The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Thoughtful or smart?
Beginnings

The History Boys contrasts three styles of teaching. The play is set in the 1980s in a second- or third-rank private school in the north of England.³ But while the school may be undistinguished, its headmaster is ambitious. He has decided that several of his sixth-formers (all boys) should apply to Oxford or Cambridge and has hired a young consultant, Mr. Irwin, to coach them for their exams in history. Irwin joins Mrs. Lintott, a teach-the-facts historian, and Mr. Griffiths, an English master who teaches anything else but—his classes filled with appreciative discussions of poetry and reenactments of old movie scenes. Irwin’s expertise is exam writing. He’s there to show the history boys how to write essays that, if nothing else, “will not be dull”—that will grab the attention of the “bored examiner” who has just read “a hundred and sixty papers each more competent than the last” (19).

Facts, feeling, cleverness. The play centers on the tensions among these values in teaching—and ends up suggesting that a real education involves all three. While the headmaster of the school is portrayed as a comic figure, an overweening bureaucrat, he has somehow engineered a situation in which the history boys can learn far more from observing the differences among their three teachers than they might otherwise learn from any one of them. And so they do, with all eight in the end passing their exams and several winning scholarships. A weakness of the play, it seems to me, lies in its depiction of the students—a group of rather-too-charming English schoolboys who run to type: the jock, the Romeo, the sensitive kid, the fat kid, the smart kid, the minority, and so on. But the three teachers—Lintott, Hector, and Irwin—emerge more fully as individuals. We see their strengths and failings, in the classroom and in person, as well as the commitments and anxieties that drive their teaching. Through them The History Boys pictures what it might mean to be perhaps not a heroic teacher but still a pretty good one.

Much of that teaching centers on writing. The history boys are stuck as writers at a stage of knowledge telling but not knowledge making—their essays show that they’ve mastered the required readings but not that they have anything of their own to say. Hector has had them learn poems and movie scenes by heart; Lintott has drilled them in the facts of history. But they haven’t learned how to mobilize what they’ve learned, to make what they know part of an interesting and lively argument of their own. As Irwin remarks about an early set of their papers:

So we arrive eventually at the less-than-startling discovery that so far as the poets are concerned, the First World War gets the thumbs-down. (23)

In response, though, Irwin has only a single gimmick to offer the boys as writers: the unexpected reversal. As he argues about the World War I poets:

If you read what they actually say as distinct from what they write, most of them seem to have enjoyed the war. Siegfried Sassoon was a good officer. Saint Wilfred Owen couldn’t wait to get back to his company. Both of them surprisingly bloodthirsty. (25—26)

Hector disparages this sort of ready contrarianism as a tactic of mere “journalism” (72). He worries that Irwin is teaching the boys simply how to make points rather than how to figure out what they might actually think or believe. The play proves him right on both counts. We learn that Irwin later goes on to become a pundit on BBC history programs, and here is how one of the students summarizes his approach to writing:

Find a proposition, invert it, then look around for proofs. That was the technique and it was as formal in its way as the disciplines of the medieval schoolmen. (35)

What Irwin thus has to teach is a method of invention, a way into the arguments of the academy. As he puts it, “A question has a front door and a back door. Go in the back, or better still, the side” (35.) Almost alone among teachers portrayed in fiction, Irwin proposes a technique for writing that is something other than “just tell the truth”—which is the only actual advice his rival Hector has to offer the boys (83). For Irwin, writing history is “not a matter of conviction” but of finding an “angle” on a question (33). The great strength of this technique is that it can be used to support almost any position. But that is, of course, also its weakness. As the play goes on, we learn that Irwin has much to hide. He is drawn sexually to one of the boys, and he did not attend Cambridge as he claims. Much of what he has to offer is thus a pose, a way of playing the game without ever fully showing your hand.

But Hector’s approach is also flawed. The first act of the play ends with a moving scene in which he and a student talk about a poem by Thomas Hardy (53—57). The student has memorized “Drummer Hodge” and recites it beautifully. But it is Hector, not the student, who comments on the meaning of the lines, noting that even though the young soldier Hodge is thrown in an “uncoffined” grave, he is not left anonymous; his name is still recalled for us by Hardy. Hector is, at that moment, wondering how he will be remembered. He has just been told by the headmaster that he must resign his position at the end of term, having finally been caught at his long-standing practice of lightly fondling the students in his charge. The boys seem to view his advances with amusement—perhaps because he is old and fat and thus, they assume, beyond having sex. And Bennett, I must say, also seems less worried by Hector’s behavior than one might hope—more inclined to view it as indiscreet rather than abusive. But while his gropings clearly diminish Hector as a person, they also hint at what drives his pedagogy. Like so many other teachers, Hector aims to seduce his students intellectually, to make them into versions of himself, to have them take on his tastes and passions. As a result, they leave his classes having soaked up his views more than having formed their own.

This problem is made clear through an ongoing wager Hector has with the boys. They reenact some of the flotsam of popular culture and he tries to identify it. So long as the boys aim for what seems to them the obscure—Gracie Fields, the closing scenes of Brief Encounter and Now, Voyager—Hector wins and they must pay up. But he is finally stumped, near the end of the play, when one of the boys sings a pop song that is actually popular at the moment, the Pep Shop Boys’ 1987 “It’s a Sin.” While one of the other students protests that “you can’t expect him to know that . . . and anyway it’s crap,” Hector is more gracious or resigned and concedes the game: “his crap or my crap, it makes no difference” (104). But that seems to me precisely the problem. If Irwin has only technique to offer students, Hector has only crap—snippets, touchstones, quotations.

