Remarks

On the Occasion of a Dinner Honouring

Christopher Drummond

Restaurant La Bodega

Toronto, December 29, 1997

***

Present: C.Q. Drummond, Alison Drummond and Johnathan Batty, Ben Drummond, Robert Drummond, John and Lorraine Baxter, Bradin Cormack, Brian and Jenny Crick, John Ferns, Lenny Ferry, Ken Graham, Gordon Harvey, Richard Hoffpauir, Caroline and Andrew Lebun, Robert and Carol Lovejoy, Tom McFarland, Janice and Phil Prince, Jim and Meg Young.

JOHN BAXTER: Ladies and Gentleman, it's a great pleasure to welcome all of you tonight to this festive dinner in honour of Christopher Drummond, our friend, teacher, and colleague. There will be opportunities throughout the evening for people to say nice things about Christopher; but since I'm not sure how well Mr. Drummond will stand up under the pressure of having nice things said about him, the first thing I'm going to do is to put him to work. You're going to have to earn this dinner, Drummond, and your first formal duty will be to receive and open this gift. The assembled company have all contributed to the purchase of this present, so please accept it as a token of our esteem and affection—and take special care with the wrapping paper: it's actually "gold to airy thinness beat."

CQD [opening gift]: I've always objected to that line, you know.

JOHN BAXTER: OK, it's a throwaway line then. Since most of those here tonight don't, in fact, know what they got for their money, you will need to show off the contents. [CQD shows blue and tartan vests.]

Now that you've finished that task, you have to move on to job number two, which is to don the Drummond tartan. We can't start the ceremony properly until we've accomplished your investiture. I've recently learned that the Drummond motto is "Go Warily." I can't imagine how they ever managed to live up to that motto if they were parading around in that loud red plaid, can you?

CQD: It's "Gang Warily"—a warning about how others should proceed [when approaching a Drummond].

JOHN BAXTER: Well, I think maybe the motto should be revised now to something like "Go Nattily"—parade in sartorial splendour. [CQD dons Drummond vest.]

But now, since a vest is obviously a lot like a short poem, it will be necessary to say a few words about style and theme. First, style. This vest is modeled on a Brooks Brothers vest, made of wool imported directly from Scotland, and the lining is Bemburg (have I got that right Lorraine?), the material and the lining both the finest that money can buy. It was tailor‑made by Sarah Emsley.

CQD: You'd better say "Sarah Baxter Emsley." [JB complies.]

JOHN BAXTER: Now the buttons. Well, the real test for them is yet to come. After you've packed away this dinner, Drummond, we'll see whether these buttons will pop, or whether Sarah has sewed them on with the right stuff.

As for theme, this vest has both a literal and a symbolic meaning. Literally, it confirms what we've all known all along: that you are an historical personage, a wearer of the Drummond tartan, a true Drummondian. Symbolically, it stands as a sign that the assembled company have all invested in your retirement. We now consider that we all have the right to call on you, with interest, for a continuous supply of ready wit, critical provocation, generous advice, and true judgment.

CQD: You can't expect much from me now, you know: I'm retired!

[Guests seat themselves around the three tables.]

JOHN BAXTER: Ladies and Gentlemen, please rise and drink a toast: to the Queen.

[In the delay before the final phrase, Thomas McFarland (and maybe others too) had his glass to his lips before he fully realized what, or whom, he was drinking to. He may be taken as the representative of republican sentiment.]

CQD [firmly to T.M.]: This is how we do things here‑—in the Dominion of Canada!

ALL: To the Queen!

* * * * * * * * Dinner * * * * * * * *

GORDON HARVEY: We're going to have the after-dinner remarks before dinner is over, so we can have time for after-dessert remarks. I too have a small present for Christopher, from his students and friends, but before he gets it he has to endure a speech from me. And even before that I want to say something about such speeches. An interesting thing about getting older is that, now and again, one suddenly feels the truth of the literature, and the human challenges it depicts, that one wrote so knowingly about in one's youth. One of these human challenges, which I first encountered in the Renaissance poems to which Christopher introduced me, was that of praising someone properly, especially one from whom one has learned a lot. At the time I thought this a pretty uninteresting problem, and I remember scoffing at those poems of Ben Jonson's (like epigram to Donne) in which Jonson tries for a bit to praise and then breaks off and throws up his hands and says that he just can't do it right. For the record, I just want to say that tonight I understand how this gesture could be genuine, and that I forgive Jonson for throwing up his hands. (I know he'll be relieved.)

