How I Learned about America, and Africa, in Texas

Abstract

September 1965 (this is an essay that can begin in no other way), I sailed into New York harbor aboard an Italian ship, once a troopship, now crammed with young folk from foreign parts come to study in America. I came, immediately, from England; at the age of twenty-five, I was heading for Austin, where the University of Texas was to support me to the tune of $2,100 a year for teaching freshman while I studied in the graduate program. In the colonies, where I came from ultimately, I had received a conventional undergraduate training in studies. That is to say, I had learned to speak Chaucerian verse with good vowel definition and to read Elizabethan handwriting; I was acquainted with the Pearl Poet and Thomas More and John Evelyn and many other worthies; I could do literary criticism, though I had no clear idea of what it was, how it differed from book reviewing or polite talk about books. All in all, this patchy imitation of Oxford English had proved a dull mistress from whom I had been thankful to turn to the embrace of mathematics; but now, after four years in the computer industry during which even my sleeping hours had been invaded by picayune problems in logic, I was ready to have another try. In an Austin hotter and steamier than the Africa I