The Gilmour(s) Down the Hall

Last week David Gilmour, a literature professor at the University of Toronto, said this to a person with a microphone:

I teach modern short fiction to third and first-year students. So I teach mostly Russian and American authors. Not much on the Canadian front. But I can only teach stuff I love. I can’t teach stuff that I don’t, and I haven’t encountered any Canadian writers yet that I love enough to teach.

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

You can read the rest of the interview here, in Hazlitt, an excellent online lit mag from Random House of Canada. After the choice paragraphs got out, Gilmour claimed he’d been taken out of context. But again, he’d spoken to a person with a microphone, and so that person handily posted the entire transcript. Gilmour had said what they said he’d said.

I have a lot of issues with David Gilmour’s positions, but I’ll focus on two in particular:

1. He displays a stunning lack of curiosity and flexibility for someone given the job of educating young adults. More on this later.

2. His rigidity and narrowness includes a problematic idea: If you want a better, broader literary education, go down the hall. But what if there isn’t one? What if there are only more Gilmours down the hall?

I can’t imagine what good it does to teach only “guys” (serious heterosexual guys!) in a literature class in 2013. Setting aside the insane idea of not teaching women authors, I assume this also means avoiding guys who write short fiction from a female perspective? So I would no longer be teaching Colum McCann’s story “Everything In This Country Must,” or Edward P. Jones’ amazing “The First Day of School,” in which Jones, a GUY*, writes from the POV of a five-year-old girl in a story populated entirely with women.

3. Third problem, I just realized: Jones is also black, which would seem to automatically eliminate him from Gilmour’s syllabus. I didn’t see a lot about that, but I’m sure someone’s covered it in the last week. And we can’t use the excuse that Gilmour simply teaches only pre-war literature, because Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal, which gets a lovely shout-out from Gilmour, was published in 2001. There may have been one or two black authors publishing before the twenty-first century kicked in.

4. And now I’ve got a fourth problem with Gilmour’s statements! Gilmour believes his students are stupid. They’re not sophisticated enough to handle Virginia Woolf. And this is both their problem and Woolf’s, but not Gilmour’s. He did say, after all, he was only going to teach what he loved. I didn’t see, either in the printed interview or in the full transcript, where he admitted he lacked the sophistication to teach Virginia Woolf.

And that’s what bothers me most about David Gilmour, and also why I’m glad he said what he did. A) He’s a lousy teacher; and B) he’s not the only one. In college during the late ’80s/early ’90s I took a half-dozen elective literature courses (I was not a lit major), and was assigned not one book by a female author. There were, and are, a lot of David Gilmours out there. And there is a danger in that. David Gilmour may know his Tolstoy, but he also seems to have carved idols of these half-dozen or so authors long ago and is merely painting them with a new coat of varnish every year. And regardless of what he has to say about Tolstoy or Fitzgerald, ultimately what his students are getting is a lot of David Gilmour.

I teach in a variety of formats, and I consider it a crucial component of my job to read widely, to stay sharp, to constantly question what I think is great. I owe it to my students to teach them interesting, inspiring, exemplary writing, and it can’t always be just a literary version of the Chris Farley Show. “Hey, Chekhov, remember when you did that thing about the lady and the little dog and the libertine guy and how he realized he was falling in love for the first time? Yeah. Uh, wasn’t that great?”

But reading David Gilmour’s interview, I was filled with dread: Am I going to be someone’s Gilmour? I teach a number of first-generation Asian-American authors, but I haven’t been teaching any Chinese or Japanese or Indian authors. I teach a lot of female authors, but is it enough? Am I teaching a wide range of female writers, or am I sticking to a fairly narrow set of voices and viewpoints? I teach black writers, but not enough. And of the writers I do teach, are they only the black writers with whom I’m most comfortable? With whom I can most identify? I could give you an answer, but I wouldn’t be comfortable with it or proud of it. I, too, have a lot of work to do.

That’s maybe David Gilmour’s greatest lesson: That it’s never enough. That you can never assume you’ve got it covered. And there is an “it” to cover. “It” not being a set of quotas or pieces of a pie chart, but “it” being the whole of human experience, which in turn is the whole of literature. And if you’re not interested in that, why are you teaching?

It’s certainly ironic that this is Gilmour’s ultimate lesson as a teacher. It’s also sad, because all he had to do to give it to us was open his mouth and say what he always says.

Note: The photo for this post is the one from Hazlitt. I hope they don’t mind, but I thought it looked better turned black & white, and then blued-out a bit. You know, like the cover of an old book that’s been left in a store window for years and years and years.