supposed to say,
"The author of 'The Chambered Nautilus' was So-and-so and he lived
in so-and-so, and the poem was about so-and-so." To ask to
describe it was just — we had not yet developed a methodology for
criticism in those days.

So I was really part of doing something new in teaching, I
mean new in a sense, which wasn't related to lecturing,
informational lecturing. Eventually I decided I ought to try a
really informational lecture course, so I made up one in the
history of the lyric (this was some ten years later) , and I worked
out an informational course in the history of the lyric. It lasted
for about two weeks. [Laughter] Then I developed a way of having
Fridays be the students' day, and Friday the students would give
information on some poet they had chosen, some lyricist they had
chosen. They were so bad at this that I then had to develop a
method. They wrote, say, every other two weeks, so they wrote five
of these Friday papers, and they were so bad! Gradually they got
better, and so gradually I learned to give them what we called a
cumulative paper in which they really added up everything they'd
said in the other five, or, what most of them chose to do as an
alternative, threw all the other five away and wrote a new short
one on their poet.

Teiser: On the same subject?

Miles: On the same poet. I tell you this detail because this is where my
interest lay, in teaching people how to do things, not in giving
them data. I did give them a lot of data on the lyricists, but
still I could only stand it [laughing] for two hours out of three.

Teiser: You wouldn't mind other people giving them data?

Miles: Well, if I did, there was nothing I could do about it. [Laughter]

Teiser: If you hadn't been given data, or gained it yourself, you wouldn't
have had the basis for teaching that you did, or would you?

Miles: That's an interesting question. This goes back quite a ways. I've
written a poem on the subject. Would you rather hear me, or read
the poem?

Teiser: What is the title of the poem?

Miles:

It's probably called "Teaching." [Laughter]
hasn't been published yet.

I don't remember. It

Teiser:
Miles:

Briefly, when I was in high school, there were two very
handsome boys across the street from me, one of them going to Cal
Tech, and the other a young married man who was working for Dun
and Bradstreet. Both of them started flunking out of school or
their job because they couldn't write a decent report. So they
came over to ask me to help them. My motivation was high, and I
was able to help them, and they both did very well. So that's how
I knew I'd like to teach.

In fact, I used to say, to protect myself, since I wasn't asking
asking anybody to give me a job, I used to say that my ideal would
be to teach at Cal Tech because they didn't have any women teach
there, and I knew there was no problem of reality. I really would
have enjoyed — I did enjoy teaching this young scientist —

How to write?

— how to analyze Shakespeare, how to talk about Shakespeare. So I
really was interested in helping people read or write or whatever,
more than telling them. Now you say about people telling me. If
you think of UCLA, these two brilliant teachers I had were
brilliant lecturers. But the one for whom I learned to write
papers a little bit was a very quiet soul, Carl Downes, who never
even got promoted. He was the one who made us do a lot of writing.
Then when I came to Berkeley, as you remember, I was very badly
off for a couple of years because everybody was giving us lectures,
and they were fascinating, but I wasn't learning how to write, how
to do graduate work. Professor Brodeur would pace up and down for
the whole hour, and the subject was Germanic Romantic Poetry,
which was really marvelous. I learned a great deal from it, but
I didn't learn how to study Germanic Romantic poetry except as he
went his way. He was the one who made the compromise with me and
said, "You try it your way, and then if that doesn't work, try it
mine." That's when I finally did try it his way and learned how to
do it his way.

But it was Ben Lehman that taught all of us how actually to
work, and to write. In his example, we had an example of a real
teacher, from my point of view — except I couldn't have done it his
way. He shamed people and he bullied them and all that — things I
couldn't do. But it was very effective, the way he made it work
with some. Very effective. I guess shaming and bullying doesn't
hurt as much as it seems on the surface because you realize the man

Miles: is caring about you and is eager to have you do better. He didn't
particularly do that with me, but he did that with many others. I
watched him do it, and I resented it. I didn't think — I would
never teach like him.

There was a whole shift, a real kind of revolution in graduate
studies, or in English studies, right around then, too, and I was
an -early part of that. As I've said, at UCLA and to a great degree
at Berkeley, graduate literary studies were sources and analogues
of whatever — sources and analogues of the Faerie Queene, sources
and analogues of "The Cook's Tale," sources and analogues of
Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode." This meant, "Who influenced him,
and what other poems are like them?" This was historical material
on which you could lecture and on which you could do research.

But in college, my group of friends, the ones of us who studied
together for the comprehensive and so on, went around asking
ourselves, "Yes, but how do you talk about a poem? What do you say
about it? There it is. We like it or we don't like it. What can
we say about it?" This may be amazingly baffling to you who know
the I. A. Richards tradition, but we just didn't know what to do!
The professors we asked said, "Just do what we're doing." Well,
but what they were doing was giving us results of full research.
We just meant that if you look at a poem for the first time, how
do you know what to say?

I. A. Richards 's book called Practical Criticism came out in
about 1924, somewhere in the early twenties. We finally got hold
of that and read it, so we went around saying, "Aha! We have a
little piece of a panacea here. You ask about the form of the
poem, the style of the poem, the mood of the poem, and the content."
This became a little formula. Now, that isn't quite Richards, but
that's one I remembered that we used, that we adapted from him.
When I got to Berkeley, that hadn't come up here at all, as neither
place was very much up-to-date on current literature or on current
criticism; it was still historic. But Berkeley was much more
up-to-date than UCLA was.

There was a young man here teaching by the name of Gordon
McKenzie, one of the Boy Critics so-called. See, we thought of
all these — these were so much more critical than the UCLA people
that we felt them all critics, though they weren't very. Bud
Bronson wasn't at all, really. But Jim Caldwell wrote book reviews
for the Saturday Review, and Gordon taught a seminar in criticism
that everybody said was marvelous (I never happened to take it) and
he wrote a book on criticism. So it gradually started going through
our skulls that there were critical methods, and there were ways to
talk about poems.

Miles: Then I. A. Richards 's book, Practical Criticism, which is still very
lively and interesting, reported giving poems to Cambridge students
and asking them to discuss them. Students were helpless and gave
what he called cue responses; that is, responded by: "The first
line in this poem has a barn in it, and I don't like barns," and
that kind of thing. [Laughter]

This all was a new glimmer on the horizon. Then in the early
forties came out Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry, which is
a landmark in critical teaching. Well, we were ahead of that
landmark at Berkeley, but nevertheless that's the book we used to
work from, and that swept the country. But Gordon McKenzie and I
had already started cutting articles out of the Southern Review
and the Kenyon Review. You see, these new reviews were coming in,
part of the same thing; the critical review was also a new venture,
in a way. Of course, you always had the Atlantic [Monthly] and
Harper's, but they had become more social discussion. These [newer
journals] were just focused on literary criticism. So this again
was a new phenomenon, at least as we felt.

A little later, when Mark Schorer came out, and Ben Lehman
was now chairman — this was in the middle of the forties — all the
members of the department now said, "Our students don't know how
to talk about poems." It took like five years to get rolling. The
whole department voted — I guess he inquired among them and they all
said they would like to have a revision of the whole department
curriculum with some relation to criticism.

Teiser: Were you implying that they would not have said that earlier?

Miles: No, they wouldn't. This was postwar, and even in 1940 they

wouldn't have said it. Nor would anybody have asked them. Ben
was characterized by asking them. So he made a committee of
George Stewart, Jim Caldwell, and me to set up a new English major,
including criticism. So among others we set up a course called
Introduction to the English Major, English 100, which prospered
for many years, which was methods and principles of literary
criticism. In those days there was no textbook, and there was no
Xerox either. So Gordon and I had to put on reserve in the
library the articles we had torn out of journals. It was that
primitive.

Then Harcourt Brace asked Mark [Schorer] to do an anthology
of criticism, sensing that this was a new thing. Mark, who
realized that we had all the clippings [laughter] — he had the
invitation and we had the clippings — suggested that really it
should be done up by the English 100 staff. We tried that — there
were about six of us — but it didn't work too well because we were
too different in what we knew. Finally it was just agreed that
Mark and Gordon and I would do it. That was a delightful year or

Miles: two that we had, '47 to '48 or something like that, making up this
anthology of literary criticism, which sold steadily for like
twenty years, which is far longer than the life of the average
anthology.

Teiser: What's it called?

Miles: It's called Criticism; The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment.
The phrase "Schorer, Miles, McKenzie" got to be quite well known.
Often in my later life somebody would meet me and say, "Oh, I know
you!" And I'd think, "Aha! A reader of my poetry." And then
they'd say, "Schorer, Miles, McKenzie." [Laughter]

Teiser: What year did it come out?
Miles: Forty-eight, I think.

Teiser: I don't find it in Stewart's book on the Department of English.
He has a selected list of books by department members.

Miles: Nobody's too impressed with anthologies. There are probably no

anthologies there, are there? That was an influential anthology,
though. But it was an anthology, which doesn't count for any
particular credit or scholarly credit.

Then, to finish up that trend of thought about teaching, we
had to kill that course off about ten years ago because the
younger men who came from the East to teach here and to teach it,
hadn't learned it our way, and there were now too many of them in
the flood of the sixties to patiently teach them how to do it.
They had done, at Harvard or Yale or wherever they were, had done
close reading, which in my rather biased version is that you ask
the student to read the work, and then you ask a bunch of students
to read the work, and then you tell them all where they're wrong
and you tell them how to really read the work. That's close
reading, and too much of that tends to kind of stultify individual
enterprise. So we gave up English 100 as an introduction to the
major. The only one of those basic courses that we still have kept,
we kept a sophomore survey course and we also kept a senior seminar
where you learn to write a long critical paper, and that's now
where we do our teaching of criticism. Except for those who teach
photomontage.

Teiser: What do you call "photomontage"?

Miles: During the sixties we had lots of experiments and we had a couple
of teachers of the senior seminar who did teach Macbeth via taking
pictures of girls dressed up as witches and stuff like that.
Didn't work all that well, I don't think.

Teiser: [Laughter] After every war, you have these experiments, don't you?
Miles: Yes.

Teiser: Well, I still go back to this question that I'm undoubtedly asking
the wrong way.

Miles: Oh, you mean you're asking something I'm not answering? I'm
answering other things, huh?

Teiser: I don't know whether you're evading it or — [laughter]
Miles: [Laughter] Try once more.

Teiser: How did you learn what the order of characters was in the beginning
of Hamlet? Did you read it for yourself and ask someone? Who told
you that it was the changing of the guard?

Miles: Jim Caldwell.

Teiser: Somebody told you?

Miles: Yes, just five minutes before the class. [Laughter]

Teiser: How did you gain knowledge of Hamlet is what I really mean. In
order to transmit it, how did you learn it?

Miles: You see, the word "transmit" is the trouble. Teaching is not
transmitting. Teaching, as the word "education" indicates, is
evoking. So you give people clues as to how to read something,
and then you ask them to read it, and then you discuss it with them
after they've read it, to see if they got the drift.

Teiser: But if they're wrong, how do you get them on the right track?

Miles: See, I don't believe they're ever that wrong. Those boys knew they
were wrong because those intonations weren't getting them anywhere.
It would be very sad if I_ had had to say they were wrong, but
usually they're intelligent enough to figure it out.

Teiser: And so you told them how to get straightened out?

Miles: No, they figured it out.

Teiser: They figured it was the changing of the guard?

Miles: Yes. Are you asking about how to evaluate student work?

Teiser: No. I'm asking about the techniques of pedagogy. [Laughter]

Miles: Well, if you want to stick to this word "transmit" I don't know
where to go.

Teiser: I see. All right, that answers it.

Miles: I did give a bunch of lectures, but I always felt they were rather
subsidiary. I mean they were just sort of subsidiary information
to the student doing some work on his own.

Going back to UCLA, what we were excited by and interested by
were these lectures by Professors Longeuil and Campbell, and I'm
sure we learned a lot from them, which we tried to apply in other
ways later. The difficulties, as I said, were often that, if other
people didn't believe what they had told us, then we too were wrong.
It's awkward.

This very nice young professor, Carl Downes, who was never
promoted because he didn't do any research, was the one that
taught us how to write papers. That, however, was just at an
undergraduate level. So we learned something from him. Then we
learned mostly, I think, from each other, which is what students
do anyway, in that this little group that I mentioned, when we
were studying for the comprehensive, we went around asking each
other, "How do you talk about a work?" In other words, I'm saying
what I said before; I'm answering the same way again because it's
the only way I know. We asked ourselves this question — "How do
you talk about a work?" — and we didn't know the answer. We asked
our teachers and our teachers said, "Well, just what we're telling
you," that we'd read our notes and they would say, "Keats was born
in such-and-such a time, and 'St. Agnes Eve' is a marvel of
concision and gorgeous language." Well, this isn't what we meant.
We wanted to know, "What is that, that that's a work there, that
we can say something about as an identity, as an entity?" And the
answer is I. A. Richards; I think he is the man who told us.

Then we started applying his method when we came to Berkeley.
We didn't get very far with it because he hadn't been adopted at
Berkeley yet, except by Gordon McKenzie. Do you see what I mean?
There was just a long, painful learning process. That's why I
stress the fact that it was not only a learning process for us, it
was a learning process for literary history in the country, in that
social journals were changing to critical journals: Harper's and
Atlantic were changing to Kenyon [Review] and Sewanee and Southern.
Here was just a whole new type of stuff being written and
discussed. We then entered into that, and then that's the way we
taught .

Students often would rebel against this and say that we were
overdoing it, that we were always teaching them how to take a
clock apart but never how to put it together again. That was the

Miles: danger of the analytical method. The analytical method now has
really run itself into the ground because, as I say, the danger
of using the analytical method is that the professor thinks he's
the only one who knows how to do it right; then you're excluding
students from the process and you don't have much teaching going
on.

Also now the shift has grown toward student response. Now in
the sixties and the seventies, there's a whole new school of
criticism, which was sort of initiated at Berkeley —

[end tape 1, side 1; begin tape 1, side 2]

Miles: The new young critics at Berkeley in the seventies got interested
in an emphasis called reader response, or transactionalism. Paul
Alpers, Stephen Booth, Ulrich Knoepf Imacher, Stanley Fish, and
others were extremely interesting and getting together — they were
sort of our new generation, who are now the middle generation — and
they stressed the involvement of the reader in the work and the
contribution of the reader to the work. This is good now, because
the new critics tried to see the work as a work of art that we
looked at at a distance and analyzed how all the parts fitted
together. And now the proposal is that one of these parts is the
reader's own contribution. This gets away from the danger that
the student is left out of the analysis.

Teiser: Do you think it's swung back to a good position, to a good point of
view?

Miles: It hasn't swung back. It's gone to a different point of view. It's
a triangulation, or something like that. You could say it has
swung back to Saintsbury in the sense that there's more subjectivism
in it now. But it's not his kind of appreciative wine-tasting
subjectivism. From his point of view, the reader would have to get
in there and change the wine in the cask, you see, to make it
appropriate to the present.

There is a lot of new discussion of literary criticism now
from new points of view. The anthology which we did in 1948 or so,
and Brooks and Warren's anthology, all of which were vital for a
couple of decades, are now really out of it.

Teiser: Did the Brooks and Warren anthology appear before yours?

Miles: Theirs was entirely different. Theirs was a "how to understand
poetry," with a bunch of poems and how to read them. Ours was a
collection of critical essays which talked about how to understand
poetry, and ours came out of these literary magazines like Ken yon
and Sewanee and so on. Brooks and Warren's essays were included
among ours, but also [Lionel] Trilling and Kenneth Burke and all
the new people.

Teiser:
Miles:

When did Edith Sitwell's anthology* appear?
earlier, wasn't it?

That was a little

I think it came out about the same time as Aldous Huxley's, which
was the late thirties. That's my feeling.

Did Sitwell and Huxley have any effect upon people here?

No — I mean, not that I remember. Neither did Laura Riding and
[Robert] Graves 's Reader Over Your Shoulder, though that had more.
But this was more really of an American thing, I think; it didn't
seem much involved with England. Oh, it may have with some people,
but it didn't cross my consciousness. And I know that the people
from England that came and taught in our department and taught
English 100 were just amazed — they'd never seen a course like that I
They really thought it was strange, and they really liked it. The
discussion of principles of evaluation with a group as a whole
struck them as not at all cricket from the English point of view;
it was neither tutorial nor lecture. I guess it was a kind of
different thing that grew up here and other places around the
country, very strongly at Yale. Yale has always been very big on
literary criticism, with [Rene] Wellek and Warren. That's where
Warren and Brooks went, and then Wellek was already there; he did
a history of criticism.

I remember once in a while I'd be teaching an English 100
criticism class, and students from the Yale criticism program
would come to my class and challenge me tremendously because I
never believed that the work of art was all that autonomous, was
totally autonomous; I always wanted to keep relating it to other
things a little bit — strands of context. But at Yale they had
studied strict autonomy. So we had some interesting fights.

Also, Ruth, another answer to your question occurs to me. In
the forties, at Berkeley, was a very interesting growth of a type
of interest that flared up and died. It's almost dead now, as far
as I know, but in the forties, perhaps running through the war, and
parallel to these other magazines I mentioned, there was the
founding of and the flourishing of something called the Aesthetic
Society, which was discussion of literary principles and art
principles. With Stephen Pepper and Will Dennes, and we had dinner
at the Faculty Club every couple of weeks and had resoundingly
interesting papers from people. Marguerite Foster, and the

*Aspects of Modern Poetry.
Ltd., 1934.

London: Gerald Duckworth and Company

Miles: Hungerlands; Isabel Hungerland was in the Philosophy Department,
and her then-husband was teaching art at [California College of]
Arts and Crafts, and Margaret Prall in music, and a couple of
other painters whose names I forget, and — what's the name of the
man in industrial design in San Francisco that has the ferry boat
office? Made a lot of money, did very well.

Harroun: Walter Landor.

Miles: Walter Landor. It was a group of about maybe twelve or so people
who got together regularly and talked about problems of analysis
and judgment in the graphic arts, and musical as well as literary.
That group was really thriving, and we'd go over to the city and
see new shows at the art gallery. I remember seeing, for example,
the first traveling show of Motherwell, Gottlieb, and Jackson
Pollock. So that paralleled the readings at the Labaudt Gallery,
and that helped a lot. You see, we were so interested in
literature as an art rather than social history that we went into
the other arts too to try to make comparisons. And that enforces
my point, that this was a big shift, because this society was
founded by us. The Aesthetic Journal I think then was founded by
Thomas Monroe in Cleveland, working out of the Cleveland Museum of
Art. It began about that time and has thrived since. But in
Berkeley there are no meetings any more.

Teiser: How long did they last?

Miles: In the large group it lasted through the forties. In the small
group we met at Katherine Rau's house; she was the philosopher.
Will Holther and Pat Wilson and Diane O'Hehir and Donald Weeks
were various names. Karl Aschenbrenner was the real leader; he
was in the Philosophy Department. We tried to write a book on
metaphor. We were all reading each other's papers on metaphor.
We finished our book, and we must have sent it to fifty places
for publication. We never did get it accepted, because they said
the essays were written too separately and didn't relate to each
other at all, which is so funny because they were all written out
of total relation to each other. But we never did manage to zero
in on our audience. But that was an interesting phenomenon.

Teiser: It was Pepper whose field aesthetics was, wasn't it?

Miles: Yes.

Teiser: Did any of the rest of you have it as a specialty?

Miles: Karl Aschenbrenner. And Katherine Rau, Isabel Hungerland.

Teiser: They were all in the Philosophy Department?

Miles: Yes. Some of us did a lot more meeting with philosophers than we
did with literary people for a while. You see, the other side of
the literary field — and I'd better be sure to pick this up before
I forget about it — had begun in the thirties with the Marxist-
Trotskyites-Stalinists and so on. This was very important at
Berkeley, and very important in our department, and I just wasn't
very much a part of it. I kept saying I wasn't interested in
social problems. T.K. Whipple, and the people whom I didn't
learn to work with, were on that side. He wanted social history.

That developed in another interesting way. They developed
a course called American Studies, both here and at Harvard, which
was American history and politics and sociology and literature.
It never did get aesthetic; it never did relate itself to art,
it always related itself to social action. So, many of my friends
here at Berkeley during my graduate years were fighting all the
time about social problems. Many of the poetry meetings we went
to, the thing would change from poetry to social fights, especially
because J.S.P. Tatlock's daughter was a poet. She would come to
the poetry readings. Her suitor was J. Robert Oppenheimer, and
so he would come to pick her up. If he would settle in and stay
awhile, then always things would turn to social issues. There was
that whole side of my life that was kind of around me but I was
not part of it where, for example, you'd see the students marching
up between Wheeler and the library, and Donald Mackay, who was a
professor of philosophy, linked arms with the head of some labor
union, and everybody would call everybody comrade, which we
thought was very, very funny.

I just want to mention, in other words, that there was a
whole other driving force here besides the one that I kept getting
involved in. That kept on being true in the department. George
Stewart was in the social side. Jim Caldwell was an officer in
the ACLU. A lot of the younger men in the department were active
in that way, without much critical, theoretical interest, but with
historical interest.

Teiser: You said that earlier, so far as poetry was concerned, you had
met Sara Bard Field and C.E.S. Wood, and so forth —

Miles: And they were on the social side.

Teiser: They gave you your first view of it, was that it?

Miles: My first view of what?

Teiser: Of relating art to social —

Miles: I think so. I first read the New Masses in order to read their

poetry, and I never did read the New Masses steadily. I think it
was partly a pose; it was just something I didn't want to get
involved in. I didn't like the long-line debate that went on,
and it just wasn't a world I really got into. I got interested in
social problems later, when they became more local.*

Also, come to think of it, I had very dear friends in Los
Angeles who did join the Communist party and who were sort of
pilloried by all this and had to leave the country. It was a
great mystery to me. Again, I never quite knew what it was all
about.

Oh yes, and also I taught in the Labor School in the city.
I was supposed to teach a poetry class to longshoremen (this was
in the mid-forties). Fortunately it was at the recommendation of
Dean [Monroe E.] Deutsch, our very much admired classical vice-
president, because that got me in a lot of trouble later, teaching
at the Labor School; it was considered a Communist institution.
What I taught at the Labor School was an evening class in poetry
which was attended by about seventeen little old Berkeley ladies
and one longshoreman. [Laughter] The wife of the head of the Ford
Motor Company was there, and all sorts of nonlongshore type people.
Let's see, Mrs. May was one of their names. Virginia Rusk. Elma
Dean. I guess I can't remember all their names, but there were
lots of interesting people in that.

Teiser: But you were picked up in some security check, then, later?

Miles: Yes, a certain amount. Really nothing to bother. It was just
that it was all sort of laughable because I had no position
whatsoever. Yes, they came around and asked me what I taught and
what my principles were, and so on.

Teiser: You said, when I was turning the tape just a little while ago,

x not to get you wrong, that you did like to hear lectures. [Laughing]
Would you say that again? I'm not saying it right.

Miles: Yes. I think big lectures are a great form of education. I do

like them, and I go to them. It's just that I found so much need
for the people in the lectures to know how to handle them better
after they heard them that I just went where I felt the need,
really. I think I lectured all right. I never lectured to more
than about a hundred.

During the forties also we were having to teach the marines
in special assignment at Berkeley. These were really brilliant
kids. We taught classes of seventy. So I taught freshman English

*See page 104.

Miles: in a class of seventy. Obviously, you're going to have to do quite
a bit of lecturing there. Lehman developed, and we developed with
him, a technique for calling on people, for reciting, and we had
teaching assistants who were responsible for calling on people.
So I did have a lot of practice in a sort of semi-demi lecture and
in relation to recitation. I mean, I can certainly rattle on, and
I have spent whole hours just telling people. As I get more full
of memories, I do it more, and I don't really want to; the time
should be theirs, I think.

Teiser: We heard you give a very good lecture last year.

Miles: Really? Oh, that was the* — but I read that. That was just about
the only time I've ever done that. [Laughing] I've seldom read
anything before. I was just too scared to deliver that cold.
Thought I'd ramble too much.

Teiser: You, more than perhaps others, have been interested and willing to
give time to high school teaching concerns, have you not?

Miles: Yes. This comes about in a special way. As I said before, I swore
off of all teacher training because of the teacher I had at UCLA,
and I stayed sworn off since our department was the same way. We
had two men who were our liaison with education, Bert Evans and
Jim [James J.] Lynch. They were friends of mine, but I didn't
particularly — well, they stressed love of literature; they stressed
the sentiment of love of literature, which was okay. But in 1960,
which was a year in which I felt sort of as if I'd be interested
in doing something different, I had some friends who were teacher
supervisors. Their names were Jim [James R. ] Gray, Leo Ruth, and
Ken Lane, and then there was Dick [Richard J. ] Worthen who was
visiting here from Diablo Valley College. One of my friends — Jim
Lynch — died unexpectedly at a department picnic of a heart attack.
They developed a teachership in his honor, which was called the
Lynch Fellowship. We invited high school teachers to come and
work in our department with us. The first one who came was Dick
Worthen, and so now develops through the sixties all this interest,
which was a big matter of accident because of all that, because of
Dick Worthen and Leo Ruth and Jim Gray.

*The Faculty Research Lecture, 18 February 1976, titled
"Where Have Goodness, Truth, and Beauty Gone?"

Miles: In 1960 they had a meeting, which I remember, in 145 Dwinelle [Hall]
where various people talked about writing and a lot of teachers came.
Lots of teachers had been my former students, and it was very
exhilarating because their questions were so good and the need
seemed so great for discussion. They liked that meeting so much
and asked if they could have more. I don't remember the sequence
from then on, but I know that we also worked together in starting
the California Association of Teachers of English, and the Asilomar
conferences, and the chancellor had conferences at Berkeley. In
other words, these young men were so active and energetic and
interesting, and they drew me into this. I would never have gone
by my own free will; I had not gone with Jim and Bert, their
predecessors in the English Department, because Jim and Bert did it
a different way. They did it, as I say, more by getting together
and appreciating literature, whereas this was more a call to
understand and learn how to teach writing and so forth — it was more
technical.

So through the sixties I went to lots of conferences and gave
quite a few talks, published various papers. I think I've written
now maybe ten papers. I just got through some meetings this week —
Jim Gray now has had four years of very exciting things (there's
probably not enough time to talk about it here, but maybe I should
later, in relation to current work*).

Courses and Students

Teiser: Let's go back to a quantitative analysis of your teaching. Has it
been an unusually large span of courses that you've taught?

Miles: Probably in the middle. Except maybe during the war, I never

taught any drama or fiction. I decided I'd quit meddling in some
fields, and those would be drama and fiction. So I taught courses
in poetry and criticism, and prose ^ plus writing. Over the years,
in general, I guess, this would be my range of courses, though of
course this isn't all in any one year. We're all asked to teach if
we possibly can, and we do, a course in freshman composition each
year, which I've always enjoyed. So I've done that. Then for a
while I taught a sophomore course in Introduction to Language —
linguistics. That got so technical, with [Noam] Chomsky and later
linguistics, that I blush to think that I was doing it, and I gave
it up. But it was a very, very interesting course based on [H.A. ]

*See pages 194-202.

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Gleason. I mean, it was technical enough, but it wasn't the new
linguistics, so to speak. But in relation to the study of style,
it was interesting.

I seldom taught the sophomore survey because I don't believe
in it. That would be an example of what you were asking me. That
has to be discussional. But it's like the sampling and appreciating
texts which I never liked in high school. (Though I did recently
try a survey I liked called English Literature, 1501-2001 for the
poor, fragmented graduate students.) So I skipped from the
sophomore survey over to Introduction to Criticism, the junior
course. Then also in about the same year would come a course in
Versification, verse composition. Then also around in there is the
History of the Lyric, which I taught for a long time. I loved that
course. (I mention it specially because it was different from the
others.) Then for a long time I taught senior seminars in a modern
author.

In the days when we first inaugurated this, we had great fights
over what modern author we could possibly teach, and finally defined
modern as being at least some short span dead, and that brought us
to Yeats. I taught a senior seminar on Yeats for a while. Then
they actually loosened up and let us teach T.S. Eliot and then
Wallace Stevens. Then somebody taught Shaw and somebody taught
Faulkner, and the whole thing opened up. Then every new young man
or young woman who came here wanted to teach the senior seminar,
and that was the great cry. So I quit it because I didn't care
that much. It was fun, hard work and interesting. Nice to get the
very best students in the department in that senior seminar, and
nice to get very good papers. But it was a luxury, which they [the
new people] needed and I didn't.

Then in graduate work, I taught Introduction to Scholarly
Method in a course called 200, which was always fought hard by the
students and which, as soon as they got a chance in the sixties to
do some strong voting, they abolished. I was not particularly the
main teacher of it, but they didn't like it from anybody. A lot of
chore work — learning to do bibliography and so on.

Is that the course you would have liked to have when you were a
graduate student?

Oh, absolutely. And necessary. They're all realizing, now that
they've lost it, that they need it. We have one young man that
teaches it so well, and I think they're going to petition again to
have him do it. But it's a lot of really heavy chore work.

Then I taught a graduate course in Introduction to Criticism,
and I guess my main seminar was in seventeenth century literature.
I know I've skipped something, but that's all I remember at the
moment. It's kind of a span. Usually I like to teach almost every
level of student every year, if I can.

Teiser: Have some of those courses been connected with the series of works
that you've done that I think has just culminated in your 1974
book, Poetry and Change?

Miles: No.

Teiser: That has not filtered over into your teaching?

Miles: No. Many people say the same thing. Most of us, or a great many
of us, agree that it's very hard to teach in relation to your
research; because your research is way, way, way ahead of where the
students are, and there's no point in trying to bring them up to it
because they're not going to stay there. Even if you have a
student helper that you're paying, which I did (I did do that; I
paid students to do some of the word counting for me) , there was
never any real desire on their part to ask my kind of question.
Sometimes I'd give them a lecture on what I was doing, and they'd
be interested. But there's just too much of a gulf.

One time President [Charles J.] Hitch proposed that we all
teach an extra course. This was a tremendous pressure on personnel
during the sixties and seventies, and we were really strapped for
money. Hitch had taken 110 jobs away from Berkeley and given them
to other campuses, and he suggested that we make up for this by
each teaching a freshman seminar in our field, without extra pay.
He was just absolutely astounded at the loud silence that arose at
that suggestion. I think I was one of the few that volunteered,
but my purpose was to do it and to show him how absurd it was.

Did you do it?

Oh no. He didn't even get to first base with that one. It's not
all impossible. I suppose this course that I taught, sophomore
linguistics, was pretty close. But it took a whole quarter just to
give them the rudiments! The rudiments was what the whole quarter
was about. Plus, they had no motivation to do the particular thing
I was doing. I think most of the faculty feels that.

Teiser: On the other hand, you teach the writing of poetry. You haven't
stopped writing poetry while you taught courses in poetry, have
you?

Miles: Oh no. Why would I? As I said, that's always kind of separate,
because that didn't get tangled up in my teaching. Sometimes a
poetry class will give me some ideas for some poems of my own;
often it won't. I just can't tell. It's just unpredictable.

Teiser: We have a friend who's an artist, George Post, who gives

demonstrations to groups of people showing how you paint. You
ought to give a demonstration how [laughing] to write a poem.

Teiser:
Miles:

Miles: I couldn't. I wouldn't know — you mean go back and say — of course,
he's doing it right there, live. But I couldn't count on any idea
developing in language. I suppose there's enough that he could do
in sheer technique to get something on canvas. The closest to that
is sometimes in the class everybody writes a ten-minute poem,
something like that.

Teiser: Do you write one too?
Miles: Yes, I write one too.
Teiser: I think that's sort of what I mean.

Miles: But it's never any good. Usually half the class does better than
I do. Some people do well quicker and other people do well slower.

Teiser: Do you think people can learn to write poetry?

Miles: Sure! [Laughing] How else — you mean, can they be taught to write
poetry?

Teiser: That's what I mean.

Miles: A class in composition gives them a bunch of opportunities, one,
to do a lot of reading, which they might not otherwise have done,
and two, to experiment and try things that they wouldn't normally
do, and three, to interact with each other and learn from each
other. There are lots more — what are some of the others? A chance
to make lots of mistakes and have them recognized as, "That's not
the way I want to go," kind of thing. In other words, a class
provides a context for experimentation, with echo answering yes or
no or something.

The bad things about poetry classes are, one, if the class is
mean to each other, if there's too much laceration of feelings. It
took me a long time to learn how to avoid that, and I think too many
people today still don't avoid it. A kind of hurt in ego trips goes
on from one student to another, especially during the early sixties
when students were very rebellious.

There's a lot of passion goes on, and a lot of, "I hate your
work," part of which is ego tripping and part of which is trying
to find out what you like and what you don't like. So I've learned
over the years a way that I do it, which nobody else does. I teach
a class by having criticism anonymous for the first month, and also
oral; I don't pass out mimeographed poems and I don't let them see
the poems. I just read them to them in anonymous clusters, and I
try to develop their ability to listen and comment. When they get
to the point where they can say, "That poem really developed its

Teiser :
Miles:

Miles: idea of a journey through space, except in that second line where
it goes so-and-so," then I know they're at the place where I can
let them go and get to know each other and criticize each other.
There's a kind of good criticism that they can develop in about a
month.

Speaking of a month, I should also say that I've experimented
a lot with timing, and it's about the eighth week that's good. In
class after class, after about a month they sort of get the idea;
after eight weeks they are really helping each other; they are
really good. And about the twelfth week, you've got it. That's
marvelous. Now we have the quarter system that stops in the tenth
week. So teaching has become rather silly because the teacher
never gets to see —

[end tape 1, side 2; begin tape 2, side 1]

That tape ended. I cut you off. You said that ten weeks —

Yes. Usually in about the twelfth week they're really going well,
and now that we have a quarter system you never get to see that,
nor do they. They really just don't, because everything stops in
the tenth week now, unless you're having a final exam where you
can ask them to do the thing they've been doing all quarter. Then
sometimes now our finals are really superb. But I don't think
this timing is just subjective. Many people have tried to go as
fast as they can to get things to work, and it's like forcing
digestion — you just can't do it. To me, the quarter system is very
bad, and there's nothing we can do about it now because the younger
instructors even, to say nothing of the students, have all got so
strong on this idea, "Get it over with fast," instant service,
that I don't know what will ever give people enough seriousness to
get back to the fifteen weeks, except maybe in some professional
series like the law school; it is still on fifteen weeks.

Teiser: Have you ever had two courses end on end? Did students ever
continue then taking the same course the next quarter?

Miles: Yes, and surprisingly enough the break happens there too. You lose
them in the break and they come back, but you can't pick them up
where they were.

Teiser: Do you accept anyone in your poetry classes, any students? Or do
you have certain requirements they meet before they're accepted?

Miles: We never have enough, we never teach enough writing courses in our
department, partly because we don't have the people to do it, and
partly because our department has never been one that wanted to
have a professional writing program. So they never seriously worked

100

Miles: on staffing it. This is the main complaint students have about our
department. They're still accepting this major that we set up in
the middle forties, which I think it's about time they didn't. But
they complain about the writing.

We allow too many people to go through, petitioning time and
time again to get into a section and then not getting in. The
general method is to show some of your work to the professor, and
then he lets in the fifteen or so that he thinks would profit most
from the course. I haven't the foggiest idea how to tell who would
profit most from the course, so I've never done that. The very
best writers sometimes are the ones who need the course least.
Then, since I give the course in a particular way, with weekly
assignments, it seems too elementary to them, so that I don't want
to take the best ones. And the worst ones, of course, are kind of
discouraging; when you see the bad stuff they'll hand in to begin
with, it's not very inspiring to pick them. I've never found
"good" and "bad" a good basis of choice. Sometimes I've tried
taking everybody and getting two teaching assistants and trying to
teach it as a mass course, which Ben Lehman taught us to do with
freshman English. I don't think that's so bad. They're not all
too thrilled with it because they get less personal attention. But
I don't think that's the main purpose of the course anyway. I've
done that three or four times, and I'm not unhappy with it.

Mostly what I do is take people for whom it's going to be
their last chance, either because they're seniors or because they're
leaving next quarter or something like that. Some of the very
worst candidates turn out surprisingly well, some of the best
candidates couldn't care less, and so on. It's not a very
satisfactory set of choices.

Lately we've been trying to fill a real demand, and we have
five sections now just in poetry, or six or seven, where we had only
one for many years.

Teiser: How many students in each section?

Miles: Oh, fifteen or twenty. And we're starting a sophomore section,
and so on.

Teiser: Do some students really just like to take courses in poetry all the
way through college?

Miles: Yes. Not many, but they like to write all the way through, yes.
Teiser: Do you try to make way for them when you see they're really serious?

101

Miles: Well — it's hard to say. I doubt there are more than one or two
like that in a quarter. Then I talk to them seriously about
whether they think they need it; whether it's worth putting
somebody else out, and so on.

Teiser: [Pause] I am trying to decide whether we want to open up another
[laughing] —

Miles: Can of worms?

Teiser: — today.

Miles: What is the can of worms?

Teiser: Well, I think it would keep you too long if we start. It's the

types of students and how they varied from decade to decade. This
isn't so much in relation to actually what you've taught them in
the courses, but just the tenor of society as you've seen it.

Miles: Oh, that's easy to talk about. I could talk just maybe five or
ten minutes about that. That would give us time.

It's easy. I do think in decades. I don't know whether this
is because of Bud Bronson's course way back then, or whether I got
into that myself just as some way of dividing things up. It seems
to me that roughly you can talk about decades as they worked.
Everybody talks about the sixties, of course.

Anyway, whether it's a decade or not, when I began teaching,
it suddenly turned into war in '41. I began in '40, and within
a year it got very heavy there, from '41 to '45. The University
of California taught special brigades of marines who were
stationed at International House, and we had to set up special
programs for them. They were a delight. Oh wow, were they good!
And caring —

Teiser: How do you account for that?

Miles: Well, it was competitive to get in the marines in the first place
then to keep from being drafted. They were eager beaver types,
all running for student body president and running for this and
that — a lot of extracurricular activities — and wanted to do well.
And wanted to read everything. Everybody wanted to read Ulysses
then, as a good freshman book. Of course, now they've read
Ulysses, so I don't know. But it was quite vivid then — all the
reading they wanted to do and talk about.

Then, at the end of the forties came the GIs back from the
war. They were another kind of delight. Instead of being eager
beavers ("Let's try this and let's try that") they were mature and

102

Miles: they knew what they wanted. Everybody that I know who remembers

this agrees that from about '46 to '49 was a heavenly time. There
were 23,500 people at Berkeley, and it seemed like two thousand;
everybody knew everybody, everybody was friendly. We were doing
these big freshman courses, but everybody knew everybody there.
I still see many of those students. [Robert Gordon] Sproul was
president, and a very friendly president. Everybody just seemed
to be working hard to do the work he knew he wanted to do.

Then like a great blast from above hit us the loyalty oath
controversy, which came not from the students, as you know. It
was from kind of an accident of the Regents beginning to worry
about communism at that late date, and Mr. Sproul not
understanding, and Mr. [James H.] Corley not understanding and
saying, "Why, sure the faculty would be glad to sign a loyalty
oath." Then the fat was in the fire. It was announced in June,
after everybody left for vacation. Jim Caldwell was one of the
first to see it, and formed a committee of six to fight it.
Already by the time we got back in the fall, students were being
quizzical, a little belligerent, "maybe you are a communist" kind
of thing. If you said anything about mutuality, "do you mean
mutuality even with Russia?" kind of challenging like this.

It was not bad, but the faculty was thrown way over on the
defensive. It was very slight, but there was a kind of heaviness
to the early fifties, as I remember, a heaviness of the students,
and I can't quite explain it. After all this wonderful light-
heartedness and strength we had, they were harder to teach. Maybe
it was a time of doubt for the whole country. It wasn't for us,
especially; you see, this had nothing to do with us. If we'd been
thinking about communism, it was ten years back. Nobody was
thinking about it now. Everybody thought it was old fashioned:
Why bring that up, for heaven's sake? It was so out of date, and
we couldn't help but get impatient. Some of us, [Edward N. ] Barnhart,
Isabel Hungerland, and I started a quarterly of faculty essays,
Idea and Experiment, to communicate with our alumni. A wonderful
response for four years, even support from Sproul. But the Alumni
Association called us Communists and killed it. We flatter
ourselves it improved the alumni death notices, though.

Alex Sherriffs organized a bunch of seminars at night, and we
all went around to the Y and the dorms and this and that, and those
were not very good conversations. The students knew nothing and
we didn't know much either. We had little conversations on things
like censorship, and we weren't prepared and they weren't prepared.
It was an effort to bridge gaps. We didn't even understand the
reason for the gaps.

Teiser: All just because of the loyalty —

103

Miles: Yes, but that in itself was secondary to McCarthy and I suppose

to maybe citizens' doubts. In other words, the doubts that should
have come up ten years ago about communism, if there were any, were
now just getting around to the public and operating.

Maybe I remember this partly because we were also in a new
building, Dwinelle Hall, which is kind of a factory-type building.
So the atmosphere physically wasn't so good; all the seats were
pasted down and various things were artificial about it.

Then that eased off and everything went along very nicely
until — there was a cumulative force there in HUAC, and the students
were all wanting to go to jail and wanting to be dragged down the
steps of the [San Francisco] City Hall and so forth, and very bellig
erent. Now they were turning their belligerence not only to us but
to the outside world. And I did have poetry classes where, as I said,
I thought they were too hurtful to each other. This wasn't just
me. Not too long ago, a student came back out of the blue from
somewhere where he was working at a job in New Hampshire, and came
back and said, "I would like to take you out to dinner and explain
why 1 said all those awful things to Mary Ann Jones in that class."
You know, it haunted him all this time. I wasn't strong on this.
I didn't stop it; I tried to let it overflow and let itself out.

Now we began getting the beginning of the hippies and drugs.
Aldous Huxley came to the campus, and everybody cheered him, and
they came in and pounded their fists on the desk and said, "Okay,
you heard what Aldous Huxley said, that irrationality is better
than rationality, and drugs are better than tea and coffee, and
what are you going to do about it? You're supposed to be teaching
us, and yet you're surely teaching us rationality, and that's
wrong." So there was this kind of challenge.

Gradually in the sixties, then, this developed into a really
most glorious time in teaching — for me. Many people say not. But
I had got all these little things three, four, five years earlier
because I was teaching writing and I was getting more personal
response earlier. In the early sixties, they were looking for an
enemy, really. These kids were looking for somebody to fight, and
they found this in the war in Vietnam — justifiably, but I mean
they were very feisty, and they had no place to go. I don't know
what was wrong with the public in the late fifties, why it was so
suspicious and why it wasn't getting good work out of — I just
really have never been able to figure out. In other words, their
parents hadn't quite sent them to school with the right spirit,
either.

As they began worrying about the war and worrying about social
problems, they began to lean on their teachers and ask for help and
advice and teaching and extra courses, and "Please give us an extra

104

Miles: course in the Bible" and whatever. Education for them became a
kind of solace for all this uncertainty.

Again, it's a little late and a little odd because in the
fifties I had got interested in politics through the Grassrooters,
through grassroots movements against — well, you know — community
groups grew up through the PTA and the Democratic party. Got
integration in Berkeley, and the famous San Mateo grassroots group
and so forth. Things worked through PTA's community action. So
in the late fifties I had worked very hard in this kind of thing —
telephoned everybody to get out and vote. This particular
neighborhood is full of Democrats, but they're southern Democrats,
so I never had very good results. [Laughing]

Students' politics, then, followed on my politics, so to
speak, and wiped mine out. What we had done — and I was only a
small part of it — what Jack Kent and Jim [Whitney] , good leaders
of the Democrats in Berkeley, and Byron Rumford, and Carol Sibley,
who was head of the school board when it was integrated — they had
achieved a turn-over from conservative to liberal control in
Berkeley. We'd sent our first Democratic Congressman, who was
[Jeffery] Cohelan, substitute for [John Joseph, Jr.] Allen, who
was a very bad person. So we were sort of happy, you see.

But then the new young teachers came in from the East, and
the new students came in, in the early sixties, and said, "That's
just ghastly, all you liberals! You've done all these compromises.
Throw all these people out! Vote against Rumford, vote against all
these people. It's got to get worse before it gets better. We've
got to get rid of Governor [Edmund G. , Sr.] Brown," (who we thought
was a very good governor), "we've got to start over and wreck
everything before we can save it." You would have thought that
this would have been very hard on us, and it was. Institutionally,
the neighborhood groups were killed off in Berkeley and defeated,
and all sorts of really radical people were elected. But on the
other hand, the students were at the same time very loving about
all this, and sort of saying, "You're a liberal, and that's not a
good thing to be; you've got to be a radical. But we know you
meant well, and we'll teach you more about it if you'll teach us
more about Milton."

So it was a very lovely time for teaching. I taught more
students, more fast, more motivatedly, more with their aid and
help than ever before. They'd like to come to your house. I
happened to have a room at school, in Wheeler Hall, that was right
on the fighting line, and at the time of day, too, which was two
to three to four o'clock. We had lots of tear gas lobbed into our
room, we had lots of rifles stuck into our room. It was a really

105

Miles: war-like situation, and sometimes none of us felt we could take it,
though we always got orders from the chancellor to stay in our
rooms. He didn't stay in his room, I say bitterly, but we were all
asked to.

I feel bitter about the University of California administration
during the sixties. The faculty was just thrown on its own and
given no support or help whatsoever. The students would vote to
come over here and we'd meet out on the patio, and the helicopters
would come down and scan us from about two feet up, and the kids
would throw those camellias at them. It was a very dramatic time
in which my sympathies were so much with the students. I didn't
see the ones that broke the windows and did the [damage] . I just
saw the writing classes and the kids who were trying to learn some
thing in the courses.

I mention Milton because Milton was marvelous in this time —
the whole sense of war in heaven and rebellion against authority.
They would learn whole passages of Milton by heart at this time.
I would ask them to go home and talk things over with their parents.
They'd talk to their parents and come in and say, "I talked to my
dad, Jo" — here's where they started calling you by your first name —
"and my dad said, 'I don't believe it. You can't tell me what you
say is true.1 I'd say, 'Put my mom on.' My mom would come on and
she'd say, 'Don't tell me. I can't believe it.' So would you
write a letter to them? Would you write a letter explaining that
I was just going around the corner of that building, and I didn't
know the police were on the other side of the street, and I didn't
know I was walking into a barricade. I was just going to pick up
a milk shake." This was the story over and over and over. It was
just a really exhilarating time, because of students' energy and
need.

This time was also very hard. My mother had had heavy, severe
strokes at this time, and I had to have lots of help. She was
frightened by the helicopters, and often we were told we had to
leave town; we had to leave the street, which was always being
bombed with tear gas, and we'd have to get her out some place. It
was very hard. The army — you read about these experiments — the
army bombed us with tear gas that was not correctable with the
usual antidotes, so that the eye, ear, nose, and throat men couldn't
tell us what to use. (I mean I know I have a bum throat now from
all that tear gas I swallowed.) The cops would bomb us in our
rooms I And I would say, "Hey, I can't get out of here fast enough.
If you throw that grenade in here, I'm going to swallow all of that
stuff," and they would throw it because my students were in there.
So it's a time which had a great deal of adrenalin and antagonism
and excitement involved.

106

Miles: The students would get together to raise money to leaflet — their
constructive work. You always hear about the glass breaking, but
they raised lots of money to leaflet in the suburbs. My students
made two or three magazines, which they wrote and printed and
collated out there on the patio, and stapled, and took out and
sold. A thousand copies, sold for a dollar a copy. They'd sell
every one, they'd get about at least $800, and they'd buy anti-
Cambodia leaflets, and they'd go out to San Leandro and they'd
talk to people, then come back and tell about their conversations —
which were lovely! I mean, so much positiveness of the sixties
will some day I hope come out. Nobody wants to hear it yet. My
hope is that these kids will be the leaders in the eighties, and
the eighties will be a very good time, because they've been through
the wars, they're experienced, and they're very good at working
together.

Sometimes we'd meet at night at a boy's house, a basement
apartment over on the other side of the campus. Denise and Mitch
Levertov sometimes came. One time I remember it got cold and he
closed the door, and there was an absolute arsenal behind the door!
Just everything — all sorts of guns, bombs, just everything. And I
said, "I don't think we ought to stay here. Some of those might
go off." He said, "Those belong to my roommates," and in came
these two great big black giants and said, "We're going to use
them right now," and took them all out. Agh! [Laughter] But one
of those fellows is still now a social worker in Berkeley, working
with the drug kids, trying to rescue the drug kids.

Then that drug thing came in too at the end of the sixties,
early seventies. Again, we got no help. Isabel Hunger land and I
both had students that we knew were really terribly sick. We asked
the chancellor (who was a good friend of hers, but not necessarily
of mine) how to handle these kids in our classes. He shrugged his
shoulders and walked away. We just didn't know enough to know how
to handle all the problems we had. I had a kid who insisted on
jumping out of the window every day, and it was too far a jump; he
didn't break his leg right away, but eventually he would. There
it really took the class to figure out how to handle him, and they
did. I have the greatest admiration for the osmosis with which
these students worked. If I would say, "We've got to meet again
next week an extra time. Who would vote for Wednesday? How many
would rather have Thursday?" they wouldn't raise their hands.
They'd just say, "Don't hassle us." They'd sit there quietly and
then somebody would say, "Monday night," and they'd all nod and
walk out. It was odd. It was a kind of ESP, which I hope they
retain.

So now we're at the seventies, and I don't know. Their
strongest quality is panic over jobs and panic over grades that
lead to jobs. It's very hard to teach people that have to have A's.

107

Miles: The whole grade system has got torn up. Not that I believe in

grades, but I don't believe in making them a mockery either. So
far, just what I've been able to do is to tell them what my
grading would normally be, and then tell them what it would be
in terms of school averages, and then ask them what they want to
do about it. So far they've been mostly — until this last class —
they've been very good. They've said, "Well, we'll just have to
work hard enough to raise it from where you're putting us to where
we want to be," which was fine response. But when you're always
thinking about that — "This poor guy is now working to get this up
from a B- to a B+ for law school" kind of thing — it's a rather
external way of working.

I just have a feeling that students, in the last three or
four years, are desperate about ways and means, and quite
uncurious. Lack of curiosity is the main problem. Maybe they've
just had too much trouble. I don't know. Maybe not enough.

[end tape 2, side 1]

108

INTERVIEW IV -- 28 July 1977

English Department
[begin tape 1, side 1]

Teiser: Let me put on the tape that last week Benjamin H. Lehman died*
[on 23 July 1977], and you called to tell us, after the last
interview. . .

Miles: That I was thinking more about the department and scholarly

interests than I was about poetry at that point, because I was
talking to so many friends about his death. So we agreed to talk
more about that today.

Teiser: Shall I ask you some things about the personal structure of the
department when you came into it?

Miles: The personal structure — how do you mean? You mean the people in
it?

Teiser: Yes. As I understand it, about when you were appointed instructor,
a man named [Guy] Montgomery was chairman. It sounds as if
everyone agrees he was not very effective as a chairman, and it
wasn't until he was replaced that the department came out of a —

Miles: I think it was true of the whole university, in a way; that is my
impression. Of course, Physics was going great guns, and English
was doing very well with Tatlock, Brodeur, Whipple, and so on. In
other words, when I was here as a graduate student, everybody had
a pretty interesting sense there were lots of good and strong
people here. But I guess there wasn't much sense of coherence in
the department; that's why I didn't have a sense of coherence
either. When Merritt Hughes suggested, when he went away, that I

*And Mark Schorer a little later, as Peggy Webb's daughter was
married, the Raleighs' daughter engaged, and Carol and Larry
Sklute's son born. J.M.

109

Miles: work with Lehman, it was such a surprise, because he was being a
prophet at that point, to see that that's where a lot of energy
would come from in the department. I think the stories were that
people hadn't been promoted for a long time, but this was the
Depression. It was this coming out of the thirties. And there had
been certain quarrels in the department that were known, but not
what they were about exactly, at least not by the younger people.
They had these new younger people, Caldwell, Bronson, and so on,
who hadn't had time to do much yet. So I would say there was a
strong sense of a future and of a lot of action, but not, as I say,
much of a center.

When Ben Lehman became chairman in '45, he had in a sense I
think already been chairman; I mean, he'd been head of the graduate
students, or something like that. He was turning his energy to the
department, away from his European trips and his novel writing.

Teiser: Let me interrupt and tell you what he said in his interview. He

indicated that because the previous chairman had been reluctant to
entertain people and get people in the department together in that
way, he had rather stepped in and taken that function on. Were you
aware of that?

Miles: Yes, I was. I was a little hesitant to go to those —
Teiser: During the time that Montgomery was still chairman?

Miles: Yes, this was in the early forties. I believe I made a big mistake
by not going to a big party that Walter Morris Hart gave for the
whole department, which was supposed to be quite a landmark. I
thought of myself as a very kind of peripheral person. It was
vacation time, and I was out in the country having a vacation, and
I didn't come in to this party. That turned out to be [laughing]
kind of a mistake, which shows how seriously they took that party.

Also Jim Cline was chairman for two years before he left to
take a position in the East, and I know he tried too to bring the
department together more. We had more meetings. He tried to have
us meet at the Men's Faculty Club, but he ran into trouble there
because they didn't want to let me in.

Te i s er : Women —

Miles: Yes. So Ben had meetings at his house in the evening and I remember,
when they turned out to be fairly serious business meetings, I did
go, and that was very exciting because it was fairly new for the
department. Also, a little later, when he recruited new people, in
'45, '46, and so on, he had them to his house and gave them very
serious talks about their responsibility to the department. This

110

Miles: has always meant a great deal to them. In other words, he

represented a kind of Biblical authority in setting up a sense or
image of the responsibility to the department, the nature of the
department as a whole, and was very strong on getting everybody to
be interested in writing and research.

I remember — maybe it was about '48 or '49, some place in
there — three members of the department got Guggenheim awards in
the same year. This was a big thing to Ben, and he went to Robert
Gordon Sproul and said wasn't this a big step forward? Sproul
said yes and invited us all to dinner. So there was a great deal
of joyful enthusiasm about steps forward, which is very good. The
quality of showing interest in and appreciation for what your
colleagues are doing is a quality that surprisingly few people have.
I often look around now and wonder how much noninterest seems to
operate in administrators. I kind of wonder that people get
anything done, because nobody particularly seems to cheer them on.
Ben did an amazing amount of that.

On the other side, he was also very negative. If he didn't
think people were doing much, he suggested that there was a good
inexpensive ticket on the next train east. He was very bad to
people, very unfair to people, he didn't like. Unfair in the
sense that he made up his mind, and then it either went one way or
the other pretty extremely.

So we all worked very hard. The new people who came in — well,
do you want me to tell a little bit more about who was in the
department?

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: From my point of view, there was that Medieval group that was

strong; there was an American literature group which was strong.
George Stewart was beginning to write novels now, which was
exciting, because he had been into Middle English and metrics
before that. I'd become a friend of his through that material.
Then he wrote East of the Giants which was, I thought, a very good
book, and maybe his first historical fiction before the famous one.
Then there were the young men in criticism, as I say, who hadn't
developed.

I think the department was hard to define; that's the whole
trouble, it was hard to define.

Also, while I'd been away as a graduate student, when I came
back the department had been sort of wiped out. There 'd been five
deaths. The great one was Harold Bruce, whom I'd never met (he'd
been away most of the time I was here) , but also everybody just
loved Harold Bruce. John Ross hadn't died, but he'd gone to UCLA.
And who else? [Thinking]

Ill

Teiser: A man named Robert P. Utter?

Miles: Utter had been struck by a eucalyptus branch, walking home from a
conference. And two or three others whose names I can't say now.
Anyway, these were ones I hadn't known, so it didn't make too much
difference to me. To me it was, "Okay, let's get going on the
department I know."

I think what happened then, in 1945, when I was telling you
about this reorganization of the curriculum by a vote of the
department, what that reorganization did was to center things in
a methodology of study, which was what Ben Lehman was interested
in. He had the phrase he used a lot in scholarship, to try to
create "the image of the work." And that, as you can see, was a
kind of new criticism because it focused on the individual work.
He didn't particularly care what field that was in. So the
emphasis on chronology was a little lessened, and the emphasis on
methodology was a little increased. So we still had our medieval
historical, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and twentieth
century tendency. George Stewart led a fight to call American
English, to call English literature both American and British.
Ben supported him on that, and some of the members of the depart
ment bitterly opposed, if you can believe it, calling American
literature English literature. We had some of our more foolish
faculty meetings on this subject. They were some of the earliest
ones I went to, and I never could believe my ears what we were
quarreling about I

That was one of the few major issues we ever quarreled about,
and it was finally settled by deciding to use the word British
for purely English and for the British Isles, and then to use
English when you meant both. Since most of us by that time wanted
to talk about both together and didn't want even the separation,
George's fight for American literature per se already seemed a

little outmoded,
had.

But anyway, that's one rather foolish fight we

Another one that came a little later, but I mention it now
because it was our other major one, was on linguistics. Our
department is called a department of English language and
literature, and that really meant to stress language as well as
literature. In the old days, that was philology, and when I was a
graduate student we took a lot of philological courses in the
background of the English language. For example, Anglo-Saxon, and
old French, and old High German, and old Norse, and so on. Those
weren't much liked by anybody, and they were gradually eliminated,
and the whole study of language rather faded. But there were
always fights about having to have Latin, and about the language
requirements in general.

112

Miles: Then linguistics developed, a fascinating new subject. Ben brought
Dave [David W.] Reed here from Michigan, who was a standard, rather
mechanistic linguist going to work on an area study of linguistic
usage. So Dave, single-handed, in his puristic way, nonmentalistic
way, as they called it, held back any speculative studies for a
long time. That's just the way he was, and that's the way the
Linguistics Department was too. That made me very restive because
I wanted, and some of us wanted, to study language more in relation
to literature. But that would have been called mentalistic.

We finally did get more linguists, a well-known linguist by
the name of James Sledd, who was a real opponent to whatever was
going on; he constituted himself the opponent to that. And
Sheldon Sacks, who was a student of his. Sheldon Sacks was a
wonderfully strong influence toward speculative linguistics in the
department. But when Sledd left, in dislike of our department, and
because of a big job elsewhere, Shelly I think felt it was good to
leave too, went to the University of Chicago, and now publishes a
very distinguished critical journal.

That whole episode in the fifties was our other major
argument, in which we had many meetings debating the development
of the field of linguistics in relation to literature. It's still
fascinating, and it'll take more distance to articulate it. I
still read the journals. Literary people are still discomforted
by the mechanisms of linguistics. On the other hand, they are too
discomforted; they don't learn enough from what linguistics could
teach them.

In the next decade I think we had the famous Chomsky here.
We went to his lectures in Engineering, to engineers, and we really
worked hard. We had a group that met here at my house for a long
time to study language and literature. That group continued. We
took in some anthropologists, and we met for lunch at the Golden
Bear — I forget how often — and talked about linguistic and
literature problems. It's interesting how hard we worked and how
little progress we made.

Teiser: Who was in that group?

