My Classroom Life

The English department I hoped to join had two tenure-track jobs going that year, and one of them looked straightforward enough. They needed a medievalist, someone to do Chaucer and Beowulf; though later I learned the position had long been a revolving door, ever since a negative tenure decision had ended up in the courts. But the spot I applied for was a different one, even if it too spoke to a history of trouble, a department that couldn’t decide what it wanted. The ad in the MLA job list named five fields, and candidates had to have two of them. British literature of the Romantic, or modern, or contemporary periods; and then film or, finally, linguistics. I knew almost nothing about film and even less about linguistics; nor was I entirely sure about the difference between the modern and the contemporary. Still, I could cover the twentieth century, and once hired I was also told to learn as much about the movies as I needed to teach them to freshmen. A real film person would have to wait.

Two spots—and two more the next year, a film person indeed, along with a Shakespearian. It seems incredible now, when my old department’s faculty lines have been cut from something like twenty-three to fourteen, and every retirement, my own included, ratchets up the collective anxiety about the improbability of any replacement at all. But what seem really incredible, in retrospect, are the circumstances of my own first interview. A woman in the department lived in Cambridge, a morning’s drive from campus. Since two jobs meant more MLA interviews than anyone’s conference schedule could handle, why not have the search committee make a road trip and meet some people in her living room? I had been in the Boston area for a couple of years, where my then-wife was in law school, and was teaching freshman writing at Tufts while trying to finish a dissertation for my West Coast program. So a few days before Christmas I was called to a gray-green house on Lancaster Street, half a mile north of the Cambridge Common, where four of the six people who faced me had Harvard PhDs. It must have seemed natural to them to find their candidates in that zip code; and, honestly, it seemed natural to me as well.

The week before I’d run into a woman from my own program. She was just starting a job at Brandeis but had spent the previous year at the school I was applying to, and when I told her I had an interview she gave me a tip. Tell that local homeowner what a beautiful place she has, and admire the furniture in particular. After forty years I have no memory at all of her couches and chairs, though I have kept an image of the room, with its old rugs and a big window at the far end, looking out to the tree-lined street. But I do remember praising the furniture when I left, after my half hour before the committee, and the woman beamed; later she proved by far the most difficult of all my colleagues. Once I’d been hired that grad school acquaintance also told me what I had to do to ensure my first reappointment. Use a lot of handouts, she said, and go to lunch at the faculty club. The one would show my commitment to teaching, and the other my—well, my clubbability. Each was more important than anything I might write, and I did both for years, popping a Hall’s mentholated cough drop before each afternoon’s class to clear my throat of the cigarette smoke that always blew across the department’s table.

So the network did its work, the old boys, the old girls. I’m sure I was more comfortable in that living room than I would have been in a conference hotel, waiting in the hallway for the door to open and seeing the preceding candidate come out. The whole thing put me at an advantage. No responsible search committee would do that today, not when the first interviews of even local or internal candidates are on Zoom, and use a set of standardized questions to make each person’s treatment as uniform as possible. Nor would a committee ask at least one of the questions that was put to me: why are you here, instead of out in California where you belong? I mentioned law school, I mentioned my marriage. I don’t know if the MLA had already ruled such personal questions out of line, though if it had I doubt that this particular set of people would have known it. But surely a candidate now wouldn’t answer as easily and unthinkingly as I did. And even back then only a man would have answered so blithely.

Two other questions stick with me. One led to the other, and that second one, I’m convinced, led a month later to a campus visit. What would you teach in a class on contemporary British literature? Auden, Orwell, and Waugh, I began. Larkin, Murdoch, Drabble, Pinter. A Clockwork Orange? Maybe Ted Hughes? None of it was terribly contemporary, and the last book I mentioned, already about twenty years old, wasn’t either. Masterpiece Theatre had just started to broadcast an adaptation of Paul Scott’s tetralogy about the end of British rule in India. I’d read it, at my mother’s urging, and finished my answer by saying that its first volume, The Jewel in the Crown, would make a good ending to the class. At that point the pearl-clad, sixty-something department chair looked up. She was enjoying that serial, she said, and then went on, her voice tentative. Some of them had begun to wonder if perhaps the department should maybe consider offering a class in what was apparently called “Commonwealth Literature.” Might that be something I was interested in?

