Old School (9 page)

A boy named Jaspers had been waving his arm like a railroad switchman, but just then Mrs. Ramsey raised her soft southern voice from the back of the room. We all make mistakes, she said. If this isn’t too personal, Miss Rand, what was the biggest mistake you have ever made?

I reject your premise. If you act rationally, you cannot act mistakenly, and I have always acted rationally.

Jaspers started to wave again, but Big Jeff was already on his feet. Miss Rand, your books reach thousands of people—

Millions.

Millions of people. Just think what a difference it would make if they knew your position on meat.

She bent forward.
What?
What is it you’re saying?

Just that if your readers knew you didn’t eat meat, I bet a lot of them would give it up too.

Meat? She pushed herself up from the chair. Are you talking about
meat
? What depraved psychology prompts you to speak like this to the author of
Atlas Shrugged
?

This is our own Jeffrey Purcell, the headmaster said. As it was his story you chose, perhaps Jeffrey can be forgiven for thinking you agreed with his thesis.

Meat? She flapped her hand in front of her face. Enough, she said. I am quite finished.

The tall fellow came up with her cape and settled it on her shoulders as the admirers surged forward and the rest of us stood and stretched and began putting on our coats. All of us but one. Still waving his arm, Jaspers finally cried out, Miss Rand! Miss Rand! The room went quiet and she looked at Jaspers and he asked the question he’d been dying to ask. She jerked her head back as if she’d been slapped. All the dark-dressed men and women turned on him in utter loathing—a court of ravens about to eat the eyes out of this whey-faced, homesick boy with his chewed-up fingernails and puppyish need to be in on everything, who in his need had asked Ayn Rand the very question I had been itching to ask and probably would’ve asked if she hadn’t skunked me for mentioning Hemingway.

Who is John Galt?

SLICE OF LIFE

Who is John Galt?

By a joke of fate, the question that brought poor Jaspers into such disfavor turned out to be the very first line of
Atlas Shrugged,
as I discovered when I borrowed the book from our library a few days after Ayn Rand’s visit. I took a few runs at it but never got past the opening chapter. And when I returned to
The Fountainhead
I couldn’t read that either, not anymore.

The problem was that I could no longer read Ayn Rand’s sentences without hearing her voice. And hearing her voice, I saw her face; to be exact, the face she’d turned on me when I sneezed. Her disgust had power. This was no girlish shudder, this was spiritual disgust, and it forced on me a vision of the poor specimen under scrutiny, chapped lips, damp white face, rheumy eyes and all. She made me feel that to be sick was contemptible. There couldn’t have been any other reason for her to despise me so, not at that moment, before I’d offended her by mentioning Hemingway.

At first I wondered if I’d mistaken her expression, but she snuffed that small doubt with the look she gave our headmaster. Her revulsion was as naked as a child’s, and it continued to show itself in the cold, offended tone she used with him. It seemed that a wen was no less damnable than a runny nose. And this alone made it hard for me to read even the novel I’d been so captured by. I became touchily aware that both Roark and Dominique looked great and never had a sick day between them. Before now I’d taken their good looks for granted, like the ugliness of their archenemy Ellsworth Toohey. It hadn’t occurred to me that the author actually thought that an afflicted face was deserving of scorn.

Her heroes were hearty, happily formed, and didn’t have brats. In fact there were no brats at all in
The Fountainhead,
or in what little I read of
Atlas Shrugged.
The heroic life apparently left no time for children, or domestic cares, or the exertions of ordinary sympathy. After getting pinned by her look I couldn’t imagine Ayn Rand driving eight minutes, let alone eight hours, to nurse a sick relative. The same went for Dominique and Roark, who seemed to have no relatives, or even friends—only inferiors. For several weeks I’d measured other people against them, and other people had always come up short. Now I couldn’t read the novel without trying to imagine the two of them changing my sour sheets, walking me to the can. No dice. They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in that sickroom. They wouldn’t have shown up at all.

The self-pity I felt at this betrayal dressed itself up as fierce affection for Grandjohn and Patty, who
had
done all this for me. I found myself defending them against Dominique and Roark as if they, not I, had turned up their noses at these loyal, good-hearted bores. And this line of thinking led me back to my own home, which Ayn Rand would consider a perfect instance of the drab little life she’d condemned. My mother had certainly been held hostage by one snot-nosed brat. Too much of her short life had been lost to worries about lousy cars, lousy teeth, lousy
refrigerators.
And as for my father, his already uncertain character devastated by grief, God knows there was plenty of weakness there.