Miles: A couple of linguists (I haven't prepared my mind to remember their
names, unfortunately). Shelly [Sacks] was in it, and later Julian
Boyd, when he came to our department, and John Gumperz from
Anthropology, Dell Hymes from Anthropology, who had to leave here
for the same reason of not developing a real central support for
the subject. So it wasn't just in our department. And Charles
Fillmore, who came to our department, finally went into Linguistics.
The whole thing was very uneasy. I went to more meetings, day and
night, of the Linguistics Department, under Mary Haas, trying to

113

Miles: make it work for me, and also in terms of computer technique and
so on, and they never reached out a hand to me in any way. I
mention these negatives because otherwise I would sound too
cheerful when people did try to reach. They didn't reach out a
hand to literary people at all. Fillmore, when he left our
department, said he had to leave us because we wouldn't talk to
him. And yet we all were asking him, we wouldn't talk to him,
but he felt he didn't talk the literary language. This is a split
between language and literature that's fascinating to me, and it's
still—

Teiser: Mary Haas?

Miles: Mary Haas was head of the Linguistics Department.

Teiser: This is my ignorance. I didn't realize that there was a separate
linguistics department. Had there always been?

Miles: No. No, I think David Reed helped found it, again, in discomfort
about English literary studies. In other words, the literary
people did not support linguistics as enthusiastically as they
could and should have. I wanted to, but didn't quite know how,
and they never helped show me how, and some in our department
thoroughly, just blindly, I thought, closed their eyes and fought
it because they felt disaster lay that way, into mechanism. As a
matter of fact, I think they were right. In other words, it still
hasn't come about that the linguists can help.

Teiser: The Linguistics Department encompasses all comparative linguistics,
in all languages?

Miles: Yes. In fact, it took in the discomfited from almost every other
department. [Laughter] It's a very interesting phenomenon — you
could talk about it for hours — because it's a history of human
thought where everybody has a certain amount of good will,
interest, and drive forward, and is constantly stymied by some
lack of understanding, common goals, communication. It's still
going on today, even in a little magazine called Style that I
contribute to sometimes, which is published in the Middle West and,
as you can tell by the title, is certainly an effort at compromise.
But it is always, the articles are always full of complaints from
the linguists that the literary studies are too messy, and from
the literary people that the rigors of the linguists aren't
pertinent to literary studies.

To me this just isn't true. My belief, going back to my
early research, is that language is the material of literature and
literature is an art , and all you have to do is talk about the
relation of art to its material. I don't see any problem.

114

Teiser: What happened when that book [S.I.] Hayakawa wrote* became
popular?

Miles: Well, that's a different trend. The English Department always
had certain waves of interest in teaching freshman English, and
one of them was semantics, and a number of people did teach
Hayakawa 's book. I taught it for a while. It was okay. It was
good for its time.

Teiser: Was it not very elementary?

Miles: Yes, it was elementary. In those days, any kind of methodology
of scrutiny was rare, because everything before had been the
methodology of appreciation. This goes back to Saintsbury again.
So any methodology of analysis and description and study and
objectivity was really quite new. The trouble with linguistics
was it was so objective as to be unrelatable to literary procedures.

Anyway, I guess we solved the American-British problem. We
never did solve the linguistics-literature problem; it's still
strong today. We have now a young man of great inspiration and
fun who's not a practical leader, so again linguistics hasn't
developed for us, though everybody likes him and likes what he
does with it. His name is Julian Boyd. Do you want to ask me
something, or shall I go ahead?

Teiser: Go ahead.

Miles: I was just going to say that the other quarrel that we've had is
right in the middle of the whole history of English literature —
eighteenth century — where fewer students want to work and where we
have some very interesting scholars. We have a real split as to
what that century is all about, and that has caused us some
degree of trouble, and still does. That's kind of interesting,
there again: there's a whole era of English literature to be
described where we divide in how we describe it. So we don't even
recognize each other's descriptions of some of the materials
sometimes.

I mention these splits because, on the whole, the English
Department has never torn itself apart about personalities or
problems, but it has had some very interesting ideological debates
which have caused I think productive results in that they raise
questions for people. The whole thing I mentioned last time about
readership as a function in criticism, that the younger men have
raised — that too has been very productive. Some have disagreed on
that, though as a whole I think those younger men have won the
department over to that approach.

*Language in Action. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941.

115

Miles: To come back, then, to Ben [Lehman], the most important thing I
think to say about him in all his tenure of office was that his
function was always to encourage these debates and these
differences and these individual productions. He was exceptionally
good at finding out what somebody wanted to do, and then helping
him do it. He was not an easy man to describe or to get along
with. As you know, he had quite a reputation as a playboy in his
youth, and when I came here I couldn't imagine working with him.

I think when he took on the job of chairman he was almost
abashed because he didn't think of himself in that role — well, 1
guess he did speculatively, but I mean in the past he wouldn't
have been in that role. I think in the department there was a
good deal of gossip that he'd been appointed to this job by Sproul
because he and Sproul got along.

Whatever the story was, he really shaped, for five years
shaped the department into a pattern of operation which would allow
for everybody to have what he called his window on the sea, which
is a rather romantic term but which is a very good thing to do:
that every young person who came here had a course that he wanted
to teach more than anything else. The whole policy was letting
you do something you wanted to do very much, and then asking you
to operate, in terms of staff courses, the way the staff operated,
and have lots of meetings to make the staff course work as a course.
That made some good strong ribs in the department; people worked
together enough there that they knew each other; they weren't just
all isolated from each other in their own fields, because everybody
taught two or three, or even four staff courses — the central core
of freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior courses which I
mentioned before.

That's really about the main thing to say about him, aside
from the fact that he went back, with others of his colleagues, and
did pretty interesting recruiting. He brought Mark Schorer and
John Raleigh and John Jordan — who are some other people I should
mention? My mind stops at that generation, but I'm sure he got
younger ones too. And he was good at spotting people with energy
and with interest. He developed in the department very much a
sense of the department as a unit, as a working unit.

At the end of his tenure, the problem of the loyalty oath
struck, and I believe George Potter was chairman. George Potter
was a very nice, quiet man easily hurt (Ben was quite a bit
tougher) . George was so hurt by the hatchet men coming to his
office door and telling him to tell everybody to leave their
classrooms if they didn't sign this contract that he sort of
retired from the fighting field. Ben, who was really not that
opposed to the administration, nevertheless supported the will of
the department, which was an example of his flexibility.

116

Miles: He had an interesting thing he used to say. He said he was not a
man of principle. He thought principles really wiped people out,
because they were always forcing them on situations where they
didn't fit. He was a pragmatist; he found out what was needed and
then tried to do it. And that was true, because it included other
people.

Would you like to ask me something there?

Teiser: Yes. I can read you a passage from his interview* that concerns
you and also concerns an idea of his that you just mentioned.

"These young doctor candidates in the period I am
speaking of" — and I think this is the late thirties — "turned
out works, every one printed, every one of distinction.
Finally, in the 1950s they decided to make an honor volume
of Festschrift. Each of them contributed an essay and
published The Image of the Work; Essays in Criticism. I
cite this again, I hope in no vainglory, because it is
evidence of how, in those decades, a university professor's
time and energies were absorbed in something that was at the
same time teaching and research.

"What lay behind this volume was that in the seminars I
always insisted that if they could raise in a reader's mind
one fully understood image of a work, they were equipped to
go ahead and do whatever they wished in the way of a
dissertation. The result of that was that when Josephine
Miles had a very original idea, which has made her a world-
famous figure as of this date, and my colleagues in other
fields in which she wanted to work wouldn't let her undertake
the enterprise that begins with the statement of emotion in
Wordsworth. . .1 gladly let her do it, because she had done a
paper on the image of the work, and I said it was evidence of
capacity.

"The whole business of the 'image of the work' was a
fairly new, certainly a fresh, statement for us here at the
University of California in Berkeley, and affected the nature
of our graduate studies."

*See interview with Benjamin H. Lehman, Recollections and
Reminiscences , Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 1969.

117

Miles: Yes, I would agree with all that. I've been stressing here the
difference between the historical approach at UCLA, which was
called sources and analogues — and here at Berkeley too, though I
wasn't here then (I wasn't an undergraduate here then) — and then
in the forties the development of the so-called new criticism.
This was Lehman's version of the new criticism, this "image of the
work." It was the way he taught it, and it was very effective,
because he was good at helping one develop that image.

Teiser: This interview reflects what must have been a very great interest
in and enthusiasm for original ideas and original approaches.

Miles: That's right, that's right. That was true not only of the

teacher but of the administrator. I've seldom seen an admin is t rat or-
this is what we've all been saying as we've talked about him after
his death — we've all been saying that we've seldom seen administra
tors who have a concept of administration which is to help good
ideas get going. That's a good concept of administration. Why it's
so rare, I do not know. But that's the one he had.

[end tape 1, side 1; begin tape 1, side 2]

Teiser: I wanted to ask a little about Walter Morris Hart. I think both
Stewart, and Lehman in a way, indicate that he was a very strong
figure in the department after he stopped being head, and that his
influence continued. I gather that he was not considered a very
great department head but that he did have an ability to find good
men.

Miles: You mean in the university as a whole?
Teiser: To bring into the English Department.

Miles: Oh. It's just a world I don't know about. He was teaching a

seminar in Shakespeare when I was here, and everybody I knew was
afraid of him because he had a very biting tongue. I can't even
remember now the stories, but there were lots of stories about his
severity. He was a great friend of Ben Lehman's and I think he
was probably extremely influential in advising Ben Lehman in
operations, with Robert Gordon Sproul. But that's a world I don't
know anything about.

What he had done earlier — what I mentioned way back some
place — they had decided to make this a real English Department,
and by "real English Department" they mean everybody should have
a Ph.D. to make it an orthodox national department. So they let
go their brilliant young writers who had only M.A. 's — Jack [W.W.]
Lyman, Jack Lyons, Robert Penn Warren maybe as a student, and
others whose names I don't remember. This caused a great stir
because these men were very central to the department in — I don't
know when — late twenties, maybe?

118

Miles:

Teiser:
Miles :

I gather — and I've never quite re-created all this — that in the
late war years, say from '15 to '25, something like that, when
[Charles Mills] Gayley was chairman — and I suppose Hart was maybe
under him and a friend of his, probably — there was a great
flourishing at a very high level of — what would be a good word to
use? Sentiment? It's hard for me to define because I haven't
been able to tune in on it. Anyway, Witter Bynner was here, and
there was enthusiasm for literature in a world way. Gayley could
give courses in the Greek Theater, and Bynner gave courses in the
Greek Theater, and they filled the place, and so on. The Greek
Theater itself functioned. It was a time of this sort of world
literature enthusiasm and of general cultural elevation. Everybody
was writing, and we mentioned Genevieve Taggard before, who was
very strong here as a pupil of Bynner' s, and Hildegarde Planner,
Marie West; probably Sara Bard Field remembered some of this. This
era of elevated, enthusiastic literary response included — one of
the things that impressed me most — Langston Hughes. Langston
Hughes said later, when he came out to Berkeley and read to black
audiences, that when he came in whenever it was — the late twenties
or early thirties — he never saw a black in his audience, that they
were all people in black ties ; they were black tie audiences. And
they were the social cream of Berkeley who entertained him, and I
know that Ben and Walter Morris Hart were involved in that.

All this elevated world was just nothing when I came here.
It had all-
Did that have any counterpart in art nouveau?

It might. I think it might. It's certainly related to Oscar Wilde,
if that's related to art nouveau.

You told me the other day that you had been talking with Jack
Lyman — about these years, was it?

Yes. He remembers the powerful figure as being Witter Bynner.
Also these people were good friends of each other. Maurice
Leseman is another name I remember, and they were passionately
fond of him. I don't remember or know about him.

Leonard Nathan, who's a poet here, and I went up to lunch
with Hildegarde Planner and Jack Lyman to just sort of ask more
about all of this. Their enthusiasm was still great, and they
would lend us things and give us things and tell us things. But
really what they liked so much, it was not in our world.

Did you read the poetry of Witter Bynner?
Yes.

119

Teiser: Did you like it?

Miles: Fairly well. I liked it better than a lot of the more George
Sterling types that were going around.

Hart was part of that more elevated circle, and he became
vice-president of the University and was powerful there. Then
there was a whole problem about the stadium being built.
[Charles H.] Rieber, another big man on the campus, was so angry
that he left for UCLA. That whole story the giants talk about as
if they couldn't communicate it to the layman, and that's when I
was a layman. So I've never heard the story of the triumvirate
that took over from Wheeler. Those are all secret places, I
gather. Maybe that's part of your sealed material. [Laughter]
Was Gayley one of those? I don't remember.

Anyway, Gayley and Hart had this sense of great distinction.
When I got here, the attitude was that distinction was all back
about ten years and everything had fallen on rather evil days, and
"we're trying to reconstitute things with these new young men who
are still pretty young." They had Tatlock from Harvard and were
trying to rebuild, but not in a very centered way yet.

So that's the best I can do for you. Hart, when he retired,
I know that Ben went to see him a lot, and read to him when he
couldn't see (in the next generation, Tom Parkinson did this too).
He was not famous for being fond of taking fools easily, and I
always felt myself kind of a fool in his presence. But I think he
did back up Lehman. I mean, I think Lehman asked Hart to back him
up in my support, and I think he did. But that's all beyond my
ken, because when I talked to him personally and he never daggered
me with any of these great repartees that he was so famous for,
still I was always feeling I was about to be [laughing] the next
victim.

Teiser: Lehman also just said in passing (and I don't remember in connection
with what in his interview) he had thought that it would be
unreasonable, in connection with your appointment, to let your
physical condition stand in the way of the University securing the
services of your intellect.

Miles: That was courageous of him. I'm sure he worked hard on this, and
so did Jim Caldwell and so did Will Dennes. I think that once he
made up his mind that I should teach, and when he found that he
wasn't going to convince smaller colleges of this, then I think he
worked pretty hard. It probably took quite a bit of maneuvering
to put it over.

Teiser: Of course, the fact that you were a woman too was a problem.

120

Miles: That's right, and our department was not all that fond of women,
either.

Teiser: Had you had any English professors who were women?

Miles: There weren't any then. I'd had them at UCLA. But they wouldn't
speak to each other at UCLA, so it wasn't a very happy scene. But
Ben did later, quite soon after — I never felt lonesome in the
department because he quite soon brought in five women who were
excellent. Unfortunately they were wives, and they were pulled
away later by their husbands, so that at the time it seemed fine
but now it seems too much of a compromise. But it was great in
its day.

Teiser: He speaks admiringly in his interview of so many women students.
He must have liked women — as you've indicated.

Miles: Yes, and I think some of his friends in the department didn't,
so that it was a kind of an interesting switch that he made.

Teiser: He spoke admiringly of Sister [Mary] Madaleva.

Miles: Madaleva, yes. She preceded us; we never knew her. And Agnes
Robinson.

Teiser: He seemed of a mind to recognize women's intellect; is that
correct?

Miles: Yes, I guess that's right. He liked individuality wherever; he
appreciated that. He was now sort of eager to make something of
this department and of the University, in collaboration with
Sproul, who was also eager to bring it to the fore, and the way to
do that, evidently, was to compete in eastern terms, which was to
write for Modern Language Association, to get Guggenheim
fellowships, to write and publish books. So he encouraged all
that, and we had a very interesting development of our young men.
If our young men who came here did too much just reviewing for the
New Republic or something like that, they would get called in and
asked, "Where's your book?" There was a lot of real pressure,
real competitive pressure, and very interesting tendencies in
publication grew up in the department through not only colleagues
like Willard Farnham and his Medieval drama but with Jack Raleigh's
study of American tradition and Parkinson's of Yeats and Jordan's
of Wordsworth. A whole lot of lines of thought were developed and
encouraged by Ben, so that even when he wasn't chairman his
influence lasted over the chairmanships of other people. There was
a constant emphasis on individual exploration of ideas.

So, as he said, some of his students later did get together
and make that collection of essays which were typical of his way
of working.

121

Publishing and Research

Teiser: If you had just done studies of somebody's poetry, would that have
been sufficient in the eyes of the department?

Miles: It would've by his [Lehman's] definition, and that's where we

disagreed to some degree, I think. By this time I really liked
scholarship [laughing], after years of struggle. I really liked
the stuff; I liked the genre of the scholarly article in MLA
[Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] . I
wanted to write for MLA and I wanted to write for scholarly
journals. He sort of laughed at me for that, and I think he
thought that if I did monographs published by our press and did
poetry that — he developed the budget committee's definition of the
creative activity as alternative to scholarly activity.

We invited here a young man by the name of Milton Miller, who
had written one fine article on John Milton, but who decided he
was not going to get a Ph.D. Milton came, and he was supposed to
be a test case of the fact that he would go ahead and write essays
and be a literary critic and not have to bother with academe in
its most rigid [forms]. Actually Milton decided not to do that
for various other personal reasons, and decided to leave and to
get a Ph.D. He's now at Riverside. But Ben Lehman wanted to make
him that sort of case. But I didn't want to be that case; I really
wanted to do research, because I now had this bee in my bonnet of
being able to describe trends in usage of English poetry.

So I was working very hard to adapt to the establishment,
which was difficult because the establishment might not be as
eager as Ben or the people here were for new ideas. But as I
mentioned before, in poetry the Southern Review was a very good
place for me to relate to. When the Kenyon Review announced it
was going to publish a special issue on [Gerard Manley] Hopkins,
I thought, "Aha! Now I can write a study of Hopkins that will
show how this kind of language that he uses works — " So I wrote
to Cleanth Brooks, who was going to be editor of that special
edition, and asked him if he would let me try a chapter, and he
said yes. That was I guess the first serious published essay
that I had in scholarship. It made a great deal of difference to
me in the sense that it's widely known now, and that little book —
it's called Hopkins; The Kenyon Critics — is still being published
and I still get royalties on it. This is now thirty years later!
It was a real early step of its kind. So it does relate to what
we were talking about before in teaching, because Cleanth Brooks
was alive to this methodology that Ben was talking about too.

122

Miles: Then I also got an article published in Modern Philology or

something else that was straight orthodox, and I remember Ben's
laughing at that, thinking then, "That's really unnecessary."
Then I sent one to MLA and after a while, after some failures,
I got one accepted there. So he was always sort of amused by
my efforts to be orthodox. I never became orthodox, but there
were enough people, not only Brooks but Rene Wellek at Yale and
Harry Levin and Reuben Brower at Harvard, Samuel Monk at
Minnesota, who were sympathetic enough with what I was doing so
that I managed to get a word in edgewise here and there.

In the meantime, there was a mysterious figure whom I'll
never know about, I guess. When I was developing the work on
textbooks — and that was an interesting parallel to scholarship,
because I thought they would fit together — there was a man at
Prentice Hall, and I should be able to say his name, Don — ?
He encouraged me to do a textbook, and then two textbooks. When
I would do a plan for a textbook, he would send me the comments of
some anonymous reader that he had read and evaluate me for his
purposes. He would never tell me who this man was, but these were
the most marvelous analyses of my work that I've ever seen.

Teiser: Actually?

Miles: Actually. They were just so great! He would never tell me who
the person was, but they always encouraged him to commission the
work from me.

Teiser: What were the two books?

Miles: One was The Ways of the Poem (first it was called The Poem*) , and
then the other was Classic Essays in English.** Both of these
were pretty much eye-openers to me in making the scholarship more
understandable in terms of actual thinking about it practically.
I'm just fascinated by how much — three or four times I've read
letters from this anonymous critic I felt "the world is mine" in
a most marvelous way. So when I wanted to publish one of my later
books, which was called Style and Proportion,*** which was a

*Published under this title in 1959, under the title The Ways of
the Poem in 1961; reedited in 1964.

**Published in 1961.
***Published in 1967.

123

Miles:

Teiser:
Miles:
Teiser:
Miles:

Teiser:
Miles:

Teiser:
Miles :

scholarly book based on what I had learned from doing the Classic
Essays, this man said, "Okay, I think we owe it to you to publish
the scholarly book since it is based on the text you did for us."
After they got it all set up and all in print and everything, he
was promoted to some high position in Little Brown (he had switched
to Little Brown, by the way), and the new man who came in, whose
name I think was Stone, just saw nothing in that book. He said,
"Miss Miles, this is what I would call a non-book." So when they
were taken over by some conglomerate and wanted a tax loss, they
shredded that book as a basis for tax loss. That's one of my
saddest stories of scholarship because that book represented at
least ten solid years of work.

You mean they didn't distribute the whole edition?
No, they didn't distribute it. They shredded it.

The University library has one.

They sent out a few copies,
most magazines, no.

It was never received for review by

Is that right? For heaven's sake I

So that book is a non-book in that it scarcely does exist really.
I have one copy; that's all I own. It is legal to write and warn
the author, which they did. But by the time I answered yes, I'd
like to buy twenty-five copies before they shredded it, they
wrote back and said, "Sorry, it's too late." So it was really
kind of the major disaster in my — *

Do they still hold the copyright, or do you hold it?

Heaven only knows! Oh, I guess I do, but so far I haven't been
able to persuade the reprint houses to reprint it, and guess why —
because there's no demand for it. Well, guess why there's no
demand for it? Because nobody's ever heard of it.

Can't they publish it as a new book?

But our press [the University of California Press] doesn't — it's
a very expensive book. It's full of plates. No, our press had
already turned it down as too expensive. This was another bad
part of the story before I even got to Little Brown; our press
turned it down because of the plates. Some heroic woman at our
press who was a major typist with a very super kind of machine
saw the work and saw that it had been turned down because it was

*See also page 130.

124

Miles: so costly to print, with all these charts, and she volunteered to
type it just for some kind of photo offset thing, so that it
wouldn't be too expensive. (I'm sorry that I don't remember the
methodology.) But she was a really heroic person. So then UC
Press in 1960 did print all these tables, and so all Little Brown
had to do was reprint some of the tables, so it didn't cost them
so much.

I got in a real mess there, from about '55 on, in that my
charts were so cumulative and the details were so detailed that
really just nobody had the interest or money to afford them. I
think now it would be better; I think there are more processes now.
Still in those days it was expensive printing. That was a very
hard time for me, around the sixties. I had none of these
champions like Ben Lehman around any more. I forget who was
chairman; I think it was Henry Smith, who was a real champion
too but was baffled by that technical problem. Since my work was
neither flesh, fish, nor fowl — it wasn't linguistics and it wasn't
aesthetics and it wasn't literary scholarship — it was hard to get
any[thing accepted]. I could always get essays accepted, but I
couldn't get the data production accepted.

That might lead me to retrace my steps a little bit and talk
about another adventure. After Ben wasn't chairman any more and
George Potter was, Guy Montgomery died. Guy had left sixty-three
shoe boxes full of cards for a concordance for the work of John
Dryden, and this was his life work. He had worked with a young
graduate student from Utah. They hadn't got too far with it.
Not to go too much into concordance work, but you have to have
some method of collating to check the accuracy of your
alphabetization. A lot of concordances have been done "by hand,"
but they're an awful lot of work. Guy had never finished this,
and the young man from Utah had abandoned it. Our department had
written to the young man and said, "Would you take this on?" and
he said, "No, it's not in good shape, and I've seen the last of
it."

George, being a rather puritanical man, said, "We don't want
to waste this whole lifetime, so why don't you take it on since
you've done a lot with concordances." He gave me a little
research money. I worked for about a year on it, and it was
impossible. The boxes of cards would fall apart, the methods
wouldn't be clear I

There was a man by the name of [C. Douglas] Chretien in
language studies who told about making dictionaries for exotic
languages with a computer — how you could do this, how they would
do automatic alphabetization — you could punch for alphabetization.
(I can't say that word!) This was quite exciting. This was sort
of, as I say, when I was fairly new in the department, and I was
kind of on my own because nobody knew anything about this.

125

Miles: I went up to Cory Lab and said, "You've got the computers up here.
Can I do anything about making these concordances? This is what
Mr. Chretien told me — " and they said, "Yes, we can do that. We've
never done it. We don't quite know how." This would be a long
story if I told it in detail. But anyway —

Teiser: Don't leave out too much.

Miles: — it took me about five years, I guess. Towards the end of that
time, we got some pretty good research money to get a young woman
who was the wife of a navy officer or army officer who was here,
and was very experienced but had little to do because of her
husband's presence in the war. So she was willing to do it for a
fairly small amount, I guess. She worked very hard at this, and
we learned these computer methods, and we did get this in
alphabetic shape, and we did get it printed. It actually is the
first computer concordance.

Teiser: Did you develop techniques —

Miles: Yes.

Teiser: — that had not been previously developed?

Miles: Yes. We really did.

Teiser: Did you ever record them, did you ever give others the benefit of
your — ?

Miles: Yes. I put it in the introduction. It's so rudimentary. It's
so rudimentary that our computers wouldn't even print language,
words; we could only print the line references to these words —
I mean they wouldn't print whole sentences. The concordance
locates every word for you. Say the word "apple," they'll show
you every line, every poem in which the word "apple" was used by
Dryden. Now [currently] any decent concordance, you write out the
line where apple is used, like "An apple a day keeps the doctor
away." But all we could do would be, say, "Line 24, poem 7." So
it's a horrible thing to use I Nobody uses it unless he absolutely
has to find out something about Dryden. But when computer usage
for concordances was developed by Stephen Parrish at Cornell, he
did say that ours was the first; he did acknowledge it to that
degree. It really was kind of a fascinating little primitive use
of a sophisticated instrument.

Teiser: Did I ask you (or did I just plan to ask you) whether the course
you took in accounting, on a bet, helped you in any of this?

126

Miles: I'm sure it didn't. I'm sure it didn't. [Laughter] I was always
sort of interested in numbers. What you're really asking is why
I did so much counting. Accounting was about something else,
really, but I probably wouldn't even have taken the bet if I
hadn't been sort of interested. The language of numbers is a kind
of interesting language. But I use it only in the simplest way.
My critics now of my work are always unhappy that I make too rough
transliterations from — you know, if it's 75 percent I'd just as
soon call it 80, and all that kind of thing. A rounding out just
drives my readers crazy. I don't mind rounding out because, you
know, [laughter] I don't think in what I'm doing it's all that
important.

Anyway, that was a kind of scholarship in which the
department — we made lots of interesting new friends, not only I
but some of my friends in the department, by working in that kind
of field. I think there was a Chinese girl up at the lab by the
name of Penny Gee who was very smart and good. Later, IBM people
from San Jose came up to interview me, and I've been interviewed
off and on ever since by IBM — "What can we do to help you?" But
I've never been able to connect with them either, though I did
with Penny Gee. She really taught me —

Bud Bronson did that marvelous concordance he used for his
study of the ballads, which was awarded some major medal by the
Queen. I mention these two things to indicate again, while Ben
would have absolutely collapsed at the very thought of this kind
of mechanistic work, and even Henry Smith would have, yet they
supported it in the sense that they let people do what they
wanted to do or felt they should try to do.

[end tape 1, side 2; begin tape 2, side 1]

It was pretty hard to get that first vocabulary of Wordsworth*
accepted. I know that the press committee that finally voted for
it was full of suggestions, like one man said throw away the first
chapter, others said put the first chapter last, others said put
the middle at the beginning — such contradictory suggestions that
I'm sure it was a great trouble to everybody, and it was a trouble
to me to rewrite it in such a way that it would suit all these
conflicting recommendations. I managed to do that.

*Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of Emotion. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1942.

127

Miles: Then the next book, the one I had written on the AAUW fellowship,
the Pathetic Fallacy,* went very easily, both in the writing and
in the publishing. People who hadn't liked the first book at all
said, "That second book is really fine." I often tell students
this, and tell them to try to write a second book right away after
their thesis book because the thesis is usually very painful, but
once you've learned how, if you do one fairly quickly then, it's
fun, because you've learned how and you can go fairly fast. People
like and still read the Pathetic Fallacy proportionally more than
other things.

Teiser: You said that there was no master's thesis when you were at Berkeley.
That seems to me a great learning experience , and I think you were
cheated by not having to write a short thesis then.

Miles: Well, maybe. I've never seen a good master's thesis. It seems to
me it's the wrong stage of your life.

Teiser: Just to learn how to do something, even if you don't do it well —

Miles: I don't think you can learn how fast enough. We decided — and this
was much debated — we decided that you could learn to write a good
senior thesis because you were very closely controlled by the class
and the instructor, and that's what we settled for. So we had the
senior theses, which we still do. In other words, you're right
that a thesis needs to be done somewhere along the way, and that's
where we decided to put it. I think it's worked well. A master's
is supposed to be done in one or two years, and you just don't
dare — we do have them now, and I'm horrified when I'm on them,
because they're not very good. There's no time. There's time to
make a good seminar paper or senior thesis; there's not time to do
a really solid, developed piece of research. I think that really
takes three years.

Teiser: Your Ph.D. thesis didn't entirely prepare you for the book, then,
the Wordsworth book that you based upon that?

Miles: Oh, it was trouble from the word gol It was just trouble from
when I started to when I finished. It was trouble from 1938 to
'41, I guess. But then the one that I wrote in '39 or whenever,
that came out in '41 also, the Pathetic Fallacy, or maybe '42 —

Teiser: Forty-two.

*Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century.
of California Press, 1942.

Berkeley: University

128

Miles: — that was just very easy. Then I developed a whole theory that I
wanted to follow out, the one of major language. Then I just had
a built-in job to do every summer. I sat on the patio with my
little beat-up traveling typewriter that had only three banks of
keys, and typed out these studies of the language of the poets of
the 1640s, 1740s, and so on. These were good for getting — I wanted
something too, not only that I liked to do, that I could sit
outside with and enjoy, but also that students could help with so
that they could get support — grant money — and this kind of analysis
of language they could do. Over the years, in fear and trembling,
I've gone back and checked whether they did it well, and on the
whole — I'm sure there are terrible errors still — but on the whole
they did beautifully. They were responsible and good people.

I just did that until about 1951, I guess; for about a decade
I did that, and then additions through the sixties.

Teiser: Let me take you back, here. In 1946 two books were published,
Vocabulary of Poetry and Major Adjectives in Poetry.

Miles: The Major Adjectives was the third of the trio. Again here I guess
this was probably Ben's ingenuity. He then said, "This trio of
monographs could make a book." So, Wordsworth, the Pathetic
Fallacy, and Major Adjectives was then published as the Vocabulary
of Poetry. I think that was his idea, and it looked very
impressive when it came out. Meantime, I had started —

Teiser: Were they rewritten?

Miles: No. When they were republished by Octagon, I wrote new

introductions, maybe a page or two in length, giving new data,
but rather additive, not actually reconstructive.

Teiser: Then in 1948 two more publications, one in which you participated,
the Criticism; The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment —

Miles: Yes, we talked about that last time.

Teiser: Yes. And The Primary Language of Poetry in the 1640s.

Miles: That's when I started the study of the '40s in each century. After
I did the 1640s, Bud Bronson — or maybe right along in there — said,
"You can't start there. You can't leave out Chaucer." So either
before that book or after that book, I can't remember which, I went
back and did some material — some subtitle there says "and earlier"
or something. I went back to the 1440s or 1340s, roughly; I did
ten earlier people. And then finally got up to the seventeen-,
eighteen-, and nineteen-forties, and then published those, and that
was called The Continuity of Poetic Language, and that came out in
'51, right?

129

Teiser: Yes. Also in '51 was the Primary Language of Poetry in the 1940s.

Miles: That's what I said. They all came out. Then I thought, "Well, now
I'd better look around and see what the forties have to do with the
rest of the century," because I knew they had something to do with
it but I didn't know what. So I did a little sampling of all of
the centuries in the nineties and found the fascinating thing that
the nineties were all much more toned down; that is, the forties
were the extreme period of usage, which I'd had a feeling for from
the beginning. That's why I hadn't done the nineties; the nineties
are more transitional, not so fully characteristic of the
differences.

Then I decided if I were really interested in poetic history,
which I now was, I'd better do this in terms of a coverage of the
whole century now, and do less of any one group. Like, I guess I
did thirty poets for the forties; now I will do thirty poets for
the whole century, or something like that. This came out first in
a book called Eras and Modes in English Poetry.

Teiser: Published in '57.

Miles: That's where I really try to say there is a very interesting,

definable pattern to the whole growth and development of English
poetry. That book the University Press refused to back up with
tables and data, and it was from '57 on to '64 that a lot of my
misery started because I now had all this data but nobody wanted to
print it.

However, because of this heroic typist at the press, they did
publish kind of a "tabular view," as it was called there in '60
(that's the big 8 1/2 by 11 typed thing that she did), and then in
'64 they published the second edition of Eras and Modes with some
of the tables reduced. That was at the behest of the editorial
committee of the University Press. I don't remember the name of
the chairman, but he was a real hero to me because he told the
press that that data was important enough. I never had much — how
would I put this gently? Though the University has published a
good deal of my work, I don't think that the manager of University
Press and chief editor ever was happy about having to do it. So
this was a case where the editorial committee stepped in and
defended me and really rescued me after years of trouble.

Then in '67, when Style and Proportion was published, that
was the addition of prose to the whole thing. Now I was asking
the question not "What is the continuity of English language in
poetry?" but also, "How does that relate to the continuity of
prose?" and "What are all the relations of poetry to prose?"

130

Miles: Because everybody had been asking this question by this time. And
this is the one that fared so ill at Little Brown.* I think it's
a good book. It got reviews only from people who asked to see it
especially, and they gave it good reviews, but I think there were
only two. But I think it is a good book, and sort of the heart of
the matter for me. That's the book for me. If I wanted to keep
one, that would be it. But that's the one that sort of doesn't
exist.

Then, before 1974, a number of people had been asking me to
write essays. They'd write and say, "How does your work apply to
Edward Arlington Robinson?" or to John Donne or whatever. Partly
initiated by these inquiries and partly initiated by questions of
my own, this Poetry and Change developed as a series of sort of
spotlights on special eras and special recurrent literary problems
and questions and how they would be related to what I was doing.

That was the book that was published most recently [in 1974],
and that book — and this is so strange, and life is so weird — that
book won the MLA prize for the best historical scholarship of that
year, '74, which is ironic because the judges were not English
professors. Mark Schorer was on the committee, but he said he
stayed out of it. The judges were comparative literature people,
who've always liked my work. So here's this same ironic thing!
When you talk about luck, how fantastic that those judges that year
would be comparative literature people! But no English professors
would like my work to that degree; it violates too many of their
concerns. But these two people that wrote me about why they voted
for it, liked the very things in it that I_ liked and that other
English professors wouldn't like.

I don't mean to say all English professors. Reuben Brower at
Harvard, for example, was marvelously understanding of what I was
doing. Many of his students I've got to know since, and are
understanding too. But on the whole, I never have really zeroed
in on any establishment consensus that what I'm doing is central to
literary concerns.

I wrote one other book, that I skipped. Somebody wrote me back
about '63 or so and said, "Why don't you do a little pamphlet on
Emerson for the Minnesota series?" I had written an article on
Emerson, and they'd read the article and they thought it was really
right. So they asked me to do this book. (I'm being anonymous be
cause I'm not quite sure who it was. There were two or three people

*See page 123.

131

Miles: on the board at Minnesota, and I'm not sure.) They had this

Minnesota series going, a seventy-page pamphlet. I thought this
would be great fun to tackle, use all that I now knew to tackle
one man, see what I could make of him, especially one whom I loved,
one of my favorite poets, and one about whom so much wrong stuff I
thought had been written, and, to be sentimental, one whom I'd
wanted to write about when I first came to Berkeley and wanted to
write with T.K. Whipple, except that he didn't feel I could do
that well. So I was very pleased about getting recognized in the
American Lit establishment after all these years — which was not to
be.

I wrote the pamphlet, forced-draft in one whole year, really
enjoyed it, and I think I read everything by everybody about
Emerson, and everything that Emerson had written. All of Emerson's
lectures and all the data weren't out then as they are now. There's
been a wonderful amount since, but in terms of what was then
available I wrote this pamphlet. It was the first thing that I was
in such a degree of hurry about that as I wrote it, in the summer,
instead of typing it myself, I gave it to somebody to type — a
typist, in other words — and she spilled a bottle of furniture
polish on it by mistake and it was obliterated. So that was kind
of an exciting story. [Laughter] I can't ever remember being bluer
than I was for a couple of days. I phoned the police department
and asked them whether they could read, with their Sherlock Holmes
X rays, through furniture polish, and they said I'd been reading
too many pulp magazines.

I remember my brother — we were going out to dinner and I was
telling my brother about this and he just really couldn't conceive
of why I was that upset. That was so fascinating to me — that
knowing me as well as he did, his attitude was, "Well, cheer upl
It's all in a lifetime, you know." [Laughter] However, the ending
was miraculously happy. I wrote to this very nice editor in
Minnesota; her first name was Jeanne; I can't quite spell her last
name; S-i-n-n-e-n or something? Anyway, I must get it right because
I haven't been that happy with editors I've suffered with through
the years, but she was just superb. I told her that this had
happened and I'd just have to bow out or start over. She said, "Do
you realize" — I mentioned I'd written the footnotes into the text
for the first time, to save time and be accurate — "Do you realize
we're not using footnotes? Why don't you just sit down and write
out of your mind what you remember and skip the footnotes? We don't
put those in the text anyway." She suggested a few questions that
might be interesting to ask myself. It was such a nice letter, so
totally constructive that I sat down and I did — I wrote the whole
thing out in about three weeks. I think it was close enough to
what I had written in the first place. I mean, I didn't feel it
was worse; I felt maybe it was even a little more coherent.

132

Miles: She liked it okay, and that came out, and that's been by far my
most successful work.* It's been reprinted a lot and sold a lot.
Royalties in my life means over $10 a year. [Laughter] So I got
lots of royalties on that. People have written me about it.
However, it was never reviewed in any orthodox magazine or
American literature journal, except there was one little summary
squib somewhere that said, "A peripheral work was done in this
field by Josephine Miles."

Teiser: It's such a small work — I was looking at it this morning — that
maybe the reviewers thought —

Miles: Oh no, they reviewed all the pamphlets. It just was I wasn't an

American Lit person. Never got to be an American Lit person. But
Emerson is a wonderful poet, and it was a great joy to me to do that
book. I summarized it — one section of it was summarized in Poetry
and Change . But it's been printed all over the world. I get
letters from India and Portugal —

Teiser: It's very highly analytical. I'm surprised that —

Miles: I am too. It's really a great joke. They buy it because they

want to know about Emerson's transcendentalism, and because he's a
big shot in India and Portugal, and then they have to read it, and
what they have to read is me, and it's very comical because it's
not what they're looking for. But the nice thing is these readers,
at least that write me, are very adaptable and [laughing] they say,
"This is not what I was looking for, but isn't this interesting!"
and then they ask me good questions.

I should say, by the way, I would never have had the nerve to
do all this if it hadn't been for Henry Smith. But he is such an
authority in the field, and he held my hand; he read it and said,
"Yes, it is okay to send in." I never otherwise would have done it
because I didn't feel strong enough in the American literature field.

I proposed that Emerson wasn't a Symbolist, that he was a
Metaphorist in the seventeenth century terms, which was his century.
That still isn't accepted. But Henry said it was true; so great! —
it's true.

Teiser: I read somewhere that many of your works had been translated into
many languages.

*Ralph Waldo Emerson.
1964.

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,

133

Miles: Yes, and that's the main one.

Teiser: I wonder how it translates into Urdu. [Laughter]

Miles: That's right — I've been translated into Urdu. Also, some other
essays of mine, or chapters, have been translated into literary
magazines in Italy and France, where there's a good deal of
criticism of vocabulary and structuralism. Then my poetry has
been translated all sorts of amazing places — China, Turkey,
Hungary. I have all sorts of texts that I can't read at all.
They tell me it's mine, but if it weren't for [laughing] the words
Josephine Miles, I wouldn't know what it was. Even the line
length looks different.

Teiser: Although you say you've hardly been part of the establishment,
you've certainly been diligent, shall I say [laughing], and if
anyone said you should publish, you have done that.

Miles: The interesting thing is it doesn't feel like diligence now. I

mean, when I see that list it looks rather diligent. After I got
going, after a rather slow, struggling start on all this, for one
thing critically or historically or whatever word you want to use,
I was really bothered by the fact that poetry was so misread by
historians and critics. I was wondering if there wasn't some way
to get closer to the poem as it works. This is partly like the
New Criticism, but on the other hand the New Criticism wanted to
deal with just one poem at a time, and my work does absolutely no
good at all to one poem at a time; mine is interested in the
function of one poem in a sequence of poems or in the work of a
man or the work of an era, the work of a type. So it's a
generalizing force, and it's for that reason that it wasn't popular-
in other words, this is going counter to the New Criticism. I've
gone to many lectures by visiting celebrities at Cal where I'd meet
them afterwards and the lecturer would say, "Oh, I know your work.
It's just a shame you don't do it in the way that would be
believable."

Teiser: [Laughter] What do they mean by that?

Miles: For the linguist, this would be to be linguistic, to do much more
with linguistic analysis, which to me has always seemed, from what
I could learn from it, too alien to the text. Or the literary
critics, most of the reviews of my books say, "This is a pretty
interesting book and we recommend you read it, but it's because of
all the tables and charts that she throws in there." So I've just
fallen between these two stools all the time, whereas my feeling is
that it's the bringing of those together that's a good thing to do.
As I mentioned before, my going to all these linguistics meetings,
afternoons and evenings of visiting linguists, and then also the

134

Miles: aesthetics group that I belonged to for so many years, and also

various little groups that we had here at other colleagues' houses,
studying some works of literature that we cared about — in all of
these I was always saying, "Can't we bring the sense of art and the
philosophy of art and the philosophy of language together? Because
that's what literature is." But the linguists want to say that
literature is some special aspect of language. They want to say,
for example, that literary language is rule-breaking language or —
what's the word? — deviant, discontinuant , in some way broken off
from normal language. That's what they want to talk about. And
they don't allow for the function of the principles of art. On
the other hand, the principles of art don't allow for the principles
of language study because they say it'd be more like analyzing the
chemistry of the paint on the canvas. Well, why not? Why not? I
hope some day this won't be so much like pulling teeth to bring
these two together.

So it doesn't seem to me that diligent. If you care about
something and you want to argue with people and you've got a lot
of friends to argue with and a lot of strangers to argue with, you
just do it as much as you can and you enjoy it. Willard Farnham,
who was one of our chairmen after Ben Lehman, used to say that his
justification of publishing was that publishing is teaching at a
wider range. There's of course been lots of debate against
publishing, that publishing is a silly demand and takes away from
your teaching and so forth. But I think Willard 's point is true;
there are various ways of teaching. I wouldn't say I succeeded in
teaching [laughing], not in the least, but it's something that's
fun to try. Once in a while you get a letter or a response that
seems to understand, and that's like having a good student in a
class that seems to understand, or a whole class, or a whole
combination of responses sometimes. But it takes a certain amount
of patience, and you feel nobody's listening and nobody's believing.
That was very hard with that one book because the relation of poetry
to prose is so fascinating and so not what people think; that is,
prose, from my study, the language of prose, or to put it the other
way, the language of poetry is kind of a seed bed for common
language. That's not the way most people think of it; they think
of the language of poetry as an ornamentation of the language of
prose. To see how this all turns around and works, and how the
language of poetry is really closest to the language of science,
because they're both trying to objectify without making statements
that need defense the way assertion needs, the whole relation of
one kind of thinking to another, is fascinating to discover.

Something else I skipped I should mention. Though we didn't
manage to get Chomsky to stay in Berkeley or agree with us, one of
his books, a study of the Port-Royal rhetoricians of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a great illumination to

135

Miles: me. For him it was an historical study, so it wasn't his theory.
But ideas I read there — I suddenly understood, and I remember the
afternoon. It was one of those great times when things become
clear. It dawned on me what is the relation between the structure
of a word, the structure of a sentence, the structure of a
paragraph, and the structure of a chapter or what have you, and
how these are all similar units of construction. So this was
helpful in doing more with the analysis of structure in different
kinds of styles in both prose and poetry.

It was also helpful for teaching composition. If you would
like to know all about how paragraphs work, I would like to take
five hours out and tell you. [Laughter] They're just a marvelous
thing. Paragraphs are parts of sentences; paragraphs are
adverbial phrases or clauses or appositions or modifiers. The
whole language gets simpler and nicer when you see what they
understood in the seventeenth century but what we lost in the
meantime when we staggered into eight parts of speech and a lot of
nonsense like that. For me it means that what you call diligence
and I call various explorations now come together and support each
other, which at least is encouraging to me.

Teiser: You have not used the word "logic" ever.

Miles: In what relation?

Teiser: In your analysis of ideas and the use of words.

Miles: Okay. Well, I could. Would you like me to try? [Laughter] First
what I was interested in was what you call lexical. It was words
and their associations and how they're used, how frequency of use
tells something about the writer. If those words are connected in
any way, basically the way you'd connect them would be grammatical;
like you'd have parts of speech, you'd have a subject and a
predicate and modifiers and conjunctions and so forth. For a long
time I stayed away from conjunctions because the writers in the
field said, "We must divide reference words from nonreference words,"
and prepositions and conjunctions were nonreference. That was a big
mistake that I tried to rectify in Style and Proportion, because
nonreference words are heavy, heavy, heavy, both with connotation
and reference and all sorts of implications. So I accepted too many
assumptions early and had to go back and learn about that all fairly
late. But lately I have done more with nonreference terms, what
they call function terms, and those lead to more studies of
structure, of construction, and that'd be grammar — how the parts
work together to make the whole.

136

Miles: Then logic would be how the statements work together. That is,
if this is true, then is that true? If all men are mortal, and
Socrates is a man, then is it true that Socrates is mortal? In
other words, you're relating one statement with another statement.
Logic is the relation of statement to statement. Sometimes people
say that logic is the relation of statement to verifiable reality,
and that's true; that is an interest. You are talking about, "If
this is true, then is that true?" and you have to talk about truth.
But basically the way logic works is the interrelation of statement
to statement.

And then, the third item in that medieval education unit,
which was called the Trivium, is rhetoric, and that's the relation
of the sentence to the audience — the tone, the relation of the
speaker to the audience.

All of these three enter in to what I am interested in. But
I've done most at the lexical level and next most at the
grammatical level, and so on up. I have done least at the logical
level because when I get to the logical level, and it's in poetry,
it's so strongly related to other interrelations of sentences,
namely of lines and of aesthetic units of interrelation, that the
logical interrelation just becomes one of many.

I did, however, do one strongly logical one, which was a
study of John Donne's poetry, to point out that if you study the
connectives in seventeenth century poetry, you find out that John
Donne uses millions more connectives than anybody else. He's just
an excessive user of connectives, and the seventeenth century uses
more connectives than any other century. So he is the acme of the
acme, and in this sense he does represent the century by being an
extreme like this. Then if you see what those connections are, you
see that a huge number are alternative or concessive or disjunctive
connectives like "but," "yet," "though."

Then, after doing that, I then went back and analyzed the
structure of his poems and found out that almost every poem — maybe
80 percent of his poetry (that's a guess) — turns on such a word,
either at the beginning of the sonnet, for example, or the beginning
of the sestet. So the way he writes is: extreme situation, extreme
situation, extreme situation, but God will turn me to a simpler one.
So his overstatements and his exaggerations and his very beautiful
hyperboles are preparatory to a reservation, which he then gives in
subordinating himself to the theological context. This structure
characterizes his poetry and to some degree I think characterizes
what you could call metaphysical poetry.

So I wrote another article about modern so-called metaphysical
poetry, and how much of modern metaphysical poetry isn't at all.
It doesn't contain this negative base, it doesn't contain these

137

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:
Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

alternatives, it doesn't contain this whole crucial aspect of
Donne and the seventeenth century. But some few moderns do a
little bit. Yeats does. Robert Penn Warren does. But it becomes
an interesting touchstone then for defining a certain type of
poetry which you can call logical in that particular kind of logic
that sticks out because of his disjunctives.

But there are other interesting kinds. For example, there's
the logic of comparison or alternation, either/or — choice. That's
a very interesting kind of logic in poetry. Those words are all
sitting there, waiting for me to get at them [laughing], after I
get through with you.

Here we are keeping you from them!

That's right! You're keeping me from either/or. [Laughter]

You were saying that you combined or wished to combine some things.
A case in point: You were just analyzing, speaking analytically,
but also you were speaking of aesthetics.

Yes. Once you find out that Donne uses a lot of yets and buts and
thoughs, then you need to ask, "In the patterning of his poems, how
do they fit the pattern?" The patterning part is an aesthetic part.
Why the linguists don't see this, and why we waste magazine article
after magazine article on fussing about rule breaking, I don't know!
[Laughter]

There are about ten million other things to ask you.
or shall we ask you two or three more, or what?

Shall we stop,

I have to stop in about five minutes. But ask me and see if I can
talk fast. I wrote several notes down here, but I don't —

Do say them, then.

One name I wrote down that I wanted to mention in terms of all this —
recently has come out a book which is a great joy to me because it
is working philosophically in the way that I believe right, which is
fairly rare for me. It's a new book in the last ten years. It's
called Structuralist Poetics, and it's been of a certain kind of
linguistic study which has dealt with substitutable elements in
literature; that is, structures where you get paradigmatic
substitutabilities, grammatical substitutabilities. In anthropology
this is represented by Levi-Strauss; you can have one kind of hero
substituted for another, one kind of episode substituted in a hero's
life for another. In grammar it can be that you can substitute a
pronoun for a noun, and so on and so on. (This is too rough and
ready.) But this has also troubled critics in America because

138

Miles: they're not very enthusiastically structuralist in the abstract

way, and they haven't done much with it. In teaching the seminar
in modern critical theory, I'm always finding the frustration of
the students who want to learn about it but then say, "So what?"
after they've learned about it, and don't find it very useful in
their inquiries.

Now, this fine book called Structuralist Poetics is by
Jonathan Culler, whose father was a professor at Yale and did an
article very influential in my life, a critical essay on Bysshe
(who's an eighteenth century author, a great interesting
transitional force). Jonathan Culler teaches in England, and this
book has come out — it's a couple of years old — and it's really
cheering to me because what it draws from — de Saussure and
linguistic studies and the structuralists and the whole Russian
formalism and all the things we've been working among for the last
two decades — what it draws from that is the function of language
as providing a community of resources of thoughts, beliefs, values,
and thus a kind of competence in the people who use it to
understand and agree with and share with each other. These could
be the poets of an era, for example. So the sense of community
of resources resting in language, making for greater communication
and greater share of values, underlies the studies that I've done
in relating a poet to poet and time to time, and extends the New
Critical idea that you stress just one autonomous poem. It
breaks up the idea of autonomy, and it goes to the idea of
continuity, and while it doesn't stress artistic and aesthetic
patterning, it could, obviously. So it leaves room for what I
would like to do, or have done, in a way that hardly any other
theory ever has. So that's a blessing to me and is the sense of
language that I have in relation to literature — that language and
literature are both resources from which individuals draw, and
which they draw not only as individuals but as groups and schools
and types and trends and mostly just as temporal communities or
more spatial communities.

That's where I started out, asking about how you define the
individuality of a poet in Wordsworth, for example. What I
quickly got into, you define his individuality in terms of his
relation to other poets through the language that they all
stressed. So you see we get back to home base there very nicely.

[end tape 2, side 1]

139

INTERVIEW V — 4 August 1977

Public Contexts
[begin tape 1, side 1]

Teiser: I didn't know if this was an inadvertent omission last time, or if
there just wasn't anything special to be said. When we were
talking about the department, I don't think you said anything about
Mark Schorer.

Miles: I did the time before, remember? When I talked about Gordon

McKenzie and Mark Schorer and I doing the anthology and so on. My
main connection with Mark was in working on ideas together, and
criticism and so forth. I suppose I could have mentioned him — you
mean as chairman of the department?

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: I seldom saw him in that role. We had a series of very good

chairmen, and he was one of them. But as I remember he wasn't an
initiator particularly; he just, you know, sort of held the fort.

Teiser: Did the chairmanship then rotate instead of earlier —

Miles: Always the dean is supposed to ask the department whom it would

like to have as chairman every three to five years, and that's what
usually happens. What I mean to say, in my memory that's the way
it's been.

Teiser: But before that, people held the position longer.

Miles: Yes. I probably mentioned Henry Smith quite a bit more than Mark
because he did more initiating. We had more crises during his
administration that were interesting, like the linguistic fight.
He later went on to be on committees that I was involved with, and
so on. I just actually saw Mark much more as a friend than as an
administrator.

140

Teiser: Another thing was the effect of the sentiment that I think came

from Governor Reagan's office, that teachers should teach and let
all that publishing stuff go; that that wasn't really what they
were supposed to do.

Miles: I followed Willard Farnham's idea that publishing was a very
important wider form of teaching.

Teiser: I think we did not discuss it in relation to the state government
pressure. Didn't they actually put pressure on people?

Miles: Well, it's always there, and it's worse now than ever. It's much
worse now than it was with Reagan, with Governor [Edmund G. , Jr.]
Brown and [John D.] Vasconcellos and Willie Brown and the whole
problem of affirmative action.

Teiser: Why does affirmative action enter into it?

Miles: When you bring up any other criterion except discovery of new
knowledge, you're in the soup! We are really in the soup with
them because they have all sorts of different ideas, like helping
the poor and getting new standards of knowledge and value and
learning, and developing a sense that knowledge is a dangerous
thing, that intellect is anti-soul and, oh, everything you can
think of we are now getting thrown at us. I'm not sure you want
me to talk about it because it takes an awful lot of time to
unravel. [Laughter]

Teiser: I was just wondering, in perspective, if this point of view had
actually cut down on most people's publishing and if it made it
more difficult for you to do scholarly work.

Miles: You're talking especially about the Reagan administration?

Teiser: Well, beginning in the Reagan administration and continuing until
now.

Miles: It's hard to think of it in those terms.
Teiser: Then I'm misstating it.
Miles: No, no. [Pause]

Teiser: Let me go way around the other side of it, then. Am I correct
that during the Reagan administration there was some attempt to
make quantitative analysis of teaching — how many hours people
taught, how many hours they were in their offices to counsel
students and so forth — and to increase the number of hours?

141

Miles: Oh, I see. Well, this is all media stuff. This has nothing to do
with us. This is what you read in the newspaper.

Teiser: Then you say what really did occur —

Miles: Robert Gordon Sproul was a businessman, but he was really

dedicated to the frontiers of research and to making this a state
university that was a big research place, especially in the big
sciences, of course, but in the arts also. The arts never had the
money spent on them, but they struggled along, and he backed them
whenever the thought came to his mind. For example, in one of the
leading anthologies of poetry for the United States, the one edited
by Hayden Carruth, who was editor of Poetry magazine, about a sixth
of the poetry comes from the University of California and environs.
That suggests the strong productivity of this place in the arts as
well as in science. Sproul was back of that combination, especially
when it was mediated by the good chairmen that we had, and Governor
[Earl] Warren. So we always had a sense of total backing and a
chance to do anything we wanted to try. That was the whole quality
of Berkeley as I knew it from 1940 to 1960, was that push forward
on all fronts, which included publishing and teaching, and there
was no split between them.

Tom Parkinson used to say that when you went down the halls of
Wheeler at six o'clock at night, all English Department doors were
open, and at every desk you saw a professor leaning over a desk
with a student's paper before him and the student listening and
asking questions about the paper. That's the picture that I have
of the English Department of Wheeler Hall teaching. That was the
way Tom got shot by the mad student; as you know, he shot the
bullet right through the graduate student and hit Tom too.* That is
the picture: we were that close together with our students. A sad
metaphor.

We didn't do any less work because we were researching. It
was one whole big thing that we were doing, and it all went
together in the sense it was the same subject matter but in the
sense that we were teaching on these various levels, both students
in classes and in office and students in Extension and then to the
people we wrote for and published for in the journals and magazines.

I doubt there was any split or problem there until the sixties.
In the sixties what got to us, of course, was the problem of much
weaker administration. We lost Ben Lehman and other good
administrators, and we lost the working with the president. Clark
Kerr was a good man, but Clark Kerr was so busy working on the
growth of the University, and tremendous growth became a problem
also. He turned, I think, away — well, he was pretty good still,
however. I remember getting little notes from Kerr and things in

*The shooting actually took place when Mr. Parkinson had his office
in Dwinelle Hall.

142

Miles: his own writing; he was very devoted to keeping the faculty in

mind. But in the mid-sixties we lost him too. I think that the
loyalty oath with the Regents, that was a great big fat distraction,
and the faculty began realizing that they had problems with
recognition. Then the dismissal of Kerr, which was another example
of Regent lack of understanding.

These were the things that brought to mind that maybe others
didn't see us as we saw ourselves, that is, very diligent, hard
working, and involved.

That's when we had a great deal of violence on campus, which
I've always felt was created mostly by Regential and administrative
blindness. But we had to turn a lot of our time just to choking
back the tear gas. This was very distracting. And we had to
teach off campus as well as on. We often had to teach two sections
of every class because some people wanted to meet on campus and
some didn't, and we had to handle both; we couldn't disregard the
minority in terms of the majority.

So if that's the kind of thing you mean, yes. But this is
administrative failure to back up faculty functions, and that was
just tremendous in the sixties. It was because they didn't
understand what was going on, and they didn't sympathize, and they
didn't cope. There were a few Regents, of course, who did
wonderfully well, and there were a few administrators who did,
notably Lincoln Constance. But they were rare. So we did lose a
lot of momentum there, except that we also gained a good deal
through the students, who were so constructive and so active and
so vital that I suppose we gained back from them more than we lost
from the administration.

Then I suppose Reagan came in, and Brown, both of whom are
highly anti- intellectual people. They're highly abstract; they
want grassroots, they want trade courses, they want job
preparation, and they want opportunity for minorities in their
sense of opportunity, which is instant jobs, and is all very alien
to a faculty function — it's not the job of a university faculty to
get instant jobs.

So we have had to spend a tremendous lot of distracting time
on going up to Sacramento, trying to state our case. A wonderful
physicist like Bill [William B.] Fretter has jeopardized his
career to sit in legislative chambers to fight the poison, really,
that comes from some legislators. I think on the whole the faculty
has tried to hold its own and has still worked very hard in both
ways.

143

Miles: You ask about quantitative figures. Well, that's hard to talk

about. You wouldn't believe it, but accounting, computing, and so
forth has been very messy in the past thirty years, and lots of
these headlines that say, "Faculty-Class Ratio Falls" turn out to
be some wrong computation by some secretary or some machine. Then
you go up to Sacramento and say, "Look, fellows. Actually it's
risen," and they say, "Oh, great," but that doesn't get in the
papers. Much of this whole hassle is really absurd. They're
trying now to get a formula for measurement which is stabilized
and secure and checkable and so on. Alan Post everybody says is a
very good man, and the budget directors. In other words, there's
perfectly good faith among the intelligent people on both sides.

It's just that when President [Charles J.] Hitch tried to turn
over to a very different kind of computational administration, I
think one thing that happened is he turned it over to people who
didn't know how to do it, and we got fantastic computational
reports that had nothing to do with reality, which nobody recognized
until last year. Things like that.

