People saw her as a person of indeterminate sexuality as she rode her old bike in her old poncho.Īnd she had gone places.
Conventions of femininity didn’t matter to her at all. She seemed to live her life exactly as she chose. She valued surprise, enthusiasm, unpredictability-a sense of music and rhythm, a sense of being pulled on an ocean current across a wine dark sea. But she responded with a literal squeal of delight-a “wheeee!!”-whenever a passage of prose or poetry spoke to her ear. She would later tell me she didn’t believe in “good” and “bad” writing-a terrifying credo for the young editor I was when she said it. Certainly she had her own idea of who would end up feeding the fishes but she never elevated her taste and judgement to a universal ideal. And the destination was hardly the point. She was Socrates, Lucretius, Heraclitus and Aristotle all rolled into one, with a dash of Epicurus-she seemed to see writing as a wild experiment, a voyage out of The Odyssey, on which you never knew what fascinating monsters (but she would not call them monsters) you would meet, or whether you would get to your destination. Daphne touted her authentic “Greek-ery,” celebrating her immigrant father who, arriving penniless, got himself into Harvard. Other teachers seemed to have in mind a Platonic ideal of writing that it was their sacred duty to instruct you in you would be graded, gently for the most part, on how close you got to that ideal. Others of us found it thrilling to let go of work-a-day processions of words and to scramble after some more elusive and intoxicating idea of meaning.
Many of her students found her go-anywhere trains of thought terrifying, fearing that not-understanding meant they were stupid.
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Max Steele had published stories regularly in Harper’s Magazine, and had collaborated with George Plimpton in Paris in the 1950s on the founding of the Paris Review, (which he made sure you knew), and was a man, albeit a gentleman, and the chair of the department, and knew how to use both hilarity and insight as tools or maybe instruments of control in the classroom.ĭaphne was soft-spoken, not Southern, thought elliptically, hated the presumption of authority, and taught a class on nonsense. Doris Betts was more famous, still published by Knopf, a regal figure in Southern letters. (I’m thinking of a well-known writer who told me not long ago that a student had said to her, “Oh, do you write too?”).ĭaphne Athas was part of a triune of writing teachers in which she had the least authority. Not that this was anything that interested us as students, we didn’t care much about our teachers’ writing careers but only about what good they would do for us. She seemed to have stopped writing or publishing fiction since Cora, in 1978, her last book with Viking, which I suspect had not sold despite critical acclaim.
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Her name was Daphne Athas, a second-generation Greek writer of both fiction and nonfiction whose moment of professional glory-a TIME Magazine “Best Book of the Year” and Cosmopolitan Book Selection (!) in 1971-had already faded into the distant past by the time I first had her as a teacher in the fall of 1983 or maybe 1984.
I am a professional enforcer of clarity, but my mentor and one of my life’s great loves was someone I only ever half understood. Here are some of the tributes delivered at that service. In November 2021, Marianne Gingher and other friends organized a memorial service for Daphne at UNC.
Most of her friends were unable to mourn Daphne together because of the pandemic. Daphne Athas died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on July 28, 2020.
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