I got my assignment in '66 between high school and college in summer session freshman comp.  About Marberry I'd been warned by my father, also in the department:  he played bridge all night, showered with his wife and had recommended Naked Lunch to a female student.  "But he sure knows good writing when he sees it."  He saw it as his duty to wake and shake us, spent one day trying to get us to say "fuck" in mixed company.  I couldn't, had an Eisenhower boyhood so sue me do you know (what I mean, just seventeen and green beyond compare) how long ago this was, how much has come unsettled since?  We wrote a theme a week.  The first was a response to Tolstoy's essay "What is Art?"

I called mine "No it's not, Leo."  Marberry read it to the class, said he liked the gall of it and gave it an A, the only one in either section.  I got four more A's and the last theme was the big one:  what does it mean to be human?  I wrote about someone I knew who seemed marked for mockery and malice, as if he invited it.  As he collected the papers Marberry proposed to demonstrate that the quality of writing isn't incremental, point by point, but lies in a style consistent throughout and evident at once--by reading a sentence or two of each theme aloud (so we'd recognize our own) and rendering a snap judgment.  He assured us that he'd critique the papers thoroughly and wouldn't remember what he'd guessed.  He bet us that in nearly every case he'd be right.

When he got to mine he seemed puzzled, read the rest of the paragraph and said, "It's either an A or an F."  I smiled, but when I got it back he'd written "F-- see me."  He said he couldn't explain but if I put the paper away and read it much later I'd know what he meant when he said I'd started off on the wrong foot--and also that I could begin again (thanks, John).  He gave me an A.