Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Half Inch I'm Not Throwing Away

So here, stacked on the table at Tom's, five inches of paper headed for the recycling, and half an inch to keep.

I'm going through old boxes of files, getting rid of them at a great rate, so as not to have to move stuff I don't want to keep. It's easy to dump so much of it, now that I'm sure that a) I will never write fiction, b) I will never be a literary scholar, and c) I will never be famous. I'm only keeping writing of mine that I actually like reading, and what that turns out to be so far -- to my surprise -- is some of my old graduate school papers, and some of my unpublished dissertation chapters from the 1980s.

I heard myself say to someone the other day, to my own astonishment: "I was a good literary scholar. I was as good as they get."

It was so out of character for me to think such a thing, let alone say it. But looking at what I wrote about Chaucer, I have to say I still think it's true. It's not an important genre of writing, of course. Academic literary writing, like journalism, is inherently ephemeral, whether it's printed on expensive acid-free paper or not. But I did it as well as it's ever been done. Nobody, as of the 1980s, understood and explicated Chaucer as well as I did.

How strange. It was the worst period of my life. Everything in upheaval. I had -- for the first time in my life -- unequivocally failed. I was a terrible teacher. I had the classroom presence of a soggy paper towel. I was drinking a lot, hanging out at taverns, scribbling a bit here or there at whiles, exiled in Portland: I had given up all my literary friendships with people at Yale -- or maybe they had given up me -- and I found no literary connections here. I had no vocation, no direction, no hope: I had two small children and a life to invent from scratch, and my skills were fluency in Old English and Latin, and a visceral understanding of what it felt like to be an English poet in the 14th Century.

And yet, I wrote this wonderful stuff. Not much of it, not even a whole dissertation's worth. But there it is, glowing in its nest of yellowing paper. No: this half inch I'm not throwing away. This I keep.

12 comments:

Dave said...

And now I want desoerately to read it...

Dale said...

Heh. That would be an interesting project, trying to make a version of it that was intelligible to people who weren't Chaucer scholars. It's a pretty esoteric world.

Jean said...

Now look, there must be something you can do with this, isn't there, some kind of synthesis with your other, more recent kinds of beautiful writing?

It's very interesting that you now look at this work and find that it is good, that the problem - your dissillusion with yourself - was not with your dissertation, but with its incompatibility with the other circumstances of your life at that time? What complicated creatures we are. Perhaps, for many people, success at any kind of very deep creative project often requires a ruthless simplification, which they cannot contemplate? Not always, perhaps (see recent discussion at cassandra pages), but often.

Uma said...

Yes, share it here with us Dale.

carolee said...

give the people what they want! we demand tiny excerpts sprinkled into our "mole." :)

Zhoen said...

Finding the pony amid all the manure.

Alexandra said...

I love the images of measured stacks of paper and ths soggy paper towel teacher :) I hope you get some good feng shui mileage from all that you get rid of...you never know what wonderous things will come in to fill the space!

Luisa A. Igloria said...

I too would like to read...

Natalie d'Arbeloff said...

Oh Dale, I empathise/sympathise with this post so much. I too have been looking through boxes & boxes of old Stuff, tearing up and dumping, but also pulling some things out and saying: shit, this is pretty damn marvellous, why am I not famous?

And yes, do what they all said. Soggy paper towel teacher indeed! NOT.

Dale said...

Thanks so much, all. Natalie, I really was not a very good teacher, although I guess I wasn't as bad as thought: some students seem to remember me fondly, anyway.

I will think about whether there's any way to make this stuff accessible. Maybe sort of like my translation of the Wanderer, where I presented bits of it and then talked about what made it hard to translate: I could do three levels of that, the Chaucer and a commentary and dissertation bits and a commentary on that. That would be baroque enough. If I kept all the bits short, it might even be tolerable.

Lucy said...

There have been times when a cool soggy paper towel on my brow would have been very welcome.

Me too, I'd like to read. It's not essential always to understand to enjoy.

Murr Brewster said...

Not that long ago, I threw out a bunch of term papers that had excited my professors and astounded my father, and I threw them out because I no longer understood what I was writing about. There's a different kind of tragedy, right there, and drinking in taverns is, I think, a culprit.