The History Boys ends with Hector telling his students to “pass the parcel . . . That’s the game I wanted you to learn. Pass it on” (109). But it’s a particular sort of parcel that Hector seems to have in mind, less something his students might make or write than something they’ve learned, memorized, had handed to them by someone else. It is revealing that his fiercest criticism of Irwin is to call him a writer, a journalist. Indeed, like John in Oleanna, Hector seems adverse to having students write. Instead, he has them memorize and recite poems, songs, and movie scenes. When one complains that he doesn’t understand poetry, Hector replies, “Learn it now, know it now, and you’ll understand it whenever” (30). But when Irwin suggests that the boys actually put such “gobbetts” of literature to use in their exams, Hector takes violent exception:

Oh it would be useful . . . every answer a Christmas tree hung with the appropriate gobbetts. Except that they’re learned by heart. And that is where they belong and like the other components of the heart not to be defiled by being trotted out to order. (48, original emphasis)

What Hector has to teach is meant to be valued for its own sake. As one of the boys patiently explains to Irwin:

Mr. Hector’s stuff’s not meant for the exam, sir. It’s to make us more rounded human beings. (38)

But however rounding or improving it may be, the sort of learning Hector has to offer is also inert—since to use it would be to betray it, turn it into gobbetts.

And so, if Irwin’s pedagogy may lead to cynicism, Hector’s risks ending in silence. We see this dilemma unfold in a brilliant scene in the second act of the play, when the two teachers try to lead a class discussion together. The students are at first uncertain how to behave:

Hector: Come along, boys. Don’t sulk.

Dakin: We don’t know who we are, sir. Your class or Mr. Irwin’s.

Irwin: Does it matter?

Timms: Oh yes, sir. It depends if you want us thoughtful. Or smart. (70)

The rest of the scene shows that they need to be both. At Irwin’s suggestion, they begin to talk about how to formulate a response to an exam question about the Holocaust. Hector objects:

Hector: How can the boys scribble down an answer however well put that doesn’t demean the suffering involved? And putting it well demeans it as much as putting it badly.

Irwin: It’s a question of tone, surely. Tact.

Hector: Not tact. Decorum.

Lockwood: What if you were to write that this was so far beyond one’s experience silence is the only proper response.

Dakin: That would be your answer to lots of questions, though, wouldn’t it, sir?

Hector: Yes. Yes, Dakin, it would. (71)

If Irwin’s attitude is glib, Hector’s is defeated. While Irwin pushes the students to find a “perspective” on the Holocaust that moves them past the “stock answer” condemning it (73—74), the only possible response Hector can imagine is outrage. Each of them, of course, is right, in his own way. Irwin is right to tell the boys that doing history depends on gaining a critical distance from your subject; Hector is right to see the violence involved in turning the Holocaust into just another subject to write on. The question is how to join Irwin’s detachment with Hector’s passion. A good writer must somehow find a critical perspective on a subject without losing his investment in it.

The History Boys leaves this as a problem in writing that the students must solve for themselves. Neither Irwin nor Hector has the capacity to solve it for them. The play hints that Irwin possesses real talent as a writer, as he goes on to be a successful journalist. But he is nervous and brittle, over-aggressive, as a teacher—reducing intellectual work to a simple “habit of contradiction” (44). Hector is warmer and wiser as a person, despite his pawing of the boys, but Bennett goes out of his way to spell out his limitations as a teacher in a scene in which his colleague and friend, Lintott, correctly accuses him of substituting the “consoling myth” of art for the hard work of education. “Or what’s all this learning by heart for,” she says, “except as some sort of insurance against the boys’ ultimate failure” (69).

Lintott is the only woman with speaking lines in the play, and she does not directly compete with Irwin and Hector for the allegiance of the history boys. She is the teacher who has gotten them this far, who has trained them to pass their A-level exams, but who has, in her own words, little else to offer them but “more of the same” (8)—the same being a continued drill in the facts of history. She represents what the boys are trying to move beyond. In a nice irony, though, she is also the person who hints most clearly at how they might fuse Irwin’s technique with Hector’s sensibility. In a scene near the end of the play in which the three teachers are conducting mock interviews with the students, Lintott is provoked to complain how “dispiriting” it has been for her, as a woman, “to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude” (83—85). What Lintott reveals in her brief and unexpected polemic is a passionate investment not in getting ahead on exams or in quoting poetry or films but in her actual work, her subject: history. Her outburst is met with an embarrassed silence, which is quickly covered over with the sort of schoolboy banter that makes up most of the play. No one in the room, including Hector and Irwin, is ready to hear what she has to say.

As Steve Benton notes in his fine 2008 dissertation “Ichabod’s Children,” what makes The History Boys stand out as a drama about teaching is that it lacks an idealized teacher as its protagonist. Irwin, Hector, and Lintott are all good teachers who are serious about their work—but Bennett makes their limitations very clear: Irwin is too clever by half; Hector, poorly disciplined; Linttot, dull. But taken together, they offer the history boys—and the audience of the play—a glimpse of what a compelling education might be: provocative, invested, and well-grounded.

By inference, that is also the play’s view of good academic writing. But inference is all we have. For as much as The History Boys talks about writing, it shows us none. We know that the students pass their exams, but Bennett is more interested in what their teachers have to tell them about writing than in what they might actually write. That is a familiar and unfortunate flaw in books and plays about teaching. By way of contrast, let’s look at a text that shows a remarkable interest in the writing both students and teachers do: Bel Kaufman’s 1964 novel, Up the Down Staircase.