Best of the Liberal Arts

Quin, Liam: “Pictures of old books” (2003)

Growing up in South Carolina, I never felt I received the best education. Always felt something was missing. Admittedly, it didn’t help shuffling through high school that I was such an uninspired student. I performed for the good teachers, Ms. Yates for English and journalism and Mr. Flounders for history. But then the former was about writing and the later history, so they had a natural advantage over, say, the biology teacher who was boring and effeminate to boot. I should also include Mr. Locklear, who allowed me read Lord of the Rings my senior year instead of the textbook. Mr. Flounders the history teacher, I heard, left his wife for a classmate a few years later, so that kinda shaded my opinion. It was a scandal in our small southern town. I wonder if he read his Nabokov.

Once I reached Clemson’s School of Architecture, I was on a racetrack aimed for a profession that had little time for much else–other than rock and roll which wild horses couldn’t keep me away from. Wild horses, you say?

What did I miss out on? A liberal arts education–essentially, a solid grounding in literature. I’d like to think I read a great deal growing up, and would be the first to credit what vocabulary I learned–that wasn’t from my mother–was gained from books, but it wasn’t by any stretch a terribly focused syllabus. I read what I wanted to read and ignored the rest.

Always the steak and frites and never the greens.

When I first read Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, I was sure of it. Mind, I wouldn’t attempt to read what Bloom did during his long life, and even if I had, his power of recall was beyond what mere mortals could hope to achieve. I stand in awe of what he absorbed from a life of books and wish I’d audited his lectures while at Yale. Regretfully, I wasn’t aware of him at the time–I was too busy still learning to design, being glacially slow. For all I know, Bloom’s would have been too pedantic a style, too off-putting for a skeptic of the first order.

One could scarcely fault Bloom for lacking an opinion. His best known contribution to literary criticism was first captured in an early work, Anxiety of Influence, a catchy title if not so clear. The theory goes, each writer receives an imprint from the authors she reads, and spends a great deal of time and effort either expanding on the previous author’s work or fighting to swerve from it. His study of the Romantic poets is rife with the concept. So should I thank him for the thought or get angry at the intrusion? Being dense has its advantages–not being so quick to be impressed. Though I’ll miss the old coot.

Ours was the first class to go through Clemson’s recalibrated 4-year undergraduate program intended to be followed by a two-year master’s degree, six all total for a professional degree in architecture. Previously, Clemson had offered a five-year professional degree. We were informed the additional year would allow for a more well-rounded liberal arts education.

Indeed, our freshman year we were granted art courses, drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture– besides the usual first year courses in math, remedial English and a foreign language–English being itself a foreign language to many.

So I gained an interest in art that first year, something I intend to get back to when I retire… yeah, I know.
Though beginning our sophomore year, we were thrown into design studio–and to the wolves so to speak. Design studio was a 5-credit course, four hours three times a week as scheduled, and in actuality we lived in the studio for three years. We began as a freshman class of 150-odd students (with 3 women) and 26 graduated (and no women). Though I got the impression the women weren’t expected to last, architecture being such a manly profession and all. To stay in the architecture program at Clemson, a passing grade was no less than a B. C+ wasn’t going to cut it. Being a state school, Clemson had to admit you, good SAT scores or bad, but by damn they’d only graduate architects. If you wanted to survive, you slaved.

At Clemson, the School of Architecture sat across from the School of Engineering with a small plaza between. Clemson’s architecture studios were technically focused, and though there was recognized design talent in our class, the nuts and bolts of the profession were more emphasized. We took our math courses with math majors and engineering courses with engineering students. For engineers, these were their core classes; for architects the engineering courses were secondary in credit load, however much they were washout courses–engineering proved an excellent means to thin the herd. I found if I repeatedly worked at the equations I could grasp the work, but it was a slog, and every hour spent studying engineering was an hour closer to missing a design studio project deadline. If you missed the deadline in design studio, you failed, no make overs.

One engineering professor cheerfully began his semester courses by informing the architecture majors if they fell asleep in his class he’d stand them up in the corner like dunces. After several days working ‘en charrette’ with no sleep–zero–I learned a survival trick of propping my hands either side of the engineering text so I wouldn’t fall out of my chair. Though it did little to augment an understanding of calculating ultimate strengths of steel and concrete. In my professional career, I always sought out smart structural engineers.

My fourth year studio project was to be done as a group project on housing. My group chose manufactured housing. I did a lion’s share of the presentation, going the last four days sleepless. True story. I remember the day of, still finishing a master plan of how our houses might lay out in an entire community, traced by hand from an underlain sketch, working one side of the drawing one moment then later waking to find myself drawing a different area and curious as to what I’d drawn while asleep. I figured I had to be hallucinating. I remember driving three hours home, falling into bed and my mother, bless her, let me sleep for several days. I did get up for Thanksgiving turkey. Got an A+ for the presentation and went into depression for the lack of sleep.

Perhaps all successful careers are single-focus. I can’t speak for any but architecture. If one hopes to succeed at architecture, throw out dreams of a life outside of the field. Though I tried. I wanted to write, but it was scattershot and largely aimless until I reached 40, walked out of my marriage, left my children and helped found an architectural business. Failing in marriage, failing in a first love afterward, working at seeing my children often as I could while working 60-70 hour weeks. No stress in that. And I managed a book of poems.

Somewhere during that crazy time, I began seeking the literature I had missed in college.
Strange how life has taken its turns. I wonder, had I decided to pursue a writing career instead of architecture where that might have taken me. Probably to a poorer retirement, but would I have burned out on writing? I fast moved away from journalism, fearing it would jade my love of writing.

After a life of architectural practice, I can honestly say I never burned out on design. Discovering a dream sprung from of one’s imagination, smoothing its awkward inconsistencies, then seeing it through to fruition. Pretty cool. My greatest regret was not finding my way faster, earlier and not pushing harder.
English Lit majors and MFAs are laughed at in this country for being hopelessly naïve about making a living. I would have made a cynical high school English teacher; I’m not that noble. I might have gone for journalism. I enjoyed the comradery of the school newspaper at Clemson, but even that far back making a living at journalism seemed hit or miss. It’s hard enough now as a bystander witnessing the newspaper profession’s sad decline.

James Merrill the poet had a trust from his father (being the Merrill in that small Wall Street institution) for funding his education, his poetry and travels. In a sense, Merrill followed a tradition of sons and daughters of the European upper class going into the arts. Though there are plenty of writers who simply plunge ahead into lives in literature regardless of funds. With the emphasis on STEM in today’s public schools, a liberal arts education falls into a mythical past, though it one time was considered essential.

Writing is inwardly focused work, and it can leave you stripped bare. Probably more inward than architecture, which is a team sport if it’s to succeed. At its best, architectural design is a synthesis of the work of architects, engineers and specialists. Though the underlying idea may spring from one person, it takes the skills of a cadre of specialists to complete the design and a whole other cadre of builders to make it real. The heart of a good story comes from somewhere inside a person’s life, so there’s no place to hide.
Though with a career in architecture probably behind me, I rise in the mornings and head for the coffee maker (that hasn’t changed) then sit with my laptop for another couple thousand words–when the Muse is kind.

In my next life, I intend to come back as Harold Bloom’s best pupil.