Writers on the Campus

by Donald Hall

FOR a century or two, poets made their living as vicars or citizens of Grub Street. In England at the moment many poets work for advertising agencies — the newest Grub Street — which display volumes of staff-written verse in their foyers for prestige. But in America, writers inhabit the vicarages of university English departments.

Despite the examples of Longfellow and Robert Frost, universities did not generally accord writers respectability until after World War II. (Pioneers in the thirties, like Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, ran into resistance from old-line professors of English.) Now fashion has changed; any serious writer — serious does not mean good but trying-tobe-good — who publishes regularly can make his living from colleges or universities. Departments of English have come to expect a writer on the staff just as they expect Blue Cross and cocktail parties. Recently, the poet-teachers at two middle-sized Eastern universities died at about the same time. The Poet was dead; long live the Poet. Both universities competed for the services of a young poet who had just won a prize for his first book.

Writer-teachers generally teach an ordinary academic schedule. I get irritated when people introduce me as the poet in residence of the University of Michigan. I’m not. A poet in residence doesn’t teach any courses. He is a poet who is in residence on campus, and if he is generous, he talks to undergraduates from time to time. But who is he? I don’t know of any permanent poet in residence at the present time. Some colleges call their English department poet by this phrase, perhaps to avoid the embarrassment of giving an academic title to someone without a Ph.D., but they work him as a professor. One man I know was granted the rank equivalent to associate professor but the title of associate in poetry. Other writers do have Ph.D.’s, and some have even become chairmen of their departments: William Stafford at Lewis and Clark and J. V. Cunningham at Brandeis.

A good many producing writers, on the other hand, are granted some relief from extra chores, and special scheduling of their classes, in order to give them more time to write. Though they are not merely “in residence,” they are more fortunate than other teachers. Like experimental physicists and rare scholars, they are allowed privileges denied the less productive.

Of course the vogue for writer-teachers leads to silliness. I spoke earlier of serious writers, and said that I did not necessarily mean good ones. Most English professors, like most publishers and book reviewers, can’t tell a good new writer from a bad new writer at a distance of five years. Recently, a really bad poet — I’m not being catty about a rival; I mean someone truly incompetent, like a center fielder who hits .124 in class D baseball (but an artist can never be sure, and can always find someone like his mother to praise him and something like the New York Times editorial page that will publish him) — decided to look for a teaching job. He mimeographed a list of the newspapers in which he had published and of the titles of the books he had printed for himself, and sent it to all the colleges in the almanac. He is now an associate professor of English at a bad college in New England, where his ability goes unquestioned as his poems go unread.

I have been talking about the writer as a fixed part of the university, the writer with a regular job; I will refer to him as the Fixed Writer, with only the slightest suggestion that he may be fixed like a dog or a cat. There is also the Rotating Writer, who visits a variety of campuses for varying lengths of time. (Many Fixed Writers rotate on their days off, and resemble their colleagues in chemistry and business administration who supplement their salaries with consultation fees from industry.) The most common phenomenon is the poetry reading, where the Rotating Poet spends approximately a day on campus, doing a reading and often taking a class or two, as well as having lunch with the English department and tea with the English club. Many of these readings are instigated when a department member who is enthusiastic about the work of a poet writes him a letter. Others are organized into the Poetry Circuits, set up by Elizabeth Kray of the Academy of American Poets. Here, anywhere from eight to twenty colleges in a given area form a potential sequence for a poet, who takes a small fee for each appearance ($100) but makes up for it by volume. The colleges share his expenses and get a poet for the cut-rate price of about $120. There are circuits in North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, two in New York State, a large one in the central Midwest, one in New England, and others in the process of being born. Professional lecture agencies handle other poets: English ones like Cecil Day-Lewis, expensive ones like W. H. Auden, and some who are not so expensive; you can buy a genuine poet for $500. Many colleges small and large have convocations and arts festivals and all manner of occasions for Rotating Writers. Opportunities to rotate are growing, and so are lecture fees. Some universities like to have a writer come to stay for a week or two, reading and talking and being available to students, and pay him accordingly. Writers who perform well on the platform are beginning to discover that they can make as much in six weeks on the road as they can in nine months of teaching.

