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  She asked them to write a soliloquy of their own—not about murderous ambition or sound and fury or anything else having to do with the play. She said, “Write it in the voice of the leading character of the book you’re reading.” The book you’re reading—the independent reading choice. “Write it in iambic pentameter and in blank verse, without rhymes, but don’t worry too much about consistency. Follow the rules and break the rules.” Shakespeare broke rules, too, she told them.

  It was a tough assignment, and the class stirred uneasily. But Miss Jordan had a way of spurring them on. She took a crack at it herself. She was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, and now she read aloud her own soliloquy based on her personal reading—not in David’s voice but in Goliath’s. She may have been new at this, having been teaching only two years, but she was game, and she told me later what was already apparent: if you want students to put themselves out for you, you have to do the same for them, even at the risk of ridicule. Taking a deep breath, Mary Beth Jordan’s Goliath speaks:

  The valley of Elah, it’s ours today!

  As sycamore-sweet sands reveal our foe:

  Frail Isra’lites crouch, perched upon the hill

  So down and ’cross the plain I go—Why me?

  Though triple-armed I am, and towering, too,

  Too weary this old Philistine to brawl.

  That was the beginning. It ended with Goliath saying, “I did not see the slinger’s shot … I am … down!” As she read the soliloquy, the accompanist hit the drum. Ta Dum ta Dum ta Dum …

  There were some smiles but certainly no mockery. They had work to do, and, the following week, they came in with dramatic poetry in hand. The iambs sounded. A student who had been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde soliloquized about Jekyll’s transformation into his loathèd alter ego:

  This hideous hag Hyde lives on in me;

  Jekyll the fate of innocent Duncan.

  The dark has started to overcome me,

  Indecency has grasped my empty soul.

  I have succumbed to primitive desires,

  Oh such great guilt to feel no guilt at all!

  They weren’t supposed to mention anything from Macbeth, and this student had mentioned Duncan. Well, Miss Jordan had told them that breaking the rules was all right. “Oh such great guilt to feel no guilt at all!” was good, almost a Shakespearean paradox by way of Freud. Others wrote soliloquies based on Cormac McCarthy’s grim shocker, The Road (“Why did the valley of death consume thee?”); on Lord of the Rings; on J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. And then there was a soliloquy based on Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, the tale of the American Olympic racer and Japanese prison-camp survivor Louis Zamperini, who competed in the Berlin Summer Games of 1936:

  Running, the endless sprint against life’s wind.

  From alleyways and city streets I come

  Running under the stars’ light and the moon

  Over the sea a crowd awaits, Berlin

  The flame of wonder now afire, it’s time

  To run a course before the world.

  That was quite good, too. Not all students did as well, but the assignment was a success: they had combined personal reading with Shakespearean prosody without dishonoring either. Some books, they knew, were better than others, but there were strengths in merely good books as well as in a masterpiece, and those qualities could be made to play upon each other. Part of the connection between classic texts and contemporary books was that they intermingled in the reader’s mind, working on each other—usually in mysterious ways, this time in explicit ways. It was just a school assignment, no more than that, but Mamaroneck’s goal, as always, was to create pleasure by connecting one book to another, the endless chain that made a reading life and that made a man and a woman, too.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  BEACON, APRIL AND MAY: DOSTOEVSKY

  Notes from Underground

  Would He Talk to Us?

  If You Think, Must You Be Inert?

  Liberalism and Perversity

  Russian Musical Chairs

  We had arrived at the climactic point—though not the end—of Sean Leon’s reading list. The class was launching into Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, a little book that would provide the fiercest of Mr. Leon’s numerous trials of his students. It was not just the most difficult text, it was the most questionable as an assignment for tenth-graders—the most demanding, emotionally and intellectually. All along, pushing the students beyond their current understanding was part of his plan. I wondered if he was now pushing them too far.

  “Dostoevsky is considered by many,” he said, “to be the single greatest writer in Western civilization.”

  Sitting at the side of the room, I felt a twinge of misery. “What happened to Shakespeare?” I asked again. Mamaroneck’s tenth-graders read Shakespeare, and so did Hillhouse students—at least a little. Most Beacon students would read Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and Macbeth and other plays as well as sonnets before they graduated. Mr. Leon wanted modern, or premodern, works only, though Shakespeare, as many have said, is both an Elizabethan and a contemporary—our contemporary. By this time, I was missing Shakespeare’s presence in Mr. Leon’s classroom as one might miss an old friend or lover.

  Whatever Dostoevsky’s standing in the Babe Ruth/Ty Cobb/Barry Bonds greatest-ever ratings game, many critics and intellectual historians have said this much: Dostoevsky’s short novel Notes from Underground, published in 1864, marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature. (Other candidates: Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, written in the 1760s but not widely read until the 1820s, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, from 1856.) Certainly, a great many works, energies, moods have descended from Notes—some of Nietzsche’s writings; perhaps Freud’s theories of the unconscious and the neuroses (though Shakespeare was Freud’s greatest teacher); perhaps Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”; definitely Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint; perhaps Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and some of Woody Allen’s work, and much else. The book’s influence was all around the students, haunting popular culture as much as high culture. There was Richard Hell, punk progenitor, definitely a guy with an intellectual bent, an Underground Man living in the East Village. And certainly the late Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground and many solo albums—Lou Reed, blowtorching his way through conventional sentiment. Larry David is a kind of perpendicular, elderly, well-paid Underground Man. Vile, funny, acidulous, self-conscious—we know this Underground Man, he is one of us.

