LESSONS FROM THE LEARNED

Three Great Writers (Who Are Also Teachers) Give Us Their Unofficial Syllabi

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels and three collections of stories, the latest of which, the jaw-dropping Like You’d Understand, Anyway, won the Story Prize and was a National Book Award finalist. Besides writing heartbreaking, hilarious works that have been convincingly set in every conceivable milieu and told in every imaginable voice, Jim is a professor of English at Williams College.

Photo by Hillary Harvey

I almost never get a chance to teach an entire novel in my fiction-writing courses, since those courses fetishize close reading to the extent that we spend an hour and a half on, say, William Carlos Williams’s three-page story “The Use of Force.” If I had all the time in the world, though, I’d teach Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, since it may be one of the most rigorous and accessible examples of Frost’s notion that poetry is play for mortal stakes. And because it features one of literature’s most instructively unreliable narrators. It’s hugely useful for people starting out to register just how slippery and protean a notion like “reliability” can be—the way, when telling our stories, we can veer not just between the sincere and the manipulative but also along a continuum that includes everything from the repressive to the self-deluding to the pathetically optimistic.

And I’d teach Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, too, as one of the most miraculous examples of our attempt to extend our empathetic imagination and immerse ourselves in an alien other. Because that willingness to do some of the work involved in learning how others different from ourselves work and live and think is supposed to be what the whole project of literature is all about.

Mostly, I teach stories. A lot of contemporary stories, because that’s what my students are trying to write: Amy Hempel, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Ron Hansen, Denis Johnson—those sorts of people. I always return to Flannery O’Connor’s stories because of the way she so implacably animates her characters’ ethical conflicts in charged and urgently important events. One of the hardest things to learn early on is that it’s not just a matter of coming up with a sufficiently fraught and vexed conflict—I love my father, and I hate my father—since that’s an inherently static situation that could go on forever. The story also has to apply sufficient pressure to that conflict: I love my father and I hate my father, and now we’re stuck in a VW Bug on a cross-country drive. O’Connor’s great at effortlessly calling her characters to account that way: making them confront the implications of their own inner divisions.

I also always return to Isaac Babel’s stories for the ferocity of his economy and the pitilessness of his emotional juxtapositions. Get to the heart of the matter. Now. And now the next heart of the matter. And don’t pretend we don’t experience some brutal juxtapositions, in terms of affect, along the way.

And who doesn’t teach Chekhov’s stories? He’s ubiquitous on writing syllabi because most of us, not having taken part in pogroms as Cossacks, often choose to write about the less dramatic emotional revelations, and Chekhov reminds us constantly about the limitlessness of those possibilities: about just how many intensities of tenderness and anguish can be bound into the quiet gesture, providing that it’s observed with sufficient care and precision.


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