Protégé

In referring to Madeline among my friends, I call her “my protégé,” though I doubt she’d call herself mine. It’s a joke, mostly. The epithet is more expressive of my feeling about her and her work than descriptive of any influence I’ve had on her, or it.

My undergraduate courses are open to all students, so I get a lot of curious dilettantes, and if I manage to improve the writing skills of future lawyers, diplomats, therapists or actors, I consider this a benefit to all mankind. Obviously, as a writing teacher, you take some special interest in those unhappy few who seem intent on becoming writers themselves, if only out of collegial commiseration. Among those students afflicted with both the ambition and aptitude to write, most have completely different styles and preoccupations than your own, and ideally you don’t try to make them write more like you, but to help them become the kind of writers they want to be. But once in a while you encounter a student whose sensibilities are similar to your own, with whom you can’t help but feel an artistic affinity. In my own case, this means students who share an essentially comic view of the world—of human beings as irredeemably flawed, fucked up and doomed, and have chosen to find this, whether bitterly or forgivingly, cause for amusement rather than despair.

The first essay of Madeline’s that made me take note of her was about discovering that her shut-in grandparents had been pornographers, publishing their own S&M-themed comic books in the 70s under the noms de plume “Mr. and Mrs. Midnight Pennsylvania.” Since graduating, Madeline has served her time for the crime of youth, being overworked and underpaid as an assistant in Hollywood, but she’s also pursued a literary career with impressive ambition and energy: she started a literary magazine, Forever, named after the star-sown Hollywood Forever Cemetery where its first reading was held (and from which they were immediately banned), which has become a fashionable place for young writers to be published.

Madeline probably won’t be the last of my former students to publish a book, but she is among the first: her debut collection, Earth Angel, was released by Clash Books on April 15th. In my blurb, I compare her to George Saunders and Lorrie Moore, but these are only referents for the benefit of Gen X and Millennial readers; she’s of a different generation than those writers, and her prose has a different feel: accelerated, fractured, closer to memes than Montaigne. She’s so relentlessly funny, so manically inventive, that you might not at first notice the deep undercurrent of sadness beneath the scintillant surface, an essential sanity and compassion for us human beings, for the shitty, ridiculous world we’ve made, and for what it’s done to us.

There’s another former student I stay in touch with, whom I won’t name here, because she probably wouldn’t want me to, at least not in this context. I’ll call her Judith. She was as smart as any student I’ve ever taught, and more serious about ideas and passionate about questions of morality than most. As a writer, she wasn’t much like me; she wrote Biblical exegesis rather than personal essays. Her semester-long project was about the evolving interpretation of suffering from Genesis through Job. Inasmuch as I had any assumptions about her future, I expected her to become a scholar, maybe a theologian. These days she writes poetry, which I understand about as well as algebra, but even I can see in her poems the same project as in her student writing: to wring some meaning out of life’s pain and losses—but now it’s less theoretical, more urgent, a matter of survival.

Judith is currently “struggling,” as the euphemism goes, as a lot of people do in their twenties (and beyond). I won’t tell her story here, but the details hardly matter; the demons that tend to carjack our lives’ journeys are the usual suspects—petty, low-level demons, like some punk street gang from the Camden, New Jersey of Hell. Judith and I inadvertently bonded once when we ran into each other at the (literal) revolving door of a mental health clinic. We exchanged awkward, amused his, skipped the what are you doing heres, and never mentioned it again, but it remains there between us, an understanding.

My own twenties were a lot more like Judith’s than Madeline’s. I was not what you’d call a prodigy; I wasn’t the best writer in my undergraduate writing program, or even in the top ten. I got, let us say, distracted from my ambitions. I’d had nothing to do with either booze or girls in my teen years, and proved to be ill-defended against their allure. Then, after my father died, I decided to take a couple-twenty years off to drink heavily and reflect.

