Professor X
Page 2
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
The verse gets difficult, and the class grows impatient. Each allusion, each wooly metaphor, seems to lead us astray from the direct path of interpretation. Why doesn’t he just say what he means? My students put up with poetry, barely. Most are in school to get a better job. They’ve got no time or inclination to start opening Wallace Stevens’s nested boxes of meaning. They need to get where they are going.
Snow is falling. It taps at the classroom windows. My students grow uneasy and restless. They look at their cell phones. Some have long drives home in unreliable vehicles, but unless a daytime blizzard shutters the school completely, there are no mechanisms for canceling or even shortening a night class. Stevens falls flat. Matthew Arnold fares just the smallest bit better. I point out the violence in “Dover Beach,” the clashing ignorant armies, the fragments of shale hurled randomly by the waves up the shore, nature molding life into form through acts of apparent chaos. In college, I wrote a paper on “Dover Beach,” failing to notice that the whole thing was about Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and received a C. My professor’s stern marginal comments have traveled down the ages, and now make up the central point of my little lecture.
The final poem of the night comes from the back of the textbook, the section of contemporary poetry. Sometimes I teach poetry in strict chronological order, because I feel that to understand any art you have to understand what came before. Then I get fed up with the rigidity of that approach. I also sense the students paying less attention to the poems themselves than to the dates of composition. They watch the years creep forward. Soon it will be over! I can feel their excitement when we get to modernism. This must be the end! What is there going to be—something after modernism? There couldn’t possibly be postmodernism, could there? So then I try teaching the poems randomly, scattershot, letting one work lead to another, trying to foster in the students something approaching the joy of discovery. The textbooks don’t have a clear idea how to handle this; some years the texts we use (the department mandates them) follow chronology, and other years theme.
We read “I Go Back to May 1937” by Sharon Olds. In this poem, the speaker examines photographs of her mother and father at school. They are innocent college kids, she writes; “they would never hurt anybody.” The speaker marvels at her knowledge of what the future holds. She addresses the old images directly: “you are going to do things / you cannot imagine you would ever do.” She chronicles her parents’ mistakes and suffering—“you are going to want to die”—but, naturally desiring her own existence, wouldn’t change history to keep them apart. “Do what you are going to do,” she writes with resignation, “and I will tell about it.”
Snow drums with force on the windows. Other classes seem to be calling it a night. We hear the hubbub and nervous laughter of groups filing past the classroom door. I tell my class that they can leave. The speed with which they jump out of their seats is unseemly. Some of the younger students are packed and gone in twenty seconds.
I put away the desktop podium and spend a few minutes sitting amid my books and papers. The Sharon Olds poem blindsided me. I can’t get it out of my mind. My wife and I—we were as innocent as those college kids in the photos. Our marriage was a placid one. We seldom argued. And now look at us!
The house we bought, out entrance ticket into the American suburban dream, has soured our life together. We fight bitterly now, in an unfamiliar way, until we are hoarse and spent. Today it was about grout. The bathroom grout. The craziest thing: whether or not all the bathroom grout would need to be replaced. Our quarrels have taken on a weird geometry. A single word (grout, chimney, foundation) or a single small event that under different circumstances might escape notice (the rain pattering on the roof in a new and more vivid way, an unexplainable delay in the arrival of heat in the morning) can spark an oddly bitter argument, one of those great shaking fights that seems to reverberate with a life of its own. Our dirty grout and chimneys in need of repointing start to seem inexorably linked to our massive personality flaws. Afterward we are exhausted and tearful. We move in a hangover of gloom.
The classroom building is very quiet. I don’t hear the distant droning of any other adjunct. Everyone must be gone. I find myself reading the Sharon Olds poem over again. There is my life, flapping like laundry strung from the poem’s long, taut, artless-seeming lines. My students digested the poem and thought of nothing but the snow and the balding tires on their cars. I want literature to resonate for them, but perhaps the prerequisite for that is the sort of pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
At the poem’s end the speaker achieves a measure of resignation. She would not alter reality, if she could, and stop her parents from coming together. She wants to live, of course; she realizes that the essence of life is suffering, and she might as well be around as the artist documenting their pain. “Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it,” she writes.
