The book that I want to talk to you about today is called Teacher and it’s a memoir. It was published in 2002 and what I want to do is tell you a little bit about the genesis of that book, a little bit about its content, and then say some things about its reception and its aftermath. I hope I won’t be embarrassing my older son too much to say that he was an integral part of the genesis of this book even though he wasn’t at all aware of it, or aware of all that much beyond the sphere of our house in 1992 when the book got going. That’s right. It took 10 years from the time of inception to the point where this actually came out. But the inception was kind of odd and it was bound up with a deep and persistent need, the need for new furniture.

Matthew, who’s now a big and strapping and strong young man, was at that point leaving his crib and we needed new bedroom furniture. This was in the middle of my wife’s mind and the back of my mind and sometimes in the front of my mind and I knew that somehow or other, salaries being what they were at the time, I needed to find some way or other to make the transition from crib to consolidated big boy bed.

That occasion came along and a lot of other good things came along with it when a woman named Nan Graham called me up and asked me, really at the behest of a couple of friends of mine who were working at Harper’s at the time, if I might consider putting together a volume on the culture wars. Consider? Sure. It was a great interest of mine writing about this culture war business and it was also a great interest of mine to raise the money to provide the furniture. These things seemed to come together just brilliant.

They came together even better when I went to New York City and I met Nan. Nan is a very charismatic and striking editor. A friend of mine described her as the kind of editor that François Truffaut would cast as a New York City editor if he were doing one in a movie. She arrived at our lunch meeting on a Schwinn bicycle and sort of jumped off with her rain slicker on and gamboled into the restaurant and listened to my proposal which was about five sentences long and highly tuned by my pals at Harpers and at the end of about six sentences, she said, “how much will this cost?” and I named a figure that I thought was outrageous and she thought was pathetic and she said, “sure” [laughs]. Thence the crib.

The book that came out of that was a thing called Wild Orchids and Trotsky. Wild Orchids and Trotsky was a collection of autobiographical essays by people in the literary critical field which was then coming under a good deal of attack. I tried to find people who were on the so-called conservative side of the question, people who were on the so-called progressive side of the question, and the result, at least from my point of view was a pretty interesting bunch of essays. Richard Rorty wrote a piece, Susan Fraiman, a colleague here, wrote a piece; Eve Sedgewick wrote a piece. Just lots of fascinating stuff where people wrote their own intellectual autobiographies.

I was the editor so I got to write the introduction to the book, but I did something else as well. Having assigned all these very interesting people, I just found the people I most liked reading and offered them a chance to write about themselves for 20 or 25 pages and, shockingly enough, they all said yes, so I tried to write my own. Well, I wrote my own and I wrote my own and I rewrote my own and I was under pressure. I was just a youngster, of course, and these were all the big names in the field, so I wrote and wrote it and wrote it and read it and wrote it and the essays began to come in and all of the essays that came in were, as I thought, as I said, quite good, but there were all about a my first encounter with Hegel at the age of eight, Simone de Beauvoir and I, stuff that was way above my head. In a certain sense, above the head of my essay anyway, because what I had written was something entirely different.

I had written an essay about my high school teacher, Douglas Myers whom I call in this book Frank Lears. He’d done something quite remarkable for me and my contemporaries at Medford High School and I wanted to memorialize that, but I was a little bit jittery about the whole thing. It wasn’t about Hegel and it wasn’t about Simone de Beauvoir and at that last last last last last minute I pulled my own essay. I rejected it unilaterally and it tumbled into the drawer. It stayed there. Does [Horace] say you’re supposed to keep your own work in a drawer for seven years or something? That seems a little bit unfair, but it stayed there for pretty close to seven years and then one day, feeling terrifically bored, I opened my drawer.

Now, one of the things that Tennessee Williams, the author, used to do is when he— He wrote every day, and when he couldn’t find anything to write, he would just pull out a story of his and write it over again and a friend of his once came by and said, “Tennessee, this has been published three times already. Why are you re-writing it?” and he said, “I don’t know. That’s what I do.” So I rewrote it a little bit, but it wasn’t half bad, at least to my then slightly more mature judgment. The irony was a little bit off in the first draft, but I thought this was okay and I spent a couple of weeks on it and at the end, I thought, hmm, I rather like this, but then I thought—publish. Nobody on this earth. Who cares about high school? Me.

