I knew her first as Professor Fran Frazer, later as Fran Frazer, and finally as Fran Baker, wife of Ron Baker, both of whom taught me at the University of Prince Edward Island when I attended in the late 1980s. I also knew their son, Ted, with whom I spent many happy hours discussing poets and poetry, sitting on the wide, carpeted steps of the university cafeteria.
I took two classes from Fran (three from Ron), both in Modern Drama. I sat captivated and terrified, enthralled by her fierceness, her precision, her excellence and wit. I felt as if I were sitting in the Algonquin Hotel studying at the feet of a master, trying to take in all that brilliant editing and rare expertise had to teach.
I walked out of more than one of her classes, too, infuriated by the strike-through pencil marks that pierced every line of my essay, momentarily ignoring the A+ (I am not boasting; I am speaking of her fairness) at the top of the page. But by the time I got home, I was babbling out her classroom commentary to Don, the words I had rehearsed and hoped to memorize so that I could learn to become half the person that she was.
I could write reams about my classroom experience with her, and about the jealousy she engendered in a discipline dominated by men. In fact, she was the only female member teaching in the department when I was a student, where she also took on the responsibility of Dean and Chair. To say that I was fully engaged in her lectures is true, but it was Fran I was even more entranced with. She was laugh-out-loud funny, shockingly penetrating and more courageous than any woman I have known on the island. And she was the first person, apart from Don, who encouraged me to pursue a degree.
Driven to express her opinions on what she felt were right and wrong, Fran did not hesitate to say that she did not wholly approve of my writing a novel as thesis. We did not have a creative writing program at UPEI, and I think she felt that setting this kind of precedent was preclusive. Nevertheless, I was granted permission, and not once did she ever make me feel as if she regretted her decision, despite all that was wrong with my work (let me count the ways), and despite her out-spoken opinions on Shaw, Shepard, Ibsen, Brecht, Strindberg, Stoppard, Synge, Pirandello, Hellman, O’Neill, Williams, Fugard and Miller—and how many others I had never read before I met her.
One of my happiest memories is watching and listening to her—stylish, red-lipsticked (her devoted husband at the keyboard)—sitting sideways on the piano bench, high-heeled shoes kicked off, belting out, “Hard hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah GA!” And the most important memory I keep is of the day I graduated, Don flying in late, delayed by a business trip, my young children in the audience, my multiple parents long-dead or vanished, Fran and Ron doffing and donning their caps, beaming toward me as I walked across the stage—the great girth of me—as I scooped up my diploma.
Over the years we exchanged Christmas letters and cards, and she was one of the cherished people who wrote to me after Don died. But whenever I took up my pen to dash off a postcard or a holiday missive, I was overtaken with a fear of poor grammar; subject/verb disagreement; weak vocabulary; punctuation errors—all those things Fran knew better than Fowler. Even now as I type this, I am halted by what I fear is poor phraseology, cloying sentiment, shaky syntax.
I also find I am writing logorrheically because I don’t want to let go of her; relegate her to the dead.
The last words she spoke to me were from her hospital bed (where illness had robbed her of breath), delivered through her kind husband, who relayed them this Christmas—words I read through streaming tears, wishing I had had an excuse to have kept more fluid contact: “Tell her to finish that novel.”
I knew her first as Professor Fran Frazer. I will think of her forever as my cherished friend. I love and respect and admire her more than people who have claimed me as family, and oh, how I will miss her.
An evening spent with Hannah sitting on your knees
Is like traveling through Alaska in your BVD's,
She's hard-hearted Hannah
The Vamp of Savannah, GA
Jack Yellen, Bob Bigelow, Charles Bates