So again, I'm not sure we ought to go into all this because it
gets so complicated, and —

Teiser: You've given us a sense of it.

Miles: The important thing is, all through the sixties and seventies I lost
much faith in what I would have called one of my central beliefs
before, and that was the First Amendment. That is, I think freedom
of the press is such a vicious force when uncontrolled, as it has
been by good people in this area. When somebody like Jim Benet for
many years on "Newsroom"* begins his report on Berkeley, whatever
it might be about, with a canned sound of kids yelling and screaming,
you know you've got distortion. That kind of distortion I guess
does grow; the distorted complex, the "What is the university for,
and what are we doing here?" We have so little validity now in the
media and in public concept that my only hope lies, as I said
before, that the children of the sixties, when they become adult
leaders, will revise the tremendous distortions.

Teiser: They're now just really getting firmly into their careers.

Miles: Yes. Some of them are already good. We already see them in action.
Some of my students I already see in legislative action, and it's
very heartening to see how they're turning things around a little
bit. It isn't only the Unversity, it's the whole public school
system that's had terrible problems with the new committee
legislation and so on. Look at — what was his name? — the head of
education that we had for years and graduated anybody so they

*0n television station KQED, San Francisco.

144

Miles: wouldn't get out of their peer group. Again, [Wilson] Riles is

trying to turn that around. So there's a good deal of hope. But
we lost so much ground with — what was his name? I can't think of
that terrible —

Teiser: That bigot who was —

Miles: That was the head of the school system here for a long time.*

Riles I think is a big hope. And [Mayor Tom] Bradley in L.A. is a
big hope. I think a lot of the black leaders, for example, are
going to turn around and fight this cheap entrance to universities
which is now being fostered, and cheap degrees and all that, and
quantitative mass control stuff. But at the moment it's very,
very discouraging. 1 think if we didn't all like teaching so much
[laughing], we'd be worse discouraged than we are. But where
there's usually some kid to talk to who feels he's learning
something, that makes up for it.

During the late sixties or early seventies, as an example, we
had some Regents who were very strongly fighting against the faculty
because they felt they were — I don't know what, really. I don't
know what their cause was. Oh, they were anti-student-uprising, of
course. But I used to get telephone calls from all over the state,
from former students saying, "I've just been to a Rotary meeting,
and Edward Teller came and talked to us about your university and
his. He asked for a moment of silent prayer from all of us, for
the sake of our grandchildren, that the University would not be as
subversive as it was as he was talking." And he said, "That was
very effective against you people up there" (because they always
say "you people up there;" that's their phrase for us). He [Teller]
would say, for example, "Do you know what it means when a professor
does field work? It means he's out on the golf course." Now, when
that goes to every Rotary Club throughout the state, noon after noon
during the Cambodia crisis, you've got a problem! We never knew how
to solve it. For a while Henry Smith was on a truth squad that
tried to go around following up. But you can't do that; just like
restatements in the paper — nobody reads them. They're not on the
first page any more. The power of the press to falsify and not
retract is so total that I simply can't know what to think about
the First Amendment.

Teiser: Is it any different than it was?

*Max Rafferty.

145

Miles: I don't remember this in the forties and fifties. I don't

remember this — of course, Sproul was very popular with the press.
That was still a time when there was growth and interest and I think
a kind of intellectual strength. The legislature was very proud of
the University as one of the best public universities in the
country. We participated in that pride and growth, and Sproul was
vocal about it. A faculty member for those twenty years felt very
much appreciated, and a faculty member in the last twenty years has
not felt appreciated — I mean by those kinds of people. As far as
the student goes, it's okay.

Teiser: Earlier, you university people weren't much in the news; you
weren't there to be distorted.

Miles: That's right. The media weren't — they didn't even call it media in
those days. We didn't have much television. If you had television,
it was kind of Edward R. Murrow showing how the illiterate could
learn to write. It was very touching and, again, it was pro-
intellect not anti-intellect. It was not using the university as
a kind of football for controversy and excitement and scare
headlines and so forth.

Teiser: Thank you for talking about that. I know that you simplified it.

Miles: Well, it's probably a lot deeper than I could get there. I probably
could say, aside from Kerr, who certainly, as I say, had a big job
on his hands to integrate and handle growth, aside from that, we
then had chancellors and presidents who were not coming from
California and I think simply didn't understand or didn't really
have much interest in California as a state or the function of
California as a state, or the legislature. I think the legislators
got turned off from all these people. We had a series of — what? —
four or five of them, people to whom we didn't speak, who didn't
speak to us, whom we never saw, who were always out of town if
there was a problem, who didn't see — there was, seemed to be, lack
of communication. I'm undoubtedly speaking too bitterly about our
administration during those years, and I can merely say that this
is truly my view. If I'd been closer or farther away, I would have
probably seen extenuating circumstances. But in the middle distance
of the faculty, it was a bad scene.

Even now it's hard, because now we have a president who is a
faculty member, and a Calif ornian, and this is a fine thing. But
we have chancellors who aren't, to some degree. Now that I'm more
closely involved in what they think and do, I realize sometimes how
far away they do seem from our problems. But I think things are
going to get much better in this way. I think Bill Fretter has been
quite a hero, and our president, and I think people have so deeply
realized how bad the problems are now, that I think the problems
you raise have been now in a sense realized and maybe will be faced
more seriously.

146

Miles: You probably didn't read in the papers that the great scandal about

something called DSIR [Data System of Instructional Resources], which
was all the data for the whole set of campuses, all this data was
reported by a group of officials with the initials D-S-I-R (I don't
know what that all stood for) . It was a data reporting and
computing analysis, and it all turned out to be false! It didn't
use proper statistical modifications and so forth, and these guys
had the power — the power, again, of the computer — and Mr. Hitch had
instituted this as a good thing and it was supposed to be. I don't
know the history — where he got it and why they were so bad and why
they weren't checked on. So we've been living a lie [laughing] for
about ten years, I guess. We've said over and over, "Look, people,
this can't be true! It just isn't true, it isn't true." They say,
"The facts are before you on the computer," and there's this whole
loss of human relations.

Anyway, let's say merely that the trouble with asking
professors to record the hours that they work is that it often
turns out to be sixty hours a week, and this is no joke! I mean,
everybody laughs, but it's no joke — we do. You have to. You can't
do all your teaching and all your research without working weekends
and summers too. So we report this, and then everybody says,
"Baloney! That can't be true." So it's one of those absurd
situations that we really like what we're doing so we really do an
awful lot of it. We're not getting time and a half for overtime.

Teiser: You work on projects on your own time during the summers, you said.

Miles: Sure.

Teiser: Are you able to while you're teaching?

Miles: You can do little things while you're teaching. You can do little
bits, sort of work toward a cumulative effect in the summer.

Teiser: Do you read all the time? Do you just read regularly every day, or
what?

Miles: Yes. Sure.
Teiser: Summer, winter —

Miles: Sure. All the time. Despite that, the amount of reading that I had
to catch up with at the end of this June, I just finished last
Friday, which is about the first of August. And that was just
reading that had to be done immediately; it was manuscripts of
former students — nothing to do with current classroom work, but
manuscripts from friends and former students who wrote to me and
asked me to check them. You do an awful lot of consulting and
conferring with people in all that, and books that I had to read in

147

Miles:

Teiser ;
Miles:

Teiser;
Miles :
Teiser:
Miles :

Teiser:
Miles:

order to get the answers to questions I was looking for myself.
So I only got caught up on the most pressing work on the first of
August. So this morning for the first time I'm reading a book that
I want to read, which is still a scholarly work. It's a book on
the ballad which I want to read, but it's still scholarly. Oh, I
did read one book of fiction.

Do you read fiction for pleasure?

I used to, after I got through finals, go down to the circulating
library and get about half a dozen books of fiction and try to slow
down my speed. I read very fast, and I'd get too wound up when I
was at the end of the year. So I would read these fiction books
fast, and slow down my speed. But circulating libraries aren't
what they used to be, either. [Laughter]

We have paperbacks now.

Yes, we have paperbacks, right.

But you don't read for pleasure just right along?

I have to fight to read for pleasure,
calls and extra manuscripts.

I have to fight off phone

You said you were reading manuscripts of former students, that you
feel interest and obligation — ?

It's a big burden and it's a big pleasure too. To have your
students keep writing is of course what you want. This extends
everything we've been saying into the second generation. And this
might be a good place to continue from what we were talking about
last time, because I did want to mention, when we were talking
about scholarship and so on, and writing and so on, that this is
true: graduate students that work with you, you like to have them
go on too, not just write their dissertations and vanish into outer
space. I've had maybe a couple of dozen graduate students, and my
great pride is that they are not apprentices in any way; none of
them have ever written books like what I write, or have used the
same methods, but have used very different methods of their own and
have worked in all sorts of fields and periods of time. This gives
me great delight, that each one is very much unlike the others.*
I guess maybe about a fourth of them have done a lot of good
publishing, which is an unusually high average. So when they send
stuff to me to read and check on, of course I'm very pleased. It
takes an awful lot of hard work to keep up with all that; the
better they are, the more hard work it takes.

*See Appendix.

148

Miles: I say that I just this morning started reading something for

pleasure, but also this morning I got two letters from two very
good former Ph.D.'s, both saying they were sending me manuscripts
to read. I won't get to finish this book before their manuscripts
come. [Laughing] But that's nice. I'm both pleased and somewhat
oppressed. I guess all of us have the problem which we can't seem
to define to other people, about the accrual of responsibility to
students as you go along.

I remember very vividly during the forties when we first
developed — again, when our department was first shaping up in its
new shape, and after the war when we were thinking of getting jobs
for students. We placed our first Ph.D.'s at Michigan and Princeton,
and Larry Benson at Harvard, and Bill Steinhoff at Michigan, David
Green at Princeton, Sheridan Baker at Michigan, and so on. This
was very exciting, because Berkeley hadn't done much of this
reciprocity of placements before, and so we were much interested
too in having them publish.

When in 1968 we had the hundredth anniversary at the University,
it was such a bad time for violence that the University hesitated to
have any ceremonies because they would have been perhaps occasions
for more violence. So the University played down in a very timorous
way its own anniversary. But the English Department decided that
that was wrong. So we asked the University for some money to have
our own celebration, and they figured we wouldn't get too violent.
What we decided to do was to invite a dozen of our most distinguished
graduates to come to a week's celebration and have a dinner and hear
them. It was fun! It was a really nice idea. We got a big list of
these and then had a vote as to which ones we would bring. We
didn't have any great fights; it was pretty clear who they were.
There were two or three of these first Ph.D.'s who had worked out
very well. Also there were some poets that had done well, like Bill
Stafford and George Starbuck. And the George P. Elliotts, and the
Tapers, Bernard and Phyllis, who were working on the New Yorker and
who had been editors of our literary magazines here.

So it was in the early or mid-forties that we picked up this
sense of distinction, of publication and action in our own students.
There too, some of them left and became extremely good teachers,
like Al Hollingsworth, who never actually finished his Ph.D. But
there again, I think mostly we wanted a double standard of hoping
they'd be good teachers and good publishers too. That's the way it
worked for many of them, a source of pleasure to the department.

149

Developments in Poetry

Miles: Then I might go back from scholarship to poetry, saying that at the
same time, in the forties, we began a new era for poetry in that in
the thirties I'd been talking about Yvor Winters and Ann Winslow
and her book. By the way, an anecdote, I got a letter today too
from somebody I know, Don Bogen, who said, "I'm writing a book on
Roethke. I'm working on the Roethke material up here in Seattle,
and I ran into your poetry in this anthology where he is too."
(This was Trial Balances.) He said, "It's so amazing to read your
early poetry that I thought I'd write you." So that was it. I
keep noticing on these days that we talk how things keep coming
back.

Ann Winslow got her M.A. and left for Wyoming to teach and
raise dogs (which was a nice switch). In about 19AO, when I came
back to teach, there was a new group. It seemed new, because I'd
been away for three years. There were these people, a very nice
group of people studying, doing graduate work — George P. Elliott and
the Bill Steinhoffs and the Tapers and the Ham [Hamilton] Tylers, the
Benbow Ritchies — all friends. The Fretters were in this group, the
one I mentioned who is now active in physics and in the University.
And the Jack Murchios. It seems that as I remember things they're
clusters; I don't know why these clusters happen, but this was a
very good cluster of friends that I got to know. George Elliott
helped me, and I suppose that was one way I got to know them. He
drove for me for a while. We used to meet in the evenings and talk
about whatever it was we thought important. I think we were still
talking about how to discuss a poem, which was still a very hot
subject in those days. I remember that we just nearly fell all
over ourselves on the subject of [Gerard Manley] Hopkins 's
"Windhover," but that's kind of a vague memory; I can't imagine us
doing it now.

Anyway, that group was active in graduate study. Then, at the
same time, we had Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer in poetry, a fellow
by the name of George Leite, who started a couple of magazines.
One was called New Rejections, and this was in reaction to New
Directions which was just becoming very strong and active and well
known in the forties. Then he did another one called Circle which
was pretty important because it circulated throughout the world,
and we had exchanges with some of those jokester magazines in
Australia, and we got a sense of poetry's being international.
Leite was a tremendous entrepeneur; he had a bookstore on Telegraph
Avenue — some angel angeled it for him — where the Eclair Bakery now
is. That provided a very, very active steering center. I remember

150

Miles: at one time somebody said, "Where's the Phi Beta office around this
campus?" And somebody else said, "Oh, down the hall," and he
pointed it out. And they said, "Oh no, that's the poetry office,"
and it was actually both. Phi Betes were poets and vice versa.
[Laughter]

Speaking of New Directions, James Laughlin came out here and
was so impressed with all this activity, he said there was no
place in the country, except maybe Madison, that had this kind of
poetic activity. That was in 1941, maybe, something like that.
He published my second book of poems. The first had been published
by Macmillan; it was a sequel to Trial Balances. Then Laughlin
started this series called the "Poet of the Month" or the year, or
something.

Teiser: The month.
Miles: Was it the month?
Teiser: Yes.

Miles: So I think somebody asked me to send to that, and I did, my second

book, the second collection that I had, and he turned it down. That
didn't surprise me particularly, but what was interesting was that
a little later I got a letter from him saying, "Delmore Schwartz is
one of our editors here, and Delmore Schwartz happened to read your
manuscript, which I was sending back, and said, 'No, we should
publish this'." So I'm very happy to think that I was rescued by
Delmore Schwartz, because I liked his first book of poetry very
much; it was called In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.

Laughlin in those days was sort of a traveling salesman for
his own work. He came out and we had a lot of fun, because he
decided my titles were no good (my titles are never any good). So
when I decided this would be called Poems on Several Occasions,
which showed my academic relation to Bud Bronson and the eighteenth
century, he said, "We'll have to name these poems for various
occasions," and so we started doing that — "On the Occasion of
Lighting a Fire in the Grate," and so on. We sat around the
apartment that I lived in then, and made up these titles, and really
had a very good time. He was a nice person.

Muriel Rukeyser was here for a while, and Octavio Paz was here,
and they decided this should be the translation capital of the
country, and everything was really humming.

Now that I had another book in the mid-forties, I decided I
ought to — well, New Directions was doing other types of things
then, as I remember; I mean I don't remember discussing it with

151

Miles: them. But I decided I'd like to have this published by Reynal and
Hitchcock because I liked Karl Shapiro's first book so much, and
they'd published it. So I sent that to them and they accepted it.

Teiser: Which one was that?

Miles: That was called Local Measures, and that was about 19—

Teiser: Forty-six.

Miles: Yes. So things were very prosperous for poetry in the forties, as
they were in other ways too. This was, remember, a heavy wartime,
and it made people very conscious of the world around us. We were
bound to Berkeley because of gas rationing. We were also bound to
kind of a cave-like atmosphere because we couldn't have lights on
at night. We were blacked out, and students would rove the streets
throwing stones anywhere they could see a gleam of light, and
yelling, "Lights out! Lights out." So there was a sort of reason
why there was all this intensity, because there was an intensity
of focus out in the town; people weren't going away for the weekend,
and they weren't wasting much time. If they were conscientious
objectors, they were wondering how that would turn out, and were
working meantime in hospitals and so on, and later were interned
up at Waldport, Oregon, where Bill Everson and Bill Stafford and
Gary Snyder and others were; that became a nest of singing birds up
there. Then they all came back here in the late forties, after
becoming friends, and they published a magazine called Interim and
another one called Ark with Sanders Russell, and so on. There are
just infinite names I could mention, and groups and clusters and
interrelations here. There's all this sense of, "Well, if we can
make it through the war, we certainly can make it through the peace."
In other words, we'll have all this stuff ready to go, if peace
comes.

I remember it was very hard for me to get to classes because I
had used student help, and the students were all drafted by that
time, all the able-bodied ones. But I did have a boy that was in
one of the armed forces on campus, and the armed forces captain very
kindly let him help me, because he had a car. But he had to come on
campus at eight o'clock in the morning. So all that year I had to
come on to campus at eight o'clock, and my class wasn't till nine.
So I parked outside of LSB, Life Sciences Building, and had beautiful
times watching the dawn come between eight and nine [laughing] , and
the students come to class. It was a very lovely time. I tried the
stunt then of telling myself to write a poem every Thursday morning,
or every morning — I can't remember what — to see if I could be a
serious kind of person who sat down at the typewriter every morning
and wrote something willy-nilly. That was my experiment with that,
and I did. I wrote a poem every whatever-it-was, Thursday or

152

Miles: Tuesday or both, for that span of time. A year later I realized
there were just as many decent ones as there would have been if I
had written without schedule. In other words, I had to throw more
than usual away. So I told myself I was right, that I shouldn't
worry too much about regularity and timing and that. But with all
these stresses and difficulties, the fact that if you did get away
for a weekend— I remember we went either to the Russian River or to
Los Gatos when we got enough stamps, maybe once a semester — then
our guys who were soldiers and could get leave would come and stay
with us. That was both sort of a harrowing time — I mean my brothers
and my friends, the fellows that I studied with who were students or
teachers elsewhere, would come and spend time with us at either of
these places, and we'd hear all about the horrors of the war. It
was a time of great tension, but also a lot of drive, I suppose, to
make up for that tension.

[end tape 1, side 1; begin tape 1, side 2]

Teiser: The forties was a period which began many things, then, in poetry,
wasn't it? Are we today still feeling and seeing the people that
started there?

Miles: Well, yes and no. Part of it began in the thirties, of course,

where Winters and Rexroth were big figures, and Kenneth Patchen and
Kenneth Fearing, and of course Jeffers. And as I showed you in
Trial Balances, that was the book of the mid-thirties and that is
full of people still working today. So I suppose if you looked
back to the twenties you could even see that stuff began there.
That's the trouble with me, I was too involved to notice. But it
doesn't seem so; it seems to me that the twenties was more of a
time turned, looking backwards. I think part of this is perspective.

But then what was added in the forties was the generation of
Leite-Duncan-Spicer et al. Spicer was a very interesting person
who's much worshipped by poets today. He was in my poetry class
with five charming girls, and they did him a world of good. He
later turned away from the whole Berkeley scene, as did Robert
Duncan, because they felt opposed to it — that it was too academic.
But I know those girls did Jack Spicer a lot of good.

Another thing we did during those years was to have, to
continue the poetry meetings that Ann Wins low had had. These now
we had in the daytime because there were night blackouts. We had
them on Friday afternoons in Wheeler Hall, and a hundred people
would cornel Again, for lack of other things to do, but also out of
interest.

Richard Eberhart was over at the Alameda air base teaching
gunnery, and he would come over. He'd published a couple of books
by that time. He'd come over and talk to the students. We had a
lot of free talks by good people those afternoons. Henry Miller

153

Miles: was a fighting phrase; I believe somebody wanted Henry Miller and
somebody else said we couldn't have him. I don't remember what
that was all about. (I guess he wouldn't come, for one thing.)
Tom Parkinson and a poet by the name of Leonard Wolf and I ran
those for three or four years, and they developed to be so popular
that we even had sections in addition to this general meeting.
Talking about contact hours, contact hours were just limitless that
we spent on this stuff, and very, very invigorating. Later we had
some quarrels among ourselves because the different poets pulled
away and wanted to teach poetry in different ways. And toward the
middle of the decade the war got pretty strained too, so we gave
those up finally.

At the same time, then — about the same time — the chairman,
Ben Lehman, decided to have another kind of poetry thing going on.
In Morrison Room in the library he started Monday afternoon poetry
readings, which weren't like ours. He thought ours were too much
hoopla. He wanted just quiet poetry readings. Every four o'clock
there would be somebody there, and anybody who wanted to drop by
Morrison at four o'clock on Mondays would hear poetry read aloud.
He started that under the pressure of the war. These were mostly
members of the English Department. Just every year we'd make out a
schedule and the people would be there — no fuss and feathers. Just
year after year. That went on for about thirty years.

Teiser: Was it a different kind of poetry read there, then?

Miles: Oh yes. They read traditional work they were fond of. It wasn't

modern. On the whole, it was whatever the poet, the reader, wanted
to read. But the idea was it was from the treasury of English
literature. There was usually some Chaucer, some Milton, and
whatever poet was much liked by the reader. Also we did have some
original poetry there. During those years, I read probably three
times there my own, and others of us did. The most elaborate we
ever got, I think, is that we did a reading aloud of Samson Agonistes
with various characters, and we had an interesting reading aloud of
the Bible in a Greek version, an English version, and a Hebraic
version. There were little variations, but it was the steadiness of
it that was really so amazing.

That was suspended on the whole after thirty years because the
trucks that went up past the library, in front of the library, were
so heavy and made so much noise that you couldn't hear. So then we
moved to Wheeler, the Commons Room, where we've been having them in
the last couple of years. There they've grown so popular that
there's poetry read in there almost every day one way or another,
and they're in Morrison too. Now all you have to do is sign up if
you want to read there, and go and read. In other words, from four
o'clock on, the Commons Room is open to sign-ups for any kind of
literary use. They're either speakers who are planned, or there
are students who want to read, or whatever.

154

Teiser: Read their own work or others'?

Miles: Read their own work or others', either one. So that has had a
remarkable steadiness, with a remarkable lack of fuss.

When the war ended— "I remember one ending; I'm not quite sure
which ending it was. It was probably the Pacific sector, because
both my brothers were in it. So I probably cared more deeply, and
most of my friends were in the Pacific sector too. I remember the
kind of tremendous moment. I remember it was about five o'clock in
the afternoon that we heard the news. It was like a marvelous dawn.
I had the feeling of great emotion that all this work that we had
been doing for this future, that that future was now with us, would
dawn upon us; and that all the pressure was off and everything would
just grow naturally. Somebody had put up the window blinds. It
was a marvelous feeling of potentiality.

We had built this little house by that time, under a civilian
permit for it, because my brothers were in the war. So everything
seemed gung-ho, ready to go.

It seems very sad to look back on that and to think that on
the one hand, yes, we had maybe three, four years of marvelous
accord, exactly what we all expected, from maybe '45 to '49,
something like that. The GIs came back; they were great students;
as I mentioned before, the campus had twenty-three thousand but it
seemed like three thousand because everybody was so friendly. It
was really kind of a heavenly time. It seems sad, doesn't it, to
think that that all was wiped out by the Regent loyalty oath
attempt — in other words, by McCarthy. McCarthy wiped out that
paradise, and it never happened again. I think he did it pretty
single-handed, though you must remember, I suppose, that that
feeling of doubt and fear was in many a heart and that's why he was
able to capitalize on it.

So then we moved into a period — in the fifties, maybe the last
year of the forties — maybe for three or four years then — of our own
war. Real embattlement again, in a different way, with people being
hurt and having heart attacks and leaving town and getting jobs
elsewhere and being in lawsuits. I can't remember my other functions
at this time at all. We were all so emotionally involved, I can't
remember anything about those years. Oh yes, heavy teaching, and
some community politics.

Teiser: Did you go on writing poetry as well as teaching?

Miles: Yes, I went on writing poetry. I know I finished up— I suppose in
a kind of mesmerized way — I finished up my Continuity of Poetic
Language, and I went on writing poetry. Quite a bit of that was
poetry about the war. Then Reynal and Hitchcock had folded by that

155

Miles: time, so I sent this around— I forget whether I had troubles there
or not. But then Indiana [University Press] wrote me, since
Indiana had an angel for publishing poetry, and they started a
poetry series. The editor was Samuel Yellen of Indiana; I think
he wrote me. And I sent my book there, which came out in maybe
'55 or '56. He was the editor, a very nice editor.

Teiser: That's Pref abrications , '55.

Miles: Pref abrications, yes. So that book was very intensely about

Berkeley and about the surrounding pressures. Then the sense of
work was now sort of harder because you had a sense that the
students were more skeptical of learning, and you had that
realization that things weren't going to open up as grandly as one
might have thought.

Then, at the end of the fifties, there came a tremendous — what
would be the word?~revelation of what those difficulties were going
to be, as the Un-American Activities Committee got stronger and
stronger, as we had the ruckus at San Francisco City Hall with HUAC,
and as the students developed an anti-authoritarian spirit.

Anyway, that was when I had such a hard time teaching poetry,
because they were so cruel to each other, so destructive to each
other's work. I said to the students that it seemed to me every
time they liked a poem it had the word — they refused to accept a
poem unless it had the word "scream" in it. You see, there was
this incipience of the violence we talk about now that came very
vividly in at that point. It would be interesting to trace back
the whole nature of that blood-thirstiness that came into poetry
and to the poetry students.

Then when I said, "Why is it that you like poems that have
the word 'scream' and obscenities in them?" one boy very intensely
said, "Miss Miles, I don't know any work more obscene than yours.
A poet that thinks he can write a poem like a Christmas package,
and tie some pretty tissue paper around it, and tie a string
around it, then tie it in a knot, and then hand it to somebody —
what's more obscene than that!" And they all said, "Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah." {Laughter] So it was very helpful to me. From then
on I had no trouble, because from then on I understood what
bothered them. I mean, I don't understand why it bothered them,
but it was clear what bothered them: easy solutions, simple
answers, things that looked neat and so on, they just couldn't
tolerate.

Teiser: Do you think it's valid for anyone to think that your poems present
easy solutions?

156

Miles: On the surface they could have thought that, yes, because my poems
have very definite endings to them, and they just didn't want
definite endings.

Then my selected poems came out in 1960, and it was a rather
desolate moment, because [laughing] here were my poems. "Maybe
I'll never write any more. Here I'm a very ancient lady of fifty
now, and this is probably the last book I'll write, and they're
out — they're gone with the wind." This was the feeling I had about
that volume, because this was the feeling students had about them.

But as time developed, two different things happened. One is,
I gradually learned. I just sat around listening to them. I
didn't try to control them, I didn't try to — many of them came to
me and said, "You've got to handle this," and I'd say, "I don't know
how to handle this." So I just sat around and listened and let them
yell at each other. And as I said, many of them have apologized to
each other since.

Then further, some of them were very, very good. A fellow by
the name of Gerald Butler was an amazingly good poet of that
generation. A fellow by the name of Lyman Andrews, who wasn't that
violent by any means but belonged in that era. And Diane Wakoski,
in whom you can see some of that icon-breaking quality, was of that
period. I remember when we asked Donald Davie to come and talk to
us, and he talked about meter. I was sitting in the back of the
room and he was up in front talking about meter, and the class stood
up and said, "Pardon us. We're going now," right in the middle of
his talk. So I said, "Those of you who feel you have to, who can't
bear to listen to these words about meter, go ahead. But that
doesn't need to be all of you. Don't feel forced by mob action."
About four people stayed. But dramatic things like that were always
happening.

As time developed, there was a tremendous change. I mentioned
that there were two things that happened. One was that things simply
wore down. And the other thing was that as there was more pressure
on the students from others, they turned to the faculty for sympathy
and assistance. Or perhaps they were now different students, I
don't know. But suddenly we found ourselves, many of us, playing a
new role. I guess not all of us; it was very hard for some people
now to teach. But for me it became just illuminatingly easy because
now they felt they needed support, I understood them better, they
felt I understood them better, and we moved back into Wheeler Hall.
(We'd had ten bad years, as far as environment goes, in that ghastly
Dwinelle Hall.) We moved back into Wheeler in '63, I think it was,
and that made a more open atmosphere. So again we had some nice
peaceful years till about '65 or '66 when the violence started
again.

157

Miles: The room that I had was in the basement of Wheeler on the

southwest side, which meant that it was in the line of fire.
I think I already mentioned, that became a battleground for about
five years. I was too dumb to realize I should have asked to move
to another building. {Laughter] I didn't even realize that up in
the Engineering Circle there wasn't all this going on that was
going on in the humanities larea of campus], I just thought it was,
you know, part of the war.

Here came then another fascinatingly good group of students,
again that I think of as a group. Paul Foreman and Hildie Spritser
and Mary Dunlap and Janice Castro and others who are still working
today in interesting aspects of teaching or law or poetry or
publishing. Jim Tate became a department visitor, and a lot of
people worked for him on a magazine called Cloud Marauder, which
was very good and different. So again this embattlement had a
certain kind of power to foster poetry and foster solidarity and
enthusiasm. I've written lots of poems about all these things.
Maybe I say them better there than here, maybe I don't. I've
tried them out on some of my friends, and my friends don't think
they go very well. So I don't know. It's a hard thing to capture,
this feeling of osmosis that comes from a lot of people in a group.
But that's what many of my classes had through the Vietnam and
Cambodian years, where there was a lot of social concern, a lot of
free writing, a lot of slap-happy writing but also a lot of strong
writing too. This developed now the era of reading aloud and the
poetry readings that you spoke of before.

Jack Niles is another good poet I should mention there who
was awfully good, as Paul Foreman was and many of them were, at
just making instant magazines of poetry, which we would sell and
make money to use for leafleting purposes.

I then [laughing] fell in with this by trying some pamphlet
poetry. Robert Hawley asked for some poems for a pamphlet for
Oyez; Robert Hawley was publishing now doing Oyez. Cody's was
there, so that had an influence, and the whole growth of paperbacks,
of course, made a lot of good difference too. So then I tried a
pamphlet called Civil Poems,* and the students liked that a lot
better because it was more along their line of interest, and it was
fun.

*Published by Oyez in 1966.

158

Teiser: Did you choose the poems for it particularly because you thought
they were pamphlet poems?

Miles: No, no, not at alii I was just about to say, it was just the fun
of writing poems to be published. I didn't choose; I didn't have
any others to choose. Those were them.

Teiser: Oh, you wrote those for the purpose?

Miles: Yes. Yes. And that was a new experience. That's the nice thing
about pamphlets. That's how the kids started out: "Let's do a
pamphlet of poems. Okay. Everybody bring a poem by Monday."

Teiser: You have one on the People's Park controversy in I think it's
called "Green something."*

Miles: Yes, there's that one too. I had a lot. The one I liked best was

the one about how to play a soccer match. An awful lot of adrenalin
went into that poem, I'll tell you. Anyway, these were all instant
poems and instant publications, and it was fun, because it was new
to me. I didn't have to save them up over a five-year span or so;
they all got published right away. So much so that when the
celebration of our centennial came along in 1968, I thought, "Aside
from inviting people here, a nice thing to do would be to write
some poems for the centennial." So I wrote a book of poems called
Fields of Learning.** These were not emotionally loaded in the
same way. They were poems about textbooks. Over a number of years,
I had always read freshman textbooks for other courses so that I'd
know what the students were reading. A lot of us did that; we'd
help them do their exams in other courses by knowing what they were
reading in other courses. I loved these basic freshman texts in
physics and chemistry, and they all seemed to me to be illuminated
with vitality. So a number of these I made into poems. The book is,
as a whole, not a success. But I think there are three or four good
poems in it, but most of them are too flat because the difficulty for
me is that the subject matter to me is so illuminated I don't care
if it's flat or not. But it doesn't mean as much to others as it
means to me.

*Green Flag, People's Park Poetry, published by City Lights, San
Francisco, in 1969. (Also poems in Street Poems and American Poems,
student collections, and Peace and Gladness, edited by Doug Palmer.
J.M.)

**Published by Oyez in 1968.

159

Miles: That book Robert Hawley had trouble with. He was glad to do it,
but Graham Mackintosh, who was such a fine stand-by printer for
Robert, was on the rocks at that particular moment and couldn't
do it, and he couldn't find anybody to do it. Finally — I can't
think who it was — some very nice poet (who could it have been?)
typed it, and then they just did a photo offset. I had fun out of
that too. I just made millions of copies and gave them to
everybody I could think of, handed them out on campus, and sent
them to all the administrators. I never got one acknowledgment
from one single administrator. I sent them to lots of chairmen of
departments and teachers of the courses that I was writing about.
I got fascinating letters from teachers of physics and teachers of
biology, and so on. Aside from the fact that I didn't turn it to
any ceremonial purpose — the dedication was "In debt to Berkeley"
and I had quite a lot of sentimental feeling about it — aside from
the fact that Echo never answered back from anybody that
represented Berkeley administratively and in relation to students,
both of those pamphlets were lots of fun.

In the midst of that, then, I guess another book was published,
is that right? I guess Kinds of Affection was published at that
time.

Teiser: That was before, yes, '67.

Miles: This now was Wesleyan [University Press]. My books didn't sell

very well, and so Indiana didn't want to do a paperback. I was now
very struck with paperbacks, so they turned me down on the paperback,
so they said I could try Wesleyan, and Wesleyan did Kinds of
Affection. That had a fairly good response. This is a very happy
thing, that I was feeling so dopey about —

Teiser: That was in both hardbound and paperback.

Miles: Yes, I guess so. But it was sort of funny to think that I was

feeling so low in 1960 with my selected collected works, that was
about it [laughing] — and then right after that I did so much new
stuff that was fun and exciting and different. That is the positive
side, I think, not only for me but for the campus. As I can't
stress too often (I probably said this on the last reel), the
marvelous vitality of those days, those years, of the students and
their creative activities.

We had then people like Archie Ammons on campus and George
Starbuck — all sorts of good writers, John Logan at St. Mary's with
Jim Townsend. And very good relations with Thorn Gunn, [Lawrence]
Ferlinghetti, [Richard] Brautigan, Louis Simpson, Gary Snyder, who
came and taught for us.

160

Miles: We did a lot of experimenting, inviting of new young black writers
to campus. I'm not sure whether this was late sixties or early
seventies, but we had Victor Hernandez Cruz, David Henderson,
Ishmael Reed, Al Young, many more, and we worked very early — we
had a committee in our department to get as many black writers
as we could to visit us. We couldn't get them to stay permanently
because, on the whole, they didn't want to be tied down. In the
one or two cases where they would've, we didn't want them to be.
But on the whole the best for us was to have visitors and to learn
from them. George Barlow was another one, and Margaret Wilkerson
(she's head of the Women's Center now). Anyway, we had all new
kinds of poetry coming in to the picture now. So the sense of
poetry in the seventies has been more various from more points of
view, both inside the department and I guess in the sense of
poetry in the country too.

I wrote some articles. I did a couple of studies for
Massachusetts Review of poetry in 1965. Roughly all the poetry
published in '65 and all the poetry published in '70. It seemed
to me that there was a shift there, the kind that I had noticed
here earlier. The poetry, the books on the whole in '65 were
rather imagistic, photographic, still-life. I think I used the
example of catching the quality of an empty package of cigarettes
floating on a pond in the park. Then in '70 all this had gone
into action, all waked up and gone in many directions of more
involvement. Maybe I was imposing this; I hope not. It seemed to
me truly that the shift that I saw between '65 and '70 in that work
was like, in a slower, more encapsulated pace, the shift that I'd
seen in Berkeley, say, from the sixties to the seventies.*

Where it's going now, it's hard to say. I was a judge this
year of a poetry contest that included — we were supposed to read
all the poetry published this year. The other judges said that
they thought that we didn't have much good work to work from. We
had read two hundred volumes apiece, but they weren't too impressed
with it. The winner was Stan Rice. I don't know if I mentioned
this before —

Teiser: No.

*For additional analysis of these decades, see page 180ff ,

161

Miles:

Teiser:
Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Anyway, we had about 150 books to read, and they asked us if we
wanted any more — they gave us the publishers' list that came out
during the year — and so I said, "Yes, there are about fifty more
I'd like to read, but mostly small press stuff, not vanity press
but small press" — because I should also mention this growth of the
small press idea and the West Coast Print Center, and things you
know about in that direction. So they added these. I was pleased
that Stan Rice won, and that a small press won.

What prize was it?

It's called the Poe Prize. It's supposed to be for the best poet
of sort of middle years who's published two books or more.

Rice has published very little, hasn't he? Unusually little for
someone — ?

Yes, and that was a problem where it was kind of lucky I knew the
facts. Rice's book was taken by Evergreen — that published
Evergreen Review, that press — it was accepted by them (his first
book, called White Boy) and they held it for five years, every
year saying that they would bring it out. Then finally they
returned it to him. I'm not sure it was exactly five years; it
might be four or six. But it was a destruction. It was just as
bad as murder, as far as I'm concerned. Then when his daughter
died he did the one called Some Lamb. So finally then both of
those books were printed by local people — just people got together
some money and printed them. One was Mudra Press, and the other
came out through Serendipity or Book People — I'm not quite sure how
it all was. It makes me sad that the Chronicle and the Examiner
and the Oakland Tribune — again, that the press couldn't care less
and never even mentioned that a local writer had won a national
award. The sports page doesn't need to be that dominating over
other kinds of contests.

But anyway, I raised this point to say that the other judges
didn't feel we were going in a very clear, good direction, and I
would guess they're right. Gary — I mean Stan. I keep saying Gary
because I want to say something like Gary Snyder; I think they
both have a kind of freedom and an emotionality, which is the only
direction I see that seems terribly constructive. I don't know
where else. A lot of the poetry from the East Coast seemed rather
inhibited — neat but not gaudy — and in kind of a narrow way.

We had so much poetry here for so long that was gaudy but not neat.
[Laughter]

We still do. We still do. That's right. And that's what I think
Stan did. So I can't predict now what's going to happen, but there's
an awful lot of interesting work being done in translation, for

162

Miles: example. Somebody like [Pablo] Neruda is very influential. Recent
national prizes have been won also by others of our people. Diane
O'Hehir just won what's called a break-through prize at Missouri
Press, which is a new press for poetry. Joe DePrisco won something
of the same. Don Bogen — another student — just won a very good
midwestern prize. And these people are all different from each
other. They're intensely lyrical, is the term I would assign them.
But it just seems that a lot is being done here.

When the National Endowment for the Arts was rather frustrated
about how to spend money for literature, Tom Parkinson was on the
board, and he encouraged them to have one of their meetings out
here, which seemed rather wild to them — why come out here and hear
the same old stuff? But they didn't hear the same old stuff. They
met in the Alumni House three years ago, I think, when Nancy Hanks
was still involved, then [Leonard] Randolph, and invited people to
come and say what they thought was needed, what the NBA could do
for them. And that Alumni House was just jammed with people
screaming and yelling and asking for things, which at first
confused them, and at noon they said they couldn't go on. But by
afternoon they began getting some messages loud and clear, and by
evening they were exhausted.

The next morning, Sunday, they were going to fly back. Paul
Foreman asked them to his house for an early breakfast, at which
everything suddenly came clear. We sat around there drinking
coffee, and everybody began saying, "Oh yeah. Oh yeah, I see.
That's the way it's got to be." And the issue was, if you give
money to a press you get bad choices; if you give money to the poet
he doesn't get printed. So, give money to the combination through
a chapbook, and that has worked well and with most printers, as
you know, is resulting in very interesting and good work. We had
a lot of these fellows already on the spot to do this because
they'd worked with Jim Tate in Cloud Marauder, and both Panjandrum
Press and Don Cushman's press were ready to go.

So now I think maybe we shouldn't worry too much about trends
and tendencies and types, but just think about letting it all out,
letting everybody get to say, and say it his way. What's going to
be chosen in terms of models and values I think is rather mysterious
now. But what's good now is the variety of activity and the
opportunity — the vast opportunity — to be heard. We have now I
think to develop a more systematic critical review method; the
review system is broken down.

Teiser: You were saying that the newspapers don't pay any attention.

Little publications keep coming out which try to do reviews of
small press work and of serious poetry.

163

Miles: They do? I [Laughter] You mean like Poetry Flash?

Teiser: Yes, I guess so. I guess that tries to be critical. It's more a
bulletin, isn't it?

Miles: Well, actually I meant something much more national and heavy,
[end tape 1, side 2; begin tape 2, side 1]

There is a lot of interest and effort to review in a rather
slap-happy fashion around here. Kayak does some interesting
reviews. That's a very interesting magazine, I think, George
Hitchcock's magazine down in Santa Cruz. And there is this little
throw-away around here called Poetry Flash, which is really
interesting and lists about umpteen activities every night in
poetry in the Bay Area at different places. An interesting thing,
though, about that is that Poetry Flash came out about a year ago
with a nasty review of somebody — I mean, just mean; you know, fun
to read because it was mean — and Tom Parkinson wrote them a letter.
Tom takes this rather Olympian tone at times, so it was very
charming, I thought. He wrote Joe Flower a letter and he said,
"Pardon me for saying so. We just don't do this around here. The
Bay Area has a heck of a lot of poets in it, and they're pretty
good, and one nice thing about them is they don't backbite on each
other. We have a lot of difference of opinion, but we don't have
cliques and rivalries and meannesses. So lay off I If you want to
describe somebody's work, describe it, but don't get any success
out of being snide and mean." These aren't his words. But I
thought it was very nice because I think it's true, and an
important thing to be said is this is not a factional area. When
you hear about New York, you step into the world of factions so
fast it's breathtaking. The two or three times I've been in New
York I've hardly been able to believe that I couldn't see a
certain person because that was an opponent to another person —
when here I was all that distance away and it couldn't matter, in
two or three days, if I couldn't see, you know, just a variety of
people.

That surely wouldn't happen here. While I've had fights
with — I don't know who I've had fights with, actually, but people
have fought with each other. Robert Duncan has fought with Spicer
and Robin Blaser — and who else? It's hardly worth — well, Rexroth
and Winters weren't always on major terms. Winters didn't like
Kenneth Patchen's work, understandably. There's a lot of people
not liking other people's work, but everybody sort of coexists.
A lot of people don't like my work, but yet they invite me to read
it. It's just a nice coexistence. I think there always has been,
and I hope there always will be.

164

Miles: It reminds me of something I skipped over in the mid-fifties.
When I said that Allen Ginsberg came to town, this was a time
when Allen was working for some business firm and had a pin-striped
suit. He came over to Berkeley to talk to Mark Schorer and me
about whether he should be a graduate student at Berkeley. He
went to see Mark, and then he came down. He had this pin-striped
suit and he had this big folder. So he said would I read these
poems and tell him whether he should do graduate work. And it
was quite a nice experience, you know. I mean, wow! He was
rather unprepossessing looking, and to lay your eyes on something
really full of energy was a real pleasure. I said, "Sure. You
ought to take Anglo-Saxon," because it was clear he was interested
in the old Anglo-Saxon beat, and he said, "Yes, that's what I
thought, because it's related to Whitman." So we got into a long
discussion of metrics, and I liked him very much. Despite all of
the things he's done that I don't like, which are many, because I
think they're distracting in the wrong way, nevertheless I think
we've got along. He's forgiven me for a few things, like walking
out of the baiting of Olson in Wheeler Hall in the summer of 1965,
and I've forgiven him for a few, like not walking out.

When they had the second Black Mountain conference down here,
the one that followed the Vancouver one, this was a very oppressive
time; this was the mid-sixties. They had this two-week conference
on campus, and Allen — well, let me move back a minute before that.
There's something else I remember I should have mentioned before —
keep track of all these beads I'm trying to string on a string.

In the forties, beside all these other groups I've mentioned,
there was a group called the Activists, taught by Lawrence Hart.
He came down from some northern county, and he had a theory of
teaching poetry, and he was a kind of Svengali, as I thought him.
He was teaching night school, and he'd brow-beat the ladies into
writing vivid images. "Vivid images" was his slogan. He was very
fond of Archibald MacLeish especially. Two or three friends of
mine took his course and were much impressed with him — Rosalie
Moore and Jeanne McGahey. Jeanne married him and was published by
New Directions, and Rosalie didn't publish right then, but later
she was published as a Yale Poet* by [W.H.] Auden. Later also, a
younger one of that group, Robert Horan, was published by Auden.
So there was a certain amount of national success way back there
through the Activists.

*The Grasshopper's Man and Other Poems. Yale University Press,
1949.

165

Miles: So now in the mid-fifties I remember being at an Activists'

party at somebody's house, and we were all reading poetry. Dick
Eberhart was there visiting — I think he was teaching somewhere out
here — and he nonchalantly said, "Well, what's new in poetry around
here? What's going on?" So we said, "There's this new fellow
that's come to town, and it's a whole new world, and it's kind of
exciting. His name is Allen Ginsberg and he's got these friends,
[Jack] Kerouac, and so on." So Dick, who likes to be kind of a
patron of the arts, said, "I'd like to meet him, like to see his
work." I lent him my copy and he wrote an article for the New
York Times —

Teiser: This was Howl?

Miles: This was Howl — he wrote an article for the New York Times that

really gave Allen quite a send-off in the East. I just backtracked
to that because there's that whole other force of Allen's entering
into that — the whole force of this free poetry entering into the
Activist tradition, which was so different and so highly controlled
by Lawrence Hart. It's kind of a comical thing. It was just
really one wave hitting up against another; they were going in
different directions.

Teiser: Incidentally, did Ginsberg become a graduate student?

Miles: Six weeks. But he was around a lot. I remember I was teaching a
seminar — the nineteenth century, I guess it was — in the library.
That door didn't have an opaque glass in it or it wasn't solid;
it was just plain glass you could see through. Towards the end of
the seminar, there was always the face of Allen outside the door,
and he was always coming to argue about something or start some
new theory or something. He was very nice to have around. I got
kind of bored with all the mantras and chantras and stuff, but at
that age he was full of zing and new ideas, and everything was
very close to his heart. He brought real energy, not only to the
San Francisco scene but the Berkeley scene too. He lived over
here, had a little house near the Parkinsons. I forget who else
was there.

Then the whole group accrued around Mike McClure and Phil
Whalen and Gary [Snyder] and Ferlinghetti, and the growth of that
whole group, which is still very strong. I would say no clear
tendency has yet supplanted that one.* As I say, now things are
sort of more fragmentized, more individualistic, but well done,
very well done in many different ways. As I said before, I think
the variety now is what's interesting.

*For discussion of another group of the 1950s, that represented by
Leonard Nathan, see page 180.

166

Teiser: In your own work, you have written the way you were going to write,
not being affected by these various trends.

Miles: Well, some people tell me — I don't know. I think my poetry has
gotten looser and freer in form than it was. I think I don't
write [laughing] as many clear endings — yes, I think I've been
influenced. But on the other hand, I don't think I fit into any
of these — I've never been accepted as a soul mate by any of these
groups. [Laughter] Once in a while Carruth or J.V. Cunningham or
someone said something about you could tell I was from the West;
that I have a western style. Then other people say, "You couldn't
tell in a million years she was from the West. She sounds like
from England." Best recognitions have been from [Richard] Ellman
and [Denis] Donoghue (England and Ireland!). So how do I know?
But I think I got a certain amount of excitement and stimulation
out of all the poetry readings of the Bill Stafford, Archie Ammons,
Gary Snyder type, and certainly went to millions of them.

Teiser: You yourself read at many.

Miles: Yes, and heard all my students developing in these ways. While I
tried to fight in them too much egregious formlessness just for
its own sake, on the other hand I think I tried to learn how to be
freer, to the result that some of my friends, like Leonard Nathan,
who is quite formal, thinks that it's too shapeless. But the last
review I read of Leonard Nathan says that he has lost his formality
too. So maybe even somebody who doesn't want to give in, has
given in to a different beat. It's very interesting to speculate
about what's happened to the ears of poets, of people. I grew up
hearing meter very, very strongly, and I still do, and so do they
if they're listening to the Beatles, say, or to country or rock
and roll. But when they hear it in poetry, they move to the haiku;
they hear it to some free form. I learned that it's more and more
difficult to urge students to hear a beat in poetry as they want
to write it, and sometimes I don't even try, and other times I do
try. But it's a real anomaly. This is not in their ears. I say
to them, "What poetry did you read when you were young?" For many
of them, there were no ballads, there was no Child's Garden of
Verses, there was no A. A. Milne, there was no Walter de la Mare —
there was just not the poetry of my youth in their youth.
Naturally you can't just instill something.

I just got through reading a fascinating book by a former
friend (I mean I haven't seen him lately). His name is Paul
Fussell, and he wrote a book about poetry of the First World War.*

*The Great War and Modern Memory.
Press, 1975.

New York: Oxford University

167

Miles:

Teiser:
Miles:

Teiser;

Miles;

Teiser:
Miles:

That poetry is just imbued with trisyllabic feet. That book was
fascinating to me to read because I was not only very chilled by
the First World War, because I was a child of maybe five or six or
so, but even in those days I didn't like that kind of poetry. So

that it gave me a boundary for what I
that was what I was turning against.

It was sentimental, was it not?

didn't like; in other words,

But now when you think about the ear, it was too trilly. There
were too many trisyllables . There were too many skipped feet.
I liked a steadier beat. Oh, I did like it — sometimes if it was
heavy, as in Kipling, you know: "Once we feared the beast/When he
followed us we ran" — that's okay. But when you get little things
about "come down to Kew in lilac time, in lilac time" — that's your
point about the sentiment, I realize. But often it's more
tripping. Tripping poetry I always especially didn't like.

You were mentioning music. How anyone whose ears are atuned, or
whose ears are assailed by contemporary rock music, or whatever
in the world it's called, could tune his ear to —

It's fascinating. The Beatles you could. You notice that half of
the Beatles' poetry you can read on the page as poetry, and the
other half you can't, which is a very interesting thing to study.

We once had a memorable New Year's party at Elizabeth Bishop's
when she was visiting here, where all the poets in town were
dancing at midnight to the Beatles on a wide parquet floor. The
whole thing looked like a Mozartian eighteenth century drawing
room.

Now, that's true you can't do that with modern rock. But I've
had classes in which there've been modern rock composers and I've
tried to take advantage of this. We had a couple of classes where
they would invite us down to their sound-proof studios, and we
would try to write words and music and stuff as they composed. I
don't know enough about it to do it well, to experiment well, but
I have experimented. I think there's a lot yet to be done there
that could be very interesting. That's the one way I think it
might go. It might go toward a popular communal ballad-like beat.
Students are writing ballads much better than they used to, and
there's something they're tuning in to there that's new and
different. But I don't know yet. I really don't know.

Do you think it ties in with this awful country music?

Well, don't worry about the message. There are some interesting
melodies, I think. There are some little books, paperbacks,
called Rock Lyrics. Did you ever look at those? The "Sound of
Silence" — do you know that? "Gentle on My Mind"?

168

Teiser: You're braver than I am.

Miles: Well, I've tried to really work it out with the students. It's

not that I'm brave, it's that I'm dumb. I don't get it as well as
I could. I'd like to be able to get us all to see if we could do
some composing in this way.

Recently one other thing happened at Berkeley, which was that
the activism — Third Worldism and so forth — took over student
administration to the degree that they stopped supporting the
literary and artistic materials on campus, even to the degree that
they didn't support the Band. They supported activities that were
definitely related to some ethnic purpose. So for the past five
years or so, another job that some of us have taken on was to try
to get the artistic stuff still supported through the administration
as a curricular adjunct, or some such phrase.

We worked with the student vice-chancellor, and we had a lot
of exciting things to do. We had to save the Pelican Building
(they were taking over the Pelican Building as a place to store
things). We now have five magazines working in the Pelican Building.
We lost a very marvelous man who used to be ASUC adviser to student
publications. He was a great asset and a conserving force.

Teiser: Who was he?

Miles: I was just afraid you were going to ask me; I'll have to look up

his name. [Added later:] Wally Fredricks. Then for a while after
him it was disaster. We had carpetbaggers coming in just because
there was a little, little money to be scrounged, and they would
put themselves off as students and edit bad stuff. We've had to
rescue that whole situation, which again I'd say the administration
hasn't done anything about; that is, the split between the ASUC and
the academic. We do have funds now to help these magazines, so
we've had some what I think are very good publications of the
Occident and a thing called the Berkeley Poetry Review.

I mention names like Ross Shidler and Rob Wilson and Jason
Weiss. (This is the last step that I was relating. This should
go on, you know, developing the earlier stage that I mentioned of
Paul Foreman and the small press tradition. The small press
tradition has helped us too, and it's helped students.) Berkeley
Poetry Review comes out maybe two or three times a year, and it's

just solid poetry by students, and I think it's very good.
I don't recognize a trend in it; it's very various.

Again,

So right now, this is the place where I don't know what will
happen next. I think probably the ASUC will take some of these
magazines back and will get a reorganization. But this is a
temporary effort to bridge a gap, since the arts have had rather a

169

Miles: hard time. We did save the building, at least temporarily, and

we do have five quite interesting magazines going, all with a great
deal of self-initiation. The faculty committee doesn't steer and
doesn't push; all it does is meet twice a year and allot funds,
based on budgets and results. I like this degree of separation
between authority, and the students have very dependably done good
jobs on their own. I like to go into the Pelican Building once
or twice a year and see everybody working there, heads bent over
their desks, getting out their magazines. The greatest pleasure
to me, that I know of, is to get students in situations where they
can teach themselves and each other just as much as possible and
make as many mistakes as possible without fatalities. And that
kind of independence is what we've got there.

We've had a good long tradition with Occident. As you know,
it goes back to Steinbeck and — did we talk about this before? I
can't remember — when we talked about students.

Now in poetry what I'm working on is — I have been trying over
a couple of years. When I went down to Riverside to teach two
years ago, it was like taking the plug out of the basin of
memories, because I lived down there. I don't know why Riverside,
because I'd gone back to L.A., I'd gone back to the beach, I'd
gone back to many places where I'd been before. I don't know why
Riverside had this power more than the others. Maybe because I
stayed there longer. But starting there I've written quite a
number of poems about things we've talked about here, things that
I remember. Things like when Leopold Senghor came to San Francisco
or when [Jean] Genet came to Berkeley. Things that are sort of
literary but have sort of a little formality of episode to them.
Some of these my friends tell me are good; most of them, they say,
don't work, because I make too many assumptions about data — detail.
But anyway, this is what I'm working on right now. So that's what
my next book will be about, if I ever get to it. It's narrative
and it's remembrances and it's autobiographical. I don't think I
in any way even then — that does fit the trend of what you could
call the remembrance poetry of, say, [W.D.] Snodgrass and Lowell.
But mine isn't at all confessional, so I don't think it fits that
trend. But it does fit the trend of looking backward in a kind of
an odd way that I haven't done before.

[end tape 2, side 1]

170

INTERVIEW VI — 11 August 1977

Writing Poetry

[begin tape 1, side 1]

Teiser: It's mean to quote anyone back —
Miles: No.

Teiser: This was in an article in the Daily Cal Arts Magazine, February 1,
1974, called "Poetry with Josephine Miles." It asked, "What basic
unit do you think in when you write a poem?" and you said, "I think
in the line. Even when there's no sense to it. The abstract or
senseless line. Structure emerges from the sense of relating line
to line. I think of a line, then wait for the meaning to hit the
fan. Once I get the abstract rhythm of the poem, then I can do it.
I'd love to write a poem about a certain thing, I have an idea,
then I wait months or maybe years for the first line, and then,
Oh boy, here we go, and the whole poem gets written." Do you still
stand on that? [Laughing] This is your chance to correct it.

Miles: No, no! That's very good. Did I say that?

Teiser: That's what you said.

Miles: All right. I'll stand by that.

Teiser: It sounds as if you have an idea and then a line comes along and
then they pull together, is that what you meant?

Miles: Yes. Some people keep books of ideas, or notebooks and that sort

of thing, but I don't have that many. When I do think of something
that dawns on me that I'd like to say, then I sort of just park it
in my mind, and then gradually I give it a sense of rhythm. Then
I start writing down the rhythm, and then the poem sort of works

171

Miles: itself out that way. When I was younger, I did this all without
writing; I just did it in my mind. But since my memory has got
less tenacious as I've gone along, now I write it down.

Teiser: Perhaps you had fewer things to think about when you were younger.

Miles: [Laughter] Maybe so. But anyway, there is some quality of having
to wait till the poem gets some kind of organizing sound to it.

Teiser: I suppose actually it starts with the idea and then goes to the
sound.

Miles: Well, I don't know. It depends on what you mean by "starts."

Sometimes I think I'm not aware of what the idea is going to be
until I hear the sound. Sometimes I invest in an idea, other
times I'm not aware of doing that. It's just that a lot of this
happens when you're not aware of what's happening, so it's hard to
describe it. But when it hits the conscious point, it's usually
in terms of having a rather insistent rhythm going through my
head, where I figure, "Oh, now I guess I want to say something."
Then I start figuring out what that is.

Teiser: I suppose anyone who creates something has this same sort of thing.

Miles: Oh, I don't — people say various different things about writing, and
I've not read many of them. I remember in Hope Against Hope,
Osip Mandel'shtam's wife [Nadezhda] writes of how he starts
muttering to himself and that it takes him a long time to get from
the muttering stage to the poem stage. So that's something like
it. I mean she gave a kind of interesting description where it
seemed to have something to do with getting a vehicle of sound.
But in terms of teaching poetry, I seem to find that people do
various kinds of things.

Teiser: I think you said that the times that you sat in the car each
morning, or one morning a week or whatever it was, and just
determined to write, didn't work remarkably well.

Miles: Yes, it worked just as well as any other way — not worse and not

better. That's what was so interesting. In other words, I put a
lot of effort in an arbitrariness that didn't mean much. But it
was interesting to find that it didn't.

Teiser: Do you think — [pause]

Miles: Do I write with a pen or a pencil? [Laughing]

Teiser: Oh no, no. It's way at the other end. [Laughter] If you had to,
could you characterize your body of poetry so far? Could you say
that it was a_ kind of poetry saying a_ kind of thing?

172

Miles: I could in a sense. I think it's lyrical rather than dramatic or
narrative, and it's meditative rather than ceremonial ritualistic
or some of the various things that lyric can be. Then, the
special quality that I would like to have in it is the quality in
the fact that it's a lyric of thought, that it tries to capture a
little bit of the drama of somebody else's thought; that is, that
there's a quality of dialogue in it, and that the speaker or the
speakers aren't necessarily speaking for me or from my point of
view. Some people say, "Of course they really are, or you
wouldn't have picked up their ideas in the first place." Well,
that may be, but then I would also say, "But I would hope I was
able to understand attitudes other than my own and capture those
in a lyric form — to lyricize attitudes other than my own," because
so many attitudes I hear, or overhear, seem to me so charming or
beautiful or moving or profound or exploratory, and I would like
to entertain those even if they aren't mine.

