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  Mr. Leon (UM): “Parents say they know what’s best for you, but it’s really best for them. They can say their daughter is going to Brown.”

  Vanessa (I): “College is breaking away from parents.”

  Mr. Leon (UM): “Why go to college? Do it for free on the streets.”

  Maud (I): “She [meaning Marina] needs to make a living to survive.”

  Mr. Leon (UM): “Survival in society means abandoning individuality.”

  Jose (I): “You just have poison in your head. You’re a parasite.”

  Maud (I): “You were abandoned. Raised by relatives.”

  Mr. Leon (UM): “Yes, for the better! I’m going to continue leading my life. How much time do you spend in front of computers or on the cell phone? How much time do you spend with the people you love? They’re going to die.”

  Jose (I): “I’m gonna spend time with them, and see them in heaven if I get there.”

  Suddenly, it was over. Time had run out. The exercise was over, and the Dostoevsky classes were over, too. It was a good place to end. Religion at last had its say in Jose’s remark, and I remembered that in the class on Slaughterhouse-Five, Marco and Jose had not wanted to live in a godless universe in which there was no apparent moral order. Jose delivered us, for a second, out of a skeptical world.

  As the tension broke, more laughter—a couple of students were almost doubled over—and some tears, too. They were all buzzing, even the students who didn’t participate. Some fell into each other’s arms; others surrounded Mr. Leon, ragging at him, and he came back at them, looking each one full in the face. The room was embroiled, and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He had brought his students into the state he wanted them in—living in the moment and defining themselves and saying what they lived for—and if the students didn’t understand every facet of Dostoevsky’s amazing little book (who did?), they had got the irritable spirit of it into their souls, which was a different but potent kind of understanding. The sweet, simple talk of an Underground Man deprived of love was now over.

  Jared Bennett had been right: you could show your anger to the Underground Man; he would bring things out in you. And Vanessa was right, too: talking to him would be like talking to your own head. They had become the Underground Man or his antagonist, which was a way of forcing them to become stronger versions of themselves. But was it right that they asked each other personal questions? Yes, a population indifferent to literature needs to be shaken to life. They were excited by a novel, and not an easy novel, either, an antagonistic, often contradictory, emotionally demanding book. They assumed a role and defended themselves; they became, so to speak, modern people through one of modernism’s most demanding and perverse masterpieces, and they would be less afraid in the future. If this wasn’t character building, I didn’t know what was.

  Their next class was approaching, and they quickly left. The next class in what? Chemistry? Spanish? After all this tumult, how could they just leave and study irregular verbs: tengo … tendré … tenía … tuve … tendría? But they had to; they were students. Only Mr. Leon, who had another group coming in soon, remained in room 332. I looked over at him, and he seemed a little grave. But he must have been pleased. The tearful Vanessa had pulled herself together; so had Jose and Jane; Hasan had become a student; Adam was putting the year’s reading together in his head. They had taken the emboldening step that could lead to the eager acceptance of intellectual effort.

  Exhausted, I staggered down Beacon’s narrow stairs. As always, shouting teenagers brushed past me, but their uproar felt like music and their tiny careless shoves like tender embraces.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  BEACON, MAY AND JUNE: SARTRE AND BECKETT

  Hell

  Sartre and Ethics

  A Second Rebellion

  Waiting for Godot

  Waiting and Acting

  Circles Again

  Unfinished Business

  The End

  In 1944, when France was under German occupation, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a play with a famous line: “Hell is other people” (L’enfer, c’est les autres). Sartre’s words, some will think, might be a good tag for a year as an adult spent in school, a year in English class. As I edged into my spot at the side of the room, I made that joke to myself, but then I took it back. I was surrounded by what I prized. On all sides of me lay speckled black-and-white school notebooks—the students’ journals, which were filled with scrawls and block letters and graceful script, sometimes in different color inks as well as pencil, the words spilling and surging into the margins. Mr. Leon had been reading, grading, and handing back the journals all year long; the journals would go back to the students again at the end of the class. Behind me on the table, against the wall, lay piles of paperback books. Their pink and yellow and purple Post-its had been removed (Sean Leon read those, too). The books were out of action for the moment, lying ready, like stacked weapons, for use in the future. Brave New World, Siddhartha, printed-out essays by Orwell and Sartre, Notes from Underground, The Alchemist, and some books assigned in other classes, Art Spiegel’s Maus, Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a pile of Macbeth paperbacks—in all, the assorted materials (with a few extras) of a long year’s reading, a long year’s work. The students worked hard; their teacher worked hard. School! It can—sometimes—be the most worthy place in America.

  No Exit is the best known of the theater works composed by the busy Sartre, who wrote novels, criticism, and political tracts, as well as penetrable and impenetrable philosophical texts. Mr. Leon assigned the play—and also “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” an essay Sartre wrote in 1946—as a way of dramatizing the basic assumptions and ethics of existentialism. In many ways, it was an odd assignment for tenth-graders, but it was central to Mr. Leon’s define-yourself mantra. And both Sartre works, it turned out, were a warm-up for the last assignment of the year, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, easily the most celebrated (and mysterious) avant-garde theater work of the twentieth century. I wasn’t sure how the students were going to cope with it.