Well, it turned out one person did. I sent it off to Lingua Franca. The editor there read it the first day he got it and said, “hmmm, high school, you, not so bad. Okay.” So there it was in the pages of Lingua Franca, a 15-odd page essay about my high school career.

Then, the thing that writers supposedly dream of and as they say, Delmore Schwartz says, “in dreams begin responsibilities.” The thing that we all dream of sort of happened, the phone began to ring. Editors, agents, agents, editors, people who wanted me to expand it into a book. Hmmmm, I thought, expand it into a book. That’s not so bad an idea. And so with encouragement that I never expected to get, not only from the home front, but also from the professional front, I did exactly that. It was a story that was very close to my heart and there was a lot to tell.
Just about every paragraph in that piece or every two or three paragraphs would eventually become a chapter in the book. The first chapter would be the chapter about walking into class the first day and seeing Frank Lears up at the front of the room. Now, I at the time was on the football team and I believe I was wearing my football jacket. Two of my football colleagues were there with me, Mitch de Leo and John Aquino. Their names can be used now and we looked up at front of us at a little tiny guy with a droopy moustache and a sad sack suit and we knew two things about him immediately—he could not bench press anything and since the highest standard of manliness and prowess was the ability to fire out from the line, no, he could not fire out from the line. We immediately saw an easy mark. We wrote him off as a sap and we bet among ourselves we’ll have him out of here by mid-October, no doubt about it. There were some more optimistic in the class who thought that by mid-September we would get rid of him. I was of the mid-October school, much more realistic.

Now, teacher torturing was a major preoccupation at Medford High School. My high school was very much like a jail. They were the jailers and when you meet a turnkey who isn’t up to snuff you go at him. The other turnkeys who were up to snuff went at us, hammer and tongs all the time, so whenever somebody started to falter a little bit, we saw that it was our day.

We sat down the first day and the strange little man who had an impeccable and fluent accent wrote something on the board. It was a quotation. It was about philosophers of the future being in contradiction or dissonance to the mores of the day. They were out of step with the times. They were out of joint with what was going on and then at the bottom of it, he wrote a name that was both familiar and unfamiliar to us, I must say—Fredrich Nietzche. John Aquino, the quarterback of the football team, turned to me and you may have to be of a certain age to get this joke, said, “see, I told ya. Nitsche’s smart.” Nitsche was none other than Ray Nitsche, the great linebacker of the Green Bay Backers. Was John being ironic? I don’t know, but if I see him at my high school reunion this year, I do intend to ask him.

Mr. Myers began to talk and we began to throw spitballs. We began to crash our desks into each other. We began to cause trouble, but he maintained an astonishing level of poise and it began to come through that he thought rather highly, if not of himself, at least of what he was up to here in this small dingy classroom in Medford High School.
We had those clocks— You know those clocks were they hop three or four minutes at a time, so we’d all sit there sort of betting—is it going to hop, is it going to hop. I don’t know. And usually underneath the clock there was a sign that said “time will pass—will you?” Most of us didn’t and time did. So, we watched that clock and watched him and we did the best we could to make him miserable. We did that for week after week after week. That was one of the stories I wanted to tell.

Another story that I wanted to tell was about my father and his interest in Frank Lears/Doug Myers. Generally, my father, as they say in the book, took about as much interest in what was going on in my and my brother’s education as he took in __________ phenomenology. We would drive by a large brick building in the middle of town and he would say, “what is that building?” And I’d say, “Dad, that’s my school.” “How interesting,” he would say. He hadn’t liked school much himself. He was brilliant guy but he had left without even having graduated from high school and the less said about it, from his point of view, the better.

Yet this Frank Lears guy, he began to find interesting, partly because I was reporting these fragments of conversation that were coming out from class. I reported to my father that Frank Lears had the bizarre idea that it was better to receive harm than to do harm. This was a platonic idea you all perhaps know and it was something that I couldn’t wrap my mind around at all. But my father who was plenty bright from thinking on his own, from reading the Boston Globe and from debating with the TV all evening long and usually winning, at least to my eye, had a lot to say about it, so his involvement with Frank Lears in this dimension of my education was something that I really wanted to think about in the book.

