There are two reasons why I love Jeannette Walls's fictionalized biography of her grandmother Lily Casey Smith. One is for what it shows about a particular slice of American history, the other for what it says about courage and determination.
West Texas and the surrounding area is the setting; late 19th c. through the 50s is the time period. The "novel" is told in the first person in a succession of short, vivid chapters. Each chapter adds a layer to the picture of the hard-scrabble, unforgiving land that was Lily Casey's home--as a child she lived in a dugout whose walls sometimes caved in when it rained--and the girl, who even as a young child, knew how to get things done. We see what the lives of ranchers were really like, the endless hard work and sweat, the sudden disasters that could ruin a family. Justice was still an individual matter much of the time, with scores settled violently and sometimes for good. I won't go into detail about the book; you can find out about it on Amazon, or better yet read it yourself. Instead, I offer my own reaction.
I love to look at old photographs. I have one of my great-grandmother (maybe great-great-; I'm not sure) that was taken before the Civil War when she was sixteen. She stands in her ruffled dress with its stiff voluminous skirt, carefully reading a letter that she holds in front of her with both hands. Her dress is short enough to show her ankles, so she must be on the very verge of leaving childhood behind. I wonder if the letter she is reading is from the man she would later marry?
My mother's family came from Richmond, VA, where I'm told they owned a plantation and slaves. I don't know if they were true gentry, but family lore gave them an aristocratic aura. When the war broke out, this girl, Agnes Singleton, and her two sisters were sent to live with relatives in Indianapolis. These relatives were, I believe, the genuine article when it comes to pedigree. They lived in a grand house with over-sized Victorian furniture, some of which ended up in my grandmother's house. I inherited a sofa stuffed with horse hair that must have been a wonder in its day. General Grant preferred to sit on it when he visited, and in our family we always referred to it as the General Grant. I don't know how many pieces of furniture have names, but this one does. It's an amazing piece really, with lots of carved wood details from periods as diverse as ancient Egypt, Greece, and the baroque. At the top of the back there is a lion's head the size of a fist that comes out, to the delight of small children grown big enough to climb up on the upholstered but rigid seat.
But back to Agnes. Like all good girls of the day, she attended church regularly and sang in the choir. Sitting in the congregation Sunday after Sunday was John McRae, a widower with small children. He took notice of Agnes, who was pretty and genteel, and after the war was over and the Singleton girls had returned to Virginia, he made up his mind to act. One day, the girls were looking out a window when they saw a horseman riding up toward the house. "Who's that?" asked one. "Why, that's John McRae. I wonder what he's doing here?" said another. In fact, he had come to propose marriage to Agnes. I always thought this story incredibly romantic, until I learned that Agnes was already in love with someone else. But John was rich. He could not only provide for Agnes but also for her family. Through his connections in Indiana he arranged for Agnes's parents to move onto one of the farms they owned west of Indianapolis. Losing everything, hiding in caves from the Yankees, suddenly becoming the poor relations must have been a trauma shared by lots of families in the South. I'm sure my forebears weren't alone in their plight, but having company in misery is cold comfort. I believe this loss was felt down the generations and contributed to my mother's insistence on refinement and being "from a good family."
From time to time I gaze at this old photograph of my great-grandmother, who looks amazingly like my mother and my aunts, and try to imagine her life. She was a part of history as surely as Grant or Lincoln. It is people like her who interest me, people whose stories can tell us so much more than the size of battles or the signers of treaties. They show us the past as a living thing. In "Half Broke Horses" Walls has created--or re-created--her grandmother's voice, and as readers we get as close to what it was like inside that dugout, how it felt to be so dirty your jeans became waterproof, and where an indomitable spirit can lead you as it is possible to be.
Lily's story is one of both success and failure, but no failure was ever complete, and she never lacked for a way out of her difficulties. She was one strong lady. She didn't care what other people thought; she did what was best for herself and her family--as she saw it; she never felt sorry for herself, and she never gave up. Her story inspires me not because it is a triumph over difficult odds, though there is that. She makes me want to (as Miss Brodie would say) brisk up, to get on with business, to shake the possibilities out of life before time defeats me.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
What Can I Do?
I fear my comments will sound like a rationalization, and perhaps they are, but I came across the following sentence in the latest "Harper's" and would like to share it.
"I shall always believe that our own humanity depends upon the accuracy with which we are able to perceive the suffering around us, and to be witness to it."--Richard Selzer, former surgeon and professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine.
How might this be a rationalization? Because it makes simply standing by and feeling bad equivalent to taking action. I have always wondered if that is enough. The same issue of "Harper's" contains an essay by Wiliam T. Vollman in which he gives an account of his efforts to help the homeless in Sacramento, more specifically in his own backyard (actually a parking lot he owns). Vollman, 51, "feels sorry" for the motley crew that camps out on his doorstep and, despite police efforts to run them off, allows them to stay and befriends some of them. He even goes out from time to time to camp with the homeless himself at various campsites and church basements, sleeping sometimes on the bare earth. He seems to me to be a man who is living his beliefs, in deed as well as thought.
We all know people who do what seems to us incredible things: doctors who eschew a lucrative practice to serve on Native American reservations, social workers who deal with families in crisis, a coach who donates a kidney to one of his players. Should I feel guilty because I don't want to do any of these things? I don't think so.
I've pondered this issue for a long time and am still not sure I have completely settled it in my own mind, but for now I am inclined to say that extraordinary sacrifice that brings you actual suffering is not required in order to be a moral person. I'd better define what I mean by "actual suffering." I don't necessarily mean physical pain. Women in childbirth feel pain, but I don't consider this "suffering." It is a condition of life to feel pain. Not everyone who accepts it is a hero, nor is everyone who avoids it a coward. I guess what I mean by suffering is anything that breaks your spirit, that makes you feel helpless or deeply depressed. If I were a physician (fat chance), I could no more practice on a reservation than fly. Living in relative isolation in what to me seems a desolate landscape would kill my soul. I was a teacher, and I loved my job. Some people say they could never be a teacher in a million years. Does that make me morally neutral because I enjoyed teaching? If I hated it but did it anyway, would that make me a better person. No.
I'm not religious, but I'll borrow from the Bible anyway, as it contains much wisdom. "The Lord loves a cheerful giver." Recognizing your own limitations and needs is perhaps the first step toward living a moral life. Doing those things you WANT to do, with a passion that comes from somewhere deep inside, is what you SHOULD do. This is not to say that we should never do anything unless we want to. Of course there are many times when we shouldn't put our own convenience first, as every parent well knows. But the big heroic acts, the grand gestures of altruism, should not seem heroic to those who perform them. We do the things we do--donate to charity, donate blood, give to the Goodwill--because it makes us happy to do them. And that is right and proper. For most of us that is enough.
There is still something more we can do, however, and I think it's more important than most people realize. There are times when simply bearing witness is the only moral act possible. I read a story once (by the writer who used to work with Merchant and Ivory; I've forgotten her name. Ruth Something) about living in India, where streets teem with homeless, desperate people and suffering is visible everywhere. The narrator was advised to imagine herself living atop an elephant, but she was never to look at it or acknowledge it was there. The elephant was the starving hordes upon whose backs the privileged lived. The only way for the rich to stay sane was to ignore the truth. So many times I've heard people say, "Well, there's nothing I can do, so I just won't think about it." I've felt that way myself plenty of times. But my point is, there is something we can do; we can acknowledge the suffering of others, accept that it exists, and be sorry. It may not be much, but I believe it is a moral obligation nonetheless.
