It was in public high school that I became conscious for the first time of a type of person that we would now call an intellectual. In those days, the word for such people collectively was “intelligentsia,” borrowed from the Russian and scarcely used anymore, as though the Bolshevik Revolution, in eliminating the social grouping, had consigned the term to “the ashcan of history”—a favorite receptacle. “Intelligentsia” had included bohemians—artists and musicians, people like Pasternak’s parents—as well as teachers, nihilists, narodniki (those inspired by a mission to “go to the people”), doctors, sometimes combining several of these vocations in one person, as in Turgenev’s Bazarov. It was the enlightened class in society. The characters typically found in Chekhov—army officers, country doctors, small landowners fond of musing on large ideas, students—all belong to the intelligentsia, whatever their occupation or lack of it. They are an epiphenomenon of increased education, hence choiceless in a sense and rather sad; the intellectual, on the other hand, is self-chosen, even when produced in quantity. The term took hold in the thirties, encouraged by Marxism and the Depression. In Garfield High School, on the edge of the Madrona district in Seattle, probably neither term was familiar in the year 1925, but the thing existed and was recognized.
Like most big-city high schools, ours had a star system, expressive of the fact that we were a juvenile mass society. The biggest and most powerful—galaxies distant from a speck of a freshman like me—were the football stars (Larry Judson); then came the track stars (the fleet Bill Albin); then the basketball aces (for some reason less glamorous, although a cheering section of us, wearing beanies and waving pennants, accompanied them to whatever high-school gym they played in, all the way to Ballard even, or West Seattle). Besides the athletes, there were the thespians (Larry Judson again, in a brown business suit, and black-haired Kathleen Hoyt, who had an “English” voice, very affected, wore a tartan cloak, and was coached by her mother) and the literary lights who edited the school paper (the famed Mary Brinker, who married Mr. Post, the English teacher, and thus became Mary Brinker Post, and tiny Estare Crane, of the single black side spit curl, who married the college wit Mark Sullivan, but of him more anon).
Garfield had no academic stars, awing the rest of us with their straight A’s. I don’t think grades played any part in the politics of the school, which may be why I let mine sink to D-minus even in French and English, usually my best subjects. My grandparents—my parents had died of the flu in 1918—thought it was because, after two years of deprivation under the Ladies of the Sacred Heart at Forest Ridge Convent, my head had been turned by boys. No doubt they were partly right, since when an end was decreed to my time at Garfield and I was sent the next fall to Annie Wright Seminary, an Episcopal boarding school for girls in Tacoma, my marks at once shot up.
But boys and their effect are not what I want to talk about here (I was not allowed to “step out” with them anyway); rather, I want to trace the onset of intellectual interests in me that I can place during that year. At first this was merely curiosity, awakened by the discovery of what appeared to be a new species of being. We had not had any intellectuals in the convent, unless I count the Mistress of Studies. There had been none in my family (although my father, with his invalidism and irregular law practice, might have qualified for the old intelligentsia), and I would not find any at Annie Wright. This does not mean that brains and scholastic achievement were undervalued in those schools—almost the contrary. In the convent, medals for excellence in our subjects were awarded every month like the wide blue, green, and pink moiré ribbons some of us got to wear over our left shoulder and across the chest for good conduct, and books were distributed at the end of term as prizes for scholarship. I don’t recall prizes at Annie Wright, but we had a number of coveted academic privileges and honors, the crowning one being to be chosen valedictorian at commencement, which was almost as good as having been May Queen.
The quality of the teaching both at Forest Ridge and at Annie Wright was greatly superior to what was offered at Garfield (this cannot have been a matter of better pay, since the nuns received only a cell and unenviable board), and the high quality of the instruction was sensed by the pupils, even the dull ones, as a special kind of electricity given off by certain teachers. There was nothing of the sort at Garfield. Maybe some of the teachers were feared; most of them, I felt, were despised. But at the convent, as at Annie Wright, a few were the objects, almost, of a cult. There was much vying to be noticed by them, sit by them at table, have them (at the Seminary) as chaperons for shopping trips and playgoing, and these were not the most indulgent or youngest and prettiest teachers but the most stiff, sallow, severe. To the more formidable Madames in the convent (Mère Bartlett, in particular, with her shadow of a mustache) legends of prowess clung—how they had been educated at the Sorbonne, how they had read all the forbidden classics on the Index under a special dispensation from the archbishop—and around the more austere women in the Seminary (e.g., Mrs. Hiatt, the widow of a cleric, who wore a gold watch and chain) we wove fables of loss of fortune that had lowered them to the sad point of teaching us.
Of course, the closed, single-sex atmosphere of boarding school encouraged such an attitude in the girls. At the convent the piano lesson, chaperoned by an old lay nun dozing in a chair, was our unique encounter with a man outside the confessional. At Annie Wright the only males we saw during the week were Mr. Bell, the chaplain, who sometimes took morning service; the janitor, an incomprehensible old Lancashireman; the gardener, an incomprehensible old Yorkshireman; and Major Mathews, the riding master (married). Having no better food for our hungry imaginations, naturally we romanticized our teachers’ mental acquirements and surely graded some of them higher than they deserved. Even so, the comparatively low esteem in which the teachers at Garfield were held seems rather remarkable. It must have been related to the lack of attention given to high marks, though which was cause and which effect is not clear.
The “exception” teacher at Garfield, I gather, had been the above-mentioned Mr. Post. He was already in the past tense when I entered, having left a summer or so before, but he was still spoken of with reverence by boys and girls who had not had the luck to have him in class. What he had taught in the way of English I never found out, but I think he owed his unusual status not so much to his classroom performance as to having been adviser to the newspaper and the yearbook—media functions that connected him with the reigning star system of the school. I picture him as a sort of coach to Garfield teams of budding journalists, some of whom had moved on to the U.—the University of Washington—across the canal; some, like Mark Sullivan, were already “making their letter” on campus by editing the college newspaper, yearbook, humorous magazine. Certainly Mr. Post had the kind of popularity enjoyed by a football coach, and, just as a Husky quarterback trained on Seattle playfields could aspire to be named All-America and enter the Hall of Fame, so a member of one of Mr. Post’s winning high-school teams could hope to have a story accepted by College Humor while still an undergraduate and eventually make it to the Seattle Post-lntelligencer or Colonel Blethen’s Times (our afternoon paper, the Star, was lacking in prestige), or even go East and become a columnist like Hearst’s O. O. McIntyre or the real Mark Sullivan, the famous pundit.