I also wanted to think about Medford High School and I wanted to find a story that would crystallize what I thought to be going on there. Finally I come up with one. This is an appalling story, so get ready to be somewhat appalled. The story was told to me by a friend of mine who is very important in the book. His name is Kevin Shea, W. O’Day in the book, and he told me a story about Joey DeVitro, a guy who seemed to live at the pool room, pool shack, handsome guy, confident guy, coming up behind a young girl that we used to call nothing other than because she was and because we were as crude as could be, the blind girl. Joey walked up behind her one day in the corridor and spun her around. Why? Kevin swears that Joey did not know he was in the room. He didn’t do it to show off. He did for it his own amusement. That struck me as one of the best crystallizations of a nasty, brutish and for many people, short life that reigned at Medford High School.

Frank Lears, in the midst of that atmosphere, was not somebody to be daunted, not in the least. He was a tough and capable guy, in his way, though unable to fire out from the line. He gave us one day pretty much by surprise a whole bunch of new books. He took back the Will and Ariel Durant book that we were supposedly reading in the course and that none of us could abide—[he knew that] and he gave us books by Kesey and by Camus and by Freud and he sat there and he read them aloud to us because we wouldn’t read them at home and he tried to provoke discussion day after day, and only one person would talk with him. Well, actually two. The one person was a young woman named Susan Rosenberg who was bright, charming, something of a hippy and very well informed. She and Doug Myers/Frank Lears would go back and forth all day while we sat there appalled at her betrayal.

But we had a hero—Tommy [Bore]. Tommy was short, trollish, angry and absolutely unreachable. He ranted at Lears all the time. He said it was nonsense, idiocy, bullshit. When he talked, you had that great image of Nikita Khrushchev from the United Nations taking off his shoe and smacking it on the desk. All right. Even when he didn’t have a shoe off, he was still smacking the desk with the shoe. When you saw him in the hall, you thought I just walked a way who has a very fierce Rottweiler with him, but there was no Rottweiler. It was just the persona bleeding out. He was relentless in his persecution of the teacher.

The teacher was completely poised and completely at ease, but at a certain point, at least by my reading of the situation, the teacher decided to fight back. One day he sent Mitch de Leo, one of the most popular and rightly so. He was a genial, good-spirited, funny, ironic, articulate guy, offensive end on the football team, he sent Mitch off on an errand and he said, “while Michael’s gone—“ He didn’t call him Mitch. We didn’t know what he was talking about, “we’re going to play a little game. When I ask you which of these two lines on the board is longer, you say that the shorter one is longer. All raise your hands. When I ask you which of these two is shorter, you say the longer one is shorter. But don’t anybody tell Michael, okay?” “Okay.”

Mitch, who had this walk that I can still remember from high school, you know those guys who’re just so perfectly coordinated and they walk with that gorgeous bounce and when he took a corner, it was like a Porsche taking a corner, you know, whirrrr— All the wheels on— He takes the corner, he comes in and he was just the right guy for this job, you know, and so the teacher points to the board—“which one is longer?” We all say, “the shorter one is longer.” All of our hands go up. Michael’s hand goes up on the other side of the question—“16 to 1, Michael, not so good.” The next time points to the board—“which one is longer?” We all lie. Michael wavers a little bit, but tells the truth. We look daggers at him. The next time we lie again, he lies with us. We lie, he lies. We lie, he lies. It’s great. And it’s amazing how good we are at it, too. You would think that his buddies, particularly his football buddies, who live, breath and, as the coaches would say, defecate, but not defecate football, with him, would have the wherewithal to tip him off, but we don’t.
We’re pretty great at it and at the end of the exercise, Mitch is probably reduced once again to Michael, the kid he was in the 8th grade and he’s sweating and upset and anxious and unhappy and finally with all the calm that he could muster, Doug Myers lets him in on the situation. It was an experiment about conformity.

“You did pretty well, really. Most people cave even earlier. Most people cave right away.” Then he went around the room, son of a gun, and he asked us how we thought we would do and we weren’t, as I recall, able to be all that confident about being much more successful than Michael had been. He taught us quite a lot that day, but that was only the beginning. All right?

