Looking back on too many years of education, I can
identify one truly impossible teacher. She cared about me, and my intellectual
life, even when I didn’t. Her expectations were high — impossibly so. She was
an English teacher. She was also my mother.
When good
students turn in an essay, they dream of their instructor returning it to them
in exactly the same condition, save for a single word added in the margin of
the final page: “Flawless.” This dream came true for me one afternoon in the
ninth grade. Of course, I’d heard that genius could show itself at an early
age, so I was only slightly taken aback that I had achieved perfection at the
tender age of 14. Obviously, I did what any professional writer would do; I
hurried off to spread the good news. I didn’t get very far. The first person I
told was my mother.
My mother,
who is just shy of five feet tall, is normally incredibly soft-spoken, but on
the rare occasion when she got angry, she was terrifying. I’m not sure if she
was more upset by my hubris or by the fact that my English teacher had let my
ego get so out of hand. In any event, my mother and her red pen showed me how
deeply flawed a flawless essay could be. At the time, I’m sure she thought she
was teaching me about mechanics, transitions, structure, style and voice. But
what I learned, and what stuck with me through my time teaching writing at
Harvard, was a deeper lesson about the nature of creative criticism.
First off,
it hurts. Genuine criticism, the type that leaves an indelible mark on you as a
writer, also leaves an existential imprint on you as a person. I’ve heard
people say that a writer should never take criticism personally. I say that we
should never listen to these people.
Criticism,
at its best, is deeply personal, and gets to the heart of why we write the way
we do. Perhaps you’re a narcissist who secretly resents your audience. Or an
elitist who expects herculean feats of your reader. Or a know-it-all who can’t
admit that stylistic repetition is sometimes annoying redundancy. Or a wallflower
who hides behind sparklingly meaningless modifiers. Or an affirmation junkie
who’s the first to brag about a flawless essay.
Unfortunately,
as my mother explained, you can be all of these things at once.
Her red pen
had made something painfully clear. To become a better writer, I first had to
become a better person. Well before I ever read it, I came to sense the meaning
of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” And I faced the disturbing
suggestion that my song was no good.
The
intimate nature of genuine criticism implies something about who is able to
give it, namely, someone who knows you well enough to show you how your psychic
life is getting in the way of good writing. Conveniently, they’re also the
people who care enough to see you through the traumatic aftermath of this
realization. For me the aftermath took the form of my first, and I hope only,
encounter with writer’s block.
It lasted
three years.
Franz Kafka
once said: “Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of
oneself.” My mother’s criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the cold
abyss, and when you make the introspective descent that writing requires you’re
not always pleased by what you find. But, in the years that followed, her
sustained tutelage suggested that Kafka might be wrong about the solitude. I
was lucky enough to find a critic and teacher who was willing to make the
journey of writing with me. “It’s a thing of no great difficulty,” according to
Plutarch, “to raise objections against another man’s oration, it is a very easy
matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.”
I’m sure I wrote essays in the later years of high school without my mother’s
guidance, but I can’t recall them. What I remember, however, is how she took up
the “extremely troublesome” work of ongoing criticism.
There are
two ways to interpret Plutarch when he suggests that a critic should be able to
produce “a better in its place.” In a straightforward sense, he could mean that
a critic must be more talented than the artist she critiques. My mother was
well covered on this count. (She denies it, but she’s still a much, much better
writer than I am.) But perhaps Plutarch is suggesting something slightly
different, something a bit closer to Cicero’s claim that one should “criticize
by creation, not by finding fault.” Genuine criticism creates a precious
opening for an author to become better on his own terms — a process that’s
often excruciating, but also almost always meaningful.
My mother
said she would help me with my writing, but first I had to help myself. For
each assignment, I was to write the best essay I could. Real criticism isn’t
meant to find obvious mistakes, so if she found any — the type I could have
found on my own — I had to start from scratch. From scratch. Once the essay was
“flawless,” she would take an evening to walk me through my errors. That was
when true criticism, the type that changed me as a person, began.
She chided
me as a pseudo-sophisticate when I included obscure references and professional
jargon. She had no patience for brilliant but useless extended metaphors.
“Writers can’t bluff their way through ignorance.” That was news to me — I’d
need to find another way to structure my daily existence. She trimmed back my
flowery language, drew lines through my exclamation marks and argued for the
value of understatement. “John,” she almost whispered. I leaned in to hear her:
“I can’t hear you when you shout at me.” So I stopped shouting and bluffing,
and slowly my writing improved.
Somewhere
along the way I set aside my hopes of writing that flawless essay. But perhaps
I missed something important in my mother’s lessons about creativity and
perfection. Perhaps the point of writing the flawless essay was not to give up,
but to never willingly finish. Whitman repeatedly reworked “Song of Myself”
between 1855 and 1891. Repeatedly. We do our absolute best with a piece of
writing, and come as close as we can to the ideal. And, for the time being, we
settle. In critique, however, we are forced to depart, to give up the
perfection we thought we had achieved for the chance of being even a little bit
better. This is the lesson I took from my mother: If perfection were possible,
it wouldn’t be motivating.
( John
Kaag is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts
Lowell and former visiting assistant professor of expository writing at
Harvard. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Finding Westwind: A Story of
American Philosophy.” And yes, Becky Griffith Kaag, his mother and a former
high school English teacher, took her editing pen to this essay. )
