Maurice Duke interview 1 (2005-05-31)

              VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY 
JAMES BRANCH CABELL LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS  
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT: TWENTIETH CENTURY RICHMOND, VIRGINIA 
 
NARRATOR: DR. J. MAURICE DUKE 
INTERVIEWER: KATHRYN COLWELL HILL 
Place:		6136 Rolling Forest Circle			No. of CDs: 1 
		Mechanicsville, VA 23111			No. of tracks: 3 
							Length of interview: 60 minutes 
Date:    	May 31, 2005				Interview: 1 of 3			 
 
Counter Index	Topic of Discussion 
[CD 1 of 1, First Interview 5/31/05) 
0:00:0		Introductions  
0:00:36		Biographical sketch of early years 
0:03:41		First exposure to literature 
0:05:03		Post-secondary education 
0:07:41		Spouse, Dr. Anne Duke 
0:08:41		Working with Mrs. James Branch Cabell; Cabell’s personal library 
0:15:12	Transfer of Cabell’s library from Monument Avenue to RPI (Richmond Professional Institute) 
0:17:45		Experience as first head of VCU library’s Special Collections 
0:21:21		Master’s thesis and Doctoral dissertation on topic of James Branch Cabell 
0:26:03		Growth of VCU: Hibbs Building and James Branch Cabell Library 
0:29:00		The Cabellian and Resources for American Literary Study 
0:32:50		Evolution of the English Department’s graduate program 
0:38:40		Tom Robbins; Richmond literary scene in the late-1950s 
0:44:00		Publications and research regarding Richmond’s African American history 
0:54:40	Cultural attitudes developed during youth in Richmond, during the 1940s and 1950s 
 [End of Compact Disk] 
Interview 1, track 1 
Track time:  0.00.17 
 
0:00:00		Introductions 
Kathryn Colwell Hill:	Today is May 31, 2005 and this is an oral history interview with Dr. Maurice Duke.  I am Kathryn Colwell Hill and I am the interviewer  
 
Interview 1, track 2 
Track time:  0.00.13 
        
       KCH:    Dr. Duke, before we finish the test would you check your microphone. 
	Maurice Duke:	Yes.  This is Maurice Duke.  I am sitting for an interview today at my home in Mechanicsville. 
 
