The boys return to their eyrie again and again, sometimes cheekily strolling out right under the noses of Mr King, their loathed Latin teacher, and Mr Prout, their housemaster. Finally, King and Prout follow them. What the masters don’t know is that the boys have befriended Colonel Dabney, the landowner, and have been expressly invited to range over his land as much as they wish. Triumph: King and Prout are found crossing Colonel Dabney’s land and are apprehended by the gamekeeper, who holds them at gunpoint until Colonel Dabney appears. And there the two masters are given a dressing-down for trespassing, the very crime they were hoping to convict the boys of, all within earshot of the evil three, who by this time are hidden in the gamekeeper’s parlour, lying on the rugs and the couch and crying with laughter.
Back at school the three boys, still showing the effects of an hour’s helpless laughter, are called up to the headmaster for trespassing and for public drunkenness. They cite their membership of the Natural History Society and produce a badger given to them by the gamekeeper’s wife as proof of their commitment. Then they explain the truth of the matter, which they’ve withheld from King and Prout, to their headmaster, and he, understanding them utterly, perpetrates the ‘howling injustice’ of caning them all. He finishes by giving them a pile of new books, and the boys return to Number Five, exultant.
When Stalky & Co was published the reviews were mixed. ‘An unpleasant book about unpleasant boys at an unpleasant school,’ said one. Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells were among those who weighed in on its nastiness, and the ‘odiousness’ of its main characters. Unhealthy, unboylike, the demonic inventions of ‘the spoiled child of an utterly brutalised public’, Stalky, Beetle and M’Turk were ‘three small fiends in human likeness’.
In other words, they were teenagers. These three fifteen-year-olds methodically, brilliantly undermined everything that readers thought they knew about the public school. This was not Tom Brown’s School Days or The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s, or even Eric, or Little by Little. This was The Breakfast Club, only these characters, almost permanently on detention, had brains and education, and they used these to defeat cant, brutality and sycophancy in all its forms. When I was fifteen I knew no-one who spoke my language so clearly as these three nineteenth-century schoolboys. They were the best companions I ever had.
* * *
I’m the mother of two teenagers now. They’re both readers, particularly my daughter. In my son’s case, this is partly to do with access to his computer and phone. When he’s asked to take a break from these he generally ends up reading. My daughter – and I think this is to do with both her personality and her gender – reads to relax, for company, for entertainment. Every so often I try to nudge one or the other of them towards a certain book. Look, I’ll tell you – sometimes I pay them to read books. Our kids don’t get pocket money, but they do get paid for work around the house. In this way I paid Alice to read Pride and Prejudice. I also paid for In Cold Blood. I paid my son to read The Wolves of Willoughby Chase a few years ago. Most recently I paid my daughter to read The Catcher in the Rye.
She’d started it a few times because I kept pressing it on her, telling her about its importance, its place as a pivot in English literature, the way it invented teenagehood. But every time Alice picked it up she was put off. ‘He’s so annoying,’ she kept saying. ‘I hate the sound of his voice.’
Sometimes in my classes I do a kind of dramatic clutching of the heart when my students tell me they haven’t read the books I’m talking about. I try to avoid the dramatic clutching with Alice, but I feel it. I wanted to clutch my heart dramatically when she said that Holden Caulfield was annoying. Finally, though, curious or needing the money, she read it, all the way through. I’m sure she has some private responses to it that I won’t press her for, but her general response was twofold – first, he continued to be really annoying; second, it was so sad.
It never would have occurred to me to use the word ‘sad’ about Holden’s experience. But of course Alice is right – it is sad. He’s all on his own out there. He is absolutely lost, lost in his own city. The future terrifies him and nobody knows or cares what he is feeling. You can imagine his parents – ‘grand people’ – going to meeting after meeting with various school principals, working, not to help Holden, but to assure each new principal that at this school he’ll shape up, become like all the right-minded boys. What a cold reader I was. I knew Holden was speaking for me but I didn’t think about him with any tenderness.
This is partly because he didn’t think this way about himself either. Empathy has been refined and improved in the new millennium. My millennial children exist in a much more empathetic atmosphere than Holden Caulfield did, in a place where theirs and their friends’ feelings are noticed, valued. But don’t forget that this has a lot to do with their worth as consumers. In the current economy, what teenagers care about matters, and so they see themselves reflected in every surface. You really know you exist when someone tries to sell you something.
* * *
Some years ago I asked a literature class, ‘What happened in 1939?’
Total silence. This time I didn’t clutch my heart. Instead, I started for the door, saying, ‘If someone can’t tell me what happened in 1939, I’m leaving.’ We all laughed; I wouldn’t have left, but it’s good to create a bit of comic tension in a classroom. Then someone shouted, ‘World War Three!’
I grabbed the door handle and swung round to glare at the class.
