The Education of a Writer - Part 4
Senior Year rolled around. And I got enraptured into the Paper Chase (ie, the pursuit of higher degrees of education, the “papers” being diplomas). In a way, it was the beginning of the development of the scholar in me, not just the student.
I’d become frustrated with the way my fantasy world was - or more exactly, was NOT - shaping up. So I set aside the novel writing for the time being. I continued to think about it, from time to time. And I trifled with various other bits of writing. But the studies were getting the most of my attention by now.
During the summer, the group of accelerating Latin students met with the continuing Classics professor (our First Year Latin professor had left UH, and the new professor had not arrived yet). We may have met three hours a week for most of the summer. In terms of language learning, we would have been covering the subjunctives in Second Year, so that was what we were hurriedly getting instruction on. With the result for me that although I knew a Latin subjunctive when I saw it, I couldn’t tell you with certainty what sort it was. (Apparently the deep recesses of my brain retain and sort things better than my conscious portion, as I would usually “guess” correctly, if such identification came up in later classes.) At the beginning of this exercise, we were asked which text of Cicero we wanted to spend the summer translating. We asked which one the Second Year students had done, thinking that we might as well be fair and do what they’d done. De Senectute (“On Old Age”). Late in the summer we’d gotten as far as chapter 23. But when we translated the first sentence of that chapter, we’d about had enough, and asked if we could wrap it all up. The professor agreed, we took our credit/placement test, and were qualified for the Third Year class for the fall. Oh, that first sentence? Basically: “It’s a sad old age that needs defending.” Chapter 23 of a defense of old age. *sigh*
LAT 331 - Third Year Latin (The new professor swept in on his Third Year Latin class, a tempest of energy. He loved his area of study. The fall semester we spent with Ovid, mostly translating the Metamorphoses. He would not let us pencil the translations of words inter-linearally, because he said it would distract us from the grammar - but we could put the word translations in the margin. And he was right: it did force us to pay attention to the grammar. But he also taught us how to pay attention to how the language was being used. And Ovid was good for this, because if there’s a possible double or even triple entendre (and there are some triple ones in Ovid), Ovid certainly did mean them. This professor was excellent at inspiring us to understand the playfulness and life in the Latin language. It was certainly not a “dead language” to him, and he made it lively for us. Excellent teacher.)
GRK 131 - First Year Greek (This was taught by the same professor the Latin group had worked with in the summer. First Year Greek is basically New Testament Greek. I’d taken it because by this time, the medieval scholar in me had been wakened. It seemed to me that it would be good to have Greek amongst my studies.)
HIS 391A - Early Middle Ages (This was one of the upper level history classes I wanted to take. The professor was great. She had fun with it, making the figures come to life. As it turned out, she’d read Tolkien at some point in her past, and in fact had said that he was what had inspired her to go medieval studies. One favorite moment of the class for me was when she took the description of Charlemagne in one of the main medieval biographies, and told us what it REALLY meant. Of course he was tall, over six feet, very tall for the age; a head like a pumpkin with no neck (“a noble, round head”); eyes that bulged out (“piercing eyes”); and a shrill, squeaky voice (I forget the terms used in the bio, and would have to look them up). We laughed. But she made her point that biographers and historians do often try to put their subject in the best light - image was as important back then as it is now. Beyond that, for that fantasy writer in me, we covered the nature of the feudal system as it worked in England. The structure in England was about as “pure” a version of the feudal system as ever existed, because the peasantry was never totally devolved into a slave status. This was probably a hold-over from the Romans, in a way that did not occur on the Continent, where the peasants mostly did become the property of the overlords. Anyway, if you’re going to write pseudo-medieval, it’s good to know how the real medieval societies worked, their economy and structures.)