Interview 1, track 3 
Track time:  0.58.42 
	 
0:00:36		Biographical sketch of early years 
	KCH:	I had talked to Dr. Duke briefly this morning and we went over some of the general categories that we are going to cover.  I think that Dr. Duke we will start with personal information so that as we go along the listener will know why you are commenting on different areas. 
	MD:	Okay. 
	KCH:	Chronologically, more-or-less, something about your birth, your parents, their names, where you were born, your early education, the Navy career.  I thought roughly 1934 to the mid-1960s. 
	MD:	I was born in Richmond on October 4, 1934.  My father [Maurice J. Duke] had many different jobs during his lifetime.  My mother [Myrtle Bourne Duke] was a housewife.  I am from a very old Virginia family on both sides; the Dukes and my mother’s family was Bourne, B-o-u-r-n-e.  We traveled around a great deal during World War II when my father was doing defense work and lived everywhere from upstate New York to North Carolina.   I never went to the same school two years in a row until I got half-way through high school. And when I got half-way through high school I quit school because I hated school and I hated everything about it.  I quit school and went to work in a shop rebuilding carburetors and fuel pumps.  My goal was to own a car, and that is the only goal that I had at that time.  However, I did go back a year later.  I picked up and finished school, high school, and went directly into the Navy.  I spent thirteen months as a flight deck photographer on an aircraft carrier, and then I was transferred to a combat photo unit called Combat Camera Group.  I went throughout the entire Far East, Asia, making movies for the Navy.  Excellent job.  I was on an ice breaker up in the Arctic.  I was at Yucca Flats for the Atomic Bomb tests.   I also covered a flood down in Sri Lanka—it was Ceylon at that time—and many of those kinds of jobs, Hong Kong, Philippines, places like that.  I also covered a S.E.A.T.O. conference in Manila. 
       KCH:	So the U.S. was not engaged in any conflicts at that time. 
       MD:	No.  We weren’t in any war at the time.  We were the motion picture outfit that serviced the Navy for motion pictures.  We worked on “The Bridges of TokoRe.”  We worked on the “Spirit of Saint Louis.”  We worked on the “Wings of Eagles,” Hollywood movies.  We worked with John Ford.  He founded the outfit that I was in.  He was a retired Admiral in the Reserves, and whenever he need footage dealing with the military he put on his uniform and came down to San Diego to get us.  We’d go shoot for him.  It was an excellent, excellent job.   
0:03:41		First exposure to literature 
       At the time that I went into the Navy, I don’t think I had every met anyone who had been to college.   I didn’t know a thing about it.  There were quite a few people in the photo units, the two major ones that I was in, that were college graduates, journalism, and photographers, also.  I got to thinking, “Maybe I ought to think about this.”  I started reading a great deal of literature.  When I was working on the flight deck my job was to photograph all of the crashes.  One has an awful lot of crashes on the flight deck, some minor and some major, an awful lot of people killed on the flight deck, that kind of thing.  The saying on the flight deck is, “You are either bored to death or scared to death.”   That is exactly right.  When you launch planes, they go on a mission and you have nothing to do but wait for them to come back and I started reading.  I started reading top rated world literature.   Then I got to the point that when we went into port, Hong Kong, the Philippines, whatever, I’d buy books.  I read Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Shakespeare, and Steinbeck.  I’m probably the only sailor that ever went into Hong Kong and bought a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  And so I got to reading and I really found it a great interest.  I decided that I wanted to go to college.   
0:05:03		Post-secondary education 
       When I was getting out of the Navy, I did not know—I am the first male in my family to go to high school, let alone college—so I didn’t know how you went to college.  I just thought you went and showed up and there you were.  So I didn’t get accepted at the places that I applied.  I applied to what was then RPI (Richmond Professional Institute), the forerunner of what became VCU.  They took me on what was called “strict probation” and they gave me one semester to make the grades or I was out.  I did very well and I transferred to William and Mary and I was on the Dean’s List down there.   [I] came back and worked as a photographer on the [Richmond] Times Dispatch and I wanted to go back to school.  I just missed the literature.  I applied to the University of Iowa, that is where I wanted to go, and was accepted.  I went there and earned a MA and a PhD.  I had not, my wife and I, had not planned to settle back in Richmond at all—we were both Richmonders—but this was the ‘60’s and we were both offered jobs on the faculty at VCU.  We took them and then the world turned upside-down and we stayed.  My wife is a Medievalist; she has a PhD also, from Iowa.  We spent thirty-three years on the faculty at VCU.  That brings us up into the '60’s, I suppose. 
       KCH:	Yes, it does.  A couple of questions, as you were relating experiences you talked about reading while in the Navy, was there anyone with whom you could discuss this literature? 
       MD:	Occasionally.  I was enlisted, of course being a photographer, but occasionally there would be an officer who would be interested.  We would sit and talk a little bit, but really not very much at all.  It was just mostly reading.  There are really wonderful book stalls on the streets, at least in those days, in Tokyo.  I used to take the train and go up to Tokyo on the weekends and hang around the bookstalls.  I would just buy the stuff and read it.  Read and study and read and study.  I would read anything and I still do.  I am still that way about reading.  But, there was not really anyone to discus it with. 
       KCH:	So you started developing your own concepts— 
       MD:	I did. 
       KCH:	—and you were criticizing, or critiquing, it as you read.  It was all on your own.  
       MD:	That’s right.  It was totally on my own.  I was totally self-taught.  As Melville said about himself, “The sea was his Harvard and his Yale,” and that was the case with me too.  That is how I got the education, to begin with anyway.  I went as far as I could and I thought, “I’m going to need some professional work in literature if I stay in this business.”  And that is what led me to college. 
