A Life in School. What the Teacher Learned

Jane Tompkins

continued from No. 3

STUDENTS IN CLASS

Little by little, in the course of doing what teachers wanted, I became a talker in class. Not the kind of talking you got sent to the principal’s office for, naturally, but the kind that comes from a desire to do one’s best. This kind of talking came from both fear and love. Maybe the rea­son I became a teacher was that I loved to talk so much.

The teacher would ask a question; there would be silence. I’d look around. So, to help the teacher out, I’d raise my hand. It became a habit. I always knew the answer, so why not get credit for it? I spoke well and clearly, didn’t mumble or swallow my words like other kids; I had a large vocabulary and could display it when I spoke. I didn’t do this to be ob­noxious, but because it fulfilled my ideal of good behavior: to stand, to speak clearly, to know the right answer, and to phrase it eloquently – what else was there?

Teachers liked me – how could they not? – I was enthusiastic about learning, and when they asked a question, I could always be counted on to save their bacon.

This triumphant slavishness explains why my favorite anecdote about talking in class comes from a lesson in German grammar. A teacher has lectured on Das Kurslaufdes Blutes (the circulation of the blood). “Why is it,” he asked the students, “that when I stand upside down, all the blood rushes to my head, but when I stand on my feet, this doesn’t hap­pen?” One of the students raised his hand and said (meldete sich auf und sagte): “Because your feet aren’t empty!” (“Weil seine fussen nicht leer sind”). I love the insult to the teacher, and the way of saying “raised his hand” in German: meldete sich auf. It implies a lot about speaking in class: “to meld yourself out,” as if you were playing cards, to expose what you’ve got in your hand to the world. Talking in class involves a kind of formal exhibition of the self different from what takes place in ordinary conversation. You’re putting on a performance in front of a large group of people, and the performance is being judged.

I loved to perform in this way. Doing my turn in front of everybody was exhilarating: I step into the spotlight, I feel the fear, I say my lines, feel hot, at risk, brave, exposed, then bow invisibly to the unheard applause, rescued from oblivion once more. In a funny way, I felt and still feel more at home in such moments than in many others. For in that space of time, borne up by the audience’s attention, my existence is guaranteed. I can’t not be, intensely.

I derived my ideal of good speaking from my mother, an excellent talker, who believed in good elocution and strong delivery. She would help me rehearse before I had to give a speech of any kind at school. I have sat for years listening to her talk, absorbing her opinions, her out­look on life, mesmerized by the drama of things as she saw them, a willing pupil and not bad imitator of her power to command atten­tion. I only began to see the dark side of this power when, in later years, I would occasionally find myself trapped in the flow of some­one’s conversation, unable to break in, dragged along by a current I couldn’t resist, mute, and unable to call for help. Even more dimly, I began to become aware of my own power to enslave another in the flow of language – always a person subordinate to me, usually a stu­dent – driven by need, the need to register my existence on the retina of another human soul.

The terrible need to talk and be listened to and the terrible way people feel when someone imposes this need on them are subjects rarely spo­ken about in a serious way. The need for attention is huge and some­times seems insatiable, and the need to be free from such impositions is equally strong and desperate. That feeling of total effacement (and invisibility) when someone else is doing all the talking and you can’t think of anything to say would come over me very strongly sometimes when I went home for the holidays at Christmas or Thanksgiving.

My parents would invite guests to dinner. During the meal I was responsi­ble for serving and clearing dishes, and getting things from the kitchen. As I sat at the table near the kitchen door, listening to the conversa­tion – my parents would be talking animatedly back and forth, the guests chiming in – suddenly I would feel a twinge, the early warning signal, and wonder what was wrong. Nothing is wrong! Here we are at Christmas/Thanksgiving sitting around drinking wine, eating good food – and I am feeling smaller and smaller, less and less substantial, as if I had a hole in my stomach that was connected to the Great Void. I feel if I don’t move or say something soon, I’ll just disappear. At such times it was as if something had happened to the very quality of my ex­istence; though I sat there in body, inwardly my continuation in being became precarious. Not to be part of that conversation seemed shame­ful, an admission of weakness, a sign that perhaps one did not really have the right to exist after all.

