JATB Reviews
Hartley’s “The Teacher’s Pet:” You’ll Want to Pay Attention While She Talks
(download pdf)
For those of you who made a New Year’s resolution to listen to more literature on the internet, rejoice: fresh on the web these days is Out of Breath Podcasts, the latest literary arm of Cherwell, the independent student newspaper of the University of Oxford since 1920. Whatever the paper’s content and quality, I am slightly disillusioned given that the University of Oregon’s paper, the Oregon Daily Emerald, has been fluttering about campus since 1900. In addition, Cherwell has only been online since 1996—this when England’s own Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web back in 1989. Perhaps the delay was due to the invention’s coinciding with the release of the fourth iteration of BBC historical sitcom Blackadder: Blackadder Goes Forth.
What matters now, however, is that current students David Wolf and Antonia Tam have embarked upon the gilded road that newspaper founders George Edinger and Cecil Binney laid down back in 1920 (I could swear I’ve used the name Cecil Binney as a pseudonym in one of my fake news stories). With Out of Breath Podcasts, Wolf and Tam have created the opportunity for aspiring writers and writeresses to share their work in a forum equal parts literature and theater.
This being so, author Julia Hartley is an ace choice to set this weekly podcast series in motion. Aside from Hartley’s literary studies, she has experience in theater as an actress and director, and this knowledge shows during her six-minute monologue “The Teacher’s Pet.” The setting of the story is modern-day, small-town Italy, where an Oxford student has come to teach English for the year. She finds trouble from the start when her class is disrupted by the boisterous Paolo, the “coccolino della maestra”—that is, the teacher’s pet.
Due to Hartley’s actually being in Italy, she was not able to record the monologue herself. This task fell in the capable hands of Harriet Madeley, a member of the Oxford Experimental Theatre Club, which has been experimenting since Nevill Coghill formed the club in 1936. Coghill would later become a literary scholar and translate Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canturbury Tales into modern English. Madeley was not reached for an interview, so it is not known whether she wishes to become such a scholar herself and give the same modern treatment to, say, John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester. But perhaps Madeley’s readers would blush at the earl’s poetry of obscenity (e.g., “In th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown / For breeding the best [lasses] in Christendom…”—he doesn’t use “lasses”; for the unedited text you may find “A Satyr on Charles II” here).
My first time listening to Hartley’s monologue, the most pleasing bit about the podcast was its Britishness. Literary spoken English—British English—is rare in the United States, usually confined to the BBC on extended cable, and interviews with J.K. Rowling. But here, Madeley enriches the monologue with an accent that turns “literature” into “litrature,” the first “t” as clean as if it had just leapt from the bubbles of a porcelain bathtub. And of course Hartley does not limit herself to the literary: I enjoyed her timely injections of slang like “bloody,” “fresher,” and “bugger off,” which without further ado took me straight back to J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. (If I create the impression that most folks in the U.S. have reduced current British literature to the Harry Potter series, I’m sorry; but until Jane Austen puts out her next novel, that’s how it’s going to be.) I note the monologue’s unique aural quality and vocabulary as an American, but that is not to say that Hartley takes completely for granted the piece’s “Britishness”; she astutely points her finger inward toward the end of the story, when she makes mention of “inevitable British self-deprecation.”
The other bits that shine in this monologue are, justly, its theatrical elements. Hartley employs her stage know-how by investing her scenes with a nearly tangible spatial quality. That is, she offers a focus on “blocking” (a theater term that refers to actor placement and movement) that is often lacking in fiction. It is certainly a lack I feel in my own fiction. Three moments stand out for their excellent blocking, and they fittingly mirror the plot arc of the story, marking beginning, middle, and end. At the story’s opening, the teacher stands with her back to the class as she writes on the board, and this moment reveals many of her anxieties—are the students staring at her rear, or else simply chatting and not paying attention? These normal teacher anxieties become heightened here given that the students in this case are of the same age and live in the same collegio, or residence hall, as the teacher, so she holds no decisive authority. (In the final recording, part of this initial scene was cut; but enough remains to make the point.)
Midway through the story the teacher’s pet Paolo comes to the teacher’s room upon a flimsy pretext. The teacher accepts this invasion of her living space—“That’s what a year abroad is about,” she thinks—but then Paolo wants inside her personal space as well. He’s fine to hang out, that is, but “that leg is not allowed to brush against mine.”
The monologue culminates with a scene in the collegio’s dining hall, and here once more the physical construction of the scene pressures the narrator and exacerbates her problems with Paolo. The teacher’s pet traps her as he sits directly in front of her, and then grabs a passing “fresher” so he can have an audience for his bragging. The corridors between the tables are narrow, so this blocked fresher has the effect of jamming the cafeteria’s natural movement, and all of the attention in the room focuses upon teacher and teacher’s pet. Not so good for the teacher.
Early in the monologue the teacher says in reference to a classroom issue, “Thankfully my big smile smoothed that one out.” At this moment and throughout, Hartley’s own smile shines through the text, and it is one of the things that makes this story such a pleasure to listen to. On deck for Out of Breath is “On Bats” by Sam Caird. Let’s hope he can meet Hartley’s bar of Britishness and keen banter.◊