"I shall always believe that our own humanity depends upon the accuracy with which we are able to perceive the suffering around us, and to be witness to it."--Richard Selzer, former surgeon and professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine.
How might this be a rationalization? Because it makes simply standing by and feeling bad equivalent to taking action. I have always wondered if that is enough. The same issue of "Harper's" contains an essay by Wiliam T. Vollman in which he gives an account of his efforts to help the homeless in Sacramento, more specifically in his own backyard (actually a parking lot he owns). Vollman, 51, "feels sorry" for the motley crew that camps out on his doorstep and, despite police efforts to run them off, allows them to stay and befriends some of them. He even goes out from time to time to camp with the homeless himself at various campsites and church basements, sleeping sometimes on the bare earth. He seems to me to be a man who is living his beliefs, in deed as well as thought.
We all know people who do what seems to us incredible things: doctors who eschew a lucrative practice to serve on Native American reservations, social workers who deal with families in crisis, a coach who donates a kidney to one of his players. Should I feel guilty because I don't want to do any of these things? I don't think so.
I've pondered this issue for a long time and am still not sure I have completely settled it in my own mind, but for now I am inclined to say that extraordinary sacrifice that brings you actual suffering is not required in order to be a moral person. I'd better define what I mean by "actual suffering." I don't necessarily mean physical pain. Women in childbirth feel pain, but I don't consider this "suffering." It is a condition of life to feel pain. Not everyone who accepts it is a hero, nor is everyone who avoids it a coward. I guess what I mean by suffering is anything that breaks your spirit, that makes you feel helpless or deeply depressed. If I were a physician (fat chance), I could no more practice on a reservation than fly. Living in relative isolation in what to me seems a desolate landscape would kill my soul. I was a teacher, and I loved my job. Some people say they could never be a teacher in a million years. Does that make me morally neutral because I enjoyed teaching? If I hated it but did it anyway, would that make me a better person. No.
I'm not religious, but I'll borrow from the Bible anyway, as it contains much wisdom. "The Lord loves a cheerful giver." Recognizing your own limitations and needs is perhaps the first step toward living a moral life. Doing those things you WANT to do, with a passion that comes from somewhere deep inside, is what you SHOULD do. This is not to say that we should never do anything unless we want to. Of course there are many times when we shouldn't put our own convenience first, as every parent well knows. But the big heroic acts, the grand gestures of altruism, should not seem heroic to those who perform them. We do the things we do--donate to charity, donate blood, give to the Goodwill--because it makes us happy to do them. And that is right and proper. For most of us that is enough.
There is still something more we can do, however, and I think it's more important than most people realize. There are times when simply bearing witness is the only moral act possible. I read a story once (by the writer who used to work with Merchant and Ivory; I've forgotten her name. Ruth Something) about living in India, where streets teem with homeless, desperate people and suffering is visible everywhere. The narrator was advised to imagine herself living atop an elephant, but she was never to look at it or acknowledge it was there. The elephant was the starving hordes upon whose backs the privileged lived. The only way for the rich to stay sane was to ignore the truth. So many times I've heard people say, "Well, there's nothing I can do, so I just won't think about it." I've felt that way myself plenty of times. But my point is, there is something we can do; we can acknowledge the suffering of others, accept that it exists, and be sorry. It may not be much, but I believe it is a moral obligation nonetheless.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
"The Mistress" a novel by Philippe Tapon
On the cover of "The Mistress" there is a 1940s photograph of a pretty young woman talking with a German soldier in front of the Eiffel Tower. The soldier has his back to the camera, so his arrogance is revealed in his posture: one foot resting on a curb as he leans on his officer's riding crop. The woman, her hat cocked at a jaunty angle, stares off into the distance, a sly smile playing around her lips. It is the perfect cover for this novel of wartime and its effect upon one French family.
"The Mistress" is not a Holocaust novel; it does not drag us into the camps or force us to witness a formal execution, but because these things are so omnipresent in our minds what happens on the page has the chill of death hovering over it throughout. As is often the case, the understated, seemingly simple style carries a heavy load. The novel is short, with descriptions of place and characters that are factual and unadorned. In fact, as you read you are struck by the contrast between the lucid prose and the horrible cruelty that consumes almost everyone.
I just read an essay in the New York Review of Books ("Who Did Not Collaborate?" by Ian Buruma, Feb. 24, 2011) in which Buruma discusses a new history of the war years, "And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris" by Alan Riding. It often happens that just when I'm thinking about something I see it pop up in various places all around me. So it is with this essay and novel, both about French collaboration with the Nazis. Riding focuses on writers and intellectuals like Sartre, Cocteau, and Camus. Tapon looks at a successful Parisian doctor with a special interest in stomach disorders, his mistress, his two children, his estranged wife, who is a peasant living in the country, a priest, and a German officer who comes to him for relief from excruciating stomach pain. Emile, the doctor, is a cruel and avaricious man: he has a stash of gold hidden on his wife's farm which is a crucial element in the plot. He is a reluctant father who misuses his daughter and beats his young son.
If he loves his mistress, it is hard to see it; it is also clear that she stays with him for security and a way out of her impoverished circumstances. They are using each other, and sex is their medium of exchange.
There are no heroes in this novel, not really any sympathetic characters. Everyone is out for himself, except perhaps the little boy, who longs for his mother. The cruelty begins with him and spirals out to touch everyone else with its poison. What I find remarkable about this novel is how Tapon manages to compress a whole range of historical, cultural, and moral issues into one slim volume. You don't have to like the characters to find them fascinating as you watch their innate natures brought to the fore by extraordinary pressures. Under other circumstances they would still be terribly flawed, but they would not do so much damage. Emile, the doctor, is the focal point, and his final outcome is inevitable, the result of both his weaknesses and an evil system.
What would you do in similar circumstances? That is the question the novel raises, and I wonder if anyone who hasn't faced them knows the answer. I have often thought that morality is a luxury we too often take for granted. I think it was Primo Levi who said that all the good people died in the Holocaust. Were the survivors heroic or the beneficiaries of others who died in their place? This is a brutal and impossible question, but it shows how complicated moral action can be. Sometimes guilt and innocence mingle in a way that makes it difficult to separate them. Tapon is not kind to his characters, but he is honest about them. Whether they deserve what they get is something he leaves for the reader to decide.
"The Mistress" is not a Holocaust novel; it does not drag us into the camps or force us to witness a formal execution, but because these things are so omnipresent in our minds what happens on the page has the chill of death hovering over it throughout. As is often the case, the understated, seemingly simple style carries a heavy load. The novel is short, with descriptions of place and characters that are factual and unadorned. In fact, as you read you are struck by the contrast between the lucid prose and the horrible cruelty that consumes almost everyone.
I just read an essay in the New York Review of Books ("Who Did Not Collaborate?" by Ian Buruma, Feb. 24, 2011) in which Buruma discusses a new history of the war years, "And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris" by Alan Riding. It often happens that just when I'm thinking about something I see it pop up in various places all around me. So it is with this essay and novel, both about French collaboration with the Nazis. Riding focuses on writers and intellectuals like Sartre, Cocteau, and Camus. Tapon looks at a successful Parisian doctor with a special interest in stomach disorders, his mistress, his two children, his estranged wife, who is a peasant living in the country, a priest, and a German officer who comes to him for relief from excruciating stomach pain. Emile, the doctor, is a cruel and avaricious man: he has a stash of gold hidden on his wife's farm which is a crucial element in the plot. He is a reluctant father who misuses his daughter and beats his young son.
