Lit Up Page 4
“Ruth Lacey is the spirit of that place,” Sam Abrams had said to me on the street. She had been sole principal since 2004, commanding the school from a sizable office just to the left of the entrance. Miss Lacey was unattended by the usual staff of secretaries and assistants guarding a school principal’s office. Her door was often open. If you wanted to see her, you walked in and saw her. She was a short, intensely vivid person in her sixties, hardheaded, funny, at times unnervingly direct. She wandered restlessly around the office or stood outside in the hall, greeting and chaffing students—“Why aren’t you in class?” Teachers dropped by for a minute to share a joke or confer on some matter. Students would wander in, sit down on a couch to the left of her desk, and air their problems. Others came in and worked on computers on the opposite side of the room; a few even worked on the principal’s computer at her desk when Ruth was wandering around. The office was both a command center and a den. When I wondered at the informality of the arrangements, Ruth told me that “high schools should have the same warmth as elementary schools.”
Her father, a German Jewish refugee, a lawyer, arrived in the States in 1939, and was assigned by Immigration to a dairy farm in the tiny town of Deposit near Binghamton, New York (just north of the Pennsylvania border). In her office, Ruth had some aerial photographs of the property, which she showed to students who couldn’t believe she grew up on a dairy farm in a town called Deposit. After the war, her mother, also born in Germany, opened a camp on the farm for the children of German Jewish refugees. But the family was pushed off the land by a big state highway (Route 17), and they moved to Manhattan, where Ruth went to public school—to Music and Art, the Fame school—and then to the University of Wisconsin. She began teaching in the city in pre-K. Eventually she taught every grade up to the fourth, and then became an art teacher for all grades. She was teaching in middle school in the early nineties when the city asked her to start a school.
“It was the farthest thing from my mind!” she exclaimed. “I like leading from behind, I like complaining, but it was the time of the small schools movement”—the belief that students functioned better in schools of limited size—and she asked another teacher, Steve Stoll, to join her. When it opened in 1993, Beacon had one hundred students; it now had a population of almost 1,300 crowded into the disused warehouse. Despite the larger enrollment, the place was harder and harder to get into. In the fall, on Open House day, anxious parents, arms draped around their children, came to visit, and the line snaked up to Amsterdam and well around the corner. “I don’t know where I’m going to fit everyone next year,” Ruth Lacey said to me in her office.
* * *
Again, a kind of ghost story. Hawthorne set “The Minister’s Black Veil” in the 1730s—some forty years after the Salem witch trials and persecutions, but well before the more genial late-colonial era of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Hooper, a handsome young minister in Milford, a small New England town, shows up for his Sunday sermon wearing a black veil. The congregation is astonished. What is he hiding? He offers no comment, but just smiles sadly (the veil leaves his mouth visible). As days pass, he continues to remain veiled, and, by degrees, the entire town becomes obsessed with him. Cloaked, he sees more, not less, of his congregation. He gazes into people’s souls; sinners on their deathbeds cry out for his aid and solace. He is judgment itself, a kind of ambulatory dark god among them, his presence so menacing that he kills the life of the town, spilling wine on the floor of an attractive couple just married—cursing, by implication, the sexual pleasure of their marriage.
It’s a great and strange story, and difficult, too—not difficult from line to line, but slightly opaque and rather subversive in its meanings. A secret malice plays through it—the “sad smile” on the minister’s face lasts until his deathbed, and though he says over and over that he is miserable, we wonder if he isn’t partly gratified by the town’s absorption in him. Hawthorne finished the story in 1835, when he was thirty-one, and published it, along with such tales as “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “Young Goodman Brown,” in collections that, along with Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic-ghoulish fantasies, amount to the birth of imaginative literature in this country—no fiction with this spiritual intensity and malevolent power had been written in the colonial and immediate post-colonial age.
