Lit Up Page 5

  As the weeks went on, the students admitted that they were surprised by the power of the fable. Hawthorne suspended the three adults and wicked little Pearl—a child associated with nature, amoral, irrepressible—in a physically vague but psychologically dense thicket of fear, guilt, pride, and vengeance. At first, the students thought Chillingworth might be sincere, even helpful in his advice to Dimmesdale. A worldly, knowledgeable man, plausible, sensitive to the nuances of personality—Chillingworth’s ruthless subtlety did not fit into their moral universe. Understanding what he was up to was an introduction, for many of them, into the nature of perversity, a stage in their moral education and their perception of character. The girls in the class, initially baffled by Hester’s situation, warmed to her power, her indifference to contempt. Hester becomes a repentant Christian woman, yet there’s something brewing in the fervency of her pride. “She was patient—a martyr, indeed—but she forebore to pray for her enemies; lest, in spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.”

  Mary Whittemore not only got the students to embody the characters as much as possible, she made them see the fable as shaped around certain choices, conditions, changes in character. She kept shifting the classroom routine, even the shape of the room, rearranging the tables for debates over Chillingworth’s character. She kept the apparatus of reading constantly in motion, so the students could never settle or allow the book to fall away from them. She made the book possess them, so that, eventually, they would possess the book.

  All along, they had been quizzed on the reading, and near the end of the unit there was a full-length test, followed by a final assignment: they wrote papers extending the narrative, in the voice of one or another of the characters. The tall, bony boy whose Dimmesdale was so effective wrote, of Hester, “Her hair was a beautiful black, like the night’s sky, that flowed down her face like rain, like the flow of water down a stream”—a lover of women wrapped in parchment and uncertain grammar. The girls were bolder, more in the spirit of Hester. One girl wrote about a young woman going back and forth between two lovers—Hester unleashed. Another wrote a utopian fantasy of old New England under the domination of women, with some of the gender roles reversed—Dimmesdale is a woman married to Chillingworth, and Mr. Hester Prynne is a man, with whom Dimmesdale has an affair. That sent my mind spinning.

  In the final class on The Scarlet Letter, Mary Whittemore showed up wearing a twenty-dollar black Cher wig and holding a baby doll in her arms—the same baby doll that a student had held earlier. It was a return to the scaffold, where Hester had faced the jeering students. Miss Whittemore sat on a high stool. “The teacher Mary asked me to talk to you,” she said quietly. “She asked me to answer your questions for your test tomorrow. I will answer any of your questions about my behavior.” The students settled down and peppered her. They were with her, longing on her behalf for the happiness which they accepted she would never have. They all agreed, for instance, that Hester Prynne could not run away with Arthur Dimmesdale even if he had the strength to take her off. In the end, the moral complexities of The Scarlet Letter made sense to them. Taught aggressively and flexibly, with humor and dramatic power, Hawthorne’s difficult book lived in high school.

  * * *

  Back in Mr. Leon’s tenth-grade class, the students were launched, however uncertainly, into reading literature. In both the Faulkner and Hawthorne stories, a town is baffled by a willful, aberrant individual. In the first story, the students judged the town’s response as malicious and intrusive; in the second, they were presented with the idea of sin and judgment, even the notion of judging themselves. The story is “about you, Jane,” was a remark that came close to a taunt, but Mr. Leon meant it for all of them. Why shouldn’t they read something hard? And why shouldn’t they be troubled by it? As Azar Nafisi said, literature unsettles the reader. Mr. Leon’s was no placid, feel-good approach to tenth-grade English.

  “Tremble also at each other!” the minister says as he’s dying. Well, that was a stern command, and an exciting one, too. Mr. Leon had been setting them up for something—but just what that was became clear only in the following week.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BEACON, OCTOBER: SYLVIA PLATH AND CONFESSIONS

  “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”

  Confessions

  Are There No Happy Adolescents?

  Telling One’s Story

  Just before class, Mr. Leon often stood at the doorway, naming the students as they passed by, nodding, smiling, shaking hands, congratulating Justin on his sneakers, Vanessa on her sweater. Today each student gave him a couple of sheets of paper. “Gracias,” he said. “Gracias, Gracias, merci, merci … thanks, awesome, thanks.”

  He asked them to rearrange the tables, and they quickly formed the pieces into a large rectangle that took up the entire middle of the room. Then he asked them to move to the inside of the rectangle. They sat shoulder to shoulder, a tight fit, boys and girls packed together in no particular order. On the way into the room, it turned out, each student had handed Mr. Leon two identical sheets, one with his name on top, one without. A poem was printed on each sheet. He put the signed sheets away, in a folder on his desk at the back of the room, and he climbed over a table and squeezed in with the students.

  In his hand, he held a sheaf of anonymous poems, which he now distributed randomly. He asked them to read what they were holding, and one student after another around the inner rectangle became a reader, reciting not her own poem but the work of some unknown student. “Don’t forget,” Mr. Leon said. “There’s another person on other side of these words. No applause after each one. No comment. If there’s language that you’re uncomfortable with, I’ll give it to someone else.”

