by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
It’s one thing to have the typical English major’s glancing acquaintance with Hamlet. But that won’t be enough if you are suddenly required to teach the thing. In the full flower of middle age, I have been forced by circumstances to cultivate new expertise; I now have the satisfaction of being intimately acquainted with the wonders of Hamlet, having read and taught it more than a dozen times. I know it far better than I ever did as a student. I still can’t get over the sheer largeness of the thing, the way it’s drenched in Shakespeare’s obsessions and passions, from his preoccupation with his career to his impatience with bad verse and his wonderment at those who would laugh at catchphrases, like the audience at Saturday Night Live. He has no patience with comics who break themselves up onstage (“ And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them: for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too… .”); he doesn’t fathom the groundling ancestors of those who dug Tim Conway breaking up Harvey Korman on the old Carol Burnett Show. When I think of Polonius reading Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia, and coming across the word “beautified” and dismissing it (“That’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase—beautified is a vile phrase… .”), I think of Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, published a decade earlier, and its dismissal of Shakespeare as an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.” The years melt away, and I shiver at the immediacy of Shakespeare’s long-festering resentment. Would anyone in his audience have understood the reference? It doesn’t matter; he couldn’t help himself.
Hamlet is nothing less than the William Shakespeare Reality Show.
Here is another fringe benefit of my job: teaching composition has improved my own. I live writing every day, and think about it constantly. I move in a Zen state of focus, transforming life events obsessively into stacks of paragraphs. My students’ minds take a straightforward event and mangle it in the telling like peppers and onions in a food processor. I understand now how that happens. I know what destroys their prose. I know their vocabulary limitations, and their biases. I recognize the residual colon paste of half-digested high school instruction. I am familiar with their inability or unwillingness to see clearly, to stretch, to think, to dig deep. Their pen nibs slip automatically into the groove of the ready-made and the cliché. They seem to apprehend the world as a collection of vague processes that defy description. They find it difficult to write using concrete detail. And they are afraid of writing. Who isn’t? I was afraid when I sat down this morning. I walk into libraries now and look at the shelves of books and think of the authors: they were all terrified, but they overcame their fear. I have come to understand the enormous detrimental effect that fear has on prose. It saps writing of thrust and cogency. Fear is the enemy. I dive into a stack of essays and smell my students’ terror. Writing requires cojones, the cojones to, as Adrienne Rich put it, dive into the wreck: to don “the body-armor of black rubber” and “the absurd flippers,” to see “the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail,” and to emerge knowing, as all writers must know:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth… .
I have grown, I think, if not less fearful in my own writing, at least aware of the place fear occupies in it.
How many other wonderful fringe benefits are there to an unexpected life in the college classroom?
Teaching literature has made me think, really think, about the inscrutable authors peering at me from those oh-so-familiar photographs in the textbooks. What else was Shirley Jackson about besides “The Lottery”? And I don’t mean the gothic stuff, The Haunting of Hill House or We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I went to the college library and checked out a collection of her short stories. The book hadn’t been borrowed in decades; there was the quaint checkout card in the back pocket, with the names of a few students from the 1960s and their Social Security numbers. The librarian’s eyes widened in horror when she saw the numbers; she shredded the card and eyed me with great suspicion, as though I was running some kind of scam. The stories, I found, were utterly conventional, little well-made slices of romantic life, tales of young single oddballs in shabby little Manhattan apartments; they were the farthest thing from avant-garde, little bits of foreshadowing and irony, photographic descriptions and eccentric characters, like a tableau of knickknacks on a shelf, pleasing, perhaps, but hardly consequential. Nothing in the book could have prepared anyone for the volcanic eruption that was “The Lottery,” but of course “The Lottery” does follow, it works the same way, uses the exact same devices and gimmicks with the simple insertion of ineffable genius.
My courses have led me to new authors, authors I would never have heard of. If you’re not in the game of literature, or a retiree with lots of time on your hands, there is much that falls beneath the radar. Literature seems a vital and healthy place to me, now that I’ve read Charles Baxter and T. C. Boyle (I know! I know! They are well known to you, perhaps, but I was just a regular guy!), Sharon Olds, Alberto Ríos, Martín Espada, Mark Jarman. I used to argue that no one was writing anything good, but I was just talking. I didn’t know a fucking thing. While I was reading the new guys—new to me—I spent some time with old hands, poets I hadn’t thought about since college: Donne and Sexton and Hughes and Creeley. There are days I can’t get the drunken lurchings of “I Know a Man” out of my head, can’t stop thinking about the darkness that makes us whole and trying to make sense of the thing. It’s so manically fraught with the possibility of incipient change, which no doubt appeals to me since my own life is so constrained. It’s so America on the cusp of the 1960s, so Mad Men: “… shall we & / why not, buy a goddamn big car, / drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going.” Isn’t that “shall” marvelous? What word could be more emblematic of a world on the brink of obsolescence than “shall”? Some days the passage beats in my head 50 or 60 times, which isn’t an entirely pleasant sensation; the poem has, in Anne Sexton’s phrase, grown “like a bone inside of my heart.”
