A Way of Happening

First Night Come Round Again

End as they may, classes in Creative Writing: Poetry, which is numbered in the university catalogue as English 527, begin in desperate fear. It is hard to say who is the more terror-stricken, the students or the instructor. An unengaged observer might guess that the instructor is afflicted with the feebler nerves. He has arrived twenty minutes before the start of this first class of the semester and has already made three visits to the water fountain down the hall. Each time he has returned to his customary seat he has seemed gloomier, more uncertain that human existence bears comprehensible purpose.

He had to come early to Barton Lounge—a seedy faculty meeting hall that serves as the writing classroom—in order to establish that the couch seat under the hanging lamp, the only area here with good light, is indeed his customary seat. If a student occupied it by mistake, there would be no diplomatic way to claim it and the instructor would be reading manuscripts in eyestraining half-dark for four months.

The disadvantages of early arrival make themselves apparent. The students come in one by one; they spot him in his well-lit seat and disconsolate mood; they identify him as their instructor—but now what? He doesn’t yet know their names or anything else about them. There is no opportunity for conversation, neither chitchat nor earnest discussion of the philosophy of literary composition. Those students who are already acquainted with one another may murmur banalities, but there is no ease. All the students must try simultaneously to acknowledge the fact of the instructor’s presence and to pretend that it is of no consequence. But they are taking minute stock; he feels their secret glances on him like the crawling of invisible centipedes.

And he hears their questions, the ones they will never ask him, the ones they are scared to put to themselves. The atmosphere of doubt in the room is as thick and suffocating as smoke from a tar-pit fire. What am I doing here? the students wonder. How did I ever undertake such a fool venture? If I really want to write, why am I not on a tramp steamer, plowing the wild South Seas, squinting at the seabirds mewing as they wheel? Isn’t it perfectly true that—as my parents, teachers, friends, acquaintances, and passing strangers have informed me—creative writing cannot be taught?

Perhaps they would like to be reassured. Perhaps they would like for the instructor to snap out of his dour trance at this instant and exclaim: “Don’t worry. Be happy. There are only a very few tricks involved in the writing of poetry and after I show you those, the path is open before you. Nothing can stand in your way.”

He is not able to say these sentences because he is assailed by the same doubts as the students: What am I doing here? Where are my lemon-scented South Seas with palms and sarongs? How much time for my own writing will I be able to shoehorn into this semester? But he does not ask the question about whether creative writing can be taught or not. He does not have to; everyone he has ever met since he began teaching this class twenty-five years ago has asked it of him.

It is impossible to express the virulence of his hatred for this question. Those who ask it either understand its implications or they don’t. If they don’t, then they are so obtuse they must fall below any limit of social comprehension that qualifies them as human. If they do, then they are casually malicious.

But can anyone really teach creative writing?

Meaning: You, sir, are a fraud and a parasite; you set yourself up to teach the unteachable, to say the unsayable; you lure gullible young fools into your clutches, fill their heads with nonsense, delude them with lurid fancies and vain dreams, waste the most precious hours of their young lives, win their confidence and even their affection with false promises, receive a living wage for your perniciousness, avoid like the coward you are the responsibility of taking a respectable Ph.D. degree, fleer at the Department’s dress code, behave outrageously at parties, become much too familiar with your students, absent yourself from campus in order to score literary junkets, and affront your colleagues with local public readings of your own obscure scribblings.

Tell us this, Mr. Creative Writing Teacher, how do you go about instructing someone to be a genius? Do you discuss the Secrets of the Human Soul at greater or shorter length than the Care and Feeding of Revelation? If I come into your class and take observant notes and turn in my stories on schedule, will I land a title on the best-seller list and win the Nobel Prize? If not, then where the hell do you get off?

The instructor has long ago formulated short answers to these queries that are really accusations in barely polite clothing. “I don’t teach creative writing so much as creative reading,” he says. “We spend our time on structural and stylistic analysis.” When he tires of the long reply he may aver, “You cannot teach students how to write, but you can teach them how not to write.” Or when he trusts that there is a modicum of good will on the part of the questioner, he may essay an epigram: “Creative writing cannot be taught. But it can be learned.”

Sometimes, though, his patience has been so thoroughly mauled that he must bite his tongue. He too could ask leading questions. He might ask the physician if all his patients enjoy long and healthy lives because of his care and escape death at the last. He might inquire of the minister if every member of his congregation is guaranteed a refulgent throne in heaven. He might request that the farmer disclose how he manages to get the right mixture of rain and shine for his crops and germinates every seed.

