The Mysteries of Life and Literature
Similarly, if
you think of when my children grew up in the 1960s and 70s, what could they
know of the society that had brought me up in the 1940s and 50s--a continuation
of the depression and then the War, the realization of the Holocaust? They know about such things at second or
third hand, through television and film, in history books and sometimes in novels.
Even my
sister, who is only seven years younger, had radically different experiences: I
was born before television came into our house, she grew up with it. When
she tells her stories--and she is a professional story teller, you know--they
just don't ring true: she lacks something essential and it is hard for me to
put my finger on it. But her purposes of
entertainment are different from mine.
In my story,
for what it is worth, what cuts to the quick is not so much those great events
which loom up out of the people who were alive all around me and still stand
like vast clouds of gloom, and also as filters through which the light of
everything else is seen and felt; but the little personal details. They are strange poetic conceits woven into
the fabric of my life, probably as much responsible for my failures as for what
little successes I have had. Sometimes I
have told these stories, many of them recreated and set within much earlier
periods of time than when they actually occurred: stories of intellectual and
moral awakening, as though they belonged to a time when I was under ten years
of age, when they happened with different characters and in different setting
years later at university or afterwards.
The voices become muffled then, too, through the infantile and
adolescent squeaks and squeals of what was probably less innocent than it
seems. My own role as bumbling fool or
as mischievous imp masks more painful memories—perhaps some that creep through
the darkness without my own awareness.
What does
something like this stand for? One
night, studying late in my dormitory at the small undergraduate college I went
to in the mid-1950s, as I read books and took notes, playfully, unconsciously I
dipped my pen into a glass of water; at most I was aware only of the different
colors that swirled around. No one else
was there. Then it seemed I dozed off,
awoke in a groggy way, and drank the liquid in the glass. Looking at the near empty tumbler, it struck
me that all those inks would poison me and I would be dead very soon. Should I try to call for help, ask someone to
phone for an ambulance, or attempt to vomit away what I could? It was some holiday when most people had gone
home and for some unknown reason I had decided to stay there and catch up with
work. Instead of panicking, I lay down
on the bed, closed my eyes, and hoped the end would come peacefully and
quietly. The next morning, out of habit
I did my ablutions, went down to the dining hall, had breakfast and chatted
with a few class mates. Later in the
day, the memory of the water glass full of ink came back to me. The words “good luck” were all that could be
thought of. But that is a meaningless statement.
Or another
little event. At the end of my second
year, having made the decision to be an English Major and not concentrate on
History as I had always planned to do, I went to a gathering organized by the
department of new and old students, held at the home of the professor who influenced
my choice. The room was crowded, noisy,
and dimly lit. As usual, I slid around
the edges of the clumps of young men and women who were there, most of whom I recognized
but only a few of whom had names I could recall, and listened to parts of their
conversations. As the party broke up, I
went back to the dorm alone, walking quickly because there were tears forming
and a deep black hole in my consciousness.
Still alone in my room, the tears came out, and the darkness made itself
into a hammer that kept knocking me, saying that it was impossible for me to be
like those others: they knew so much, had read all the great poets, novels, dramas
and essayists, and they just have grown up in families that were literary and
cultured, gone to schools that emphasized ideas and intelligent conversations—there
was no chance I could ever catch up with them.
But I had made
my decision. The only thing to do, I
said to myself, was try to read as much as possible over the summer months and
come back with some small degree of knowledge that would help get me through the
next two years of study. After that, who
can imagine? Though I still and to work
in the dress factory in Jersey City, nevertheless I spent as much time as possible
going through the authors the others had talked about. Then when September rolled around and the
train took me back to the little rural valley where the school was, I prepared
myself for all the disappointments of being too far out of the world these
other students belonged to and for the mockery of the lecturers, and so for
inevitable failure. In the first week of
term, the head of department called all the English Majors together for some
announcement, and so there was another gathering at his house, with tea and
cakes and noisy talk. Yet this time, as
I lurked about, standing at the edge of conversations, it suddenly struck me
that even the senior student and some of the younger lecturers, at least, were
all phonys. They had read only the
excerpts in the anthologies and the few books on the syllabus. I had spent four months not only reading all
of the Spenser’s Fairy Queen, the
whole corpus of Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained,
and dozens of other long and difficult works, but also many shorter collections
of poems, stories, plays and essays. And
I could remember them, with ideas floating up into my mind, even though, the
truth is, I could only make conversations in my head or comment on the opinions
of the others in imaginary dialogues.
It would
still be a long time before I dared speak aloud, other than to answer specific
questions in class. When I look back on
some of the essays I submitted, where the mark received was an A, I am astounded,
because if they had been written for me when I became a lecturer, I might give
them a C or C+ at best. To this day, I
don’t know what that means. These are
mysteries which confounded and still confound any attempt to measure myself
against colleagues that have come and
gone. For as remarked earlier in these
little fragments of an autobiography, mostly the world makes no sense to me.
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