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Bad Memory
by Dan Branch I never cried at funerals. Until recently, I had cried only once since Sister Anna Marie’s first grade class. That time I shed tears of frustration, not sadness. It happened in 1972 when I broke down in the office of UC Berkeley Professor Thomas Parkinson. The day before, in his creative writing class, I had asked the professor for the definition of a run-on sentence. He stiffened, glowered at me from behind his Old Testament beard and said, “See me during office hours tomorrow.” * The definition of “run-on sentence” must have flowed into the other students in their mother’s milk. Otherwise they would not have reacted to my question with gasps and derisive laughs. They could sniff out a run-on sentence hidden in Limburger cheese. * I blame the nuns at St. James the Less School for my ignorance of grammar. If they had not tried to beat writing rules into me with their rulers, I might have never developed an adverse reaction to sentence diagrams or the tendency to sing, “La La La” to myself when someone mentions a rule of grammar. Thanks to pressures I will not describe here, I eventually managed to absorb and sometimes apply the lessons of Strunk and White, except for the one about keeping it short. * Professor Parkinson’s better students cared about dangling participles, could identify a gerund, and knew the professor’s reputation as a Yeats scholar. They honored him, not for his poetry, but for his testimony in defense of Alan Ginsberg’s Howl at an obscenity trial. Professor Parkinson’s gifted students longed to have their work published by The New Yorker. I just wanted to write long, meaningless short stories like the ones I read in that magazine for the break it provided me from political science homework. Readers of The New Yorker in the 1970’s might remember the kind of stories that inspired me; stories in which nothing happens to the characters even though they doubt themselves and treat other people badly, which is ok because no reader could care about their victims. The perceived pointlessness of The New Yorker fiction made it the perfect no-pressure medium for me to emulate. I could create a world no one would care about and fill it with characters that lacked motivation or lives. I didn’t have to struggle to give the stories something that the professor called, “arc.” Until I asked for a definition of “run-on sentence,” I thought I could get five needed credits toward graduation for playing in this wordy sandbox. * Now, more than forty years after that class, I learn about narrative arc from the professors in a MFA program. Those teaching the non-fiction cohort convince me that writing is hard but satisfying work. The fiction cohort students learn to be responsible gods—designers of clockwork worlds where every word counts and tension moves the story arc forward. * The day after my grand embarrassment, I knocked on the professor’s office door. “It’s open.” Inside, the professor sat behind a desk of age-darkened oak. He gestured to a wooden chair on the door side of the desk. I sat after nodding to the grad student who ran the class related seminar that I attended. “You have no talent for writing." “But.” “No, listen. You should stop wasting your time.” “You don’t understand…” “I am telling you this for your own good. Stop wasting your time.” “Look…” “No, really, if it is not too late, change your major to accounting.” My face blushed and for the first time since grade school, I had to scrunch my eyes to block tears. The professor, who had had been looking at me like God must have looked at Moses when the prophet asked for another copy of the Ten Commandments, grew pale. Lifting his hands, like the angel might have to calm Abraham after telling him that the whole “slay your son” thing was just a test, he said, “Well you might make a go of it. Even John Steinbeck had a hard time. I don’t how many publishers rejected, Cup of Gold before McBride printed a few hundred copies of it.” Being the recipient of what I now think of as “The Cup of Gold” speech broke me. I cried. I wanted to tell the professor that my dreams were filled, not with prestigious bylines but with a kind woman who loved me, an acceptance letter from a good law school, and a job that would pay for a nice three-bedroom ranch house in the East Bay. I had taken his class for the opportunity to write stories that end without with a meaningful paragraph that rings of truth. But, I didn’t speak because I knew my words would sound like the protests of a crying child. The professor’s hooded eyes showed fear. When he calmed, he said, “You can still come to class but don’t ask questions. I don’t ever want to talk to you again.” Pointing to the grad student, he said, “All future contact must be through Jack.