0:07:01		Spouse, Dr. Anne Duke 
       KCH:	Your wife, her name is— 
       MD:	Elizabeth Anne [Foster].  She goes by Anne.  She is a Richmond native.  She was a graduate of T J [Thomas Jefferson] High School.  She has a BA from Longwood, a MA from the University of Virginia, and a PhD from Iowa.  She is a Medievalist and she was a professional organist before we married.  She left the profession and went to graduate school.  Her specialty is Medieval Studies.   
       KCH:	It would be very enjoyable, I would think, to be on a faculty together. 
       MD:	It was.  It went very well for most people.  We didn’t want to do it.  We always wanted to be in different schools.  It didn’t work out that way but we had no problems.  At one point, when we were teaching at Iowa, we shared an office.  We got along very well with that, always did, all of the way through the educational process.   
0:07:59		Working with Mrs. James Branch Cabell, Cabell’s personal library 
       KCH:	That brings us, as you say, right up to the ‘60s.  Your dissertation and, I understand your master’s thesis, dealt with James Branch Cabell. 
       MD:  	That’s right.  I did a comparative study between Faulkner and Cabell for the MA paper.  When I came to Richmond, at an afternoon garden party given by Allan Brown—who was then the chairman—I met a man whose name was Edgar MacDonald.  Edgar—I had a good deal of  training in analytical bibliography in graduate school—he told me about Mr. Cabell’s library, which was James Branch Cabell’s library, that had never been studied in any way.  He took me up and introduced me to Mrs. Cabell and she gave me permission to work in the library.  I checked with my graduate committee at Iowa and they gave me the go-ahead.  And so I went to work in the library.   
       KCH:	Now I understand—from having visited with Dr. MacDonald earlier—that Allan Brown, and I don’t know whom else, was interested in having the new library named for James Branch Cabell.  I may have things in the wrong sequence here so— 
       MD:	There were four people who did this: Edgar MacDonald—I’ve forgotten what Mr. Wilson’s first name is but he was director of the board in those days, this was late ‘60s—[Wilson], MacDonald, Allan Brown, and myself.  That is where the idea came from.   
       KCH:	Was Mrs. Cabell receptive? 
       MD:	Well, what happened was I was working in the library every day and I realized immediately what a rich collection it was.  I went to Allan and said we should try to name the library, “You have a new library with no name on it.  We ought to try to name the library for James Branch Cabell because he is, although he is not well known now, he was a nationally, internationally known writer in the ‘20s.”  Let’s see, Edgar and I, I don’t think Allan was there, and Wilson called on Mrs. Cabell one afternoon, pre-arranged, and asked her if we could use his name on the library.  She said that she would think about it for a few days and let us know.  So she did think about it.  I was working in the house every day and so I saw her every day.  She told me, she said, “I think if you name the library for James, I think his collection should go there.”  So bingo, we had it. 
       KCH:	That is wonderful.  It really is wonderful how those things evolved. 
       MD:	Just fell into place. 
       KCH:	It did.  It did.  What was it like working in the Cabell home with Mrs. Cabell there, and Ballard there? 
       MD:	She did not bug me at all when I was working.  I would come in every day after I had taught classes.  I guess I’d work for about three hours, something like that, in the library.  Sometimes Ballard would come in and peer over my shoulder while I was working.  Then he would take off down the hall when I recognized his presence there.  But, it worked out quite well.  No problem at all.   
       No one had worked in the library since his death, since Cabell’s death in the late ‘50s, and so I had to straighten up a few things.  I found boxes of letters from people like H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, even found one from William Dean Howells—who was a major nineteenth century writer but not too well known in the twentieth century—a little bit of correspondence with Bennett Cerf, who was then at Random House, regarding James Joyce; things such as that. 
       KCH:	Did those letters become a part of the collection that was donated? 
       MD:	All except—.  An interesting story—.  The first thing I thought I ought to do was throw some trash away.  There was a cardboard box, which I was pretty sure was trash, in the corner and I got ready to take it and throw it out and I thought I maybe I ought to look in it first.  There were a couple of hundred letters from H. L. Mencken.  Those letters I think went to Charlottesville because there is a big Cabell collection there too.  But, the rest of the things came to us.  What we didn’t know at the time—I don’t think any of us knew—was that Cabell used his books, personal books, as filing cabinets for letters from his friends.  You open up The Great Gatsby and there is a letter from Scott Fitzgerald, and so on and so on.  [There were] many letters such as that and they all came to us.    
       KCH:	Now the letters that were inserted at different points in the books, are they still there in the books? 
       MD:	No.  They took them out of the books and they are all in files now in the Cabell Room.   
       KCH:	Is it noted where they were located? 
       MD:	Everything.  I noted every letter, where it was, in my dissertation.  They can use that as sort of a guide. 
       KCH:	I glanced at your dissertation last week and it [Cabell’s] is a voluminous library. 
       MD:	Yes it is.   
       KCH:	As you started cataloging the Cabell library, personal library, the point was to just put it in order; that it needed to be available.   
       MD:	Yes, so that anybody in the future who was studying Cabell could see—.  You know what people read influences their lives.  There are three or four books in my life that are extremely important that I read; three of them, I guess, in particular.  You can tell how that person’s intellectual life has developed by knowing what that person read and studied.  So now anyone who is interested in studying Cabell in the future can go to that catalog of mine and see what he read and where he kept it; very interesting that he had one section of the library on occult readings.  All sorts of voodoo and sexual practices in the islands, things like that.  He had the Bible in there, which I thought was hilarious. (Laugh)  But, you know something about what he was studying and how this was transformed into art.   
