Lit Up Read online

  I had mixed feelings about Mr. Leon’s disapproval of “to be.” Yes, it was weak: “is,” “are,” “were.” What are you saying? That something is something else. It’s just a way of identifying one thing with another. Much of the time, the first part of the sentence predicts the second half, eliminating surprise. Weak, as Mrs. Thatcher would say, definitely feeble compared to the vibrant activity of those bold Anglo-Saxon athletes break, bend, fight, yield, sing—expressing force or at least energy. All true, yet who didn’t use various forms of “to be” again and again? I used it myself in this paragraph. And I sympathized with any fifteen-year-old who depended on it thirty times in a three-page paper. I made a guess about them: They were just coming into an identity of their own, and the kind of will expressed by ax-wielding Saxon activity might have scared them a bit. They weren’t ready to act upon the world. More likely they wanted to find a place in it, and so, instinctively, they said one thing equals another. They identified the world as a state of being, often, apparently, a hostile state of being. The world was.

  Mr. Leon taught as a vitalist, that much was clear. You had to will yourself into activity, using the active voice in words and deed. They had no trouble demolishing a ridiculous sentence he wrote on the board. “An amended declaration shall be filed with the IRS office with whom the original was filed, even if you move to another district.” He said he would tell them later that the passive voice had its uses, but right now he wanted them active.

  * * *

  This normal reliance on “to be,” however, was linked to something else, something that puzzled me at first. I noticed it not so much in Mr. Leon’s class but in other Beacon classes. It was this: the students had trouble saying the name of the author. Until the teacher spoke the words “Fitzgerald” or “Hawthorne” or “Hesse” about twenty times, students said things like “It says that Nick lives in a house right next to Gatsby’s mansion.” Or “Even though it’s not telling you the story, I think it’s very beautiful—I like the full descriptions.” Or, even more strangely, “They say that Siddhartha ate very little for days.” But who in the world are they? The fifth or sixth time I heard this, I thought to myself that the French critic Roland Barthes, when he announced “the death of the author,” didn’t go far enough. It now appeared that the author had never lived. I was amazed. What’s so hard about remembering “Poe”?

  They had trouble acknowledging authorship. But why? One obvious reason: Like most American high school students, Beacon kids are given the books by the school. They make them their own, taking notes on yellow and pink Post-its, which they attach to their copies—some of the books were so flapped and colored they looked like exotic birds incapable of flight. They customize the school copies, but they eventually give them back. Officially presented and then retrieved, the books possess authority but, for many, no particular author.

  There may be some other commonplace reasons. My son Thomas, who was then twenty-four, reminded me that the students had seen a lot of textbooks. Didn’t I remember textbooks? Many of them had multiple authors. “Dad, no one remembers who wrote them.” Okay, the boy was right. Writing often came to students impersonally, produced by authority without any particular identity. Another commonplace reason: fifteen-year-olds were used to seeing TV series and movies made in collaboration. The best-informed knew who David Chase and Matt Weiner were, but TV was always there, always a feast, and as for who made individual shows—did it matter? It wasn’t important for most people.

  All this made sense, but I was a little sore (I was taking this personally in some way), and I wasn’t prepared to let up on them. There had to be less innocent explanations. Many of these kids don’t have favorite authors, I said to myself. That’s why they don’t care about who wrote the books they were reading in school. But that can’t be entirely true. When they were younger, many had read the Harry Potter series; many were now reading the Twilight and Hunger Games series, which certainly demonstrated loyalty—if not to J. K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, and Suzanne Collins, then at least to a common setting, a common destiny, a familiar pace and style. But did they know the authors’ names? Or were the books something that hit them anonymously, propelled out of the whirlwind of media noise?

  I gave Mr. Leon’s students a questionnaire, asking them to tell me what books they read on their own, what books were most important to them. One of the girls said Camus’s The Stranger and a couple said Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; the elegant Maud said Go Ask Alice, the sensation of 1971, which purported to be the diary of a teenage drug addict but was largely concocted by the therapist Beatrice Sparks, who signed herself “Anonymous.” Jordan of the strong shoulders liked Kurt Vonnegut and Ian McEwan; she had read McEwan’s great Atonement. She was one of three real readers, three out of thirty-two students. The others were Nino and Latisha Hornby, the one African American student in the class, who mentioned books by Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou’s autobiographical writing. Several boys read sports bios like Derek Jeter’s The Life You Imagine. James Patterson’s fiction had a couple fans. Again and again, The Hunger Games and Twilight. Several said they hadn’t read any books recently on their own, and none of the answers were ambitious or wild or obsessional.