‘I mean World War Two!’ shouted the same panicked student, and I let go of the door. We laughed again. We returned to the novel we were studying.
* * *
A book that both my children read voluntarily – and then saw the movie, and then read the book again – is Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. The plot is simple: the heroine, Katniss Everdeen, lives in a dystopian future where a group of lower class children and teenagers are ‘reaped’ – randomly selected once a year to fight to the death in a huge arena, all of it televised.
The Hunger Games is written in the strangely affectless prose that seems to dominate YA writing these days. I’m looking now at its opening sentences:
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course she did. This is the day of the reaping.
There doesn’t seem to be anything either terrible or wonderful about this writing. It is almost wholly uninflected. There are a lot of short sentences, heightening the sense that this girl has little time to tell you what she needs to tell you. The descriptions are adequate. The plotting is solid. Despite the fact that The Hunger Games owes its existence, in part, to the literature that came before (to George Orwell’s 1984, and to Shirley Jackson’s terrifying short story ‘The Lottery’ (1948), set in a village that gathers once a year to choose a person to stone to death), the writing itself does not seem to know this. It is almost entirely textureless.
Still. Last year, teaching creative writing at a city university, I found myself talking about The Hunger Games to my class. I had been trying to explain to my students why some narratives have traction in a culture. The Catcher in the Rye had traction because the teenager was coming into being and Salinger happened to be there to name him at exactly the right moment. The moment was not right for the characters of Stalky & Co, which remains a little-read book amongst Kipling’s enormous oeuvre. Trying to think of a text that might make sense to them, I suggested that the reason The Hunger Games had been so popular was because it spoke to something unexpressed in teenagers’ hearts. It describes without seeming to their sense that they are being forced out into a world they did not choose and did not create. The characters’ struggle to survive, the way they are forced to attack one another in order to live, and the way this seems to have been invented for the amusement of adults: this is what it feels like to be young today.
I sai
d these things wondering if they would have any effect. But as I looked around the room, every teenager in front of me was nodding. Briefly, warmly, we occupied the same space.
* * *
I recently read two books by the 2015 Nobel Prize winner, Svetlana Alexievich. Originally from Belarus, Alexievich has spent years travelling around Russia interviewing ordinary Russians for what she sometimes describes as ‘chorus novels’. Instead of trying to tell stories, she asks questions and records answers, with little or no descriptive intervention. The result is powerful. While Voices from Chernobyl is the more instantly arresting book (its opening monologue by the wife of one of the first firemen on the scene after the reactor exploded is horrible, riveting), Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets had a more profound effect on me. Alexievich says, ‘I’m piecing together the history of “domestic”, “interior” socialism. As it existed in a person’s soul. I’ve always been drawn to this miniature expanse: one person, the individual. It’s where everything happens.’
I had read Russian literature and journalism about the huge changes the country had gone through in the move from communism to capitalism. I had some idea, some understanding, of Russian experience. But reading these interviews with ordinary Russians in post-perestroika cities was like suddenly being introduced to the Russian psyche as a whole. I felt I’d never known who these people were before.
What struck me most particularly was how many people missed their lives under communism. We’ve been brought up to think that the privations of postwar Russia were unbearable – and in many cases they were – so it was odd to hear the children of parents who’d been sent to labour camps speak about regretting the loss of culture that came with the advent of capitalism. ‘Our country was covered in banks and billboards.’ ‘An entire civilisation lies rotting on the trash heap.’ One remembered that when the new work of a favourite poet was published, ‘We’d queue round the block for a copy.’
* * *
I think sometimes about my friend Trevor, a writer whose twenty-year-old son has not read Camus and Sartre and Dostoevsky and Kafka, once the usual fare for thoughtful young men. I think about the time Trevor said to Corin that if he did not read fiction, he would be a very lonely man. This makes perfect sense to me, although it is probably wrong. Corin is most certainly not lonely; he has music, and his band, and the magazine he writes for. But I feel less lonely just thinking about Trevor saying that.
I’ve passed through my activist age, when it was my sworn duty to make sure every student I taught read at least one book. It’s exhausting to be angry all the time. I try to remember what I learned years ago – that when the book became readily available in English households in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people feared a kind of apocalypse of communication. Instead of sitting by the fire in the evening and talking, everyone would disappear into the silence of text, and civilisation would come to an end. Then there was the long-playing record, and then there was the radio, then the movies, and then, horror of horrors, the television. And now – well, here we are, still talking to each other.
Besides, when I look into the rooms of the two teenagers in my house they are happy reading, or texting, or checking their Instagram or listening to music, or, it seems, doing all of these things at once. I don’t use any social media myself but I can feel the rich hum of theirs in our house. There are ways my two children are communicating, ways they are becoming themselves, that I don’t intervene in – and that’s as it should be.
