The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Deceivers
Forging a self

Angela Argo is an unlikely siren. Skinny, awkward, clad in motorcycle leather and chains, her red hair streaked with orange and green, her “sharp-featured face pierced in a half-dozen places” (8), the emo-punk Angela has sat silently for weeks in Ted Swenson’s fiction writing class. Swenson is yet another middle-aged writer who has stopped writing; it’s been years since he published his second novel, and he has long lost interest in working on his third. But he’s also a serious teacher and a likable guy, happy in his marriage and his teaching job at a small New England college. Angela finally speaks up and saves a class discussion Swenson has let go off the rails. She’s a more perceptive and candid reader than her classmates. She’s also at work on a novel, which she asks Swenson to read. It’s good, and he takes an interest in her. And so Francine Prose would seem to prime us for a classic wonder boy narrative in Blue Angel (2000).

But the title of her novel suggests otherwise—since it invokes The Blue Angel (1930), a classic early sound film directed by Josef von Sternberg, in which a staid professor wrecks his career in mad pursuit of a cabaret singer, Lola, played by none other than Marlene Dietrich.⁷ So this Angela must clearly be trouble. And indeed, as Swenson falls head over heels for her, we realize that she is manipulating what goes on, creating a situation where he will feel compelled to take her writing to his publisher.

But even though their relationship quickly involves sex, or at least a failed attempt at it, Swenson is more driven by an intellectual lust. He seems indifferent to Angela’s thin body and edgy appearance; at one point, he describes her as a “twitchy ferret” (49). It is her skill as a writer that attracts him. Prose provides several excerpts of Angela’s novel in progress, “Eggs,” which is, aptly enough, about an affair between a student and a teacher. It’s funny and erotic in a slightly creepy manner, and despite his own warnings to students not to read fiction as disguised autobiography, Swenson can’t help but speculate about possible real-life sources of the story. He lets Angela flatter him—she admires his writing, his is the only course she bothers to attend—and he listens to her stories about her boyfriend and her parents. He discovers she has written a series of poems about a phone sex worker and secretly reads them. He is so seduced by everything Angela says and writes that it never occurs to him that all of it, not just her novel, may be made up. She has forged a self, a persona, that she lives out not just on the page but in her daily life.

Blue Angel ends with Swenson hauled before a campus judicial board to face charges of sexual harassment brought by Angela. Such board hearings are staples of fiction about teaching. Four of the texts I discuss in this book (Educating Rita, Oleanna, Mustang Sally, Blue Angel) include scenes in which teachers are grilled by committees about their behavior, as do several other recent academic novels—including J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000). But I think the scene misfires in Blue Angel. One of Prose’s aims seems to be to satirize the political correctness of the academy in the 1990s, and I suspect that Swenson’s trial is supposed to achieve a kind of madcap absurdity, as a procession of friends, colleagues, and students betray him with increasingly wild accusations—but it all just seems kind of sad. Prose’s characters are too human and personable to function as satiric figures.

That includes Angela Argo. However conniving she may be, Angela is also an inventive writer, confident in her sexuality, and witty in the design of her ploys to deceive Swenson. She’s a compelling, well-realized character. You can understand why Swenson falls for her. He sees in her another version of himself—not in the sense that she might also achieve what he has already done but that she represents what he hopes to become again. Swenson sees in her a way of renewing his life as a writer. There’s a quiet and wonderful scene in Blue Angel in which, having read several chapters of Angela’s novel, Swenson returns to his own work in progress. It now bores him. He’s more interested in what Angela is writing.

And in what Angela has to say. In the beginning pages of the novel, Swenson defines his problem in leading a writing workshop:

Let his colleagues try this. The ones who think it’s easy—no lengthy texts, no lectures, no exams to grade. . . . Let them spend class knowing their careers depend on finding a way to chat about bestiality so that no one’s feelings get hurt. (4—5)

For sex with animals has been a recurring theme in the stories written for Swenson’s course that semester. His students aren’t sexual outlaws; they’re just looking for ways to impress their teacher, push the envelope—while he’s searching for a way to have a civil conversation with them about writing technique. In this particular class, the students patter on about plausible ways of explaining why the narrator of a short story they are discussing, rebuffed by his girlfriend, might relieve his sexual tensions at the end of the evening with the aid of a refrigerated chicken. Swenson knows that for such a story to have any chance of working, the narrator’s actions must not only come as a surprise but also feel like the sort of thing any of us might, at some point, be capable of doing. But he’s not sure how to say as much to a group of near-adolescents. And so when Angela awakes from her silence and remarks

I guess I think the best thing—the one good thing—is that the end is so weird and unexpected. Isn’t that the point? Anyone could do something like this. (10)

Swenson is thrilled. Angela can say to her peers what he cannot. She becomes his second and more eloquent voice.

Prose illustrates the tensions of a writing workshop in accurate and comic ways. She sketches quick portraits of Swenson’s students without caricaturing them and shows how they compete with one another for his praise while guarding against criticisms that seem too frank or hostile. “Attentive to infinitesimal shifts of status and position” (113), they note how Swenson defers to Angela in class and resent that she doesn’t share any of her own work in progress. When Angela finally does bring in a chapter from her novel, they suspend their customary rule of politeness and trash it. Swenson foolishly rushes in to defend her work against their criticisms, arguing that they have failed to appreciate its originality, which, of course, only causes “two dark coals of resentment [to] glow in each student’s face” (203).

Swenson’s self-deception enables Angela’s scheme. He is happy to have her become a stand-in for his views in class. Although warned she is unstable and prone to making up stories, he believes everything she tells him. He identifies so strongly with her work that he fails to notice that she, too, is writing sort of a sex with animals story. (The student in her novel is incubating eggs for a science project; at a key moment there is need for lubrication . . .) And all of this is because Swenson is convinced Angela “may be a real writer” (134)—which, in turn, would seem to make him a real teacher. Angela doesn’t need to sleep with Swenson to convince him to show her novel to his publisher. Doing so merely seals the deal and then turns everyone against him when things begin to sour.

As teachers, we live on through the work of our students. Novels like Prep and Blue Angel speak to the importance of keeping that statement in the plural. There is hubris involved in imagining you can divine who among a group of young and unformed writers possesses true talent. Swenson’s intellectual infatuation with Angela warps the way he teaches his seminar. He becomes invested in proving, if only to himself, that she is a better writer than anyone else in the room. Angela takes advantage of his credulity. The deception at the heart of Blue Angel is the result of a folie à deux, the willingness of both to believe that Angela possesses a genius that separates her from her classmates.