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English Education: The Long Slow Fuse Model
Kate Grenville
I'm a writer, not an educator, so I don't have anything as coherent as a position on this subject.
The only thing I can bring to this discussion is a writer's perspective. I've written 5 books of fiction and 2 books about the writing process (one in collaboration with Sue Woolfe), and writing has been my life and livelihood now for going on twenty years. Thinking about my own English studies at school, and whether they had anything to do with me now being a writer, I was struck by what a long slow fuse the study of English can be.
I must have been a cow of a kid to teach. I lie awake and blush about it now. I announced to Mrs Armstrong one afternoon at Cremorne Girls' High that King Lear was terribly overrated. (Mrs Armstrong was good enough not to laugh.) I told anyone who would listen that Jane Austen was irrelevant. None of us in 5A had ever seen anything as silly as an evening spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table, and we thought it was ridiculous to worry about eating peaches.
Under the desk another whole world was going on. Under the desk were Salinger, Steinbeck, Nicholas Monserrat, Paul Gallico, John Fowles. Ah, now that was real literature. Why weren't we studying that?
At another school I'd been forced to learn poetry by heart. I thought the poetry was doggerel, and I didn't approve of learning off by heart. Things should well up spontaneously from the heart.
In general, I was an extremely resistant consumer of the English syllabus of the sixties.
It took 20 years before something happened that made me eat humble pie. I was in the Royal Hospital for Women in labour with our first child, trying not to panic. Suddenly, from the primitive depths of my back-brain, despised and seemingly forgotten, something came to my rescue.
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;
"Good speed!" cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;
"Speed!" echoed the wall to us galloping through;
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast."
When that stopped working, there was more.
"On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
and through the field the road runs by
To many-towered Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow,
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott".
In the end, Tom was born to a rousing mixture of old chestnuts. The rock-solid gleaming rhythmic safety of these lines had locked onto my neurones in 1963 and never been accessed since, but they were still there, fragmentary but powerful.
It shocked me, as you can imagine. But it set me thinking.
I considered the fact that although my oh-so sophisticated brain might sneer at this "doggerel", some deeper and less articulate part of me had simply gulped it down whole.
I considered that perhaps liking a piece of writing, or finding it relevant, or even understanding it, might not be the whole story. There might also be something much more primitive going on, to do with rhythm and cadence and a dreamlike fluid association of words. After all, "poetry does not mean, it is".
I had to admit that being made to learn it off by heart hadn't actually killed me, either. It had been a way of smuggling this rather valuable thing inside me, past the sneering policeman of a young person's aesthetic judgement. It was part of my organism now, the same way the vitamins in my mother's force-fed spinach were.
I thought then about all the other literature I'd read and scorned when young. I knew enough now to grieve with silly old Lear and see that you didn't have to be wearing white muslin for Austen to be relevant. I had now seen for myself an evening sky spread out against a sky like a patient etherised upon a table. I knew exactly what frame of mind you had to be in to see it like that, and it was not a 16-year-old frame of mind.
So now, too late for long-suffering Mrs Armstrong, the penny had finally dropped.
One of the things that helped me to re-discover that literature was learning how to read as a writer, rather than as a reader. This is where Creative Writing comes in.
Looking at writing as a writer, you look at it not in terms of themes or subject but in terms of the writer's problem. To take an example - the funny part of a joke is, by the very nature of the thing, at the end. So the joke-teller's problem is how to strike the right balance between getting to the punch line too soon, and spinning the preamble out too long.
Once you've told a few jokes yourself, you listen to other people telling jokes not only in order to laugh at the joke, but also to see how they managed the problem.
Jane Austen's problems as a story-teller were many and subtle, but one of them must have been how to be truthful to her frustration at being a woman in her society, while at the same time producing writing that was socially acceptable.
It's a common writerly problem. Swift, Milton, Dickens and Milan Kundera have all found different ways around it. Austen's way was to develop her particular, unmistakable and potent kind of irony.
Now, being angry at the system and not being able to say so was something I knew all about at 16. After all, I was the one who was threatened with expulsion for refusing to wear her socks folded down to the regulation 3 inches above the anklebone. If I'd looked at Jane Austen from a writer's perspective at 16 I mightn't have thought her books were so irrelevant after all.
Creative Writing was an unheard-of concept when I was at school, but I hope that for that child who was born to the rollicking rhythms of "We leapt to the stirrup", and for his sister, Creative Writing can open up some new ways into Creative Reading.
I also hope our children will be taught grammar. Any grammar will do.
I'm not good on grammar: apart from a few sessions taught like a guilty secret from an old-fashioned teacher early on, I was never actually taught any in English classes. The little bit of grammar I know came from learning French.
I took it for granted that everyone had the same kind of minimum working knowledge of grammar I have, until I started teaching Creative Writing to adults. One of the exercises I ask my students to do in class is to write a description of a person without using any adjectives or adverbs.
The first time I asked a group of my well-read, well-educated middle-class students to do this I couldn't understand why half the class started writing, but the other half - the younger half - sat with funny looks on their faces. Finally one of them said bluntly, We're happy to do the exercise, but first you'll have to tell us what adjectives and adverbs are.
These days I never assume everyone knows what an adjective is. But it's a limitation, for readers and writers.
To give an example - you might write that a character is pretty. You can see that pretty is a weak kind of word. You try to think of better words. You go to the Thesaurus. She was beautiful. She was gorgeous. She was ravishing. She was utterly gorgeous. She was startlingly gorgeous.
But the thesaurus isn't going to help you, because what's really wrong isn't the choice of adjective. No adjective will do, because what you need is something with more horsepower than any adjective can provide. You probably need to start thinking about verbs. Once you can see the problem in those terms you can put away the thesaurus and approach the whole problem in a different way.
It's not that as a writer you think, Oh, now I'm writing a verb, now I'm writing an adjectival clause. You do it by "feel", of course. But if your "feel" deserts you, or if you want to do something beyond the range of your "feel", you need to be able to take the language apart at a molecular level.
I don't think it matters which grammar is taught or what the parts are called. And certainly the old prescriptive rules aren't what I'm talking about. But writers and readers both need a vocabulary to identify the various levers and fulcrums in a sentence. I think it has to be taught, cold-bloodedly, as a tool, the way a soldier learns the Naming of Parts of his rifle.
Since I've always prided myself on being a bit of a rebel, I'm extremely surprised to have found myself taking what seems to be such a conservative position in all this. Perhaps it's because as a writer I know that I stand on the shoulders of every writer who's gone before. Not to be aware of that would be an impoverishment, if not downright shameful.
It might have taken decades, but the writer in me has finally educated the reader.
Kate Grenville