I’d never thought about it. I knew a bit of Naipaul, and had liked Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, a novel I’d opened by pure chance, because I noticed its bold pink cover on the bookstore shelf. That was it; nothing at all by an African writer, or even by an Australian. But I did read a lot of book reviews, and I wanted the job. So of course I said I was interested, and strung a dozen names together for a syllabus. It was only after I was hired that I began to catch up on what my interview had suggested I already knew. I had to. It was part of the “institutional considerations” in my contract, and to keep that job I needed to develop a class on what I pretty quickly learned to call the postcolonial. There weren’t many people trained in it yet, and it wasn’t something my own grad program had taught. But the more I read the more I realized that I’d gotten lucky. My new chair’s question had opened a world. For I loved the books I now began to read, so much more vital than the midcentury British stuff in my dissertation, and I started to write about them even before I began, in my second year, to teach them.

*

That spring I pushed hard to finish my thesis, and hard as well, if more pleasantly, on the film course I was expected to offer, haunting the Boston-area rep houses and renting videos to watch in the Tufts library—two a day, once I was done with my footnotes. There I had my initial encounter with Fellini, Kurosawa, and the French New Wave. In July I got my first paycheck, and decided to give myself a present. I went one afternoon to a Harvard Square bookstore and bought a copy of Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, and then added a couple of others. My new employer was a women’s college, and yet my knowledge of feminist criticism was limited to A Room of One’s Own. So I picked up both The Madwoman in the Attic and Elaine Showalter’s just-published anthology, The New Feminist Criticism.

I really did, and do, read a lot of reviews, and that meant the argument of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s 1979 book was familiar to me. Much of what I’d seen in the mainstream press had been skeptical, presenting its claims as interesting but overstated. Yet to me it seemed clear-eyed, and certainly far less exaggerated than the Bloomian model of artistic influence it pushed against. The Showalter collection contained a selection of crucial scholarly articles from the previous decade or so. I read Jane P. Tompkins on the way the construction of the American canon had elbowed Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other novels by women aside, and then pieces by Nina Baym and Carolyn G. Heilbrun, by Deborah E. McDowell and my future colleague Annie Jones, the latter on l’écriture féminine. There were two essays by Annette Kolodny, including the brilliant “Dancing Through the Minefield,” which describes the near-impossibility for a feminist critic of avoiding the missteps—the supposed missteps—that in the eyes of her male colleagues would blow her sky-high.

The article that stuck with me, however, was Nancy K. Miller’s “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction” (1981). Miller starts with La Princesse de Clèves (1678), and the germ of her argument lies in her claim that the book’s author, Madame de La Fayette, was unable to imagine a heroine whose possibilities were not limited by marriage. She couldn’t give her character a story that resembled her own; no more, one might add, than George Eliot was able, two centuries later, to give Dorothea Brooke the kind of career she had herself. Here Miller turns—reluctantly, combatively—to Freud, drawing on a 1908 essay called “The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming.” The ego rules, Freud writes, and finds its expression in both erotic desire and fits of “overweening” ambition, a daydream of worldly success. And yet Miller suggests that this only applies to the male protagonist, who sees himself as an exceptional being, an exalted self. The female protagonist can have no such trajectory. In classic French fiction, Miller argues, the woman’s story lies not in triumph or ambition, not in any sense of being an exception, but rather in her ability to endure or even “transcend the perils of plot with a self-exalting dignity.” She suffers. She bears it, like Madame de Beauséant in Balzac’s Père Goriot, who immures herself in the country when her lover takes a young bride.

That’s my example, not Miller’s, and of course it’s not chosen at random. Grad school for me was narrowing, and channeled all my reading energies into the English novel. But during that final spring and summer my mind seemed to open again. I couldn’t write on into the evenings, my wife was buried in case-law, and our black-and-white TV had only the most unreliable of rabbit ears; I needed something to do, and turned to the books I had always meant to read. Père Goriot was one of them, and so was The Red and the Black. Crime and Punishment, and then a start on Anna Karenina. Add Madame Bovary, the one French novel I’d read in college. Books that seemed relentless, and that all end in emptiness. I sat on the porch of a two-family house in Watertown, Massachusetts, with Showalter’s book open on my lap and the summer sounds of our landlord’s children coming from an upstairs window, and began to argue with Miller’s argument. Were the plots available to a female protagonist in the nineteenth century really all that different from those offered to men, whatever they might have been in an earlier age? Didn’t Emma Bovary have more in common with Balzac’s Eugène de Rastignac or Stendhal’s Julien Sorel than she did with a minor figure like Madame de Beauséant, or indeed the Princesse de Clèves herself? For she doesn’t bear it, she refuses the dull stupidity of the people around her. Flaubert’s character wants more than life has given her, more than it can give her; her ego rages, it burns, and she needs a way to feed it.

