The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  Graduate school in English, at least during the time I attended, was the sort of thing you could pursue in the interstices of the rest of your life. Once you had finished your coursework—which at Berkeley took only two years, or at most three—you did not have to remain fully enrolled in the university while you were working on your doctoral dissertation. Given the length of time that most people spent working on their dissertations (and, within that period, the amount of time they spent not working on their dissertations), it was difficult to differentiate between people who had actually quit the Ph.D. program and people who were just taking a while finishing. In fact, one never knew for sure which of the two categories one belonged to until one finished the dissertation; those who never finished remained in a permanent state of definitional flux.

  I finished my dissertation after seven years in the program—not a speed record for completion, but not an embarrassment either. (My thesis, for the record, was entitled “The Urban Tradition: Transformations of London as Reflected in Dickens, James, and Conrad.” The colon and the passive voice are especially typical of the genre.) Finishing the dissertation was made simpler by the fact that I had long since come to view the Ph.D. thesis as just another writing job, one that needed to be submitted to three clients for approval before I could be paid with my degree. I was implicitly aided in this approach by my dissertation director, a then-young academic who has since gone on to help found a school of literary theory known as Pragmatism. Exercising an embryonic version of this philosophy, he said about the dissertation draft I had recently given him: “Well, if you just want a Ph.D., I’ll sign right now. But if you want a job at a place like Hopkins or Yale, there are a few little rewrites you’ll have to do.”

  “Sign right now,” I promptly answered, leaning across his desk to indicate with my index finger the appropriate place on the degree-granting form.

  (Earlier there had been another ticklish moment when I showed a draft of the first few chapters to my friend and former teacher Christopher Ricks. Christopher, with his usual acuity, pointed out that there was a conceptual problem at the core of my project: whereas I could prove that the city of London had indeed altered over the given fifty-year period, and could also mark differences in style as I moved from Dickens to James to Conrad, I hadn’t actually demonstrated any causal link between the two. “I know that, and you know that, but let’s keep it under our hats, shall we?” I said. And he did, bless him, though he believes in perfectionism on all fronts, while I limit mine to the places where it will show.)

  No doubt my attitude toward correcting the shortcomings of my thesis illustrates how poorly suited I was to an academic career. I did not interpret it that way, though. I simply knew that I did not want a job at Hopkins or Yale, because taking such a job would require moving away from Berkeley. I had already met the man I was to marry; I’d been supporting myself for years; The Threepenny Review was just getting on its feet. In short, I had a life. Why should I give it up for an academic career? I did deign to apply for the single Bay Area job available that year, at Stanford University, but Stanford did not deign to hire me.

  In subsequent years, when the foundation world seemed too oppressive to be borne, I undertook several semesters of visiting lectureships at UC Santa Cruz. I loved constructing the reading lists for my classes— it was wonderful to be thinking and talking about nineteenth-century literature again—but in the course of teaching those books to undergraduates I discovered several things about myself. One was that I hated grading papers. It was bad enough, I felt, to read an inept poem or a boring short story that someone had been passionately inspired to write, the sort of reading I did all the time in my Threepenny work; but to read a poorly constructed paper that someone had been forced to write seemed meaninglessly painful. I also learned that I was hapless at dealing with the politics of an English department (or even of a “Lit Board,” as it is euphemistically called at Santa Cruz); I made enemies right and left, and wanted to kill most of my colleagues. But the worst thing I discovered about myself was that I am not a very good teacher. I am lively and enthusiastic in talking about books I love, so I am a good-enough teacher for students who are already interested in the material; but for the students who really need to be taught and helped, I am hopeless. And if you can’t teach those students, you don’t belong in teaching.

  I allowed myself to drift away from academic employment. Luckily this drift occurred at around the time that Threepenny began paying me a small salary, so I didn’t starve. This decision to leave the university world was never a fully conscious one, and it always seemed as if it might someday be reversed. So it was with a great deal of surprise, some chagrin, and an unforgivable trace of pride that I read in a recent TLS review: “Having turned her back on academia … Lesser has taken her magazine in the same direction.” I turned my back? And all those years I had thought academia was turning its back on me.

  This is disingenuous, and a little false. Nobody really did any backturning. When I speak of myself as being “out of” academia, I use the phrase in part the way racetrack commentators use it, to cite the heritage of a particular horse by noting that she is “by” Thunderbird and “out of” Flying Lady. Academia is my dam, you might say, contributing half the genetic stew that went into the training of my adult mind. From the university and its scholars I acquired my respect for close reading as an analytic technique, my belief in the serious importance of literature, and my admiration for impractical thought as a necessary and beautiful intellectual activity. I still enjoy academic talk, and I count among my friends a disproportionate number of my former teachers, including one who eventually married my friend Katharine, another with whom I have lunch every week, and a third who came up with the title for my last book.