But rather than attempt to praise Christopher, I want to talk about a subject I feel more secure in talking about: me. Specifically I want to answer this question about me: what made an often bored and fairly cynical undergraduate at the University of Alberta, for whom university generally seemed depressingly like high school, and English courses mostly impressionistic blah and law school an all but inevitable destiny—what made me turn around after meeting Christopher Drummond and choose to study literature—and to pursue a career whose average income is so much lower than that of law?

In thinking about this question, four different answers come to mind—four different reasons why I did this apparently irrational thing. (Actually nine reasons came to mind, but I figured that you might want eventually to get your dessert.)

First, there were the things that Christopher said, which from the start amazed me, because every word was interesting. There was no soft blah, in or out of his classes. Every remark (and "remark" is one of his favorite words, not incidentally) was firm, clear, reasonable, and challenging. One wanted to write everything down—especially after a few drinks, when one felt one's memory starting to blur.

Part of what made these remarks interesting was their unpredictability, in topic and in taste. In conversation with Chris-topher, you were as likely to hear about Freud or Aquinas as about Jonson or Donne, as likely to hear about grammar or theology or music as about literature. And as for taste, I remember thinking, after my first few months in Christopher's class, that I had him figured: the plain style, rational form, Ben Jonson—basically a "classical" view. And then one day I asked him after class what fiction he thought worth reading, and he said (as if it were fairly obvious), "Well, D.H. Lawrence." Probably I just nodded, as if it were apparent how the solar plexus and rational form went together; but I know I walked home ponderously that day, sore from the stretch that my categories were undergoing.

Then too, Christopher's memorable remarks were always made so humbly: "I don't really know anything about this, you know, but ..." or "Oh well, that's all just Leavis, of course." This kind of humility, insofar as it was humility, was utterly winning (I didn't encounter a lot of it elsewhere in English classes at the U. of A.). And insofar as the humble disclaimers were also sincere, they were heartening. I knew that I was no original thinker, and that I'd be relying on other people's help and ideas, so it was heartening for me to see that one could do this and not be a drudge—in fact could possibly be interesting.

But most of all, what Christopher said was fun. He made the intellectual life fun, and he (more than any teacher I've encountered anywhere) was obviously having fun living it. Later on I was amazed to realize that Christopher had a reputation in the English Department for severity and negativity. This taught me something about the fear of intelligence and (especially) of literary criticism, even among well-meaning people. For only people made deaf by some great insecurity could entertain such a view of a man whose most characteristic gesture in conversation is, after all, that great whooping "Ha!" of delight, and whose most characteristic phrase is "It's just wonderful!"

A second thing that drew me to Christopher was that, whenever I was around him, I wanted to improve myself. In particular, being around him made almost everything about me seem, well, slovenly. There was first of all my slovenly use of words. I still recall the first word I said to Christopher; it was in his 16th century poetry class, in response to his asking his usual "how shall we describe" question of Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," and the word was "slushy." Christopher merely looked at me and repeated the word back: "Slushy." And that was all he had to do for me to realize that it wasn't remotely accurate, wasn't any kind of real language at all, was in fact downright embarrassing. From that moment forward, though I still regret the sloppiness of half of what I have said and written to and for Christopher, I tried to be more present-minded and exact.

Then there was the slovenly state of my beliefs—or rather, as Christopher's conversation made me realize, the fact that I didn't know what I really believed about many things, including things that as a Canadian I ought to have thought about, such as the nature of Canada, Quebec, the Queen. I realized that it might be a good idea to think about what I did believe, if only so I didn't feel quite so dull and passive when Christopher would say, "Well, you know what my view of that is, don't you?"

There was even my handwriting, which I knew wasn't great, but which beside Christopher's was slovenly. I recall Christopher once coming upon me sitting at the typewriter in the English Department office, typing out some application or another, from notes I had made in my usual way: jotting, scratching out, jotting in the margins, drawing arrows, generally making a mess. Christopher began to speak to me and then, noticing on the page before him something so utterly lacking in rational form (or any other), recoiled a step or two and uttered quiet, stricken "ugh," surely from the solar plexus.

