"I never read lectures, and rarely talked from notes," clarifies
Clayton, retiring this spring after 55 years of university teaching, 47 at
Minnesota. "So it was constantly a matter of interactivity between my mind and
the students' minds. I'll miss that. There's no substitute."
Students thrived within that intense engagement (Clayton has
won the University’s top undergraduate and graduate teaching awards, as well as
CLA's). And they don't forget him. "He was tough—tough in a good way," says
Hazelden Betty Ford CEO Mark Mishek (BA 1974). "I took every class that I could
take from him. I found him to be a tremendous teacher: very passionate about
what he was doing. He brought Shakespeare to life in ways that I'd never seen
before."
Hollywood screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (BA
1985) also took Shakespeare with Clayton, and went on to enroll with him in the
Literature in London Program, a quarter in England studying Shakespeare and contemporary
British drama (Clayton taught the program in 1981, '84, and '91). Clayton describes
personally attending 100 theatrical performances in the spring of '84: "The
students didn't get so near that," he reports with a smile, "but they did get
in the habit of going regularly to the theater and thinking it was an important
part of their experience there." Burns—co-producer of An Inconvenient Truth and the writer behind Bourne Ultimatum and The
Informant!—states it plainly: "He had a huge influence on my life."
Even as phased retirement eased his class load, Professor
Clayton embraced teaching opportunities. Last spring he led a directed study on seventeenth-century poetry for six English doctoral students. "His
extensive feedback on my papers helped me improve my style and precision
immensely," said graduate student Asa Olson, "and consequently helped me become
a better writing instructor."
Another, Marc Juberg, has chosen to work closely with
Clayton since arriving in 2012. "I for one am a much better reader for having
studied under him," he maintains. "Dr. Clayton urges students of poetry to pay
closer attention to what texts have to say for themselves. He reminds us that
responsible literary criticism must not move from context to text in a
self-confirming way, but must rather listen carefully to how the text's unique
music, together with its discordances, helps to constitute its own context for
interpretation."
Clayton's dedication to literature has not flagged, and
he expects to continue reading, publishing, and presenting work. Blunt when
talking about himself ("I like plays and poetry, I expect, for the same reason
I tend to write articles rather than books: the ADHD"), he expands to learned
and witty paragraphs on the subject of, say, seventeenth-century minor poet
Sir John Suckling, or twenty-first-century rising star playwright Mike
Bartlett. (More from Clayton on the latter here.)
Beyond the seventeenth century, Clayton also has a
great interest in Classics: He helped found the University's interdisciplinary Classical
Civilization Program and chaired it for two decades before it became a track
within Classical and Near Eastern Studies last year. (The Tom Clayton Scholarship
in Classical Civilization was inaugurated December 2006, by former student
Victoria Keller.) "The satisfaction I've had in my research," he asserts, "is
in working with extraordinarily gifted writers, certainly some of the best in
the English language, who had a lot to say about the human condition in the
most eloquent possible way . . . and the most ambiguous. Not wholly ambiguous, in the sense in which ambiguity is a
fault, but in the sense in which ambiguity is a term for plurisignification."
Born in New Ulm, and raised in small towns in "Minnesconsin," Clayton studied at the University of Chicago before transferring to the U and
graduating summa cum laude in English
and Latin. He was awarded the prestigious Rhodes scholarship to Oxford
University, in England, where his work toward a B.Litt. in English was advanced
to doctoral status, and he earned his D.Phil. in 1960. (His time at Oxford bracketed
two years in the Army, 18 months based in Germany.) A tenure-track instructor
at Yale and an assistant and associate professor at UCLA, he returned to
Minnesota and joined the English faculty in 1968. "My late wife Ruth [Madson]
and I were both natives as well as University alumna and alumnus," he says, "and
thought Minnesota was a great place to bring up children."
For almost 20 years he helped select and coach nominees
on the University's Rhodes Scholarship Interviewing Committee: One of them,
English major Clay Jenkinson, in 1977 ended up winning Rhodes and Marshall
Scholarships and a Danforth (Graduate) Fellowship. Jenkinson is now Director of
The Dakota Institute through the Lewis & Clark Fort Mandan Foundation; you
may have seen him on PBS' The Roosevelts documentary. "It is absolutely certain that I would not have been a Rhodes Scholar without
his direct intervention and encouragement," asserts Jenkinson, who describes Clayton's
teaching as life-changing. "His classroom style was perfect: brilliant
lecturettes, witty digressions, Socratic questioning of students, sudden flashes
of genius about English poetry and the world of the Renaissance. One could
never come to class and just sit and absorb what he was doing. It was English
literature as a contact sport."
In 1978 Professor Clayton received a Guggenheim
Fellowship, and CLA made him Scholar of the College from 1989 to 1992. He
served more than two decades in the CLA Assembly and University Senate, sitting
on and chairing numerous committees. In 1999, he was awarded the University's
highest honor, a Regents Professorship, for service, scholarship, and that exceptional
dedication to student development.
Two of Clayton's PhDs, Linda Anderson (PhD 1984) and
Janis Lull (PhD 1983), instigated the publication of a 2002 festschrift of
essays, A Certain Text: Close Readings
and Textual Studies on Shakespeare and Others in Honor of Thomas Clayton. "The
genesis of that was some good-hearted souls who thought I deserved such a thing.
I was about to become 70 years old," Clayton notes drily. "Probably everybody
thought I wouldn't live much longer, so it'd better be now rather than later."
This spring, he departs campus with some reluctance—but
also with a feeling of optimism about his long-time home. "I would like to say,"
he advances, "that the English department has been the beneficiary of new blood
that's very creative and academically productive and scholarly—and also
good-natured and likely to do a lot of good for the future of the department
and the University."
Will his retirement include the embrace of new non-academic
pursuits? "There aren’t any non-academic interests," scoffs Clayton with a
straight face, enjoying the provocation. "Everything is grist for the mill of
the intellect. 'Academic' is not as confined to scholasticism as some people
think."
The wind lifts his paper cup, and he jumps up to retrieve
it. "One thing I look forward to is seeing a lot of people that I haven't had
much opportunity to see," he says, returning to the table. "And they're all
over the place." He's still in touch with classmates from Oxford, as well as
students and colleagues from his years at UCLA, among others. "I would describe
myself as a gregarious loner," Clayton remarks briskly, "but I'm very much
attuned to other people, whose company I richly enjoy."
There was that day in 1967, for example, when a student
showed up at his office and asked if he'd like to hear "your madrigal." He
assented, of course. She called in two more students, and, with herself on
guitar, the three performed. (First line: "The Tin God sits upon his perch,
Alleluia!") As Professor Clayton remembers, "It was a satirical representation,
but a rather warm one, of my teaching style.
"It was called 'Omnibigmouth.'" Still pleased at the
students' sauce, he laughs into the sun.
