In all there were eighteen of them and, with the exception of my religionist, not one who seemed to smoke less than a pack a night. They wrote on the backs of order forms and office stationery; they wrote in pencil and in multicolored inks; they forgot to number pages or to put them in order (less frequently, however, than I thought). Oftentimes the first sheet of a story would be stained with food spots, or several of the pages would be stuck together, in Mrs. Slater’s case with glue spilled by a child, in the case of Mr. Wertz, the male nurse, with what I took to be semen spilled by himself.
When the class got into a debate as to whether a story was “universal” in its implications or a character was “sympathetic,” there was often no way, short of gassing them, of getting them off the subject for the rest of the night. They judged the people in one another’s fiction not as though each was a collection of attributes (a mustache, a limp, a southern drawl) to which the author had arbitrarily assigned a Christian name, but as though they were discussing human souls about to be consigned to Hades or elevated to sainthood-depending upon which the class decided. It was the most vociferous among them who had the least taste or interest in the low-keyed or the familiar, and my admiration for Lydia’s stories would practically drive them crazy; invariably I raised somebody’s hackles, when I read aloud, as an example they might follow, something like Lydia’s simple description of the way in which her two aunts each had laid out on a doily in the bedroom her hairbrush, comb, hairpins, toothbrush, dish of Lifebuoy, and tin of dental powder. I would read a passage like this: “Aunt Helda, while listening to Father Coughlin reasoning with the twenty thousand Christians gathered in Briggs Stadium, would continually be clearing her throat, as though it were she who was to be called upon to speak next.” Such sentences were undoubtedly not so rich and supple as to deserve the sort of extensive, praiseful exegesis I would wind up giving them, but by comparison with most of the prose I read that semester, Mrs. Ketterer’s line describing Aunt Helda listening to the radio in the 1940s might have been lifted from Mansfield Park.
I wanted to hang a sign over my desk saying ANYONE IN THIS CLASS CAUGHT USING HIS IMAGINATION WILL BE SHOT. I would put it more gently when, in the parental sense, I lectured them. “You just cannot deliver up fantasies and call that ‘fiction.’ Ground your stories in what you know. Stick to that. Otherwise you tend, some of you, toward the pipe dream and the nightmare, toward the grandiose and the romantic-and that’s no good. Try to be precise, accurate, measured…” “Yeah? What about Tom Wolfe,” asked the lyrical ex-newspaperman Shaw, “would you call that measured, Zuckerman?” (No Mister or Professor from him to a kid half his age.) “What about prose-poetry, you against that too?” Or Agniashvily, in his barrel-deep Russian brogue, would berate me with Spillane-“And so how come he’s gotten million in print, Professor?” Or Mrs. Slater would ask, in conference, in-advertently touching my sleeve, “But you wear a tweed jacket, Mr. Zuckerman. Why is it ‘dreamy’-I don’t understand-if Craig in my story wears-“ I couldn’t listen. “And the pipe, Mrs. Slater: now why do you think you have him continually puffing on that pipe?” “But men smoke pipes.” “Dreamy, Mrs. Slater, too damn dreamy.” “But-“ “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 than 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-allowing each of us to be as teacherly or as studently 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 spotless!