Best Man

The Love of a Mentor

by Lyman Grant

I will plant companionship thick as trees along the rivers of America,

and along the shores of the Great Lakes, and all over the

prairies.

I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s

and along the shores of the Great Lakes, and all over the

necks,

By the love of comrades,

By the manly love of comrades.

—Walt Whitman

My friendship with William A. Owens, the man who was willing to be my mentor, began 13 years before I met him. One spring night in 1963, my mother again lost her temper and began whipping me with a leather belt. I was only l0 years old, but I knew that this night her whipping would stop. I yanked the belt from her, and she never tried to whip me again.

My friendship with Bill deepened six years later. My mother had been dead for a year. In a blizzard of mutual haired, my father and I fought over her memory and what she meant to us. I threw him against the kitchen wall, held him by the collar, and for the first time in my life saw fear in his eyes.

By the time I entered the University of Texas, I knew that I had failed both of my parents. I was Lyman Winstead Grant, Jr., and quite aware of what I should accomplish. I should major in business management and become a personnel director like my father, I should join the ROTC, and my father, a retired Lieutenant Colonel, could proudly pin his own Lieutenant’s bars upon my shoulders. It was 1971 and I would do none of these things.

By the time I met Bill Owens in 1976, I was a lost young man with fear in my eyes and a hole in my chest. From the time I was a junior in high school, I had been emotionally on my own. Without knowing it, I had no parents. Because I was independent, rebellious, contemptuous, diffident, secretive of my talents, I attracted no adults who looked out for me, cared for me, listened to me, taught me. I desperately needed an older man, a man with authority, to tell me that what I felt was undestandab1e, that what I desired was good and possible, that what I had done in my family relationship was acceptable.

All I knew was what I had read in Shakespeare, Thoreau and Plato, on the one hand, and Hemingway and Fitzgerald on the other. I identified with the wounded men the latter wrote about, but hoped against hope that I could find the wisdom of the former. God, I was lost. I could see lights in the distance, but saw no path at my feet. If I believed my father, I would never find it. In one of our many arguments, my father shouted that I would never be a writer because it was not in my genes to be one.

Then I met Bill Owens, and my life changed. I was 22 and had enrolled in graduate school in English without my father’s knowledge. Bill was 70 years old and recently retired as dean and professor emeritus from Columbia University. Having just published his 11th book, he was returning to Texas A&M as its writer-in-residence, where he had begun his college teaching career 30 years earlier, to begin writing his 12th book. When he arrived, I did not know the range of his work or the awards he had won. Nor did I know that he had been born in a family of poor dirt farmers in Northeast Texas, that his father died the day Bill was born, that he had struggled against all odds to get an education and become a writer.

I knew only that in the1940s and ’50s he had been the protégé of Roy Bedichek, the author of one of my favorite books, Adventures With a Texas Naturalist. When I volunteered to be Bill’s graduate assistant, I thought that I might learn something about Texas and nature; I never dreamed I was meeting a man who had overcome almost every obstacle life presented him, who was dedicated to teaching other young men to do the same. I did not know that I was meeting the man who would initiate me into manhood.

Now that I have become involved with the men’s movement, I understand what I experienced. As men like Robert Bly have explained, a boy must go through several stages to become a man, stages our society does not make clear. Growing up, a young boy will bond with and separate from his mother, then bond with and separate from his father. As the man begins his career, if he is lucky, he will find or be found by a mentor, what Bly calls “the male-mother.”

I prefer the term “male-mother.” The word “mentor” connotes a purely professional relationship between master and apprentice. The mentor in the usual sense is someone in a position of authority, such as the vice-president in a business or a professor in a university, who takes an interest in the work of younger colleagues. Mentors will discuss with the young protégés problems of a strictly professional nature; sometimes, mentors will serve as conduits to information or to other influential professionals. The male-mother performs all these, but he also nurtures the young man, cares for his entire being, his intellect and his soul.

One of the first lessons Bill Owens taught me was that success need not be bought by bartering joy. I had committed myself to write a tedious and meaningless thesis, but being the son of a personnel director, I thought success lay in boredom. Through Bill’s example and his candid conversations, I learned the difference between the academic mind and the creative mind. I knew which I warned to develop in myself and in my students. I knew which Bill believed I had a talent for. A few months later, when I read J. Frank Dobie’s statement about dissertations’ being the transference of bones from one grave to another, I understood. I wrote the chairman of the department, asking to change thesis advisors and topics.

The lessons have continued as Bill tries to move me beyond thinking like a writer to loving like a man. In a conversation last year, we talked about the teacher’s responsibilities to the whole student, not just to his or her intellect. He told me of a time 40 years ago when a student appeared at his house. “I’ve come to tell you I’m killing myself,” the student told him. “I had to drop everything. I had to stay with him and talk, no matter how long.” Bill told me, Bill’s crystalline eyes told me more. Although Bill was 83, retired for more than a dozen years, at that moment he was face-to-face with that desperate student. He had never stopped loving him, caring for his development. Their talk had helped. The student graduated and led a happy, successful life.

