News from the World (16 page)

I don't know how deeply, or in what part of his mind, he felt there to be a fatal connection between his fleeting rage, the wish that had expressed it, and the death that afternoon. I know he suffered—his very abstractedness was a form of suffering.

One night, Frank lingered on the gatehouse porch. He asked me if I had ever worked in another place like Sleepy Hollow. I said no. Then, for some reason, I told him, as I have told you, about the concentration camp children I had met in the high Tatra mountains. I spoke a little about the Holocaust. We sat down on a step. It was a clear night, spring, with a little warmth in the air. The stars were thick.

“I never heard of anything like that,” he said. He asked me what would happen to those children in the mountains. I said I didn't know, except what happens to everyone—they would have their lives, they had endured and survived the horror of the camps, and each would make what he or she could of it. He looked up at the sky.

“What's after the stars?” he asked. “What's outside of all that we're looking at?”

I named a few constellations I thought I recognized. Although his grades were low, he'd read an astronomy textbook on his own. He corrected my star guesses twice. “But what do you think about out there?” he urged.

I said there seemed to be a wall in the mind beyond which one couldn't go in imagining infinity—at least, I couldn't. “Me, neither,” he said. We sat for a few more minutes, then said goodnight and walked away from the gatehouse, me to my car, and he to the cottage where he would live a few months longer before he ran away and was not heard from again by anyone in Sleepy Hollow.

The children in that residence accepted a certain amount of discipline—do your homework, make your bed, eat the carrots before the cupcake—though they complained noisily about it all. What they hated was to be told what they were. They had a heightened sensitivity to questions that weren't questions at all, but that were rooted in ironclad assumptions.

There were two or three people on the staff who were pretty sure they knew everything. They had forgotten—if they had ever known—that answers are not always synonymous with truth, which tends to fly just beyond reach in a thousand guises.

Those staff members were imprisoned in their notions as much as the children they met with weekly were imprisoned in case-history terminology. Professions require a system of reference and the language to express it, but the cost to truth is high if there is no reflection on the possibilities beyond that system. “What's outside of all we're looking at?” Frank had asked.

It is a question that appears to be inherent in our species, until we smother it with comfortable certainties. Jonathan Swift wrote that the people of Laputa were fed with “invented, simplified language,” and machines were made to “educate . . . pupils by inscribing wafers, causing them to swallow it.”

A protocomputer, perhaps—input, output. Can machines tell us what goes on between you and me? As the scientist Dr. Jacob Bronowski once said, a computer cannot be embarrassed or be made to feel regret. It can't feel joy. Lest we turn into machines of certainty, I think we must sustain the suspicion that there's a lot we don't know.

A decade after I left Sleepy Hollow, I was hired by a private prepatory school in New York to teach children who were failing their courses. Most of them were the offspring of alumni and were kept on in the school despite its reputation for placing accomplished students in the most exalted colleges and universities.

The G-group, as my students were called, were separated physically as well as in more subtle social ways from the rest of the student body. Our classroom was in an annex. Except for two or three, most of these children came from homes where they had their own rooms. Their closets were filled with cheerful clothes for every season. They had ice-skates, soccer balls, typewriters—but a list grows tedious. What they had was anything they wanted, or their parents thought they wanted. They were born into families which—whatever their own predilections might have been—valued learning and cultivation. Literature and music and art were as much a part of the environment as regular meals, summer camps in New England, nice clothes, and visits to pediatricians, psychiatrists and dentists when the services of such were called for.

Of course, there were children who didn't give a fig for art, music, and literature. “He won't read anything but baseball scores,” a parent would tell me in tones of despair about her seventh-grader, a despair more appropriate to a death in the family than a child's reluctance to wade through
Barnaby Rudge.
These children were burdened not only with material choices; they bore from an early age their parents' fierce ambition that they aim themselves like arrows, not deviating a jot, until they had landed safely in an Ivy League college. This was in the late sixties, so as we know from the student rebellions and all their consequences, that safety was illusory.

Writing about these prep-school students, I recalled the son of an acquaintance who went to Bronx Science, a public high school with an unblemished record of graduating every senior, every year. On graduation day, my acquaintance's son was missing from the parade of seniors accepting their diplomas. He had failed and was obliged to repeat his senior year. But he was in the vicinity, outside on the sidewalk, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, shouting in jubilation and triumph, as the happy families emerged from the ceremony, “I didn't make it! I didn't make it!”

There were obviously profound differences between Gloria, Danny, and Frank, and many of the students in the New York private school. One of the most unpleasant was the privileged children's unquestioning belief that all they had was theirs by right, and that those who had less were somehow inferior. The Sleepy Hollow children hadn't the faintest idea that anything at all was owed them.