  So why, if I feel such affection for its denizens, did I get out of academia? External circumstances played a part, of course, but in my experience such circumstances, when you give in to them, always prove to be internal as well. Finally, if I had to give a single reason, I would say I wasn’t suited to the academy because I wanted to exercise a kind of judgment that was not normal there. If you are an old-fashioned literary scholar, you are presented with a collection of excellent books to work on, and you practice your techniques on this already certified group. Or, if you are a newfangled literary scholar, you find a collection of writing that fits the category you want to study, and you don’t care whether the books are good or bad, or even whether they’re books; you are only interested in the patterns you can discern. In either case evaluation is irrelevant. But evaluation is central to what I do—not even what I want to do, since that implies choice, but what I need to do.

  And this need, I began to discover, extended beyond literature to the other arts: to film, to painting, to theater, to dance, even to opera (which is the rich godmother of all the arts) and television (which is their poor cousin). There didn’t seem to be room in academia for this kind of relatively untutored omnivorousness. Increasingly I found myself focusing on the experience that takes place when a reader or observer or auditor encounters a work of art: that meeting place between one person’s sensibility and another person’s creation. Inevitably, that sensibility was going to be mine—since, as a critic, I had no true access to anyone else’s—but if the focus was necessarily narrow and inward-looking in this one respect, I wanted it to be as broad and outward-facing as possible in other ways. I didn’t want to have arbitrary lines drawn between things: between old masterpieces and contemporary works, between art and the rest of the world, between criticism and conversation. I wanted the whole terrain. And, in my own tiny way, I got it.

  DANCE LESSONS

  ecently I had occasion to spend the evening dancing, to the music of a not fully professional but nonetheless adequate salsa band, in the company of several old friends. Most of these friends were writers, and in the manner of writers we had spent countless hours talking, eating, and drinking together, but rarely, if ever, dancing. After a few numbers had
been played (during which my husband and I had eagerly taken to the dance floor), one of my old friends—a man prone to beautifully crafted, restrained writing and profusely exaggerated speech—came up to me and said, “You’re good! You can really dance! You should be doing that for a living! Why are you wasting your time with words when you can do that?”

  He was, in many ways, wrong. I am not good enough, and have never been close to good enough, to dance professionally. In my lifetime, I have been a beginner in many different dance forms. At various times I have taken modern dance (of the Martha Graham, Mary Wigman, and José Limón varieties), jazz dance, ballet, Afro-Haitian dance, salsa, Balkan folk dance, Israeli folk dance, and yoga movement. In each case I began very promisingly and then reached a plateau beyond which I could not progress. (Generally, but not always, it had to do with turns.) Other people who initially seemed less talented moved ahead of me, and soon I was left in the dust. A girl from my childhood ballet classes went on to become a professional ballerina in Europe. Several women from my college modern dance classes are pursuing careers as dancers in New York. I, on the other hand, am stuck with words, earthbound.

  Yet dance is, and always was, very important to me. In this way, I see what my writer friend means. If you could do that, how could you bear not to? Dancing is the closest thing I have ever felt to flying. I don’t mean flying in an airplane, which is basically like riding in a bus or a train; I mean lifting yourself off the ground with the power of your own wings, as you do in dreams. Dance allows you to feel as if you’re conquering physical laws, especially in those supreme moments when you sense the congruence of the music and your own motion, when the swell of the rhythm seems to lift your body off the ground. Surfers must feel like this, I imagine, and ski jumpers—perhaps great athletes of any kind. As an essentially unathletic person, I have only felt it through dance.

  My husband also loves to dance, and dance has meant a great deal in his life, too. (But that is his tale, and I won’t go into it here.) We fell in love without knowing this about each other, but there must have been some secret signal we were sending, unbeknownst to ourselves. Certainly other people have picked it up. “You seem like people who would go out dancing together,” said a thennew friend who met us before we were married. And when we were younger we did go out dancing a lot. Then we stopped for a while, because every evening on the dance floor led to a giant fight. It was as if things we didn’t want to acknowledge about each other, hidden sources of conflict and animosity, inescapably emerged when we were dancing. Lately, though, we have been able to dance together again; perhaps, after twenty years, we are beginning to find those secret differences less frightening.

  Because we both felt strongly about dance, we sent our son to all sorts of dance and movement classes—with his willing consent, I should add. By the time he was seven he had taken ballet, Afro-American jazz, gymnastics, tae kwon do, and capoeira. (These last two are technically martial art forms—from Korea and Brazil, respectively—but they use a number of dancelike motions.) My East Coast friends felt this was very California of us, to be sending our child to all these weird classes.

  And perhaps it was. There does seem to be some connection between California and dance. This link is partly historical and biographical, in that European modern dancers fleeing the Second World War seemed to settle in disproportionately large numbers in California (just as their counterparts in music and drama, for more obvious reasons, tended to relocate to Los Angeles). My childhood modern dance teacher was a German refugee, and so was the founding figure of Stanford’s modern dance program. But there’s also a climate here that produces home-grown dance and dancers. Performers from Martha Graham to Allegra Kent to Twyla Tharp all hail from California. (That they had to go east to find work is another story.) And bizarre offshoots of dance, ranging from the tree-hugging, self-expressive, improvisation-based therapies to the chanting, swaying, chime-ringing performances of the Hare Krishnas, have also found fertile soil here.

