Just As I Thought (24 page)

For some people it meant that as a teacher you had to make great writers: either a student becomes a great writer or what’s the point in teaching writing? Whereas the person who believes that you can teach math never thinks about whether or not the idea is to make a great mathematician. Nor does the history teacher believe that it is essential, in order to be an honorable teacher of history, to produce a great or famous historian. In a way, they are right about what they’re doing: they want to produce women and men who love history, or math, or chemistry, and would understand what they (the teachers) are doing, and love and maybe understand the world a little bit better. Our idea was that children—by writing, by putting down words, by reading, by beginning to love literature, by the inventiveness of listening to one another—could begin to understand the world better and begin to make a better world for themselves. That always seemed to me such a natural idea that I’ve never understood why it took so much aggressiveness and so much time to get it started.

At one of our early meetings, we were walking along the beach, and Muriel, Anne, and Denise were reading poems to each other in the evening, which made it very beautiful and memorable for us. And then we found out that we had to write a grant! We had to figure out how to write a proposal to ask for the money. We sat there and wrote it, but one of our big arguments was about how to write it. Someone had already informed us that there was a whole grant-writing language. It was new at that time, but it was “interesting.” But we argued among ourselves, saying, “We’re trying to get money for this Teachers & Writers program, and we’re writers, so let’s just
write
it!” Finally, as we came to the end of it, there were a couple of people, more experienced in this kind of writing, who looked at it and said, “You can’t do it this way. You have to use a certain kind of form for it.” But we felt extremely brave, saying, “No, we’re not going to end that way, we’re going to end this with a noble statement as writers.”

*   *   *

Now I want to say just a few things about the imagination. I’ve looked at a lot of other speeches about writing and the imagination, and I’m all for it. I’m not against the imagination, so I don’t want you to think that. But I read somewhere that Isaac Babel said that his main problem was that he had no imagination. And I thought about that a lot, because if you read him, you know that what he’s trying to say—except for a few pieces, such as “The Sin of Jesus”—is very close to his life, the terrifying life that he led in the Cossack Red Army during, I guess, 1920, ’21, ’22. And so I tried to figure out exactly what he meant. I guess what he really didn’t understand was the amount of imagination it had taken for him to understand what had happened, what was real. There were people in his unit who, if they had tried to tell him what was going on in this particular hut or pogrom-suffering village, couldn’t have. Yet he was able to use what he
did
know about life and poverty and war to stretch toward what he
didn’t
know about the Cossack Red Army. So I think about that as the
fact
of the imagination.

That leads me to think of the headline that Jordan Davis held up when he introduced me:
MCNAMARA ADMITS HE MADE A MISTAKE
.
¹
Well, McNamara finally developed an imagination is all I can say. Of course what he
may
have imagined is what was going to happen to him in the next world if he didn’t admit it. Something like George Wallace the other day at Selma, who also said he had been wrong. But the idea of McNamara’s living through that time, allowing some of us to spend either our youth or the prime of our lives fighting in or against that war, and trying to help our neighbors imagine what was happening in Vietnam, while he and a few others were up there thinking, You know, it’s possible we’re not right, it’s possible we shouldn’t have gone in there, maybe we made a mistake, and then not speaking another word about it for the next thirty years!

At that time, hints came to us that there was dissension in the administrations, and that the children of a lot of those people, being young and healthy, had some idea that this was a terrible business that their parents were involved in. I mean, it’s bad enough being the child of any parent: you suspect how wrong your parents are from the beginning. You
think
they’re wrong, but you don’t
know
they’re wrong. But these young people
knew
their parents were wrong, and had to live with that. What I’m trying to say is: Where is the imagination in that? What do we need our imaginations for?

First of all, we need our imaginations to understand what is happening to other people around us, to try to understand the lives of others. I know there’s a certain political view that you mustn’t write about anyone except yourself, your own exact people. Of course it’s very hard for anyone to know who their exact people are, anyway. But that’s limiting. The idea of writing from the head or from the view or the experience of other people, of another people, of another life, or even of just the people across the street or next door, is probably one of the most important acts of the imagination that you can try and that can be useful to the world.

Certainly one of the things that haven’t been sufficiently imagined yet, apart from the deaths of 60,000 Americans, is the terrible suffering that the Vietnamese people have been subjected to all these years. From the very beginning of the war, and then after the war, when everyone—the left with joy, the right with bitter rage—ran around saying that the poor little Vietnamese had beaten the Americans. Well, they never did. We—the United States, that is—beat them. And we continued to embargo them and keep them in terrible poverty, with unexploded bombs going off under their children for all these years. So, not to be able to imagine the suffering that we imposed directly on them, and for our 1996 congresspeople not to be able to imagine the suffering that they’re going to impose on the poor people of this country—it’s hard for me to believe that they can’t imagine it. Unfortunately, I think they do. They simply don’t care. Another subject.

