Teacher

by Mark Edmundson

  But the real climax to this book, if it is that, comes a little later. The fact is that now we exchange soft greetings and I begin reading my book, the autobiography, just as he’s reading his. We’re like a couple of monks alone in the chapel making what use we can of the light.

  For, of course, there is no club to join; there is no group investiture. What you are when you go Lears’ route is someone who, not entirely unbeholden to books and to others, has nevertheless decided to find truths for himself, maybe to find truths that fit only himself. I must create a system of my own, says William Blake, or be enslaved by someone else’s. Is it a surprise that in his day-to-day life Blake was one of the loneliest of men?

  Soon my fellow students begin jostling and jiving their way in. Lears seemed relieved. He probably felt the pressure for a big encounter, a climax for now and the future, just as I did and was glad to have the thing curtailed. On they came, Dubby and Rick and Cap and Sandra and Nora and Tommy Buller and Carolyn and the rest, all up, in a fine mood, even though they’d been through five periods of dreck, because here, in Frank Lears’ class, something good was likely to happen.

  It was not until years later, long after the class was over, that I realized that all the books Lears assigned us were on a theme. The Stranger, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Group Psychology—they all dealt with the oppression of conformity (among other things); the last, Siddhartha, was about the Buddha’s serene, fierce rebellion against it. We were all weighed down by conformity, Lears could apparently see. And he also knew that we, his philosophers-in-the-making, were oppressors in our own right, passing on the ways of the system, the Combine, as Kesey called it, to the weaker and duller kids.

  The books were an insult, an affront. He had diagnosed our worst qualities and had gone at them, though without ever saying as much directly. He was as much our attacker as he was our guide. Teachers, freelance spirit healers that they are, or ought to be, make their diagnoses, then concoct the elixir, which can often burn going down. If at the end of the year, when he had us under his spell, he had come rather to like us—his irony, never on hold, was surely diminishing—I am sure we still never became people he pined to spend free afternoons with. We were supposed to change. Many of us did, and surely he was glad, but it did not make him swoon over us, love us as though we were his own creations.

  In America, the story of the great good teacher is told over and over again. It is the story of the man or woman who comes upon a hapless group of kids and helps them remake their lives. In the standard version, in the myth, that teacher is always fired by the highest of motives, chief among which is a love for the students that is unequivocal and that begins the day they walk through his door. The love never falters and never ends. Years later you can go back and visit the great teacher; he will remember everything about you. He will exult in your accomplishments. Your defeats he will put in proper perspective.

  This great good teacher of popular legend is full of broad, generous, and generally applicable truths, which he dispenses to all. In these truths there is, of course, nothing shocking. They are things we all know on some level—put your family before your career; try to enjoy the little things—but in our hustle and bustle have forgotten. The great good teacher is happy and one with himself, and he wants us to be the same. He will die with a smile on his face.

  Lears, on the contrary, was a great teacher in large measure because, at least at the start, he clearly did not like us much at all, and showed it to anyone who had an eye to see. Essentially, I think, Lears held us in contempt. At the beginning, I believe, he felt about us collectively roughly the way he did about Buller from the first day to the last. He did not love us as individuals or as a group. But I believe he did love freedom—he wanted to live among free people, in part because it made his own life richer. And the prospect of offering us a freedom of our own moved him and made him work hard and take chances and stand up to people like Jingles McDermott, whom he would probably much rather have avoided. In fact, he might have wanted to avoid the whole bunch of us, but once in, he did what he could. What I liked most about Lears, I suppose, was that for all the minor miracle of what he accomplished with us, he was no missionary: He served us but also himself. I think he got what he wanted out of Medford High, which was a chance to affront his spiritual enemies, though with some generosity. His goodness, as Emerson liked to say, always had an edge to it.

  As well as some sorrow: Good teachers have many motivations, but I suspect that loneliness is often one of them. You need a small group, a circle, to talk to; unable to find it in the larger world, you try to create it in the smaller sphere of a classroom. Lears, who seemed at times a little lost in his life, a brilliant orphan, did something like that with us. When he saw the material he had to work with on that first day, he must have been on the verge of stepping out the window.

  But one distinction is worth insisting on. He clearly wanted people he could talk to, who would consider caring about what he cared for, who would get his jokes. But he just as clearly did not want us to think as he thought. He wanted us to forge ourselves, and if those selves were antithetical to him, entirely un-Lears-like, then so be it. The only crime was standing pat, not thinking, refusing to ask and answer the questions, refusing to put one’s own beliefs up on the rack and twist and tear them a little.

  The late sixties were a particularly good time for this kind of teaching. There was a feeling abroad that everything was up for grabs, that all consequential things might be remade. People who felt that way, and I came to, did so because they thought there was never a time where there was more room to be an individual, to strike your own path. And yet—here is the important distinction—in doing so you remained part of a large, collective movement, a movement to get rid of the war, to make women and men potential friends, to help black people get a clean shot at the promises that everyone else took for granted. It was like playing in a very good jazz band, being alive then, a band where the wilder and weirder you played your solo—provided it was truly yours—the better it fit in with the whole, the more the performance expanded.