And finally, there was even my posture and manners, which, if not exactly slovenly, were at least slouchy, beside Christopher's unfailing courtliness and decorum, and the utter absence from his talk of slang and buzz phrases. My failings in this and other areas, which (with the exception of that one reaction to my notes) Christopher never pointed out, made me want to better myself—though of course for a while I overcompensated and took on something of Christopher's manner, of his hesitant formality, as a substitute for his manners. In doing this I made some of my old friends think that I'd gone crazy. And not just them: I recall once, during this period, having a moonlit conversation with a woman I knew a little and wanted to know more and having her pour out more of her soul to me than I was quite ready for, and wondering what Drummond would say in this situation, and then hearing myself say earnestly and precisely, "Thank you for telling me these things!" At which she just stared and finally said, "What??!" and fled indoors.

Another thing that drew me to Christopher was the fact that he wasn't just Christopher, but a kind of intellectual center who brought together, and invited me into, a whole community of wonderful people— many of whom one couldn't imagine coming together in any other context. There were his immediate friends, Richard Bosley and Mort Ross, and later on Garry Watson and Dick Hoffpauir (who is here tonight). There was the whole network of poems and books and interesting people connected by their association with Winters or Leaves. But most of all there were his other students, particularly those who with Christopher's encouragement had the (to me) thrilling unconventionality to start and to continue The Compass. Here were startlingly smart, dedicated people who were conversant in a common body of writings and critical issues and terms and so had a common basis for critical conversation. It was what just English studies should be but (I've since realized) almost never is. This community also had the sense of solidarity that comes from having a common enemy, a blank, uncritical, Romantic "they." This kind of solidarity can of course be taken too far—I know I assumed some enemies that I hadn't even read—but it was for me, as an undergraduate, at once heady and exciting, and stabilizing.

And finally there was, and is, a compelling quality about Christopher that's harder to define, but which I think of as his constant intimation of something larger, something beyond. Beyond the 16th-century poems we studied there always lurked the greater works: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, the Bible, Aristotle, Homer—whom one of course needed to know (and about all of which Christopher had vivid and memorable things to say). Beyond our classroom discussions and papers was the larger, social mission of literary criticism, of which what we were doing in class was, excitingly, a part. And beyond all our ideas, and beyond literary criticism, was ... what? The religious questions of whence? and whither? and what for? These questions, and the problem of faith in modern life, were never far away from anything Christopher said (which is why he is such an incomparably better teacher of Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, and Bunyan than either his merely atheistical or his complacently Christian colleagues in the English Department). And his engagement with the problems of faith, and of g race, was for me, and I think for all of his students, very moving.

So these are some of the reasons why I didn't go to Law School. And I should mention one more reason: Christopher told me not to, or rather, suggested irresistibly that I could do something else. He didn't advise me directly about this, although he has done so about many other matters—and I'm sure that others here tonight have had Christopher say to you, about your work or life, having clearly thought about you since your last meeting, something like, "Gordon, here's what you need to do ...." But for me the most forceful way that Christopher told me what I needed to do with my life was by simply talking to me as if I were someone who could do something, by sharing with a basically unlearned and uncultured person his reflections on learning and culture—on everything really: theology, music, philosophy—as if I knew enough to be conversing, and even to reciprocate. So that eventually I could actually start to!

I take as an emblem for this process, of Christopher's pulling me along, a small moment I remember from the spring I visited the Drummonds in England, when Christopher was on sabbatical leave outside of Cambridge, reading Dickens and George Eliot and Bunyan. The Drummonds had the use of a strange little car . . .

[From the Drummond table:] That was no car!

CQD: It was--only it was Dutch!

Anyway, we were going to take this non-car to visit Ely Cathedral, and Christopher informed me that once the car was going (I think I have this right), when the motor was still cold, it couldn't be stopped without stalling. For us to start off, I'd have to close the gate to the yard and then, as Christopher was driving away, open the door and jump in. And that's what happened: he started off down the road and said, "Come on, Gordon, get in!" And I did, and away we went, him showing me things along the way.

All these qualities of Christopher's that I've mentioned, and which drew me to him, add up to a definition of a great teacher. I have now taught at three universities, listened to and studied with many notable scholars, and I have yet to encounter another teacher who has all these qualities. Life being as short as it is, and as fraught with accident and chance, I feel fantastically lucky (and I know I speak for all of us here) to have encountered Christopher Drummond, and to be able to go on learning from him. And as a small, imperfect token of our admiration and love, I'd like to present him with another gift (also wrapped in aery gold), from all those whose names are listed inside.

CQD: [Opens and reads out title of book inside.] It says, "Not Always to Be Taught: Essays and Poems Presented to C. Q. Drummond."

