The Small Room

by May Sarton

  And she guessed, not for the first time, that there could be no answer ever, that every teacher in relation to every single student must ask these questions over and over, and answer them differently in each instance, because the relationship is as various, as unpredictable as a love affair.

  CHAPTER 8

  Lucy woke to a dull dead gray November day with an icy wind whipping round the buildings. Everyone ran across the campus, driven like a few late leaves; mufflers were wound round necks; knees over long woolen socks looked blue. Pieces of newspaper rose and fell and were flattened against stone steps; everything had a desolate, naked air. If only it would snow, Lucy thought, as she put her head down against the wind and walked fast toward her freshman class. She had with her a briefcase full of terrible papers.

  The room when she got there, panting after the three flights of stairs, had the stale smell of a winter room, overheated; she flung open a window, feeling impatient with and irritated by the two or three students who sat there, as passive as fish. Then, as the bell pealed out, shrill and startling no matter how hard one had listened for it, the others came thundering in, blowing on fingers, unwinding scarves, and Lucy experienced the tremor of anxiety that always accompanied this moment of suspense.

  Was it the subdued giggle in the back of the room, when one of the new arrivals slammed the window shut again? Or was it the sullen expression of Mary Ford in the front row, she who was apt to explain accusingly that she had sat up all night over a paper that was marked D minus, as if tired work were a virtue and deserved a better grade? Something in the atmosphere touched Lucy like a whip. She brushed the notes she had been reading over aside, and stood up, hardly aware of the amount of suppressed emotion she was about to release.

  “Wake up!” She was astonished to hear herself saying, “It’s nine o’clock in the morning and you look like a drove of whales washed up by the tide.”

  Laughter rose and then quickly subsided as they sensed that this had not been meant kindly, or as a joke. They all shifted nervously, their eyes open very wide, like children at a play.

  “Now listen!” Lucy opened The Iliad and began to read. She read as she had never managed to read before, the words falling like hailstones because she was so angry. And she could feel the electric current she was setting up, the something like a sigh that ran across the room and bound them together, those twenty-five wandering attentions, into a fused whole. She read here and there, sometimes giving a word of explanation to remind them of where the passage appeared; she read for twenty minutes by the clock that ticked relentlessly in front of her. Then, when she had finished and closed the book, she took three of the worst papers out and read a paragraph or two from each of them.

  “This was the material before you, and this is how you honored it,” she said, looking at the class with real hostility. “Here is one of the great mysterious works of man, as great and mysterious as a cathedral. And what did you do? You gave it so little of your real selves that you actually achieved boredom. You stood in Chartres cathedral unmoved. For the ancients this book was very much what a cathedral became for the people of the Middle Ages, a storehouse of myth, legend, and belief, the great structure where faith was nourished and the values of a civilization depicted … and you didn’t bother to look at it!”

  She picked up another of the dull C papers and read it through. “This is not a matter of grades. You’ll slide through all right. It is not bad, it is just flat. It’s the sheer poverty of your approach that is horrifying!”

  Now for the first time Lucy heard the appalled silence she had created around her. The class seemed hardly to be breathing. But she was riding a wave, and had to go on as she had begun, until the wave broke, until the bell rang. “Very well,” she ended. “Your next assignment is Job. Please come prepared to discuss it, and that means think.”

  The clock gave a final tick in the silence and then the bell shrilled out. At that moment the class, to Lucy’s immense surprise, burst into spontaneous applause. She had been so concentrated that she had entirely forgotten herself and, in a curious way, even the class. Their applause made her blush.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but you deserved it.”

  As soon as the spell was broken, she realized that she had spoken as she did, with that violence, because Jane Seaman had been in the back of her mind all the time, Jane’s kind of intensity; as if she had been so angry with these freshmen because they would never have the wit to discover Simone Weil’s essay, let alone steal from it, as if her burst of rage had been an unconscious defense of Jane. Yes, she saw now, whatever had happened in her office the day before, she had committed herself to the defense.

