Yale's Daily Themes Course

 "No Telling, No Summing Up" by Calvin Trillin in the New Yorker - 

(found a source online that made a spreadsheet with all of the themes.  Here's a copy of the spreadsheet.)

Benjamin Nangle, a Yale English professor who has been one of the instructors of a fiction-writing course called Daily Themes since 1923, has read about so many young couples parting forever that he long ago lost count. Boys and girls have said goodbye at railroad stations, in dormitory rooms, in cars parked in the suburbs of Midwestern cities, in the booths of dingy restaurants—almost anyplace where the girl can walk slowly out of sight, or the boy can hang his head and listen to the retreating footsteps, or the girl can slam the door. “Boy-girl themes generally fall into two equally bad types,” James Folsom, another Daily Themes instructor, once said in a speech. “The first of these deals with a boy—or occasionally a girl—innocent beyond belief, high-minded, studious, morally beyond reproach, who, for some reason which remains unfathomable, is treated with inhuman cruelty by someone of the opposite sex—someone cunningly disguised as a normal human being but in actuality heartless, vicious, sadistic, and corrupt. The second type details the fortunes of two young people who, through the malevolence of fate—or occasionally the malevolence of someone acting through incomprehensible motives of the purest evil—are separated from each other forever.”

Undergraduates might be expected to consider experiences with girls important enough to write down; undergraduates taking Daily Themes, under pressure to produce a three-hundred-word piece of fiction every day for eight or nine weeks, eventually consider experiences with almost anyone important enough to write down. They begin to observe their roommates. Folsom considers the themes produced by roommate observation better, by and large, than those that result from recalling romances, though he admitted, in the same speech, “It is true that the general picture one gets of roommates when surveying the sizable field of roommate literature as a whole is that they are universally the most nasty, unwholesome, stupid, and despicable young men ever gathered together in one spot.”

Yale English instructors have been reading daily themes for about sixty years—to the background music of countless writers saying that it is futile to try to teach something so obviously a matter of divine gift as writing, and of countless professors hinting that it is vaguely disreputable to try to teach something so obviously unscholarly as writing. From the start, a theme has been defined as “a part of a short story,” a page or two long. “Daily” has always meant daily, or almost daily. “The title of the course is somewhat misleading,” the lecturer often says at the first meeting of the class. “There are no themes due on either Saturday or Sunday, or on Thanksgiving. In other respects, however, the course title is not misleading. We mean that one theme is due every day. The first theme is due tomorrow.” Undergraduates who are inclined to endure this regimen do not expect their burden to be lightened very often by praise from above. Daily Themes has always been one of the few courses in Yale College to use letter grades (later translated into the numerical grades used in Yale records), and the grade after D has always been W. Nobody is certain what W stands for, but most people believe it means “Worthless.” An undergraduate on the way to his weekly conference with his instructor, where he receives marks and criticism on his last five themes, walks in the presence of W’s. From the outset, it has been a tenet of Daily Themes that a student should not be permitted to leave a conference without a ray of hope—that somewhere in his five themes there must be at least one adjective that can be commended, or one phrase that is not as bad as all the others—but it is common for an instructor to leave the impression that a ray of hope was not easy to find.

To demonstrate what is not a daily theme, a lecturer sometimes reads to one of the early classes something called the Jawbone Theme—in which a man wanders through a ghost ship that has washed ashore, idly comes across a human jawbone, and suddenly realizes, to his distress, that he is holding the jawbone of his beloved. Trick endings are anathema to Daily Themes instructors, and telling an anecdote is a foolproof Method of receiving a W. In fact, telling anything in Daily Themes is dangerous. Like most courses in writing, Daily Themes demands that its students “show, not tell”—show through dialogue and description, rather than tell by pronouncement or plot summary. “Telling” written in the margin of a daily theme is severe criticism, and so is “Summing up”—trying to explain what should have been revealed in the action by tacking on what is meant to be a pregnant last sentence. The most vivid event in the memory of one Daily Themes veteran is a lecture by Nangle that ended with the evils of “summing up.” Nangle appealed to the class, almost poignantly, not to submit to him any more themes that ended with the sentence “He walked away in disgust.” Wearily leaning over the lectern, he tried to make clear how many themes he had read over the years that ended that way, and how many he was likely to read in the future, no matter how many appeals he made. At that thought, he walked away in disgust.