* * *
But it used to be that when I stood in front of a class I felt an excited kinship, and a sense of my enormous luck – to be there, right then, amongst young people, as their reading and writing took shape. I still feel lucky, because it’s a privilege to be next to young people at any stage of their lives. But sometimes, when I read their writing, I want to send up a howl of desolation. Their flimsy words scud across an empty landscape, a landscape unpopulated by all the books that came before. There’s no weight, there’s no texture, there’s no echo, there’s no depth. In the late ’90s I used to chuckle to myself when I read the work of yet another young man whose style had been colonised by Cormac McCarthy or Tim Winton or Charles Bukowski. There’s nothing to chuckle at anymore because my students haven’t read any of these writers. There’s no-one to be colonised by. Cue tumbleweeds.
I can’t expect undergraduate students to have read as many books as I have – I am fifty and they are twenty – and not all can share this sense I have that literature is a conversation with history. That it can be turned to when we are seeking understanding of ourselves or our attitudes. That by examining it we can discover what kind of person we are, and how forces like capitalism, like communism, play a part in forming a person. That literature played its part in the invention of the teenager.
Nor do I expect my students to read Stalky & Co, or to channel Cormac McCarthy or Tim Winton or Charles Bukowski. I don’t even expect them to have full command of their sentences when we first meet. Times have changed. These days I spend a good half of my class time demolishing and rebuilding sentences with my students, and the other half introducing them to as many works of literature as I can. I respect their right to be at university and I try to make sure they leave my classes having learned something, and – this comes second, and always must – having enjoyed themselves.
But oh, the silences in their writing. The rush of wind. The tumbleweeds.
Detail III
My old friend Patrick sent me a scan of a page torn out of an exercise book, scribbled on in a loose, fast-moving hand – the hand of someone speaking to themselves, barely seeing the page. It’s written by David McComb, the lead singer of Western Australian band The Triffids, about their 1986 album Born Sandy Devotional. Patrick and my husband Russell and I spend some of our idle time making lists and sending them to each other. When Prince died we each made a list of our ten favourite Prince songs, and then Russell compiled them into a playlist (there were several overlaps, including ‘Mountains’ from Parade and ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’ from Sign o’ the Times). We also make lists of our favourite albums, of our heroes and heroines, our favourite books. It is a way of speaking to each other about a long shared history: the three of us have been together in one way or another for thirty or more years. Russell’s favourite album is Prince’s Parade; he has its barcode tattooed on his left bicep. Patrick has two favourites: Parade and Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, The Go-Betweens’ fourth album. My favourite album, of all time, without hesitation, is Born Sandy Devotional.
McComb writes:
the theme will be
Unrequited Love
But the language
will reach way above
and beyond that
VERY LITERARY to prevent it being soppy
Muscular, slow
droning long background strings
deft jazzy bass + drums
Why is it my favourite album? It is because it so willingly reaches for greatness. It is VERY LITERARY. But if Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens was Charlotte Brontë – more intellectual, more controlled – then David McComb was Emily, and Born Sandy Devotional his Wuthering Heights, a masterpiece both helpless and willed. The Triffids wrote landscapes of sound, grand songs to accommodate the grand feelings and deep, commanding vocals of its lead singer. They made a kind of operatic beauty out of simple things. They were prepared to find Western Australia – Perth, no less – a place of great passions. Born Sandy Devotional, with its mad, apparently meaningless title, says yes to art.
I remember where I was when I learned that David McComb had died, just before his thirty-seventh birthday. He’d had a heart transplant a few years earlier, having ruined his cardiovascular system with excessive drinking and drug taking. Finally the heart rejected him, or he it. Another note, this from McComb’s London diaries, counts beers drunk on an ordinary night out: ‘Personally, it was definitely a “light” night as far as imbibing goes: nine or eleven p
ints, which is practically technically a “night off”, “a night on the wagon” per se.’ Despite the emerging narrative of disaster, I love this sentence: its sprouting ugliness, all those self-conscious quotation marks. I love that pompous ‘per se’, which is only there for the sound of it. I love the showing off, the self-dramatising, the youthful use of words like ‘imbibing’. I love the sound of ‘practically technically’, like dice cracking together. The Triffids, and David McComb in particular, taught me that writing like this – being grandiose, showing off, indulging the self – wasn’t a crime. Or it wasn’t if through the practice of it you could produce art.
Annie Dillard says:
One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time… These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water… Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
It was 1999 and I was driving somewhere in the dark, most likely to or from Sydney, from or to the Blue Mountains. The radio played ‘Wide Open Road’ from Born Sandy Devotional. Tears coursed down my face. I felt the odd, displaced grief of losing someone you never knew: grief for McComb’s loneliness, his or all of ours in the face of death. And grief because I had never had the chance to say to him, Music like yours allows art in others. It is a part of who I am, and because of that David McComb still lives.
The Details Page 12