the good fortune of the "snake-bit": or, can creative writing be taught?

South Atlantic Modern Language Association

The Good Fortune of the "Snake-Bit": Or, Can Creative Writing Be Taught?Author(s): Marion MontgomerySource: South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 40, No. 2 (May, 1975), pp. 65-71Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3199190 .

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THE GOOD FORTUNE OF THE "SNAKE-BIT": OR, CAN CREATIVE WRITING BE TAUGHT?

MARION MONTGOMERY

University of Georgia

It is not likely that anyone can say a new thing on my topic. The most I hope for is to say something sensible, out of my experience as student in and teacher of creative writing classes and "work- shops." I speak to my question as a skeptic: I suspect that when a course has to be publicly defended so-often there is something wrong with it. What I take to be a sign of what is wrong with creative writing is its title. Creative is an advertising word evolved out of the romantic discovery of the imagination in the nineteenth century. In its most deadly aspect, it is a bait to catch the adoles- cent, romantic mind. For it suggests that the writing teacher has a golden 'key to give, or a wand to wave. Surely creativity is a special attitude-a gift-beyond the powers of a teacher to confer. Let me say quickly that I am not proposing to abolish writing courses; what I hope is that we may put them in a more acceptable academic perspective. Nor do I believe the really gifted writer is ultimately damaged by writing courses, good or bad. Let me cite an authority who is at once an example to the point, a writer who as a student went through the most famous of our schools of creative writing and not only prevailed but promises to endure: "Unfortunately," says Flannery O'Connor, "there is a kind of writing that can be taught; it is the kind you then have to teach people not to read. This does not mean that writing courses are not valuable, but that their value is limited to doing a few things which will help the student with talent to a greater critical aware- ness. A good writing course can do two things: show the student what, from the writer's point of view, great literature is and give him time and credit and criticism for writing of his own if his gift seems to merit it." Many feel called but, sadly, few are chosen. That many feel chosen, and are encouraged to feel so, leads to the necessity of teaching people not to read the kind that can be taught. That is the sort of unteaching that Kenneth Rexroth was attempting some time ago when he characterized the typical product of Miss O'Connor's writing alma mater as "cornbelt meta- physical."

Called or chosen, I find myself dealing with would-be writers at every turn, and I have and do try to teach them. My own first concern as teacher is to root out the student who merely likes the idea of being a writer, the student for whom the writing course is



Writing

the next best thing to a party, since it promises to allow undis- ciplined, random maunderings about writing and its problems; an accredited busman's holiday for busmen who have yet to do any responsible driving. I estimate that about ninety per cent of my would-be writers are of this kind-those excited by the prospect of talking excitedly about writing. For them, the writing course is an ego oven, and they generally expect to be in charge of the temperature. I suggest to such a student that he notice Conrad's remarks about the lonely terror of the writer before the blank sheet of paper. I encourage him to believe that one must earn the right to speak of one's burning desire to write, through that tedious agony of repeatedly facing a typewriter and its blank sheet of paper. At which point he is as likely as not to ask, "Yes, but what about a pencil or pen?"

In order to weed out the ninety from the nine, I try to inter- view students well ahead of course time-two years ahead if I can manage it. That gives me time to exorcise or exercise the likely candidate. If he will work two years without worrying about academic credit or the chance to perform before his peers, there may be hope. And I like to see samples of his work all along, not work done by assignment for course work. I haven't the time or inclina- tion to "inspire" a would-be writer, and if he isn't already writing under some inner compulsion and doesn't continue to do so, he is inevitably a dead weight. I'm not talking about bulk of writing: I'm talking about words he puts down intermittently as he struggles to answer fundamental questions about the nature of language and of the mind and of their human relationship.

I'm interested in a student's reading too, the reading he does other than for assigned course work. I hope always to find a biology or history major who reads Chaucer and Keats, or an English major who is reading philosophy and history and science. When the question arises as to the best major for a would-be writer, I ask, "What major had John Keats? Or Coleridge, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Cervantes, Faulkner?" I want a student to have read literature, of course. And I warn him he's a day late and a dollar short if he hasn't looked closely into Homer, the Greek tragedians, Aristophanes, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton. It is always surprising to me how many students professing a serious interest in writing have managed somehow to have missed most or all of these writers, who (I tell them) are looking over their shoulders as they write, whether they wish it or not.

Having weeded out the ninety, what of the nine? I am looking for the gifted, sensitive student, one who regards words at least with fascination and fear and reverence. Often this student has

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South Atlantic Bulletin

been singled out by his high school teacher or his junior college teacher as gifted. He has a "literary" mind, which through a sort of hopeful distortion of concepts by his harassed teacher becomes a "creative" mind. He is encouraged to believe himself a gifted writer. As often as not, he has been released from the rigors of the particular academic system in some degree and allowed to go his way pretty much alone. Usually that means he reads widely and without much discrimination-not necessarily a bad procedure for the gifted. He writes his heart out, impressionist free verse or motley prose, and that is bad for him, because he gets in the habit of unknowingly abusing language. He loses whatever fascination, fear, or reverence he may have had for words in the interest of his own emotions. Whatever his potential, he has not had much attention paid to it, either by his teacher or himself. As for the poor teacher, there are after all the ninety to be got through subject- verb agreement and pronoun reference against the national literacy achievement tests. The nine are reluctantly neglected with praise.