What will you do to get what you want? How far will you go? Those novels, I thought in the sunshine, were all of them about desire, about characters who refuse to be bound by the rules of their world; who want to make their own lives, their own laws, to bring their circumstances in line with some ideal version of the self. That’s easiest to see in Dostoevsky, and so is the price of that refusal, the cost to the soul that the killer Raskolnikov is at last forced to acknowledge. But these books were all versions of the same story, novels about characters who won’t accept the hand they’ve been dealt, and they all end with the discovery that no such absolute freedom is possible. For men, that attempt to push the self beyond all limits takes the form of a worldly ambition, as Freud and Miller had each suggested. For the female protagonist that rebellion against life’s constraints finds its fullest expression in adultery.

That’s a catchy phrase, I thought, “ambition and adultery,” and went inside to make myself a sandwich. A course with that title might be fun to teach. It took me a few years to find a similarly alliterative subtitle—“Social Order and Subversion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel”—but I offered some version of that class for almost the entirety of my career.

*

Not that I got it right the first time, or the second. Like most young teachers I tried to do too much, in this case to fit in something English. Middlemarch offers a catalogue of ambition’s different forms, some of them spiritual—why not add that? But English novels didn’t really work here, not when the national bias was for finding success within society’s given terms: the marriages of Austen, with what Miller describes as their “second-chance rerouting of disaster”; or the chastened hopes of Great Expectations. The English accommodate themselves. The continental fiction was much different, and the class eventually fell into place in the form of a writing-intensive seminar for first-year students. Four novels: Père Goriot, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina. Two French, two Russian; two about a man’s ambition, two about a woman’s adultery. Leave aside Tolstoy’s Levin here, whose ambition might be the greatest of all: to learn how to live.    

For a critical framework I turned first to the argument that the British critic Tony Tanner developed in Adultery in the Novel (1979), one predicated on the difference between status and contract. Status is fixed, based on one’s position in the family, and by extension in a society whose order is perceived as permanent: father, son, daughter, wife; peasant, noble, priest. Contract, on the other hand, is a matter of constant negotiation, which perpetually draws and redraws the lines of what’s allowed; everyone tries to make their own bargain. The novel, Tanner argues, works by exploring the relation of status to contract, its plots generated by the tensions and confusions between them.

That’s where I began, but my points of reference soon expanded. Lionel Trilling offered an account of what he called “the young man from the provinces,” the hick who comes to the city. Both Rastignac and Raskolnikov follow such a path, and behind them, he says, lies the original young man, the one from Corsica who refused to be bound by anything. His influence could be felt everywhere. For Charles Baudelaire, Emma Bovary more closely resembled a Napoleonic hero than she did a heroine, someone who tries to bend the world into the shape of her own desire. Such a claim makes adultery itself into a form of ambition, for what’s at stake in these books is no less than the question of whether there is some moral order inherent in the world, or whether we must each make it for ourselves alone. They anticipate Nietzsche. Balzac’s Rastignac learns early on that if he wants to succeed, to rise to the top of French society, then he is going to have “to shoot for God,” and his words are not a metaphor.

I think that every one of us in that classroom was attracted to the idea of creating an autonomous self, one free from any shaping or inherited structures. At first I wasn’t so many years older than my students, and saw it as part of the still-ongoing process of establishing an adult individuality, separate from the world of one’s parents. Contract, and not status, though putting it that way leaves unanswered the question of the deal’s other party. But if my students didn’t want to live by the rules that others had made, they were startled each term into realizing the costs of autonomy. They liked Rastignac’s ingenuous charm—only to discover that he was willing to sacrifice his sisters’ well-being for the sake of his own success. How far will you go? Every now and then a student would suggest that one should go as far as one needs, that there really should be no curbs on one’s behavior. Then Crime and Punishment would make her pull back. For there was no getting away from it: Raskolnikov’s attempt to test the limits on individual action really does make him an axe murderer.

But the most troubling case for them, and for me, was that of Anna Karenina. They quickly and rightly dispensed with the superficial resemblance between her situation and Emma’s. It’s not the adultery that makes Flaubert’s character suffer, and when she kills herself it’s to avoid financial rather than sexual embarrassment; she dies because she can no longer afford the things that have cushioned her life. Anna’s despair has a more profound source. Late in the novel she reminds her sister-in-law Dolly that she’s not a wife but a mistress. She is outside the law, she lives beyond the boundaries of any social order, and her own ambition lies in the belief that she and her lover Vronsky no longer have any need for that order. A purely private life ought to be enough; they should subsist on their love alone.

But it isn’t and they can’t. Individuals are never entirely self-sufficient: that’s the knowledge she resists, redoubling her insistence on her own autonomy even as it eats away at her. For there is finally no self without that contract’s other party, the society that contains and confines us; without what Henry James has one of his most hateful and perceptive characters call our defining “envelope of circumstances.” So Levin discovers as well, only he learns it within the most sustaining of marriages and a world marked by his obligations to those around him.