I’ve been sitting at the desk for a long time. The classroom motion detector senses no life, and the lights wink out. It’s time to go home.
1
The Adjunct
I ATTENDED COLLEGE in the 1970s. Midsemester of my freshman year I found myself chatting with the girl who sat across from me in a history class. She told me she was studying to be a nurse. She was a sweet girl, with a friendly, square-jawed face and twin plastic bows holding the sides of her hair in place; no doubt she went on to make someone a solid and dependable wife. She asked me what college I was in.
“What college?” I said mockingly. “Silly girl. This college. What do you think, I commute to UCLA?”
She gave me the fisheye. She introduced me to the concept that a College of Nursing existed on campus, but that intelligence didn’t spur me on to figure out which particular college I was in. I went to class, studied a little, read the campus newspaper’s accounts of research labs and internships and sometimes wondered: how in the world do you get involved with something like that? It was another classmate who finally clarified everything for me. Harry, twenty-five years old, was a chronic pot smoker and indolent film major. His checkered academic career had left him highly sensitive to the nuances of school enrollment and academic placement. He’d been cashiered from other colleges; he knew the ins and outs. He ticked off the colleges at our own institution for me. There were colleges of nursing and business and education and performing arts.
“So which do I go to?” I asked. You see how stupid I was?
Arts and Sciences, he replied.
“Film seems like a liberal art,” I said, my confidence in such matters growing. “You must go there too.”
Ah no, said Harry wistfully. He was in the College of General Studies, which was the least prestigious of all the schools. He was hoping to keep up his grades so the administration would allow him to transfer into Arts and Sciences, officially declare his major, and be taught by full-time professors, not just adjuncts.
Harry had truly enlightened me. I began looking at the teachers at our sprawling university in a new way. I took note of the instructors who appeared on campus only at dinnertime, the middle-aged bald guys in trench coats and Florsheim shoes carrying accounting textbooks. I saw them and thought: CGS teachers. Adjuncts.
And then I forgot about these distinctions for about twenty years.
When I finally finished my master’s degree, my wife had a brainstorm. Why didn’t I adjunct, maybe a class per semester? It would give us some extra cash for vacations, or maybe for a new car if the need arose. We speculated on how much money adjuncting paid. I thought a grand per course; she thought more like two. She turned out to be right. The money attracted me, but I couldn’t get my arms around the idea of actually teaching college. It seemed highly unlikely.
Nevertheless, I made crisp copies of my newly minted MFA degree, retyped my unimpressive resumé, photocopied some writing I had published, and prepared a package to send to
nearby Pembrook College. Pembrook was nothing but a name to me, a tidy collection of buildings that I glimpsed on occasion from the highway, a place that sometimes turned up in squibs in the newspaper. I’d never set foot on its campus, and didn’t know what its academic strengths were, or if it even had any. I never gave a thought to who made up its student body. I sent the package off.
Normally this would be the place to write “… and promptly forgot about it.” But I had no time to do any forgetting. A scant week later I got a call from Dr. Ludlow, the chairman of the English department. We set up an interview.
The campus turned out to be lovely, a neat little collection of buildings from various eras nestled on a hillside. The place was a quiet haven of ornate stonework and columns, peaked roofs, stained glass windows, Gothic Revival archways, sweeping quads, and prim Victorian scalloping. Students chatted or examined their cell phones or studied languidly under spreading trees. On the athletic fields, balls clicked faintly against bats. Bells tolled irregularly. I sat in my car and breathed it all in, deeply. I felt an inordinate peace. I had a job interview looming, but I was not nervous. What place could be more tranquil than a college campus? The only thing I felt was a gnawing regret: why hadn’t I gotten my Ph.D. and spent my life in such placid surroundings as these? The cares of marriage, of raising children, the crushing monotony and bureaucracy of my full-time job—these all melted away. Could there be a healthier environment than college? A middle-aged professor in a polo shirt and Wallabees—Wallabees!—moseyed abstractedly past the car, open text in hand. He was trim and fitlooking. He exuded calm. What must be the state of his arteries? How unobstructed must they be? In my mind, I could hear the strong rhythms of his sluicing blood.
