Up the Down Staircase

by Bel Kaufman

  “Miss Kaufman, we are also an educational publisher and sell a large number of books to schools, colleges, and universities. Can you perhaps change it to rats?”

  I was adamant. Rats was not a word worthy of being etched on wood. I prevailed.

  Next—the page on which a girl passes a note to her friend about the class politician: “Harry Kagan is a prick.”

  “Miss Kaufman, we are also an educational publisher and sell a large number of books to schools, colleges, and universities. Can the girl possibly say he is a louse?”

  “No,” I replied, “that’s not a word she would use. Besides, had you read the book carefully, you would have seen that Harry Kagan happens to be a prick.”

  At least they laughed. Nevertheless, we changed prick to ass in the book. As I left, I said, “Next time I write a book, I’ll give it to a dirty publisher!”

  My editor and I discussed the format of the book and settled on a hardcover that would sell for $4.95. (This was in 1964!) Why would anyone pay that much for a book about school? I wondered. Perhaps a few teachers might smile in recognition, a few readers might see that the book was more than merely funny. But would the general public be interested?

  As is customary before publication, we tried to sell the first serial rights to one of the commercial magazines. It was refused by three. Again, its style was the problem. “It would probably stop our readers cold,” wrote one editor. “Is it too ‘special’?” wrote another. “I am returning the manuscript and will see how the book does.”

  My immediate fear was that I would be fired from my new teaching position at the community college when the book was published. I confided to a colleague that I had written a novel in which I satirized some school administrators, and I was afraid I would lose my job. “Forget it” my friend reassured me. “Who will review it? Who will know you wrote it?”

  As soon as the book was published, letters came pouring in from friends, strangers, and teachers. I thought I had written about one school in one city; I didn’t know I’d written about many schools in many cities. Teachers told me it was a book they should have written had they not been so exhausted after a day at school. “How did you know?” they wrote. “You described my class, my kids, my problems.”

  A letter came from the Board of Education: “You would be pleased to learn that a number of changes have been made with our Board of Examiners, including the elimination of ‘Dear Sir or Madam.’ ”

  A principal wrote: “We’d let you use any staircase you wish.”

  And a soldier in Vietnam, a former student, wrote he found my book in a tent. He addressed me: “Dearest Teacher,” and signed: “Your devoted pupil.”

  I brought a copy of the book to my mother in the hospital where she was dying of cancer. She put it under her pillow, and the next morning she died. She never knew of its success.

  I awoke one morning to find myself famous. I had become an instant authority—on everything, like the comedian who billed himself the world’s greatest authority. I said what I had always said, but now people listened. I discovered a new career as a speaker at education conventions. Teachers who came to hear me laughed in recognition and felt better about their profession. For the first time, after years of feeling isolated and abandoned, they had finally found someone like them, who knew, who had been there, and who told it like it was. At the same time, the general public became aware of what teachers have always known.

  I achieved identity as “the author of.” “You the one wrote the book?” asked the makeup man on a talk show where I was sandwiched in between a juggler and a transvestite. I was presented with plaques and scrolls and citations. My favorite, which hangs framed in my study, says in multicolored crayon: HUMER AND CHUCKELS AWARD FROM MRS. VINOGRAD’S CLASS. My most unlikely honor makes me a Kentucky Colonel.

  I was photographed on staircases all over the nation, holding my book so that the title showed. I became a crossword puzzle item. I read my book into a record at the American Foundation for the Blind and received a fan letter from a blind reader: “Best book I ever heard.” My novel was chosen for the Presidential Library. And it was banned in Knoxville, Tennessee. Parents of twelve students had the book removed from a list of approved books in Knoxville city schools because it contained “vulgar language.” Someone must have caught that c in fuck. After the book was quietly reinstated, I took special pleasure in delivering the keynote address to the Tennessee Education Association at its annual convention in Knoxville.

