Teaching

Advertising, advertising, fatal lady of the lake
No one opts for copywriting, they get in there by mistake.

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I quote from memory a poem by Gavin Ewart (whose work should be more available because it's funny and salutary). I quote it because many people get into teaching by mistake, or, if not quite by mistake, by wandering in for shelter, for lack of a place to be, then by staying. I know there are vocational, idealistic teachers who want to make the world a better place. They tend to be played by Sidney Poitier or Robin Williams and mostly they are a sentimentalisation. I suspect true vocation may be not what pre-exists but what might, with luck, be discovered, and that it is less to do with idealism than most consider convenient.

I myself wandered in in much the same way some thirty-seven years ago, because a man has to do something, especially when his wife is expecting their first child, and when his degree is in Fine Art which offers a great deal, but not a career structure. I could have hung around and starved for a while, or tried to duck and weave, but that would have seemed a little unfair on C and the incipient other being. Teaching - school teaching then - was a job choice, not a career choice. In that respect it was like most jobs. It was so distinctly not a career choice that when three years later I was made head of an art department, only because I was older than my one departmental colleague, I had reached the pinnacle of most art teachers' academic career without ever even trying to reach it.

Did I regard being a young head of department as a triumph? Not in the least. Did the fact of having to be a schoolteacher at all seem like a defeat? My mother thought so. She had higher hopes. It seemed neither triumph nor disaster to me. I just regarded it, as I have regarded almost everything, as interim.

So years passed in schools - I taught in a few of them - then I was asked to write a poetry course for the art college in Norwich (by that time I had published some six books of poetry and two or three of translation, which my mother would have liked, or at least been reassured by, but she, alas, was dead) and so I wrote the course and delivered it, first by myself, then with excellent others. After more than a decade of this I started teaching at the university, and that's where I am.

What I discovered over the years, slowly at first, ever less intermittently, was that I liked teaching. Not because I thought I had a stash of knowledge that I could dole out to the needy but because I liked thinking and talking with others about the subject. I liked it so much that there were times I thought:

Money for jam! You get to do it, you get to talk about it, you get young fresh people to talk to all the time and they tell you things, and then you have to rethink and re-articulate, and in re-articulating things you come across this truly fascinating thought and you wonder where it goes, so you follow it and try it out, and that leads to something else. And in the meantime the students get on and you like them as people (you do after all share an abiding interest) and when they do well it is genuinely a good feeling, because you don't get left out of it, and in any case you carry on doing what you yourself need to do, so you put up with institutions and procedures and all the stuff about best practice, some of which might be good practice, some of which is just piety, and you carry on thinking the real contract, the true contract, is what goes on in class and in discussions, which is something you take deadly seriously because it is, after all, the only proper human contract, and you hope that your idea of the contract is indeed the important thing, more important than ticked boxes (but you tick them) and the ancillary obligations (which you fulfil), because, surely, that's what you're there for, you now realize, to be part of this intense and necessary but courteous conversation that is the contract, because, you say, what else is there?

That's a very long passage in italics but maybe that is what a vocation might be. I know full well I have had it easy, and am lucky to be doing this, because I could be struggling to make myself heard in a hostile classroom down a bad street, except I know I wouldn't do it, would refuse to do it, and that those who do are heroes, not because they have the vocation, but because they have the persistence and the hope and the wit and the good will which remains good will despite the odds. And they run the risk of drying out, turning dull, turning petty, having their minds and bodies exhausted for little thanks, surviving perhaps through developing small, vital eccentricities.

This is written as a rather breathless riff at the end of two long teaching days. Sometimes I wonder whether I'd miss teaching if I stopped? Probably not. I'd probably be filling my head and time with other things, of the store of which there is no end. Nevertheless, there are rewards, and they are the ones I list above, so it's not a bad job, nor indeed a bad vocation, not today, not on the spur of the moment, the right moment that is, because the right moment is what you work towards and hope to enjoy, the chances being that if you enjoy it, others might too.

