Beet (10 page)

At last the professors took up the business of the student demonstrators. The faculty voted nearly unanimously for no punishment of any kind. Apart from the fact that so many of their own number had joined the occupiers—and
they
certainly were not going to be punished—many expressed the sentiment that the students had been in the right, though no one could say exactly what they had been right about. And they forgot entirely about the demands other than amnesty, but so had the students. Except for Manning, who wanted the one-term expulsion, and a biochemist named Watson, who hated everything about undergraduates no matter the circumstance, and who voiced his opinion that the MacArthur Five should be sent off in shackles to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, the rest of the Beet College faculty, save one other exception, voted to let them off scot-free.

Matha looked pleased by the decision; it taught her what she had wanted to learn. Bollovate, too, for the same reason. Huey, of course, looked pleased as well. Ferritt took notes on their reactions, writing on his little pad: “There was a firestorm of protest.”

The only moment worth noting was the point at which Professor Porterfield, that other exception, chose to speak—something he'd never done. That, he recognized, was his mistake when the Free Speech Zone vote came up; he should have expressed free speech. He would do so now. He raised his hand, stood just before the question was called, and said, in approximately twenty-three seconds (a record for faculty meeting speeches that stands to this day):

“Mr. President, I would like to raise two objections to letting the protesters off. One is sort of technical. But I always thought
acts of civil disobedience were undertaken to incur punishment, not to avoid it. The second has to do with the message this decision would send. In other words, with teaching. In my judgment, we're doing the students no favor by pretending crimes have no consequences.”

Then he sat again as quietly as he had risen, and calmly beheld Huey, who conferred with Bollovate while most other faculty members muttered and mumbled. Manning applauded and tried to whistle. Matha Polite stared at Professor Porterfield with renewed interest. All at once she realized something about this man that had a direct connection to her future. Bollovate realized the same thing about his own future regarding Peace, which meant Huey did too. Ferritt not only realized it, he was composing the “hed” on his piece for the
Pig's Eye
: “Porterfield Betrays Students.” Peace's colleagues may have realized it as well, though some were more dimly aware than others. Members of the CCR certainly realized it, and quickly looked to one another across the room for mutual confirmation.

It had not occurred to any of them before. Until that moment, it would have been as removed from anyone's mind at Beet College as anything could be. Beyond remote. Impossible. As distant as the half-life of uranium. As far away as Nairobi. But now, for wholly different sets of reasons, it was there, as plain as the nose on everyone's face: Peace Porterfield had to go.

And sure enough, for the first time in his life—in the misty rivers of the mind where momentous thoughts flash like a carp's head, brown and white, just below the surface—Peace was beginning to realize the very same thing.

THE BETTER TEACHERS AT ANY LEVEL POSSESS INVENTION AND
imagination. These powers are not the same and are not equal. An imaginative teacher is always inventive, but an inventive teacher is not necessarily imaginative. Between the two, invention is a comparative cinch. It's a three-eared camel or a farting Sri Lankan ambassador or a three-eared Sri Lankan camel schooled in international diplomacy who farts out of one of his three ears. That's all it is.

But imagination? Ah. Imagination is enthralled only by the camel, the ordinary humpy, durable, malleable-mouthed, diva-eyed, superior camel. Wow. The imaginative teacher walks around the animal, dreams into it, worries about it aloud in front of a classroom. The students overhear him as he worries. What's so fascinating, Professor? Professor? Can you hear us? Professor?

The imaginative teacher is thought itself. And to come upon one such person in a lifetime is to find, well, gold.

Peace Porterfield was an imaginative teacher. As a boy, he would dream into a painting in his parents' house—a nineteenth-century English landscape his father had picked up in a junk shop to cover a wall over a mantelpiece. In the center of a green valley stood a whitish castle that included several towers, and another
freestanding tower, gray and shadowed off to the side. Behind the castle stood a spread of vague blue-gray hills and a sky of lighter blue-gray in which puffy white clouds swung upward in a fuzzy comma. The day looked bright and yet also about to rain. To the left and right of the castle were trees full of leaves of resplendent greens, which grew more distinct the closer one came. Several trees tilted to the right as if pushed by a wind. Three black sheep occupied the middle distance, one grazing, two lying on the sward. And a boy and a girl walked on a path that seemed made of marl or some crumbly material, and ended halfway up a hill. He wore a straw hat and a blue shirt. She wore a red shirt and a white skirt shaped like an inverted egg cup. In the foreground were the brambles of a hedge, over which young Peace would climb while calling out to the boy and girl and telling them to wait up because he had questions to ask them.

That's what he would do as a teacher when looking into a poem or a novel or a story. He would translate himself into the object of his interest, using an instinct that was a boon to his students and a saving grace to himself, especially when he was down or disgruntled or feeling out of place—a time like the present.