  Instead of losing my job at the community college, I was promoted to assistant professor. The style of the book, which had previously stymied editors, became a topic of study in writing classes. The title I worried about became part of the language, showing up in cartoons and headlines throughout the years. During the stock market plunge in October 1987 it was a front page headline in the New York Daily News: “Up The Dow Staircase.” It even appeared in a Soviet newspaper: “Up the Glasnost Staircase.”

  The book was bound to become “a major motion picture.” It was sold to Warner Brothers for one of the largest sums paid at that time for a first novel by an unknown author—only because another studio, Twentieth Century Fox, was bidding for it at the same time. The legendary Annie Laurie Williams, theater and film agent whose word was honored by everyone in the industry, telephoned me every few minutes, quoting constantly escalating sums. She finally decided on Warner: “Alan Pakula wants to produce it and Robert Mulligan to direct it. They love it and they’re good. Shall we say yes?” We said yes.

  A few minutes later Annie Laurie called back to say that Twentieth Century Fox had just offered considerably more money, but she would stick by her word to Warner. At that point I was so benumbed by numbers, such large sums weren’t real. What was real was the price of party invitations I went to buy the following day. Some cost five cents each; the prettier ones were ten cents—too expensive.

  The movie was filmed in New York City, in and around what was then Haaren High School, located in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, and emptied for the summer. As “technical consultant,” I was allowed to hang around. It was thrilling to realize that all those people—actors, electricians, cameramen, script girls, director, producer, assistants, makeup people, scenic designers, and kids selected from schools and settlement houses, some with switchblade knives that had to be confiscated—were all there because one day I had sat down and put a blank piece of paper into my typewriter.

  Since the film was shot in a real high school with real kids, I found it uncanny to see the names of the teachers I had invented printed on the school mailboxes, as if they were truly alive. And it was strange to see artificial snow on one of the hottest days in August, actors bundled up in winter coats and earmuffs on the street, while makeup people wiped the sweat off their faces and wilted New Yorkers on a passing bus stared out of the windows in disbelief.

  None of the youngsters, so touching in the film, went on to an acting career. They had their one brief moment on the screen. I often wonder what became of them.

  Look magazine was doing a picture story about the movie, and we went to the home of the Puerto Rican boy, a school dropout, who played José Rodriguez—whose own name happened to be José Rodriguez. His mother hugged me and said, “Please, Miss Kaufman, write another book soon so my boy could be in it.”

  I, too, appeared in the film in a cameo bit. For a few seconds at the beginning of the movie, I was one of the teachers punching in with Sandy Dennis, who played Sylvia Barrett. There we were, Bel and Syl, side by side.

  At the end of the filming, at a party for the cast and crew, I found myself, along with the others, singing the school song, “The Purple and Gold,” with tears in my eyes. “Idiot!” I said to myself. “Why are you crying? You made up the song, you made up the school ….”

  The film opened in New York at Radio City Music Hall, and in 1967 was chosen to represent the United States at the Moscow Film Festival. There it was shown in the huge Kremlin Palace of
Congresses to an enthusiastic audience of some five thousand people.

  The Russian translation of Up the Down Staircase, called Verkh Po Lestnize Vedooshchei Vneez (Up the Staircase Leading Down), is so lively, it reads as if I had written it in that language. I couldn’t tell much about the other translations I saw, although I was intrigued by some of the titles:

  Swedish: Hei, Fröken!

  Czech: Nahoru Poschodisti Dolú by Bel Kaufmanova

  Spanish: Subiendo por la Escala de Bakada

  Italian: Su Per la Discesa

  Estonian: Allakäigutrepist Üles

  Hebrew: Bamalá Hamadregót Hayordót

  Japanese: vertical and unrecognizable, except for the photo of Sandy Dennis on the cover.

  I learned that “Hi, teach!” in Finnish is: “Terev, ope!”; in Czech: “Cau, pancelko!”; in Spanish: “Hola, ‘Profe’!” The French, with a sexy Gallic touch, transformed the book into a movie, L’Escalier Interdit—The Forbidden Staircase. And I heard of a pirated edition I couldn’t trace that gave the book a whole new dimension. It was called Upside Down on the Staircase.