To the graduate professor of literary studies he might say, “Is it really possible to teach scholarship? How do you ensure that your students will never make errant literary judgments or ascribe anonymous manuscripts to the wrong authors or fall for ridiculous Shakespearean hoaxes? Which of them have you cultivated so carefully that he or she must become an Edward Gibbon, a Barbara McClintock, a Michael Ventris, a Helen Gardner? Are you not, sir or madam, an arrant fraud, misleading the impressionable younger or almost desperate older students into believing that by memorizing current reference procedures, gaining some acquaintance with computer networks, and acquiring a few broken phrases of German they are in some fashion contributing to the sum of human knowledge? What have you vouchsafed your prize candidate by granting him a Doctorate in Philosophy for his dissertation on Gender Confusion and Displacement in the Minor Dramatic Works of Neil Simon?”

It may be true that creative writing cannot be taught and that the whole notion of the enterprise is phony, but it is demonstrably less fraudulent in intention and in result than the other fantasies our universities promulgate. Because to begin with, I, as a teacher of writing, promise only failure. That is my one guaranteed product. I deny the concept of literary success; I maintain that if someone’s happiness is dependent upon literary good fortune then that person’s life is diseased.

As for a teaching job, I can promise only that in the unlikely event a writing student is able to land one, he will receive a lower salary than his colleagues with traditional degrees and his prospects for advancement will be dimmer and that once a week without fail—rain or shine, hurricane or halcyon, fire or flood—one or another of his colleagues will accost him in the hall to inform him that creative writing cannot be taught. They will wink and smirk; they will let him know they see through his little game.

Hard thoughts these—and yet they are not the considerations that have made our instructor sit here now so glum and apprehensive. He knows that this question about the feasibility of teaching the subject is not the one that most deeply troubles the students. Nor are the most obvious ones the most distressing: “What are you going to do for me? When will I be rich and famous?” The questions at the bottom of the cold gray dread that possesses everyone present are these: “Are there matters at stake, hazards and pitfalls, I don’t know about? If I choose writing as a way of life, can I ever be happy? Will I be transformed, changed utterly from what I am now into a creature I cannot recognize? What is the worst, the absolute worst, that can happen as a result of my choice?”

The worst thing that can happen is that the student will give up writing and become one of those who wander the halls of English departments, muttering in a trance-state the sacred formula: Creative-writing-cannot-be-taught, creative-writing-cannot-be-taught, creative-writing-cannot … But this catastrophe shall not take place because the persons who seriously put themselves, for even a short period of time, through the disciplines of trying to compose worthwhile fiction, drama, or poetry understand that the question has no practical meaning.

It doesn’t matter in the least whether the craft can be taught or not; as long as it can be learned, as long as its essentials can be acquired by close and sympathetic reading or by imitation of established authors or by dogged observation and unremitting application or by any means whatsoever, it makes no difference whether writing can be taught by wise sages to eager students or picked up like a social disease on a congressman’s fact-finding mission. The only important thing is the page that is produced; if it is true and beautiful the means of its production are almost entirely irrelevant. That fact is the first and last thing to keep in mind—and it is the one rarely understood by those who do not write.

* * *

Most academic students do not go on to become purely professional scholars. They become teachers and they then discover that this profession offers so much challenge and so little reward that to double hardship by adding on the second profession of scholarship proves very difficult indeed. In order to garner salary raises and achieve promotion, they find it necessary to undertake a modicum of research, but this research does not present itself as their first responsibility, nor does it take first place in their affections.

The case is much the same with those who have taken degrees in creative writing; the trials of composition and the relentless assault of rejection stop off their literary careers before they begin. If they teach in colleges, this is the point where they usually start to take up regular academic careers, going through the Ph.D. ordeal, publishing a few papers, struggling up the shaky ladder that someone is always trying to pull out from under them. A degree in creative writing is no hindrance to teaching or scholarship. In fact, since the kind of close analysis that workshops emphasize is what undergraduates are expected to learn, many discover it to be a durable asset.

Some few creative writing graduates are able to fulfill their double dream; they find a job teaching and have some little success in writing. The Gruesome Horsecollar Review accepts a couple of sonnets; then The Agni Review publishes the lengthy sequence “A Night of Pure Sauerkraut,” and finally The Sewanee Review or Poetry or The Kenyon Review accepts three brief lyrics on the birth of the poet’s second daughter. He makes certain that the chairman of his department is aware of these glad tidings and he keeps plugging away, pinching pennies but not coeds, keeping a dutiful straight face during committee meetings, and turning in student evaluation reports that give him praise so unqualified it amounts almost to adulation—just the same kind of evaluation reports all his colleagues turn in. At last the great day arrives. He receives notice from the University of Southeastern New Mexico Press that his manuscript has been accepted for publication; The Thousand Sheep of Hector Berlioz will be listed in the forthcoming autumn catalogue.

Now, he thinks, I have played the game by the rules and won. This book will open up the track; some sweet day I may be a full professor. But when he apprises his department head of this delightful intelligence he learns that he has not played the game by the rules—because they have changed the rules. The Faculty Credentials Committee has met and decided that more will be required of the creative writing staff; the equation now in place is that two published novels or three published volumes of poetry equal one Ph.D. dissertation. (The dissertation does not have to be published. Or publishable.)