  And Lears, who seemed to me the spirit of the sixties (in the best sense) as much as the spirit of Socrates, brought us to the point where we could join that rambunctious collective if we wanted. We knew what it was about. And we could have our particular say in it, too, hear our own voices, make our own notes. Free in himself, he tried as hard as he could to make others free. And that, centrally, made him—I’d like to say again that it made him a great teacher, but Lears himself detested grandiloquent praise. He was a master of understatement, of litotes, in all its forms. To put it in his own subdued idiom, Lears wasn’t a bad teacher, not bad at all.

  ON WHAT seemed to be a whim—here comes the nonfilmic climax, such as it is—Lears decided that we weren’t going to have a discussion that day. Instead, we’d just listen to music. He went to the beaten-up phonograph and put on a group called the Incredible String Band, whose music I immediately disliked. I buried myself in Malcolm X—he was coming back from his pilgrimage to Mecca now, about to declare for the unity of all men and women, regardless of color, and then be murdered by the minions of Elijah Muhammad—and tried to shut out the String Band’s racket.

  In between passages on brotherhood and an end to violence, I sat and pondered, and thought over the course. I thought about Dubby whipping his spitballs the first day, and our tormenting Lears and imitating him and trying to make him crack during the days when Sandra was the only one who would read or pass a civil word with him. And I thought about all his efforts to wake us up, we being devoted to sleep at all times of the day, whether sitting, walking, or lying prone. I thought about the Milgram experiment and the game with Rick; I thought about the new books and the SDSers and the proto-Panthers and about Nora’s saying “I” and the victory over Jingles, and the Doober’s coloring the o’s and doing the McMurphy imitation, and about the snowball fight that, whether Lears knew it or not, was probably the thing that
broke the course open. He had trusted us enough to let us kill or at least maim him if we liked—but we didn’t like. He was our man, with his gunboats and padre’s hat and his refined accent and his inscrutable paper clip. He was the best mapless guide to the future we’d ever get.

  As to me and my future, an acceptance from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst came one day in the mail. I’d been on the waiting list, and the word was that no one ever got into U Mass from the waiting list. Art Mondello’s father, who was multiply connected, may or may not have had something to do with this. Artie did once observe that I was the only person he knew whose college acceptance might have “fallen off the back of a truck.”

  I loved U Mass, but in some ways it still reminded me of Medford—being in the state of Massachusetts was probably enough. So I transferred to Bennington College, a place that, while I was there, from 1972 to 1974, operated about equally under the aegis of John Dewey and the god Dionysus. In time, I became a teacher myself, and did a stint at a marvelous hippie boarding school that, alas, came flying apart. It did so, most people would say, because we gave the students too much freedom, but I’m not sure that was so. From there, I went to graduate school at Yale. The edition of Freud’s Group Psychology that I used while working on my dissertation, a literary critical reading of Freud that became my first book, was the one that had belonged to Dubby O’Day. The o’s were colored in to about page 17. Now I teach at the University of Virginia, Mr. Jefferson’s school, though Edgar Allan Poe, its most famous student, lurks around the margins.

  I got to study, as I say, with some of America’s best minds. But none did for me what Frank Lears did. For he’d set me on my way. Not much, after that, was needed.

  Which is not to say that since then all has been sweetness and light. For one pays for the kind of mental exhilaration that Lears began. One pays in self-doubt and isolation, in the suspicion that what seems to be true resistance to the givens is merely perverse and ill-tempered, a facile way of always having something to say. Lears’ path, so appealing in its first steps, distanced me from my family, cut me loose from religion and popular faith, sent me adrift beyond the world bordered by TV and piety and common sense. One step down that road followed another, and nearing fifty now, I probably could not turn around if I wished to.

  But of course—as it is probably plain enough to see—I never left Medford entirely behind. I owe it many things. I owe it an abiding inner quotient of irascibility; I owe it, too, a deep tendency to see much of life in terms of oppositions, thesis against antithesis, me against him, linebacker against the guard—what football calls going one-on-one and what, refined away from its physical bruise and crack, thinkers like to refer to as the dialectic. This way of thinking and feeling is, naturally, a recipe for a life of conflict. But without Medford and football and brawling and all the rest, I wonder if I would have had the wherewithal to hang in and say the unpopular thing, cause salutary trouble, and take the hit quite as much as I have managed to do. I wish, truly, that I had had the stomach to do it a little more.

  As to my father and me, things did not go well between us. After that night when I screamed in rage at the chance of me and Philip dying in Vietnam, things changed. One way to describe the transformation would be to say that I was one of the first Americans to hear a version of what would become known as the White House tapes. On the tape recordings released during the Watergate scandal, Nixon revealed himself fully. The tapes were full of rage, rants of the most dismal, bitter sort. My father anticipated many of these for me, going on at great length and with teeming fury about hippies, draft dodgers (“Do what you’re told!”), malcontents, the eastern establishment, and, obsessively, the Kennedys. (Though, unlike Nixon, my father was anything but a racist or an anti-Semite.) All of the resentment he had kept under wraps, at great effort and in hopes, I think, of maintaining relations with his son, he now let fly. Things were past hope.