I think that from the time I was very little I must have felt overpow­ered by my parents’ conversation, which went on, literally and figura­tively, over my head. At any rate, my mother’s need to talk and be listened to modelled my own. Talking was being; being was being lis­tened to. I learned to talk and get attention, so I could “be” along with the rest. I learned how to do this from my mother and carried the ability to school, where I performed to the great satisfaction of my teachers.

I love to talk, and so do most professors I know. Talking’s the stock in trade of academic life. Sometimes I think I’ll die if I don’t get to do it.

There are situations that set going in me an electric current that has to discharge itself in words. I sit in meetings, and before I know it, I’ve spo­ken, passionately, sure there’s some point that has to be made, which no one can see but me. If the meeting lasts long enough, I have to speak twice, three times. It’s got nothing to do with the topic, or very little; the dynamic is almost physical; if I don’t talk I’ll explode. The process isn’t conscious – if it were, I’d manage to keep quiet – and only in retro­spect can I see how I behave. Where two or three are gathered together, there I need to talk, and if I don’t, there’s a price to pay. When talking is being, and being is being listened to, not talking drains your life away.

But the desperation points to something out of place. I think that in my upbringing, and almost certainly in my mother’s, talking must have been a way to substitute for things that have no words. Things like sit­ting in my Aunt Leta’s lap in the corner of her dining room, while she rocked and sang to me a Welsh lullaby, the sense of security and rest, the buoyant feeling of not having to do anything but lie there and be rocked, feeling safe and taken care of: that was the kind of thing you didn’t need words for.

Recently a friend of mine returned from Tahiti. One day, she said, she was out snorkeling, and, feeling the buoyancy of the ocean under her, the effortlessness of floating on the surface while gazing at the world beneath, she suddenly started to cry. She just let herself, since no one could see or hear her. That feeling of being completely supported, held in an infinite embrace: so it must be to be able to live without talk­ing. Just floating there, effortlessly borne up, your body rising and falling with the water, only thus could one exist without the need for words.

No wonder, years later, I found it hard to get the hang of nondirective teaching, where you give your power over to the students, and they do the talking; no wonder I found the change irresistible. To perform in order to survive existentially is backbreaking work; to give up the burden of performance, an inexpressible relief.

RESEARCH (HICHER EDUCATION)

It was in the smokers of Denbigh (pronounced Denbee), my dorm for three years at Bryn Mawr, that college happened for me. It was a fore­gone conclusion that I would go to college; the only question was where. The choice I made turned out to be a good one; at Bryn Mawr my expe­rience of school took a definite upward turn. Right away, there are two contrasting stories. The more vivid takes place in the front smoker, one of the public reception rooms where we hung out in the daytime between classes, and where at night we drank coffee from demitasse cups and played bridge and smoked. The other story belongs to the quiet smoker at the back of the firstfloor corridor where some of us studied and read and wrote papers. The two settings mirrored the division be­tween personal life and work life, though at Bryn Mawr these two as­pects of existence seemed less separate and opposed to each other than they ever would again.

My business is with the back smoker, where my work life acquired the shape it would have for a long time to come. But first I want to glance at myself and Jeannie Berkeley, sitting on the banquette of the big bay window in one of the front smokers of Denbigh, to note the softness and intensity of her eyes, brown eyes deeper than any I’d ever looked into, and to hear her throaty voice saying things so frank I was aston­ished a person could say them, as I thirstily waited for more.

Jeannie left after her sophomore year to get married, pulled away by forces whose strength I didn’t understand. But not before she told me after dinner in the smoker one night what it was like having sex for the first time. Her voice was lowered, choked with emotion and conspiracy: “It hurts like hell,” she said. I sat there with nothing to say, more amazed than ever.

I loved being with Jeannie, whose life, it seemed to me, went down several stories deeper than anyone else’s I knew; Jeannie, who was Jewish, named things no one else would. She focussed on personal relation­ships, feelings, her own and other people’s. I was hurt and disappointed when she left. She was my link to something, I didn’t know what, more alive and real than anything I’d yet been in contact with. When she left I had no other way of making the connection. At least not for a long time.

But the person I’m going to become is not sitting on the sofa with Jeannie. She’s in the back smoker, working on a paper on the nineteenth century Shakespearean actor Tommaso Salvini. I’m a senior, I’ve come back from my junior year in Florence, and I feel comfortable sitting at the table under the fluorescent lights, going through my notecards, smoking, drinking coffee, getting my thoughts in order.

