Merton on his English students . . .
I was writing a book—it was not much of a book—and I had classes to
prepare. It was the latter work that had the most in it of health and
satisfaction and reward. I had three big classes of sophomores, ninety
students in all, to bring through English Literature from Beowulf to the
Romantic Revival in one year. And a lot of them didn’t even know how to
spell. But that did not worry me very much, and it could not alter my
happiness with Piers Plowman and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight: I was back again in that atmosphere that had
enthralled me as a child, the serene and simple and humorous Middle Ages, not the lute and goblin and moth-ball Middle Ages of Tennyson, but the real
Middle Ages, the twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, full of
fresh air and simplicity, as solid as wheat bread and grape wine and water-mills and ox-drawn wagons: the age of Cistercian monasteries and of the
first Franciscans.
And so, in my innocence, I stood up and talked about all these things in
front of those rooms full of football players with long, unpronounceable
names: and because they saw that I myself liked my own subject matter,
they tolerated it, and even did a certain amount of work for me without too
much complaint.
The classes were a strange mixture. The best elements in them were the
football players and the seminarians. The football players were mostly on
scholarships, and they did not have much money, and they stayed in at night
most of the time. As a group, they were the best-natured and the best-tempered and worked as hard as the seminarians. They were also the most
vocal. They liked to talk about these books when I stirred them up to argue.
They liked to open their mouths and deliver rough, earnest, and sometimes
sardonic observations about the behavior of these figures in literature.
Also, some of them were strong and pious Catholics with souls full of
faith and simplicity and honesty and conviction, yet without the violence
and intemperance that come from mere prejudice. At Columbia it had been
pretty much the fashion to despise football players as stupid: and I don’t
maintain that they are, as a class, geniuses. But the ones at St. Bona’s taught
me much more about people than I taught them about books, and I learned
to have a lot of respect and affection for these rough, earnest, good-natured,
and patient men who had to work so hard and take so many bruises and
curses to entertain the Friars and the Alumni on the football field, and to
advertise the school.
I wonder what has happened to them all: how many of them got shot up
in Africa or the Philippines? What became of that black-haired, grinning
Mastrigiacomo who confided to me all his ambitions about being a band-leader; or that lanky, cat-faced villain Chapman whom I saw one night, after
a dance, walking around chewing on a whole ham? What have they done
with that big, quiet Irishman Quinn, or Woody McCarthy with his long
bulbous nose and eyebrows full of perplexity and his sallies of gruff wit?
Then there was Red Hagerman who was not a Catholic, and who looked
like all the big cheerful muscle-bound football players they believed in in the nineteen twenties. He went off and got himself married towards the end
of that year. Another one called “Red” was Red McDonald, and he was one
of the best students in the class, and one of the best people: a serious young
Irishman with a wide-open face, all full of sincerity and hard work. Then
there was the big round-faced Polish boy whose name I have forgotten, who
grabbed hold of the tail of a cow which dragged him all around the pasture
on the day of the sophomore beer-party at the end of the year.
The most intelligent students were the seminarians or the ones that were
going to enter the seminary: and they were the quietest. They kept pretty
much to themselves, and handed in neat papers which you could be
relatively sure were their own original work. Probably by now they are all
priests.
The rest of the class was a mixture of all kinds of people, some of them
disgruntled, some of them penniless and hard-working, some of them rich
and dumb and too fond of beer. Some of them liked to play the drums and
knew how. Others liked to play them and did not know how. Some of them
were good dancers and danced a lot. Others just went uptown and played
the slot machines until the last minute before midnight, when they came
back to the college in a panic-stricken rush to get in before the time limit
was up. One of them, Joe Nastri, thought he was a Communist. I don’t
suppose he had a very clear idea of what a Communist was. One day he
went to sleep in class and one of the football players gave him the hot-foot.
Of all the crowd, it could not be said that they were very different from
the students I had known in other colleges. With a few exceptions, they
were certainly no holier. They got drunk just as much, but they made more
noise about it, and had less money to spend, and were handicapped by the
necessity of getting back to the dormitory at a certain time. Twice a week
they had to get up and hear Mass, which was a burden to most of them.
