Writing, teaching, and sex - Work in progress

The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Writing, teaching, and sex
Work in progress

In my reading I’ve come across only one fictional writing teacher who seems at all aware of the field of composition. Unfortunately, he is also a terrible teacher, compulsive gambler, kvetch, and would-be womanizer. Pack Schmidt is a middle-aged nobody professor of English in Mustang Sally (1992), a bleak campus spoof by Edward Allen. Describing his coursework near the start of the novel, Pack offers quick nods to process, freewriting, and Writing with a Purpose. But if he knows a little bit about best practices in composition, it is probably because he is no longer allowed to teach much of anything else. Both his life and his career are washouts—divorced, lonely, bored, stuck at an obscure midwestern university, more interested in gazing at the sorority girls who take his intermediate composition courses for an easy grade than in teaching them anything about writing. And so, when Pack refers to meeting “the writing authority Donald Murray” (160), it is a detail that further places him as part of a small and unimportant professional world, much as, in another sort of campus novel, a quick allusion to chatting with Stanley Fish or Edward Said or Paul DeMan would establish the speaker as a member of a globe-trotting academic elite. As Pack himself says:

For the level of my own classes, none of the theoretical stuff matters much. I don’t need to learn about Foucault . . . and I probably won’t get thirsty enough to attend the Marxist cash bar following the symposium about new ways of incorporating Race-Class-Gender into remedial composition classes. (86)

And so once more, comp equals mediocrity.

In a series of plot twists both elaborate and familiar, Mustang Sally offers Pack redemption through sex. He falls head over heels for Mustang Sally, a beautiful former student who is now a sex worker in a Nevada brothel, and lurches with her through a series of escapades both on and off campus, beginning, as he does, to imagine an alternative to the dreariness of his current life. It’s a classic wonder boy narrative and a somewhat tired academic farce. What intrigues me, though, is a long passage early on in the novel (30—37), when Allen reproduces in full the final paper, “Things Happen in Pairs of Three,” Sally writes for Pack’s class in intermediate composition. Like Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee, the point of this extended seven-page quotation appears to be to prove just how bad a writer Sally is—as well as how uninterested Pack is in her work. Sally appends a note to her essay, apologizing that “it’s not very good, but I have been so busy that I didn’t have any more time to revise it like you always want people to” (36—37). Pack agrees, thinking to himself after he reads her aimless series of anecdotes:

There was a time when I would have given this paper the F it deserves, but then I would have gently guided the student through the long revision process, which would have brought it up to a C-minus or so, and everybody would have been happy. The problem is that it’s just so much work. (37)

Instead, Pack just cuts to the chase—offering Sally a series of innocuous comments and meaningless edits and giving her paper, “despite its first-draft feel” (37), the C-minus he figures it would eventually get anyway.

Mustang Sally is an unappealing novel. Like Mamet’s Oleanna, it is a diatribe against the perceived excesses of the sexual politics of the early 1990s, but unlike Mamet’s conflicted play, it is strident and boorish in its voicing of male grievance. However, it does offer a painfully accurate example of how the teaching of writing can so often go wrong. Sally just fills up space on the page. Pack’s assignment asks her to “come up with a personal theory about some aspect of reality, and to use as many specific examples to show how that theory operates in real life” (30). The paper she writes in response, “Things Happen in Pairs of Three,” echoes the thoughtlessness of the assignment. In turn, Pack fills up much of the white space remaining on the page with his own red-inked marginal notes “about run-on, frag, awk, what?, sp, confusing” (37). But neither of them much cares—who would?—about whether things actually happen in pairs of threes or not. As Sally puts it, laughing, after reading Pack’s comments:

You should have given me an F . . . I was drunk and it was the middle of the night. You don’t have any standards at all, do you? (61)

Sally and Pack thus tacitly agree to have a non-conversation, a mock intellectual transaction that seems uncomfortably similar to the sex for money that begins the next phase of their relationship. It’s all work for hire. She pretends to have something to say; he feigns interest; a grade gets assigned.

But there are other scenes in fiction that show teachers and students talking together about writing in very different ways—that depict conversations with a use value as well as an exchange value. I think it’s worth looking at such scenes to see what might help a teacher and student move beyond the sort of formulaic transaction Sally and Pack are caught within. How can we talk with students in ways that actually help them rethink and improve their writing?

