I felt like an outsider when I was teaching at Harvard for any number of reasons. I was not a part of the religion the school was founded to promote and protect. I was not a believer in the kind of high-level research the school made its first priority. I did not like the feeling of institutional self-satisfaction. I’d never have been admitted as a student at Harvard, and I suppose that made a difference in my attitude, too.
I was happy to be there, grateful even. But at the same time, not so happy. In some ways, I was predisposed to be an outsider, and I became the same kind of outsider that my parents had been in many of the institutions of their lives. Not the usual suspect. Not the expected type.
Both of my parents were raised in New York City, both had been teachers for at least a little bit of their professional careers, and no one who knew them would say that either one ever was at a loss for words. They were both talkers, both confident in what they had to say and quick to tell others what was really going on. Not shy people. Not prone to lapses of silence.
But two moments of silence, one from each of my parents, stick in my mind. Years ago, I was a full-time graduate student in New York City, living with my wife and our two small daughters, taking my comprehensive exams for my PhD and teaching like a madman to keep the family in food and diapers. At my graduate school, most professors taught two classes a term as a full teaching load. At other schools, three was the norm. I was routinely teaching five, six or seven courses a term, often at three or four different colleges around town, paid per course and not much. The more I taught, the closer my little family came to paying all of our bills. I taught a range of courses – American literature, speech, ethics, and a lot of college composition classes.
Composition was the least interesting course for most full-time professors to teach, and in some ways the hardest. Lots of papers to grade, and to do it well the teacher would have to learn how each student thought, and what ideas and what styles of language were struggling through often muddled prose to meet the world.
I liked teaching composition, and there were no shortage of classes to be picked up here and there around the city. Part-timers like me liberated more senior scholars to teach the courses with more prestige and less insistent demands on the teacher. As I entered my fourth year of graduate school, I began to think that surely no other young teacher in New York City had taught more college writing courses than I had in the few years prior, and I had certainly learned a few things about how to help young adults (and not-so-young adults) read, think and write better. I was still a year or two away from being ready to go on the job market to seek a full-time tenure-track job in my sub-specialty of American social rhetoric, but I always had my eye out for something special that might allow me to grasp onto some decent university’s payroll sooner, if only for the sake of my daughters’ habits of requiring food and clothing on a regular basis.
I saw an ad that year for a full-time position teaching writing at Harvard University. I applied, interviewed, and expected absolutely nothing. I was at least a year early in the process – my own professors had not declared me ready, and I had only barely begun on my dissertation. But all those college composition classes I had taught had given me a few things to say about teaching writing, and the intensity of my apprenticeship had some appeal to the good people in Cambridge who looked me over.
Bot of my parents – each long departed from their marriage, but still joined in the project of launching their three young adult children into the world – had the same reaction to my phone call when I told them that I’d gotten the job. Both of these talkative New York City never-at-a-loss-for-words Woody Allen talk-talk-talking, bagel-and knish-eating stereotypes, hung there on the phone without a word for the count of twenty. Speechless. Shocked. And happy. But mostly shocked. They hadn’t doubted me because they’d thought I wasn’t good enough, I’m sure, but because they knew how odd a fit I would be at Harvard.
On arriving to start my new job, even with as lowly a faculty station as mine, I was given a special credit card good only for use at the Harvard Faculty Club. The club did not sully itself with actual cash transactions. Only faculty and their guests could dine there, and only the special cards were accepted for eventual payment. The club was lovely, and just across a brick path from the building housing my small, shared office. The food was fine, the tone a casual, almost shabby old-style men’s-club, leathery tone that other places I’ve been since have tried but failed to pull off. At the faculty club there was no false note. It was what it seemed.
My grandfather – a Depression-era high school dropout who loved learning more deeply and honestly than anyone else I’ve ever known, an autodidact who talked often about his long walks to the library, pronouncing it “lie-berry” – came to visit me once while I was still teaching there, and we sat for a time in one of the sitting rooms at the club. He soaked it all in, radiating the calm I remembered from his one day off a week when I was small boy visiting his apartment.
He would, those days, after an hour or two of sitting in his one reclining chair, smoking his pipe, reading the Sunday New York Times with classical music on his phonograph, exhale finally a long work-week breath, and sip back in the sweet air of Sunday. Then at length he would whistle gently a bar of Mozart or Brahms, at peace and exactly where he wanted to be.
After a bit of time deep in a chair at the faculty club, he glanced over to me and said, “You know, Pete, this place reminds me of something I’ve seen.” I thought, ah, how lovely, his life has had more of this than perhaps I’d thought; he’s been to places like this. He had indeed traveled a bit, had served in Asia, had been in the homes of many influential people either to deliver their dry cleaning from his brother’s store in a tony corner of New York, or in those half-hidden meetings from his political days when even a club like this (or especially a club like this) might host a circle of working men and intellectuals to plot some blow for the betterment of the world.
“I’ve seen this,” he said as I listened so hopefully, “in a movie.” Ah, I thought again, a movie – not a moment from the script of his own life. “It was called My Fair Lady, and there were clubs and rooms like this. Very inspiring.” A movie, alas, stretching all its elements to their breaking points, a film of the musical version of the George Bernard Shaw play about a too-cultured man reinventing a waifish woman taught to sound and act like an aristocrat, every convention, from the social caste of both key players to the club rooms and the comforts of their inhabitants, mocked.
My grandfather had the image, the scene, but not the mockery in his head. Too far from his own world and too precious in its premise, I think, for him to feel that mockery. A better innocence there, I still feel, than the man or woman who gets the joke could feel. He was an outsider too as we sat there, inside the club.