Daily Themes instructors stress that what they consider a good theme is a scene—however mundane—that reveals something about the people in it. “We outlast them,” Folsom says. “They run out of the experiences they had always thought they would ‘write up someday,’ and they have to look around.” Looking around, undergraduates are never quite convinced that their daily lives are the stuff that first week or so, most of them begin to find their supply of memorable adventures running thin, and then even mundane scenes seem to disappear from their lives. The world becomes a blank in the twenty-four hours between themes. The normal mood of Daily Themes students on a week night is desperation. They cull anecdotes (and W’s) from their friends. They try to goad their roommates into behaving in nasty, unwholesome, stupid, or despicable ways. ‘They probe their memories for goodbyes in high school or during summer vacations. They think of people they have disliked in the past. They strain their ears for overheard dialogue while waiting for green lights. When something out of the ordinary happens on the campus, they feel delivered. For many years, Yale undergraduates were required to attend morning chapel, and they would all go from there to the post office to pick up their mail. An old vender with a horse and wagon was stationed between the two spots to catch the passing trade. One day, just after chapel was dismissed, the vender’s aged horse fell to the pavement and, after a twenty-minute delay, died. Daily Themes instructors say that no horse’s death has ever been more widely celebrated in fiction.

ORMALLY, girls surpass horses as a subject of daily themes, but that triumph is fairly recent. For forty years—from 1909 to 1949—a collection of daily themes was produced in book form every year, each student contributing his favorite theme and his share of the printing bill. (The books were discontinued when printing costs got too high, and were resumed last year with the money from a recent bequest.) Richard Sewall, who taught Daily Themes for several years in the forties, once read through the hundred or so themes preserved from 1911, and he found only three girls—all of them pleasant and none of them saying goodbye. (One of them, a laundry-bill collector described as “one of those many old-faced little daughters of the poor,” belonged to the small band of little old ladies, decrepit panhandlers, quaint Italians, and pathetic young girls who used to creep through the early themes as representatives of the lower classes.) Parents and their ilk appeared as rarely and as pleasantly. The one theme in the 1909 book that deals with generational relations is narrated by a young man who was reluctant to spend an evening with some friends of his parents but later concludes, “No small talk here of the belle of the ball, whose sheltered life furnished naught else; nor the crude accounts of the young men’s coatroom, bred of an unbalanced outlook on life. That evening with experience-silvered heads—I would not give ten Proms for it.”

A hero in last year’s Daily Themes book found himself in a similar position:

“Mother, will you please just leave me alone for a while?”

“Can’t you at least come down and say hello to them?”

“No—they’re your friends, not mine. I don’t give a damn whether they ever come over. I don’t care about them.”

“Well, they care about you. They want to see you.”

“Well, good for them. I don’t want to see them—I don’t want to see anyone right now.”

“I don’t see how anyone can be so perverse. Is something bothering you?”

“Yes, the whole damn world bothers me right now so I want to be up here by myself and I especially don’t feel like going down there and being hypocritically pleasant and civil to the Bayleys.”

