A class act

Jay PARINI is the author of well-received, perceptive biographies of John Steinbeck and Robert Frost, and, most recently, a life of William Faulkner, “One Matchless Time.” His other published efforts consist of six novels, five volumes of poetry and a work of literary criticism, an impressive output for any professional writer, let alone one for whom the day job, as it were, is teaching at an elite liberal arts college where there are no graduate students to correct papers or conduct work groups for him.

It is not unusual for teachers to write -- who among us is unfamiliar with the phrase “publish or perish” to describe the sword of Damocles that hangs over the heads of untenured instructors? And yet, “Gore Vidal once said to me that teaching has ruined more writers than alcohol,” Parini quips at one point in “The Art of Teaching,” a charming reflection on 30 years devoted to learning, tacitly acknowledging the dilemma he has solved quite effectively in his own life.

Truth be known, the man loves to teach; not only does it give structure and balance to his daily regimen, it provides true satisfaction, a circumstance that provides the book’s thrust. Where does the 56-year-old English professor at Middlebury College in Vermont find the time to do both?

“Oddly enough, I seem to get less done on sabbatical leaves than I do while teaching a full load of courses,” he writes, possibly because the rhythms of the academy require him to fill every available minute with productivity. “As a writer who teaches, I have often thought about the parallels between the crafts of writing and teaching,” Parini says. Of paramount importance in both, he feels, is the need to establish an authentic voice, be it in the form of a written narrative or in the classroom. Another essential ingredient is to regard the class as a Greek theater in which the “donning of a mask,” or developing of a persona, will resonate with young minds. “A class is a performance,” he stresses, and each “must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Parini offers a number of tips in a manner that is decidedly laid back, friendly and casual -- in much the same way, one surmises, that he teaches his own classes. “My notion of the ideal teacher is that of primus inter pares, with the teacher as lead student,” he writes. “I wish I had understood from the beginning that I was, at heart, a perpetual student: amazed before the world’s variety and unworded beauty and frustratingly contradictory nature.” *