HIS 483A - Tudor England (I’m not sure where my love of Tudor history began, but it goes back a long time. Perhaps it was inspired by my early love of Shakespeare. In particular, Queen Elizabeth I had always fascinated me: I’d read three bios of her in high school, on my own, just because I was fascinated. I really liked this course for what it covered and what I learned. But the reality is, I’m not a historian, except as in how it affects the literature of an age, for the most part. I was a bit over my head here, when it came to the course work. It probably didn’t help that when it came to our term papers, which were supposed to be on a personal figure from the era, I chose William Cecil, Lord Burleigh. Yes, he was very smart and savvy, having survived as a politician the transit from Henry VIII until Elizabeth’s reign, but…. well, if you understand that he’s the model for Shakespeare’s Polonius in Hamlet, and you know that character, you’ll get an biased idea of what he was like. I got a C in this class. Fortunately, when it came time to select which courses would count toward my graduating point grade, I had such an excess of electives, I didn’t have to count this one in. But I’m glad I took the class. There’s nothing like stepping outside your natural field of endeavor, trying your hand at a “related” one, to help you become certain that you DO know what is your calling.)
ENG 338 - Shakespeare (The 2nd half of required course - I was finally ready to get back to dealing with the Bard. The professor I had this semester was very good. And she also remembered that we were dealing with works of theater. One of our secondary readings was a book on Elizabethan staging. She liked to focus on how staging can help address the meaning in the text. In fact, one of our paper assignments was to take a scene in Hamlet, block out some staging and explain how the staging would assist in emphasizing the meaning of the scene. In retrospect, looking at this from the distance, this is superb training for a writer of stories. The way characters move can have great import on sequences. It hadn’t occurred to me until the moment of writing this how much that awareness of staging and drama, even in a prose scene, was trained in this class. But this was important to it. There’s a long story behind the writing of the paper for this class, but I think I’ll save that for its own post, instead of cramming it in here.)
ENG 431X - Senior Honors Thesis (on Coleridge’s “Christabel”) (It had not originally been on my plan of study to write a Senior Honors Thesis. I had not been planning to be a scholar when I started college - I was training myself to be a writer of fiction. But by this point, I was a member of both the English Club and the Classics Club. Something about that combination of activities and studies had swept me into the dream of Academia. I had originally signed up for an upper level course on the English Romantics, taught by the professor I’d had for the second half of the English lit course. I told you he was good. Unfortunately, the class didn’t make the minimum number of students, so it was cancelled. Here it was the first day of the new semester, and I really wanted to study with this professor. As the unhappy few of us were leaving the non-class, somehow the mention of doing Senior Honors study came up. This was done one-on-one with a professor, similar to graduate degree theses are. So I followed the professor to his office and said I wanted to do one with him. He was willing. I would have loved to have done something on Keats, but his area of specialty was the early Romantics, and Keats would have been the territory of a different professor. So I opted for Coleridge (Wordsworth - his specialty - not being my thing), and “Christabel” as something not much work was done on. So I plunged into the world of scholarship, reading and reading and reading on Coleridge and his works and thought. I don’t know that I really knew what I was doing, but I was learning the lessons on how to do it, and that was the important thing.)
Throughout my undergraduate career, I’d been living at home. The UH campus was more or less on the way to my father’s place of work, so we car-pooled every day. He’d drop me off at the campus fairly early in the morning and pick me up after 5 in the evening. My days were spent on the campus, in the snack lounges of the English and Drama departments or in the library. I got a carrel in the library - in my case, not one of the private closet type ones, but rather a desk in the reading room which had a lockable set of shelves and lockable drawers. It helped to be able to leave things locked up there, so I wouldn’t have to carry everything around with me all day.
Because of the Honors Thesis, my record showed I was overloaded with hours, and so once again, I had to get the student advisor approval. Which, at least in my case, was no more difficult than a rubber stamp. I’ve only sometimes wondered if it was so for everyone. Also, because of the Honors Thesis, I thought I would need extra hours of study on campus, so I made an arrangement with my parents that on Friday nights I’d stay on campus until 8. In theory, it was a good plan. In practice, not quite so elegant: I was not taking light-weight courses, and I was really applying myself to them. By Friday evening, I was often a bit brain-fried and punchy. But I trod onward.
