Writers & Lovers(66)
We go back through the glass entrance area and down a wide hallway, bright with sun pouring through a line of high windows. Honestly, I don’t remember windows in my high school. Every memory is cast in dim tube lighting. Was anyone happy there?
Manolo points through an open office door and says that’s Aisha’s office, and we’ll go in there in a bit. I follow him to his office, which he shares with another colleague who’s in class. We chat in the middle of the room in matching chairs that spin before we cross the hall to my interview. He asks me what I read when I was in high school, and I tell him that I was assigned the standard fare of The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, Updike and Cheever stories, tales of boys being disillusioned by humanity, but on the side my mother was supplying me with Wharton and Didion and Morrison. I see a copy of Macbeth on a desk and tell him about this article I read recently about how Lady Macbeth has all the qualities of the tragic hero, but no one teaches it that way. He asks me if I’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, which his seniors are reading, and I say I have and he asks me what I thought about it and I say I couldn’t get past the writing to enjoy the story, that he seemed to be alternating between imitating Hemingway and imitating Faulkner. He looks disappointed, then a bell rings and he says he has to get to class. He grabs his book bag and says it was great to meet me and shakes my hand again, just as hard. He shows me to Aisha’s office, and I realize that that was my interview with him. I thought we were just chatting, waiting for the real interview in Aisha’s office to begin.
There’s a receptionist at a desk in a small waiting area. She gets up and shows me in. Up close Aisha isn’t as severe. She smiles easily and takes off her shoes as soon as she sits back down. She folds one leg under her. We’re in green wing chairs near the window.
‘What is amusing you?’
‘Oh.’ I can’t think of anything to say but the truth. ‘I was just thinking about this book that has a wing chair in it.’ I touch the hard green wing by my head.
‘Which book?’
‘Woodcutters. By Thomas Bernhard.’
‘German?’
‘Austrian. Most of it takes place in this wing chair in Vienna.’
‘The book takes place in a chair?’
‘The narrator has gone to what he calls an artistic dinner at the house of old friends who disillusioned him when he was younger. He hasn’t seen them in thirty years, and he sits in this chair by the door and ruminates about them and their artistic dinners. There are no chapters or paragraphs. It’s just his thoughts, which are punctuated by the phrase ‘as I sat in my wing chair.’ It’s a refrain. ‘As I sat in my wing chair.’ Many times a page. He’s there because a mutual friend committed suicide and they’ve just been to her funeral and it’s really a book about art and becoming an artist and all the ways it ruins people, actually.’
‘How did it ruin her, the friend who committed suicide?’
I like the way she seems truly interested in this fictional world, as if it matters, as if she has all the time for it before she starts grilling me about my teaching background. ‘According to the narrator, she started out as an actress and a dancer, but she met a tapestry artist and married him and channeled all her dreams of artistic greatness and international fame into him, he who would never have pursued it without her driving him on. And she succeeded. As he became more and more renowned, she became more and more miserable, and yet he was actually her work of art, so she kept having to work at it, and eventually she self-destructs. At least that’s what I think it’s about, as I sit in my wing chair.’
She has been smiling the whole time, which makes it hard to stop talking. And talking about characters in books is exciting and soothing to me at the same time.
‘Have you always been such an enthusiastic reader?’
‘Not really. I liked reading, but I was picky about books. I think the enthusiasm came when I started writing. Then I understood how hard it is to re-create in words what you see and feel in your head. That’s what I love about Bernhard in the book. He manages to simulate consciousness, and it’s contagious because while you’re reading it rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature. Not themes or symbols or the rest of that crap they teach in high school.’
She laughs hard.
Honestly, I forgot briefly why we were having this conversation.
‘How would you do it differently in your English class?’
I think about this. ‘I would want kids to talk and write about how the book makes them feel, what it reminded them of, if it changed their thoughts about anything. I’d have them keep a journal and have them freewrite after they read each assignment. What did this make you think about? That’s what I’d want to know. I think you could get some really original ideas that way, not the old regurgitated ones like man versus nature. Just shoot me if I ever assign anyone an essay about man versus nature. Questions like that are designed to pull you completely out of the story. Why would you want to pull kids out of the story? You want to push them further in, so they can feel everything the author tried so hard to create for them.’
‘But don’t you think there are larger issues the author is trying to explore?’
‘Yes, but they shouldn’t be given primacy over or even separated from the experience of the story itself. An author is trying to give you an immersive adventure.’ I throw out my hands, and I think this startles her.