Teiser: In and out of my mind, as I have read your poetry recently, has

flitted the idea of Browning's dramatic monologues. Was that a —

Miles: I like Browning very much. His are much more dramatized, and

longer and fuller and more exploratory of the ironies of elaborate
situations than mine are, but I agree there's a glimmer of what you
mean there. If you contrasted Browning, say, to his famous
contemporary, Tennyson, I would feel much more affinity to Browning
than to Tennyson. Or I will feel more affinity to Frost than to
Hart Crane, in our day; that would be a somewhat similar parallel.
In other words, there is a kind of lyric that's very rhapsodic —
Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Tennyson, and so on. It's a long
tradition, a Pindaric tradition of the lyric, the ode, which I
like very much but I don't think I write it, though the celebrative
quality of it I would like to make use of in a more quiet way, in a
less public, in a less developed, less elaborative way.

Teiser: I was also trying to read a little, putting myself a hundred years
hence, in another place, and wondering if there was much I would
lose.

Miles: I've been told that my poems don't appeal to England at all; that'd
be another place and another time. But the English seem to be very
hung up on the fact that mine are colloquial in a way that they
don't speak to. It's interesting too because my research has been
really much more appreciated and dealt with thoughtfully in England
than in America. So that's really rather an interesting thing;
England feels very friendly in one sense, but not in the sense of
poetry. Thorn Gunn says he likes my poetry, but he says it's just
much, much too colloquial to transport.

173

Miles: And I don't know about time. I'm already in books where there are
footnotes to meanings. I've had an amazing amount of republishing
in anthologies. I must be in about eighty or a hundred
anthologies. This was a great surprise to me, because my poetry
hasn't sold that well. But it has been anthologised.

Teiser: Do you get royalties for anthologies?

Miles: Yes. Not enough to matter, but what you do get is a terrific

amount of circulation, so that I've had lots of correspondence and
lots of response, which I wouldn't have expected to have from the
books, which I've got through the anthologies. Those anthologies,
many of them footnote what seem to me very comical little details,
for students. Already apparently they think things need
explanation.

Teiser: I can't remember whether potato salad is potato salad in England.

Miles: I don't know, but no, that potato salad is probably very local. I
would guess so. It's in Germany, of course, but I don't know
whether it would mean that degree of domestic picnic. That's
probably exactly what Thorn Gunn means; the words mean something,
all right, but the overtones weren't there. When I read that poem
in a large hall to students, there's quite a rustle, quite a
response, just to potato salad, without their even knowing what's
going to happen to it.

It's a most evocative poem within any westerner's experience,
I imagine .

Yes. Apparently potato salad does mean a real solid norm, the way
they respond to it.

But the whole poem I should think is one of those that would come
over more immediately to people —

Yes, it does.

— than some that are the more recondite.

That's true, because the last line is quite a shift but it's a
shift that the students — when I say students, I mean that most of
my audiences, I guess, are at least half students — seem amazingly
prepared for. I mean they're ready to shift on; they're very
responsive to the last line, even if they've never heard it before.
It's a poem they seem to enter into very strongly.

Teiser: I should put on the tape that this is a poem called "Family."

There are two that were reprinted in the Daily Californian Arts
Magazine interview.

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

174

Miles: I wanted to give you this today before you go — John Oliver Simon,
who's one of the local publishers, has put out now a book called
Buds and Flowers of Berkeley or some such thing. Anyway, it's a
Berkeley anthology, and that poem is printed in there. The whole
anthology should interest you. It has I think quite a good spirit
of Berkeley. He captures a very interesting Berkeley quality in
it.

Teiser: Is it similar to the book you lent Catherine? The nineteenth
century Berkeley one?

Miles: Slightly different, slightly different. [Laughing] Different buds
and different flowers.

Teiser: [Pause] I'll keep on quoting you, if I may.
Miles: See if I recognize them.

Teiser: Yes. [Searching for quote] I was going to quote a jacket blurb,
but I think I haven't brought it.

Miles: That's good. I'm not very fond of jacket blurbs.

Teiser: Which book was it, now?

Miles: Oh, was it To All Appearances, where I talked about —

Teiser: I think so, yes.

Miles: — where I talked about below appearances, beneath appearances?

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: Have you got To All Appearances there?

Teiser: I don't have it. I brought everything but, I guess.

Miles: Well, I don't remember it very clearly, but I was just making the
point that To All Appearances has a kind of double edge to it. In
one sense it means that to all appearances may not necessarily be
real, and the other sense is that I am speaking with pleasure to
all appearances, for all appearances — I'm addressing appearances.
That double edge is just the double edge that some people feel —
appearances are less indicative of the real than something
underneath is. I'm just saying in that title, at least, that I
think appearances carry a lot of weight, carry a lot of value,
whatever is underneath. It took me awhile to come to that
position; that was an attained position, an attained belief.
[Laughing]

175

Teiser: There was an implication in it , I thought — maybe I read something
into it — that you began, that the poems began with the appearance
and perhaps explored contrary —

Miles: Hmm. That doesn't ring a bell.

Teiser: I shouldn't misquote you to yourself [laughing], should I?

Miles: I don't think I would like to do that; I mean, I would like to stay

with the appearance all the way through, except perhaps see different
aspects of it. The poem that's so much quoted about the man that
drives the car in front of the movie theater. The appearances there
are everybody trying to get him out of the way, and then his
appearance, when he finally gets to speak for himself, is that
Reason is his middle name. In other words, his appearance is just
as much of appearance as all the surface of the scene. But the
difference is that it's his. You might say it goes deeper into
appearances, but not away from them.

Teiser: You and I were talking on the phone before we began this interview
about something; I don't remember what preceded it, but I remember

Miles :

Teiser;
Miles:

Teiser:

accusing you [laughing] of not believing in Absolute Truth.

Yes, very good. True,
very well.

[Laughter] I can't accommodate absolutes

To come back to this appearance bit and the poem we were
talking about before — "Family" — there the appearance is, is somebody
drowning or is somebody not drowning? Then there's the appearances
of the standard family picnic, and then there's the rescuer, one
able to be sensitive to the truth of appearances. Then the last
line, "This is what is called the brotherhood of man," still the
phrase "is called" is there, and that's still an appearance.

Yes.

And that is therefore praise or joyful recognition of somebody
else's recognition. It's not any statement of my own, but there's
a joyful acceptance of an acceptance.

I'm looking at a review in the issue of Voyages in which there was
an homage to you.* There's a review of your Kinds of Affection,
and I think it's this review which indicated that there was more
emotion in it, or more indications of emotion, than in your earlier
books. Is that right?

*Fall 1968. The review is by Arthur K. Oberg.

176

Miles: The reviewers have been saying that gradually. The first two or
three books, I got very tired of the remark that these poems were
very well wrought, very well constructed but didn't deal with very
vital matters. This always troubled me because how could they be
well wrought if they didn't seem vital? That is, that seemed to me
a very superficial distinction between good writing and whatever
they meant. In other words, the sense of superficiality in
elaboration of good writing I didn't understand. Obviously the
poems just were bad if they gave this sense of triviality.

I haven't been getting that comment so much lately. I think
maybe it's just that people are getting used to my writing [laughing]
and they don't expect such big revelations as they thought they
should have had before. Or maybe I did take some clue from the
students, and do try somewhat to make the solutions seem less
constructed than I once did; that's a possibility. I'm not quite
sure if it's true. It's very hard to judge that in your own work —
whether you've changed or shifted — but it may be that I use less
formal organizing qualities than I once did.

Teiser: There's one book on our list that's a mystery to me.

Miles: Oh, well that's nice!

Teiser: Maybe it never got published — Neighbors and Constellations.

Miles: That's not a book. It's a section of selected poems in the

Selected book. In other words, that Poems 1930-1960 (Indiana) was
a selection from all the other books, namely Trial Balances, Lines
at Intersection, Poems on Several Occasions, Local Measures,
Prefabrications , and then the further section was Neighbors and
Constellations .

Teiser: I see.

Miles: So that's where you saw it.

Teiser: I saw it in a bibliography of some sort.

Miles: Oh, then it's a mistake. It shouldn't be in the bibliography.

Teiser: I see. Then I do withdraw my earlier statement — the University of
California does have all your books in the library. I couldn't
find that title.

Miles: Good. Where are they? Everywhere?

Teiser: Here and there. They're in The Bancroft Library and they're in the
main library, and I guess in the undergraduate library.

177

Miles: People are always telling me they can't find them in Moffitt, so I
wondered.

Teiser: A lot of them are in Bancroft.

Miles: Yes, that's what I was afraid of.

Teiser: And some of them are in both.

Miles: That would be better.

Teiser: One of them is a Rare Book in The Bancroft Library — In Identity.

Miles: [Laughter] Somebody must have signed it for me. Oh, it's a

broadsheet that somebody did. You know, I'm not too fond of these
bibliographical ploys — little broadsheets and little single poem
volumes and so on. There are a number of those.

Teiser: Also there's one copy of Kinds of Affection that's a Rare Book too.
Miles: Are some of them in Doe, in the regular main library?

Teiser: I can't tell. I just have the ones marked in Bancroft, and others.
I don't know where the others are; I haven't searched them out
myself.

Miles: Because I'm just curious. When students say, "Why aren't your books
in the library?" I never know what to say.

Teiser: Tell them to search in every possible library. [Laughter]
Miles: "Work harder" I should say to them. [Laughter]

Teiser: I meant to ask you about this a long time ago. George Stewart was
asked in his interview with the Regional Oral History Office* about
his interest in metrics, and he said, "Of course, Jo thinks I'm a
great enemy of poetry, but I'm not. Just certain kinds of poetry
I don't like."

Miles: That was a special article that George wrote agreeing with Edmund
Wilson in I think the New Republic way back, in which he said that
metrical poetry was going to die down.

*See interview with George R. Stewart, A Little of Myself, Regional
Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley, 1972.

178

Miles: George's own study of metrics is a wonderful study. He did two
books, actually, and they've never been superseded, remarkably.
It's too bad he didn't go on with it, because he was doing that —
when I first came here, he was shifting to novel writing. But the
more books come out on metrics, the more George is referred to as a
beginner of understanding. He was the one that made clear this
quality of the triple foot, that I've mentioned so often, as
characteristic of nineteenth and into the beginning of the twentieth
century. This very interesting book that Paul Fussell wrote that I
mentioned, on the First World War and First World War poetry, when
you read that you see the triple foot is just reigning as a way of
thinking, and it's a nineteenth century way of thinking.

Teiser: Now we're on George Stewart, I think you said you liked East of the
Giants, and he said in his interview, "Curiously enough, Josephine
Miles was a great admirer of that book. It doesn't seem like her
book." [Laughter]

Miles: Oh! Yes, I do like that book. [Laughter] We can leave unsaid what
I think of Doctors Oral. [Laughter]

Teiser: He really got into everything, didn't he? What did you think of the
Oath? Want to leave that unsaid too?

Miles: No, that was a nice, hard-working book. That was a very marvelous
job that George did there. Where I think Doctors Oral represents
his real hatred of his own work in some ways — self-hatred in a very
sad way — his Year of the Oath represents his wonderful ability to
get people to do work. He just rallied all the young men around
him to do research, to look things up. What did he have me do? He
assigned something to me. I think I was supposed to study the
charter, the organic charter. Then we were all supposed to write
reports, and these were all merged as a beautiful job of community
action. Just George at his very best. And it was again a University
thing. It was the whole positive side of his — he was a very
important man in the University and in our department, though he was
never on committees much and he was never elected to offices and
stuff — he was nonparticipative except in the Faculty Club, because
he was always on part-time, writing novels. But his role in the
department was very strong, a kind of an ethics of perspective of
action: why one should never have unanimous votes on things, why
one should never report numerical votes, why in the department we
shouldn't have tabling motions. He had a real courtesy book for
the department and for the academic world that was a very important
influence.

Teiser: The other two things that I have here to talk about next are poetry
today (which you have talked a little about) and also publishing,

which we talked with you about some years ago.
comes next better.

I don't know which

179

Miles: Well, let's see. We could bring them together in the sense that if
we speak of now, the publishing situation is quite different. I'm
not sure that I can say more than I said last time about that.

Teiser: I'm thinking when we talked to you for those Chronicle interviews,
one of which appeared* and one of which didn't, you said then, I
believe, that in earlier years eastern publishers had wanted to
publish poetry, for one reason and another, and that by then — and
that was early 1972 — they didn't very much, and that you had a
book finished and were looking for a publisher, and you were at that
time having —

Miles: Trouble.

Teiser: — trouble finding one. It almost seems impossible.

Miles: Yes. You say it seems impossible; I never got a book published

without trouble, except the little pamphlets that were fun. Yes,
it always took me three or four years to find a publisher because,
for one thing, as I mentioned last time, a couple of the publishers
vanished, like Reynal and Hitchcock, and some of them changed their
policies, editors changed. I always thought how nice it would be
to be able to talk about "my publisher" the way some people do, the
way, say, Richard Eberhart does for Oxford. Actually, Oxford had
asked me at the beginning to submit a book to them, which I sent to
Macmillan instead because of Trial Balances. I always had a kind of
a sense of having to try over each time, that values changed so much
at New Directions and changed so much at Wesleyan.

The way I got To All Appearances published, as I can
interpret it — one never gets told the whole story — a former
student of mine was teaching at Illinois and talked to Richard
Wentworth, who was the new head of the press at Illinois, and
Richard Wentworth had worked at the Southern Review back in the
old days — an example of my point of the way strands continue. So,
I had a letter from him, I sent my book there, and they took it and
published it. They did a lovely job of it, I thought, and
advertised it very thoughtfully. Wentworth is a nice person, I'd
guess. I've never met him.

The important thing to say about publishing, as you've already
mentioned, carrying on from '72, is that when the eastern
publishers were doing less and less, doing about two volumes a
year, mostly for somebody's cousin, as Louis Simpson would say,
gradually the little presses started working there; people like
Hawley started working with Oyez, and all over the country the

*"The Big Boom in Bay Area Poetry Readings," San Francisco
Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, 27 February 1972.

180

Miles: little presses began to increase and grow. Secondly, new

university presses took responsibility. My example of Illinois
would be an example, and the University of Missouri press has done
a fine lot of publishing of what I consider to be very good poets,
ones I happen to know and ones I don't know also. Princeton Press
has started a new series which started publishing Leonard Nathan.
He had been published before by Random House. But the Random
House editor that he had left, and this is the part of vagaries of
the publishing situation.

Leonard Nathan, by the way, represented a group that I forgot
to mention last time. I was talking about how, as I look back,
people seemed to work in groups and flourish in groups . There was
a group in the fifties which represented the kind of conservatism
of the fifties, and also of poetry. Counterbalancing the Allen
Ginsberg kind, which grew up then, was the conservative kind of
Leonard Nathan and also some younger people of his friends who
became scholars and professors, like Bill Brandt, Robert Beloof,
Allen Hollingsworth, George Hochfield. This represented a very
different kind of person working in poetry and in scholarship in
the fifties, from the Ginsberg tradition. I think it's important
to mention that, to say that I don't think you ever get a time in
which there's a huge wave in one direction without some counter
action.

This group was much appreciated by Ted Weiss at Bard; I think
he was at Bard and at Princeton. He was editor of the Quarterly
Review of Literature. We were all kind of sustained by Ted Weiss,
if I put myself in that group, when a lot of the publishing was
shifting over to the Beat Poets, which we weren't. On the other
hand, since I had been a teacher of Jack Spicer, who had a very
funny sense of humor, Jack insisted that I be in their anthologies,
or the records that they made of their poetry. This made for a lot
of real humor because this record and some of the anthologies would
be reviewed, and the reviewer would say, "How did it come Josephine
Miles gets in there? I've seen her work in MLA," this funny kind
of connection which Jack enjoys. Jack likes scholarship, and he
liked this combination.

So in the fifties there was this kind of double of values
going. That helped encourage the growth — sustained the conservative
poetry and encouraged the growth of the newer kind of experimental.
I don't want to make that split, though, because of course there are
other kinds of experiments all the time. It's just that there were
various kinds that were different from the Ginsberg group kind.

Then in the sixties was when I felt the worst sense of problem
in the feeling that we weren't quite sure where we were. Leonard
wouldn't go to poetry readings because he found it all so distaste
ful. In other words, the conservative found the experimental really

181

Miles: distasteful. Archie Annnons, on the other hand, was developing,

and he and I were both going to meetings and listening and feeling
observant. I remember that none of the experimenters around here
would give Archie the time of day until a leader, Jonathan Williams
in North Carolina, gave him a rave review in the New York Times or
somewhere. In other words, it was a very anomalous, mixed sense
of values when these two currents were moving side by side and
together. But you have to say something to say there was a great
variety in these currents. You can see why the publishers got
confused and mixed up. I mentioned last time the reviews I did
for Massachusetts [Review], a review in '65 and in the seventies,
in which I felt that there was a real motion from the inherited
neatness of '65 still, toward a really freer opening out in
general all over in the seventies. A lot of that was black.

The whole sixties really gave rise to I think a new breath of
life in poetry, and it was black poetry — people like Al Young and
George Barlow and Michael Harper, Robert Chrisman from Berkeley,
and many, many more. There's a little anthology called Dice and
Black Bones, or some such title, which very well reveals this new
kind. From now on, then, I don't think — yes, I guess we still do
have problems in these types. A very good black poet by the name
of Gloria Oden in Maryland tells me that she still has a hard time
getting published because the publishers say she's not black
enough. So here the publishers must still be holding some curious
kind of typology in mind. There is one big publisher of black
poetry who does much more than the others , though the other
conservative publishers are now trying to move into this field.

To summarize, I think that the little presses have helped,
aided by NEA (that's fairly recent; that's only been about the last
five years that that's been true), and some of the university
presses, unfortunately not ours. Our University Press has been
blindly and blankly oblivious to poetry, except sometimes in
translation. They did publish, very successfully, a book of poems
translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa from the Japanese, A Year of My Life;
A Translation of Issa's Oraga Haru, which is a beautiful little
volume. They did make some good names in translation. They
published Carlyle Maclntyre, for example, and some other good
people. Especially that was true when they had a wonderful editor
at the University Press whose name was [Lucie] Dobbie, and she
sponsored a lot of innovative publishing and translation, which
died with her death. Except for her and except for that, we've
been one of the worst in the country in poetry.

[end tape 1, side 1]

182

Values and Standards
[begin tape 1, side 2]

Teiser: I was talking to Bob Hawley and told him we were interviewing you.
He was much interested and very pleased. He said he didn't know
what kind of poetry you liked, that he'd never been able to figure
it out. The nearest he had ever been able to tell was from an
article you had written for the Pacific Spectator, which Catherine
and I have just read, and we can't tell from that. If that's the
nearest you came — [laughter] you haven't come very near. But
seriously, for that you analyzed a great variety of poetry from
newspapers, and books. Do you have that article in mind?

Miles: Sure. That's funny. I got a lot of criticism for the cryptic

quality of the evaluations in that article. I didn't feel it was
that cryptic. In fact, the Pacific Spectator got some very angry
letters. One man said he was a donor or something and was going to
withdraw his donation it was so disgraceful to have no value system
represented, and that I was willing to talk about newspaper poetry
at the same time with published poetry. That's an interesting
point in that back then, whenever that was — the forties, I guess.
That was about the time of Donald Weeks — editor at Mills —

Teiser: It was published in spring 1948, and it was a review of the poetry
published in 1947.

Miles : I was up to my more recent tricks there of what I did for

Massachusetts Review. I like to do that. I get very impatient
with so-called objective selectivity, the selectivity that seems
to be covering a field and is actually just covering the interests
of the selector. And so, every time I do one of these, what I try
to do is be as complete as possible and describe it completely as
possible and let the reader draw his conclusion about what's going
on. I try to use some outward principle of selection. With
Massachusetts, it was the books that came out, or they sent me,
or that I was able to scrounge around and find in Publisher's
Weekly and so on. With the Pacific Spectator, I think it was what
was printed around here in magazines and —

Teiser: Up and down the coast.

Miles: Yes, because that was the focus of Pacific Spectator. Also in

those days, and this is sad to look back on, the newspapers were
publishing some pretty good verse. There was a man on the Oakland
Tribune who did a lot of encouraging of poetry (Ad's Column or some
such thing) , and the California Writers Club had an annual banquet
in which they awarded prizes and they got together. This related
to the work that I did in that labor school where I taught that class

183

Miles: of rather domestic poets, who were nevertheless in their own way
very good. I think it's very important to say that all of poetry
doesn't have to be equally avant-garde. Some of those women,
especially the women in the California Writers Club , and one man
that's important to mention, and that's Harold Witt, because he's
always been very loyal to this group and they've been loyal to him.
He now is functioning out in the Walnut Creek Library poetry scene
this way. I say it's more domestic; I don't know what I mean by
that exactly; it's a little less avant-garde; it's a little more
about things around us, but it's very literary too. Rosalie Moore
and Elma Dean were in this, and B. Jo Kinnick still today very
active. Ruth lodice. I admire these people for doing their own
thing in their own way. Sometimes they belong to college women's
clubs, poetry circles and so forth.

Teiser: Are they comparable to Sunday painters?

Miles: I suppose they are. Yes, yes. I thought it was just charming to
notice all this semi-demi stuff that was going on in Pacific
Spectator. I wasn't trying to write about what I liked; I'm not
all that interested in what I like. What I like I like so fast
and completely that that's just that — I don't want to bother about
having to defend it or explain it to anybody. But I am really more
interested in finding out what I don't like and trying to understand
that. My dissertation was done on that basis. I didn't like the
poetry of Wordsworth. I was complaining about that, and Ben Lehman
said, "It's sometimes-usually-of ten hard to write on somebody that
you are crazy about because you stay crazy. But if you write about
somebody you don't understand and try to figure him out, this is
helpful." He was very right, and I got really enthralled in
finding out what Wordsworth thought he was doing. I've written a
lot on Wordsworth —

Teiser: You still don't like him?

Miles: He's still not my favorite poet, no. I like him now; I don't love
him. The poet that I like the best, W.B. Yeats, I've written very
little on. The article I did write I think was pretty good, but
nobody's ever referred to it since; it was published in one of my
books. I think the interesting — I think value judgments are so
instant that what they then need is documentation in terms of
understanding of how they arose. Only after you really understand
what you're looking at in terms of, say, paintings or whatever, do
you want to come back to further evaluation.

For example, if I go to an art gallery to see a whole roomful
of new paintings that I've never seen before, I think I stand in
the doorway and look around and say Ugh! to all of them, or "There's
one over there in the corner that I think is marvelous. I'll go and

184

Miles: look at that." Then I gradually let the paintings sink in. But I
don't think it's right to pretend that I'm not instantly
responding, and I don't think it's right to start saying, "These
are good and those are bad." That's just far too premature — and
by premature I mean not only in terms of days but of weeks, months,
and years. That's why I like to spend a lot of time describing
and analyzing.

The reason for my scholarship in poetry is that I feel we
know all too little about what we're talking about. That doesn't
mean that we shouldn't believe what we feel, but rather it means
we should believe what we feel in a clear-cut, open way, so that
we allow ourselves to go back and then see what is there in
addition to, or in counter to, what we are able to get from it,
which is usually sort of limited.

So Robert Hawley says he doesn't know what I like. One
reason is that Robert Hawley very kindly brings me a lot of books
which I don't like, and I don't particularly want to write back
and tell him I don't like them.

Teiser: Why don't you?

Miles: Because Robert Hawley has got a clear taste of his own, and I
respect it.

Teiser: He brings you things that he likes?

Miles: No, I think he brings me what he publishes. I think I'm just on

his donation list. I don't know what he likes, as far as that goes.
I often send people to him, and sometimes he accepts them and
sometimes he doesn't. He accepted Naomi Clark, who I think is
wonderful, and she couldn't get in anywhere. But he took her on.
He has a kind of eclecticism that I think is good. I don't have
any eclecticism at all. I really like very, very few things. I
could never be an editor or a critic because I don't like that
many things .

Teiser: What don't you like? Can you describe what you really don't like?

Miles: Oh, let's see. No, I can't, really. Maybe in the whole world I
like ten poems, and you're asking me to describe all the rest
[laughing], which would be a little difficult. [Laughter]

Teiser: Hawley also said — I always ask him what the current state of small
press publishing is — he said there's lots and lots being published;
he suspects that there's some kind of a factory some place in the
Midwest which sends a helicopter full of [laughing] poetry every
week, and a large percentage of it shouldn't be published — it's
just bad.

185

Miles: I don't agree. Maybe I'm not seeing what he's seeing, though;
a lot more of it comes to him than to me. But an example is
what's done by the Poets' Co-op around here. I'm not sure yet
about all these titles, but we have a Poets' Co-op, a Poets'
Conspiracy, a Poets' Collective. These meet on various nights
and alternate Wednesdays, and sometimes they meet at Cody's
Bookstore. One of them — I think the Co-op — publishes an annual
anthology. It would be a good target for the word "bad," but I
would think that would be a mistake. I think it should be a
target for the word "good" also. It's kind of preliminary; the
people may not get better. But it's potential, a strong
potential volume.

Oh — I guess I know what I think is bad. What is bad is
absolutely inert repetition of old modes , where the whole life
has gone out of them. In other words, really bad poetry, as I
see it, would be done by people who were writing haiku for the
five millionth time, or Whittier's "Snowbound," or whatever
generation they're from, doing it with absolutely no sense of
anything but doing it again. That's not bad either psychologically;
I mean that's the kind of practice and the kind of exercise which I
would welcome. When I get that kind of manuscript I just write
back and say, "Keep on doing this, and also do a lot of reading so
you'll see if there are other things you'd like to try." In other
words, try to widen your horizons so that the repetition doesn't
become inert .

But the Co-op stuff is by no means inert. It's full of life
and vigor. That's how I would think most of the stuff I see,
multifarious as it is, has that kind of life in it.

Teiser: Do you assume that a lot of it won't survive and some will? I mean
continue to be read.

Miles: Well, you know, John Donne almost didn't survive.
Teiser: He came back.

Miles: Yes, yes. I'm not sure how important — is survival really an
important criterion for you? You mean, is this stuff writing
toward the future? Well, I'm afraid maybe it doesn't have that
much originality. If you put it in a space capsule it would
survive , and people would get a very good idea of our time from
reading it, if that's a good criterion for survival.

With Kathleen Fraser and Robert Haas, I was a judge for a
contest which San Jose State ran for the bicentennial, in which
they asked for poems from all over the country for the
bicentennial. They told us we'd have to read about sixty or

186

Miles: eighty poems and make a decision of the first ten. Actually they
got over a thousand poems. That's bad, because we had to read
those, and we all slaved for months reading huge boxes. If we'd
been warned by them, we'd have divided them up, but nobody told
us these were going to keep coming. Now, on the other hand, we
got a lot of stuff there which we could separate into bad and good,
and the bad would be poems that began, "Columbia, the gem of the
ocean/Columbia the gem of the sea/My heart's devotion goes to thee."
In other words, they would reek of poetry you had heard before.
The good ones would have just marvelous touches of nobody else in
them: My grandfather's wooden teeth, or George Washington's
wooden teeth, or the buffalo on the prairie, or catching whales.
Even if it wasn't very well written, it would be marvelously
interesting and have the quality that a good diary would have.

Happily, the three of us agreed on this. We all saved out
from this ghastly flow I believe it was two hundred poems, and
that's not what they'd wanted to hear. This is probably a pretty
good answer about your word good and bad, because it was certainly
a laboratory for what you're asking. Furthermore, we tended to
agree on what the good ones were. Of the two hundred, all three
of us, different as we are, agreed on about 150 of them. Kathleen
wanted a few more women's attitude poems than Robert and I did.
Robert and I agreed almost totally. So we added maybe twenty or
twenty-five poems more from the women's point of view for her —
they were still good, but I mean they seemed to us a little more
conventional — and then we took this two hundred and shipped them
down there and said, "These are it, and we suggest you don't give
any prizes but publish a book, and spend the money that way,"
because there was no poem there that we thought was outstandingly
good. Okay? Well, the rituals of the world don't allow for this,
and the San Jose citizens who donated the money didn't want this.
They wanted awards to be given to fine, upstanding young American
students who would be encouraged to go on. Actually, when they
did force — these were all anonymous , by the way — when they did
force a winner, it turned out to be a conscientious objector who
lived in Canada. So justice was done. [Laughter]

Oh, and by the way, I should say that since they were
anonymous, we found later that of the thousand, another two or
three hundred were by well-known poets, that we'd rejected. There
shows the amorphousness of the bad, because we were clearly getting
in a groove of some kind of learning something about America, and
many of the very good poets were just still telling us something
about themselves or something. In other words, you develop
special criteria for special occasions.

187

Miles: Finally, they did force us to give awards, which was really

painful and useless — an example of how "bad" and "good" aren't
meaningful terms. But then they did raise enough money in town
to publish the book, and I think it's an awfully interesting and
good book, interesting because it's a documentary almost. That's
just a whole example of other sets of criteria.

This summer I was a judge for the best poetry written in
America by somebody who'd published two or more books by all the
publishers. Again, we had to read everything, except vanity
presses (remember I told you that, that I had to read a lot of
little presses).* The other two judges — and I guess I agreed with
them — said that as a whole the poetry of 1976 did not seem to them
good poetry, and I guess I would agree. So there's another answer
to the meaning of bad (you see how relative this all is) : in the
sense of vitality of people that we know writing today, the 180
books that we read last year were not all that vital.

Now, what does vital mean? It apparently meant for us that we
didn't get much sense of the quality, the identity of the speaker,
the poet, and anything particularly new in the way he was saying
what he wanted to say — not necessarily new, but peculiarly adapted
to what he wanted to say. There were maybe ten like that, but as
it turned out they didn't fit the stipulations laid down by the
contest.

It must mean that good and bad, as you already told me, are
not absolute but are relative to occasions where you're working.

Teiser: Hawley also said he sees poetry today as being two parallel streams,
one the neat poems of Bukowsky, and the other the Olson influence.

Miles: Oh, he saw those as different, did he?

Teiser: He considers them parallel and quite different.

Miles: I'd have to do some readjusting of perspective there.

Teiser: I thought he was indicating that Bukowsky' s line flies all over
the place and Olson's line is structured.

Miles: Maybe. If so, then Hawley is over in Camp A and he's not talking
about Camp B, because neither of them is at all neat in the sense
of neatness that is still being written. When I mentioned Ted

*Page 161.

188

Miles: Weiss and Leonard Nathan, Robert Haas — oh, so, so many — Grace

Schulman, Albert Goldbarth (these are books published last year) —
so many people that we read that were fairly good, they have a
very controlled accentual line of a fair degree of regularity, of
a fair degree of stanzaic structure or something close to it.
Whereas Olson and Bukowsky are both over on the side of a great
deal of break in the line. Olson has a whole theory in what he
calls projective verse of the projectile quality of the line,
which brings the force to the end of the line and then breaks over,
and where you break the line in unusual places just so that force
will build up. (He uses the metaphor of the synapse.) Bukowsky
does that so much that he doesn't get that kind of controlled
force. I can see how you would make them opposed to each other,
but as I say, that's only in terms of getting over in that side
of the picture in the first place.

Teiser: Not analyzing the whole field...

Miles: Yes. They're even both on the other side of Allen Ginsberg because
he uses a kind of chant beat. I can't think of any outstanding
poet today, beside those two, who uses such broken [lines]. Creeley
does, but Creeley does it in a different way again, a very
controlled, formalistic kind of break that he uses.

I would need more enlightenment on what Robert meant there.

Teiser: As I look at the whole small publishing picture here, I see

Hawley's publishing as being perhaps diverse, but also having what
I would call high standards (I guess now I'm contradicting you
[laughing]), while many publishing ventures will publish anything
that's done with enthusiasm. Is that right?

Miles: You don't mean vanity presses?

Teiser: Well, it's hard — I don't know what the difference now is between
a vanity press and a small press, because some people publish
their own poems.

Miles: No, I was just thinking of big vanity presses like Vantage.

Teiser: No, no, no. But I suppose the ultimate vanity press really is
self-publishing, isn't it?

Miles: The small presses are doing it differently. The editor, the

publisher of the press, makes his selection. Paul Foreman doesn't
publish anybody he doesn't like.

Teiser: Oh yes, that's right. Well, I think he's very selective too.

189

Miles: And Don Cushman, and Dennis Koran, and Robert Hawley and — who

else? Well, you mention the old presses — the old White Rabbit,
Robin Blaser, and a woman who publishes Cafe Solo down in San Luis
Obispo.

Teiser: You mentioned Hitchcock.

Miles: Yes. These are all highly, devotedly personal about their own

standards; they all think they've got the highest standards in the
country. They can't bear all the other stuff that's coming out.
So they're more idiosyncratic about it. That's why I think it's
important to accept them all, as far as one can.

Teiser: There's a chap whose name I finally thought of today and have lost
again who's very vigorous and very anxious to publish in San
Francisco. He publishes about once every quarter, I guess, a hefty
kind of magazine-size anthology.

Miles: Was it Norman Moser?
Teiser: No.

Miles: There's another one. Ed Mycue? Oh, there is really lots of stuff
going on over there. There's Tom Head, is that his name? The Head
Press.

Harroun: You don't mean Stephen Vincent?
Teiser: Stephen Vincent I*

Miles: Oh yes, he used to be head of Intersection.** Yes, he's
interesting.

Teiser: He keeps publishing.

Miles: Yes. Intersection is a very free, experimental, rather good,

healthy place, I think — I mean healthy for variety. Yes, that's
true, he does.

Teiser: The publication of gay men — they started long ago a quarterly.
Miles: Oh yes, you mean Manroot.

*The publication is Shocks.
**A San Francisco arts center.

190

Teiser: Manroot, yes, which seems to be fairly selective.

Miles: That focuses on the whole homosexual tradition and is very —

Teiser: But publishes material more widely diverse than that.

Miles: But, yes, it's pretty focused, though, on the prison tradition too.
And John Oliver Simon is doing some prison poetry. That's
another interesting kind. It's a good example of the point. A
lot of that prison poetry is not howlingly well done, but it is
howlingly moving, and how you can reject it I don't know.

If you take Poetry Flash and just notice that there are about
five or ten poetry groups to go to every night, and most of them
are publishing, you see Robert Hawley's point, that there's an
avalanche of work happening, and I would say it's at a miraculously
high level all over. I don't run into any of it that I would want
to reject. When I go to the poetry meetings around here, where
kids grab the mikes and they have fights and they throw each other
out of the cafe and they yell obscenities and so forth, a lot of
that is extraneous. But the poetry you hear at those meetings is
often extremely good — extremely good, again I mean in the sense
that there's a sense of strength, of interest, and some sense of
constructive effort in it. The more the presses manage to handle
that and get it out and get it improving, the better it'll be.

This may all wear itself out and people will turn to some
other form of expression or communication or what have you, but
while they're doing this I'd say there's no point in blocking it
off at any point.

Teiser: To go way over on to another point of view, Hal [Harold I.]
Silverman, who edits California Living and who has clearly
somewhat of an open mind about —

Miles: I like that magazine. I think he's doing a good job there, don't
you?

Teiser: I do.

Miles: His articles have the sense of what the New Yorker used to be good
at — a tremendously patient detail of observation, which I really
like.

Teiser: I was muttering to him — we did an article for him that he wouldn't
take; maybe we didn't have much conviction in it. It was on Paul
Foreman and Everson and a little press in San Francisco called
Five Trees, run by women. I don't know — maybe it was just because
we couldn't get it for him.

191

Miles: Was it about small press poetry?

Teiser: Yes, it was — small presses and what they were doing. I said, "You
know, there's something wrong here. I guess we were writing for
an audience that was already interested" — which we were, as a
matter of fact — "but why shouldn't there be an audience that's
already interested? Why shouldn't there be interest here in what's
being written?" And he said, "Because most of the small press
stuff is so bad." I said, "Well, I don't think so."

Miles: Well, there's nothing easier in the world than to call other

people's stuff bad. I just think that the exhilaration of finding
the good is worth reading a lot of bad, makes reading a lot of bad
worthwhile. In teaching a poetry class, of course, you get down to
another nitty-gritty of this where you're reading twenty and
thirty poems a week which you can call bad. But what bad means
there is self-sabotage; they haven't got themselves together. When
they start getting themselves together and a poem starts moving in
a direction of their choice, it's so exciting that you're not sorry
you've read the efforts along the way. To sit around calling that
stuff bad to begin with, the tendency would be to not ever get the
good results. I suppose you get good results in some ways by
calling things bad by challenging people, and I'm sure that's
often done. You know, "This is just so awful," and the fellow is
so hurt that's told this that he goes out and tries something, and
in anger, in adrenalin, improves it.

Don Cushman was my reader once, and I had a huge, huge poetry
class — about fifty people — and I needed readers. At the end we
were giving grades, and grading just meant — it was an honors course
to begin with, so you just decided whether they were good or better.
Don said, "I suppose you think there are some really good people
here, and I don't think there's one, not one." In terms of this
community, he has a more hierarchical view than I do, and that was
an interesting example of it. I actually thought there were four
or five. So we're not all that far apart, and Don is a very good
example of hierarchical taste. He was a good follower of Jim Tate,
and Jim Tate is pretty selective on what he does.

The question is, "Is it bad, on the way to being good?" That's
the question — is it in motion? I would say around here and in San
Francisco it is. Of course, I haven't been to all the thousands
of millions of bar readings that go on over there. Maybe Silvennan
has. But the people you were talking about aren't that way. This
is a book that Paul [Foreman] just brought me. It's an anthology
called Southwest, and It's just people from Arkansas, New Mexico,
Arizona, and Southern California. I was just reading through the
list of contributors; I scarcely know one of them, because it's a
whole other scene. I'm sure you could throw the whole thing out
as bad, or you could hail it as great, either place, wherever you
want to stand.

192

Teiser: He's very interesting. I must get in touch with him and apologize
for taking up a lot of his time when it didn't come to anything;
maybe it will some day.

Miles: With California Living, my hunch is that you did it in too

traditional a fashion. I think the interesting thing about the
people who write for Silverman is that they write the story kind
of as if they were having breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the
person.

Teiser: [Laughter] Yes.

Miles: And so what you would do — really, seriously, if you want to think
about it — is to go to the West Coast Print Center, sit around and
watch the presses turning, and see who comes in and what they
bring and the questions they ask. You'd enjoy it, and that's
what Silverman wants, I think.

Teiser: Good idea.

Miles: That's I think the virtue of California Living, that it does not

stand apart and look at things as they have been structured, which
is what traditional writing tends to do, but tries to get there in
the midst and follow the process. Remember that popular contrast
that we have today between product and process? Products are out.
Process is self-involving, and so on. You could do a fascinating
article on the West Coast Print Center, and it could stress form
and it could stress all these people, but it would just be —
remember that night that I read at Panjandrum?*

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: Now, that was an interesting evening as a process. The people

that were there, what they did and said, the old man who thought
I was Ina Coolbrith, and lots of fascinating stuff was going on
there, but you'd have to be God to listen in on it all — that was
the hard part.

Teiser: We were in the back, and we didn't hear you were Ina Coolbrith.

Miles: It wasn't public. He just came up later and said did I remember

Ina Coolbrith who, way back in the early forties, used to teach at
Berkeley. She was lame and a very interesting old lady. I said,
"I think you're talking about me, if you'll pardon the expression."
"Oh no! No, no, no, no. You're quite a young lady. This was Ina
Coolbrith. She had white hair, and she taught poetry in Wheeler
Hall in Berkeley- in the early forties." It was really kind of an
interesting confusion. {Laughter]

*Panjandrum Press in San Francisco.

193

Teiser: That was an interesting evening. People were so involved.

Miles: Yes, and they were so miscellaneous — where on earth did they all
come from? And the presence of the presses around there. It's
even more harrowing at Cushman's place* because they're so busy,
and people are there nursing their own manuscripts through the
presses. Oh, it's just funny.

Teiser: That's a good idea. I guess the reason we wanted to write that
article was that Everson had just published an interesting book
that had never been given any notice, Archetype West , and Foreman
was just doing that anthology of translations —

Miles: And you could add Stan Rice of Mudra Press to this now. That would
give you another good lead. Oh, don't despair. Do it over. With
Stan Rice's award now, that's a big motivation. I've been hoping
you would do that because the Mudra Press deserves quite a bit of
credit for getting that award, and who the heck is Mudra Press?
Two nice women that felt that Stan ought to get printed.

[end tape 1, side 2]

*The West Coast Print Center in Berkeley.

194

INTERVIEW VII — 18 August 1977

[This interview begins, after a section of faulty taping, with
a continuation of the discussion of teaching students to write
clearly. (See pages 95ff.)]

Committees

[begin tape 1, side 1]

Miles: Besides writing and research and teaching, there's another side to
our work — committees. The committee work is very various. First
of all, early in the fifties a subcommittee on educational policy
started studying junior-year writing and how to teach improvement
all along, using what they knew. What teachers need to know is
what to do very simply and fast and quick and clear that the
students can absorb and use. When we first started working in the
fifties, with students in other departments, we would say, "Okay,
we're going to have two people mark your midterm, one from English
and one from History," or whatever the other course was, "and
compare notes on how much of the problems they find are in the
writing." The students would look very bewildered and they'd say,
"But don't you want this written like an English paper? You don't
want it written like a History paper, do you?" We'd say, "What's
the difference?" Well, in History you don't bother about the
writing." In other words, they have a kind of esoteric feeling
that in English classes you do something special, and you don't
generally do that because there's no demand.

After we got the History instructor and the History teaching
assistant to talk about the importance, and when we were able to
point out that maybe half of their grade depended on the lack of
organization rather than the lack of information — that's why they
were able to improve so fast. I mean, it was a sheer survival
technique, and they were motivated by dire necessity, not by
interest or by any lovely thing like that. They realized it was
impractical to write the messy way they'd been writing.

195

Miles:

Teiser:
Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

It's from that that we carried over now to the teachers and to the
schools. This is about the fourth year of the [Bay Area] Writing
Project, and I think that the statistic of improvement showed up
last year.

My word! That is fast.

It is fast, and it can happen right away. You might ask about the
minority people. Subject A has done some very interesting
experiments with them, and they do have some motivation problems
that are different; that is, they don't trust their own voice or
their own evidence or their own position in a middle class English
that's stripped of their own colorful qualities. And so, in
Subject A, especially in the black and Asian courses, and chicano,
they've been doing a lot: about the first month is getting the
student to be free to assert himself and free to state his own
position.

A very sad result of scientist!) and behaviorism and a lot of
things that went on in the first half of the twentieth century is
a kind of mechanization of writing in which you use the passive
and the impersonal. Science did this because science wanted to
observe rather than interpret. And yet, interestingly enough, in
my studies of prose styles, as I think I mentioned, the most
adjectival or descriptive or elaborate prose style is a scientist's
because he wants to assume a lot of qualities, and that takes a
grammatical construction of adjectival modifications. Young
students are not wanting to make that much assumption; they're
going to try probably to state simple opinions, and that's going
to be short sentences, which is all right for them.

We try to say to teachers, we try to encourage them to say,
"Don't forbid anything." Typical remarks are, "Don't use 'I',"

"Don't use the passive," "Don't use the word thing

'Don't use

short sentences," "Don't use adjectives," or don't use this or
don't use that — these are all easy tags that the teacher has got
to assert so that if the student does do this they can mark him
down for it. Anything goes in any traditional style in English
prose so long as it's used for the right purpose; that is, for
the purpose that the student establishes. [Telephone interruption]

Ask me something, because I forget where I was.

I think you were summing up the fact that when you didn't put
demands upon students, then —

Yes, yes. If we could manage to agree on the demands and make them
simple enough, I think we*re okay. Subject A has developed some
very good approaches with minority students that are working well.

196

Miles: Subject A also developed an interesting diagnostic test. (I

should mention names here. Phyllis Brooks is one, and there are
others.) They developed a diagnostic test, finding that, say, 80
percent of errors are four errors, and those are all errors of
coherence. In other words, they mean that the student doesn't see
what he's doing. If he sees what he's doing, those errors all fall
away. Happily, that corroborates our studies in the fifties when
we found that — we didn't isolate them especially as coherence
errors, and we didn't isolate them down to four, but just a great
mass of errors falls away if the student knows what he is doing.

Teiser: In the thirties at Stanford there was a little book that was very
popular among Subject A teachers called Thinking to Some Purpose —

Miles: That sounds good.

Teiser: — that was supposed to underlie the whole shooting works. When I
taught Subject A I think I spent all my time abjuring the students
to think. That's why I didn't get anywhere with them.

Miles: That's true. That's why I was going to say that very title speaks
from another era, because words like reasoning and thinking aren't
stylish now. It goes way back, then; it goes twenty years back,
thinking and purpose and goals (that's not a very good word either).
It's just another ambience of kinds of terms that are good. A
concept now is some way of talking about developing the stages
through which you carry an idea. "Idea" is not a good word either.
When I once asked a student in freshman English (somebody
impatiently said, "What do you mean by an idea, anyway?"), I said,
"What does an idea mean to you?" and this kid said, "An untrue fact.1
There is that sense of opinion that isn't valid.

That's the whole problem of the behavioristic, mechanistic
tradition, and we really have to work hard to bring that extreme
together with the subjective extreme of "Anything I say is right,"
and "My journal, bad or good," and all this kind of thing. Many
good teachers in our department are now teaching journals, which
they consider sacred, which they will not correct, obviously. How
would you correct a journal?! Students are encouraged to use other
media, too. All this is good, except there's a main line in the
middle between thinking to some purpose and photomontage and journal
keeping, which is having an idea-<-which is making a generalization
and supporting the generalization with instances. When they can do
that, then they can handle academic work, which is asking them to
test generalizations by the reference to instances, or to make
generalization on the basis of instances they have experienced,
and it's- just so simple! But I go and talk to people and people
say, "What do you mean by a generalization?" That's not an easy
answer for people who have to ask you the question.

197

Miles: But you're right — you can't use the word "thinking," you shouldn't
better use the word "logic," and so on. Some of our very best
handbooks today, written by very good friends of mine, give examples
of good thesis sentences, ones like, "Everybody should pay more
attention to politics" — now, that's an impossible thesis sentence
because of the "everybody," and their simplest study of logic
should have told them that, so that it's the teachers as well as
the students who are confused. I mean, you can't write about all
or none, you can't write about superlatives, and yet a typical
student lead sentence — if you ask them to write on "My Home Town,"
they'll write, "My home town is the best little home town in the
world." Impossible unless you're going to deal with all the other
home towns in the world and show why it's best. But they don't use
a superlative with any meaning like that; it's just an emotional
remark from a chamber of commerce bulletin. So you have to spend
time talking about what kind of a generalization could they
themselves support. Once they see what kind they can support,
then they feel secure in supporting it. But obviously they have
felt pretty mixed up about supporting some of these other ones.

It's fun and it's easy — that's the sad part that it has got
so mixed up. But naturally of course it has, in all the confusions
of our culture; that's obvious. When I say it's fun and easy, it's
fun and easy because at that simple level where I'm talking about
It, you hardly ever get any reality. But if you can persuade them
to see that reality, abstract enough to see that reality to use it
even a little bit in their college work, it's very helpful. And I
don't just mean college work; I mean making reports and in almost
everything they're going to have to do in whatever job they have,
just to be able to make a generalization, perceive a general
situation and then see what instances need to support it. It's
not just a college exercise; also it's a lifestyle.

One meaning of illiteracy, I think, in our society is the
inability to use language to generalize and to support. This is a
simple thing we just have to teach over and over.

Did I mention before — yes, I'm sure I did — when I was in high
school, I enjoyed teaching the neighbors, who were young men
starting in business. Why did the young man, who was twenty-four
years old, come over and ask me how to help him write his report
for Dun and Bradstreet? Because he had twenty-five yellow pages of
data on Albers Mills, which he'd been asked to visit, and he didn't
know how to make a generalization to cover the twenty-five pages of
data.

Teiser: Was he able intellectually to add it up and do something?

198

Miles:

Teiser :
Miles:

Teiser:
Miles:

Teiser:
Miles :

Teiser:
Miles:

Yes, he could. When I, in my simple high school way, said, "Let
me read over this data and see what seems to repeat itself," and
then I would say, "Oh yes, you keep talking here about too much
overhead. What does that mean?" He would say, "Well," and he'd
explain it to me, and the light would dawn on his face and I
wouldn't have to say anything except, "Oh yes, hey, that's a good
point: One of the problems at Albers is too much overhead."

Then you were teaching him to think.

Well, that's your term. I'd just say I was teaching him to
generalize. [Laughter] Avoid the word "think" at all costs these
days. [Laughter]

Well, I suppose, when you have a selected group, when you have
people who are able to pass an aptitude test and get into college,
you have people capable of making generalizations.

You don't, though, because they haven't had any practice
consciously doing it. They may be doing it unconsciously, and
that's how they'll skim through.

But they're capable of learning, you mean,
whole high school population would be —

I don't know that the

The people that we taught in upper division learned, as I say, in
two weeks, because it meant that they already knew but weren't
using it. We would go back and say, "Look, our teaching assistant
shows that you actually did D- work in the writing of this paper.
Your History TA says you had B amount of information. So what's
the result? You get a C- on the test. That's nonsensel You
should be getting the B credit for the information." The teacher
would stand up and say, "Yeah, yeah. Go, go," and the assistant
would stand up — if we had said it, they wouldn't have listened; but
when we got this general affirmation, then we'd give them another
test two weeks later (just use their same old midterm techniques) ,
and the exact data I think is that over 50 percent of the class
improved more than a whole grade in two weeks. That meant that
they were suddenly paying attention to what they were doing, that's
all, and they recognized the demand.

Does grammar play any part in this? Is that another bad word?

Grammar isn't too bad a word. I do think we talked a lot about
this before; we were talking about grammar, rhetoric, and logic,
remember?

Teiser: But in this relationship. Do you teach them grammar!

199

Miles:

Sure. The study of grammar has been a lot improved through
linguistics studies and somebody like Charles Fries. Linguistics
as a whole hasn't seemed to be very applicable because it's so
elaborate, but it helps you get rid of those nonsensical eight
parts of speech, it helps you get rid of a lot of stress on frills
in sentence structure. One of the best teachers of writing in the
country in the last five years, and very crucial to our program,
is Francis Christensen of USC. Grammar is what he stressed; he
taught through grammar. He would point out, for example, how
Hemingway began with modifying phrases. You know, "Unaccustomed
as I am to public speaking, I will begin my talk with an anecdote."
Now that "unaccustomed as I am to public speaking" is considered
very sophisticated, and teachers don't even bother to teach it
because — they just say, "Don't write short, jerky sentences," but
they don't bother to say how you can get around writing short —
One way is to use an initial modifier, which would be "unaccustomed
as I am." Christensen helped the students see how to do that.

Jim Gray has spent lots of time doing that, and it works very
well, especially in the black community because the black community
uses that kind of rhetoric all the time. He was simply cashing in
on the powers of black English, which are more elaborate, less
simplistic than the grammars of white English at this level. So
he had very good luck with letting the black community use its own
powers of language of this kind.

[end tape 1, side 1; begin tape 1, side 2)
What about memory work?

We could do more with, I think, use of memory again. I have a
very bad memory, and I stopped being a Classics major because I
couldn't memorize all the lines I was supposed to learn. So I'm
not too enthusiastic. But on the other hand, I think some simple
use of memory throughout school would be good if we would decide
how to do it reasonably. I think memory would give students the
security that they now don't have.

Teiser: I was thinking of this in connection with the fact that Leonard
Bacon's daughter said that he could recite long passages of

Teiser:
Miles:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Shakespeare, and I remember that my father could,
was part of the education of that period.

Perhaps that

And a lot of it was very dead wood, and you can make fun of it.
On the other hand, some of it might be good. I know a lot of
people who can do nothing but recite long passages from Shakespeare.
They don't inspire me.

I suppose one thing about learning things, if not by heart, at least
becoming very familiar, is that so much literature, particularly of
the past, is allusive. I suppose if you don't know what it's
alluding to —

Of course, they could learn literature of the present, besides;
it doesn't have to be the past.

200

INTERVIEW VIII -- 25 September 1977

[including portions of Interview VI and VII]
[begin tape 1, side 1]

Teiser: I'm afraid we should recapitulate what was inadvertently lost on
the tape, which was a discussion of the Bay Area Writing Project.
We're going to fill in and then add on, is that all right?

Miles: Fill in about the Bay Area Writing Project.

This very interesting work with the Bay Area Writing Project
began actually way back in 1960 when Jim Gray, Ken Lane, and Leo
Ruth, three young supervisors in Education — all supervisors of
teaching of English — had a lot of good, lively ideas about
teaching English. I joined with them, and a visitor by the name
of Dick Worthen from Diablo Valley, and others, had a big meeting
in 145 Dwinelle with lots of teachers invited. The teachers
seemed to like it, so we kept on having meetings. It turned into
something called the Chancellor's Conference in Teaching, every
May. These young men had the virtue of winning progressively the
interest of more and more teachers throughout the Bay Area and
throughout the state.

Also at this time teachers were organizing somewhat because
there were great problems under the then superintendent, Rafferty,
whenever he was in. So they organized the California Association
of Teachers of English, and various branches of that, and they
had conferences at Asilomar, at Yosemite, and in San Francisco
and Los Angeles. Great activity of teachers trying to figure out
how to cope with the social problems of the sixties. The picture
of teachers giving up on teaching just 'cause things got rough in
the sixties is really pretty unfair because, while I'm sure some
teachers gave up under too many students and too much pressure,
they were constantly doing more and more studying of how to meet
those very problems.

201

Miles: There was an interesting summary today of reasons why SAT scores
had gone down over the last fourteen years or something. One of
their main points was that teachers had held less high standards.
I would really like to take five or eight hours to debate this
point because, for one thing, standards are not necessarily
limited to SAT standards, which are white, middle class, eastern
seaboard standards. I think maybe our teachers have taught
marvelously new things that aren't being yet examined for. On the
other hand, the pressures of the sixties, and the failure — here I
go again! — of administrators to back up the teachers under these
pressures meant that teachers simply didn't have the strength and
time to give the extra effort that they needed to do all the new
exploring they had to do. But that's what these very good
teachers did, with our supervisors.

We developed a kind of strong esprit de corps. I say "we"
because I was in on it, but they really deserve the credit — and
others too. Miles Myers, Cap Lavin, many, many others who —

Teiser: When you say you were in on it, what do you mean — you met with
them frequently?

Miles: Exactly, that's what I mean, yes. They, however, did all the

organizing and all the work. They, about three or four years ago
when Subject A scores were so bad, organized a four-week program
in the summer at Berkeley to invite teachers to come and work in
a seminar of twenty-five to help each other develop a program which
they would specifically and formally carry back to their high
schools and specifically and formally teach in their high schools.
They feared they wouldn't get support from their administrators,
but we had a dinner for the administrators that following fall and
got great enthusiasm from them. This whole program was helped by
one of our administrators, Rod [Roderic B.] Park, our provost.
Also our chancellor, Al [Albert H.] Bowker, is interested in the
whole teaching of writing because he was at CUNY [City University
of New York] when they had the open program there and saw how there
is a great problem of teaching. Anyway, we had some good support.

This first seminar worked very well the first year, and I
went to that part-time, and to the second part-time, and I missed
last year. I went again this year part-time. The nice news was
that scores in the taking of the placement test, essay writing for
college placement at Berkeley, had fallen to about 70 percent
failures of all who took it, and after two or three years of our
program the failure was only 20 percent. This was enough evidence
to finally get real support from foundations, which at first had
laughed at us, and it was really "they laughed when I sat down at
the piano" kind of thing because really they did come around and
ask to help us. Jim now has lots of money and lots of organizations

202

Miles: all over the state; there's even a branch of the Bay Area Writing
Project in New York. It's very exhilarating, because there are
simple, good ways to teach if we can get everybody organized and
focused on doing it.

Those ways, briefly, substantively are just to focus on
teaching the making of reasonable, supportable generalizations and
then supporting them. You'd be surprised, as simple as that sounds,
how nobody understands what a generalization is, or how to support
it. They fool around with things like "what is description,"
"what is narrative," and a great many old-fashioned left-over
problems from the nineteenth century, or else they're very modern
and deal with journal writing and expressiveness, which doesn't
give them much help in formalizing the support of ideas. So that
is a nice, hard working, inventive and successful project I've
been in on and enjoyed for now about seventeen years or so. It was
not discontinuous with the one I mentioned at Berkeley, the Prose
Improvement Program, where we had worked for the preceding decade
on teaching our own university students. We keep learning the same
thing over and over; if we could manage to spread it far enough
fast enough, we wouldn't be in such bad shape as we seem to be in.

Teiser: You said somewhere that a couple of weeks of intensive teaching
would —

Miles: Yes, a couple of weeks of intensive teaching, with a double

support, one from the teacher of English and one from the teacher
of the subject matter. This is absolutely vital to have a double
view; otherwise, the students think that English is something
special that's being dragged in on them. Or they get a rather
fragmentary teaching from their own subject matter teacher. The
combination is necessary, and it's the stress on generalization
and support of generalization with data. This they sort of know
already. It's really the demand for it and the reminder of it that
makes them come through with it.

The minority problem is also a problem of voice; that is,
the self-assurance of the student.

Teiser: I think we've managed not to lose on the tape your discussion of
that.

Miles: All right. Then that's a good place to stop with that. Then we

might turn over to other committee work I did, or lecturing and so
on?

Teiser: Yes. There were two committees, I think, that you didn't mention,
and one was a Committee on Research of the Academic Senate, and the
other was the President's Committee on Search for the Chancellor of
the Berkeley Campus.

203

Miles: Yes. I forgot about those before. The Research Committee I was

on fairly briefly — I learned a lot on it — because that is a rather
pathetic committee. It distributes money which the University has
to aid scholarship of faculty members, aid research. But it has
so little money that we sit around quibbling over whether we
should give a man $300 or $320, and if he has five children we
decide to give him $320. There's a real pathos that I could hardly
bear. The National Science Foundation supports the sciences, and
so this committee, though it was heavy with scientists, was very
aware of the fact that we needed more support for the humanities.
We did, I remember, support some very interesting projects, like
stone rubbings from Asia, and researches into musical analysis.
But actually that figure $300 is roughly what we were able, as an
average, to give people on this. You know you can't do terribly
much research [laughing] for a year on $300.

What I learned from that committee was mostly a kind of
breadth of view and generosity from the men on that committee, as
a whole; not in all cases, because there was one man who kept
counting the children in a way that bothered me. But a kind of
breadth of view which the other committees at other campuses didn't
have. I was impressed with the fact that experience and maturity
in Berkeley does mean something.

For example, the committees from other campuses would write
us and say, "Don't you think that we should dock a professor any
amount that he makes after he has done the work on his research?"
In other words, if we had helped him $300 worth, and he sells a
book, shouldn't we ask for $300 back from his royalties? This was
a reasonable request and I entertained it happily and, yeah, why
not, and' fair's fair, and that would replenish the funds and so
forth. It was so marvelous to me to hear these men explain [laughing]
why that was just nonsense; that our job is to encourage, and the
more they make the greater, and the more they try and do, the
greater. If we're always going to keep tabs on these little bits
of money we're giving them, the whole thing becomes kind of a silly
little game. It was that kind of a larger view of what we were
trying to do with this money, which was not to trade back and forth
but was to get good work done, that was very exhilarating to me.