Literature is for posh people

So an acquaintance said to me after he had come to hear Hugo Williams and I read at The Bicycle Shop. 'I'm a working class boy,' he says. 'Literature is not for me.'

Well, Hugo is Eton and glamorous in a sort of Bohemian theatrical top-notch sort of way, and if you're feeling sensitive about these things, then he is just a toff, and writes toff literature, because literature is for toffs.

It wasn't always like this, of course. The great project at the beginning of the 20th century - the WEA project, the Everyman project, the Penguin project - was to bring litterachewer to the masses, because litterachewer was not simply a class signifier, but the written experience of being human, and that written experience had been denied those without education. Certainly it carried its class origins with it, just as it carried its gender, ethnicity, and personal genes, but then educated people die too. They too are born, get sick, lose people, fall desperately in love, are disappointed in love, cheat and are cheated, grow old, wet themselves, and go ga-ga. The fact that they had eddication doesn't prevent the human cycle running them over. The human cycle is the great leveller.

The best most terrifying poem about ageing is by Hugo Williams. When I Grow Up is savage and funny and sad. It is not the poem of an Old Etonian. It is the poem of a man contemplating indignity and death. It is not litterachewer, it's a poem, and, frankly, class doesn't come into it at the point of contact.

There's no point in choosing your reading on the basis of social rank alone. Don't tell me that a working class boy is beyond litterachewer, that it's all posh talk and nothing to do with him. To think that is to bring shame to your class. Read John Clare, read Robert Bloomfield, read Blake, read Rosenberg, read Harrison. Read bloody Lord Byron! Don't just stand there, looking gormless and cross. Read something! You might learn something!

Sunday Night is... early Nat King Cole twice

Solid Potato Salad (with Oscar Moore and Johnny Miller).

And here, a little later, with dancer, in I'm An Errand Boy for Rhythm



All good happy music contains sadness inside it. That is what makes it happy music. It has worked its way there without having seemed to.

Something Understood

My poem, English Words, appears on Vesna Goldsworthy's Something Understood on Radio Four. The whole programme is here.

The text of the poem:

English Words

My first three English words were AND, BUT, SO;
they were exotic in my wooden ear,
like Froebel blocks. Imagination made
houses of them, just big enough to hang
a life on. Genii from a gazetteer
of deformations or a sprechgesang:
somehow it was possible to know
the otherness of people and not be afraid.

Once here, the words arranged their quaint occasions,
Minding their Manners, Waiting in the Queues
at Stops and Hatches, I got to know their walls,
their wallpaper and decorative styles,
their long louche socks, their sensible scuffed shoes.
Peculiar though: their enigmatic smiles
and sideways looks troubled my conversation
swimming in clouds above the steam of kettles.

You say a word until it loses meaning
and taste the foreignness of languages,
your own included. Sheer inanity
of idiom: the lovely words are dead,
their magic gone, evaporated pages.
But this too is a kind of spell: unread,
the vocables coagulate and sting,
glow with their own electricity.

I cannot trust words now. One cultivates
the sensuous objects in a locked museum:
their sounds are dangerous and must be heard
voluptuously, but behind thick glass.
Their emptiness appals one. One is dumb
with surprise at their inertia, their crass
hostility. They are beautiful opiates,
as brilliant as poppies, as absurd.

I'll try to conjure what I was thinking when I wrote this poem, about thirty years ago. It was one of a series, 'Appropriations', I wrote about our first years in England. The title of the set came later, and I dropped two or three poems from the group. The verse form was the same in every case: four verses of eight lines each, rhyming unobtrusively, ABCDBDAC.

My first three words were indeed, AND, BUT SO, as in the bilingual version of A A Milne's Now We Are Six. What I didn't then know was that they were set language exercises. Froebel Blocks are children's wooden building bricks. The first verse is laden with words foreign to English or slightly unfamiliar words: Froebel, genii, gazetteer, sprechgesang (speech-song).

The second verse involves English mannerisms and phrases. The idea of queueing, minding your manners, 'quaint' occasions such as waiting at bus stops, at dinner hatches, are slightly displaced in a verse full of wallpaper, shoes, long shorts, tea kettles. It tickled me to use the French word louche to describe things so English.

