The dirty secret of building a career in the arts is the other jobs you have to do in between or alongside gigs. As the current Writer’s Guild strike in Hollywood highlights, making art is a precarious professional choice in this economy, even for those who’ve had some form of ‘breakthrough’ success. These issues are on my mind because, after several months happily invoicing for my Arts Council-funded show Live to Tell, I’m back to my other job now: teaching. I’ve also been reading George Saunders’s fantastic book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain.
Learning about the day jobs of great writers is revealing: Chekhov the provincial doctor, James Joyce the EFL teacher. In his Introduction to A Swim, Saunders speaks with refreshing candour about working in an oil field before his writing career got off the ground. The whole book is premised on the duality of Saunders’s career: even after building a successful career writing short stories and an absolutely singular, Booker Prize-winning novel, Saunders still teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. (And — in a very 2023 move that many of us lesser writers can relate to — he’s also started a subscription Substack.)
I’m hooked on A Swim because, like all good teaching, it’s also a performance. Saunders’s teaching persona jumps off the pages of this book: ‘There’s a different sensibility when I come into a classroom,’ he’s said, ‘I’m a slightly nicer and less egotistical person.’
A Swim in the Pond is ostensibly devoted to analysis of some classic Russian short stories by the likes of Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy etc. Really, though, it’s about the nuts-and-bolts of writing itself. The stories are printed in the book for us to read, followed by chapters where Saunders pulls them apart. The style is not standard literary criticism but ‘shop talk.’ It’s insightful but in a friendly, funny way, with well-honed observations, jokes and adages peppered throughout:
We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that questions.
(See?
Structure’s easy.
Ha, ha, ha.)
If you’ve taught for any decent length of time, you recognise the tone of what Saunders is doing here. A teacher develops charming, memorable little lines delivered with a wink. They have at the ready a set of texts that slot perfectly into the pedagogical schema they’re trying to get across. The performances gets refined over time, with exercises, examples and explanations that run along well-worn grooves. This lecture-performance aspect is not far off from stand-up comedy.
But there’s a quite different skill set that distinguishes teaching truly great teaching, and it’s analogous to hosting a party. How do you create an atmosphere? Gradually, as the class or the term goes on, there should be less of you and more spontaneous participation from the group. A host sets things up so that the party takes on a life of its own. In the same way, a teacher lays out stimuli and sets things in motion, hoping that eventually they’ll be able to stand back and watch the students guide their own learning.
I’m assuming George Saunders is good at that, too. His conversational lack of pretension in this book doesn’t imply that he’d lead the sort of class where you walk in timidly with a sense of reverence for the Master you’re about to encounter. It’s miles away from the persona of someone like Harold Bloom, who spent decades writing from a position of haughty authority that pronounced about what did and did not constitute great literature. Bloom was still teaching seminars when I was in college at Yale. Based on descriptions from friends who attended, he had his own performance schtick: with the self-aggrandizing modesty of Norma Desmond, he’d slope to the head of the table and greet the class with, “Who will sit next to the wretched Bloom??”
As a teacher, one can perform as a spotlight-hogging headliner or supportive ensemble player. The former, though dazzling to watch, is limited in the real learning generates. An awareness of this distinction separates the artists who just show up to do a bit of teaching from those who think about teaching as an art in itself. It belies the old adage that hangs over the heads of all creative artists who work as educators, “Those who can do, and those who can’t teach.”
Thanks to the prevalence of that sentiment, self-doubt seeps in whenever the balance of your teaching time seems to overtake your creative output. Saunders seems to live the dream so few of us can achieve, dividing his working life into three days of teaching and four of creative work.
The income Saunders receives from teaching is surely less of a necessity than it is for me – but it’s reassuring to read that, for both of us, it provides a sense of satisfaction. ‘Some of the best moments of my life,’ he acknowledges in A Swim, ‘the moments during which I’ve really felt myself offering something of value to the world, have been spent teaching…’
I know artists who phone in their teaching, ready to drop the gig as soon as they can afford to leave it. My guilty secret is that, actually, I love teaching. It has become a forum to work through ideas, to connect, to solve issues in my own work and to continually re-encounter the craft.
In the first chapter of Saunders’s book, he moves page by page through Chekhov piece about a provincial schoolteacher who’s bored with her monotonous life. The subject of the story created a kind of Hall of Mirrors effect on me. I enjoyed decoding the text along with Saunders, but kept getting thwacked by home truths about the complex mix of feelings that our ‘day jobs’ can inspire.
At one point near the climax of Chekhov’s tale, his schoolteacher heroine contemplates what type of teacher she has been:
She had begun to teach from necessity, without feeling called to it; and she had never thought of a call, of the need for enlightenment; and it always seemed to he that what was most important in her work was not the children, not enlightenment, but the examinations. And when did she have time to think of a call, of enlightenment? Teachers, impecunious physicians, doctors’ assistants, for all their terribly hard work, do not even have the comfort of thinking that they are serving an ideal or the people, because their heads are always filled with thoughts of their daily bread, of firewood, of bad roads, of sickness. It is a hard, humdrum existence, and only stolid cart horses like Marya Vasilyevna can bear it for a long time; lively, alert, impressionable people who talk about their calling and about serving the ideal are soon weary of it and give up the work.
Saunders fails to mention that Chekhov himself was an ‘impecunious physician’ and continued to practice medicine in the provinces even as he developed a successful following for his short fiction and plays. I’ve always loved that biographical detail about Chekhov but also been puzzled by it. Why did he keep at his other job? Based on the way he describes it here, and from the perspective of the doctor characters in his plays, it often sounds like drudgery. Perhaps it just kept him grounded. Perhaps, subconsciously, that regular exposure to diagnosing people and their problems helped feed his art…
I see myself in both of the teaching extremes that Marya Vasilyevna describes above. I certainly need the paycheck – but I’m also hanging onto the ideal. Teaching is a practice I think and care deeply about. If anything, I’ve got better and better at it:
And if sometimes, the grind can wear you down like grooves in the mud of an often-trod Russian road, there remain moments of genuine epiphany, when the sun hits the windows just so and you see the whole landscape anew. You have your bag of tricks, full of frequently employed insights and examples, but they are a means to set in motion a process that has never happened before in quite this way, with this group at this moment. In facilitating a process of discovery both for and with your group, you can teach yourself something and get invigorated to carry on.