After a two-year sabbatical, Hendrix English professor Ashby Bland Crowder is back in Conway and getting back into the rhythm of campus life. He spent the first year working on a book and the 2005-06 academic year teaching American Literature in Poland as a Fulbright scholar. Crowder recounts his adventures during his two-year absence.
Q: Why Poland?
A: I wanted to go to Eastern Europe because I’d never been, and I looked next for places that wanted somebody to teach American literature. Poland was one of those – they had two slots for American literature. American literature had always been important in Poland, because that was the one way they could be subversive back in the days of Communism.
Q: Had you ever applied for a Fulbright before?
A: I applied once about 25 years ago, and I didn’t get one then. I applied to go to Yugoslavia then, I think. But anyway, I didn’t get to do that. So, oh well. Twenty-five years pass: I think I’ll try again.
It’s an arduous task to fill the application out and answer all the questions and write all the essays. I was on sabbatical when I applied, and if I hadn’t been on sabbatical, I wouldn’t have had time to fill out the application. I think that’s one reason that I decided to do it then.
Q: But you didn’t go on sabbatical just to have time to apply. What was the original purpose of your sabbatical?
A: What I was mainly doing on my sabbatical was finishing up an edition of Robert Browning’s last volume of poems, called Asolando. So I did that, and then when I finished doing that, I started editing the selected letters of William Humphrey. I finished doing that while I was in Poland on my Fulbright, because I had time enough to do that, too.
Q: What kind of teaching were you doing? Did you have lectures? Seminars?
A: Well, one class I taught the last semester was something they called a monographic lecture class, and I had about 50-some students in there. And all they did was come once a week for 45 minutes and listen to me talk on anything that I chose to talk about that day on American literature or American culture. One day I told them about what it was like first-hand growing up in a racist society in Richmond, Va., and I told them about all the things I encountered as a little boy and when I first encountered them and how curious they were. They knew about a lot of that sort of thing, in general, but they’d really never heard that kind of detailed experience.
Q: How did you spend your time when you weren’t teaching or working on your book?
A: My teaching load there was much lighter than it is here because I had three classes, but I met one class one day, and then the other two classes the next day. So I was off from Wednesday until the next Tuesday. The weekend was longer than the week!
I walked a whole lot and went around. There were all kinds of things to see in the town. And then my wife had to leave every three months in order to leave the country to get her passport stamped again to be legally in Poland again. So we would say, ‘Oh my goodness, it looks as though we have to go to Prague this weekend.’ We would go to Prague on Thursday and come back on Monday. And then we did the same thing and went to Vienna, and we went to Budapest. It was very inexpensive to ride to places on trains. We went to Berlin. We got to go and visit places we’d never been before.
Q: Did you speak Polish, or did many people speak English?
A: Not many people at all spoke English outside of the English Institute. At the airlines people would know English, but not if you bought train tickets or bus tickets. You had to write it all down in Polish and hand them the paper. It’s like a bank robber going in and putting down what you want. Then they would tell you how much. They write that down for you and then you count it out. You can do all kinds of things without knowing the language.
Q: Did you have someone from the Institute help you?
A: I would sometimes get somebody to write out what I wanted. I remember once taking a note in to get a haircut, because the first time I had gone in, I had gestured, and my gestures were incorrectly interpreted. I came back almost skinned!
Q: Is it nice to be back at Hendrix? You’ve been away for awhile.
A: After I suddenly realized that I had been at Hendrix for 30 years, it just didn’t seem that long. Suddenly I thought my life was disappearing, and I felt kind of alarmed about it. It was time to take a sabbatical, so I took half-pay and took a year off. But then the year just didn’t seem that long. I thought, ‘You know, I need to sort of break up my life.’ I wanted to come back to Hendrix and have it seem new and fresh to me. That was something else that really made me work really hard on that Fulbright application.
I wanted to feel like I was coming to a new place, and it worked. I was glad to see my old colleagues, but there are a lot of people I’ve never seen before, and I didn’t really understand exactly how everything worked. I was a little bit bewildered by it. I was kind of like a new person.