He was capable of doing extraordinary things. One day he brought in his pals from Harvard University, Students for a Democratic Society, and he sat them up in the front of the room and he got them to denounce the war for us. We had never heard the war denounced quite like that. This was a working class town and a number of us, our brothers, fathers, were off in Vietnam or in favor of the same and we had never heard America called a criminal and a rouge nation. We’d never heard anybody say that Richard Nixon should be put on trial for war crimes and all of his Cabinet with him. We’d never heard about reparations for the evils done to the earth by the American nation. It had begun with the Indians. It had run through the Filipinos. It had gone to Cuba. It had gone to the Mexican American War and now here was more evidence of the same. We were simply devastated and blown away and also, I have to say, exhilarated by the whole thing.

Not only we were there in the classroom that day, but kids from other classes skipped in order to come. Now, kids skipped class all the time at Medford High School. Every time the bell rang, there was a general 20% shrinkage of student population, but this time, the first time in history, maybe even the last, kids were skipping class in order to go to class. They turned up at this class and they gave the SDS guys quite a tussle. The most prominent and articulate and charismatic of them all was forced by Steve Smith, middle guard, toughest guy on the football team, ultimately to admit that not only did he not have any relatives in Vietnam, he didn’t even know a single person who was there. “Well, it makes it a little easier,” Smitty, I recall said, “to root for the North Vietnamese then, doesn’t it?”

So, some of these guys gave as good as they got, but we got, too, and it was quite interesting. This classroom became a center where interesting things were going on. People knew this and they responded to it. One day, half a dozen black kids walked into the classroom and they said, bellowed, actually in the direction of Frank Lears, “do you know what today is? Today is the anniversary of the birthday of Malcolm X.” Frank Lears/Doug Myers, did not lose a beat. He simply smiled in their direction and said, “and when did he die, Malcolm X?” The leader of the group gave a date and then Myers said, “well, why don’t you sit down and talk about him for a while?” and they did. Half a dozen black guys, some of them formidable, fierce, some of whom we were very frightened of and also frightened of us, sat down and gave a collaborative seminar with Doug Myers that day on who Malcolm X was. We learned a tremendous amount.

On the way out of the classroom that day, as I recall it, Doug Myers said to me, “you know, you might try reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I believe that’s a book that you would like quite a lot.” It’s the first book that I ever bought with my own money and it was the first book in a long time not having to do with football that I read all the way through. When my friends saw me reading it, some of my white linemen friends—the defensive backfield was a good deal more liberal—they had some fairly scathing things to say about it. It’s quite true.

After the SDS day, there’s some fairly warm debates in the locker room and it was more or less defensive line versus defensive backfield on the subject of the war. The defensive backfield, for whatever reason, righter, smarter, quicker, I don’t know what, they’re against the war. The defensive line for and many of us in the middle. It was not a half bad discussion. In fact, the only people for a little while that I heard oppose the war who were of my class and of my age were Fred Carbone and Michael de Leo, two defensive backs on the football team and as I said in the book, after you’d gotten your brains banged on day after day after day, your nose bleeding and your ears bleeding sometimes, too, then it probably would be no surprise that you weren’t afraid of making your opinions known. What else could they do to you, really? And so they said and they did. All right.

It became a much livelier place. One of the days that was most salient and I most wanted to write about came just after the SDS people had come and left us still boiling, boiling, boiling. It was a very torpid day. It had just snowed outside. One of those spring New England snow storms that leaves, oh, four feet snow and Frank Lear suddenly stands up and says, “let’s go outside, this is boring.” We all go outside and no one has ever gone outside during school time in Medford High School except to commit a crime. So, we go outside and he bends over and he does something quite extraordinary and absolutely death-defying, if he only knew what he was getting into. He packed a snowball together and he threw it in a not too, you know, New York Yankees infield manner here in the direction of one of us.

Now, we had been throwing snowballs from the time we were kids and with us was John Aquino, the quarterback of the football team, also was the shortstop of the baseball team. When John threw something, you didn’t even see it leave his hand. You didn’t see it hit the thing. All you saw was the destruction on the other end. All right. And he had started the fight, our teacher. Now, you remember his nemesis, the guy with the Rottweiler who wasn’t there. He immediately saw the opportunity. He picked up an enormous chunk of ice and went in the teacher’s direction. He threw and missed and Doug Myers started to push him into a snowbank. Well, it looked like now Tommy was finally going to get his revenge, but suddenly from out of nowhere, comes an enormous fuselage of snowballs aimed not at Doug Myers, the figure of authority, vulnerable now and hospitalizable from the point of view of all of us, but at Tommy who we didn’t like much anymore.