The Search for the Chancellor Committee was a very hard, hard,
hard job. We had a good chairman from the law department, and we
had good people who knew a lot. Often I play the role of somebody
representing the naivete, innocence, and gentility of the
humanities. That's the role I had on that committee. There were
about two others of us who did, plus the students who were on the
committee were very interesting. I tended always to agree with
what the students wanted rather than what my colleagues wanted in
the way of a chancellor, and I'm sure we were wrong. We were

204

Miles: interested in people with interesting ideas who'd written well on
the subject of student problems, and the generality — I would say
most of the people that we pulled for for the few first weeks of
our discussions — are now in rest homes. None of them could stand
the gas of the sixties, and they all retired early and are writing
their memoirs. Whereas the older, wiser men on this committee kept
saying, "You've got to have somebody strong, who can fight, who can
even do in-fighting. It doesn't matter whether you like him or
whether he likes the students. It has very little to do with
charisma." They would always say, "Al Bowker is one of the ones
who keeps being brought up, and he's from New York," but everybody
said at the outset, "He has no charisma." This is one thing that
was said about him, and the other thing was that he was rather
careless in appearance. We heard this so often, excusing, on the
other side, his wonderful ability to organize. He had done very
good work at Stanford in building up the Graduate Division, and
Berkeley clearly needed support in its Graduate Division because
it was being robbed steadily of its graduate powers because of the
political desire of demagogues in the state to fill us up with
freshmen; in other words, to provide more opportunities to more
people, but not higher opportunities to more advanced students.
That was the argument: that Bowker was strong and intelligent in
the way of research.

He came, and after — oh, we had hundreds of proposals. All of
us investigated the biographies of hundreds of people. Then we
telephoned to people we knew in every state where somebody was
concerned, or a university where somebody was concerned. We had
fascinating discussions with people about their administrators.
Finally I think Mr. Bowker was the only one we actually interviewed;
I mean he was the first one we interviewed, and everybody liked
him — liked not him, because he doesn't exactly ask to be loved, but
liked what he stood for. The regents did too, and so he came here.

Interestingly enough, some of our other candidates were later
called upon for other jobs in the University. So we did a good
job of developing not just one, but a list of good people. It was
good experience for me, surely, to be on a committee with such
broad-viewed men interested in administration and policies, and
also to see how that committee was handled. We didn't do much
dilly-dallying, and everything was held very tightly under control
by the chairman.

The other kind of work that I was doing at the same time,
committee work, was, for one thing, on the Chancellor's Committee
for the Arts. That was the other side of my interest, in the arts.
There were some prizes set up, Eisner Awards, in five art
departments: Graphic Arts, Music, Drama, English, and Architecture.
Those were fairly large; that is, they could range from $600 to

205

Miles: $3000 for a student, for the work, as a kind of fellowship so that
he could do his work without having to work on the side. The
Chancellor's Committee administered those.

Fascinating people on that committee. Joe [Joseph] Esherick
was one chairman from Architecture, Philip Brett from Music, Henry
May from Drama, for another. Really interesting work and debates
we had. Our actual chancellors were never much interested in the
arts, so the reports that we wrote to them seldom were replied to.
Nevertheless, we did some really interesting reports on fountains
on campus and what was wrong with them; what was wrong with
temporary structures that remained permanent. We had luncheon
meetings maybe every two weeks or something, and it was a great
pleasure.

You might be interested if I would give you one kind of
anecdote of how things went with students during the years of the
arts committee (I think it was established around the beginning of
the sixties or earlier, maybe). Eisner had wanted this, that these
awards should be very high level, dignified awards; that they should
be given at a banquet where the finest wines should be served and
the finest food, and that some very good speaker should come. The
donors actually left money in the treasury to pay for this
particular goodness. As we administered those awards, we also
administered the banquet and got the speaker and got the students
to come, and so forth. It was interesting to decide where to go
for dinner and what to serve and so on. It was all kind of an
aesthetic unity. We had a couple of dinners of that sort, with
good speakers, like the man who teaches music at UCLA, Jan Popper.
Good, lively people.

Somewhere along in these disturbed times, the students who
were coming to the banquet, which was at, let's say, six o'clock at
the Women's Faculty Club, were caught in a tear gas barrage on
Telegraph Avenue. It was a time of lots of barraging back and
forth; maybe it was People's Park; I don't remember the date.
Anyway, many of them coming from that direction, as most of them
did, got caught in a tremendous fracas on Telegraph and surrounding
streets, and they arrived at the Faculty Club about half an hour
late and absolutely stripped. They were bleeding, they were cut,
their clothes were torn, they looked like real orphans of the storm.
I would stress the fact that it was physical endurance that these
kids went through after they'd been through a police line, or trying
to get around a police line, or trying to get through the tear gas.
And they were crying, and they said that they couldn't come to the
banquet but they just came to report. They couldn't get their
checks if they didn't come to the dinner, and they wanted to get
their checks and go home and clean up.

206

Miles: Well, Joe Esherick, who was chairman at that time, a very cool

architect, I thought was really superb. He sent out for a whole
bunch of big Band-Aids and gauze wrappings and some kind of
disinfectant, and sent them down to the respective restrooms in
the Faculty Club, told them to bandage themselves up and come to
supper because they probably needed some food anyway because they
were probably mostly in shock, which they were. They did this,
but in expectable student fashion. They also, with great humor,
removed quite a bit more of whatever clothes they had left. So
they were really bare; and really, above the waist, as they sat
around the table, this was one of the less formal of the banquets.
You couldn't see anything but bare skin. There maybe would be at
these banquets, say, considering the judges and so forth, there
would be maybe forty people. So it was quite a hilarious dinner,
full of anecdotes of brutality, and jokes, and lots of wine (which
they never noticed how good it was), and so on. It was kind of a
major absurdity, the whole thing.

Our speaker that year was Allan Kaprow, the man who talks
about happenings. You know about Allan Kaprow? He was down at
California Institute of the Arts. This was the man who, in the
sixties, was so famous for the new sense of art as happening,
which you've heard about in Golden Gate Park and with the Beatles
and with Ginsberg and so forth, and with the students as a whole.
Well, Kaprow was a leader in all this in the East, and he told us
about the importance of art in this instant, spontaneous way, and
how at the California Institute of the Arts one of their
assignments was to build ice houses — ice structures — and the one
most complete and yet most easily destroyed, of course, would be
the winner (except competition is bad, so you don't have winners).
So the students would make up teams, and they would build these
ice houses in the middle of parking lots at midnight, and on
freeways, and I can't remember where else. Then they would get it
all done, they'd rush to meet the dawn light and the first traffic,
and then when they made their deadline and the first cars kept
coming and pushing over these things, then they would walk away.
There was kind of triumph, you see, in this concept of art.

The young man next to me — young black student — we'd been
talking about his future in music. He said to me (I'll curb some
of the language), "Jo" — he didn't know me from Adam, but he called
me Jo — "I'm, as I've told you, a student of the violin, and I hope
to be a great violinist some day. I practice the violin at least
eight hours every day, and I am so goddamn insulted by this so-and-
so who's standing up there talking about melting ice houses — I
think he's insulting every one of us here who've devoted our lives,
as he evidently hasn't, to the perfecting of some art — that I'm
leaving." He stood up, threw his wine glass into the middle of
the banquet shape of the table, said this again to the assembled
multitude and invited as many as wished to leave. And most of them
left.

207

Miles: That was an example of motivated and rather interesting violence,
as I experienced it. Allan Kaprow, who had, I felt, created
another interesting happening, did not respond as I thought he
should by saying, "God, we've really got a good happening here,"
but was just furious. I never could understand that. I thought
he [the student] had triumphed beyond belief.

Teiser: Isn't that interesting.'

Miles: It was. Actually, the whole event makes a kind of center in my
mind of how there's wrong and yet right in the student point of
view.

The next year, the students on our committee — there were
always students on our committee, of course — said, "We just can't
have any more banquets. We don't want any more. We never have
wanted them. You've just got to break that part of the bequest."
Whether we had to go to law, I'm not sure. I was on another
committee called the Prize Committee where we had to go to law
to try to break the bequest for $1000 for the best Latin
translation from Cicero, which nobody, even for a thousand dollars,
wanted to do!

The dead hand of prize-giving is very, very interesting. I
decided I'd never leave a prize for anything because I couldn't
possibly tell what would be happening ten years from then.

Anyway, it was agreed that we would have a picnic next time —
not a picnic in the hills (there were too many people) but a picnic
in the same room, which was a nice, simple room, and we invited
[Howard K. ] Warshaw of UCSB, the painter, to come and talk. That
was extremely informal. We had wine and cheese and crackers and
sandwiches, and he talked, and there was a fair amount of
discussion. But somehow that didn't seem like a good solution
either. We tried that a couple of times. Joe Esherick was so
interested — he had kids of his own — so interested in trying these
things. But we couldn't quite seem to hit it off, and the students
said, "Why the blankety-blank do you make us come to anything?
Just mail us our checks!" which was a little angrifying to those
traditionalists who felt they ought to come through with a little
ceremony.

Then we tried something that has now worked out to be quite
nice, because it suddenly dawned on me, "It's not really that the
students want their checks. What do they really want?" You know
the answer? Obviously, I'm sure you could say it: They want to
be heard. It's not the money, it's the voice that they want.
Henry May and I, the next year, tried — and it was a total failure,
but it was because of our lack of realization of the problem — tried

208

Miles: to have a dinner in which they read their prize-winning poems,
their prize-winning stories, or they played their prize-winning
music, or they showed their prize-winning dance films on a screen,
and so on. Well, we didn't realize how much rehearsal that was
going to take. Besides, they weren't very responsive at all; they
thought we were tricking them into something, they weren't sure
what. The lights didn't work and the screen didn't work, and it
was one of those bad media things where nothing works, and nobody
could hear anybody. We went home very unhappy.

But we got maybe a dozen letters from students after that,
saying that was it, "Do that again, though it didn't work this
time. We will volunteer to run the machine, and we will volunteer
to collect the stories," and so on. So now we've done it maybe
three times. Now what we have, in the Art Museum, catered by the
Swallow, is just a kind of an antipasto and wine, and then we have
the whole show from about seven till nine in the Art Museum. Or I
think the last time we had it in Hertz Hall, because there was so
much good music to be heard that it seemed to need Hertz.

Now we've solved it, and I think it's a good story of trying
to adapt a prize to the people, and also to the times. Temporarily
we've solved it, but I'm sure there's going to be some new problem
and new difficulty. But it was really interesting how — you see,
again, you were talking [off the tape] about "the boy stood on the
burning deck."* The Eisners, who gave this money, felt that the
intrinsic quality of a good banquet and a good speaker — that is,
the tradition of listening to "The boy stood on the burning deck,"
so to speak — was the nicest thing they could do for good people.
But the sixties and seventies are saying, "No, let us be heard.
We don't want to listen to anybody else. If anybody's going to
recite, let it be us." I'm not saying this is better, I'm just
saying it's different. Again I say I wish we could somehow,
sometime get a combination.

Teiser: Is this same spirit shown at commencement now?

Miles: Yes, very much so, and we have far better speakers at commencement
than we ever had in the past, and they are student speakers and
they're awfully good. And student poetry readers, and this and
that. It's mostly a student fiesta. On the other hand, I much
regret the loss of the commencements in the stadium because I
regret the loss of those marvelous Chinese families with their
thousands of relatives, from Grandma down to Baby, with their big

*That is, the tradition of making students learn poetry by heart.

209

Miles: picnic lunches, coming there to see some kid graduate, looking
for him in these hordes of kids down on the field, finding him
and taking his picture 25,000 times, and that whole mass feeling
of ceremony I like too. But again, that's old-fashioned; it's
too impersonal now.

Teiser: Partly I suppose because kids aren't put through college so much
nowadays as they put themselves through — is that part of it?

Miles: I think maybe so. But for a while the parents would say — oh, the
parents would complain! A lot of parents would come up and bawl
the liver out of me for the fact that there was not enough
ceremony for their child. But now they're coming back in such —
I think we had our graduation in Wheeler [Auditorium] , which
holds seven or eight hundred, and we couldn't even get the people
in. So, the parents are now coming; it's now formal enough for
them. There again we've hit a kind of happy medium for the moment.
Always experimenting. [Laughter]

Teiser: It's interesting that the University should be so responsive. I
don't know that it always has been.

Miles: It isn't the University, it's the departments. The University just
abolished the big one; it didn't do much about it. It just said,
"We can't afford to have those big fights. Do what you will. If
you want to do anything, do it." This whole burden has been on
the departments, I think; that is, they may have got some help,
but I haven't noticed it. They get money that used to be spent
the other way, for lemonade or whatever.

The next step I took in committee work was just very exciting
to me, and sort of led to where I am involved now. Would you like
to have me go on with that at the moment?

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: We had spent a great deal of time in the Prize Committee deciding
which students should get the gold medal, the student who had an
all A average in chemistry or the student who had had an A+
average in physical education. I was so irked by this nonsense
about one A+ and another A+, and which field is better than which
field, that I asked not to be put on that committee any more.
That was a natural committee for me to be on, since I was
interested in writing. But a lot of it seemed like quibbling to
me, especially the gold medal kind of thing, and so much depended
on grades, and grades to me is such a foolishness — at least at
that level, when you're quibbling about whose A- is better than
whose A-. So, I said I didn't want to be on the committee but
that I would be willing to serve on a committee that dealt with
ideas in some way.

210

Miles: They hit me back with a really major blow: they put me on the
Committee on Privilege and Tenure, which is essentially a legal
committee, or at least it's a — it should have lay faculty on it,
but its chairman is a member of the law department and it has
other lawyers on it, and it's involved in faculty appeal for
faculty rights of privilege or tenure. That is, if somebody
is not appointed to tenure and feels the lack of appointment was
unfair, or somebody who is fined for some reason, like for
keeping out billions of library books, and feels it's unfair, and
so on — any kind of appeal for rights, faculty rights, to the
administration is brought to Privilege and Tenure, and it's a
really serious, life and death kind of committee.

I didn't know what I was doing when I made this trade. It
was too hard for me physically because you have to sort of stay
up all night with this thing and have hearings and so on. But I
did stick it out for a couple of years until I had a sabbatical,
and it was fascinating. I was so impressed with the people in
the law department. I guess I was on two or three years, and
the final year I was not impressed with the man from the law
department, which shows it wasn't a total bias. The power of the
good men to see the overriding generalizations that control the
conclusions, in contrast to the power of this third man to
quibble, as it seemed to me, on small issues — that was just as
bad as the Prize Committee then.

But those first two or three years were really stimulating
and exciting and opened up my mind to the heart of the University
from terms of faculty rights point of view, and University
politics in terms of finagling, and then, as I say, this whole
matter of ideas and how they operate. At first I felt that I
could say nothing, but gradually as I was on for a while I did
develop a few principles that I thought were valid.

One of the men on the committee for a while was Mark
Christensen, who later became vice-chancellor, who's supposed to
be — everybody says he's too nice. But he became chancellor at
Santa Cruz and had too much trouble to handle it. I thought he
was marvelous at elucidating principles, too (he's a geologist).
I really looked forward to every meeting even if they went on
too long.

By now I was hooked on committee work. My friends laugh at
me for this, but I think one of the most exciting things — and of
course this does relate to teaching freshman English — is to see
a good, valid generalization emerging out of a messy situation,
and see it emerging in the minds of people. The great thing
about teaching is when suddenly that kind of light comes in
somebody's eye that says, "Oh yeah. I'm beginning to get the

211

Miles: picture." This is true, as you know, with little, little children.
When some little child begins to get a notion of something, to see
the wheels turning around in their head, there's just nothing better,
from my point of view. And I was seeing it happening in very
august brains, and it's very stimulating there too.

Some time after that I went on to another committee called the
Planning Committee.* I remember some of my friends would be on the
committees that appointed me (we had a thing called the Committee on
Committees, which appoints people to committees), and I remember
some of my friends saying, "Jo, do you really want to be on another
committee? We've talked about putting you on such-and-such, but
isn't that really too much work? Are you just a committee freak,
or what?" I would say, "If it's a good, thoughtful committee, put
me on. I'd enjoy it." My friends tease me about this. I even
like good department meetings. [Laughter] I really like good
discussion of that kind. On the other hand, a bad department
meeting or a bad committee meeting, there's nothing more awful,
because it's just people assassinating each other with language,
which is very bad.

The Planning Committee I've been on for about three or four
years. That is trying to get ahead of ad hoc brush-fire kind of
decisions, and trying to study the University at a distance and
say what is going to be needed in the future and how should we
meet it by acting now. And I must say, it's not a success story,
except that our good men have been consulted often by the chancellor
and the vice-chancellor, and I think this has been fine. But as a
committee, our decisions have not been upheld by the [Academic]
Senate. We're considered way too far out; most people, in fact,
say you can't plan, so why try? Or we spend a year working up to a
decision, and the decision on that subject is announced by the
administration, and they hadn't mentioned that they were working on
it (in other words, they were supposed to tell us), and so on.

I don't see that we have solved thinking far enough ahead to
offer relevant solutions to current problems. When we are called
in on brush-fire problems, we have enough perspective to help them,
and that part's all right. When I've talked briefly with my
friends in my own department and colleagues in other departments
about the ideas we're entertaining for the future, they're all
horrified. They think it's capitulating to all-University concepts
instead of to Berkeley; there's a great tug and pull, of course,
between — When President Hitch came in, President Hitch was very
strong on robbing Berkeley to pay Paul, and so we lost 110 faculty
members with nothing to take up the slack except our own hard work.
It's ever since then that I think our faculty has felt so driven
and so exhausted, because they've really been doing the work of 110
nonpeople, and those FTE, those full-time jobs went to other campuses

*Committee on Academic Planning.

212

Miles: which, with the argument being a good one, were intended to grow
and could not in their youthful state stop growing, whereas we
could manage better to stop growing than they could. Berkeley and
UCLA — mostly Berkeley — have been taking up a lot of the difficulties
of the whole error by the demographers who predicted that there were
going to be twenty-seven thousand on most of the campuses.

I mentioned that one of the villains in my life is
administrators, and another villain — major villain, I guess — is
demographers. How they could have predicted that we were going to
need nine campuses of twenty-seven thousand each, knowing all that
everybody knew even then, I can't conceive. And why we went along
with that, I don't know. The campuses are perfectly reconciled —
the campuses don't especially want to have twenty-seven thousand;
they're reconciled to ten thousand. But a lot of the planning has
gone awry because of this. So I've grown more and more interested
in the nine-campus structure and work between campuses, and
Planning has involved all that. There I've got to know such
people as Mel [Melvin M. ] Webber and Marty [Martin A.] Trow and
Fred [Frederick E.] Balderston. These men are in planning,
business management, and just really marvelous people. To have a
chance to meet such good people on a big campus is exciting.

If you were on a small campus, some little place like Scripps,
you would meet all the people in other fields, and some of them
would be extremely interesting. But I don't think you'd have the
sense of scope that you have here; these men, if you don't see
them around, it's because they've been called to Holland to advise
the Dutch government or something. It's really interesting to hear
the world that they deal in, what they know, and how they can
manage to work toward the future. Each one of these men, as he's
been chairman of our committee, has had different ideas for how to
get ahead of the problems, and I think maybe we are a little bit
ahead.

For example, this year the relation between professional
schools and Letters and Science has become very important because
students are all looking for tickets, and the ticket now is the
professional school. This is a sad illusion, but it's an illusion
that's fostered not only by what they read about medicine, law,
and so forth; it's also fostered by computer sciences. There's
not enough practical aid in Letters and Science any more so that
they can feel secure with it. It seems to me we have to at least
compromise enough to give them some kind of technical training in
Letters and Science. For example, yesterday I read an article
that said somebody made a study that people who can use computers
are more self-confident about everything they do than people who
can't. This would be an example of how we could help them get self-
confidence in figuring, in arithmetical operations, computational

213

Miles: operations, which do relate to thinking things through. So why

don't we help join technology and philosophy in this way? But Rod
Park, our provost, has just been back to a reunion or to a meeting
at Harvard in which Harvard has reinstituted the old breadth
requirement, like Greek history and so on, and I'm afraid we're
going to go back to the old Harvard routine, which I think is not
for Berkeley and not for the West, if for anybody now.

We have done studies, we have begun studies of all the
professional schools, compared the professional schools in other
parts of the country, invited speakers to come and talk about
professional problems in different fields, got very deep into the
problem of the School of Education here, which is being reassessed
and reevaluated in some crucial ways. One of the ways that's
interesting is they just discontinued Jim Gray, Leo Ruth, and Ken
Lane because they don't have tenure, they don't have professorial
status; they were supervisors.* They're cleaning out all super
visors, so they just cleaned out these three men who, for all their
success and hard work over these years, could now find themselves
without jobs. I'm glad I'm a little bit in on the other side of
that. I don't think they'll continue because I don't think they
could possibly face the anger of the California Association of
Teachers of English if we told the public what was going on here;
I don't think the University would want to face that. And
everybody's keeping very politely quiet about it.

But these terrible bureaucratic absurdities keep on happening.
It's a mixed thing; it's great to be on the good side, and it's
absolutely shattering to be on the bad side. That's why I'm right
now on that committee. I can't even explain — nobody can understand
how they could do such a thing. Probably, our guess is that this
is a legalism; but this is no way. And it takes up time and
feeling.

Another absorbing problem has been women's lib. We've had at
Berkeley a fine group of women graduate students who worked with
the Modern Language Association, which was having some uprisings
in terms of favor of women's leadership, under some women in the
East. These girls wrote, these women wrote to them and worked with
them, and started their own little set of protests and operations
here at Berkeley, saying that there were only three faculty women
in the department and they didn't provide much of a sense of model —
this has always been my problem, is I never provide a model! They
wanted more women and they wanted them right hurry up, and they
wanted more recognition.

*Apparently the plan was abandoned. The two supervisors were
still employed and active in the School of Education as of August,
1978.

214

Miles: The same thing was happening nationally; they had some big,

upsetting meetings nationally, and we had our upsetting meetings
locally. They didn't ask me to be a part of this because, as I
say, I think women always take the attitude toward me that if
they'd lean on me I'd fall over — I gather. I mean I felt sort of
on the sidelines. The other women in our department didn't want
to be thought of in that way. One of them said, "If I thought I'd
been invited here because I was a woman, I wouldn't have accepted.
I want to be invited here for myself and as a scholar." I think I
felt that way too; at least that was always my idea when I was
young, is that this women's lib stuff was — well, I never thought
about it. I simply liked working with men; there weren't many
women around to work with. The ones, when I came to Berkeley, that
invited me to join with them and discuss research were marvelous
bluestocking ladies from the twenties but very old. Two or three
of my friends on the faculty were women. But I didn't get into
anything that seemed like women's coherence. I had not been
accepted by women's colleges. One little thing stuck in my mind
when I went to professional meetings in New York: it was the men
that invited me to lunch and were friendly to me. No woman did.
So I guess I had a kind of strong bias in that direction.

Then one of these young women came around to see me and said,
"I think I want to talk to you, because I don't understand what's
wrong with the department. They're fighting us and they won't
give us what we need. What's your advice? Would you come to one
of our meetings?" I said ho-hum and ta-ha, "The department hasn't
been as bad as you think. We've moved slowly, but always when I've
been teaching here there 've been five or six women in the
department. But they've been wives and they've left when their
husbands have left, and that was the concept of the fifties." The
fifties were great killers to women's rights, because women wanted
the men home from the wars and wanted to take a back seat, and
there weren't the big applications. It wasn't that the department
was crushing them but that they weren't asking.

However, these women, of course, were part of the big surge
of the sixties. The men were in war, and the women were taken in
as graduate students. We immediately gave a proportion of
acceptances to women graduate students in proportion to the
applications. I never saw unfairness as I would recognize it.
They were so suspicious, however, and so dubious that I'd been
too cloistered to understand, that much against my will I did go
to some meetings and did join with them, and from then on was on
the committees. I learned so much that was important to me to
think about, because I had really been too aloof. The deans of
women had never been pleasant to me. Every time I'd gone to them
on something crucial, they'd always turned me off.

215

Miles: To be specific and to tie this with other things I was saying,

women do not seem to me to generalize well. When I would go to a
dean about a crucial issue, she would hand me a particular reason
why we couldn't do it, but she'd never discuss the issue. So I
have certain intellectual biases, I think, and emotional biases
too. But this was such a great bunch of women in the department,
and they were doing so many things that I felt wrong, by being
challenging and kind of, "Well, chairman, we're going to stick
our toes in the door here until you answer us."

I was also very fond of our chairman at this time, John
Jordan, a young man who I thought was absolutely heroic at
handling the troubles of the sixties flexibly. He wasn't
sympathetic with these women, because they were very belligerent
to him and he was used to a milder approach. There was a lot of
incipient toe-to-toe stuff going on there that I thought would be
fun to try to avoid. So this was quite interesting — to go to
their meetings and see how much misconception they had.

I persuaded them to do a history of the function of women in
the English Department since the beginning, which changed their
mind quite a bit because, considering the availabilities, it wasn't
all that bad. We had had women Ph.D.'s, they had got good jobs,
we had women staff members — but they were wives, and that was a
particular problem but it was part of the problem of circumstance.
The first woman professor we got after I was there was not a
howling success, but maybe the men weren't the best judges; that's
the only thing I can fault them for.

These women developed this great challenging thing, that we
were going to have this big presentation at one of the spring
meetings of the whole department, and we were going to insist that
they appoint one woman per man every year from then on, until some
kind of parity was reached. Well, considering there were about
sixty men in the department and three w^men, that was the year 3000.
But I suggested that we phrase it a little differently and we write
it up a little differently. They were willing to compromise and
they, thank goodness, asked me to make the request. I was so glad
because, while I hated to be put in the role of something I thought
was a little absurd, on the other hand I was so glad that my tone
of voice could be one of fairly common sensical and not railing,
which they were tending to do. And so I read this petition to the
department, and without any discussion they voted for it
unanimously! That was such a nice thing; I was right that the
women were too afraid of a sense of opposition that wasn't all that
strong.

We now have twelve women in a department of about sixty. We
have about a fifth women, and many of them have tenure. I think we
could avoid all the hassles of the eastern tribes. Like when I was

216

Miles: at Wesleyan for a couple of weeks, and Wesleyan women seemed to me
just chewing the fat all the time on all these problems, terrible
issues. These women that worked together so well have interesting
jobs. About half of them got very good jobs. They were our first
women appointments to Dartmouth and Princeton and so forth, and
they're doing well. Two or three of them still don't [have jobs],
though. One of them is secretary to a dean at Mills and she's
studying administration that way. The problem hasn't been solved,
by any means. We've still got a long way to go. I learned so much
about how right they were, as much as how wrong they were. I've
gone to women's underground meetings and I've gone to the Women's
Center, and I've done a lot of things that were against the grain
with me. The University did a very bad thing at not appointing
some women lecturers for full-time work when they petitioned, some
very fine people. The trouble was with them that they'd all been
here long enough that they'd made enemies, and one enemy is enough
to make that all difficult.

I went to a lot of those protest meetings, and they by no
means were overstating a lot of the unfairnesses against them.
Many departments still have no women in them, and just look at you
and laugh and say, "Why should we?" There's some great absurdity
going on.

Lucy Sells, one of the women — students — on one of our planning
committees, found out this fine thing that's been so helpful: did
a statistical study showing that where women don't get ahead in
college is in the heavy sciences, the hard sciences, because their
high school, their junior high school advisers (women!) steer them
out of mathematics. Now, that one fact is worth so much knowledge;
that junior high school advisers really have tremendous power for
segregation, which they use to the hilt, and women have not been
able to get into the heavy sciences. Now we're having heavy
tutoring for math on the campus, which is a good thing. So many
ways — we have a good Women's Center headed by Margaret Wilkerson,
a black dramatist, where we're getting some money for research and
for helping bring up this average to discount some of these
disadvantages that women have. Lucy also pointed out in her
statistics that women drop graduate school more than men by about
40 percent. And here's another nice present, by the way. When
Lucy published this and we talked about it in the department, and
it seemed clear that the only reason that 40 percent more women
were dropping than men in graduate study was the sense of insecurity
and that they weren't making it, we decided that was partly the
department's fault, lack of mutual aid. This was done all over the
campus. Also, women tried to give more security by having more
meetings in the Graduate Division. That 40 percent has now been
eliminated. No more women drop now than men in graduate school.
Again, it was a very simple solution, and that was to not let the
woman feel she was alone in this whole thing.

217

Miles:

Teiser:
Miles :
Teiser:

Miles:

Teisen
Miles :

Now, the Women's Faculty Club too, instead of merging with the
men's as it had intended for financial reasons and the encourage
ment of the administration so they could have the women's building
for other purposes, and because it seemed absurd to have two clubs
(but the reason was that in the twenties the men wouldn't let the
women into their building), the Women's Faculty Club voted last
year not to merge with the men's because its life style is too
different, and its life style is really different, and one of the
ways its life style is different is it won't generalize. You ask,
"Should we raise the rents on the garages?" and instead of saying,
"How much would we need to raise the rents to be able to afford
this charge, or to make it worthwhile?" we say, "No, we'd better
not because Susan Smith, one of our older members, couldn't afford
it if we raised the rent." This just boggles my mind!

I go to meetings — I was asked to be on the board because they
thought I could argue better with the Men's Faculty Club about some
of this merger bit. It's incredible to me what we spend time on
in terms of charming details. But I must say, it really touches my
heart. We have this really lovely president who's a former head of
big works in the library, went to Wellesley I think. To see her
work, to see those committees work in what you can really call a
feminine way, is really a good lesson for me. I feel that I have
been reformed in my old age [laughter] against some of my biases.
I've been working on that quite a lot recently, to save ourselves
from getting chewed up by the men's life style, which is rather
grim. [Laughter] So I must ask you to lunch over there. Have you
been there lately?

No.

Gerrie [Scott] hates it.

We have a variety of other things to ask you.
another session with you, we will continue.

If we may have

Do you have something on your mind right now about what I was
saying here?

Not necessarily.

Because, again, I always feel tempted by thinking how many of these
things come together — I don't want to overgeneralize, but there's
a quality of a work of art and a quality of a student composition
and a quality of a university organization, whether it be a club
or a group or the whole schmeer, that's similar, that's shared in
common, that I think is fascinating — there is a sense of coherence,
of parts working in a whole, of the articulation. That fits in
with grammar (you know, the articulation of a sentence) . There are

218

Miles: such nice kinds of basic principles. On the whole, I think the
people that I love the best, that I've got to know the best
through these kinds of works, are the people that are aware of
this and are trying to do something about it. Many in the
academic world have this quality, I think. Some artists — well,
I'm not sure about proportions, but some artists and some
administrators and some faculty members and some just people,
just friends, have this quality and are able to help you with your
own writing.

Usually there's some group or other that meets in Berkeley,
where we discuss each other's work and are quite harsh with each
other and help each other. That group is different from one time
to another, different people in it. Many times we ask new people
to join who've just come to town, and they can't stand it; they
think it's much too rough. At this time of year, many people come
to town and want to join groups of this kind, but then feel that
the rigors are too great. But they really aren't great because if
you get the right people these aren't ad hoc condemnations or
sniping at the details, but they are the grasping of the sense of
the work that you've written, and where it doesn't jell. In other
words, the most practical kind of literary criticism you can get
is something like these other things I've been mentioning.

University Professor, Readings, Journeys

Miles: Another thing that got me interested in all the campuses is that
it appears — I didn't know about it until it happened — we have
something called the University Professorship, which I gather they
want to have instead of chairs. I think that Harold Urey said
he'd like to be a University Professor — visit campuses and visit
labs and be kind of an intercampus operator. So they made him one,
and then they made some other scientists University Professors.
These stressed, as I understand it — nobody's ever heard of it
[laughing] until you get involved, but I guess around 1971 I was
made one —

Teiser: Seventy-three, I have.

Miles: Seventy-three, okay. It seems longer than that. No, I think

you're right. It appears that Harold Urey had said to Mr. Hitch
that he thought just to have all scientists was wrong; that there
should be people from the humanities too. They appointed three
people from the humanities that year, roughly — Neil Smelser and
Lynn White and me. Then later [Sherwood L. ] Washburn from
Anthropology and [Murray] Krieger in criticism from Irvine and UCLA,

219

Miles: and maybe more. Anyway, the stress is on that you've done a lot
of work and that you have general recognition in other countries
as well as here. I think the process is your department nominates
you, and then it goes on to higher committees and so on. One of
the requirements is supposed to be that you actually do visit
different campuses and know a little bit about different campuses.

Teiser: Is this for a full academic year?

Miles: It's forever. I'm a University Professor of English. It has
never been thought through, so nobody knows what it really is.
I think that Harold Urey kind of invented it and Mr. Hitch went
along with it. Mr. Hitch seemed to enjoy having us all to dinner.
I think they put a thousand dollars in the budget to pay our
expenses to travel around, and to pay for some substitute while
we're gone, and this kind of thing.

Teiser: Doesn't it pour a lot of extra work on you?

Miles: It depends. When we were talking about naming more University
Professors this spring, we were consulting each other about
whether it wouldn't be better to — they're either going to kill
the whole thing or develop it in some way. Neil Smelser and I
wrote letters around saying, "We suggest that there be people
from every campus, which there aren't now, and that we have a kind
of consultative role and travel around, and especially help our
younger colleagues travel around to develop more of a sense of the
other campuses." There is now too much sense of alienation between
campuses. But Glenn Seaborg's secretary wrote back and said, "Were
you sending us a suggestion or a job description?" which I thought
was sort of cute. [Laughter] Yes, it would be a major job as
we're thinking of it more. But for me it wasn't, because for a
number of years I've been invited to different campuses to read
poetry or to talk about poetry, to teach for a week or something
like that anyway. I would usually ask for a leave, or I would do
it in my sabbatical. That was one thing I did during my sabbaticals
was go around to different campuses, because I have a lot of
friends and I've been here a long time. So I would read or teach.
I had such a good sense of different campuses this way. No, it
wasn't much extra work; it was just something I did as — writers
tend to get invited to give readings at other places. I had been
other places, like Vancouver and Houston and Denver and Boise and
New Mexico and New York, and so it was nice to see the range at
California too.

Teiser: Have you been to all nine campuses?

Miles: No, and I'm working on that. I've never been to the Medical
School.

220

Teiser: Oh, that's too far away. [Laughter]

Miles: I keep teasing my doctor (Morton Meyer), who's a teacher over there.
I said, "I think you ought to be embarrassed! The Medical School
is afraid to ask me." He said, "You're not kidding!" [Laughter]
But I've been to all the other eight, or seven, or however many
that would be. I've been to some of the state colleges too.
They're fun too; I wouldn't put them down. Sonoma's lots of fun.
And the community colleges — Diablo Valley and De Anza and San
Francisco State and City and so on. I enjoy meeting poets from
different places and talking to students. Since I've been lucky
enough to have good help to help me get there — my student help, of
course, has been a very important part of ray life — it was no more
extra work to be invited as a University Professor. In fact, it
was great, because I didn't have to be invited formally by the
chancellor as the rest of them do, and I didn't have to go to a
dinner and I didn't have to have a red carpet. I just went on my
normal poetry invitations and then later reported back that I had
been as University Professor. I kind of went incognito, which was
fun. Except now they didn't have to pay for me; now they were
getting me free, so I went more often. [Laughter] I loved a whole
quarter I taught at Riverside.

Teiser: Was that part of your being University Professor, the quarter at
Riverside?

Miles: Yes.

Teiser: I see. That wasn't '73, was it?

Miles: No. That was about two years ago, must have been '75. This last
year I went down to Irvine for a half a quarter and shared that
with somebody else, John Ashbery.

Teiser: What were you teaching?

Miles: I was teaching a workshop in poetry. At Riverside I taught two
introductory courses —

Teiser: In poetry?

Miles: No, one was a seminar in critical theory, that's right. At San

Diego I did an interesting thing. Roy Pearce asked me to write a
poem for the opening of a new building, a new arts building down
there. I went down ahead of time to see the building so I could
write the poem. However, the contractor wouldn't let me in,
although he had promised to, so I could only write from the outside.
But then I went down to the big festivities they have —

221

Miles: They had a week for the opening of this building, a big celebration
of this art center, and I went down to that. I was celebrating,
lots of fun, Nancy Hanks came out from NEA [National Endowment for
the Arts], and I met lots of interesting people that I hadn't met
before, like — what's the name of that marvelous dancer? — I'm sure
you know her, the woman from San Francisco who's down there now in
dance studies? She's a very interesting person. Well, I can't
say her name. But I met a lot of interesting people and went to a
lot of the concerts and debated about how the Music Department was
down there. I loved that whole quality, the whole different sense
of meaning that San Diego has. The word that I heard about every
thirty seconds down there was the word avant-garde, which of course
I never hear up here, or not very often.

Then another time I went to UCLA to a meeting of university
professors of English worldwide, and that was an interesting
gathering, because most countries just have one professor. Then I
also did some lecturing and some poetry, both at UCLA. Santa
Barbara was good for poetry, Davis was good for poetry. Every one
of those places I would love to go back to, and I have been back
to them; I've been to most of them three or four times. They're
just so likable. But I must manage to get to the Medical School
by some hook or crook; I don't know quite how. [Laughter] I want
to be able to say I've done my duty and been to all the campuses.

This too has given me a sense that there's a lot of
unnecessary conflict between campuses, that it's done by competing
administrators, that the faculty couldn't care less. A lot of the
faculty comes from Berkeley anyway, and they want to rely on
Berkeley and they want to be left alone to do their own thing,
whatever that may be. A man who wants an especially good course
in English or Greek doesn't particularly care whether there are
twenty-seven thousand or ten; he just wants a clear-cut policy
about how his university is going to operate, and leave other
things to Berkeley.

This picture doesn't percolate through when you go to
administrative meetings, because at administrative meetings they're
always talking about, "Oh, well, Davis wouldn't stand for that."
Who does "Davis" mean? Some ambitious administrator. I feel the
faculty doesn't have enough voice, and much more should be done to
get coherence and to get especially the younger members of the
faculty to visit at various places. The unions oppose me here.
The AFT [American Federation of Teachers] says that if we let a
policy in of having faculty members go to other campuses, they
would then say our tenure is in the whole situation rather than at
Berkeley. This of course would be a fate worse than death. The
union is another one of my enemies [laughing] at the moment.

222

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles:

I think it would be great if our younger members would voluntarily
and with interest, before they had kids in school and so forth, or
older, afterwards, if they're getting a little bored, go to another
campus and get to know a different set of people, different qualities
of value, different ways of doing things. I think this would be
beautiful. But we have not yet sold our new president on this, to
say nothing of our faculty.

If you have some outstanding specialist in one thing, might that
not keep him shuttling and never give him time, if there were such
a —

That's what Lynn White and Glenn Seaborg are exactly afraid of. I
think you'd just be sensible; you don't have to go every time they
ask you, any more than they have to take you if you want to go.
This would be a voluntary agreement on all sides. This would also
be planned in terms of their own programs, maybe two or three years
ahead sometimes. Neil Smelser was asked all at once to teach on
every campus. Obviously he couldn't do that. He wanted to plan
ahead. But then he got other responsibilities — that he had to be
chairman because his department was in trouble. Then he decided he
had to get away from the department, and so he's in London for two
years doing University Abroad. So he's serving the University very
strongly for the past four years, but he hasn't got to any of the
other campuses the way he'd intended.

Well, we'll just have to see how the Powers That Be work all
this out. There's a majority of us. The younger members all think
that it should be developed this way, but many of the older feel
it's too much of a burden to discuss it.

You asked about lectures?

Yes, there were two lectures,
earlier; I don't know when.

One was the Gayley Lecture. It was

Yes, that was about 1960. The English Department has an annual
lecture called the Gayley Lecture, and it elects one of its members
to give that lecture. I gave it one year. I remember it as rather
a strain, because I don't tend to teach by lecturing nor do I tend
to stand up that long. The room that I gave it in was the kind
that slants upward, and it's really hard for me to stand up that
straight. But it was okay; it was a nice audience. It was on the
"poetry of praise," which was about American poetry in the
nineteenth century, and Whitman and so forth.

223

Miles: The Faculty Research Lecture* was easier and more pleasant, though
it was bigger. It was a huge audience by my experience; it filled
Wheeler Aud. That's a traditional lecture where a faculty committee,
I guess of your predecessors, elects you. It's awfully seriously
taken, I'm learning, now that I'm on the committee to elect the
next faculty research lecturer, how seriously they take it. One of
the men said to me the other day, "There's no place on this campus
where I find more moral and intellectual judgment more deeply
probed than on this committee." It's very hard to weigh what
people in any one year should be considered lecturers; they are
supposed to have done research that's inventive, and they're
supposed to have been doing it progressively, and so on.

At one of the meetings they said to me, "Did you ever go to
Faculty Research Lectures when you were first here?" I said, "I
went quite faithfully because I always liked them as a form." I
think that when I was very new here I went to one by Ivan Linforth
on the Greek gods, which really was impressive. So I went to many
others, not all of which were that impressive, but many of them
were. I went quite faithfully, maybe every third year or something
like that.

Then they doubled. They couldn't just hold it to one as the
faculty grew, so they now have one twice a year. I didn't go
quite so often. But then the committee made the point, which I
thought was interesting, that many people who become faculty
lecturers say that, that they have been interested in the past.
It doesn't prove anything except a kind of interest in scholarship
that's very abiding, because they don't ask you if you'd be
interested in lecturing or anything like that. But I guess the
people that are interested, are interested in university research
in general and therefore are considered to have more general
concerns than some.

Anyway, that was a very nice experience.

Teiser: Does it parallel in any way your magazine Idea and Experiment?
Miles: You mean getting to the public?

Teiser: Yes — getting the results of university research out beyond just
scholarly —

*Delivered 18 February 1976. See Appendix.

224

Miles: Well, let's see. I wish it did. I don't think the Faculty

Research Lecture does go to that public, to that alumni public.
I think it goes more to faculty themselves or to the townspeople.
I was asked to make it over into an article, and it was published
in a magazine called Critical Inquiry at the University of
Chicago. But that's still a highly, highly special quarterly.
Unhappily, I don't think it's yet very popular. But, I did get a
lot of response that was sort of popular. I mean, for example, a
couple of university presidents wrote me and said that they had
had it multilithed for their faculty, and kind of interesting
things like that.

Teiser: It was most interesting.

Miles: It did have some general ideas in it, though it was an effort to
generalize about my actually very specific research. It's always
hard to balance very specific research with wider generalizations.
In other words, the simple 1A problem is a really great problem in
a research lecture; that is, to get the generalization from the
data at the same level! But anyway, it did turn out happily in
terms of the response I got. Also, just meeting the other research
lecturers is very, very pleasant.

Teiser: How did you meet them?

Miles: The chancellor gives a dinner, and then Sigma Xi gives a dinner
for the science ones (there's no celebration for the humanities,
but the science people celebrate), and so they invited me to
theirs. Then this committee that works again on finding the next
one — works very hard! After all, you've got to read everybody's
research that's going on, in order to. So, that was good.

I was pretty frightened in both cases because, as I say, I'm
not an experienced lecturer. My limit was always about seventy,
so to get seven hundred was [laughing] a little too much of a jump.

When I say my limit was seventy, I had done another kind of
lecturing or reading — which maybe I mentioned; I'm not quite sure —
the kind of poetry readings where you go around to other universities
and meet with special groups of teachers. Some of those I would
mention as being also extremely informative to me and fun. One was
in Vancouver, one was in Texas where the National Council of Teachers
of English had a panel of ten poets. People who came to that four
or five days of reading literally said that they came on buses from
small schools in Texas, and that it was really worth the price to
be told that there are writers still alive today that are publishing,
and they came to see that we were really alive. There was a kind
of interesting discovery of how these meetings mean more in other
places than they do here. James Dickey invited me to the Library

225

Miles: of Congress to read there and to have a kind of talk with him and
some other poets. Then I also read for the Library of Congress
recording system, and that was about an hour's reading.

That ties in with something else I might have mentioned
before, that is recordings and collections.

Way back in 1939, a young man called on me from Buffalo. His
name was Charles Abbott, and he said he wanted to build up a good
library at the University of Buffalo, but he hadn't any money.
His idea was to start collecting authors who published in 1939,
which I had, and just start building from there (maybe it wasn't
quite that limited). Anyway, he asked me if I would from then on
give my manuscripts and letters and so on to the University of
Buffalo, which of course I felt very flattered by in those days,
and I think was a really neat idea, because he got a lot of us
who were in that generation before collecting manuscripts became
such a game. For a long time I did send my things to the University
of Buffalo. Later they became less interested; with the death of
Abbott, I'm not sure what happened to that program. I really
haven't heard about it later. But he was a very fine person.

Then there's a fine-books library at the Washington
University in St. Louis. There is a poet by the name of Mona Van
Duyn, and she then asked me to send my things there, and they
would make a bibliography. I think they were taking ten poets or
six poets and just taking care of all their stuff. At that point
I asked our library whether they would like to have my things;
Buffalo seemed pretty far away, and I had no particular connection
with St. Louis, and I thought I'd rather give them here. But
George Hammond, who was head of our Bancroft, said he didn't want
them; they weren't enough connected with Mexican history. I did,
then, send them for a number of years to Washington and they did
make an interesting bibliography. Another one was then made by
somebody for some degree at Scripps College. So I have a very
helpful set of bibliographies, which I never in the world would
have thought of keeping for myself. Also a lively "profile" done
for Journalism, which makes me very busy but doesn't reflect my
peaceful side!*

We also had recordings made in Texas and Washington, D.C.,
and then somebody from Folkways Scholastic came out and made a
recording here. So there is a record, I think it's called Today's
Poets, Volume II, in which I share a side with Bill Stafford and
others.

*See Appendix.

226

Miles: But the funnier record is even one that came earlier that was
made by Evergreen Press — is that the Don Allen press? The one
where I share a side [laughing] with a lot of people, like Allen
Ginsberg, and that's a really comical one, just because the
mixture of people on there and the mixture of poetry is sort of
surprising.

I think those cover the main readings at a distance except
one at Colorado and New Mexico and Boise and Hawaii, and the one
that I made in San Diego for that special opening of that building
that was kind of a different project.

Teiser: Was that recorded too?

Miles: I think it was, yes. It was published in the — I think that no
editor liked it outside of San Diego. Finally somebody who had
heard it in San Diego wrote and asked if they could print it in
the San Jose Studies, which happened to be edited by a graduate of
San Diego, who'd read it and liked it. I was glad to get it in
print because I didn't have any copyright on it or anything like
that, and that was sort of complicated.

Would this maybe be a good place — since I've been talking
about trips — to talk about other places for other reasons?

Teiser: Yes. But finally, after Dr. Hammond retired, you did get your
papers —

Miles: Oh, you want to get my books into the library. [Laughter]

Teiser: I want to get your papers into The Bancroft Library. I don't want
to leave them hanging.

Miles: Before that, the step was that a former student of mine, Leslie
Clarke, became head of our Rare Books room. By that time I was
sending them all to Washington, but I did ask her if she'd like
a lot of my old little magazine, because I had a really neat
little magazine collection. Just out of sheer inertia, they just
kept coming and I kept reading them and keeping them. For a
number of years, and I've always since, contributed my little
magazines to the Rare Books room. Then eventually, yes, I think
maybe, I asked Jim Hart if he would accept my poetry, and he said
he would. Then I said, "Okay, if I'm going to give you my poetry,
I would like to give you my prose manuscripts too, my research
stuff too, because I hate to keep scattering it all around, and
to send that to Washington and the other to you — " Well, he
allowed as how he didn't want the research. It took me an awful
long time to really foist everything off on him.

227

Teiser: They're there now?

Miles: They're there now, yes. Now I finally have unloaded everything —
all my scraps and letters and everything — on the poor people. Jim
[James R.K. ] Kantor is archivist, happily.

Teiser: And you're continuing to give things to The Bancroft as you get
batches that you want filed? [Laughter]

Miles: Yes, yes. Every time my study gets too crowded, I just put

everything in manila envelopes and take it over there. I do have
some basic copies, some basic texts, handwritten texts of every
thing I've written, that I haven't given them. But I've given
them typescript and bookscript and things like that.

Then, besides, this kind of talking and reading was fun for
me because I hadn't had a chance to travel much before. For one
thing, my mother was ill for a decade, and for another thing it
was hard for me to get help to get away, and it was hard to get
around. I think the first trip I took was in 1950 or '51 to give
a paper on Blake at the English Institute in New York. That went
perfectly well, so that gave me more courage.

Then I had some really nice friends — I mean, I'm fond of my
friends, and I've got a lot of them, and they mean a lot to me.
But these two or three sets of friends had a kind of special
understanding of the fact, how much it would mean to me to travel.
And so I've been with them on long trips and short trips, across
the continent a couple of times, and to New York and through New
Mexico and across the Cascades, and even in the Beckermans' San
Francisco as if it were Europe. One time the Steinhoffs, who are
teaching at the University of Michigan, were in the University of
Michigan program in Provence. They suggested that I fly over and
meet them and spend a week with them as they finished up their
finals and then they would drive me up from Provence to Paris and
put me on the plane. That was kind of adventuresome, but it
worked out very well. Air France was very nice, loading me from
plane to plane, and it was a really outstanding adventure. It's
nice to have been to Europe once, to have a little sense of what
is European. I liked it so much, indeed, that when I think about
going back to Europe again, I would just as soon go back to
southern France, because it felt like home to me. In fact, it was
the place I'd always wanted to go, and it was rather a coincidence
that that's where they were.

Teiser: Where is that university — which town?

228

Miles: Aix-en-Provence, which Kenneth Rexroth said used to be the best

little city in the world. A great little city. I also went with
the Elliotts, George P. Elliott and his wife, a number of times to
New York and various places, and up and down this coast, as they
were very fond of Mendocino County. As most people go away on
their sabbaticals, and I hadn't done that because I hadn't felt
able to, what I did on my sabbaticals was to stay home and take
courses, or study other subjects than the ones I knew about.

I must have had more sabbaticals that have slipped my mind,
but I think very early in the forties I remember asking the Harrises,
Fred and Mary, if I could watch them rehearse plays, because I was
still wanting to write plays. They finally said I could if I came
regularly. I went over twice a week, all afternoon, and watched
them rehearse. One whole semester it was Hamlet, and another whole
semester it was an original play, the adaptation of George Ade, and
quite frivolous, called The Sultan of Sulu. But a young man by the
name of Bob Porter had written all the lyrics for it, which was
interesting to me, and a very good contrast to directing Hamlet.
Those were adventuresome hours for me, those afternoons watching
those rehearsals, and I became very fond of the Harrises and the
students. They made me a member of Mask and Dagger, which was a
drama review, and I made many friends there that are still very
close to me because we still go to plays together. We have a play
reading group, and so on. That was another kind of depth that was
kind of like the traveling.

I used to go in the gate of the campus I didn't normally go
in, so I wouldn't see anybody I knew. I'd try to pretend I was not
in Berkeley, as it's very hard if you're here to stay unconnected.
This summer I totally failed, as you know.

Then the next time — I think it was the next time — I wanted to
study anthropology or sociology, and Leo Lowenthal, a very
interesting professor in Sociology, said to study practical
working sociology, not theoretical. And Karl Kroeber told me to
study anthropology, but again, thinking it would be better to go
on a field trip or something, which was hard to do.... So the
anthropology course I took was rather poor; it was read off of 5 by
5 cards — a rumor which is not unfounded for some teachers. The
other one I took made a great difference to me because it was in
quantitative analysis, given by a young man by the name of Hanan
Selvin from Columbia, a student of [Paul] Lazarsfeld. I got very
deep into quantitative analysis, statistics. I don't mean I
learned to do it, any more than I learned to write a play. But I
learned how it worked, and he and I wrote an article together, and
that just widens out in another very nice direction.

Teiser: Did that not tie in with your studies of words?

229

Miles: No. That's a good and important question, and I hardly ever get to
say no like that because hardly anybody ever asks me; they just
assume it. Most of my work was not statistical.

There was another interesting little episode. One summer
I got a letter from a man by the name of Edgar Anderson from the
University of Missouri, I think — or was it Washington in St. Louis?
I forget now. I guess it was Missouri Botanical Gardens. Anyway,
he wrote me and he said, "I'm coming out to lecture at the think
tank at Stanford,* and I'm lecturing on turbulence. Your studies
fit right in with this because you're one of the few people I know
that does much arithmetical, quantitative study; most people do
statistical studies, and it's very important not to do statistical
studies but to continue arithmetical studies." This was all news
to me. [Laughter]

He was a botanist, and he came, called up and invited himself
to breakfast. We sat out on the patio, and he told me which of my
shrubs were happy and which of them weren't happy. He liked the
vine on the garage. He said it was really a very happy vine. He
told me all about his theories, and he gave this talk at Stanford
that I went down to, which was called "Potatoes, Poetry, and
Turbulence," or something like that. He was doing work for
Lockheed, or one of the big airplane firms, on quantitative
analysis of — well, it wasn't propellers, but turbulence created by
their energy. Then he showed how — anyway, he had scales of
estimates which my poetry fitted into the way his studies of
potatoes did. It's just such fun. He wrote a book called Plants ,
Men, and Life, which our University Press has recently republished
because it has kind of an underground reputation. It's a charming
little book.

He was a very eccentric man. I remember that we had dinner
together at Stanford. He brought the dinner, and it was all health
food stuff in paper bags. He had a rival. His best friend there
was a statistician, and they just constantly argued why arithmetic
was better than statistics. He wrote an article on my work for the
University of Michigan Quarterly. Kroeber had written an article
on my work for MLA, and these sort of conflicted with each other.
I was never quite up on the level of theory where they were, you
see. All I knew is that, practically, I knew I didn't want to do
statistics because I didn't want to sample works of art.

*The Institute for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences.

230

Miles: It did turn out all right. I did work with statisticians, and

Elizabeth Scott became a good friend of mine for this very reason.
Elizabeth Scott was very helpful to me; I revised my work many
times because of Elizabeth, and this was in terms of security of
data. But we both agreed that to sample you have to tell something
different about a work of art. I wanted to talk about whole works
of art, to talk about representativeness rather than sampling.
Those were ways of widening out.

A third way was the most recent one I remember doing. It's
quite a while back now, but it was to try to find how to read
music, which I had never learned because my teachers in school —
and I hadn't had much chance to go to much school — but I did go
to the fourth grade and fifth grade, and the teacher there
thought I had read music because I had memorized the names of the
notes without realizing I was doing that. This had been a great
sorrow to me, that I could never tell which note was higher and
which note lower, and I thought I could pick this up in a basic
music course. I couldn't find one easy enough until I finally
got down to Jack Swackhamer's Introduction to Husic for Teachers,
because all the rest — even freshman music — assumes the knowledge
of piano. So I did take Swackhamer's course and wrote a couple of
songs, one of which Bud Bronson said sounded like the Japanese
National Anthem, which was a nice idea in that I wanted it to
sound floating but I didn't exactly like the nationalism of it!
I spoke of this earlier. That was also an experience that went on
for a couple of years, because I also listened to Andy [Andrew]
Imbrie's readings of Beethoven Quartets, and I listened to Seymour
Shifrin's composition course, music composition — so different from
our kind that it was a fascinating development.

Then I suppose what happened in the later years was that my
sabbaticals were either taken up by student riots and tremendous
student problems, or I did have a couple of health problems. I had
a breast removed for cancer, and I had a hernia, in reverse order.
Those mostly just took vacations, but they slowed me down a bit,
and so there were a couple of sabbaticals there I didn't do much,
and then I guess some of this committee work became very absorbing.
So I didn't get any real adventures in the last two or three of my
sabbaticals. In fact, believe it or not, the last one I forgot to
take [laughter] because I was so involved in interesting things.
I would merely end up my sabbatical story by saying that I got too
involved to separate one thing from another.

Despite the difficulties of getting work done and staying
separate in town, there are a lot of advantages. So many of my
friends get so dislocated when they go abroad, and it takes them
a quarter to get gone, and a quarter or two to get back, that I
felt a certain kind of smugness in having mine more easily and
more simply and yet very adventuresome.

[end tape 1, side 1]

231

[begin tape 1, side 2]

Miles: I'm still thinking about interesting places and what effect they

had on my life. I don't guess I could say that a place like Boise
did in any way that's spell-outable, but I've never lived in a
small town and I've sort of always wanted to have the sense of a
small town (well, I did for six months when I was in Palm Springs,
but mostly my life has been suburban). Boise was a fascinating
place to me.

I went there on an interesting project. Boise got some money
from the federal government, from NEA, to have a series of TV
broadcasts on environment, and to bring into this lectures and
officials from the town, and the arts and graphics and poetry.
They invited four different poets to come and represent four
different issues. I was in the spring, and I was supposed to talk
about the city. Their feeling was that I had done a lot of poetry
on the city, which I was surprised to hear, but I was willing to
accept that idea.

Since I was the fourth, and they'd done this three times
already, they were very expert at it. So they just really
undertook, in two or three days, a live broadcast for an hour or
two, with the mayor there and debaters on either side of the
question of saving the foothills of Boise, saving the town of
Boise. They used my poems as sort of — I would not like to say
musical accompaniment because they were more intelligent than
that — but as sort of background. There was a very fine photographer
who did the visual background for the poems, which was just
delightful.

For example, I have a poem about a moon rising over a beauty
shop, and he had a really neat picture of this moon rising over
this beauty shop.

Teiser: He went and took them as illustrations for your poem?

Miles: Yes. Oh, it was all very well worked out. I sent the poems
ahead of time, they printed them up in a folder — it was all
community involved there. They had an art gallery where they
showed the stuff. It was really masterly. One of the chairmen —
they were both people in English, and one of them's husband was a
secretary to the governor. I suppose he's now busy, since that
governor is now busy. Anyway, to be involved in an open-ended
broadcast with debate, argument, pictures, poems, was fun, and the
people were great.

Another place I went where I got new ideas was Hawaii,
where I taught for a summer, where the idea would be — I was told —
that I'd have to take account of the fact that students were not,

232

Miles: say, as good as our students, especially in summertime. And most
of the students in my class were Japanese, and they did ask rather
peculiar questions. Like when I said, "I don't want to make any
assumptions here that you're not aware of," and one boy said, "Miss,
what's an assumption?"

On the other hand, they were so sensitive in ways new to me
to literature. They'd never heard of haiku; they'd heard of
Tennyson but not haiku. They were not raised in their own
culture; they were very afraid of their own culture, but they had
a kind of sensitivity, say in the use of metaphor, which was so
different that it was just really like teaching a whole new world.
I did that for I guess six weeks, and that was very illuminating.

Neighbors and Family

Miles: I thought too, as I was thinking about this, that one thing I

haven't mentioned that's been important to my life is my neighbors.
The neighbors in my childhood, for a while — I mentioned, I think,
our very nice dead-end street with fascinating people on it. Then
we moved to West Los Angeles and had really no neighbors, because
it was a building subdivision, and the neighbors we had were mostly
contractors' cousins. Nobody was long enough there to get to know
anybody. Well, I did mention my neighbors that I was interested
in teaching composition to, but that was rather rare. When I lived
for four years on the other side of this campus, that was living
square in the student community. That was extremely interesting.
It was during wartime. The students sort of patrolled and ran the
student community; I was very much impressed with student
responsibility and student action in those four years.