  When these barrages came, I just grinned and left the scene: No way I was going to give him the satisfaction of getting to me. He was going to be the raging child now; I, the secure, thoughtful adult.

  Of course, when times were propitious, I took my own sort of revenge. I would gas away about this subversive new book or that, Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It, maybe, or Kunin’s Strawberry Statement. Of course now I talked constantly about Lears. Frank Lears said this and Frank Lears said that. I was showing my father that he had been cast aside, disowned as the proper authority. And I suppose he was trying to show me that he did not care much, that he was sticking to his rusted guns.

  But, a father myself now, I know that the child can inflict more pain by withdrawing his esteem (his love) and transferring it to another than the parent can ever exact in return. The child has all the world before him, many things to discover and become. The father’s horizon is shrinking—he has achieved what he can in life; most of his best moments are behind. The sense that the child is his child—spiritually, in the mind and heart—and will go on and continue his work in the world, with some improvements and maybe a salutary swerve, this hope helps secure a father against the despair of age. But how few fathers can sustain the belief that this will be so?

  From a distance, it almost seems the natural order of things that children will leave their families and strive to put themselves under the influence of other guides, different from their own mothers and fathers, more attuned to their rising hopes, often ready to flatter and to idealize them. This is the way of human growth. Plato leaves his own family and goes off to make Socrates his father; then Aristotle leaves his to become Plato’s progeny, at least for a while. But how sad the process is for the father left at home. “I’m so proud of all my son has accomplished,” says the abandoned one. Yet the prouder he can claim to be, the more completely, in general, he has been left behind, repudiated for another.

  After I went away to college, my father and I stayed in touch, casually, emptily. Our last moment of real contact came just a year before he died. He had come to visit me at Yale. I remember him in white after-golf shoes and matching white nylon jacket standing in the midst of the Gothic piles at the old college, themselves a touch absurd. He stood there and stared at the great towers, which, whatever the reality, bespeak learning, leisure, the mind’s thriving life. And he said, almost under his breath, “Imagine, spending your life here instead of in some plant.” He meant Raytheon, his company, where he had now been for twenty-five years. I had never heard my father express regret about anything. Whatever he had was always good enough—grand, in fact. There was never any problem, and wouldn’t be, so long as we’d all just Do What We Were Told (and Relax).

  My father had more than enough intellectual talent for Yale, surely as much as I did. He should at least have tasted such a world, which was the best one I myself had known. But at the moment when I could have shared a new life with him, that year in Frank Lears’ class, and helped us both grow out of the old skin, I used my new learning, my new mind, as a weapon to sear him. Perhaps I had little choice. The Vietnam War was, in one of its less significant corners, a war between us, my father and me. I suppose our future life together, his better life, was one of its barely acknowledged casualties. My father had already lost a child, his girl Barbara Anne, a grief that was for him too deep for tears. Now a son was gone, too.

  In a report that a psychologist did on my father just before he died—seeing a shrink was part of his sentence for a drunk-driving conviction or some such thing—the psychologist remarked on his visiting Yale, being drawn to the place, and having said to himself, “There but for the grace of God go I.” But grace was not the word my father intended.

  THAT YEAR of teaching was the last for Frank Lears. He got married, went to law school, and eventually moved to northern New England, where he could pursue a life a little akin to the one Thoreau, his longtime idol, managed to lead during his stay at Walden. I haven’t seen Frank Lears in about three decades. But I do carry around with me the strong sense
that the party he invited us to, me and Nora and Dubby and Rick Cirone and Jingles McDermott (but not Buller, no, not everyone, quite), is still a live possibility. Sometimes I even stumble on an installment of it, or help create one.

  And often when I do, an image of Frank Lears rises up in my mind, an image from the day when he put on the String Band. (Climax—no cameras on the set; the director has stalked off in frustration—is now.) I dislike the record, and sink further into The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Lears cranks up the music a little louder. I keep reading. But then, curious, I raise my head. The racket of the String Band pours in. And there in the back of the room, is Frank Lears, dancing away. He’s a maladroit dancer, stiff and arhythmic. Not until I saw Bob Dylan onstage did I ever see someone move so self-consciously. But it struck me that this was probably the first time anyone had ever danced in this building, or at least in this classroom. The air was too heavy with invisible, gray weight: Most bodies, given instructions, probably couldn’t have moved.

  But here was Lears bringing it off. In the future, years down the line, maybe they’d have everyone at Medford High School up and dancing to the Incredible String Band in geometric unison or in spontaneous disarray. They’d teach mini-courses in the String Band’s kind of music, whatever that might be. But not then, and not for some time to come, either. No—here was Lears alone, dancing by himself. He was shakin’ it hard; he was letting go; he was workin’ it, as they said then, on out. And why not? When you let Socrates out of the box for one more run, he will dance. Lears had scored a semi-benevolent victory over the place. You could say he’d beaten us at our own game; but, really, he’d shown us a new one. He had a right to a little celebration.