Teacher (29 page)
I got to study, as I say, with some of America’s best minds. But none did for me what Frank Lears did. For he’d set me on my way. Not much, after that, was needed.
Which is not to say that since then all has been sweetness and light. For one pays for the kind of mental exhilaration that Lears began. One pays in self-doubt and isolation, in the suspicion that what seems to be true resistance to the givens is merely perverse and ill-tempered, a facile way of always having something to say. Lears’ path, so appealing in its first steps, distanced me from my family, cut me loose from religion and popular faith, sent me adrift beyond the world bordered by TV and piety and common sense. One step down that road followed another, and nearing fifty now, I probably could not turn around if I wished to.
But of course—as it is probably plain enough to see—I never left Medford
entirely
behind. I owe it many things. I owe it an abiding inner quotient of irascibility; I owe it, too, a deep tendency to see much of life in terms of oppositions, thesis against antithesis, me against him, linebacker against the guard—what football calls going one-on-one and what, refined away from its physical bruise and crack, thinkers like to refer to as the dialectic. This way of thinking and feeling is, naturally, a recipe for a life of conflict. But without Medford and football and brawling and all the rest, I wonder if I would have had the wherewithal to hang in and say the unpopular thing, cause salutary trouble, and take the hit quite as much as I have managed to do. I wish, truly, that I had had the stomach to do it a little more.
As to my father and me, things did not go well between us. After that night when I screamed in rage at the chance of me and Philip dying in Vietnam, things changed. One way to describe the transformation would be to say that I was one of the first Americans to hear a version of what would become known as the White House tapes. On the tape recordings released during the Watergate scandal, Nixon revealed himself fully. The tapes were full of rage, rants of the most dismal, bitter sort. My father anticipated many of these for me, going on at great length and with teeming fury about hippies, draft dodgers (“Do what you’re told!”), malcontents, the eastern establishment, and, obsessively, the Kennedys. (Though, unlike Nixon, my father was anything but a racist or an anti-Semite.) All of the resentment he had kept under wraps, at great effort and in hopes, I think, of maintaining relations with his son, he now let fly. Things were past hope.
When these barrages came, I just grinned and left the scene: No way I was going to give him the satisfaction of getting to me. He was going to be the raging child now; I, the secure, thoughtful adult.
Of course, when times were propitious, I took my own sort of revenge. I would gas away about this subversive new book or that, Abbie Hoffman’s
Revolution for the Hell of It,
maybe, or Kunin’s
Strawberry Statement.
Of course now I talked constantly about Lears. Frank Lears said this and Frank Lears said that. I was showing my father that he had been cast aside, disowned as the proper authority. And I suppose he was trying to show me that he did not care much, that he was sticking to his rusted guns.
But, a father myself now, I know that the child can inflict more pain by withdrawing his esteem (his love) and transferring it to another than the parent can ever exact in return. The child has all the world before him, many things to discover and become. The father’s horizon is shrinking—he has achieved what he can in life; most of his best moments are behind. The sense that the child is his child—spiritually, in the mind and heart—and will go on and continue his work in the world, with some improvements and maybe a salutary swerve, this hope helps secure a father against the despair of age. But how few fathers can sustain the belief that this will be so?
From a distance, it almost seems the natural order of things that children will leave their families and strive to put themselves under the influence of other guides, different from their own mothers and fathers, more attuned to their rising hopes, often ready to flatter and to idealize them. This is the way of human growth. Plato leaves his own family and goes off to make Socrates his father; then Aristotle leaves his to become Plato’s progeny, at least for a while. But how sad the process is for the father left at home. “I’m so proud of all my son has accomplished,” says the abandoned one. Yet the prouder he can claim to be, the more completely, in general, he has been left behind, repudiated for another.
After I went away to college, my father and I stayed in touch, casually, emptily. Our last moment of real contact came just a year before he died. He had come to visit me at Yale. I remember him in white after-golf shoes and matching white nylon jacket standing in the midst of the Gothic piles at the old college, themselves a touch absurd. He stood there and stared at the great towers, which, whatever the reality, bespeak learning, leisure, the mind’s thriving life. And he said, almost under his breath, “Imagine, spending your life here instead of in some plant.” He meant Raytheon, his company, where he had now been for twenty-five years. I had never heard my father express regret about anything. Whatever he had was always good enough—grand, in fact. There was never any problem, and wouldn’t be, so long as we’d all just Do What We Were Told (and Relax).
My father had more than enough intellectual talent for Yale, surely as much as I did. He should at least have tasted such a world, which was the best one I myself had known. But at the moment when I could have shared a new life with him, that year in Frank Lears’ class, and helped us both grow out of the old skin, I used my new learning, my new mind, as a weapon to sear him. Perhaps I had little choice. The Vietnam War was, in one of its less significant corners, a war between us, my father and me. I suppose our future life together, his better life, was one of its barely acknowledged casualties. My father had already lost a child, his girl Barbara Anne, a grief that was for him too deep for tears. Now a son was gone, too.
