John P. Fox, i.m.

Friendships are character-driven, whether they forge or fall....

Recently, I had occasion to Search for my old friend and mentor, John P. Fox, and discovered that he had died in 2013. 

I first met John in 1968, when I was an undergraduate and he was an Assistant Professor of English at a university in Kentucky. I had submitted some poems to the university literary journal, to which John was attached as staff advisor to the student editors.

As a result of this submission, and subsequent publication of these poems, he managed to secure a place for me on the university's principal creative writing course, which, I came to discover, was in fact a post-graduate course. John had clearly pressed my case to the relevant authorities.

Unfortunately, his teaching style drew unwarranted, negative attention. While several of us were only too happy to meet at a bar on the Kentucky River, for all the Romantic connotations of drink and poetry, others found its substitution for a standard classroom irksome and pointless. John's two-year contract was not renewed.

He was married at the time, with an infant daughter; truth be told, his wife, a lovely woman, was clearly too good for him. John himself had been a graduate of the Iowa State Writers' Workshop, a bastion of potential young novelists and poets in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite his early promise, John's own literary successes were never to rise beyond the publication of a few short stories in regional magazines. His character was truculent, and he was closed-down emotionally. 

From conversations I had with John's brother, Bill, around that time, they both were the products of a domineering, distant father.

John and his wife separated shortly after he lost his teaching post.

John began to get work as a painter and decorator, a trade he had pursued for extra cash while himself an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. He asked if I wanted to give him a hand on occasional weekends as a 'painter's mate' and then for several weeks in the summer. I had no real interest in the work, but it was a useful, if irregular source of cash. After I obtained my degree I still had no clear career path apart from an intention to write and publish poetry. After John left the university, I continued with modest writing success, publishing poems in university publications and national anthologies until in due course I had the first of several long poems published in the prestigious Poetry in Chicago.

I left the area and lived in Florida for a time, continuing to write and to publish, and I didn't see John for a couple of years. On a visit back to the area, he congratulated me on my award in Poetry as 'Best Poem by a Younger Poet' and was incredulous to learn that I was unaware of the award, and the conversation became somewhat strained. That aside, I had little money, and the cash award that accompanied the prize was welcome. Because of my frequent changes of address, had I not had the conversation with him, I doubt if I ever would have been aware of the award. Still, there was a simmering resentment in his attitude that I found troublesome.

A year or two later, we had made up our differences and I went to work for him when I returned to the area. By this time John was a reasonably successful commercial decorating contractor, and my working relationship continued for a time, but that, too, eventually, ran its course as well.

I later moved to England, where I've lived for thirty-five years, and lost contact with him completely. During my Search, I found that twenty-odd years ago he had been taken to court in a dispute with a painters' union. The court ruled against him, and he appealed, but the original ruling was upheld. It was noted that John had duly set up an escrow account into which to pay the six-year shortfall in the payment of employee wages over an agreed period of time, as he lacked the funds to settle the issue immediately. The whole episode struck me as true-to-character: argumentative, locked in to punitive six-year legal battle and, sadly, apparently unrepentant, his business after more than forty years still only supporting a handful of employees.

John was of medium height, his straight hair side-parted. He maintained a trim, collegiate look more in keeping with a 1950s campus than the age of Flower Power. His gait was somewhat bow-legged. When he walked he had the curious appearance of a sailor making his way across a rolling deck.

He was seventy-five when he died, and as far as I know he never remarried. I remember through the small front room of his house his bedroom just visible off the hallway - a bed, chair, and sidetable with a lamp and a couple of books, the floor plain polished boards - a monk's cell.
 
The funeral directors who handled his funeral provided a personal page on their website, inviting his friends to post a message in his memory. There were no listings. 

His daughter would be in her mid-40s now, if she still lives. Perhaps like me she'd lost touch with him over the years; it happens. I remember in the late 1960s walking with John through a seedier part of the city, on our way to yet another bar. As we crossed a railway track, he stopped and, fishing a coin from his pocket, returned and laid the coin carefully on the face of one of the tracks. A few minutes later a train roared through, flipping the flattened coin in the air. Delighted, he held the faceless streak of copper up against the streetlight and smiled, "My daughter loves stuff like this."