Still, he has his book. He feels it is a solid achievement. If hard work makes poetry live, this volume must be splendid, for he has sweated out every iota, giblet, and semicolon. So has his wife. So has his one friend in the English department, the only other teacher here who reads modern poetry. The book appears and he and his wife go out for a dinner they cannot afford. Next day his friend comes over and they drink more beer than they can afford. He gives copies of The Thousand Sheep to six others in the department. Why not? They have traded greetings in the hallway; their smiles have seemed genuinely polite. He receives in reply two cards that promise the senders will read his book soon, really quite soon, just as soon as they can get some paperwork out of the way. The other card is a formal one that says in embossed gold lettering on the outside, “In Deepest Sympathy”; inside there is no message, not even a signature.

These developments do not much dampen the spirits of our struggling bard. He is no naïf, and everything has turned out pretty much as he expected. Poets are not supposed to have bright professional careers. One of his old friends, a poet he respects, once remarked that the poet occupies in the university the same niche that a jester filled in a medieval court. His tasks are to fleer and flyte and frolic, to dodge hurled hambones and empty wine jugs. The modern poet in academia is advised to defend his office the way rock bands defend their platforms in raunchy bars: tootling their music inside chickenwire barricades.

* * *

Most of the class has assembled now, sitting in chairs ranged along the walls of the room, leaving in the center the open space the instructor knows will often, in the weeks to come, fill up with uneasy silence as with a wind-whipped snowdrift. He begins to size up his students furtively, trying to look as if he is not looking at them.

On his far left, by the closed door, sits a pale, slight girl with mouse-blond hair and delicate features. Her eyes are closed, her hands clasped in her lap; she presents an appearance highly spiritual, almost pre-Raphaelite. He pegs her as a devotee of Sylvia Plath and hopes she will not identify herself with that figure too closely. The results of such an experiment can be tragic.

On her left sits a slight, bearded young man with an orange canvas book-bag at his feet. He wears steel-rimmed glasses and his black hair is a mass of tight curls. He glances jerkily from one to another of his classmates, careful to avoid seeing the instructor. It is as if he does not want his worst suspicions to be confirmed. He is the earnest northern student, the star of his undergraduate writing classes at Brown or Brandeis. He just missed getting fellowships to Stanford and Iowa and is wondering if he hasn’t made an irreparable mistake in coming to this obscure, sleepy Southern university.

Next to him is a striking African American girl with a patient demeanor and calm hands, neatly and tastefully dressed. But “tastefully” in this context means unfashionably, and in truth she is the only person in the room, including the instructor, who doesn’t share in some degree the routine grubbiness of students. She is confident, she knows what she wants and believes she knows how to go about getting it. But the instructor can foresee one of the first lessons she must learn: that writing is not a ticket into the Establishment. Poetry is, beginning to end, a supremely unrespectable vocation.

And the young man in the cowboy hat, the Adidas, dungarees, and Beavis and Butt-head T-shirt. He slouches in the chair, his legs stretched out so that latecomers have to step over. His air is a studied casual superciliousness, easy to read. He will be comparing the work of his classmates to that of such titans (his actual word) as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He will become impatient with such terms as cadence, closure, and transition and insist that the most important element in writing is something he calls it, or the thing. “You have to hit the thing and move on,” he will say, “nail it and move on.” He will write explicit sex lyrics that the women here will object to on grounds of technical impossibility. Near the end of the first semester he will leave town and head vaguely west.

In the righthand corner perches a woman who looks to be in her early fifties. She has dressed for the occasion but seems not entirely comfortable in blue jeans and a green plaid shirt. A notebook is already open upon her knee and she is already writing something in it with a felt-tip pen. In the large canvas handbag by her feet there will be three other pens, a safety measure. She is the only student in this class who can understand that art is punishingly long and life unmercifully brief, but this means that she will rush at her poems, trying to pack everything she knows and feels into too few lines. The instructor understands her; in fact, he loves her and decides that he must cause her to laugh. If only he can get her to laugh, her work may relax and unknot into gracefulness.

The young man next to her is a bit overweight but still in fighting trim and has the humorous seedy air of a high school football coach. His costume is the most traditional of writing class costumes, a black leather jacket with a tiger and a girl in a pink bikini painted on it by his sister. He is a professional Good Old Boy; the sound of his poems will inevitably remind his readers of Willie Nelson; he will make animal noises of disgust whenever the instructor mentions Anthony Hecht.

