Essay Test: Torn and Frayed

Here is an essay a student submitted to universities across the US last year:

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I’ve always told stories, but it took me a long time to tell them the way I meant to tell them. An early stab of mine at this art form was fraught with a clash of cultural norms: my kindergarten teacher, Miss Callin, didn’t approve of my fairytale. I was fresh out of the realism of The Paper Bag Princess, in which a princess saves her prince from a dragon, only for the feckless suitor to spurn her because the dragon burned her clothes and all she’s got to wear is a paper bag. Scorning the superficial romanticism of the Cinderella and Snow White (oh, those cute anthropomorphized animals!), I’d had my princess leave her kingdom and spend her money on a trip to see the world. 

That version of the story never saw the light of day. My teacher exercised her right of censorship, and suddenly the princess was giving her money to the poor and marrying a prince. I found the new ending dissatisfying, lacking somehow in the qualities I prized—whatever those were, but it had something to do with truth, and with avoiding oversimplification. I may be projecting my current opinions onto my former self here, but it seems to me I didn’t want to do things the same way that Charles Perrault had done them. 

Considering I was fighting against conformity, it’s odd that in my preteen years I stopped trying to beat them and joined what I now call the “full of crap” school of thought, which prized elevated sentiments and left any moral uncertainty out of the picture. Sure, I was in good company: most of the Baroque and Romantic poets could have backed up these high ideals and unrealizable aspirations. I came to this way of thinking through a trap that has snared older and wiser than I: I fell for the falsely heroic, truly violent “chivalric” ideals of Pierre Corneille’s El Cid, a heavily pro-dying-for-honor 17^th-century French play, studied by French eighth-graders for admittedly breathtaking verse and its, shall we say, rather accessible level of psychological complexity. I read rather too much of Corneille’s work, which always portrays the world as it should be, and I then started seeing the world as it should be.

For me, goodness became adherence to moral beliefs. Doubt basically came from the devil. To a child, there was something seductive about the certainty of never being wrong. I was intellectually walking around with blinkers, a perfect example of how reactionary children can be, but this is the kind of world where everyone loses their delusions eventually.

Right on cue, my teenage years helped shake things up. When I was sixteen, my influences expanded once and for all into the twentieth century. It was the century of Albert Camus, who proclaimed it was absurd to search for a meaning to life. His philosophy, at first glance, looks like a “life has no meaning” brand of nihilism. But the meaninglessness of life gives you a blank slate. Life doesn’t acquire a meaning on its own; you have to find meaning in it, to live with passion, in a way that means something, and refuse absurd rules that impede your search for a free, meaningful existence. For Camus, no ideal could possibly be worth giving up a day in this world. It was a philosophy far more beautiful than dying for a belief.

The chaotic twentieth was also the century of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, who have nothing to envy the laconic poetry of Hemingway. Whoever thinks the Beatles are so much deeper than the Stones should listen to “Torn and Frayed,” off Exile on Main St: a love letter from Mick Jagger to Keith Richards that tells along the way of how violently outsiders are rejected by “main street,” the world of normal people in which they live. In the song, the drummer is a codeine addict: “doctor prescribes, drugstore supplies; who’s going to help him to kick it?” Society feeds the junkie’s habit while it prosecutes him for possession, and never lets him return to normality. Exile took me down into the “barrooms and smoky bordellos” that the music portrayed, and I found that beyond my insignificant sphere, there was more than one real world. Doing “the right thing” was a hopeless aspiration. The hero of the story is a man who is perceived as immoral, and the villain resides in the normal society of doctors and drugstores. 

To break the lesson I’ve learned down into a maxim would be both to dumb it down and coat it in sap, but basically, life isn’t simple and no belief is a sufficient guide to life. When I realized that, I had wholly broken from the “full of crap” tradition and recovered my artistic roots. But I am glad the journey was necessary because it was worth more than just returning to my starting point. I’ve learned to be lucid and honest, seeing things clearly and telling the truth about them. 

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In a recent book, The College Application Essay, Sarah Myers McGinty, a former instructor at Harvard, has this advice to say about writing the college essay.

"The structure of formal writing has been described in this way:

tell em what you're gonna ell 'em

Tell 'em

Tell em what you told 'em."

She then goes on to say: "No matter what your writing background you have worked with this common structural pattern". And she summarizes her point in this way: "You have been taught his structure, and it is just what you need for the college essay." P. 25

A number of years ago, I wrote an essay on essay writing for the US News College Edition: Sound Advice From An Expert. I put this particular link to this essay that has been used by schools all over the world, as it contains some discussion of other issues pertinent to college admission. In it, I tell students the following:

Any student who has already learned the basics of showing should think about taking a risk on the college essay. What kind of risk?:  "The woman wanted breasts.” ....

A risky essay can border on the offensive. That is the danger of taking a risk. People wonder if they will be penalized if they do take a risk in an application. They want to know, in other words, if there is any risk in taking a risk. Yes, there is. I can say, however, that my experience in the admissions field has led me to conclude the great majority of admissions officers are an open-minded lot and that to err on the side of the baroque might not be as bad as to stay in the comfort of the boring.

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Questions:

If you used the Harvard criteria what grade would you give this essay?

If you used my criteria what grade would you give this essay?

Justify your grade. No points off for spelling errors.

Extra Credit: what kind of essay are you planning to write based on the two pieces of advice you have been given?

For those of you interested in the Stones' song referred to, I have posted it on my Facebook page via Spotify.

Here is a link to Part II of my comments on this essay and on comments about the essay.