Mr. Leon told the class a few things about puritanism, about the unrelenting consciousness of sin, the sense that one could never be good or clean enough; and then he asked them to research the subject online. He gave no more context than that. He wanted them to experience the strange story in an unmediated way. He asked the students to mark key passages and to focus their responses on those points, and then to read passages aloud. Tina Hsu, a quiet Asian American girl, who giggled and covered her face with her hands before she spoke, picked up the first paragraph in its third sentence:
Children, with bright faces, tript merrily beside their parents, or mimicked a graver gait, in the conspicuous dignity of their Sunday clothes. Spruce bachelors looked sidelong at their pretty maidens, and fancied that the Sabbath sunshine made them prettier than on weekdays.
Like other students who had read aloud in class, she read efficiently, without hesitation or stumbling—they were all fluent, “good readers”—but she read without emphasis, too; indeed without expression of any kind, as if reading aloud were simply an exercise, a duty that had to be got through. They all read that way, flatly, barely above a monotone, and I thought I knew why: they didn’t want to reveal any of themselves by giving one phrase or another extra emphasis. Not personal strengths or weaknesses, not sexual feelings—not anything. They were shy, and they read defensively, and I felt a traditionalist pang for earlier America schoolrooms in which public reading and even memorization had been a central part of education.
Mr. Leon didn’t urge any more out of their public reading. Instead, he asked, “How many have had the feeling when you dress in your Sunday best that you’re good? For those who aren’t raising your hands, I would suggest that you’re lying.”
No response. “Why does Hawthorne refer to God as ‘the dread being’?” Mr. Leon asked abruptly. “Why fear God?”
Marco Perez was a slight, willowy kid who liked to fool around. A couple of times, he had called Mr. Leon “Bro,” which was not well received by his teacher. Marco the class clown now blurted out, “He’s the one who condemns you to eternal hell.” Which of course was the right thing to say, but some of the others ignored this remark. They thought that “being,” in the phrase “the dread being,” referred to the social collective, the massed opinion of the town itself. After all, the theme of the course was “the individual and society.” They were taking the cue. To my amazement, they saw Mr. Hooper as an individualist who had provoked the enmity of the town. Many of them thought the story was about social conformity, about distaste for a man who is merely different or odd. A girl named Vanessa, who had dark eyes and a slightly plaintive way about her—she seemed close to tears at times—now said, “It’s the community that has judged Mr. Hooper as bad.”
Mr. Leon didn’t correct what was wrong; at least, not immediately. If the conversation was rolling, he let it roll, but sitting on the side of the room I said to myself, “They’re not getting it. This is what they fear—society as the great dread being that was always evaluating them, with nothing but college prep and endless job pursuit ahead of them.” In the wildly successful Hunger Games books and movies, the authorities set teenagers against one another in competition to the death. The students felt they couldn’t escape society’s judgment. The demanding “society” was their dark God. Just outside of Mr. Leon’s classroom, on a bulletin board, a drawn poster showed students being fed into a hopper.
Suddenly, a girl named Marina broke into the conversation, and right away she began to make sense: “Hooper brings evil to the wedding; he brings down the bride. The veil represents the darkness we don’t show in our appearance.” She had a purple streak in her thick dark h
air, a tattoo on her right shoulder, and a brazen way about her. Every day, she bustled into class, spilling in different directions—books, purse, clothes—and plopped herself down. She was ready to rock. Her remark was more like it, and when Vanessa, the social-conformity obsessive, stated her theme again, Marina came right back at her: “He is saying to the pure people, ‘You aren’t so pure,’” and I felt relieved, because she had nailed it.
After wearing the veil for years, Mr. Hooper draws close to death, and the members of the community gather around the old man; they beg him to remove the veil at last. Marco, prompted by Mr. Leon, began reading Mr. Hooper’s impassioned last words, but Marco the joker had trouble getting angry—it wasn’t in his nature. So Mr. Leon stopped him and read what another minister says to Hooper: “Dark old man! With what horrible crime upon your soul are you now passing to the judgment?” Marco started again, and this time, in a Bronx accent, he read Hooper’s final speech with surprising emotion.
“Why do you tremble at me alone,” cried he, turning his veiled face round the circle of pale spectators. “Tremble also at each other! Have men avoided me, and women shown me no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful?… I look around me, and lo! on every visage a Black Veil!”