Beside him sits a girl with lovely copper hair cut into bangs in front but falling straight over her shoulders in back. Her dark soulful eyes are steady on the book she is reading, and the instructor is disappointed that he cannot make out the title. She is shy but determined to acquire critical convictions and to stand by them. She is so serious about writing that she regrets just a little her youth and is considering the notion of commencing a love affair simply in order to gain some experience of life. Some of the males here will be boisterous, one or two may be bullies—but this quiet girl will show more courage than any of the men because one of the most difficult elements of courage is endurance. She will be able to go on writing in the face of rejection, failure, and sorrow.

And so on down the line …

It is like a Dickens novel in which the characters first present themselves as rather outlandish Types, but then enlist our benevolence more strongly as we are more exposed to them. The instructor knows that he must understand that the greater part of all this posing is ironic. The poses of young writers belong to a species of practical joke; they are trying to elicit reaction from a world they believe is unironic, bourgeois, and shockable. In a few weeks much of this garish veneer will wear away; the more facile an irony is, the more onerous to maintain over a period of time. They will notice this fact about themselves, but will require more time to find it true of their writing also. By semester end, they shall barely remember their first impressions of one another; the dramatic unfolding of personality as it takes place in a writing class expunges accidents of physical appearance and calculated manner. Except for the inevitable sexual impulses, they shall begin to see each other in terms of ideas; it is a giddying stage of discovery. But it too passes, though it never passes entirely. Sweet traces shall remain. The students shall have formed loyalties that will not be apparent to them until—sometimes—decades have passed.

* * *

Reflecting fondly but warily upon his new students and the prospect of a fresh semester, the instructor realizes how accustomed he must have become to young writers, to their various physical appearances, their mannerisms of speech and dress, their drinking habits, in order to make out this sort of descriptive catalogue. These students attend other classes too; they take courses in Linguistics, Medieval Literature, Eighteenth Century Studies, and so forth. The academic instructors used to tease the writing teacher. “Your budding geniuses are a weird-looking crew,” they tell him. “As soon as I walk into my first class I can pick out the MFA people.”

Later they circulate anecdotes about the lack of academic discipline on the part of these pupils:

“Your Mr. Albertson asked if he could turn in a dramatic monologue about Swift rather than a term paper.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I informed him that in the real world graduate students write term papers.”

The MFA students acquire unsavory reputations in other areas too. It is said that they drink to excess, pursue Lawrentian—even Milleresque—sex lives, are as lazy as delta rivers, and show alarming symptoms of emotional instability. Haven’t there been breakdowns, incarcerations, death threats, and suicide attempts by the members of your bewildered flock?

The instructor acknowledges the truth of these observations—and refrains from remarking that all these same incidents have also taken place among the regular M.A. and Ph.D. program candidates, as well as among faculty members. Instead, he makes a collegial offer: “Tell you what, Dr. Beauzeau, since the writing students are such a nuisance, why don’t I advise them not to take your classes in Advanced Environmental Hermeneutics? That way you won’t have to put up with them.” He receives a jolly thrill in watching the unhappy expression that passes over his friend’s face as he replies, “Oh, no need to do that. I’m here to teach, you know. Can’t discriminate.” For they both know that the MFA students are generally the best of the lot. By and large, they are the more intelligent, the more widely read, the more industrious. And it is in them that any teacher can discern a genuine love of literature.

Not that they are perfect students, by any means. Their reading is overbalanced in the direction of the moderns; they display irritated impatience when discussions touch upon books they have not read or, worse, have never heard of. They have also picked up from their academic courses the dismal habit of employing political correctness as an aesthetic standard and have become fond of claiming that their classmates’ poems show unconscious biases toward various ethnic groups, economic classes, and genders. The instructor used to take pains to point out to them that their one abiding prejudice, their almost unanimous blind spot, was toward history. Like Huck Finn, they put no stock in dead people. Only a few sensationally tragic or pathetic corpses interest them: Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman. And Jim Morrison. Somehow or other Jim Morrison has entered the pantheon of modern literary figures. To the instructor this is rather like finding a plaque of Red Skelton in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

This particular reaction is one that sets him apart from his students. A few of the cheekier call him “Teach,” underscoring the fact that the division between student and instructor in the writing program is never so wide as in the academic courses. In those the professor’s years of intensive reading and investigation, his attendance at learned conferences, and his own ceaseless or casual researches into his subject matter invest him with authority. But the writing instructor stands on shakier ground. When he tells a student that a particular scene in a short story seems to lack relevance or purpose, he can only give his best cogent reasons for his opinion. An argumentative student may find reasons just as cogent—and to her thinking more compelling—why the same scene is a brilliant success. The impasse that results from this disagreement can usually be broken, but more times than not the instructor is satisfied to let the impasse stand. Writing is not often a rote art like bodybuilding or bus driving. Perhaps for some readers this confused scene will have meaning and interest; his task has been only to point out that in it all four characters talk exactly alike. The final artistic decision must be the student’s own.