If he loves his mistress, it is hard to see it; it is also clear that she stays with him for security and a way out of her impoverished circumstances. They are using each other, and sex is their medium of exchange.
There are no heroes in this novel, not really any sympathetic characters. Everyone is out for himself, except perhaps the little boy, who longs for his mother. The cruelty begins with him and spirals out to touch everyone else with its poison. What I find remarkable about this novel is how Tapon manages to compress a whole range of historical, cultural, and moral issues into one slim volume. You don't have to like the characters to find them fascinating as you watch their innate natures brought to the fore by extraordinary pressures. Under other circumstances they would still be terribly flawed, but they would not do so much damage. Emile, the doctor, is the focal point, and his final outcome is inevitable, the result of both his weaknesses and an evil system.
What would you do in similar circumstances? That is the question the novel raises, and I wonder if anyone who hasn't faced them knows the answer. I have often thought that morality is a luxury we too often take for granted. I think it was Primo Levi who said that all the good people died in the Holocaust. Were the survivors heroic or the beneficiaries of others who died in their place? This is a brutal and impossible question, but it shows how complicated moral action can be. Sometimes guilt and innocence mingle in a way that makes it difficult to separate them. Tapon is not kind to his characters, but he is honest about them. Whether they deserve what they get is something he leaves for the reader to decide.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
"Here's Looking at Euclid:
A Surprising Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math" by Alex Bellos is a book I would never in a million years have picked up, unless my husband had brought it home in hopes I might be tempted. Let me explain. You see, I suffer from a condition known as "dyscalculia", which neuroscientists have identified in the brain using MRIs. Most of us are familiar with dyslexia, but until I read Bellos's book, I had never heard of dyscalculia. I feel as if a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. My entire life--at least since third grade, when my parents were summoned to a conference with my teacher for the first time--I have had math "issues." Not to put too fine a point on it, I am lousy at math. Embarrassingly so. That's why I am delighted to learn that I am neither stupid nor lazy; I am simply wired differently, and I can't do anything about that.
"Here's Looking at Euclid" is a marvelous book, filled with fascinating facts and figures presented in a lively, engaging style. Bellos brings the great mathematicians, known and not so well-known, to life on the page, leads the reader through a history of numbers, and provides explanations of math that show it to be exciting as well as challenging. I couldn't follow all of it, but I certainly got the jist and I now have a much greater understanding and appreciation of what mathematicians do. I didn't know, for example, that zero was invented in India and changed mathematics forever. I learned that there are other ways to do multiplication than the way I was taught in school--easier ways at that. I discovered that Fibonacci numbers occur everywhere in nature, from the chambered nautilus to the petals on a flower.
I am a literary person, and when I read something like "Anna Karenina" or the short stories of William Trevor, I am made aware of what is most profound in human life. When I read "Euclid", I am struck my how magical the universe is.
"Here's Looking at Euclid" is a marvelous book, filled with fascinating facts and figures presented in a lively, engaging style. Bellos brings the great mathematicians, known and not so well-known, to life on the page, leads the reader through a history of numbers, and provides explanations of math that show it to be exciting as well as challenging. I couldn't follow all of it, but I certainly got the jist and I now have a much greater understanding and appreciation of what mathematicians do. I didn't know, for example, that zero was invented in India and changed mathematics forever. I learned that there are other ways to do multiplication than the way I was taught in school--easier ways at that. I discovered that Fibonacci numbers occur everywhere in nature, from the chambered nautilus to the petals on a flower.
I am a literary person, and when I read something like "Anna Karenina" or the short stories of William Trevor, I am made aware of what is most profound in human life. When I read "Euclid", I am struck my how magical the universe is.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
"By Nightfall" A Novel by Michael Cunningham
How many subjects are there really in fiction? Love, death, sex, God, art. "By Nightfall" by Michael Cunningham doesn't have much, if anything, to say about God, but it has plenty to say about the other four big topics. Love is the heart's home, death is the frightful separation, sex is the lightning strike that briefly connects heaven and earth, and art is the vessel for every human thing.
"Isn't this part of what you keep looking for in art--rescue from solitude and subjectivity; the sense of company in history and the greater world; the human mystery simultaneously illuminated and deepened....The art of the past tried to give us something like what's happening to Peter right now--a look into the depths of the human other." (p. 115)
The ancient Roman playwright Terence said, "Nothing human is alien to me." Time, place, gender, race--nothing alters what is essentially human when art pierces with its eternal truth. You don't need to be an ancient Greek to understand Andromache's fear when her husband goes out to meet Achilles in battle. You don't need to be an insane Dutchman to apprehend the power of "Starry Night." You don't need a college education to feel your skin prickle to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." Great art works its magic and makes life, if not possible, bearable to a greater degree than life without it. That is why is it more disturbing (this is hard to admit) to see the treasures in the Cairo museum destroyed or threatened, to lose the artifacts of the great civilization that was Iraq, to see the museums in Florence flooded into ruin than to hear on the news of the deaths of strangers in faraway lands. Art can carry us beyond our own circumstances and show us ourselves at the same time. It can challenge us or lead us into quiet places where we can be comforted.
"Maybe it's not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too--some sort of virtues--but we don't care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they're good. We care about them because they're not admirable, because they're US, and because great writers have forgiven them for it." (p. 119)
Tragedy is "available only to the young....it's different entirely from the tragedies of age, even of middle age, when any hint of downfall is shaded by gravity, by wounds, by the simple, maddening failure to stay young. Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed." (p. 120) I would say that Cunningham is a Romantic, and this quote surely demonstrates that. First of all, I believe real tragedy almost requires a certain level of knowledge and understanding. The death of a child is unbearably sad, and it may indeed be a tragedy for the grieving parents, but the self-destruction of James Dean or Marilyn Monroe is not the tragedy of youth. These were old souls wrestling with demons that have been around forever. The Romantics were wrong to believe that children are necessarily innocent, and Cunningham is surely wrong to think that leaving youth behind is tragic. From the moment we are born, we are all in the process of getting ready to leave. It is art that sustains us on this journey, transforms the solitary suffering of loss into a shared fate that is given meaning through beauty. Of course, this is not the only way to think about art, and not all art is beautiful, but this is the definition, if that is the right word, of art that I embrace. Reading Cunningham's novel, I felt that he embraces it too.
You can tell from these quotes that Michael Cunningham is a marvelous writer. He does what all good writers do: puts common thoughts into uncommon words and makes them new. In just these three selections, he encapsulates the scourge of loneliness, ubiquitous human frailty, and the inevitable tragedy that is life. What makes all these bearable? Family. Friends. Vocation. Art.
"Nightfall"'s protagonist, Peter Harris, is a mid-western transplant in New York who owns a moderately successful art gallery. He is in a settled marriage with Rebecca, who owns and manages an art magazine, not one of the big ones. Their daughter is grown, a college drop-out, living in Boston in queasy circumstances. The plot turns upon the arrival of Rebecca's much younger, drug-addicted brother at their SoHo loft. Rebecca is solicitous but wary; Peter is supportive but not optimistic about Ethan's future. Ethan (Mizzy) is a compelling and infuriating character: beautiful, sexually ambiguous, soulful, lost. The novel's crisis is Peter's falling in love with him.