Then there is the gifted writer, perhaps at a most generous estimate one or two among my nine. The writing course presumably exists for him. Now I don't know how to detail the symptoms of his gift in a formula so that he is easily identified. I usually de- scribe him as the "snake-bit" one-the one who cannot not write. I'm looked at in puzzlement by the student who can refrain from writing when I encourage him to do so, as I praise him because he is among the elect and admonish him to go and sin no more. I am very much interested in that student who, by the time he is a rising junior, is beginning to see the possibility that his gift is a curse. (He's not likely to do much talking in the course itself, incidentally.) He has a perception of nuances of human existence and of language, a curiosity leading him always to see-or try to see-one thing in relation to another or in terms of some other. In Aristotle's characterization of him, he has a faculty with which he sees likeness in unlike things.

If I run across this rare sheep, I do not promise to teach him how to perfect his gift. For the most part, one can but underline his failures to him, which in the sequel may not prove failures at all. Of course the how is presumably the point of the writing course, but for the creative mind the how may be the most difficult mystery of all. Too close an attention to the how, indeed, may turn him from the act itself, may turn him into the speculator of literature, the critic. The mystery of the how does not yield easily to writer or critic, in spite of all the help linguistics and psychology have been trying to give us. E. A. Robinson has put that mystery mar- velously well, into the mouth of a creative and academic mind.

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Writing

He has Ben Jonson say of it, while puzzling that most rare creature, William Shakespeare:

What he does Is more to you than how it is he does it,- And that's what the Lord God has never told him. They work together, and the Devil helps 'em.

I prefer to think of the writing teacher as taking the devil's part, but as devil's advocate, please note, since his best service is negative. He asks questions, raises doubts, rather than instructs. Why doesn't this character convince? Why this word or these words or this scene or action in relation to the other parts and to the whole? For what an acceptable writing student needs-but seldom in fact wants- is a reader who will ask the hard, minute question that probes defects in his verse or prose.

What then justifies the so-called creative courses? Aside from the chance aid to the gifted student, there are a number of indirect but sufficient advantages, given the current realities of the Ameri- can university. The first is that, through examining any good student's words severely (and in my experience the students them- selves become the most severe critics of each other's writing), we lead him to see disparity in his profession of words. In short, there are educational advantages such as we used to practice in the formal training of the mind through the hierarchy of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and at a level earlier than the college.

From the student's point of view, particularly the student of some gift who may indeed begin to write better in the light of his gift, the creative course introduces him to fellow students of like critical or creative bent-if not fellow writers, perhaps fit audience for his writing. That is a welcomed advantage to a student in the large school, and particularly so if there is no tradition of student writing already established, evidenced by a more or less lively student publication. On this point we might reflect with wonder in

comparing our own schools to those of England and France, where creative writing courses were until recently unheard of-or if heard of, generally considered an absurdity. Nevertheless we know a liveliness in the English institutions that sets Auden or Thomas, and numbers of distinguished if lesser writers, on their way. There it was assumed that one wrote poems and fiction, whether a C. S. Lewis or Tolkien or C. P. Snow and no matter what one's "professional" emphasis. Such writing was an adjunct to one's primary professional address, not an avocation or hobby, a natural con

sequence of one's devotion to the intellectual life. There was, and we hope still is, a tradition of letters in England, the envy of our

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Hawthorne and James and Eliot, to which the English university contributed significantly. A tradition we in this country seem hopeful of creating by instituting and institutionalizing creativity.

Recently the Times Literary Supplement published a series of controversial articles on new trends in the teaching of literature in the great old schools of England and in the new ones grown up since World War II. In the process of modernizing curricula, democratizing the mind, enlarging enrollments and, in general it would appear, imitating the development of American universities in this century, the English university is progressively given to specialized programs of a new variety-the sociology of literature, or the literature of sociology. Selective, streamlined, cross-disciplin- ary pursuits that now formally enter the curricula and promise a new academic bestiary of degrees. In the wake of these develop- ments, new courses in creative writing are coming into their own. But the reporter for the Times Literary Supplement, examining the poems and stories, the first fruits in sponsored literary maga- zines, reflected on the loss of a literary accomplishment such as was expected of old. He very likely is witnessing the birth of that kind of literature which we must subsequently "teach people not to read."

