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
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.
As for their writing—the thing I was supposed to be helping them get better at—they would hand in little essays twice a week, and I would spend hours covering them with red marks, pouncing on every dangling modifier and misplaced comma like an avenging angel. No matter how bad things were going in the classroom—this was my twisted logic—it was the one thing, I thought, that I could do for them. And then they would hand in the next set of papers, and all the same mistakes would still be there. I wanted to pull my teeth out. Shouldn’t they have learned this stuff already? Why weren’t they trying harder? Didn’t they appreciate what I was doing for them? I wanted to blame them for the way things were going, but I secretly knew that I wasn’t the teacher I thought I was going to be, and I certainly wasn’t anything like the one my professor was. I began to wonder if my whole desire to go into academia hadn’t been a terrible mistake.
Under the circumstances, I was only too happy to turn back to my other work. The first chapter of my dissertation was going to be about Jane Austen, needless to say, and I started out by going back and rereading all of her novels, this time in chronological order. That meant beginning with
Catherine Morland, the figure at the center of the story, was only seventeen—one of the youngest and certainly the most naïve of Austen’s heroines. In fact, she may have been the novelist’s own mocking self- portrait. If Austen resembled Elizabeth Bennet as a young woman, Catherine may well have been what she was like as a girl. Both were daughters of clergymen in sleepy country villages. Both came from big families—eight kids in Austen’s case, ten in Catherine’s—and both had a bunch of older brothers. Catherine, at ten, was a tomboy: “she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house”—just the kind of slope the Austens had at the back of their own house.
At fourteen, Catherine preferred “cricket, base ball”—yes, baseball, and how marvelous it is to imagine the young Jane Austen playing shortstop—“riding on horseback, and running about the country” to reading books. Or at least, serious books. Catherine loved reading novels but hated having to study history—just like her creator, who composed a satirical “History of England” (“by a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian”) when she was just about the same age.
But at fifteen, “appearances were mending.” Catherine began to curl her hair, long to dance, read love poems, and wear pretty clothes. Her looks improved, and by seventeen she had become an attractive girl. But one
