Remembering, forgetting and how we learn

by David Benjamin

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” —Confucius

PARIS—There has long existed a sort of nihilist cottage industry, lucrative for its philosophers and divines, that professes contempt for, well, professors.

Every few years, someone writes a book claiming that he learned nothing in school of any practical use for the rest of his life. Or someone else writes a polemic claiming that every lesson her teachers taught her in school was a scurrilous lie. Or another commentator, in The New Yorker, laments that no one ever remembers a single lesson, fact, historical date or quadratic equation supposedly taught—by cynical and incompetent teachers—in twelve years of mandatory education. These feuilletons exposing pedagogic fraud become bestsellers, triggering shouts of “Bravo!” from sources as lofty as Harvard and as lowly as Dogpatch.

But I don’t get it.

In my school days, as erratically as I navigated them, I managed to pick up nuggets that linger still in my craw. This adhesive enlightenment came not just from teachers, of course. I also gathered fragments of wherewithal at recess, in the corridors, in locker rooms, during summer vacation between grades and by applying the Yogi Berra Method: “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

This reluctance to repudiate my schooling redounded unexpectedly this week in Paris. Hotlips and I were dining at a homey, rustic bistro, Le Perraudin. While consuming our herring, escargots and bavettes with a bottle from the Loire, Hotlips had been “observing” two men across the narrow aisle where our serveurs squeezed and scurried between the tables.

Noting her interest, I said, “You should draw those guys.”

So, she did, tearing off a corner of our tablecloth and borrowing my felt-tip pen. The result was hasty but evocative image of our neighbors’ animated dialog and the feel of our locale. I took the drawing over and had each of them sign it.

This practice of art voyeur in restaurants and other public places has been one of the pleasures of our union. Hotlips once (figuratively) ambushed the Barefoot Contessa and shooed me over to her table for an autograph.

Even before I knew her, Hotlips was drawn to drawing. She did it with ease, flow and urgency. Drawing was an urge she couldn’t suppress. In the decades since, she has made Paris her canvas, working in ink and aquarelle, capturing the city and its people in a style that’s lively and distinctly individual. This has happened despite her dearth of Art Education. As far as I know, the only lesson she ever had was one that I recalled—and shared—from my high-school art teacher.

You see, in my senior year—after four years of required courses in English, math, science, Latin, history, social studies and gym—I had an opening in my class schedule. I saw my chance to spend my last two semesters in the atelier of La Follette High’s nutty professor. I decided to take Art with Roy Liddicoat.

Mr. Liddicoat, by general consensus, was the flakiest and most nakedly opinionated teacher on the faculty. These qualities, off-putting for most of my peers, drew me to Roy like a June bug to a streetlight. In previous visits to the Art Room, I’d sensed in him a balance familiar to me, of joie de vivre and quiet anger. For his part, he already knew I was cursed by a creative streak. Best of all, we were both ironists. We got along like olive and oil.

In the end, the art I generated under Mr. Liddicoat is gone and forgotten, and it wasn’t all that good. But his class, besides being fun, instilled in me—if no one else—a sense of art’s power to soothe the savage breast and express the ineffable. Best of all, notwithstanding the dogma of common-school skeptics, I remembered stuff. Two moments in Roy Liddicoat’s class have stayed with me forever. The first involved a girl named Quigley.

One day early in the semester, the girls in class—I think I was the only boy—gathered ’round Quigley, oohing and ahing over a drawing on which she was just applying her finishing flourish. She was a remarkable girl, with an eerie knack for replicating, down to the finest line, color, tone and filigree, an advertisement illustration in a magazine. The particular ad she had chosen, possibly in Seventeen or Vogue, was for hair dye, perfume, lipstick—something like that. Quigley’s painstaking copy, which obviously took hours to complete, was perfect.

Mr. Liddicoat noticed the hubbub and approached. He loomed over Quigley’s masterpiece. Quigley pinkened with anticipation of her teacher’s praise for her flawless rendering. Mr. Liddicoat sighed, shook his head and said it was crap. The girls, envious of Quigley’s brilliance, gasped in shock.

Mr. Liddicoat backed away then. He didn’t do much explaining, but I got his drift. Into her obsessive-compulsive reproduction, Quigley had dared no variation, interpretation or whimsy. She had put nothing of herself onto her canvas. She was, in Mr. Liddicoat’s verdict, a consummate draftsman but an artist without a soul.

My other memorable Liddicoat moment was a unit on basic pen-and-ink drawing. He assembled a still life which, he insisted, we should draw without looking at the paper. He called this technique contour drawing. Later, he also had us draw one another’s faces without looking down and guiding the stylus with our eyes. In essence, he was telling us to draw as though we were blind.

You can imagine the results.

Twenty years later, when Hotlips showed me her paintings, I was startled. She’s a natural. Her images were both recognizable and inaccurate. She made no effort at photographic replication. She interpreted what she saw, imbuing inert objects with kinesis. However, as she drew, I also observed a measure of fussiness. Her brush was sometimes hesitant, sometimes too busy, sometimes drawing two or three lines where one was enough, then wishing she could erase her excess.

And I remembered Mr. Liddicoat.

“Draw me,” I said, “But don’t look at the paper.”

Like me in Mr. Liddicoat’s class, Hotlips thought this was a stupid idea. But I insisted, so she gave in. Her drawing rendered me as a sort of praying mantis in a fright wig. But it was a better portrait—more alive (and ironic)—than the images she had tried while looking at the paper.

Hotlips got Mr. Liddicoat’s point immediately. What she learned from him—with me as the middleman—is a synergy between the eye and the artist’s hand that bypasses the brain. Michelangelo said that “A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.” But I think he was over-intellectualizing his job, a common failing among artists who feel the need to explain themselves. Roy Liddicoat’s simple lesson in contour drawing, which Hotlips absorbed ever after into her drawings and watercolors, is that sight and movement can mesh without thinking.

Of course, the art she has created since my Liddicoat recollection doesn’t resemble the blind scrawl of the pure contour drawing. But all her works—like the picture she made of the two guys at Le Perraudin—evoke the meandering line and anti-angular playfulness of making art with your eyes closed.

My semesters of Art with Mr. Liddicoat, most of it now forgotten, might have been better spent learning small engine repair or touch-typing, both skills more “useful” than knowing how to tell Monet from Manet. But they instilled at least one lesson I couldn’t forget, and which I shared eventually with my own true love.

It occurs to me, finally, that far away and far past, unknown to him and aided by the fleeting memory of a surrogate, Roy Liddicoat gave Hotlips what every good teacher hopes to bestow once in a great while, on a student whose talent he gently exalts and whose mind is not yet closed. Her set her free.