In many ways, "By Nightfall" is an old-fashioned novel that juxtaposes the comfortable happiness of "normal" life with the Romantic exhilaration of breaking out, overturning the status quo, and risking everything for the chance of a moment of transcendent joy. The one abiding value is art, at least Peter's devotion to the beautiful, to "real genius." Mizzy represents art, his older sister Rebecca reality. "Mizzy, who might be cast in bronze, and Rebecca, his older girl-twin, who has with age taken on a human patina, a hint of mortal weariness that's never more apparent than it is in the morning light; a deep, heartbreaking humanness that's the source and the opposite of art." (p. 142)
Cunningham has written beautifully here about the amazing power of art to illuminate the quotidian: "Isn't it the task of art to acclaim these people [ordinary, decent folks], to ennoble them? Consider [Manet's] Olympia. A girl of the streets becomes a deity." (p. 176) The mistake would be to choose art over life, as Peter nearly does. He desires the sickly surrender that forbidden love and great art demand, at least from the Romantic point of view. His struggle is poignant, not least because both he and the reader realize that everything--love, beauty, life itself--is "evanescent."
I am reminded of a film that came out some years ago, starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche. It's called, appropriately enough, "Damage." Binoche is engaged to Irons' son, but the moment the father and the fiancee meet, their fate is sealed. They descend into passionate, desperate sex, helpless to deny themselves or to consider others. Their passion is convincing, in large part perhaps because both actors are so beautiful, and its destructiveness is perversely part of its power. It all ends very badly, as anyone can tell it would. The question "By Nightfall" asks is the relative value of different kinds of happiness: brief but intense vs. enduring and tranquil. This question is left unresolved, and we are left at what is the beginning of another story, an even more significant one: what will happen now between Peter and Rebecca.
"Isn't this part of what you keep looking for in art--rescue from solitude and subjectivity; the sense of company in history and the greater world; the human mystery simultaneously illuminated and deepened....The art of the past tried to give us something like what's happening to Peter right now--a look into the depths of the human other." (p. 115)
The ancient Roman playwright Terence said, "Nothing human is alien to me." Time, place, gender, race--nothing alters what is essentially human when art pierces with its eternal truth. You don't need to be an ancient Greek to understand Andromache's fear when her husband goes out to meet Achilles in battle. You don't need to be an insane Dutchman to apprehend the power of "Starry Night." You don't need a college education to feel your skin prickle to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." Great art works its magic and makes life, if not possible, bearable to a greater degree than life without it. That is why is it more disturbing (this is hard to admit) to see the treasures in the Cairo museum destroyed or threatened, to lose the artifacts of the great civilization that was Iraq, to see the museums in Florence flooded into ruin than to hear on the news of the deaths of strangers in faraway lands. Art can carry us beyond our own circumstances and show us ourselves at the same time. It can challenge us or lead us into quiet places where we can be comforted.
"Maybe it's not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too--some sort of virtues--but we don't care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they're good. We care about them because they're not admirable, because they're US, and because great writers have forgiven them for it." (p. 119)
Tragedy is "available only to the young....it's different entirely from the tragedies of age, even of middle age, when any hint of downfall is shaded by gravity, by wounds, by the simple, maddening failure to stay young. Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed." (p. 120) I would say that Cunningham is a Romantic, and this quote surely demonstrates that. First of all, I believe real tragedy almost requires a certain level of knowledge and understanding. The death of a child is unbearably sad, and it may indeed be a tragedy for the grieving parents, but the self-destruction of James Dean or Marilyn Monroe is not the tragedy of youth. These were old souls wrestling with demons that have been around forever. The Romantics were wrong to believe that children are necessarily innocent, and Cunningham is surely wrong to think that leaving youth behind is tragic. From the moment we are born, we are all in the process of getting ready to leave. It is art that sustains us on this journey, transforms the solitary suffering of loss into a shared fate that is given meaning through beauty. Of course, this is not the only way to think about art, and not all art is beautiful, but this is the definition, if that is the right word, of art that I embrace. Reading Cunningham's novel, I felt that he embraces it too.
You can tell from these quotes that Michael Cunningham is a marvelous writer. He does what all good writers do: puts common thoughts into uncommon words and makes them new. In just these three selections, he encapsulates the scourge of loneliness, ubiquitous human frailty, and the inevitable tragedy that is life. What makes all these bearable? Family. Friends. Vocation. Art.
"Nightfall"'s protagonist, Peter Harris, is a mid-western transplant in New York who owns a moderately successful art gallery. He is in a settled marriage with Rebecca, who owns and manages an art magazine, not one of the big ones. Their daughter is grown, a college drop-out, living in Boston in queasy circumstances. The plot turns upon the arrival of Rebecca's much younger, drug-addicted brother at their SoHo loft. Rebecca is solicitous but wary; Peter is supportive but not optimistic about Ethan's future. Ethan (Mizzy) is a compelling and infuriating character: beautiful, sexually ambiguous, soulful, lost. The novel's crisis is Peter's falling in love with him.
In many ways, "By Nightfall" is an old-fashioned novel that juxtaposes the comfortable happiness of "normal" life with the Romantic exhilaration of breaking out, overturning the status quo, and risking everything for the chance of a moment of transcendent joy. The one abiding value is art, at least Peter's devotion to the beautiful, to "real genius." Mizzy represents art, his older sister Rebecca reality. "Mizzy, who might be cast in bronze, and Rebecca, his older girl-twin, who has with age taken on a human patina, a hint of mortal weariness that's never more apparent than it is in the morning light; a deep, heartbreaking humanness that's the source and the opposite of art." (p. 142)
Cunningham has written beautifully here about the amazing power of art to illuminate the quotidian: "Isn't it the task of art to acclaim these people [ordinary, decent folks], to ennoble them? Consider [Manet's] Olympia. A girl of the streets becomes a deity." (p. 176) The mistake would be to choose art over life, as Peter nearly does. He desires the sickly surrender that forbidden love and great art demand, at least from the Romantic point of view. His struggle is poignant, not least because both he and the reader realize that everything--love, beauty, life itself--is "evanescent."
I am reminded of a film that came out some years ago, starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche. It's called, appropriately enough, "Damage." Binoche is engaged to Irons' son, but the moment the father and the fiancee meet, their fate is sealed. They descend into passionate, desperate sex, helpless to deny themselves or to consider others. Their passion is convincing, in large part perhaps because both actors are so beautiful, and its destructiveness is perversely part of its power. It all ends very badly, as anyone can tell it would. The question "By Nightfall" asks is the relative value of different kinds of happiness: brief but intense vs. enduring and tranquil. This question is left unresolved, and we are left at what is the beginning of another story, an even more significant one: what will happen now between Peter and Rebecca.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
"Thrones, Dominations" Dorothy L. Sayers & Jill Paton Walsh
This is the next to last novel in the Lord Peter Wimsey series and the first of the two completed by Jill Paton Walsh from notes left by Sayers after her death. "A Presumption of Death", the final novel, finds Harriet Vane Wimsey raising three sons during WWII, while Lord Peter is mostly off on a secret foreign mission. "Thrones" gives us the beginning of their marriage, so long delayed, now so completely fulfilling. I intend to go back and re-read some of the earlier books, both to recapture my initial pleasure in them and to see how they compare--in style and in substance--to the co-authored ones.
