Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
Clare wants to consider this misbegotten sequence of events as little as possible. She is, additionally, almost certain now that Hillary, formerly a character in her one good story, knew her father when they were both in the Seminars together, how bizarre. And, as Clare apprehends on day one, Hillary’s class is not just distressingly unpopular, given the universalist topic, but more than slightly unbalanced and very, very verbose. Hillary gallops around a sonnet by Keats for approximately 135 percent of the allotted class time and then, spent, summarily dismisses her. It is a routine, if not intentional.
Hillary will say, “I guess we’re going to get started.”
“Am I sitting too far away?” Clare, at the other end of the table, will foolishly inquire.
“Too far away for what?”
Clare will change the subject. “Are we going to wait for anyone?”
“I’m not going to.” It’s a now-breezy Hillary, shuffling papers.
Clare reminds him that she is in fiction.
“Why’s that?”
“That I’m in fiction?”
“That you should mention it.”
“This is a poetry class?”
“I told you I have no prerequisites. Neither should you.” Hillary’s voice is treacly, lascivious, but his eyes are dead. Clare thinks he may have forgotten her name.
“This is about living, about writing and living,” Hillary seems helpless to prevent himself from insisting. “Real things. How people live,” he repeats, “in writing, and how they write. What is true. It’s about great poetry, the great themes. This is about how—” Hillary trembles.
Clare bites her lip. “I didn’t do the reading,” she announces.
“No one here does the reading,” Hillary tells her.
It is even stranger than the fiction Clare must laud and eviscerate on a weekly basis.
However, Hillary’s shaky pedagogy is having one salutary effect: it has caused Clare to recognize that, in spite of her own difficulties and loneliness, she is, at least, not the one in charge.
Even if she must give up the old dream of flawless self-expression, even if that is no longer possible, given the mess that is/are the channels via which her feeling circulates, yet she can do other things. She can imitate. She can become someone she is not. She can mimic and she can compete. And the reason she can do this is that there really is no other means of expression, speaking of what is true.
Clare remembers reading somewhere that when the mind is like a passageway where someone is talking, the voice belongs to someone else. Was it an academic poet who said this? Maybe Heraclitus? Virginia Woolf?
In any case, it’s a notion she can reverse-engineer.
Because Clare can write, as long as she does not do it.