It was seven days into November. He had left the faculty meeting on the day of the MacArthur Five decision two days earlier without speaking to his colleagues, who, though they had voted against him, would have spent another hour privately congratulating him on his moral courage. He had gone to be with Livi and the children. And in the days following—whenever he could wrest himself from the interminable and ineffectual CCR meetings, which had grown testier by the day, and bright with savage hauteur—he devoted himself to family and to the classroom.

“May I ask you a sophomore bull session question?” Livi said to him one evening when they stood together scraping the dishes. “What are you looking for in your life, Peace? What do you want—I mean, besides us?”

“To be useful”—without hesitation.

“Useful to whom?”

“To my students, so they'll be able to live in the world more
alertly, or interestingly, I guess. I'm not crazy about big lofty pronouncements.”

“I know. But the way everything is going, I thought it was a question you might ask yourself.” She kissed his cheek. “Just trying to be useful.”

In any given year he would teach a wide range of courses in subjects that simply interested him, and because they did, interested his students as well. Max Byrd had followed Peace from course to course, from a lecture course in the Metaphysicals, to seminars in Dr. Johnson, Conrad, and African-American novelists, to a conference group on the Irish Renaissance—a crazy salad, except that these various subjects came alive in the hands of a teacher of the first rank who gave Max and all serious students the goods. This fall, Peace was teaching but one course, since he'd taught three courses last spring, hoping to free time for writing. But the trustees' assignment intervened. His one course—Modern Poetry—had become almost excessively important to him, like a safe house.

A bleak and dank Tuesday began with a lacerating phone call from Bollovate, pushing him about the CCR's progress; a shouting complaint from the curator of the college museum that several pieces of African art were missing, and did Peace know anything about it and what was he going to do about it (as CCR chairperson, Peace had somehow become the catch-all for every college gripe and tantrum); a reading of his notes on yesterday's meeting of the CCR (in which Lipman proposed that the new curriculum be built around “The Great Gray Lady: How the
New York Times
Gives Us the World”), and another corrosive call from Bollovate.

Before heading off to the college, he noticed an old textbook of Livi's lying open on the kitchen table. The page was dog-eared and underlined at a description of a proximal row carpectomy, a procedure to remove three of the eight bones in the wrist, to relieve pain. A so-called salvage procedure, it is usually done to correct a botched surgery. The underlined portions detailed the procedure step by step. He took note of the book and the page as one does of something unusual that may be of importance later, but then slips one's mind. Unconsciously he frowned.

At noon he left his office. He hiked up the collar of his brown woolen sports jacket against the damp cold, traced the flight of a pair of grackles bisecting a long line of gray mist, and walked across the Old Pen from the library to Mallory, where the English Department taught its classes. Mallory was typical of aggressively modern campus buildings—ghastly yet expensive. The cinderblock walls were painted brown and had so gritty a texture that if one brushed exposed skin against them, it came away bloody. Ceiling lights were pinholes. Linoleum was the color of rotted lettuce.

Yet Peace was comfortable there. He closed the classroom door behind him, sat at the greenish table that served as a desk, and looked out upon the faces of twenty-three people with whom he would talk for the following fifty minutes about nothing but the likes of Eliot, Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Auden, Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, W. D. Snodgrass, Theodore Roethke, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and today's subjects, Marianne Moore and Richard Wilbur.

Modern Poetry was conducted as a discussion group, though the class was larger than Peace would have ideally had it. He was a well-known softy, and many more students applied than the limit noted in the course catalog, figuring Professor Porterfield would always make room for one or two extra, or ten. Twice a week they met to give close readings to poems, usually organized around a common theme, but not always. He wanted to teach them how to read a poem, and more, to absorb the language of poetry so that they might learn to generate original language on their own.

“Original language,” Peace told them at the first meeting, “is what distinguishes the real writer from the writer.”

He quoted Twain's dictum about the difference between the word and the right word being the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning—not to tell them something about the poets they were looking at, but something about themselves. As thinkers, as people, and, for a few perhaps as future writers, they should only aim to be in the lightning business. The right word as opposed to the word. He would show them a quatrain from Eliot's “Sweeney Erect,” but with a word omitted—“suds”—what the
darkly comic, beer-drinking, lecherous Sweeney wipes around his face as he prepares to shave. What right word did Eliot choose? he asked them. No, not soap; it gives you nothing but the shave. No, not cream; it suggests only the lechery. Same with “foam,” yet foam comes closer because it gets to the beer. And maybe to madness. And why is “suds” the right word? Because it contains the comedy, the lechery, the shave,
and
the beer. That's why.

He did not want to turn the students into poets. He wanted to make them see the world the way the poets see it, at least to see it that way some of the time. Because some of the time, the poet's way of seeing the world is clearest.