I teach the students about the changing literary canon. I talk about the rising and falling reputations of writers. Why do we teach the writers that we teach? One student, exasperated by my idiotic question, answered charmingly: “Because those are the ones in the textbook.” Yes, yes, I said. But how did they get there? Who picked them? She had never considered that there was a political/intellectual/social process to textbook creation; she thought of textbooks as fully formed things, like pretty pebbles on the beach. I try to convey all that goes into a writer’s reputation: the academic chops of his supporters, fashion, affirmative action, snobbery and reverse snobbery, book sales and the lack thereof, and academic connection. Sometimes a notable death helps; it certainly hurt John Gardner, he of Grendel and The Sunlight Dialogues, that his dramatic death on a motorcycle on September 14, 1982, was the same day Princess Grace of Monaco fatally cracked up her car. Gardner got no play. The older students understand what I’m saying—they’ve seen in their lives the mysterious ways fashion can change. The younger ones are vaguely upset by the notion. They feel, perhaps, stirrings of paranoia as they realize their place in the cosmos. The same girl as before: “Who actually decides? Is it a committee?” She can’t get her mind around it. The young students are perhaps just learning that forces beyond their control exist in the world, telling them what to think; who knew that something so boring and irrelevant as a literature textbook could be just one more tool to tell them what to believe?
These discussions of the literary canon have brought me around to an appreciation of some of the poor bastards who’ve been thrown out of it on their ears. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for one. His very name is a joke, three bywords for all that is hokey and American in a tricornered-hat sort of way. I used to dismiss him. “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere”—it’s doggerel and bad history to boot; Paul Revere was probably off in a whorehouse on the eighteenth of Apri
l in seventy-five. What a glorification of the dead white male!
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Feathers and headdresses, wampum, smokum peace pipe—it’s too painful to think about. In the library before class one night, I grabbed a book of Longfellow’s verse and actually read him, and all I can say is that his dismissal from the texts is our loss. He is a fine, fine poet, and his greatest hits are not entirely representative of his work. As a thinker and a poet, he reminds me in his approach of Wordsworth, and like the latter he walks a fine line between the profound and the campy. “The Arrow and the Song,” so endlessly parodied (“I shot an arrow into the air, / It fell to earth, I knew not where”), works as a piece of romantic verse in much the same way as “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”—and, like that more respected poem, is simultaneously brilliant and a little silly. “The Village Blacksmith,” under his spreading chestnut tree, is an American incarnation of “The Solitary Reaper.” “Evangeline” has moments that are simply gorgeous. I will never go on a camping trip again without thinking of its haunting, atmospheric opening (“This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, / Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, / Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic”). “The Children’s Hour,” another slice of Romanticism, uses shadings and insinuation to catch the feel of an essentially uncatchable moment. Longfellow’s language is stirring and memorable—“Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O UNION, strong and great!” He must have known he had a winner there—and I wouldn’t have known about any of it had I not been abducted into the college classroom.
My time in the classroom keeps me marvelously connected to the larger culture. The students keep me young—it’s an awful cliché, the sort of thing I try to banish from their writing, but it’s true. I watch how the young ones dress, catch snatches of conversation, observe the dance of the sexes, and modern life seems vital and worthwhile to me, not just a debased version of what I have already experienced. I note my own interactions with the older students and understand, for the first time, the profoundly important role that age plays in relationships. The middle-aged teacher’s aide, the middle-aged Toyota mechanic, the middle-aged English adjunct—we all understand each other because of all that we have seen, our common touchstones, our little shared segment of the unspooling ribbon of existence. We have watched Nixon resign. We’ve been to parties and heard side one of the Pretenders’ first album played, over and over. We understand the concept of side one. We have all been beaten down by our children. Retirement worries thrum constantly in a fevered, anxious corner of our consciousness. As a basis for mutual understanding, age trumps sex, age trumps race, age trumps education and social class.
I can hear you now: more news at six, smart guy. These are my own epiphanies. This is as profound as I get. At the end of “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy realizes that everybody dies. It’s at least as good as that, isn’t it?
9
The Pain
THERE ARE MANY wonderful aspects to teaching English in college. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, no matter how tortuous the route that got me there in the first place. But sometimes I feel so frustrated.
I do love what I do, but there is something missing. The students and I seldom complete the transaction, seemingly so fundamental, of my teaching and their learning. We do not experience the consummation devoutly to be wished. The students are never able to re-create the compositional points that I demonstrate. They can never incorporate what I say into their own work because they are not at that place yet. I am denied the teacher’s orgasm—I’ve been dry-humping for a decade—because of a fundamental falseness in the system.