  “The text requires, even at eight in the morning, that we sort it out and take risks,” Mr. Leon said. For the second time I marveled at the hour. I couldn’t believe I was even there. At that moment, I couldn’t handle The Sound of Music.

  Mr. Leon spoke of Dostoevsky’s nameless hero, a spiteful modern Hamlet living a barely respectable life in mid-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg. “He’s sarcastic, he holds ideas opposed to what we believe. Sometimes, he says things we want to say. Is he confused or contradictory?” Marina, always at the ready, said, “He’s both sadistic and self-loathing, so his miserable circumstances make him happy.” Yes, but his circumstances also make him unhappy. His attitude toward everything is two-sided, even three-sided. He’s always perverse:

  I, for instance, am horribly sensitive. I’m suspicious and easily offended, like a dwarf or a hunchback. But I believe there have been moments when I’d have liked to have my face slapped. I say this in all seriousness—I’d have derived pleasure from this, too. Naturally it would have been the pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation. And when one’s face is slapped—why, one is bound to be crushed by one’s awareness of the pulp into which one has been ground. But the main point is that, whichever way you look at it, I was always guilty in
the first place, and what is most vexing is that I am guilty without guilt, by virtue of the laws of nature. Thus, to start with, I’m guilty of being more intelligent than all those around me.

  The Underground Man is unable, putting it mildly, to act in a straightforward way. He thinks that only fools act from instinct, without hesitation, and that intellectuals like himself must necessarily be inert. A self-regarding, miserable, witty man, then, who carries on as if he had a poisoned tooth in his head. Azar Nafisi wrote that literature “unsettled” us, forced us to “question what we took for granted.” Notes from Underground pushed that notion to the outer limit and beyond. Dostoevsky blasts our concept of what a human being is capable of.

  Dostoevsky worked on the book in 1863 and published it the following year in Epoch, the magazine edited by his brother Mikhail. From our vantage point, Notes from Underground feels like an anticipation of the colossus that came next, Crime and Punishment (1866). The two fictions share a solitary, restless, irritable hero and a background of St. Petersburg’s dingy apartments and feverish streets and dives—an atmosphere of careless improvidence, neglect, even sordidness. It’s the modern city in extremis. The text itself purports to be the writings of a retired midlevel government bureaucrat. A family bequest has allowed him to quit his job. Now forty, he lives in a “mousehole” with a servant he despises. He is writing a book—the book that we are reading. He addresses an imaginary audience he refers to as “you” or “ladies and gentlemen”—presumably a representative group of educated, westernized Russians. He alternately insults them and abases himself before them. They are people besotted, he believes, with Western ideas of progress and rationality—the ideologies of utilitarianism, socialism, evolution, the greatest good for the greatest number, and so on. After introducing himself, he rails, in his stop-and-start way, against the Crystal Palace, a vast London exhibition hall constructed in 1851 out of cast iron and glass, a structure considered for years the summa of industrial capitalism and modern technology. He reviles what the building represents—scientific rationality and any sort of predictive, mathematical model of human behavior.

  “There was a belief in the nineteenth century,” Mr. Leon said, “that everything could be charted, sorted—even us. But Dostoevsky said, ‘You cannot sort me out.’” On the contrary, human beings are unfathomable, unknowable. Their behavior can’t be determined, since they may act against self-interest, at least as other people define it.

  And what makes you so cocksure, so positive that only the normal and the positive, that is, only what promotes man’s welfare, is to his advantage? Can’t reason also be wrong about what’s an advantage? Why can’t man like things other than his well-being? Maybe he likes suffering just as much. Maybe suffering is just as much to his advantage as well-being.… And, personally, I even feel that it’s shameful to like just well-being by itself. Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time.

  “He suffers from excessive consciousness,” Mr. Leon said, a remark I enjoyed a great deal, since in the past his aim had always been to increase and extend the consciousness of his students. The overlord Mustapha Mond in Brave New World had tried to destroy consciousness (except for his own), and the students, with Mr. Leon’s encouragement, had seen him as an oppressor. But now, in Notes from Underground, consciousness was raised to “excess,” and Mr. Leon said it caused suffering. He looked at his class, which seemed a little overwhelmed by these contraries. After some preliminaries, he asked a general question: “Would he be interested in talking to us?”

  A slight rumble—it’s a strange question—which ended when Marco said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Meaning that you represent the ordinary man?”

  “Yes, I don’t know how to say what I want to say,” he said with an anxious smile. But this was not always true. Marco had got better and better about saying what he wanted to say. Vanessa, however, was sure the underground man would be interested in talking to the class, since, she said, he always addresses people. But then Marina, often Vanessa’s antagonist, said, “He would want to share his opinions. He wouldn’t be interested in ours.”