Then I moved to this house and have had extremely good
neighbors here — not close and cozy but just very nice straight
forward families growing up, which has been nice, seeing the
children start at age three and move away at age thirty. A very
nice Baptist minister, a very nice physicist, a very nice man who
was one of the early dispatchers for United Air Lines, a fellow
who used to be the University Explorer, a refugee doctor from
Germany, and now my former dean of graduate studies, Will Dennes,
lives down the block. An unusual kind of neighborhood in that it
wasn't, as I say, exactly club-like, but it had kind of a mixture
of children growing up and interesting people that were very
likable.

Also I've had a certain amount of student help, living in, to
help me, as well as some part-time housekeepers, that have been

233

Miles: likable and illuminating;* to live with students is a nice idea,
I think, and you keep getting new ideas. Then probably, since
I'm mentioning varieties, I should probably mention that one of my
brothers has always lived nearby in Oakland, in the real estate
business, and the other one lived in Japan but is here now. I've
had also two nieces and nephews, and now I have grand-nieces and
nephews. This explains what I do on July 4 [laughing] and Labor
Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. [Laughter] I think I've taken
care of all the days now.

Teiser: Do you have an alternate home?

Miles: When we lived in Los Angeles, my father was a restless type. He
was sort of a free agent in his insurance business, so we would
go to the desert, back to Palm Springs, which we loved so much,
in the winter, where we camped out in Andreas Canyon. In the
summer we went down for a while to Coronado, and then built a
little shack on the Roosevelt Highway, Los Flores Canyon. So this
became part of our lives, to have a shack somewhere and go to it,
and this seemed like part of the world to us.

When we moved up here, we couldn't find anything like that.
Northern California seemed to us antidemocratic in the way that
there were not nearby easy places to go to, like the coastline;
you had to go far to Tahoe and Yosemite and Santa Cruz, and so on.
We determined we would lick this problem by starting up at
Martinez or Antioch, and just following the shoreline down, and we
were sure we would find a little cove or coastline spot that we
could buy or rent and build a shack on. We were trying to impose
the pattern of one place on the other.

I think we actually did — I think I know more about that
shoreline than even the Hercules Powder Plant does. But this is
what we found, of course, all this industrial use and all the
barbed wire, and it was very discouraging. We went from Antioch
down around to the Alameda Yacht Club: nothing. It really seems
to me disgraceful, this shoreline. It's a little improved, now,
and the Save the Bay group has fought very hard to improve it even
a little bit. It's like pulling teeth. We finally did find the
one little place where it's not too much like pulling teeth —
Point Richmond. The part of the point that goes out beyond the
little town. There was nothing for rent or sale there because a
man by the name of Tiscornia, a San Francisco businessman, owned

*See Appendix.

234

Miles: all the lots. When he died, he left them all to his secretary.
There's a very mysterious quality to Point Richmond, because
there's still plenty of empty lots, but absolutely everything is
very tightly held.

Teiser: Does she still own it?

Miles: Yes.

Teiser: He owned the site of the Bank of America headquarters.

Miles: Oh yes, I know! And on Kearny Street he let all the buildings
run down. There are famous stories about Tiscornia.

Well, we gave up. We worked and worked and worked and
worked, and gave up. We looked up a lot of records in the court
house, and wrote to people. That's the way I found this house,
because this was just a little victory garden, but we found this
by looking up records and two years later having somebody wanting
to sell, which was nice. But that didn't work there.

There was a funny thing (I suppose it's not important).
There was an ad in the paper for a little house in Albany that
didn't cost much money. I answered the ad, thinking at least
maybe I could just flee to Albany. The real estate man handling
it said no, that wouldn't suit me at all, it was in a dump or
something, but he would look for me. Then he found these lots in
Point Richmond. He said later that he'd worked so hard on it
because his daughter was getting married, and he absolutely had to
have some money for the wedding. So that was my motivation for
getting my lots. They were very inexpensive, and we built an
inexpensive little house —

Teiser: They were outside of the Tiscornia ownership?

Miles: Yes, they were just being sold at that moment by a tug captain

that needed cash at that very moment, and I did have cash. That's
the way we built this house too, is that my mother sold the house
we had in Los Angeles and got cash for that, so we were able to
build this house at an amazingly inexpensive price.

Teiser: Should I ask about this house — did Geraldine Knight Scott plan
your garden?

Miles: More than that. She held my hand throughout, because after we got
the lot, I was going to wait till after the war to do something
about the house. But I was so stuffed up in that apartment, I was
really desperate. We could be allowed to build a house because my
brothers were in the war, but it could only be one of two plans;

235

Miles: it had to be war housing. One was Mason McDuffie's, which was

atrocious, and the other was J.M. Walker's, which I thought were
very pleasant little houses down on Sixth and Seventh Street. He
did one for his mother, for example, that I thought was really
charming. We asked him if he would do one on this lot, and
because we had the money — he desperately needed money because he
was doing everything on account in the war effort — he used all
his old materials, like his old doorknobs and nice floors and
stuff, and he wasn't doing it with mass-produced stuff. But
Mother's lawyer said he would quit as her lawyer because he said
the house would fall down after five years, and he did indeed
quit. [Laughter]

On the other hand, Gerrie and Mel [Scott] both recommended
it, and they thought there was nothing wrong with Plan 5 war
housing. They recommended where it be placed on the lot.*
Walker's young architect was a very nice young man who's now a
millionaire, building condominiums in Hawaii. They were all
eager to do something individual; they were tired of the mass
stuff. And they were the greatest people! They could only do
the basic plans. Well, this is Plan 5 war housing. It's turned
around, and the patio was added, and the windows were lengthened
into doors, and the window boxes were taken off, and the arches
were taken off between rooms, and those connecting doors were put
in to separate this room from the study so we could make it a big
room (which we never have), and so on. It was just a delight.

When we built the house at the Point, I said, "I've never
had a chance to have a real architect and start from scratch."
But that turned out to be miserable! These guys had been so
adaptable, and there were only five hundred choices instead of
five thousand. But the talented and brilliant young architect I
had at the Point kept getting 200 percent over the budget — just
heartbreaking! So that shack and this house cost almost the same
amount of money, which is absurd, because this house is so much
more functional in so many more ways.

Teiser: Were you under war pricing restrictions, however? Weren't
materials under ceilings on this house —

*I also got the contractor to make the patio and the floor of
the house on the same level, which required changing the footing
at the front of the house. [Geraldine Knight Scott]

236

Miles: Yes, oh yes.

Teiser: — and they weren't on the other?

Miles: No. I fortunately didn't have any money, so that contractor just
said, "Pay the architect for his plans," and then did it his own
way. That was a very nice contractor by the name of — no, I can't
say his name. But he was a literary man who was dabbling in
contracting, and very honest. [Added:] Willis Foster.

That shack, then, that was about 1950, and we did use that
for about a decade, until my mother got so that she couldn't drive
out there. But it was a good decade. Now my brother lives there,
my Japan-Hawaii brother, and he's enjoying it. It's just
incredibly beautiful. It's just a matter of sheer wonderment
that that place exists for anybody but millionaires. Have you
been there? Have you seen it?

Teiser: No. You once invited us and we weren't able to go.
Miles: Oh! It's too good to be true.

Any other joyful topics like that, or do you want me to talk
about the arts?

Arts and Other Ideas

Teiser: You've said several times, and I think we've discussed this in
several ways, that one of the values of poetry, good or bad, is
what people say as an indication of what people .in a time and
place are thinking — is that right? Am I saying what you think?

Miles: Yes.

Teiser: So that it's a sociological document rather than literary —

Miles: Not "rather than." That is, one of the ways that social values
find external form is through literary expression. But the
expression is literary, and the literary expression is rather
slow. I have not done any correlating of times here. Language
that today expresses, I think, some of the values of today in
very strong ways was begun to be stressed by poets in the early
nineteenth century. So there's a very slow progression; it isn't
that it just springs up and flares down again. If you take the
whole history of English poetry, from Chaucer on, or even before
Chaucer, and you take the main language of that poetry, about a

237

Miles: fourth of it is the same now as it was then. So those values are
surviving through that whole five hundred years or more, whereas
some of the values in the different periods have come and gone,
and we don't see them any more. Then some of them — some of the
values — are being expressed today for the first time in poetry.

Teiser: Are you comparing highly selected poets of earlier periods with a
very large mass of poetry, unselected, today?

Miles: No, I'm taking exactly the same kind of poets, and the same number
from the same sets of times. In other words, I define a generation
as thirty years, and I take that time and I take the poets who are
born in that time, of a certain degree of surviving reputation.
Many people say that that's a danger, about surviving reputation,
and it may be slightly, not very.

Teiser: When you say "what the students are writing" or what is being
written here generally today, that's an unselected mass.

Miles: That's true, that's true. The selected mass that I've studied —
I could name the names to you, the ones that I based my
generalizations in Poetry and Change on. I not only had the
student mass here, but I also had all those people I wrote about
in the Massachusetts Review — everybody in the seventies and
everybody in the sixty-fives. But there's only ten that I based
my generalizations, my mathematical data, on because I had ten
in other periods. I can't remember them all, but Ginsberg is one
and Gary Snyder is another, James Tate is another, Thorn Gunn,
LeRoi Jones — anyway, that type of level.

Teiser: Again — I'm asking a question and not asking it clearly — this is

a whole different subject: When you look at what is being written
today and look at the mass of it as an expression of what people
feel and think today, aren't you looking at a much wider segment
than, say, your Elizabethan segment? (I don't know why I'm
arguing with you!)

Miles: Let me try to answer that by telling you about the very minute

study that I've done of language from the scholarly point of view —
for example, I have pointed out that nineteenth century, eighteenth
century language tends to stress words like bird and moon and air
and wing and tree. Okay. By words like those, I mean words of
nature of a fairly minute discrimination. And that some of those
are now dropping away; you don't find so many birds and leaves and
trees and wings and moons and stars in the poetry of today,
anywhere, unless the person is quite old-fashioned. There are
many more words today in poetry — remember it's just these ten
people I'm talking about, but also more widely — of types of street
and road and wall and house and window and door. I think you can

238

Miles: see that there's kind of a quality to those words that they share
that's different from the other. What I talked about in Poetry
and Change was that the context of those words repeated over and
over suggests some different kind of context of interest than the
words of wing and tree and stream and sky and stars. The context
may be very different from the ten that I looked at and the
hundreds that are writing around here in Berkeley, but their
emphases, their attentions are focused in much the same way.

An example of your point that's interesting is that I — for
a while, when you doubt what you're doing, you're often very upset
by what you don't find. I was pretty interested in all these
doors and windows in modern poetry. I picked up a copy of Poetry
magazine and I said, "This is a good place to get some good whole
examples. An easy short-cut to writing my article, I'll just
whiz through Poetry and pick up a bunch of doors and windows."
There wasn't a door or window in that whole issue I I thought
there must be something wrong if that would be true. So I looked
at Poetry throughout the year, and then there was a sampling but
a not very interesting sampling. Then I realized as I overheard
a number of conversations saying that Poetry magazine today is
not very representative of modern poetry, I then said to myself,
"I'll look at a number of magazines and just see what I find, but
also I'll look at other books." And as a matter of fact, then it
came very fast because I got a list of books for the 1970s, just
a list of the names, and many names had these words in it —
The Bed by the Window, The Door to the — you know, that kind of
thing. They were so important, then, that they were used for
titles. So, it's tricky, but there is a relation between minute
particulars which support just those limited generalizations, and
generalizations which you draw out of vast amounts of material.

Teiser: Thank you for explaining that.

Miles: So, you'd like to have me talk about the arts a little bit?

Teiser: I mentioned to you before we began this interview that I'd like to
ask about the sources of originality. I was thinking of that in
relation to your own work and what you could judge from your own
experience. Your scholarship has been creative, your poetry has
been creative — originality is what I mean, not creativity but
originality. I don't know about your teaching, if your teaching
is original or not — it's effective, I understand. [Laughing]

Miles: Sometimes, sometimes.

Teiser: But where do you think originality comes from?

239

Miles: I think originality comes from making new connections. That is,
when you see a connection that somebody else hasn't noticed or
hasn't seen, and you make it, and then other people do see it,
then that's originality. If they don't see it, it's never
noticed, it can be original till the cows come home and nobody
will notice because nobody's picking up what you've noticed.

There is one book on this subject. I think the man's name is
[Homer Garner] Barnett, and I think it's called Innovation, and
it's a very interesting book. It's a fascinating subject, and
nobody's really tackled it. But this book Innovation does this,
and it was a great help to me because I was concerned with
innovation in my literary studies. I wanted to know where things
came from and how long it took them to get going, and so forth,
and he makes some very interesting points about lastingness, and
what is the measure of lastingness or measure of originality if it
doesn't last, and so on. (See the last sections of my Continuity
of Poetic Language.)

I know this is off of what you were asking about me, but in
a little way, when I was talking about my sabbaticals and my few
journeys, I was meaning to make the point that these were important
to me because they let me see old connections in new materials, or
new connections, and to come back here and see new connections in
old material. In other words, Aristotle says that the heart of
poetry is metaphor. What I think he means by that is good; that
is, you see a possibility of comparability: as if something is as
if something else. And you see the possibility of relating those
two things as they haven't been related before.

I'm sure this is true, for example, in inventions, in
technical inventions like the steam engine (this is apparently how
Robert Fulton got going), and I think this is true in teaching
writing. In my own writing, well, I just have the feeling that if
I get an idea that I know I want to do something with, it's probably
an idea where I see some connection that I want to try to explore
in my mind. Or if I hear somebody say something that I think
connects up with other things I know, and I'm not quite sure how,
I try to explore it by writing about it.

As for my scholarship, I think that is original in that it's
trying to — it's too original; not enough people believe in it.
I'm trying to connect repeated usage or steady assumption with a
sense of artistic value. It's just very hard to get this point
over. Linguists don't want to relate artistic assumption to
linguistic materials; they don't want to cope with artistic
assumption. And artistic assumption people don't want to relate
their materials to something they think is as mechanical as
linguistics.

240

Miles: These are all examples of making connections that aren't normally
made, where the danger is, as they say, you fall between two
stools. This is the danger of interdisciplinary study, which is
so hard to regulate and encourage. Indeed, I tend to think you
shouldn't try very hard; that is, I think it's safer to keep to
categories and departments. I love category jokes, I think
category jokes are just great, because category jokes are the
whole humor of what you're talking about — a person who sees
connections between categories is a metaphorist and a kind of poet
and a kind of a — well, I don't want to say poet; I mean he's a
kind of an artist, in any material you want to mention. Category
jokes are really just beautiful for stepping on the toes of
assumptions, of generalizations.

Teiser: Would you tell one?

Miles: Oh, I knew you were going to ask me that and I wouldn't be able
to. [Laughter] Oh dear. I've been trading them around lately.
Did I tell you the one that I heard about two months ago that I've
told to everybody and nobody thinks it's funny?

Teiser: Yes, but tell it on the tape.

Miles: I hate to put it on the tape. And everybody tells me I don't tell
it right and it's not funny, and I still chuckle inwardly. It was
just on television. It was just two gag men standing in front of
a curtain talking, as they do in vaudeville, and one man said to
the other — these were just sort of sloppily dressed bums (I have
to explain this because people tell me I should say how they
looked — it doesn't matter how they looked 1) — and one said to the
other, "Are you Jewish?" and the other one said, "Not necessarily."
Didn't I tell you that?

Teiser: You did, yes.

Miles: See, you didn't even remember it!

Teiser: I remembered it perfectly. [Laughter]

Miles: But you didn't remember it as funny. [Laughter]

Teiser: I told it to my father, who is a connoisseur of jokes, and Jewish,
and he didn't get it either.

Miles: Well, there you see. I'll tell you the classical category jokes
are the elephant jokes. "What is grey and heavy and weighs six
tons? An elephant six-pack." I'm not saying it right, but that
kind, where you take three miscellaneous qualities and add them
together, and then you create a category to fit them. This is the

241

Miles: classic kind of joke that the kids tell. There are many more.
"Why does Uncle Sam wear red, white, and blue suspenders?" is a
very good example. You immediately say, "Aha! We're talking about
patriotism here — Uncle Sam stands for patriotism." Or "Why does a
fireman wear red suspenders?" "Aha I We're talking about the
category 'firemen'." And this makes you foolish because you're
not getting to the crux of the problem, which is keeping up the
pants. Don't you think that's nice? Well, so. [Laughter] Where
do we go from there?

I think that's all I can say about originality. You said not
creativity, but I think they're all — I don't think you create out
of nothing.

Teiser: I was just changing words because creativity is so overused.

Miles: I know, it's a bad word today. But I think to create is to

originate. I think it doesn't fit badly with the physiological
sense of creation; that is, that two people get together and create
a third is really the same point. You're bringing, to some degree,
unlikes together, and you're getting another kind of unlike or like.
So I think the metaphor is a decent one, I mean the root is a decent
one; it's just that we often misuse it. Genesis confuses us.

In teaching, many people scornfully say, "You can't teach
writing or you can't teach art." Well, of course you can. And
what you can do is just this, is to afford the opportunity for more
unlikes and more likes to get together and splash around in the
student's mind, set off sparks, set off ideas, until one works for
him. What the untaught student is, unless he's been teaching
himself, of course, but what the helpless, needful student is is
somebody who's just swimming around in his own juices with no new
ideas and no new assumptions and no new questions. That's what
teaching wants to get him out of. It happens with ideas in
abstract courses as well as writing or art or music courses. But
they're all perfectly teachable. That's why it's fun to teach:
you see it. It may be in the heart or the lungs or the brain, but
you see it in the eyes, and you can watch it happen. Of course,
you can also see it in the products that sometimes get made.

[end tape 1, side 2; begin tape 2, side 1]

Teiser: You mentioned that comments on your work have just appeared in
Style. Is it a magazine?

Miles: It's a magazine, a journal they call them, which comes out

quarterly and has articles stressing study of style. This summer
issue, which just came, has articles especially on historical
study of style, the use of history to help understand style, the
use of style to help understand history — a really important topic

242

Miles: which I don't think this magazine — I read these articles and I

don't think they really tackle it yet. I have never found a study
of history that I thought really faced the idea of history whether
it's a question you asked before about originality or origination.
What I think needs to be studied there is that process by which old,
assumed, standard materials weary people to the degree that they
start looking for something new, and then that makes them see the
old in a new light, and so they invent some new form to handle the
new or they may even consciously go back and search in the past.
The people born right this minute are probably going to go back
and search the past in new ways. At least that's what they've
especially done in other last generations of a century. There have
been people who have been aware of the passage of time and centuries
and so on, and we have gone as far away as we can go in the direction
that their predecessors have gone and then started looking backward
for something new. At least, as I say, this has happened in other
centuries. I would think it might happen again. But historians
haven't studied this. They haven't studied the motion of time.

Thomas Kuhn has studied the motion of scientific revolutions,
and there he says they come by little explosions. In other words,
these connections are very explosive, in his view, as they come
out in scientific experiments. In arts they aren't because in arts
you can see them quietly happening from just a few to more to more
to more to more to the whole thing.

You can see somebody like Thomas Blackmore initiating the use
of a certain vocabulary — in a minor way merely — which brings him
the scoffing of his compatriots — not just because he uses the
vocabulary but because he is not terribly good at it. But he does
initiate. But he's not given credit for that. That's the
vocabulary which Milton later is given credit for initiating,
because he does it so much better in terms of blending it into the
cultural surroundings. I don't think this issue of Style has
tackled that fully enough.

A lot of the articles refer to my work because they say I was
a pioneer in making quantitative studies. Sometimes they say
statistical studies, which is not true unless you want to use
statistical very loosely and just mean frequencies. Then they
point out a lot of errors that I've made and that's too bad, but
I have and I don't know how to avoid it. The editors gave me a
chance to reply and that's what I say — let's get on with the
business of studying the theory of history and not worry too much
about errors because, for one thing, when you deal with masses of
data and you start trying to correct errors, you make more. So
It's really better to leave what you've done after the best kind of
correcting you can do once. Leave them and then let people who are
using them for a particular purpose make the corrections.

243

Miles: When I do try to correct, that is what I try to do, I try to do a
specific study where I dig a well down deep and do it all over
again to check it out rather than the old surfaces. It's not like
proofreading. You can't find errors very well that way, and you do
make more. I don't think I've made many errors that would change
the validity of the generalizations I'm making, and furthermore
they are correctable by people who have a motive for doing it better
than I did. But my drive was to go forward into a field I could
generalize further about because, after all, just checking is
unmotivated, unless you know what you want to set forth. So, anyway,
that's what's in that journal.

You asked me a while ago about my idea about the arts in
Berkeley. I guess partly I've been thinking about the arts in
Berkeley as arts on the campus. When you mentioned that the other
day, I said, "What do you mean? I can't remember." That's sad
because the reason I couldn't remember is that I've been so defeated
on it that I pushed it to the back of my mind. You have said you
felt I was persistent in nature and I challenge you to learn
whether my persistence ever pays off in this field, which it hasn't
in all these decades I've been working on it.

In the first place, Berkeley, as an institution and as a
functioning financial body, is not interested in art. It's
interested in facts and forces. So power structures simply bypass
the arts at every point. Secondly, Berkeley attracts students and
teachers and people who are really interested in the arts and are
really very good. So better people come to Berkeley without any
motive for aid at all than, say, in my opinion, go to Michigan
where there are huge, wonderful awards. That would be disputed by
Michigan, I'm sure, but I have the feeling that we get awfully good
and interesting and inventive people in the arts in Berkeley. At
least I have some evidence of this. For example, Seymour Shifrin
certainly felt he had marvelous students here in music. About
painting I'm not so sure. Painting is a puzzling subject because
of San Francisco versus Los Angeles in patronage and all that . But
graphics in inventive ways if not traditional easel painting are
certainly interesting here, and the whole tradition of [Richard]
Diebenkorn and the Six and so forth, painters whom I at least admire
a lot. Certainly there has been lively work in poetry, and as I
think I said one time, Hayden Carruth's anthology called The Voice
That Is Great Within Us, which is one of the first recent collections
across the board, across the country, about poetry today, includes
so many from here.

So we have on the one hand a tremendous demand, and on the other
hand a tremendous lack, and no way to get them together. Expensive
big buildings don't do the work. As far as teaching goes, we get
really very little help in teaching. That is, we don't have the
materials for classes. We don't have traveling shows. We don't

244

Miles: have recordings. Or we have them all, but they're all skimpy and

scattered. We tried for many years to get a room for poetry. I've
always wanted a room for all of the arts together. My ideal has
been a room where students could read poetry aloud, hear it, hear
some music, see some paintings on the walls, make some connections.

This gets in what you asked me about originality and
teaching. This is my interest in students, to help them get out
of wherever they're stuck and move ahead in some new direction. So
this gets with everything that I've been saying and trying in my
own life. It's amazing how hard it is to make any of this work.
The reason I have now pushed it from my mind is partly the fact
that the students themselves have sabotaged themselves. The theft
problem is so great that we can't do anything that would have free
usage of materials. Student self-sabotage is naturally always my
greatest worry. There's always plenty. We have made one compromise
now which is to have a little corner of the Morrison Room used for
poetry. It's quite lovely and it makes me very happy to think of it,
because there are forty shelves of poetry there and it's a pleasant
room. Students can drop by there. They can't take notes, they
can't read to each other, they can't speak above a whisper, and
there is a custodian there so they're not supposed to be able to
steal, which they otherwise clearly would. But with all those
foolish restrictions which are now necessary, it's workable, and it
makes me really happy.

On the other hand, just to mention a plan that hasn't worked
and it's so beautiful — there's this old power house down by the
creek which is a beautiful old building built of brick. The old
power lines ran through there. [Interruption] It's a beautiful
building and it used to be used for art exhibits and exhibits of
utensils, good working objects a lot of times. When the big art
museum was built, where we were supposed to have a meeting room for
the arts but Peter Selz denied that finally, the idea was that we
could use the power house as a meeting place and have exhibits and
classes and pictures and poetry. It's across a charming little
court from the Pelican Building where publications are held forth,
where Pelican publishes its magazine, and Occidental and Poetry
Review and so on. In between there's just a little land and a
little pool and some grass and two Chinese dogs, which if they were
turned around to face the street would provide a very interesting
little entrance to this little complex. So we could call it the
Art Triangle or the Art Quadrangle, and you get to it by crossing
a bridge from the regular campus. It's really a nice dream. It's
great — the students sit around on the lawn. They use this place
anyway; they read to each other there and they sit around there and
they argue there and so on.

245

Miles: However, earthquake hazards prevail, and the police need a place
to register bicycles, so that's what the power house is used for.
Blue and Gold needs more darkrooms, and so that's what the Pelican
Building is trying to be used for. So despite all my hopes, the
situation now is just about zero. The student body leader is saying
that the original magazines that are published aren't worth much,
and graduate offices would be great in the Pelican Building, and
here we have all these bicycles to register and there's just
nowhere. So we are nowhere. It's hard for me to believe — all the
time we've spent on this, with all the different committees and all
the different ideas and hopes and plans and fears, that we are now
farther away from any center for the arts on the campus than we have
ever been. So this is not to end all these discussions on a
negative note, but it's to say that life ain't easy. But it's to
say also that this place is various and imaginative enough to invent
new possibilities of unpredictable kinds.

246

INTERVIEW IX — 22 February 1979

Winding Down

[begin tape 1, side 1]

Teiser: The last time we talked was a few months before you retired; as I
understand, you retired and got ill at the same time.

Miles: Two days apart.

Teiser: The other notable thing that has happened is your winning of the
prize which brought you much note, the Academy of American Poets'
1978 Fellowship— with its $10,000 award.

Miles: Money makes a lot of difference to people!

Teiser: I wonder — do you think it was all money? You've had other honors —

Miles: Yes, I have, and nobody even knew or flipped or turned a hair. See,
the newspapers react to money .

Teiser: We weren't here when it was announced, so we didn't see all of the
press on it.

Miles: Oh, there was a lot of press.

Teiser: Well, let's take it up as we come to it. Start with whatever next
happened of significance —

Miles: After our last talk, eh?

Teiser: Yes.

Miles: And that was in, you said, the end of '77?

Teiser: August '77.

247

Miles:

Teiser :

Miles:

August '77.
retirement.

So that was really only about a half a year before

That's right. We were getting it out of the way so you could get
busy and retire.

Things did get very, very busy in that last year, '77 to '78,
because I was trying to finish up so many things, not only teaching
but that very interesting planning committee [the Committee on
Academic Planning] I was on managed to write a report. By a miracle,
everybody on that committee agreed on it, diverse as they were, and
we had a very happy ending where we all congratulated each other on
the report, which spoke of the need for much more personal discussion
of the problems the University was facing. And we were going to
discuss this in the next meeting of the Academic Senate, because it
was a senate report, but then there turned out to be an emergency
on confidentiality, so Chancellor Bowker needed the whole afternoon.
It was simply placed on file, and we then asked individuals, members
of the senate who had read the report, to come and speak with us, a
group of people that we thought highly of. Some chairmen and some
other interested people came to lunch and told the committee what
they thought of this idea. They thought it was impossible.

Very interesting feeling of all the leadership there that one
couldn't raise issues in department meetings, which was really
alien to everything that I'd grown up with in our department, which
was that that's where you discuss the problem. And sometimes you
had fights, but mostly you didn't. Also in political work that I
had done with the Democrats in Berkeley, we usually raised
questions and left a Sunday night meeting with a consensus where
we didn't even need to vote. So I was really appalled by the
attitude of this leadership: don't rock the boat, don't upset
your faculty, don't tell them anything, don't ask them anything,
let everything go on in sort of a blind way until there may be a
disaster and we don't know.

Teiser: What kind of a disaster was —

Miles: Well, what you're reading in the papers now: Governor Brown's

governorship was going to lead to financial straits (that was even
before we knew about Proposition 13, but that's another financial
strait). And, of course, behind that the sinking of enrollment,
which nobody agrees on whether it's going to sink or not. But the
whole condition of straitened circumstances, changed student
demands, would lead to very interesting discussions of how much
any discipline should alter its methods and procedures. And the
great size of the University and the fact that we had grown so
desperately during the sixties would also not only lead to some
sense of retrenchment but also some sense of reorganization and re-
orientation of the people who came in so fast that they still didn't
know they were there .

248

Teiser: You mean the faculty?

Miles: Faculty, yes. Students too, I suppose. And so, because in the

sixties we did much more discussing with the students because they
wanted to discuss — now students didn't want to discuss. Nobody
wanted to talk about anything. Now when you talk to a student on
Dostoevsky, he says, "That's all very good about Dostoevsky, but
what is our mid-term going to be about, and what grade am I going
to get in the course?" So this is a new, important problem too.

Our happiness on the committee, which means a great deal to
me because it was so — it emerged out of real, real disaffection
and chaos — was short-lived as far as talking to other people, but
then we only had the hour at the luncheon to talk to them. Maybe
we could have convinced them too if we'd had more time.

Anyway, that fell very flat, and nothing happened. We made
some particular recommendations for easing strangeness and
alienation of faculty from each other, and none of those were
carried out. So, in other words, it was a non-success. But [it
was] an interesting report, and I'm glad it was printed, and
maybe something will come of it.

Teiser: Where is a copy?

Miles: It would be in the records of the Academic Senate, April '78. And
everybody on the committee said they signed it with pleasure, and
that's really rare.

So then, when that was done, I felt pretty relieved — as we
met up until the last minute on that. And I got through.

Let's see, I had a very difficult poetry class where students
were either very shy or militant against each other (that happens
every once in a while), and made it sort of hard at the end. So
there was a real feeling of, "I hope I finish here before I fall
on my face."

Then, it was a very happy and pleasant kind of retirement.
The Committee on Teaching [of the Berkeley Division of the Academic
Senate] had an award for good teaching [the Distinguished Teaching
Award], and they had a banquet for that, and it was the first time
they had tried this banquet idea. It was very elaborate and costly
to them, and a lot of fuss and feathers, and it was fun to be in on.

Teiser: How many people were there?

Miles: Six of us. One was a good friend of mine, and the others I didn't
know but were very interesting people. It was extremely

249

Miles: interesting to me because at the same time they were going through
this fuss of giving us this banquet and these votes — and they took
it very seriously, you know: Who would you vote for, and what would
be the criteria? — at the same time they — and I guess I mean here
the faculty, who was probably ignorant — were allowing some of the
best teachers in our university to be let go after years. That is,
the young men in education, who had done such leaderly work as
supervisors of teachers in the School of Education. (I've talked
about this before on tape, I'm sure.*) They were the liveliest and
most constructive people in the department, and they were put on
one-year notice, which legally, many lawyers say, was not only dirty
pool but illegal. And the fight hasn't still come to a crux because
they haven't yet given their notice.

But the irony of this weighed so heavily upon me, and I spoke
about it but people didn't particularly want to listen, because
they'd gone to a lot of work to decide who the distinguished teachers
should be. I didn't ask for any letters from friends in college
because I don't like the process, but they did use the Bay Area
Writing Project as an example of a kind of teaching — not just
personality but, you know, stuff I had done over many years. So I
didn't feel too bad about that. But the fact that the authors of
the Bay Area Writing Project, aside from me, were being so badly
treated at the same time I was being retired was pretty silly.
Something that has developed more in the past year is this great
problem in my mind of the relation between the system and the
individual, and the power of the system to ignore the individual
though the individual is what the institution is based on.

Anyway, then we had a very nice retirement dinner, which was
pleasant. We didn't call it "retirement dinner." Jim [James D.]
Hart retired too, and it was a kind of buffet in the late afternoon
in the Women's Faculty Club. The sun shone in and everybody looked
very happy and pretty. And the chancellor came over and gave Jim
and me citations, which is supposed to be great.

He told me, when he gave me mine, that he wished it could be
in the form of a pelican. This was humor to the end. That was
another fight that I totally lost — I along with my student and
faculty companions. Without giving us a hearing, without going
through any due process, the chancellor just one day put locks on
the Pelican Building doors, cleaned up the building, and sent
thirty-two Graduate Association secretaries in there, and sent the
student writers down into an old darkroom in the basement of
Eshleman. So there was, again, an excellent example of not only

*See pages 200 and 213.

250

Miles: not justice but not due process either. None of these drastic

actions that I was involved in at the end of the year had anything
to do with decent process. So that battle was lost and is still
lost. I had many telephone calls from people saying, "Who are
those strange people in the Pelican Building?" and "How could you
have given up on that?" and so on. It was very sad.

The students are so far just publishing out of the darkroom,
and as I said before, they won a good many awards and so forth, so
they're still doing good work.

Then I had a lunch with Betty Neely, who was former dean of
women, and she warned me not to be bitter when I retired, because
it was appalling what they did without fair consideration. She was
still so bitter, but she wanted to warn me not to be — which is very
good, because at the same time I was having all these rather
superficial honors, these terrible things were happening underneath.
So her warning was very helpful.

Then I decided that after retirement I'd better go on a quick
vacation and get these things out of my mind. So I made a
reservation up at Bodega Bay, and my helper and I went up there
for a couple of days. It was beautiful weather, and I sat in the
sun, and we drove around. I said, "Look how great it is! Of
course you can relax if you like the outdoors." We drove home and
I stopped to see my brother, and he said, "Why don't you stay for
supper?" So I did. After supper I said, "I don't seem to be able
to swallow." So, to make a long story short, that turned out to
be an emergency gall bladder operation. It nearly did me in, and
I was in intensive care for ten days. Medicare won't pay the
surgeon's fee, because he made it so high because he said it was
one of the hardest operations he'd ever performed. And they, on
the other hand, don't make that exception. So it turned out to be
very expensive, in more ways than one. But it was a weird one; it
was a twisted gall bladder, which he said he'd never seen before.

So I was pretty sick for maybe two or three months. But it
was very charming: I said, "The one thing I hate to miss is,
next week" — I said to the surgeon, before the stitches were out —
"one thing I hate to miss next week is I want to go to a friend's
son's bar mitzvah." My medical doctor is Jewish, and he said,
"You can't miss a bar mitzvah!" The surgeon came early, a couple
of days early, to take the rest of the stitches out so I could go
to the bar mitzvah. And I went. [laughter] I was very wobbly,
but it was very nice to get back on my feet that fast. So I went
to a couple of other parties, but aside from that I stayed home
for a couple of months.

251

Miles: I guess the best other things I should speak of are just in terms
of the work I've been doing, all of which seems to me to kind of
be putting ends on things. That's why I had a feeling it would
fit in with this tape, because all these things are sort of
dusting-off stuff. I haven't had time to start anything new at
all. It's amazing that after a year — since we were talking
before — how busy I am just trying to keep up with the past. Isn't
that a curious thing?

I guess in the middle of the fall I got this very large
monetary award from the Academy of American Poets. It's a good
award that's been won by good poets, and it's also this gigantic
sum, for poetry. Because it was money it was publicized in the
papers a lot, and that's much different. I won an equally good
award for scholarship about three years before that, and nobody
ever mentioned it [laughing] because there wasn't much money
involved. This led me into a tremendous amount of publicity — calls
from the newspapers, and then the University decided to make a play
on this. The University has taken a role in this past six months
of publicizing me as a good example of a graduate of the University
of California and a teacher here, in a rather surface way. And I
think because they know they're not being fair to individuals,
they pick out an individual that they have been very fair to, over-
fair to, and publicize that person, whereas actually, if they had
treated me the way they've treated these other people lately, I
would never have done all these things.

Anyway, I've had lots of invitations to talk and all sorts of
celebrations, up, down, and sideways. For example, I just came
back from San Diego where I was given an award for teaching and
writing, a very elaborate occasion and very nice, lots of fun.

Teiser: What award was this?

Miles: Well — what was it called? I guess it was called the Author of the
Year. That's right — a California Association of Teachers of
English Author of the Year. It was a plaque. But it was a nice
party, and nice people. There were a thousand teachers or something,
and I talked on poetry. I enjoy those, because I think English
teachers are a pretty nice type, as a whole. And they're of course
getting younger and younger. [laughter] That's not in terms of
the old joke that I'm getting older, but they really are, because
unless they all dye their hair, you really don't see much grey
hair in one of those crowds any more.

Teiser: Maybe they can't stand being English teachers for long.

252

Miles:

Teiser :
Miles :

Teiser:
Miles:

[laughter] There's a new phrase that I heard down there for the
first time, and it's very common now, and it's sad. It's called
"teacher burn-out." And it's a serious phrase; I mean it's a
phrase for what's really happening to lots of teachers. They're
getting no appreciation, no credit; they're killing themselves for
less money; at the same time they're threatened to be dismissed.

So then — let's see, what else has happened? Oh, I got lots
of lovely letters from older students — that part was really great.
I had lots of very nice letters from students who read about this
in the Daily Cal; or there was an article in the alumni magazine
[California Monthly] , there was an article in the University
Bulletin; there was an article in whatever. And students and
teachers reacted to this and wrote me letters. So that was
pleasant. But also I wrote millions and millions of answers,
which took up a lot of time. And of course read millions and
millions of manuscripts that were sent to me by people who said,
"I was in your writing class in 1946 and I'm still writing, and
here's a large volume of my work which I thought you might like
to see" — which I did, but it was very time-consuming.

My word! You really don't turn anyone down?

Oh, you can't. Can you imagine writing a letter, "Dear student
from 1946, You've just sent me a bunch of stuff I don't have time
to read." You couldn't do that.

You couldn' t .

I don't know who could.

Another interesting thing that has grown up this year is that
I've been asked by lots of groups to come and talk on special
projects that they have. For example, there's a special project
of a group in the Institute of Governmental Studies which is
studying images of California from different points of view —
architectural, political, economic, and so on. It's interesting
to go to those and to listen to the various celebrities in the
various fields, and I'm going to talk eventually on poetry.

There's another one, an all-day seminar on the classical
lyric, which I'm supposed to talk on with a group, and that's just
the Classics Department. And so on. These I enjoy. These are
just local student -things which give me a kind of ongoing feeling
of relation to the students and to work they're doing and to
interesting ideas.

I go to my office once a week, keep my same office hours,
because everybody warned me that if I didn't I'd fall on my face.
And besides, I couldn't ask all those people to come over here.

253

Miles: So I meet with everybody over there once a week, and that's been
fun. I spend more time on individuals than I would have in the
old days, and I'd rather spend more time on larger groups, because
I think they teach each other, whereas if you just talk to one
individual — you know, the tutorial system I'm not too fond of.
Nevertheless, I've been doing that. So I guess my life, in
relation to the campus, is about the same as it ever was, except
I miss Freshman English, of course. But I see plenty of graduate
students and so on.

Teiser: Do they just talk with you informally, or are you actually working
with them on projects?

Miles: A number — maybe half a dozen graduate students — hadn't finished
their theses when I retired. I was not in charge of any, I was
careful not to do that, but I was a second reader on many that I
couldn't control the dating of. So I've been seeing them. And
then, as far as poetry goes, I've been working on my new book, and
it's going to be published in the fall.

Teiser: What is it?

Miles: It's going to be called Coming to Terms, and that's a book of new
poems. So, I've been trying to revise and get those in the right
order and do all the kinds of things you do when you're getting a
poetry collection together.

Teiser: I thought you were going to say, when you started, that you
haven't had any time for poetry.

Miles: Oh'. No, I have lots of time for all those things — for poetry, for

teaching — not so much for scholarship, because that takes a quieter,
slower momentum than I've had time for. But one nice thing did
happen there, I think, that I was pleased by. (I'm not sure I
should be, because I don't know the powers that run it.) But the
United States has a magazine called Dialogue which they send around
the world to represent American thinking and American problems, and
they, to my surprise, extracted and printed one of my articles on
the language of poetry, which was pretty surprising! It did deal
with cultural change and with current social aspects a little bit.
But it was fun to be in this magazine with a lot of sociologists
and historians.

Teiser: Did they shorten it, actually? Did they revise it?

Miles: They said they did. I haven't taken the pains to find out. I mean
I read it, and it sounded all right, and I didn't particularly
notice what they did to it. Whatever they did sounded okay to me.

254

Miles:

Teiser:

Miles :

Teiser:

And so I guess that talks about poetry and talks about ideas are
the main things that have happened.

Did you retire from being University Professor as well as Professor
of English?

This is another thing the University hasn't got itself together
on. I've written to ask a number of people what my role is, and
they give me different answers, and they also don't bother to
check with each other and decide. Mr. Saxon*is interested in the
University Professorship, it seems, and the last report I wrote,
he answered. However, it wasn't his job; the man who was supposed
to answer didn't. And that man I asked whether I should still go
to other campuses and who would pay travel and so on, and I said,
"Do University Professors fade away?" He said, "In effect,
University Professors are just like everybody else." What does
that mean? Because we have a travel grant and so on — does he mean
we still have it or we don't? So I've been putting that off a
little bit, because it's kind of expensive if you pay your own way.
Oh — that's another whole thing I should mention that's interesting
too. I know I'm sounding cross about the University, but I think
it's important to put on the record, you know, it's got to get
itself together. It's so hard for the individuals who serve it
now, because its system is so antagonistic to individual problems.

The retirement system is now divided between statewide and
local, and I still haven't got some of my pension; I still haven't
got a clear statement of how it's going to be distributed. After
six months of struggle, I don't know where I'm at in terms of funds
at all. They conflict with each other. I call Faculty Retirement
and they say that question should go to Accounting; I telephone
Accounting and they say that should go to Faculty Retirement. I'm
referred to a different name each time, and all these names never
heard of the problem, and so on. There's one nice person there
named Mr. Cranston, but he himself confesses that he doesn't know
what the other offices are doing. They keep changing rules in the
middle of the stream. So I've made all sorts of plans that will
now never work out because they abolished those rules in about
October.

What got me on to that? It was something I was talking about
about ways and means — oh yes, the University Professorship. So I
am going to go to Davis and Irvine, but I don't know how I'm going
to get there as far as payment goes yet. I haven't faced the
powers that be yet. And then I'm also going to go to Texas and to
Cornell, because I know they're going to finance the trip.

[end tape 1, side 1; begin tape 1, side 2]

You've been invited to speak at Texas and Cornell?

*David S. Saxon, President of the University of California.

255

Miles: Yes, I'm going to read poetry at Austin — University of Texas — and

talk with some friends in education there, and then in the fall I'm
going to go to Cornell and to Columbia and teach for just about two
weeks each, in October when the weather hasn't got too cold yet.
So those ought to be nice adventures. Then, I think by that time
maybe things will have simmered down enough so that I can get back
to quieter work. Oh, I've just been asked to give the Ewing
Lecture at UCLA in 1980!

Oh yes — something else that I've been doing this year, on the
basis of that prize I won on scholarship a couple of years ago, is
that I'm now a judge for that prize, which is called the Lowell
Prize, of the Modern Language Association. We have to read about
a hundred scholarly books in six months to pick a winner.

Teiser: When you say read —

Miles I mean read.

Teiser: — do you read them all through?

Miles: Sure!

Teiser: Do you ever start one and say, "Oh, this is awful," and look in
the middle of it to see if it continues to be awful?

Miles: Yes, I do that. But I would say that's reading in the sense that —
I couldn't pass an examination on every page, but I could pass an
examination on the structure, theme, and general set-up of the
book. So I've read only about forty books so far, and we have a
hundred by April or something.

Teiser: Do you learn a lot of things you don't want to know?

Miles: No, I love what I learn! Really, seriously. I'm not fond of

biographies; that's not my favorite subject. And maybe I don't
want to read about Edith Wharton's early years. But usually
something comes out of it that's amazingly interesting and a
surprise to me. I always have liked scholarly writing. It can be
very stuffy, of course, but it's always dealing with ideas in terms
of very thick, concentrated, collected evidence.

Aside from these books, Mel Scott may have told you I was
reading a book of a cousin of his on E.E. Cummings which the
cousin had asked Mel and Gerrie to read, and they let me read it
too.

256

Miles: At the same time I was reading another biography for a publisher
on Sara Teasdale. And these were quite close contemporaries, and
to read these two and see how differently — and side by side, really,
practically simultaneously — and see how differently the biographers
tackled the problems of how a poet works in his life and how the
poetry relates to his life was really interesting to me. One of
them — the Sara Teasdale person — used the poetry as evidence for the
biography, whereas the E.E. Cummings person much more used the
biography as evidence for the poetry, which of course I would much
prefer. He wearied of this towards the end and started throwing in
the data. But Mel and I and Gerrie, we all wrote him and said,
"Oh, do more with the poetry," and so on, and I also said this to
the Sara Teasdale person. There needs to be a lot of interplay to
make it make sense.

So there's my least interesting form [biography] and yet you
can see that that is interesting too, whereas the theoretical ones,
like the use of myth in the Renaissance and so on — these are of
course just really, really fascinating. So I don't mean that there
aren't bad books, but it's a gamble and you never quite know. Dick
[Richard] Bridgman, in our department, and I are both reading, and
we tend to read, I guess we'd say, about six books a week, and that
doesn't mean we have to. But that doesn't mean a book a day; you
can settle down for a long evening with maybe two or three books.
You have to be a very fast reader, which I am.

You can read stuff that you don't think you want to read.
For example, Dick and I were meeting in the hall one day and just
commenting on how little we wanted to know about a book called
Zola's Crowds. Zola's Crowds indeed! I'm not that fond of Zola
in the first place, and the crowds, so what? But it's a
fascinating book. Maybe I like it because it has somewhat of this
theme that I've been thinking about — this relation of the individual
to the group.

That brings up another thing that's been interesting to me.
I decided that when I do do a new job, I'd like to write an essay
on bureaucracy — this same question that I raise. And you can help
me with it [speaking to Teiser and Harroun] because you doubtless
know a lot about it, and I know nothing, and I don't want to go
and read a lot of books on bureaucracy; that would be worse than
death. But I think if somehow it could be thought through it
would be interesting, I mean just on the superficial level — what
is the problem with it? As one of my friends in Government Studies
said, "Well, what would be the alternative — autocracy, monarchy,
oligarcphy, ideocracy? You'd better not blame it too much until
you consider the alternatives."

257

Miles: I don't know historically about the history of bureaucracy. I

looked it up in Webster's and it says — the root is lovely, the root
means a hairy rug to cover a table with. [laughter] And the root
is "hairy," the root isn't "rug." I don't have to go further into
how that then developed. There's another nice definition, somewhat
related, that I ran into, which is that a filing system is a way of
losing things alphabetically. [laughter] Do you like that one?
So what has come of this is that I've been having lunch with some
friends that are in the bureaucracy, and we've been talking
together. There was a student body president, a nice young woman
at Santa Barbara, who because she was student body president was on
the Board of Regents for a couple of years. She got so interested
in it that she's up here now getting a Ph.D. on the question, "What
is the relation of autonomy to accountability?" which is another
way of saying the same thing [that I was saying]. So somebody sent
her over to see me, and she was really fun to talk to, from a
younger point of view. So this is my little sort of side luxury;
I guess this is my example where I have been able to start ahead
very slowly, just a little bit, but thinking about an idea that
would be fun to develop.

Teiser: You're going to have to do a serious study of Proposition 13 too,
aren't you?

Miles: I'm not going to do a serious study of anything I This is just going
to be a little jeu d'esprit . [laughter]

Teiser: I think Proposition 13 is supposed to cut the fat out of the
bureaucracy, isn't that it? [laughter]

Miles: I'm sure that it's too much for me and there's nothing I can do
with it, and so on.

Teiser: Yes, write it without finding out anything more about it.

Miles: That's right, that's my point, yes. By no means find out anything
about it. [laughter]

But in a way of summarizing, I think — and I really do want to
summarize, because I think this stage of my life is really pretty
much finished — the good part is that in some ways I've been forced
to be individual. I haven't been able to blend into the crowd,
and as a whole I've been helped to be individual by the world
around me. I worry a great deal, as I get to this point in my
life where I'm now being given credit for being an individual,
about the fact that that isn't happening very much to the people
I see around me; that people are not given credit for being
individuals, that they're being stopped by the system. That bothers
me.

258

Teiser: However, how much force in the development of individuality comes
from the person, the independence of spirit of the person?

Miles: Grant that. Grant that as given in both my case and other

people's cases. Sure I had independence of spirit, but I couldn't
get two feet in this bureaucracy we've got around here right now if
I hadn't built up some momentum.

Teiser: Let me go back to something you mentioned earlier, when you were
talking about your report. (And this doesn't have to be on the
tape, but it interests me.) You said the problems now — and maybe
I'm misunderstanding — were created, at least in part, by Proposition
13 and the Governor's attitude toward the University, which meant
economic cutbacks, less money.

Miles: Plus student cutbacks; there's going to be fewer students,
demographically.

Teiser: Well, theoretically, fewer students need less money.

Miles: Theoretically, we started with fewer students and the numbers were
supposed to be ideal, and the build-up was just supposed to be an
emergency build-up.

Teiser: Yes — so?

Miles: Who ever heard of going back to the way it should be?! This is a
curious attitude: say thirty is ideal, you build it up to fifty
because of emergency. You say to your teachers, "It's a matter of
life or death — you've got to sacrifice yourself temporarily." It's
like temporary buildings! They're the most permanent buildings on
the campus. And it angers me because it's not only illogical and
destructive but it's morally wrong — it's wrong to treat people that
way.

So we'll never go back to what we once agreed was right. What
we agree is right tends to be wiped out by any petty little
emergency .

So this young student I talked to from Santa Barbara was
saying — and other people have been saying, as we've been talking
about this — the way to get a decent relation between autonomy and
accountability, or between individuality and group, is to be aware
of shared values on which you base your procedures. And to go back
to our report, as we were saying, we are now not aware of shared
values, and we should be and we should get together and find out
what are our shared values.

Teiser: The larger the institution the more difficult it is to find those?

259

Miles: I don't think so, because I know Mr. Sproul had lots of faults,
but this university had 23,500 people in the late forties, and
under him it was a real working, sharing of values. I'm not giving
him all the credit — Earl Warren deserves a tremendous lot of credit
too for backing him up; the faculty deserves a lot of credit for,
again, it was working very, very hard. But it wasn't to the point
of faculty burn-out or teacher burn-out, which is really destructive.
And the students, of course, had energy because they were coming
back from the war and so on, and they were really gung-ho for going
ahead. It was a very fine time. It had nothing to do with size.
Very small places today, the smaller the tighter, the more
constricted. Santa Cruz is having trouble. The smaller the more
the students say they don't want to be homogenized, and that's
partly because of size.

[telephone interruption]

Teiser: I wonder how much an institution is shaped by its leaders, and in a
state like California where the governor is so close to the leader
ship of the University, what the effect of our two most recent
governors has been — if they have not been factors in what you are
speaking of.

Miles: You mean Reagan and Brown?
Teiser: Reagan and Brown.

Miles: Well, for one thing, yes, Reagan had a very different idea of what
a good education was — namely, his, which was a small, cozy school
in the Middle West. And Brown went to the University of California
at Berkeley and didn't like it, so has a real animus, as I gather.
At least one can see that he does for what you call scholarly
education. So they both pulled in a direction which we see us
moving in: everything's going to be downgraded two years. The
junior college is going to become a training school, the college
is going to become a junior college, as you see this plan at Santa
Cruz; the university is going to become a college, graduate school
is going to become university school (that means taught at less
costly levels and less exploratory levels). And this is sad if
you believe, as I think a lot of us do, in exploration.

I think we've just cut out thirty-five managerial positions
at the University, just at Berkeley, so as not to touch the faculty.
Cutting managerial positions sounds like, "Oh well, that's cutting
out the fat." But each one of those people was a support for
certain faculty actions, for certain faculty knowledge, certain
faculty inquiry. Without support, the faculty just can't move. I
don't know enough about how many could or could not be cut, but I
mean in terms of concept, it isn't just "fat" by definition. People
need a certain amount of fat, and when you talk about faculty burn
out, that means when you ain't got any fat left, for energy.

260

Harroun: How are you going to be able to make your opinions known on these
subjects?

Miles: I don't know. I don't know. I think quite a lot about that. At
the university level I think we have some good leadership — Saxon
and Bill Fretter, and I think that Bowker certainly has done some
very smart things in rescue work, and so has Mike Heyman. * They're
not all bad people. (Some of them are bad, I haven't mentioned.)
But they become victims in a system that they themselves are bosses
of. Wouldn't it be possible to have a system that grows more out
of the rank and file, the grassroots, and that that system would
have a sense of values which they could recognize as really
shareable, instead of ones that they either invented themselves or
impose?

We have a little group called the Victorian Club which meets
once a month and has the motivation of reading long Victorian
novels which otherwise you wouldn't have time or incentive to read.
The one we're reading for tonight is called North and South by
Mary Barton — is that right? Sounds wrong. Anyway, it's a
marvelous little book — no, I'm sorry, it's by Mrs. Gaskell. It's
published in 1885; I think it was written earlier. This reminds
me of Arnold Bennett, who comes a little bit later, with the
Stories of the Five Towns. This is of a family that moves to a
mill town, to an industrial town, in northern England, and there is
a very interesting passage in which the young woman, who is trying
to understand the industrial psychology and is faced up with a
strike and has never seen strikes before, and all this whole
threatening violence, says one thing that seems strange to her is
that the owners have never talked to the strikers. Well now, you
know, of course we build in a whole industrial complex of
negotiation and conference, and I'm sure that the people I'm talking
about, in the situation I'm talking about, would feel somehow that
they have conferred and met because they've conferred with
representatives, you know. But if you happened to see that
marvelous picture of the Kentucky mining strike where you see the
miners' faces, you see the miners' wives, and you know they haven't
been talking to anybody, they haven't been heard by anybody — their
representatives are already miles out of their league, in talking
to the owners.

Education is already way, way too far into an industrial
pattern, and it's forced into that by HEW and the government in
Washington. We've slipped into this industrial pattern to such a
degree that we talk about hiring and firing professors instead of
appointing a professor. We don't seem to be able to rally our
forces enough to set up our own system of values which can be
sustained. And maybe that's, as you say, because we don't have
enough strong individuals in the profession. I don't know what to

*Ira Michael Heyman, Vice Chancellor of the Berkeley Campus.

261

Miles: say about that. Maybe that's true. But on the other hand,

professors are people who have sort of chosen not to get out into
the fight but to stay in their laboratories and libraries and
work it another way. That quality of theirs is now being exploited
in a strange sort of way.

We have some marvelous people at Berkeley who have — in terms
of collective bargaining, we've had to go that road, which is an
industrial road, with the legislature, with the Regents, and so
forth. And this was forced on us, and this was just so bad to put
us into that industrial pattern, and most of the faculty just dug
in their heels and said, "We won't collective-bargain! You give
us some decent living wage or we'll leave, but we will not strike,
we will not bargain." In other words, they're that old-fashioned;
they won't accept industrial models. Which is fine, it's noble.
But what do you do? I mean, you see, this is an example of where a
pattern is forced on you, where your individuality is stomped on by
the system.

We have a real heroic leader in the law school by the name of
Dave [David E. ] Feller who has negotiated for the faculty and has
won a fine set of terms in that he's given the faculty — in the
legislature the bill passed that each bargaining unit should be
the faculty of a campus. Now there's an assertion of the individual-
that the values of the campus faculty will be the values negotiated
for, not the values of K through 12, not the values of educational
systems all over the country. And so that, last year, was a great
achievement, which I was in on only a little bit in that I was a
member of the board of that group. So that isn't discouraging, but
where are more Dave Fellers? Nobody has given him any banquets.

[end tape 1, side 2]

[added April 1979] You see my muddle of fear and affection, all at
once; oh, have you heard of the Berkeley Fellows? A hundred of
them? Pillars? Now I'm one. And this week at Charter Day I sat
next to an alumna who's a farmer near Stockton. Row crops. She
was homesick for the crops, all the way from 1928. When the new
carillon played, we were sentimental together.

Transcriber and Final Typist: Lee Steinback

APPENDICES

262

From "Bibliographical Introduction to Seventy-five Modern
American Authors" September 1976. Gary M. Lepper

Josephine Miles

LINES AT INTERSECTION. New York : Macmillan, 1939.
Hardcover, dustwrapper.
"FIRST PRINTING"

POEMS ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS. Norfolk, Conn. : New Directions (1941).
Wrappers.
No statement of first edition.

WORDSWORTH AND THE VOCABULARY OF EMOTION. Berkeley .- University of
California Press, 1942.
Wrappers.

No statement of first edition.
ALSO : New York : Octagon Books, 1965.

Hardcover, dustwrapper.

No statement of first edition.

NOTE : New preface by the author.

PATHETIC FALLACY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1942.
Wrappers.

No statement of first edition.
ALSO : New York : Octagon Books, 1965.

Hardcover, dustwrapper.

No statement of first edition.

NOTE : New preface by the author.

LOCAL MEASURES. New York : Reynal & Hitchcock (1946).
Hardcover, dustwrapper.
No statement of first edition.

MAJOR ADJECTIVES IN ENGLISH POETRY. Berkeley : University of California Press
1946.

Wrappers.
No statement of first edition.

263

322 JOSEPHINE

THE VOCABULARY OF POETRY. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1946.
Hardcover.
NOTE : Comprises the 1942 publications of Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of

Emotion and Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century in addition to Major
Adjectives in English Poetry, all three bound together.

AFTER THIS, SEA. (San Francisco) : Book Club of California, 1947.
Single sheet, folded.
750 copies.

THE PRIMARY LANGUAGE OF POETRY IN THE 1640s. Berkeley : University of
California Press, 1948.
Wrappers.

No statement of first edition.
University of California Publications in English, Vol. 19, No. 1.

THE PRIMARY LANGUAGE OF POETRY IN THE 1740's and 1840's. Berkeley : University
of California Press, 1950.
Wrappers.

No statement of first edition.
University of California Publications in English, Vol. 19, No. 2.

THE PRIMARY LANGUAGE OF POETRY IN THE 1940's. Berkeley : University of
California Press, 1951.
Wrappers.

No statement of first edition.
University of California Publications in English, Vol. 19, No. 3.

THE CONTINUITY OF POETIC LANGUAGE. Berkeley : University of California Press,
1951.

Hardcover, dustwrapper.
No statement of first edition.
ALSO : New York : Octagon Books, 1965.

Hardcover, dustwrapper.

No statement of first edition.

NOTE : New preface by the author.

PREFABRICATIONS. Bloomington, Ihd. : Indiana University Press, 1955.
Hardcover, dustwrapper.
No statement of first edition.

ERAS AND MODES IN ENGLISH POETRY. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1957.
Hardcover, dustwrapper.
No statement of first edition.
ALSO : Berkeley : University of California Press, 1964.

Wrappers.

No statement of first edition.

NOTE : Revised edition.

264

MILES 323

POEMS 1930-1960. Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, 1960.
Hardcover, dustwrapper.
No statement of first edition.

RENAISSANCE, EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY, AND MODERN LANGUAGE IN ENGLISH. ^
Berkeley : University of California Press, 1960. v

Wrappers.
No statement of first edition.