The third verse is about sound - how the sound of words has little to do with the things they refer to and the way words dissolve, on repetition, into nonsense sound. The sensuousness of language is partly attached to the associations of the words, but when the associations vanish, there isn't a complete vacuum. Sheer sound comes into its own. Something remains.

The distancing effect of seeing or hearing language from the outside, as it were, has the effect of putting a sheet of glass between us and it - 'there is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses', wrote MacNeice. The fourth verse watches words at work the way a voyeur watches other people. It is exciting. The words retain their power but are objects of suspicion. The poem turns to the most impersonal of English pronouns, 'one' to carry the voice. It is a form of self-awareness, I suppose, 'playing English' as if from the outside.

It can be hard knowing whether 'one' is inside or outside the glass case.

Don Juan

Her eye (I 'm very fond of handsome eyes)
Was large and dark, suppressing half its fire
Until she spoke, then through its soft disguise
Flash'd an expression more of pride than ire,
And love than either; and there would arise
A something in them which was not desire,
But would have been, perhaps, but for the soul
Which struggled through and chasten'd down the whole.

Her glossy hair was cluster'd o'er a brow
Bright with intelligence, and fair, and smooth;
Her eyebrow's shape was like th' aerial bow,
Her cheek all purple with the beam of youth,
Mounting at times to a transparent glow,
As if her veins ran lightning; she, in sooth,
Possess'd an air and grace by no means common:
Her stature tall—I hate a dumpy woman.

Wedded she was some years, and to a man
Of fifty, and such husbands are in plenty;
And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE
'T were better to have TWO of five-and-twenty,
Especially in countries near the sun:
And now I think on 't, 'mi vien in mente,'
Ladies even of the most uneasy virtue
Prefer a spouse whose age is short of thirty.

'T is a sad thing, I cannot choose but say,
And all the fault of that indecent sun,
Who cannot leave alone our helpless clay,
But will keep baking, broiling, burning on,
That howsoever people fast and pray,
The flesh is frail, and so the soul undone:
What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate 's sultry.

Happy the nations of the moral North!
Where all is virtue, and the winter season
Sends sin, without a rag on, shivering forth
('T was snow that brought St. Anthony to reason);
Where juries cast up what a wife is worth,
By laying whate'er sum in mulct they please on
The lover, who must pay a handsome price,
Because it is a marketable vice.

I love the way Byron can drift from subtle, veiled dissection of an effect in the first verse above, to a brief insulting aside ("I hate a dumpy woman"), before rounding on elderly husbands and philosophising on the difference in sensuality between hot and cold climates.

It is the airy discourse of a man confident in society, working his way through several glasses of fine liquor as he goes raising an eyebrow here, tipping a wink there, sighing, wrinkling his brow, laughing, digressing then moving on with the story. He is fully in control of tone and register. The swagger is becomingly tired but light. It is the end of the day not the beginning.

All this is a few verses from Chapter One. Of course it is light verse, but light verse with a muscular heroic sweep. The story blows past us like a gale, but never so much like a gale that we cannot turn from it to let fall some remark about something quite different.

That is what is so marvellous about Don Juan. Byron loafs, he clowns, he sings, then gets on with the tale. Auden did it without the heroics or the glamour, Tony Harrison could have done it technically, with a frown but without the aristocratic lightness (what use would he have for aristocratic lightness? a cavalier laddishness he could manage in his earlier poems). Most of us would look a little stiff in the costume, but there's no harm donning costume now and then. Perhaps we can wear it in.

One project brewing is a collaborative updating of the tale of Don Juan. Long deadline calling from afar.

The Stretford End

In one of the strangest twists of any football story, Rooney has re-signed for Manchester United.

Was it the forty masked men, like the thieves in the story of Ali Baba, that terrified him? Did Coleen tell him off? His mum? Was it all a ploy to get the Glazers to release more money?

