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Snippets

The Trump Bibles cost $60, but for $40 more, you can get a limited edition signed by Jesus, a recent immigrant from Chiapas, maybe undocumented. But, hey, who’s to know?

My doctor was excited that he had turned 66. He runs sprints competitively, and was now moving into a class where no one was younger and sprightlier than he. He went to a tri-state meet recently and found that he was one of six entered in the sixty-yard race. Three would get medals, and he thought that finally he would get one. He finished fourth and said that the 69-year-old winner was really fast.

I have stepped up my playgoing recently. The other week, I saw Appropriate written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at the Belasco Theatre, which is a Broadway venue. I don’t go to many Broadway productions. Often they are not serious plays but spectacles aimed at tourists. I’ve already seen some of these in the past and am looking for something different now. And this year quite a few potentially interesting plays are opening. A brief description indicated Appropriate was a thought-provoking play, and because I could get tickets on one of my discount services, I went.

The play reminded me again of my ignorance, this time about Broadway and its denizens. I often don’t recognize stage actors even though they have performed repeatedly on Broadway and are significant stars to others. Listed above the title of this play was Sarah Paulson, who received a round of applause when she first entered. I had no idea who she was but apparently many others did.

I had complicated reactions to the play. On one level, it seemed clichéd: Yet another dysfunctional family, this one set in a former plantation home in the southeast Arkansas of 2011. However, it transcended the usual clichés. It was not only well-written and well-acted, it also had shocking twists that made me wonder how well we can know someone else and how we should react to the skeletons in our family’s closets.

Other than a brief description I had read of it, I knew nothing about Appropriate before going. Afterwards I read Jesse Green’s New York Times review. It was an unusual one. He said that a decade ago when the play opened at a smaller theater, he had given it a scathing review—“neither understanding nor enjoyment were forthcoming,” he had written. Now he was giving it a rave, and he felt he had to explain why. He said that the playwright’s rewriting had sharpened the focus of the play as had the direction by Lila Neugebaur. He also praised the “daredevil cast,” but he said that these improvements only partly explained his present reaction. “Perhaps this does: Playwrights who show us things we are reluctant to see may have to teach us, over time, how to see it. And we must be willing to have our eyes opened. I guess I’ve changed at least that much in 10 years of reviewing, and Jacobs-Jenkins is part of it.”

I was not entirely sure what the playwright was trying to tell us. I know that I have sometimes had an intense reaction to a play or movie. Often, however, this has been highly personal, and I did not expect others to respond in the same way. Perhaps Green meant something like what has happened to me with books: I try to read a classic and give up. But after time goes by, I pick up the novel again, and understand why it has been thought marvelous. Moby Dick comes to mind. (I am still waiting for this to happen with War and Peace. Three times I have tried and have yet to feel its magnificence.) For whatever the reason, some books were not right for me when I first attempted them but became so later in life. (On the other hand, there are books that I thought good when first read but later did not think highly of. I read some early Hemingway right after college and enjoyed it, but when I tried to reread those early novels decades later, I found them embarrassingly adolescent.) In any event, although I might not be as effusive in my praise as Jesse Green, Appropriate is worth seeing, at least with discount tickets. And it will produce a reaction from you.

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It Was So Age-Inappropriate What I Read

My grade and high schools must have had libraries, but I have little memory of them. I certainly don’t remember any controversies surrounding what books they should or should not shelve. On the other hand, I have many memories of the Mead Public Library, the facility that served the entire town of 45,000. I went there obsessively. It was a two-story building with the adult section on the entrance floor and the children’s books upstairs.

I gave little thought to who or how it was decided what books were in the children’s library. The decision, no doubt, was made by the librarians as to what was age appropriate. Appropriateness, I would guess, had to do with reading ability. Third graders were not ready for War and Peace or Descartes. Such books would be in the adult section.

Now, however, books are kept from children not just because of vocabulary, complexity, or length. Instead, the books in many places are segregated because the subject is not considered age-appropriate or, as an Arkansas statute says, because the book will be “harmful” to the young reader or even because it may make a reader “uncomfortable.”

Take Heather Has Two Mommies by Lesléa Newman. It has been frequently removed from shelves for being age-inappropriate, but it is written with a simple vocabulary and structure with innocent, colorful illustrations. It is not age-inappropriate for first and second graders because it is too difficult to read. Instead, some adults insist it is age-inappropriate because of its subject matter. The book readily accepts as normal a same-sex relationship, although nothing in the book states that Heather’s mothers have sex. Is this age inappropriate? The answer should be no.

If children are asking about a topic, a book in age-appropriate language is not inappropriate. It is only natural for curious kids to wonder why they have a mother and father while another child has two mommies or only one parent or only a grandmother. Books written at a suitable language level about divorce, single motherhood, and untimely death are appropriate for kids who wonder about such things. The same is true for a family with two mothers or fathers. Heather has been banned not because young’uns are not inherently interested in the topic but because adults are uncomfortable with it.