That much was true. But Ayn Rand’s cartoon vision of my parents—
brainless slattern, frustrated imbecile
—sickened me. She had no idea what went on between such beleaguered people, how infinitely complicated it was and dramatic, the effort it had taken them to keep going through all the disappointment and sickness and dreams of escape. I blamed Ayn Rand for disregarding all this. And I no doubt blamed her even more because I had disregarded it myself—because for years now I had hidden my family in calculated silences and vague hints and dodges, suggesting another family in its place. The untruth of my position had given me an obscure, chronic sense of embarrassment, yet since I hadn’t outright lied I could still blind myself to its cause. Unacknowledged shame enters the world as anger; I naturally turned mine against the snobbery of others, in the present case Ayn Rand.

This part of my reaction was personal and unreasoned. But there was more. It had dawned on me that I didn’t really know anyone like Roark or Dominique. Though Ayn Rand insisted that such people existed and that she herself was one, my own experience of them was purely literary. Everyone I knew, even in the most privileged families, was beset by unheroic worries. A brilliant daughter made pregnant by her piano teacher, a sweet-tempered son gone surly and secretive, flunking out of school and shedding his friends and wrecking one car after another as if with a will; nervous breakdowns and squabbles over money. I had stayed with these families during holidays and long weekends, and among even the happiest of them I had learned to efface my presence at certain moments—the sound of a door slamming upstairs, a husband’s dark silence as his wife poured herself yet another glass of wine.

The people I knew, and the families I knew, were all more or less beset. And none of them—not one—seemed capable of the perfect rationality and indomitable exercise of will that Ayn Rand demanded as a condition of respect. Nor, I had to admit, was I. Everyone was troubled, nobody measured up, and I began to think that the true failure lay in Ayn Rand’s grasp of human reality.

Her ridicule of Hemingway brought this home to me. Not immediately, of course. My first reaction was shock—at her unfairness not only to the writer but to a character for whom I had a great liking. Wretched eunuch, she’d called Jake Barnes, as if the fact of such a wound, of woundedness itself, made him merely pathetic. I knew Jake pretty well, having read
The Sun Also Rises
twice the previous summer. He’d gotten about the worst break I could then imagine, but he wasn’t wretched. He took pleasure in how Paris came to life in the morning. Pleasure in food and drink and travel, in watching men face dangerous animals, in fishing, in friendship. Jake lingered on these things. He watched the life around him with interest. You could sometimes feel the pulse of hopeless longing, but you could not say that Jake was wretched. It was wrong, and it was mean.

It had become a fashion at school to draw lines between certain writers, as if to like one meant you couldn’t like the other. So far I’d avoided the practice. I liked most of what I chose to read and saw no point in reducing my pleasures by half. But Ayn Rand jolted me into taking sides. She made me feel the difference between a writer who despised woundedness and one for whom it was a bedrock fact of life.

In the weeks after her visit I re-read
In Our Time
and all the Hemingway stories in my textbooks and anthologies. The young narrator of “In Another Country” has been shot in the leg, and among his crowd of patients he’s the lucky one. Manolo in “The Undefeated” goes straight from a hospital bed into the bull ring and is almost immediately gored again. “The Battler” opens with Nick nursing a black eye, just before he meets a punch-drunk boxer with one ear gone and the other worn to a nub, and in “Cross-Country Snow” he can’t telemark because of a wound to his leg. The narrator of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is dying of gangrene. All these wounds and scars . . . I’d never linked them up before, but when I did they began to seem the most visible symptoms of a general condition that included the Swede’s despair, Francis Macomber’s humiliation, Krebs’s inability to feel.

There’s a moment at the end of “Indian Camp” when Nick’s father is rowing them home after delivering a baby by cesarean. It’s been a rough morning. In the course of the birthing the baby’s father, unable to leave the hut because of a crippling axe wound, was driven to such distress by his woman’s cries that he slashed his own throat. Nick avoided watching the operation, but had a good look at the dead man’s neck when his father examined the cut. He’s young—still calls his father Daddy. Now they’re crossing the lake toward home, Nick trailing his hand in the water. And what is he feeling?

In the early morning sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

I first read the end of this story with something like nostalgia. What child hasn’t dreamily trailed a hand in the water, lulled by the creak of oars in stronger hands, the rhythmic lunge of the boat? This memory, more the body’s than the mind’s, brought with it a recollection of the old serene trust that the world was kindly and mine for good. I recalled having this trust, and so recognized what Nick was feeling, but I no longer felt it myself.