IN IDENTITY. (Berkeley): Oyez, 1964.
Broadside.
350 copies.
Oyez 3.

NOTE : 27 copies, numbered, signed by the author in 1964 but published in 1965 in
portfolio entitled Poems in Broadside. Oyez. First Series.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON. Minneapolis, Minn. : University of Minnesota Press (1964).
Wrappers.

No statement of first edition.
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers #41.

CIVIL POEMS. (Berkeley) : Oyez (1966).
Wrappers, no priority:
1). 500 copies.
2). 40 copies, uncut, for the use of the author.

BENT. (Santa Barbara, Calif. : Unicorn Press, 1967).
Wrappers, no priority:

1). 450 copies, brown wrappers.

2). 26 copies, lettered, signed by the author, orange wrappers.

SAVING THE BAY. San Francisco : White Rabbit /Open Space, 1967.
Wrappers.

KINDS OF AFFECTION. Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press (1967).
Hardcover, dustwrapper.
"First edition"

STYLE AND PROPORTION. Boston : Little, Brown (1967).
Hardcover, dustwrapper.
"FIRST EDITION"

FIELDS OF LEARNING. Berkeley : Oyez, 1968.
Wrappers.

POETRY AND CHANGE. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1974.
Hardcover, dustwrapper.
No statement of first edition.

265

324 JOSEPHINE

TO ALL APPEARANCES. (Urbana, 111. : University of Illinois Press, 1974).
Two issues, no priority :

1). Hardcover, dustwrapper.
2). Wrappers.
No statement of first edition.

Additional entry submitted by Gary M. Lepper 3 September 1978

THIS SOFT PAPER. (Berkeley) : Inkslingers (1976)
Broadside, no priority:

1. 75 copies.

2. 25 copies, numbered, signed by the author.

Office of Pub! ic Informal wn

266

• (415; ()!2-373-4 • 101 Spioul II. ill

l/24/73--Thayer--File 4942

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Berkeley—Josephine Miles, poet and professor of English, has
been awarded the distinguished title of "University Professor" at
the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

The appointment was announced today (Wednesday, 1/24) by U.C.
President Charles J. Hitch and Berkeley Chancellor Albert H. Bowker.

Recommending the appointment last week to the U.C. Board of
Regents, President Hitch said: "Professor Miles provides unparalleled
inspiration by the clarity of her thinking, her imagination, will,
integrity, and humanity."

Professor Miles is the eighth U.C. faculty member to receive the
honor, which designates a senior faculty appointment in the statewide
University system.

The special professorship was established some 15 years ago by
The Regents.

Other University Professors are Chemists Glenn T. Seaborg and
Melvin Calvin, Physicists Edward Teller and Charles Townes , and
Sociologist Neil J. Smelser, all of Berkeley; Historian Lynn White,
Jr., of UCLA; and Harold C. Urey , professor of chemistry, emeritus,
at San Diego.

Professor Miles is a distinguished scholar, teacher, and poet,
whose work has received international acclaim.

( more )

267

Her eighth volume of verse is about to be published, and her
poetry has also appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers ,
including Poetry, New Directions, New York Times, Yale Review, and
Saturday Review.

She is also the author of two books, "Eras and Modes in English
Poetry" and "Style and Proportion: The Language of Prose and Poetry."
A third she has just completed is "Poetry as History." Her books
have been translated into several foreign languages.

Textbooks she has written are "The Ways of the Poem" and
"Classical Essays in English."

She has been acclaimed a superb teacher at both the undergraduate
and graduate levels , and she has received a commendation for service
to English teaching by the California Association of Teachers of Engli;

During the early 1950s, she was one of the founding editors of
Idea and Experiment, a quarterly journal which for some five years
carried articles by U.C. professors on their research and publications

A native of Chicago, Professor Miles graduated from UCLA, then
earned her master's and Ph.D. degrees from the Berkeley campus. She
has been on the Berkeley faculty since 1940.

She has served on the Campus Committee on Prose' Improvement,
and the Chancellor's Committee on the Arts, as well as Academic
Senate Committees on Research, and Privilege and Tenure.

Among her many awards have been a Guggenheim Fellowship, an
honorary Doctor of Literature Degree from Mills College, and a
Fellowship from the National Foundation on the Arts. She is a member
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1968, an "Homage to Josephine Miles" was published in the

national magazine Voyages.

-jbs-

268

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
THE FIRST OF TWO LECTURES OF

THE SIXTY-THIRD ANNUAL
FACULTY RESEARCH LECTURES

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1976
4:00 P.M.

THE AUDITORIUM OF BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER HALL

269

Lecturer for 1976
JOSEPHINE MILES

UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

Subject

WHERE HAVE GOODNESS, TRUTH, AND
BEAUTY GONE?

The second of the 1976 Faculty Research Lectures

will be presented by John Verhoogen, Professor of

Geology and Geophysics, on April 15, 1976

270

JOSEPHINE MILES

Josephine Miles was born in Chicago, June 11, 1911. Academically she is a
daughter of this University, earning her B.A. at UCLA, her M.A. and Ph.D.
at Berkeley. Joining the University faculty in 1940, she advanced through
ranks to become Professor of English in 1952. Her poetry began early to be
recognized, and brought her many distinctions. She was elected to the Amer
ican Academy of Arts and Science in 1964; and in 1965 received from Mills
College the honorary degree of D.Litt. Her superlative, far-reaching service to
her own University was acknowledged, as a crowning honor, by her appoint
ment in 1972 as University Professor.

Josephine Miles has the unique distinction of being one of the most sensi
tive poets of our age and at the same time — two gifts that virtually never
reside in one and the same person — a lucid, imaginative and innovative
analyst and historian of modern literature and poetry. Her volumes of verse
now number more than a dozen; her poems frequently appear in anthologies,
and work of hers has been translated into foreign languages both European
and Oriental. The national literary magazine, Voyages, in 1968 published
a 16-page "Homage to Josephine Miles."

In literary analysis, she has ranged from the sixteenth century to the latest
decade of the twentieth. She has published ten critical monographs, un
counted essays, and a handful of collegiate textbooks. Her adventurous mind
moved beyond the familiar along a path of discovery. The originality of her
critical approach and her analytical techniques are probably unique. Studying
the kaleidoscope of vocabulary among English poets through the last four
centuries, she has in a sense rewritten the history of our poetry from the
Elizabethan age to the present.

The earliest of Josephine Miles' studies of the changing language of En
glish poets was Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of Emotion. In it she
employed the method for which she has since become well known, in which
she first tabulates and next analyzes those words a given poet uses most
frequently so as to show that the very language itself reveals the author's
underlying interest and intention. From this initial inquiry she went on to
study the significance of the major adjectives used by poets ranging from
Wyatt in the sixteenth century to Auden in the twentieth century. By isola
ting one part of speech — the adjective — and considering both the frequency
of its use and the actual words most commonly employed by specific poets,
she was able to present clearly objective data to investigate. Then by her
own sensitive scrutiny she demonstrated the nature of the shifting sensibility
of English poets over a period of four centuries.

She wrote a series of monographs that in the same way studied the primary
language of twenty poets who wrote in the 1640's, of twenty who wrote in
the 1740's, of twenty who wrote in the 1840's, and of twenty of her own
older contemporaries in the 1940's. She made striking discoveries of similar
ities among poets of each period who were commonly thought to be quite
different and she made equally revealing explanations of the differences
among language preferences in separate centuries. From these findings she
went on to make a penetrating inquiry into the whole sweep of English
poetry since 1500, culminating in a study entitled Eras and Modes in English
Poetry. Her latest scholarly work, Poetry and Change (1974), received the
1975 Lowell Award for literary scholarship from the Modern Language
Association.

Josephine Miles' precise inquiry into the vocabulary of poetry has brought
out an understanding of both continuity and change that it of great signif
icance to the study of literature and language, and also an important contri
bution to sociology and psychology.

271

THE BI-ANNUAL FACULTY RESEARCH LECTURE

HISTORICAL STATEMENT

On April 29, 1912, at a meeting of the Academic Council, a special com
mittee appointed by President Benjamin Ide Wheeler "to consider the
feasibility of establishing at the University a series of lectures for the
presentation of results of research at the University of California," re
ported favorably on the proposal. The committee's report was adopted.
It provided that the Academic Senate shall elect annually as Faculty
Research Lecturer one of its members who has distinguished himself by
scholarly research in his chosen field of study. The first lecture of the
series was delivered in the week of Charter Day 1913. Because of war
conditions no selection was made for the year 1919. The lecturers in the
several years have been as named in the list below.

FORMER LECTURERS

1913 WILLIAM WALLACE CAMPBELL,

_Astronomy
I9I4~ JOHN C. MERRIAM, Paleontology

1915 ARMIN O. LEUSCHNE*.
Astronomy

1916 FREDERICK P. GAY, Pathology

1917 HERBERT E. BOLTON,
American History

1918 RUDOLPH SCHEVILL, Spanish
Language and Literature

1920 GILBERT N. LEWIS, Chemistry

1921 CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, English
Language and Literature

1922 CHARLES A. KoForo, Zoology

1923 GEORGE R. NOYES, Slavic
Languages

1924 CARL C. PLEHN, Economics

1925 HERBERT M. EVANS, Anatomy

1926 FLORIAN CAJORI, Mathematics

1927 ANDREW C. LAWSON, Geology

1928 A. L. KROEBER, Anthropology

1929 SAMUEL J. HOLMES, Zoology

1930 WILLIAM POPPER.
Semitic Languages

1931 WILLIAM A. SETCHELL, Botany

1932 WILLIAM HAMMOND WRIGHT,
Astronomy

1933 GEORGE P. ADAMS, Philosophy

1934 WILLIS LINN JEPSON, Botany

1935 FREDERICK J. TEGGART,
Social Institutions

1936 JOEL H. HILDEBRAND, Chemistry

1937 KARL F. MEYER, Bacteriology

1938 ERNEST O. LAWRENCE, Physics

1939 HENRY FREDERICK Lurz,
Egyptology and Assyriology

1940 GEORGE D. LOUDERBACK,
Geology

1941 IVAN M. LINTORTH, Greek

1942 DENNIS R. HOAGLAND,
Plant Nutrition

1943 ROBERT J. KERNE*,
European History

1944 ERNEST B. BABCOCK, Genetics

1945 JOHN S. P. TATLOCK, English

1946 RAYMOND T. BIRGE, Physics

1947 EDWARD C. TOLMAN, Psychology

1948 WILLIAM FRANCIS GIAUQUE,
Chemistry

1949 ROBERT H. Lowre, Anthropology

1950 GRIFFITH C. EVANS, Mathematics

1951 AGNES FAY MORGAN, Nutrition

1952 STUART DAGGETT, Transportation

1953 WENDELL M. LATIMER,
Chemistry and Chemical
Engineering

1954 ROY E. CLAUSEN, Genetics

1955 EDWIN M. MCMILLAN, Physics

1956 MURRAY B. EMENEAU, General
Linguistics and Sanskrit

1957 MELVIN CALVIN, Chemistry

1958 STEPHEN C. PEPPER, Philosophy

1959 GLENN T. SEABORG, Chemistry

1960 EMILIO SEGRE, Physics

1961 BERTRAND H. BRONSON, English

1962 Luis WALTER ALVAREZ, Physics

1963 ALFRED TARSKI, Mathematics

1964 CURT STERN, Zoology

1965 MARY R. HAAS, Linguistics

1966 LEO BREWER, Chemistry

1967 YUEN R£N CHAD, Oriental
Languages and Literature

1968 HEINZ L. FRAENKEL-CONRAT,
Molecular Biology

1969 KINGSLEY DAVIS, Sociology

1970 FRANCIS J. TURNER, Geology

1971 DAVID BLACKWELL, Statistics

1972 HORACE A. BARKER, Biochemistry

1972 SHERWOOD L. WASHBURN,
Anthropology

1973 WALTER W. HORN,
History of Art

1973 EARL R. PARKER, Materials
Science and Engineering

1974 DANIEL MAZIA, Zoology

1974 JOHN H. REYNOLDS, Physics

1975 WILLIAM J. BOUWSMA, HISTORY
1975 GEORGE C. PIMENTEL,

CHEMISTRY

8e-S.'78(S9858l)— 6, 1

THE
MONDAY PAPER

OCT. 13, 1978 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY VOL. 7, NO. 4

Miles honored
with top a ward
for American poet

The highest award of the Acad
emy of American Poets is being
given this year to Prof. Emeritus Jo
sephine Miles of English.

The Academy's 1978 Fellowship,
which includes a stipend of $10,000,
honors Miles for "distinguished po
etic achievement."

The 37th American poet to re
ceive the award, Miles joins such
other honored names as Robert
Frost, William Carlos Williams, Ezra
Pound and Marianne Moore.

Miles retired from active teaching
last summer after 37 years on the
faculty. She was honored on campus
this year with a Distinguished Teach
ing Award and earlier was honored
by Berkeley's Academic Senate as
Faculty Research Lecturer.

Most recent of her nine books of
poetry is To All Appearances: Poems
New and Selected, published in
1975. She is also author or co-author
of five volumes of criticism and ed
itor of several textbooks.

Her poems, she has said, speak
for "acceptance and praise of all ap
pearances, however alien they may
seem to the truths underlying them:
the appearance of magnitude in the
appearance of power, of confidence
in doubt, of death in age, of joy in
simplicities, of large ideas in small
talk."

Among Miles' other honors are fel
lowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation and the National En
dowment for the Arts, the Blumen-
thal Award of POETRY magazine
and an award from the National In
stitute of Arts and Letters. She is
also a Fellow of the American Acad
emy of Arts and Sciences.

Annual election of a Fellow of the
Academy of American Poets is by
the Academy's Board of Chancel
lors — 12 eminent poets who also act
as literary advisors to the Academy.

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1 09 MOSES HALL

273

IMAGES OF CALIFORNIA CULTURE SERIES:

A SESSION WITH JOSEPHINE MILES

Josephine Miles, poet, teacher, and scholar, will be the principal speaker
at our fourth session and will talk about "images of California." Her presenta
tion, she says, will consist of "poems and other stuff," and she promises to
disagree with most everything that has been said before.

The meeting will be held on Wednesday, February 28, from 3:00 to 5:00, in
the lounge of the Women's Faculty Club. We must begin promptly at 3:00 because
we must finish by 5:00 to make way for another event.

Josephine Miles, an internationally acclaimed poet, has written nine vol
umes of verse and several critical works on poetry. She was raised in Los
Angeles, attending L.A. High and UCLA. She received her Ph.D. from Berkeley
and stayed as a teacher. She has been associated with the University of Cal
ifornia for 50 years and is the first woman to become a University Professor.
Several months ago she was honored with the Fellowship from the Academy of
American Poets, an award once held by Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and Marianne
Moore.

We invite you to attend. The combination of a small audience from the
arts, humanities, and social sciences and the "specialness" of Josephine Miles
promises a most interesting event. Her presentation will be followed by cof
fee and conversation among everyone present.

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274

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109 MOSES HALL

IMAGES OF CALIFORNIA

A SESSION WITH JOSEPHINE MILES. POET: A REPORT AND INTERPRETATION

Our recent session was the occasion for us and Josephine Miles to think
about images in general and her California images in particular.

Jo was cautious about images and skeptical about her images of Califor
nia. However, the previous session, which featured Lewis Baltz, an urban
landscape photographer, gave her both a way to think about imagery that was
important to her and a reference for the selection of poems — streets, houses,

and other urban scenes.

•

The session was in part a response by Josephine Miles to Lewis Baltz.

Visual images did not excite her; her enthusiasm lay in a fuller meaning
of imagery, one involving all of our senses. There is an image of lavender,
she said; an image of the salt-smelling sea, of Mozart's music, an image of
sound. What do we mean by images of California? Jo asked. Are we speaking
simply of pictures of California?

Jo argued strenuously that we pay attention to the imagery of tone —
"the tone we take toward California." Our seeing is colored by our attitudes,
our feelings (i.e., irony, flippancy, cynicism, anger, naivete, hopefulness,
love). In examining images of California, we must discern tone.

Jo was forthright in her judgment of the tone conveyed by Lewis Baltz 's
photographs: those pictures, she said, were loaded with comment; although-
Baltz found a gold mine in the industrial parks of Irvine, California, he did
not love them. Jo loved the kind of architecture she felt Baltz did not be
cause from 1940 she saw "the square of blankness" replace the kind of archi
tecture she had experienced, and it was new and good to her. Her first poem
was chosen to illustrate the old; it is called "Row" and was published in Lines
at Intersection in 1939.

Some of the roofs are of Hopi Indian decision,

They cut square into the sky with plaster,

The tan edge going up two stories past the windows

And turning north and east for straight cement horizon.

Some have old noble English temper peaked,
Alternate red and green shingles but getting the drift,
Gabled to peer out of a possible anciently fallen snow,
And clear superior against gray sky.

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275 n>9 MOSKS HALL

All of them look west and take in sunset,
Keep their ferns warm the length of supper,
Sparkle their cups of milk and all accompany
With aerial music that evening sun go down.

Images of California, for Jo, have been images of artifice. California is
a place of artifice: . its constructions may reveal but frequently obscure reali
ty (i.e., movies, the Rose Parade, mission bells, the poems of John Steven Mc-
Groaty, poet laureate of California) and are insubstantial (i.e., prefabrica-
tions), full of show and intended for petty purpose (i.e., searchlights). For
her next poem, "Seer," which was published in the same volume as the first, Jo
suggests that we pay attention to the place, the building. Notice its shabbi-
ness amid the light and wind.

The psychic metaphysician sat tight in the white

Shine of the rocks outside Riverside,

It was like living in a world of mirrors

The left hand rocks and leaves so took the light,

The left of cornflakes in the kitchenette

So took the light.

Is it wind or is it a new year, asked the psychic metaphysician

Resting his hand upon the parlor chair, and the flare

Of answers long lying in that dust dazzled him,

The left hand cups and mirrors so took the light,

It was like living in a world of answers

The hand so took the light.

I shall be prodigal with thine information,
The psychic metaphysician knelt and spelt,
Changing fifty cents to forty on his sign,
It swung against the porch and took the light,
It was like living in a world of sight
The sign so took the light.

In 1956 Jo published Prefabrications. It contained two poems which were
about "a spirit of building" Jo was experiencing; for prefabrication, Jo felt
interest and horror. The first poem is called "Summer."

When I came to show you my summer cottage
By the resounding sea,

We found a housing project building around it,
Two stories being painted green row after row
So we were set in an alley.

But there is the sea I said, off the far corner

Through that vacant land;

And there the pile of prefabricating panels

And the cement blocks swiftly

Rose in the sand.

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276 ,09 MOSES HALL

So darkened the sunlit alley.

Ovid, Arthur, oh Orion I said, run

Take rags with you, send me back

News of the sea.

So they did, vanishing away off and shouting.

The second poem is called "The Plastic Glass" and is in the tradition of "art
mirroring life" literature. Jo will say that she is impatient with artifice
and ironic about it, but she loves it too, and the love arises from its poten
tiality. The poem, says Jo, is more a description of a feeling than of a
place. That feeling, she suggests, is gladness at being in the Bay Area, in
Berkeley.

A saint I heard of saw the world
Suspended in a golden globe; so I saw
Shattuck Avenue and the Safeway Stores
In Herndon's globe of friendly credit.

And where the car moved on, there the whole trash

Flats of Berkeley floated in suspense

Gold to the Gate and bellied to the redwood

Cottages.

And I would ask the saint at what expense
This incorporeal vision falls to the lay mind,
And search the breast
For revelations of unquietude.

But in this dear and Christian world the blessing

Falls not from above; the grace

Goldens from everyman, his singular credit

In the beatitude of place.

Jo devotes her most recent volume of poems to appearances, that realm
within which artifice occurs. She read two new poems from that volume (To
All Appearances, 1974). They are about suburbia, about tracts. The first
poem, "Tract," is about an outworn tract — a place Jo describes as a prison.

(

Old tract, the houses of wood-siding

Old callas at the drain pipes, a frontal

Cedar, line among lots

Cabs, a wagon, a pick-up

And the bay not far, a dozen miles over town.

A boy on a bike now and again

Makes up a tunafish sandwich and starts off.

Few go out otherwise, they stay in to listen.

For some tracts, a whole range

Of mountains takes the bay's place,

Holds all the answer or loss

Behind curtains as tears.

For some, beyond the outskirts of the houses,

More callas, more houses.

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BERKELEY: INSTITtTE OF GOVERNMENTAL STUDIES
1 09 MOSES HALL

Jo tells us to pay attention to the difference in tone, in sound, of these two
poems. In the first, there is a sense of waiting, of nothing happening, of
people stuck; the drain pipes are clogged. In the second poem, "New Tract,"
there is a sense of activity. However horrifying tracts can be, says Jo, they
contain tremendous energy. The new tract is part of a process of building, of
spreading, seemingly without limit, without horizon — but with costs.

Streets under trees

lamps in their windows
gathering dark,

Comfortable coming of home,

fussing and crying, tears of the tired, yet lamplit
windows under the trees
trees under opening stars.

Work done, car in the port,

children cleared and asleep under stars,
why not enough?

Held in the hold of the mountainous night
And the bend of the street,
why not enough?

Building and bearing

street after street in the town to the mountains and on,

state after state in trees of the plains with a plenty or spare

and by rivers
why not enough?

Later from night,

trees upon street

droop of the dark sides, haggard of morning,
show that it was.

Jo concluded her reading with two unpublished poems which were written
after a visit to Southern California and at a time, Jo says, when memory was
taking over and her childhood and past struck her very hard. Since I am not
clear about their copyright status, I will not write them down. The first is
called "Trip" and is about her coming from Detroit to Palm Springs when she
was five years old. I will write down instead a published poem, one which she
told us from memory, one grown so worn to her she cannot bear to read it; for
I think "After This, Sea" makes much the same point that "Trip" does.

This is as far as the land goes, after this it is sea.
This is where my father stopped, being no sailor,
Being no Beowulf, nor orient spice hungry
Here he let horizons come quietly to rest.

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278

What he fled is past and over,
Raftered roof and quilted cover,
The known street and the known face,
The stale place.

This is as far as the land goes, here we are at length
Facing back on the known street and face, all flight
Spent before our time in building the new towns,
Letting these last horizons come quietly to rest.

We have a special pressing need
We of the outer border breed
To climb these hills we cannot flee
To swim in this sea.

This is as far as, the land goes, here the coast ranges
Hard and brown stand down to hold the ocean,
Here the winds are named for saints and blow on leaves
Small, young, yellow, few, but bound to be ancestral.

Nowhere are so still as here
Four horizons, or so clear.
Whatever we make here, whatever find,
We cannot leave behind.

That poem was published in Lines at Intersection in 1939. She did not feel a
pull to India or a threat from the Pacific; she felt stuck: "well, here we
are and we've got to do something about it."

Her final poem, "Easter," suggests enormous potentiality. It makes the
central point of the session, its resonances in other poems, especially perhaps
in "Seer" and "The Plastic Glass," namely, that out of tackiness, improvisation,
bargaining, indeed, out of artifice, arises possibility. Our Spanish and Cath
olic past, for example, is largely fabricated. Its images are hardly sustain
ing. Carving soap missions in the fourth grade is, for many of us, the depth
of its hold. However, the Spanish romance suggests grace and leisure, just as
the Asian romance suggests values at variance with those of mainstream America.
Unfortunately, in this multi-cultural landscape of Chicanos, Asian Americans,
Native Americans, and African Americans, most of us have experienced the barest
contact with other cultures. The myth of a multi-cultural heritage, authenti
cated, Jo suggests, by the kind of labor and help that supports the dominant
European American culture, is undermined by what Jo refers to in a poem, "In the
neighborhood of my childhood, a hundred lungers," as deprivation, absence. Jo
wonders if such romance can be the basis for life-affirming images, images of
California that can sustain us, upon which we can thrive. She says that she has
no idea what to do with California, what to make it. But in an age which de
mands assertion and is uncomfortable with irony, we need affirmative images for

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Page 6 279 109 MOSES HALL

California which would shake the earth and "unearth those possibilities that we
are only sensing." Jo is alive to the possibilities of new forms. She suggests
that the metaphor of the frontier may be most apt: frontiers are tacky in their
constructions because they are improvised, temporary. In a landscape of arti
fice, there is enormous energy and power. Jo, who may well find her images of
California obscure, has through her poetic voice a tonal force.

So what we have, says Jo, is a "cheerful belief," an idea that out of the
tacky comes something wonderful and illuminating. So the searchlights bring
ticket buyers; the psychic metaphysician offers reduced prices for illumination.
Jo asks, How do we achieve a finer sort of illumination, a realization of poten
tiality? At the beginning of the session, Jo raised the question, Why are we
concerned with images of California? Here is her answer: "I think that shift
between noticing something and achieving something and realizing the relation
between them is awfully important and I don't see my way clear to it at this
point." How, she asks, can we discover a decent picture of where it is we need
to put our energy?

James D. Houston, the novelist who will be our next speaker, in part will
address that point.

Jim Hughes
March 22, 1979

280

Ph.D. Dissertations- (* published)

Josephine Miles, Director

'" Ray eraser — »*> Renaissance imagery

* Burton Kurth ~ Milton's Christian Hero

Daniel Knapp — American Drama in the late 19th century

George Crane -- Mars ton's Satire

Sister Francesca Cabrini — Samuel "Garth :-arid Epic Satire

* Albert Ball — Charles Churchill's Sublime

* George T. Wright — The Poet in the Poem

* William Baker — The Grammar of Modern Poetry

Lee Winters — Modern Inagism and the Chinese Book of Odes

* Michael Cooke — Byron and 17th cen. Modes

* Zrnst Bernr.ardt-Kabisch — Southey and -Romanticism

* Carl Dennis — Emerson's Poetic World

* Edward Pechter — Dryden's Critical Theory

* Ruth McConnell — Conrad's Imagery

Mary Tyson — Cvidian Humor in Renaissance

* Mary Bet'n Kelson — George Crabbe and 15th c. Poetic Narrative

* Suzanne Juhasz — Metaphor in Kodern Poetry

* Dennis Jarrett — The Language of the Blues

* James Welch — Tennyson's Landscape of Time

Robert Becker — Narrative Structure for Spenser and Hilton
QD Robert Wilson — The American Poetic Sublime

* Donald Bogen — Poet and Manuscript

281

A PROFILE OF JOSEPHINE MILES

by Katharine .Livingston

1973

It is the Spring Quarter on the Berkeley campus, and mornings
are mild, turning bright as the fog lifts. As the Campanile bells
strike the hours, Sproul Plaza fills with successive waves of students.
They move in a river through Sather Gate and then scatter north, east
and- west toward classes. On Tuesday mornings between ten and twelve,
Josephine Miles holds office hours on the fourth floor of Wheeler
Hall as she has done for more than thirty years. In 1967 she wrote

a poem called "Office Hours."

• » •

Here is my second chapter on Philip Sidney's ethic

What did you think of Chushingura? I saw you at it.

Here's my translation of Statius, Be critical!

I hear you write poetry, so does my mother. She's in

Hong Kong and I'm homesick
Do you still have the paper I wrote two years ago? I'd

like to reread it.

What would you do about Viet Nai?.? Please sign this petition.
Did you have a student who wrote a book on Milton? What

. was the pame of it?

I'm hot on the trail of Dryden's brother-in-law.
Would you like to read these poems in a couple of medical

journals my husband subscribes to?

I just noticed walking by what a great view you have from
your window.

Please explain these marks you put on my paperr* you liked

it, why correct it?
Will you come to a discussion of poetry in politics at

4:10 today?
Why should you have three meetings scheduled for that time?

That doesn't make sense.

In six years the mood of the Berkeley campus has considerably
changed. The quarters in the academic year roll by quietly arid
routinely, distinguishable only by season, no longer by political

282
crisis. The tension, the fears, the vitality and brash urgency of the

•

Sixties are muted. But Josephine Miles' office, small and lively, is
still a mecca for students in need of aid and comfort, or just good
conversation.

Today a somewhat stiff and self-conscious young man, winner

of an Esiner prize for poetry is discussing with her the problems of
getting published. "I don't think that many people realize that
editors are trying to find a poet, not a poem," she tells him. "They
want to be able to say we are presenting a new poet who has never
been published before." She advises him to send off six poems that
have something in common. The young poet is doubtful; he's still
experimenting. "Anyway, I did send some poems to Hyperion. The
editor turned them down because he said they were too formal and 'net
enough from the heart as Josephine Miles would say'." He grins at her
shocked expression, and she begins to laugh. "Does that sound like
me? You sure can get misquoted in this life."

The next visitor is a former student who's been away from
Berkeley for a year. "I haven't looked anyone up. I'm lying low
trying to finish my thesis, but I had to come see you." They talk
a bit about her subject, which is Italian Renaissance Art.

Another woman sticks her head in the door to confide that
she thinks she's about to be offered a job thanks to Miss Miles'

recommendation .

»
The phone rings every few minutes. The two . campus literary

magazines have had their funds cut off by the Associated Students'

283
Senate and Miss Miles is trying to rally support to save them. She's

arranging a noon meeting to discuss strategy.

At a quarter to twelve, however, she is deep in conversation
with still another visitor, a woman with a heavy Slavic accent. They
are discussing Russian structuralism. "Her name's Valentina," Miss
Miles explains later, "and I don't know her last name or even where
she's from. She called up last week out of the blue and asked me
to read her book. She's done a translation of Ouspensky, a Russian
critic who does structural analysis, and she got the manuscript back
in proofs and just panicked." Miss Miles likes the book, and Valentina
is almost tearful with relief and gratitude. Miss Miles attempts to
caution her that she doesn't know that much about Russian structuralism,
but Valentina insists, "It doesn't matter. I have such faith in you,
Miss Miles."

She is already late for her meeting when again the phone
rings. This time with a dinner invitation for the weekend. "I can't
come. I've got to receive an award in Los Angeles." UCLA is honoring
two distinguished alumnae: Josephine Miles and John Wooden, coach
of the University's famous basketball team. "I told my nephew about
it and he's so pleased that I get a chance to meet Wooden. He's sure
we'll like each other."

Earlier this year Josephine Miles received another more
prestigious award. "The distinguished title of University professor"

may not sound 'like much, but it is the University of. California
equivalent of the Triple Cross or the Legion d'Honneur. Since it was
created fifteen years ago, the University Professorship has been
awarded eight times, to chemists Glenn Seaborg, Melvin Calvin and

284 •

Harold Urey, to physicists Edward Teller and Charles Townes, to
Neil Smelfzer, a sociologist, Lynn White, an historian, and Josephine
Miles, Professor of English and poet. Until 1973 the honorees. were
mostly scientists (including four Nobel laureates) and- all men. In
recommending Josephine Miles' appointment, President Hitch said,
"Professor Miles provides unparalleled inspiration by the clarity of.
her thinking, her imagination, will, integrity and humanity."

Josephine Miles' career as a poet began, she says, at age
eight, -and "it didn't come from within. I lived next door to two
older girls, about ten and twelve who subscribed to St. Nicholas,

a children's magazine, a nineteenth century Kind of magazine really,
• i •

with Andrew Lang fairy stories and illustrations. These girls kept
pushing St. Nicholas at me. "Why don't you try working the puzzles,
look at the pictures, look, you can send in your own poems and stories 1
I resisted that. I would walk around the corner just to get away from

(

those girls and their darn old St. Nicholas. Then we moved and my
mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I asked for a subscrip
tion to St. Nicholas because I was homesick for those girls."

Eventually Josephine became a regular contributor to the
poetry contests, and a member in good standing of the St. Nicholas
League (which she pronounced lee-gew) , but only after she and the
editors of the magazine had a misunderstanding. Josephine didn't
know the rules. "In June they'd print poems about camping and then
Halloween poems or something in October. I read the poems about
camping and would then write one of my own and send it in the fall."
After several such miscalculations, St. Nicholas lost its temper, and
sent Jo exasperated letters telling her to please read the rules.

285

She wrote poems and plays throughout her childhood, and then
in high school. Nothing was published, however, after St. Nicholas,
because she was far too shy to venture much beyond the school paper.
When she entered Berkeley as a graduate student, she joined a poetry
club. The founder of the club promoted the work of the members of
her club with a much more enterprising spirit than they could manage
for themselves. She sent Josephine's poetry to the Nation and the
Saturday Review, where it was accepted. Her first book of poetry,
Lines at Intersection, appeared in 1939. She has published seven
volumes since.

Miss f Miles remembers being interested by imagists like Carl
Sandburg when she was in high school, and later, in college, she and
her friends formed a kind of cult around W. H. Auden. ("He was our
little epigram book.") She recalls being hit hard by Dylan Thomas,
and finally by Wallace Stevens, but she can't really name a poet who
made any great mark on her style. St. Nicholas and traditional
poetry (Poems Every Child Should Know, Scots ballads) had more
influence on her than any poet she read later. "If I had to go to
a desert island with one poet, it would be Yeats. But I haven't
been able to write like him. Theodore Roethke has, and I think it's
been bad for him."

In 1921 T. S. Eliot published an essay on John Donne which

caused a major re-evaluation of the seventeenth century poets by

i
modern literary scholars. Eventually the new interest in Donne,

Marvell and Herbert led to a revival of metaphysical poetry which

286
reached full bloom in the mid-thirties. The movement had a profound.

• y

impact on John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Spencer, Allan Tate, and for
very personal reasons Josephine Miles. Before the renewal of interest
in intellectual poetry, the prevailing fashion in the thirties was
the populist imagist tradition. The ideal of imagism was a tough
objective poetry, taken directly from observation and presented without
interpretation. Marianne Moore called it "the raw material of poetry
presented in all its rawness." Poets in this tradition were supposed
to cram their lives with physical experiences, to ride freight cars,
and see the world, to be "out on the road."

Jpsephine Miles has been severely crippled by an arthritic
disease since childhood. 'Physically she is quite helpless, dependent
on others to carry her from place to place. The metaphysical
revival freed her from the sense that her physical limitations
necessarily confined her poetic power and imagination. Magazines
like the Kenyon Review and the Southern Review became' interested in
the poetry of an intellectual sensibility. Suddenly, "there was
somewhere to put my feet. I had a wor-ld to write for."

It was a great relief to have it acknowledged that one
could be a poet without tackling Life in the vast and vagabond sense.
But, of course, the stigma against "academic" poetry is still kicking
around. Miss Miles recalls with amusement an afternoon when she
and Allen Ginsberg were sitting her garden in the sunshine. Ginsberg

suddenly announced with a sweeping gesture, "What this patio needs,
is a whole bunch of dog piss."

287

Josephine Miles' world is. very, much a world of talk. She
talks a great deal herself, enthusiastically, and at length en any
subject that is offered or that comes into her head. Her speech is
an odd and vigorous mixture. It combines a precise and erudite
literary vocabulary, current hip idioms, and surprisingly corny
vintage slang from her youth. She tells stories, reminisces and
theorizes, but unlike many people who talk for the pure pleasure of
it, she never loses track of the person she's talking to, and she
listens with absolute attention and a quick understanding. She
usually settles herself next to a telephone and every few minutes
conversations, are interrupted by its ringing1. She will break off to
answer, enter into another lively talk with whoever is on the line.
Then she hangs up, turns back, to her visitor, and without an "urn"
or "where were we," plunges back into the sentence where she left
off. Much of her poetry is patterned on the rhythms of vernacular
speech. One of these talk p6ems was published in an anthology called
Poet's Choice in 1962, with an explanation of why she chose it.

Reason

Said, Pull her up a bit will you Mac, 1 want to unload here
Said, Pull her up my rear end, first come first serve
Said, Give her the gun, Bud, he needs a taste of his own bumper
Then the usher came out and got into the act:

Said, Pull her up, pull her up a bit, we need this space sir
Said, For God's sake is this still a free country or what?
You go back and take care of Gary Cooper ' s horse
And leave me to handle my car .

Saw them unloading the lame old lady, ,

Ducked under the wheel and gave her an elbow,
Said, All you needed to do was just explain;
Reason, Reason is my middle name.

288

Her comment: "Reason is a favorite one of my poems because I like the

•

idea of speech — not images, not ideas, not music, but people talking
as the material from which poetry is made. So much inert surface, so
many hidden depths, such systematic richness of play in tone and
color, with these I too easily become impatient in modern poetry
because I like the spare and active interplay of talk. Like the
young man from Japan, I like to get as many unimportant syllables in
a five-stress line as I possibly can. That way they can't be implica-
tive. And the accents of a limited and maybe slightly misplaced pride
interest me. Good strong true pride we need more of, and the oblique
accents of.it. at least sound out the right direction."

Her poetry reflects what a friend and fellow poet, Thomas
Parkinson, calls "an absorption with the ordinary. She never writes
lofty or rapturous poetry. It's a poetry of low level, low' key
experiences as subjects. Not the big subjects, but suburban ordinari
nesses like mailmen, the sun going down, talking to people on the
telephone, an article she read about anthropology — sort of junk
really." Her poetry does have a magpie quality. She can't get about
much, but when she does make an excursion itfs as though, as one friend
commented, she'd "been to the beach and come back with pockets full of
pebbles and shells." She's a gatherer, noticing, picking up and storing
bits and pieces of daily living. Yet despite this freewheeling random
ness of selection, her poetry is extremely polished, crafted, and

•

always controlled.

"My main way of writing a poem, is to overhear something
that's very live, with an. aura of energy around it. It might even be
a quotation from a paper, but it's still my tendency to place it in a

289

more metrical framework than the' younger generation does. They'd
rather place it in a loose cadence. But metrical frameworks are
not naturalistic, so it's more the idea I reflect than the sound."

Miss Miles is keenly interested in the work of other

contemporary poets. She would hate to be thought of as an ivory tower
academic poet, and she craves communication with those in the mainstream
of the art. • She is curious, and is thirsty for reaction and response.
And, in spite of her semi-serious references to the "younger generation,"
she has no intention of being left behind. At the same time, she is
conscious of her own poetic territory, and resistant of any attempt

to push her in any direction but her own. When she was a graduate
• » • •

student , a member of a group of poets from Stanford who were students
and admirers of Yvor Winters telephoned and asked her to join them,
adding in no uncertain terms that she would have to make a radical
change in her style. She hung up without another word. ("I was very
snippy in those days," she says.)

In 1964 the Black Mountain Poetry Conference was held in
Vancouver. It was an enormous success and the following year a
similar week-long conference met at California Hall on the Berkeley

campus. The poets involved were a flamboyant and controversial lot

•

including Ginsberg and Jack Sgfhcer and the heart of the gathering

was Charles Olson. These were the transition figures from beat to hip.

&ld
They arrived on motorcycles and the conference was *-Mftl-out.

Students who couldn't afford the price of admission hung from the

fyvJ
windows of California Hall in order to hear. Me«t of the English

faculty dtd»'t attend, but Josephine Miles went faithfully every day
with a friend and fellow poet, Archie Ammons. They sat in the back row

290 10

• " •

and were ignored by the other poets there. The snubbing was a small

f •

blow to Miss Miles' pride, but more than this, the conference
represented an artistic crisis for her. She couldn't comprehend the
poetry, couldn't hear what the poets were trying to do. She felt, she
says, like "Aunt Minnie on the shelf," anachronistic and out of touch.
But as she and her friend appeared day after day, the poets warmed
towards them. She already knew and was friendly with Allen Ginsberg,
who had come to Cal's English Department in the fifties to study
Anglo-Saxon meters. He abandoned this project gratefully after six
weeks. Miss Miles was never introduced to Charles Olson, which she
explains with a touch of malice, would have been the mark of honor.

But the significant thing was that after days of listening
she began to catch the music and syntax of poetry which had been dead
to her on the page. She stopped feeling alien and outdated 'and began
to comprehend what the new poetry was about. Civil Poems was written
rapidly within a couple of weeks after the conference, and published
immediately. Just what .influence these poets had on her writing
isn't clear. Certainly she didn't become one of them. Rather,
perhaps, they charged her with a new stimulus that -produced a new
vision of possibilities, but possibilities very much her own.

It is difficult to imagine her feeling far from the center of
contemporary poetic activity. She is friends with an astonishing
number and variety of American poets, of all types, personalities and

•

ages. She ftnnln n f^mnnrlriua needs to have the action buzzing around
her and filtering through her, wB3Steis perhaps ilia lu UIL f^ct that
she is very much tied to one place. She lived in Berkeley for six

years of graduate school, and then returned in 1940 to teach and has

291

been there ever since. She lives in a small green house on Virginia
Street. It's an unpretentious California bungalow affair,, noticeably
modest on a street lined with tall Victorian, and coy imitation
Mediterranean houses. She has a deep and longtime familiarity with
Berkeley, its houses, streets and people, and its changes. And she
loves it, with the mixture of affection and frustration that a member
of the family feels, both more critical and more loyal than any
outsider could be.

Her knowledge of and fascination with Berkeley is such that
she would probably choose to live here of all places she could be.
But she is also confined here by her physical condition and one wonders
how content she is with her house on Virginia Street and her office
in Wheeler Hall year after year. She is a woman of driving and
adventurous spirit who would thrive on change. As a child Josephine
was taken to football matches by her parents, avid sports fans, and
was obliged to wait alone in the car during the games. By listening
to the cheers from the stands and the directions they came from, she
tried to calculate who won, and more often than not she could compute
the score as well. She remarked once that "no one has really studied
how productive limitations can be, except perhaps Robert Frost, who
said poetry in free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
One of the great problems in living now is that people have such a
multitude of choices to face, and in an existential world making choices

r. ->•_ •

is everything. It's when choices are limited that it's easy to make
intelligent decisions and my choices were always very limited."

292 12

* *

She has explored the vivid microcosm of the University with

a vigorous curiosity and pleasure. Most professors use their sabbatical

• -ArtCi-colfi
leaves to travel or live abroad. Since this was ,uiyju>eia.djlii for

Miss Miles, she stayed at the University and took courses outside the
English Department. During one sabbatical she studied music, drama
during another and the third she spent learning quantitative analysis.
A recent book, Fields of Learning, is a kind of poetic celebration of
ventures into disciplines outside English. She began reading her
freshman ' classes ' textbooks so that she would know about other
subjects they studied. Considering how insular most University
departments are, and how- pre-occupied most professors are with their
particular academic concerns, it was an extraordinary thing to do.
In the process she was inexplicably taken with the language the
textbooks used, their "energy." In Fields of Learning, the. poems are
entitled "Botany," "Biology," "History," "Physics," and so forth. In
each poem a phrase or passage or idea that caught her. imagination
becomes a poem. Dry textbookese is broken into line and meter,
fancifully selected and recombined to make an odd and arresting verse.
One poem, called "Chemistry," ends with "Warnings."

In the synthesis, purification, and identification

Of organic compounds

Avoid unstable assemblies of apparatus

Taste Nothing.

Miss Miles' poetry is not emotional, it is not musical, and
it is not easy. She bears no strong resemblance to any other contemporary
poet. While colloquial in expression, almost mundane in subject, it is
not what you would call friendly poetry. Often abstract and oblique,
the poems can appear closed off and private. Those in a recent book,

293

Kinds of Affection, look at love 'from different perspectives, points
of view that are sometimes intriguing in their uniqueness, sometimes
so unique as to be inaccessible.

Love at a distance can mean

Love of a dozen • .

Students sitting around for the last time

Before summer, to come no more,

Tired and sore,

Yet be loved in their measureless- aptitude.

Love at a distance can be the good
Work done by a workman, so simplified
r;^i''^; He could not do better if he tried;
~ " ^fi ££ " Only by use .

Or can be the distance at which you measureless move.

That is, far off.

So that love can be drawn

In filaments of thought, in line as thin

As lines latitudes rest upon.

From plenty from perfection, marking these

Measureless distances.

Leonard Nathan, a friend and former student of Miss Miles,
now a Professor of Rhetoric and a poet himself, says that one thing he
learned from Josephine Miles was simply that poems can be funny. Hers
very often are, with a humor that is sly and ironic.

' The doctor who sits at the bedside of a rat
Obtains real answers — a paw twitch
An ear tremor, a gain or loss of weight
No problem as to which to^temper arid which is true
Whatarat feel*, he will do.

Concomitantly then the doctor who sits

At the bedside of a rat

Asks real question as befits

The place, like where did the potassium go, not what

Do you think of Willie Mays or the weather.

So doctor and rat may converse together. t

This is not the poetry of a sentimental person, and though the book,
Kinds of Affection, treats in part the currents of love connecting
people, it also contains poetic statements which are harsh, eerie and
grotesque. This is a poem about a friend's divorce.

294

Throwing his life away.

He picks at and smells it.

Done up. When did I do this up?

I date its death to the time someone

Said something.

Back then.

Everything else, all striving, making

Marrying, error

Is this old bird.
Pah! He throws it.

As the long string lengthens

It begins unwinding

The ligaments of his hand.

She 'is at her best when describing short scenes with the sparse
but exact detail of a born observer. She has made only one effort at
fiction, a short story in college days which she claims as the great
embarrassment of her life. "I can't spin the time in fiction. I have
no narrative sense at all."

Although she is compulsively disciplined about obligations
like correspondence, (she answered 300 letters of congratulation on
her University Professorship in one week) , she writes poetry pretty
much as the spirit moves her. One semester she had an hour free
between classes every Tuesday and Thursday, and determined to write
two poems a week during that time, just to see the result. In fact,
"I gained and lost nothing. I wrote some good poems and a lot of bad
poems. There was a pool inside that I tapped more systematically,
but I didn't enlarge the source itself." Y

Josephine Miles is sixty-two this year, andTyhe looks rather
older, is extremely bent, and tiny, and frail.- She seems perched on

a chair, and her feet barely rest on the ground. Her face is round
and heavily lined under a smooth cap of short gray hair. Her eyes are
hooded, and move back and forth rapidly, missing little. She sits

295

quite still. Her hands are bent nearly. double with arthritis, so that
her movements with pen and paper are slow and painfully deliberate.
Her voice is surprisingly loud, flat and unmusical, but full of energy
and quick to turn into laughter.

She was born in Chicago in 1911 but her parents, alarmed by
the progress of her disease, moved to Los Angeles when she was five

in hopes the' climate would help arrest her arthritis. She is

-rht «i«-'
surprisingly nostalgic about the Los Angeles of her youth. Pupitig

wh&1
the twenties (Hollywood became the capital of the film industry, and a

hundred thousand people a year poured into Los Angeles in search of

California gold. There was an automobile for every three persons

jet-

there by 1925, but thorja_i*a*"e no freeways tfewi. People rode on street
cars as they did in other American cities, and it was not until a decade
later that the hot bright Los Angeles sunshine was poisoned forever by
smog.

Glimpses Miss Miles' offers of her childhood suggest that it
was an extraordinarily happy one. Theirs was a close and active
family, she tells stories of frequent camping trips, excursions to
the beach, of playing 'and wrestling with her two younger brothers. Her
parents, she says, were very compatible and very dissimilar. Her
father provided the adventurous spirit and her mother the stabilizing
force in the family. "They had very different opinions about raising
kids and they told us so. For instance, my father would tell us

'Look there's a lousy movie playing around the corner and I think we
should go anyway, but your mother thinks we ought to wait until a
better one comes. What do you think?1 It gave us a sense of alter
natives, and showed us respect for other people's points of view.

296 16

And my parents were marvelous too, at getting us out in the world

doing what we could do best."

George Elliott, a long time friend of Miss Miles who knew

her mother in later years says that she was a "superb, strong woman"
who was chiefly responsible for keeping Josephine out of the crip-pled
child syndrome. "She was murder on self-pity not only in Josephine
but in everybody. She had a surprising harsh laugh, a real scorn for
sentimentality. Josephine has it too, but it goes along with the
most genuine kindness of heart."

Because she wore plaster casts as a child, Josephine missed
most of her early schooling. She did spend two years at a grammar
school just down the block from her home. She was' in her element
there, writing and putting on plays, loving it all, teachers, children,
principal, but her family moved to a new neighborhood just as Josephine
was to begin the eighth grade. There she wasn't allowed to go to
school. The principal objected that the eighth grade was on the
second floor, that school was no place for a girl in a wheelchair,
that it wouldn't be possible for teachers to help her or send lessons
home — a brick wall. It was a crushing disappointment, and for
Josephine a lost year. (When she speaks of it now there is lingering
bitterness in her voice, but she says simply "You can't expect people
to be good all of the time. When they're good, it's great.")

That summer at the beach she met some girls from Los Angeles

•

High School who suggested that she try and go there. Armed with a
notebook of her writings she went to talk to the principal who, to
her surprise, agreed to let her come on the condition that she learn
Latin, French and take remedial grammar. First she came in a

297

wheelchair and later walked from home in braces. Friends helped her
between classes. Her schedules were bizarre, since she had to take
all her classes on the first floor of the building. This sometimes
meant all languages one term, and all sciences the next.

The school had two literary clubs which were rumored (rightly)
to be "pre-sororities." Josephine was asked to join one, "I was a
kind of screen," she says slyly, "a smokescreen for reality." The
literary clubs were mostly good excuses for getting together and having
a good time. Cars provided an enchanting new freedom and Josephine
and her friends would spend their weekends riding around, going to the
beach or up the coast to visit friends in Santa Barbara. It was
"lovely. There was a special quality to it. In those days you weren't
supposed to be a grind, you were supposed to get gentlemanly C's. If
you were bright you didn't let anyone know it. So my friends and I
who were interested in writing, were only supposed to do it with ouC
left hands. Even that was good for us. We had fun."

Josephine's parents wanted her to go to Scripps, a small,
exclusive Southern California Women's College, so that she could get
away from home and be independent. This sounded like a fine idea to
Jo until she visited the school. She talked to the dean and looked
around the campus and driving away decided, "NO WAY, no way would I
go 'to that school for a million dollars." She thought Scripps

resembled nothing so much as a cloister. There was an academic

t
question, too; since she was devoted to and inspired by an old man

who taught Latin at L.A. High, Jo was righteously indignant that the
school offered no Latin. She was so adamant in her determination not
to go to Scripps that her bewildered parents acceeded with hardly a
murmur.

298

Josephine then applied to. and was accepted by UCLA. She went
to talk to the Dean of Women there , explaining that she would need
some help in order to attend classes. To her surprise, she met with
the same wall of misunderstanding and condescension she'd met when
trying to get into the eighth grade. Yes, the woman said, she'd need
help, far too much help. She'd have to ask many favors, and she'd be
better off at a small college, like Scripps, for instance. Josephine
went out past the policeman at the gate. "How'd it go?" he asked her.
By this time she was in tears. She explained to the cop that she

wasn't to be allowed in because she couldn't stand in the lines to

kl !#****

in line for you and I'll let you in." Thanks to the cop, and
unbeknownst to the Dean of Women, Josephine attended UCLA for four
years and graduated.

She speaks fondly of her time at UCLA. She began her studies
at the old campus of UCLA, ah aged, comfortable, shabby-genteel place
in a rundown part of town at the corner of Melrose and Vermont. The
school was young and undistinguished, virtually unknown elsewhere.
It had no graduate school in those days, but she is quick to explain
this didn't mean that professors got involved with their undergraduate
classes. It was, in fact, quite the opposite. The professors
retreated into their own world, ignoring the students as well as they
could. In self-defense, the students organized their own clubs, put on

•

their own plays, held their own discussion sections. Miss Miles
compares it to an old-style German education.

In a Logic class her freshman year she met a young man
("Who I was just madly in love with") and he solved her problems of

299

getting around campus. She had been looking for a strong girl to
help her, "but he suggested that the men in his fraternity needed to
earn money and would be more than happy to carry her around. She has
employed students to do this ever since. The system has worked
beautifully and in forty years she says she hasn't had an irresponsible
helper. "They're my greatest admiration."

There was a great sense of unity at UCLA at this time.
Friendships, studies, and the arts were quite wonderfully integrated.
"It was ideal," Miss Miles sighs, "and just what there isn't in
Berkeley." The peculiar inability of Berkeleyans to organize and work
together is a permanent source of discontent to her. Her dream is to
help foster the spirit of. community in young artists which she
experienced at UCLA.

The year after she graduated wa's lonely and unhappy.
Josephine was twenty-one and had set aside the year for a series of
long delayed operations whose object was to enable her to move more
freely. They failed.

This was 1932, in the heart of the depression. Many of her
friends went into welfare work directly from school. Others moved
to Berkeley for graduate work, none could afford to go East. After a
year of idleness and disappointment, she, too, was persuaded by her
friends to come to Berkeley, even though, she say's, they all hated it
there. Up to this time, she'd been told that graduate school was no
place for a poet. "Poets," she remarked ironically, "aren't supposed'
to think and to feel at the same time." In the end she prevailed on
her mother, now widowed, to move north with her, and in 1933 she began
her studies at Berkeley.

300 ' • 20

•

Even before she began, Josephine had a glimmer of what she
wanted to study. She was reading criticism by William Empson, I. A.
Richards, and others, and decided that she wanted to do research on
the function of language in literature.

The English Department at Cal in the thirties was at its
lowest ebb aBBr. As described by George Stewart in his informal
chronicle of the department's history, it was mismanaged by the
University administration, suffered from poor leadership in its
chairman, and was characterized by stagnation and chronically poor
morale. Miss Miles points out that she and other students were
largely unaware at the time of the straits of the department found
itself in. They were inexperienced in such things and had interests
of their own.

In these years, the most eminent men in the department were
medievalists, and Josephine felt she should study with "the big shots,"
Arthur Brodeur and J. S. P. 'Tatlock. This was a qualified success.
They were genial and gentle men, but rather appalled by the kind of
research she wanted to do. They let her try it, but always demanded
a second paper done their way. Matters were greatly improved when she
was allowed into the nineteenth century literature seminar of
Professor Ben Lehman. She had already been thrown out of his classes
two or three times for being "too medieval, " and he had a reputation

for being very hard to get along with. In fact, she became Lehman's

•
protege and with his support began the research and criticism on

poetic vocabulary which has occupied her ever since. Lehman was to
prove an important friend and advisor for he later became chairman

of the department, and was for some years its most powerful and
I
controversial member.

301

Miss Miles' critical method, as much as her poetry, is
stubbornly her own. It is stylistic analysis by 'the statistical
method. In recent years thanks to the computer this has become
something of a rage; It was quite unheard of when she began, though,
and thoroughly resisted. Even today, though Miss Miles has published
more literary criticism than anyone in the Berkeley English Department,
it is received with varying degrees of enthusiasm by other English
scholars.

The basic method, to explain a highly complex technique rather
simplemindedly, is counting the occurrence of fundamental words in a
given poetic era, to determine what words are used most and what usage
they are given. Employing this method in books like Eras and Modes,
and A Style and a Proportion, Miss Miles attempted to designate basic
similarities of language from poet to poet in succeeding ages. It has
produced some surprising results. It reveals, for example, that John
Donne was neither a poetic misfit nor a poetic revolutionary, but was
actually far more in agreement with his contemporaries in his poetic
vocabulary than anyone had previously thought.

Her conception of criticism runs counter to the prevailing
mode of analysis, especially the "New Criticism" which deals with
poems as organic entities and evaluates them individually. Miss Miles
proceeds poera by poem and poet by poet. But despite the minuteness
of her method, her aim is to trace large evolutions in poetic language
throughout its history. Her best known work, Eras and Modes, is, as
the title implies, an attempt to designate large areas of poetry, and
above all to make capacious generalizations about them.

302

•

It is not at all the criticism one would expect a poet to do,
rather it is the kind of criticism people tend to consider worthy, but
not exciting. This because the statistical method does not demand the
use of the kind of intuitive insights that make criticism at its best
an art in itself. The statistical method sounds faintly plodding.
George Elliott worked for Miss Miles counting words when he was a
student at Berkeley thirty years ago. "The damndest miserable job I
ever had," he remembers, "and I didn't believe in it for a second."
More than a few people, enthusiastic about Josephine Miles' poetry, are
quite turned off by her criticism. It is a' considerable jump frora her
verse, which is small in scope, narrow-eyed and personal, but there is
in her prose writing, if not in her method, a decided poetic quality,
particularly in her most recent articles. The following is taken from
her essay called "Forest and Trees; or The Sense at the Surface."

A poet's language has its leaf or hand print, the
. whorls that make it singular, the individuality of its
style and engagement. But these do not work in isolation,
they are part of the forrest,part of the langue part of the
competence of poetry. The strands of common usage which
hold poems together in any time and from time to time,
seem of such strength and predictable duration that one
can see, in literature especially among the arts, the
commonality provided by the medium itself as well as by
shared cultural values and interests. So the individual
is to be read in the context of the language and literature
he shares, that is, of his profession in time, his
• acceptances, his assumptions and what he does with them.
A leaf is unique not because there are no other leaves,
but because of its singular variations upon the commonplace
of leaf in its particular part of the forest.

This is a poetic language utterly different from the kind

that appears in her poetry. It is both elaborate and formal. It is
rich in imagery, musical and suggestive, in fact highly implicative
language.

303

Whatever the relationship between Josephine Miles as critic

•

and Josephine Miles as poet, she would probably be mockingly amused
by speculations about it. One of her loveliest poems from Kinds of
Affection suggests that there is no contradiction at all.

When I was eight, I put in the left-hand drawer

Of my new bureau a prune pit .

My plan was that darkness and silence

Would grow it into a young tree full of blossoms

Quietly and unexpectedly I opened the drawer a crack
And looked for the sprouts; always the pit
Anticipated my glance and withheld
The signs I looked for.

•

After a long time, a week, I felt sorry

For the lone pit, self -withheld,

So saved more, and lined them up like an orchard.

A small potential orchard of free flowers.

Here memory and storage lingered
Under my fingerprints past retrieval,
Musty and impatient as a prairie
Without its bee.

Some friends think of this recollection

As autobiography. Others think it

A plausible parable of computer analysis.

O small and flowering orchard of free friends!

• She was asked once about the special quality of this poem,
and said, "I really did that. We were living in a rented house and

, •

I was just at the age when magic seems very possible. I related
that experience in my mind to the work I was doing in computer
analysis which my friends thought was dull and al,ien. But I had the
feeling there was magic in that, too, a sense of qualification, a
sense of things, and the power they have, whether modern science
or prune pit growing.

Miss Miles has been given an impressive number of fellowships
and awards for 'poetry and scholarship, and in 1970 she received a
commendation from the California Association of Teacher of English

304

for the excellence of her teaching-. Certainly at Berkeley she is as
well known as a teacher as she is a poet or scholar, but when she
first finished her doctorate she called it a "research" degree', and
did not even consider the possibility of going on to teach. Instead,
she .spent a hot Los Angeles summer working in the cool rooms of the
Huntington Library and hoping for a nomination to work on the Medieval
Latin Dictionary. Ben Lehman and James Caldwell, on the Berkeley
English faculty, however, who felt she should teach, encouraged
her to apply at Mills and Occidental and other small California
colleges. To her surprise, none of these would even consider hiring
her, and she describes, still with a measure of bitterness, the kind
of letters of refusal she got from the Deans of women's colleges.
"We clearly could not be responsible for introducing such a sensitive
soul into the grind of academic life." .

