He’s good, I said. I knew she wanted detail. I knew she wanted to know that he was miserable, or great, or dead, or married. But I could not embellish.
Maybe we can have lunch sometime, she offered. I’m here at least until March.
I told her I’d like that, too dazed to even consider the possibilities, and said my goodbyes and walked out the door.
It took me to the end of the hallway to remember that she had once been forbidden to wear underwear around Chris. She hardly seemed like the same girl. Then, as that pleasant and disturbing image played in my head, I stopped dead in my tracks, ice cold all over, and rushed back to the office.
She was startled to see me again so quickly but offered the same kind of smile—half administrative, half friendly.
What’s up? she asked.
I stuttered, Could you please not read or even look at my story?
She winked. Wouldn’t dream of it.
And although I wanted her to make the oath in blood, I knew that was the best I could do. As I walked off, it seemed to me that the ferocious bravery I’d felt writing such a piece the night before was nothing but false bravado when confronted by the possibility that someone with an actual connection to the story might encounter him or herself in it.
That’s the fear I have now writing this book.
My
first class with Rivers was on a Tuesday morning, the twelfth day of the year. His class was to meet only once per week for
three hours each time. We would meet infrequently because we were meant to be doing the serious business of writing between sessions. We would meet for an extended duration because we were meant to engage in the intense and serious work of cutting each other to pieces during those sessions. But when I arrived at the classroom, there was a notice on the door.
Professor Rivers’s class is postponed until January 26. In preparation, please gather and read (as much as possible) the following.
And a half-dozen books were listed.
No one seemed to know why class was cancelled for two weeks. One woman announced she was heading to the department to demand an explanation. The rest of us dutifully jotted down our list of required readings and slunk off in guilty appreciation of the unexpected freedom.
I was glad to find the list appropriately heavy and dark. It included Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground,
Nietzsche’s
Beyond Good and Evil
, Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury
, Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises,
and Conrad’s
An Outcast of the Islands.
Not a Margaret Atwood or Eudora Welty among them. Fuck you, Toni.
Two weeks later, there was no notice on the door but neither was Professor Rivers there to greet us. Nine of us sat in the classroom that morning, six men and three women. At ten past the hour, Rivers still hadn’t arrived, and a restless irritation began to build among my classmates. They had expectations about the obligations of professors, which I didn’t share, and believed that paid-for services should be provided in full and as advertised. To me, every class was a mysterious collision of personality, performance, and the piecemeal revelation of arcane
knowledge. You waited like an acolyte for whatever the master brought you, and hoped he wasn’t a fraud.
Rivers arrived just before the revolt could grow. He pushed the door open with a shoulder, and we saw that his hands clasped the bars of two short aluminum crutches. There was a knapsack over his shoulder, which made him look young, even though he wore a blazer with elbow patches and a sweater vest and had a full beard. He stood on one leg stiffly. The other, as evidenced by the way the hem of his pants had been pinned up, was missing.
It was this second leg, the one that was not there, that we tried to inspect closely and also utterly ignore. The tension, the confusion in the room, was an electrical storm. I felt icy sweat on the back of my neck. I had not been told, I had not been warned, even by Leah, that Rivers was an amputee. I had heard no rumours. It made me wonder, suddenly, whether this was a recent occurrence, which seemed possible given the awkward way Rivers moved and the makeshift job on his pants. Had he missed class while recovering from some horrible surgery? We could only wait silently for an answer. Rivers in turn offered us a grim and unwelcoming expression, an accusation of blue eyes beneath dark eyebrows. I thought how much he resembled the young Ernest Hemingway, angry and wild, handsome and brutally serious. He regarded us all for a moment, and finally spoke. Come with me. Then he left the room.
We were puzzled and confused. We were also stuck to our chairs. We had our books out and our coats off. We had not expected an amputee professor. We had not been prepared to rise and follow. And yet, necessarily, we trailed after him.
Rivers crutch-swung his way down the long hall, like a perpetual motion device that had achieved enough anger to make forward progress. Someone asked him about our destination and whether we would need our coats. Rivers merely swung his torso forward contemptuously.
Down steps into a basement, ever so awkwardly, we doubled back along a lower hallway until we came to an old wooden door. Thrusting it open with a crutch, Rivers motioned us through. Three long tables with chairs were organized in a triangle formation. There were wires and cables along the floor, and the walls were covered with spongy foam, as though the wood panel had been pulled away to expose the insulation.
Have a seat at one of the tables, Rivers said, and he hobbled over to a sound deck and began flicking switches.
His arrangements completed, he looked back at us and hit a last button.
I wanted you to hear it clearly. This is the Vorspiel of Wagner’s
Ring Cycle.
The sound built slowly, and at first I didn’t understand that it was music at all. I need to explain, however, how hard this piece hit me, how suddenly and quietly it came over me, like a dream that obliterated all my other questions, making them seem meek and pointless compared to a larger moral quandary.
A baritone hum began, emerging not so much from an instrument as from some gorge or crevasse. Then a new note arrived, pitched at an oblique angle to the first flat tonal groan. After a breath and a pause, you realized an awakened giant had just taken an enormous step, and then another, and that he was now looking around. You could suddenly see the mountains that
surrounded him, multiple sharp peaks, along with clouds and the specks of distant birds. All of that visual information picked up speed as light sharded through and dark storms began to brew over far-off bodies of water. A hundred violins in strident chorus circled each other in dizzying spirals that kept climbing higher, building urgency with a slow but terrible determination, massing pure energy. And then you realized it was not sky they were climbing but a depthless ocean. A single flute rose slowly, like a swimmer, shimmering in the fractured light of water. Then there were more swimmers, moving faster, so that you could not tell whether they were desperate or elated. Together, they neared, while never reaching, some urgent point, like a treasure that flickered or a breath of life-giving air, surfacing finally with a single operatic gasp that became an argument of song.
