Teaching at every level offers definite rewards, tangible as the student who develops a love for literature expressed with so much grace and gift that one can only smile and approve. Or the chronically inarticulate student who, after years, achieves some measure of eloquence. Every year I receive dozens of notes and e-mails from students who thank me for the energy that I give to my classes, and who tell me where they are in their own writing careers. Yes, my former students are themselves making a mark on this country’s literature. But the precise challenge of teaching—and teaching well—is far removed from the urgent trivialities of university life, the frustrations of trying to arrive at a sensible destination in an arena attentive to so much arcane minutiae that every memo and notice becomes a virtual ankle chain.
How did I get here? I often ask myself. The students are worth the energy, and they are the primary reason for my passionate attachment to teaching. But the politics and the picayune jealousies and the jockeying for position and the back-stabbing and the slow poison that leaks through the vents of decrepit buildings perform a version of cumulative discouragement. Where once there was a sunshine aura to post-secondary education’s physical and psychic space, it is now obsessed with results and advancement. Students want jobs when they graduate—and what they are learning is mere conduit to that land of tech-toys and six-figure salaries, enviable cars and downtown condos. The university itself reinforces that commercial mindset: the more research dollars professors bring in, the more respect they are given. And so, imagining itself a version of a corporation, academe has allowed its halls to become the site of cloak-and-dagger competition, obsessed with arguments over space and resources, with sadly petty results.
But wait, how did I get here? In my first year as a student at the University of Alberta, I was completely and unreservedly happy. I went to my classes, I studied, I wrote papers and knew in my bones that I had found my heart’s desire: to make my living reading and writing books, to make my living working with words. My notion of making my living then had to do with making a life, not making money. Money was not much discussed at institutions of higher learning in the 1970s; more important was the reading and research and the satisfaction of learning itself. And this happy state of innocence I expected to continue. But I should have taken notes, paid more attention to the worms in the apples.
I entered Honours English after an exploratory first year (as was customary at the University of Alberta) and in that very small seminar had a puzzling encounter. A young man who had been in my freshman English class was one of the half-dozen of us admitted to Honours English—and in the first Honours seminar, I was pleased to see him again. “Hi, John,” I said, with friendly goodwill, and was surprised when he frowned at me.
“You’ve got my name wrong,” he said. “It’s James.”
I was young and stupid enough to be quite certain that in the freshman English class we had taken together he was definitely John. “Have you changed your name, then?”
“No,” he said haughtily, “I’ve always been James.”
“But, last year …”
He interrupted me roughly, and with a lowered voice. “Listen, I took the course for someone else, okay? Just shut up about it.”
The very notion was so puzzling to me (at the age of nineteen) that I couldn’t quite figure out what he meant. He took the course for someone else? Why would one do that? At that moment the professor entered and my question was put on hold. Seeing my face, James probably thought that I was naive enough (and he was right) not to understand the ramifications of his identity switch, and when the class was over, he pulled me aside again. “I traded,” he said. “He did biology for me, and I did English for him.”
“But why would you do that?” I asked, incredulous.
“To get an A, stupid,” he said. “He’s a science student. I’m an English student. He got me an A in biology; I got him an A in English.”
“But that’s lying,” I said.
“It’s an A.” He turned his back and walked away, but I had made, by the sheer accident of having been in his doppelgänger class, an enemy. And since we were Honours students together, we took many of the same courses. Where, every time I had to do a presentation or made comments in class, Mr. James (I truly cannot remember his last name), did all he could to punish me, making snide comments and challenging my critical position.
Academic misconduct of this kind was far removed from my sphere of recognition, immersed as I was in my studies, and it was less well policed than it is today. While I thought James’s actions wrong, it would not have occurred to me then to report him, or even to censure him. His drive for success was so intense that he had carefully planned and orchestrated getting a good grade in an area that was not his strongest, in exchange for helping a friend in the opposite field of study. I thought he was excessively pragmatic, and that was the sum of my youthful judgment. And I did not, until years later, connect the source of his antagonism to the information that I had inadvertently acquired. Oddly, it was his early scholarly taunting that toughened me up, probably helped to sharpen my already strong feminist sense, and made me question the motivations of those who insist on humiliating others in the classroom. So perhaps I ought to be grateful.
My second shock was less accidental and more personal: deliberate harassment. Graduate students at the University of Alberta who held teaching assistantships in English were given their own freshman classes to teach. This entailed long hours of marking and preparation. As an apprenticeship in pedagogy, it was definitely a trial by fire, but I took to it with a passion and zeal predicated on my genuine love of literature and desire to persuade others to share this love. At the time, I was also writing my first novel, and my energy was happily divided between teaching and writing, all in preparation for defending my MA thesis. Because I was living in a tiny apartment, I spent long hours in my airless, windowless office. I didn’t care; I was doing what I loved. I worked sometimes from nine in the morning until ten at night, eager and engaged, completely focused on literature and writing.
