Chapter 3
northanger abbey learning to learn
From the beginning, my love for Jane Austen had been intertwined with my love for the professor with whom I had first encountered her. He was the one who had taught the seminar where I read Emma, he was the one who had shepherded me through my oral exams, and now he would be the one with whom I would undertake the inconceivable task of writing my dissertation.
But first he did the impossible by helping me find a great, cheap New York apartment. I had been schlepping around the city for weeks on end trying to figure out somewhere to live—filling out forms in shady brokerage offices, answering ads for fifth-floor walk-ups, auditioning for spots as the fourth roommate in apartments the size of a decent bedroom, checking out places where the bathtub was in the kitchen, the kitchen was in the living room, and the living room reeked of rotting fish from the Chinese market downstairs—when he mentioned that his next-door neighbor was looking for someone to rent one of the floors in her brownstone.
The place was a palace compared to the things I’d been looking at, and she was asking far less than she could have gotten on the open market, so it was way too sweet a deal for me to worry about the fact that I’d be living right next to the person who’d be supervising my work for the rest of my time in school. I did experience one little wave of panic, though. Smoking pot with some friends a few days after signing the lease, I stumbled into one of those moments of stoned clarity. Oh, my God! I thought. I’m moving in next to my professor! Could there be a more obvious way of telling the entire world—especially my professor—that I think of him as a father substitute? Nor was the irony of breaking free from one father only to go running into the arms of another in any way lost on me. I could practically feel the diapers growing on me as I sat there. But even in that state, something told me to calm down and stay with my first instinct. I had too much to learn from this man to back away from him now.
He was the youngest old person I had ever met. He was already old enough to retire by the time I took his class, but he was still going stronger than anyone else in the department. He advised a huge number of graduate students, taught courses on a vast range of subjects (nineteenth-century fiction, Romantic poetry, Native American literature, children’s literature, science fiction, Great Books, etc., etc.), helped run about eight professional journals, published a new book every three years or so, and even took on extra classes—an unheard-of thing and a testament to his incredible devotion as a teacher. A houseguest of his—a medical student, no layabout herself—once told me that she’d hear him hustling down the stairs first thing in the morning, getting a running start on his workday before she’d even had a chance to climb out of bed.
But it wasn’t just his energy. He had a young person’s ability to see the world with fresh eyes. His white hair shot up off his forehead like a jolt of discovery, and when he came across a new idea, all the lines in his face would stand at attention. He always wanted to hear what you had to say, no matter how much you stumbled while trying to say it, because he never missed an opportunity to learn something new.
It took me a while to figure all this out. In fact, I wondered at first if I had made a mistake by taking his class. That first day, as he came bustling into the room with a stack of books under his arm, a little old man with a white beard, his manner seemed oddly abrupt, almost jumpy, his eyes kind of squirrelly, and he gave a sort of chuckle, as if he were enjoying a private joke that he didn’t plan to share with us. He came across as eccentric, to say the least, if not actually soft in the head, and the impression was not dispelled by the questions he proceeded to ask. They seemed absurdly simple—silly, really, almost stupid, too basic and obvious to ask a class of freshmen, let alone a graduate seminar.
But when we tried to answer them, we discovered that they were not simple in the least. They were profound, because they were about all the things we had come to take for granted— about novels, about language, about reading. Questions like, what does it mean to identify with a literary character? I thought I knew, but did I really? Does it simply mean putting yourself in their place? Obviously not. Or approving of their actions? But we’re happy to identify with bad characters, given the right encouragement. No, the best I could come up with was that it seemed to be a kind of in-between state—you’re somehow them and not them at the same time—that can’t exactly be put into words. Which wasn’t really much of an answer at all.
Or again, he observed that there is one part of Madame Bovary that no one ever translates into English. Huh? Well, he said, the title—why is that? That one really brought me up short, almost made me angry, it was so audacious. Were you even allowed to ask a thing like that? On the other hand, how would you translate it? Lady Bovary? But she’s not an aristocrat. Mrs. Bovary? But that’s much too plain. The answer seemed to be that there is no English equivalent for “Madame,” not even “Madam,” which said more than I really wanted to know about the differences between the two cultures, and, therefore, my ability to understand the novel altogether.
Within about half an hour, I had started to get what the old man was doing, and I realized that I had never experienced anything like it before. He was stripping the paint off our brains. He was showing us that everything is open to question, especially the things we thought we already knew. He was teaching us to approach the world with curiosity and humility rather than the professional certainty we were all trying so hard to cultivate. In order to answer his questions, we had to forget everything and start over again from the beginning. “Answers are easy,” he would later say. “You can go out to the street and any fool will give you answers. The trick is to ask the right questions.”
I knew a good thing when I saw one. I took a second class, in Romantic poetry, and became a regular at office hours. It felt like a privilege to be able to sit next to his desk and talk to him one-on-one. He never made us feel like anything less than his equals, even though we weren’t. He had an impish laugh, though, and he could be shifty. (When I found out that he also studied Native American literature, I decided that he must be Coyote, the trickster. But we had a tendency to mythologize him. An Indian friend saw him as the elephant-headed god Ganesh, remover of obstacles.) If you said something vague or half-formed, he’d pretend to misunderstand you, as if he were slightly dense, so that by fighting your way back to what you really meant, you’d have to figure out what you’d been trying to say in the first place. I’d catch myself walking out of his office backwards, as if I’d been in the presence of royalty.
My dearest hope, once I started teaching myself, was to have the same kind of impact on my students. Starting our third year, the graduate program required us to teach three years of freshman English. The challenge thrilled me; I had always wanted to be a teacher, and now, after encountering my professor, I was more eager than ever to get into the classroom. But once I did, all the air went out of my balloon, and fast. Something was desperately wrong with what I was trying to do, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I would come into class with long chains of questions that I had painstakingly designed to lead my students to the ideas I thought they needed to grasp, but they never managed to give me the answers I wanted, and the whole thing would deteriorate into a guessing game.
Instead of being receptive to what I had to tell them, they would fold their arms and sit back in their chairs and stare at me with those skeptical-teenager looks on their faces. The air in the room would go sour, like a bad smell. Time turned to jelly. By about ten minutes in, a little piece of my mind would detach itself and float up to the ceiling, watching me for the rest of the hour as I stood there flailing away. It was like one of those dreams where you find yourself onstage and realize that you’ve forgotten to learn the lines. I’d rush from class with a guilty feeling in my stomach, like a criminal making a getaway, or try to engage a student as we left the room, hoping for a last-minute reprieve. But of course they couldn’t get out of there fast enough.