Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  My second tattoo vision was a five-man plan. Sort of like Shazam and the Roman gods who seeded his power, I would carve upon me the five men who informed my world view.

  I suppose it says something about the unfinished nature of that foundational personal philosophy that I’ve forgotten two of them. I hope to Christ neither was a professional wrestler. The first guy was the Irish rebel and martyr Michael Collins. The second was Malcolm X (I’d just read his autobiography and its finishing touches on inclusion and human solidarity had felt very profound to me). Collins and X were late discoveries, relatively speaking. They’d come to me as a generalized teenage purposelessness and rage began searching for some useful, bookish conduit. I’d eventually end up at Frantz Fanon and Bolshevism, but before I could go all little-red-book I got too busy working for a living. This is why all personal revolutions end—because you have a double shift on Saturday.

  My third tattoo man had been with me much longer—George Orwell.

  For a certain sort of person, there is a lifelong struggle between those writers and books you claim to like best versus those you actually do. Most of what we read is literary corn syrup—easily digestible and runs right through us. Cheap mysteries, borderline pornography, John Grisham, stories about precocious teenagers with telepathy hunting each other in the near future—that’s the bulk of our diet.

  We don’t sit down to absorb these books so much as graze on them while doing other things—riding the subway or burning time in a waiting room.

  “Real” literary time is spent in a comfortable chair and booked in advance. You might make yourself a cup of tea and cross your legs like you once saw William Buckley do. You are Reading. It requires concentration. You are growing as a person. You can feel it. Is your head expanding? Quite possibly!

  After a while you grow bored, but you hold on to the feeling proper literature gives. And you tell other people about it. That’s important. There is no point reading a good book unless others have heard—or better yet, seen—that you’ve done so.

  Orwell closed this loop. He was a great writer, great thinker and great entertainer. He is, to my mind, the most usefully instructional writer in English—spare language; staccato sentences; propositions instead of meanders; the chronological arrangement of narrative. If you want to know how to write well, copy Orwell as best you can.

  And, like few major authors in history, his collected work was tiered to hit you at key moments in the development of your interior life.

  I started out with Animal Farm as a grade-schooler. I was alerted to the fact that this book was special because my mother insisted on reading it to us. As a rule, she did not do a “bedtime routine.” There was no “tucking in,” no petting back the hair, no staring into our eyes and telling us how precious we were. There was a steady escalation of threats that started around eight and ended near ten with shouting and lights shut off, followed by surprise guerrilla forays into the room to see if any of the natives were still active past curfew.

  This went on for years and years because my mother had a farmer’s fixation on when people should and should not be asleep. In the day? Absolutely not. Not unless you’d just come out of surgery, and even then. At night? Absolutely. And no half-assed stuff—no nightlights, no music in the background. Curtains pulled, blankets at chin, unconscious for eight solid hours. She’d have drugged us if it had occurred to her. And then it all started again. This military precision has blessed/cursed me since. I am incapable of sleeping in without feeling an enormous weight of guilt (and I do so constantly, which means the dysfunctional snake has truly swallowed its tail).

  So on the night she announced that bedtime would be delayed and literature would be read aloud, it seemed a trap. What was going on here? Was all my stuff going to be removed while I was distracted? Would strangers annex the living room? Was this all a pretext to calamity?

  Fair to say that I first came to Orwell primed with the proper, paranoid mindset. Animal Farm is not a long book. It runs, like the best stories, in order. It is chilling but emotionally detached. There’s no simpering or pandering—the worst parts of all children’s literature. Some of the best advice I’ve received on writing is that it is finished once you have held it up and shaken out all the extra words. Animal Farm had no extra words.

  Thinly veiled, the book is the Russian Revolution channelled through Old MacDonald. The animals on a farm revolt. They send the humans to flight. Led by two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, they create a socialist nirvana. And then things start to slide.

  The allegory here penetrable by the mind of a child but subtle enough to appeal to adults. It’s premised on two basic features of life you must understand to survive—nothing is fair; and everyone is a hypocrite when it suits them.

