Tate Too

Writes one Cambridge commentator on my writings:

Your ramblings are really boring and nonsensical. You're always complaining. To me you're a silly self-centred perfectionist with irrationally high expectation on everything. You're a very miserable man with extremely negative views on the things around you without a bit of appreciation. You're a scandalous cynic. Everyone has already been sick of your absurd ranting and raving. Why don't you just lock yourself up.

[Excerpt from lengthier original.]

Far be it from me to throw oil on the flames, but I need to correct a possible misconception. I've documented my disappointment with teachers Adrian Barlow and Alex Lindsay. Did I leave open the possibility that my remaining teacher, Trudi Tate, was undeserving of criticism?

If so, that was an oversight. I'm obliged to report that she was no paragon of excellence either.

I will say that Trudi was no monologuist. On the other hand -- and I am aware of the danger of lending credence to my squawking critics (You're always complaining) -- she was so undiscriminatingly receptive to all student involvement, so open to any and all ideas, so indifferent to reconciling any issue, that one suspected she didn't think it worth a damn to worry one way or another what anyone ended up thinking about the material.

She didn't appear to have thought a great deal about the material herself. Emerging from her classes with my fellow student John (the Brit who teaches English literature at a Stockholm high school), we used to debate whether Trudi could be as uninformed as she appeared about the material she was supposed to be teaching, or whether she was feigning ignorance as a kind of device to motivate students. Both theories seemed improbable, but we ended up agreeing that the latter was more so.

During her discussion of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, for example, a question occurred to her with respect to the lines:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

"Does anyone happen to have a dictionary with them," Trudi asked the class. Someone, luckily, had brought a small pocket dictionary. Trudi asked the student to look up the word darkling. After a few seconds' wait, the student reported that one of the meanings was "mysterious."

"Ohhhh! ... Isn't that interesting," said Trudi in a tone of wonderment.

Another time we were examining sonnet #35 from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. This is the entire poem:

If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange
And be all to me? Shall I never miss
Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss
That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,
When I look up, to drop on a new range
Of walls and floors, another home than this?
Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is
Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change
That's hardest. If to conquer love, has tried,
To conquer grief, tries more, as all things prove,
For grief indeed is love and grief beside.
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.
Yet love me-wilt thou? Open thy heart wide,
And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.

Trudi faltered as she tried explaining, "If to conquer love, has tried, / To conquer grief, tries more....," which may initially seem confusing. She evidently hadn't examined the lines beforehand and wasn't reading them right. Then a student pointed out the correct reading, which is clear once you see it. (Try is used intransitively here, in the sense of, "To cause strain or hardship," so the meaning is something like: Conquering love has been difficult, but conquering grief is even more difficult.)

Another time we looked at sonnet #6 from the same collection:

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore-
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

According to an information sheet Trudi distributed in class, the author married in 1846 and eloped with her husband. Her father, whom she'd lived with til then, refused all communication from that point until his death in 1857. Sonnets from the Portuguese was published in 1850.

The class discussed this poem for some time. The remarks by Trudi and the students all took it for granted that the speaker is addressing a lover. But then one student suggested the speaker was the author, addressing her father.

This seemed like the best explanation. But although Trudi never overtly disagreed with anyone's comment, she clearly didn't find this one convincing, and subsequent discussion continued as if the object was a lover.

These are just a few examples, culled from my very skimpy notes. (The course took place during the first of the two summer sessions, before I had any thought of writing of my Cambridge experience.) None is very damning on its own, but they fairly represent Trudi's apparently casual preparation.

Also representative was the handling of the lover vs. father issue. Trudi always encouraged and smiled upon any input anyone offered. The flip side, however, was that no input seemed to alter her prior view or make any real impression on her, even when it seemed persuasive.

Trudi's lack of discrimination evokes another poem discussed in her class, Robert Browning's My Last Duchess, since the duchess is guilty of the same offense. The duke, talking to a dinner guest, explains it thus:

... She had
A heart -- how shall I say -- too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace -- all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men -- good! but thanked
Somehow -- I know not how -- as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift.

As the duke and his guest contemplate the lady's portrait on the wall, the duke eventually explains how he resolved his difficulty:

Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.

Surely, reader, you do not imagine for a moment that I could be such a brute. (However, a fellow student's email, coincidentally arriving moments before my dispatch of this letter into webspace, states: "Monologues -- lectures -- arose in the middle ages when books were few and teachers had the authority of the One True Church behind them. And so it continues at Cambridge (and elsewhere) today. Like My Last Duchess, Mr Wittenberg, you seem to have had insufficient respect for a nine-hundred-year-old name. I strongly suspect that if you had remained in Cambridge for much longer, commands would have been given.") Trudi ran a pleasant, lively course, whose seven-day duration I bore with little or no suffering -- certainly nothing like the narcotization I underwent at the hands of the other two. (I no longer even think about the plenary lectures, which were beyond the pale.) I harbored no ill will towards the woman.

Only.... Trudi inquired, on two separate occasions when I ran into her outside class, how I was enjoying the Cambridge program. Both times were in circumstances when there was only half a minute to talk. What was the point? In case of any genuine interest, I gave her, the second time, a copy of my "Downside" essay, thinking she might respond. She never did. (By that time the first session had ended and I was no longer in a class she was teaching.)

Of course she had other things to do. But it reinforced the impression left by her negligent preparation and her general indifference to what the heck all these poems were really saying: She just didn't take the mission of education terribly seriously.

(Continued....)