I just returned from Rochester, New York, where I attended a memorial for my AP English teacher, Bill Polito. His passing has helped me a truth generally unacknowledged about teachers that I want to bring to light.
First, a bit about Bill.
My senior year, 1983, was a pretty unhappy time for me. I was on the fringes socially, anxious about things like affording college, and having difficulties at home. But there were a few bright spots, and Bill’s class was one of them.
The very first day of class Bill didn’t take attendance – “I’ll learn your names as we go” – and straightaway handed out paperback copies of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. For those who have never read it, it’s a slim volume, about a bridge outside of Lima, Peru that breaks in 1714, killing the five people on the bridge. A friar, Brother Juniper, believes that God chose those five people for a reason—and he trots around trying to find out what it is.
Bill asked a boy named Steve, in the front left corner of the room, to turn to the first page and read aloud. Years later, when I was teaching English classes of my own, I would begin my first class having students read aloud because by then, I understood why Bill did this. Most of us students could read fast – I often read a book in a day – and he was purposefully slowing us down to make us attend to the language, to the nuances, to the minute swerves of feeling and thought.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a book about love – about the different kinds of love and longing that compel us. At one point, there is a line something like this: “he knew as much about love as a boy who lost his dog yesterday.” Bill paused us and asked, “What does he mean by this?” If I recall correctly, the classroom remained silent, so Bill continued, “Think about it. A boy who lost his dog is sad, but he’s not thinking about himself. He’s thinking, Is my dog okay, is he in heaven, does he have enough to eat? It’s selfish versus unselfish love.”
I don’t have the best recall – some days I walk into the kitchen and can’t remember what the heck I came for – but this memory from 40 years ago is sharp. Surprise etched this moment in my brain, and Bill’s comment cracked open a door I hadn’t even known was in the wall. You see, until then I’d read to escape my world. But here was Bill not only showing us the artistry of words and phrases and sentences, but also illuminating a work’s humanity. He was trying to show us how literature can give us a way to understand our hearts, frail and flawed as they are.
I wrote my first paper on The Bridge, and he gave me a “90 – Pretty good. It flows” scribbled across the top. I didn’t know at the time that was high praise.
We went on to read a great deal of good literature that year — works that would become favorites of mine and that I would go on to teach at NYU, U Michigan and UW-Milwaukee. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Richard III — with a soliloquy that was the first passage on the English AP in May (the whole class chuckled). Short stories: “Miss Brill,” “The Kiss,” “Hills Like White Elephants.” Poetry: “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” and “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff.”
Another novel we read was Heart of Darkness. I have a funny story about that one. Bill always gave five-question quizzes to start the class, to see if we’d read the book with some attention to detail. One day, I didn’t get to finish reading Heart of Darkness – I was working late nights at Ponderosa Steakhouse, trying to save money for college. Anyway, I asked my friend Nathalie, What are some of the questions going to be? She said, “One of them will definitely be Kurtz’s last words, which are ‘the horror, the horror.’” Well, I misunderstand and wrote “the whore, the whore” on my test. Bill just gave me a big blue question mark for that one.
Anyway, at graduation, Bill gave me the English award. I knew I didn’t have the highest grade in the class (the poor grade on the Heart of Darkness quiz wasn’t the only one), and I asked him why he chose me. He shrugged. “You can write.”
Looking back, I think it was a throwaway remark for him. But it became a small talisman for me. I won’t say it’s the reason I became a novelist, but it is part of the reason I took a creative writing class in college, where I happened to have a TA who encouraged me to pursue English, which caused me to attend grad school for English, which sparked my interest in the Victorian period, which became the setting for my first novel.
(Just a side note: I’ll say this about writing novels. It helps if you have no idea how much rejection and failure there will be.)
My first attempts at a novel were terrible. I could have wallpapered entire sections of my house with my rejection letters from agents. But I had people around me – mostly my husband and some friends – who kept telling me, keep going, you’re going to figure this out. And Bill’s voice, that distant echo, was part of that.
Eventually that novel was published. Then I published another. And another. I would see Bill whenever I came home to Rochester. We’d hang out on his back deck, or meet at a coffee place or a restaurant, and talk books and tell each other stories about teaching, stories about our kids.
In my first novel, I created a character named Tom Flynn, a straight-talking newspaperman, slightly pugnacious, who was missing part of an index finger (after a brawl down by the London Docks). He was my tribute to Bill. Bill caught on to this somewhere around book four and we had a good laugh over it.
I think he was sometimes perplexed at how much I cared to keep our friendship up. There is a natural inequality in the teacher/student relationship. After all, I was only one of hundreds of students he taught; he would go on to teach hundreds more. Sometimes I suspected he felt a bit embarrassed that his encouragement had meant so much. He may have felt sorry that I had needed it so badly.
The last letter he wrote me was in April. I had sent him a book called Dear Committee Members, about an English professor at a university that is phasing out the humanities – and the professor must write all these stupid letters of recommendation for students and faculty. It’s snarky and profane and funny, and I thought he’d like it. He wrote me back saying he’d enjoyed it, that he’d passed it on to his son, and that literature is good “for the embittered hour.”
It is. But of course it is not the only thing that can help us through those embittered hours. Friendship and kindness and encouragement are others. I will always be grateful that I met Bill early and had his friendship for as long as I did.
And this brings me to that unacknowledged truth I mentioned at the beginning.
I told several people I was going home to Rochester for Bill’s memorial – and each one responded with a story that ran along these lines: “I was sort of [miserable/lost/a screwup/anxious] in [Xth] grade, and I think at least part of the reason I [got through it/found my path/went to college] is because I had this really great teacher who [encouraged me/gave me advice/invited me and some other guys over for steaks every so often/provided a creative space]. And I never thanked her/him. I wish I had.”
This is perhaps the teachers’ burden. I fear many never know that their encouraging remarks or a casual kindnesses landed more widely and with more weight than they could imagine.