It suits me, this job. I do it well. The research for the paper is largely in Italian, and I like delving into books, especially if few others besides me can read them. It’s like bringing back buried treasure; at the same time, I get to prove my proficiency in a foreign language. The writing is satisfying, too. I derive great satisfaction from crafting sentences that have a certain ring to them, a rhythmic Tightness – if possible, a dramatic flair. I like to feel my own enthusiasm fill me up as I create a ver­bal picture. I enjoy the process of moving from the phase where all you’ve got is a collection of bits of information and few rough ideas to a smoothly polished paper, with introduction, rising action, climax, and denouement. It’s hard work, I have to push and strain to do it, but I know that if I keep trying I’ll get it done.

Three years before, as a freshman, I had struggled to write a paper that drew not only on Italian but French as well – at the time, I had only a few months of Italian and some high school French to go on. I’d cho­sen to write on two Renaissance plays, Corneille’s Sophonisbe and Trissino’s Sofonisba, an Italian version of the same story, comparing them to each other in light of Aristotle’s unities of time, place, and action, and with reference to Corneille’s treatise, Les Trois Unites. The paper was for a philosophy course, so, although I didn’t know it, I was steering wide of the mark with my literary comparisons, but I forged ahead, overwhelmed by the difficulty of the language, the endlessness of the plays, the brute, unforgiving nature of Aristotle’s dicta about tragedy, and the task of coming up with something interesting to say. Three years later, I know Italian, know how to choose a paper topic, know what my professor requires, and know that with some effort I can bring the whole thing off. Besides, it’s spring, and the consciousness of sunshine and balmy air, daffodils and green grass out of doors makes the work I do inside my head, surrounded by books and papers, more intense, the cigarettes more delicious.

At Bryn Mawr I enjoyed doing scholarly work, which ranged from the technical (analyzing prosody in sonnets by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas), to the archaeological (doing research on Tommaso Salvini), to the wildly exciting (finding autobiographical elements in the mystical poetry of Thomas Traherne). When I worked hard, 1 gained ap­proval from my professors and felt good about myself.

Sometimes the approval came at a price. For one class we were using an anthology with a reddish brown cover, Seventeenth Century Prose and Poetry. The introductions to the poets in that volume – Vaughn, Donne, Herbert, Traherne, Crashawe – were the most inspiring pieces of criti­cism I’d ever read. I remember exactly where I was sitting in the back smoker when I encountered them. They were lyrical and impressionistic full of passion, brimming with wonder and awe at the dazzling beauty and expressivity of the poems. The writer used words like “diamonds” and “pearls,” “fountains” and “sunlight,” to describe the poems; I was beside myself with happiness. But when I mentioned my enthusiasm to someone in the class, her sniggering reply warned me that it was danger­ous to love this kind of prose. Soon afterward the professor dismissed the introductions as silly and effusive, not real criticism. We should ig­nore them. But I knew that the person who had written them had put his whole soul into those paragraphs and that it was my soul, too, be­cause his words had expressed exactly what I felt about poetry some­times. From then on I was careful to temper my own effusiveness. I didn’t want to be associated with the names people used to describe those introductions. But the passion and exuberance I felt for literature remained nevertheless, fuelling my efforts.

At Bryn Mawr the work took place in an environment that was ideally suited to me. The campus was green, secluded, and architecturally ro­mantic. At eighteen, its cloistered atmosphere provided just what I wanted: the opportunity to be sequestered from the world for four years in order to read books, to listen to professors who were authorities on their subjects, to learn to write papers, to talk to other students, to take part in activities like singing and acting, to make friends who were simi­larly motivated, and to date boys from backgrounds like mine. College was a place where I could exercise my curiosity, develop my talents, and test the waters of social experience without worrying about earning a living or meeting the demands of an alien environment. It was a place where what I was good at counted, where I felt challenged but also felt safe.

Dorm life provided the right combination of society and solitude. For an only child, living with seventy-five other people with interests and values similar to mine was heaven. I never had to be alone, could always find someone to talk to, yet there was no pressure to socialize. If you liked, you could hide in your room all day. Moreover I had friends right there every day for closer companionship, and boys from Haverford and Penn who would take me out on dates. It was a tremendous relief to find I was attractive to them since I hadn’t been popular in high school. My sexual ignorance, combined with the desire to please and be polite, got me into some ludicrous situations.