There is always this ticklish matter of how far to go in discussing a student’s work. One is supposed to be helpful without interfering, the instructor believes. The heavy hand is oppressive, the careless shrug chilling. What he wishes for is a Magic Smile; he would like to be able to read a manuscript, smile upon it beatifically, and have Disney-like moonbeams of palpable influence change its missteps in sequence, smooth out its stylistic perplexities, and provide theme for pages where none can be discerned. But as Disney has failed to provide this gift to our schoolteacher, he must rely on class discussion and personal conferences.

Personal conferences are preferred for discussions of style. When a writing class discusses prose style or poetic diction it will often bog down in trivial personal association:

“I just can’t stand the word macaroon. My stepfather was always calling me a macaroon. I hated that son of a bitch.”

“When you use the word moreover in this line what exactly do you mean by it?”

“Splurge? Why did you put that word in? It reminds me of pulling my boot out of swamp mud.”

Often young writers are at that stage when they first become acutely aware of the complexities of association that words and phrases call forth. Words are so important to them that they take for granted that most of their subjective associations must be important too. They have learned that language has the power to suggest and they are likely to suppose that the more it suggests the greater its power. Experience will prove that language also gains power by limiting its suggestiveness in the interests of clarity—but they don’t have a great deal of experience. The instructor is supposed to supply counsel from his own.

And this fact also is largely misconstrued by students and colleagues alike. What fits a teacher for instructing in creative writing is not his imputed successes. He has earned a few by now: The Thousand Sheep of Hector Berlioz was followed by a pretty well-received book of satiric verse called Say What?, then came the novel Blue Risotto, and the book of stories Bermuda Delights. His long narrative poem, Killing Cockroaches at the Lovesick Motel, is now in press. He has become an associate professor and the way looks fairly clear—as clear as it can look in the murky landscape of academia—to promotion to full. He has done passing well in the eyes of the administration and his department chairman; if anybody could be qualified to teach creative writing, this man is. For, look you, he hath spread his name and gained some credit on’t.

But what really qualifies a teacher of writing are not his little triumphs but his failures. For if he has not made the same bonehead mistakes his students make, if he has not dropped into the same spiked pitfalls and wallowed nearly to drowning in the identical quicksand, then he has no advice. He is able to tell someone that his story lacks steady narrative pace because more than one editor has told him the same thing about some of his work; he can advise a novice dramatist that she needs a second-act curtain because he had to struggle so long to find a clinching line; he can suggest that the nervous wet-eyed girl’s poem actually begins with her third stanza because he has learned—slowly and painfully—to look at all his own poems with this strategy in mind. When he says (with the properly tentative inflection), “Well, if this piece were mine, I might think of lengthening it out in the middle just a bit,” what he means is: “I tried foreshortening an ending in this manner one time and it made the story half-baked and addled. I had to learn to develop the middles of stories and to stop being so entranced with openings and closures, the glamorous parts.”

But when he tries to tell his students that he has made the same errors they make, they sometimes do not believe him. They cannot see how anyone ever started so far distant from success as they are starting now. They lack, in short, confidence. To criticize—however benevolently, however courteously, however encouragingly—the writing of a young person who lacks confidence requires the diplomacy of a Senate-hearing witness, the charitable disposition of a Mother Teresa, and the bland ease of manner of a TV game-show host.

(Anyhow, that’s the composite tone this particular instructor attempts to strike. Other writing teachers much better known than he display quite different strategies. Some are terrifying ogres; some are egregious clowns; some behave as if they were senior editors at Esquire or The Kenyon Review; some teach more about karate than about plot mechanics; some pursue love affairs with students of any sexual persuasion; some go over manuscripts with microscopic intensity while others fake the whole thing, rarely reading a line of student work; some insist that student work deal with certain kinds of subject matter; some insist that traditional narrative is dead and that students must compose metaliterature; some require that students read widely in European and Asian literatures; some do not allow students to read contemporary literature at all; some try to guard their charges from their own “influence,” while others desire them to write just the way they themselves do.…

(Well, as Kipling should have said, there are a million different ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is wrong.)

But even the best efforts at diplomacy don’t always work. Some students are natural Weepers. If they are told that their pages might improve with fewer adverbs, they burst into tears; if they hear that one of their poems is better than anything Auden, Marianne Moore and the instructor himself ever wrote, the floodgates open again. The instructor wants to cry out: “Look, it doesn’t matter what I say—whether I condemn your dialogue or praise it, whether I treat you scurvily or award you gold stars. For a writer, criticism of his or her work always comes down to one of two words: an editor’s Yes or an editor’s No. And the judgment of that editor may be better than mine or it may not; what is certain is that it will be more hasty than mine, and more final.”