To get at some answers to that question, I look in this chapter at several novels whose plots center around the work teachers and students do together in a writing course: Jincy Willet’s The Writing Class (2008), William Coles Jr.’s The Plural I (1978) and Seeing through Writing (1988), and Alison Lurie’s Love and Friendship (1962). I then turn to two novels that depict an older writer mentoring a younger one: Antonio Skármeta’s The Postman (1985/1995) and Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1992). None of these books offers a simple plan for responding to writing, but each suggests ways a teacher can guide the work of beginning writers without wresting control of it from them. Before I turn to these hopeful accounts of teaching, though, I need to consider the more troubling view that to really learn to write, a student must first be willing to submit—in both mind and body—to a master artist and teacher.

Writing, teaching, and sex

Part of the lore of graduate school is that brilliance allows for, perhaps even requires, a certain level of arrogance, impatience, and assertion. One way of proving you’re no fool is to show that you do not suffer them gladly. To this day, the figure perdures of the eminent professor—uncompromising, exact, passionately devoted to their discipline, their craft, loathe to share its secrets with all but the most talented students. In many plays and stories about writing, this eminent professor also possesses an unerring ear for an original voice amid the babble of workshop strivers and acolytes. That is why students sign up for their courses, in the hope of being heard, of being recognized as a real writer.

For instance, in her brief novel All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (2010), Lan Samantha Chang tells the story of Roman Morris, a talented young poet enrolled in an MFA program somewhere in the Midwest. Roman is drawn to Miranda Sturgiss, the star of the writing faculty, who is so ruthless, aloof, and dismissive as a teacher that students refer to her classes as “bludgeonings” (12). Yet they line up to take her courses in the hope that her acumen as a critic and prestige as a poet will somehow help them advance in their careers.

The ambitious Roman launches into a secret affair with the somewhat older Miranda, whose husband is in England. He tapes a note on his desk saying “all that matters is the work” (26, original emphasis). He desires Miranda more as a muse than a lover, going to her “almost every night, bringing drafts and pieces of his work” (29). And yet the odd thing is that the novel never shows us any of Roman’s work. We are left to assume that it is good for much the same reason he does—because Miranda says it is. Genius recognizes genius. But although we are told that Miranda “was as critical a reader as she had ever been, insisting upon revisions and then questioning every word of them” (58—59), we are never shown any of the poems Roman is writing and revising and that her questions are said to spur forward. Rather, the work the two of them do with his writing is kept hidden, an intimacy like sex and perhaps connected to it.

As the novel progresses, Roman leaves Miranda and becomes a successful poet and teacher in his own right. In a striking scene, set near the present, Roman reflects on the differences between his and Miranda’s approaches to teaching. At this point in the novel, Roman is himself middle-aged and working with a talented young undergraduate, Veronica, who is writing a novel based on her struggles with anorexia. One afternoon Veronica shows up in his office in tears and it occurs to Roman, as he consoles her, that in some earlier time (say, the 1980s), he might well have had an affair with her. Nowadays, of course, such relationships are frowned upon. Roman’s feelings are mixed:

He did not know if the rules were most helpful in preventing a student from suffering abuse or in avoiding a situation where the other students watched jealously from the outside, knowing they were learning relatively little, while one of them had an access to so much. (148—49)

Here the links among teaching, writing, and sex are made explicit. The best-case scenario is one in which a teacher bestows their attention on a favorite, a beloved. Having once been so adored, Roman is ready to grant the connection between the intimacies of sex and learning. After all, he thinks, what has replaced it? According to Roman, students now

believed that writing could be “taught” by the dissemination of “craft,” and that anyone with the smallest speck of ability or desire was entitled to the dissemination. No one bludgeoned anybody anymore. (146—47)

So what does Roman do as a teacher, in this new age, with Veronica? It seems much like what Miranda did with him when they were not having sex—he offers a close line-by-line reading of her work in a series of “two-hour bouts” that leave him “wrung out” from the effort (147). But over the course of all these editorial bouts, we are offered little sense of what sort of comments are being made on what kind of manuscript. We are simply told that a promising writer has met an experienced reader and asked to imagine the strenuous and passionately charged intellectual work they do together.