Toward the end of the semester, I’d decided that I wanted to go on to graduate school. I looked into the schools that had good medieval studies, but the costs were way out of my reach. So, no going to Chicago or McGill or SUNY-Binghamton. The University of Texas I could just afford. I looked up what was required to get into their graduate English department: all they wanted was a certain score on the Verbal section of the GRE. I sent off my application and signed up to take the GRE in January before the Spring semester started. All on my own. The day I mailed the stuff off, I afterwards went looking for my Honors Thesis advisor, just because I felt I needed to talk with someone. We had not talked about this possibility, by the way. But he wasn’t in his office at the time. So there I was, sitting on a bench in the hall where all the professor’s offices were, and that Mythology professor walked by and saw me. Since the English Club had a cubicle up there, I was moderately known on sight to professors. “Sarah, what are you doing?” he asked. And inside, I started to laugh at myself: I’d already made my decision. “Looking for moral support I don’t need,” I answered.
At Christmas time, the Classics Club had a party (for the holiday and the end of the semester). The highlight of the gathering was going Christmas caroling in the Latin professor’s neighborhood -- singing the carols in Latin, of course. Nothing like “Jingle Bells” and “Deck the Halls” in Latin - I wish I still had the words around. I suppose I could find them online somewhere. Heh.
I took the GRE on a Saturday morning in January, and was particularly unconcerned. Instead of getting wound up inside, before the test, I sat in the hall reading Dorothy Sayers - Gaudy Night, I think. I felt I did pretty well on the Verbal part of the test. On the Math portion, I had to laugh, because there was a try-out section that instead of actual math, was all logic stuff. Which was so much more up my alley than algebra problems! I breezed through it.
Then, it was back to the grind for Spring.
LAT 332 - Third Year Latin (From Ovid, the class moved on into other Augustan poets. Propertius (the professor’s specialty), some Horace, and a good chunk of Virgil.)
GRK 132 - First Year Greek (By now, our study of Greek grammar had moved into the mysterious (to me) and complex realm of Greek verbal tenses. Greek - classical Greek at any rate - has sixteen tenses, all with very specific time and condition implications. We never did get far into them. But the vision of all those tenses certainly affected my awareness of language use. The Greeks liked to be very precise in their language use: if something was a speculation about the past, there was a tense for that; if it were a speculation about the future, there was a tense for that. Sixteen tenses. How you said something in Greek was important. That was something that stuck with me, since years later, when my fantasy world had reshaped itself, my Fynlaren take a similar degree of care in how they express themselves.)
ENG 373B - Classics in Translation (This was taught by my Latin professor. And we did cover things other than what I’d already had in Latin classes, since Greek theater and poetry was also covered. I just wanted to take it. I didn’t realize at the time, but did when it came time to count up credits for the final GPA and crediting a minor, this class, which could be counted in Classics Studies as well as English, put me over the number of hours for a minor in Classics. As it happened, I’d also accrued enough hours in History for a History minor. A double minor, without planning for it.)
ENG 336 - Intro to Poetry (I had really hoped for a course on prosody, studying the effects of poetry, how they are achieved, meter and all the language effects. Alas. The only section of this course that fit my schedule was opposite the second half of the Middle Ages, with that delightful Tolkien-influenced professor. I gave up the Middle Ages for this class and profoundly regretted it as the semester unfolded. The class was chock full of Teacher Education students, and it made me very cynical about the future for high school students. The professor was rather lackadaisical about the class, almost as if he were bored by it.
The first day of class, he presented a discussion of Sigfried Sasson’s “Base Details”, a noted anti-war poem from the period between the World Wars in England. I’m not big on Sasson, but I’d read the poem before, and new the general nature of it. I was a bit shocked when the professor latched onto the word “toddled”, and interpreted as meaning “unbalanced in the manner of a toddler”, inplying incompetence on the part of the General described. I’d read enough English writers by this time, to know that “toddled” instead implied a care-free, sauntering walk. I even spoke up to this point in the class. It did not bode well.
