Over the past weeks since I saw the movie Storytelling, I’ve been preparing in my imagination a film festival, “The Writing Teacher in the Movies,” for my creative-writing students. My festival will be subtitled “Beasts and Fiends” and is open to all members of all departments. “Your subtitle,” I imagine the vicious fiction teacher in Storytelling haranguing me: “Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?”
Well, yes and no. Actually, my festival’s subtitle is from another film, Hal Hartley’s 1997 tour de force, Henry Fool. That one’s about an alcoholic, child-molesting, grandiose, apparently talentless social parasite who teaches poetry. But “beasts and fiends” could be a line from a number of contemporary movies about writers as mentors who invite their young protégés to witness eye-opening displays of negligence, rage, creative impotence, sexual and social excess, or ineptitude.
Recent movies show writers lurking in curtained, cluttered apartments, or in garbage-strewn alleyways, or in dark and smoky bars, their eyes red and their moods black, their relationships, attempted novels, and psyches unraveling. They show us writers not writing, writers not teaching, writers not coping -- but always chasing after human decency by encouraging younger, natural talents who, thank goodness, are far better teachers than their teachers.
We could open the festival with Steven Kloves’s adaptation of Michael Chabon’s amiable Wonder Boys, in which the creatively blocked fiction professor Grady Tripp leads his protégé James Leer through a night of bacchanalian hysteria, complete with nearly vaudevillian sexual adventures, theft, firearms, adultery, and drunken chaos. As a writer, Tripp once “had it” -- he wrote a bestseller. But he’s ruining his second novel and his life, prompting James to write of his teacher, “His heart, once capable of inspiring others, could no longer inspire even so much as himself.” Or there’s Christopher Hampton’s Total Eclipse, ostensibly about the self-destructive poet Arthur Rimbaud and his blocked mentor Verlaine, who inspires Rimbaud to wreak emotional havoc, pee on party guests, bray like a goat on all fours, and abuse everyone.
Finding Forrester, by Mike Rich, is the midpoint in our festival. Here, the recluse author William Forrester rages in his student’s company against society, publishers, writers, critics, and himself. Forrester, like Tripp, once wrote a great novel but has published nothing else. He’s been in a 40-year sulk in his dark apartment (blocked, maybe?). He teaches his protégé, another James, what he knows: “The key to good writing is not to think! Just write! Punch the keys! Punch them! Yes!” The boy’s talent lures Forrester back into the world to pass along his literary baton and die.
Fortunately, the Jameses and Arthur don’t need to know about writing -- and they’ve come to the right place. What they need is stimulation, escapades, confrontation with defeated lions, a problem to transcend, a story to tell, a race with a beast. At the movies, crimes and typing replace thought and discussion, and relationship between student and teacher is born, dramatically, from pity instead of from the page. “You can’t teach writing,” Tripp explains; Verlaine and Rimbaud announce that they “don’t like to talk about poetry,” sparing everyone a yawn; and when Forrester begins to read aloud, music soars conveniently, drowning him out. (Too bad this doesn’t happen more often in life.)
Apparently, the real dramas of language are too problematic to capture in a visual medium, even by ambitious screenwriters, and maybe those dramas just aren’t “fun.” I can hear producers sighing, “How can we make an interesting film about verbs and adjectives?” The drama of language is replaced by psychological dramas that praise and reinforce popular ideas about writers and writing teachers: Relationships between writers and their students are sexy and intimate; writers don’t really teach their subject; writers who teach are probably failures; and the teaching of writing is merely an excuse for indolence, therapy, or savagery.
At this point in the festival, I imagine my own creative-writing students will be eager to change their major. They want a little action, and I have them writing third drafts of their novels. The dean has stopped in for a look. She too is now having second thoughts about the creative-writing program. I explain that our festival explores the assumption that writers suffer social pathologies, are “beasts” and “fiends,” and suggests why that assumption makes them alluring protagonists for narrative: They are neither fully in nor fully out of the moral landscape they are able to acknowledge but unable to accept.
