Reed Whittemore, Handyman to the Muse

Saving, clearly, quite out of reach, and so he

G-rrr

Got up every morning and g-rrr ate his breakfast

And g-rrr lumbered off to his eight o'clock

Gladly to teach.

He really throws himself into those g-rrrs. Sitting behind him, his younger daughter swipes at a tear.

Daisy Whittemore has come prepared to read as long as necessary herself -- but from her father's memoir, not his poems. "It's really hard for me to imagine reading my dad's poetry out loud," she says later, "because I hear his voice when I read poetry.

"And I hear his 'g-rrr.' "

Garrison Keillor was a Whittemore student once, in Minneapolis more than four decades back. In a foreword the poetry-loving radio host contributed to "Against the Grain," he writes that his teacher talked of literature as "a noble undertaking but also a job of work that a man or woman does in the ordinary course of things, just as you would plant a field or weld a fence."

Keillor describes the Whittemore of 1964 as "movie-star handsome," and his craggy face does nothing to belie that judgment today. But a New England WASP of his generation would never suggest such a thing about himself, as can be seen when someone gets up to read a self-description from the memoir. It was selected by Whittemore's son Ned, who couldn't make the reading but was moved by the "brutal honesty" of this portrait of the artist at age 21:

"He was nearsighted but wore no glasses. He had a medium-grade mind and managed to mix intellectual modesty with sudden arrogance. . . . He preferred to think of himself as a genuine rebel yet couldn't help being polite."

The politeness was learned growing up in New Haven, Conn., in a not entirely happy household. At the end of meals, Daisy Whittemore says, her father was required to say "I've had a great sufficiency" before he could be excused. As a young child, he thought that meant "I have had a great fish," so it was puzzling to have to say it after roast beef dinners.