T. Harry
Williams Center for Oral History Collection
INTERVIEWEE NAME: Aubrey
Williams #
4700. 0899
IDENTIFICATION: LSU Alumnus,
former Professor of English at Yale and Univ. of Florida
INTERVIEWER: Julian
Pleasants
PROJECT: WWII, LSU
History
DATES:
11 September 1997 FOCUS DATES: 1922-1997
ABSTRACT:
T 1279
Williams born and raised in Jacksonville,
Florida; education of relatives; Williams mother important influence; family
lives for a time in Montgomery, Alabama; Williams works as Piggly Wiggly bag
boy; the Great Depression; father's problems; Williams's school days; Williams
majors in journalism at LSU and works as police reporter for the Morning
Advocate; unable to report racist police behavior; attitude toward labor
issues at paper; becomes ethically disillusioned with journalism; Williams's
athletic career; originally on football scholarship at LSU, but quits team
after one year; no regrets about choosing LSU over Chapel Hill; LSU freshman
hazing; lives in Tiger Stadium; makes lifelong friend, Herman Armel, a Brooklyn
Jew, in the dorm; freshmen taken to whorehouse; military atmosphere; strict
campus rules; double standard for women; Williams joins Sigma Chi, meets future
wife at a party there; Williams courts and marries Bette Sue Dougherty of Baton
Rouge; marries on impulse in Magnolia, Mississippi at urging of friend Mary
Carolyn Bennett; history of wife's family in Baton Rouge; honeymoon in New
Orleans; couple moves off campus; Reveille staff frequents Brechtel's; Williams takes every English course he can;
freshman English with Robert Heilman; writes essay about visit to Key West with
high school sweetheart's family; studies with Cleanth Brooks at LSU; describes Brooks; Williams writes article
protesting wartime shutdown of Southern Review as belt tightening
measure, pointing out Mike the Tiger is more expensive; discussion of Brooks,
Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Review; Tom Kirby chair of English
Department; Eric Vogelin in political science; Rudolf Heberle in sociology; T.
Harry Williams; Huey Long's support of football team and band; loss of many
great faculty members as a result of low pay; Warren's poetry and fiction;
Brooks's new critical stance; The Well Wrought Urn; Warren at Yale;
Cleanth Brooks home on the outskirts of New Haven; Warren mows Brooks's pasture
with a scythe; Warren as a storyteller; Warren more liberal than other southern
agrarians; Katherine Anne Porter gives a reading from Ship of Fools in
Baton Rouge, Williams sits at her feet; Porter's close friendship with Cleanth
and Tinkum Brooks; Porter changes clothes at Williams's New Haven apartment,
admires hunting horn, which he gives to her despite the fact it is a family
heirloom; Williams experiences with The Reveille; John J. Tigert speaks
on campus, Williams is critical of him in The Reveille; later he has to
be interviewed by Tigert for a Rhodes Scholarship, which he does not get;
Tigert asks what he thinks of T. S. Eliot and New Criticism and asks no further
questions when Williams is positive about both; Williams glad in retrospect not
to have gone to England with two small children; opportunity to follow Brooks
to Yale follows soon after; Williams addresses campus racism in Reveille;
fraternities well-chaperoned and well-behaved in Williams's day; no binge
drinking; fraternity paddling; ROTC at LSU; officer candidate school at Fort
Knox; specific ROTC officers; Battle Training near Elizabethtown, Kentucky;
bunkmate Harry Leopold; Williams regrets not donating his Faulkner collection
to LSU; discusses how much he values his LSU experiences; goes to graduate
school at Yale while on the G. I. Bill; Gillis Long and Walter Parlange
veterans at LSU; scholar Al Kernan also
at Yale on G.I. Bill; campus housing for veterans; tank corps; Williams's
experience as a young officer; grueling training; requests transfer to flight
school and is sent to Sheppard Field in Texas; Captain McGee;
T 1280
Wichita Falls, Texas; flying piper cubs;
Fort Sill; Fort Jackson, North Carolina; Nuremberg, Germany; Bad Toltz; General
Ernest Harmon; Kaserne; Tegern See; Aachen; Anzio; General Schact; Stenson
airplane; the Siegfried line; Nuremberg trials; Hess and Van Papen; General
Mark Clark; trains crossing the river Lintz during the Russian
occupation; Munich; Vienna; Bamberg; chauffeuring Gen. Clark through Vienna;
Williams leaves the service in June 1946; Williams describes Rudolf Hess at
