by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
We shouldn’t have gone to the closing, my wife and I. We should have blown it off, left all the vultures sitting there in the bank office with their reams of unsigned documents. We should have gone out to lunch. That would have been more productive. We were wonderfully unencumbered, with a check for more than a hundred thousand dollars in our pocket. We could have packed everyone in the car and headed west. Lit out for the coast. Like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty—with the kids, of course.
Life can’t be edited, really. My wife and I view each other now through veils of argument. Our collective landscape is littered with the rubble of past quarrels. You can’t erase hurt. Can’t just delete it or drag it to the trash. We’ve been through a lot, the two of us. We can say the rich experience has been good. We can say our love is deeper. I know that it’s sadder.
15
Resonance
SOME OF MY STUDENTS have had a rough time of it. They have suffered fractured home lives and job losses, unwanted pregnancies and galloping diabetes, turns of life that could bring a person to tears. But many of them are still young, and haven’t been beaten down completely. The literature we read in English 102 does not resonate for them. It bores them, and how I envy them their boredom. For them, the living of life still seems something separate from the sorrows and tragedies portrayed in literature.
And I understand, for though I have always loved literature and writing and have thought of myself as someone thoroughly embroiled in the written word, my studies of literature remained for a long time just that: studies. I may have swooned at the beauties of a novel, chewed over the characters in a short story, reached mightily for those ideas in the greatest poems that seemed just to elude me. But it was not until I felt my life falling apart that texts began glowing for me with the warmth of personal meaning.
I suppose the first classic I taught that seemed to resonate for me was D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” I’d read it in early high school, and remembered it only dimly; I seemed to recall that the protagonist, a young boy named Paul, was able to go into some sort of trance on his rocking horse, which enabled him to pick the winners at the big horse races.
But I didn’t remember, until I had reread it, what had driven him to develop such a skill. I didn’t remember the bitter worries about money that ruled the house, the fact that the house itself seemed to whisper, “There must be more money!” Of course I didn’t. The occult aspects of the story, which don’t interest me at all today, will loom large in the mind of a teenager; the other stuff, the household economics, just seem like narrative setup. I didn’t see the significance. I was the sort of teenager who never imagined he wouldn’t have enough money. Growing up, all the families I knew, including my own, seemed solvent enough without breaking much of a sweat about it. But I wasn’t privy to the whole story. I couldn’t tell who had a good or bad job, who had wealthy parents, whose life was an unrelenting string of small, futile economies. I didn’t know that having enough money was not life’s default state, that having resources sufficient to navigate the shoals of life without anxiety takes some planning and doing.
The lack of tenderness in Paul’s household in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is heartbreaking, and money lies at the root of the problem. Paul is aware of the money issues swirling about—the walls and wainscoting fairly scream them out to him—and as I taught the story to a class for the first time I found my academic distance from the text shrinking. As I stood at the chalkboard, things seemed hopeless to me. Did my children understand why I was out working two and sometimes three nights a week? I would not let fatigue wear me down. I would not make my suffering apparent. I vowed to be, above all else, hearty. I returned from class each night full of vigor, and mischief, as though I had been out buying secret presents for everyone in the house, perhaps a shade too ebullient, rather more happy and empty-headed than actually I am, like a male incarnation of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York. But it worked. The children may have known that something was up, but they would never hear the smallest trickle of misery from my lips. I would not be short-tempered, or anguished, or desperate.
The truth dawned on me that I was in fact a very lucky man. I was not waiting tables, or working security, or tending bar, or stacking inventory in Wal-Mart. I was fortunate enough to be teaching school, an occupation about which I could be very upfront with the children. This was a world they understood completely, and they joined me in it.
I brought my work home joyously. I left my textbooks around for all to examine. Poetry and short stories bubbled up at the dinner table. My son has always been interested in mythology. And so together we read bits of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” with its haunting valedictory on the dignity possible in middle age.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
These lines never fail to revive and hearten me, even as I return home exhausted, like one of the narcotized tars in “The Lotos-Eaters,” from working and teaching. There is dignity possible for a hardworking man in the second half of his forties, and though the merest shell of myself, I will not yield—though tomorrow, I must ascend the ladder and clear the leaves from the gutters. When I am tired, I cannot resist the cruel conceit that I am engaged in the same work as Ulysses and Telemachus, only I bring the glories of literature to my rough and reluctant classes to “fulfill / This labor, by slow prudence to make mild / A rugged people… .” And then, as the family watches a documentary on the Kennedys, the tear-rattled voice of one brother eulogizing at another’s funeral (I don’t remember if it was Bobby at Jack’s or Teddy at Bobby’s) sounds through our home, saying the lines: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The children squeal with the delight of recognition. We are in a house dripping with art and literature, the walls draped with British poetry, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson is as palpable a figure to us as Martha Stewart or Manny Ramirez. Poetry matters.
