Teacher (28 page)

HAPPINESS, SOMEONE said, is complete absorption. If so, that morning, reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in the Medford Library, I must have been in bliss. The whole world simply disappeared, as though the genie who had let reality pour forth out of a cracked magic lamp had called it all back in, leaving just me and that book alone. When I looked up at the normal, non–frog hopping clock that presided in the library, I saw that if I was going to get to Lears’ class on time, I would have to hustle. It was hot outside by now, so I left my football jacket—who really wants to swipe someone else’s football coat, embossed with another’s number, in my case 66, two-thirds of the number of the beast in Revelation?—there on my seat and began to sprint for the school building, about half a mile away.

I was wearing track shoes, not the ones with the metal bottoms, fortunately; I was in fine shape from beer drinking and weight lifting and putting the shot (or throwing the shot, as the coach said) and occasionally even running the quarter-mile with the track team, and I could fly. I tore down into Medford Square, past Brigham’s, where the Medford High boys and girls came together, site, for me, of multiple social snafus and idiocies, then down past the entrance to Stag’s poolroom. The cave was just opening up for the day; a few of the customary dwellers—the local hustlers, Hank the Hat and Paulie, who spun the Blind Girl—were grumbling down the stairs; they seemed disconsolate, as though they were on a payroll and headed for mandatory labor in the mines. As I cut the corner onto High Street, I glanced toward Papa Gino’s, forbidden territory for me, the place where the South Medford Bears gathered in their gang jackets, surrounded by their girl-friends and female admirers, all in leather, luring and dangerous, like gorgeous black spiders.

Then into the side door of the school, up one flight of stairs, and then turning to another, where, still on the fly, I encounter the form of Mace Johnson, former coach of the Medford Mustangs and still, nominally, my teacher of American history. In the mirror today, before taking off for school, he must have looked particularly formidable to himself. He was spiffed up, wearing a blue suit and a gregarious yellow tie.

Mace Johnson, I could tell, wanted me to stop, wanted me to explain myself and my absences from class and my flying hair and crazed shirttails, but some kind of momentum seemed to be on my side.

“Hello, Mark,” he says in the basso profundo, stop-’em-where-they-are voice. I’m sure that in the back of Johnson’s mind, pushing relentlessly forward, is the view that there are three things he hates: small dogs, women who smoke in public, and half-promising former linebackers who let their hair grow wild (or, as wild as the Beatles had it in, say,
A Hard Day’s Night
—not very) and read all the time and never come to class, and, and, and . . .

But I haven’t got time for the homily. I’m hardly touching the stairs. I’m on my way.

“Hello, Coach,” I pant. (I still gave him that, the title—would give him that today, if I saw him.) Then I was gone.

I am faster than I imagined—or maybe the clock at the library is a little aggressive, a bit brisk—for a librarian’s idea of paradise, I sometimes think, is everyone out of the library (but himself) and all books restored to their rightful place on the shelves. So when I get to Frank Lears’ room, he is sitting there, alone, hunched over the sad gray desk, thumbing through a book, making notes in his insects-on-a-spree script.

And this, reader, ought to be the climax of the book. In a film version of this story or in a novel, this would be the moment when I had my major encounter with Frank Lears. It would be the final dramatic turning point, the end that was, in effect, a beginning. (Raise the music level a little; sail the point home.) In light of my new passion for learning, my unassigned assiduous reading, my subversive class-cutting for higher purposes, and my repeated quotations of Richard Brautigan and Allen Ginsberg, he recognizes me as part of his tribe and we go through a short ceremony of investiture. It would be a little like the day Mace Johnson ushered me into the cult of gridiron manhood for sending poor Tom Sullivan ignominiously to the dust and humiliating Frank Ball. At the end of our discussion, mine and Frank Lears’, a hug might even ensue. He would be tentative, unsure, but eventually he’d succumb to my bearish, football McMurphy–style
joie de vivre
, and neither of us would hold back.

