The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

On the job
Postscript

Whatever other problems they may face, fictional writing teachers tend to have enviable workloads. Most of the teachers in the books, movies, and plays I’ve looked at here appear to teach only one class—and that class is often quite small. Several work with just a single student writer. We encounter occasional hints of other classes or obligations, but those are placed well in the background. Our attention is focused on the work a teacher and student (or small group of students) do together.

While this strikes me as a reasonable plot device—especially for how it offers a novelist or dramatist the chance to draw not just teachers but students as complex characters—it also distorts the working experience of most of us who teach writing, which surely centers on the feeling of having much more to do than hours to do it in. No writing teacher comes home and wearily sighs, “I have a paper to correct this evening.” It’s always a stack, the latest set of fifteen or twenty or thirty or more pieces turned in by today’s section or sections. I’d thus like to bring this study to a close by looking at a few books that make the working conditions of writing teachers a key element of their plots: Julie Schumacher’s 2017 Dear Committee Members, Richard Russo’s 1997 Straight Man, and James Hynes’s 2001 The Lecturer’s Tale.

None of these three books has anything of much interest to say about classroom teaching. But that’s the point. They show how events conspire to make the already difficult work of teaching writing even harder to do well. They are campus novels rather than teaching novels, but all three books center on the work lives of ordinary academics at undistinguished institutions. They present academic life not as a calling or a form of minor celebrity but a job. And they show how the conditions of that job tend to work against good teaching.

I should also add that all three novels are very funny, accurate, and sharp in their depictions of college English departments. They are particularly good at documenting the sorts of nearly invisible tasks that can absorb much of an academic workday. For instance, Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members is an epistolary novel consisting of sixty-seven letters of recommendation written over the course of one academic year by Jay Fitger, a disgruntled professor of creative writing at Payne University, a fictional school of no particular distinction located somewhere in the Midwest. Jay’s letters span the gamut. He recommends (in an often sideways manner) some students for fellowships and grad schools, other for jobs in paintball emporia, snack shops, and supermarkets. He writes on behalf of colleagues who are searching for jobs at other schools or who are looking for other positions at Payne. He supports still others for tenure, promotion, grants, awards, and chairs. It seems likely that most of his efforts do more harm than good. For while the first few of his references are merely cranky, Jay increasingly makes himself the focus of his letters. His recommendations become excruciatingly personal and ill-considered, filled with a venting of professional grudges and desperate attempts to rationalize his own mistakes and failures. And he has the added burden of needing to address several letters to either his ex-wife or his ex-lover, who are both also academics.

Jay’s letters are intemperate and comic in a mean-spirited way. He writes double-edged praise like “intended to be philosophical rather than humorous, the story nevertheless succeeded to great comic effect” (138). But the sheer excess of detail in Jay’s letters allows Schumacher to sketch a familiar portrait of a middling academic whose career is going nowhere. Payne University has frozen searches for new faculty in the liberal arts, and the English department has been placed in a kind of receivership with a sociologist serving as its temporary chair. The department offices are in a crumbling building under constant repair. (Jay’s office is right beside the men’s room.) And although he is a serious writer, Jay has promiscuously mined the details of his personal life for his fiction, to the detriment of both.

What is most striking, though, is how the novel performs its argument, showing us how Jay’s energies as a novelist and teacher are displaced into the writing of recommendations that few people will ever read and even fewer will take seriously. As Jay observes in one of his early letters, in what is for him a modest digression:

Though the academic year has just started I fear I am already losing the never-ending battle to catch up with the recommendations requested of me. Suffice it to say that the LOR has usurped the place of my own work, now adorned with cobwebs and dust in a remote corner of my office. (10—11)

It’s soon made clear, though, that Jay has grown much less interested in finishing his “own work” than in the politics of literary and academic life—with who is appointed to direct what program, who is published by whom, who is offered what prize or residency. It’s this undisguised self-absorption that gives Dear Committee Members its comic edge and allows Schumacher a chance to redeem Jay at its end. What I value most about her novel, though, is how it shows, in exaggerated form, how a minor if necessary task, the writing of recommendations, can crowd out the time and focus needed for the real work of teaching and writing.