Nuremberg trials as having glaring eyes like Chaucer's Pardoner; Himmler and
Goering; International Military Tribunal; war crimes; My Lai comparison;
slaughter in Katyn Forest; V-J day; Williams asked to re-enlist in
Counter-Intelligence Corps, but declines because his second child has just been
born; Williams in favor of Truman's decisions to use atomic weapons in Japan;
son's military career; grandson a Marine; integration of military; Williams's
admission to Yale under Brooks's sponsorship; requirements at Yale; Louis
Martz; Fred Pottle; Professor Prouty; Maynard Mack; Williams decision to write
on Pope with Mack; dissertation on “The Dunciad” wins John Addison Porter
Prize; rejected by Yale Studies in English, probably for political reasons
involving a grudge against Mack, but accepted and published by both Methuen and
LSU Press. Williams completes Ph.D. in
1952; process of becoming full faculty at Yale; the Williamses have four more
children while at Yale; teaching loads at Yale; Mack the editor of the
Twickenham Edition of Alexander Pope's works; John Butt; Emile Audra; Williams
becomes a Twickenham editor; Williams applies for a Fulbright and a Guggenheim
fellowship and spends a year in England; course Williams taught at Yale;
Bayswater Hotel, England; cottage in Kent; commuting to London; Geoffrey
Tillotson; Bonamy Dubré; Williams meets T. S. Eliot; Sir Harold Williams,
editor of Jonathan Swift's work; Williams's youngest son born in England;
Williams pays doctor to sit and drink Scotch while midwife delivers baby;
Williams leaves Yale for the University of Florida in 1958; one reason for
leaving is that his children can get a good public education in Florida and he
could not afford private tuition for six children in New Haven; homesick for
Florida; friend James Osborne at Silliman College, Yale, encourages him to go
home if that's where he really wants to be;
fishing very important to Williams and
the fishing would be better in Florida; size and structure of Florida's English Department; courses Williams taught
at Florida; Johns committee seeking out communists and homosexuals; Senator
Charlie Johns; twenty-six faculty members forced to resign; Williams leaves for
Rice for better money and higher rank; Alan Mackillop urges him to come to
Rice; Rice well-funded, but Williams
did not like Houston and there was no place to fish; Williams accepts offer to
return to Florida as a graduate research professor; compares students at Yale,
Rice and Florida; limitations of
Florida students; refuses to grade more easily for the sake of making
affirmative action work; kicks two graduate students out of program for
plagiarism; dissatisfaction with Florida and its inability to attract or place
quality students; Dean Grinter; Williams builds seventeenth and eighteenth
century collection for library; goes to President Reitz in 1961 to ask for more
for books; Williams proud to have placed all his graduate students who went on
the job market; extreme dissatisfaction with the state of higher education;
lack of contact between highly paid scholars and students; women in Florida's
English department; minority faculty; tragedy of Council Bly, an
African-American faculty member who was a personal friend; Bly hired without
proper qualifications, but later fired for homosexuality; Williams forms
bi-racial committee to defend Bly; Bly
found murdered after he is missed at a farewell party thrown by Williams;
Williams believes all students should learn standard English; opposed to
affirmative action; resigns from Florida in 1986 in protest of the direction in
which higher education is headed; objects to hiring stars who do only research
when you could hire three teaching Ph.D.s with the same money; adamantly
against faculty union and resultant political maneuvering; believes departments
and faculty should be held accountable; denial of tenure to faculty, then no
mention of it in letters of reference angers him; Williams takes academic
dishonesty seriously; students not required to write enough; technology; against large lecture classes with graduate
student graders, at least for subjects like English; universities not really
businesslike enough, in the true sense of the word, not getting the job done;
makes comparison to medical profession.
TAPES: T 1279, T 1280 TOTAL
PLAYING TIME: T 1279, 90 min.; T 1280, 90 min.
# PAGES TRANSCRIPT: 96
RESTRICTIONS:
COMMENTS: Tapes also deposited with the University of Florida's Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.