Once in her childhood she and her family went camping in the
San Andreas Canyon near a hot springs where she was treated for her
arthritis. They were to camp about a mile and a half up the canyon,
and Josephine's father hit on the idea of hiring an Indian from a
nearby reservation to carry her to the campsite. The Indian was
found, and carried Jo in silence no more than thirty yards before
dumping her unceremoniously on a rock, declaring "very bad medicine,"
and left. She made the rest of the trip carried head and foot by

her younger brothers who managed admirably with an occasional mishap

»
like dropping her in the stream. The story has a sequel. Last

October, Miss Miles went on a lecture tour in New Mexico, and in the

company of a young guide went to visit the reservation at Pueblo

^- / "

where Scott MonuJday, author of House Made of Dawn, and a colleague,

305

grew up. They wandered about the reservation for a while in search
of a woman who sold Indian bread. When they found her, she seemed
delighted to see them, invited them into her home, and made a great
fuss over Miss Miles, giving her little pats on the head and stroking
her head. As they left she remarked to her guide on the woman's
friendliness. He replied that Indians of Pueblo believed that

handicapped people were favored by the gods. It was "just compensation,"
Miss Miles says, for being bad medicine. She feels there has been a
pattern in her life — "People saying yes and people saying no" — unlikely
villains and benefactors, who for their own finally mysterious reasons
have held her back or pushed her forward.

In the end, the Berkeley English faculty came through as her
champion in the business of finding a teaching position, no doubt
feeling righteously affronted that she had been turned down in spite
of their vigorous recommendations. To prove she could teach, she
was invited to Berkeley to take over the classes cf a man on
sabbatical, but was warned to bring only one suitcase since there was
no question she could stay.

Berkeley, like Harvard, has a strict tradition of not hiring
its own graduates until they've had experience elsewhere. An
exception was made in Miss Miles' case. After her trial year of
teaching she was hired by Berkeley in 1941 and has been here ever

since.

•
Miss Miles has a reputation for being an extraordinary

teacher with a singular rapport with students, which she rather

shrugs off. "I think it's baloney to say you're a born teacher.

I've made lots of mistakes, and plenty of people have hated me. I had

306 26

one student who said ' if you ever want to know what Simon Legree was
like just take a course from Miss Miles.'" From the beginning,
pedagogy intrigued and excited her. The first class she taught at
the University was English 1A, and she began with Hamlet. At a
friend's suggestion, she began by having the boys in the back row
read the first scene. These were still the days when football
players sat in the last row and cut up during class. As she
intended, "they read it wrong; students always do at first. Then

you point out that the wrong man's being challenged and that's the

•J

motion of the whole play. It's about people caught off balance.
So in a few lines you catch the depths and the surfaces at once. You
carry on from there , and they ' 11 never again be able to read on the
surface and make the mistakes they always do. That was the most
important thing for me to know, that people really need help to get
unstuck and move forward."

She is a popular and sought after teacher, but unlike TAW^
University teachers, she is less interested in individual students
with special talents than in the dynamics of a group in the mysterious
process of learning. What fascinates her is the evolution of a class
as an entity, and the timing and subtle manipulations necessary to
make it- all come together. She is undeniably fond of her students,
but it's a slightly detached, impersonal and generalized affection.
She is rather like a benign wizard at work, pulling invisible strings
to draw the disparate energies of her classes into a workable whole.

The atmosphere in her classes is relaxed and easy. She
sits presiding, very small behind her desk, talking and listening
and laughing frequently. It is crucial, she says, for students in

307

writing classes to get to know each other well, so she frequently holds
meetings at her home. Beginning poets, she feels, have to be allowed
anonymity at first, and then gradually, as students get to trust each
other, they will be willing, even anxious, to expose their poetry to
class criticism. Her favorite classes are freshman composition and
the poetry writing and she has written textbooks for both. In
general she -prefers to teach students with little expertise or
experience in writing. She would hate the tutorial system and
prefers double sections (20-30 students) when possible for her
poetry classes. "It's more exciting with a larger group; more people
spark each other to better things; there's more reaction. and more
self-teaching goes on ... there ' s a very minimal quality to a group
of fifteen."

f"-' .

The informal mood in her classes is perhaps deceptive.
Students are expected to attend class regularly and turn in poems
weekly. She's firm about deadlines and shows little sympathy for the
self-styled independent poet who chooses to ignore the structures of
her class. "I'll tell you my worst experience in teaching which
happens every quarter. Students come out of the woodwork about the
eighth week of classes and want to turn everything in in a lump and
get credit without any process. Kids wander in and say 'Hello!
what have I missed?' and it makes me furious. There are always

these types and they shouldn't bother me, but they do. I don't give

•
incompletes because I think they are bad psychologically, and no F's,

because an F means to try and to fail. So I tell them to do all the
work in one week in order to get a D, and they just hate that, but

it's my wicked solution to the problem."

308 28

, * *

Equally hateful to her is the quarter system (ten weeks term)

•

which was instituted as an economic measure by the U.C. Regents some
years. ago. Originally there were to be four quarters in an academic
year so that the University could be in full time operation, but
summer quartsr has been defunct for a number of years and the dubious
arithmetic of the three quarter system remains. Miss Miles has
remarked more than once, and in great disgust, that "it's a disgrace
to the faculty that they let it stay. During a semester you could
capitalize on the growth of insight in a class. Here you can be happy
they grasped it, but then there's only two weeks left. There's a rate
of digestion in a class operation. It's like changing from a solid
three course dinner to a 'ham sandwich. It's just hot as nourishing."

Students from her poetry class come in to talk about their
poems during her office hours, and she is generous with her' time and
her opinions. One thing becomes clear. She does not think that
poetry is a spontaneous outpouring of feeling or a mysterious
birthright possessed and not learned. Talking poetry, she is matter
of fact as she is sensitive, and .cries of the soul aren't what she's
after. Going over a sheaf of poetry which Miss Miles has just
identified as "hang-up" poems, she tells a young woman with long hair
and wide solemn eyes, "You have to be more self-conscious about what
you're doing." It's a notion she repeats in different ways to each

student she talks to. She asks one girl to name her favorite poem,

i
and the girl responds with the names of favorites ranging from

Ozymaridias toPrufrock. "No," says Miss Miles, "I think the thing
for you is to read one whole poet all the way through. You might try
Yeats. He's a little old for you but he's got a lot of zing. No, I

309

think Denise Levertov. Read everything by Denise Levertov and when
you're through you'll be able to say: 'She's Denise Levertov, and
I'm me, and we're different." She grins, "I was like you when I was
young. I wanted to be able to pick and choose poems and I didn't
want some whole poet pushing me around."

Another student has written about an incident in her
adolescence when she and a group of thirteen year olds, long legged,
exuberant, and awkward, were taken on an expedition to attach markings
to a flock of black crowned night herons. She is on her second
version of the poem, but Miss Miles finds the parallels between the
adolescent girls and the gangling baby herons are made too explicit.
"You're too patronizing to your material," she says. The second
version has more details than the first, intended to capture the mood
better, but Miss Miles suggests another solution. "A way to get the
reality in a poem is not to add more, but to take out the unreality.
As T. S. Eliot said, 'a little reality will go a long way.'"

About halfway through every quarter she asks her poetry classes
to do a translation of a foreign poet's work into English. Students
choose a poem in whatever language they're familiar with, French,
Hebrew, German, Chinese perhaps. Miss Miles hit on the assignment
after participating in a prolonged translation exercise herself. Ten
years ago, a visiting scholar in Near Eastern languages, Professor
Mishra from India, began receiving letters from young Hindi poets
asking for translators for their poetry. Miss Miles volunteered and
she became a member of a kind of translator's workshop. None of the
group knew the language, so Mishra read the Hindi verse onto a tape,
and played them ( usually, Miss Miles says, managing to string them

310 30

on backwards) , while he read aloud a rough English translation. It
was a kind of stereo bilingual text. The group spent a year on the
project, and at the end published a small book called Modern Hindi
Poetry. "We got letters from the poets themselves saying, "I can't
believe Americans could understand us so well. ' They knew English,
of course, so they could judge our work. In reservation, I'll say
that I'm still not quite sure about them. There is a quality of
slowness in those poems, and I'm not sure whether it was in the
original 'poems or in us. It seems to me that there was a kind of
alertness and motion of thought which we didn't capture, but I can't
be sure."

Working on the Hindi translations, she had an insight into the
nature of poetry that she wanted her classes to share. "That's when
I first understood what poetry is, the purposefulness and the selection
part, rather than the spontaneity. Translating another poet is a
great exercise for students because they get the sense of having it
all add up. My hunch is, though, that if I tried to do it earlier in
the quarter it wouldn't work, so I haven't had the nerve to try.
They are not aware enough of poetry at the beginning. It's a matter
of knowing when it will work and when it will be useful." The
quality of timing in teaching is elusive, puzzling, essential, she
thinks. She says that in every quarter there is 'a point at which a
class that seems scattered and random will suddenly and en masse "get
good." "Every quarter, I'm afraid, I think it can't possibly happen ',
and every quarter it suddenly does. It's a great feeling of lightness
then; a weight off your shoulders."

311

During the spring quarter of 196.9, a major crisis occurred over
the issue of a piece of land called People's Park. Students and
Berkeley street people had taken over the unused land, which legally
belonged to the University, and turned it into a small park with
children's swings, flowers and a vegetable garden. Unexpectedly the
University authorities tried to reclaim the land stating that it was
"needed" for' a soccer field. A fence was put up around the park
which students attempted tp tear down. Riots followed, police made
hundreds of arrests and a young bystander was killed. The National
Guard was called in. Berkeley was like a city under seige, and the
University campus like a battleground, but Miss Miles calls this, and
the time of the Cambodian crisis the following year, "the best and
easiest years of teaching. I don't feel all this mea culpa thing.
The students could have been handled by a sympathetic administration,
and I feel the whole upset was for the good."

Students these days call her "Miss Miles," but in those years,
she says a bit nostalgically, they called her "Jo." "Everybody was
being free in the sixties. The great thing was that the students
worked together. They had a sense of group — there was a magic about
this. I had a classroom in the basement of Wheeler, and we were tear
gassed and had guns stuck at us, and I'm sure it took years off my
life, but it brought out a wonderful esprit de corps, I remember I
wanted to set up an extra class meeting at my house and I wanted

•

them to vote on the day we should do it. And they said, 'Oh, Jo,
don't hassle us with stuff like voting. ' Someone suggested Friday
afternoon and they all agreed instantly and walked out. It was like
osmosis."

312 32

The class got together to publish a book of poems about People's

•

Park to raise money for the bail fund. Everyone contributed a poem,
and then gathered at Miss Miles' house to put the book together.
"It's hard to collate and staple; I hadn't expected them all to come.
But they did come with wine and cheese and I sent out for pizzas. By
evening we finished and we had to get a cover and a title. Five
titles were suggested, so I asked people to raise their hands and
choose, and they said 'Never mind Jo, we'll think of something.
Someone suggested Berkeley Street Poems and everybody immediately

*•"""

said 'fine' and that was it. Interesting phenomena.,"

The book sold well, over a thousand at a dollar a copy. The
poems themselves are mostly long and intense and ybung, full of
passionately felt outrage, clumsy and touching. Miss Miles'
contribution is characteristically restrained, and sharp as- a
snakebite.

How to Win a Soccer Match

When the players get down close to the goal, the ghost goalie
(He's a ghost goalie because ther's no field there yet.
And he's playing on it, active • sportsman* )
Raises his rifle and sights along it;
By the rules of the game he ' s the only one .
Who can use his hands.

She admits frankly that students in the Seventies are a
disappointment to her because they lack that sens,e of mission and of
camaraderie. "Now it's just like pulling teeth to get them to do
something together. They straggle in and out and they're just not ,
with it in a way I don't understand." When only fifty percent of
students voted in the April City Council Elections this year, Miss Miles
was shocked and dismayed as though they'd let her down in some stupid,
careless and personal way.

313

It is not surprising that student apathy should find no
apologist in Miss Miles. She is temperamentally an enthusiast with
a matchless capacity for delight in ideas and things and people. Nearly
all her friends will allude to this, though not all as bluntly as
Thomas Parkinson who says simply, "She suffers fools gladly." He
acknowledges that her extraordinary ability to find something to like
in everything and everyone is a tremendous asset in teaching, but more
of a liability in literary criticism. "The trouble with it is she
doesn't make discriminations. Great poets, and some damn thing in
the Oakland Tribune, she treats them all the same. She thinks everyone
is doing something interesting. She treats literary figures like her
students. She finds something to admire in the worst trash."

Another friend remembers a dinner party he gave for Josephine
Miles and a faculty couple who proved to be excruciating bores. The
couple left after what seemed to him the longest and most tedious
evening he'd ever spent and he turned to Miss Miles to say as much.
He was shocked to hear her praise them for this and that obscure virtue.
It was, he say, "downright perverse."

As a counter balance to this near-Pollyannaism, there is a
streak of malice in her nature. Leonard Nathan calls it "a glimpse
of talon." One senses it gradually listening to her conversation, a
vinegar tang to her speech, a small but devastating put-down in passing.
Eager as she is to find hidden virtues in acquaintances and strangers,

Miss Miles' close friends are apt to get an occasional decorous but
well-aimed scratch.

On the Berkeley campus, problems of policy are most often
delegated to the scores of faculty committees. The rewards of

314

committee vrork are long, unpaid hours pf meetings, tedium, bureaucratic
flak and the likelihood that whatever recommendations emerge from this
painful process may well be rejected or ignored. To most professors
with classes to teach, research to conduct, and lives 'of their own to
lead, committee work is a frustrating, time-consuming nuisance. In
the past fifteen years Josephine Miles has served on at least one,
and often several major committees every year. She was chairman for
four years of the Campus Committee on Prose Improvement. She has
served' on the prestigious Academic Senate committees on Research and
on Privilege and Tenure. For three years she belonged to the
Chancellor's committee on the Arts and two years ago she. was a member
of a most powerful and demanding committee, that to select the new
Chancellor .

The truth is she loves committee work, considers it a joy and a
challenge rather than an obligation. To less enthusiastic colleagues,
she will explain, "There's nothing like a good committee, and the
chance to hear all those fine>, minds at work." One she failed to
convert', commented simply, "She's crazy."

She is a champion of causes, feisty and persistent tc the
point of being annoying. In the English Department, Thomas Parkinson
says 'she's considered "an irritant and an adornment," but people
listen to her because her approach is as gentle and reasonable as it

is stubborn. Civilization is built on decorum and legality, rules

•

and procedures. Jo is very sensitive to this. She has tremendous

stamina. She's flexible but she never really gives up. It's people
like her* who are potent in the business of the world."

315

William Fretter, former Dean of the College of Letters and
Science and now chairman of the Physics Department, served with Miss
Miles on the Committee in search of a Chancellor. ' "There was a
warmth in the room when she came in. She provided an enormous amount
of good sense, common sense and humor, and a very human view of people.
She always made it perfectly clear that she wanted a human being and
not an administrative automaton."

But Miss Miles admits that hers weren't the best choices for
Chancellor. "The ones I wanted wouldn't have been any good. One's
gone to an asylum with a nervous breakdown. I wanted sensitivity
types, but theyVe been beaten down at other places." She feels the
choice of Albert Bowker, .formerly of the City University of New York,
was a good compromise. "We all felt he had strength."

- Working women have generally not 'fared well at the University
of California. As administrative employees they have held low
echelon positions, been poorer paid and up for fewer .promotions than
men with comparable skills and ambitions. As faculty members their
security is precarious. Women account for only three percent of the
tenured faculty at Berkeley. Changes are imminent however, as the
University encounters increasing pressure for redress and reform
from the HEW. Josephine Miles is a woman who has spent nearly forty
successful years at Berkeley, been the first woman to get tenure in
the English Department. She holds a position of relative power in
the campus at. large, and has received numerous honors culminating in*
the University Professorship she was awarded this year.

316 36

•

Although the recognition she has. received as a woman scholar is
uncommon and not reflective of the destinies of most women of her age
and vocation, Miss Miles has been a keen observer of women in academia
for a long time. Her view of the whole business is characteristically
lacking in cant, unsensational, and not really the story one expects
to hear.

When she attended Berkeley graduate school there were, she says,
an equal number of men and women students in the English Department.

At UCLA, three of the ten members of the English faculty were women,

so she had no sense at all that women "didn't teach." When the
English Department hired her in 1940, she was the only woman in the
department, but there had been others in the past. As she remembers
it, married professors with children were more of a threat to the
Old Guard of the English Department than women scholars were. She
says that at this time the notion of teaching as a bachelor profession,
isolated, and ascetic, was still a common and cherished belief among
many academics.

"In the forties, she says, there was an extremely powerful and
active Women's Faculty Club." A group called "The Bluestockings"
handled the question of women on the faculty independently, and
succeeded in promoting women to a total of 16 percent of the tenured
faculty, as compared to 3 percent today.

Five other women were hired by the English Department shortly

»
after Miss Miles. These women soon left, but all she says for

"perfectly friendly reasons," like job offers elsewhere or marriage.
Miss Miles began writing letters all over the country in search of
applicants to replace them, but it became apparent that there were

317

very few qualified women to be found. Miss Miles blames this on a
general anti-intellectual trend among American women in the late
forties and fifties. It seemed to her that after the war great
numbers of women lost interest in scholarly careers and chose to stay
home and keep house. The department did hire an early feminist from
Radcliffe in the fifties who stayed only briefly. She was the sort
Miss Miles reports, who would slap a man's face if he opened a door
for her.

The next, decade brought a great change. "The cold war created
a new crop. The sociology of women changed. More women won fellow
ships than men when I served on the scholarship committee in the
sixties. In the English Department every year for the last eight
years we've gotten one woman who's stayed."

She believes that the Cal English Department has discriminated
far less against women than other departments like History,
Sociology and Psychology. She does recall suffering one episode of
blatant sexism, but she tells the story with more amusement than
indignation. In 1942, English Department meetings were held in
the Men's Faculty Club, and as the then sole woman in the department,
she simply did not attend. The meetings were, she says tactfully,
"kind of smokers." The day of one such meeting, the new department
chairman ran into Miss Miles in the department office and asked, then

insisted that she attend the meeting and bring the minutes with her.

•

That afternoon, minutes in hand, she started for the men's faculty
club in the arms of her helper. It was quite a distance, so the
helper decided to short cut by entering the back door. He and
Mrs. Miles were greeted by a faculty member in his tee shirt who

318 38

nearly closed the door on them in his alarm. The department chairman

•

was sent for, the whole place went into an uproar, while Miss Miles
waited outside for what seemed an interminable time with the minutes.
These were finally intercepted by the chairman and Miss Miles was
sent all the way around the building to the front door where she
was permitted entrance to a special public room. Outraged manhood
thus soothed, the meeting began. She has never been exactly sure what
decencies she transgressed by trying, to come in the wrong way, but it
seems "I would have had to walk by a place where men played pool in
their underwear or something." She grins and shakes her head, "It was
another world then, in terms of Emily Post, it really was."

Part of Miss Miles' success in a male-dominated institution may
well have to do with the fact that she so obviously likes many of her
male colleagues, admires their minds, and is indulgent about their
foibles regarding women. She says that some years ago a Dean of
Women told her , "The very fact that you are a woman sets the cause
back fifty years because you don't pose the same problems another
woman would." It was a cruel remark, and more cruel because half true,
but Miss Miles .simply adds that its a fact that she was not the threat
that a pretty young woman might have been. She is inclined to think
tha't her University Professorship was a result of University
uneasiness over HEW. "They're under pressure to be fair and they

don't want to be fair. There's a lot of tokenism like that and its

dangerous." But considering the University Professorship a gesture
of tokenism didn't stop her from accepting her eleventh hour nomination
graciously, attending the .dinner for other University Professors
given in her honor, and enjoying herself immensely. Of course, she

319

explains, it was double tokenism in that they needed someone in
Humanities to balance the bias in favor of science. The dinner
took place the day after the announcement of the award so most- of
the people there didn't even know who Miss Miles was and nobody
recognized her when she arrived. "They thought I was somebody's
sister." Eventually, Harold Urey, a man in his eighties approached
her and asked who she was. "I told him, and he asked what I did.
I said I teach linguistics and write poetry, and he said 'Great!
I'm going to get us both another drink."1

Josephine Miles has a certain cool detachment about her own
successes. And though she fully supports University women's attempts
to secure equal status with men, here too she keeps an objective
distance. It's clear that excellence in teaching and research is
a standard she wouldn't compronise on behalf of her sex, and she does
exhibit an occasional impatience with "the cause." She recalls the
dinner meetings of the Woman'1 s Faculty Club in the fifties. "The
women talked about their research. Those were fascinating evenings.
Now all they talk about is the rise of women," she says a bit pettishly.

In the coining collision between the University and HEW, she
would rather act as mediator than advocate, and she feels she would
be a good one. "Of course women have had a bad deal, but it take a
while to sensitize people to a different kind of culture. It would

help both sides to have a more historical perspective. They wouldn't

•
be such adversaries if they'd be more historical."

Miss Miles has been involved in University conflicts for
several decades now, but if you ask her about politics she will make
a precise and rather pedantic distinction between this and what she

320

considers "real" politics. When she talks about politics, she says

•

she means traditional neighborhood politics, campaign strategies
and elections. She was political to a degree until the defeat of
Stevenson in 1952. When the Berkeley campus first swung left in the
thirties and many of her friends became Communists, Miss Miles went
to Communist parties and picnics with no sense whatever of political
commitment. Then in the early fifties friends organized a grass roots
Democratic party in Berkeley which defeated the entrenched conservative
Republicans on the city council and elected a school board that
integrated the Berkeley schools years ahead of any district in the
country. They were exciting times, she says. "There were terrible
defeats and great unexpected victories. It was illuminating to see
how resilient people were."

She has consistently supported student protests against
repression from the earliest beginnings of the Free Speech Movement
in 1964, but this, she says, is principle, not politics. Her
explanation is reminiscent of her poem "How to Win a Soccer Match."
It's a matter of psychological tyranny she says. "There's a kind of
politics involved, but one in which all power is on one side and the
side with principles is a helpless victim. She remains defiantly
dissatisfied with the way the University is run. "I'd like to reform
the whole administration. I hate the way all the pressures are
robbing initiative from the faculty, shifting principles away from

~-T ' •

education and toward political and financial ones." This year she
is a member of the Faculty Association, a committee created by the
Academic Senate to negotiate directly with the Regents and the
Legislature and attempt to secure autonomy and power for the faculty.

321

She has another cause, this, one very much her own, which she
has battled ' for singlehandedly for years now. She thinks that
Berkeley artists, especially poets, need a meeting place where they
can go to work, to hold readings, to talk and exchange ideas. She
would like to see a kind of workshop established that would be open
every day for people in need of stimulus and feedback or simply
pleasant surroundings to write in.. As one of Berkeley's best knovm
poets, acquainted with poets all over the country, she is beseiged
by young poets who arrive in Berkeley feeling lonely and out of touch.
They all ask her where they can find a group to read and discuss
poetry with. According to Miss Miles, Berkeley is unique in having
a large number of good poets and a singular inability to get it
together poetically speaking. Groups with good intentions and remark
ably short half lives spring up and disappear in a community that is
too stubbornly individualistic to uphold even as harmless an
institution as a poetry club. This poetic entropy is Miss Miles'
despair.

'Once she invited a large group of poets to her house to read
to each other and get acquainted. Many more came than expected, and
soon her tiny living room was filled with fifty voluble poets . Her
intention was that the gathering would spontaneously generate smaller
poetry reading groups that could meet on their own. Instead, the
atmosphere rapidly became hostile and chaotic and the hoped for
evening of artistic communication degenerated to a near brawl. The
group met twice more at her home with less people but equally
mistrustful vibrations and then Miss Miles washed her hands of the
whole business.

322

.' She herself belongs to a poetry group which meets only once or
twice a year with at least most of the same people each time. She
nicknames it after the Guys and Dolls 'crap game, "The World's Oldest
Established Permanent Floating Poetry Club." It seems to hold
together by the pure virtue of non-organization, a spirit which she
finds quintessentially Berkeley.

Nevertheless, she has not abandoned her project for a
community arts center through the auspices of the University, but
here she has met with bureaucratic obstacles. Recently she attempted
to secure a place in the new University Art Museum. This seemed
feasible until the plan was axed by the controversial director of
the museum, Peter Selz. Miss Miles claims that Selz opposed the
project because it wasn't stylish enough for his stylish museum.
Leonard Nathan says, "There's a terrier quality to Jo. When she wants
something she holds on and doesn't give up." At present she is
maneuvering to secure the Powerhouse for her p6ets. It's a small
building on campus, surrounded by trees and guarded by stone lions,
once an art museum and now being used by the Campus Police for bicycle
registration'. Miss Miles is once more optimistic, "Chancellor Bowker
is backing this and we may just get it."

Josephine Miles' house on Virginia Street looks tranquil
enough, but there is constant activity inside. A steady stream of
people, friends, students, drivers, come and go during the day. A
woman student rents a room there, and a housekeeper comes to clean
and cook. One of the two television sets is usually on, blatting
softly and continually although Miss Miles appears to take no notice.
Her days are tightly scheduled. She is extended in so many directions,

323

counted on for so much and by so many that she is constantly at odds
with time. Plainly she seeks out this .bustling k'ind of existence and
she thrives on it.

She is a gregarious woman with a great many friends and enough
invitations to warrant a thick and frequently consulted engagement book.
She has a core of intimates, many of whom she's known since her student
days. Evenings she dines out often, is decidedly adventurous about
restaurants, enjoys going to plays and concerts.

In summer she simplifies her life. She owns a small vacation
house at Point Richmond where she stays alone with the help of a
neighbor girl to run errands. Mostly she sits on her porch and looks
at the view and absorbs the stillness around her. .It's at Point Richmond,
if anywhere, that she slows down. "I sit and watch the freighters go
by on the bay and they go by very slowly, about one every two hours."
She reads long books set in foreign places. "I don't like mysteries
or puzzles or detective stories, just novels that ramble through
scenery. "

Travel is something she craves for herself, greedy for new
sights and sounds and flavors. George Eliott and his wife have
been on numerous short car trips with Miss Miles. He recalls one
3 day trip when Miss Miles was "enjoying everything and all the time.
Finally I couldn't stand it any more. I got tire'd of reacting to
every fence post we saw." Although her physical condition makes long
distance traveling difficult, she's made a number of trips in the
United States, usually to attend conferences at other universities.
She comes back full of ideas and impressions, things to write about
and things to tell. She has been to Vancouver and Death Valley,

. . 324

Houston, New York and Washington and most recently to- Colorado and
New. Mexico. She would like very much to see the South, preferably
from the deck of a Delta Queen on its way down the Mississippi.
Friends say that she conscientiously sends them postcards when she
travels, written in tiny close script like engraving on jewelry.

Eight years ago- she was invited for -a short visit with some old
friends who were spending a year in Aix-en-Provence. She was to go
alone and the trip involved a change of planes without help, a
prospect that frightened her. She's such a resourceful woman it's
hard to imagine her at a loss and because she never complains about
pain, it is easy to forget how fragile she is, how physically
vulnerable. She confided once to a friend that the two things that
she is afraid of are -big dogs and high winds, things that could
knock her down. Yet she wanted very much to go and when the airlines
agreed she could, off she set for Marseilles. The trip lasted only
two weeks, and she admits it was a bit crazy to travel so far for so
short a stay, but it was worth it. Of all the places in the world
she wanted most to see it was the South of France.

A new book of Miss Miles' poems called To All Appearances will
be published next year, but probably as part of a volume of new and
selected poetry, which disappoints her because she is partial to the
title. In the last several years she has attracted more notice as
a poet than ever before. For some reason her poetry is getting more

representation in new anthologies, and this puzzles and amuses her.
"Just when I'd acceeded to the younger generation. It's an odd and
mysterious twist." Still, it is unlikely the attention will turn
her head since it took months to find a publisher for To All Appearances

325

which was rejected right and left for not being sufficiently avant-
garde. The Norton Anthology, a standard and prestigious college
textbook for English literature printed a number of Miss Miles poems
in its new edition. In commemoration of the event, a friend sent her
a copy of World 's review of the collection. The reviewer expressed
delight that Norton had included two major and neglected American
poets, Edgar Lee Masters and Josephine Miles. The neglected Miss Miles
positively chortles, "How do you like that. Puts me right where I
belong, in the obituary column."

One evening this April she gave a poetry reading in Cody's
Bookstore in Berkeley. She gives readings infrequently, three or
four times a year, and never charges a fee. This one was held in
Cody's upstairs gallery and the room gradually filled with about
forty people who chatted and moved around, waiting for her to start.
She looked young and very cheerful in a bright violet blouse and a
long peasantry skirt. She waited about ten minutes before beginning,
sitting calmly and leafing through her book of poems. In public she
has the special poise of someone who has learned to sit patiently
without the option of timing her entrance, or getting up and mingling
until time to start.

"She began by announcing gently that a new young poet was giving
a reading at the same time on campus and urged everyone to go hear

him. "I don't know this young man's poetry, but he has a very

•

handsome picture in the paper. The thing is, I didn't even know I

was giving this reading until I read it in the paper yesterday so I
had no time to protest or set up another time. So don't think I'd be
hurt or anything." She paused, but no one left. "Well, I'll read for

326 . 46

twenty minutes and then have an intermission so you can leave if you

want to."

. She broke the poems up into loose groupings, beginning with
fables, poetry cibout gods and animals. She read "Sheep," "Fish," and
"God a man at Yale" and others in an easy conversational tone of
voice. Occasionally, she would comment on the inspiration for the
poems, or explain which pleased her and which still did not satisfy
her. She read "Sisyphus," explaining that though Sisyphus had
become a symbol of the existential dilemma, hers was an anti-existential
interpretation .

He said a man's reach must exceed his grasp,
Or what is Hades for?

He said, it's not the goal that matter, but the process

Of reaching it, the breathing joy

Of endeavor, and the labor along .the way.

This belief damned him, and damned, what's harder

The heavy stone.

During the second half of the program she read new poems and
took requests. People called out lines. Few remembered titles and
neither did Miss Miles. Someone asked for "Oedipus." "Really? now
some people just hate that poem. It sets their teeth on edge."

The gang wanted to give Oedipus Rex a going away present
He has been a good hardworking father and king.
And besides it is the custom of this country.
To .give gifts on departure.

But we didn't know what to give Oedipus, he had everything
Even in his loss he had more than average.

So we gave him a travelling case, fitted which we personally
Should have like to receive. •

Reading, she paused slightly at significant lines. It was in no
sense a performance, yet as William Fretter said about the committee

327

"there was a wc.rmth in the room." Toward t.he end she read a
called "Family."

When you swim in the surf off Seal Rocks, and your family

Sits in the sand

Eating potato salad, and the undertow

Comes, which takes you out, away, down

To loss of breath, loss of play and the power of play,

Holler say

Help, help, help. Hello, they will say,

Come back here for some potato salad.

It is then that a seventeen-year old cub

Cruising in a helicopter from Antigua

A jackstraw expert speaking only Swedish,

And remote from this area as a camel , says

Look down there, there is somebody drowning.

And it is you. You say yes, yes, yes,

And he throws you a line.

This is what is called the brotherhood of man.

There was silence and then laughter and loud applause. "My
god," someone muttered, "my god, she's good."

328
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

BERKELEY • DAVIS • IRVINE • LOS ANGELES • RIVERSIDE • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO j&tflfpHJS^I] ! SANTA BARBARA • SANTA CRUZ

REGIONAL ORAL HISTORY OFFICE BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA M720

THE BANCROFT LIBRARY January 1980

UNIVERSITY HISTORY SERIES

Bound, indexed copies of the transcripts of the following interviews are
available at cost to libraries for deposit in noncirculating collections for
scholarly use.

Adams, Frank, Frank Adams, University of California on Irrigation, Reclamation, and
Water Administration. 1956, 491 p.

Birge, Raymond Thayer, Raymond Thayer Birge, Physicist. 1960, 395 p.

Blaisdell, Allen C. , Foreign Students and the Berkeley International House, 1928-1961.
1968, 419 p.

Chaney, Ralph Works, Ralph Works Cnaney, Ph.D., Paleobotanist, Conservationist.
1960, 277 p.

Corley, James V., Serving the University in Sacramento. 1969, 143 p.
Cross, Ira Brown, Portrait of an Economics Professor. 1967, 128 p.
Cruess, William V., A Half Century in Food and Wine Technology. 1967, 122 p.
Davidson, Mary Blossom, The Dean of Women and the Importance of Students. 1967, 79 p.
Dennes, William R. , Philosophy and the University Since 1915. 1970, 162 p.
Donnelly, Ruth, The University's Role in Housing Services. 1970, 129 p.
Ebright, Carroll "Ky", California Varsity and Olympics Crew Coach. 1968, 74 p.
Evans, Clinton W. , California Athlete, Coach, Administrator, Ambassador. 1968, 106 p.

Foster, Herbert B. , The Role of the Engineer's Office in the Development of the
University of California Campuses. 1960, 134 p.

Gordon, Walter A., (In process )

Grether, Ewald T. , (In process )

Hamilton, Brutus, Student Athletics and the Voluntary Discipline. 1967, 50 p.

Harris, Joseph P., (1980 - in process)

Hays, William Charles, Order, Taste, and Grace in Architecture. 1968, 241 p.

Hildebrand, Joel H. , Chemistry, Education, and the University of California. 1962, 196 p

329

Hutchison, Claude B. , The College of Agriculture, University of California, 1922-1952.
1962, 524 p.

Johnston, Marguerite Kulp and Mixer, Joseph R. , Student Housing, Welfare, and the ASUC.
1970, 54 p.

Kerr, Clark, (1979 - in process)

Lehman, Benjamin H. , Recollections and Reminiscences of Life in the Bay Area from
1920 Onuard. 1969, 367 p.

Lenzen, Victor F. , Physics and Philosophy. 1965, 206 p.
Lessing, Ferdinand^ D. , Early Years. 1963, 70 p.

Mclaughlin, Donald, Careers in Mining Geology and Management, University Governance
and Teaching. 1975, 318 p.

Merritt, Ralph P., After Me Cometh a Builder, the Recollections of Ralph Palmer
Merritt. 1962, 137 p.

Meyer, Karl F. , Medical Research and Public Health, 1976, 439 p.
Miles, Josephine, Poetry, Teaching, and Scholarship. 1980,343 p.
Mitchell, Lucy Sprague, Pioneering in Education. 1962, 174 p.

Mixer, Joseph R. and Johnston, Marguerite Kulp, Student Housing, Welfare, and the ASUC.
1970, 54 p.

Neuhaus, Eugen, Reminiscences: Bay Area Art and the University of California Art
Department. 1961, 48 p.

Key Ian, John Francis, Politics, Law, and the University of California. 1962, 319 p.

Olney, Mary McLean, Oakland, Berkeley, and the University of California, 1880-1895.
1963, 173 p.

Pepper, Stephen C. , Art and Philosophy at the University of California, 1919 to 1962.
1963, 471 p.

Porter, Robert Langley, Robert Langley Porter, Physician, Teacher, and Guardian of
the Public Health. 1960, 102 p.

Richardson, Leon J. , Berkeley Culture, University of California Highlights, and
University Extension, 1892-1960. 1962, 248 p.

Robb, Agnes, Robert Gordon Sproul and the University of California. 1976, 138 p.
Shields, Peter J. , Reminiscences. 1954, 107 p.

Sproul, Ida Wittschen, Duty, Devotion and Delight in the President's House, University
of California. 1961, 103 p.

330

Stevens, Frank C. , Forty Years in the Office of the President, University of
California, 1905-1945. 1959, 175 p.

Towle, Katherine A., Administration and Leadership. 1970, 369 p.

Treadway, Walter, Correspondence and Papers on Langley Porter Clinic. (Bound in
Langley Porter interview.) 1960, 37 p.

Underbill, Robert M. , University of California Lands, Finances, and Investment.
1968, 446 p.

Waring, Henry C. , Henry C. Waring on University Extension. 1960, 130 p.
Wessels, Glenn A., Education of An Artist. 1967, 326 p.
Wilson, Garff, (1980 - in process)

Witter, Jean C. , The University, the Community, and the Lifeblood of Business.
1968, 109 p.

Woods, Baldwin M. , University of California Extension. 1957, 102 p.

Wurster, William Wilson, College of Environmental Design, University of California,
Campus Planning, and Architectural Practice. 1964, 339 p.

331

INDEX — Josephine Miles

Abbott, Charles, 225

Academy of American Poets award, 246, 251

Aesthetic Society, 90-92

Aldington, Richard, 60

Allen, Don, 226

Allen, John Joseph, Jr., 104

Alpers, Paul, 89

American Association of University Women fellowship, 71, 127

American Federation of Teachers, 221

American Pen Women, League of, 40

Ammons, A.R. (Archie), 159, 166, 181

Anderson, Edgar, 229

Anderson, Judith, 69, 72

Andrews, Lyman, 156

Aschenbrenner , Karl, 91

Austin, Mary, 60

Ayres, Dorothy, 28

Babcock, Miss, 9, 12

Bacon, Leonard, 52, 59, 199

Baker, Dorothy, 54

Baker, Howard, 48, 54

Baker, Sheridan, 148

Balderston, Frederick E. (Fred), 212

Ballinger, Martha Bacon, 39, 42, 52, 59, 60

Bancroft Library, The, 225, 226-227

Barfield, Owen, 31, 38

Barlow, George, 160, 181

Barnhart, Edward N., 102

Bay Area Writing Project, 195, 200-202, 249

Beatles, the, 166, 167, 206

Beckwith, Martha, 72

Beebe, Francis, 5, 10

Beloof, Robert, 180

Benet, James (Jim), 144

Benet, William Rose, 53

Benet family, 49, 54

Benson, Larry, 148

Berkeley Fellows, 261

Berkeley Poetry Review, 168

Berkeley (city) politics, 104

Billing family, 2

332

Bird, Remsen, 71-72

Bishop, Elizabeth, 52, 66, 167

Blaser, Robin, 163, 189

Ely, Robert, 55

Bogen, Don, 149, 162

Bookman, The (magazine), 19, 39

Booth, Stephen, 89

Borah, Woodrow, 21

Bowker, Albert H. (Al) , 201, 204, 247, 249 ("the chancellor"), 260

Boy Critics, 48, 65, 84

Boyd, Julian, 112, 114

Bradley, Tom, 144

Bradshaw, Franklyn Royer, 24, 28

Brandt, Jewel Holder, 42-43, 68

Brandt, William (Bill), 180

Brautigan, Richard, 159

Brett, Philip, 205

Bridgman, Richard, 256

Brimhall, Lila, 70

Brodeur, Arthur, 43, 46, 49, 83, 108

Bronson, Bertrand H. (Bud), 17, 48-49, 65, 77, 84, 101, 109, 126,

128, 230

Brooks, Cleanth, 66, 89, 90, 121
Brooks, Phyllis, 196
Broughton, James, 56
Brower, Renken, 122, 130

Brown, Edmund G. , Jr., 140, 142, 247, 258 ("the governor"), 259
Brown, Edmund G. , Sr., 104
Brown, Gilmore, 71, 73
Brown, Willie, 140
Bruce, Harold, 110
Bukowsky, Charles, 187, 188
Bunche, Ralph, 28
Burough, Reuben, 5, 10
Butler, Gerald, 156
Bynner, Witter, 52, 118

Cage, John, 21

Caldwell, James R. (Jim), 48-49, 50, 53, 54, 55, 57, 63, 68, 73,

78-79, 84, 85, 87, 92, 102, 109, 119
Caldwell, Katherine, 49, 53, 54

California Association of Teachers of English, 95, 200, 213, 251-252
California Institute of the Arts, 206
California Living magazine section, 190, 192
California Writers Club, 182-183
Campbell, Lily Bess, 37, 38, 67, 71, 72, 88
Carruth, Hayden, 141, 166, 243
Castro, Janice, 157

333

Cheney, May, 42, 72

Chipman, John, 1

Chipman, Sarah, 1

Chomsky, AvramN., 112, 132-133

Chretien, C. Douglas, 124-125

Chrisman, Robert, 181

Christensen, Francis, 199

Christensen, Mark, 210

Clarke, Leslie, 226

Clark, Naomi, 184

Cline, James M. (Jim), 48-49, 65, 109

Cloud Marauder magazine, 157, 162

Cody's [Books, Inc.], 157, 185

Cohelan, Jeffery, 104

committees, U.C. Berkeley:

Chancellor's Committee on the Arts, 204-208

Committee on Academic Planning, 211-213, 247-248

Committee on Committees, 211

Committee on Privilege and Tenure, 210-211

Committee on Research of the Academic Senate, U.C. Berkeley, 202, 203

Committee on Teaching, 248-249

Faculty Research Lecture committee, 224

President's Committee on Search for the Chancellor, U.C. Berkeley,
202, 203-204

Prize Committee, 207, 209, 210
Constance, Lincoln, 142
Coolbrith, Ina, 192
Cooperrider, Ken, 63
Corley, James H. , 102
Cowley, Malcolm, 53
Creeley, Robert, 58, 59, 61, 188
Crofts, Howard, 42-43
Cruz, Victor Hernandez, 160
Culler, Jonathan, 138
Cunningham, Imogen, 61-62
Cunningham, J.V., 52, 56, 57, 166
Cushman, Don, 162, 189, 191, 193

Data System of Instructional Resources, 146

Davie, Donald, 156

Dean, Elma, 183

Dennes, William R. (Will), 64, 73, 90, 119, 232

Denny, Roberta, 28

DePrisco, Joe, 162

Deutsch, Monroe E., 93

Distinguished Teaching Award, 248-249

Dobbie, Lucie, 181

Donne, John, 136-137, 185

334

Donoghue, Denis, 166

Dower, Welda, 5, 13-14, 15

Downes, Carl, 37, 83, 88

Drake, Francis, 47, 48, 49

Dryden concordance, 75, 124-125

Duncan, Robert, 56, 58, 61, 149, 152, 163

Dunlap, Mary, 157

Eberhart, Richard (Dick), 61, 152, 165, 179

Edwards, Walter, 20, 22

Eisner Awards, 204-208

Eliot, T.S., 60, 65

Elliott, George P., 148, 149, 228

Elliott, Mary Emma Jeffress, 148, 228

Ellman, Richard, 166

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 130-132

Empson, William, 38

Esherick, Joseph (Joe), 205, 206, 207

Evans, Bertrand (Bert), 94

Everson, William (Bill), 61, 151, 193

Faculty Research Lecture, 223

Farnham, Willard, 45, 120, 134, 140

Fearing, Kenneth, 152

Feller, David E. , 261

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 61, 159, 165

Field, Sara Bard, 49, 52, 54-55, 92-93, 118

Fillmore, Charles, 112, 113

Fiorito, Ted, 13-14, 15

Fish, Stanley, 89

Fitzell, Lincoln, 54

Planner, Hildegarde, 40, 53, 118

Flower, Joe, 163

Foreman, Paul, 157, 162, 168, 188, 191-192, 193

Foster, Marguerite, 90

Foster, Willis, 236

Fraser, Kathleen, 185-186

Fredricks, Walter S. (Wolly) , 168

Fretter, William B. (Bill), 142, 145, 149, 260

Frost, Robert, 35, 61

Fussell, Paul, 166, 178

Gayley, Charles Mills, 118, 119
Gayley Lectures, 222
Gee, Penny, 126
Genet, Jean, 169
Gibbs, Barbara, 47, 56

335

Ginsberg, Allen, 55, 56, 60, 164, 165, 180, 188, 206, 226, 237

Gleason, Madeline, 56, 58

Goldbarth, Albert, 188

Gray, James R. (Jim), 94-95, 199, 200, 201, 213

Green, David, 148

Grossenheider family, 3

Grubb, Verna. See Winslow, Ann

Guggenheim awards, 110

Gullans, Charles, 56

Gumpertz, John, 112

Gunn, Thorn, 159, 172, 175, 237

Haas, Mary, 112, 113

Haas, Robert, 185-186, 188

Hamilton, Clair, 42-43, 44

Hammond, George P., 225, 226

Hand, George, 76

Harper, Michael, 61, 181

Harris, Fred, 228

Harris, Mary, 228

Hart, James D. (Jim), 62, 226, 249

Hart, Lawrence, 164, 165

Hart, Walter Morris, 109, 117-119

Hawley, Robert (Bob), 157, 159, 179, 182-183, 184-185, 187-189, 190

Henderson, David, 160

Hendricks, Kimmis, 21

Herriman, George, 5

Heyman, Ira Michael (Mike), 260

Hitch, Charles J., 97, 143, 146, 211, 218, 219

Hitchcock, George, 163, 189

Hochfield, George, 180

Holder, Jewel. See Brandt, Jewel Holder

Hollingsworth, Allen (Al) , 148, 180

Holt, Achilles, 56

Holther, Will, 91

Hopkins: The Kenyon Critics, 121

Horan, Robert, 56, 164

Howland, Hope, 1

Hughes, Langston, 118

Hughes, Merritt, 46-47, 63, 64, 69, 108

Hungerland, Isabel, 91, 102, 106

Huntington Library, 69-70

Huxley, Aldous, 103

Hymes, Dell, 112

336

Idea and Experiment magazine, 102, 223-224
Institute of Governmental Studies, 252
Intersection (arts center) , 189
lodice, Ruth, 183

Jaqua, Mary Alice, 42-43, 44, 63, 70

Jeffers, Robinson, 49, 55, 57, 152

John Martin's Book (magazine) , 8

Jones, LeRoi, 237

Jordan, John, 115, 120, 215

Joyce, James, 58

Kantor, James R.K. (Jim), 227,
Kaprow, Allan, 206-207
Kayak magazine, 163
Kent,~T.J., Jr. (Jack), 104
Kenyon Review, 66, 88, 121
Kerouac, Jack, 165
Kerr, Clark, 141-142, 145
Kinnell, Galway, 61
Kinnick, B. Jo, 183
Knoepf Imacher, Ulrich, 89
Kroeber, Karl, 228, 229

Labaudt, Marcelle (Madame Lucien) , 58, 91

Labor School (San Francisco), 93, 182

Lackner, Ernest (grandfather of J. Miles), 2, 3, 4, 6

Lackner family, 3

Lamantia, Philip, 56

Landor, Walter, 91

Lane, Kenneth (Ken), 94, 200, 213

Latona Avenue School (South Pasadena), 5, 9-10, 11, 70

Laughlin, James, 150

Lavayea, Miss, 23

Lavin, Albert (Cap), 201

Lehman, Benjamin H. (Ben), 47-48, 63, 65, 66, 67-68, 69, 71, 72,

77-78, 83-84, 85, 94, 100, 108-122, 124, 126, 128, 141, 153
Leite, George, 149, 152
Leseman, Maurice, 118
Levertov, Denise, 106
Levertov, Mitch, 106
Levin, Harry, 121

Lewis, Janet (Janet Lewis Winters), 50, 56
Lindsay, Vachel, 60
Lines at Intersection, 53, 72
linguistics, 111-114, 133-134, 137, 138, 139, 199, 239

337

Logan, John, 159

Longueil, Alfred, 37, 38, 88

Los Angeles High School, 19-25, 26, 34-35, 36, 37, 40

Lowe, Frank, 28

Lowell, Robert, 61

Lowenthal, Leo, 228

Lowes, John Livingston, 39

loyalty oath controversy, 102-103, 115, 142, 154, 178

Lyman, W.W. (Jack), 117, 118

Lynch, James J. (Jim), 94

Lyon, Earl, 42-43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 70, 72, 78

Lyons, Jack, 117

McClure, Michael (Mike), 56, 61, 165

McGahey, Jeanne, 50, 56, 164

Maclntyre, Carlyle, 37, 38, 72, 181

Mackay, Donald, 92

Mackenzie, Armine, 28-29

McKenzie, Gordon, 48-49, 84, 85-86, 88, 139

Mackintosh, Graham, 159

Mann, Thomas, 61

Manroot, 189-190

Mason McDuf f ie (realtor) , 235

May, Henry, 205, 207

Mearns, Hughes, 23

Meredith, George, 45

Meyer, Adolph, 26

Meyer, Morton, 220

Miles family, 1-3

Miles, Frederick Billing (grandfather of Josephine Miles), 2

Miles, Herbert (Herb), 1, 2

Miles, John (brother of Josephine Miles), 3, 4, 5, 13, 15, 16,

21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 31, 38, 66, 75, 79, 152, 154, 233, 234, 236
Miles, Josephine, 1, passim

interest in films, 14-15, 43

literary interests

early childhood, 6-14, 15, 19

high school years, 20-21, 22-23, 34-35, 37, 40
college years (undergraduate), 28-31, 35, 37-43, 53
mature years, 30-245, passim

musical interests, 15-18, 230
Miles, Josephine Lackner (mother of Josephine Miles), 2-3, 4, 5, 6,

7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12-13, 18, 19, 21, 26, 30, 31, 32, 36, 38, 62, 66,

73, 74, 105, 227, 235
Miles, Reginald Odber (father of Josephine Miles), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7,

9, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 21, 24, 26, 62, 233
Miles, Richard (Dick) (brother of Josephine Miles), 3, 4, 5, 13, 15,

16, 21, 22, 26, 27, 31, 38, 66, 67, 75, 79, 131, 152, 154, 233, 234

338

Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 39, 54

Miller, Henry, 152-153

Miller, Milton, 121

Mills, Clark, 66

Mills College, 69, 71, 77-78

Modern Language Association (MLA) , 121, 122, 130, 255

Monk, Samuel, 122

Monroe, Harriet, 40

Montgomery, Guy, 75, 108, 109, 124

Moore, Marianne, 52, 57, 61

Moore, Rosalie, 56, 164, 183

Morley, S. Griswold, 61

Moses, W.R. , 66

Mudra Press, 161, 193

Murchio, Jack, 149

Myers, Miles, 201

Nagel, Mary, 5

Nathan, Leonard, 55, 118, 165, 166, 180, 188

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) , 162, 231

Neely, Betty, 250

New Directions, 149, 150, 179

Niles, Jack, 157

Nuntius, The (periodical), 20-21

Occident magazine, 168, 169, 244
Oden, Gloria, 181
O'Hehir, Diane, 91, 162
Oliver, William I. (Bill), 73
Olson, Charles, 164, 187, 188
O'Neill, Eugene, 10
Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 92
Orem, Bob, 42-43, 63

Pacific Spectator, The, 182, 183

Panjandrum Press, 162, 192-193

Park, Roderic B. (Rod), 201, 213

Parkinson, Thomas (Tom), 56, 119, 120, 141, 153, 162, 163, 165

Parrish, Stephen, 125

Pasadena Community Playhouse, 11, 30, 70-71, 73

Patchen, Kenneth, 152, 163

Paz, Octavio, 150

Pelican Building (U.C. Berkeley), 168-169, 244, 245, 249-250

People's Park controversy, 158, 205

Pepper, Stephen, 64, 90, 91

Peters, Robert, 61

339

Phelan award, U.C. Berkeley, 71

Phi Beta Kappa, 32

playwriting, 9-11, 70-71, 73-74

poem, Josephine Miles 's first, 8

poetry, 5, passim

Poetry magazine, 40, 80, 238

Poetry Flash newsletter, 163, 190

Poet's Co-op, 185

Popper, Jan, 205

Potter, George, 71, 75, 115, 124

Prall, Margaret, 91

Rafferty, Max, 144, 200

Rahu, Philip, 55

Raleigh, John (Jack), 115, 120

Ranson, John Crowe, 61

Rau, Katherine, 91

Reagan, Ronald, 140, 142, 259

Reed, David W. (Dave), 112, 113

Reed, Ishmael, 160

Reinhardt, Aurelia Henry, 71, 72

Rexroth, Kenneth, 50, 54, 56, 61, 152, 163, 228

Rice, Stan, 61, 160-161, 193

Richards, I. A., 39, 84, 85, 88

Rieber, Charles H. , 28, 119

Riggs, Lynn, 39

Riles, Wilson, 144

Ritchie, Benbow, 149

Roethke, Theodore, 52, 61, 149

Ross, John, 110

Royer, Franklyn. See Bradshaw, Franklyn Royer

Rukeyser, Muriel, 52, 61, 150

Rumford, Byron, 104

Ruth, Leo, 94-95, 200, 213

Ruthven, Madeline, 5, 13

sabbatical years, 16, 228-230, 239

Sacks, Sheldon, 112

St. Nicholas magazine, 8-9, 10, 12, 19, 59, 60

Sandburg, Carl, 61

Sansome, Clarence, 28

Saxon, David S., 254, 260

Schorer, Mark, 85-86, 108, 115, 130, 139, 164

Schulman, Grace, 188

Schurz, Carl, 2

Schwartz, Delmore, 150

Scott, Elizabeth, 230

340

Scott, Geraldine Knight, 217, 234, 235

Scott, Mel, 235

Scripps College, 24, 27, 212

Seaborg, Glenn, 219, 222

Sells, Lucy, 216

Selvin, Hanan, 228

Selz, Peter, 244

Sengher, Leopold, 169

Shapiro, Karl, 151

Shelley award, 53

Sherriffs, Alex, 102

Shidler, Ross, 168

Shifrin, Seymour, 243

Sibley, Carol, 104

Simon, John Oliver, 174, 190

Simpson, Louis, 159, 179

Sledd, James, 112

Smelser, Neil, 218, 219, 222

Smith, Ella Victoria, 2

Smith, Henry, 124, 126, 132, 139, 144

Smith, William Odber, 1, 2

Snyder, Gary, 61, 151, 159, 161, 165, 166, 237

Southern Review, 65-66, 88, 121, 179

Spender, Natasha, 61

Spender, Stephen, 61

Spicer, Jack, 58, 149, 152, 163, 180

Spritser, Hildie, 157

Sproul, Robert Gordon, 102, 110, 115, 117, 120, 141, 145, 259

Stafford, William (Bill), 61, 148, 151, 166, 225

Stanford, Don, 52, 56

Starbuck, George, 148, 159

Steinhoff, William (Bill), 148, 149, 227

Stephens, Alan, 56

Stephens, James, 61

Stewart, George, 60, 76, 85, 86, 92, 110, 111, 117, 177-178

Structuralist Poetics (by Culler), 137-138

student protests, 1960s, 104-106, 142, 144, 155-157, 204, 205-206

Style magazine, 241-243

Swackhamer, John M. (Jack), 16, 17, 230

Swinburne, Charles Algernon, 59

Taggard, Genevieve, 54, 118

Taper, Bernard, 148, 149

Taper, Phyllis, 148, 149

Tate, James (Jim), 157, 162, 191, 237

Tatlock, J.S.P., 43, 45-46, 49, 69, 92, 108, 119

Teasdale, Sara, 54

Teller, Edward, 144

341

Thomas, Dylan, 59, 60, 61

Thorsen, Marjorie, 43, 44, 70

Tiscornia, Adolph A., 233-234

Townsend, James (Jim), 159

Trial Balances, 51-53, 149, 150, 152, 179

Trow, Martin A. (Marty), 212

Tyler, Ham, 149

University of Buffalo, 225

University of California, Berkeley, passim

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 24-25, 27-32, 36-39,

42-43, 49, 56-57, 60-61, 67, 68, 71, 77, 83, 84, 88, 94, 117, 120, 212
University of California, various campuses, passim
university professorship, 218-222, 254
Urey, Harold, 218, 219
Utter, Robert P. , 111

Vasconcellos, John D., 140
Victorian Club, 260
Vincent, Stephen, 189

Wakoski, Diane, 156

Walker, J.M., 235

Warren, Earl, 141, 259

Warren, Robert Penn, 66, 89, 90, 117, 137

Warshaw, Howard K. , 207

Washington University, 225, 226

Ways of the Poem, the, 122

Webber, Melvin M. (Mel), 212

Weeks, Donald, 91

Weiss, Jason, 168

Weiss, Theodore (Ted), 180, 187-188

Wellek, Rene, 122

Wentworth, Richard, 179

West, George, 49, 54

West, Marie, 49, 118

West Coast Print Center, 161, 192, 193

Whalen, Philip (Phil), 165

Wheeler, Benjamin Ide, 119

Whipple, T.K., 43, 49, 92, 108, 131

White, Helen, 71

White, Lynn, 218, 222

Whitney, James (Jim), 104

Wilbur, Richard, 55

Wilkerson, Margaret, 160, 216

Williams, Frances, 28

Williams, William Carlos, 57, 58, 61

342

Wilson, John C. , 38

Wilson, Pat, 91

Wilson, Rob, 168

Winslow, Ann (Verna Grubb) , 33, 49-53, 57, 149, 152

Winters, Janet Lewis. See Lewis, Janet

Winters, Yvor, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53-55, 56, 57, 66, 149, 152, 163

Witt, Harold, 183

Witt-Diamant, Ruth, 59

Wolf, Leonard, 153

Wolverton, Miss, 19

women, equality of, 104, 213-217

Wood, Charles Erskine Scott, 49, 53, 55, 92-93

Wordsworth, [William], 63-65, 68-69, 116, 126, 127, 138, 183

World War II, effects of, 151-154, 232

Wortham, Jim, 42-43, 44, 46, 48, 63, 70

Worthen, Richard J. (Dick), 94-95, 200

Wright, James, 55

Yeats, W.B. , 183

Yellen, Samuel, 155

Young, Al, 61, 160, 181

Young Critics. See Boy Critics

Youth's Companion (magazine) , 12

344

INDEX — Books by Josephine Miles discussed in the interview

Classic Essays in English, 122, 123

Coming to Terms, 256

Continuity of Poetic Language, The, 128-129, 154, 239

Criticism, The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment, 86, 128

Eras and Modes in English Poetry, 129

Fields of Learning, 158

In Identity, 177

Kinds of Affection, 159, 175

Local Measures, 151

Major Adjectives in Poetry, 128

Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century, 127-128

Poems, 1930-1960, 156

Poems on Several Occasions, 150

Poetry and Change, 97, 130, 132, 237, 238

Pre fabrications, 155

Primary Language of Poetry in the 1940s, The, 129

Primary Language of Poetry in the 1840s, The, 128

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 130-133

Style and Proportion, 122-124, 129-130, 135

To All Appearances, 174, 179

Vocabulary of Poetry, 128

Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of Emotion, 126, 127, 128

Catherine Harroun

Born, St. Joseph, Missouri.

Educated in Pasadena, California; Carlsbad,

New Mexico; Stanford University, B.A. in

English.

In San Francisco since 1930 as advertising

copywriter, Wells Fargo Bank; curator and

researcher, Wells Fargo History Room.

Newspaper and magazine writer since 1950.

Ruth Teiser

Grew up in Portland, Oregon; came to the
Bay Area in 1932 and has lived here ever
since. Stanford, B.A., M.A. in English,
further graduate work in Western history.
Newspaper and magazine writer in San
Francisco since 1943, writing on local
history and economic and business life
of the Bay Area. Book reviewer for the
San Francisco Chronicle since 1943. As
correspondent for national and western
graphic arts magazines for more than a
decade, came to know the printing
communi ty .

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