”Through their knowledge, enthusiasm, insight, and high expectations, the best teachers engender in their students an insatiable search for answers to the important questions.” Anyone lucky enough to have had a great teacher recognises the truth of this statement by Dale Salwak, who invited 20 writers, including novelists and poets, such as JM Coetzee, Andrew Motion, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Margaret Drabble, as well as several critics and scholars, to reflect on inspirational mentors.
[ In Praise of Older Books: Age of Iron by JM Coetzee (1990)Opens in new window ]
Most remember either schoolteachers or postgraduate influences, the latter embracing professors but also other writers, friends or simply books. (Creative writing programmes hardly feature). The essays describing influential schoolteachers are the most interesting. They played key roles in the young writers’ lives because they were intelligent, but above all kind. Memories of university professors and later influencers tend to focus on learning, dedication and brilliance – Paul Theroux’s mentor, ”Drill Sergeant” VS Naipaul, far from kind and often wrong in his judgments, was nevertheless inspiring.
The stunning opening by Coetzee, remembering his teacher Gerrit Gouws, is a perfect essay; it gives as clear an insight into life in 1950s South Africa as anything I have ever read. Mr Gouws lives on the page as vividly as any fictional hero. Coetzee comments on the accepted brutality of the educational system, as does Motion, whose primary school “was an expensive misery factory, where a regime of beatings and other sorts of abuse turned my mind to stone”. He too encountered a kind teacher, Peter Way, a poet and gifted teacher of English literature – another beautiful individual shining in the nightmare of history. Not a schoolteacher but his grandfather, who could not read, revealed to the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o the beauty of their language Gikuyu. In 1952, when Ngugi was still at school, this language and all African languages were banned in Kenyan schools, replaced by English (violently enforced).
All the essays deserve high praise. Seldom does one encounter such a wealth of good prose within the covers of a single volume. The book is itself inspirational, teaching much about writing and teaching, thinking and living. It gave me real pleasure and I will return to it again and again.
[ Writers and Their Mothers review: ‘I am what her savage loving has made me’Opens in new window ]