       KCH:	Did he incorporate a lot of the images? 
       MD:	Many, many.   
0:14:29		Transfer of Cabell’s personal library from Monument Avenue to RPI 
       KCH:	How did it develop that the library books were transferred to VCU?  I had understood that at first Margaret Cabell was reluctant to let them leave the house. 
       MD: 	That is correct, she was.  This was the ‘60s and there were riots on campuses all around the country.  This was the period of the Kent State shootings and such things as that.  Mrs. Cabell had told me that she had decided to give James’ library—she always called him James—to us, but she didn’t want to get rid of it.  One morning—she was getting ready to go to the river for the summer.  They had a summer house over on the Northern Neck—she called me early in the morning and said that she wanted me to take the books out and bring them to the VCU library.  Actually it was not the Cabell Library yet, it wasn’t open.  I told her that I would and I asked her when she wanted me to do it.  She said, “Today.”  (Laughter)  Back in those days university professors all wore suits and ties and that is what I had on for the day.   I came home after classes and changed into jeans and rented a truck, a van, and got two students to help me.  We went to the house and packed up everything—I don’t know how many hours we worked that day—put it all in the van and carried it down to VCU.  At that time Harvey Deal was the librarian—N. Harvey Deal, N as in Newton—Harvey’s office was just on the alleyway in Hibbs, the Hibbs building, and so we drove the van up, parked it right beside the window, handed all of the boxes up through the window—the whole Cabell collection—put it in his office, and we had it. 
       KCH:	I think of the Cabell Room and there are several thousand volumes! 
       MD:	That’s right.  It was a big job. (Laugh) 
       KCH:	I can just visualize you men there.  I mean by then it was dark. 
       MD:	We worked, I don’t remember the time.  We started mid-day and just kept working until we got it out. 
       KCH:	I was thinking that that had to attract some attention of students as they walked by. 
       MD:	Yes, these three guys that were hauling books out and putting them through the window. 
0:17:01		Experience as first head of VCU library’s Special Collections 
       KCH:	Was it with the acquisition of the books that you became the first head of Special Collections or responsible—? 
       MD:	Yes, because I was the one who knew the collection and no one else did at that time.  Harvey Deal did not have an assistant and so Harvey worked out that I had half of my appointment in the library and the other half in the English department.  At that time I was also the Book Editor for the Richmond Times Dispatch, which I did for about twelve years and as such I was able to make contact with lots of Virginia writers.  We knew that we could not ever compete with libraries like Charlottesville has—the University of Virginia, the Alderman—nor could we compete with William and Mary or anybody else because we were little more than a glorified junior college at the time.   So, Harvey and I decided, well maybe the direction in which we should go would be to collect materials by contemporary Virginia writers.  If I would get books for review from the publishers and it had a Virginia connection, I’d make contact with the person, with the author, and ask if they would donate their papers to us.  Then Harvey and I would go up and spend a day, sometimes, with them, have lunch, and bring back a car load of books, papers, and such things.  We got—.  There is an eighteenth century collection in the library that was collected by a man named Lynwood Giacomini.  I’m not sure how that was spelled but anyway he was the guy.  He was interested in the eighteenth century and he had a lifetime collection of eighteenth century books.  He was a friend of Mrs. Cabell and he gave us the whole collection.  So we have the Lynwood Giacomini collection now.  They are very valuable for contextual critics studying eighteenth century books and bookmaking methods.  So we got that collection.  We found for sale—somewhere in south Richmond, some collector had been collecting twentieth century first edition novels and sending the novels to the authors and asking them to autograph the copy and send it back.  Harvey and I bought that whole collection and brought it in.  Then we got the collection of the Virginia Poetry Society— I was not involved in that one though—and other such things, different sorts of things.  That is how it came about. 
       KCH:	It had to be very exciting to be part of that kind of discovery. 
       MD:	Well for a young person, such as I was at the time, just finishing up a PhD—.  I’d spent a great deal of time in course work and things like that and I had done a lot of work in analytical bibliography.  That is essentially studying books as objects apart from what they hold, how they are made, how many type setters worked on them, etcetera and etcetera.  It was fascinating for me to be thrown into a library like that; autographed copies and things such as that.  There is a very poignant inscription in one of the books by Sinclair Lewis—I’ve forgotten which one now—that Lewis sent to Cabell shortly after he found out that his son, Wells Lewis, had been killed in combat if World War II—I guess it was a letter not an inscription—but the letter was in the book and those kinds of things.  It was fascinating.  It really was. 
0:20:36		Master’s thesis and Doctoral dissertation on topic of James Branch Cabell 
       KCH:	Now your training as a biographical— 
       MD:	Bibliographical. 
       KCH:	—bibliographical person.  Your initial interest in Cabell, did it surface because of his—no, I’m answering my own question.  [Your interest] wasn’t because the library was present and thus presented an opportunity?   
       MD:	No, no. 
       KCH:	It was because you had done your Masters— 
       MD:	Yes, yes.  I had the Masters then.  I was what they called A-B-D, “all but dissertation.”  I had done my final exams for the PhD.  We had to have three foreign languages at Iowa and I had finished the foreign language requirement and such things as that.  I had come to Richmond with the intent of doing a dissertation on a different author.  I was going to do what is called a critical edition.  I needed certain kinds of mechanical equipment to do that—a Hinman Collator it was called—and we didn’t have one.  The closest one was Charlottesville.  I realized that I was not going to be able to get to Charlottesville to collate these first editions of this author and so I was without a dissertation topic and just fell into this one.  It was Edgar.  Edgar was very helpful. 
