“Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose”

Sometimes you have an opportunity to take stock. You look around. You look back to see — or perhaps imagine — a path you took.

Jul 28, 2022

Read time: about 9 minutes. This week: I look back on my career teaching writing as I think about seeing students of forty years ago. Coincidental convergence of writers and … dead editors, non-fictional and fictional. Next week: Guess what? I haven’t decided yet, but I’m thinking about air travel. Can one really be wistful about PanAm’s good old days? Yup.

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Historians do it all the time, this looking back. They have a methodology and, if they’re lucky, mountains of historical sources, perhaps a living person or two who’s willing to chat or respond to a letter or email. Mostly, it seems, the way appears as breadcrumbs of events, half-eaten by time and slightly tainted with the mold of misunderstanding.

I got an email from a former student, now a physician in Virginia with her own family of almost-all-out-of-the-nest children. It was an invitation to come to a reunion of alumni and to share some thoughts in a few minutes. No specific format. An informal reunion of students, held annually. Of course I agreed to take part, since I treasure the experience of working with the students of the time. And, I have to admit that I began to feel exactly the same anxiety and excitement that I felt in the weeks before my “introductory writing” class would begin back in the 1980s. The Nineteen-Eighties! Forty years ago!

What is there to share? What might I see when I look back?

I bumped into coincidently related pieces after that email invitation, and they seemed to speak to the roles we take as students and as teachers — for, remember: in our lives we play both roles, repeatedly and maybe even always. I know that the people I see this weekend taught me a great deal during a time when they called me a teacher. I think we share in the celebration of each other, just as we share the debt we owe each other. For my students, now middle-aged, shaped me as much as perhaps I touched them.

So, my thinking about teachers, writers, editors, students — which we all are in some fashion — as I read and thought through the past few weeks. I saw a movie, too.

The teacher. The editor. The twain shall meet after all.

When I think about my time teaching, I view the activity mainly as “teaching writing.” Writing — putting words together meaningfully — assembles thought, discovers ideas, and reveals weak spots, the rotten boards imperiling the bridge from one thought to the next. Like a mathematics of language and discourse of inner life, writing is an essential tool of learning and thinking, and the tool shapes processes of teaching.

But that metaphor of mathematics also deceives, because language itself is a slippery thing. Language reveals ambiguously and evocatively, qualitatively not quantitatively. It admits poetry and eloquence as well as misunderstanding and falsehood. (Sometimes all at once.) So the “stance” of teachers differs from the mathematician, who can build on firmer ground.

I’ve come to think that many successful teachers function as editors in academic garb instead of wearing green-shaded visors, pencil tucked behind their ears. They value and focus on the writing their students produce, just as editors value — even revere — prose from the writers they work with. An editor pokes at the rotten boards, revealing weaknesses and sometimes offering a work around or, in the worst cases, a suggestion to tear things down and start again.

Three essays and a movie popped up since I was invited to the reunion, all of them recalling editors and teachers. The first was in a book that I’d used long ago when I taught that introductory writing course to the people I’ll see again later this week. The book is known as “Strunk and White,” more accurately The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. White revised, though as his introduction suggests, he didn’t dare augment or elaborate too much.

The dog’s name was Minnie. *A Family Photograph of E. B. White, Cropped from a Photo of Him and His Wife.* Unknown date. Black/White negative. White Literary LLC. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EB_White_and_his_dog_Minnie.png. Rights: CC BY-SA 3.0.

Strunk and White is a little book. In his introduction to the 1979 edition White assured readers that the original 1918-era “vigor is unimpaired, and for sheer pith I think it probably sets a record that is not likely to be broken. Even after I got through tampering with it, it was still a tiny thing, a barely tarnished gem.” It struck me that White’s introduction conflated his old teacher Professor Strunk with the the little book’s stern pronouncements, as if Strunk’s voice and character were embodied in rhetorical precepts (and they are rigid little things, those Strunkian precepts). An example of the mixture:

Each rule or principle is followed by a short hortatory essay, and usually the exhortation is followed by, or interlarded with, examples in parallel columns—the true vs. the false, the right vs. the wrong, the timid vs. the bold, the ragged vs. the trim. From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor, his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into strong light, his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses, his smile shuttling to and fro under a carefully edged mustache.

White introduces The Elements of Style, but he also remembers and cherishes his teacher.

The Elements of Style helps teachers teach; in E. B. White’s case and probably many others’ the little book guided editorial pencils. He wrote for The New Yorker and was a “contributing editor” from 1927 to the end of his career. A correction in the New York Times about White’s longevity at The New Yorker is amusing in itself, and probably would make White chortle:

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the number of years E.B. White wrote for The New Yorker. It was five decades, not centuries.

(As Michael Agger commented, Ars brevis. Vita longa. NB: The correction has since been revised and isn’t nearly as funny.)

