The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Teaching as mentoring
Work in progress

Such a conversation does not need to be a collaboration or even an exchange between writers of equal skill. But I do think you can teach writing without taking on the pose of sage or guru or taskmaster—that is, without talking down to students. You can instead approach students as something more like a fellow writer, a co-worker. Let me close this chapter with two examples of such conversations among peers.

In her great novel about World War I, Regeneration (1992), Pat Barker imagines a series of conversations between two soldier poets, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, while both were convalescing in a sanatorium in Scotland. The younger and at the time lesser-known of the pair, Owen, has been charged with editing an in-house literary journal, The Hydra, as part of his treatment for shell shock. He tentatively approaches the more distinguished Sassoon for a poem. Sassoon agrees to contribute but also asks to read some of Owen’s work.

One of the first poems Owen brings to him imitates the style of Sassoon’s own war poetry. But Sassoon is not much taken by the complement, insisting instead that

the fact that you admire somebody very much doesn’t mean they’re a good model. I mean, I admire Wilde, but if I started trying to be witty and elegant and incisive, I’d probably fall flat on my face. (124, original emphasis)

Owen gets the point—he and Sassoon are very different sorts of writers—but still wants to work with the older poet. Sassoon, in turn, sees that the young man clearly has talent and, taking on the role of mentor, puts Owen on a strict writing schedule: “It’s like drill. You don’t wait until you feel like doing it” (125).

In response, Owen begins to draft what will become one of the most harrowing poems ever written about war. He brings an early version to Sassoon, leading to this extraordinary exchange between them:

Sassoon took the sheet and read the whole poem through twice, and then returned to the first two lines.

What minute-bells for those who die so fast?

—Only the monstrous/solemn anger of our guns.

“I thought ’passing’ bells,” Owen said.

“Hm. Though if you lose ’minute’ you realize how weak ’fast’ is. Only the monstrous anger . . .”

“’Solemn’?”

“’Only the solemn anger of our guns.’ Owen, for God’s sake, this is War Office propaganda.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Read that line.”

Owen read. “Well, it certainly isn’t meant to be.”

“I suppose what you’ve got to decide is who are ’these’? The British dead? Because if they’re British, then ’our guns’ is . . .”

Owen shook his head. “All the dead.”

“Let’s start there.” Sassoon crossed out our and penciled in the. “You’re sure that’s what you want? It isn’t a minor change.”

“No, I know. If it’s ’the,’ it’s got to be ’monstrous.’”

What passing-bells for those who die . . . so fast?

—Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with the second line.”

“’In herds’?”

“Better.”

They worked on the poem for half an hour. (141—42, original emphases)

While this conversation is fictional, it is based on actual events. Sassoon and Owen did indeed meet in 1917 while both were recuperating at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland, The Hydra was a real journal, and the changes Barker has Sassoon suggest to Owen do in fact appear, in Sassoon’s handwriting, on an early draft of Owen’s famous antiwar poem, then titled “Anthem for Dead Youth.” (A digitized image of this draft with Sassoon’s comments can be found on the British Library website.) What Barker does in her novel, then, is dramatize the process of revision by creating a scene that lets us eavesdrop on a writer and teacher as they work together on a text.

That work is, of course, far more incisive than most of us can hope to imitate. Owen and Sassoon focus tightly on a set of word choices—minute-bells or passing-bells, solemn or monstrous, our guns or the guns. But each of those choices has a kind of ripple effect. One change leads to the next. As Owen remarks, “If it’s ’the,’ it’s got to be ’monstrous.’” The changes they discuss are thus not mere editorial corrections, simple substitutions of one word for another, but revisions that affect the stance and meaning of the poem as a whole.

Such work with texts is the meat and potatoes of teaching writing. We spend much of our time trying to help writers think through the implications of using one word or the other, or crafting a sentence in this way or that, or striking a certain stance or tone, or starting or finishing their essay on a particular note. So you might think our scholarly literature would be filled with nonfictional versions of Barker’s imagined conversation between Owen and Sassoon.

It is not. I suspect one reason it is not is that we have been preoccupied with, as it were, Sassoon’s side of the conversation. Since the 1980s, scholars in composition have argued for a mode of responding to work in progress in which teachers help students develop their projects as writers rather than simply correct their prose. That is excellent advice. But there has been surprisingly little work done on the uses students make of teacher comments. There has been little attempt, that is, to track changes, to chart the actual work students do from draft to draft. Instead, the focus of researchers has been directed predominantly on what the teacher, not the student, has to say. The effect is to suggest that teachers can decide on a style of response in advance of commenting on any particular essay—that our comments are driven not by what students have to say to us but by what we have already decided to tell them about writing.

In contrast, Barker is interested not simply in what Sassoon has to say to Owen but in the not entirely predictable uses Owen makes of his advice. Some days after the conversation I’ve quoted, Owen returns to Sassoon with yet another version of his poem. When Sassoon asks him what draft this is, Owen replies that he’s lost count, that, after all, Sassoon did tell him to “sweat his guts out.” Sassoon replies:

“Did I really? What an inelegant expression. ’What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?’ I see we got to the slaughterhouse in the end.” Sassoon read through the poem. When he’d finished, he didn’t immediately comment.

“It’s better, isn’t it?”

“Better? It’s transformed.” He read it again. (1992, 157, original emphasis)

But after offering this silent testimony to the power of what Owen has written, Sassoon goes on to argue some more with the direction the poem has taken, worrying that Owen might offer his readers a false sense of consolation for the meaningless slaughter of the war. But Owen objects to this reading of his work, insisting that one can take “pride in the sacrifice” without suggesting it was justified. Indeed, Owen points out, Sassoon makes a similar move in one of his own poems about the war, which Owen begins to read triumphantly to his teacher (157). Sassoon cedes the point to his newly confident student but still makes one last and telling revision, changing Dead to Doomed in the poem’s title (158).

What matters most to me is not how this conversation ends but that it is a conversation, an exchange in which both writer and reader, student and teacher, assert their views about the text they are working on. Barker shows us a process in which both Owen and Sassoon win, lose, and compromise—and through which a better text is forged. The poem remains Owen’s, but Sassoon has had a hand in its shaping. It is a remarkable depiction of the kind of work with writing a student and teacher can do together.