Excerpt from Peter Elbow’s Everyone Can Write

In college, my experience of writing was the experience of being knocked down, but then stubbornly picking myself up, dusting myself off, and finally succeeding. On my third essay for freshman English, my teacher wrote, “Mr. Elbow, you continue your far from headlong rise upward”—and the grade was D. The teachers I met in 1953 at Williams College were sophisticated and I was naïve. But I was eager to do well and I worked hard at it—and by the end of my first year had begun to do so. Indeed, I gradually found myself wanting to enter their world and be like them—a college professor, not just a teacher. I wanted to be a learned, ironic, tweedy, pipe-smoking, professor of literature.

As for writing, I took no particular pleasure in it. I wrote when assigned. I no longer experienced any imaginative element in the writing I did; it was all critical. I found it difficult, but I sometimes got excited working out a train of thought of my own. Toward the end of my four years, however, I began to notice out of the corner of my consciousness, an increase in the “ordeal” dimension of writing papers: more all-nighters; more of them the night after the paper was due; more not-quite-acknowledged fear. But still I got those As.

And with them, a scholarship from Williams to go to Oxford. I wish I’d been as smart as my predecessor from Williams, Price Zimmerman: smart enough to study a different subject at Oxford from what I planned to study in graduate school. But I was too earnest and chose English. My Oxford tutor was another teacher in his first year of teaching: Jonathan Wadsworth, the grand nephew of the poet. My experience with him was, in a way, like the one I had at college, but more so. He played harder. Again I was knocked down—but it felt like I was knocked out and when I gradually staggered to my feet, the grogginess wouldn’t go away. I thought I’d become sophisticated and critical at college, but this experience showed me I was still the same old tender naïve boy who wanted to be liked and praised. I thought I’d learned a lot about irony from my college professors, but Jonathan brewed a tougher English strain. (Interesting that I eventually wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on double and triple irony and the relinquishing of irony in Chaucer.)

Tutorials were conducted in the tutor’s rooms. Once a week, I’d knock on the oak door and come in and read my essay to him, and be instructed, and then at the end he’d say something like, “Why don’t you go off and read Dryden and write me something interesting.” My first essay was on Chaucer and he was pretty condescendingly devastating. (“What are we going to do with these Americans they send us?” Interesting again that Chaucer was my Ph.D. topic.) During one tutorial, he cleaned his rifle as I read my essay to him. On another occasion, as I pronounced the title of a poem by Marvell in my broad-vowelled American accent, “On a Drohp of Doo,” he broke in with his clipped Oxford accent, “On a Drup of Djyew,” and remarked, “Maybe that’s why you don’t understand poetry, Elbow. You don’t know what it sounds like.” Before the end of the fall term, I was coming in every week saying, “I don’t have any essay for you. I tried as hard as I could, but I couldn’t write it.” And I really had tried hard, spending the whole week writing initial sentences, paragraphs, and pages and throwing them all away.

Eventually, I changed tutors and limped through my second year. I took a lot of Valium as exams approached. For in fact, it turned out that the Oxford degree didn’t depend at all on any of these essays written for tutors over two years. They were nothing but practice for the nine three-hour exams you took during your last four—and-a-half days. I was terrified, but it turns out that the exams didn’t throw me as much as the essays had done: in each exam there were only three hours for at least three essays and there wasn’t time to agonize—even to revise. I survived with acceptable results (an “undistinguished second”)—and very grateful too. “Pretty much what we expected,” was Jonathan’s comment on the card on which he mailed my results.

With all that education, you’d think I’d have learned a few simple things—for instance that I needed a break from school. And in fact, I spent the last weeks in August looking for a teaching job in schools. But none turned up and, ever earnest, I started on my Ph.D. in English at Harvard. I still wanted to become a professor, and people kept telling me to “just get the degree out of the way”—like having a tooth pulled or an injection before going on a trip. But, of course, in our American system, the graduate seminar papers count for everything. I had a terrible time getting my first semester papers written at all, and they were graded unsatisfactory. I could have stayed if I’d done well the next semester, but after only a few weeks I could see things were getting worse rather than better. I quit before being kicked out.

My sense of failure was total. I wouldn’t have been so bad if I had been less invested or hadn’t tried so hard. But I’d long announced my career commitment to my family and relatives, my friends, and my teachers—and I’d tried my damndest. I’d defined and staked my identity on this business of getting a Ph.D. to become a college professor. And I’d also defined myself—to others and to myself—as “successful,” particularly at school. So when I quit, I felt ruined. I felt I never wanted to have anything to do with the world of books and teaching again.

First Reflection: On the Experience of Failure

I realize now that much of the texture of my academic career had been based in an oddly positive way on this experience of complete shame and failure. In the end, failing led me to have the following powerful but tacit feeling: “There’s nothing else they can do to me. They can’t make me feel any worse than they’ve already done. I tried as hard as I could to be the way they wanted me to be, and I couldn’t’ do it. I really wanted to be good, and I was bad.” These feelings created an oddly solid grounding for my future conduct in the academic world. They made it easier for me to take my own path and say whatever I wanted.

In subsequent years, I’ve noticed that lots of people’s behavior in schools and colleges is driven by the opposite feelings—sometimes unconscious: “uh-oh. They could really hurt me. I must do this or I’ll fail. I couldn’t say that or they’d kick me out. To fail or be kicked out is unthinkable.” When you live with these feelings—as I had certainly done through all the years before I failed—you sometimes notice a faint impulse to say or do something unacceptable (for example, to skip an assignment, or to do it in a way that the teacher would find unacceptable, or to stand up to the teacher with some kind of basic disagreement or refusal). But you scarcely notice this impulse because acting on it would be unimaginable; insupportable. I realize now that most unsuccessful student are often the most adventuresome or brave or mentally creative. They operate from the feeling of, “They can’t hurt me any worse. What the hell!” That feeling can be empowering. In truth, the most successful students are often the most timid and fearful. They have the most at stake in getting approval. They do the most cheating in school; they have the most suicides. (6-8)

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