Other poems capture the household’s imagination. William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say” winds up transcribed onto a piece of loose-leaf and affixed as a joke, with a magnet, to the icebox.
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
We love this poem, but of course make lots of fun of it, and our own notes to one another start to be parodies of it. The poem opens us all up to the idea of plums, and we can’t wait for them to come in season. They turn out to be something of a disappointment, or maybe we just never get a good one. The children are learning subliminal lessons about the need for civility in relationships, always; and the absolute requirement that we communicate. I love the idea of this polite little poem, this veiled ode to desire, the quenching of desire, and the regret that inevitably follows, burbling through our home like a Zen koan.
We also love Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” How timely, how contemporary seem these musings of the alienated aviator, who fights not because of “law” or “duty” or the exhortations of “public men” and “cheering crowds,” but simply because of his profound love of flying. He has achieved the self-actualization we all strive for.
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds …
It is good for the children to imbibe a healthy dose of antijingoism, coupled with the marvelous evocation of all that man is capable of. Here is a man who has followed his dreams and freed himself, as nearly as one can, from the bonds and boundaries of the world. His passion may well lead to hi
s doom, but following his heart is the means to achieve lasting happiness. I followed my heart and wrote my fiction, but my mistake was to abandon the dream and jump into real estate. I should have been content with my surroundings and written more; those reams of unpublished pages, in an odd way, were a key to satisfaction. I might never have succeeded as a writer, most likely wouldn’t have, but my dreams at least kept my life grounded. It was only when I abandoned the dreams that I felt the gnawing, the nothingness, that I tried to fill with a house. I hope that my children have large dreams, and I hope they approach them more thoughtfully, with more self-awareness, than I did.
Other poems have come to be part of the shared language of the household. “It is better to produce one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works,” wrote Ezra Pound; does any poet encapsulate this more than Robert Hayden? A great many poets never come with anything as devastatingly true and ringing as the money phrase from “Those Winter Sundays,” his hit out of the ballpark: “love’s austere and lonely offices.” I joke around with the children about the phrase; making a peanut butter sandwich becomes one of life’s austere and lonely offices; the phrase heartens me, and gives me the strength to proceed with my own evening offices. On the Little League field and the school basketball court, my wife and I watch with great fervor; there is no more total escape from workaday cares, as James Wright well knows, than youth sports. I see myself among the disappointed souls in his 1963 poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” the “Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,” the “ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,” the “proud fathers” who are “ashamed to go home.” (Why? Are their mortgages too big?) And why do their wives “cluck like starved pullets, / Dying for love”? Have the cares of life extinguished all hope of sexual ardor? In the end, there is almost no joy to be had but the youth sports, and they take on a heft they would not have otherwise had: “Therefore, / Their sons grow suicidally beautiful / At the beginning of October, / And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.” After the basketball game, we leave the hot gym and step into the freezing night; shivering in the quiet, our breath steaming, the still world somehow seems bereft, and I would give anything for the game to begin again.
From the abyss of despair comes the light of literature. Few things have been as comforting to me in the long middle of my life.
16
The Writing Workshop
WHEN I THINK OF MYSELF TEACHING, in my mind’s eye I see a composite class of all the students I have taught. The faces looking out at me are not particularly eager. I see nursing students and EMTs, education students on the road to becoming teachers, midlife career changers, state and local government workers, military types and civilians who labor on military bases. I see a part-time high school coach looking to grab a certificate and get tenure. I see hopeful police officers, court officers, sheriffs, marshals, correctional officers, parole and probation officers—representatives in training, in short, from all stages of the criminal justice cycle, from pursuit to apprehension to release.
I can’t say that I’ve been particularly successful as a writing instructor, but I teach in the way that comes most naturally to me. My goal is to demonstrate for my students the way a writer thinks.
I present myself to the class less as a writing instructor than as a writer. I emphasize what is, I believe, the greatest strength of the adjunct. As one writer has put it rather elegantly, adjuncts “possess something that regular, full-time faculty members essentially lack: authenticity.” Adjuncts are, as the title of this article puts it, “emissaries from the world beyond.”1 I know the craft of writing. I tend to think of my students as apprentices. I would pass on what I knew to them, like a stonemason or potter or auto mechanic. Writing is an art and a craft and a knack that can, with time and long effort—longer than we really have, unfortunately—be mastered.
