Don't Quit The Day Job:
The College Ate My Masterpiece
By Marshall J. Cook
In her recent New York Times review of Gone Tomorrow, a new novel by P.F. Kluge, Janet Maslin says of the novelist/teacher protagonist: “As a man with a reputation for unfulfilled potential, Canaris has a bad case of ‘the college ate my masterpiece.’”
Forty years ago, George Canaris landed that most coveted of day jobs for a writer, “novelist in residence” at a small liberal arts college. He was a rising young star then, with “a couple of good books that people still read of their own free will” to his credit and the Magnum Opus under way. He could look forward to a nurturing environment in which a novelist might flourish—stimulated but not overly taxed by eager students—while he creates The Big Book.
But over the decades the opus turned into an onus, and then an albatross. The cozy job with tenure destroyed the author’s drive and initiative while providing a ready excuse for his lack of productivity.
And now the college has found a new young star, “the king of the door-stoppers, a generational icon, a rock star.” It’s time for George to, um, “retire,” preferably gracefully.
George isn’t the only writer to fall prey to the seductions of the Good Life. Following the success of his incredible first novel, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison all but disappeared into the academic life, for example. Well, “disappeared” is hardly accurate. While serving as Albert Schweitzer professor in the Humanities at New York University, with stays at numerous other universities, Ellison published lots of criticism and racked up a ton of awards, including the Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Arts. But his much anticipated second novel never materialized. On his death in 1994, he left only an unwieldy, unfinished 2,000-page manuscript published posthumously as Juneteenth.
On the other hand, Wallace Stegner, my college mentor, published a lot of great stuff during and after his tenure as head of the creative writing program at Stanford. I suspect for every Ellison, there’s at least one Stegner to more than balance the scales, and Stegner—a great teacher—helped launch Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, and Robert Stone, among other notables.
Kluge himself managed to squeeze out Gone Tomorrow while forced to endure the agonies of teaching at Kenyon College, so it apparently can be done.
Let’s figure the potential pros and cons here. On the plus side, a gig teaching creative writing has the following advantages:
* A paycheck and benefits.
(Need I go on?)
* Summers off.
(Surely you’re seduced.)
* A chance to talk about the only thing really worth discussing, fiction, with like-minded (if relatively callow) spirits
* The Wow-Factor” at parties.
(“Writer in residence” sounds a lot better than “unknown novelist.”)
On the negative side of the ledger—and I do admit there’s a down side:
* You have to read a lot of stuff—much of it not very good and some of it not even punctuated—you wouldn’t ordinarily read except at gunpoint.
* You might forget how to spell “loneliness” after seeing it misspelled so often.
* You have to grade people on their stories, which is a lot like grading people on how they make love. (Are you supposed to factor in degree of difficulty?)
* Teaching takes time, and good teaching takes a lot of time.
I’m no George Canaris, but I have taught writing for the past four decades while plying my trade as a novelist. Would I have written more/better if I hadn’t had to teach? I’ll never know. If left with whole days to write instead of that precious hour and a half in the morning before work, I might have written multiple masterpieces. I also might have seized up, written nothing, and wound up watching Judge Judy, Sports Center, or even, God have mercy on my soul, the home shopping channels all day.
How about it? Is teaching writing the ideal day job for a writer? If not, what is? Give me your thoughts at mcook@dcs.wisc.edu, and we’ll share them in a future column.