  I hate improvisation myself, and whenever a dance class turns in that direction I know it’s time for me to leave. It’s not that I don’t like to move freely in time to music. I do that, after all, every time I dance at a party, and I often do it alone in the comfort of my living room. But on both these sorts of occasion the act of making up my steps is safely private—in the former case because it is shielded by the social nature of the event (I am, that is, operating within the relatively strict conventions of a dance party) and in the latter case because no one else is there. What I hate about “guided” improvisation, of the kind you are asked to do in some modern dance classes, is that you are essentially being commanded to bare your soul. It’s like making a confession over a public address system, or having one of your dreams projected onto a movie screen. If you take the endeavor seriously, you are going to reveal extremely personal things (or, at least, imagine you are revealing them) to people you hardly know. A dance class, for me, is a place to be somewhat anonymous; I don’t want my interior life splayed out in front of the other participants, except insofar as it happens to be revealed by the way I do the pre-set steps. Or perhaps I feel that to dance at all is to reveal oneself, almost to the verge of embarrassment, so that the additional dragging-in of one’s inner life is bound to tip fruitful nervousness over into paralyzing shame.

  Dance, for me, is peculiarly interior in another way as well. It goes straight to the ganglia, bypassing the cerebrum. There are ways in which this is not entirely true: one has to think hard to make or follow patterns, and the most brilliant choreographers are, in my experience, among the fastest thinkers. But to the extent it is true, it is true of watching dance as well as doing it. That is, seeing a beautiful dance gesture moves me on a physical level, before I even have a chance to understand why I find it beautiful. The pleasure of watching Baryshnikov leap (in his prime), or Savion Glover levitate over his tap shoes, or Mark Morris dance in The Office, or Gene Kelly perform with cartoon characters, is something that seems to originate inside my rib cage rather than in my brain. When I see John Travolta execute a few dance steps in Pulp Fiction, I don’t think, “Oh, how clever of Quentin Tarantino to echo Saturday Night Fever.” I think, “Oh! How beautifully he moves!” The appreciation is entirely visceral at first, and only subsequently intellectual.

  I have tried to hold on to something of this feeling in my writing about dance. I am not primarily, or even often, a dance critic, but my engagement with the form occasionally draws me into writing about it, and those essays seem, in retrospect, to have more of me in them than most of my other critical writing. Is this because I am writing about bodies rather than words? I strongly doubt it, since anything, even bodies—especially bodies, these days—can be made grist for the abstract, academic mill. Is it, then, because I love good dance so much, and hate bad dance with an equal if opposite passion? But I feel the same way about good and bad books. Or is it, perhaps, that the effort to retain one’s sense of that first visceral response, that pre-intellectual delight, is so comparatively easy with dance? I can think about a performance and make up theories to my heart’s content without in any way damaging or erasing my initial feeling of wonder. The pleasure is still there, long after the dance is over.

  PASSIONATE WITNESS

  began following the Mark Morris Dance Group in 1990, when I arranged a trip to New York specifically to see them perform at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I had heard a lot about the company from friends, so I expected to like what I saw. But I did not expect to be completely smitten—to spend the rest of my New York visit urging everyone I knew to get out to BAM, telling them that I had finally seen a great artwork, a masterpiece, made in my lifetime.

  The piece I saw that first time—the evening-length L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato—remains, for me, an exemplary high point. Choreographed to a Handel piece which itself was composed as the setting for poems by Milton, L’Allegro displays many of Mark Morris’s virtues and virtuosities. It is at once rooted in hist
ory and strikingly contemporary. The line back to the seventeenth-century words and the eighteenth-century music feels strong and unbroken, and yet the dancers are performing steps and combinations that seem thoroughly modern. Mimetic gestures of book-reading, bird-singing, game-hunting—gestures which evoke the pastoral scenes on medieval tapestries—combine with the vigorous rhythms and patterns of Eastern European circle dances. Archaic courtliness intertwines with humorous inventiveness, as a female soloist’s graceful adagio emerges from a full-group rendering of arm-shaking, leg-swinging mirth. Men and women share and exchange roles, with one ensemble dance having the women lift the men, followed by the men lifting the women. (It is part of Morris’s acute intelligence as a choreographer—a social as well as aesthetic intelligence—that he thought to have the lifts performed in this order. Had the men lifted the women first, the women’s lifts would have seemed a mere joke on traditional techniques. Coming first, they have a tenderness, a maternal protectiveness that is all their own; only secondarily do they become part of the joke about relative sex roles that is indeed being made. The pairing, in this order, evokes a moving revelation rather than a guffaw.)