But the real climax to this book, if it is that, comes a little later. The fact is that now we exchange soft greetings and I begin reading my book, the autobiography, just as he’s reading his. We’re like a couple of monks alone in the chapel making what use we can of the light.

For, of course, there is no club to join; there is no group investiture. What you are when you go Lears’ route is someone who, not entirely unbeholden to books and to others, has nevertheless decided to find truths for himself, maybe to find truths that fit only himself. I must create a system of my own, says William Blake, or be enslaved by someone else’s. Is it a surprise that in his day-to-day life Blake was one of the loneliest of men?

Soon my fellow students begin jostling and jiving their way in. Lears seemed relieved. He probably felt the pressure for a big encounter, a climax for now and the future, just as I did and was glad to have the thing curtailed. On they came, Dubby and Rick and Cap and Sandra and Nora and Tommy Buller and Carolyn and the rest, all up, in a fine mood, even though they’d been through five periods of dreck, because here, in Frank Lears’ class, something good was likely to happen.

It was not until years later, long after the class was over, that I realized that all the books Lears assigned us were on a theme.
The
Stranger, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Group Psychology
—they all dealt with the oppression of conformity (among other things); the last,
Siddhartha,
was about the Buddha’s serene, fierce rebellion against it. We were all weighed down by conformity, Lears could apparently see. And he also knew that we, his philosophers-in-the-making, were oppressors in our own right, passing on the ways of the system, the Combine, as Kesey called it, to the weaker and duller kids.

The books were an insult, an affront. He had diagnosed our worst qualities and had gone at them, though without ever saying as much directly. He was as much our attacker as he was our guide. Teachers, freelance spirit healers that they are, or ought to be, make their diagnoses, then concoct the elixir, which can often burn going down. If at the end of the year, when he had us under his spell, he had come rather to like us—his irony, never on hold, was surely diminishing—I am sure we still never became people he pined to spend free afternoons with. We were supposed to change. Many of us did, and surely he was glad, but it did not make him swoon over us, love us as though we were his own creations.

In America, the story of the great good teacher is told over and over again. It is the story of the man or woman who comes upon a hapless group of kids and helps them remake their lives. In the standard version, in the myth, that teacher is always fired by the highest of motives, chief among which is a love for the students that is unequivocal and that begins the day they walk through his door. The love never falters and never ends. Years later you can go back and visit the great teacher; he will remember everything about you. He will exult in your accomplishments. Your defeats he will put in proper perspective.

This great good teacher of popular legend is full of broad, generous, and generally applicable truths, which he dispenses to all. In these truths there is, of course, nothing shocking. They are things we all know on some level—put your family before your career; try to enjoy the little things—but in our hustle and bustle have forgotten. The great good teacher is happy and one with himself, and he wants us to be the same. He will die with a smile on his face.

Lears, on the contrary, was a great teacher in large measure because, at least at the start, he clearly did not like us much at all, and showed it to anyone who had an eye to see. Essentially, I think, Lears held us in contempt. At the beginning, I believe, he felt about us collectively roughly the way he did about Buller from the first day to the last. He did not love us as individuals or as a group. But I believe he did love freedom—he wanted to live among free people, in part because it made his own life richer. And the prospect of offering us a freedom of our own moved him and made him work hard and take chances and stand up to people like Jingles McDermott, whom he would probably much rather have avoided. In fact, he might have wanted to avoid the whole bunch of us, but once in, he did what he could. What I liked most about Lears, I suppose, was that for all the minor miracle of what he accomplished with us, he was no missionary: He served us but also himself. I think he got what he wanted out of Medford High, which was a chance to affront his spiritual enemies, though with some generosity. His goodness, as Emerson liked to say, always had an edge to it.

As well as some sorrow: Good teachers have many motivations, but I suspect that loneliness is often one of them. You need a small group, a circle, to talk to; unable to find it in the larger world, you try to create it in the smaller sphere of a classroom. Lears, who seemed at times a little lost in his life, a brilliant orphan, did something like that with us. When he saw the material he had to work with on that first day, he must have been on the verge of stepping out the window.