It fascinates and irks me that a novel centered around the teaching of writing has so little to say about it. Chang is the director of the celebrated Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her descriptions of the vanities, intrigues, and anxieties of the world of academic creative writing are spot-on. But what happens on an intellectual level between Roman and Miranda, and Roman and Veronica, remains mysterious. It’s as though writing exists in two parallel worlds—a visible one of social networking and professional infighting and another, hidden one of ineffable craft.

If that is true, then it makes sense in two ways to sleep with your professor, since in doing so you can both make connections to get ahead in your career and receive the direct ministrations of genius. This seems the takeaway lesson of Theresa Rebeck’s literary sex romp, Seminar (2012).5 Rebeck’s play is a lighthearted send-up of the pretensions of both aspiring writers and their teachers. Its main character, Leonard, is yet another failed novelist, now a journalist, editor, and egomaniacal cad who trades on his inside ties to the world of publishing to offer a series of private and very expensive seminars to promising young writers. The four students in his current seminar are Douglas, an author of shallow yet finely drawn short fiction; Izzy, an enterprising hottie who will write or do anything to get ahead; Kate, an Upper West Side intellectual whose stories are studied reworkings of Jane Austen; and Martin, an earnest type who believes in Art. It is, in short, a setup for farce, which is what Rebeck delivers. Each scene in the play is a new meeting of the seminar: Leonard stops dead at the first semicolon in Kate’s rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, professes to love Izzy’s two pages of soft-core porn and beds her after class, finds Douglas “not without talent” and suggests that he try Hollywood. The students complain among themselves about his arrogance and compete for his attention. Scene after scene is dead-on and funny.

But Seminar also subscribes to the same myth of genius—and its connection to sex—as All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Leonard introduces Izzy to Salman Rushdie and Douglas to Harvey Weinstein (a detail which perhaps resonates differently now than when Rebeck was writing). After some handwringing, Kate decides to sleep with Leonard. and gets a ghostwriting gig as a result. Martin is the holdout. In the last scene of the play, he goes to Leonard’s apartment to demand a refund, only to discover that Leonard has not only read his manuscript but, recognizing its worth, edited its first section:

Leonard: I finally read those pages that idiot Bob Gladeau sent me. The first twenty pages of your masterpiece. I did a line edit for you, show you what you got.

. . . Martin sits, and reads.

Martin: So you think I . . .

Leonard: You’re just hearing too many words.

. . . Martin continues to read. After a moment he looks up.

Martin: This is—fantastic.

Leonard: It really is the only way to learn anything about writing, to have a decent editor go through it word by word for you. Help you see what it is, what you meant. What you didn’t even know you meant. (102—3)

This is the real romance. Martin and Leonard don’t sleep together, but in an outburst that fuses sex and writing, Leonard offers to be Martin’s editor, promising him:

Leonard: I will fuck you up in so many different ways you won’t even know who you are anymore. That seminar was the prelude . . . How serious are you? You want to be a writer or not? (104)

So Martin has found his soul mate, his editor, the person who hears his voice. But what is that voice? What is Martin writing about? What changes has Leonard made? We never learn. We simply look on as the two bond in some sort of mystical artistic communion.

Both All Is Forgotten and Seminar set up a dialectic between bludgeoning and intimacy. The fierce critic in seminar becomes the selfless reader in private—willing to invest hours refining the work of a single, talented student they have chosen from among the rest. Both also imagine the work of teaching writing as almost exclusively editorial in nature. Neither Miranda nor Leonard helps their charges develop the projects they are writing; rather, they are both shown working line by line, sentence by sentence, on the drafts of their students, “questioning every word.” Good writing is pictured as hinging on the turn of a phrase and good teaching as involving a lover’s attentiveness to detail.

It may be that you can only learn some things about writing from such close and intimate work with a master. I don’t know. I’ve never done it. But if that is indeed the case, All Is Forgotten and Seminar fail to show us what those things are. Miranda tells Roman that their affair is part of his “poetic education” (77), but we never see how she influences the poetry he writes. Leonard promises to “fuck Martin up” into being a real writer, but again, we never actually see the work he does on Martin’s manuscript. We are left instead like the students Roman describes as watching from the outside, excluded from the secrets whispered by their teacher to a favored pet or protégé. The transfer of genius, it seems, always takes place in another room, behind closed doors.