Hank Devereaux Jr., the narrator and protagonist of Richard Russo’s hilarious Straight Man, is yet another sad sack, although a more likable one than Jay Fitger. Hank is the son of a renowned literary theorist, William Henry Devereaux, Sr. As Hank tells us in the opening paragraphs of the novel, his well-published father favored “distinguished visiting professorships” with light teaching loads and the expectation “to read and think and write and publish and acknowledge in the preface of his next book the generosity of the institution that provided him the academic good life.” Hank’s mother, in contrast, “also an English professor, was hired as part of the package deal, to teach a full load and thereby help balance the books” (xii). The hierarchies of work in an English department were thus baked into the very structure of his boyhood family.

Hank has himself spent his career teaching a full load at the fictional West Central Pennsylvania University, an academic backwater in the rust belt of the state. It’s the sort of place where ambition goes to die. Adhering to the conventions of the genre of the campus novel, Hank published a well-received first novel twenty years ago but has since settled more or less contentedly into coping with writer’s block (or lethargy) and teaching section after section of creative writing and composition. I won’t spoil the comic and convoluted plot of the novel with a summary, but it centers on Hank’s shambolic attempts, as interim chair of the English department, to deal with a looming budget crisis. (One of his strategies involves threatening, while being interviewed for the local TV news, to kill one of the ducks on the campus pond each day the university budget is delayed.) Hank spends most of his time going from one quotidian meeting to the next—hiring, budget, retirement, and the like. He also teaches two classes. These are described only fleetingly in the novel and don’t seem to occupy much of his attention. Teaching is only a part of his work week, not its center.

Hank’s advanced fiction workshop has been stalled by a feud between the only two students in it who consider themselves serious writers: Solange, a wannabe poet, although “to her this has less to do with writing poetry than with adopting a superior attitude” (99), and Leo, an earnest boy with a Hemingway complex who, in his own words, “lives to write” (71) but unfortunately doesn’t seem very good at it. The other students serve as an unnamed, frightened chorus. For his part, Hank seems unsuccessful in his attempts to convince Leo to “understate necrophilia” (97) in his stories or to get Solange to add some actions as well as metaphors to hers (349—50). It’s a class running on autopilot.

His comp class goes even worse. Midway through the semester, Hank admits that “so far, I haven’t persuaded my freshmen that the ability to persuade is an important skill” (200). So he starts winging it. On the spur of the moment, he assigns his students to write an essay persuading him to either (1) begin killing a duck a day, as he had threatened, theatrically, to do on the local TV news, or (2) not. Predictably, when the essays come due, most students argue for poultricide, as Hank learns to his dismay when he calls on several of them to read their pieces aloud in class. Desperate, Hank calls on his best writer, a quiet young woman named Blair, in the hope that she will somehow rescue the discussion, but in doing so he only manages to embarrass her (265—68). The class is a fiasco.

When we see Hank at other moments in the novel speaking with Leo, Solange, and Blair, it’s clear that he’s fond of each of them. He’s a good guy at heart, just burned out and worn down, much like all the other middle-aged wonder boys in academic novels. That’s not an excuse for indifferent teaching, but expectations are low and workloads high at West Central Pennsylvania U. What sets Straight Man apart from most academic novels is that at its end, Hank is neither lost nor redeemed. He doesn’t start a new novel or resolve to become a better teacher. But the university weathers its fiscal crisis, as they almost always seem somehow to do, and Hank and his colleagues continue to trudge along pretty much as before, with a kind of collective, bemused shrug. The lessons of Straight Man have to do with finding happiness on the lower rungs of the academic ladder.

Still, for Hank and most of his colleagues, those rungs are pretty secure. They may be anonymous and overworked, but most of them hold tenure or the strong prospect of gaining it. They are solid members of the middle class. In contrast, The Lecturer’s Tale, by James Hynes, fantasizes a revolt by the academic underclass. Or at least in part. The Lecturer’s Tale is another difficult book to summarize. It has aspects of a David Lodge—like farce, with an array of flamboyant characters resembling well-known literary critics and theorists of the 1990s. It’s also a gothic tale centering on an academic nobody, a visiting adjunct lecturer, who gains uncanny powers of persuasion. And it has elements of a realist, Richard Russo—like domestic comedy. It is a tour de force.