I suppose all readers have fairly particular qualities they look for in the books they read; I know I do. I love a novel that has intelligent, interesting characters--at least some of them, a plot that pulls me in and keeps surprising me, substantive ideas that make me think and/or see things in new ways, arcane information about lines of work (mining, ship-building, medicine, crime) and interesting subjects (archaeology, diamond cutting, psychology, mountain climbing), and, most of important, because without it I read no further, good writing. I lean toward domestic realism, small English country towns, the clash of cultures, and some love interest.
"Thrones, Dominations" pretty much fits the bill. It's interesting to observe a marriage of equals, where both partners are highly intelligent and respect each other's gifts. It's also interesting to watch as Harriet navigates her husband's upper class world, complete with long-time family servants and a snobby sister-in-law. In English novels the clash of cultures often occurs within the broader English milieu and involves class. A yeoman farmer might feel as alien in a lord's drawing room as a Tahitian at an American southern barbecue. Harriet refuses to be cowed, and we admire her for her resolve, especially her determination to keep writing mystery novels despite her new role as a married woman. In pre-war England (and America) a woman was expected to give up working when she married, unless she was a servant or a laborer. I will have more to say about the role of class in the novel shortly.
In Chapter 9, there is a fascinating discussion between Harriet and Peter about fiction in general and the mystery novel in particular.
Harriet says, "Things have to be connected or the reader would not believe them."
"It's odd, that, isn't it?" said Peter. "If unconnected and spur-of-the moment things keep happening in the real world, why shouldn't they be plausible in novels?"...."But in real life random things occur, and there may actually be no plot, in that sense of the word."
"I think a novel has to deal in a different kind of truth," said Harriet.
At a different point in the novel, Harriet explains that a mystery has to be about a murder, not a robbery, a forgery, or the like. It has to involve life and death: two lives, two deaths. Because in England at this time the penalty for 1st degree murder was hanging. A Lord Peter mystery may be arch and amusing, but serious matters are at stake. I enjoyed seeing this kind of literary discussion woven into the fabric of the novel. It lifts it above the level of the run-of-the-mill who-dunnit.
Front and center, of course, is the matter of class and decorum. This is perhaps what is most difficult for Americans to understand, let alone sympathize with. Lord Peter is the second son of an earl. He won't inherit the estate and title, but he occupies a very high place in society indeed. He does not work for a living, only out of a sense of duty (in the foreign service) or for fun (solving crimes). He has all the tics of his class--the clipped accent, the precious locutions--and it is fun to see Harriet parry them with her own middle-class common sense. These two are beyond class, at least with each other, which shows it's possible if one has sufficient courage to shrug off others' expectations.
When I was a freshman in college, my composition professor told the class that the great subject of literature is the war between men and women. "And I do mean it's a war," he said. I don't want to agree with him completely, but there is some truth in that he said. Harriet and Peter are aware of this eternal tension as well, and it makes their marriage more interesting.
A silly woman has been murdered, and Harriet says, "...I want to see the stupid woman avenged!"
"A woman, however stupid, being on your side?" [says Peter]
"In what conflict, Peter? Are men and women at war?"
"We are not," he said. "At least WE are not."
"No, indeed," she said. "I think what I meant was that I wanted to see the weak protected against the strong, and stupidity is a form of weakness."
"A potentially lethal form," he said. "Nothing is weaker than a murdered corpse..."
All too often, when it comes to love, weakness is the silent partner in a game played with power as an opponent. Peter remarks on the long years he wooed Harriet to no avail, and she acknowledges her reluctance to admit she needs him.
"That was my fault. All that peacocking and manoeuvring. I was overbearing; trying to win you by overpowering your resistance. Every attempt I made made it harder for you to accept me, because acceptance would have been surrender. In my own defence all I can say is that I eventually realised that I could not win a free spirit like yours in such a way."
Harriet describes the war between men and women as a game, even if it is not their game. Women put up a show of reluctance. The man is enflamed by her resistance and "storms the citadel." She gives in from "pity or love or mercy for his need and must be paid in gratitude. It's a dangerous game; it contaminates love with power."
Perhaps even more interesting is the relationship between Lord Peter and his man-servant Bunter. They are very much master and man, and they would never think of crossing the line with each other, yet there is genuine love between them--real friendship that rivals even familial ties. How can this be? How can two men from such unequal backgrounds, with such divergent lives and opportunities, where one almost literally controls the other, possibly find a common ground upon which to meet as friends. And yet they do. At least in the novel. Although she never says so explicitly, I believe Sayers is a subversive when it comes to upholding the class system. Her heroine is a self-made, professional woman with a mind that is very much her own. She makes it possible for Bunter to marry--with dignity--by arranging to have the stables done over into a cozy apartment for the newlyweds. She befriends Bunter's wife in a way that makes it clear she considers this servant's wife an equal. It is Harriet who shows up the class system for what it is: an unfair categorization of people based not on merit but on circumstances of birth.
One shouldn't sneer at the English for their traditions, nor even for some of their prejudices. They come by them honestly. Whiffs of the feudal system still linger in their air. Americans never had anything like English history to shrug off. Before we feel too smug about our supposedly classless society, let us remember we have our own problematic history to reckon with. "Thrones, Dominations" may be a satire on the upper class, but it is not a screed. Only Peter's older sister is genuinely unpleasant, but she isn't dangerous. Peter's older brother may be the heir, but he's a bit of a buffoon. Peter, who embodies every upper-class mannerism, is nevertheless entirely fair and genuinely concerned about others' welfare. It is clear that Sayers likes him very much; she may make light of his oversights from time to time, but she never scorns him.
There are plenty of other readers who have read and studied Dorothy Sayers more than I, so I shall not presume to offer a well-developed analysis. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it, though even now many of the details are fuzzy. The plot is the first thing I forget about a novel I have read, and it doesn't take long for this to happen. But in mysteries it's never the crime that interests me; it's the reactions and relations among the characters that stand out. Best of all, though, is when an author says something true about life that seems both original and familiar. Harriet's and Lord Peter's discussions of art and love do both.
I suppose all readers have fairly particular qualities they look for in the books they read; I know I do. I love a novel that has intelligent, interesting characters--at least some of them, a plot that pulls me in and keeps surprising me, substantive ideas that make me think and/or see things in new ways, arcane information about lines of work (mining, ship-building, medicine, crime) and interesting subjects (archaeology, diamond cutting, psychology, mountain climbing), and, most of important, because without it I read no further, good writing. I lean toward domestic realism, small English country towns, the clash of cultures, and some love interest.
"Thrones, Dominations" pretty much fits the bill. It's interesting to observe a marriage of equals, where both partners are highly intelligent and respect each other's gifts. It's also interesting to watch as Harriet navigates her husband's upper class world, complete with long-time family servants and a snobby sister-in-law. In English novels the clash of cultures often occurs within the broader English milieu and involves class. A yeoman farmer might feel as alien in a lord's drawing room as a Tahitian at an American southern barbecue. Harriet refuses to be cowed, and we admire her for her resolve, especially her determination to keep writing mystery novels despite her new role as a married woman. In pre-war England (and America) a woman was expected to give up working when she married, unless she was a servant or a laborer. I will have more to say about the role of class in the novel shortly.
In Chapter 9, there is a fascinating discussion between Harriet and Peter about fiction in general and the mystery novel in particular.
Harriet says, "Things have to be connected or the reader would not believe them."
"It's odd, that, isn't it?" said Peter. "If unconnected and spur-of-the moment things keep happening in the real world, why shouldn't they be plausible in novels?"...."But in real life random things occur, and there may actually be no plot, in that sense of the word."