WHAT THE UNIVERSITY GETS

When a university hires a Fixed Writer, one of its motives is visibility. Visibility is an academic euphemism for publicity. Competition for grants, for faculty, for graduate students, and even for the best undergraduate students requires that the university appear in the public eye. Budgets of state legislatures provide an obvious annual crisis, but private institutions are just as much concerned: alumni are interested in visibility, too. After a basketball player on the cover of Sports Illustrated or a physicist who becomes a Nobel Laureate, a National Book Award novelist comes a decent third. (Academic attention paid to prizes, most of which are rubber medals, is extraordinary; a good poet I know, who was seldom asked to do readings, read at fifty-five universities the year after he won the Pulitzer.) But even when a writer is not a prizewinner, by definition he publishes. Some good and dedicated teachers have to struggle, against their inclinations, to publish in order not to perish academically; the writer as long as he remains a writer is building his bibliography simply by being what he is. The biographical note at the back of the magazine states that Mr. X is a professor at Y University, and the dean of the college smiles. It is possible that the professional writer may benefit his unproductive colleagues by accumulating bibliography in the dean’s office, the way Nuns of Perpetual Adoration store up prayers for souls in purgatory.

But the university writer is a teacher too, and as a teacher the university may hopefully look for a number of special things from him. In most departments, the writer-teacher has classes in literature as well as in writing. When he teaches literature, the intelligent writer looks upon it with a more technical eye, as a shape constructed by a series of possible choices, than does the professor of Victorian literature who finds “Dover Beach” (1) a monolith and (2) a document of intellectual history. (I speak of this poem because I have always wanted to revise it.) His approach is more critical and formal, less biographical and historical. Not to argue the value of these biases, let me assert that the university finds it valuable to represent them all. The writer lends humanity to the study of literature, first by his dynamic attitude toward the art as a piece of making, and second, by his mere presence as a man engaged in the struggle to make art. He helps the undergraduate to think of Shakespeare not as a monument, but as a man who sat with a piece of paper and solved problems.

Then there is creative writing (a hideous phrase). I am still astonished at the people who, having discovered that one teaches such a course, smirk and ask, “But can you really teach people to be poets?” The answer is “Of course not, you bloody fool!” But you can teach a great deal else in a course in which students try to make poems and stories. Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing. What is rarest is originality or achievement. Perhaps I have taught two hundred wouldbe writers at Michigan. I think as many as eighty had talent. At least twenty have printed in Poetry, The Nation, The Hudson Review, New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker. There are three who I think will be real writers for the rest of their lives. And of them I would be rash to predict anything further.

But I feel no frustration, because I have taught most of these students more, I suspect, than I have taught a random two hundred of my literature students. I have taught them something about understanding literature that they would not have learned otherwise. The practice of writing, provided that you have a minimal ability to put one word after another, is an immeasurable help toward the intimate reading of literature. By accomplishing even wooden versification, one learns to scan; by confronting one’s own metaphorical mishmash, one learns to distinguish the metaphorical genius of a master. So the university hires in a writer-teacher a special exponent of the teaching of literature.

But the convention of the writer-teacher is not always so happy for the university as I make it sound. The reason some well-known writers keep moving from place to place is not so much being restless as being arrested. But more commonly, the writer is an egotist who has a loyalty to himself which transcends his loyalty to his students. He will hold back from his students in order to preserve strength for his own endeavors. He will not sacrifice his art for his teaching, and since teaching involves self-sacrifice, he will be incomplete as a teacher. He will also withhold himself from his colleagues, and refuse to serve (or serve lazily) on a committee to which he could otherwise contribute.

Of course there are writers who are conscientious teachers. Theodore Roethke was one who seemed to give himself totally to a class and totally to a poem. But many writers cannot split themselves: either they hold back or they find that their own problems and ambitions disappear beneath the problems and ambitions of their students. They cease being writers and become teachers only, which is not why the university hired them. One well-known novelist, author of three novels, the last of them twelve years old, told me that when he was writing he would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about a piece of his novel; when he was teaching he would wake up in the middle of the night solving a student’s problem.

But I have been talking only about the Fixed Writer. The Rotating Writer also fulfills a number of functions for the university. The Arts Festival, fatuous with panels during which writers are expected to toss dirty words at each other, is sometimes an attempt at visibility. But usually the encounter is single and intramural, a university Cultural Event like a traveling soprano.

When the lecturer or campus visitor is well chosen, there can be a real meeting, which can be intense and valuable though brief. Whether the occasion is an enforced convocation or a small gathering of the literary club, the Rotating Writer if he is clever can encounter the young student directly and present his own poems and ideas about poetry and literature. He can stimulate both students and faculty. In some colleges one gets asked what’s happened since Vachel Lindsay; the visiting writer brings news, and to the naive student he brings evidence that poems are written on purpose. A typical question after a reading: “You mean you mean those hidden meanings?” If the campus is larger and more sophisticated — if, for instance, there is already a writer on the staff — — the visiting writer often brings controversy and the excitement of alternatives to the local orthodoxy. The ideal university is rich enough to have staff writer-teachers, visitors who come for a week or two and others who fly in for a fast day of talk and fly away again.