I have only to summon up in memory the hushed study halls of Forest Ridge and Annie Wright, with the surveillante, or teacher-on-duty, raised above us at her desk on the dais, I have only to see morning chapel, with the girls in dark-blue serge uniforms and black net veils, like widows, intoning “Oui, je le crois,” or else in Episcopalian middy blouses and bareheaded tuning up on “Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear, I nothing lack if Thou art near,” to admit that an intellectual cannot be the product of an élite education. Rough plebeian democracy is the breeding ground of the class of intellectuals, springing up like the dragon’s teeth to fight and kill each other down to the last five men before they can found the city.
I think of evening chapel at the Seminary: The day girls are gone; the organ plays; the boarders stand up in their poorly fitting colored-silk dinner uniforms to sing the dirge for the day (“Now the day is o-o-ver, night is draw-ing ni-igh,” my favorite), whereupon our principal, Miss Adelaide Preston, dark-eyed, in a polka-dotted dress, goes down on her stout knees at her prayer desk and clears her wattled throat to begin the Collect for Aid against Perils, “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord,” in her deep New England voice. Stubby Miss Preston is a Smith woman; her favorite hymn is No. 117 (Bunyan’s “He who would valiant be”); she cries easily, like her billowy blue-eyed counterpart at Forest Ridge, Madame McQueenie, the acting Reverend Mother; they are both fond of taking repentant girls onto their slippery laps—Miss Preston’s, usually silken in the evening, being worse. Now our voices follow hers in the General Confession: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” How true! Chapel and study hall, Church of Rome and P.E. merge. I listen to the scratch of pens, the bell of the surveillante, the soughing of the organ, the creaking of pews, and I could weep for it all, for the waste of it.
Those hardworking women, our teachers, not always brilliant themselves, gave a sound education, tried to inculcate good morals and a respect for excellence, and accomplished hardly more than a finishing school. What they taught (like the art of making buttonholes, which we had to master in sewing class in the convent) was never used afterward. Or only by that tiny percentage who were going to teach school themselves or find some other employment for Boyle’s law or the subjunctive after French verbs of saying, thinking, and the like, when uncertainty is conveyed. Annie Wright prepared you for college—that was the idea—but you did not need any special preparation to go to the University of Washington, and in my year, 1929, only two of us went on to an institution that required college boards. The Ladies of the Sacred Heart made no pretense of college preparation; they had a so-called college department, consisting of two years, for the tall, blue-ribboned older girls, and that was it. What both schools imparted to their graduates was something like old-fashioned “accomplishments,” but these were mostly out of date (those buttonholes!) or bizarrely irrelevant to the future lying ahead. Was Latin prosody a grace that would sit prettily on a girl who was going to marry a lumber executive? And the pas de chat and correct ballet positions we were taught at the convent, the schottische and polka we got at the Seminary—how were we going to use them? In the years of the tango and the Charleston, we were learning clog dancing.
I will explain. A superior education, such as, on the whole, we got in those private schools, can only be used by those it was not intended for. By the fluke of having gone—for a single year—to a big-city high school, I happened to be one of them. The point of a private school in the U.S.A. is to represent in its curriculum the purest conspicuous waste. Unlike the English public schools, our private schools do not aim to prepare a ruling class to govern. (The exception used to be Groton.) Our usual private schools are not vocational schools even in that remote sense. If there is anything “exclusive” (aside from the cost) in the whole system of private education, it is the exemption of a class of students from evident vocational goals. Some at Annie Wright strove harder for grades than others, but this seemed to be a matter of temperament rather than need. There were no grinds (that I remember) among us. As with high jump and shot put, the act of surpassing rivals in sight-reading a translation was performed for its own sake or for purposes of showing off. I am not saying that there were no professions besides teaching for which Latin could not someday be useful. There was medicine, for instance. In our class at Annie Wright, besides a future French teacher we had a future doctor. Yet if those two girls and I profited from the curriculum, it was through the fact of being—or becoming—anomalies.
Just to make it clear: I am in favor of the teaching of Latin and Greek, plus one modern language, on the secondary-school level or even earlier. It is probably the best way of teaching history—Western history, to which as a nation we can claim an inheritance. But I believe that this has no meaning, even as a utopian dream, unless the entire nation’s children are given the “basics” of a culture we all share, as Jews and unbelievers, like it or not, once shared the culture of Christendom. When the classics are offered as ornaments or status symbols for the few, they become otiose, and this happened at some point during the Coolidge era The public high school of a New England mill town—say, Fall River, Massachusetts—on the retirement of its old-maid classics teacher ceased offering Latin and Greek to the progeny of millworkers and thus obliged the owners who wanted “advantages” for their children to send them away to school. (This was a sign, evidently, of an impoverishment of our culture as a whole. It is the same with food: in countries with a superior cuisine—France, Italy, China—allowing for regional variations based on climate, everybody eats the same diet, though the rich have more of it and more often; in nations famous for bad cooking—England, the U.S.—rich and poor have utterly different food cultures.)
For Latin to be rescued from oblivion (to which even the Church has relegated it), there would have to be general agreement on its absolute value and desirability—not just some faint persuasion of its utility, such as the argument now put forward that it can help teach ghetto children English, however true that contention may be. The average intellectual today has no Latin; indeed, he may have no language other than English. Though the class of intellectuals can trace its ancestry to the clerks and pedants of the medieval and Renaissance “schools,” learning is no longer an earmark—it is optional, and the lack of it avoids confusion with the horde of academics. Here is a better criterion: an intellectual, as opposed to a dutiful classroom performer but like the “upstart clerks” of Elizabethan times, is always self-made. Finally, it is a mistake to think that an intellectual is required to be intelligent; there are occasions when the terms seem to be almost antonyms.
