Unless It Moves the Human Heart Read online

  Know thyself. The Greeks didn’t restrict that piece of advice to writers, but writers cannot do without it. In embracing what she had most strongly resisted, Anurada did not merely find her subject in her life in the Marines, she found who she was. That is what I want for all my students. Eventually, they will discover that their writing validates their lives. Somewhere in Inur’s exotic family history is an authentic self with an authentic story and an authentic way of telling it. The same is true for Ana’s rarefied upbringing, and for Veronique’s work photographing street crimes, and for Jasmine, who “has never experienced anything,” and for Donna, Kristie, and Robert, who have spent most of their lives on Long Island, and for Diana on her parallel bars, Nina in her library, Suzanne and her Quonset huts, George in his limousine, and Sven in his warplanes. The stories they discover in themselves will not depend on their adventures or the lack of them, but on more hidden things, like the fear of loud noises and their capacities for viciousness and betrayal and yearnings for nobility and feelings about justice—all the generally human things that define us. They may not make their self-discoveries during the time they work with me, but it is my business to spot the revelatory moments in their writing, and to pause and say “Here you are.” When I find something essential in their work, I am helping them get a glimpse of themselves. And when they learn to spot these things on their own, they will string the moments together sentence after sentence, and will begin to feel the shaky exhilaration of being a writer.

  In the fourth week of classes we turn to their stories with such questions as the nature of beginnings hanging in the air. I tend to conduct my courses like a juggler with a dozen dinner plates spinning on sticks at once. When one plate wobbles and threatens to fall, spin it some more. Keep them all going. No topic in writing is independent of any other, and nothing is ever done with.

  “Let’s look at Diana’s ‘A Candle in the Forest.’ ” Diana used “Happy Birthday” to make a story about an ill-matched couple. It begins with the narrator overhearing his girlfriend Elizabeth being serenaded on her birthday by friends. The narrator is imprisoned upstairs with a broken foot. He’d broken it running downstairs, in an effort to escape the house and his girlfriend, Elizabeth:

  Maybe I had no reason to leave, though I told her I was running down the stairs because I’d left my headlights on. Lizzy has expectations for me and I shouldn’t feel overwhelmed. She thinks I should get my master’s and teach college, says my talents exceed typing up the Sunday real estate section of the North Country Post-Standard. She thinks I should learn to cook more than spaghetti noodles and frozen vegetables. She says that my scruff makes me look homeless and hates that my hair is longer than hers. “What are you, a rock star?” she scoffs. I like my hair. But maybe she’s onto something. Maybe I should be teaching myself French and reading Proust like she does every night after dinner.

  “Do you like that paragraph?” They nod and smile. I ask them why.

  “Diana gets so much into it,” says Veronique. “The status of the narrator. His boring job. How he thinks about Elizabeth. How she thinks about him. Her highfalutin’ education. His humor. Even his appearance. It’s all in one paragraph.”

  “What is a paragraph, anyway?” asks Suzanne.

  “Damned if I know. I used to think I knew what a paragraph was until a few months ago, when I did a piece for the New Yorker. My editor, Dorothy Wickenden, changed my entire view of a paragraph simply by editing the piece a certain way. I wrote three paragraphs, and Dorothy would yoke them into one. And it read much better.”

  “But a paragraph is just one idea, one complete movement,” Ana says. “You write one movement. Then you go on to the next.”

  “So I thought. But Dorothy showed me a wholly new way to look at a paragraph, which also turns out to be a more modest way to write. When you write a paragraph as a complete idea, as Ana suggests, or as a complete feeling, and then you stop, it’s as if you are saying to the reader, ‘See? Aren’t I smart? Don’t I look pretty?’ But if you compile a bunch of thoughts, as Diana did here, you draw less attention to the writing. You pile on the information, half burying the gems you’ve come up with. At my decrepit age, I finally may be learning how to write a paragraph.”