He might go on to add that never again in this young person’s writing career, whether it ceases with his graduate school experience or whether she goes on to fame and fortune in the quality lit trade, will his or her work be subject to such close and mostly friendly scrutiny. The audience one encounters in a writing workshop is necessarily small but it is the most attentive and generally the best-intentioned one that exists.

But this is another article of unqualified disbelief. Do you mean to tell me (the student would like to ask) that when a new issue of Poetry or The New Yorker appears, people don’t rush to inspect the poems, to admire and memorize them, to try to figure out why the editor accepted these special lines instead of the ones we luckless others submitted? —Well, they don’t (the instructor would reply). The New Yorker poems are mostly scanned, hurriedly or listlessly, by patients in medical waiting rooms after they have savored all the cartoons and advertisements and have tasted all the nonfiction. As for Poetry, it is read almost entirely by poets, a few professors, and by students to whom it is assigned in composition classes. Is it true, then (the student might ask), that more people write poetry than read it?—Yes. And that’s the way it should be. Literate citizens should be expressing their thoughts and feelings on paper; their emotional lives are so furiously busy that they really don’t have time for the secondhand emotions of others, no matter how genuine those feelings are or how adroitly they are presented. If the competition for publication is daunting, think how disheartening is the competition for attention that published writers suffer. It’s a wonder that poetry and fiction are read at all—by anyone. Yet this situation is healthier for a writer than one in which people did little else but peruse short stories and lyric poems. As long as readers engage with the complexities of their lives in an unforgivingly factual world, they must deal with literature only sporadically and haphazardly—and this situation makes them valid critics. If they dealt only with literature in their lives (as writers sometimes imagine they would like for people to do), they could never appreciate fine work nor distinguish bad. The present situation for writers is not perfect; in fact, it is pretty bleak. But there are numerous realities that are preferable to imagined utopias.

These considerations are likely to send students into black depressions, to make them question their purposes:

“If what you say is true, then how is it possible for me to get my work published and to become known as a writer?”

“That is not possible,” the instructor might reply. “Forget about it.”

“It must be possible. What about Candace Flynt and Rodney Jones and Kathryn Stripling Byer and Tim Sandlin and all the other young writers who made successes?”

“They are anomalies. Don’t think about them. If you think about them you’ll go crazy.”

“Then, if there’s no chance for me, not even the sickliest glimmer of opportunity, why am I doing this?”

Here the instructor falls silent.

He knows the answer, though, and could say that the one reason to write fiction or poetry is because you cannot help doing so. You must try to write the very best you can without thought of publication, without the least hope for any readers. Once upon a time it was possible for a young writer to look to the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a possible model; now it is better to think in terms of Emily Dickinson.

* * *

Is it time to begin class?

The instructor goes out into the hall for another gulp of water and returns to call the roll. He informs his charges that this is a graduate-level class, English 527, in the composition of poetry. He explains that there is no assigned textbook because, of course, they will be writing the textbook that they all shall study. There is no assigned amount of pages to be composed; it is taken for granted that they intend to write. Why else would they be here? But since many feel uncomfortable with such unwonted freedom, perhaps they should aim at the equivalent of a dozen fully completed poems during the course of the semester.

Then he tells them his name, and this is the moment of the evening he has been dreading, one of the moments he dreads most in the teaching year. For it is equally embarrassing if the students know who he is or if they do not. One can never be famous enough or obscure enough to teach a writing class.

Let the instructor be as celebrated as Ezra Pound or Robinson Jeffers, a certain number of the students already reject what they imagine to be his “vision,” his way of thinking about writing, his way of looking at experience, his way of choosing experience to write about. If he or she is very famous indeed, they will resent just a little that they must stand, even now at the outset, so deeply in that fabulous shadow. The more famous the teacher, the sharper the temptation to beg easy favors—recommendations, introductions, invitations, and so forth—and then to become angry for asking. There is almost no way for the famous writer to put students at ease; and of course there are some renowned writer-teachers who do not desire to do so, preferring the advantages of superior position.

It is just as awkward if the teacher is unknown, or only faintly known, as a writer. He will not readily admit it, but the student feels aggrieved that he is not studying with a person of more consequence in the literary world. A student is prone to think in old-fashioned terms like literary world, prestigious publisher, major author, and so on. He imagines in foggy brightness an opulent and gleaming bar somewhere in plushest Manhattan; there Wallace Stevens and Edna St. Vincent Millay are having a drink together, and they are not talking about the two slim books his instructor published so long ago. What can it mean to go out into the world and proclaim, “I studied creative writing with Chappell,” if the person on the receiving end of the proclamation inquires, “Who the hell is Chappell?”