I believe in the editing process, the procession and refining of draft after draft, but I also believe that students have to be shown exactly how to do it. It’s all well and good to direct a student to edit a paper, to do a new draft—but what the hell does that mean? I tell my writing class on the first night: You’ll hand in first drafts of every essay to me. But here is what won’t happen. You won’t get back your first draft covered by teacher hieroglyphics, awks and ills and frags like the discordant cries of exotic birds, scrawled ???s and arrows and circles like the tracks of those same birds, all followed by a small sermon at the end: Your details are plentiful and your topic a novel one. The main problem is your thesis, which is underdeveloped. Your lack of topic sentences leads to wandering paragraphs and a loss of control. Watch capitalization and comma splices. Have a nice day.
No one reads that stuff. I never did. It might as well be written in Sanskrit. No one reads anything but the grade on the last page. What we will do instead is pass out copies to everyone in class and edit the compositions together—we will workshop them.
I was a little nervous about this approach at first. I wondered if the workshop format was too intense for my tyro writers. I have been in many college classes, and the only ones in which people cried—and I mean broke down completely in huge, racking sobs—were the writing workshops. And these were English majors, who had asked for their misery! I wasn’t sure my apprentices could hold up.
Students are capable of becoming good editors, but they must be taught how to go about it before they can work on someone else’s paper. Anyone who wants to learn how to dismantle and clean a carburetor must watch it being done; writing works exactly the same way. To learn to write you must watch someone do it. Doesn’t it stand to reason? Writing is the most private of arts. We are surrounded by the finished products, but the drafts are hidden from us, and we never get to live with the writer as he or she polishes, tunes, rejects, augments, agonizes, and generally reworks the thing. We talk volumes about the writing process and give the students no more than a few road signs—and those written in hieroglyphics—indicating how it actually works.
The idea is not complicated. For the first few classes, the students follow along with me as I edit their pieces on the chalkboard. Concept by concept, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, I edit out loud and on the fly. The class watches what I do, and listens to my thought process. Why do we need to expand this idea here? This paragraph seems rushed—can we slow it down? Why is this observation irrelevant? There seems to be a problem of logical structure here; D follows A—do we need to insert B and C? The author of the composition takes notes on what is to be done with his or her essay; the rest of the class follows along, seeing (one hopes) their own writing in the work of others, the same gaps in logic, the same sorts of confusion over and over again, the same infelicities—writing speed bumps—that slow the reader to a crawl.
This is all something of a high-wire act. This writing and rewriting and editing out loud can be risky. I am never sure how successfully it will go. This very book has moved smoothly and cooperatively on some days and crankily on others. Writing and editing well, being in a good zone of productivity, is as mysterious a process as hitting a baseball; who can say why on a given night the .300 hitter, facing mediocre pitching, goes 0 for 4? There are some nights when the student essays stump and defy, when the student writers seem to have done something magical: that is, created a Gordian knot of confused prose that cannot be undone, writing that cannot be improved. I feel like a jeweler who has dismantled a watch and forgotten how to put it back together: the wheels, the springs, the works lie about in disarray. My contribution to the student prose seems to add little more than a layer of rather high-blown confusion. When that happens, a cloud of deflation descends upon the room. Writing seems impossible—to the class, to me.
Those nights aren’t completely wasted. The class gets to see just how difficult it can be to free one’s prose from the weeds and brambles of composition. I am at least gratified that my students can see how torturous the process can be. They see it as I labor to edit and re
write, standing at the board, staring in frustration, sweat glistening on my brow.
Oh, but on other nights the editing goes so sublimely well! Every emendation seems to tighten and strengthen and nourish and clarify the prose. The editing process seems magical. As a class, we read the original prose out loud, and then the rewrites. We savor the taste of good writing in our mouths. Even to a class that has never before given any thought to the business of writing, the results are impressive. And then comes that almost divine moment of clarity when a successful rewrite seems so achievable that the students, unbidden, join me in the process.
They, too, are writing out loud.
Their steps, at first, are tentative, their corrections elementary. They might note the sort of thing they have never noted before. Perhaps a clanging, empty sort of word like “particularly” appears three or four times in a paragraph (“I’ve never been particularly eager to buy a motorcycle… . The dealers I’ve spoken to have never been particularly convincing … There’s something particularly dangerous about these vehicles.”), catching our attention in as distracting a fashion as an oddly dressed movie extra who keeps passing by the camera in a crowd scene. I will ask them to compress a paragraph and they will do so by deleting words, which is a good start but only half the battle. The prose becomes oddly telegraphic and bare, like an old building whose gargoyles and pediment have been removed for safety reasons. And then finally, after long effort, a student will not just remove words but actually recast the writing, turning sentences around, substituting new and better verbs, and at that moment the writing teacher can bathe in the warmth and glow of learning.
We have made the first strides.