That Woman in my Creative Writing Class (1982)

I am presently in Billings to teach an electrical Code class (related to solar PV installations) to a handful of state electrical inspectors.  As I drove through Bozeman yesterday, I got to thinking about a woman I once studied with in one of my creative writing classes while I was at MSU in 1982.  She came from Bozeman, and you might not opt to fancy her as pretty unless you like huge round faces and unkempt hair.  She admired tame ducks, vegetable gardens, gates flung open, and on those occasions when she recited one of her flawless poems, her voice might have been mistaken for a flute.  Her writings often stood without match in our writing class—stood upright and glittering in poetic beauty.  But more often than not she became ensconced in feminism and rote arguments against everything written by men.  Every time she finished a scathing critique of one of my works, she ended with “You should try writing from a woman’s point-of-view.”

I really liked her.   A man’s point of view.

And I really sucked as a writer.

When a discussion about Nabokov’s Lolita erupted on night as we were riding together in a car, we found ourselves camped in positions on opposite hills, figuratively speaking.  We soon began volleying rounds back and forth into each other’s camp.  As I mentioned, I think she exuded the most talent of anyone in our class.  But she interpreted the characters in Lolita only after passing them through some manner of feminist litmus test.

While a litmus test to measure compounds for alkalinity or acidity that might be handy for scientists in chemistry, similar tests based on a single factor in studying literature may end up providing only a profound disservice.  Great literary characters should defy such gross over-simplification.  A simple test will not begin to penetrate the depth of them.

My writer friend saw Humbert as an evil, over-sexed man taking advantage of, corrupting an innocent young girl.  End of story.  Certainly, I agreed that Humbert was, indeed, all of that.  But he was also, at the same time, a victim, too.  He was a victim of his own impulses, of circumstance, of (take this feminist swine) Lolita.

My friend had absolutely written one of the main characters out of the book: Lolita.

Go ahead, call Lolita the protagonist if you desire.  But how do you explain away her flouncing around?   How about the way she manipulates Humbert to attain favor?  What about the way both of them shoved Lo’s mother right out the window?

To this day…I wish I could write as perfectly as that woman in my class...from a man’s point of view.

--Mitchell Hegman