Some book removers go further when books for kids deal more directly with sexuality. They maintain that the goal of the authors and librarians is to groom or indoctrinate children. If the fear is that schoolkids will be transformed into  gay or trans or nonbinary people, it’s just plain silly…worse, ignorant. On the other hand, these books introduce the concept that gay, lesbian, trans, nonbinary, and other queer folk should be accepted into the community, should be free from legal and societal discrimination, should be treated with the same respect as we treat others. (I recall there being something in the Bible about loving thy neighbor as thyself.) However, if that’s the kind of dangerous indoctrination the censors fear, they may be right.  

Attacking books because of their sexuality might mask broader concerns than just gay sex.  What comes to mind is what Masha Gessen wrote about Vladimir Putin in The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. When Putin feels politically vulnerable, he launches anti-gay attacks. He has produced his own version of don’t-say-gay laws by enacting legislation that bans “homosexual propaganda.” Putin has also anticipated those loyal Americans who don’t want topics taught that might make school kids uncomfortable. Russia under Putin “protects” kids not merely by eliminating reference to homosexuality. He has also banned “any mention of death, violence, suicide, domestic abuse, unhappiness, and, really, life itself.” In putting in place these restrictions, Putin has said that he is defending “traditional values.” As far as I am aware, however, he has not said that he was promoting “family values.” When he is criticized, Putin has been a master at diverting that criticism by attacking gays.

When I hear concerns that books are in the library for purposes of  “indoctrinating” children, I think back to what I recall of my elementary school reading. I remember few of the books I consumed except for a series which I labeled in my mind the “orange biographies” because they all had orange bindings. Of appropriate length and vocabulary for a third grader, they were hero books with an emphasis on the childhoods of the likes of Thomas Edison or Andrew Jackson, but they also contained enough about the subject’s adulthoods for me to learn a bit of history. These books have stayed with me on some level, forming some of my background knowledge about various personages and historical eras. Looked at another way, however, they were books that indoctrinated.

Although the spouse remembers an orange biography about the first woman doctor, almost all were about men. Although there might have been biographies about Booker T. Washington or Washington Carver, almost all were about whites. They were about “great” white men with little, if any, suggestion that “ordinary” people did important things. They were all about Americans as if “foreigners” could not or did not contribute to a better world. The books were a subliminal indoctrination into the American myth that any American child (at least any white male) could become a great person—just work hard and live right and, perhaps, be a little adventurous. The subliminal corollary to this belief, however, is that if you or your parents have not become rich, are not powerful, or are not important, it is your or their fault. (David Maraniss reports in A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Family that the playwright Arthur Miller thought Americans had the tendency to blame themselves for economic shortcomings and not the economic system. He theorizes that this proclivity to blame oneself prevented America from ever facing a real challenge to the economic system.)

So yes. Reading indoctrinates. By using a much less charged synonym, however, we also know that reading teaches. That is, of course, why education should present all sorts of information and all sorts of views to children. Presentation of only one viewpoint might be indoctrination; presenting more than that gives a child a true opportunity to learn.

(The fear by conservatives of indoctrination in our schools is not new, but the concern over subject matter has not remained constant. I found it amusing when I read that William “Big Bill” Thompson ran for Chicago mayor in the 1920s on an America First platform charging that the English monarchy was planting pro-British propaganda in the Chicago schools. Sarah Churchwell, “America First” in Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Myth America: Historians Take the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.)

Concluded June 19

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Where Have All the Writers Gone?

          Good writing is good writing is good writing. Or at least we might think that, but perhaps not really. I have enjoyed a certain writer at one stage of my life but not at another. Of course, sometimes a book was too hard when I was young, but I later saw greatness in it. Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter fall into that category. Assigned in high school, they were both dreary chores and probably unfinished ones. Decades later I tried again and realized why they were classics. They are great books.

          Sometimes my appreciation for a book has depended not on the quality or difficulty of a book or a writer, but on my own life cycles. Dickens is not hard to understand, but I hated and then avoided reading him when young. Then, because the spouse had to read it for a Victorian literature class she was taking, I picked up Pickwick Papers, and its laugh-out-loud funniness got me to go to his other books. Each summer for two decades when I had more time for novels, I eagerly read one of his books. I placed Dickens as the second greatest or most important writer in English after Shakespeare. Then, perhaps fifteen years later, I sought to reread Bleak House, a book I had regarded as marvelous. I couldn’t do it. This did not make me think that I had misjudged Dickens or the book but only convinced me that I was at a different stage in my reading life and Dickens did not now fit into it. I once read, for example, that you should read Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel, that Thomas Wolfe) in your youth or you won’t be able to read him at all. So far, I have not read him, and youth is far behind me.