When it came to discussion the general theories about poetry and its significance, instead of lecturing on it himself, he pulled out a book of essays on poetry theory. He would give the book to a student, tell them to read one of the essays and make a presentation to the class. I had a nodding acquaintance with the book, and had previously read many of the essays on my own, so I knew that many of the essays took views contrary to each other. The first student presenter was one of the English TE students - and instead of telling us what the essay was about, she did a presentation that was basically what the STRUCTURE of the essay was, complete with handout. In all honesty, I don’t think she realized that was what she had done, but that’s what it really was. And that became the template for the rest of the presentations (except for the one a friend did, on Sayers’ essay on poetry). I was doomed.
He would give us assignments to write in-class essays, analyzing a particular poem. He’d post the day’s poem on the blackboard up front, and then leave. Every week, at least once a week. About two thirds the way through the class, he came in one day and expressed concern about the quality of our introductory paragraphs. There wasn’t much to them, he said. I sat there wondering what the heck he expected for an essay written in an hour. I was well aware that for the in-class essays, everyone was falling back on the essay structure learned in high school. You know: intro paragraph you identify the work and author, state your thesis, and then list the three points you will discuss to support your thesis. It’s a bland template, but it works, especially when you have only an hour to crank out the work. So, seriously, I was wondering what he expected.
Anyway, this day, because of his concern, he was going to give us a whole hour to craft an introductory paragraph for the analysis of a particular poem. Surely we would be able to do better with an hour for the paragraph. The poem he assigned? Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”
I was furious. In so many ways. First off, as I said, Wordsworth is not my thing. But even so, there are many of his works that are excellent. But I did not consider this one to be a sterling example of his work. I thought it trite to the extreme. The idea that I was going to have to spend an HOUR writing an introductory paragraph to this piece of fluff enraged me. The fact that I’d given up a class I’d really wanted for this waste of time fueled the rage. I carried colored felt tip pens with me at the time, and I had a purple one. I proceeded to write out - in doggerel verse, an introduction to an essay on the poem, and I used that tried-and-true intro paragraph structure. I wish I’d kept the whole of it, but I do remember the first four lines --
If e’er were writ a poem of thought
That to the world deep meaning brought
Such poem is not the one that’s called
“I wandered lonely as a cloud”
The next four lines enumerated the flaws in the poem - the four foot line falls into doggerel, the rhymed couplets chime too much, and the imagery is trite. All in purple ink.
It was the only assignment that semester that he never handed back to us. I’ve always wondered if it was because he didn’t know what to make of my submission. I had, after all, done the assignment, as he requested. I admit, it is, even to this date, the most contemptuous thing I have ever done, really rubbing the person’s nose in my displeasure. Like I said, I was furious. And though I was tempted, towards the end of the semester, when I already knew I was going on to graduate school at the University of Texas, I never did ask him about that assignment.)
ENG 474 - Chaucer (Another professor who had been influenced by Tolkien. He had that huge poster of the original Ballantine covers on the wall of his office. He was fun and lively and a very good teacher. Unfortunately, it was his last semester at UH: they were letting him go not because he hadn’t published enough, but rather because of the “quality” of the journals he’d published in. Pity - he really was a good teacher.
As a side on this, at one point my Honors advisor and I were talking late in the semester about more general things, and he mentioned some interviews they had conducted of potential candidates for the medieval position at an MLA conference. They’d talked with one very promising candidate, who was promising right up to the point where it was revealed he’d not studied any Latin at all. Even I, nascent medievalist that I was, was surprised and shocked by that: a medievalist with no Latin?)
ENG 432Y - Senior Honors Thesis (on Coleridge’s “Christabel”) (Onward to the end. I read The Road to Xanadu, which was a labor to get through. I read as much scholarship on Coleridge and the poem as I could. Then I wrote the paper. But seriously, I didn’t really know what I was doing, and my heart was not in it. I got a B - which, for me, was “good enough.”)
By June, I was walking away from the University of Houston campus with a Bachelor’s degree in my hand. I felt certain that in selecting my own course of study, I had gotten a far better education than I might have if someone had been looking over my shoulder saying “You should take this and this.” My ambitions as a fiction writer had not disappeared entirely, they continued to nibble away, and would resurface more forcefully during graduate school. But the glory of the Graduate Studies Paper Chase had risen up in front of me, and I was running for it.
I have some reflections on all this, but I’ll make a separate post on that.