Teaching English

Teaching English

I’ve never seen an English teacher manage much creative writing. Those who teach creative writing at universities are already established authors. But the ones who teach an English literature degree course are the ones I am talking about.

You can teach how every great one writes, why they wrote on their subject matter, how they wrote, when they wrote it, what their probable state of mind and circumstances were, who they were influenced by, what pressures they felt, what religion they had. You can compare their work with their peers and rivals.

You can teach it, and teach it most articulately. You can inspire and fire the imaginations of thousands of your students over the years.  You can go to this work for years, from being young lecturers and grow old doing it. But know that it gives you creative impotence as a side-effect.

Sometimes a book or two of poetry comes out, mostly after a decade or two of the daily grind forming the minds and literature appreciating abilities of generations of students - mainly because friends in publishing persuade you to write something.

Then there are forewords to other people’s books, articles for the feature pages in newspapers on Sunday and websites, notes from thousands of lectures, some interviews, play direction, but almost always very slim creative output.

This malady afflicts people in publishing too, and to a lesser extent those in journalism and the sloganeering world of advertising. Creative writing needs obscurity, solitude, the cocooning of a cloister.

Sitting in judgement over thousands of manuscripts, editing the work of aspiring and established writers, kills it for Commissioning Editors, Editors-in-Chief and Advertising doyens alike.

TS Eliot was an exception as Director of Faber & Faber. He published his own path-breaking and most beautiful poetry there that won him a Nobel Prize. But I wonder, did he write his poems before he took on the position with Faber & Faber?

Most English teachers who write poetry do it because it is oblique, open-ended, subject to multiple interpretations, a way to express bitterness, criticism, social comment, longing, beauty, without however being too specific. You can hide yourself behind it, because you who dissect writing for a living, are subconsciously afraid to be judged.

The famous English teacher Eunice de Sousa of St. Xavier’s College Mumbai comes to mind. There were Nisha da Cunha, Nissim Ezekiel and Adil Jussawala too.

But a few poets also live bold lives. Kamala Das, a contemporary of the above, didn’t just write direct poetry. But then, she used two languages, Malayali and English, and did not suffer the constraints of being an English teacher.    

But prose, a novel, a play, or a story, puts you out there in plain sight to a much greater extent. You have to let yourself go, open up to the recesses of your inner self and say something that matters to you. You have to be ready to be criticized, ridiculed or ignored altogether. So it is usually not what an English teacher or a Publisher, or the others in wordsmithing, so much the judge and jury already, can psychologically manage. He or she is trapped by a trained sensibility, and cannot rush in where angels fear to tread.

Some have the mortification of writing and publishing mediocre fiction that goes nowhere despite their stature and considerable promotion. But even this act takes immense courage because a reputation and an aesthetic sensibility is being staked. “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours” does not come easily to someone ensconced on the other side of the table.

How many then have fought shy and not written anything at all? Some do translations. Gillon Aitken, born in Kolkata, schooled initially in Darjeeling, translated Pushkin from Russian into English – not his poetry, but Pushkin’s prose work. But the publisher and later literary agent of so many great writers including Salman Rushdie and VS Naipaul, never wrote anything in his own write. Not once, throughout his long life as a man of letters.

Being too close to the subject is probably one of the problems. There is perhaps too much knowledge. What it ends up giving you is inhibition and self- consciousness, instead of insight and flow. And, strange as it may sound, the loneliness of a developed inner self that is very difficult to share.

English teachers and commissioning editors are essentially solitary, lonely people. Their marriages tend to be turbulent and often fail. Many never marry at all and don’t even have any special companions as they age. Books, films, travel, a pet, seems to take up the void instead.

These are by and large sensitive people. They nurse their hurts and betrayals. They are opinionated and headstrong. They refuse to suffer fools gladly. Often, they drink and smoke too much, these men and women of books, who don’t write themselves.

Some, amongst them have agonized, humiliating sex lives, that they seem relieved to dispense with as they age. A monkishness seems to go with the territory. A life that is spent reading and analyzing other people’s thoughts leaves little room to live, love, and create for themselves.

All the drama in the lives of English Teachers and Literary Agents tends to be of a tragic nature.  Affairs soured but never explained. Aborted aspirations. Subtle,  nuanced, hesitations.

Gillon Aitken, gentlemanly, elegant, six feet six inches tall, died in 2016, of cancer. But not before losing his estranged former wife to an untimely and accidental death from a nasty fall, and then his only child, a daughter, two days later, to a grief-fuelled drug overdose. When he died himself, a few years after from the cancer, and a cloud of constant cigarette smoke that caused it, it must have come as a blessed relief.  But just because he bore his sorrow with a dignified stoicism does not become a written statement of how he felt and not just about the hammer blows received late in his life.

Unless, one counts the piles of respectful obituaries for him - and all the others like him.

 (1,013 words)

December 10^th, 2018

Gautam Mukherjee