  “That was wonderful,” a clear young voice broke into her thoughts. “Why didn’t you get angry before?”

  Lucy laughed, but underneath, and as she walked back across the campus, she felt humiliated. “No, no, no,” she said aloud.

  “No what?” It was, surprisingly enough, Jennifer Finch who stood there before her, smiling, “You seem to be saying a rather definite ‘no’ to the world at large.”

  “I’ve just put on an exhibition of rage to a class of Freshmen. Now I feel ashamed.”

  “Why?”

  Faced with this question, Lucy had to think. “I suppose one has the idea that if one can only get their real attention by having a tantrum, one must be a rather poor teacher.”

  “Well …” Jennifer Finch lifted her chin and looked about, taking her time, as she always did. “Isn’t it a matter of temperament? Maybe that is one way you can communicate; I would find it devastating, but I am not you.”

  “Oh you know,” Lucy said fervently.

  “I know plenty about failure, if that is what you mean.”

  So they all said, Lucy thought, recognizing the climate of this profession as one might recognize the climate of a nunnery, the daily, hourly examination of conscience.

  “I suppose,” she faltered, “there are as many kinds of good teachers as there are of artists.”

  “It is an art,” Miss Finch responded, for once, instantly. And then with her usual unexpected slant, she added, “It is also an art to be a student. I wonder sometimes if we think enough about that. Learning is such a very painful business. It requires humility from people at an age where the natural habitat is arrogance,” and she smiled her discreet smile. “But, oh dear me, here I am philosophizing when I should be teaching a class in calculus this minute.”

  Lucy watched her go, the stooped figure in a mackintosh, like an angel in the most inappropriate of disguises, and wondered if she knew about Jane yet, and if Carryl Cope knew. She felt reluctant to go back to her room, where she would have to decide whether to go home for Thanksgiving or not. On her desk lay a letter from her mother, and the question loomed. She was aware that she did not really want to go. She remembered hearing that if an animal is caged long enough it does not want to be released, and will not walk out through an open door. It had taken her all these weeks to get acclimatized to the cage of Appleton, and now she was almost afraid of a few days absence from it, of the whole adjustment to life at home (shades of John too), to her mother’s moods, to the inevitable calls on her two aunts. What she longed to do was go off somewhere alone, to a hotel in a strange city, and there quietly chew the cud of these last weeks, ruminate, be still, read …

  On an impulse she turned back and decided to visit Hallie’s eleven o’clock class; perhaps the witnessing of a master of the art would help quiet her mind and set things back into a true balance again. At least it would keep her from facing everything on her desk for another hour.

  “May I?” Lucy asked, at the door.

  “Of course, delighted to have you.” While the girls assembled, Hallie sat at her desk, with a pile of books before her, entirely concentrated on something she was reading. Lucy noticed the warmth of this room where the romantic poets and the English novel had been taught for so many years: pots of African violets on the window-sill, the worn torn map of the
British Isles on the wall, posters of the Lake Country, of Bath, and the bookshelves at the back crammed with pamphlets and clippings. Hallie faced a semicircle of chairs three rows deep; this was a popular course. She did not lift her head until the bell had rung, until the girls were seated and quiet.

  And Lucy herself felt the slight chill at her spine, the suspense, as the whole class was poised on silence. If this preparation had seemed to foretell a dramatic opening, a speech from the chair, the exact opposite took place. Hallie looked out the window a moment, then said quite casually,

  “You have now all read at least some of the Keats letters. Would one of you like to read a passage aloud, or a whole letter that you think appropriate for class discussion?”

  Half a dozen hands flew up, and they were launched.

