Pedagogy for Men
Marvin Gettleman
Emeritus Professor of History
Brooklyn Polytechnic University in New York City
E-mail: marvget@earthlink.net
I
rarely accompany Emily when she gives talks at professional academic conferences.
She usually prefers to be alone at those times, to meet old friends, make
new ones; to perform those mysterious operations called networking, or
as she says to enjoy just being by herself. Earlier in our marriage, projecting
my own former experiences and urges that usually welled up at poetry readings,
I used to wonder: does she ever have affairs at these meetings? But as
the strong physical attraction that cemented our ten-year old marriage
miraculously continued, I thought about it less, worried less.
For my part, I had long abandoned
the image of myself as some latter-day Dylan Thomas, the itinerant goat-poet
seducing faculty wives and nubile undergraduates, who would sometimes
arrive late at night to the motel in which I had been housed. With Emily,
that all receded into some absurdly surreal past of cosmic yearning and
self-punishment, into which I dipped now and then for inspiration for
a poem. I wonder: maybe my poetry now suffers because of the idiotic happiness
I now enjoy in this second glorious marriage, but if so it is a sacrifice
that I rarely regret.
Last year I did go along with Emily
to Chicago so we could both see my daughter, Jennifer, who lives there.
After arriving at the hotel conference site and telephoning to make arrangements
with Jennifer, Emily and I, both stimulated by the airplane flight, the
taxi ride, and the opportunity provided by our hotel room, made relaxed
and pleasurable love. Afterward, Emily rose up, wrapped herself in her
white terrycloth robe, sat at the desk, revising and polishing the talk
she would give at the University that evening. From the bed, wondering
if my back would suffer from the soft mattress, I watched this woman,
my wife. Anyone could see that she was stocky and middle-aged, like me.
But watching her I also remembered a poetry conference in Iowa City two
decades earlier, where I met the hefty Anna Shaw and took her triumphantly
to bed in a hotel reminiscent of this--some generic Ramada or Holiday
Inn. In the same flamboyant language that made Anna's poetry so unruly,
she confessed that she was about done with one night stands, and if I
treated her like a casual "artifact" she would wreak horrible
revenge. I promised I wouldn't but never thought through how such a commitment
could be squared with my own marriage at the time to Lorraine. But, whether
because Anna perceived that I could not fulfill my promise, or out of
disappointment with men in general, or something altogether independent
of me (the hardest possibility of all to contemplate), I was unable to
bring her to orgasm then, or in the few more times we slept together.
Eventually, she decided to rededicate herself to her neglected marriage
to Austin Cunningham, and I found myself unceremoniously dropped.
Lorraine found out about this affair
just about when it was ending. "That's it," she said. "I've
had it. I'm leaving." And she did. I wrote a lot of poetry then,
some maudlin, and some not so bad. I never got a chance to explain to
Lorraine that it was over with Anna and me. But maybe no such explanation
was possible. These affairs cost; there's no denying it. It was at that
point that I began thinking about the contradiction between my poetry,
my attempts to capture precisely in writing the texture of feelings, perceptions,
and my life, in which I was willfully blind to the perceptions and feelings
of those close to me. Dr. Trumbull was of great help then.
When it was time to dress, Emily
crawled into bed to whisper "time to get up." I reached under
her robe. What made our love life so enjoyable was that she actually welcomed
my passion for her body. Between us, the intervening space was always
clear, unlittered with unspoken hesitations, distracting unarticulated
grievances. Our infrequent arguments were vehement and brief.
That evening, Emily presented to
the meeting of her fellow educationists a synopsis of her developing ideas
on urban pedagogy. She began with a subtle but devastating critique of
John Dewey, many of whose educational ideas, she pointed out, had been
developed right there in Chicago. She first described what she called
the liberating rhetoric of Progressive Education but went on to show a
discordant undercurrent of conservatism in Dewey's outlook. Then she advanced
the concept of engaged teaching, for which she was becoming widely
known in her field, a concept which had emerged from her early years of
work in the Springfield, Massachusetts public schools. Since then, after
she joined the Yale faculty, she had further explored these ideas in ethnographical,
classroom observations in such places as Santa Rosa, California, New York
City and Nairobi, Kenya. I had no idea whether or not she was right. She
sure got attacked. But she explained her ideas and their evidentiary basis
in a woman's way, with an air of gentle, informed competence. I especially
admired Emily's deft handling of the questions and objections that came
after she had concluded her formal talk. Dewey-ite true believers challenged
her, and she skillfully parried their pious invocations of the Master
by her own undeniable familiarity with Dewey's own reports from the Chicago
Laboratory School, which they did not know or had forgotten. Silence,
and then hostile murmurs, fell over the hall when she mentioned Dewey's
support of corporal punishment. "Oh, you don't remember that observation,"
she said archly. "Here, I'll read it to you." And she rummaged
in her briefcase alongside the lectern for a marked copy of the relevant
Dewey-ite text, Schools of Tomorrow, or some such title. "Ah,
here it is, p. 31, in case you want to look it up yourselves." That
woman could sure do research -- not to speak of her wittiness and other
talents.
While the question period was still
going on, I left the lecture hall to seek a toilet. Standing at the urinal
next to me was a man in his mid-fifties, who had evidently also just heard
Emily's talk. Once we were washing our hands, he said, "Smart woman,
that."
"She sure is," I readily
agreed.
"I wouldn't want to be
married to her, though."
"Why not?" I asked.
"She's the kind who will
use her mind to put a man down all the time. Believe me, I know women
like that."
I thought for a moment of Emily's
dogged support for both of her previous husbands, the alcoholic Ben, who
barely could keep solvent in the business he inherited from his father,
and Sam, the insecure school administrator who left her because of sheer
jealousy when she won a graduate fellowship to study at Harvard's education
school.
Then I asked the man: "Just
what is it that you know?"
"Women like that, they're
ballbusters, they cut you down."
"Sounds like you're talking
from practical experience," I observed as we washed our hands.
"You must have been through the divorce ordeal."
"I've been married, and
divorced, yes, but never to anyone like that. I know better."
"Then how do you know what
it is you claim to know?" I asked, gazing intently at the balding,
stooped man, who was not only about my age, but who also looked a bit
like me. The man suddenly became defensive.
"Hey, wait a minute.
Is she...?"
"She is," I proclaimed,
radiant with a surge of pride similar to what I experienced when I composed
my best poems. "And you're so wrong that I guess from what I just
heard that your whole life must have been warped by the petty misogyny
you just expressed." He tried to get away from me, but I put my hand
on his shoulder before he could get out the door. "I shouldn't tell
you this, but that woman," I proclaimed, "gives the greatest
sex a man could ever have. You're all wrong in your frayed zero-sum conception
of life, as if because a woman's smart it's got to detract from something
else. Drop such misconceptions before it's too late." I looked him
over as he stood before me, feeling in that moment like an inspired missionary
trying to convert a resistant unbeliever. "You're not too old. There's
time yet. Don't go to the grave before you find a woman like that. It
will bring you more joy, more happiness than anything you ever imagined.
Do it, man do it."
He squirmed free of my grip, mumbling
apologies. "I'm sorry for what I said about
your wife. I didn't know ... " He walked rapidly down the hallway.
I called after him, "Idiot,
I wasn't talking about her. I was talking about you, about us, about men!"
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