       KCH:	Life is often that way. 
       MD:	That is right.  Strange things happen.  When I went aboard the aircraft carrier I went aboard as a plane pusher.  That is what you do out on the flight deck.  I went down to the photo lab and saw the chief photographer and told him that I had been a photographer in civilian life and was there any way that I could get into the photo lab.  He gave me a Speed Graphic press camera and he said, “Do you know how to use this?”  I said, “Yes.”  He said, “Here is where you load the film, here is the film developing room, here is the enlarging room.  You take a picture of anything, bring it back and show it to me.”  And I did.  That was a Friday.  He said, “I’ll have you transferred to photo by Monday,” and he did.  That changed my whole life.  My whole life was changed because of what that chief photographer did for me. 
       KCH:	But, you showed the initiative, also. 
       MD:	Oh yes.  I didn’t want to push those planes! (both laugh) 
       KCH:	Cabell, at the time that you were studying him, you would have been in Iowa in 19—? 
       MD:	‘63 to ‘66. 
       KCH:	—were other people paying attention to Cabell as a— 
       MD:	Not really.  There wasn’t—.  Cabell has been one of these people whose reputation has been up and down.  He was just glorified and lionized in the 1920s, and then he fell out of favor in the 1930s with the Depression, up and down with his reputation.  Iowa had an excellent faculty, graduate faculty, in English.  I had some people on the faculty who knew who Cabell was.  They had read him but they hadn’t studied him.  Nobody there had published on him.  They were excited when they learned that I had entrée into the personal library of Cabell.  The way I got interested in Cabell was—I think maybe it was even before graduate school—my wife—, who was an ardent reader, still is—had read Jurgen and didn’t like it.  I thought I’d give it a try and see if I liked it.  I liked it very much.  So then I went on and did the MA paper on him.  I think I did a seminar paper in one of the graduate seminars, then did the MA paper, and then met Mrs. Cabell and had permission to work in the library.  That is the way it came about. 
       KCH:	Did Mrs. Cabell—I know she was eager to have a biography written— 
       MD:	Right. 
       KCH:	—and to have the letters catalogued and those kinds of things—did she approach you about doing some of those tasks? 
       MD:	No.  Not so far as I remember.  I know she didn’t about the biography.  I don’t think she did, I just don’t know for sure.  I was still working with Cabell.  I was publishing articles on Cabell in the scholarly journals and I was not involved in the pursuit of a biography. 
	KCH:	I sense that you weren’t interested in that path individually, but she—from what Dr. [Edgar] MacDonald has told me—she had this forceful personality— 
       MD:	Right. 
       KCH:	—and was always looking for opportunities to advance his legacy. 
       MD:	That’s right. 
0:25:24		Growth of VCU: Hibbs Building and James Branch Cabell Library 
       KCH:	You have covered so many of these topics that I had written down. (Laughter)  When special collections were housed at Hibbs, where were they housed?  That was a fairly new academic building. 
       MD:	I was the first one to have an office in the new section of Hibbs. 
       KCH:	Where was the old Hibbs? 
       MD:	There were two sections; that building was built in two sections.  The first section came from the alley up to about where the steps go down to the basement.  I don’t know, around in there.  That was opened in ’58.  I got out of the Navy in ’58 and I was one of the first classes in there as a student.  Then the other side was opened in ’66 and I was the first faculty member in the new side.  There were houses there.  The music building, which was in a house and had been a private residence, was on the corner.  There were row houses running along Shaffer Street at the time and then, of course, up along Park Avenue.  They started—I guess by eminent domain—to take those buildings and build Hibbs.  They took some by eminent domain to build the Cabell Library.  When I came on the faculty, where Cabell is now there were all private residences, along the whole block.  We lived, when I was a youngster, we lived briefly, my family and I, at 914 Park Avenue, which is right across the street from the library; just next to the Hibbs building.   
       KCH:	Okay, literally on campus. 
       MD:	On campus.  It is where that little park plaza thing is now.  This was mid-1940s. 
       KCH:	You had one of the first offices in the new section of Hibbs and did you just continue to keep the collection there? 
       MD:	I kept them there and I was the only one—I wasn’t using them at the time—I just had them locked up.  Harvey had me bonded.  The library was being built and Mrs. Cabell wanted to decorate a room in mid-Victorian décor for the Cabell Room, she undertook that.  I was not involved after that time.  I had been about Cabelled out by then.  I went in a somewhat different direction and I was not involved in the building or the planning for the Cabell Room.  I did not transfer those books into the Cabell Room.   
0:28:17		The Cabellian and Resources for American Literary Study 
       KCH:	A couple of more things on Cabell and then we will go on to other areas.  The Cabellian was a publication that, I understand, you were instrumental in starting? 
       MD:	I was involved with it early on and I wrote for it when I was on the advisory board.  It was done by a man in New York whose name was Julius Rothman.  He was the one who actually started The Cabellian.  I published a few articles.  A fair bit of what I am telling you today I think I published in The Cabellian back in the ‘60s, maybe early ‘70s. 
       KCH:	That is helpful for future researchers to know.  They can get further details.  So The Cabellian was not ever actually published here in Richmond; it stayed in New York.   
       Among the other things that you were involved in around the same time were the formation of the Ellen Glasgow Society and—. 