WHAT THE WRITER GETS

As the university wants visibility and a presence, the writer wants solvency and time. The economics of poetry is a common scandal. Novelists, until they write Herzog or Ship of Fools, are in nearly the same position. Unless writers choose bohemianism or poverty — which are real alternatives but involve the sacrifice of desires (family, house, food and drink, books) that are real and strong for many writers — they must make their living in some way other than by writing what they like. They can try writing what they don’t like—a difficult task to accomplish well —or they can take some sort of regular job.

Teaching has become the regular job usually chosen (once the universities found it useful or prestigious to hire writers), for good reasons. Most writers find manual labor onerous, business compromising, advertising dishonest, and publishing a frustrating combination of business and art. There is satisfaction in teaching, and there are also positive practical advantages to the writer in the nature of the job. The hours of work are relatively adaptable, since so much of it — preparing classes, grading themes —is done on your own schedule. The amount of work is often adjustable, too: one novelist I know teaches just two courses, at two-thirds pay, and finds that the arrangement leaves him precisely the right amount of time. Others are able to teach full-time one term a year and have eight months each year for uninterrupted writing. But most important, teaching is the one profession from which it is possible to take frequent leave and to return without penalty.

But there are disadvantages to teaching. At first you learn by overhearing yourself be brilliant; later, there is the badness of hearing your voice be brilliant the same way the fifteenth time. Of course, this problem is endemic to teaching and not peculiar to writer-teachers, but I think that it is particularly dangerous to them. When conviction is forced, the voice turns false, and his honest voice is a writer’s stock-in-trade. And it is not only the repetitions which hurt the voice; deference hurts it, deference from students and even from colleagues. Undergraduates of moderate intelligence are likely to consider you Shakespeare and Tolstoy; you do not necessarily believe them, but you cannot help smiling as you deny the allegation. In general, even intelligent students look upon you as an authority. For that matter, you are, which is why you were hired in the first place, but authority implies definitive statements from platforms. Poetry comes from meditation, from conversation, even from arguments with friends; it does not come from lectures or from consultations.

There is also the problem of getting on with your colleagues. Deference to the face is often a symptom of sneers behind the back. Though English departments must have their poet, they don’t have to like him too. The writer finds considerable hostility, though most of it resides just below the surface of politeness. Some of the trouble is mere jealousy. The writer publishes without struggle and gets paid for it. The writer more often spends a Guggenheim year in Europe. The writer saves up his lecture fees in order to take a term off to write. So a colleague gets drunk at a party and tells the writer’s wife, “Gee, Fred is a swell guy, but why does he sell out?” A friend of mine who teaches at a large university in the West made his academic name by writing four critical books. Just recently he brought out a collection of poems he had quietly accumulated over the years. It was well reviewed, and suddenly he was a poet rather than a scholar. I met him, and he smiled happily: “They’ve stopped talking to me in the corridors!”

For these reasons and others, many writers are looking for a way out of teaching, and some of them find it in rotating — making a living on the road. For years popular critics have complained that modern poets lacked an audience. The Rotating Poet sees an audience, hears them laugh and clap, or rustle and cough when they are bored. Reading a new poem to an audience is a form of publication; by the very enunciating of it, the poet may see flaws in it. The vogue of poetry readings — given a boost by Dylan Thomas after the war, but surely reaching back in the American consciousness to Emerson and his colleagues who left the pulpit for the road — grants the poet a memorable audience of true faces, maybe five thousand faces a year. It is still the university which supports him, but the Rotating Writer avoids some of the drawbacks of regular teaching. He is also likely, being a writer, to enjoy performing. He is also likely to make the same money as a Fixed Writer in less time and free himself for more writing.

While the most prominent Fixed Writers leave their jobs in order to rotate, the absolute number of openings for Fixed Writers increases with the growth of universities. There are at least two results. Young writers are hired with magazine publication as a credential in lieu of a Ph.D. who would once have needed either the Ph.D. or a book of poems. Many of them are thus able to avoid the graduate school years which tortured a generation of American writers. But also, the demand for writers exceeds the supply of real ones; increasingly the fourth-rate writer, who probably cannot teach either, is hired on the basis of wretched, minimal publication. These products of creative-writing classes, come back to teach creative writing, may eventually disgrace the whole convention of the writer-teacher and force the writer to look elsewhere than the university for patronage. But that won’t happen for some time.