But to return to Garfield. Instead of study hall, there were school assemblies held in an auditorium, though not every morning, and sometimes the school band played. Since you were expected to study at home, you did not have your own desk here in which you kept your books and equipment. We each had a locker for that purpose, and we hung our coats, scarves, and so on, in a hall lined with hooks. I cannot remember what provision there was for overshoes and rubbers; it hardly ever snowed in Seattle, but it rained a lot.
Nor can I remember where and how we ate. I think some brought school lunches, to be supplemented with milk from the school cafeteria, and some brought money and bought food there, and a few bought more glamorous and unwholesome food in nearby eating places catering to the fast crowd. Certainly we did not go home for lunch. And what strikes me now, as I look back at that big high school, is a sense of being adrift, having no settled place.
At table we had our established places. A Seminary table consisted of ten or twelve girls moving every second week to sit with a different teacher, till the top table, headed by the vice-principal, Miss Justine Browne, was reached, after which new tables were formed. By what sort of shuffle those combinations were made up, nobody knew. Why the “two Gins” (Virginia Barnett and Virginia Kellogg) were sometimes put at the same table, although roommates, while I repeatedly drew one of my bêtes noires—a pale, spectacled, black-haired, sneering underclassman by the name of Catherine McPherson—was beyond understanding. In general, if there was a principle to be discerned, it was the negative one of keeping friends apart, to insure that Miss Preston’s golden rule of M.C.G. (Make Conversation General) would be maintained. In the Forest Ridge refectory, conversation was limited by having to be in French, by Lent and Advent, by retreats (when the only utterance permitted was “Passe le sel”), and by sudden, arbitrary silences imposed by the surveillante’s clapper. There, too, our place at table was not chosen but assigned. It was all decided for us and sealed by our napkin ring, marking the spot like the name tapes sewn to our clothing. Similarly, with our library book, assigned to us once a week for our “free-time” reading, and with the precise hour of our weekly bath (which we took under a canvas shift, so as not to have to see our bodies), we occupied the station to which God or some Madame in her infinite wisdom had seen fit to call us. Garfield, by contrast, was a churning millrace of apparent free will.
Here the classrooms were long, and we sat in rows, rather than around an oak table, seminar style, as we had at the convent. In those long classrooms, the teacher, up front by the blackboard, seemed a great way off, and it was possible not to be called on if you made yourself small. I was quite often unprepared. In freshman English, we had the Old Testament and “Ivanhoe”—both boring. Instead of the English history and French history, with kings and favorites, that I had learned by heart in the convent, Garfield started us with World History, which did not have any interesting people in it—nobody like Warwick the Kingmaker, Jack Cade and Perkin Warbeck, or Ganelon, the traitor. The result is that I can still name you the rulers of England and quite a few of their prime ministers, down to whiskered Lord Palmerston—the Capets and Valois did not stick with me so well. At the convent, in eighth-grade French, I had been memorizing Victor Hugo (“Cette étoile de flamme, cet astre du jour, cette fleur de l’âme, s’appelle l’amour”); Garfield’s intermediate French was all exercises and grammar.
At home, having finished “Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” I felt I had outgrown my grandfather’s library. “Pickwick Papers,” one of his great favorites, put me off Dickens for about twenty years. I loved “A Tale of Two Cities” (when it was read aloud to us during sewing class in the convent by a tiny, Irish-accented Madame), and I liked some of “Oliver Twist,” but I could not abide “Boz” and refused to open anything with a name like “Martin Chuzzlewit.” In my school crowd, insofar as I had one, nobody read; our entire mental apparatus was bent on grading boys and girls in terms of appearance, dress, antecedents, though the last category was not too important unless it conferred mystery. Our curiosity, such as it was, centered on a white-faced fat boy who had entered with us and was said to be a “morphodite.”
Except for the few boys who played musical instruments, it was unusual for Garfield’s students to have “interests.” There was a girl who painted—a dainty blonde named Ebba Rapp, who wore uneven hemlines and a jabot—and I went to her house for her to do my portrait, a pastel head-and-shoulders that my grandmother kept for a long time. But I don’t remember ever entering our Seattle art museum; nor did I go to a concert till much later, when they had “Symphonies Under the Stars” in the stadium at the university, with Michel Piastro conducting. Yet Seattle was an artistic town. It had a Ladies’ Music Club, run by my Great-Aunt Rosie, who had gone to Vancouver once with Chaliapin, the Cornish School of drama and art (which also offered eurythmics), a stock company, and would soon add a repertory theatre, run by Mr. and Mrs. Burton James. But none of this seems to have “related” to the adolescent population, which entertained itself by having sodas and sundaes, swimming and diving in the various lakes, playing popular records, and going with dates to the movies—something my grandparents would not let me do.
I could go to the movies with them, sitting in loge seats—a torment; I did not wish to look “different.” I could go to the Saturday matinée of the stock company with my grandmother and one of her sisters, go shopping with her in her electric, take a family ride in the Chrysler around Lake Washington after Sunday lunch, pick out “Marcheta” to myself on the piano, persuade my married uncle’s friends to hear me recite “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” play practical jokes on the telephone (“Have you got Prince Albert in a can? . . . Well, let him out”), and, once or twice a year, go to a tea dance at the DeMolay Temple (Masonic) in ribbed silk stockings with a coerced partner who, like me, had never learned to dance. I could send in coupons for samples of nail polish, freckle cream, bust-developer from the cheap magazines I read; put Cutex nail polish on my mouth in the guise of lipstick when I thought my grandmother was downtown; make messes in the kitchen trying overambitious candies like marshmallows—a sticky, gelatinous mixture hopefully cut in cubes and rolled in floury sugar. I had dropped piano lessons on leaving the convent; the only sport I knew was swimming (breaststroke, sidestroke, overarm sidestroke; no crawl); I was unaware of masturbation—except maybe for boys. In short, I had no real occupation, and my sole real interest—the stage—required an audience.