       MD:	No, I was not involved in that.  I knew about it.  I was involved in—we did start a literary, scholarly, journal.  I was one of the three people who started that and edited it for about five or six years or so.  It is still being edited now.  It is still being published—The University of Pittsburg Press is doing it now—I don’t know who the editor is, but it started at VCU.   
       KCH:	What was the title? 
       MD:	Resources for American Literary Study.  We solicited articles from around the country, from scholars who knew certain collections.  They would write about what these collections were and what kind of research one could do in these collections. 
       KCH:	Very helpful. 
       MD:	Yes, we thought it was.  It still is.  It is still alive.  I think that the first issue was in 1971 and it is now 2005 and it is still being published.    
       KCH:	We are finding that with the internet there are so many more opportunities— 
       MD:	Oh good Lord, yes. 
       KCH:	—to put documents online.  The study of any topic is [so accessible]. 
       MD:	That is right.  It has indeed. 
       KCH:  	Let’s see (consults notes)—Special Collections, your role as an Associate Librarian, getting the [Cabell] collection— is there anything that you think is pertinent to put on tape about that period of time when you were working? 
       MD:	The only thing that I can say was it was a most exciting time.  I have been associated with several universities during my career—I taught at Kent State for a little while, I taught at Iowa and Virginia State, and my wife taught at William and Mary for a little while and at VCU—we found VCU in those days, the only thing that I can say, electrifying.  Of course I was young then but we were evolving from essentially a junior college into a small, I guess you could say university, although that is using the word loosely then.  And now it is an internationally known school in certain departments.  When I went there in 1958, right out of the Navy, I wanted to major in English and that is all I ever wanted to do is major in English.  I couldn’t major in English because they had no English major.  I think that it was 1968 that we graduated our first English major and now we have a nationally known MFA program.  
0:32:07		Evolution of the English Department’s graduate program 
       I was the first director of graduate studies for the MA and the first director for the MFA, also.  It was just a very exciting place to be. 
       KCH:	Can you tell us anything about the evolution, especially about the MA and MFA. Programs.  I would think—aren’t there a limited number of schools that have a MFA in creative writing or is—? 
       MD:	No, that is more common.  When I was in Iowa, Iowa has, as you may know, one of the best known, maybe the best known, creative writing departments in the world.  When you mention a writer’s name of the twentieth century, chances are that he or she had some affiliation with Iowa somewhere along the way.  Philip Roth lived down the street from me.  I didn’t know him; he was there before I was.  Kurt Vonnegut was on the faculty when I was there and so on and so on.  All of these major writers came through Iowa.  Paul Engle was the man’s name, E-n-g-l-e.  He began the writer’s program in Iowa back in, I think it was in ’37.  He wanted, apparently, a MFA degree, a Master of Fine Arts.   
       I did have some trouble with some of my colleagues at VCU because a MFA is considered to be a terminal degree.  The person who takes a MFA that is all he or she needs to be a writer.  But, still there is discrimination—“You don’t have a PhD”—that sort of thing.  I was on the side of the MFA and I went to loggerheads with the dean of the School of the Arts.  He was adamantly opposed to us having a MFA because he wanted the only fine arts degree to be in the art department.  At the time I did a study of various MFAs offered around the United States—it took me a long time to do it—and then brought that to the committee and argued for it and said, “This is the common degree for a first rate writing program.”  We got it.  I won that one.  This was a normal kind of thing.   
       Also at Iowa, they would take a person who was—.  In one case they had—I can’t think of the man’s name—the man who wrote the novel The Man with the Golden Arm—it was made into a movie staring Frank Sinatra—that fellow, I don’t think that he had finished high school, and he was on the faculty and he was an excellent writer.  Nelson Algren.  Nelson Algren was his name.  My friend Tom Robbins—who was well known at VCU—Tom and I were drinking buddies together when we first came to RPI.  Tom has a BA or BS, which ever it is, in journalism from RPI, not VCU but RPI.  The last time I talked with Tom, he said that Iowa had contacted him and offered him a faculty position.  So they were also free about, “If you can write the fiction, we want you.”  I got in a little bit of hot water with some colleagues when I took a student into the MFA program.   He had finished high school but I don’t think he had finished college.  I argued for him and it turned out that he wrote a novel and was very successful.  I don’t know what he is doing now.  I don’t have any idea.  I’ve always been in favor of—I guess Iowa taught me that, influenced me positively in that direction—that if you can write the fiction, you don’t need a BA, a MA, a PhD, or any thing else to write.  That is the way it was. 
       KCH:	Who were some of the first faculty that you attracted for the MFA in creative writing program? 
       MD:	I guess one of the major ones was Dave Smith, the poet.  I got him here.  Let’s see who else was in it?  I do not remember now.  I think that he was the first big catch.  No other names come to mind right now.  I do not think that I have recruited a fiction writer, but I’m not sure whether I did or not.  I just do not remember. 
       KCH:	It was a very exciting accomplishment for you and it was wonderful for the university. 
       MD:	Oh, it was fun.  I am a type A personality—otherwise I wouldn’t have had the heart attack—but I am a type A personality and I like to be going all of the time.  Just before you came in a half-an-hour ago, I was putting some finishing touches on a book that I am working on right now—co-authoring with somebody else—which will probably be published next year, I guess.  That is it. 
       KCH:	That is what keeps you alive, don’t you think? 
       MD:	You can’t quit.  My father retired and sat in the rocking chair, or sat in the chair, and watched TV for four years and then died.  I didn’t want to do that.  I’d much rather be working all day.  I like to write.  I just enjoy sitting at the computer so that is what I do.   
 
