The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020
Wonder boys
Dead poets and wonder boys
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, directed by Robert Neame (1968), is a haunting study of the personal consequences—for both students and teacher—of a pedagogy based on charisma. Set in a small Edinburgh school for girls in the years leading up to World War II, the film is based on the short and acute novel by Muriel Spark (1962) and, with some small changes to characters and plot, retains Spark’s unflinching portrait of Jean Brodie as a teacher and person. As played by Maggie Smith, Miss Jean Brodie is a stunning, intelligent, unmarried woman in her self-described prime, which is to say she is no longer quite young—in her early forties, it would seem. Unconventional and worldly, she is mentor to the “Brodie set”—a group of four ambitious girls, labeled by Brodie as “the crème de la crème,” who, fascinated by their teacher, strive to adopt her tastes, first in art and literature and then, as they move through their teens, in politics, men, and sex.
The vain Brodie thrives on their emulation. But her influences are ambiguous at best, as she encourages one student toward fascist politics and another toward an affair with an older man. But the movie is also about the cruelty of youth, as one of Brodie’s protégés quietly usurps her position, both personal and professional—by taking on one of her teacher’s lovers as her own and then intriguing to have Brodie dismissed from the school faculty. It is as if to fully impersonate her teacher, the student must also replace her.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie thus reveals a dark side of teaching as courtship or seduction. On the one hand, the more charismatic the teacher, the stronger will be her sway over students. On the other hand, the student must at some point pull away from the teacher—and the more intense the bond between the two, the harsher this rejection must seem. Few other books or movies have gazed so steadily at this tense relationship between youth and age. Brodie documents the perils of growing old as a teacher, as both novel and film close with Jean Brodie left discredited and alone. But there has also emerged a small genre of films that offer a far more romantic view of, as it were, the dead poet past his prime.
The protagonist of these movies is most often a man in late middle age, a onetime rebel who over the years has grown bored as a teacher and blocked as a writer. A good example is Professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglass) in Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys (2000). Tripp is unshaven, unkempt, often stoned, and seemingly unprepared for the one class we see him teach. He is hopelessly stuck on the writing of a big novel that is supposed to seal his reputation as a major author, infatuated with one of his undergraduate students, envious of the talents of another, about to be divorced from his second wife, and conducting an open affair with the chancellor of his school. He is, in short, a mess. We meet him at the start of the movie as he distractedly leads a creative writing workshop that has gone off the rails—the students hate a lugubrious story written by one of their fellows, and Tripp seems unable to do much besides wander about the classroom futilely urging them to “be constructive.”
At the same time, Tripp is too likable not to be redeemed. He refuses to seduce the young woman in his class who fascinates him and who would clearly go to bed with him; he respects the skill and drive of the difficult young man whose story is trashed in the opening scene and helps him find a publisher; he realizes that he actually does love the chancellor and marries her—and through all this, he finds a way to start writing again. Even if the youthful enthusiasm and energy of the dead poet have faded into ironic detachment, the wonder boy still possesses empathy, wit, and an unused reserve of talent.
Second books and second chances dot the narratives of wonder boy movies. So do brilliant protégés. In Gus Van Sant’s Finding Forrester (2000), the reclusive writer William Forrester (Sean Connery) is drawn back into the world by a chance encounter with Jamal, an African American teenager who is attending a New York City prep school on a basketball scholarship but whose real ambition is to write. The author of a single, much-celebrated novel, William agrees to tutor Jamal, who unsurprisingly proves to be an immensely fluent and eloquent writer. All William really needs to do is sit him down to work. But then, when a skeptical teacher accuses Jamal of plagiarism, the agoraphobic William agrees unexpectedly to give a reading at the prep school. The faculty assumes that William is reading from a handwritten draft of his long-awaited second novel. Only after they have finished applauding does William reveal that the passage was actually written by Jamal. But there is a further twist, as at the end of the film we learn that William has in fact written another novel, dedicated to Jamal. Forrester has indeed been found—reawakened, rediscovered—through the process of teaching Jamal.
Similarly, in Lewis Gilbert’s 1983 Educating Rita, Frank, an ex-poet and indifferent English tutor, is rejuvenated by Rita, a young ladies’ hairdresser from Liverpool who comes to him as an Open University student. Based on the 1980 play by Willy Russell, Educating Rita is one of very few movies to include scenes of the actual work of teaching and learning—about which I’ll have more to say later. Still, its storyline has a familiar arc. At the start of the film, Frank (Michael Caine) is charming, rumpled, cynical, and usually drunk. He has given up on both writing and teaching. But working with the unschooled but perspicuous Rita (Julie Walters) convinces him that he might still have something to say. The movie ends with him heading off to Australia to make a new start. Once again, the —ing in the film’s title is important. Rita is indeed educated by Frank, but she has an educating influence on him as well.
Other wonder boys in recent movies include Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfuss), the composer who does not rediscover his art until he fully commits himself to his students, in Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995) and Andrew Crocker-Harris (Albert Finney), the fatigued teacher of classics in The Browning Version (1994) who is reminded of his original love of learning at the very end of his career. Crocker-Harris is the anti-dead poet, whose last words to his students are an apology for having failed to offer them “sympathy, encouragement, and humanity.” His character has become something of a figure unto himself, having been played over the years in film and TV remakes of The Browning Version by an unusually distinguished series of actors: Michael Redgrave (1951), Peter Cushing (1955), John Gielgud (1958), Ian Holm (1985), as well as Finney (1994).
The self-deprecating maturity of the wonder boy offsets some of the cowboy zeal of the dead poet. He has been around the block a few times, has known disappointment, and is less an outsider to the system than a second- or third-stringer within it. A hard-won humility is key to his effectiveness as a teacher. But at bottom the wonder boy and dead poet are versions of the same character. Both teach through the force of personality. And both are imagined as forces of good. The dead poet and wonder boy teach students to become versions of themselves, and the movies about them idealize those selves. There is almost never a downside to their influence. (Jean Brodie is the telling exception.) When things do go wrong, it is always somehow the fault of others—of overbearing parents, indifferent administrators, demanding employers, skeptical friends or spouses.
There is an appealing candor, then, to the discomfort many teachers feel with these images of ourselves. We know that teaching is far more difficult, and the interactions between teachers and students more complex and fraught, than such movies suggest. In her fine 1999 study Tales out of School, Jo Keroes looks at how the relationship between teacher and student has been depicted in a wide range of novels, plays, and films. Keroes is particularly interested in the emotional and erotic undercurrents of teaching, and she inveighs against the common portrait of the teacher as a Pygmalion who shapes a student to satisfy his own ambitions and desires. Her readings of several of the movies I’ve discussed here have informed mine. She contrasts the sentimental uplift of Dead Poets with the cooler ironies of Jean Brodie and applauds how in Educating Rita the flirtation between Frank and Rita ends in a meeting not of bodies but of minds. Her focus throughout Tales, however, remains on the figure of the teacher—and there our approaches diverge. I am more interested in how movies have depicted the work of teaching.
In a brief but astute essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Melora Wolff (2002) suggests that in the movies, “The drama of language is replaced by psychological dramas that praise and reinforce popular ideas about writers and writing teachers.” I’d argue that most critics of movies about teaching have made a similar mistake. We have fixed our gaze on how films depict us as professionals and concluded, unsurprisingly, that they’ve gotten us all wrong. I think that line of analysis has brought us to a dead end, that to move ahead we need to shift our attention from the image of the writing teacher to the work of teaching writing. Let me suggest what such a shift might entail.