  Ordinarily I do not refer to something I’ve written, as I did with the New Yorker piece, unless it fits the discussion and is of immediate use to the students. The effect is to call attention to the fact that they are being taught by a professional. But that is not entirely bad. They like it, and I make use of it, though I try not to abuse the privilege. Writers who teach get away with things other teachers do not. We are placed on pedestals that we often erect ourselves. Professors of subjects with longer histories and thick syllabi do much more work. They drill the pilings. We paint the frescoes. Yet it is us the students adore. When they read about writers in books, we look heroic—disheveled, glamorous leaders of corrupt-yet-desirable lives. Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys presents a perfect picture of the writing teacher in Professor Tripp, whose very name bespeaks the drugged-out, irresponsible, adventurous existence. His wife leaves him, he knocks up the provost, and he is finally fired by the department chair, who happens to be the provost’s husband. But there is not a student at his university, or anyone who reads about him, who would not trade places in a trice.

  Still, you have to be careful playing the dual roles of teacher and writer. As a teacher, you may not bear the features of the bloodless Ichabod Crane or the buffoonish professor of The Blue Angel, but you’re sort of a fictional character yourself. Writing teachers who think of themselves as writers who dabble in teaching implicitly condemn the work they’re engaged in. The old saw that writing cannot be taught is a back-door put-down of the teacher. And the idea cheats the students.

  Every teacher eventually finds the most comfortable method or manner of teaching, which is inevitably an extension of personality. At Harvard I took a poetry-writing seminar with Robert Lowell. Lowell’s teaching method was a dry and distant severity. “This is not very good at all,” he would say with that high-pitched, complaining, nearly whining southern patrician voice of his. “This is very weak”—of nearly all the students’ poems we brought before him, like tithes. Yet Lowell’s method succeeded because it was consistent with who he was, coolly distraught and more than a little scary. He was also the greatest poet in America at the time, and when he liked a line or even a word in your poem, you knew you were getting the goods. Late in the term, when his bipolar condition was starting to veer toward its depressive state, he would become uncritical, and would say nice things about everything we wrote. That depressed us.

  Not being of Lowell’s temperament, and not being the greatest anything in America, I could not get away with teaching as Lowell taught even if I wanted to. I actually tried it one year, doing my level best to sound like John Houseman in The Paper Chase, without the English accent. I was absurd. The students learned nothing, except, perhaps, the art of ridicule. The method that suits me is praise laced with broad, and transparently good-natured, insults. The insults merely goad, but the praise is sincere and frequent, and it is more practically useful than it sounds. If you find things you like in a student’s work, and you celebrate them, then the things you don’t like—the really awful parts—will seem anomalous mistakes uncharacteristic of the writer, ones they can correct. The students will side with you against their own weaknesses. If, on the other hand, they begin to think they can’t do anything right, they will get worse and worse. No matter how cheerfully they appear to take your criticism, or how mature their attitude, they will think to themselves, “I can’t do this.” Or they’ll write defensively, anticipating your familiar objections, and be dull within safety.

  “George, will you look at this sentence of yours?” I read aloud from his short story called “They say it’s your birthday”—“ ‘He was home, where all his roads ended and began.’ ”

  “What’s wrong with your sentence, George?” And before he comes up with somet
hing for the hell of it, I shout, “Nothing! This is a perfect sentence. Clear, undecorated, revealing, powerful. You are capable of perfection! Congratulations!

  “Now compare it to your second paragraph:

  No party favor or decoration brightened the Spartan rooms. Every window had closed blinds, atop drawn shades. Wherever a blue slit of melting gelatin sky might slip through, antique newsprint was carefully taped across it to block the gaps of burning sunshine. Sheets were draped over every wall monitor, every house appliance eye was cloaked with a concealing cowl or cozy. Two oil lamps with smudged glass flues glimmered on the table. In each room, rafts of tall, thick candles glowed dimly.