Bill Owens’ ability and willingness to help young men (and he has helped dozens) is one of the wonders of this world, an example of how Nature compensates for loss. Orphaned by his father’s death, he grew up in a strong matriarchy. From this early experience, Bill discovered the importance of older men in the lives of younger men. Throughout his life, he searched for and found several men who recognized in him his own good heart and curious mind.

In his book, Three Friends, Bill writes of a time when he turned to Bedichek, not for professional advice, but for nurturing, care, understanding. During the Depression, Bill traveled to the prison at Sugar Land to collect black folk songs. Instead of finding song, Bill discovered institutionalized racism. He drove straight to Austin, awoke Bedichek, and talked with him long into the night. “1 had never heard anyone so sympathetic to the Negro, or so concerned over the Negro question,” Bill writes. “He helped me understand a lesson I had begun to learn that day: to a collector, people must be more important than their folklore.” This was a lesson that would eventually lead Owens to become a writer instead of a folklorist.

As a writer, Bill has devoted much attention to the rites of passage necessary to become a man, the development of a strong sense of character, of values and integrity. His third novel, Look to the River, about a young country boy in the 1920s, is a direct exploration of the mentor protégé relationship. Although his character, young Jed, has found surrogate parents who will care for him, he has no chance to grow to his potential until he meets traveling John. Because of his fear and his innocence, Jed makes mistakes that, without John’s aid, would have hurt him greatly. Toward the end of the novel, Jed asks, “How come you done this for me, John?” John replies, almost as Bill might reply to my same question, “It ain’t easy, being a boy like you, so somebody’s got to help — somebody that’s been through it I’m old now, but a long way back I went through it— not the same, but close enough.” In one of my copies of Look to the River, Bill has written. “To Lyman Grant, a Jed of sorts.”

The influence of a male-mother is broad and deep; the most important ways are personal, not professional. Although I was deeply honored when he asked me to be the co-editor of the volume of letters by Roy Bedichek, his mentor. I hold just as dear the smaller kindnesses Bill showed me. He talked with me about women and sex. He recited poetry with me. He told me of times when he was frightened and hopeless about his writing. He gave me his volume of Watt Whitman’s poetry and wrote inside, “I am now giving you this book because I want you to love it.” We walked through fields of wildflowers, and he told me what Bedichek had to say about them. He complimented me by soliciting my opinion on his works in progress. Most important, he listened to me talk endlessly, pointlessly, until I had found myself.

In finding myself, I let go of my father. I was given a choice of what kind of man I wanted to be. Over the years, Bill and I had often discussed his experiences in World War II. Since his experiences and opinions were so dramatically different from my father’s, I listened carefully. When my father was drafted, he was offended and outraged. He viewed being a private as a personal insult and struggled single-mindedly to become an officer. He was proud be spent the entire war behind a desk in Nashville1 Tennessee. Bill, on the other hand, volunteered and served most of the war as a sergeant, much of it in the Pacific Theater. My father and Bill even admired different generals. My father greatly admired Douglas MacArthur, while Owens praised Walter Krueger as the common soldier’s general. Bill’s latest book, Eye-Deep in Hell, about his experiences in World War II, is often critical of MacAuthur’s pomposity.

The contrast between the two men — my father and my mentor — became primarily a contrast in values. One man was elitist, the other democratic; one selfish, the other dutiful; one timid and safe, the other brave and adventurous. I knew whose values I admired and could follow.

My friendship with Bill Owens, therefore, meant that one day I would recognize that by the age of 17 I had overcome the hold my parents had on me. My will to know myself was stronger than theirs to confine me. It has taken me 20 years to understand and accept it.

A small, but personally significant act finally cut the chains. Fully aware of the importance of his suggestion, when it came time to type the title page of the book we edited together, Bill suggested that I drop the Jr., after my name. In this seemingly trivial act, I claimed a name and an identity that had always been denied me. I was no longer Lyman Jr., pale reflection of my father. Instead, I stole my father’s name from him. I did not know who this new Lyman Grant was, but whoever he was, I was he, and despite his raising, he had his name on a book.

In one of the Calamus poems Bill and I read together, Whitman writes “Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting. / The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon’d.” So it was with me. Although my father and I began to accept each other and understand each other’s differences — I was at his side when he died two years ago — we finally released each other to live our separate lives.

My father and I seldom spoke about my writing; only once did we speak about Bill Owens. I began talking about the process of getting books published and how grateful I was to Bill for asking me to work with him, and how much I learned from him because he included me in all stages of publication. I talked too much, and the next thing I noticed was that my 75-year-old father had stepped into the adjoining room, slacked-shouldered, head bent. Unmistakably, he was crying and hiding his tears from me. I said no more, then or the few remaining years that my father lived.

At that moment, my father realized he had lost me. Little did he know that he had lost me years before, when he decided that since I would not emulate him, he would not encourage me in anything else. It troubles me that my father would cry about the love another man gave me. I did not want to hurt him. But if it took my father’s tears for me to know Bill and appreciate what he has given to me, I would make my father cry and cry again.