  Exhale

  I’m more than nothing

  You leave me bone dry

  Sometimes I just want to die

  You’re a dictator

  Without your foot in my face

  I wear my skin like a cage

  The reader was Maud, tall, slender, pretty, well-dressed Maud, who had an almost regal air. The lines might have been written by any other girl or boy—or by herself, for that matter, if she had drawn her own poem. Actually, I was quite sure they were not written by a boy. The tone and snap of those words sounded like female rage. And the anger wasn’t exactly a surprise. The previous week, as we were discussing “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Mr. Leon had asked the class to read at home two poems by Sylvia Plath, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” Plath wrote “Daddy” in the famous burst of creativity before she died in 1963, a suicide at the age of thirty. The poem begins as follows:

  You do not do, you do not do

  Any more, black shoe

  In which I have lived like a foot

  For thirty years, poor and white,

  Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

  Daddy, I have had to kill you.

  You died before I had time—

  Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

  Ghastly statue with one gray toe

  Big as a Frisco seal.

  In a break from Hawthorne, we had briefly discussed such poetic devices and conventions as diction, rhythm, dramatic monologue, and so on. Mr. Leon spoke of an author’s “toolbox,” which provided the students with a set of tools, too—a way of talking about poetry and fiction that went past mere impressions. He went through “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” with the students, pointing to the short, rippling lines, the shock effect of violent imagery, the anguish and contempt. But Plath’s words were so calamitous that talk of “tools” felt trivial—at least to me. Back there, the week before, we had briefly discussed the morality of Plath’s killing herself by sticking her head in an oven while her two little children were sleeping in the next room. The students were not awed as many of their elders have been for years by Plath’s suicide. They were appalled. Moving away rapidly, Mr. Leon returned to poetic devices, and he said, before giving them an
assignment, “The literary devices are just as important as a conversation in which we’re talking about ourselves.”

  At the time, I was puzzled. Talking about ourselves? But that, it turned out, was precisely what we were going to do. He asked them each to create a confessional poem over the weekend. At the door, they had handed over their effort, as if paying a toll.

  A student named Ike Pressman, a round-faced boy, trembling slightly, now read as follows:

  There is constant monitoring

  Of what I say or do,

  Because they’re right

  They always are

  And if they’re always right

  Then I’m always wrong

  Yet if I’m always wrong

  I could be wrong about them being right.

  A nice turn there at the end, a bit of proud irony that suggested the writer suspected he was not wrong at all.

  I could see where this was going. They had been cued by the brilliant, ferocious Plath poems—primed to accuse, to complain, to vent. They read, one after another, and the mood in the room was hushed, even solemn; no one snickered or even smiled. Lodged inside the building, without a window, Mr. Leon’s classroom was like a sanctum, an interior space devoted to books and reading, and Mr. Leon took advantage of the closed-in quality. He was pushing them to reveal themselves, anonymously and collectively—to bind them together and to make them trust one another by exposing how vulnerable or angry they felt. Each student read someone else’s poem, but for that moment it seemed to become his own story, her own story. Latisha Hornby, an African American girl from Brooklyn, read this one:

  I’ve lied, I’ve stolen, I’ve cheated

  Who hasn’t

  I’ve been lied to, stolen from,

  Cheated on. Who hasn’t.

  The poetry recitation was like one of those trust games at summer camp or at an office retreat in which you fell backwards and prayed that someone else would catch you. Or maybe it was closer to sitting around a campfire and telling ghost stories. Shiver my timbers. Whatever it was, it was working. I felt a kind of mute solidarity growing among the students as the poems were read—often intoned—aloud.

  People think I’m happy

  I’m wealthy, I’m this, I’m that

  That I’ve got it good

  Judgments

  Assumptions

  You don’t really know me

  You don’t really know what I go through

  Coming to school each day with a smile is hard

  It’s a lie.

  My God! Were there no happy poems by fifteen year-olds? Yes, Mr. Leon had pushed them in a definite direction, but did they all need to sound like mad, mean, brilliant Sylvia Plath? There’s such a thing as being too good a student. A number of poems, I noticed, complained of absent or overly demanding fathers: “He screamed so loud / With his veins popping out of his neck / You’re a bitch / You’re a brat.” Plath had licensed the aggrieved tone, but I was still surprised. These kids were the winners in the public school system. They had faced a competitive entry and gotten into a good school, and most of them were heading to college, even very good colleges, and I grumbled to myself that their fathers’ toughness may have been one reason for their success until now. Kids with absent or indifferent parents or guardians rarely made it this far. The pressure on Beacon students may have been unpleasant; it may have worked, too.

  But all of that was beside the point. The poems may have made me squirm, yet in some way or other they were bitterly true. Anyway, I was an idiot for expecting a balanced view. They were fifteen. The point was they were propelled into self-expression, even anonymous self-expression. For Sean Leon, literature enabled students to tell their own stories, to fix the beginnings of an identity out of the chaos of fear and desire. Teenagers have a talent for morbidity and dramatized self-pity, emotions that, ten years later, they might laugh off. But if they didn’t go through this complaining now, they might not have anything to relinquish later.