0:37:46		Tom Robbins; Richmond literary scene in the late-1950s and early-1960s 
       KCH:	You mentioned Tom Robbins earlier.   Would you describe the literary scene in Richmond in the late- to mid-1950s and into the 1960s?  I understand that The Village Restaurant was one of the— 
       MD:	It was wild and it was fun.  Tom and I worked together at the Times Dispatch; both at the photo lab.  He was not a photographer but he was a lab technician in those days.  I was working in the lab at the time and we used to hang out in The Village, the old Village.  It was across the street from where this new one is.  We’d meet there almost every night and drink beer.  We were all veterans and so we’d go in there and drink beer until the place closed; get more beer and take it with us and drink it somewhere else.  (Laughter) 
       KCH:	Were you discussing literature? 
       MD: 	Literature and art, both.  It was Tom and me; and B. K. Kendrick, an artist; and then Bill Jones, an artist—a very well known Richmond artist—; and some other people, too.  We did a lot of literary talk; a lot of drinking.  We’d get together at each other’s places and talk about what we had been reading; things like that.  There was a pretty big jazz scene in Richmond at the time and we were all into that.  As I said, we were all veterans and we were all older.  Tom had just come back from Japan and so had I.  That gave us sort of an in; a friendship that began immediately.  It was just an exciting place to be, very exciting. 
       KCH:	Were either he or you considering publishing at that time? 
       MD:	No.  I was not even considering graduate school.  What I had planned to do was—.  I was working pretty hard on the photography then and I was working chiefly for the Times Dispatch.  My goal at the time was to be a staff photographer for either Life or National Geographic.  That is what I had hoped to do.  Tom graduated a year before me and then later went off to the state of Washington. I went to the Times Dispatch full-time.  I hadn’t been there for a month when I realized that I wanted to get back into the literary world, and that is when I quit the photography.  Actually what I did was—I always have had cameras and I still have them, of course—I took the cameras and kept everything when I left the Times Dispatch.  We went to Iowa City, Anne and I did, with the idea that if something happened and I couldn’t make it in graduate school; we were going to keep going to California and I was going to get another newspaper job.  That is what I planned to do. 
       KCH:	What was it about your background, do you think, that [led] you to be a risk-taker?  When you saw something of interest, you thought, “Why not?” and your wife had a similar personality. 
       MD:	I wish I knew.  I couldn’t tell you.  I have no idea but you are right about that.  I did what I wanted to do.  I failed at everything I tried until I was about twenty, I guess twenty-one.   It happened when I got aboard the aircraft carrier and that is where I developed a sense of self-worth and the idea that I could do something.  I decided while I was in Combat Camera Group, that I mentioned a while ago, that I wanted to go to graduate school and maybe be an English professor.  I had just barely gotten through high school.  I didn’t know a thing about college.  I didn’t know that there were black colleges and white colleges in the South.  I applied to two or three black colleges.  I didn’t know they were black.  I applied to Harvard; needless to say, I didn’t get in. (Laugh) I just applied everywhere because I didn’t know any better.   
       KCH:	I think sometimes that is good.  When you don’t know any better, it can be amazing. 
       MD:	My father thought I was crazy; when I left the Times Dispatch and went to graduate school.  I had given up a good job and gone back to school and was wasting time studying all that silly stuff.  I didn’t pay any attention to that.   
       KCH:	Did you have any brothers and sisters? 
       MD:	I have a brother and a sister.  I have a brother ten years younger than I who is an extremely successful businessman.  My sister is married to a man who has just retired as a lieutenant on the Richmond police force.   
       KCH:	They also went on to— 
       MD:	The three of us did okay, but it didn’t look like we would in the beginning.  I can tell you that!  (Laughter) 
       KCH:	You must have been developing some characteristics during those years that—. 
       MD:	Well I did.  The real world brings out—I’m not comparing myself to William Faulkner, but when he was asked how he got interested in writing he said, “I don’t know where it came from,” that was the same thing with me. 
(Dr. Anne Duke enters the room. Dr. Maurice Duke speaks to her. “We are taping.”)   
(pause) 
0:43:08		Publications and research regarding Richmond’s African American history 
       KCH:	Just now you were talking about your youth and not being particularly focused but open to many kinds of individuals, when I look over the topics of the books that you have published, or been involved with as an editor, Don’t Carry me Back: Narratives by former Virginia slave, or co-editor with [Jackson] Bryer and [Thomas] Inge, Black American Writers, American Women Writers, what spurred your interest in those topics?  You were taking on topics that others weren’t touching.   
       MD:	You mean with the black and female? 
       KCH:	Particularly with blacks, but I believe you have also done some things with the Chesapeake Bay [residents]. 
       MD:	Yes, that is the book [Chesapeake Bay Voices] that you have the microphone on.  When I finished at Iowa—I finished my PhD work—I had never read nor had I ever been assigned a work by a black American writer, and my specialty was nineteenth century literature.  [I] didn’t know a thing about any of them and I got to, I read, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.  The basic theme of the story is that no matter what a black person does in American society he or she becomes invisible.  Their contribution is invisible.  So I thought, “Well maybe I’ll read some more of this stuff and find out what it is all about.”  I didn’t believe it, at that time.  I am from a poor, southern, white family and I just didn’t believe that kind of thing.  I decide to test out what Ralph Ellison had said and I went to the standard bibliographies of American literature to see what kinds of criticism had been written on black American writers.  “Nothing” was the answer; this was in the early-1960s.  These people were invisible.  I’m from a very modest background.  My father finished about the fourth grade.  He did all kinds of work: he was an iron worker, he was a cab driver, and he was a truck driver, stuff like that.  I felt a certain affinity with these people because I knew what it was like to be poor and I knew what it was like to be discriminated against—not to the extent that black people have and I understand that, too and I don’t mean to make a egregious comparison there—but I think that is the thing that got me interested.  Eventually I got to the point of thinking, “It’s not their background.  It’s not my background.  It’s is our background.” That’s why I’m doing this.  The book that I am working on upstairs now is a study of African American Richmond.  When I see what happened to black people in Richmond society, and in general society, too, I understand a great deal of what they went through, although I didn’t go through any kind of deprivation quite that severe.   
       KCH:	And it is so important to have that brought to our attention. 
       MD:	Yes.  Many people that I have talked with, even recently, just don’t understand what I am talking about.  I have a friend, a sailor—not a Navy sailor but a sailboat sailor—and I was talking, roughly a year ago, about black people and slavery and he said, “By God that is the last time we got any work out of those people.”  That is pretty primitive thinking, but it is there.  So I realize that it was there and, to a large degree, it is still there.  We’ve always seen black people as “them,” not as people but as “them”—“What did ‘those’ people do?  What do ‘those’ people want to do?  What should ‘those’ people want to do?”—not realizing that we are all in this life process together.   
       KCH:	I do think—I grew up in Nebraska— 
       MD:	Ah.  I thought I detected, heard, some mid-western voice there.  (Laughter) 
       KCH:	I wondered if you did.  —from your neighboring state, when you were in Iowa.  Obviously, I did not grow up with the same attitudes around me.   
       MD:	No, you would not. 
       KCH:	So having come to Virginia lately, I encounter people with attitudes exactly as how you described yourself; who initially just didn’t believe it. 