"I think a novel has to deal in a different kind of truth," said Harriet.
At a different point in the novel, Harriet explains that a mystery has to be about a murder, not a robbery, a forgery, or the like. It has to involve life and death: two lives, two deaths. Because in England at this time the penalty for 1st degree murder was hanging. A Lord Peter mystery may be arch and amusing, but serious matters are at stake. I enjoyed seeing this kind of literary discussion woven into the fabric of the novel. It lifts it above the level of the run-of-the-mill who-dunnit.
Front and center, of course, is the matter of class and decorum. This is perhaps what is most difficult for Americans to understand, let alone sympathize with. Lord Peter is the second son of an earl. He won't inherit the estate and title, but he occupies a very high place in society indeed. He does not work for a living, only out of a sense of duty (in the foreign service) or for fun (solving crimes). He has all the tics of his class--the clipped accent, the precious locutions--and it is fun to see Harriet parry them with her own middle-class common sense. These two are beyond class, at least with each other, which shows it's possible if one has sufficient courage to shrug off others' expectations.
When I was a freshman in college, my composition professor told the class that the great subject of literature is the war between men and women. "And I do mean it's a war," he said. I don't want to agree with him completely, but there is some truth in that he said. Harriet and Peter are aware of this eternal tension as well, and it makes their marriage more interesting.
A silly woman has been murdered, and Harriet says, "...I want to see the stupid woman avenged!"
"A woman, however stupid, being on your side?" [says Peter]
"In what conflict, Peter? Are men and women at war?"
"We are not," he said. "At least WE are not."
"No, indeed," she said. "I think what I meant was that I wanted to see the weak protected against the strong, and stupidity is a form of weakness."
"A potentially lethal form," he said. "Nothing is weaker than a murdered corpse..."
All too often, when it comes to love, weakness is the silent partner in a game played with power as an opponent. Peter remarks on the long years he wooed Harriet to no avail, and she acknowledges her reluctance to admit she needs him.
"That was my fault. All that peacocking and manoeuvring. I was overbearing; trying to win you by overpowering your resistance. Every attempt I made made it harder for you to accept me, because acceptance would have been surrender. In my own defence all I can say is that I eventually realised that I could not win a free spirit like yours in such a way."
Harriet describes the war between men and women as a game, even if it is not their game. Women put up a show of reluctance. The man is enflamed by her resistance and "storms the citadel." She gives in from "pity or love or mercy for his need and must be paid in gratitude. It's a dangerous game; it contaminates love with power."
Perhaps even more interesting is the relationship between Lord Peter and his man-servant Bunter. They are very much master and man, and they would never think of crossing the line with each other, yet there is genuine love between them--real friendship that rivals even familial ties. How can this be? How can two men from such unequal backgrounds, with such divergent lives and opportunities, where one almost literally controls the other, possibly find a common ground upon which to meet as friends. And yet they do. At least in the novel. Although she never says so explicitly, I believe Sayers is a subversive when it comes to upholding the class system. Her heroine is a self-made, professional woman with a mind that is very much her own. She makes it possible for Bunter to marry--with dignity--by arranging to have the stables done over into a cozy apartment for the newlyweds. She befriends Bunter's wife in a way that makes it clear she considers this servant's wife an equal. It is Harriet who shows up the class system for what it is: an unfair categorization of people based not on merit but on circumstances of birth.
One shouldn't sneer at the English for their traditions, nor even for some of their prejudices. They come by them honestly. Whiffs of the feudal system still linger in their air. Americans never had anything like English history to shrug off. Before we feel too smug about our supposedly classless society, let us remember we have our own problematic history to reckon with. "Thrones, Dominations" may be a satire on the upper class, but it is not a screed. Only Peter's older sister is genuinely unpleasant, but she isn't dangerous. Peter's older brother may be the heir, but he's a bit of a buffoon. Peter, who embodies every upper-class mannerism, is nevertheless entirely fair and genuinely concerned about others' welfare. It is clear that Sayers likes him very much; she may make light of his oversights from time to time, but she never scorns him.
There are plenty of other readers who have read and studied Dorothy Sayers more than I, so I shall not presume to offer a well-developed analysis. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it, though even now many of the details are fuzzy. The plot is the first thing I forget about a novel I have read, and it doesn't take long for this to happen. But in mysteries it's never the crime that interests me; it's the reactions and relations among the characters that stand out. Best of all, though, is when an author says something true about life that seems both original and familiar. Harriet's and Lord Peter's discussions of art and love do both.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
How to Live, How to Grow: Tentative Answers
"Find a job you love, and you'll never work again."--Winston Churchill
"I never worked a day in my life."--my dad
Here is something I've thought a lot about: How should I live my life? Some follow the precepts of a religious faith, others social conventions or family expectations. Of course, some people never think about this at all and simply go wherever the wind blows them. But ever since I was a young teenager, I have consciously been trying to answer this question for myself. It hasn't always been easy.
The other day I read a review of a new book in the NY Times: "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua. Ms. Chua is a Harvard law professor, is married to a Harvard law professor, and is the mother of two teenage daughters. The girls have been denied many of the normal activities of the American teenager--sleep-overs and the like--in order to devote more time to academics. Ms. Chua, following in her Chinese parents' footsteps, has raised her girls to be successful, obedient, focused. When one of the children was quite young, her mother threatened to cut off the head of her teddy bear unless the played a certain piano piece perfectly. By bedtime the little girl had managed to please her mother and toyicide was averted. Not until the younger daughter was thirteen and rebelled--loudly and in public--did her mother reconsider her approach to child rearing. Ms. Chua had never listened to her American husband's pleas for her to let up sometimes; she just knew her way would lead to successful adulthoods for her girls, and that, after all, was what life was for. Success--academic, financial, social. All that takes hard work and sacrifice, but the end result is well worth it--at least in Ms. Chua's view.
I haven't read "Tiger Mother," but this review got me thinking. I can't generalize about everybody. Each life is unique, and everyone has to figure things out for him/herself. But in addition to the question, "How should I live?", another equally important question for me is "Whom should I live for?".
I remember my mother saying once, when I was a surly teenager, "You don't fly in the face of convention." My mother had lots of sayings like that. I like pithy sentences that encapsulate rules-to-live-by. "Waste not, want not." "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." "He who loses his temper loses the argument." There is wisdom here. But when my mother told me not to go against mainstream social expectations, I said silently to myself, "Watch me."
When I was in college, I had a sorority sister (Yes, I was in a sorority. I did TRY to follow the mores of my time and place, at least sometimes.) who was headed to med. school. She studied all the time, and I mean ALL the time. The Saturday evening of our spring dance, she and her boyfriend closeted themselves with their books. They never let up. I admired her, I suppose, but I basically thought she went a bit overboard. I've known more than a few people, many of them friends, who have been successful all their lives, for whom studying hard was a given, even if for a course that seemed boring or irrelevant to their interests. I've always worried that I'm selfish with my time and energies. I agree with Aristotle that one of life's aims, perhaps the principle one, is to avoid boredom. Next to snakes, I probably fear boredom more than anything. Exhausting yourself simply to please others or to fulfill someone else's dreams seems to me like giving up an important part of your own life. Many years ago, when I was a high school teacher, I had a student who told the class his father had hated every day he went to work. He'd spent twenty years of his life an unhappy man. I wanted to avoid that if at all possible.