But one distinction is worth insisting on. He clearly wanted people he could talk to, who would consider caring about what he cared for, who would get his jokes. But he just as clearly did not want us to think as he thought. He wanted us to forge ourselves, and if those selves were antithetical to him, entirely un-Lears-like, then so be it. The only crime was standing pat, not thinking, refusing to ask and answer the questions, refusing to put one’s own beliefs up on the rack and twist and tear them a little.

The late sixties were a particularly good time for this kind of teaching. There was a feeling abroad that everything was up for grabs, that all consequential things might be remade. People who felt that way, and I came to, did so because they thought there was never a time where there was more room to be an individual, to strike your own path. And yet—here is the important distinction—in doing so you remained part of a large, collective movement, a movement to get rid of the war, to make women and men potential friends, to help black people get a clean shot at the promises that everyone else took for granted. It was like playing in a very good jazz band, being alive then, a band where the wilder and weirder you played your solo—provided it was truly yours—the better it fit in with the whole, the more the performance expanded.

And Lears, who seemed to me the spirit of the sixties (in the best sense) as much as the spirit of Socrates, brought us to the point where we could join that rambunctious collective if we wanted. We knew what it was about. And we could have our particular say in it, too, hear our own voices, make our own notes. Free in himself, he tried as hard as he could to make others free. And that, centrally, made him—I’d like to say again that it made him a great teacher, but Lears himself detested grandiloquent praise. He was a master of understatement, of litotes, in all its forms. To put it in his own subdued idiom, Lears wasn’t a bad teacher, not bad at all.

ON WHAT seemed to be a whim—here comes the nonfilmic climax, such as it is—Lears decided that we weren’t going to have a discussion that day. Instead, we’d just listen to music. He went to the beaten-up phonograph and put on a group called the Incredible String Band, whose music I immediately disliked. I buried myself in Malcolm X—he was coming back from his pilgrimage to Mecca now, about to declare for the unity of all men and women, regardless of color, and then be murdered by the minions of Elijah Muhammad—and tried to shut out the String Band’s racket.

In between passages on brotherhood and an end to violence, I sat and pondered, and thought over the course. I thought about Dubby whipping his spitballs the first day, and our tormenting Lears and imitating him and trying to make him crack during the days when Sandra was the only one who would read or pass a civil word with him. And I thought about all his efforts to wake us up, we being devoted to sleep at all times of the day, whether sitting, walking, or lying prone. I thought about the Milgram experiment and the game with Rick; I thought about the new books and the SDSers and the proto-Panthers and about Nora’s saying “I” and the victory over Jingles, and the Doober’s coloring the
o
’s and doing the McMurphy imitation, and about the snowball fight that, whether Lears knew it or not, was probably the thing that broke the course open. He had trusted us enough to let us kill or at least maim him if we liked—but we didn’t like. He was our man, with his gunboats and padre’s hat and his refined accent and his inscrutable paper clip. He was the best mapless guide to the future we’d ever get.

As to me and my future, an acceptance from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst came one day in the mail. I’d been on the waiting list, and the word was that no one ever got into U Mass from the waiting list. Art Mondello’s father, who was multiply connected, may or may not have had something to do with this. Artie did once observe that I was the only person he knew whose college acceptance might have “fallen off the back of a truck.”

I loved U Mass, but in some ways it still reminded me of Medford—being in the state of Massachusetts was probably enough. So I transferred to Bennington College, a place that, while I was there, from 1972 to 1974, operated about equally under the aegis of John Dewey and the god Dionysus. In time, I became a teacher myself, and did a stint at a marvelous hippie boarding school that, alas, came flying apart. It did so, most people would say, because we gave the students too much freedom, but I’m not sure that was so. From there, I went to graduate school at Yale. The edition of Freud’s
Group Psychology
that I used while working on my dissertation, a literary critical reading of Freud that became my first book, was the one that had belonged to Dubby O’Day. The o’s were colored in to about page 17. Now I teach at the University of Virginia, Mr. Jefferson’s school, though Edgar Allan Poe, its most famous student, lurks around the margins.