I don’t know how he picked that day but he was our guy and from then on this was the most exciting educational experience I ever had. I read read read. A lot of people in the class the same way. When my friend Kevin Shea read the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest through for the first time, he read it again and again and again and at a certain point, I said, “can I have a look at your One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?” And he said, “no, it’s gone.” “Where did it go?” “I used it up.” He used the book up he read it so many times. And he became for a while in an ironic sort of way, in a very appealing way, none other than Randall Patrick McMurphy and off he went doing better than he would’ve under the other circumstances.

When I went to my high school reunion five years ago I ran into a student from that class and I said, “what do you remember about Doug Meyers?” She said, “nothing.” I said, “oh, really.” She said, “he changed my life, but I can’t remember a damn thing about it.” Everybody who had any contact with this guy said as much.
Well, I’ll tell you. It was a pleasure to write about such a thing, you know. Susan Sontag has this idea about writing that I’ve always liked. She says, “whenever I have something that I want to write about, I don’t go to a library and read about it. I don’t even take a lot of notes. I just pull out a yellow pad, I sit down and I start to scribble. Then we find out what’s really back there. Because one of the great pleasures of writing is, well, you never know what you think until you see what you write. Right? There’s a lot of stuff back there. It’s quite a place and if you don’t deign to disappoint it too much, all sorts of magnificent things can happen.”

Well, some magnificent, some bad, but I wrote away at the greatest velocity and with the greatest pleasure. It was like skiing downhill, downhill forever and I don’t even know how to ski. It was blissful. All right.

How was it to write? It was great. How was it to write? It was awful because at a certain point in the writing process, I had a realization that you’ll find, I hope or I imagine, risible. Other people were going to read this. You really don’t think so. You just sit there writing what comes into your mind and saying what you think is interesting and true and important and doing your best to get it all out and then suddenly you realize, oh, my goodness, this will be read by somebody else. Wow.
Not only that, I had my editor’s suggestions to contend with and they were pretty extensive and a little bit—he wasn’t doing so well at the time, I suspect. I mean, he’s a great editor, on the ferocious side. Well, I had a tough summer thinking about those edits and I had a tough time starting in on them, but one thing that I learned from reading a writer like Norman [Mayo] was an engineering major at Harvard is that a lot of writing is like engineering. You figure out where to start, where to lay the first brick, where to begin to dig the foundation, so I started revising from the back and there weren’t that many emendations there, partly because he’d probably gotten tired and quit by that time saying he’s absolutely incorrigible, so I worked back to front and I managed to get there and turn it on time.

The book got its title on September 11th, 2001 when my editor called me at about 10:15 in the morning. We talked it back and forth and then he said “I really have to go. There seems to have been some kind of a thing down at the World Trade Center, but I’m not sure what it is.” Not necessarily the best karma with which to launch a book, but however the karma was, when the book came out in the fall of 2002, it had a simply marvelous ride. It got reviewed, reviewed, reviewed, Times, Post, NPR. Every newspaper in the country, Entertainment Weekly, People Magazine, and just about all of the reviews were good.

Books are hard to write. At the end of Huckleberry Finn, Huck, speaking for Mark Twain says, “If I’d knowed how much trouble it was to write a book, I don’t think I ever would’ve started.” Right? But one of the things that made this book worth writing was the responses that I got, thanks be to e-mail, from individuals who found it, as I say, an occasion to find their own voice and to talk about their own childhoods and their own educations in ways that might’ve been somewhat against the grain and surely weren’t ways that were institutionally easily sanctioned. It became, and I think it still is, a book for mavericks who want to describe a process of self-education that’s achieved in some collaboration with good educational institutions but also in some opposition to good educational institutions.

Hemmingway once said some interesting now that we’re on the subject about Huckleberry Finn. He said it was the first American book and one of the things about Huckleberry Finn, I think, that Hemmingway had in mind was this—the reason I think he thought it was the first American book is that it gives you the sense that anybody’s experience, if plumbed at the right place and thought about in a clear and compassionate way, can be the substance for a book. We all have a book inside of us. If Huck does, so do we.

Now, that may be fictive a certain sense, but I found it a moving one and I found the best part about writing this book was discovering that I had a book in me that as a college professor I never imagined that I would write and that I ignited books and possibilities for books and conversations that may have sounded like books in other people who may never have suspected that they had a book inside of them to write either.