Or did he realise he had been misguided by his agent, one Paul Stretford, and so decide to break his chains and leap back into the cage?

In any case he will have lost almost all the affection in which he had been held. If he was being led on by Stretford he should sack the agent and find a new one. Time, I think, for a better and proper Stretford End.

Post Rooney

Good to hear Ian Holloway and Mark Lawrenson on this.

No point in speculating about all the reasons. I think Lawrenson is right and I think the splendid Ian Holloway is right.

Regarding Rooney's current stated reason for leaving - no investment in the team - Mark Pougach asks Lawrenson about Ronaldo and Tevez leaving and not being replaced.

I haven't seen it mentioned yet that hardly anyone had heard of Cristiano Ronaldo when he arrived at Old Trafford. For a season or two he was regarded as a flashy no-product luxury. Ferguson thought different, and he was right. No one had heard of Beckham and Scholes and the two Nevilles when they first came into the team ('You'll not win anything with kids'), and Giggs had already been dismissed - I remember it quite clearly, by Oliver Holt? - as someone who'll never be a great player now. Ronaldo wasn't a big money buy. Giggs, Scholes, Beckham, the Nevilles, Nicky Butt, Wes Brown, John O'Shea, Darren Fletcher, Jonny Evans cost nothing and are or have been all internationals. Solskjaer cost very little. No one had heard of Vidic or Evra when they arrived. The jury was out on all of them. It has been out on Nani but the verdict seems ever more likely to be favourable, and it has been out on Berbatov, but I am pretty sure that too will be favourable. The jury seems likely to approve of Raphael and Fabio, and it might well approve of Obertan. Anderson could come good. Bebe is a mystery, but I wouldn't bet against him. Valencia, Gibson, Cleverley, Welbeck, Hernandez, Smalling, have all looked very good at different times. Macheda might be fine. People, especially young players, need to start somewhere, just as the 1992-93 team did.

Not every buy was successful but they can't all be successful. There were disappointments: Kleberson, Djemba-Djemba, the various goalkeepers. On the other hand Ferdinand was good and Rooney was good, but they both reached their best at Manchester United, as did Keane and Cantona. Van de Saar has been outstanding at Old Trafford, beyond anything he might have achieved at Fulham.

Few players leaving Manchester United have spoken ill of Ferguson, and Hunter Davies is talking malicious rubbish when he suggests that all Ferguson can do is scream and shout. Plenty can scream and shout, but no one has produced results like Ferguson, or indeed loyalty like Ferguson.

The pride of the team has been less in its big money investments (who can be proud of a hideously wealthy oligarch or sheik buying whoever they fancy? that's not an achievement!) but its development of promise.

I just want Rooney to go now, as soon as possible. Let him follow the bigger money if that is what this is about, as Lawrenson suggests.

I rather relish the thought of playing without Rooney and coming through, not necessarily this season but in the next two or three. There is no divine right to be champions of everything all the time. If it weren't for the vast oceans of cash I'd welcome Manchester City's challenge, just as I do that of Spurs. It is quite mad in my opinion to insist that a club spend a fortune for the sake of spending a fortune. Far better not to, not just for the sake of economics, but for pride.

The Glazers are a nuisance and should go at a suitable moment. They are not so much a nuisance in themselves as through the whole principle of a leveraged buy-out. Given that as a mechanism, they have been no worse than anyone else would have been or has been, at, say, Liverpool.

If money is to be spent in my view, it is an outstanding creative midfielder the team needs rather than anything else. I doubt Carrick is the man, though he has been pretty good much of the time, better than he is given credit for at the bad times. A great midfielder might be worth paying big money for, but Ferguson could just as easily spot someone promising out of the corner of his eye, either within the club or somewhere else. I wouldn't be surprised him bid for Jack Rodwell. But then I wouldn't be surprised if he thought he had something else cooking.

I started supporting the team in 1958 after the Munich crash. I never expected to have so much success over such a long period. Ferguson has given far more than anyone dreamt he could have. The problems could begin after he goes, depending on whom they appoint. But that's another question.