REED: What do you think that Roethke would have made of the Roethke Reading list?
MATCHETT: I dunno, Ted was really very jealous of other readers. REED: Oh yeah. MATCHETT: And of other poets.
And it showed up time and again.
If they.. The better they were the less he liked them.
(LAUGHING)
The more he felt in competition with them.
He was...Lowell was the one who really (LAUGHING) worried him. (LAUGHING)
Yeah, so I, so I have no idea.
I only heard Ted read once...
...in all my time here. He gave one in Seattle--not at the U-- I forget what the event was, but something downtown.
McCUE: What was he like as a colleague? MATCHETT: What? McCUE: What was Ted Roethke like as a colleague?
MATCHETT: Well we had--as I say--we got along very well because I was no threat to him.
I think he, he, uh, was fiesty with some of them.
Oh...
Let me see...
Well, I heard of Ted's death--I was in New England, coming back from my first sabbatical
where we had been in Italy for the year--and uh,
I'd had a number of letters from Ted, in Italy, while we were there.
I picked up the New York Times--we were visiting Judy's parents in Connecticut--and I picked up the New York Times
and there it was. Well it was a dreadful shock.
And in my luggage I had
a set of bocce--the Italian bowling balls--because Ted had...
...Ted had a set and we had bowled on his lawn, there in Madrona. What was that on?
I've forgotten the street where he was, but anyway.. Uh, we had..
So I was bringing the set back so I could have him...we could bowl out at our lawn out in Nellita.
That never happened.
So that was.. (QUIETLY) That was a shock. But we got along, you know we..
He was blustering most of the time.
McCUE: Were you in, um, Parrington? Was that where the...the English Department was in Parrington Hall then?
MATCHETT: Yeah, yeah. Well my office was in one of those shacks north of Parrington, but the department was there.
And Ted had the office next to mine in the shack.
But he was never there, because he just used his classroom as an office. They had to
keep any other classes out of there because, because he took that over as his office.
McCUE: And that was in Parrington?
MATCHETT: That was in Parrington, yeah.
It was one of the big rooms with the table in the middle and
chairs at the table and other chairs around the outside.
Oh dear, Ted had one of his breakdowns in the middle of class one time,
and was removed, in a straight-jacket, from the class.
And I will never forget his appearance on the steps of Parrington, because he knew his students were seeing him.
And he was SO unhappy to have them see him in that condition. Oh...
...it was frightful, frightful.
McCUE: Heilman really cared for him.
MATCHETT: Oh, Heilman kept him...kept him...Oh!
President Henry Schmitz--I don't know if that name means anything--
Henry Schmitz was a sweet man, way over his head as president of a university.
His brother, Derek Schmitz,
was a banker in Seattle and a regent.
And I gather that Derek thought--Henry taught agriculture, I think, in Iowa--
and I think Derek thought it would be nice to give Henry a couple of happy years before retirement in his hometown of Seattle.
And he got him out here to be the president.
I don't know how it was pulled. And, poor Henry...
(LAUGHING) ...well, several stories:
He called Bob Heilman--sort of his first day in office-- and said, "Who is Theodore Roethke?"
And Bob said,
"He's a distinguished poet that's on our faculty." He said, "Oh."
"He phoned me at two o'clock this morning,
and said, 'Schmitz! You've got the greatest poet, the greatest goddamn poet in America on your faculty!' "
(LAUGHING)
McCUE: Wow. MATCHETT: I think Ted was calling from New York at the time.
MATCHETT: Well, they date the Creative Writing department back to Ted's coming. And of course
it didn't exist then. It was just Ted.
And I don't know when, officially, the Creative Writing department started.
But I'm ... I'm sorry, there's that division.
McCUE: Was that--did you feel that when you were there?
MATCHETT: Yeah. Yeah.
REED: One thing, when I was looking in the archives at Roethke's teaching notes,
is that I discovered that he seems to have been...a graphomane:
He wrote out every poem he had memorized or read.
And he would type the same poems over and over.
And he made his own students do this-- MATCHETT: Who was it?
REED: Roethke MATCHETT: Roethke? McCUE: Yeah, wow.
REED: And so that a student would turn in at the end of the quarter
a notebook full of poems that they had typed.
And I, uh, I found Hugo.. Richard Hugo's notebook, where he had to retype poems that Roethke had assigned.
Uh and, and Hugo started writing in the margin his opinions about the poems.
(LAUGHTER) And Roethke started replying back.
This was not a part of the assignment, clearly.
And Hugo had the temerity to say that he didn't like Louise Bogan's poems.
(LAUGHING) And
Roethke responded quite, uh, sharply.
You know, Beatrice Roethke Lushington is still alive.
I hear from her regularly.
She's, she's in Eastmoor on the south coast of England.
She's widowed for the second time.
McCUE: How old would she be, Bill?
MATCHETT: She just had her ninetieth birthday. McCUE: Okay. MATCHETT: Just.
But uh, she was married to Stephen [Lushington] much longer than she was married to Ted--
her second hus--her second marriage.
And Stephen died, oh, two years ago now.
She's blind.
But well taken care of in the home she's in.
But she was here in Seattle, just about, oh, a year ago.
She used to come here fairly regularly.