Yet, the G-group had something in common with Danny, Gloria, and Frank. They had known failure, too, in their own community. It was a paradox that these G-students were sometimes more interesting as people than their successful contemporaries in the main school. They had a certain gravity, and hardly any of the complacency that makes for endless adolescence.

One of them was a fourteen-year-old boy, Peter. He and his family had fled from Hungary during the uprising in 1956. Each family member took one small possession in their escape. Peter's was a book of Hungarian fairy tales he kept with him wherever he went. I saw it every day on his desk, the pages tattered, the cover faded. He often touched it as though it was a talisman. It was. It had been read to him in his own language, in the days before he had experienced a bitter sense of strangeness and hopelessness.

I began to have the conviction that he couldn't go on with his life unless he could give up the book. He was a lovely boy, courtly, dreamy, gentle. But although he spoke English quite well, he couldn't keep up with any of his studies. He was trying to go backward, to the days when he had been small and happy. Like Frank, he was thinking of something else.

One afternoon, I kept him after class to go over some work. The fairy tale book was there, as always, within his reach, on my desk.

“Why don't you translate one of those stories?” I asked him.

“But I can't,” he exclaimed, as though I'd asked him to profane a sacred object. Perhaps I had.

“One of the short ones,” I suggested. He looked through the pages of the book, many of which were clumsily repaired with tape.

“Yes,” I said, not knowing quite what I meant.

“But it's better in Hungarian,” he said.

“It's always better in the original,” I said. “But you could try.”

I would like to tell you that he took up my suggestion at once, translated the whole book, made great strides in his school work and escaped the G-group. It didn't happen that way. But he did make an effort with one of the stories, and somehow, that gave him encouragement. He was a brave child. Eventually, he got through the school and went to a small college in the Middle West. The man who was headmaster of the school during the years I taught there once said to me, “It is not unreasonable to limp in this world.”

I ask these questions: What do pessimism or optimism have to do with Richard, who lived his childhood, day after day for six years, in a concentration camp? With Gloria, Danny, and Frank? With Peter? With these living presences, immanent with human soul?

Are their lives, and ours, like sad? Like baffling? Like rapturous?

The ebbing away of religious belief has resulted in the loss of the language we need to express deep and serious feelings about our lives. How are we to give voice to despair, to exaltation and redemption?

But we can turn to great poets, great writers, to help us speak of life, of its mysteries. They, too, have reverence for the gods, and implicit in their work is the belief, as it is in religion, that everything that happens is extraordinarily important.

And so I would like to end this talk with the words of a great writer, Franz Kafka, who wrote:

“You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”

OTHER PLACES

M
Y GRANDMOTHER AND
I were obliged to live for several years in a very small apartment in a Long Island village which was, at that time, undergoing changes that would alter its village character forever, as the New York City commuting range extended further. I attended a public elementary school in the neighborhood. Every Saturday, I was allowed to go to the Inwood movie house, a mile or so from where we lived.

I don't remember the feature movies I saw there, only an inexhaustible serial called
The Invisible Man
, each of its episodes ending as the stocky actor who played the invisible man disappeared in sections, first his legs, then his arms, then his torso, until only his head remained floating above the furniture of a 1930s living room. When his head vanished, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat, it was time to go home.

If he disappeared from one place, I surmised, he must have been appearing in another. It was about that other place I mused as I walked home to the box where my grandmother and I lived, a place utterly and crushingly different from the Cuban plantation house where we had been before coming to the Long Island suburb.

I'm pretty sure I wanted to be that invisible man with his power to transfer himself where he wished simply by wrapping himself up in long lengths of some white material. I knew there was camera trickery involved, and I was not so credulous as to believe it was possible for solid flesh to be in two places at the same time. But despite that, the image on the screen held a powerful fascination for me, not dispelled by reason. I pondered it as though it were a riddle. Dimly I began to perceive that for a person to appear and disappear at will was a literal representation of something else. I began, in fact, to comprehend what an analogy was long before I had heard the word. After all, I may have said to myself, here I was walking along new sidewalks already crumbling, under limp-leafed trees, passing jerrybuilt new apartment houses in the hazy, humid summer air, yet in my mind I was running along a dirt road among fields of sugar cane under a vast tropical sky. And if that tropical landscape palled, I could go years back and find myself trudging up a long hill to a Victorian house overlooking the Hudson River on a winter day when the air crackled with cold. It was not lengths of material that made it possible to be in two places at once; it was memory.