And this was the point as it applied to Peace himself. His wife and his best friend harassed him for not living in the world as it is—in Bollovate's world, when one came down to it. Yet from Peace's perspective, teaching and learning were as real as the world got. That may have been his problem. But it was also true. This is as good a place as any to note that if Livi was right and he resembled Candide, it was Candide with brains.

“We must learn to imagine what we know,” he told his class. “That was Shelley's idea. Do you see it? There is the life of facts and the life of dreams. And they come together in the imagination. Learn what has happened—history, biology, anything. Then imagine what you know and it fills the facts with noise, color, and light. Whatever you saw is the same but different all at once. Because you looked. Only you. You looked.”

How often Max Byrd wrote to his folks in Alabama that Professor Porterfield was his reason for staying in college. What he was learning about computers he could pick up anywhere. Were it not for Porterfield, he'd have come home long ago to work for his dad. Max was mired in debt with student loans, and in many ways preferred his parents' life, minus the poverty, to much of the esoterica and the claptrap hurled at him at Beet. Only Professor Porterfield seemed to speak for the value of learning, indeed for the value of growing up. “And he talks like a real person, Dad. You'd like him.”

Even the grumpiest and most skeptical adored him. Why would they not? Peace was on their side. He didn't pander to them any
more than he pandered to his colleagues, though the students seemed to better intuit his motives. He didn't agree with them automatically, and tell them how wonderful they were. He didn't say everything they wrote was “brilliant, but…,” or “splendid, yet…” He never called student poems “interesting.” And once in a while he accused his classes point-blank of sloppy thinking and “English major bullshit.” He didn't do anything overt to win them over. And he could not have cared less about student evaluations given at the end of every course, though his always shot through the roof. As he'd told Livi, all he wanted was for them to be more alert, more aware, more expressive, and generally smarter when he finished with them than when he began.

And in the interests of caring about them, he cared about his subject. He cared so much about literature he worried about it aloud. “Is
Juno and the Paycock
a tragedy? Is
Riders to the Sea
? How could they both be tragedies? Why did Ellison write nothing of value after
Invisible Man
? Did John Donne suffer? What were Conrad's politics? Does a real writer
have
politics? Why would Dr. Johnson never speak of death?” And so forth. The students overheard him, and beheld the imaginative teacher. So deep would he go in his private-public investigations, sometimes he would look up suddenly in class and blink like an awakening baby as if surprised to see anyone else in the room.

“Mr. Porterfield?”

“Yes, Sarah?”

“I didn't get the Marianne Moore poem at all.” Others nodded. They were about to take on “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing.”

“Let's try to figure it out,” said Peace. “The mind is an enchanting thing. How so, Max?”

“Because it is complicated?” said the boy.

“In what way is the mind complicated?”

“It moves in many ways,” said Jenny.

“And it moves quickly. It darts,” said Leslie, a music major. “‘Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti,' Moore writes. She means the mind is quick and agile.”

“Quick and agile,” said Peace, considering their words. “But so
what? Everyone knows that the human mind is quick and agile. Why write a poem about it?”

“Why write a poem about anything?” said Jenny, evoking a wave of light laughter.

“Yeah,” said Peace. “Why do poets write poems?”

“To give you something to teach,” said Lucky, a black kid from Andover, who could be counted on to say things like that.

“Precisely,” said Peace, with a smile. “And what do I like to teach, Lucky?”

“Deep meaning,” said the boy in a deep, dramatic bass, eliciting another laugh.

“Quick and agile. And deep,” Peace said. “What makes a mind worthwhile? The use of a hand can be quick. The eyes can be quick and deep. The voice, too.” He imitated Lucky: “‘Deep meaning.' But Marianne Moore is writing about the
mind
, which is the engine of the hands and the eyes and the voice, the center of everything. What makes that organ special to the poet?”

“I can think of another organ that is quick, agile, and deep,” said Lucky.

“I'm sure you can,” said Peace. “But try this once to stay on the subject.” More laughter, then a meditative silence.

“It can change,” said Jenny. “The mind can change.”

Peace read aloud the last lines of the poem: “‘It's not a Herod's oath that cannot change.' Good for you, Jenny. And what was Herod's oath? Why would it have been better had Herod changed his mind?” Several students offered the correct answer. Peace leaned back, clapped his hands once above his head, and gave them the thumbs-up. “What?” he teased. “You've read the Bible? What heresy is next? The Greeks?”

So the class progressed, from Marianne Moore's poem to Richard Wilbur's “Mind,” which was on the same subject but took a different turn. The mind is as blind as a bat, said Wilbur, that flaps about in the dark. Yet once in a glorious while, it can find a new flight path and “correct the cave.”

They talked and talked. They looked up, they looked down—heads bent over books. So open, so private. This was the beauty of
teaching—under the wheedling and the grappling, the strange loveliness of the enterprise. In their jeans, their baseball caps, even their nose rings and their saucy tattoos, the kids were, to him, breathtaking.