Hawthorne, as great as he was, often had a dreadful ear for dialogue: “the mystery which it obscurely typifies” never passed the lips of a dying man or even a living man. But at last, in this devastating final scene, Hawthorne cleared things up—somewhat. The story wasn’t about nonconformity and the power of society, it was about the individual consciousness of sin, the guilt of each man and woman before God and his neighbors. Mr. Hooper and his mysterious veil amounted to an accusation of himself and others. He was an ironist of sorts—that “slight smile” was more like death’s head grin. He wears a veil because they are veiled, hiding their sins behind Sunday clothes and proper manners.
Henry James, who wrote a short study of Hawthorne in 1879, when he was twenty-six, thought that his predecessor in fiction was playful, even mischievous. “The old Puritan moral sense,” James wrote, “the consciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful nature of our responsibilities and the savage character of our Taskmaster—these things had been lodged in the mind of a man of Fancy, whose fancy had straightaway begun to take liberties and play tricks with them—to judge them (Heaven forgive him!) from the poetic and aesthetic point of view, from the point of view of irony and entertainment.” In other words, Hawthorne made use of the Puritans’ extreme consciousness of sin as an outmoded religious faith—used it (repeatedly) as richly eccentric material for fiction. Puritanism was irresistible in its oddity, its convergence of the human and the uncanny.
In an essay written in 1964 called “Hawthorne in Our Time” (and included in the collection Beyond Culture), critic Lionel Trilling rebuked Henry James, arguing that whatever Hawthorne himself believed—his religious sentiments were cloudy—he took sin and guilt very seriously. He was descended from Puritans—descended from one of the three judges in the Salem witch trials of 1692. And Trilling described reading Hawthorne through the lens of modern literature, through Kafka’s work in particular. Mr. Leon didn’t mention Kafka, but there he was, the man with haunted eyes staring at the kids from the back wall of the classroom. Mr. Leon didn’t teach Kafka to tenth-graders (he had a twelfth-grade class for that), but, for me, sitting in that room, Trilling’s evocation of Kafka was hard to miss. You wake up one morning, and you’ve turned into a bug. Or you’ve been arrested for a crime, and you never find out what it is. That was Kafka—“Metamorphosis” and The Trial. In Kafka’s work, we are objectively guilty without having done anything—a transposition of the religious sense of sin into a psychological and political condition. Hawthorne built on religious traditions, but he anticipated modern consciousness. He was one of us; that was Trilling’s point. Mr. Hooper hasn’t done anything wrong, but he can never, in his own eyes, be cleansed, and neither can anyone else.
“The whole time, it’s been about you, Jane,” Mr. Leon said, turning to a pale-faced girl who looked a little frightened. She opened her mouth but said nothing. “The minister is saying, ‘You’re looking at me, never inside yourselves.’ This story is tragic for us, in terms of what it says about us.”
In the end, he moved them to the “right” interpretation, but he never simply laid down the law. If they were going to talk candidly in class, they needed to be free to make mistakes, to head off in strange directions. He played off pairs and groups of students against each other, teasing and cajoling, and he ruled out nothing categorically. When he wanted to straighten things out, he asked a student to read from the text. At a certain point subjectivity had to end. Read from the text: The conversation was free, and sometimes loose-limbed, but it had to come back to literature.
* * *
“The Minister’s Black Veil” was hard for tenth-graders, hard for everyone. Hawthorne! Was there any point in continuing to ask teenagers to read him? What about his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter? Some of my friends loved it, others recalled reading it as a slog interrupted by moments of excitement, even exaltation. In any case, it had become notoriously hard to teach in high school. The book was passionate, almost anguished, fantastical, shot through with intimations of the supernatural entering everyday life, but for American teenagers it was also stiff, awkward, and distant. As it happened, an eleventh-grade class at Beacon was taking up The Scarlet Letter at the same time as Mr. Leon’s class was reading “The Minister’s Black Veil.” I had to find out. How do you teach this extraordinary book? Many high school teachers had given up on it.