Memory, books, and imagination. Stories took you to other places. Maxim Gorki wrote in
Childhood
, the first volume of his autobiography, that books made the world a larger place. There was a big public library in that Long Island village. Every week I came home with as many books as I could carry. And on Sundays, when most of my school friends stayed home and when the Inwood movie house was closed, I could read through the long afternoons. I could disappear from the constricted rooms of the apartment and appear in other places peopled with the stories, the imagination of writers, where a fierce convict changed the destiny of a bullied child, where a water rat and a mole picnicked on the banks of a stream, where an orphaned child led pirates to buried treasure, where a little girl drank a potion so magical she could shrink to a size that would allow her to enter an enchanted garden.

There was no television then, of course. But we did have a radio, and there were programs for children, “Mandrake the Magician,” “Jack Armstrong,” “The All-American Boy,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Fu Manchu,” and many others I no longer remember. What resonating voices! What gongs, hooves of galloping horses, tooting of river boats, breaking of waves, foghorns, grinding villainous voices of rascals, clear, grand, if somewhat shallow voices of heroes and heroines, all—all invisible, yet more present, brought more to vivid life in the room where I listened than the images I see now on the television screen which occupy the space imagination once made boundless.

My grandmother told me stories, too, of her life in Spain before she was sent, at sixteen, to marry a man she had never seen. Some of her tales were comic, and some were tales of dread. My grandfather, a Spaniard from Asturias, owned a plantation far from Havana, and his young bride was plunged into a nineteenth-century colonial world that is now gone forever. It was her good fortune to come to care about this man in a marriage that had been arranged by an elderly relative of his, although like much good fortune, it didn't last very long. He died just after the end of the Spanish-American war, and her life was once again changed, violently this time, when she left the plantation, a large part of which had been burned to the ground, for the United States.

What I recall about her stories, told to me in fragments over the years I lived with her, was an underlying elegiac note, a puzzled mourning for the past. Every story, as concrete as the kitchen table where we sometimes sat, or in the living room where sunlight fell upon the floor through the rusted bars of a fire escape, had a subtext, and it is its melancholy note I now remember. Concrete stories, transcendental meanings—surface and depth.

But it was when my grandmother took me to see a play that I glimpsed the most dramatic instance of the double nature of life. She didn't speak English well, but she could read, and she must have seen a review of the play and thought it would be something I would like. We went to a Saturday matinee. The theater was small and beautiful. The play had been running on Broadway for some time. It was not a period, as I remember it, when there were special plays for children, anymore than there were special books for what we now call young adults. But because the play concerned itself with the misadventures of a high school student, many children were in the audience.

My grandmother had gotten us orchestra seats quite near the stage. I discovered that by leaning to either side I could see into the wings, see the actors prepare to leap from a waiting stillness into frantic activity on stage. But this view I caught of off-stage life seemed as dramatic to me, as much a part of theatrical illusion, as it did years later in London when, during an Old Vic production of
King Lear
, I saw a stagehand beating a huge sheet of tin to simulate the thunder on the heath.

The play was in the mode of the Andy Hardy movies of that period—a cartoon of teenage life. The hero was an inept, bumbling youth who was always being caught out in some mischief, drawing caricatures of a teacher, putting frogs in a girl's locker, failing all his courses, although in the end he triumphed over a brainy rival—intellect being considered a handicap then as it still is.

The climax of the play came when the youth got into a tangle with the school principal and was faced with expulsion. He cavorted and shrieked about the stage, making up in noise what was lacking in drama. The audience laughed and clapped at his predicament. I turned for a moment from the stage and noticed what I had not seen when my grandmother and I had sat down. In the seat next to mine was a small boy sitting next to an elderly woman in a uniform, a nurse perhaps. His legs stuck straight out, nearly touching the forestage. On each leg there was a metal brace as cruel looking as an animal trap. I knew at once, as any child would have known in those years, that he had had infantile paralysis. He was a small dark-haired boy. He had rested his chin on one clenched fist. Tears were streaming down his face.

As the school principal informed the youth sternly that he was to be expelled from school, he fell to his knees to plead for another chance, to promise he would be a model student from then on. The weeping of the small boy next to me grew more audible. I couldn't take my eyes from him. I don't recall much else about my first play. But although it has been fifty-two years since I sat in the theater, staring at that crippled child's profile, I recall his features distinctly. I remember how he tried to stifle his sobs, how he tried to cover his whole face with his hands, how the nurse put her arm around him and tried to comfort him.

I think that, where the audience saw only the antics of a clown, the little boy saw the misery of someone not only threatened with expulsion from school but expulsion from the human race—that he saw, in fact, the sadness of a person who can enter human society only as a fool because he feels no other way is open to him. Perhaps it was his illness, the shock of it, his banishment from what we choose to think of as the ordinary world of childhood, that had made him see differently, deeply, to discern suffering masked by silliness and self-caricature.