  “Okay, George. You tell me what’s wrong with this. We only have a week.” We cover all the examples of overwriting, which constitute most of the paragraph. “Here’s why I’m pissed off at you, George. The substance of this passage is riveting. The windows, the blinds, the newsprint, the cozies on the appliances. Nouns, nouns, nouns. You’ve got all your nouns ready to do the work. Why am I pissed off, George?”

  “Because I just should have simply said what’s in the room,” he says. “I do get it, you know. Sometimes I can’t help myself.” Suzanne pats his arm.

  Some students’ stories have used the happy birthday idea, some have not. Ana has written about a woman, recently divorced, who dreads a visit from her father, a gallant roué. He arrives with “his Latin dash intact.” Inur’s story tells of a woman, lonely in her marriage, who depends on store catalogs for her social life. Jasmine has written a strange, Edgar Allan Poe–like story of one man so obsessed with another, he takes over his life. Suzanne’s story is about a strong Irish woman whose husband dies when she’s pregnant with their son; Kristie’s, about a woman ditched by her boyfriend and snowbound in Vermont. Veronique has written a tender story about a boy named Arthur whose father remarries after the death of his mother—Arthur’s helpless loneliness. Sven has written a long, ambitious story about a couple of guys who wind up in a bar in Aberdeen and get told a story—a story within a story. It doesn’t quite work because the outer story is more effective than the inner one. But Sven is a clean writer. I tell him to give more thought to his subject, and then to start with what surprises him.

  “Robert, would you give us your first paragraph?” He reads:

  I peer out my window as my mother pilots our station wagon effortlessly away from the monotony of expressway traffic through the graceful curves of the beautifully named Meadowbrook and onto the freedom, mobility and relative exclusivity of the Northern State. It is summer, 1959, and we are mobile, and living Robert Moses’ dream. The Chevrolet is huge and blue and packed with promise. My mother is at home, here on the parkway, filled with the confidence of her ability to drive, to navigate away from where she came. Poppy, who taught her this and so much more, says she drives like a cowboy, and she delights in confiding this to me, her tow-headed son.

  “What do you think of this?” The class goes over some of the successful particulars in the passage—the mother “piloting” the station wagon, her “confidence,” her ability to “navigate,” her driving “like a cowboy.” We note how much Robert gets into this first paragraph. The place. The time. The character of the mother and her relationship to her watchful, innocent son. Most of all, the “promise” of the situation, and Robert Moses’s dream, which was the dream of Middle American happiness won at the expense of minorities and the poor. All this Robert packs into a car ride, in a Chevrolet, on the Meadowbrook. We speak of how the feel of the entire story is encapsulated in its beginning, so when the piece eventually widens to include the whole family, it is as if we are being told of an entire world. We appreciate Robert’s ability to draw character with a picture—“My father’s pipe was a disgusting thing: a cracked, charred wooden bowl at the end of a smelly, denture-worn plastic stem.” We feel the freedom Robert felt on Jones Beach as a boy. America, the whole of it, good and bad and self-deluding, breathes in his story.

  Donna’s story, a fable for adults, begins with “Happy Birthday to You” sung to Mr. Elephant by the mice in his employ. The mice work in a mousetrap factory. “They punched in Monday through Friday at 8:00 a.m., and were home by 4:00 in the afternoon.” The class talks about how “punched in” signals that this is a fable for grown-ups. The piece involves mouse complaints about working conditions, a petition demanding more food for the workers, mouse rights as opposed to elephant power, and eventually the moral: Mice need to learn how to get their own food, and to think for themselves.

  “What’s the function of the Happy Birthday song at the outset?” I ask. “Do the mice really wish Mr. Elephant a Happy Birthday?”

  “They want more food,” says Ana. “They’re sucking up.”

  “So the song of celebration is insincere,” says Jasmine.

  “That’s what the story is about,” says Robert. “The mice are trapped by their own subservience.”

