Tribute to George S. Fayen, Jr. (1931-2023)

Here's my tribute to the best teacher I ever had. And I've had good teachers. From my father, through Brad McAdon at the University of Memphis (the last pure teacher I ever had, and ever will have), the best teachers have overwhelmed me and inspired me with knowledge and passion. It must be a dozen teachers at OPRF, including Richard Blackburn, Paul Noble, Richard Zabransky, and Jessica Young. Many others, Mr. Neumer among them.

But in August 1999 I traveled East to New Haven, CT. By advice from an upper-classman, I enrolled in George Fayen's English 125 course at Yale University. It was a full year of the major English poets. It's the best class I've ever taken, and I can't imagine a better one. In almost twenty years, I've taught nothing even close to the significance of what George Fayen taught us: Chaucer, Spenser, Donne; Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Yeats. Read carefully, ye students, writers, readers, and teachers of literature, to the obituary of George Fayen. He is the most pure and effective teacher I've ever encountered, and we will not see his like again.

The greatest lesson Professor Fayen taught me was to abandon the thesis statement. Do not assume that you know the ending before you begin. This was the single most profound lesson I've ever learned in my life, and, to me, it is permanent wisdom. Goals and plans are for chumps. The worst thing about making a plan or a goal, is that you can achieve it. Much better to go for the most difficult thing you can possibly imagine. The only way you "progress," you go forward, is that you encounter something you can eventually master, but not right now. So you have to work on it. Start with the poets, and you could do much worse than the sequence of Chaucer to Yeats.

To be sure, my Yale education was not perfect. There are important authors that are a bit beyond my range. The first amongst those is Nathaniel Hawthorne. But what kind of teacher would meet you twice a week, far more prepared than you are. Mind you, you are 18 years old, and now I learn that Professor Fayen was in his late 60s when he taught me. He reads far better than you do.

You come to class with the book, but George Fayen begins talking. and he knows the works better than you do. That is the best relationship between teacher and student. The one memory I can give you here of Fayen's instruction is that he used the word "concatenation," and similar words, regularly. Only much later did I understand the word "concatenation," if I still do understand it-- the movement forth of arguments (?).

Ok, my beloved George Fayen, the prince of my soul as a teacher -- for he taught me first to seek, and not to conquer -- once you learn the wisdom of the quest, the destiny rather than the destination, your life has changed permanently. You want to find the most difficult thing that you can possibly master, and eventually one finds several potential outlets for one's genius.

I took George Fayen's class for one year before I read Emerson with Pamela Schirmeister. I have posted my writings about Emerson and Melville on this site. I read Blake in high school with Mr. Zabransky, and D. H. Lawrence, and so I had a background in English rebellionism. The "Satanic" aspect of Milton's Paradise Lost. But I read Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth (the most important poets--Donne and Yeats, I believe, are secondary to that tier) with George Fayen.

Fayen would make sure that each of his students visited his office for maybe 20 minutes before each paper. As a teacher, I can tell you that is an enormous time commitment, and emotional commitment. Yet I went to the meetings, and George was there. He told me to forget about the thesis statement. Find something difficult in the text that you do not understand and go for that -- seek it, push it, spend all your time to conquer it, or at least try to write about it. That is the point of essay writing, an inheritance from Michel de Montaigne that I could never have apprehended in the whole. But George Fayen taught it through his dillegence, specificity, and patience.

After I finished English 125 with George Fayen, I visitied his office a few more times. I remember he gave me his copy of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, he recommended to me Diane Ackerman's Natural History of the Senses, and he suggested I take English 120 with Margaret Spillane. A great teacher is not like a father. A great teacher is a great teacher. He teaches you to find the most difficult thing you can possibly tackle. He is like God, who gives you the greatest challenge while equipping you perfectly to handle that challenge, if you will only have faith in him.

I have never been able to teach with the mastery and the kindness, the devotion of George Fayen. I think, as a teacher, I have had my moments, and I certainly aspire to do the best I can.

When I looked up George Fayen recently I saw that he had died. I was not sad. I was overjoyed to read his obituary, to learn about his life, to join myself more fully to his legend. Students, teachers, scholars, amateurs of all kinds -- study ye well the career of George S. Fayen, Jr.

Rest in peace.

PS. Many of my writings in Fayen's class at Yale (1999-2000) are posted in the blog section of this website.