But it is not my responsibility here to question the wisdom of a seemingly fundamental shift in the educational processes of the British Empire. The burgeoning (if it is that) of our own tradition has to be dealt with, and my subject is creative writing formally taught. This aspect of our academic tradition I should say has developed out of an attempt to deliberately create an environment such as that accidental congruity of talent and circumstance that history shows us from time to time producing a flowering of letters at a particular place. The Mermaid Tavern in the sixteenth century or the home of Sidney Hirsch in Nashville in the 1920's. If we can transport and rebuild London Bridge in the western desert, why not build a poet or novelist? Such is the present reality, the attempt to make Ben Jonson or Sidney Hirsch academically legiti- mate.

If we are to justify the formal "creative" course, an important reason for it, we might argue, is its advantage to our academic Ben Jonson. And not simply because he is constantly required to engage the youthful vigor of his students by such courses, no mean virtue. On the pragmatic level-and that is the climate of our approach-it may allow him some compensation of time. For given our system, he is sure to be the member of his department to whom the aspiring freshman or sophomore is sent with his tentative verses. It is a curious reality to the writing teacher in the American

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university that a colleague, adept in the intricacies of Ben Jonson's metrics or John Donne's love metaphors, will disqualify himself to that sophomore clutching his own effusions in sweaty hands. One skilled in the mysteries of Macbeth or the Divine Comedy or Lord Jim or Ulysses becomes all humility to escape the freshman Hem- ingway. Occasionally such a colleague is just not interested, but more often he really feels himself inadequate to the task. It is a symptom of the same general decay of intellectual confidence in the American university that one finds when the history teacher or science teacher does not hold his student responsible for good writing since neither the teacher nor the student is an "English" teacher or "English" major.

The writing class, then, carefully screened and limited in the light of the present reality and of the possible, becomes some compensation for that part of the writing teacher's workload that does not show up on the tally sheets kept at the behest of deans or regents or trustees. As I said, that is no mean reason for the writing course, the specialized "advising" course-given the teacher of good intention who is not strong enough to run away from his indenture. He does what he feels he must, and feels he must learn to live as he can. Survive, if not prevail. The thought will cross his mind at idle moments whether the English "chair" is not after all the better answer to the problem of how we may encourage the gifted student in the university. Or perhaps the "Artist in Residence" status of a Faulkner at the University of Virginia. Those are more enlightened approaches to the problem of tradition and the indi- vidual talent in the Age of Technocracy, and what writing teacher is not himself a struggling Hemingway or Eliot or Faulkner?

But so much for that thought-full dream. And so much for the circumstances of the writing teacher at this juncture in the history of the American university. So much, as well, for the ninety and nine would-be writers he must deal with. But what of the missing member, the one needed to make perfect our tally so that all are accounted for and our machinery allowed to rust in peace? Well, no machine is perfect. I suspect the one is out there somewhere, maybe in the anonymous student body. Or maybe my selected figures should really be 91 and 9. Or 90 and 10. Maybe the teacher has missed him or misplaced him. He is really the one I began with, the gifted student whom the course will not damage, whether he takes it or is excluded from it. He will show up ten years from now, and our books will be set straight. The new Pound or Joyce or Faulkner, writers whose several relations with universities are informative in the light of our subject. Or Eliot, Auden, Thomas? Perhaps. But I for one am not going to worry about him. He is

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too busy wrestling his own angel, as only he can and must, to need or much want my concern. He is too happy in his misery for me or the academic machinery to rest heavily on his conscience. I'm more than willing to let him wrestle in peace. Certainly I don't want to seduce him into a course in "creative" writing. I'll play devil's advocate as my time and energy allow, if and when he needs me, but I don't intend to play the devil.

POPULAR CULTURE

The next southern regional popular culture meeting, sponsored by the Popular Culture Association in the South and the English Department of the University of South Florida, will be held in Tampa on October 9, 10, and 11. Meetings will cover a wide range of subjects from the movies to detective stories, westerns, science fiction, jazz, Southern popular culture, the relationships between popular and high culture, popular myths, and the new approaches to the popular arts including structuralism and semi- otics. Those who wish to attend or participate may write for details to Irving or Harriet Deer, 303 Brentwood Drive, Temple Terrace, Florida 33617.

Late Abstract

The following abstract of a paper read in the Studies in Popular Culture Section at the 1974 annual meeting arrived too late for publication in the January Bulletin:

The Uses of Scholarship: Interpreting the Popular Arts-GARY L. HARMON, University of North Florida.

New texts and scholarly inquiry in the popular arts will not, I hope, replace Chaucer or the classics, but they will enfranchise literature to which we have previously been blind. While familiar interpretive strategies-such as historical and formalist approaches -are used and useful, newer applications, psychological, arche- typal, or structuralist, are particularly useful to studies in the popular arts. Structuralist-style analysis reveals several familiar American cultural dilemmas, for instance, in the imagery of tele- vision's Columbo. (An eight-page annotated bibliography and a copy of a longer paper on Columbo and structuralism are available from the author at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville.)

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the good fortune of the "snake-bit": or, can creative writing be taught?

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