56.
January
10, 1992
My dear R.K.
Singh,
Congratulations
on your becoming Head of the Department of Humanities & Social
Sciences. I suppose it means responsibilities
and nuisance chores, especially committees.
I was chairman of American Studies at the University of Buffalo from
1952 to 1963, a department I created. It
did well until the English Department got jealous. I resigned in June 1963, when I came back
from two years of Chairman of American
Studies at the University of Istanbul.
They wanted me to stay there for ever.
Looking back, it seems only a short time between 1963 and 1968 when I returned
to Turkey, this time as Fulbright Lecturer
at Hacettepe in Ankara. From there
I came to India in 1970 (May) to teach American Literature to teachers at the
University of Madras, who were planning to teach American literature for the first
time. At the end of the month I went to Srinagar
for an all-Asia conference on American literature with representatives form all
over Asia. I was the representative from
Hacettepe. It was there I met Pandeya
(who told me to call him Shiva), I saw
him again in August 1971, when I traveled
all over India lecturing, and it was in that visit that I met you in New Delhi.
Our long friendship followed. I have
been lucky to have you as my link to India, and many friends I made there, of
whom you are the last from whom I have letters.
You are kind
to send me pp. 69 & 70 of Creative Forum. For me a surprise and a
pleasure to see together—separate from the other lyrics printed with them—those
6 from RECALLS. I enclose for you my latest
– SEARCHING FORAMY – published only a month ago—and another chapbook printing
some of the other Prefatory lyrics. I am
sure I sent you my longer book AZUBAH NYE, where all the prefatory lyrics
appeared, those once printed in RECALLS. Bob & Sue Arnold, printers of
RECALLS, also printed SEARCHING FOR AMY.
You will see that I am still plunging into the same mysteries of the human
psyche.
I am now 80,
and very unhappy over the state of the world’s political confusion. The United States seems falling apart, and
the last society that should set itself up for an example for the rest of the
world to emulate.
I myself am
lucky. I live in a beauty spot looking out over fields I love on the farm where
my wife Amy was born. The farmland is
about to be sold to the farmer who has been tilling the land twenty-five years
since the death of Amy’s father. Amy’s
sister Olive, who kept the farm, died last year (November, 1990), and my oldest
daughter Laura and her Jamaican husband Roald Reid, she 51 & he 64, have
come to live in the farmhouse down the road from me. I am teaching them to drive an automobile,
because it is impossible to live here 4 miles from Bennington without having a
car to go to market.
With
best wishes from your friend
Lyle
Glazier
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