At the beginning of her classes, Mary Whittemore, an attractive woman in her late thirties, with light brown hair and gray-green eyes, pushed the desks out to the far walls and lined up the abandoned chairs in rows. The class had become an auditorium. Suddenly, from the corner behind her, a student emerged from a supply closet. She was holding a bedraggled baby doll, and she was wearing on her chest a large A. The other students giggled and sighed. An instant of suspense: Would the A fall off? No, it was felt with an adhesive back. She climbed onto a chair in front of the class, and everyone began hissing and jeering.
Thus the first scene of Hawthorne’s novel, in which Hester Prynne, the book’s magnificent heroine, emerges from a “beetle-browed and gloomy” jail and stands on a scaffold before a good part of seventeenth-century Boston. In her arms, she holds her illegitimate baby, Pearl. Miss Whittemore then handed out pages of script to different students who played the handsome young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester’s former lover; the decrepit elderly doctor, Roger Chillingworth, her cuckolded and coldly enraged husband; the town officials and divines, the harpies and ordinary citizens. She chose still other students to read the narration. The script was the students’ first introduction to The Scarlet Letter. Reading aloud, they stumbled over words like “contumely,” and they laughed at the intentional period formality of Hawthorne’s prose—the “hithers” and “haths” were a problem.
D. H. Lawrence, in Studies in Classic American Literature, teased Hawthorne as “a blue-eyed darling” who nevertheless “knew many disagreeable things.” Among the disagreeable things that Hawthorne knew: prurience, social cruelty, sadism masquerading as concern, moral weakness disguising itself as sanctity. Hester has not, in her own eyes, done anything wrong; Dimmesdale, in his own eyes, has, and he suffers terribly from agitation, physical weakness, despair—all the symptoms of a man in psychological torment. But his sin is not so much lust as hypocrisy. Like Mr. Hooper, the hero of “The Minister’s Black Veil,” he must lead his congregation, yet he feels himself an impostor, and his torment is only increased when Chillingworth, who keeps his identity hidden, moves in with him under the guise of helping him and sticks the knife in and twists it. Nasty solicitude is perhaps the most disagreeable thing that Hawthorne knew.
Miss Whittemore’s students,
like Sean Leon’s, had trouble understanding a society suffused with the presence of God, and still greater difficulty accepting extreme punishments dealt out by a godly people. They were baffled by the moral logic of the story. One girl, exasperated, burst out: “I don’t get it. If she’s married, and she’s got a baby, what is the problem?” There speaks the twenty-first century! Her scorn produced a ripple of amusement. Other students voiced similar discontents. They felt that the emotions of the story were overwrought in relation to what was actually at stake. Why was an entire community obsessed with an adulterous woman? They judged Hester by modern standards, and by those standards, in which sexual pleasure was a right for women as well as men, she was certainly not innocent, but she was not terribly guilty, either.
As she worked her way through the novel with her students (they read it at home as well as in class), Mary Whittemore was calm, encouraging, friendly—her face mild, her eyes flashing when a student said something especially interesting. Yet she was extremely persistent, with hints of an underlying fire beneath the warmth and equanimity. The students responded to her, especially in those moments when she cast away mildness. For four weeks, she alternated an increasingly detailed discussion of character, atmosphere, and motive with additional performances in the reading theater. After a while, the idiom became more familiar, the difficulty of the prose easier to handle. When Miss Whittemore caught a student reading Dimmesdale weakly, she asked, “What does that mean? What did you just say? Do you know what you just did, Dimmesdale?”
“Let me think,” the reader said shyly. A few minutes later, when the conversation came back to him he said, “I just made a lot of excuses and contradicted myself,” which caught Dimmesdale’s confusion; the reader had fallen into the character without quite realizing it. So did the others. A tall, pale, intellectual boy, dry and earnest, with a bony nose and parchment voice, read Dimmesdale a few times and then seemed more like Dimmesdale every time he made a comment. A blustering boy lowered his voice to insinuation as Chillingworth. A girl who spoke a great deal, her words normally a thicket of “likes” and “sort ofs,” read Hester’s refusal to relinquish her child: “God gave her into my keeping. I will not give her up!” She read it with passionate anger, and, after that, her classroom comments became leaner, more to the point, less self-conscious. Whatever the students’ resistance to the novel, Hawthorne’s defining strength cleared away their adolescent vagueness.