Is such deepening of consciousness only brought about by suffering? Some philosophers and many storytellers have thought so. But must we pose, against the alerted sensibilities suffering may bring, only a shallow cheerfulness? An inability or a disinclination to feel for others, even to feel for the self? Real life is too complex for such superficial oppositions. Is it conceivable that a human child does not, at some time or other, feel intimations of hardships, of conditions, of experiences far beyond the range of his or her own experience? I think not. Even in those child-rearing circumstances we have come to define as good—parental tenderness and interest, physical well-being, material comfort—is there not in any child an instinctive sense of the common vicissitudes, the afflictions, to which we are all susceptible?

I recently saw on television an ad for a children's blanket which, treated with some chemical, shines in the dark. “Make your child feel secure,” said the television saleswoman cozily. Secure against what? The menace one so often detects in commercial offerings is, in some way, only a cruder form of a certain kind of psychological bullying: Be caring, sharing, loving—or else!

The paradox is that by our constant, obsessive concern with security, we imply ever more powerfully the dark forces against which security is supposed to guard us. We are afraid of the dark; the light of a chemically-treated security blanket only reveals its density. Would it not be wiser to acknowledge that our children feel, as we did when young, the uncertainties and alarms and confusion of being alive, of growing up?

The little boy with infantile paralysis had fallen right through the world of surfaces. Perhaps his grief was too great. Yet when the play was over, he clapped vigorously for the actors. I saw him struggle to his feet, smile up at his nurse, and hobble up the long aisle out of the theater. He was game. He had not been undone by his feelings for the play's poor fool. He had seen what was visible and what was invisible. I think now, looking back, that he had courage.

Recently I reread E. M. Forster's novel
A Room with a View
, and I came across a passage that struck me with great force. It was this:

She gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue.

It is, of course, much easier in the short run, for us to fall back on catchwords when we are gripped by fear, by confusion, by intimations of the chaos which can turn our lives upside down on any sunny morning. I think of a middle-aged woman I heard about who, when she learned her father was dying, said at once that death could be a very enriching experience. Before her heart or brain could be engaged by this enormous event, she had sped away from it, staking out a claim for enrichment before death could get the drop on her.

And I think of a girl I read about in a newspaper story about young cancer patients. She had had leukemia for some months, and during the long periods of treatment for it, she was quoted as saying to her parents, “Please, please don't know everything about what is happening to me. Please don't understand my feelings too quickly.”

Even in small matters we often seem too impatient to allow ourselves to be puzzled. We rush to define events, anomalies, surprises of all sorts, before we begin to know what we feel and think about them. We write off whole continents of human mysteries with inane clich
é
s, and, sometimes, we reduce a mysterious human person, standing right in front of us, to a heap of psychological platitudes. “The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,” wrote T. S. Eliot. And, too often, we use formulas to see by. They give off a dim light.

These formulas have come to express the only commonly held views we are supposed to share. But, as Randall Jarrell wrote in an essay, “The Taste of the Age,” they have taken the place of a body of common knowledge that educated people—and many uneducated people—once had. “Fairy tales, myths, proverbs, history—the Bible and Shakespeare and Dickens, the
Odyssey
and
Gulliver's Travels
,” writes Jarrell, “often things that most of an audience (now) won't understand an allusion to, a joke about.” Yet, he goes on to say, “These things were the ground on which the people of the past came together.”

What is integral to the works on Jarrell's list is an apprehension of the peculiar and unique situation of being human. Part of being human is, as the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, writes, to be able to bear “that dramatic consciousness ever alive in our inmost being, and upon our feeling, like a murmuring counterpoint in our entrails, that we are only sure of insecurity.”

Who was safer, I wonder, who more truly secure, at that play I saw long ago? The complacent, laughing audience who frantically applauded a mockery of adolescent suffering, or the weeping crippled child, who through his capacity to imagine, to feel, infused the play with meaning.

Children begin clear-eyed. Their vision is not clouded by sentimentality. They see the peculiarity of a thing, of a person. They see things we would rather they didn't see. They ask questions we either cannot answer or do not wish to answer. Yet we cannot bear their uncertainty and tell ourselves we must spare them it. So we hastily stop up their curiosity, their speculations, their first intimation of life's mystery with our formulas, a kind of mental spoon-feeding, about which Randall Jarrell, in the essay cited above, quotes E. M. Forster, who said: “The only thing we learn from spoon-feeding is the shape of the spoon.” The contents of that spoon may change from period to period, but the impulse to shove it into a child's mouth does not seem to.