At Garfield I tried out faithfully for skits and playlets that were done outside class hours under the coaching of a teacher. These were independent of the regular school play (“Dulcy” that year, by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly) and were more like what are now called workshops—held in a disused classroom in the school basement without lights, scenery, or costumes, and with only a faithful few signing up for them regularly. I hardly know how to tell this, but one afternoon, in a sketch we were doing—for practice, with only the teacher watching—I was cast as Larry Judson’s wife. Yes, the captain of our football team. He was a senior, with dark-reddish curly brown hair, reddish-brown eyes, and well-cut manly features, possibly a dimple in the sturdy chin. If I remember right, he played end, my favorite position. What possessed the teacher to cast me, a freshman and only thirteen, opposite Garfield’s idol, with whom I was secretly in love? And that was not all. In the playlet he had to put his arm around me and hold me to his chest, though the “heart” he pressed me to was a little too high for my head to rest against without stretching—I had not yet got my full growth.
But I truly did play his wife; all at once I am completely sure of this, for I have recalled an odd detail. That dark-brown suit, almost chocolate-colored—a real man’s suit—smelled when he “clasped me to his heart.” It was not an armpit reek of stale sweat announcing that the suit needed a trip to the cleaner’s; it was more a closet smell, as though the suit had been hanging quite a while in an airless space. And it was somehow a mature smell, reminding me now of the collective B.O. of my grandmother’s clothes when I got a whiff of them all together in her closet. It belongs to the aging process; I have noticed it on my own clothes in these last years when they have spent a winter in an unopened closet without benefit of mothballs. Maybe it has something to do with the oily or tallowy secretions of the sebaceous glands. Could my “husband” have been wearing a middle-aged man’s suit? That might have been passed on to him from an uncle who had died? I try to recall whether it was two-piece or three-piece. Did I encounter any vest buttons in our hug? I am not sure. All I can bring back is a sense of the color and heaviness of the cloth, which put age on him, giving him a sedate, settled look.
Now something else comes back to me that I had entirely forgotten. Larry Judson was Jewish. I do not know how or when I learned it—certainly quite a bit after we played husband and wife. I think a Jewish friend told me, as if it were a thing I should have known already. To me, though, it was a stunning surprise. “Larry Judson?” I was shocked. I was a quarter Jewish myself and I had already had a Jewish love object—my second cousin, Burton Gottstein, in his sophomore year at the university, velvet-eyed and lustrous as a black pearl. At the convent I had decided that the degree of consanguinity (we were actually first cousins once removed) could not prevent our marrying in the Church if he would consent to take instruction. Now I had left the Church, so Larry’s Jewishness should not have bothered me on that score: no need to be married by a priest. Anyway, marriage was no longer in my mind—a sign, surely, that I was maturing. Just worshipping him from not too far off was enough. Why, then, was I so taken aback? It was a sort of disillusionment, like learning the real names of one’s favorite movie stars. I could have slain the relative who brought me the tidings that Ricardo Cortez was plain Jake Krantz. On the screen he would never be the same for me. In Larry’s case, though, I was able to accept the undeception. The suit and the mature smell, I guess, had prepared me for swallowing a dose of reality. In my soul, without knowing it, I was getting ready to be sorry for the boy-man.
At that point I had not given much thought to Jews, or to what it meant to be one. There were several kinds, evidently (corresponding, I now see, to the degree of assimilation): the kind represented by my grandmother and her sisters; another kind, represented by their brother, Uncle Elkan Morganstern, and his huge-breasted wife, Aunt Hennie, whose girls were too fat and whose boys at the age of confirmation went through some rite called the bar mitzvah with presents and a party afterward, where you got sweetbreads and mushrooms in patty shells, cheese puffs, and Crab Louis; and a still stranger kind, in funny clothes, whom I used to look at from the Madrona streetcar, which went by their houses—the poor Orthodox Jews from the Pale.
In the Pale, which Larry’s parents probably came from, little boys wore long dark trousers and resembled little men. Philip Rahv used to tell me, years later, of how he had felt marked as an immigrant in a Providence, Rhode Island, grade school by the Old Country long trousers his mother dressed him in. And I remember how Philip used to call my five-year-old son, Reuel, “little man.” In 1925-26, in Seattle, I could have known nothing about the Pale and its customs. Yet on the broad porches of those multifamily dwellings—wooden tenements—that I stared at from the streetcar I had seen quite young bearded men wearing shiny black hats and thick, dark suits, and old, bearded men in black skullcaps and their undershirts, and, no doubt, pale boys, too, looking old and solemn for their size. And, nearer home, our next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Gerber, afflicted with heavy accents, had two long-nosed sons, Len and Sid, who dressed “old” and kept apart from the neighborhood. Unlike my young Uncle Harold and his friends, they were destined for “business,” I heard, as though it were a vocation, like the priesthood. Larry’s brown suit may have spoken to me, in a foreign language that I was nonetheless vaguely able to decipher, of a fate in store for its wearer—a doom of premature manhood already thickening his jowls. That was the price he would have to pay for his parents’ being poor Jews—a price Burt Gottstein, who belonged to “their” best fraternity and would soon join a smart brokerage house, would know nothing about.
I am guessing, of course. All I am certain of is that Larry, our school star, disappeared from my ken as though swallowed up. Maybe his parents moved. My memory of him stops with the suit, the hug, the piteous little “racial” realization framing the whole like a black mourning border. And I remember nothing further of those after-school dramatics. Maybe I ceased to sign up for them, because the teacher failed to give me another leading part. Or spring came and I got interested in the track team, following them to meets in the afternoons, which might have made a “conflict” with the acting workshop: I traded Larry Judson for Bill Albin.