  No doubt I’m asking too much: I know perfectly well that there was never a Golden Age of Teen Reading—let’s say fifty years ago—in which more than a minority read on their own J. D. Salinger or Joseph Heller or Charlotte Brontë; or, forty years ago, Kurt Vonnegut or Ray Bradbury or Allen Ginsberg. Obsessional reading is always a minority taste, and now such readers are even a smaller minority. But, unfairly or not, I was sorry that among Mr. Leon’s students there were no mad enthusiasms, no crazy loves, no compulsive reading of every book written by a single author, no stretching and reaching—not for Dave Eggers nor for Anne Tyler nor, except for Latisha, for Toni Morrison. For a hundred and fifty years, Jane Eyre has been an emotional favorite of girls this age, but it did not turn up. A thing about Grace Paley, perhaps, or Emily Dickinson? I didn’t find it. No, most of them did not relish authors. Except for Latisha and Jordan, no one named an actual writer. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye were gone as teen reading, at least at Beacon. When I asked, they told me that they had heard that Holden Caulfield was “whiny.”

  They all said they read on the Internet, which meant, like the rest of us, they read not just signed articles and parts of books but fragments and summations and borrowed text in which the words came from everywhere and nowhere—the words aggregated but seemingly not authored (even when they were). Writing on the Internet, with some exceptions, is manifold, accumulative, highly interwoven, repetitive, associational. It may be good writing, but much of the time it has no obvious source. “Isn’t the World Wide Web a new ether, in which we are all haunted by ghostwriters”? asked the Scottish novelist and essayist Andrew O’Hagan. The Internet really was a “they.”

  All right, cool down. They were young—isn’t that mainly what I am saying? They were students, tenth-graders, uncreated readers, or half-created, and their unwillingness to name authors may have been related to their dependence on some form of “to be” seventeen times or thirty times in a three-page paper. They lacked confidence, as I did at fifteen. If they recognized a strong personal voice in writers, they might wonder if they didn’t have to create a voice for themselves, which is hard at any age. At the moment, a lot of their speech was a way of putting off clear declaration. Like using “like” again and again. “I thought he was like saying you like face up to what you had done”—this about The Scarlet Letter. “Like” is a kind of spontaneous punctuation—a verbal tic setting off units of meaning. But it’s also a way of suggesting that the opposite of what one says may be true. “I offer this now, but I may take it back.” The word like is suppositional, a minor down payment upon assertion, a way of showing other people that you don’t take yourself any more seriously than they do. Eventually, as we get older, “like” fades away and gets overtaken by real punctuation, by need, wan
t, hope. But give them time, for heaven’s sake.

  * * *

  Initially, I was startled when Mr. Leon introduced the blunt question “So what?” into a composition lesson. Of all the compositional criteria “So what?” was the hardest for fifteen-year-olds to meet. To say why something—anything—mattered, or did not matter, required knowledge of the world, experience in all varieties. They would have to read and observe a great deal, and probably get knocked around, too, before they could answer well. But they would have to answer some day. We all have to answer, at any age. So what? is the common skepticism of the world. Is what you’re doing or saying interesting? Valuable? Original? Of any use? Does it make money for anyone?

  America is a supremely utilitarian society, and a derisive one, too. The Internet is spangled with words, ideas, proposals, jokes, so many of them that the most determined young person could be climbing up someone else’s tailpipe, choking on the exhaust, without even knowing it. Then they find out: the teasing irony and snark of professional entertainers is the common style of anyone who wants to boast that he knows something that others don’t know. The Internet has created a generation of information snobs and put-down artists. And even in the best of times, the world—the professional world—little feels it needs to make room for another ego, another claim on its attention, and the easily discouraged could be cowed by indifference or hostility. That the students had to be interesting as well as grammatical seemed paramount among the many things Mr. Leon wanted to teach them. So what? was an unpleasant question, but it toughened them up.

  At the end of the composition talk, Mr. Leon turned to a thesis sentence that had been on the board all along. It was a kind of matrix with missing words. “Sylvia Plath uses [blank] and [blank] to illustrate psychological tumult wherein each ‘death’ empowers her to rise above the ashes of her life.”

  “Is it perfect?” he asked. Someone in the other section had written it. The 10G students could fill in the blanks and make it better. Perfect, no, they said, but they all liked it. The sentence was active; it didn’t depend on some form of “to be”; it was interesting. “It’s heading in the right direction,” Mr. Leon said. “This student is trying to connect the themes of suicide and rebirth and resurrection.”

  He had asked them to tell their own stories in rude little poems, and, in his composition lessons, he was trying to pull them out of adolescent tentativeness and create them as bold young men and women, forcing them to put their entire being into words. It was a utopian goal, an English teacher’s goal.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BEACON, NOVEMBER: HUXLEY

  Brave New World

  Digital Fast

  Need

  False Happiness

  Maryanne Wolf and Deep Reading

  What Is the Soul?

  Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, the satirical shocker of 1932, is not a great novel, as Huxley himself seemed to know. Huxley created the characters as vehicles for whatever attitude or temperamental quirk that he wanted to define them by. The story moves intermittently, in odd fits and starts. As fiction, it feels arch and a little thin—remarkably clever, but repetitive, pedantic in its scandalous way, even a bit self-satisfied. Yet Brave New World still has power; it still feels like an accusation that has to be answered. I remember reading it decades ago in high school, paired with Orwell’s 1984, just as it would be paired now in Mr. Leon’s class. And I remember getting into an argument with the best English teacher in my school, a staunch anticommunist, who insisted that Orwell’s dystopia, ruled by constant surveillance and pain, was much closer to the current truth than Huxley’s futurist nightmare, which was ruled by biological engineering and pleasure (i.e., sex and drugs). I thought he was wrong—that Huxley’s vision was closer to our reality. I wasn’t much of an arguer, and anyway, back in the sixties, we were talking about two different things—he of the USSR, me of America, with its tranquilizers, its Muzak, its avid hedonism and incessant advertising for goods not always needed. Fifty-odd years later, the Soviet Union is gone, though the iron fist hasn’t disappeared in Russia and elsewhere, while America is still its pleasure-seeking, consumption-addled self. If anything, much more so. Which novel better predicted our current world?

  That old question—a high school chestnut that still glowed—couldn’t have been the only thing that interested Mr. Leon in Brave New World as a book for teenagers. The theme of tenth-grade English was “the individual and society,” which could be called a serious teenage obsession. All right, an obsession of serious teenagers. Dystopian fiction in which the individual had to fight to survive had become pop culture. The Hunger Games, with its starving American teenagers manipulated by corrupt, media-wise elders (they have tinted hair, and they smirk), is certainly the ultimate in teen paranoia, an emotionally satisfying metaphor for the kid-crushing demands of “society.” The Hunger Games was actually assigned in some American schools, but when I asked Mr. Leon about it, he said, “What is there to teach?” Clearly, there was something in Huxley’s eighty-year-old book, or something provoked by it, that mattered more to him.

  Reading Brave New World again, I was amused by how much Huxley relished his own naughtiness as he laid out the repulsive social structure of a future civilization. In the World State, as he calls it, babies are created in hatcheries, and enclosed in a caste system, ranging from Alpha Plus overlords at the top, down through Betas to Deltas, Epsilons, and Gammas. The masters look after administration and ideology; the lower orders do menial, agricultural, and industrial work. Art and religion have been banned; instead, people go to the “feelies”—pornographic movies whose tingling joys pass through the chair armrests into the audience’s flesh. Heroism and nobility have been rendered irrelevant; strong loyalties and love do not exist. Suffering doesn’t exist, either, and no enemy looms on the horizon. It is a world society, always at peace, tranquilized by sex, which you enjoy as often as you want and with whomever you want, for everyone belongs to everyone else. Anger and discontent, insofar as they exist at all, get washed away with a feel-good drug called Soma and with ritual gatherings that begin with incantation and end in orgy. Those few Alpha dissidents who find the lack of freedom intolerable are sent off to remote islands. For most people, life is very pleasant.

  Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe (the local overlord), holds forth on the subject of past civilizations for ardent students in the London hatchery:

  He waved his hand, and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he had brushed away a little dusk.… Whisk. Whisk—and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus?… Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal …

  And so on. It had all vanished, and no one cared. Only a few people, like Mustapha Mond, hoarding a library of vanished books, knew about such things—the old religious and artistic glories, the product of suffering and hope, two states that were now impossible to imagine.

  * * *

  As Mr. Leon was introducing his students to Brave New World, he suddenly said, “I want to ask you a question. In what ways have advances in science negatively affected the individual?” That was a mouthful, and not easy to answer. No immediate response. And then he asked, “How many of you sit down for a family dinner every night?” The students looked a little puzzled, and about half of them slowly raised their hands. “There was a time,” he said grimly, “when most families did that.” He left the question hanging as the class ended. The two questions made an odd pair. I wondered where he was going.

  When we returned, the questions were still hanging. He began by asking the students about certain characters in Brave New World, especially Bernard Marx, a diminutive and cranky Alpha Plus who initially seems to be the book’s dissident hero. Bernard finds much of life in the World State inane. In search of variety, he goes off with Lenina, a conventional but beautiful and shapely woman—“highly pneumatic,” as all the men say, which is one of Huxley’s least a
musing naughty jokes. Together they cross the Atlantic and visit the Savage Reservation in New Mexico, an area that has been left “uncivilized.” They are shocked by a part of the world in which parents conceive and raise children, and sexual desire leads to possession, jealousy, competition. But Bernard sees an opening to make himself more important. He will bring back a savage with him—John, who grew up in a hut but has read, again and again, the only book available to him, a filthy one-volume edition of Shakespeare’s complete works left behind by an earlier visitor from the World State. John’s head is full of passionate nobility expressed in extraordinary language. Literature, and nothing else, creates the novel’s single fully alert human being, alive to pleasure and pain; literature provides the only resistance to technological utopia. A naïve idea? Extreme? False? I was still stirred by it.

  Mr. Leon asked them to break into groups and talk over Bernard, and, as always, he patrolled, the room crouching next to one table or another, asking questions, urging them on, pulling silent students into the conversation. Almost every class had some small-group discussion. The groups allowed some students to loosen up and talk openly, take some risks, without the pressure of an audience of thirty-two. For instance, Tina Hsu, who was mostly silent in class, and covered her face with her hands when she did have to speak, talked aggressively in groups. She wasn’t timid, but a public performance was not her style.