by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
I pressed on. Writing is difficult because we don’t even call it what it is. The writing, the recording, the typing, whatever, is the least crucial part. Writing is thinking and crafting and editing; unfortunately, the writer always desires to make progress, and without constant vigilance may slip out of thinking and crafting mode and into mere progress, which can signal doom.
Writing is difficult because it seems so useless. One cannot imagine one’s writing having the smallest impact on the world. And is there any process that calls for more self-discipline to get it right with less potential payoff?
Gore Vidal said it well. “The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.”1
E. B. White said that, when writing, he had “occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure, an antic sound.”2
Both writers manage to convey how the act of writing can seem like the pastime of a lunatic.
Writing is difficult because sometimes as we write we are forced to confront the shattering reality, about midway through composition, that no part of what we are saying is true. Writing, often inconveniently, reveals truth. The composition of an essay advocating a position may reveal to the writer that he believes the exact opposite. What could be more demoralizing? The honest writer, upon seeing that the piece will not move forward, chucks out everything and begins afresh, which requires copious amounts of moral fiber. Writing assignments require honesty and fortitude in a way that chemistry homework doesn’t.
Writing is difficult because it is so fraught; we know that we will be judged as people by the work we present. Math, even badly done math, is more neutral. As a friend of mine said after watching a comedian who failed to amuse him, “You never say, ‘Hey, what a bad comedian!’ You say, ‘Hey, what an asshole!’ ” Writers are in the same fix. We are judged as human beings by our writing, but how difficult is it for us to convey in writing the depth and subtlety of our minds? How often do we receive an e-mail at work that portrays the writer as completely different (and not in a positive way) from the person we know so well? It’s a writing issue. At the wedding, the sozzled best man, normally a considerate chap, manages with his toast to the bride and groom to embarrass every last person in the tent. It’s a writing issue. The man disappoints because his prose does.
The reverse, of course, can also be true. On September 11, 2001, when asked how many firefighters New York City had lost, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani would say that he didn’t have the figure yet, but it was certain to be “more than we can bear.” That morsel of extraordinary diction—the choice of the word “bear”—would help make the mayor the most respected public official in the United States.
I told my class of writers to think of a compressed spring. When expanded, the spring can do nothing; potential energy is only created when the thing is compressed. The most powerful writing is that which has been cut to its essence. The writer must discard much of what he does. Is that the case in any other field of endeavor? Writers know to be suspicious of any seemingly clever turn of phrase. Are accountants told that? Must they, as an old writing teacher of mine liked to put it, knock down their own sand castles? Are medical researchers cautioned to kill their darlings? (“I came up with a cure for cystic fibrosis over the weekend, but I chucked it out. I don’t know … It just seemed too pat.”)
The class was still with me. I could feel their apprehension and sense their resolve. In this class, they thought, they would finally slay their writing demons. College instructors, even newly minted ones, know when they are falling flat and I certainly was not. I had them convinced, at least for the moment, that good writing was the most important thing in the world.
The contradictory instructions, I warned the students, will never stop coming. Exhaust your topic, cover it thoroughly—but at all costs avoid tangents. Stay focused, adhere to your thesis—but illustrate with very detailed examples. Be vivid in your language—but not wordy. Be tightly organized—but remember that some memorable writing results from serendipity.
Writing is difficult because the smallest infelicities—repetition, bits of ambiguity, parallelism out of whack—can harden into speed bumps, slowing the reader down and distracting from the content. Prose must go down like honey. Take another look: “When expanded, the spring can do nothing; potential energy is only created when the thing is compressed.” The spring/the thing—is it a rhyme, a typo, a what? The reader will slow down, perhaps by an amount so small as to be immeasurable, but for the duration of that sentence, the rickety girder work of the prose overwhelms the meaning. A careful writer can wrestle with a sentence like that all day, ending up in one of those weird positions writing puts you in, wishing that springs had been called something else.
Finally, I told them, writing is hard—and writing courses are hard—because really there is no such thing as college-level good writing. There is no such thing as beginner’s-level or intermediate good writing. Writing is either good or it is bad. Good writing has something fine and profound about it. The homeliest classroom assignment, composed well, written with honesty, carefully crafted, can put us in the mind of Thoreau.
And now for the last word, the most demoralizing fact of all. Even when writing is technically without fault, it can be not much good. When I was a young teenager, my sister, eight years older and a marvelously impressive figure, sat down at the huge Smith-Corona she’d gotten for Christmas and began writing a novel. I was speechless with admiration. She wrote a chapter or two and abandoned the project. I asked her what had happened.
She considered a moment and sighed, “It just all seemed so pedestrian,” she said.
Her phrasing has stayed with me all these years. What better way to describe the dull, weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable way that our own writing often strikes us? Pedestrian. If she had brought that level of inspiration to the actual composition, she’d have written one corking novel! It’s all been done before, we think. Why am I even bothering? Some other monkey at some other typewriter has churned all of this stuff out before. Even as I write this now, I can’t shake the feeling that, sitting in some dusty back room of the Strand Book Store, there sits a yellowing copy of some other In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, all of my thoughts and words out there already, already written by somebody else.
