City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [96]
The most Yale could do by way of creative writing courses was to have house seminars. Each dormitory or college offered some electives to students. I was hired at Jonathan Edwards College. Once a week I took a train up to New Haven (a two-and-a-half-hour trip each way) to teach my twelve undergrads. I kept imagining that the students would be much better educated than I and would unmask me as a sham; after all, I thought, I’ve never read The Faerie Queene!
Of course few nineteen-year-olds, even at an Ivy League university, have read widely and deeply. They simply haven’t had enough time, especially when the admissions departments at such schools insist they be “well-rounded.” In high school they have to do some sort of community outreach, sing in the glee club, play lacrosse, work as a volunteer for their state senator in the summer, hold down a part-time job to learn the value of a dollar—and study with a tutor the rudiments of Mandarin Chinese twice a week after school. When would they find time to read Spenser or Flannery O’Connor?
Europeans often ask what is actually taught in a creative writing class. Funny, I think, they don’t ask the same question of drawing or musical composition instructors. Literature is at once more banal and more sacralized than the other arts—or, better, since everyone can write a letter or a theme paper, it’s assumed that what separates great “authors” from mere writers is some magical and unteachable talent.
The really popular creative writing teachers (I’m not one of them) talk a lot about “creativity” and “awakening the imagination” and “loosening up” the writer from his inner “inhibitions” and letting him express himself. They have exercises for doing all that and for putting the student in touch with his or her “unconscious.”
That approach would make me feel like an impostor, since I’ve never subjected myself to such exercises and have never once discussed “creativity” with a real writer. Writing as therapy was something I had done in my teens and twenties, but after thirty, as I began to get control of my problems, I had to find a more professional reason to write. I’d always been interested in technique and devoured all the Paris Review interviews of established writers, especially for their hints on how to write. Elizabeth Bowen once wrote nine or ten useful pages on technique, but it’s amazing how few writers have anything to say on that subject. Perhaps they’re afraid to bore the general reader with “shoptalk.”
At Yale every week I gave a minilecture on something technical, such as when to use dialogue, how to establish character, the care and feeding of figurative language, creating suspense—and setting up constant dynamic tension, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. I discovered an invaluable little text by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, an analysis of Bunin’s story “Gentle Breath.” In The Psychology of Art, Vygotsky speaks of the disconnect in every successful literary work between the figurative language and the direction of the plot. He discovered that the greatness of a novel requires an antagonism between the style and the story. Bunin, for instance, tells a dreary tale in “Gentle Breath,” but the final effect of the story is exhilarating. Why? Because all the similes and metaphors, all the descriptions, even the rhythm of the paragraphs, are excited, light, uplifting. This dynamic tension is the real secret of prose, Vygotsky argued—the opposite of what every aesthetician from Aristotle on down through history has averred. Whereas they all believed in redoubling their effects, in reinforcing the general impression of the “anecdote,” in truth the great playwrights and novelists undermine the drift of the plot through the “ornaments” of their prose. The melancholy of Don Quixote’s plot is undercut by the buffoonery of the writing.
New, insecure teachers usually say all they know in their first class and are afraid to call on the students. As teachers leave the classroom after the