Only very few of them heard Mass and went to Communion every day—
outside of the seminarians.
However, most of them clung with conviction to the Catholic faith, a
loyalty which was resolute and inarticulate. It was hard to tell just how
much that loyalty was a matter of conscious faith, and how much it was
based on attachment to their class and social environment: but they were all
pretty definite about being Catholics. One could not say of them that, as a
whole, they led lives that went beyond the ordinary level demanded of a
Christian. Some of the most intelligent of them often startled me with statements that showed they had not penetrated below the surface of
Catholicism and did not really appreciate its spirit... One, for instance,
argued that the virtue of humility was nonsense, and that it sapped a man of
all his vitality and initiative. Another one did not think there were any such
things as devils....
All of them were serene in their conviction that the modern world was
the highest point reached by man in his development, and that our present
civilization left very little to be desired. I wonder if the events of 1943 and
the two following years did anything to change their opinions.
Merton seems to revel in his job as an English instructor. Loves his students--from the football players to the seminarians. He acknowledges that many of the young men he taught probably ended up as soldiers in World War II, with many of them not surviving. They all work hard for Merton, keeping him on his toes. The thing that Merton seems to admire most about all them is their Catholic-ness. They all, to a greater or lesser extent, have "souls full of faith and simplicity and honesty and conviction . . ." Merton readily admits that he learns more from his students than they learn from him. In my experience as a teacher, that is always the case.
I know that my extended absence from blogging has probably not really been all that noticed. As a writer, I like to imagine that people wait for my posts the way that Victorian Londoners waited for the next installment of Great Expectations or The Pickwick Papers. Of course, that isn't reality. What I do in this blog will really change nothing in the world. Perhaps there are a few disciples out there who find a kindred spirit in me. Maybe I make some of you feel a little less lonely. But, for the most part, these little musings I send out into the ether are just messages in a bottle. I don't know if they sink or make it to a friendly shore.
The reason for my lengthy sabbatical was professional in nature. Last week, in the City of Marquette, we celebrated Art Week, which is a six-day festival of poetry readings, concerts, art classes, sidewalk art, historical tours, and art exhibits. It is a gargantuan effort, and, for my part, I spent all last week running from one event to another. I arranged popup poetry readings and a gallery show of poetry broadsides. Two concerts. One spontaneous writing booth. An embroidery class. And I was commissioned to write a closing ceremony poem.
Then, on the seventh day, I didn't rest. I traveled to Calumet, Michigan, and performed in a variety radio show, which I also cowrote the scripts for.
Monday night, I was literally brain dead.
But, the thing that kept me going was this: I was literally surrounded by artists. People of like mind and ideas. Passionate dreamers. And they care about making the world a better place though art. It's sort of like Merton being surrounded by those souls filled with faith and simplicity. These were my people, and it was an amazing experience.
Of course, life's problems don't disappear, even during Art Week or after. In Merton's passage above, the specter of World War II looms large. In my life, it's a struggle with someone close to me who puts my love to the test frequently. Sometimes daily. With Art Week, I feel connected and loved. With this person, I often feel the exact opposite--disconnected and unloved.
So, for the last seven days, I've been sort of living in both of these worlds. And it has been a little draining. It's difficult for me to integrate these two lives, because they are so dissimilar. Tonight was particularly hard. Without getting into personal details, all I will say is that I feel very alone. And angry. And betrayed. And I don't know what to do about it.
Art is a way to work through difficult situations, especially writing. I can't tell you how many times I've written my way back to center in my journal or through a poem. Despite what some poets may claim, there's always a little truth of the poet's life in every poem. I've been writing poems about Bigfoot for the last five years or so. Bigfoot has become my stand in--smarter, stronger, emotionally more connected than me. Bigfoot would know what to do tonight, and perhaps I should summon his spirit. Or the spirit I've created for him.
So, tonight, after a long week of art, another evening of heartbreak, I reach out to my Bigfoot self. Smell his hairy musk. Stare into his yellow eyes. Feel his Stonehenge presence.
Saint Marty may be staying in Bigfoot's cave for a while, surrounded by his cave drawings.
