My Secret Diary -- Part 5 (1989-90)
Sentenced to a whole year of teaching at Creative Writing Stalag 16, also known as the University of V_______'s writing program. They think I've got it easy: all I have to do is teach a lit class and give a graduate seminar. Little do they know how it eats at my soul and corrodes my Talent.
They even acceded to my request that I have full access to a piano in the nearby music building. They think it's some kind of eccentricity, this drive to play the piano. But while I am away from my beloved sensei, the piano's is the only keyboard at which I can express myself, and music will be the only thing to keep me sane.
January 28, 1989
All students on hardbitten, film noir kick. I have a seminar full of pint-sized Hammetts, Chandlers and Elmore Leonards. To wit:
She was a tall, blonde glass of champagne, the kind you order when you're on a lucky streak and running the table in the third hour. But I wasn't on a lucky streak and this was no casino. This was the waiting room of the Trailways Bus station in Phoenix, Arizona, and nobody ever got lucky in a bus station waiting room. Nobody, until now.
My, my. I can just hear the wailing saxophone on the movie soundtrack. Nobody ever got lucky in a bus station waiting room? I write in the margin: "I wish I could take your word for it, but this is a generalization you don't even need. You're just putting it in because it sounds good. Besides, the end of the story proves this was no luck at all."
Had to squeeze in last bit because I ran out of margin.
Here's another:
My pal George Harris couldn't punch his way out of a paper bag, but that didn't stop him from trying to intervene one night in a neighborhood tavern when some drunken dockworker started using his wife for a punching bag. George went up to the guy and said, "Hey, pal, why don't you take it easy? Let me buy you a drink." And the guy's wife hauls off and clobbers him. George's eyes roll back, he falls, his head hits the edge of a chair and that's it, goodbye George. The woman got three to five for manslaughter and was probably glad to get away from her husband. George didn't have a wife -- or so I thought.
The authors of these pieces aren't cheap detectives from the streets of Los Angeles circa 1948, they're college kids who've never been in a bar fight or on a lucky streak at blackjack, never known a murderer or even ordered champagne. They know nothing. They've experienced nothing. And nothing they can write can convince me otherwise.
Oh, that's right, I could tell them to "write what you know." I guess that explains the avalanche of When-I-was-wee memoirs about life in the American suburb, and the thinly fictionalized tales of being on the receiving end of various kinds of abuse -- child, racial, sexual, drug. Since the American educational system is free and this is a public university, I might have expected some diversity of experience, someone who has, at least, experienced genuine abuse. But the blacks here seem determined, more than anything else, to demonstrate they're like all the other students. Well, if it makes them spell accurately, so much the better.
February 4, 1989
Prisoner conclave, otherwise known as a faculty meeting. Work assignments are handed around and there is general griping. The chair wants a committee to examine "Alternate expressions of racial and gender identity" as expressed in grad student applications. A longtime inmate says each member of the English Department is getting a computer terminal in his office. What possible use could a computer be in the English department? Are we going to be calculating formulae for the Physics Dept. in our spare time?
March 7, 1989
Disgusted by latest raft of student work and by my recent discovery that the most substantial thing most of them read is Cosmopolitan, I decide nothing will do but direct exposure to the classics. I proceed to spend the entire class today reading from Alice Munro. Next class, Joyce Carol Oates.
Foreheads hit the desks with satisfying cracks.
March 30, 1989
I asked students to experiment with point of view.
I got the usual: a football tells about being passed for a touchdown; a bed tells about the people sleeping in it. Of the more imaginative (yet just as atrocious) pieces, one student wrote a story from the point of view of her underpants; another wrote from the point of view of the "z" key on the typewriter. (The "z" was envious of the "s.") A third wrote from my point of view -- that is, of someone reading the class's stories. I wrote in the margin, "The stories your narrator reads sound much more interesting than most of what I actually get. Why don't you write those?"
Still another student wrote from the point of view of a chunk of ore buried deep beneath the earth, so deep it will never be mined. Another lovely fantasy.
April 6, 1989
Called in by department chair. This is never good. I wondered if it could be to complain about assigning my graduate seminar all of Faulkner, or perhaps to spank me for not turning in a syllabus. (A syllabus -- nothing more than a glorified lesson plan. What is this, junior high school? I could no more plan a discussion of literature and writing than I could choreograph lovemaking. On the other hand, come to think of it, I haven't had much of either in a long time.)
It turned out a couple of students had complained to the chair about my comments on their stories. He showed me a page with red slashed across: "Who cares? I don't care! Make me care!"
"What did you mean by this?" he asked.
"Simply that a narrative is worthless unless the reader can be made to care about the characters and what happens to them," I said, as simply as I could.
"You were trying to tell the student that her story is worthless?"
"In its present form, it is worthless."
He looked away for a moment, at the high window that reminded me of the police lockup in Durban. There my classmates and I were detained for a few hours following a demonstration. It was literally an occasion of no consequence: we received a slap on the wrist for our timid banner which read "Afrikaans is the Language of the Oppressor." Even so much as that slap is probably beyond the capacity of the chair of the English Department of the University of V_______, so I wasn't very concerned.
"These are students," he said finally. "We are here to teach and encourage them, not to make them feel worthless."
"Are you suggesting I lower my standards?" I asked in an icy voice.
"You're here to teach, not to judge. Your job is to show the student where she went wrong, and help her correct it. With some students, you must take them step by step. You can't expect polished work. They're here to learn, and to make mistakes."
"A story is no good, until it is," I retorted. "There is no middle ground."
"Again, you are not a judge. You are here to lead them across that middle ground until their stories are good. Tell them when they make mistakes, by all means. But a little encouragement along the way won't kill you, and it might make all the difference for them."
"So I'm to be Nursey now. I'm to be Mummy, wiping the little brats' noses and telling them they could grow up to be good little writers. Well, they will never learn to be good little writers, not without talent, and talent is innate. It cannot be taught."
"So you bear no responsibility?"
"Don't psychoanalyse me," I snapped. "Children need a firm hand. They need standards. They need to know the difference between quality and garbage. This society encourages them, all right, this society pats them on the head all day long, it has for their entire lives, and when they arrive here at what is supposed to be the pinnacle of their educational lives -- much less the beginning of an academic career, and I shudder at the thought that any of these whippersnappers will ever teach another person how to tie her shoes, much less how to write a story -- they arrive here barely knowing the difference between a comma and a period. They don't know the difference between past tense and present, they don't know the first thing about character. These are the products of V_______'s vaunted educational system, these are the ones who got through successfully. I tremble, Dr. Wheeler, I tremble at the notion that these are the cream of the crop of V_______'s schools, and... and..."
I had to stop before I had a heart attack.
The chair looked at me a long time. Then he handed me the student papers he'd been given. He said, "Sucks to be you." Then I was dismissed.
