Hugo Schwyzer

The newest carnival of the feminists is up here.

J.K Gayle at Speakeristic tags me with a meme: name the thirteen teachers or mentors who most influenced your life, and offer a brief explanation of how they did so. The teachers can be professors, parents, or long-dead writers whose work has shaped you. Here goes:

1. E. Alison Moore Schwyzer, my mother. I see so much of the world through her eyes still; she gave me a love of poetry, a love of history, and a love of the spoken word. Hers were the first lectures I heard (on long car trips, she gave her two boys and their dachsund the same lectures she gave to her classes at Monterey Peninsula College), and I still often find myself imitating her style.

2. Hubert Rudolf Georg Schwyzer, my late father. He taught me many things, but mostly that masculinity and gentleness are indeed deeply compatible, and that in the end, decency and beauty and love are what matter most. I sat in on many of his lectures at UCSB and elsewhere over the years, and some of his mannerisms have made it into my style.

3. Margaret Roeding Moore Chickering, my maternal grandmother. “Peggy”, as she was known, was a renaissance woman. She taught me how to write sincere and witty thank-you notes; how to load and shoot a .22 rifle; how to plant bulbs; how to master a complex table setting. Equally at home riding trails on horseback or hosting a Junior League tea, she taught me that duty and joy were not mutually exclusive. And that’s a wonderful lesson to learn.

4. Elisabeth von Schuh Schwyzer, my paternal grandmother. “Elsa” was born in Vienna at the dawn of the twentieth century. She was a relentless bundle of energy and of shifting opinions, an impetuous, inexhaustible woman, she had been a passionate adolescent Communist; a close and devoted lifelong friend to the philosopher Karl Popper; a farm wife who milked cows and raised hogs in rural England. She wasn’t Jewish, but she married my grandfather, who was. His conversion to Catholicism wasn’t enough to protect the family after Hitler’s takeover of Austria, and it was her determination that enabled them to make their way to safe haven in Britain. She returned to Vienna after the war, and worked as a teacher into her late 80s.

5. Robert Douglass, my third and fourth-grade elementary school teacher. “Mr.D” was a great big bear of a man, resembling a lumberjack more than an elementary school teacher. Hungry for male attention in the years after my parents’ divorce, Mr. D gave it to me. I was an inordinately clumsy boy, but Mr. D taught me how to make things with my hands — my mother still has the cutting board I made for her in 1977; when I look at it, I can feel his patient hands guiding my own.

6. Peter Lyon, my high school English and Social Studies teacher. Insisted his students call him by his first name. Ran a magnificently chaotic and ambitious course called “Five Cities”, a course in which, over the span of an entire school year, his students explored the art. culture, politics and vision of five places: ancient Athens, renaissance Florence, Enlightenment Paris, early twentieth-century Moscow, and our own Carmel by-the-Sea. We kept journals, and we wrote about everything imaginable in them — nearly 25 years later, I still have those journals. Peter’s comments were immensely encouraging to me; indeed, I still reread them. He was the first teacher (outside of my family) I ever had who told me he loved me. I loved him too, and I’ve never forgotten him.

7. Richard Fletcher, my high school biology teacher. “Fletch” is still alive, and just on the cusp of retiring after decades at Carmel High. Much of my commitment to environmentalism and animal rights was nurtured in his class, but he too was a magnificent mentor. Yes, he made me learn botany (I had nightmares about xylems and phloems for years), but he also was prone to giving spontaneous, memorable life lessons. One day after class he pulled me aside and told me, “Hugo, you need to take better care of yourself. You’re an addict in the making, and I’m worried about you.” I don’t know what he saw or how he saw it, but he was the first person to name my addictive streak.

8. Marcia Gambrell Hovick, who was my theater teacher and second mother from the time I was seven until I was eighteen. The Children’s Experimental Theater in Carmel was my second home through my childhood and adolescence. Marcia didn’t make me into an actor, as I’ve not performed since I left high school, but she gave me confidence and a voice that could reach the back of a room. Whatever fleeting charisma I seem to possess when I’m lecturing is largely due to eleven years of her guidance. Marcia is still teaching in her late 80s, and is an institution on the Monterey Peninsula. Every time I speak in public, I carry her with me.

9. Leon Litwack, the legendary American history professor at Cal. If you were a student at Berkeley in the last forty years, and you didn’t take Litwack’s intro course, you missed out. One of the most naturally gifted lecturers I have ever heard; his cadence and rhythm inspired me tremendously, and I find myself aiming for that same delivery in my own classes.

10. Norma Alarcon, who taught a Chicana Writers course I took in 1988. I was the only white guy in the class, and I was talkative and difficult — but also eager. I’m sure I drove her up the wall, but she was patient with me, and did more to help me see the depths of my own privilege than any professor I’d had before or since.

11. Father Al Moser, CSP; my favorite priest at Newman Hall in Berkeley. A wonderful, kind Paulist, I met with him often before and after my baptism and confirmation. He heard my first confession, and said to me once “Hugo, you know, God wants you to be happy.” Those words may well have saved my life, and they certainly have provided me a great deal of comfort over the years.

12. Scott Waugh, my graduate adviser. Fifteen years ago, if Scott had told me to walk through the fires of hell to bring him a latte, I would have done so — not that he ever made those sort of requests. A gifted teacher, he was as exceptionally patient with my insecurities as he was with my pompous and occasionally florid writing style. He once told me that I was only allowed to use one adverb per page, a restriction that nearly killed me but did a great deal of good.

13. Philip Arthur Schwyzer. I am not ashamed to say that my younger brother is one of my heroes. We are very different men, and “Pip” (as he is nicknamed in the family) is one of the most deeply moral human beings I’ve ever met. That’s not my way of saying that I’m deeply immoral, merely that for most of my life, I’ve been guided more by sentiment and impulse than by deep conviction. My brother has been the opposite; he was the one who first gave me the phrase I often use here on this blog about the importance of “matching one’s language and one’s life.” I still learn much from his example.

I tag no one and everyone.