          Sometimes I recognize that a book must be great but does not suit me. I have read War and Peace three times (you are entitled to think that I must be crazy) and I have never understood its touted excellence. I accept the world’s opinion that it is great, but not for me. Some books I have tried to reread and wondered why they were ever considered good. For example, I plunged into Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms recently and thought that it was amateurish and simply awful.

But what I have been thinking about recently are those writers who were considered good or important and clearly had an impact on “letters” but who fell out of favor while other comparable writers continue to be read. Sometimes such writers “disappear” for a while and then seem to reemerge. Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Wilkie Collins may fall into such a waxing and waning category. Others, perhaps George Gissing and John P. Marquand, just ebb.

          So my game for you: Name the ten, or twenty-five, or even fifty best or most important American writers of the twentieth century. Did your list include the writers who won all of these: a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a National Book Award for a different novel, and two Pulitzers for drama? It’s a trick question. There is only one who won them all, but your list probably did not include him: Thornton Wilder. We overlook him even though many of my generation read the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey, an innovative, powerful work. And many of us have seen or read or even acted in his innovative, powerful play that won a Pulitzer: Our Town. On the other hand, I have never seen his other Pulitzer-Prize winning play, The Skin of our Teeth, although I would have liked to have seen the original Broadway cast of it, which starred Frederic March and Tallulah Bankhead. Some years back, I found that the Barrett Friendly Library had a copy Wilder’s The Eighth Day, which won the National Book Award four decades after Bridge won the Pulitzer. It is very good, and that made me wonder why he wasn’t read more these days. Even so, I did not seek out more of his output or reread Bridge, and perhaps it is telling that I could not recently remember the title of The Eighth Day nor could I tell you a lick about it other than I remember it is a good book. These thoughts came back when I plucked Theophilus North, Wilder’s last novel, published when he was 76, out of a leave-one-take-one book kiosk. I enjoyed reading it and read more about Wilder, an astonishing man. In addition to the Pulitzers and the National Book Award, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Letters and the Presidential Medal for Freedom. He knew many languages and his translation of Ibsen’s A Doll House was running on Broadway when Our Town opened. He wrote The Matchmaker, which had a long Broadway run, and its adapted version, Hello, Dolly, played even longer. He wrote a famous screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock, and his friends included both Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein. And with all of these accomplishments few of us would think to place him on our list of great American writers.

          Theophilus North is set in 1926 and reads as if it is a slightly fictionalized segment of the author’s life. In the summer of 1926, Theophilus, our narrator, a graduate of Yale, has left his teaching job at a prestigious prep school in New Jersey (Wilder had taught at Lawrenceville and graduated from Yale) and heads off to Newport, Rhode Island, near where Theophilus (and Wilder) had been stationed in World War I. Importing archeological ideas from ancient Troy, North tells us his theory of nine cities of Newport—early settlers, seaport, playground for the rich, local workers, and so on. North spends the summer teaching tennis to and tutoring youngsters and reading to the elderly. Each chapter is a short story, with some of the same characters popping up in many of them. Each story has a similar structure. A problem or a mystery crops up, which Theophilus resolves. Although those helped are grateful, he always rejects pay or any hint of future consideration. The book explores the various posited Newport cities but does not have any central plot or moral or theme. Each chapter could stand on its own. This made for satisfactory, episodic reading. A chapter a day is the way I approached it.

          As I was reading, I kept thinking that Theophilus North reminded me of something else that I read, but at first could not place it. It was not the dissection of a time or place as in Updike’s Rabbit novels. It was not the intertwined short stories of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. It was not his contemporary or semi-contemporary authors writing about American themes, like O’Hara, Bellow, or DeLillo. Instead I realized it reminded me of another episodic book that I am currently reading: The Second Rumpole Omnibus by John Mortimer, a collection containing three Rumpole books that had been separately published. Each Rumpole book consists of short stories, but, as with Theophilus North, characters recur and incidents from one story are referred to in another. The Rumpole stories are similar to Theohilus not only because of the first-person narration, butalso because at the beginning of each story a problem or mystery is presented and by the end the situation is neatly resolved by the narrator. Both North and Rumpole, the well-worn barrister, have pockets of erudition;­­ North has a vast knowledge of literature and languages and Rumpole knows bloodstains, Wordsworth, and judges. But given the choice, I would take Rumpole over North. Wilder has created a character that seems too good to be true, while one can imagine Rumpole existing because, although an idealist, he is flawed. North is a prig; Horace Rumpole has self-deprecatory humor and a wife who at least slightly terrifies him. I would like to have a glass or three of Chateau Fleet Street at Pomeroy’s with Rumpole because I might not only enjoy the conversation, but I also might learn something more about human nature. I can’t imagine having a drink with North unless I wanted to learn more about him.

          And while I am in awe of all that Thornton Wilder accomplished, I am also in awe of all that John Mortimer has done.