  It happened that the first two letters to be read aloud each spoke of “ripeness” or of “ripening,” first an early one written in 1818: “Nothing is finer for the purpose of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.” (The last phrase, pointed up by Hallie in an ironic reference to themselves, caused a ripple of amusement.) The second and third choices introduced the Keats who educated himself by reading. “An extensive knowledge” (so he had written in May of 1818, so a young girl’s voice repeated now) “is needful for thinking people—it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of Mystery …” They were familiar passages, of course, being rediscovered once more as if the ink were barely dry on the page. The students were excited (who would not be?). Lucy watched Hallie quietly pushing them to analyse, to bring together and consider as a whole the growth of this young man of genius, watched her do this with a casual question, with a smile of enjoyment, drawing attention to specific words, “a diligent indolence,” or the pungent series of verbs from an early letter to Fanny, “go out and wither at tea parties; freeze at dinners; bake at dances; simmer at routs.” For such a young man the evidence of pain might show itself first as irony. But Lucy sensed that Hallie was keeping tragedy at a distance still, deliberately holding the class back from the late feverish letters.

  And slowly, what had been a painful, stumbling series of unrelated questions and answers became something like a fugue. Hallie was gently imposing a line, bringing them back to certain themes played over and over-thought, language, character, the making of a poet. And as she led the class back to these major chords, again and again, weaving in and out, asking the probing question, responding to the sensitive answer, what had in the first few moments been a professor “drawing out” a student, had become now a true dialogue. The students had been driven, probed, excited to a degree of concentration and power that could not have been imagined when the class began.

  When Hallie finally recognized a girl who had waved her hand insistently all this while, it was clear that she had held this particular vision of the material in reserve, and that she launched it now, with a conscious sense of timing.

  “We’ve talked and talked,” the intense dark girl was wringing her hands with the relief of at last being allowed to speak, “but we haven’t even approached what Keats was, nor what Fanny did to him!”

  Half a dozen hands flew up in protest, and were quelled by a glance from Hallie, as the girl proceeded to read her evidence aloud, quoting first from that strong letter of 1819: “My mind is heap’d to the full; stuffed like a cricket ball—if I strive to fill it more it would burst. I know the generality of women would hate me for this; that I should have so unsoften’d, so hard a Mind as to forget them; forget the brightest realities for the dull imaginations of my own brain. But I conjure you to give it a fair thinking; and ask yourself whether ’tis not better to explain my feelings to you than to write an artificial Passion.” This was followed by several examples from the searing letters a year later where illness and passion combined, as the girl said with a vehemence close to tears, to unman him. “You could not step or move an eyelid but it would shoot to my heart”; “I am sickened at the brute world which you are smiling with”; and she ended by stating that the proof of her thesis lay in the poems, where one could clearly see that all the great work preceded that last year, and heartless Fanny must be blamed, she who had fallen like a shadow even over the early letters: “Even as I leave off it seems to me that a few more moments thought of you would uncrystallize and dissolve me. I must not give way to it but turn to my writing again. If I fail I shall die hard.”

  As soon as she sat down, the argument began, a general clamor in which there was no thought of waiting for formal recognition. Lucy glanced at the clock. They had fifteen minutes to go against the brutal locking of the hour. Would Hallie herself never take over? For the eagerness, the excitement of discovery, the involvement that a first meeting with Keats must always elicit was there, but Lucy longed now for the voice of experience, for wisdom to shed its light at last. More than ever before she understood the marriage between a text and its reader. Keats himself was being diminished because these girls could only approach him with a thin layer of experience; the analysis of a text like this, she thought, is comparable to psychoanalysis. Everyone can get hold of a few simple formulas, but what knowledge, patience, and wisdom it must need to penetrate and fully understand the central complex of a personality!