[1]” * Before I enrolled in a MFA program, I told this story the same way many times. I ask the stupid question. The smart ones laugh. The professor glowers. I cry tears of frustration because the professor thought I wanted to emulate him while I just wanted to write pointless stories for fun and five credits. Because I have learned from my writing mentors to test memory with reflection, I need to correct The New Yorker fiction part of the story. What I saw then, as pointless prose may have been insightful. Now I see the problem stemmed from my ignorance, not the writers’ skill sets. The New Yorker authors described life in a place for which I had no context. They didn’t write about children who lived in the lower-middle class household of a sheet metal mechanic who loved family, his dog, and the Los Angeles Dodgers; knew about union seniority rules and strike benefits but had never read The New Yorker or John Updike. My father’s children went to church on Sunday, but at St. James the Less, R.C., not St. Luke’s Episcopal on Foothill Blvd. For most of my eight years at St. James, one Irish nun controlled me and fifty-nine other kids with immigrant names like Canale, Van Hooten, Moy, and Bevacque; some from homes with nine or twelve, maybe thirteen siblings and mothers too tired to do a nightly head count, fathers unsure of their youngest ones’ names. * Jack was a kind man. Unlike many of the TAs assigned to my other class seminars, he concentrated on the transfer of knowledge and not on seducing the prettiest woman in the group. The professor had banned my submission of any more pointless stories but allowed me to hand in poems and essays. After returning his critique of my essay on how to rebuild a VW engine, Jack asked me to wait for him after class. Loitering outside the Dwinelle Hall dungeon room where the seminar met, I wondered why he wanted to talk. I needed the class credits to graduate so I hoped he wasn’t giving me the axe. He asked me to go for coffee. I’d like to write that we walked down Telegraph Avenue to the Café Med for an afternoon espresso. It’d be nicer to tell you that Jack sent my VW repair essay on to the professor who laughed at the funny parts. But we just walked over to the student union where he gave me the professor’s back-story. He told me that I was not the first student the professor had moved to tears. In 1961 he had invited a struggler to see him during office hours. This one concealed a double-barreled shotgun in his overcoat. When the professor gave him the Cup of Gold speech, the student shot him with both barrels. The pellets killed an attending grad student and disfigured the professor’s face. He grew the full-face beard to hide the scars. The explanation angered me but I didn’t take it out on Jack. On the way back to the cell I rented from the Berkeley Co-Op, I cursed the tenure system that allowed the professor to take out his frustrations on the pathetic, someone like me: a poli sci major who happened to stumble into his world on the way to law school. I got my five credits from the professor and graduated. After spending the summer working in a drug company warehouse unloading shipments of expired plasma from the Viet Nam battlefields, I started law school, worked as an attorney, and then enrolled in the MFA program. Having developed an aversion to writing fiction in college, I study creative nonfiction. This involves writing, to be sure, but also a lot of “critical” reading. We learn from the masters, who all distrust their memories. According to Argentine neuroscientist Rodrigo Quiroga, they have good reason to doubt their memories. His research proved that memory changes a story each time we repeat it. [2] But my memory does not change the things that mattered. I remember what Professor Parkinson told me in his office. I remember the high points of Jack’s explanation for his boss’s behavior. After using Google to get the date of Professor Parkinson’s shot gunning, I now wonder if I owe Quiroga an apology. The search lead me to a University of California summary of the professor’s life which makes a liar out of one of these three: Jack, my memory, or the guy who wrote the summary. Calling the professor a tall tree that attracted lightning, the Cal guy wrote that Parkinson’s left wing activities, and the fact that Senator McCarty branded him a communist, brought him to the attention of a rightwing political group. Its members published a broadside that branded the professor a Stalinist and homosexual. The document of hate ended up in the hands of an insane former student who walked into the professor’s office with a sawed-off shotgun under his coat and fired it point-blank[3] All the Internet hyperlinks lead to Calisphere so it establishes the truth for cyberspace. But I trust my memory of the meeting with the professor. It was too emotionally charged to forget. I also trust my memory of Jack’s story. He told it to me during the Viet Nam war, which I opposed and protected against. I had canvassed for McGovern and still despise Senator McCarthy. I would have remembered the professor as a victim, not a bully if Jack had told me the right wing shooter story. So kind Jack, my buffer and the deliverer of five credits, had it wrong. [1] Not his real name. [2] Quiroga, Rodrigo Quian, Borges and Memory. Trans. Juan Pablo Fernadez. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2012. [3] "University of California: In Memoriam, 1992". Calisphere. University of California Regents. 1992. Retrieved 2015-02-27. |
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