A Writer's Life by Gay Talese

standing in my junior year fell below the level required by our principal to earn his recommendation for college-entrance consideration, my father became more insistent that I sit for a few hours a week in his workroom practicing certain rudiments under his guidance, such as how to cut and secure a pair of trouser cuffs, and how to make buttonholes, and how to baste the inner lining of a jacket. At the very least, he explained, tailoring was “something I could fall back on.” He also tried to reason with me while repeating an offer that, in my darkest moments of self-doubt, I must admit held a modicum of appeal.
    â€œWouldn’t you like to live in Paris after you’re out of high school?” he would ask. All that was required of me, I knew, was to occupy a guest room in the Paris apartment of an older Italian cousin of my father’s who had left their village for Paris as a tailor in 1911, and who now owned a thriving shop on the rue de la Paix where I could work as an apprentice. I had also been told that this cousin’s clientele included General Charles de Gaulle, several French film directors and performers, and other prominent people who my father hoped would convince me that there was a glamorous side to the tailoring profession. But I knew from watching my father at work that tailoring was tedious, time-consuming, and physically demanding, and that it often brought considerable pain to his back muscles and fingers. He made each suit stitch by stitch, avoiding the use of a sewing machine because he wanted to
feel
the needle in his fingers as he penetrated a piece of silk or wool and moved at a worm’s pace along the seam of a shoulder or a sleeve. If whatever he did deviated from his definition of perfection, he would pull it apart and do it again. He hoped to create the illusion of seamlessness, to attain artistic expression with a needle and thread. Much as I admired his aspirations, I was never tempted to become a tailor, and yet I listened respectfully whenever my father alluded to my possible apprenticeship in Paris—which he did more than once after my diligence and weeks of work on my term paper had earned me only a
B
-minus.
    I tried to defend myself as my father shared my disappointment with the grade. My teacher’s standards in English were not necessarily relevant to my future in journalism, I insisted. My research indicated that the great Adolph Ochs had begun his career without encouragement from his Englishteachers—he, too, had been an average student, one whose intelligence and talents became apparent later in his life. He had started out in journalism as a floor sweeper on a small newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was also convinced, although my reasoning was based on emotion, without a shred of evidence, that my English teacher’s assessment of my classroom work was influenced by personal factors, such as the fact that she privately loathed me, or at least disapproved of me, and thus graded me harshly. The
B
-minus was not the lowest mark I had received in her class. I got mostly
C
’s, sometimes
D
’s, and once—after I had misspelled Shakespeare’s name twice in an essay on
Hamlet
—an
F
. She wrote notes of explanation across the front page of each student’s composition. On mine, she criticized me constantly for writing sentences that were “too wordy” and “indirect,” and sometimes she underlined sentences in red ink and wrote in the margin a single word:
syntax
. This word might appear two or three times on the same page with exclamation points:
syntax! syntax! syntax!
Although I looked up the meaning of the word in different dictionaries, I was never entirely sure how it related to what was wrong with my grammar, and yet I was reluctant to approach her. I felt intimidated by her in ways that I did not when in the presence of other teachers. I had transferred to this public high school after eight years in