The epigraph reads: I take this labor in teaching others, that they should not be always to be taught; and I would bring my precepts into practice; for rules are ever of less force, and value, than experiments. —Ben Jonson

GORDON HARVEY: The book contains pieces sent, in Christopher's honour, from all over: from Janet Bailey, John Baxter, Michael Beatty, Bradin Cormack, Flora Decoteau, Kenneth Fields, John Fraser, Kenneth Graham, Gordon Harvey, Richard Hoffpauir, Tiree MacGregor, Thomas McFarland, Helen Pinkerton, W.B. Piper, Gerald Wandio, Garry Watson, Jim Young, and Meg Young.

CQD: I don't know what to say. Thank you.

* * * * * * * Dessert * * * * * * *

BRADIN CORMACK: I have been asked to read remarks sent by several people. First, Mrs. Robin Thay, whom Christopher has been tutoring for many years:

I am delighted to be informed of the dinner honouring Dr. Christopher Drummond. Although I cannot attend, I would like to send these greetings: Dr. Drummond your instruction, advice, and friendship have meant very much to me in my years at the University. In particular, your superb teaching has helped me gain assurance in writing in speaking. You have helped me devise means of critically analyzing material for both essays and examinations. I am extremely honored to be part of this well-deserved tribute to both your talents and your achievements. Thank you, Dr. Drummond. I wish you all the best in your future activities. Robin Thay

Next, from Leon Craig, professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta:

While I have nothing that would seem appropriate for the collection that you wish to present Prof. C.Q. Drummond on the occasion of his retirement, I do wish to be included among those honouring his qualities as a teacher, scholar, and colleague. For many years now, Sir Christopher (as I affectionately refer to him) has been among my most valued friends. Our regular conversations have been an education for me, as has the thoughtful criticism which he has so generously bestowed on successive drafts of my own written work. I hope to enjoy more of both for many years to come, and wish him every happiness on this evening when you celebrate his academic career.

Leon Craig

And finally a longer piece sent by Richard Bosely, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Alberta and Christopher's longtime friend, entitled "Tribute to a Great Teacher: C.Q. Drummond":

There are two ways of understanding the foundation of teaching and learning—two ways, I mean, which have been developed in our tradition. One of them is shown by Plato; the other, by Aristotle. In the early dialogues Socrates holds that learning is recollection; Socrates, who Christopher thinks is one of the two greatest teachers in the West, says that he knows nothing and, knowing that he doesn't know, is prepared to learn from those who say they do know something. In the Meno Socrates gives a demonstration of how a slave boy can be brought to recognize geometrical truth which, before Socrates lends a hand, the boy would hardly claim to know. Socrates lends a hand by asking questions. Asking good questions springs from a capacity to listen. Christopher too is a good listener and he, like Socrates, asks good questions which plant the sees of fear—the fear, namely, that we don't know as much as we thought we knew.

According to Socrates's view, reincarnation supports learning; for knowledge is already in the soul, needing a teacher only to bring to speech what is already in the soul. In the Theaetetus Socrates speaks as if he were a midwife, helping to deliver Theaetetus of his, of perhaps of their, child—namely an answer to the question of what knowledge is. And perhaps Christopher too, like Socrates, is at once father and midwife, helping his students deliver themselves of their ideas.

On Plato's view of a universal, namely that a universal is self-exemplifying, the universals in the soul, if the ladder of memory be lowered, can climb into discourse by themselves. But I don't think that Christopher has ever held the theory of reincarnation; and due, perhaps, to the influence of Yvor Winters, he is more inclined to Aristotle's view of a universal than Plato's. And this difference makes a difference to the kind of teacher one would be and that Christopher in fact has been. Aristotle, perhaps due to his moderate empiricism, allows that the student comes to the academy with starting points and with capacities in the soul. The student is prepared by virtue of having lived in the world; he comes to the academy with some universals already in the soul. The teacher, by explaining, can make some things actual which already exist in potentiality. So Aristotle lowers that status of dialectic and therefore of conversation in acquiring knowledge.

Christopher has remarkable abilities for both modes of teaching, of conversing and of explaining. He has a perfect sense of reciprocity, being both a close listener and an acute talker. But it is Aristotle's view of a universal that provides a rationale for Christopher's actual practice of teaching: both the path to the universal—the path of eliciting from particulars the general--and the path from the universal to the particular. I have been present in seminars in which Christopher at once helps us come closer to the apprehension of the general—in discussing, for example, a poem by Ben Jonson—and also to come closer to the sensuous content in which the general is enclosed. Metaphor lies on the ways up and down, allowing us a vivid impression of the general. And I still remember Christopher's striking discussion of the line, "Life is a top which whipping sorrow driveth"—a line that shows the wonderful power of metaphor to make itself and the general memorable.

