Peter: That happened during the second semester. Our teacher for that half of the year was the Irish writer Frank O’Connor. He was a splendid writer who, like all the famous writers of his generation, had traveled widely and knew everybody. He was very charming, very handsome‌—‌I remember that he tended to dress in a southwestern style, with a bolo tie‌—‌and he was also one of the most dogmatic people I have ever met. Certainly the most dogmatic teacher ever, at least since the fourth grade. On O’Connor’s first day in class he ran down a list of tropes and types and genres and writers he didn’t want anything to do with, and very nearly managed to alienate everybody in the class…which he knew perfectly well, but he was what he was and he couldn’t quite stop it. I was cool, watching him tread on everybody else’s toes, until he got around to what he called the difference between story writing and story telling, and his insistence that all writers did either one or the other. I was in my Isak Dinesen phase, completely in love with her work, and wanted to know where she would fall in this categorization. He said he couldn’t exactly speak to that, because she bored him so much that he’d never finished one of her stories…at which point I started skipping classes, as so many others had been doing since O’Connor took over. But one day when I did come in, Judy Rascoe‌—‌I think it was Judy‌—‌read a beautiful little fantasy story, set in Mexico, which O’Connor brutally trashed because it was a fantasy. I was so angry that I holed up with friends in Berkeley‌—‌on Channing Way, I could still find the house‌—‌and wrote “Come Lady Death” in about a day and a half. I wanted to write a fantasy he just couldn’t find any fault with. Then I submitted it to the class.

Connor: …And?

Peter: O’Connor read it out loud, in his best Abby Theater reading‌—‌he’d directed there at one point, and had a fine dramatic voice for this sort of thing, so he gave it the works. And I do think the class was at least held by it. Then when he was finished he looked around at everybody and said, in the same declarative voice, “This is a beautifully-written story. I don’t like it.” And that was that‌—‌that was O’Connor, right there. By the end of the semester he very nearly had a mutiny on his hands. Which he knew, and he told Stegner about it, but he didn’t know any other way to be. He was a strange man, O’Connor. I remember going to a lecture of his one time. He had all his charm working, everything going, telling stories, commenting on Irish literature…he held the audience spellbound, literally in his hand, for something like an hour and a half. And then he ran ten minutes over and blew it. His bitterness and frustrations, all the things that really riled him, began to come out in those last ten minutes, and when they did he lost everyone in the room. I’ve always taken that as a lesson, when I speak in public: get off the stage early, rather than too late.