Although it’s meaningless to compare suffering, I think that what Judith’s undergone in the last year is harder than what I went through back then. I’m afraid that in her place I would not have been as resilient as she’s proven; I might’ve succumbed to the temptation to just say fuck it and let the undertow take me out. But Judith was resolute in her will to survive. Her credo was, The only way out is through. She felt that the only choice available was between death and life, or—what was, for her, the same thing—between death and writing. She never stopped, not even when she was institutionalized. My own career has mostly been a matter of luck, but one thing I will say to my own credit is that I never stopped writing, either, not even when I was mistakenly trying to write fiction, or when I accidentally became a cartoonist instead. I was in my forties before an editor took a liking to my work, and an agent noticed it. So I have a special affection for the slow starters, those who got waylaid or sidetracked, who wandered, who got lost.

Madeline and Judith were in the same class, the first one I ever taught. My students’ personal lives and interrelationships—which were friends, which were frenemies, who was sleeping with whom, who was on the outs—were invisible to me, murky currents deep beneath the daylit surface of the classroom, so I don’t know how well those two may have known each other. But I can certainly imagine how I‘d feel if I were Judith, seeing Madeline’s apparently fabulous life on Instagram—Madeline’s book cover, Madeline’s photoshoot, Madeline’s interviews, Madeline’s travels—while I was still trying to scrape together something that at least looked on the outside like a normal grownup life. I’m a relatively successful writer, and I still feel like John Milton’s Lucifer or Wagner’s Alberich or fucking Gollum whenever I contemplate the acclaimed hacks and beloved frauds who are my own artistic nemeses—some wretched creature seething with ressentiment, spitting spite and vengeance from the pit. I just learned the Czech word litost, translated as “the humiliated despair we feel when someone reminds us, through their accomplishments, of everything that has gone wrong in our lives.” At least I was spared the pestilence of social media in my own youth. Of course Instagram is not real life, and Madeline’s life has not been charmed, or even especially easy; she’s had her own “struggles.” But then it’s not one another’s inner lives that we covet.

Anyway, early success is not necessarily the best thing that can happen to a young writer. Donna Tartt’s first book was a sensation, and every book she’s written since has been a critically acclaimed bestseller; but so was Tama Janowitz’s, and unless you fall within a certain very narrow age range you don’t know who that is. A friend of mine’s first novel was a breakout success—well-received, made the New York Times bestseller list, adapted into a movie—and then the literary world somehow collectively decided she was a one-hit wonder and has ignored everything she’s published since, even though her last novel was the best thing she’s ever written, far better than most of the fashionable ephemera that got critical attention that year. The vagaries of literary reputation are notorious: Herman Melville had a great career going ‘til he wrote that colossal flop Moby-Dick; one copy of Beowulf somehow survived the bottleneck of the Dark Ages to make it to the exalted Valhalla of high school curricula. No arena better exemplifies that Zen parable whose refrain is: “Good news, bad news—who can say?” It’s hard to know who’s gonna go the distance, who’s gonna burn out, who’ll fade away, who’ll be read and remembered in a thousand years and who’ll just end up department chair. Life is long and improbable, with plenty of time in it for both glory and squalor, and there is no “ending up,” except for dead. So my joy for Madeline is both wholehearted and provisional; my worry for Judith is the same.

I never had any children; I’ve only had students. My responsibility to those young people, and my investment in them, isn’t remotely comparable to a parent’s. But, watching Madeline and Judith’s lives, I think I can at least begin to imagine some of the aching pride, nightmare worry, and feral love that parents must feel, watching their children sputter and flail when they’re thrown into the deep end of young adulthood. Following my students’ wavering ascent trajectories, I feel the same way I did at the space shuttle launch I attended long ago: holding my breath with hope and apprehension, my heart surging up with them in something like prayer. Biblical exegesis is not my forte, but I did go to Sunday school, and remember well the parable of the Prodigal Son. I’ve always empathized with the son who comes crawling home broke and contrite from the pigsty; I also get the son who’s like, So I run the family business for years but we’re gonna throw a big party to celebrate King Fuckup here getting out of rehab? But most of all, lately, I identify with the father who rejoices in both his children: one who’s excelled and another who’s endured, one who’s triumphed in the eyes of the world and one who’s quietly, heroically, survived.

Space shuttle Challenger launch, Mission STS 41-G, October 5, 1984. Photograph by astronaut Paul J. Wietz, ©NASA