My Life as a Man (10 page)

I also withstood the temptation to take myself for an interview to the North Shore clinic where the study of psychosomatic ailments was getting under way. Not that I was out of sympathy with the theories or techniques of psychotherapy as I had grasped them through my reading. It was, rather, that aside from these headaches, I was as vigorous in
the
execution of my duties, and as thrilled with the circumstances of my life, as I could ever have dreamed of being. To be sure, to try to teach sixty-five freshmen to write an English sentence that was clear, logical, and precise was not always an enchanting
experience; yet, even when
teaching was most tedious, I maintained my missionary spirit and
with
it the conviction that with every
clichéd
expression or mindless argument I exposed in the margins of my students
’
essays, I was waging a kind of guerrilla war against the army of slobs, philistines, and barbarians who seemed to me to control the national mind, either through the media or the government. The presidential press conference provided me with material for any number of classroom sessions; I would have samples of the Eisenhower porridge mimeographed for distribution and then leave him to the students to correct and grade. I would submit for their analysis a sermon by Norman Vincent Peale, the president
’
s religious adviser; or an ad for General Motors; or a
“
cover story
”
from
Time.
What with television quiz shows, advertising agencies, and the Cold War all flourishing, it was a period in which a composition teacher did not necessarily have to possess the credentials or doctrines of a clergyman to consider himself engaged in the business of saving souls.

If the classroom caused me to imagine myself to be something of a priest, the university neighborhood seemed to me something like my parish—and of course something of a Bloomsbury—a community of the fai
th
ful, observing the sacraments of literacy, benevolence, good taste, and social concern. My own street of low, soot-stained brick apartment buildings was on the grim side, and the next one over, run-down only the year before, was already in rubble—leveled as though by blockbusters for an urban renewal project; also, in the year I had been away, there had been a marked increase of random nighttime violence in the neighborhood. Nonetheless, within an hour of my return, I felt as comfortable and at home as someone whose family had dwelled in the same small town for generations. Simultaneously I could never forget that it was not in such a paradise of true believers that I had been born and raised; and even if I should live in the Hyde Park neighborhood for the next fifty years—and why should I ever want to live elsewhere?—the city itself, with streets named for
the
prairie and the Wa
bash, with railroad trains
marked
“
Illinois Central
”
and a lake bearing the name
“
Michigan,
”
would always have the flavor of the faraway for one whose fantasies of adventure had been nurtured in a sickbed in Camden, New Jersey, over an aeon of lonely afternoons. How could
I
be in
“
Chicago
”
? The question, coming at me while shopping in the Loop, or watching a movie at the Hyde Park Theatre, or simply opening a can of sardines for lunch at my apartment on Drexel, seemed to me unanswerable. I suppose my wonderment and my joy were akin to my parents
’
, when they would address those envelopes to me in care of Faculty Exchange. How could
he
be a professor, who could barely breathe with
that
bronchitis? All this by way of explaining why I did not betake myself to that clinic for
the
study of psychosomatic ailments and offer up my carcass and unconscious for investigation. I was too happy. Everything that was a part of getting older seemed to me to be a pleasure: the independence and au
th
ority, of course, but no less so the refinement and strengthening of one
’
s moral nature—to be magnanimous where one had been selfish and carping, to be forgiving where one had been resentful, to be patient where one had been impetuous, to be generous and helpful where one had previously been needful
…
It seemed to me at twenty-four as natural to be solicitous of my sixty-year-old parents as to be decisive and in command
with
my eighteen- and nineteen-year-old students. Toward the young girls in my classes, some as lovely and tempting as the junior at Pembroke College with whom I had just concluded a love affair, I behaved as I was expected to; it went without saying that as their teacher I must not allow myself to take a sexual interest in them or to exploit my authority for personal gratification. No difficulty I encountered seemed beyond my powers, whether it was concluding a love affair, or teaching the principles of logic to my dullest composition students, or rising with a dry mouth to address the Senate of the Faculty, or writing a short story four times over to get it
“
right
”
…
How could I turn myself over to a psychoanalyst as
“
a case
”
? All the evidence o
f my life (exclusive of the mi
graines) argued too strongly against that, certainly to one to whom it meant so much never to be classified as a patient again. Furthermore, in the imme
di
at
e aftermath of a headache, I would experience such elation just from the
absence
of pain that I would almost believe that whatever had laid that dose of suffering upon me had been driven from my body for good—that the powerful enemy (yes, more feeble interpretation, or superstition) who had unleashed upon me all his violence, who had dragged me to the very end of my endurance, had been proved unable in the end to do me in. The worse the headache the more certain I was when it was over that I had defeated the affliction once and for all.
And was a better man for it.
(And no, my body was not painted blue in these years, nor did I otherwise believe in angels, demons, or deities.) Often I vomited during the attacks, and afterward, not quite daring to move (for fear of breaking), I lay on the bathroom floor with my chin on the toilet bowl and a hand mirror to my face, in a parody perhaps of Narcissus. I wanted to see what I looked like having suffered so and survived; in that feeble and euphoric state, it would not have frightened me—might even have thrilled me—to have observed black vapors, something like cannon smoke, rolling out of my ears and nostrils. I would talk to my eyes, reassuring them as though they were somebody else
’
s:
“
That
’
s it, the end, no more pain.
”
But in point of fact there would be plenty more; the experiment which has not ended was only beginning.