White’s revision of The Elements of Style reinforces a scaffold of writers’ habits — a scaffold that editors and teachers scale together with their respective charges.

Two writers remember an editor who taught

The other three items flesh out that relationship of writer-editor and student-teacher. All coincidentally relate to The New Yorker. Two have to do with John Bennet, whose career at the magazine may have started just as White’s was closing. He died in July of cancer, and Mary Norris (aka "Comma Queen”) and Nick Paumgarten remembered him in its pages recently. Paumgarten wrote that Bennet’s “style” of being an editor, “as it matured, was deft, intuitive, but not heavy-handed. He believed, for better or worse, that, as he put it, ‘Anything great about a piece is because of the writer. Don’t fuck it up.’ ” Paumgarten recalled a “Bennetism”: “Here, take a look at this.” How many times have I heard that come from the lips of a reader confused by something I wrote? That Bennetism has been swallowed into English idiom.

Paumgarten also decorated his office wall with an artifact from Bennet:

Above my desk I have a galley tacked to the wall. It’s page 30, version whatever-million, of a Profile I’d written, and Bennet has deleted just about every paragraph on it, as well as all of pages 31 and 32. Three columns, on the floor. In the margin, his chicken scratch provides the explanation: “Blah Blah Blah.” Who can argue? This isn’t to suggest he couldn’t be expansive or deeply patient. A tally of the happy hours that colleagues and acolytes spent in his office, chewing over the work, or plucking one of his guitars, would add up to a life span of its own. His company, his attention, was a kind of embrace.

Bennet’s editorial approach sounds a bit harsh as Paumgarten describes it, but the essay — really an obituary — amounts to a tribute to a friend, who was also an editor. Mary Norris follows that thread with her personal recollection of occasions she had with Bennet as his life was ending and when she, Bennet, and friends awaited and attended a performance of Antigone. Editorial matters she pushed aside to show the man, her lament of his loss, the treasure of times she spent with him.

An alignment of Bennet’s rather brusque editorial approach and the manners and tactics of teaching might feel a bit stretched. I know I couldn’t be so harsh without alienating and, indeed, failing my students, even though I was known for the red pen that profusely bled in papers’ margins. (I don’t think I ever wrote “Blah Blah Blah” though.) Bennet worked with seasoned writers, not those just beginning to struggle with the hard work of writing. Yet it’s good to recognize that assessment and love of the written word is something that the most seasoned writer never completely accomplishes alone. It takes a reader with a role like an editor or a teacher to cajole prose and its authors to greatness. And as I wrote that last sentence, I think, maybe it never happens without someone next to your desk, reading with you, maybe virtually in a remote exchange of paper or bits. Two minds function alike in editorial mode and in teaching mode, when they’re grounded in mutual respect and a desire to tempt words to speak truth in a writer’s voice. The tactics might differ somewhat, with the editor perhaps more free and more blunt with “chicken scratches.”

That’s why teachers should read like editors and not like … um, judgmental, standards-obsessed, rule-toting, forever ranking teachers.

Hm. A movie that ends with another dead editor?

The movie that I watched was The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, written, directed and produced by Wes Anderson. It’s set in “Ennui-sur-Blasé” — satirical name of a made-up city, thank God — and unfolds stories from an imaginary magazine that is modeled in part on The New Yorker. The film is episodic — four stories from four writers, all tied with the magazine’s founder and editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray).

Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray) and Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) discuss Wright’s story on “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” at the offices of The French Dispatch. “Cheery Writer” (Wally Wolodarsky) reads a book in the background. Still from Anderson, Wes (director, producer). *The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Star*. Searchlight Pictures, 2021. Rights: Fair use.

A friend of mine suggested that I see the movie. “And don’t watch it on Netflix,” he advised. “Get the full effect in the theatre on the big screen.” He and his wife had seen it at the Carolina Theatre downtown, during a riskier Covid time. I watched on our old plasma TV anyway. My friend may have been right about watching on a small screen — my wife abandoned the movie around the second episode, saying it was “too weird.” I was intrigued by the editor-writer story and how it fit into the coincidental patterns of my reading. The film is indeed a bit weird, but I like it in part because of that. (Next time, Misha, at the theatre. I promise.)

Howitzer mixes stern and soft in his editorial manner, giving writers a long leash because he could and needed to do so. In her reflection on the film, Genna Rivieccio wrote, “The French Dispatch … is such a bittersweet window into a past that actually allowed writers to ‘do their own thing’ a.k.a. be creative, meandering and ‘weird’ thanks to existing in a time when even the most middling literary magazines had a budget.” Howitzer guides his writers, sometimes gently with a question and sometimes more directly.

Howitzer’s tagline fits this mode, and and good writing teacher might deploy it:

Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.

The directive painted above the door to his office at the Dispatch is also good advice for both teachers and students:

No crying.

… even though it’s often hard not to.

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