In a report that a psychologist did on my father just before he died—seeing a shrink was part of his sentence for a drunk-driving conviction or some such thing—the psychologist remarked on his visiting Yale, being drawn to the place, and having said to himself, “There but for the grace of God go I.” But
grace
was not the word my father intended.
THAT YEAR of teaching was the last for Frank Lears. He got married, went to law school, and eventually moved to northern New England, where he could pursue a life a little akin to the one Thoreau, his longtime idol, managed to lead during his stay at Walden. I haven’t seen Frank Lears in about three decades. But I do carry around with me the strong sense that the party he invited us to, me and Nora and Dubby and Rick Cirone and Jingles McDermott (but not Buller, no, not everyone, quite), is still a live possibility. Sometimes I even stumble on an installment of it, or help create one.
And often when I do, an image of Frank Lears rises up in my mind, an image from the day when he put on the String Band. (Climax—no cameras on the set; the director has stalked off in frustration—is now.) I dislike the record, and sink further into
The
Autobiography of Malcolm X. Lears cranks up the music a little louder. I keep reading. But then, curious, I raise my head. The racket of the String Band pours in. And there in the back of the room, is Frank Lears, dancing away. He’s a maladroit dancer, stiff and arhythmic. Not until I saw Bob Dylan onstage did I ever see someone move so self-consciously. But it struck me that this was probably the first time anyone had ever danced in this building, or at least in this classroom. The air was too heavy with invisible, gray weight: Most bodies, given instructions, probably couldn’t have moved.
But here was Lears bringing it off. In the future, years down the line, maybe they’d have everyone at Medford High School up and dancing to the Incredible String Band in geometric unison or in spontaneous disarray. They’d teach mini-courses in the String Band’s kind of music, whatever that might be. But not then, and not for some time to come, either. No—here was Lears alone, dancing by himself. He was shakin’ it hard; he was letting go; he was workin’ it, as they said then, on out. And why not? When you let Socrates out of the box for one more run, he
will
dance. Lears had scored a semi-benevolent victory over the place. You could say he’d beaten us at our own game; but, really, he’d shown us a new one. He had a right to a little celebration.
Acknowledgments
I suppose that if any kind of book should spring fully formed from the mind of its author it would be a memoir. But at least with this memoir, that was not the case. I had considerable help along the way, which it’s a pleasure, now that the labors are nearly ended, to acknowledge.
Chris Calhoun’s contribution stretched far beyond what anyone would have the right to expect from even the best of literary agents. He was crucial in getting this project up and running, then provided ongoing insight, generous support, and amiable advice.
Alex Star saw the possibilities for this subject well before I did; he published an early essay that was the book’s seed, and continued to take an interest in the book long after any professional obligation had lapsed.
Daniel Menaker took the project on at Random House, believed in it before there was much reason to, then, at exactly the right moment, cast his superb editorial eye on the manuscript. I have profited from his help no end.
Katie Hall took the book over and, with dash and generosity of spirit, saw it through its final phases.
Michael Pollan read and reread the book, always improving it with his comments and continually bolstering me with his encouragement. Those who know Michael and his work will understand how fortunate I am to have such a friend.
I am grateful to my colleague Chip Tucker, who brought his considerable learning and acumen to bear on the manuscript and, as he has with all my books, made it palpably better than it would have been without him. My former teacher David R. Lenson read the book and responded with great high spirits and plenty of fine suggestions.
Michael DeLeo gave me the benefit of his wit, good humor, and considerable insight. I thank him profusely.
Thanks also to Veronica Windholz for numberless useful interventions, to Megan Marshall and Jason Bell for wise advice, and to Greg Adams for a critical favor at the right moment.
My sons, Willie and Matthew, kept me afloat during the hard times and enhanced the good ones no end. To my wife, Liz, I owe the most of all. She is my first reader, first editor, fervent ally, and sage adviser. All through the writing of this book, I had the blessing of her love, humor, steadfastness, and grace. No expression of thanks could encompass all that she has done for me.
MARK EDMUNDSON
TEACHER
Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. A prizewinning scholar, he has published a number of works of literary and cultural criticism, including
Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida.
He has also written for such publications as
The New Republic
,
The New York Times Magazine, The Nation
, and
Harper’s
, where he is a contributing editor.
ALSO BY MARK EDMUNDSON
Towards Reading Freud:
Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson
and Sigmund Freud
Wild Orchids and Trotsky:
Messages from American Universities (ed)
Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida:
A Defense of Poetry
Nightmare on Main Street:
Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of Gothic
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2003
Copyright © 2002 by Mark Edmundson
Vintage and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the
Random House edition as follows:
Edmundson, Mark.
Teacher: the one who made the difference / Mark Edmundson.
p. cm.
1. Lears, Frank. 2. High school teachers—United States—Biography.
I. Title.
LA2317.M49 E36 2002
373.11’0092—dc21
2001048981
eISBN: 978-0-307-42805-9
v3.0