The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Ciphers
Forging a self

In a scene midway through Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep (2005), high school sophomore Lee Fiora gets ready to leave her English class:

We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked around my chair to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. (123)

Sittenfeld’s novel is a painfully accurate rendering of the self-consciousness of adolescence. Lee is a scholarship student at a tony New England prep school. She has become attuned to the fine distinctions of social rank and anxious to hide the signs of her own middle-class background. Writing is for her a chance to slip up, to reveal traces of a self she is working to leave behind.

But, of course, writing also offers you the chance to forge a new self, one you can manage and fashion in ways everyday life rarely allows. You can become a different person on the page or at least sound like one. That is, I suspect, one reason behind the interest so many novels and films take in the teaching of writing. The stakes seem higher than in most other subjects, in math or science or social studies. For what is being learned is not simply a skill but a form of self-expression and perhaps of self-making.

Which, in turn, raises the possibility of deception. What ties the person we hear on the page to the actual person writing? How do we tell if the voice created on a page by a writer is authentic or fraudulent? The smith forges something new out of iron and fire; the grifter forges a check, a signature, an identity.

Later in this chapter I’ll look at several novels about students who want so badly to become writers they are willing to compromise who they are as persons. In Francine Prose’s Blue Angel (2000), a talented and opportunistic young woman is so eager to publish her work that she concocts an elaborate scheme to entrap her writing teacher. In May Sarton’s The Small Room (1961), a young scholar so desperately wants to impress her mentor that she plagiarizes her thesis. And in Tobias Wolff’s Old School (2004), a likable and ambitious young man so identifies with a short story written by another student that he convinces himself that it is his own. Each of these novels portrays a plagiarist who aims not so much to deceive as to become someone they are not quite yet. But first let me return to the other side of the problem, as it were, to Prep and Lee Fiora’s worries that her writing will instead disclose the very person she no longer wants to be.

Ciphers

Lee Fiora is not an especially sympathetic person. She is an arriviste, a born social climber, who as a fourteen-year-old conceives the ambition to attend boarding school as a way to escape the boredom of her home in South Bend, Indiana. Prep chronicles the four years she spends at the fictional Ault School in Massachusetts. During that time, Lee distances herself from anyone who might impede her efforts to become a preppy insider—an Asian roommate, an African American classmate, a working-class townie who asks her for a date, her mother and father when they visit for Parents’ Weekend. But Lee is not so much conniving as desperate not to be found out. She yearns to blend in, which makes her an extremely sharp observer of what goes on at Ault.

Lee’s teacher for sophomore English is another outsider—Ms. Moray, twenty-two years old, a recent graduate of the University of Iowa, smart but naive, an earnest midwesterner thrown among the eastern sophisticates of Ault. Lee, of course, loathes her immediately. She hates her sincerity, her enthusiasm, her careful attempts to dress like a prep school teacher. For Lee, these shortcomings are symbolized by a silver pin shaped like a book with its pages turned open that Ms. Moray often wears to class. It seems a “frumpy accessory” to Lee, something probably given to her by an older relative or teacher and now a clear sign that Ms. Moray is just trying a little too hard to fit in (117).

Near the start of the semester, after the class has read Walden, Ms. Moray assigns students to write an essay on where they go to reflect on life. But after listening to her classmates read descriptions of their houses in Scarsdale and their boats on the Long Island Sound, Lee has a mild panic attack. She cannot force herself to read her essay aloud in class. Ms. Moray excuses her for the moment but then insists that Lee read her piece to her alone after class. Her essay begins with a few throat-clearing sentences about Thoreau and solitude. It then moves to the passage Lee realized she could not read to her classmates:

My father’s store is called Mattress Headquarters. It is located in South Bend, Indiana . . . In the back of the store, there is an office and behind the office, there is a storage room with many mattresses. This [is] the room where I reflect because it is quiet and comfortable, and I could lie on all the mattresses, which sometimes reached almost to the ceiling. The best part of this room is that I can hear other people talking, especially my father because he has a loud voice. I can listen to my father and other people such as customers and sales staff and know I am not alone, yet I do not have to join in the conversation. (136)

Lee has let her guard down. Her father is in trade. She has handed in the very scrap of paper she fears others might discover, the one that lists her secrets and humiliations. But Ms. Moray either fails to recognize the source of Lee’s anxiety or refuses to acknowledge it. Instead, she praises the essay, “especially . . . the part about being able to hear your father’s voice” (136), and tells Lee that it’s good to meet a fellow midwesterner. She decides that what Lee really needs is “Confidence,” which she mouths encouragingly to Lee, thrusting her arms out like a cheerleader (137).

Ms. Moray is right, of course, but Lee is well beyond the reach of pep talks from her teachers. She has no intention of becoming a model student. Rather, she wants to remake herself in the image of her privileged classmates, which means writing not more but less about her actual life and views. The next assignment in sophomore English is to “write about something that mattered to us, to take a stand” (138), and Lee is stumped. There’s not really all that much she cares about, besides fitting in at school. She comes up with a phony piece on why “Prayer Is Not a Good Idea in Public Schools.” Irritated, Ms. Moray fails Lee’s essay, although it is probably no worse than the pieces on abortion or travel or sports written by her classmates. But Ms. Moray had hoped for more from Lee, for some sign of commitment or interest. As she tells her after class: “I don’t know what to do with you, Lee. I don’t understand you. You’re a cipher” (161).

Here Ms. Moray perhaps says more than she intends, for the term cipher defines Lee in several senses. She is a riddle, a code her teacher can’t crack. She has sealed herself off from the gaze or friendship of others. And she also feels like a person of no consequence, a nobody. What matters to Lee is the gap she senses between herself and her more assured classmates: “All I ever did was watch other students and feel curious about them and feel dazzled by their breeziness and wracked by the impossible gaping space between us, my horrible lack of ease, my inability to be casual” (162). But that gap is not something she can write about.

Or at least not at that moment in her life. Prep is told from the perspective of Lee ten years or so after she graduates from Ault—and this older Lee is able to find words for emotions and insights that her younger self cannot yet articulate. A weakness of Prep as a novel is that it never shows how Lee develops this ability. Her encounter with Ms. Moray ends in an uneasy truce, but Lee never shows any stirrings of intellectual interest in her class or in any of the others she takes at Ault.

The older Lee does possess an empathy her younger self lacks. Remembering the silver pin, the badge of reading, that Ms. Moray used to wear, she now sees that

she was a young woman who had moved alone to a different part of the country, and she must have been acutely conscious of all these factors—that she was young, that she was a woman, that she was alone; her happiness, if she was happy (I have no idea if Ms. Moray was happy), must have felt so tenuous. That is why, looking back, I am almost sure she bought the pin for herself. (165—66)

It’s a poignant observation. If the young Lee is a cipher, Ms. Moray is an open book. She identifies with writing, while Lee believes “written words trapped you” (147). Ms. Moray’s mistake lies in thinking she can will Lee into becoming someone like her. She is a failed dead poet who has picked the wrong student to try to inspire.

It’s tempting to speculate that Lee is someone who might be drawn to more critical or analytic sorts of writing—that what she fears is not writing so much as the disclosure of emotion, of self. But I’m not sure there’s a clear lesson in teaching to be drawn from Prep—except perhaps for a caution against remaking students in our own images. And yet that is precisely what so many teachers in novels and films seem to do.