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Friday
This is the latest post in my on-going series on “My Life in Literature,” which appears every Friday. Because an informal autobiography written by my great grandmother Eliza Scott means so much to me—she discusses the novels that were important to her as she grew up in Victorian England—I figured that I should do something similar for family members who come after me. Of course, the subject is also consistent with the mission of this blog, which is to explore the many ways that literature enhances and sometimes changes our lives.
My childhood ended abruptly in the fall of 1965, which is when I returned from an idyllic year in Paris and entered the Sewanee Military Academy. From its founding in 1868, SMA was closely affiliated with the University of South, which meant that it had the strongest academic program in the area. Unfortunately, as a military school it featured drilling, hazing, uniform inspections, marching with M-1 rifles, and ROTC classes. We even marched to church on Sundays—we were an oxymoronic Episcopalian military academy—as our band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
While, as a dutiful son, I never questioned my parents sending me there, I was miserable, at least at first. I remember returning from the first day of orientation and sobbing uncontrollably on our living room couch after having been yelled at for hours for not properly executing the marching steps.
Just to offer a snippet of life at SMA, whenever a first-year cadet wanted to enter a room in which upperclassmen were present, he would have to stand at attention and say, “Sir, cadet [Bates] requests permission to enter the room, sir!” An upperclassman would say, “Enter,” at which point he would enter but still stand at attention. Then he would be told to “rest”—which meant shifting to “parade rest”—until a second “rest” allowed him to move freely. Sometimes we were thrown up against lockers for infractions.
There were compensations, however, which made the experience bearable. I loved my classes, especially English but also Ancient and Medieval History and advanced French (later to be followed by Latin). Having felt like a nonentity in grade school, I suddenly discovered I was one of the school’s highest academic achievers and was honored accordingly. (I would graduate salutatorian.) I was also on the tennis team (which I captained my senior year), wrote for the newspaper (I would be the editor my senior year), competed in first poetry contests and then debate on the school’s forensics team, and wrote Camus/Sartre type fiction for the school’s literary magazine. I even published an issue of an underground newspaper, which I slipped under everyone’s door my senior year, but was found out and told not to do it again. Despite these successes, however, I never felt comfortable with the military.
It’s somewhat ironic, then, that a military epic eased my entrance into the school.
In Sparky’s Edgin’s freshman English class, we started off with Richard Lattimore’s translation of The Iliad, much of which we read out loud. As I had loved Greek mythology as a child and had even read a child’s version of the Iliad, I was thrilled. This version, however, presented me with moral complexities that were new to me. Though I saw myself as firmly on the Greeks’ side, I was challenged by how both armies were capable of savage brutality. In spite of myself, I found myself mourning Hector. Simone Weil sees the epic as one of the world’s great anti-war works, and I had the sense that I was swimming in deep waters. For the first time in my life, I saw school teaching me something of substance.
The same thing happened with the forensics club. From a common poetry anthology we were to bring one poem of our choosing to the competition and have one assigned to us. I got to know all the poems on the list, which included Sir Walter Scott’s “Soldier, Rest,” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” an excerpt from Pope’s Essay on Man, Keats’s “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern,” Robert Burns’s “Highland Mary,” and many others. I chose the Scott and was assigned the Pope, which disappointed me because the rhyming couplets felt like a seesaw. The real revelation was Coleridge, however, and in retrospect I was sorry that I hadn’t mysteriously whispered “caverns measureless to man.” I placed second in the district competition.
My sophomore English class was somewhat of a disappointment as I never warmed to American literature. But to that class I owe one memorable experience that I’ve written about in my book. Our teacher assigned Catcher in the Rye, and while many of my classmates loved it, I loathed it. It struck me as unspeakably dirty, what with the pedophile teacher, the encounter with the prostitute, and Holden’s smoking and swearing. The only part I liked was Holden’s interactions with his little sister Phoebe on the playground.
Only decades later did I reread the novel and analyze my adolescent aversion. I discovered that what I had hated about Holden was my own anxiety about growing up. Here I was, an insecure, acne-pocked, prep school adolescent dealing with a world over which I had no control. I wanted Tolkienesque fantasy that took me away from this world, not Salinger realism that plunged me into it.
I now admire Catcher in the Rye’s insight into adolescent insecurity such as mine. Only in my later reading did I realize that Holden too doesn’t want to grow up, that his desire to be a catcher who will save little children from loss of innocence is about himself as much as it is about Phoebe. The following passage is filled with projection as he sees himself in the little kids:
I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around–nobody big, I mean–except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff–I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.
Not much else stands out for me from sophomore English, other than memorizing the 23rd psalm; having a garbage can full of candy in the classroom which students could dip into whenever they wanted and which the teacher called agape (St. Paul’s word for Christian love); and having a fellow student inform me that “Kubla Khan” is a description of a wet dream. (Now that blew my mind.)
Sparky Edgin was my teacher again junior year, and his British Literature survey proved to be my favorite class of all time (as I would tell him years later). He had assigned us an anthology of British Lit, and after starting with contemporary lit, he took us back to the early stuff. I’m relying on memory here but I recall reading (are you ready?) Beowulf, Preface to Canterbury Tales and The Miller’s Tale, Christopher Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (along with Sir Walter Raleigh’s satiric response), Hamlet, sections of Paradise Lost, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” (Milton again), Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Vicar of Wakefield (Goldsmith again), Blake’s lamb and tiger poems, Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Upon First Reading Chapman’s Homer,” Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Tennyson’s “Flower in a Crannied Wall” and “Crossing the Bar,” Shaw’s Pygmalion, Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October,” Saki’s short story “Louise,” Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” and James Stephens’s “The Shell.” I wish I still had our wonderfully illustrated textbook so that I could recall the other works but my internet search has come up empty. If you know the book—the front cover is bluish with waves crashing against a shore—please let me know.
While I can’t report any shattering experiences such as I had with Catcher in the Rye, I do remember really, really liking the two Goldsmith works we read, especially She Stoops to Conquer. Looking back at them now, I wonder whether they helped push me in the literary direction I would eventually take, which was a concentration in 18th century British literature.
But more importantly, the class gave me a sense that I was entering something a whole new world, one that was wider, deeper, and more varied than anything I had encountered before. My imagination, my intellect, and my senses were all fully engaged. While before the course I thrilled to individual works, now I thrilled to a whole field. To borrow shamelessly from Gatsby, I felt as though I were in the presence of a something vast and shimmering, something commensurate to my capacity for wonder.
Like Fitzgerald’s Dutch settlers, we lose some of that capacity as we grow older and become more familiar with the terrain, but to teenagers the world seems to have no boundaries. As Milton says of Adam and Eve as they leave Edenic innocence behind them, the world lies all before them.
The awe goes a long way towards offsetting much of the pain and insecurity we associate with adolescence. Literature saved my teenage self.
