Dispatch from the World of Payne

Jason Fitger, Professor of English, is charged on short notice and against his will with running Payne University’s Study Abroad program. So he’s off to England, with a group of students who don’t care about literature and can barely write themselves. We learn this first hand, for we are privileged to read, with Fitger, the essays his students submit. One student, in his application, pleads “I have an accentuating circumstance.”

That’s the setup for The English Experience by Julie Schumacher. One blurb calls the novel a work of satire, but that’s misleading. Satire uses humor and exaggeration to express contempt or condemnation: think of the Shepherdson / Grangerford episode in Huck Finn, where would-be aristocrats are exposed as murderous hypocrites. True, this novel’s main characters are failures or mediocrities—Fitger knows this about himself, his students do not—and this is often played for laughs. True, throughout the novel professor and student alike stumble and hurt each other through blindness or vice. But in the end they emerge as decent human beings, and do each other some good. This is a novel filled with compassion for its characters. The rest of us failures and mediocrities, it says, are also capable of virtue and worthy of love.

One student, Wyatt, hands in an essay about a conversation with a stranger in a pub. The conversation gets personal—too personal. Wyatt tells the stranger about the death of a friend, and in response she admonishes him. Wyatt writes,

she was shouting, she was grabbing my hands with her swollen hands, her fingers clutching me like the roots of old trees tangled in soil and she was telling me that I should have been with him, which is something I’ve thought about a lot, we were supposed to hang out that night, me and Lowell, but when Jack wanted to come I ditched, I lied to Low and said I had plans.

This episode sends Wyatt into a tailspin:

If the point of this assignment is to tell about a conversation that we will remember then this is the one. Because I think Helen was right what she said about me and it is a hard feeling that comes to me sometimes when I ask myself if I have already failed at the things in life that matter most, and I will never be what I was supposed to become.

Fitger must assign a grade to this confession. He gives it a B-. And what does one say to a student who writes such a thing? Fitger is a writing teacher, not a counsellor, but can Wyatt’s sense of worthlessness be left unaddressed? Fitger did not want to leave it unaddressed. While talking to Wyatt he

was trying to decide how to phrase what he wanted to tell him: Your friend is dead but you are still here.

But Fitger never does tell him anything of the sort. His feedback, instead, is that “You tend to overwork your descriptions, but that business of the dog eating peanuts [...] that was well done.”

Fitger’s instruction is not without its larger benefits, but those benefits are subtle and indirect. He helps his students learn to live, by teaching them how to write. It’s fitting that what we know of this, we also learn indirectly, through the students’ final assignments. The last of them is turned in three years late; Fitger accepts it anyway. “You said,” the student (Xanna) wrote, that

an ending in an essay should feel like a door that swings shut—but the writer should leave a crack of light around the frame so people would wonder what might exist, on the other side.

—a piece of writing advice that also urges the importance and the possibility of hope.