And memory, to return to the theme with which I began, is the great handmaiden of intelligence. Christopher is blessed with a wonderful memory: precise, clear, and, in discussion, both as listener and as talker, decisive. With that faulty we now remember and recall and academic life in pursuit of intelligence and sound judgement, displayed both in his classes, and, as I know best, in conversation. Richard Bosley

BRADIN CORMACK: To this I would like to add some remarks of my own: I have been struck this evening by the singular candour and emotional honesty of the various tributes preceding this one. I take it that these qualities are not surfacing casually, but reflect rather the directness that, in conversation, Christopher both displays and encourages. All of which puts me in a slightly difficult situation, since the remarks that I have prepared will, I think, next to those others, seem dangerously oblique. That difference reflects, in part, my own character, but I would like to think that it is responding also to one particular facet of Christopher's genius as a thinker and teacher.

I was fortunate enough to have Christopher formally as a teacher for three years in high school and four years in university. When I think about his influence on me, however, I do not think of the formal occasions of classroom and syllabus, but more generally of his extraordinary conversation, of which his classroom method is, of course, an extension. Those conversations, as we all well know, are marked by clarity and precision, by intellectual and social generosity, by charity, perhaps, or what Richard Bosley refers to as a perfect sense of reciprocity. But I wonder how many of you would agree with me that there is at the centre of his kind of conversation something that remains mysterious, all but inaudible, certainly indefinable. Charity must be very close to what I mean here, but I want to try to get at it through metaphor—an appropriate choice, I think, Christopher being Christopher.

Entering a conversation with Christopher is rather like entering an unfamiliar house that seems also, somehow, uncannily familiar. As we pass through the door, we turn our attention to the architectural detailing of ceiling and staircase, or, visible through an arch on the left, to a mantle on which a plate stands or a vase. There is a scent of newly oiled wood, let's say, and, coming through the window, a dusty light that feels like memory. We notice other things, how one room flows into another, and how a corridor connects those two rooms to a third. Chiefly, at the very edge of ourselves, we have the impression of being inside: not an unusual feeling until one notices it, something we are not apt often to do. This is the meaning of the scent and the light, of the momentum of one room flowing into another. Being inside pervades the place; and it transcends it. For, when we leave the house, when we re‑enter time outside, we leave and don't leave it: we carry with us, in all of its complexity, that profound sense of being inside, wearing it into the outside, as we might wear a coat. Two ways of finding oneself inside, then, each appropriate to a kind of time.

Being inside a conversation, of course, is infinitely rarer than being inside a house or a coat. Christopher's talk has always asked me, always asks us, to be inside. So I ask you now to join me in a toast to houses and coats, to Christopher's conversation, to Christopher.

KEN GRAHAM: I will read a note sent by Bill Bartley, who teaches at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon:

Dear Christopher: I wish I could be a dinner tonight to join everyone there in honouring you on the occasion of your retirement and to enjoy your company once again. Since I can't be there, I'd like to pass on a few words for you and others to hear. My hope is to praise you sufficiently without embarrassing you, and brevity might guarantee this, but at the risk of embarrassing you anyway, you simply must know that you are the greatest teacher that anyone could have. My incalculable debt to you began accumulating twenty years ago, in your memorable seminar on Shakespeare's sonnets, when I—a callow, callow youth—first encountered the most exceptional kind of "exalted humming" that George Whalley says is something more than just "teaching"—"when we think" he goes on to say, "of the memorable things that we have seen our instructors doing over a literary text, or reflectively over some subtle point of articulation, or across some sweep of time and space, it is as though we were privileged to overhear an interior monologue; we might intervene occasionally to touch the reverberant strings

of it; it did not seem spoken to us; certainly it was not spoken at us."

How do I discharge this debt? By doing my work well—at least with the same energy, generosity and courage, if never the elegant, finely‑tuned and head‑clearing insight in the unmistakable, irreplaceable Drummond mode. You may remember that you also taught me how to make a martini; I may have surpassed you in that, and I'll prove it the next time I'm in Edmonton. Best wishes, Bill Bartley

KEN GRAHAM: And to this I too would like to add a few remarks of my own. This past semester I taught a Milton class for the first time, and I have never felt more keenly the influence Christopher Drummond's teaching has had on me. Again and again I found myself asking questions and making points that I realized I had first heard from Christopher during his astonishing year‑long Milton class, which I took seventeen years ago.

