Robert Peter Tristram Coffin was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet, an essayist, a Maine historian and chronicler — and in the fall of 1954 he was my Shakespeare professor at Bowdoin College.
Sadly, the course lasted only a semester because he passed away in Portland during my sophomore midyear break in January 1955.
I’ve always been grateful for the fact that I chose this elective, even though it meant that, combined with second-year German, I was carrying six eight o’clock classes every week.
The bare bones of Professor Coffin’s life and career are that he was born in Brunswick in 1892 and educated there. He graduated from Bowdoin College (1915), Princeton (A.M. 1916) and, as a Rhodes Scholar, Oxford University (A.B. 1920); while in England, he served as Second Lieutenant of the U.S. Army. He began his teaching career as instructor and later, professor of English at Wells College in Aurora, New York (1921-34), where he ran the English honors course. He returned to Bowdoin as Pierce Professor of English (1934-55), was a visiting lecturer at several colleges and universities from the 1930s through 1950s, and a Fulbright scholar at the University of Athens in 1953-54.
This outline, though, doesn’t cover the fact that he was a striking looking man, with hair and a handlebar mustache the silvery color of driftwood that has been long exposed to the tides and the weather. He always wore a brass-buttoned blazer with the insignia of Oxford University on the breast pocket.
And he rolled his own cigarettes, never missing a beat of his lecture and never spilling a shred of tobacco. Remember, this was an era when professors kept ashtrays on the corners of their desks for those of us who smoked.
Professor Coffin’s approach to teaching Shakespeare was based on the fact that the playwright was born to the yeoman class and that his origins directly affected his writing. He included the phrase “the yeomanly Shakespeare” in his talks more times than I can remember.
What I remember best and enjoyed most, however, were his occasional digressions into the lore of coastal Maine, with special attention paid to Casco Bay. He was fond of declaring that his late wife, Ruth, had made the best lobster stew in the world, and he based his claim on the following logic. First, it was common knowledge that she had made the best lobster stew around Casco Bay, and second, that any lobsters outside of Casco Bay simply weren’t worth stewing.
In one class, Professor Coffin set out to teach us how to open and eat a boiled lobster without using implements of any kind, not a nutcracker, not even a rock. I tried following his directions and had, for months afterward, a scar across my palm, the result of following his instruction to take a claw “with your hands clasped as if in prayer and pressing on it.”
Although he had a brilliant career as an academic and a poet, Professor Coffin will always remain in my memory as one of the most remarkable storytellers I’ve ever heard — or read, for that matter.
That statement notwithstanding, I have to say that I now use every tool available to open a boiled lobster, and since that day on Bailey Island I have not approached a lobster claw with my hands “clasped as if in prayer.”
Bob Gustafson lives and writes in Eastport.