Robertson Davies wrote, in The Rebel Angels, that “Energy and curiosity are the lifeblood of universities; the desire to find out, to uncover, to dig deeper, to puzzle out obscurities, is the spirit of the university, and it is a channeling of that unresting curiosity that holds mankind together.” Where did you teach, Davies? Someplace good, I am sure.
I ask my students to write about the books they have read. Several write about Harry Potter. Some tell me they have read She Said Yes, a young-adult novel about the Columbine killings. Also, Scar Tissue, by Anthony Kiedis, lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Crank by Ellen Hopkins, a young-adult novel in verse that Amazon calls “a Go Ask Alice for the 21st century.” The collected works of Mitch Albom. The Giver by Lois Lowry, a high school novel but a freshman high school novel.
One of the things I try to do in English 102 is relate the literary techniques we will study to novels the students have already read. I try to find books familiar to everyone. This has thus far proven impossible to do. Many of my students don’t read much, and though I tend to think of them monolithically, they don’t really share a culture. To Kill a Mockingbird? Nope. (And I thought everyone had read that!) Animal Farm? No. If they have read it, they don’t remember it. The Outsiders? The Chocolate War? No and no. Charlotte’s Web? You’d think so, but no. So then I expand the exercise to general works of narrative art, meaning movies, but that doesn’t work much better. That really surprised me—that there are no movies they have all seen, except one: they’ve all seen The Wizard of Oz. Some have caught it multiple times. So, when the time comes to talk about quest narratives, we’re in business. The farmhands’ early conversation illustrates foreshadowing. The witch melts at the climax. Theme? Hands fly up. (The students can rattle off that one without thinking. Dorothy learns that she can do anything she puts her mind to and that all the tools she needs to succeed are already within her.) Protagonist and antagonist? Whose point of view is the movie told from? Can anyone tell me the cowardly lion’s epiphany? Are the ruby slippers a mere deus ex machina? What would you say is the symbolic purpose of the winged monkeys?
The movie comes in handy. Discussions are pretty lively.
My students are sometimes suspicious of ideas, those admittedly thorny and vexing things. The college classroom certainly seems an odd place for such sentiments to be on display, but I often encounter wide swaths of what can only be described as resentful anti-intellectualism.
Let me say at the outset that I am in no way opposed to anti-intellectualism. A philosophical stance is a philosophical stance; reading books and thinking about stuff are not pastimes for everybody. I do not worship at the altar of books. I have known people whose reading, meaty as it was, provided as much desperate escapism as obsessive ESPN viewing. I am not here to say that reading The Alexandria Quartet is inherently more worthwhile an activity than making flourless chocolate cake or collecting “Guinness Is Good for You” posters. Whatever floats your boat. I’m not willing to say that my intellectual pursuits have done me the smallest bit of good; in truth, they may have done little more than fill me with unrealistic ambition, impoverish me, and needlessly clutter my thinking.
However, remember: we’re talking about college, where ideas are supposed to be the coin of the realm.
Our literature anthology spends some of its bulk early on fretting over a definition for literature. To that end, it juxtaposes a contemporary “literary” short story with an excerpt from a Harlequin Romance. The approach is snarky and could be effective, but the joke is lost on my students, who get the intent of the whole thing backwards. They can’t make head or tail of the literature; the protagonist strikes them as too crazy. “People don’t really act that way,” says a middle-aged woman in nursing scrubs, shyly (wait till we read Carver’s “Popular Mechanics,” with the baby perhaps torn in half by the feuding couple), but the class is quite impressed by the realism of the Harlequin excerpt; it excites them, and gets them talking about literature in a way that no other writing will that semester.
I am no snob. I love Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time cycle of novels, but I love the 179-episode cycle of I Love Lucy reruns
even more. Reading, however, is a prerequisite for doing college work. Lack of familiarity with the written word makes it impossible to write essays with any degree of sophistication. Michael Holden, assistant professor of English at Delaware State University, says of his students:
They know almost nothing about their own country, its history, or the planet they live on. Worse, most of these students do not read. In the last 4 years, I have read 25,000 pages of student journals, which are an integral part of my writing courses. Writing this paper, I reflected on the contents of those thousands of pages and was struck by an astounding realization. Not one journal in four years and all those pages has dealt with a book that the student was reading outside of a required class assignment!1
I am encouraged in my endeavors, but only a little, by the words of Thomas Bailey:
[Some students may] make significant progress in developmental education, but their skills do not reach the college-level standard. Getting a student from a sixth- to a tenth-grade … level is a valuable social undertaking, even if it is not enough to provide a solid foundation for a college education.2
I suppose that helps. I am happy to do my bit for the larger society. I toil, unseen and forgotten, in the basement of the ivory tower after dark. Sometimes, ours is the only class in session. What must our building look like from the highway, one window lit by pulsing blue fluorescent light? I wonder how it will all end. What will become of my students? What grade does one give a college student who progresses from a sixth- to a tenth-grade level of achievement?