Dr. Ludlow greeted me warmly. She was a petite woman, a flat five-foot-tall. She was attired exotically in a dark dress with slits through which I glimpsed a crushed red material, like coffin satin. She told me how much she had loved my journalism, and my ego arched with displeasure. I found her use of the term “journalism” just slightly, vexingly inaccurate: my essays had been published in newspapers and magazines, but the first way I would categorize them would not be journalism. Had I written accounts of Zoning Board of Appeals meetings, that would be journalism. But whatever. She was just being nice. She said she had laughed out loud at the humor in some of my pieces. Well, okay then. Now we were talking. She was flattering me. I knew immediately: she wanted me for the job. What they were looking for, she said, was someone to teach freshman English, known as English 101 or Introduction to College Writing, and English 102, Introduction to College Literature, to students in the evening program. She handed me the standard English 102 anthology, a big brick of writing from all eras, and asked me what approach I would take to teaching “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath.
Suddenly, I was very nervous. I paged anxiously through the book, looking rather desperately for the poem. I had to get a grip. “Well, the first thing I would go over is basic study skills—the use of an index and all that, heh, heh.” She seemed unmoved by my self-deprecating humor. I finally found the poem and read it through quickly. I had read it in college. In fact, it was during this episode that I formulated the approach that would serve me so well with “Dover Beach.” I had gotten a poor grade on a paper about “Daddy” in one of my own freshman English classes because I had neglected to mention Ted Hughes. The simple explanation for this was that I hadn’t known about Ted Hughes. Never heard of him. Of course, he was mentioned prominently in the little biographical sketch of Plath that introduced her section of poetry in the text, but I hadn’t been assigned to read that, had I? But now I talked feverishly and passionately about Plath and Hughes, their symbiotic and consumptive relationship; I talked about the poem’s irony, about the way its foursquare rhythm comes at the reader like a drill press; I alluded to its childish rhymes, and of course its edgy metaphorical choices—the Nazis and all. I could see in Dr. Ludlow’s face that I was doing well. This is a poem, I said, that simply couldn’t be fully understood unmoored from its real-life circumstances. I talked about all I knew about the Hughes/Plath union, which really wasn’t much, and then I saw a small darkening of Dr. Ludlow’s features. Her brow creased; her mouth made a moue. I had taken my approach too far. I hit the brakes and backpedaled. “But of course, we don’t exactly know where the reality ends and the poetry begins,” I said. “It would be a mistake to confuse the speaker with Sylvia Plath. And that’s one thing I would want the class to be very clear about.”
Dr. Ludlow smiled. She liked my answer.
I was astounded at how well the interview was proceeding. I couldn’t quite believe that I would be teaching college. I was still frankly in awe of my own college professors. Their lives seemed purposeful and integrated—full of pleasure, and none too strenuous.
A year or two after graduation, I was in the Strand Book Store on Broadway at 12th Street in New York City. I came upon one of my English professors: a woman who taught a class in the “autobiographical acts”—whatever those were—of Mary McCarthy, Edward Dahlberg, Lillian Hellman, and the then-obscure Maya Angelou. The day was terribly rainy; the store smelled of wood and damp—the floor, the shelving, the pasteboard. She stood four rungs up on one of those library ladders, reading from some ancient-looking text with an olive-green cover, completely engrossed. I stood right next to her, enthralled. Her presence before me seemed nothing short of miraculous. She was no more than thirty. She wore a trench coat and a Burberry hat. A drop of rain hung at the tip of her tapering nose. I had enjoyed her class, and had met with her in her office a few times, but now I was too frightened to talk to her. I followed her around the store. I stalked her. She addressed a clerk, and smiled a radiant smile; I looked away, grimacing at my own cowardice, and when I turned back she was gone. She had put down her olive-green book, deciding against purchasing it. It was called Getting to Know Your Cocker Spaniel.
