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Thursday
I’ve moved up my weekly memoir to give over tomorrow’s slot to Halloween. (Prepare to be terrified by two gothic Emily Dickinson poems!) I focus on my senior year at the Sewanee Military Academy because of our deep dive into existential authors in Will Solie’s Senior English and J. R. McDowell’s Senior Religion. I vividly recall McDowell’s capstone assignment—we were to describe our values—which served to crystallize my thinking in a way that, four years later, my senior thesis would do at Carleton College.
I begin with a flashback to an overheard teacher-student conversation my first year about T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I was immediately intrigued. Eliot may be describing a midlife crisis but in the process he also appeals to adolescents caught in their own identity confusion. The lines “There will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” and “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” especially hit home.
“Prufrock” was just a foretaste of what was to come. Solie gave us a heavy dose of existential authors, especially Sartre (No Exit), Camus (various short stories), Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Ibsen’s Wild Duck, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Meanwhile, in McDowell’s Religion class we read Sophocles’s and then Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, Christopher Frye’s The Sleep of Soldiers, Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell (from Man and Superman), and Camus’s The Stranger. Ionesco’s Rhinoceros showed up somewhere in there as well. Some of us on the literary magazine wanted to be Camus and tried our hand at existential parables.
Grim though many of these works are, they matched my mood for much of the year as I was increasingly tired of the military. One issue was a commandant intent on having misbehaving cadets walk penalty tours. I, who had mostly avoided getting disciplined, ended up marching an hour’s tour for wearing a pair of shoes that had lost their tongues. (When the inspecting officer barked, “Bates, your shoes have no tongues” I, playing the smart aleck, replied, “They have nothing to say, sir,” which didn’t’ go down well. But I didn’t want to hit up my parents for new military shoes when the year was almost over.)
Adding to my woes was the worst case of acne that my dermatologist had ever seen (so he informed me), which contributed to my low esteem and lack of a love life. So while I plunged into my studies and extracurricular activities (tennis would be particularly important, as would the newspaper), I still felt lonely, lost, and confused. Then again, as I was to learn decades later, this was probably the norm for everyone at the school.
I owe my psychological understanding to a “Film and Adolescence” course I team-taught in the 2000’s with psychologist Barbara Bershon. She informed me that teens are simultaneously going through four major life transitions, any one of which would bring their parents to their knees: neurological (their brains are growing but they don’t know how to use the new capacity yet), physiological (their bodies are going crazy, both inwardly and outwardly), social (they are no longer children but don’t know what they are instead), and cognitive (they’re moving from concrete to abstract thinking but haven’t het mastered the latter). No issue is more urgent that identity formation.
For someone who spent much of his time in his head, existential fiction and Eliot poems like “Prufrock” and “The Hollow Men” spoke to these changes. Their somewhat cold treatment of emotions (“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure”), along with the existentialists’ frequent choice of allegory over realism, held at bay the swirling emotions that threatened to drown me. This in turn gave my brain the distance it needed to examine the big existence questions that were flooding in. As a child, I had assumed my parents had all the answers, but now I realized we all must wrestle with the issues on our own. The prospect was both exhilarating and terrifying.
Of course, death is one of existence’s greatest challenges and I chose to make it the focus of an independent study required for Senior English. In the essay I looked at John Donne’s Sonnet 10 (“Death, Be Not Proud”), Shakespeare’s “Fear No More the Heat of the Sun” (from Cymbeline), Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell,” e. e. cummings’s “Buffalo Bill’s Defunct,” and other works. Since I hadn’t lost anyone close, however, the topic engaged me only intellectually, not emotionally. This unfortunately would characterize many of my essays over the next twenty years.
I say unfortunate because I missed out on many opportunities to grapple with subjects that would have meant more to me. I burnished by academic credentials by exercising my abstract thinking muscles but something important was missing. I was like Robert Browning’s Andrea Del Sarto, a painter whose art is technically proficient but lacks soul.
Why was I like this? Perhaps the very books that provided me with a refuge also kept me from descending into the messy world of feelings. While I don’t want to blame everything on my British ancestors, my family was marked by a very British reserve so that we buried our emotions as much as we could. For the longest time we didn’t even hug or enjoy being touched. A number of fictional works feature the reserved British male—Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne’s Phineas Fogg, Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day butler—and I have experienced a flash of recognition each time I have encountered these characters.
Any number of books warn the stories can be a double-edged sword, from Don Quixote to Northanger Abbey to Madame Bovary. I’ll touch in future posts on my complicated dance with reality. One of the biggest developments in the course of my life has involved connecting my emotional life and my reading life, with a few notable exceptions, that didn’t start happening until my late thirties. More on that in essays to come.
I’ll just note here that, if literature sometimes held me back, it also helped me figure out what to do next when I needed to make adjustments. The bildungsroman or growth story proved especially critical in this process.