I mention that movies, until very recently, have emphasized success stories, but that the writer-teacher has persisted, like a commedia dell’arte character, as the male failure figures that inspire others through tragic example, their incapacities in life proving far more instructive than their capacities in their work. I explain that we are contrasting that movie mentoring scenario with the less-dramatic truths: Writing teachers probe the inner lives of students and ask them to get personal -- on paper. We talk a lot about behavior, perspective, character, and ways of expressing life through language. We read student manuscripts when we are not writing our own, and the two activities can be at odds. A lot of us are better at writing than we are at teaching, and vice versa. In our classrooms, honesty jousts with diplomacy.
Dark psychic dramas seem far more interesting on film than the experience Jay Parini describes as “the much larger conversation, one that reaches back as far as Athens and has kept the lamp burning in many windows down the centuries, wherever young writers have gone for advice” -- the relationship between writers and students that is born from language. Can an “exciting” movie be made about the love, or the loathing, between people experiencing language together? How can a “fiend” teach language? Is language itself a viable subject for a movie -- a movie about writers?
I’m relieved that the dean doesn’t stay to watch Storytelling, one angry answer to that question. In this movie, the writing teacher fiend, named Mr. Scott, loves to humiliate students either in the classroom -- “Your story is a piece of shit. Who’s next?” -- or in his bedroom. He hates the kids he conquers less than the ones who retaliate, like Vi does. She writes a story about her sexual encounter with Mr. Scott and reads it to the class, but he extinguishes her in a final critique of her humanity. We hear the phrases he abhors, the “interpretation” he defies. The racial, sexual, and political power of language erupts through Mr. Scott and Vi, and their confrontation of words advances the language theory of Todd Solondz, the writer-director: Creativity is destruction. Storytelling makes the subject of language a charged cinematic event.
So does Henry Fool, which argues that the language of the “beast” is his spiritual salvation. Henry is out of jail on parole and is writing a memoir he believes “is going to blow a hole in the world,” although everyone else agrees it stinks. Undefeated, Henry nurtures the literary gifts of a garbage man. His protégé wins the Nobel prize for literature. We never do hear Henry’s terrible novel, or his protégé's prize poem. We do hear Henry’s spoken language, his glorious hyperbolic rants and his exhausting passion for words that inspire. He may be a beast, but “the best parts of him come to the surface when he’s helping others learn.”
My own protégée’s hand is waving in the air. “Professor, are we to understand from these movies that the word must be delivered through a savage male beast, some sort of fallen angel who challenges us to salvage the potency of language from the impotence of humanity? Is writing the domain only of the fallen? Can’t poetry, prose, and creativity be taught by the healthy? The successful? By someone who teaches by powerful expertise and example? Isn’t that the more famous mentoring legacy of writers?”
Well, in reply I’ll have to close the festival with the foreign film Il Postino. That Italian movie offers no suspicion of writers, and no beast at all. The writer here is a spiritually wealthy, prolific, patient, and gifted mentor, a film version of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda who guides a shy postman named Mario toward the practice of poetry. They listen to the sea and talk of metaphor. They recite poems and get dizzy with the rhythms. They study love as a call to write, anger as an excuse for adjectives, life as a composition. In a leap of understanding about the silence from which words fly, Mario makes an audio recording of “the starry sky” as a poem for his mentor, and awakens to creative happiness. Both Mario and his teacher move on to even greater successes.
Obviously, I’m a biased moviegoer. I write, and I think poems are great adventures. I teach, and I think there’s more stirring drama in teaching than in breakdowns, addictions, and creative impotence. But mostly, I think language is an event in itself. Sometimes, too, I think of my own writing teachers, my college and grad-school professors. I heard a rumor that the one who lent students Nabokov’s Speak, Memory to read had a “mental problem.” The one whose favorite short story was “The Dead”? I heard he drank. And the one who could recite the opening pages of Lawrence’s Women in Love, I heard she didn’t love her husband.
Did I live their private dramas with them? No. As their student, I lived only their relationship to words, which is an unlikely film. I look at my own students as they leave the festival. OK, I admit that I hope they remember me. But not as a beast, not as a fiend, not as someone who taught despite herself. I hope I’m just a supporting player in their story, and that words remain their stars.
Melora Wolff teaches creative writing as an adjunct professor of English at Hartwick College. She is the author, with John K. Clemens, of Movies to Manage By: Lessons in Leadership From Great Films (Contemporary Books, 1999).
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