| Have you heard of Arturo Vivante? He was my Fiction Writing teacher when I was 19. He published many short stories in The New Yorker and several collections of short stories. His books are out-of-print, but if you are a New Yorker subscriber you can read his stories at the website. He was a writer’s writer, a member of the literati. This was my second Fiction Writing class. I loved writing fiction. You could take Fiction Writing and Poetry Writing again and again for credit. You wrote your heart out, the secretaries made copies for the class, the students picked them up at the office, and in class the students’ criticism was polite. And my first Fiction Writing teacher was a very kind T.A. who gave helpful advice. He went on to became a famous writer. Fiction Writing was a delightful break from academic subjects. The writing was fun, even if the critique was stressful (though inevitably positive). But the visiting professor, Arturo Vivante, an Italian doctor who gave up his medical practice to write, seemed astonished to find himself in the Midwest. “What am I doing here?”That was in a bubble above his head, I swear to you. One look at us tragically hip midwesterners and he wondered, “Why did I agree to teach summer school?” (That was another bubble above his head.) . You’re here, deal with it. That was my motto. But he didn’t want to deal with it. That was part of the problem. I can see it from his point of view: we were not the kind of people a guy like him wanted to hang out with. Most of us were undergraduates. You know, we all wore t-shirts, often bearing political slogans (mine said KEEP ABORTION SAFE AND LEGAL), or proclaiming that the wearer had run a 10K race. There were also two high school teachers from a town 30 miles away, a busker who played a violin, and a couple of Vietnam vets. Vivante’s focus was on the Vietnam vets. We all were concerned about them at the university. Some of them were not – quite there. They were dazed and silent, or joked around constantly, but the jokes were a wall. They seemed old and weary, and a bit desperate, as if they had just dropped Agent Orange on a village or seen their whole squadron killed in battle. And yet they couldn’t have been much older than I was. I never quite took that in. They were bitter, partly because of their reception when they returned from this much-protested war. But one told me that the army was the best thing that happened to him, because of the G.I. bill. Here’s what happened in class: Vivante shot down the short stories of both the teachers. RAT-A-TAT-TAT. He told them they needed more than good grammar to write a story. Was he insulting them for being high school teachers? Yes, he was. I butted in. “I really believed in the woman’s sadness at the party. That was moving. That’s what parties are.” What that meant I couldn’t tell you, but I wanted her to know that she shouldn’t take Vivante too seriously. I wish I could remember what I wrote, but it is a complete blank in my mind. I don’t remember what Vivante said about it, either. That means it was neither too good nor too bad. I got an A, but I threw the story away long ago. Now we get to the sad part. One of the Vietnam vets wrote a story about rape. The guy was a mess. This story should not have been discussed in class, but in a one-on-one conference. It was offensive, crazy, and terrifying. Was this graphic rape scene based on an experience in Vietnam? Or was it a warped fantasy that had nothing to do with that? At 19, I did not know. Vivante actually praised the story. I felt myself derealizing during his critique. But I think he felt he had to praise the Vietnam vet. He himself had been through a lot during World War II: in 1938 his family fled to England because of growing anti-semitism. The British sent Arturo to an internment camp in Canada, separating him from his family. We didn’t know that, of course. Still, his disrespect for women’s feelings felt unforgivable. So these are the two things I remember about the class: his dismissing the high school teachers’ stories as exercises in grammar, and his praise of a rape story. N.B. I would never have written this if Vivante was still alive. |