There is another stage performance of my Garfield year, which I do not know where to situate. Perhaps quite early, before Larry and the skit. The problem is that the person it happened to, the heroine of the occasion, has become unrecognizable to me, so that I cannot account for her feelings and behavior. That is not true of the convent: in my slightly spotty blue serge uniform, unrelieved by any good-conduct ribbon, I am my familiar self, younger. But in trying to describe what I can remember of the Garfield time I have been noticing a contradiction. From the record, I know that I was wild about public high, to the point of losing my head and having to be removed by my grandparents. But it does not sound that way, to read my description. I sound scornful. Evidently, the self that felt the attraction of Garfield’s mob scene has been sloughed like a snake’s skin. Or brutally killed, leaving me, the person I am now, as the sole survivor. “I know not the man,” St. Peter said, denying Jesus, and I can say, with greater truthfulness, of that thirteen-year-old pennant-waver, “I know not the girl.” In what I am about to relate, the dissociation is almost complete, resulting in big patches of amnesia I do not even know what I looked like or what I wore—there are no photographs of that period.
Once upon a time, then, I appeared on the stage at Garfield before a good-sized audience and scored a real success. It was an event, I think, for freshmen, designed to bring out the talents of the entering class—something like “amateur night” in the movie theatres and vaudeville houses of those days, when volunteers mounted the stage to do solo acts and were judged by the amount of applause they received. If I reconstruct it right, you could sing or yodel or tap-dance or play an instrument, such as the banjo, or you could recite, but it had to be something light—nothing on the order of “Lord Ullin’s Daughter.” I had chosen a comic monologue by the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock: “I had a little dog and her name was Alice.” It was meant to be delivered in a doleful, deadpan voice that would make the recitation all the more hilarious. Well, I brought the house down—a slightly untoward surprise (even though I had aspired to it), as I had always thought of my muse as tragic. They clapped and cheered and possibly stamped; if there was a prize, I won it. Then why does a clear recollection of that red-letter day, as if too painful, refuse to reach consciousness?
I can see several answers. First, they were laughing at me, rather than with me, or, as we used to say in boarding school, I was being funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. Perhaps so: the recitation may have succeeded in a partly unintended way, causing an excess of applause. Second, plagiarism. Could I have pretended to have written that skit myself? And then did some teacher confront me with my theft? Possibly. There was a precedent in my history. Back in grade school, I had stolen copiously from Our Sunday Visitor for my prize-winning essay on the Irish in American history. Still, that was different: then I did not know it was wrong; now the uneasiness surrounding the blank in my memory may suggest guilty feelings. Yet a temptation to steal somebody else’s words was not my thing; perhaps I was too conceited for it. So, third, my claque.
Probably the real answer lies there. But to explain I shall have to go back and account for the improbable fact of my having a claque. It was the crowd from Mercer Island, halfway across Lake Washington, whom I had come to know slightly the previous summer through staying with the Berens twins from Forest Ridge. Today, Mercer Island is reached by a bridge and is much like any other outlying section of the city. But in those days you took a ferry to get there; it was rural, and behind its farmland and dark spruce trees rose Seattle’s claim to fame in our geography books—snow-capped Mt. Rainier. Looking across from my grandmother’s tall house on moonlit nights, I saw the moon make a silver path across the black lake water which corresponded with the daytime route of the ferryboat. The band of noisy rooters occupying the first rows of our Garfield auditorium on the day of “Alice” came whooping to school on the ferry every morning and went home by the same means every night—the tooting ride back and forth seemed to have welded them into a vociferous unit like the Anvil Chorus. I shut my eyes and try to see that cheering section individually, but they have stuck together in a lump, like candy in a coat pocket—like their fatal watchword, “Let’s stick together, kids.” In the blur I can pick out only one face, that of Josephine Hooey, their leader: glasses, pale eyes, pale lashes, skin the color of junket, fish mouth. When she laughs, she chortles; her fattish shoulders shake.
Yes, this was the reception committee that had welcomed me to Garfield, where I had thought I would know nobody. From the first day, they had taken me under their wing, showing pride in the act of adoption by trumpeting my convent nickname (“cye,” which they mistook for “Si,” as in “Silas”) whenever they caught sight of me: “There’s Si McCarthy!” “Hey, Si! Hey there, Si!” In the summer, they must have heard the twins greeting me at the ferry, and of course it was the Berens twins, known to most of Mercer Island at least by sight, who were responsible for the bit of red carpet put under my feet at Garfield.
At Forest Ridge, the two girls were boarders, a class ahead of me, but in the summer they lived on the island with their widowed mother, a realtor, who wore a beret at a sporty angle on her prematurely white hair, smoked cigarettes in a holder, and painted big circles of crimson rouge on her cheeks. That summer, they had had me over two or three times to spend the night with them in their bungalow; they were sorry for me, I guess, because I could not win the popularity I coveted (the twins were very popular), or, lacking one parent themselves, they could imagine how it felt to lack two. (In fact, it was not clear whether Mr. Berens had died or whether he had deserted Mrs. Berens; he was never alluded to in my presence, and his relict had all the earmarks of what was then called a grass widow.) I loved staying with the two of them—lively Louise and studious Harriet—going to bed in the starlight on their screened sleeping porch, and I loved the island, which was woodsy and informal even for the West. I was impressed by the knowledge that Mrs. Berens “worked,” unlike other convent mothers, and wore big pearl earrings even around the house. The twins helped with the cleaning and washing up, and I envied them; in my grandmother’s house, I was not trusted to do anything of importance. On Saturday nights there was dancing—or was it a movie?—in a barn down the road, and Mrs. Berens let us go, not even bothering to look in herself as a chaperon.