Though he will not do so, the instructor could tell his new friends here that their charming passé notions of literary eminence no longer apply. Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway share the oblivious dust with Byron and Trollope. Not many American citizens could confidently identify the names of John Updike, Mark Strand, Wright Morris, or Richard Wilbur. Accost a random sampling of people in an airport and ask them to name a famous living American author. Some few of those who don’t say “Longfellow” or “Rod Serling” might mention Norman Mailer, but you will search a long time before finding anyone who has read a book by Mailer all the way through. An impressive number are carrying paperback copies of novels like Do Me Again, but if you ask one of these readers for his opinion of its author, Sheldon Steele, he will give you a baffled stare and mutter, “Steal Who?”

So that if the aspiring writer does achieve the fame she longs for, she shall have impressed only a small but shrewd band of readers whose tastes are broadly democratic. In this writing class, for example, one is likely to find as many devotees of Djuna Barnes or Susan Howe as of George Garrett or William Stafford.

The instructor does not tell his students these facts because he knows that however cheerful and just he reckons them, the students will find them disheartening. Notoriety remains general, however brief in duration—there were a few weeks in which Jack Abbott, the murderer Norman Mailer got released from prison to murder again, was the most widely known American author. But genuine literary fame, like scientific and philosophic renown, has become specialized. Even a writer anxious for fame settles to the fact that it is only a limited number of people he wants to be known to, though he wants to be known to them for a long time.

Better not to distress the students’ quaint notion of fame, though, because it is a concomitant of their necessary and touching faith that good works shall be rewarded. The students still believe not only in literary fame but in the idea that recognition can be achieved if one learns to write honestly, brilliantly, and with a certain individual flair. The instructor might tell them that this is a good way to win acclaim but also an equally good way to achieve neglect. Let them go inquire of his colleagues who teach American literature their views about the poetry of William Meredith, Dabney Stuart, and Daniel Hoffman if they wish to observe how sterling quality fares in its encounter with casual indifference. Perhaps they may see too how the university all unwittingly furthers some of the worst instincts of the commercial publishing houses and how deeply academic career interests may be vested in a few established writers like Seamus Heaney and John Ashbery. Then the students may be able to take note that literary enterprise is not free enterprise in the finest liberal sense of that adjective; the promotion of one deserving reputation is always at the expense of some other reputation.

But if the students do find out these matters, it is still more important for them to learn not to be bitter about them. This is simply the way the situation is, and the kind of injustice that obtains in the literary ranks is motelike as compared with the larger and more urgent injustices of society. These latter concerns must be the subjects students address in their writing in some fashion, however oblique, and self-indulgent whining about the vagaries of reputation amounts to enfeebling distraction.

Sigmund Freud, who claimed to understand a great many things, also claimed to understand why writers write. They write, he said, for fame, for money, and to attract the love of beautiful women. That is a formulation so thoroughly Viennese as to be useless. Does a grown man perform any action whatsoever for reasons other than these? Well, if anyone does—if a scientist, for example, may be allowed disinterested curiosity as a motive—then Freud has not adequately described the motives of the contemporary writer, for there are easier and less gloomy ways of acquiring fame and fortune than by writing; and the favors of beautiful women have become much less scarce than those of influential literary agents.

What the instructor will say to his class, as soon as possible, is that the only authentic recompense for decent literary work is the work itself. Not the finished product, which is inevitably and always a disappointment, but the process of creating that product. The delicate and furious search from noun to noun, from comma to comma. The virtuous agony, the saintly tedium. When the force of literary discipline has taken solid hold of the writer’s personality, even rejection and ugly critical notice are not mere disappointments but also serve to brace up resolve, have the effect of fixing the writer’s attention more directly on her ultimate goals. On one large side of its nature, writing is a monastic exercise, and the hair shirt an indispensable element of its stringency.

Some of this arcana he will not yet reveal, fearing that his young friends may find it much too overbearing. As yet he will not tell them that a time is coming for them when they will welcome rewriting, even to the fourth and fifth versions, with more joy than setting down the first draft. They will certainly not believe that, and he had better not stretch their credulity too soon.

He does tell them how the class operates on its mechanical side. They are to write poems and photocopy them for their classmates, to read attentively the work of the others, and to be prepared to discuss it cogently, honestly, and diplomatically. No points accrue to brutality, none to pusillanimity. Any parade of erudition about literature, art, music, science, and political ethics is a waste of time. The Golden Rule applies: Be as useful to the poem as you would have it be to its readers.

He advises them that he will not promulgate a consistent theory of poetry. The rule in Barton Lounge is that every poem generates its own aesthetic laws and theories and is to be judged entirely on its own terms. It is the student’s task to discern, by attentive regard, what those terms are. This takes practice but is less difficult than it seems once specious standards are jettisoned. The poems here are not to be compared to poems in print; a metaphysical poem will not be set beside “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” an exercise in ironic wit will not be humiliated by the example of John Crowe Ransom.