  In 1968, invited to the Soviet Union to spend my royalty rubles, I discovered that my book was widely popular there, perhaps because bureaucracy is not unknown in that country, and because the Russians have a strong affection for children. The Soviet teachers were especially enthusiastic. “Just like here!” one of them told me, but of course, it wasn’t, except that good teachers, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are alike everywhere. The Soviet teenagers I met seemed to identify with the book, or wanted to. And I learned only recently that the American edition of Up the Down Staircase is used in some Russian schools to teach students contemporary English.

  I have been back in the former Soviet Union many times since then, always welcomed with open arms as the author of that book. I saw Russian plays based on my novel, some with music and lyrics. I read a new Russian edition of the novel in one volume that included a half dozen of my articles on education. I attended round-table discussions of the book by Russian authors. I was invited to meet President Gorbachev at receptions in Moscow and in Washington—all because of the popularity of Up the Staircase Leading Down. In October of 1990, on a plane from Moscow to New York, I met a sixteen-year-old Soviet girl who told me in Russian how much she had enjoyed appearing in my play in her high school in Tashkent. “Who were you?” I asked. “Sexpot,” she replied in English. (The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.)

  Back home, when Up the Down Staircase was dramatized for amateur performances in the United States, youngsters who appeared in it wrote to me:

  “Now that I am a movie star, this is my favorite future career.”

  “If not for you, I never would of got a curtain call.”

  “On opening night the crowd laughed when I was supposed to commit suicide by jumping out of the window, but that’s not your fault.”

  When my book was published in an inexpensive paperback edition that the kids could afford, I began to get “Dear Miss Barrett” letters from them:

  “Dear Miss Barrett we going down the drains. Keep in touch.”

  “You helped me overcome school.”

  “This is the first book I ever bought. For money.”

  “I am seventeen years old and I just read your book and I put it in my underwear drawer so that when I get married my forthcoming offsprings can read it too.”

  “When I was young I had a lot of griefness, but tomorrow will be worse.”

  Today is that tomorrow, and it is worse. Much worse and more serious than an insolent boy going up the wrong staircase. Education in this country is in crisis. If Sylvia Barrett were to step out of the pages of this book, she would find dramatic changes in the world. Yet she would immediately recognize her school.

  The more it changes, the more it remains the same. Schools today are exactly the same as they were over a half of a century ago, only now they are more so. Everything described in my fiction is today reality. Only computers and condoms are new.

  Teachers still cope. They cope with demeaning nonteaching chores, deadening bureaucracy, paper miles of clerical work, inadequate facilities, and heavy teaching loads. The same problems that have been “shelved for lack of time” and ignored for lack of attention have remained, have proliferated, have become chronic. Minor infractions—whispering in assembly, chewing gum in class, smoking (cigarettes) in the lavatory—have swelled into major crimes: assault, vandalism, arson, robbery, bullying, and worse. The “mugings and rapings” children wrote about in Up the Down Staircase have become more frequent. Teachers today lock their doors from the inside, hide their window poles, hold on to their wallets. They are still trying to teach, but for many it has become a question of survival.

  In some schools, in overcrowded classes, children sit on radiators, as they did in my book. Even the old controversy about the “moment of silence,” the fear that it may, God forbid, turn into a moment of prayer rather than meditation, is still, in some states, unresolved. No longer “bowed and cowed,” teachers now speak for themselves, but they are seldom heard.

  The staggering statistics on dropouts mentioned in this book are still staggering: today huge numbers of dropouts, mostly minority children, functionally illiterate, spill out of our schools and self-destruct. Drug pushers are more brazen. Glue sniffing is now cocaine and crack. In rereading my book, I see how innocent the “epidemic of chalk stealing” sounds; today it’s robbery at knife-point. The sassy boy in Up the Down Staircase who dared to say to the chairman, “Aw, go jump in the lake!” would today call him “motherfucker.” Pregnant girls walk casually in school corridors; others bring their babies to school daycare centers. The school nurse, who was not allowed to give aspirin or touch wounds, is now dispensing controversial condoms.