It must have been on one of those Saturdays that, thanks to the twins, I met my first “man.” His name was Armour Spaulding (which said tennis to me); he was twenty-one and smoked a pipe. One night, in his white oxfords, with the pipe glowing, he walked me home along a path through the woods, under a moon, no doubt, with the dark lake water lapping the shore. Possibly Mrs. Berens had deputized him to escort me home; he may have taken me for older than I was. Anyway, he sounded quite interested in my flow of conversation and courteously drew me out when I hesitated. For about a year I lived on the memory of it, as if on stored-up energy, though I never saw him again, and all I retain of him is the name, the pipe, the shoes, a close-cropped, somewhat bullet-shaped head, perhaps a white shirt and dark-blue blazer. He must have cast a spell of glamour over the whole of Mercer Island, in reality not very classy—he and the popular, kind-hearted twins and their trouper of a mother.
At Garfield, the contingent that welcomed me and seemed proud to count me among them probably knew Armour Spaulding, but I never asked. Instead, I lingered around a downtown sporting-goods store that carried Spalding racquets, as though the surname would make him materialize like a genie reporting for duty at the rubbing of a lamp. Meanwhile I acquiesced gratefully in the sponsorship of the Mercer Island entity without being especially drawn to any of its members. But before long I became aware that I had let them take me over too quickly. Those friendly millstones were pulling me down to their level. And that dawning suspicion, I now conjecture, was what has made me efface the success of Alice and her dog from my memory: I was ashamed of my success then and there, stricken in medias res. As I stood on the stage receiving plaudits, I must have wished to drop through a trap door, like the one in the Metropolitan Theatre that, according to Aunt Rosie, was utilized by Harry Houdini when he did his famous disappearing act. But no such luck. I was left with a hatred of Stephen Leacock, of the loyal chortlers and stampers, and of the side of myself that wanted their mindless applause. But I have no recollection of my emotions. If some psychoanalyst is moved to tell me, “You felt imperilled by success,” I do not deny it: I was imperilled by success and, at the age of thirteen, apparently had the sense to know it.
Yet there is a little more, I suspect, to the “Alice” humiliation. At that very time, as I now reckon it, I had probably made my first intellectual friend—if “intellectual” is the right word for Ted (really Ethel) Rosenberg, whose organ of reflection was perhaps less fully developed than her bump of sensibility. She had a broad, coppery, high-cheekboned face, like an Indian’s; short, black curly hair, like a boy’s; a thin, flat-chested figure. She wore brogues, and soft loose vests of deerskin. Her green, prominent eyes, flecked with brown, had a riveting gaze and widened shyly with excitement, and her voice, always husky, got breathless when she spoke of her culture heroes and heroines, some of whom were dead and some of whom were right there in our school.
She came of a family of intellectuals, very close-knit and loving, who did not seem to have any other relatives. There was a sister, Matilda, called Till, who worked in a doctor’s office; a tall, gaunt, rabbinical-looking older brother, Dan, who was a graduate student in the speech department at the university and talked in a slow, careful voice; and a little brother, Jess, who played the violin. The father was a tailor; the mother kept the house, read, baked, and benevolently listened—she was active in Aunt Rosie’s Temple De Hirsch (Reformed). I had never met a family like this before; the nearest I had come was Aunt Rosie, who played solitaire all night in a downstairs bedroom lined with signed photographs of opera stars and pianists, and her husband, Uncle Mose, who subscribed to the New York Times.
I am not sure how I got to know Ted, who was at least a class ahead of me. It was a question, I think, of my becoming aware of her becoming aware of me. This could have happened in the cafeteria, in the hall in front of the bulletin boards, or even on a chilly bench at the side of the sports field during football practice, for Ted’s hero worship fully embraced athletes. The intellectuals at Garfield were equipped with radar for finding each other, though they themselves, the diviners, would have been barely noticeable to eyes less skilled than their own. From among the incoming freshmen, somehow Ted had picked me out as someone worth knowing, like a connoisseur looking over a Whitman’s Sampler and sensing which one, underneath the chocolate coating, would have the liqueur cherry. Some feature of me had caught her attention—something about my appearance, something she had heard about me, something she had heard me say. However our acquaintance started, my first clear memory of Ted is connected with a book.
In those days, modern literature (like “creative writing”) was not taught in school or in college. You read it, relying on tips from friends. As with Prohibition liquor, you had to know somebody to get hold of the good stuff. Professional librarians were no help. (The circulating library at Frederick’s had recommended “The Peasants,” by some Pole who had won the Nobel Prize, to my grandmother, who read it night after night, scarcely making any progress.) I had heard of a novel about flappers—“Flaming Youth”—and about “Three Weeks,” by Elinor Glyn, but the existence of modern literature, apart from such titles, was a secret everyone had succeeded in keeping from me till I met Ted. And when she introduced me to “Green Mansions,” by W. H. Hudson, after school in the deserted locker room, it was on a note of confidentiality. The Modern Library imprint awed me, as though it were a sort of guarantee or the password of some exclusive set. I did not notice that the book had first been published in 1904.
In the friendship that began, she was the guide, scout, pathfinder; I was the follower. Yet my character was more decisive and sharper than hers. Once I was initiated into this new, arcane region, I promptly judged. The one-way traffic in limp leather volumes that moved from her locker to schoolbag did not always go smoothly. I did not like all her treasures. And though I usually tried to hide it, so as not to disappoint her, I think she generally knew when I felt let down.
It started, in fact, with “Green Mansions,” with that girl, Rima, who was meant to be the spirit of the South American rain forest and who flitted about, naked, among the trees. Somehow I had been led to expect, possibly by the glow of Ted’s countenance, that some torrid scenes were coming—Rima was not naked for nothing. But in reality, alas, she was; she violated that literary principle—wasn’t it Chekhov’s—that a loaded gun hanging on the wall in the first act must go off in the last. Yet Ted, I perceived, did not mind Rima’s being a disembodied spirit; she liked her better that way. That was one of the pitfalls of modern literature, I soon learned; it did not always live up to its promises. I had been let down already by Conrad’s “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” when I took it out of the public library the year before, thinking that the dirty word “nigger” in the title was going to couple perversely with the white narcissus bloom, but then Narcissus turned out to be the name of a boat. “Marius the Epicurean” was another falsely promising title for the expectant young reader.