Because no matter how much poetry they know they can never know enough. They have read Chaucer, perhaps, but probably not Petrarch. Almost certainly not Deschamps, Verhaeren, James Russell Lowell, Shenstone, or Stuart Merrill. In order to have adequate bases for comparison as a practicing poet, you have to know all poetry. And it is too easy for discussion to bog down in disputes about the comparative merits of Adrienne Rich and James Dickey. Let us then stick closely to the material that you have written.

Which means that unless you write and turn in material we shall have nothing to talk about in class. But the class will still meet, even if we must sit for three hours in silent meditation … No, don’t giggle; I’m perfectly serious.

But that’s no problem. It is easy to see that you are all highly productive geniuses of the first water.

* * *

Of course, they are not all geniuses of blinding brilliance, and just as well for them too. The literary scene as she is currently observed in the United States is ill equipped to handle genius. Reading through a few literary trade journals and hearing some of the gloomier comments of his agent, the instructor has been startled to realize just how little room is left in the larger publishing house lists for the best innovative new work. It has come home to him that some of the work he most admires, books he learned to love and envy when he was learning to write, would now have to depend upon the smaller and more uncertain presses to see the light of day. Mrs. Dalloway, Remembrance of Things Past, The Beloved Returns—if works like these were submitted to the big trade houses with unknown names posted as their authors, junior editors would reject them summarily and no agent would be interested. In fact, he vaguely remembers that someone tried such an experiment not so long ago—and with predictable results.

But these sad facts need not be the instructor’s essential concerns. He is not, after all, an agent or editor or publisher; the economic hardships of publishing he will outline for his students, but he is not obliged even to condemn them with much warmth. His task is not to see that young writers get published, but that they discover and utilize their best talents, that they have some grounding in the basics of literary expression, that they can tell a mixed metaphor from a forced simile at one hundred yards. After that—like everyone else—they’re on their own.

Some of them will never publish a line anywhere. Others will publish a little, then lose interest. A few will publish a sufficient amount of quality work to land sound editorial or teaching jobs. Some will publish fine books and win prizes. A few will become ghost writers for politicians, join advertising firms, transform into hermit poets singing in the actual wilderness. One he knows of became a member of the Secret Service. Another invented a machine to make marijuana smoke more potent, and his gadget was written up admiringly in a Sunday supplement of The Boston Globe.

And, anyway, why would a sane person desire literary fame, or fame of any sort? The instructor’s experience with media exposure is small indeed, but it has been enough to cause some awkward moments:

—An aggrieved woman, a stranger, telephoned to ask why modern books are all such morally degraded trash. She has not read the instructor’s books, of course, but since he writes them he must be part of the conspiracy to tear down the Christian family and the foundations of America. His reply, that he found contemporary literature to be morally degraded at about the same degree as the contemporary Baptist church, did not mollify her.

—One of his department colleagues, meeting him in the hall, told him with a serious and troubled air, “If I see your picture in the paper one more time I’ll puke.”

—One of his undergraduate students dropped out of school, ran away from home, and became a successful department store manager in a northeastern metropolis. Her family blamed the instructor for what they considered the young lady’s “failure.” “You filled her head with poetry,” her father said to him.

—In a manila envelope in his university postbox he found a paperback copy of one of his novels, torn to shreds.

—After suffering an unfavorable review in a local newspaper, he received seven copies in the mail. One of them decorated with yellow highlighter ink the severest passages. None of the envelopes carried a return address.

—The father of an undergraduate called his home one evening to tell of his own literary leanings. “I used to write some poems,” he said, “but not this modern kind. I believe in the good old simple words like love and truth and businessman.”

—Etc.

* * *

He decides at last he has but a single thing he wants to tell this new English 527. He had remained undecided, until this very moment, about whether he would begin to teach this evening or cancel the class and go home and never return. But he wants to tell them that the poem is the only thing that counts:

“The poem is what you want to deliver, to render in the clearest possible terms. The poem is so much more intelligent than the person who writes it down that your job is always to treat it with deferential respect. Do not impose yourself upon it; do not clothe it in language strained, outlandish, or cute; do not force it to say things it doesn’t want to say or make it pretend to feel things it doesn’t really feel. Do not become an obstacle to its articulation. You are not the master of your material; poetry has no masters, only a company of skillful, devoted, and unobtrusive servants.”

He cannot say these sentences tonight, and by the time he does get around to saying them, the students already know. If he does his job well, the instructor shall have made his occupation seem redundant.

But most of these matters, these wise and trivial disappointments, belong to the future. Now the students want to begin, and, despite his anticipation of the oncoming bone-deep weariness, the instructor wants to begin too.

He excuses himself to make a final trip to the fountain, where he drinks for a long time and, dipping his hand into the cold arc, splashes his face. He returns to the room and sits again under the best lamp. He detaches a sheet from the sheaf of copies, mutters a prayer, and then intones that ponderous, necessary, ineluctable, anguished first word of the poem, the word that heralds the onset of the furious tempest: “The.”