The year after I was born, in Charlottesville, Virginia, the only child of two teachers, the family moved south, where my father accepted a post on the English faculty of a state-endowed university, otherwise undistinguished. It was on the outskirts of an unpleasant place which qualified in population and industry as a city, but in every other way it was a farm. Here I was toilet-trained, went to school, read from A–AND through MUN—ODD in the Britannica (Scholar’s Edition), and was hit by a tractor. I twist the ignominious facts. Actually the tractor was stationary. I hit it, absentmindedly. God knows what I was thinking about (something in MUN—ODD?). So much for the bewilderment of boyhood.

The university had not too long ago emerged from the cocoon of an agricultural college; it still suffered the pangs of afterbirth. It was like some sprawling mutant, misshapen and without fingerprints, the tail wagging the mongrel, and its proud traditions were for thoughtful men embarrassing—a long devotion to the cult of the plow and the Confederacy. The undergraduate body, peasants in saddle shoes, were full of sweaty and ill-conceived pranks, like dressing up as Ku Kluxers on Halloween or energetically waving the Stars and Bars at football games.

The football games were what I hated most, marching down the field in the band, caparisoned like a hussar with a shako of imitation fur slouching over my eyes and frogs of imitation gold braid curling across my chest. But I had to do it; performing on the tuba was a contractual obligation that went with my scholarship.

There was constant conflict between the farmers and the philosophers. I can’t remember all the petty maneuvering my father reported to us at dinner, but I’ll never forget the Honorable Orville Wiley, who rose in the state legislature to lead the impassioned fight against an expenditure to enlarge the French faculty.

“The English language,” he declared, ape eyes burning, “was good enough for Jesus Christ, so it ought to be good enough for yew-all.” And that was that.

My father had a certain sardonic sense of humor in those days, before life in its incessant pursuit of perversity turned him sour and obsessive. He relished those bitter inside jokes of the humanities people. Unfortunately he was himself an inside joke to his colleagues. I think he annoyed them with his fastidious precision, which made him unable to resist such infelicities of speech, however apposite, as “the rice of American civilization,” and “the Don Jooanism of Byron.”