  “Which means that working for the elephants has forced them to lose track of who they are,” says Inur.

  “Or to remember who they are at the core,” says Nina. “Mice.”

  We talk about this being an interesting and complicated idea. “But is it the idea that Donna promotes?” I ask. “The moral of her fable pales in comparison to this question of the self-manufactured traps of the servile mind, does it not?” I check Donna’s reaction to ascertain that she is attentive, not hurt. “Children’s fables are not complicated because they’re for children. Aesop’s fable of the lion, the fox, the jackal, and the wolf is simply about hogging, to mix animal metaphors. By the way, people say ‘the lion’s share’ to signify the larger portion, but in the fable the lion eats it all, everything. So the lion’s share, used properly, means everything. Don’t say you didn’t learn anything in this course.”

  “Are you saying that a children’s fable aimed at adults has to be more complicated?” asks Veronique.

  “More complicated, more interesting, more important. Do you know James Thurber’s animal fables?” They shake their heads. “Do you know James Thurber?” A couple of students say they’ve heard the name, but that’s about it.

  “That’s the trouble with humor writing. It rarely holds over from one generation to the next. A hundred years ago, people found Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley hilarious and sharp. The same was true of Langston Hughes’s newspaper columns about Jesse B. Semple, the ‘Simple’ stories. Today, both characters are a yawn. Thurber was a wonderful writer, a major writer, but he’s practically disappeared.” I tell them about “The Owl Who Was God” and “The Wolves Who Ate All the Rabbits.” “Thurber’s fables were written about grown-up issues, and were put in children’s language to emphasize the importance of the ideas. It’s as if he was saying, Even a child can understand this. The owl fable is about the ease with which people are led by false prophets, and the wolves fable is about the Nazis. The wolves eat the rabbits, and then tell the world it’s none of its business, because the rabbits had become ‘an internal matter.’ ” I ask our author, “Donna, is your message of fending for oneself important enough to merit the use of the fable form?”

  “It’s important,” she says. “But maybe you’re right. It’s a little easy.” I love it when students open up to criticism, and this particular criticism of mine is the hardest to take, because it applies to the intelligence of the work. Only someone who really wants to write better will respond as Donna does, and I think that her background in business—dealing with problems that have to be solved—helps.

  “A fable for grown-ups must be about something they did not realize and could not learn in any better way.”

  “But I like Donna’s story,” says Kristie. Many others nod in agreement.

  “So do I. It’s just not as smart as it could be. In a form like this, you need to be as smart as you can be. Your mice might surprise you by how smart they can become, Donna. Characters do surprise you. Eudora Welty said that in One Writer’s Beginnings.”

  “Yes,” says In
ur. “But are those real surprises? Don’t they have to be in you before you let them out?”

  “The surprise is that they’re in you. Amazing, preposterous things. Hemingway led a life of fights and blood sports. Welty led a sheltered life. Yet when it came to putting words on paper, Ernest was no wilder than Eudora.”

  We come to Nina’s story, “A Taste of Plums,” which uses “Happy Birthday” as a dirge. “They’d never found her out,” it begins. “Not one of them had ever suspected what really happened, not even her father. She’d known they would not, for the simple reason that they’d all underestimated her; they’d failed to recognize the mind behind the protective disguise. And yet what had it been, that wonderful disguise of hers? It had been nothing more than a bodice and petticoat. Nothing more than that she was a girl.”

  Her story is about Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith, whose twin brother Hamnet is favored by the family, especially by the father, solely because Hamnet is male. At the twins’ birthday, it is Hamnet who is honored. Shakespeare ignores his daughter. So, carefully and deliberately, Judith plots to poison her brother using the very poison that her father was testing when he was writing Romeo and Juliet. Nina tells her story in a way that both pleases the class and raises a question. She gives it a surprise ending, concealing Shakespeare’s identity till the last line and making it seem a tale of more ordinary people living in a time when women were ignored.