       MD:	That is right.  That is exactly what I thought.  Some of the people whose works I came in contact with—.  I was a very ardent, and still am very interested in jazz—I’m not a musician—the Modern Jazz Quartet, for example, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis, people such as this.  Then here comes along someone like Wynton Marsalis—I don’t see how if you know him—who is a fascinating, unbelievable musician.  All of this over time just chipped away at my consciousness and I realized that I was raised in the post-slavery south.  You can say post-slavery in some ways and in some ways the moral attitudes are still there for many people.  When I was growing up, my friends were all pretty much from the same kind of background I was.  My two closest friends, when we quit high school, they both ended up in prison.  I used to spend most of my time in Oregon Hill and Oregon Hill was a tough, tough, tough neighborhood in the ‘40s.  I remember that a black person would not come into Oregon Hill—Case closed! The end!—because of the unbelievable racism.  When you are at the bottom of the social, economic, and moral ladder, you’ve got to have someone to look down on.  That is what the red-neck whites did and to some degree still do, to some degree.  
       KCH:	I know that you are involved in ACORN, Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods. 
       MD:	Right.  I’m the photographer. 
       KCH:	Their photographer.  They also list you as their consultant on African American projects. 
       MD:	Yes.  The reason is Jennie Knapp Dotts, who is the executive director there.  She was a student of mine twenty or twenty-five years ago.  I had done that book on the Virginia slave narratives and [when] she found a cabin over in South Richmond, which she thought had been a slave cabin; she made contact with me and asked me if I’d come over and look at the cabin and see if it was a slave cabin.  It turned out that it wasn’t a slave cabin.  It was where an ex-slave had lived in the early 1870s, 1880s.  So then I just sort of stayed.  I’ve always—no matter what  people are going through personally—I’ve always been interested in Richmond history; even as a drop-out I was interested in that.  What she was doing just interested me and I stayed on.  I work quite a bit for her now.  It is all volunteer stuff.  I do all of the photography.  I don’t know if you see Style Weekly or not, I’ve had three big layouts in there.  Did you see the last one with the gargoyle on the front by any chance? 
       KCH:	No, I haven’t. 
       MD:	That was mine. 
       KCH:	Where did you photograph the gargoyle? 
       MD:	There is a horse watering trough in Shockoe Slip and the gargoyle is on there.  I have it upstairs if you’d like to see it. 
       KCH:	I’d like to, yes. 
       MD:	That is how I got into ACORN, working with Jennie.  Jennie is such a wonderful person. 
       KCH:	Yes, she is.  She has that talent of bringing people of very different backgrounds together and promoting the city and its change. 
       MD:	Yes she does.  She is excellent to work with.  I have a lot of respect for her.   
       KCH:	I do too.  Have you encountered any reluctance on the part of the African American community? 
       MD:	Oh yes.  Sure.  I’d expect that though.  They don’t want this white boy messing around with their stuff.  I would expect that and I don’t pay any attention to it.  There is a—.  I think there is a reason to be suspicious.  You have a black neighborhood and if there is a street you are planning, you put it in the middle of the black neighborhood.  That is how it is always done, that kind of thing here.  There’s a black church out here in the West End where I’ve been trying to get some information about the cemetery there at the church.  I wanted to do things in the church six or seven years ago.  They took all of the tombstones out, took them to the landfill, and threw them out and— 
       KCH:	Oh! 
       MD:	I know.  I was trying to get enough information to put something in the book about it.  I went out there and talked to the church secretary and she wouldn’t have one thing to do with me.  She was just hostile and wasn’t going to tell me a thing.  The first thing that I asked her when I met her, “Do you know of an African American cemetery around here?”  “I don’t know anything about that.”  It was fifty feet away from where she was standing.  So yes, that kind of thing has happened.  I’ve also gotten and the guy who is the primary writer— I’m not the primary writer on this book,—we’ve also gotten an awful lot of acceptance.  So has Jennie, who has given talks in the black churches.  I’ve published a couple of pieces in the Free Press.  I know the editor down there.  We’ve had a good response.  But, we’ve gotten hostile response, too.  As I say, I expected that and I don’t pay any attention to it.  If they insult me, I don’t mind that either.  I don’t care.   
       KCH:	You try to behave in a respectful manner— 
       MD:	That’s right.  That is exactly right. 
0:53:38	Cultural attitudes developed during youth in Richmond, during the 1940s and 1950s 
       KCH:	You talked about different areas where you lived.  You mentioned Park Street— 
       MD:	Park Avenue 
       KCH:	Park Avenue and, when we were visiting on the phone, you mentioned Grace and Harrison as one of the homes.  It sounds as if a number of the homes were in the general Fan area or just outside of Richmond.  Tell me your observations about how that area of Richmond has evolved.  
       MD:	We left the country, Powhatan County, in the summer of 1940 when my grandmother died, and came to Richmond.  We never owned a house.  We rented a house at 1003 E. Grace Street.  It’s now a Get-n-Zip, something like that.  We lived there for awhile, then we went to New York, the Syracuse area where my father was working; then we lived in New Jersey for awhile; we lived in North Carolina; we lived in two places in Tennessee.  We came back to Richmond and lived at Harrison and Grace again, but in a different building; then we lived up on Harrison Street, across from where the Pollak building is now; then we lived at 914 Park Avenue; and then we moved to 4 North First Street, right across from where the city library is.  Finally, in 1950, my parents bought a small house in the Lakeside area and stayed there until my father died in 1977.  We moved my mother out three years ago and she is in a nursing home now.  I had no stability at all growing up and, as I say, I never went to one school two years in a row.  It caused problems too, educationally in particular, because from one year to the next I was in a different environment.  I didn’t know what the kids had studied before and then I got to the point where I didn’t care.  When I finished my first year at John Marshall [High School], my freshman year, I held the—they told me—I held the record for absences for the whole school.  The principal told me, I remember it very well, he said, “Get out and don’t come back until you can comply with the laws of the school.”   And I said, “Fine.  That is exactly what I want.  I don’t want to be here anyway.”  So I was out. (chuckles) 
       KCH:	We don’t know how that constant change—your not having been part of the community of the school the previous years—affected your attitude. 
       MD:	Never was.  Never was.  No.  I was always sort of the outsider.  The kids that I knew in Oregon Hill, my two friends that went to prison, we all had that same outlook.  We all considered ourselves failures and we thought it was funny.   And that is the way the underprivileged, under-classed, black kids are today; going to jail, “Hey man, what are you doing here?” “I shot somebody.” “Ah man!” that kind of stuff.  You are in a subculture.  You live in the subculture and you have contempt for the culture above you.  That is a prisoner’s mindset, too.   
       KCH:	How did you as an English professor try to combat that kind of attitude?  I can see where your attitude toward the students, particularly ones that were struggling, might have been different. 
       MD:	Actually I tried to combat it by trying to get over to them the idea that literature was not something produced by elite, effete people; that it dealt with real issues of human beings.  I did a lot of self-effacing humor in class.  I did a lot of poking fun at the people I was teaching sometimes, the authors I was teaching.  And then I would say, “But on the other hand, it is a very important thing when you get up in the morning and just see a bird on the walkway.  It can do certain things to you.”  So I did that kind of stuff; to say that normal people did this but that these were the same kind of guys.  I used to tell them about how so many authors just weren’t very nice people—in the company of letters—I would tell them that too.  That appealed, I think, to some of the kids whose backgrounds were not totally different from my own.  I always started off the semester by telling them that I was probably going to be the only high school drop-out who would be teaching them while at the University.  People, some of these kids, would come back years later and I would see them and [they would] say, “I really sat up when you said that.  I was wondering what this was all about.”  I worked it from that point.  I was a pretty successful teacher.  I enjoyed it. 
       KCH:	I think that when someone enjoys something they often are more successful. 
       MD:	I loved it.   
       (pause) 
       KCH:	Why don’t we end here? 
       MD:	Okay 
0:58:42 
End of Interview #1 
?? 
 
?? 
 
?? 
 
?? 
 
		  
 
 
Dr. Maurice Duke		  
 
 
3