  “Does anyone feel alienated, as he does?” Mr. Leon asked, and Nino answered, “I overthink things, so I can’t take revenge.” Revenge for what?, I thought. “I hate testing; I hate the SATs,” he told me with great disgust when we talked again later. But no grounds for revenge existed there. He loved playing baseball, he loved music, he did magic tricks, he had many interests. He had never read much in the past, as he admitted to me, but he was recently reading more. He had developed a thing about Vonnegut. A loyal reader, with an obsession! And he had read recently The Meaning of Everything, Simon Winchester’s account of how the Oxford English Dictionary was invented, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. So allow him his mysterious talk of revenge. Readers are complicated people.

  Other students nodded in agreement with his remark, and then stern Adam, building on Nino, raised his hand and said, “I am easily offended, so if I carry out vengeance I feel awful that I have taken the easy way out,” a remark almost worthy of Dostoevsky in its complexity. He was a Brooklynite, from the prosperous neighborhood of Carroll Gardens; his father ran day-care centers, his mother was an English teacher. He got into Brooklyn Tech, one of the elite math-and-science schools in the city, but, he told me, “I excel in math and science, so I thought I should study English and history,” and decided to go to Beacon. In the beginning of the year, he had been shy about speaking in class. “I wasn’t so sure of the ideas. And Marina talks so long, she made my point for me, and I put my hand down. Now, I like to be the center of the argument.” Adam was tough on other people—tough on himself, too. Of all the students, he had the most imperious sense of his own value. “The books in English are important for seeing in what direction I’m going,” he said.

  We were under way, but still, the question of whether the malicious hero would talk to the students—and also whether they would want to talk to him—remained hanging, and I wondered why Mr. Leon had asked it. Jared Bennett, speaking a little more often now than at the beginning of the year, said, “Sometimes cynical viewpoints are good. You could have a really honest conversation. You could bend toward him. I could show my anger to him.” So talking to the Underground Man would be liberating. And Vanessa added, “It would be like talking to my own head. Saying all the thoughts that I suppress.”

  Wait a second. Was this the plangent but guarded Vanessa we had heard all year long? Her remark was both an accurate description of what the Underground Man does—talking to his own head—and the work of a newly confident girl. Vanessa had stopped weeping; she was showing healthy signs of ego. As she spoke, someone outside the classroom—someone in the hall—shrieked, and Mr. Leon said, “Awesome!” which made the class laugh. But I was sure the word was meant for his student.

  “Remember,” Mr. Leon said, “that this is not Dostoevsky speaking but a voice he has created.” That was the important point for literary study. A voice. As Mr. Leon emphasized, Notes is a canny work of literature, not a tract. Dostoevsky, he told them, probably agreed with many of his creation’s opinions, but that was not the point, at least not for us, as readers. The Underground Man was the central and dominant character in a fiction. And what that voice indicated to us was that opinions were inseparable from personal strengths and weaknesses, even from personal pathology. That we are inevitably subjective is a tenet of modernism that runs right through literature and philosophy. We are also entirely inconsistent. The Underground Man taunts his listeners, apologizes, criticizes himself, then gets aggressive, then collapses again. He knows very well that he’s trapped in the three-by-five cell of his own character.

  * * *

  “I commend you for fighting your way through this very difficult text,” Mr. Leon said when we took the book up again.

  “Fighting your way through” was the right phrase. Keeping them on track, Mr. Leon sent them a
ssignments on the school’s website—so many pages by next Monday, so many more by Thursday. They were reading it slowly, which is the only way you can read it. In class, they struggled with the pronunciation of Russian names, including Dostoevsky’s name. It was their first brush with the infinite complications and satisfactions of Russian literature. Again, I thought of how young they were. I had read Notes four times in my life, and I couldn’t possibly contain all of it in my head—Dostoevsky kept bursting the boundaries of his own created space, spilling over into wildness and whim. The book was unstable, the product of a disorderly genius. Laying it on fifteen-year-olds was outrageous.

  But that was the point for Mr. Leon—hadn’t I known that all year long? Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five? Too hard for tenth-graders. The students were balanced between childhood and adulthood; Mr. Leon was trying to push them into adulthood, and they resisted him and welcomed him at the same time. Fighting their way through, they had many questions and issues, but discussion settled on one issue alone: Did remarkable acumen like the Underground Man’s lead only to inertia? “He’s so intelligent,” Mr. Leon said, “that he can’t be anything, do anything.” And he read aloud the beginning of part 1, chapter 6:

  If only my doing nothing were due to laziness! How I’d respect myself then! Yes, respect, because then I would know that I could be lazy at least, that I had at least one definite feature in me, something positive, something I could be sure of. To the question, “Who is he?” people would answer, “A lazy man.” It would be wonderful to hear that. It would imply that I could be clearly characterized, that there was something to be said about me. “A lazy man.” Why, it’s a calling, a vocation, a career, ladies and gentlemen! Don’t laugh, it’s the truth. I’d be a member of the foremost club in the land, and my full-time occupation would be constant respect for myself.