And then I started to get phone calls. Very strange phone calls, making utterly outrageous sexual comments. I could not understand their source at all and at first assumed that some sex phone line had a number remarkably similar to that office number. But they persisted, and a few of the male callers (they were all male) actually used my name. Finally, it was the students in my class who told me that they had seen an ad (the usual three free lines) in the campus newspaper citing my name and my number in a sexually explicit way. Only my colleagues and students knew that university phone number, but although campus security investigated, they were never able to discover who had placed the harassing advertisement—it had been done anonymously. They concluded it was students playing a bad joke, but from the perspective of time, and given my awareness that I was working far harder than most of my colleagues (and frankly, achieving greater success), I now suspect those calls may have had more to do with academic jealousy than student prankishness. Of course, the calls were so disturbing that I could no longer work in that office and had to set up a rickety desk at home. I had enjoyed having an office; I had worked well there. Now, it had been made a zone of discomfort, impossible to occupy.
These moments of shock may seem inconsequential with the passage of time, may seem to be merely about space or self-confidence, but they have a long echo, a discernibly discomfiting effect, creating stumbling blocks of doubt, distress and even, of course, danger. Older and fiercer now, I would seek to bring about some serious retribution on those responsible, but I am not sure I wouldn’t encounter similar laissez-faire attitudes from administrations, student governments and even security officers. For the dominant presences within academic institutions are genuinely puzzled about women’s discomfort with their scales and balances. Men like Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, whose remarks about women’s abilities in the areas of science and engineering have brought him considerable censure, seem always surprised
by the reaction they incite, despite years of information and discussion. Perhaps part of the source of unease between women and men in academe is this conflict of outcomes, the differing measurements that are imposed on goals. On the other hand, the largely male administrations of universities tend to be thuddingly and resoundingly blind to their own participation in systemic difficulty if not discrimination, so much so that they cannot imagine the changes begging to be made.
Compounding these subtle toxicities are overt collisions that can only be defined as downright thuggery, of both the silent and the spoken variety. Intellectuals are not necessarily the kindest of folks and despite the low stakes (university professors earn commensurately far less than people who work in the corporate world; writers earn virtually nothing), frustrations surface in the strangest places. I have watched men appoint themselves gatekeepers and authorities, and then bully those who are least powerful. I have seen men draft women to serve as their lackeys, their puppets in hounding other women, and I have watched those women acquiesce. The imperatives of power or friendship or debt are difficult to escape, even in a world where the higher imperative is supposed to be the transmission of knowledge.
As my experience as a student should have taught me, there is always a worm in the apple of knowledge. I have encountered, with frustrating predictability, actions intended to discredit and discount the work of women, as if it were inherently of questionable worth, or as if some alternative, harsher measurement were required for what women do. And yet, cowed by our own abjection or even our lack of confidence in our own value, we permit these disparagements, perhaps because there are only so many battles that can fruitfully be fought. For while universities proclaim an intellectual recognition of equality, putting that ethic into practice is another matter. The contingencies of excellence, qualification, seniority and connectedness will always trump egalitarian ideals.
In fact, the subtle hazings that go on in the academy make a high school look civilized. And a successful woman is not immune. In fact, she is likely to be the object of disgruntled or vituperative colleagues and students. I have weathered various attacks on my character and scholarly integrity; I have had to correct misinformation that was being repeated about me and I have seen other women subjected to the same subtle harassments: their publications held up to minute scrutiny, their accomplishments downplayed, their commitment to research belittled. The only armour possible is to love the work, to make the work its own reward.
So why bother staying, why continue in such a bear pit? Why not give it up and spend my time writing? The question calls for cogent answers. First, the temptations of the academy are many. A regular salary, an office (not necessarily with a view) and a version of life-schedule, along with the lure of a substantial library, are too much to resist. I am happily engaged with literature, happy to be immersed in intellectual thought. Why should I give up the work that I love because some people would like to make me miserable? Far better to refuse to be miserable. Second is my powerful sense that women must not allow the academy to function as such a punitive institution; if we flee its bruising, we leave the field open to the bruisers. On the other hand, we must also take care not to become bruisers ourselves, not to internalize the sneering, the scoffing and the quibbling. The third is the obvious delight and inspiration that students provide, coupled with the fact that students deserve good teachers, good teaching, people who give them the very best attention. If teaching in the humanities is left to those who would reduce it to its basest level, then the future of study in the humanities is short indeed. Finally but not least, I love literature and I want to instill that love in every student I encounter.