Freedom has its limits and self-fulfillment its costs. These are familiar lessons, but they always bear repeating, as do all the things that we each have to learn for ourselves. My favorite moments in the class came in the series of debates we staged about some crux of interpretation. In our penultimate session on Anna Karenina I divided them in two and asked half of them to define Anna’s understanding of her love affair, and half Vronsky’s. How does her sense of what’s gone wrong differ from his, and what can be said on his behalf? The students I assigned to take his part didn’t much like it at first, but quickly found that they enjoyed arguing against their own impulses. More: they found that Anna’s understanding of the relationship isn’t the only one possible. Vronsky too has a point of view, and that in itself is enough to tell us that nobody, not even a title character, is ever entirely free to make their own life.

*

Neither those novels nor their questions ever got old, and nor did the discussions I had with my students, sixteen of them each fall. There was always somebody in class who’d already read Crime and Punishment, but for most of them all this was as new as college itself, and I fed a bit on their eagerness. They liked disliking Emma Bovary—so cruel to her daughter!—and their vehemence made me defend her; they found Raskolnikov so haunted and doomed as to seem a bit seductive. Yet I also wonder, now that I’ve taught that class for the last time, if some of my own zest came from the fact that these novels were ones I never wrote about. I meant to, I wanted to, but the words didn’t come, and even now I’m not entirely sure why.

Anyone who regularly stands in front of a classroom will recognize this paradox: the best way to learn something is to teach it. You master a subject by figuring out what you need to know in order to make it clear to another person. All my books have come out of my teaching, at least after the first dull one I made from my dissertation. I wrote about what I taught, and yet after a while I also noticed that I rarely taught what I’d written about. The classroom was a place to try out a thought, to build an interpretive fiction, but once I’d taken what I’d learned there and turned it into prose I was usually done with it. My ideas had gelled, and it was time to move on, to try a new field, century, continent. I wrote a book about the postcolonial novel and gave up the class on “Commonwealth” literature that I’d been handed at my job interview. I put together a course on travel writing and finished it off by producing a travel narrative of my own. I even stopped teaching my Henry James seminar after writing a biography of him. Some of my friends and colleagues stuck with the same subject for decades. I was fickle.

Or rather I was allowed to be fickle by what I came to understand as the conditions and possibilities of my job, by what it meant to teach at a liberal arts college rather than a research university. The ad I answered now seems absurd, as outdated as the circumstances of my own first interview. No dean would approve it today. Some of my future colleagues wanted to replicate themselves by replacing a retiring modernist. Others wanted something that for them at least was new, like film. They couldn’t make up their collective mind, and probably they fought about it; I would see a lot of fighting in the decades to come, and more than a few temper tantrums. Still, let me look at it a different way. In its sheer breadth that ad also signaled a willingness to be surprised, to see what turned up. Even, perhaps, to gamble, in a way that’s almost impossible now, when positions in the humanities are scarcer than ever and everything has to be authorized in advance by some central committee. I hadn’t yet finished my thesis, and all of a sudden I was responsible for an area that hadn’t been advertised and that I didn’t yet know.

But then my department didn’t need everyone to be a specialist. We weren’t in the business of preparing our pupils for the academic job market; we weren’t even in the business of preparing them for graduate school. I didn’t have to stay focused on my own narrow field of origin, and once tenure had made the institutional considerations in my contract irrelevant I was free to wander. Sometimes I tried out a new subject simply because I was bored with what I had to say about the old ones.

But “Ambition and Adultery” stayed with me to the end. Each time I finished a book I would look at those novels and wonder if it was at last time to get them right, to give some coherent form to my notes and memories of class discussion. It never was, and for years I told myself that I just hadn’t figured out how to do it yet. A chapter about each book seemed too obvious, and stale. A single long essay? That might gesture toward the scale of the subject—nothing less than the nature and limits of individualism itself—while acknowledging the inadequacy of any attempt to exhaust it. Yet I couldn’t get myself to believe that that was the right way either, not enough to start; I always found other things to write instead, and as I got toward the end of my classroom life I began to wonder if maybe I was afraid.

Maybe if I wrote about these works I would stop teaching them, as I had so many others, would give up a course that over the years had given me so much pleasure, and whose questions seemed so vital to students just starting their adult lives. Maybe too I couldn’t write about them because I first needed to untangle what I might say about the books themselves from the story of how I came to teach them; the kind of untangling I’ve tried to do here. Neither excuse holds now, but age brings others, and I still don’t know how to begin, or just what shape that writing might take. So perhaps it will all stay in my notes, these paragraphs aside. I have been the most opportunistic of teachers, forever turning my classes into copy, and there’s something both ironic and refreshing in the thought that one of my best and earliest ideas was kept for my students alone.