The early writers of daily themes had no precise substitutes for girls and parents, but they seemed to derive a lot of enjoyment from the look of the campus and the wonders of nature. A good number of burning logs crackled in cheerful campfires in those days, and a lot of snow was driven against the glistening windowpanes of rustic cabins. A typical nature lover of 1910 wrote, “Around the bend in the piney mountain trail where first the sapphire lake flashes into view I swing, just as the flaming sun sinks below the last azure hill of the intervale, flecking with pink and gold every fleecy August cloud.” Going through most of the old Daily Themes books, Sewall found that the subject matter had not been greatly affected by the upheavals of the First World War and the Depression—both of which were pretty much ignored as subjects themselves. In the twenties and thirties, the language of the themes gradually lost some of its nineteenth-century flavor, but if the writers were having any serious confrontations with girls or parents or roommates, they were unwilling to write them down. The subject matter of the themes began to broaden at the time of the Second World War, but even today half the themes are still about college life. Some subjects are so common that instructors talk of the Mixer Theme, the Shoot Down (it is usually the boy who is shot down by the girl, occasionally at a mixer), the Lonely Theme (people are often lonely at mixers and after being shot down), and—a voice from the past—the Panhandler Theme. “There is also the Summer Job Theme and the Growing Up Theme,” Folsom says. “And the theme about adventures in New York. There’s a strong sub-genre of the New York Theme about being approached by a homosexual.” Daily Themes writers are not known for their upbeat endings. Michael Cowan, who is one of the instructors of the course this year, says, “Although you can find happiness experiences, fulfillment experiences—sexual fulfillment or a guy getting elected to a club—the average story turns the other way. People laugh if someone reads a theme that implies any sort of easy happiness.” There is some evidence, however, that today’s undergraduates are not as far from musing on the beauties of azure hills as they seem. “Now we get the guy sitting on the beach musing about the girl he’s slept with the night before,” Folsom says. “Sometimes I think they’ve just replaced Swinburne romanticism with Hemingway romanticism.”

Before the Daily Themes course was five years old, John Berdan, who taught it from 1907 until his retirement, in 1941, had established the criteria governing the themes in the form of eight slogans, most of which lasted, without alteration, for more than fifty years. (But by the fifties the same slogans that had once brought forth flowery descriptions of nature and football were producing spare dialogues between surly boy and unwilling girl, or careful accounts of the most disgusting event of the weekend.) For the past several years, the slogans have not been used word for word as lecture topics, and teaching methods have become more varied now that the regular course has been supplemented by sophomore seminars at some of Yale’s residential colleges. But Berdan’s influence remains, even if modern students miss the opportunity of seeing him chalk a slogan in huge letters on the blackboard, turn to the class, and announce, “Individualize by Specific Detail!” Speaking before secondary-school English teachers at a conference sponsored by the Yale Master of Arts in Teaching Program, Sewall called Individualize by Specific Detail the eyeopener in Daily Themes’ attempt to revive the sensitivity to detail that is often buried in secondary schools under the weight of parsed sentences and dull source themes—a “return to the vivid, honest, and direct observation of children.” At a later conference, Nangle cited “A young, rather attractive girl stood on the street corner” as an example of the type of sentence that young, rather unsuspecting Daily Themes writers offer up for annihilation during the first week of the course. “Young?” Nangle asked. “How young? Two? Five? Twelve? Eighteen? Twenty-six? Attractive? What constitutes attraction? Color of hair, beauty of face or figure, mode of attire? Attractive to what instinct—the maternal, the sexual, the aesthetic, or some other? Can you see her?” After a conference or two, Daily Themes students who have been observing their roommates begin to observe them a bit more closely.

“Vivify by Range of Appeal!” Berdan would exhort after he had despaired of making any progress in persuading students to Individualize by Specific Detail. “Characterize by Speech and Gesture! Clarify by Point of View! Unify by a Single Impression! Combine Details for Coherence! Charge Words with Connotation! Choose Words for their Sounds!” In an effort to remind students that they had sound and odor as well as sight at their disposal (Vivify by Range of Appeal), Berdan would write a word like “garbage” or “perfume” on the board and wordlessly pass out paper. At the following lecture, with the reeking results in his hand, he would preach moderation in all things.

