A Letter to my Students

MY DEAR YOUNG FRIENDS:

As I prepare to depart your august institution, I am aware that I will hardly be leaving a mournful group of tear-struck students in my wake. On the contrary, many of you will be glad to see me go. For, I well realize, many of the expectations engendered, and nurtured, by your previous instructors in what we call -- at times euphemistically -- "creative writing" have been disappointed, if not downright dashed, by my presence among you over the past 10 weeks.

Several weeks before the end of this quarter, I was struck by a certain "Love Letter and Thank You Note" addressed to you and my other temporary colleagues by one of the younger, departing professors of creative writing -- a warm and seemingly charming person -- in which she declared her devotion to what she described as "student-centered, relationship-based teaching," and attributed her own, self-described success (which I have come to equate, simply, with popularity) to the fact that she "love(s) my students." She "started loving my students," she went on, "because I saw such inspiring, fragile, invincible, vulnerable beauty in them." She saw, our young poet did, "the same kind of beauty in them I see in the just-about-to-fall spring petals on the trees..."

Not satisfied with providing her own encomiums to her capacities as a teacher, our young colleague -- whom many of you had as a teacher -- also furnished testimony from one of her students' mothers, who, after having sat in on her class and observed what was no doubt the unabashed praise of her offspring's work, said to our erstwhile young professor, "I wish the media would cover stories like this [class] -- we'd all feel a lot more hope about our future in this country."

This being California, our young, about-to-go-on-to-greener-pastures professor couldn't, of course, simply content herself with an outsider's praise. "When people feel loved, nourished, supported and respected; when people feel recognized, seen, and known; when people feel unique and valued," she went on, "they feel confident enough to explore their gifts, to develop those gifts, and to make significant contributions to the human community." To which I can only add: Amen.

In her defense, my younger colleague is probably a victim of what a friend of mine contends (and I wholeheartedly agree) has become, increasingly, the purpose of university life itself -- the presentation of moments of self-gratification, little assurances and narcissistic stabilizers that confirm: Yes, I am smart, I am creative, I am loved. Personally, however, I prefer Goethe's approach -- of which you will come, in time, like it or not, to see the wisdom: "If I love you," the great bard wisely asked, "what business is that of yours?"



And now, my young friends, at the risk of both dashing one of your dear mother's hopes, and relieving any of you who may be experiencing a certain sadness at my departure, let me make a terrible confession: I do not love you. While I have come to like several of you quite a bit, admire some others, feel sympathy for some, and a cool distance toward others, I must confess that for none of you have I developed that rare, precious, and deeply human feeling I would describe as love.

Nor, let me assure you, am I someone incapable of feeling that emotion we call love. I love my son and my close friends. I have loved both my wives in different ways, and several lovers before and between them. But I was not brought here -- your former professor's mushy rhetoric notwithstanding -- to love you, but, rather, to teach you, as I hope I have, something about the beauties, challenges, hardships, joys, and dignity of making, and reading, poems, I was brought here not to be an oracle of love, but because presumably I knew a bit more about being a writer than you do; so that, with some luck and application on all our parts, we might together learn something about that difficult and demanding vocation.

Several years ago, a friend of mine, a long-tenured professor of creative writing, warned me -- in a gesture both well-meaning and sincere -- not to "shit in your own backyard," an act for which my ancestors, the Germans, have a much more poignant, and efficient, term: Nestbeschmutzer -- someone who dirties his own nest, a term popular among the Nazis as well. But thanks in no small part to colleagues like the one who has showered you with her love and testimonials to "the endless possibilities of the human spirit," I have long ago ceased to think of the world of creative writing and its instructors as my "nest" (much as I would like to hope that I have a home of sorts in the world of literature), nor have I continued, except for occasional forays such as this one, to inhabit that backyard. So I can afford, as I am doing now, to take liberties, preferring to cite a line from one of my own generation's better poets, Bob Dylan: "When you got nothin', you got nothin' to lose."




On our first day of class this quarter, I told you that, insofar as I was concerned, there were three possible things to be gained from a class in creative writing: the ability to become better, more discriminating readers; a greater capacity for truth-telling and, with it, the acceptance of hard truths from others; and a greater respect for the difficulty of writing itself. If I have done my job, whether you have come to "love" me or not, you may have learned something about all three, and I can leave here a satisfied, if not universally beloved, teacher.

Which leads me to yet another confession you may, or may not, want to hear: I do not need your love. (And is there, I wonder, a more abused, and misused, word in all of the English language than "love"?) For I am, in that sense, a lucky man: I already have the love of most, if not all, of those whose love I need. What I need from you, or at least would prefer, is something more befitting our student-teacher relationship: your respect. And respect -- let me assure you, from the lofty vantage point of middle age -- is something both more enduring, and more necessary of being earned, than are the vagaries and vicissitudes of what we so often mistakenly call "love."

Nonetheless, I am well aware that you are under the impression that you have been "nurtured" and "loved" by certain teachers who have been far more popular with you than I have been. But let me let you in on yet another little trade secret: You have been neither loved nor nurtured. You have, rather, been lied to and betrayed. Though the mother's milk that flows from such breasts may temporarily satisfy your ravenous appetites for praise (and its donors' hunger for tenure), it is not, I assure you, a very nourishing brew.

You have been told that the not good is good, that the unworthy is the worthy. Rather than being commended on the hard work and noble intentions of your ambition (when it was worth commending), you have been praised for the beauty and rightness of its product (for poetry, as the poet Howard Nemerov once put it, is "getting something right in language").

And, perhaps worst of all, to paraphrase Auden, rather than being respected for wanting to learn how to play an instrument, you have been virtually handed a seat in the orchestra, endowed with a feeling of professionalism without either the hard work or genuine apprenticeship that normally precedes it. This, today, is what passes for "nurturing"; once upon a time, it went by another name: deceit. But to give you such unearned praise -- as a friend of mine, a long-tenured professor who has taught at Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, recently reminded me -- "is not only to give [you] nothing at all, it's to deprive [you] of the one thing we have to hold onto; real work and an objective correlative."

Nor has anyone, I suspect, bothered to acquaint you with the dark subtext that underlies all this nurturing and lying and love: That dishonesty -- for a writer even more than for most "ordinary" people -- is an acquired, and contagious, habit. That if you are lied to by your teachers and encouraged to lie to one another and, ultimately, to lie to yourself, the habit of lying will ultimately permeate both your soul and your work, and you will be incapable -- even if you are otherwise graced with the gifts of language, subject, time, and peace of mind -- of uttering in your work that most difficult, and necessary, of truths: the truth, as Matthew Arnold put it, "of what we feel indeed."




And so, my young friends, I leave you with perhaps not the most stellar student evaluations, but also with the luxury of not needing them, seeing as how the department of which I aspire to be a tenured member has no office here, nor at any other university. And if some day, as has happened to me on numerous occasions in the past, I should receive a letter from some -- or at least one -- of you, saying, "Although I didn't particularly like you at the time, or feel sufficiently praised by you, I realize now that I learned something about poetry, and about the struggles and exhilarations of being a writer, from being in your class" it will feel as good to me as being praised by one of your mothers, or covered by the media.

It will even -- let me assure you -- feel better than being loved.

Respectfully yours,

Michael Blumenthal