So I’m talking about the imagination in another way. We’re living in a very lucky time, in some respects, in this country. As far as literature is concerned, we’re really fortunate, and I think that Teachers & Writers and poets-in-the-schools programs and the other organizations that have been involved in basic literacy work have had something to do with it. We’re living in a time when the different peoples in this country are being heard from, for the first time. I’m happy to have lived into this period when we hear the voices of Native Americans—twenty or twenty-five years ago you didn’t even know they were writing, apart from token publication. That was the general condition of American literature at that time. The voices of African-American men and women, the voices of women of all colors, Asian women, Asian men, all these people—
this is our country
—and we’re living at a time when we can hear the voices of all these people. So whenever I hear complaints about what’s going on in literature in this country—those people without imagination talk that way—I want to remind them: When before now did this happen? Then they will say with that denigrating tone, “multiculturalism.” Or “diversity.” Or “political correctness.” They use those words to try to shut all of us up. This is what the imagination means to me: to know that this multiplicity of voices is a wonderful fact and that we’re lucky, especially the young people, to be living here at this time. My imagination tells me that if we let this present political climate defeat us, my children and my grandchildren will be in terrible trouble.

*   *   *

I will probably think of other things to say to you when I’m asleep, but it won’t bother me so much because I’ll know you’re all asleep, too! But I would like to thank all of you. I think you’ve overrated me somewhat, but if there’s ever a time in your life when you like to be overrated, it’s when you’re old. I thank you for doing it, and I thank all the young people and children who are here tonight, who have been writing poems and plays. They honor us with their presence. The child, you know, is the reason for life. Thank you, all.

—1996

Notes in Which Answers Are Questioned

Is the problem of education really a problem of schooling? Isn’t there a class meaning in the assumption that a perfect school will produce the extraordinary person?

For many years I’ve been something of a pain in the neck to my friends whose kids are in private schools or alternative free schools. I must admit I’m obsessed with the notion that the children of radicals belong in the public elementary-school system. There, they and their parents and teachers can take part in the great social struggle for sensible education for
all
the children. The school is the event: the school and its citizens are the education.

It’s true—that isn’t what’s usually meant by “radical education,” but it is at least a more truthful way to educate radicals.

The public school served the industrial needs of a society which required workers who could read and write; it socialized their souls into an American value system. But it also amazed the immigrant with the possibilities of language, science, literature, history.

Private “progressive” schools came from a rising class of families with the loving wish to reform the rigid classrooms of their childhood and with enough money to do so. They hoped their children would be more creative, more fulfilled than they—a continuation of their own high reforming intelligence—just as Catholic-school parents educate for a continuation of the Catholic household and upper-class schools for upper-classness—the sense of owning the world which precedes actual grown-up inheritance.

Even when the local public school was fairly good, the class decision was to extract its children from among the others. In some cases, this turned the local school into a ghetto. In other cases, an array of exclusive schools was established. (We wrote lots of angry articles about that kind of thing when it happened in the South.)

The results were particularly noticeable in my own neighborhood. While there were once half a dozen public elementary schools, there are now two. There are five or six exclusive schools and as many Catholic schools. The public schools are not only fairly good but offer choice—that is, in one, children work in open classrooms and broader age groups; the other is more conventional and some neighbors prefer it.

These two schools exist in all their interesting difference as a result of passionate (and continuing) struggle around the ideas of education, teacher responsibility, and neighborhood control. Some of my radical friends, whose children attend exclusive schools, had strong opinions and great longing to take part in these struggles as they have in more furious ones—like busing. “Who’s that guy? When’d he get into the act?” neighbors have asked. Who will listen to people who have abandoned the people?

One last remark: There
are
examples of alternative or “free” schools that made sense—the First Street School (on the Lower East Side of New York), for instance, where Mabel and George Dennison and Susan Goodman persevered for a couple of years. The lives of
those
children required the most “private,” the most attentive of schools.

Some of the energy of the Free School Movement was in that useful direction. The pressure of that movement persuaded some Boards of Education and State and National Arts Councils to fund non-authoritarian educators who were able to teach in public schools one or two days a week.

But very often the rhetoric of that movement served as an excuse for loving parents to withdraw their child from the community—abandoning the local school. What was just ordinary self-concern and ambition in the middle class was, my puritan nature suggests, a serious mistake for the radical parent.

—1977

Christa Wolf

About ten or twelve years ago I visited my friend Marianne Frisch in West Berlin. I asked her if I could somehow meet the writer Christa Wolf. Yes, they were friends, Marianne said, and took me by way of Checkpoint Charlie through the Wall past the taciturn, well, hostile guards into that other country, the German Democratic Republic.

Christa Wolf is the second writer I’ve ever sought out; the first was W. H. Auden, in New York in 1939, the year, maybe the day, that ten-year-old Christa stood watching the SS march through her town, bayonets pointing toward Poland. She remembers that day, sharp as a wood carving, and tells about it in one of these essays.

Why did I want to see her? I had read
The Quest for Christa T.
and
Patterns of Childhood.
I thought we would talk for hours, this pacifist feminist who would never describe herself like that. What interested me was the woman, the writer who had a passionate commitment to literature and believed at the same time that she had to have a working relationship with society—and a responsibility as well. She seemed to be exactly the writer I wanted to know—not too many like her, though some are dear to me anyway.

And so we came to her apartment in East Berlin on Friedrichstrasse, trolleys rumbling by. I wanted to cry out, Don’t give up the trolley for the bus; your cars are bad enough. But of course my German was only a failed street Yiddish of about twenty words and her English had just begun. Still we became friends. For me, a lucky mystery.

When you read these transcribed talks, essays, interviews, you’ll be reading Christa Wolf’s political and literary history in the country which, after Allied shaping, became, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic, the special concern of the U.S.S.R. Berlin, itself divided, was stuck in the GDR’s chest. Eventually the Wall was built, graffiti on one side, soldiers with guns on the other.