Rather than multiply examples, I want to recall one of my favorite memories of that year, a memory that I think is among my favorites because it captures something of the emotional range that made Christopher's teaching great, and in particular the combination of passionate commitment to literary value with the lively skepticism of a self‑described former village atheist.

On the day I'm thinking of, we were just finishing Paradise Lost. After months spent combing through the poem with us, Christopher introduced the final hundred or so lines. He would read them, as always, and then we would discuss them. But as he read out in his full, expressive voice what Waldock calls "the inimitable close," something happened. He was moved: his voice filled with emotion and, when he ended, he said simply, "Shall we end there?" Although there must have been fifteen or twenty minutes left in the class, Christopher had, I think, decided that, on that day, this was poetry that

left nothing to be said. And, with his example in front of us, I think we understood that.

When I read the end of Paradise Lost to my students last month, I too was moved, and felt once more the giant—and reassuring—influence hovering over my shoulder. I too ended the class early, hoping that the poetry spoke through me as it had through him.

But this is only half the story, the sentimental half. And with Christopher, there's always more. Not long after class ended that day, I was upstairs in the Humanities Centre, where I overheard Christopher's delighted chuckle as he said to a colleague, "I nearly moved myself to tears teaching Paradise Lost today."

So I, too, went upstairs after my Milton class and said to a colleague, "I nearly moved myself to tears teaching Paradise Lost today."

GORDON HARVEY: I have one more item to present, and three more letters to read. Bill Piper writes, from Rice University, that he wishes he could be with us tonight, and he sends for presentation to Christopher his new book, just-published. It's called Common Courtesy in Eighteenth Century Literature, and it is formally dedicated . . . "To C.Q. Drummond." [Presents book to CQD.]

The following was sent by John Ferns, of McMaster University:

Dear Christopher: On your retirement I would like to thank you for introducing me to the poetry and criticism of Yvor Winters, J.V. Cunningham, and Janet Lewis. Also, I thank you for the major part you played in The Compass. For a brief period, we had something like Scrutiny in Canada. Your Milton lectures, which I read in The Compass, really helped me in my own teaching of Milton. I will always remember your excellent lecture at McMaster on Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, as well as your defense of teaching to the Vice-President (Academic) of the University of Alberta. Through you, in addition, I met your students John Baxter, Gordon Harvey, Jim and Meg Young—from whom, and from Betsy Ross, I learned what an inspiring teacher you are.

Finally, I continue to appreciate your story about J.V. Cunningham's estimate of Yvor Winters: "He was the most generous man I have ever known, and the most difficult."

Thank you, Christopher, and may you enjoy your retirement. John Ferns

This comes from Michael Moore, who is currently chairman of the English Department at Sir Wilfred Laurier University:

One afternoon in September 1976 at the University of Alberta, a newly appointed sessional lecturer with a new Ph.D. from Queen's was sitting in his newly assigned English Department office, wondering anew what to say to his first charge of first-year university students. There came a rapping at the open door. On the threshold stood an unfamiliar figure, fixing the occupant with his glitt'ring eye. "I'm Christopher Drummond," spake this stranger, "and you're a student of George Whalley; I want you to tell me about him." I somehow had the nerve to respond to these declarations, "Well, George Whalley has no small talk either."

So began, characteristically, my acquaintance with Christopher. And so it has been over the years whenever our paths have occasionally crossed. No trifling allowed, no discipleship possible, though much respectful fencing enjoyed. Still, my most vivid and grateful recollection of him will always be that first conversation. I got from it a double boon that I'd like to share now with him and others.

We did talk that first day about my own mentor Whalley; and to my surprise, I discovered during the amiable interrogation many things I didn't know I knew. Things that suddenly mattered, needing to be named and valued rather than taken for granted. And unasked questions suddenly in want of answers. The sort of experience, no doubt, that Christopher's friends and former students will recognize as his modus operandi. In my case, his bracing discourse almost certainly saved me at a crucial moment from simply forgetting Whalley's larger significance, from dissolving it into a vague personal nostalgia. My commitment ever since to keeping alive Whalley's thought became stronger than it ever would have been without Drummond's timely intervention.