  “I have a great deal of respect for the courage to share, even anonymously,” Mr. Leon said at the end of the class, and I thought to myself, imitation Plath or not, “I wear my skin like a cage” was a powerful line. I couldn’t have written anything like it at fifteen. No one asked me to, but I doubt I could have done it if someone had.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BEACON, NOVEMBER: NUTS MATTER, AND BOLTS, TOO

  Thesis

  To Be or Not to Be

  The Spiritual Significance of the Active Voice

  Who Are “They”?

  Students Reading on Their Own

  So What?

  Mr. Leon stood before his class holding up a student paper—one of his own, it turned out. “I thought of myself as a good writer,” he said, turning it over in his hand as if it were some sort of alien object, then turning it back again. “I was a student at Louisiana State, and I was nailing it on paper after paper—A, A, and A. I wrote an essay on Walter Lippmann, the journalist and political thinker. My professor said it was one of the best essays he had received, but he gave it an F.” He paused. “I had misspelled the author’s name throughout the essay. I was purporting to criticize this guy Lippmann, and I misspelled his name. Over time, I’ve become a more humble person.”

  He was saying what he had said before in one form or another. If the students didn’t care for precision in writing, they wouldn’t write anything anyone wanted to read. The soul expresses itself in speech, in words, in writing, but craft has to come first, or the soul would be stunted or mute. Nuts and bolts—grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and “thesis statements”—were as much part of tenth-grade English as literature.

  “Writing and instruction can be pretty boring, but I get revved up about it, so don’t try to figure me out. I love this stuff,” Mr. Leon exclaimed. He was wearing a pink shirt, a yellow tie pulled down from the neck, and a blue sweater. He was festive. Excitement ahead! Thesis statements!

  Sean Leon happily slipped writing and language instruction into literary discussions, or inserted it at the beginning of a class, or saved it for the end, as if it were champagne, a reward for hard work. At home, the students punctuated pages of run-on prose that he distributed on sheets. They also turned the passive voice to active in such mishaps as “My books were stolen by someone yesterday.” In class, they rearranged dependent clauses, set up parallel constructions, transferred qualifiers from one place to another. They were forever moving words around, for a sentence was a malleable thing, and writers of sentences were either dynamic or inert.

  He read some sentences generated by another class. They were intended as thesis statements—jumping-off points for an essay: “Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.” Pause. “That is shite,” he said. He drew the word out contemptuously. For the first time, and only briefly, he sounded Irish. “Shite. Meaningless. How about this? ‘Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.’” The class was quiet. “Well, that’s better, isn’t it? But where’s it going?”

  The students were working on their first paper, a comparison of “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “A Rose For Emily,” and Mr. Leon was easing them into writing a step at a time, starting with a statement of what the paper was about. He had asked them to email him their statements, and now some of them read the sentences in class.

  Nino: “In ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’ Hawthorne uses symbolism to show the fallibility of human behavior.”

  Vanessa, who wouldn’t let go of the idea that Hawthorne’s story was about conformity and individualism: “In ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’ Hawthorne uses symbolism to relay the essential message that people should be authentic rather than crack to societal pressures.”

  Justin: “In ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’ Hawthorne uses foil to express…” No, no more. Uses foil? They were plugging literary terms like flagsticks into the middle of sentences. “You’ve got to show,” Mr. Leon said gently, “how symbolism is
used to make those points about society.” He asked the class to score the thesis statements according to the following criteria: Is it clear and concise? What are you analyzing? What are you arguing? And also: So what? That is, why does it matter?

  He was tough on them, making them do things that would have caused me to freeze. He asked individual students to go to the board, write their sentences, and call on others for comment and criticism. In effect, they would lead a discussion that could tear apart their own work, a daunting exercise. They had to man up, woman up. Some of them looked a little scared, but they did it. Mr. Leon remained quiet, though when energy flagged, he said, “Let’s go, let’s go! Time is short in my world.” The class revived and roundly criticized most of the statements on the whiteboard as vague and rudderless. “I don’t see an argument in it,” was the common sentiment. They were hard on one another, though ragging and sarcasm were forbidden.

  For Mr. Leon, grammatical, syntactical, and usage questions had their spiritual implications. He wanted to shake his students out of safety and lethargy, to make them energetic, even effervescent. Writing was a way of being. The British had ruled an empire with boys educated in Latin declension and syntax, and he set out the modern equivalent, rules for the active life.

  Wordiness—that was the other thing he got the students to criticize in one another’s writing. They could hear the meandering in other kids’ writing, however, without necessarily knowing how to cut it out of their own. “One way we address wordiness,” Mr. Leon said, “is to get rid of all versions of ‘to be.’” A few classes later, as they brought in a complete first draft of their essays, he asked them to swap the pages with one another and to mark forms of “to be” in the writing in front of them. “If you wind up with ten, not bad; twenty, worse; thirty, stomach-turning.” Most of them, looking at other writers’ papers, counted about fifteen.