In the second semester of that—no other word will do; if it smacks of soap opera, that is not unintentional—of that fateful year, I was asked if I should like to teach, in addition to my regular program, the night course in
“
Creative Writing
”
in the downtown division of the university, a single session each Monday night running for three consecutive hours, at a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars for
the
semester. Another windfall it seemed to me—my round-trip tourist-class fare on the
Rotter
dam.
As for the students, they were barely versed in the rules of syntax and spelling, and so, I discovered, hardly able to make head or tail of the heady introductory lecture that, with characteristic thoroughness, I had prepared over a period of a week for delivery at our first meeting. Enti
tl
ed
“
The Strategies and Intentions of Fiction,
”
it was replete with lengthy (and I had thought)
“
salient
”
quotations from Aristotle
’
s
Poetics,
Flaubert
’
s correspondence, Dostoevsky
’
s diaries, and James
’
s critical prefaces—I quoted only from masters, pointed only to monuments:
Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, The Ambassadors, Madame Bovary, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Sound and the Fury.
“
‘
What seems to me the highest and most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does— that is, fill us with wonderment. The most beautiful works have indeed this quality. They are serene in aspect, incomprehensible
…
pitiless.
’”
Flaubert, in a letter to Louise Colet (
“
1853,
”
I told them, in responsible scholarly fashion,
“
a year into the writing of
Madame Bovary
”
)
.
“‘
The house of fiction has in short not one window but a million
…
every one of which is pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will
…
’
”
James, the preface to
The Portrait of a Lady.
I concluded with a lengthy reading from Conrad
’
s inspirational introduction to
The Nigger of the
“
Narcissus
”
(1897):
“
‘
…
the artist descends within himself, and in
that
lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of
the
warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities—like the vulnerable body within a steel armor. His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring—and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes
theories. But the artist
appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition— and, therefore, more permanen
tly
enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn
…
’”

When I finished reading my twenty-five pages and asked for questions, there was to my surprise and disappointment, just one; as it was the only Negro in the class who had her hand raised, I wondered if it could be that after all I had said she was going to tell me she was offended by the tide of Conrad
’
s novel. I was already preparing an explanation that might turn her touchiness into a discussion of frankness in fiction—fiction as the secret and the taboo disclosed—when she rose to stand at respectful attention, a thin middle-aged woman in a neat dark suit and a pillbox hat:
“
Professor, I know that if you
’
re writing a friendly letter to a little boy, you write on the envelope
‘
Master.
’
But what if you
’
re writing a friendly letter to a little girl? Do you still say
‘
Miss
’
—or just what
do
you say?
”

The class, having endured nearly two hours of a kind of talk none of them had probably ever heard before outside of a church, took the occasion of her seemingly ludicrous question to laugh uproariously—she was the kid who had farted following the principal
’
s lecture on discipline and decorum. Their laughter was
pointedly
directed at student, not teacher; nonetheless, I flushed with shame and rema
ined red all the while Mrs. Cor
bett, dogged and unperturbed in the face of the class
’
s amusement, pursued the knowledge she was there for.

Lydia Ketterer turned out to be by far the most gifted writer in the class and, though older than I, sti
ll the youngest of my
students—not so young, however, as she looked in the bleak heart of a Chicago winter, dressed in galoshes, knee stockings, tartan skirt,
“
reindeer
”
sweater, and the
tasseled
red wool hat, from which a straight curtain of wheat-colored hair dropped down at either side of her face. Outfitted for the ice and cold, she seemed, amid all those tired night-school faces, a junior-high-school girl-in fact, she was twenty-nine and mother of a lanky ten-year-old already budding breasts more enticing than her own. She lived not far from me in Hyde Park, having moved to the university neighborhood four years earlier, following her breakdown —and in the hope of changing her luck. And indeed when we met in my classroom, she probably was living through what were to be the luckiest months of her life: she had a job she liked as an interviewer with a university-sponsored social science research project at two dollars an hour, she had a few older graduate students (connected to the project) as friends, she had a small bank account and a pleasant little apartment with a fireplace from which she could see across the Midway to the Gothic facades of the university. Also at that time she was the willing and grateful patient of a lay psychoanalyst, a woman named Rutherford, for whom she dressed up (in the most girlish dress-up clothes I
’
d seen since grade school, puffed sleeves, crinolines, etc.) and whom she visited every Saturday morning in her office on Hyde Park Boulevard. The stories she wrote were inspired mos
tly
by the childhood recollections she delivered forth to Dr. Rutherford on these Saturdays and dealt almost exclusively with the period after her father had raped her and run, when she and her mother had been taken on as guests—her mother as guest, Lydia as Cinderella—by the two aunts in their maidenly
little
prison house in Skokie.