  “Let me bring this hour to a close by reading you three letters I have chosen,” Hallie spoke at last. Her tone had changed. She laid aside the gentle questioner who had opened the door for each student into his own capacities for appreciation. The long-withheld summation was at hand. And the class, so sensitive an instrument in the hands of this teacher, felt it. Doodlers stopped doodling. There had been excitement; now the attention was of a different, more intense kind. Yet Hallie Summerson had not raised her voice, sat as she had sat all along, books open before her, glasses taken on and off nervously, a plain middle-aged woman in a shabby classroom. But now the reason for formal education became apparent. For what took place before Lucy’s eyes was created by Hallie, but had been born in her because of the class before her, and sprang from all that had preceded it. Lucy had observed the whole process, the initial enthusiasm, the disciplining of this rather loose excitement, then the gentle artful playing of a fugue where they ceased to be master and pupil and became partners in the dialogue, and finally the launching of a brilliant student who might be counted on to take them to the heart. Out of all these together, the summation flowered.

  Never, Lucy felt sure, would Hallie Summerson be able to speak to one person as she now did to sixty. Something streamed out of her that was absolutely open, passionate, of an intensity that made shivers go up and down Lucy’s spine. It was the freeing of a daimon, as surely as the writing of a poem springs from the freeing of the poet’s daimon. It surrounded Hallie Summerson with the aura of a person set apart, lonely and—Lucy half-smiled at the word, but uttered it to herself nevertheless—sacred.

  Yet what she was actually doing seemed simple enough—the reading of three carefully chosen letters, followed by a brief analysis of the romantic point of view, its risks, its weakness, its tendency to surpass the reality of occasions and people and to create a dangerously intense world of its own: Keats and Fanny Brawne. But also its capacity to inspire works of art; a whole world of sensation, thought, passion at its most naked and suffering, built around the small figure of a woman, utterly unable to bear the burden laid upon her. “Alas, poor Fanny,” Hallie said wryly, “Who can blame her? Life is not a Wagnerian opera and Fanny was asked to play a giant role.”

  The bell rang, shattering the moment like a shot breaking a glass. It was the measure of that moment that neither the class nor their professor paid the slightest heed. She read the Bright Star sonnet, closed the book, gathered up her papers, said, “Think it over—” and was gone before anyone stirred.

  Lucy sat on alone, on the hard chair, after everyone else had gone, thinking it over. She felt sure that only from immense inner reserve, only from the secret life, the dedicated life, co
uld such moments be created. They came from innocence, deep as a well, the innocence of those who have chosen to set themselves apart for a great purpose: “the teacher,” a voice from a cloud. This power, Lucy suspected, had to be as carefully guarded as the creative power of the artist. What nourished it? Would she herself ever do more than stand at the threshold of the mystery, stand there with awe, but outside? Would she ever herself be a keeper of the sacred fire?

  CHAPTER 9

  When Lucy got back to her room just after lunch, she found a pencilled note on the hall table, marked urgent: Professor Cope asked her to drop in later on in the day. But urgencies faded before the first steady fall of snow. Lucy opened the window and knelt beside it, tasting the cool freshness, the stately, suspended, hypnotic fall, drank in the silence, and finally fell onto her bed as if she had been drugged, to sleep a dreamless sleep.

  When she woke she could not remember where she was, started up in a panic, then feverishly pulled on overshoes, a woolen scarf, a raincoat, as excited and lifted up by the scene outside as she had always been as a child. If only her destination could have been Nowhere, some empty field where she could lean against a tree and watch the magic world being shaped around her. But as she stepped out and felt the gentle touch like a kitten’s paw on her eyelids and mouth, she had to accept the fact that her destination was Carryl Cope. She stuffed her hands into her pockets and walked fast, head bent, thinking what a strange day this had been so far, a day of revelations, and dreading what new mysteries she would have to meet in a few moments. She had been summoned for what purpose? As whipping boy? Confidante? Or merely as a necessary source of information? It is idiotic, Lucy admonished herself, to be nervous. After all, Carryl Cope is not an ogre and I have done nothing wrong. Nevertheless, it was an effort to leave the gentle, gentling world of the snow outside, ring the bell, and climb that long black tunnel of stairs to the great blank door.