  Mr. Leon asked them what they thought Sartre meant by the statement “Existence precedes essence”—the starting point of existentialism, the foundational belief of a philosophy partly devoted to the destruction of foundational beliefs. Luisa, cautious in the past, began by saying, “I thought he was kinda like saying, you were there before you know what you are gonna do,” which, of course, was right, and Mr. Leon congratulated her on taking a risk. Ike allowed that “human life was like a painting in which the painter started slapping paint on and didn’t know where he was going,” which was also right, and clever. A blank canvas but an active painter. The existentialists told us we were alone, there was no God, nothing out there that could be called metaphysical truth or natural law. We had to make ourselves up, create rules for ourselves through action. Mr. Leon, summing up Sartre’s outlook, said, “What you dream of doing doesn’t matter. What you could have done is nothing. What you do in life defines you—not what you felt about it, not what you thought about it.” I recalled what he had said to Luisa earlier, that no one had ever lived her life before, and no one would live it after. “That’s a wild idea,” he said.

  Luisa stared at him then, and she was staring now. They all were. “When you think of all the factors that come into play for you to be you,” he said, “it’s wildly inconceivable to think that you exist. Parents meeting, having sex, the sperm fighting to get to the goal … Then, with every step, you’re taking a step on your own, and you’re nothing more than the sum of your actions.”

  He was at it again, challenging them in their very being, and I experienced some of the foot-dragging hesitations I felt when we discussed Siddhartha and journeys, and he had said, “Be there.” Everything he said that was true for them had to be true for me, too, and sitting where I was, surrounded by student journals, I wasn’t sure that it was true. Sartre, writing at a time of French weakness, was pushing his rea
ders toward self-defining acts—political activity, citizenly activity, morally heroic activity. Fine, but many of us would still say that we are also dreams, hopes, plans, evaded and rejected thoughts—slight wishes that don’t go anywhere yet make up a good part of consciousness. What was the name of the famous Delmore Schwartz story? “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” It was a line that Yeats had seized from somewhere and used as an epigraph for one of his collections. Yes, fantasies, anticipations, and desires that were not the mere vacancy of action but rather the quarry for action, not mere time-wasting but the source of renewal—all of that was part of identity, too.

  For the second time, Mr. Leon’s vitalist sentiments sparked a mild protest. Clare asked, “Isn’t thinking an action?”—and before anyone could answer Vanessa said, “Thinking doesn’t always transcend into action, and for me it’s important that I think and feel. It’s very important to think alone and not do,” and I remembered her extraordinary remark to me earlier, “Being so obsessed with actions can lead to decay in yourself.” As was clear in the Dostoevsky classes, Vanessa had become bolder, and she now spoke defiantly, as if issuing the truth of her being. She made a case for the contemplative view of life. She didn’t want to be judged entirely by what she did.

  But some of the others were very much bent on judgment. Marina insisted on personal responsibility. “You have the right to your own mind,” she said. “We’re not living in 1984. There’s no thought police, and you are free as long as you don’t act out in an aggressive way.” Adam, following up, insisted that we had the right, always, to judge other people, and hold them to account. Marina the self-willed; Adam the judge. Some of them, working from Sartre’s existentialism, insisted on a no-excuses morality: you are free, your choices are your life, and you are completely responsible for choice and its consequences. They had heard Sean Leon (all year long) as well as Jean-Paul Sartre.

  There was a nice irony here. Sartre was an atheist and a leftist, even an apologist for Soviet and Maoist tyranny. In his personal life, he was at times a scoundrel. Yet here were American teenagers enunciating ethical demands, derived from his ideas, that would not be out of place in a Republican Party platform. Nino, summing up, put it this way: “Even if there’s a God who gives laws, that doesn’t absolve you of the job of looking after yourself. This would be a good thing for atheists to say rather than arguing against God all the time.”

  Amen to that. Nino the wise.

  Mr. Leon listened to their fervent comments, and then, as the class ended, he returned to his emphasis on action, but in a new way—he was, I thought, answering Vanessa and Clare’s feelings that his definition of action was too narrow. He didn’t want to leave it there. As before, he spoke of his family. “My stepfather moved us when I was very young, and we settled in Louisiana. There was a couple next door.” The Washingtons. He had mentioned them before. “The husband let his wife know he loved her, every day. They danced every day, something especially important to me, since my mother and stepfather’s marriage turned to shite.”

  He paused for a minute; he was moved by thoughts of his family, his boyhood in Louisiana, the disintegrating marriage—the neighborhood, too, which he missed. It was his constant obsession, made more insistent by the illness of his brother. As he had said before, he was considering going home—leaving Beacon and taking a job in Louisiana, so he could be near his family.

  “Coming from an Irish-Catholic family,” he said now, “and seeing my cousin murdered by the Brits in Derry, and our people treated like shite, we brought this idea of action with us. But Mr. Washington and his wife … his action was that he loved his wife and children. That idea of action was enormously empowering to me.”