  Now, as then, the school system is strangulated by its own red tape. Now, as then, it is mired in rigidity and befogged by empty rhetoric. Now, as then, teachers are overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated. Now, as then, children wage war against their schools. Many see no reason to attend classes; one boy told me, “My future is forget it!”

  I recently asked a teacher in my former school what has changed since my time. He shrugged and said, “Truants are now non-attenders!” Absurdities remain the same. Teachers from all over the country keep sending me directives from their principals, such as these:

  DO NOT ISSUE LAVATORY PASSES TO ANY STUDENT UNLESS PRESENTED WITH A MEDICAL CERTIFICATE TO COVER THE CONDITION

  and

  PLEASE DISTRIBUTE THESE CARDS TODAY TO EVERY STUDENT IN ALL YOUR CLASSES, INCLUDING ABSENTEES.

  Fact follows hot upon the footsteps of fiction. In Up the Down Staircase, my invented phrase: “Staircase which terminates in the basement” has become real. A teacher in the Midwest sent me this:

  FROM NOW ON ALL STAIRCASES MARKED UP WILL BE MARKED DOWN; ALL STAIRCASES MARKED DOWN WILL BE MARKED UP, AND ALL STAIRCASES LEADING TO THE BASEMENT WILL BE DOWN ONLY.

  Another phrase in my book, “Please disregard the following,” was echoed in this directive a teacher recently mailed me:

  FORTUNATELY, THE MESSAGE WE ASKED YOU TO DISREGARD WAS NOT SENT …

  In one school, above the time clock, I saw a notice that could have come straight out of Up the Down Staircase:

  THE CLOCK IS BROKEN. PUNCH IN ANYHOW.

  A broken window was a constant in my fictitious classroom. Many public schools today are in worse disrepair than Calvin Coolidge High School. Not only broken windows but broken toilets and holes in the ceiling go unattended.

  Uniformed guards provided by the Board of Education are stationed at school entrances to stop “intruders” like the ones who disrupted the assembly in my book. Some schools have installed metal detectors to spot knives and guns. When I went back, as a per diem substitute, to one of the toughest schools in New York, I had to show my identification to the guard and explain my reason for being there. I’m not sure how effective this method is: the Deputy Chancellor of Education, investigat
ing high schools, had written as his reason for visiting one: “child molester.” He went in, unchallenged by the guard. Inside the school, I saw cops in the lobby, pot on the stairs, chaos in the halls. The principal, barricaded behind the door of his office, popped out long enough to say to me: “If you see a kid with a knife, take it away. And give him a receipt!”

  In Up the Down Staircase the students’ problems sprang from the same sad soil of poverty, joblessness, racism, and hopelessness. A boy in my book writes: “They tried to integrate me, but it didn’t take.” It didn’t.

  As far back as 1961, educators warned about the “social dynamite” building up in our schools. Now, it is exploding all over the place. At their historic meeting on education in 1989 at the University of Virginia, state governors wondered how to solve all of society’s ills in the classrooms. So do teachers today. An ad for Apple Computer summed it up: “We expect our teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the shortcomings of the family. Then we expect them to educate our children.”

  In the last few years, there has been a spate of books, articles, news stories, radio programs, and television documentaries with frantic titles: “A Nation at Risk!” …. “High Schools on the Brink!” …. “Save Our Schools! …” National reports have lamented the quality of public education, trying to “stem the tide of mediocrity.” And what do these reports tell us? Everything that can be found in a book written in 1963. They inform us that:

  “Teachers are troubled by loss of status, bureaucratic pressures, negative public image and lack of recognition.”

  “Teachers should be relieved of the burden of record keeping, paperwork, security duty and other chores.”

  “Teachers scrounge for chalk and paper clips while being bombarded with procedural directives.”

  An article in The New York Times spoke of teachers’ “monumental frustrations over lack of authority and working conditions.” My book could have been written today; perhaps that is why it has endured.