Angels and Demons

It's probably not good form to list people you liked and didn't like along the way, but that's no doubt what this will wind up being. I'll try to leaven the acerbity of some of my darts and jabs with

Let me preface my prejudices and quirks by admitting up front that when I started my first job, I was fired up to be a literary critic specializing in stylistic analysis. When I began to realize (rather quickly) how old that would get and how soon it would get old, I cast about for some more expanded context for my activities. A colleague suggested that, to assure myself of tenure, it would be a good idea to make myself indispensible to the department: I should become the resident specialist not just in stylistic analysis, but in the general theory and practice of stylistics. This was good advice. However, I read several essays in the field and knew immediately in my heart that I could not stomach a career reading and thinking about such things. This was unfortunate because literary theory was at or near the ground floor and would probably have paved my way toward a lasting university career. But for me, stylistics was too boring.

I had a second revelatory experience: I had submitted my doctoral dissertation for publication at the invitation of a publisher I can't remember; but the reader who evaluated it did not find it adequate for publication and it was returned to me with an embarassed letter of rejection. I did not have the intellectual savvy at the time to continue working and repair its deficiencies. I thought the rejection was final and the reader had spoken for all readers at every press and declared my work hopeless. My doom was spelled. I am older and wiser now, but I would not go back to do scholarly work for other reasons.

So, two avenues seemed closed: publishing my dissertation as a book, and becoming an expert in stylistics; the first was beyond control (or so I thought); the second was too--well, I might have enjoyed more sitting in a closed garage with the exhaust running.

Another avenue, if not actually closing, was darkening in its future: scholarship generally. I seemed to find more joy and exhilaration in photography and music; writing scholarly material at all was do-able, but I didn't enjoy it. It would have been the same as punching in and punching out at Penny's, where I had worked one tedious summer selling work clothes.

So, I may have had promise as a scholar, but I was not thrilled about the prospect of doing scholarship for the rest of my life. Whenever since then I have had ideas that might conceivably have been turned into scholarly books, I remind myself that to do so would require four or five years of concentrated effort and subordinating activities I really enjoy. I reconciled myself rather easily to the idea that the world would never see a book on any of the four or five topics I might have written on. And who would know? Who would care? There are plenty of ideas out there, and many of them already fall by the wayside. A friend at my current institution, Pasadena City College, once quite adamantly urged me to get back to work on the scholarship--he had the generosity to describe my essays on Milton's prose as "cutting-edge stuff." But I had to tell him "no" several times: I was too far away from any interest either in the specific topic or in the activity. He had helped me get access to the Huntington Library, but I never went back after the first visit, at least not to the scholarly collection.

An interesting fact that some colleague in a how-to-get-tenure meeting at this university raised: something like 90% of the valuable scholarship is done by some 15% of working scholars. The percentages may have changed, but the ratios are probably still valid. For an almost innumerable variety of reasons, it is hard to get published, it is hard to write important scholarship, etc etc. But this is not an apologia--I just lost interest and defaulted back to creative interests I had always had: performing and writing music, and doing photography.

My shortcomings admitted from the outside, I can go ahead to pinpoint some of the high and low points along the way related to teachers.

First, a couple of high points: I took multiple classes at UCSB from Alan Stephens, a poet primarily, but he had also written some critical essays. Another professor (Benjamin Sankey, who wrote on Thomas Hardy and William Carlos Williams) described Stephens as a very "shrewd" reader of poems and a very careful writing. With Stephans, I had to become the most rigorous critic of my own writing that I call on my own students to be. He set high standards.

Ben Sankey was very friendly and very helpful--above and beyond any call of duty, he offered to tutor me informally, gave me a reading list for the summer and read a paper I produced, all entirely outside of class. I don't believe I took the paper seriously enough, but he was still helpful and patient. I was a young and curious undergrad, innocent about style, but hankering: I once asked if we should regard Faulkner as a model for writing our papers. Sankey didn't say yes or no, but he turned to a nearby grad student, jerked his thumb at me and said, "He wants to know if Faulkner is a good prose model." I guess for papers in class--not. Ben Sankey died early of cancer. He believed in me enough to suggest that I try for Woodrow Wilson fellowship. I didn't get it, but I went through the interviews.

Philip Damon: a very friendly, engaging professor, who later transferred from UCSB to Berkeley, so I had the pleasure of being in his classes there as well. I had a Chaucer class from him, in which he made us recite from the Canterbury Tales. He announced in class one day that we were to do fifty lines or so. The next class meeting, he announced that he had realized how much time it would cost him for thirty or forty students to recite that many lines individually in his office. So he reduced it to fifteen or twenty. I listened to the recordings, put on my best Middle English accent, and went in to recite from the Wife of Bath's Prologue, where she argues that Jesus didn't mean everyone to live without sex, only those who wanted to live "parfitly." I twanged out "parfitly" as parfitly as I could, and Damon chuckled and complimented me on my choice of a typical Chaucerian passage.

At Berkeley, I had Damon for an intro to medieval lit course, in which we read the contemporaries of Chaucer. He said something that has always stuck with me: he was, himself, conducting his own education publicly. Meaning, I think, that he didn't come into the class with all the ideas worked out and all the information prepared ahead of time, but he was flying by the seat of his pants, trying ideas out in class discussion, coming up with them on the spot: the class was a form of brainstorming session for him. I noticed that about several professors at Berkeley: classes were a way to develop ideas, not places where you taught ideas that were already worked out. This may sound like lack of preparation, or inadequate preparation, but I think it's a different kind of preparation: where the professor fills himself with the primary material and then goes into class ready to ask questions and develop ideas. Too much preparation ahead of time (I mean, you have to have some ideas worked out in order to have a framework for discussion) can be detrimental. On the other hand, my office mate in Detroit, began his first classes (which was also when I began mine) by writing out his lectures in full. He didn't read them in class, but writing them out enabled him to think through issues in ways that the seat-of-the-pants method does not.

I must contrast this with a colleague at my first job in Detroit. Since I heard this second hand, I cannot absolutely attribute it to him, but he was reported to have cautioned that one should never present in class an idea that had not already undergone the trial by fire of the referee experts who approved an article for print: that is, never present an idea in class that hasn't already appeared in a book or journal.

Can anything stifle creativity and spontaneity more? If this was indeed his philosophy, it seems to me based on the false assumption that appearing in print makes an idea somehow more definitive, not as subject to wayward and unpredictable change. But, what else is class for? This professor published quite regularly: he was something of a scholarship mill. Certainly, though, ten years after one of his own books was published, his ideas must have continued to evolve. A classroom is an intellectual snapshot, as is a book. They are not portraits for the ages. Even portraits for the ages are not that: painters go on to do other things in other styles.