  * * *

  Sartre’s play No Exit is literally a portrait of hell. Three dislikable people—a man and two women, adulterous, dishonest, murderous—have been delivered by Judgment to a sealed room. Eternally damned, they confront not fires and burning pits but one another. The room is without mirrors; their eyes are lidless, and they cannot sleep. As Sartre later explained, the line uttered by one of the characters, “Hell is other people,” did not mean, as so many assumed, that relations with other people were hellish. It meant that one’s judgment of oneself was reflected through other’s people’s perceptions. If those perceptions were twisted, life with them was misery. Each of the three people desperately want to impress the others—vanity, deception, and seduction are central to their lives—and they cannot.

  For my money, the play was flavorless and uninteresting, but the class was intrigued by the fiction of a hell without physical punishment, and they chewed it over at length, going through each of the characters’ crimes and defenses. They understood the trial of confronting other people without interruption, without relief, without the possibility of redemption. At Mr. Leon’s invitation, they took turns standing at the board and expounding the play, posing questions as Mr. Leon listened. Latisha, the African American girl who was often reticent, fluently went through the three characters.

  But Mr. Leon pushed their involvement further. He wanted the students to face one another in his own arena. First he tried a loosening-up exercise. He asked John to stand in the opening in the middle of the desks, and he asked Leonardo to stand facing him. “Whatever John does,” he said, to Leonardo, “you have to mirror it.” As John blinked, stuck out his tongue, reached for his side, and stood on one leg, grave Leonardo blinked, stuck out his tongue, and so on, and my mind, movie-soaked, went back to the famous bit in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) in which Groucho and Harpo, identically dressed in a white nightshirt and cap, confront each other in a doorway, each thinking he’s looking into a mirror but not sure, each smirking, dancing, trying to catch the other in un-mirrorlike behavior. An old vaudeville skit, I thought, was as good a way as any of getting to the mysteries of identity. Earlier in the year, in the compare-and-contrast exercise, Mr. Leon had brought out the students’ differences, and now he was bringing out their similarities. Other pairs took the place of John and Leonardo—Marco and Clare, Lauren and Tina, who initially covered her face, as always. All year long, she had been strong when the students broke into groups, but quiet in class. Suddenly, she stuck her tongue out at Lauren. We were back in kindergarten. Education had returned to play, which is where it begins.

  “Throw your inhibitions aside!” said Mr. Leon. “Someone announce a theme.”

  “Carnival!” came a voice from the corner. It was John, who began singing and air-juggling, at which point Marco, frowning, barged into the opening at the center of the class. “Hate Mr. Leon!” he said and staggered and roared like a wounded buffalo. For at least a moment, Marco the clown was back. After quiet was restored, they read passages of the play aloud, the boys taking the two women’s parts, the girls playing the man, and the classroom theater was alive. It didn’t feel at all like hell. But all of this was a way of easing the students into Waiting for Godot.

  * * *

  When you try to read it cold, you run into trouble. Beckett’s play opens this way:

  ESTRAGON: Nothing to be done.

  VLADIMIR: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. So there you are again.

  ESTRAGON: Am I?

  VLADIMIR: I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.

  ESTRAGON: Me too.

  VLADIMIR: Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? Get up till I embrace you.

  ESTRAGON: Not now, not now.

  Two forlorn, quarrelsome, middle-aged gentlemen in worn-out clothes and bowler hats inhabit a rubbishy and largely featureless landscape (there is a single tree). Like Chaplin’s tramp, Vladimir and Estragon have fallen in society, yet they try to maintain the social graces and something like self-regard. They have been waiting together for years—forever—for the promised appearance of Godot. (Beckett was Irish, and great
Irish actors pronounce the word “GOD-oh.”) The appearance of “Mr. Godot” is frequently heralded, but he never shows. In his place, he sends a sweet young boy, who says “Yes” when Vladimir asks if Godot will come tomorrow. The boy also says that Godot does “nothing.”

  As you read, the non sequiturs and repetitions, the jokes and tirades at times resemble old vaudeville and music-hall skits. Vladimir puzzles over the gospels: two thieves were crucified with Jesus, he points out, but of four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved.

  VLADIMIR: One out of four. Of the other three two don’t mention thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him.

  ESTRAGON: Who?

  VLADIMIR: What?

  ESTRAGON: What’s all this about? Abused who?

  VLADIMIR: The Saviour.

  ESTRAGON: Why?

  VLADIMIR: Because he wouldn’t save them.

  ESTRAGON: From hell?

  VLADIMIR: Imbecile! From death.

  “Who’s on first?” as the old Abbott and Costello routine goes. “What’s on second?” and so on. This colloquy about the gospels in Godot suggests that making sense of life, forming an interpretation, is a hopeless task: four accounts of the same thing, and they didn’t agree. Everyone has a different account of reality, of history, of the sacred truths. There is no law or certainty. Dialogue like this is despairing and funny—the comic side of impotence—but tough to read, page after page.