I was practically panting with excitement. Had an adjunct ever had a heart attack on the first night of class? I had forgotten how much I loved thinking about writing, and never before had I had the opportunity to do so at such length. Everything I thought poured out of me, all of my writing worries, my frustrations, my writing demons, coupled with all that I had learned after spending thousands of hours at the keyboard, thousands at the typewriter, thousands hanging over legal pads. God, I thought, I’d written for so long I’d written through multiple ages of technology. And there was more. Already I was filling up with more stuff about writing. Yes, yes—I would have to tell them about balance, about preambles that are too long and rushed conclusions; I would have to tell them about my wife’s trick—how she, as the first step in evaluating a page of my writing, would look at the literal shape of it, eyeing it from halfway across the room so that she couldn’t actually read the text but could see the paragraphs as mere shapes, like the outlines of continents on a map.
I stepped out into the corridor for a breath of air. I needed to compose myself. First night of class: I noted that most of the other adjuncts had already dismissed their students for the evening. One other teacher, at the far end of the hall, was still going. His rasp was indistinct. I heard not his words but just the rising and falling of his voice, which had a querulous quality to it as he explained some lengthy pro
position. A corridor of classrooms at night is a lonely but exciting place. I had to swallow down a rising gorge of exhilaration. I coughed to cover my excitement. A writing cliché to avoid: I felt wondrously alive. Not necessarily particularly happy, but surgically opened, splayed, scalped, vivisected, and mounted. I was my own raw self. This was me, take it or leave it. I felt like I’d been confessing at a meeting, Alcoholics Anonymous, or any of the other sorts of assemblages that take place in empty school buildings.
I stepped back into my classroom.
“And now,” I told the class, “we write.”
The students, all business, took out notebooks and loose-leaf and folders and pens. Someone piped up with a question: would they be keeping a writing journal? They knew more about what was supposed to go on than I did. Had some of them taken the class before? I would learn in time that, yes, they certainly had. I told them that I didn’t believe in journals. When you have that much writing lying around, you don’t want to waste it, and so you try to shoehorn that writing into whatever projects happen to come up, and it seldom fits.
“We have to do a base-level writing exercise,” I said. “I have to get a feeling of where everybody is.” They nodded. They understood they had to participate in such tedious formalities. “Write me an introduction and then three good body paragraphs. Here’s the topic: I’m exactly the same person that I was five years ago. Or, if you don’t like that one, I’m a completely different person than I was five years ago.”
A hand rose: do you want a conclusion?
“No,” I said, briskly and with great authority. I had already learned, as a professor, to speak ex cathedra. Never had I given the idea of conclusions any thought, but instantly I apprehended the boundaries of the matter. “Conclusions are childish. Let the reader draw them. You shouldn’t have to tell us.”
The woman with the tattoos and cardigan ventured a rather nervous comment. “My teacher always told us to turn our introductory paragraphs on their heads. She wanted us to use the same words, but mixed up, for the conclusion.”
She was about my age; this was the sort of McGuffey’s Readers stuff teachers used to spout.
“If the last paragraph is just the first in disguise,” I said, “then why even bother with the middle? We haven’t progressed even slightly.”
The students made notes. They wrote a first draft. They got up and stretched and wrote a final draft. They worked with great industry and seriousness of purpose. They thought before they wrote. They twisted their bodies as they wrestled with their undoubtedly twisted prose.
My first night of class, it seemed, was an unalloyed triumph. Christ, I thought. How fucking inspirational am I? Look at these people go! I sauntered down the hall, in the direction of the other teacher. I peeked into his room. He was instructing up a storm, teaching some sort of accounting. He was very tall and bulky, in a suit and Rockports and aviator glasses. His classroom had a whiteboard, which was covered with numbers in various colors. He held three colored markers clawlike between the fingers of his left hand. A rhombus of light from the overhead projector shone in the middle of the board. He nodded to me and went right on teaching. That man—God knows what his name is—has now been with me for a decade, teaching a classroom or two away. We greet each other tentatively when we pass in the hall. We chat while waiting for photocopies. We talk of the weather, and jovially complain about the work ethic of our students. We note the passing of time every September, and commiserate over the midsemester doldrums, and laugh together almost giddily when the term is over. We laugh, but it is clear that we both want more classes. I long to ask him: why are you here? Are you, too, under a house? Is it divorce, or gambling debts, or a civil judgment? Did you back your sensible Toyota out of the driveway and over a child?
