Look, write a story about shopping at Carson ’ s, Mrs. Slater! Write about your afternoon at Saks! ” “ Yes? ” “ Yes! Yes! Yes! ”
Oh, yes, when it came to grandiosity and dreaminess, to all manifestations of self-inflating romance, I had no reservations about giving them a taste of the Zuckerman lash. Those were the only times I lost my temper, and of course losing it was always calculated and deliberate: scrupulous.
Pent-up rage, by the way—that was the meaning the army psychiatrist had assigned to my migraines. He had asked whether I liked my father better t han my mother, how I felt about heights and crowds, and what I planned to do when I was returned to civilian life, and concluded from my answers that I was a vessel of pent-up rage. Another poet, this one in uniform, bearing the rank of captain.
My friends (my only real enemy is dead now, though my censurers are plentiful)—my friends, I earned those two hundred and fifty dollars teaching “ Creative Writing ” in a night school, every penny of it. For whatever it may or may not “ mean, ” I didn ’ t once that semester get a migraine on a Monday, not that I wasn ’ t tempted to take a crack at it when a tough-guy story by Patrolman Todd or a bittersweet one by Mrs. Slater was on the block for the evening … No, to be frank, I counted it a blessing of sorts when the headaches happened to fall on the weekend, on my time off. My superiors in the college and downtown were sympathetic and assured me that I wasn ’ t about to lose my job because I had to be out ill “ from time to time, ” and up to a point I believed them; still, to be disabled on a Saturday or a Sunday was to me far less spiritually debilitating than to have to ask the indulgence of either my colleagues or students.
Whatever erotic curiosity had been aroused in me by Lydia ’ s pretty, girlish, Scandinavian block of a head—and odd as it will sound to some, by the exoticism of the blighted middle western Protestant background she wrote about and had managed to survive in one piece—was decidedly outweighed by my conviction that I would be betraying my vocation, and doing damage to my self-esteem, if I were to take one of my students to bed. As I have said, suppressing feelings and desires extraneous to the purpose that had brought us together seemed to me crucial to the success of the transaction—as I must have called it then, the pedagogical transaction—all owing each of us to be as teach erly or as studen tly as was within his power, without wasting time and spirit being provocative, charming, duplicitous, touchy, jealous, scheming, etc. You could do all that out in the street; only in the classroom, as far as I knew, was it possible to approach one another with the intensity ordinarily associated with love, yet cleansed of emotional extremism and tree of base motives having to do with profit and power. To be sure, on more than a few occasions, my night class was as perplexing as a Kafka courtroom, and my composition classes as wearisome as any assembly line, but that our effort was characterized at bottom by modesty and mutual trust, and conducted as ingenuously as dignity would permit, was indisputable. Whether it was Mrs. Corbett ’ s innocent and ardent question about how to address a friendly letter to a little girl or my own no less innocent and ardent introductory lecture to which she was responding, what we said to one another was not uttered in the name of anything vile or even mundane. At twenty-four, dressed up like a man in a clean white shirt and a tie, and bearing chalk powder on the tails of my worn tweed jacket, that seemed to me a truth to be held self-evident. Oh, how I wanted a soul that was pure and spo tl ess!
In Lydia ’ s case, professorial discretion was helped along some, or I should have thought it would be, by that rolling, mannish gait of hers. Tire first time she entered my class I actually wondered if she could be some kind of gymnast or
Oh, yes, when it came to grandiosity and dreaminess, to all manifestations of self-inflating romance, I had no reservations about giving them a taste of the Zuckerman lash. Those were the only times I lost my temper, and of course losing it was always calculated and deliberate: scrupulous.
Pent-up rage, by the way—that was the meaning the army psychiatrist had assigned to my migraines. He had asked whether I liked my father better t han my mother, how I felt about heights and crowds, and what I planned to do when I was returned to civilian life, and concluded from my answers that I was a vessel of pent-up rage. Another poet, this one in uniform, bearing the rank of captain.
My friends (my only real enemy is dead now, though my censurers are plentiful)—my friends, I earned those two hundred and fifty dollars teaching “ Creative Writing ” in a night school, every penny of it. For whatever it may or may not “ mean, ” I didn ’ t once that semester get a migraine on a Monday, not that I wasn ’ t tempted to take a crack at it when a tough-guy story by Patrolman Todd or a bittersweet one by Mrs. Slater was on the block for the evening … No, to be frank, I counted it a blessing of sorts when the headaches happened to fall on the weekend, on my time off. My superiors in the college and downtown were sympathetic and assured me that I wasn ’ t about to lose my job because I had to be out ill “ from time to time, ” and up to a point I believed them; still, to be disabled on a Saturday or a Sunday was to me far less spiritually debilitating than to have to ask the indulgence of either my colleagues or students.
Whatever erotic curiosity had been aroused in me by Lydia ’ s pretty, girlish, Scandinavian block of a head—and odd as it will sound to some, by the exoticism of the blighted middle western Protestant background she wrote about and had managed to survive in one piece—was decidedly outweighed by my conviction that I would be betraying my vocation, and doing damage to my self-esteem, if I were to take one of my students to bed. As I have said, suppressing feelings and desires extraneous to the purpose that had brought us together seemed to me crucial to the success of the transaction—as I must have called it then, the pedagogical transaction—all owing each of us to be as teach erly or as studen tly as was within his power, without wasting time and spirit being provocative, charming, duplicitous, touchy, jealous, scheming, etc. You could do all that out in the street; only in the classroom, as far as I knew, was it possible to approach one another with the intensity ordinarily associated with love, yet cleansed of emotional extremism and tree of base motives having to do with profit and power. To be sure, on more than a few occasions, my night class was as perplexing as a Kafka courtroom, and my composition classes as wearisome as any assembly line, but that our effort was characterized at bottom by modesty and mutual trust, and conducted as ingenuously as dignity would permit, was indisputable. Whether it was Mrs. Corbett ’ s innocent and ardent question about how to address a friendly letter to a little girl or my own no less innocent and ardent introductory lecture to which she was responding, what we said to one another was not uttered in the name of anything vile or even mundane. At twenty-four, dressed up like a man in a clean white shirt and a tie, and bearing chalk powder on the tails of my worn tweed jacket, that seemed to me a truth to be held self-evident. Oh, how I wanted a soul that was pure and spo tl ess!
In Lydia ’ s case, professorial discretion was helped along some, or I should have thought it would be, by that rolling, mannish gait of hers. Tire first time she entered my class I actually wondered if she could be some kind of gymnast or
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