The lecturer of the tale, Nelson Humboldt, is about as unassuming as you can get, a young academic whose prospects are already declining. He holds a PhD from an undistinguished state university, with a dissertation on James Hogg, a forgotten literary figure. Basically, he likes to read. This makes him pretty much invisible to the clique of tenured theorists, feminists, neo-Marxists, and postcolonialists who run the English department at the prestigious Midwest University, where Nelson has bumbled into a job teaching three sections of composition and one of study skills each term. But even this small bit of luck runs out for him, as he is told in the opening pages of the novel that his contract will not be renewed at the end of the fall semester. In despair, he stumbles onto the Quad, only to have his index finger severed in a freak accident. After his finger is sewed back on at the hospital, Nelson discovers he can make others do his bidding simply by laying his hand gently upon them. His requests, at least at the start, are humble: a new contract to continue teaching composition, the friendship of his colleagues. But events unfold in increasingly madcap and outlandish ways, and the novel ends with the university almost literally turned upside down—with its famous library burned to the ground, the celebrity theorists fled from its faculty, a textbook publisher running its curriculum, and Nelson chairing the English department.

But I get ahead of myself. One of the key moments in The Lecturer’s Tale occurs early on, when Hynes describes Harbour Hall, where the English department is housed:

There were nine floors . . . but only eight of them were above ground. During the fifties a windowless underground bunker had been sunk as a hideaway from nuclear war, with walls of reinforced concrete sixteen inches thick. The elevator sank below ground level and lurched to a stop . . . This was the portal to the Bomb Shelter, home of the Department of English’s Composition Program. (62—63)

The theorists, of course, reside on the very top floor. Here below dwell the comp teachers, “the sad women in the basement,” as the writing scholar Susan Miller once called them (1993, 121). Hynes goes several steps step further in a biting passage:

Most of the comp teachers were divorced moms and single women with cats who taught eight classes a year and earned a thousand dollars per class, who clung to their semester-to-semester contracts with the desperate devotion of anchoresses. They combined the bitter esprit de corps of assembly-line workers with the literate work of the overeducated: They were the steerage of the English Department, the first to drown if the budget sprang a leak. They were the Morlocks to the Eloi of the eight floor . . . They were the colonial periphery, harvesting for pennies a day the department’s raw material—undergraduates—and shipping these processed students farther up the hierarchy, thus creating the leisure for the professors at the imperial center to pursue their interests in feminist theory and postcolonial literature. (63)

This intellectual underworld is ruled by Linda Proserpina, MA, the director of composition, a chain-smoking wraith who has no more respect or affection for Nelson than do the theorists. Linda sees Nelson as an interloper, a dilettante with a literature PhD, almost a scab. He is someone who teaches comp not out of love but only because he has to.

And truth be told, Nelson seems an uninspired writing teacher. His one virtue is diligence. As his wife observes:

She’d never completely understood the life of the young academic: why he taught four classes a semester for a fraction of the salary of professors who taught two, why he was never paid for the articles he published, why he stayed up to all hours of the night writing comments on the papers of students who would only throw them away after looking at the grade. (13)

Still, throughout the course of the novel, we never learn the name of a single undergraduate Nelson teaches. He views the textbook he has been given to use as offering “one part writing to two parts twelve-step program,” and yet he’s willing to assign projects from it like presentations on “My Most Important Personal Epiphany” (36). He is employed by a program in which only heroes and martyrs can thrive, and Nelson is neither. Four classes and an inane textbook have instead turned him into a drudge. He approaches his own writing much the same way: “Because he needed to publish and he didn’t have any better ideas, Nelson ground out Hogg article after Hogg article” (33). Like Hank in Straight Man but at a much earlier stage in his career, Nelson has been reduced to going through the motions.