Likewise a seed long in the flowering was Christopher's other service to me that day. The interview turned to my own work, and then, fortuitously, to my thoughts about teaching. It was soon apparent to both of us that I had no thoughts about teaching. Naturally this didn't stop me from blithering something to the effect that young minds need most to be reassured that any critical interpretation is as good as any other. Christopher listened courteously, and then asked, "Don't you think you should tell your students what you believe?" I was astounded. What an idea! The presumption of it! And yet as the weeks and months and years passed, first at Alberta and then elsewhere, that principle became more and more my practice. Although I also came to realize that it had indeed been the practice of all my own best professors, I have always associated its articulation with someone who was never formally my teacher: Christopher Drummond.

And finally, this comes from Louis Kampf, of M.I.T.:

My friend Chris suffers from the strange belief that the proper study of great literature can turn people into morally responsible human beings. He believes this with a passion and spent many years trying to make this utopian notion a reality. As you might guess, I find this vision of humanism misguided, if not dangerous. Yet I know of no teacher of literature I respect more than Chris. His passion for the teaching of literature is utterly sincere and not an ideological cover for a reactionary political agenda. I wish I had been blessed with such a literature teacher when I was an undergraduate. I would not have bought his ideas, but I would have learned much fighting with him.

When Chris and I were Graduate students at Iowa, we drove to Cedar Rapids one chilly night to see The Bridge on the River Kwai. There is a point in the film where the character played by Alec Guiness realizes that he has been responsible for the death of many people. "What have I done?" he cried out. The scene struck me as being so ludicrous that I laughed. Chris, his head in his hands, was making chuckling sounds—laughter I assumed. After a few moments I realized he was crying. I felt thoroughly ashamed. There was a level of sympathy for misguided morality that I was incapable of feeling.

From all this you might deduce that Chris is capable of deep laughter—very deep. I don't know what I would have done in grad school without his brilliant conversation, his foolish idealism, his loyal friendship. Besides, he made wonderful martinis.

I have never know anyone like Chris. I'll take him. His wrong-headedness is preferable for me, to the good sense of the many dullards. I only wish he'd quit the NAS. Well, you can't have everything. Louis Kampf

TOM MCFARLAND: I suppose I should say something too, since I think I am the only person in the room who is older than Christopher (and therefore wiser), and the only person who wasn't Christopher's student!

I first met Christopher through a mutual friend when he was at Oberlin, studying philosophy I think, but we became friends only later when he was a graduate student at Iowa. We later became colleagues at Western Reserve in Cleveland, thanks to the efforts of W. Powell Jones who was chairman there at the time. Jones was like a lifeguard pulling up drowning people, or people barely afloat on planks, and hiring these unhireable people to teach in his department. Down went Jones's hook and he pulled and pulled and up came Charles Murrah. Down went the hook again, and he pulled and up came Mac Hammond. Down again, and up came Speed Hill and Al Cook. And Christopher Drummond came too, out of graduate school.

At Western Reserve, Christopher and I had offices near one another. Mine was bigger, of course, since I was hired earlier and more advanced in my career. But Christopher's had a lot of light, I remember. And in this office Christopher had an amazing collection of books, as most of you here can well imagine. They covered his entire office, from floor to ceiling. And they were really good books, on the latest topics, especially literary criticism.

CQD: And back then I read them, too!

TOM MCFARLAND: I know! That's my point! I would drop by to visit Christopher in his office every day or two and notice this or that book on the shelf and ask, "What's that?" Christopher would pull it down and tell me a bit about it, or read me something from it. And I would go away and use what he had told me! And then I'd come back another day and ask about another book. In this way I got a kind of education. So you see it's really a lie that I was never Christopher's student. I was, but he never knew it!

JOHN BAXTER: I have here a list of people who could not be here but who have sent their wishes to Christopher tonight: Helen Pinkerton, Grosvenor Powell, Wesley Trimpi, Garry Watson, Michael Beatty, Gerald Wandio, Shannon Murray, Tiree MacGregor, John Fraser, Roger Hornsby, and Betsy Ross. And I have a postcard from one of Christopher's youngest admirers, Tom Baxter:

Dear Mr. Drummond: Here is a postcard to match the vest that Sarah has made for you [shows plaid of Drummond clan on front of postcard]. Apparently the Drummond motto is to go warily; however, I'm sure this will be no deterrent to you to "let it all hang out," as Merle Haggart says—at your party and in your retirement. I'm honoured that my middle name was chosen because it is your first, and I hope that sometime, in university, I will meet someone able to cut through to the truth of a matter the way my father tells me he did meet such a person. Have a great retirement, and plan a visit so that we might discuss Calvin's doctrine and other matters.