It's a lucky person who has a passion, be it playing an instrument, running a marathon, or breeding bulldogs. My passion is reading. I still find it peculiar every time I hear of a school principal volunteering to eat worms if his students will read X number of books. (True story.) Why anyone, even a kid, should have to be coerced or cajoled into reading is beyond me. I am lucky to have been around books all my life. My life would be an empty desert without them. One of my deepest fears--and I say it now for the first time--is that I will go blind and be unable to read. I don't like being read to, and listening to books on tape is not real reading. So when I was in college, and in graduate school for that matter, I read a lot, not just my assigned reading but always something on the side as well. Something just for me. I can always find time for "selfish" reading, even if it's just ten minutes over breakfast. I've read a lot of very fat novels over tea and an English muffin or standing in line at the DMV. This is probably why I was a decent student but not an outstanding one.
Fortunately my parents (both teachers) didn't seem to care. I wasn't pushed. In fact, one of my favorite memories of my dad was the time I got a D (oh, the truth comes out now!) in a college French course. I was planning to major in French, so this was a something of a setback. My father taught at the same school. In those days grades were sent home to parents, so I knew it wouldn't be long before my failure came to light. I decided to get the worst over with and went to my dad's office. I had a knot in my stomach and was afraid I might cry. I hated to cry in front of my parents; I thought it made me appear immature and weak. I hated not being in control of my emotions. I told Dad what had happened, knowing he would be especially disappointed as it was he who had encouraged me to major in French in the first place. Here is what he said: "Everyone ought to get at least one D just to know what it feels like." I will never forget that moment. I knew that, whatever else, he was on my side.
*******************************************************************************
I have always believed that teachers are born, not made. This is not to say that education is irrelevant or that teachers don't need to learn a very great deal before they stand in front of a classroom. But I know I have never done anything professionally as rewarding as teaching. For me, there was really never anything else, though it took a while to figure out what level I was best with and even longer to grow into a mature teacher with enough confidence to do things my own way. I came to love my students even more than my subject, English literature. I wanted to give them confidence in themselves, to encourage their independence, to demonstrate my own passion for literature in hopes they might want some of my obvious pleasure for themselves. I believed it was more important to connect with them than to assert my authority over them. I wanted them to follow me of their own volition because I had something they wanted. If I could have taught without giving grades, I would have been delighted. You do not slap a grade on a meaningful conversation; there is no need to quantify an experience that moves you. I wanted to have conversations with my students, grounded in the literature under discussion, that went both ways and touched on real life, that answered in some fashion questions about how we should live. I wanted to leave my classes feeling I had grown intellectually and emotionally because of what transpired between my students and myself. I wanted to feel we were all part of a community that wanted the best for each of its members. By the time I retired I believe I had found that. I am grateful beyond words for my life in teaching. If I were rich, I would have done it for nothing.
Just as there is more than one way to be an effective and loving parent, so too there are many ways to teach. But it's not just a matter of following the right protocols, measuring input and output, or completing the syllabus. It is about lighting fires, and that very much depends upon the personality of the teacher--and the student. Good teaching is about relationships, about mutual affection and respect. The indefinable quality that makes for a good teacher cannot be measured. You know it when you see it. That is why I believe the current emphasis on "assessment" is a cop out, a way of rewarding the mediocre (who fill out forms to perfection) and choking off the air of those who would ignite the imagination and passion of their students.
Young children are thirsty for love and for information. Curiosity is innate, and its cognate is love. Just as love is essential between parent and child, so too love is important between teacher and student. If your first-grader loves his teacher, chances are good that he will learn as much as he can. Parents love their children even when they sink into adolescent angst. Sadly, this is just when teachers often begin to separate themselves from their students' emotional lives. First graders and eighth graders need very different things, but both need love to flourish. I was a teacher, but I never for a moment considered teaching the very young, and when I taught adolescents I knew it was a bad match. I loved my own children at those ages, but I certainly wasn't drawn to kids who weren't my own, or only rarely. I do love young adults however, and that is where I found my niche. Many professors avoid freshman classes like the plague. A recent study has shown that college students don't learn all that much in their freshman and sophomore years. Questions are being raised about how and why colleges are failing. In my view, they are failing because many professors don't love their students.
My mother taught junior high, what we now call middle school. I found eighth graders to be quite insane and hard to tolerate. They are like puppies that might have been cute once but haven't grown out of the biting and chewing stage, only now their teeth are sharp. My mother was a wonderful teacher, beloved by her students. And she loved them; bright or slow, privileged or poor, she sympathized with their awkwardness and insecurity. She once told me that the only way to be a good teacher was to love your students. That may be the most important single piece of advice anyone ever gave me.
I sympathize with freshmen, who may be away from home for the first time, who are used to succeeding but are now afraid they won't make it in college, who are ready to fall in love. My heart goes out to all of them. If they seem lazy or indifferent, it may be because their life is a mess. Anger or rejection is not the correct response. Sophomores are different. A lot has been sorted out, friendships made, routines established. I have found this to be the year when students are most intellectually alive. They have discovered, if they are lucky, that there is a lot of fascinating stuff they'd had no idea about or they have found they can now see familiar things in exciting new ways. They have not become jaded, cynical about the institution of higher learning, burned out, or increasingly anxious about what comes next. A lot is going on in their heads; they are at the beginning of genuine maturity. And the beginnings of things are always revelatory. I love being there to watch them bloom, knowing that the shy, bumbling freshman of today will be a poised senior with even a bit of gravitas four years hence.
It's a matter of development, as well as good study habits or challenging courses. Most students will write better as seniors than as freshmen, whether they take freshman comp. or not. They will grow in wisdom as they get older, just as I hope to do. Small children want to please their parents; so too students want to please a teacher they are fond of and who they feel cares about them. Not all professors feel as I do, and that's OK. By the time they're in college, students should be responsible for themselves, whether they like their professor or not. Graduate students appreciate their professor's approval, but it probably doesn't make them work any harder. That is why I love freshmen and sophomores. They are old enough to know what adult love is (whether they've experienced it yet or not), so they are ready to identify with the world's greatest literature. They inhabit a new world where anything can happen.
"I never worked a day in my life."--my dad
Here is something I've thought a lot about: How should I live my life? Some follow the precepts of a religious faith, others social conventions or family expectations. Of course, some people never think about this at all and simply go wherever the wind blows them. But ever since I was a young teenager, I have consciously been trying to answer this question for myself. It hasn't always been easy.
The other day I read a review of a new book in the NY Times: "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua. Ms. Chua is a Harvard law professor, is married to a Harvard law professor, and is the mother of two teenage daughters. The girls have been denied many of the normal activities of the American teenager--sleep-overs and the like--in order to devote more time to academics. Ms. Chua, following in her Chinese parents' footsteps, has raised her girls to be successful, obedient, focused. When one of the children was quite young, her mother threatened to cut off the head of her teddy bear unless the played a certain piano piece perfectly. By bedtime the little girl had managed to please her mother and toyicide was averted. Not until the younger daughter was thirteen and rebelled--loudly and in public--did her mother reconsider her approach to child rearing. Ms. Chua had never listened to her American husband's pleas for her to let up sometimes; she just knew her way would lead to successful adulthoods for her girls, and that, after all, was what life was for. Success--academic, financial, social. All that takes hard work and sacrifice, but the end result is well worth it--at least in Ms. Chua's view.
I haven't read "Tiger Mother," but this review got me thinking. I can't generalize about everybody. Each life is unique, and everyone has to figure things out for him/herself. But in addition to the question, "How should I live?", another equally important question for me is "Whom should I live for?".
