I have always been one who followed the rules. In second grade, I got caught peeking under a girl’s dress—I really didn’t know why I did that; I just told the teacher that I felt free, and she smiled at me—and after that I always came up to the mark.
I always did my homework. I never misbehaved on the playground. I never cheated.
Ok, there was once: my 18th Century English Prose teacher gave a great final, a model I used later. He printed out a bunch of samples of prose from the period, and asked, OK, who wrote these? BUT you didn’t have to be right. You only had to say why you thought Bernard Mandeville wrote that. If you gave good reasons but were wrong, victory nevertheless. Great, you had to know the ideas and the style but didn’t have to memorize anything.
So Dr. Solomon handed out the final, I looked at the first five, and I had no fucking idea. So I glanced at the brilliant Elizabeth Cleere’s paper—her first answer was in fact Mr. Mandeville—and somehow the entire world of 18th century English prose came back to me in a flash. I wrote the final with no further reference to Elizabeth’s paper and got an A. This was 1974. Surely the statute of limitations on this felony has passed? And the knowledge was there, just needed a nudge?
I didn’t commit any such sins in the practice of law—aside from the fact that my first law firm was obsessive about ethics, I was scared to death of the State Bar’s disciplinary committee. I never fudged my timesheets, or misled the court in a brief, or played loose with the rules with opposing counsel, if only because I figured that they were smarter than I was and would call me on it. And I had no idea how I would cheat anyway. In point of fact, I was too busy committing malpractice to find some other way to get in trouble.
I’ve never committed any crime. When I’ve read how the cops somehow find some miscreant who would strike me as untouchable, I’ve pledged and repledged never to commit any crime. Aside from D.B. Cooper, they can find anyone, eventually. They will dig your moldy corpse out of the ground and put it on trial if the DNA matches. I don’t much like cops, but I’m not going to test them.
I’ve had one or two parking tickets, both a matter of misunderstanding. I have had one speeding ticket, in the charming, artsy, Victorian town of Port Townsend, Washington. We had taken Kate to an art event there, and we were trying to find our frantic way back to the highway, and I was stopped for speeding. Lawyer that I was, I protested in writing, but the court wouldn’t entertain any of my arguments about faulty speed guns etc. But those are all of my transgressions with law enforcement.
So it is with some chagrin that I must report a time that I really broke the rules. It was during the second year of my MFA program at UNC-Greensboro. The first year was simply a matter of adjusting: doing a little course work (why did I take 17th Century English Poetry?) and then writing as much as possible and learning from the fiction writing class. We met on Monday nights from six to nine in a large room with dark blue curtains drawn against the light, and everyone smoked. The air was grayly-blue with smoke.
I usually sat next to or near a woman who had graduated the previous year, Lynne Barrett. She was hanging around town and showing up to class while trying to find a teaching job. We started seeing each other, and became an item, except that some girlfriend of another student asked Lynne if she was dating a guy named Jim Driggers and was I gay. The situation was exactly the opposite.
The method was that the recently-deceased and revered teacher, worthy of a obit in the New York Times, Fred Chappell, would read a story, and then ask students to react. I don’t really know how effective that method was. Fred seldom spoke, except to sum up at the end.
I don’t even know that Fred was accurate about my last story, “Katherine in Transit”, which was published in the program’s literary journal, The Greensboro Review, which I edited. When Fred finished reading it, and asked for comments, there was sad consensus: “Too long!” “Nothing happens.” I kind of agreed with them.
But Fred said, “I wouldn’t change a word of it.”
Really? I was, I think, a much lesser talent in the program, though no other men in the program have ever published much. I think Fred was just supporting me. Protecting the vulnerable and being kind against the onslaught, as it were.
So how good, really, was he? He didn’t take me aside afterward and give me the real truth, after all. I wish he had. I never learned much of anything from Fred, except, as I wrote in an earlier post, how to deal with a transition to and from the past perfect tense.
OK, here’s how I really broke my own rules, if not anyone else’s. In preface, I will say that I attended every one of my first year law school classes. When I reported that to my circle of friends, I became a real figure of fun. Many of them were 22 and had arrived at law school right out of college business school or political science, so they lacked perspective or at least the sense that they were now in a professional school and ought to pay attention. There was a lot of bar hopping among that group. I studied every night.
But during my second year of my MFA program, I skipped an awful lot of it. Not all of it, as I recall most of the names of the people who came in after me. There was a very blond thin married couple from Minnesota. His stories were technically absolutely perfect, which is hard to describe otherwise: The scenes weren’t too long, the dialog was tight, and the stories moved along in a sprightly well-paced way—in my experience, you can’t teach dialog and pacing. But his characters didn’t exist as real people.
His wife’s however, were painful: the emotions were raw, the characters horribly honest, constantly going insane while on their period and flunking out of school. We were all looking down at our laps and rubbing our foreheads as Fred read them. The stories were chaotic, with no beginnings or ends. Was that intentional? Did it work? We didn’t have time to process it and decide.
Ultimately, we thought that the couple ought to write a story together as it would be perfect.
So I do remember my second year, but I remember skipping class a lot. Why? Was it that I didn’t think that the time was worth it? To this day, I hate writers’ groups and never go, because the egos are too much in evidence. But that never happened in class; Fred would never have allowed it, and Fred himself was so self-deprecating that it would have taken a 20-something with a self-awareness issue to have engaged in any kind of self-promotion.
All I really remember that year was turning up at Fred’s office with a manuscript of a second draft of a novel, typed for some reason on yellow paper. (This was, of course, before the glorious era of word processing on a laptop. I wonder how anyone wrote anything before then given the torture of typing on a portable.) I held them up to Fred who smiled and laughed. “I know second sheets when I see them.” Were second drafts typed on yellow paper? I still don’t know.
He read that novel and stated about the chief activity, which consisted of games of touch football, “I don’t know why this matters so much to this character.” I thought it was completely evident, but I guess it wasn’t.
A chapter of it sneaked into my thesis. You can check it out this very day from UNC-Greensboro’s Jackson Library. The title is “Deliberations”, which I had forgotten until this very moment. I have no idea why I chose that title or how it has anything to do with what I wrote.
I wasn’t inactive; I took a teaching internship that was very helpful when I went back to Auburn as an instructor. I wrote that novel. I had some sex and drank a bunch. I got a job teaching at Jefferson College, a private, proprietary community college downtown (see “Long Live Jefferson College”, November 7, 2019.) So I wasn’t watching a lot of TV or reading for fun.
When I graduated, I ran into Fred and thanked him for all he did, which was a lie. He knew it, for he laughed and said, “Yeah, Lynne Barrett is a great teacher.” That is true; today she is a professor of creative writing at Florida International University.
I really don’t have any memory of why I skipped class so much. I know I didn’t think much of the writers who came in the second year. I probably didn’t credit their responses to Fred’s requests for comment. Somehow, in my own youthful arrogance, I must have thought that class wasn’t really worth my time. Considering my failure to publish much of anything over the next nearly 50 years, missing class was my real transgression.
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