Sincerely,

Thomas Christopher Baxter

At this point I would like to follow some advice from Roger Hornsby's letter, which I think sums things up well:

Your party for Christopher is generous and fitting and I wish I could be part of it. He is still one of the brightest, most refreshing men I have ever known. I admire him greatly, not the least because of his devotion to his students. Drink a toast to him for me.

Will you please join Roger, and me, in toasting our friend and teacher, Christopher Drummond.

ALL: To Christopher!

JOHN BAXTER: Finally, we'll hear from Ben Drummond, speaking for Christopher's family.

BEN DRUMMOND: Thank you. Walking on North Clark Street in Chicago recently, I found myself wondering what I might say or read on this occasion, and for some reason, a certain poem came to mind. Not remembering the text exactly, I stepped into a used bookstore hoping to find it, and while looking through the poetry section, I came across three books of used poetry, side by side by side on the shelf, which immediately caught my eye. They were a collection of poems by Ben Jonson, a collection of the early poetry of Yvor Winters, and The Mountain, a collection of poems by Donald Drummond. All in a row —Ben, Yvor, and Drummond— which, as a Drummond named for Ben Jonson and Yvor Winters, I took as a sign, and I bought all three of them.

In reading Donald Drummond I found a poem which struck me as very fitting for this evening, given not only the coincidence of names, but also given that the poet, like my father, was a student and admirer of Yvor Winters. Moreover, the poem, "For Teachers: 1965" captures, I think, the spirit of exchange of knowledge, and, indeed, of roles, between teacher and learner, which my father loves so well.

But before I read it I would like to say just a few words. Alison, Robert, and I agree that Gordon Harvey's words said very well most of what can be said about why we are here tonight. You all mentioned the eagerness with which you faced your next seminar or meeting with him in the Humanities Centre. Alison and I, however, as well as our brother Alex, are in the unusual position of being not only our father's children, but also, like many of you, his former students. The critical difference, however, is that you all presumably chose to be in his classroom!

My father taught high-school English at Tempo School, founded by Bradin Cormack's father, which was also the school where he sent us, and as it was a small school, we had no choice but to be in his English class in grades 11 and 12. An interesting experience, to say the least, and certainly not without significant conflicts and stresses. The course was more or less an extension over two 9‑month years of freshman English lit and composition, and I think Alison would agree with me that, to the extent that either of us has any formal understanding of literature and of what it is closely to read a text, it is thanks in large part to our father. His classes in high school prepared us, in ways that I think we fully appreciated only after the fact, for our lives as undergraduates in particular, and as users of language and readers of texts in general.

Many of the people I grew up with knew, or seemed to know, at an early age what they wanted to do when they grew up. Although it was the source of some frustration and anxiety over the years, my parents explicitly refused to direct their children's lives, and this is something I have come to appreciate as an adult (although it is also probably why I am almost 30 and still don't know what I want to do when I grow up). Out of that freedom, however, we all learned one lesson in common, one for which Alison, Alex, Ian, Andrew, Robert, Annie and I owe our father the greatest thanks, and it is this: an approach, which each of us has adapted in his or her own way— the extension of his particular and odd combination of analysis and play to the living of ordinary life.

We have all been taken many times down the Christopher Drummond didactic path: Here is an issue. Here is what has been thought about it. Now, what is it that you think? Are you interested in other ways of thinking about it? Let us look at some. In your lives as in mine, many matters were probed and investigated in this manner. But for me, the influence of my father's view of literature, the world, and its issues became clearest when I recognized that I had learned to take others, and, more importantly, to take myself, down the same road, and that a close version of his had become the basis of my own engagement with many aspects of the world.

While I may bemoan two involuntary years as a teenager in my own father's classroom, I recognize that having been a student of Christopher Drummond has helped me understand what it is to be his son, and to recognize the full and admirable worth, as I think all my siblings do, of what a lifetime of instruction has brought to our understanding of the world, and of our own second selves.

For Teachers: 1965

They are insoucient, and yet they are themselves.

They are what we have always hoped to see

And yet so different: our new mystery;

Different from us, yet neither gnomes nor elves.

The products of our early energy,

They own their energetic second selves

Within a world I did not hope to see.

They keep their hope; they never bow a knee.

The pessimists who do not probe the young;

Who damn their brief experiment with time,

Will never find their own time's oversung,

And hear the assonance of rhyme.

I love these young. I listen to them too.

I understand them, or hope I do.

JOHN BAXTER: Christopher?

CQD: Thank you—thank you all.

TOM MCFARLAND: They really love you, Christopher.

CQD: So it seems.

***