Hank and Nelson call to mind Ted Sizer’s Horace’s Compromise (1984). In this book, Sizer argues for restructuring the workloads of high school teachers so they can spend more time doing hands-on work with individual students. It’s a sensible argument that got lost in the years of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core. At the center of the book is a composite character Sizer calls Horace Smith, a fifty-three-year-old English teacher, an “old pro” who loves his work and would never do anything else. And yet Horace has had to make a series of compromises simply to get through his workday. He rations the amount of time he devotes to preparing each class meeting, alternates the classes he collects homework from, assigns writing less often than he’d like (once a week rather than twice), restricts those writings to just a paragraph or two, and sometimes grades them using only a plus, check, or minus. As Sizer observes, “He hadn’t time enough to do more” (16). He saves writing college recommendation letters for his Christmas vacation. And there are other activities that simply go by the wayside: revising curricula, meeting with parents, counseling students, reading in his field. These compromises gnaw at Horace. He is a professional who is not allowed the time or means to truly exercise his craft. Instead, he must find ways to work around “a chasm between the necessary and the provided” (21).

Straight Man is about living with a similar set of compromises. But The Lecturer’s Tale ends with a fantasy of reform. When at the close of the novel Nelson improbably becomes English department chair, he decides to create a department “where pedagogy and scholarship are the same thing, where a good day in class is as exciting as another publication” (369). He thus appoints Linda Proserpina as assistant chair and promotes all of her composition instructors to professorships. Harbridge, the publishing company that now owns Midwest University, has standardized curricula through “strongly encouraging” the use of its own textbooks and instituting a stringent set of annual reviews for all instructors (376). But while most of the remaining university faculty chafe under this new system, the comp teachers find that their situation has improved:

The corporate salary was actually better than the old university salary for comp teachers; year-to-year contracts were better than semester-to-semester, and Harbridge, mirabile dictu, actually provided benefits, sick days, and vacation time. To attract students, the classes were smaller, and Harbridge provided each instructor with brand-new copies of their entire textbook line. (376)

This is clearly a flawed utopia (as they all are). But the new, standardized Midwest U also reveals how the glamorous research university that came before it was a kind of Potemkin village, its facade of graduate seminars and advanced literature courses propped up by the labor of a teaching proletariat grinding out classes in composition for subsistence wages. The overall argument of the novel is not for regimentation but fairness.

As a case in point, the only star theorist who does not abandon Midwest University at the end of the novel is Anthony Pescecane, the regal ex-chair of the English department. Re-embracing his working-class New Jersey roots, Pescecane drops “Anthony” for “Tony,” swaps his bespoke suits for jeans and muscle shirts, trades his Jaguar for a classic Mustang, and dives gladly into teaching composition to freshmen. Nelson is pleased but not fooled; he knows Pescecane has “a highly lucrative second career on the lecture circuit” (381), so he can afford to teach whatever and whomever he wants. But that’s exactly the point. If it’s to last, the comp revolution needs people like Tony Pescecane. Teaching writing shouldn’t require a vow of poverty. A profession that demands the sacrifice of money and ambition will soon be left with only the saintly or desperate as its practitioners. The goal has to be not only to improve the lot of comp teachers but also to show how teaching writing can be a welcome part of a successful professorial career—a task for Tony Pescecane as well as Nelson Humboldt and Linda Proserpina.

The Lecturer’s Tale closes with Nelson entering his classroom on the first day of a new semester. For the first time in a longish novel, we are offered an extended description of the undergraduates he teaches:

Some of them were sullen, some bright-eyed, most of them wary. The former University of the Midwest had finally achieved the diversity to which it had long paid lip service; Nelson no longer faced the overindulged, pampered, narcissistic, upper-middle-class white kids who used to make up the university’s student body. Now he faced the kids who couldn’t have afforded it or met its entrance requirements before: inner-city black kids, Latino kids from farmworker families, poor white kids from dying industrial towns, divorced moms, downsized middle-managers, laid-off factory workers . . . Taken as a whole, they were both ill prepared and heartbreakingly expectant. (384—85)

When Nelson looks out at this group, he wonders what he has to offer them. Is what they really need a chance to read some books and to try to formulate their own ideas about them? “It will have to do, he told himself, because it’s all I’ve got to give them” (386). It’s a wonderful moment, both humbling and inspiring, as a teacher begins to speak not from a sense of mastery but from doubt and an anxious desire to help. That’s what drives the work of the best writing teachers we see in fiction, drama, and film: an urge to connect, to work together on a text, to imagine new possibilities for writing.