It had a sting in its tail, this quiet passage. Even as I smiled at young Nick’s doomed assurance—doomed the instant he insisted on it—I understood that mine was already gone, and with it the trick of not seeing my own fate in that of others. At this moment I knew what I knew: that what happened to everyone else would happen to me.

You can’t read “Indian Camp” and then go back to
The Fountainhead.
Everything seems bloated and cheesy—the swollen sentences, the hysterical partisanship of the author, the crassly symbolic, uninflected characters, the impossible things they think and say and do. Really, you can’t believe a word of it. “Indian Camp” ruined
The Fountainhead
for me, even as the novel helped me to see the patience and delicacy and adamant reality of the story.

I already admired Hemingway above all other writers, but the truth was that I’d been drawn to him mostly by his life—that is, by the legend of his life—and by a set of ideas about his work that spilled over from the legend. I’d gone in looking for images of toughness, self-sufficiency, freedom from the hobbles of family and class and conventional work, so that’s what I’d found. Now I was reading a different writer. Hard things happened in these stories, but the people weren’t hard. They felt the blows. Some of them gave up and some came back for more, but coming back wasn’t easy. The first time I read “Big Two-Hearted River” I liked it for its physical details. You saw everything Nick did, in precise, almost fussy descriptions that most writers would’ve left out. How he drives the pegs of his tent until the rope loops are buried, and holds his pants and shoes in his hand when leaving the tent at sunup. How he dampens his fishing leaders. Exactly how much flour and water he uses to make his pancakes—a cup of each. I’d liked being in on all these rough solemnities but I had missed the fact that Nick observes them so carefully—religiously is not too strong a word—because they keep him from falling apart.

How had I missed that? Reading the story now, I saw everything through the shimmer of Nick’s fragility.

We had been taught not to confuse the writer with the work, but I couldn’t separate my picture of Nick from my picture of Hemingway. And I had a sense that I wasn’t really supposed to, that a certain confusion of author and character was intended. But the man who lived in these stories was not the steely warrior-genius whose image had so fogged my first impressions. He was in most respects an unremarkable, even banal man who got things wrong and suffered from nervousness and fear, fear even of the workings of his own mind, and who sometimes didn’t know how to behave. I hated the way he dumped Marjorie in “The End of Something.” Telling a girl whose love you’d taken advantage of that it wasn’t
fun
anymore? I judged him for that, thinking how much better I would’ve handled it.

I judged him, but I also understood that he’d allowed me to, and this was chastening. Knowing that readers like me would see him in Nick, he had given us a vision of spiritual muddle and exhaustion almost embarrassing in its intimacy. The truth of these stories didn’t come as a set of theories. You felt it on the back of your neck.

Not everyone at our school loved Hemingway; he had his critics. One of our English masters, Mr. Rice, a native of Mississippi, insisted on putting him in the ring with Faulkner. At dinner it was sometimes his pleasure to recite the infamous love scene from
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
flattening his rich drawl into a deadpan that threw every fault of sentiment and phrasing into painful relief. One night I tried to return the fun with a passage from
Absalom, Absalom!
that I had memorized for this very purpose. Blowing my voice into a fat bubble of molasses, thus did I answer his Hemingway with my Faulkner:
. . . talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.

I was enjoying myself so hugely that I failed to notice the ice thickening on the table, but when I brought the passage home nobody laughed. All the boys were tending fixedly to their meatloaf. Only Mr. Rice was looking at me, over the rim of his glasses, and I understood the instant I met his gaze that but for the luck of age and circumstance I might well find myself called out to an affair of honor. Finally, as if not trusting himself to speak to me, he turned savagely on the boy to his right and said, You will be so good as to pass the catsup, sir!

I knew there was a vein of portentousness and swagger in Hemingway; mimicking it was good sport even among those of us who looked up to him. But I did look up to him, now more than ever. So much, in fact, that I began to copy out his stories. I’d read an article about a writer’s colony in Marshall, Illinois, where the aspirants spent their mornings transcribing masterworks in order to learn what it actually
felt
like to write something great. James Jones had been associated with this group. If the practice helped him write
From Here to Eternity,
why couldn’t it help me? I used my typewriter because Hemingway famously did—posed above it in a photo over my desk—but I slowed myself to hunt-and-peck speed so I could feel the sentences take form, sense the shift in focus or tone when I struck the carriage return for a new paragraph; a thoughtful pause as I read over the page I’d just finished and slowly rolled a fresh one onto the platen, then the final period smacking home and all the joy of completion, the joy of Hemingway himself, as I rolled out the last sheet of “The Undefeated,” laid it upon the others, and squared the stack.