I continue to mesh teaching within a university and writing (writing across genres: fiction, history, non-fiction, journalism) because for all that an institution and its follies might seek to destroy our joy in this profession, universities exist, nevertheless, as movable feasts. At the end of Audrey Thomas’s irascible novel, Latakia, the narrator declares to her lover, “The best revenge is writing well.” Having lived through the various pitfalls and pratfalls of this profession, there is always available that comforting mergence of subject and practice. For a writer, the best revenge is writing well, but even better is to make of life material for writing. I make notes on jolly and generous and thin-skinned administrators alike, on ascetic and jealous and cheerful and eccentric academics. I talk to the cleaners and the women in the coffee shop, I try to inspire both avid and melancholic students. I cherish this work because it is material, cloth of a sort that will eventually become a story, a tale both tender and parodic. There is no stronger compensation than to make of these frictions a fascinating fiction.
When my mother was five months pregnant with me, my sister Susan—who was five years old and the firstborn—contracted leukemia and died. I gather she was sick for a very short time. Treatment was limited in 1948, hope futile. Apparently my mother visited her hospital room every day for the paltry hour allowed, and I went with her, floating oblivious inside. I still dream of hearing her cry.
I grew up in a family that had difficulty acknowledging Susan’s existence, her life, her death, her truncated potential. Perhaps their need was to carry on, to forget, to put the loss behind them; grief is personal and there is no prescriptive path. For me, having never known my sister, the need was vastly different, and for as long as I can remember I lived with a pressing sense of something missing, of a huge hole my parents stepped around that threatened to engorge and drown us all if we dared to peer into it. And yet I was continually drawn to the edge, lured not by salacious curiosity or perilous attraction, but by some intense, innate need to know.
My father refused to speak of her; I was instructed never to ask him to. My mother spoke seldom and softly, hurt, I realize now, by my questions and baffled by the insistence of my interest. “You weren’t there,” she said, trying to spare me pain and implication, but instead I felt excluded and denied.
When I was old enough to receive them, my mother gave me three items that belonged to Susan. A hinged locket engraved with her name, a baby mug with her initials and an elegant napkin ring. They are all empty vessels, all silver and cold to the touch. I believe my mother’s need was to rid them of sad memory, whereas mine was to fill them up. My task was like trying to animate a precious shell or dress a ghost.
Information was what I wanted, and what my parents could not give me. No headstone, no birth date, no death date. In my thirties I was counselled by a wise friend to visit Susan’s grave to see if that would settle the haunting and satisfy the quest. I knew she’d been cremated, so once again I prodded my mother and forced her to remember. “Where,” I asked “are Susie’s ashes?” Without a pause my mother replied, “We never picked them up. We left them at the funeral home.” And the subject dropped like lead, like a tight-fisted ball of stiff-upper-lipped anguish sealed and compressed and forced down to sink out of sight.
It took another decade, but finally I determined to find Susie, which I realize now was really a way of finding bits of myself—my capacity to face misfortune, to handle tragedy, to approach loss, to accept imperfection.
It began on her birthday. I was driving from my farm to the city to give a paper on nineteenth-century female literary characters and medicine, a critical feminist presentation that exposed the damaging power of misogynist doctors. It suddenly struck me as I passed between fecund fields on that spring day that this was Susie’s birthday. I’d somehow learned the date by then, though my parents never told me. After I gave my paper, in that moment between the last sentence and the first question, I came out of academic mode and confessed that my sister, had she lived, would have turned fifty that day.
I told my audience about her death in a hospital in that very city, about the doctors’ rules which limited my mother’s visits and kept her away from her dying child’s side. Instead of questions I got anecdotes from many of the women there, some of whom remembered those days of maternal exclusion. They tol
d their stories and shared in mine, infusing personal experience into literary criticism.
Having spoken in public about Susan, I was compelled to know more. I requested her death certificate and by citing my family medical history I was able to obtain a copy of the original document. When it arrived I felt an unexpected solar-plexus-punch of emotion. I walked up my lane from the mailbox, then slid the letter knife into the government envelope, withdrew the official crested legal bond and read “Full Name of Deceased” followed by all I knew of her, in elegant cursive script.
The form demanded race, and “Scotch” was written in. My father’s signature verified the document in dark ink, the pen nib thick but the letters steady and sure. The saddest part was medical. The physician had attended her only on the day she died. Susie was pronounced dead by a stranger, a duty doctor. I imagined the scene, imagine it still.
To find her remains I traced the funeral home. I learned that this does happen, that people sometimes leave ashes, that the law allows for burial in Common Ground after a year. They had no record, however, and it took a number of inquiries to narrow down the search, but as I’d begun to look on a Friday afternoon I had to wait impatiently and impotently through the weekend until business hours on the Monday to make the final call. I hesitated, fearing failure perhaps, more loss, but when I dialled I got a recording and for the first time said her full name out loud: Susan Betsy McLean. Soon the return call came: “We have her. She’s here, buried in Common Ground.” Simple as that. A name on a ledger, a spot on a map. Susie’s is one of perhaps a hundred urns in a crypt in an unmarked, and unmarkable grave, for it is forbidden to place a tombstone over a common plot.
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