Over the music, Rivers read a passage from a paperback in his right fist.
The will to truth which will still tempt us to many a venture …
He sat with the gone leg stuck out over the edge of one of the larger speakers; the noise must have caused vibrations on his pants.
What questions has this will to truth not laid before us!
He looked up at us and I didn’t know whether he was now reading from the passage or talking to us from his own fevered brain.
What strange, wicked, questionable questions!
Then back to the text.
Who
is it really that puts questions to us here?
What
in us really wants “truth”?
He gave a long, unbroken stare.
We sail right
over
morality, we crush, we destroy perhaps the remains of our own morality by daring to make our voyage there.
He read on.
Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life brings with it in any case, not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience.
And then, looking directly at me.
Our highest insights must—and should—sound like follies and sometimes like crimes when they are heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and predestined for them.
He dropped the book, a mere release from his fingers, but never had such a passive gesture struck so ominous.
I could read from this all day. But that would only reinforce the things I have already said, and if you are not interested in entering this labyrinth or sailing past morality, then you will not understand me. I am here to teach you about writing. But writing cannot be taught. Writing is not about morality or goodness. It is about truth. The only thing I can teach you how to do is to be frightened of what you have an inkling you want to become—this thing called a writer—and to understand that you will not get there without recklessness and courage and a willingness to leave everything behind, including your morality and many comforts and any hope for the approval of others, because your highest insights will not be understood and they
will sound like follies and sometimes like crimes to the people you give a shit about. The catalogue says this is a writing course. This is a course about power. Creative thought—in whatever form you articulate it—is an act of will. It is an output of an argument you must want to win. You can pretend that power doesn’t matter because it doesn’t make you feel good. But if you intend to generate something that is worth reading, to manufacture from your stunted and inconsequential library of experiences some account or tale that someone else in the world will get truth from when they devote to it their precious reading time, then you had better understand what writing takes. Otherwise, you are better off not beginning the voyage at all. Because it cuts even the great ones down.
We could not help, of course, but look at his leg, look for it anyway, that piece cut from him, in some battle in whatever labyrinth.
He dared us to stare at it. Then he said:
Writing is a life-threatening activity, and if you are not reckless enough or deluded enough to go forward, I suggest you give up now. We’ll develop a schedule for submissions next week. You’re free to go.
It goes without saying that I stumbled from that cave in a daze, blinded by the daylight of the world above.
In
the weeks and months that followed, I became an unquestioning disciple, unafflicted by doubt or any divergence of views. In my world, Rivers was the God of Writing come down from Olympus to walk among us. He was the Oracle and the Answer.
Others disagreed.
Some students, some faculty, a cadre of the small-minded who feared what sailing over morality might involve, quietly and subtly ridiculed his intensity and machismo, his bullying past the sensibilities of others. They mocked his very notion that writing was as much a physical act as it was an intellectual one and that the stakes mattered and went beyond the words on the page.
This criticism extended to his injury. Although its severity was undeniable, blame was ascribed to his own recklessness and love of glamour. The accident had taken place on a ski hill in Europe, it turned out, but for the critics, the way Rivers carried himself, the grim purpose he’d adopted when he returned, made it seem as though he’d lost the leg on a battlefield, not a black diamond run.
But perhaps the root cause of resentment was his rigour. Rivers brooked no bullshit in the writing he reviewed. A number of my classmates banded together to complain to the powers that be about the intensity of the assignments and Rivers’s harsh grading of their work.
I did not believe that Rivers liked my writing either, since he red-marked it so mercilessly. The welts were painful but I accepted them as an acolyte accepts his due count of lashes. They were meant to purify and kindle a fiercer commitment.
Halfway through the semester, Rivers invited two of us to his home. The fact that I had been included with Giles Osborne, the obvious star and talent in the class, was enough to make me swoon.
When we arrived, implements awaited. There was a tree that needed pruning. It had overgrown his veranda and was
knocking the shit out of his shingles, and he needed us to climb the roof in the semi-twilight and hack and saw some branches down. Giles and I did it willingly, gleeful to be taking such lawsuit-reckless chances for the professor of our dreams.
Afterwards, Rivers invited us in for curry and beer.
His girlfriend, Megan, served the food. She was an attractive but subdued woman of Rivers’s age who gave the impression she came from privilege and was slumming it with her bohemian boyfriend. The living room had low furniture and plenty of pillows, like a hookah den, and we sat on the floor, feeling self-conscious about Rivers’s awkward positioning and his calls to Megan for whatever implements, condiments, or replenishments were needed.
We talked about various living writers and their latest books and the status of their careers. We talked about the circle jerk of book reviewing, and the bullshit of academia, and even some of the students in our class and their merit and potential. I vibrated with the inappropriate and adult nature of the discussion, its many dangerous edges.
When the food was done, Giles, in a typically brilliant stroke, pulled a bottle of Crown Royal whisky from his knapsack and stood it on the table. Rivers grinned and asked Megan for glasses and ice. I had never tried whisky straight before and struggled to man it down. The alcohol seemed to amplify Rivers’s thoughts while honing our attention on his words.