I remember my mother saying once, when I was a surly teenager, "You don't fly in the face of convention." My mother had lots of sayings like that. I like pithy sentences that encapsulate rules-to-live-by. "Waste not, want not." "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." "He who loses his temper loses the argument." There is wisdom here. But when my mother told me not to go against mainstream social expectations, I said silently to myself, "Watch me."
When I was in college, I had a sorority sister (Yes, I was in a sorority. I did TRY to follow the mores of my time and place, at least sometimes.) who was headed to med. school. She studied all the time, and I mean ALL the time. The Saturday evening of our spring dance, she and her boyfriend closeted themselves with their books. They never let up. I admired her, I suppose, but I basically thought she went a bit overboard. I've known more than a few people, many of them friends, who have been successful all their lives, for whom studying hard was a given, even if for a course that seemed boring or irrelevant to their interests. I've always worried that I'm selfish with my time and energies. I agree with Aristotle that one of life's aims, perhaps the principle one, is to avoid boredom. Next to snakes, I probably fear boredom more than anything. Exhausting yourself simply to please others or to fulfill someone else's dreams seems to me like giving up an important part of your own life. Many years ago, when I was a high school teacher, I had a student who told the class his father had hated every day he went to work. He'd spent twenty years of his life an unhappy man. I wanted to avoid that if at all possible.
It's a lucky person who has a passion, be it playing an instrument, running a marathon, or breeding bulldogs. My passion is reading. I still find it peculiar every time I hear of a school principal volunteering to eat worms if his students will read X number of books. (True story.) Why anyone, even a kid, should have to be coerced or cajoled into reading is beyond me. I am lucky to have been around books all my life. My life would be an empty desert without them. One of my deepest fears--and I say it now for the first time--is that I will go blind and be unable to read. I don't like being read to, and listening to books on tape is not real reading. So when I was in college, and in graduate school for that matter, I read a lot, not just my assigned reading but always something on the side as well. Something just for me. I can always find time for "selfish" reading, even if it's just ten minutes over breakfast. I've read a lot of very fat novels over tea and an English muffin or standing in line at the DMV. This is probably why I was a decent student but not an outstanding one.
Fortunately my parents (both teachers) didn't seem to care. I wasn't pushed. In fact, one of my favorite memories of my dad was the time I got a D (oh, the truth comes out now!) in a college French course. I was planning to major in French, so this was a something of a setback. My father taught at the same school. In those days grades were sent home to parents, so I knew it wouldn't be long before my failure came to light. I decided to get the worst over with and went to my dad's office. I had a knot in my stomach and was afraid I might cry. I hated to cry in front of my parents; I thought it made me appear immature and weak. I hated not being in control of my emotions. I told Dad what had happened, knowing he would be especially disappointed as it was he who had encouraged me to major in French in the first place. Here is what he said: "Everyone ought to get at least one D just to know what it feels like." I will never forget that moment. I knew that, whatever else, he was on my side.
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I have always believed that teachers are born, not made. This is not to say that education is irrelevant or that teachers don't need to learn a very great deal before they stand in front of a classroom. But I know I have never done anything professionally as rewarding as teaching. For me, there was really never anything else, though it took a while to figure out what level I was best with and even longer to grow into a mature teacher with enough confidence to do things my own way. I came to love my students even more than my subject, English literature. I wanted to give them confidence in themselves, to encourage their independence, to demonstrate my own passion for literature in hopes they might want some of my obvious pleasure for themselves. I believed it was more important to connect with them than to assert my authority over them. I wanted them to follow me of their own volition because I had something they wanted. If I could have taught without giving grades, I would have been delighted. You do not slap a grade on a meaningful conversation; there is no need to quantify an experience that moves you. I wanted to have conversations with my students, grounded in the literature under discussion, that went both ways and touched on real life, that answered in some fashion questions about how we should live. I wanted to leave my classes feeling I had grown intellectually and emotionally because of what transpired between my students and myself. I wanted to feel we were all part of a community that wanted the best for each of its members. By the time I retired I believe I had found that. I am grateful beyond words for my life in teaching. If I were rich, I would have done it for nothing.
Just as there is more than one way to be an effective and loving parent, so too there are many ways to teach. But it's not just a matter of following the right protocols, measuring input and output, or completing the syllabus. It is about lighting fires, and that very much depends upon the personality of the teacher--and the student. Good teaching is about relationships, about mutual affection and respect. The indefinable quality that makes for a good teacher cannot be measured. You know it when you see it. That is why I believe the current emphasis on "assessment" is a cop out, a way of rewarding the mediocre (who fill out forms to perfection) and choking off the air of those who would ignite the imagination and passion of their students.
Young children are thirsty for love and for information. Curiosity is innate, and its cognate is love. Just as love is essential between parent and child, so too love is important between teacher and student. If your first-grader loves his teacher, chances are good that he will learn as much as he can. Parents love their children even when they sink into adolescent angst. Sadly, this is just when teachers often begin to separate themselves from their students' emotional lives. First graders and eighth graders need very different things, but both need love to flourish. I was a teacher, but I never for a moment considered teaching the very young, and when I taught adolescents I knew it was a bad match. I loved my own children at those ages, but I certainly wasn't drawn to kids who weren't my own, or only rarely. I do love young adults however, and that is where I found my niche. Many professors avoid freshman classes like the plague. A recent study has shown that college students don't learn all that much in their freshman and sophomore years. Questions are being raised about how and why colleges are failing. In my view, they are failing because many professors don't love their students.
My mother taught junior high, what we now call middle school. I found eighth graders to be quite insane and hard to tolerate. They are like puppies that might have been cute once but haven't grown out of the biting and chewing stage, only now their teeth are sharp. My mother was a wonderful teacher, beloved by her students. And she loved them; bright or slow, privileged or poor, she sympathized with their awkwardness and insecurity. She once told me that the only way to be a good teacher was to love your students. That may be the most important single piece of advice anyone ever gave me.
I sympathize with freshmen, who may be away from home for the first time, who are used to succeeding but are now afraid they won't make it in college, who are ready to fall in love. My heart goes out to all of them. If they seem lazy or indifferent, it may be because their life is a mess. Anger or rejection is not the correct response. Sophomores are different. A lot has been sorted out, friendships made, routines established. I have found this to be the year when students are most intellectually alive. They have discovered, if they are lucky, that there is a lot of fascinating stuff they'd had no idea about or they have found they can now see familiar things in exciting new ways. They have not become jaded, cynical about the institution of higher learning, burned out, or increasingly anxious about what comes next. A lot is going on in their heads; they are at the beginning of genuine maturity. And the beginnings of things are always revelatory. I love being there to watch them bloom, knowing that the shy, bumbling freshman of today will be a poised senior with even a bit of gravitas four years hence.
It's a matter of development, as well as good study habits or challenging courses. Most students will write better as seniors than as freshmen, whether they take freshman comp. or not. They will grow in wisdom as they get older, just as I hope to do. Small children want to please their parents; so too students want to please a teacher they are fond of and who they feel cares about them. Not all professors feel as I do, and that's OK. By the time they're in college, students should be responsible for themselves, whether they like their professor or not. Graduate students appreciate their professor's approval, but it probably doesn't make them work any harder. That is why I love freshmen and sophomores. They are old enough to know what adult love is (whether they've experienced it yet or not), so they are ready to identify with the world's greatest literature. They inhabit a new world where anything can happen.
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