Class drew to a close. The students handed in their papers. Some hung back, wanting to talk. Some of the older students burned to talk to me. They were nervous. Writing has always been a challenge. They said it various ways: I’ve got it up here [pointing to head] but I can’t get it to come out here [making handwriting motions]. When I write I feel like I’m drunk. I never have enough to write, says a nurse’s aide, but my husband can’t understand it because he says I never stop talking. Such is the mystique of writing that the biggest men—the building contractor too bulky for his seat, for example—are reduced to jelly by its difficulties. Writing is so boring, one said. I want to jump out of my skin, said another; I feel like my body is inhabited by crawling insects of boredom.
I liked that last one. That’s not pedestrian at all.
Oh, Dean Truehaft: leave early? Hah! We were twenty minutes over. Has a college class, in the history of higher education, ever been as excited about a curriculum? I was feeling pretty full of myself. I was happy. This wasn’t like work. This was undiluted spiritual satisfaction.
“Okay,” I said to the class. “Are you happy you signed on?”
“All we want is three credits,” someone said.
3
Revelation
EVERYONE AT HOME WAS ASLEEP: the children upstairs, my wife in the downstairs bedroom, scant feet away. Her door was open. I could hear the sound of her light snoring, such a comforting sound, a gentle rasp followed by a pleasing gurgle. Two window air conditioners whirred upstairs. The roof of our Cape Cod house sliced through the bedrooms, not unattractively, in a 1950s sort of way, but since there was no attic, the rooms, pressed against the surface of the roof, were virtually uninhabitable without air-conditioning in the summer.
I put down my mug of coffee. I looked over, for the third and perhaps the fourth time, my stack of baseline essays. I did not then own a cell phone and had never sent or received a text message, but I needed the phrase that would become one of the greatest of electronic clichés.
WTF. What the fuck.
The essays were terrible, but the word “terrible” doesn’t begin to convey the state these things were in. My God. Out of about fifteen students, at least ten seemed to have no familiarity with the English language. It seemed that they had never before been asked in school to turn in any sort of writing assignment. I can say that there were words misspelled, rather simple words at that. I can say that there was no overarching structure to the paragraphs, that thoughts and notions were tossed at the reader haphazardly. I can say that there were countless grammatical errors; sentences without verbs; sentences without subjects; commas everywhere, like a spilled dish of chocolate sprinkles, until there were none, for paragraphs at a time; sentences that neither began with a capital letter nor ended with any punctuation whatsoever. I can say that the vocabulary was not at a college level and perhaps not at a high school level. I can say that tenses wandered from present to past to past perfect back to present, suggesting the dissolving self of a schizophrenic consciousness. I can say that some of the mistakes concerned matters of form explained to me by Sister Mary Finbar on—as God is my witness, I can remember this—the very first day of first grade, matters such as the definition “a sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought” and the requirement that, before nouns and adjectives and adverbs beginning with a vowel, the writer is obligated to use the article “an,” not “a.” I can say all that, and you may still think to yourself: English teacher. What do you expect? Nitpicking bastard.
Perhaps, dear reader, you think the main issue is the arrogance and superiority of the aforementioned teacher rather than any problem with the students. Perhaps you think of me as Guy Crouchback, the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, who during World War II censors letters and observes snootily of the writers that some “wrote with wild phonetic misspellings straight from the heart. The rest strung together clichés which he supposed somehow communicated some exchange of affection and need.” I could quote broken sentences all day, but I won’t. The words banged against each other in unnatural ways, twisted up like mangled bodies. There is something pornographic about viewing such poor work.
I think of a four-line utterance without a
verb—the world’s longest sentence fragment—and the old joke about the world’s tallest midget comes to mind.
Nothing I can do can really convey—so that you can feel it, as I did, in the cold pit of my stomach—the true abilities of many of these students. Fine-tuning—that’s what I had expected to be doing: turning workmanlike prose into something substantial, something rounded, something that occasionally even sang. Instead, that lonely night in my little Cape Cod, I drowned in incoherence. I was submerged in a flood of illogic and solecism and half-baked coinages, this last being a charitable spin on the use of made-up words.
There were exceptions. The older students were better. The woman with the tattoos and cardigan knew what she was doing, in the sense that she didn’t make up any words, and she had some sense of having embarked on a piece of construction, something to be fashioned, like a birdhouse or a ladder-backed chair, something that needs to be plumb. To my relief, she had her tenses firmly corralled, her verbs and their auxiliaries lined up in formation like little tin soldiers. There was another competent paper, this one from a woman in her forties. Her fourth child, the last one, was poised to leave the house for college. She was a true minivan mom, the picture of unruffled composure. The personal essays she would hand in that semester portrayed all the complexities of suburban living. She wrote of Brownie troops and uniform swaps and soccer tournaments; she wrote of brokering complex favors with three other mothers so that none of their boys would have to miss an optional T-ball practice; she wrote of the struggle to make and serve dinner around four competing sets of extracurricular activities. With her youngest about to leave, she had gotten a job coordinating training sessions for medical and clerical staff of a hospital. She wrote how nervous she was about it, but I knew she would do fine. Compared to managing a household, taking guff from condescending surgeons and disgruntled X-ray techs would be a breeze.