Imagine my thrill of recognition to encounter, years later, in my students’ English 102 text, “Three Girls” by Joyce Carol Oates, in which a pair of young college poseurs stalk an unglamorous peacoat-wearing hair-braided Marilyn Monroe, not daring to talk to her, in the very same Strand in 1956. (In Oates’s story, La Monroe hits the Judaica section, and heads to the checkout counter with Jews of Eastern Europe; The Chosen People: A Complete History of the Jews; and Jews of the New World.)
Some of my college professors dazzled with their erudition. Some I mocked. Some I thought insufferable bores. I thought it criminal that a few of them were allowed to teach. But to all of them I took off my hat. To stand before a class, lecturing for hours at a time, armed with nothing more than the stuff of the mind, able to field any question, no matter how far-flung, seemed impressive.
To teach college seemed a preposterous endeavor, but what I didn’t realize was how closely I fit the profile of an adjunct instructor. I had spent my college years mocking premeds and soul-dead accounting majors and psychotic computer science types. They all had the last laugh. I was a classic adjunct type with a master’s degree, a failed artistic career, and a need for cash. Men and women of my stripe litter the streets of the metropolis like discarded latte cups, waiting tables or proofreading for law firms or hanging on in their cubicles to the lowest rungs of the publishing industry. But in the exurban heartland where I live, they are in short supply. Where I live there are the country people, who have been here for generations, rather wealthy transplants, and civil servants, none of whom typically will be found adjuncting.
Dr. Ludlow knew that she had a live one on the hook. She told me that she couldn’t believe how lucky they were to find someone like me. Then she looked away. “There’s only one thing,” she said. Her body language was alarming. She sat hunched forward in her office chair, her legs entwined beneath her, fingers interlaced. God, what was happening? The woman was all knotted up. “The pay. I don’t know what to say. The pay, the salary—it’s an embarrassment. I’m embarrassed to offer it to someone of your skills.”
“
Well, how much is it?” I asked.
She looked to her office door. Her face was in direct profile. Her cowl of hair came to her jawline. High cheekbones, puffy eyes, bit of eyeliner, bit of a beaky nose.
“I can’t make myself say it,” she said.
“Please don’t let it concern you.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
We had reached an impasse. I would have to worm it out of her, which was humiliating. I was pretty sure I had the job, so, unafraid of queering the deal, I did what you shouldn’t do at a job interview and made a joke.
“Pretty please?” I said.
The tension was broken. Dr. Ludlow pressed her palms to her mouth.
“Nineteen-hundred per course,” she said from under her hands.
I wasn’t sure what to say. Normally, I would have assured her that the money seemed fine, or some crap like that, but since she thought the money an insult, I couldn’t very well contradict her. I didn’t want to seem insane (talk about queering the deal), so she and I just sort of hung our heads sadly.
“I think it might get better,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
I felt a little irked. This was my first exposure to the peculiar manner in which colleges do business. They consider themselves exempt from traditional market forces, and I suppose that if they think it, they are. Dr. Ludlow’s admission that I wouldn’t be paid enough for my trouble seemed not honest but smug. I found myself longing for the more traditional business approach, all hypocrisy, in which the capitalists pay nothing but aren’t quite so cheerful about it.
Each course, Dr. Ludlow told me, would require 38 hours of instruction. I started doing the calculations in my head: $1,900 ÷ 38 = $50 per hour, which, as it turns out, didn’t sound all that bad. Ah, but I supposed I would have to grade papers as well. How long would that take? I added 7 hours to make it an even 45: $1,900 ÷ 45 came to exactly $42 per hour.