Today, the slogans have been replaced by “a kind of brushfire approach,” Folsom says—concentrating on whatever evils seem most widespread in the week’s themes. There is never any shortage of horrible examples. Inevitably, some of the themes turned in during the first week of lectures are sensational tales of horrifying violence, and they are often followed by what Folsom calls Lost in the Jungle Week. Discouraged from the sensational (”Gentlemen, it is not necessary to kill off your grandmother for our benefit”), undergraduates often turn toward the scatological. The use of obscenity and swearing for effect is a fairly recent phenomenon. Looking through the themes of the Roaring Twenties, Sewall found “only a few ‘damns,’ one timid ‘goddamn,’ and one mild four-letter word.” This and the fact that most of the themes seemed more romantic than roaring led him to conclude that Yale was suffering from a slight cultural lag. (The Class Book poll of seniors in 1925 showed their favorite novel to be “A Tale of Two Cities.”) By 1933, Daily Themes writers were catching up, with sentences like “When in hell would the damn music end?” For the past several years, Folsom has found it necessary to explain in an early lecture that realism cannot be obtained merely by sprinkling the page arbitrarily with obscenity. In a theme of only three hundred words or so, it is often not very difficult to see where the writer went wrong, and the clinker caused by an ill-chosen word can be deafening. (Nangle’s favorite is a romantic description of a lovely girl that ends with the sun striking her “shiny blond pate.”) The themes read in class remain anonymous, and some who have taken the course believe that the most important lesson it teaches an undergraduate is how to look as contemptuous as everyone else in the room while his own theme is being read.

WHEN Daily Themes advocates are told that writing courses belong in trade schools, they often answer that Daily Themes is the best course in literary criticism at Yale— that, as Folsom once said in a speech, it teaches “by example, rather than by precept, that the proper question to ask in the interpretation of literature is not ‘What does the story mean?’ but, rather, ‘How does the story work?’” To those who say that writing cannot be taught, the instructors answer that it can at least be criticized, and that, to judge from the results, it can be improved by taking Daily Themes—although they don’t pretend to know just what it is in the process that causes the improvement. “At least, it purges some of the nonsense from their style,” says Sewall. “Sure, it may be rule of thumb, and a refined mind can find all kinds of philosophical arguments against it, but, damn it, it works. At the end of the semester, they write better than they did at the beginning.”

Harry Berger, who once taught Daily Themes and is now chairman of the English Department of the University of California at Santa Cruz, says that the Daily Themes method is “fine as an exercise—a way of getting guys to do certain aspects of craft that they otherwise wouldn’t do,” but he adds, “The danger is that guys really think they’re getting some kind of magic formula for being successful writers.” Some students do fall into a formula. Attempting to avoid some of the more obvious means of getting a W, they tend to write in the flat dialogues that are associated with Hemingway or John O’Hara, and the dictum that they must show rather than tell can force them to put a character through some strenuous exercises in order to avoid telling the reader outright what is going on. But Daily Themes instructors say that after Thanksgiving, when the themes give way to weekly short stories, the undergraduates feel no special allegiance to the rules that haunted their autumn evenings.

Before that emancipation, most Daily Themes students accept the combination of daily grind and faint encouragement stoically, like Marine recruits who know they are voluntarily enduring consistent mistreatment. Occasionally, though, it all becomes too much to bear, and the student reacts (as he reacts to many of his daily difficulties) by writing a theme about it—purging himself of his anger and solving the problem of what to hand in the next morning. The exasperation of taking the course is one of the few theme subjects that have remained constant through the years. One piece of particularly angry interior dialogue that Nangle has saved was written by an undergraduate named Johnson in the early fifties. It begins, “By God he better understand this one. That old Wilder bastard better get this one. Ten themes of mine he’s read now—ten themes and I don’t think he’s caught one thing I’ve said. Jesus, that guy must still be in the eighteenth century. Well, urn, kaff, Mr. Jacobi, it’s perfectly obvious that the girl here is in perfect control of the situation, urn, kaff. No, Mr. Wilder, you blind old bastard, the girl is not in control of the situation, the girl is making an ass of herself, and if you had one-half an eye in your head you’d see that. . . . I get it. My roommates get it. My friends get it. . . . How did an old quack like you ever get to teach this course anyway?”

Johnson got a B for that one.