To be truthful, what I was hoping for from books described as modern or daring was to see the fig leaf stripped off sex. Someone had finally told me the rudiments of the act, but I did not feel wholly convinced that that was what men and women did. There was the usual difficulty in picturing respectable people—e.g., my grandparents—doing it, and in fact something in the sexual conjunction does arouse a natural skepticism, whoever the parties involved: for “Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.” But unless someone has experienced sex or a close approach to it, stories and poems do not tell much; if one has, they may act erotically as reminders. In my case, what might have been helpful was scientific manuals (unavailable), yet even with scientific manuals (does anyone remember “Ideal Marriage”?) some prior knowledge or practice is generally required for full enlightenment. “It is something like the uncertainty principle: if you are distant enough from the experience to need instruction, you are too remote to be benefitted. Possibly blue movies shown in the classroom by a teacher with a pointer are what is really wanted. Or is the famous “need to know” of children just another ignis fatuus?
At any rate, I felt the need, and Ted apparently did not. At the same time, I could tell that for her there was a strange vibration in “Green Mansions,” something thrilling and esoteric, that remained hidden from me. Now I know its name: literary art. We called it beauty then, and for a long time I had trouble perceiving it without being nudged, at least when it was of human manufacture; I could recognize it in sunsets, dew, wildflowers, fireflies, snowflakes, and the like. The excitement that literary art could produce in someone like Ted confused me, therefore, leading me to look for a set of thrills and revelations that literature does not give.
The romance of this story, for Ted, lay in the suggestion of a liaison between the two men; that is obvious to me now. Later, I gather, she became an overt lesbian, moving to California and changing her name from Ethel/Ted to Teya. But at Garfield, in her crushes—all purely mental, I assume—she did not distinguish between the sexes, any more than between football and track, where she distributed her love equally between Larry Judson and Bill Albin. I thought of her then as a sort of deep-voiced boy; somewhere in my mind or in a lost album is a picture of her playing baseball, with springy legs spread apart and a catcher’s mitt. More girlish, though, was her perpetual weaving of romances, as though to cover the nudity of everybody’s life. She spun her webs around Kathleen Hoyt and her tartan cloak, around Estare Crane and her spit curl; it must have been she who told me Larry Judson was Jewish. She was sweet on my grandmother, whose tragic story she seemed to know, just as she knew mine, and I could never tell whether it was as a beautiful woman that Augusta Morganstern interested her, or as a Jewess, or as the wife of Harold Preston, for she was sweet on him, too, and so was Till. My grandmother, in turn, liked them both and would put down her book to chat with them, which was rare with her if I led a friend into the living room, with its shirred pongee shades and fancy grass wallpaper.
Our friendship that first year was almost entirely bookish, on a separate plane from the other friendships I was beginning to make: with a pug-nosed Virginia who lived in Denny Blaine; with Mary McQueen Street and her sister, Francesca, who lived on 35th Avenue but really came from the South; with Ethel Scott and Mildred Dixon, who already dated and lived in a run-down section of mainly two-family houses and grassless front yards. . . . I ask myself whether it was because Ted was Jewish that I did not try to mix her with the others, but actually none of my new friends mixed; I went to each of their houses separately in the afternoon—my grandmother’s strange inhospitality made it too hard to ask the others home in the evenings. Besides, the bookishness into which Ted with her shining eyes had initiated me was a bond between us, like stamp-collecting, which kept us apart at times even from her sister.
Aestheticism, unfortunately, was the key. Clearly there was not much roughage to stimulate the brain in those on the whole limp leather volumes that were coming my way. Anatole France, eventually (“The Procurator of Judaea,” “Thaïs,” “The Red Lily”), but no Shaw or Wells. I ask myself how it happened that Ted never discovered Joyce. But wait! Now that I think of it, I can recall “Pomes Penyeach”: “Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling, / Where my dark lover lies / Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling, / At grey moonrise.” Surely that is an ex libris of Ted’s, marked by her inspiration (including my belief that Rahoon—actually the Galway cemetery—was in the South Seas; confusion, maybe, with Rangoon, the capital of Burma). Still, I have no memory from this period of “A Portrait of the Artist” (maybe not yet a Modern Library title), which would have given us more to chew on.
Itry to bring back a typical evening at 712 35th Avenue during the spring term at Garfield. The year is now 1926; my grandfather’s chair is vacant; he has put down “The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page” and gone to his club for a rubber or two of bridge. In her chair my grandmother, who by now has probably finished “The Peasants,” by that Pole, is reading another long, dull book, this time by a Dutchman called Couperus, who did not win the Nobel Prize. I am lying on a sofa with a mystery story, “Cleek of Scotland Yard,” or a new Berta Ruck, “Leaves of Grass” having fallen from my hand. My young Uncle Harold, a sophomore at the U., is in his quarters, off the landing, with his cronies. The telephone does not ring, which is just as well, since if it should be a boy for me I shall have to refuse any date he proposes and get him off the line as fast as I can without his guessing that I am only thirteen and for that stupid reason prohibited even from flirting with him on the telephone. All at once there is a thundering on the stairs: my uncle and his friends are going out.
They have names for each other, like Goose and Flamingo; a fat one, Don Dickinson, older brother of Kenny Dickinson, is called the Toad, and they call me the Niece. Our big, gaunt maid Lavinia is Leviathan. Two of the troupe are still seniors at Garfield—John Lewis and Paul Janson—and of course they know my age and condition of servitude. My uncle comes into the room and kisses my grandmother’s cheek; “Night, Niece,” he adds, waving. It is too early, still, for me to go to bed, and I have nothing left to read but the paper and “Leaves of Grass.” Rescue, however, is in sight, though I do not yet realize it. Among Harold’s cronies is one who does not call me the Niece as regularly as the others, who sometimes stops to talk to me in the downstairs back hall, who went to Garfield and had Mr. Post, knew Mary Brinker, and far in the future will marry Estare Crane of the single black spit curl and work for the Seattle Times, before dying young. This is the Mark Sullivan whom I mentioned earlier. Sometime soon (if he has not already started), he will undertake on his own hook to correct my reading. The first thing will be to try to cure me of Adela Rogers St. Johns.
Mark was a tall, somewhat knobby boy with a red face (hence Flamingo, I suppose), a blinking, flannelly Irish type very different from the male McCarthys, with their green eyes and thick dark lashes. His teeth were poor, and I did not think he brushed them enough, which was true of a number of Harold’s friends. He wore slightly ragged sweaters, usually red, and his socks hung down. He was the son of a Seattle policeman and had a sister named Marcile. Every summer my grandfather took him with us to Lake Crescent, in the Olympic Mountains. Mark and Harold shared a double cottage, and I shared one with my grandfather that had two rooms with separate entrances. My grandmother stayed home in Seattle, not liking the mountains and being afraid of the water, because of some experience with a rowboat when she was young. She had box lunches packed for us to take on the ferry to Port Townsend, whence we took the train to Port Angeles and then a rattly bus past dark-green Lake Sutherland to Singer’s Tavern, on “beautiful Lake Crescent, a jewel in the heart of the Olympics,” as the publicity leaflet said. My grandmother was happy shopping at Frederick’s every day; my grandfather was happy playing poker and bridge at Singer’s with his contemporaries—Judge and Mrs. Alfred Battle, Edgar Battle, Mr. and Mrs. Boole, Colonel Blethen, of the Seattle Times—and every morning leading a party of walkers up to the Marymere Falls. He approved of the food in the hotel dining room; one night, after dinner, he sent a dollar bill to the chef “with my compliments.”
Mark and Harold, the Flamingo and the Goose, would never dance in the evenings to the two-piece band of young-lady musicians on the hotel porch, but they played golf and tennis a lot and at least once a summer took me along, switchbacking, to climb the peak called Storm King, though never the redoubtable Sugar Loaf, across the lake. Once Mark, all by himself, and without any trail, explored the hidden waterfalls that rose above Marymere like a secret winding staircase with green overgrown landings cut into the mountainside. I believed—and it may have been true—that he was the first person ever to have followed them to the top. At my pleading, he promised to take me with him the next time he undertook it, but probably my grandfather told him no, too dangerous for a little girl, and I remained unfulfilled. To this day I remain a romantic about waterfalls. He and Harold did not go in swimming, I think—maybe because of the icy lake water—but my grandfather always made one of them accompany me in a rowboat when I took one of my “championship” swims to Rosemary Point, the next resort, and perhaps Mark, out of his good nature, occasionally watched the after-breakfast diving exhibition I put on at the hotel pier.
At Singer’s, Mark and Harold were mainly spectators of the human comedy, which included a lounge lizard from the East, me pumping the player piano, my grandfather’s watchfulness over my virtue, the framed poems and mottoes on the walls of the big cardroom (“Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, he travels the fastest who travels alone”), the golf on the five-hole course. Mark, who was a humorist, wanted to be a reporter or feature writer—at the U. he was on the daily paper and the magazine—and premonitions of the blue pencil led him to take up an ironical attitude toward red-faced Colonel (“General,” by preference) Blethen, which pleased me, since I did not like the Blethen boys, Bobby and Billy, and it did not wholly displease my grandfather, who considered the newspaper owner a martinet.
The authors Mark admired ought to have been a counterweight to Ted’s “pashes”: Mencken, above all; George Jean Nathan, Dreiser, Ben Hecht, Carl Van Vechten, Ernest Boyd. I can fancy an invisible struggle of the two opposed forces for possession of my mind, except that I do not think Mark saw enough of me during his visits to Harold to be aware of Ted’s influence. Nor (the same as with Ted) was I always responsive to his urging: Jim Tully, the hobo poet, was as lost on me as Marius the Epicurean. And, again, there was my expectation of sex. Mark’s favorite book, which he left for me one night on the back-hall table, was “Mademoiselle de Maupin,” in English, by Théophile Gautier; the heroine dressed in men’s clothing, and the book was reputed to be “hot,” but if there was anything erotic there I was utterly unable to find it. It was another disappointment, like “Green Mansions,” that I kept to myself. Other recommendations of Mark’s misfired. I preferred “Tom Sawyer” to “Huckleberry Finn”—an error; it should have been the opposite. I was too young for Dreiser’s “The Genius,” a well-thumbed volume that was left for me on the hall table, too. “Moby Dick,” likewise, was way over my head; that I had seen it as a movie,. “The Sea Beast,” with John Barrymore, was more a hindrance than a help. Nevertheless, Mark was having his effect. I was soon reading The American Mercury and had induced my grandmother to subscribe to Vanity Fair, a Condé Nast publication that I could look at the day of its arrival in the sewing room, along with her Vogue. And he had made me seriously wonder about Berta Ruck.
Even before summer, I must have already suspected that I would not be returning to Garfield. I do not remember whether, finally, that was cause for grief or not. Maybe I was glad, on the whole, to be removed from the excitement of boys, since it would be two more years before I would be allowed to go out with one of them. My grandmother had statutory ages for everything: sixteen for boys, fourteen for real, non-ribbed silk stockings, fifteen perhaps for lipstick (Tangee). The E, the D, and the several D-minuses that came my way at the end of the grading period were fresh arguments for a change of scene. Meanwhile, in the last days of the term, while my grandfather was writing in from his office for boarding-school catalogues, I found that I had made my mark at Garfield High, albeit ambiguously. Despite Ted’s briefing, our school intellectuals had been known to me only by sight. But they knew me. When the yearbook, edited by them, came out in due course, that became clear. There I was, almost the only freshman so singled out, on a page of that year’s memorable personalities, with an appropriate sport, hobby, or pastime listed opposite each. I never sought to learn who had elected me to that company—a mortal enemy or just some senior having fun on the basis of information supplied by one of my associates. I could choose to think that it was teasing or I could choose to think that it was meant to hurt, but this was how, toward the bottom of the page, I appeared: “Si McCarthy. Tiddledywinks.” ♦
(This is the first part of a two-part article.)
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