  Are you going to be a Napoleon or a Snowball? Are you going to be the revolutionary who wins or the one who will not go the whole way? Seriously, who would want to be a Snowball in this scenario? It’s a fat blob of nothingness that melts as soon as matters heat up. With necessary amendments, I’ll be the guy up on my hind legs, thanks very much.

  Worse, you could be a Boxer and get marched off to the glue factory on the basis of your principles. Boxer—the horse—was the hero of every other book I’d read to that point, and here he was a schlemiel who cannot feel the direction of the wind changing.

  The book doesn’t get really grim until the last few pages and then it just ends. The force coming from the implied final act—“Things got much worse for all involved and then continued on like that, forever.” This literary device was new and exciting—a book you are meant to imagine to its finale. It was my first experience of post-modernism.

  My mother and I did not discuss our feelings about the book afterward. It was left to me to read it again at my leisure. We were not a didactic family in that way, which is why my mother’s Bolshie politics never fully infected my own. Caring only that I had the critical information, and not caring how I interpreted it, was one of her gifts to me. She was a true anti-authoritarian. She didn’t feel the need to convince you of anything or turn you to her way of thinking. These days that would make her as rare as a fucking dodo.

  Were you going to be the person screwing people over in life or the one getting screwed? Animal Farm was a sort of Nietzschean primer on this question. Given his own first-hand experience with political utopianism—he got shot in the neck for his trouble—Orwell offered no middle ground on this score. There was no third way that allowed you to save your skin as well as your pride. This was pure “one-or-the-other”-ism. Even as a nine- or ten-year-old, I appreciated the dull honesty.

  As I suppose my mother had intended, Animal Farm awakened in me an early mistrust of systems and their rewards. My own solution to the choice between tyrant and victim was to opt out. I would be the person who did not adopt philosophies or sign on to political modes of thought. I’d be the distant cynic, the person narrating the tragedy of existence from a safe remove. In essence, I’d be Orwell himself. I’m not sure this was his point, but it was the point I took. I would not become a writer for a long time. But though it did not occur to me then, this was the beginning of that urge.

  Of course, as a child you don’t think of it in this organized a way—“I am a dissenter in the Greek tradition, and will, when asked, drink the hemlock without ever having bent”—but Orwell made it easy to apply his own rules to the observed reality of the schoolyard. You knew who the pigs were, and realized distressingly that you were probably a sheep. There was only one honourable way out of that bind. Animal Farm gave you the road map.

  Orwell popped into my consciousness a second time in 1984, when I was turning twelve, and “Did he call it right?” became a pop culture sensation. A lot of people seemed to believe that Winston Smith’s rise-and-shine calisthenics while being shouted at by the interactive view screen presaged the 20 Minute Workout, as if that was what Orwell had been after—knocking off H.G. Wells.

  Most failed then to notice (and still do) that
1984 was not a work of prediction or a warning. Instead, it was a piece of journalism relevant to all eras. It referred most precisely to the way in which free people organize their own intellectual confinement.

  This time the allegory was subtler, and perhaps only perceptible to children, since they had not yet been invested in the game. All of us want to be fooled. Orwell wasn’t showing us how to avoid that. He was only reminding us of the fact.

  What struck me most about that book was the nobility of a doomed resistance. Doomed being the operative difference from every other piece of art I imbibed.

  Winston was always going to be crushed by the system. You knew that from page one. The only possible redemption was in doing it on his own terms. He doesn’t manage it. He fails himself and the only person he cares about. In the end, he survives. He can’t even manage to become a Boxer.

  What a freeing idea. That there is a real possibility life will not work out the way you’d hoped. That you will become less than you imagined. Perhaps even much less.

  At the time, there was a pedagogic rage for aptitude tests. We were forever filling out forms designed to tell us “what we were meant to be.” There was a strong tendency toward wish fulfillment in all this. Indiana Jones was a big thing at the time and I thought I’d like to be that—a swashbuckling archaeologist. We even had a whip that my brother would take out intermittently so we could flay each other.

  Of course, that profession popped up a lot in my tests—archaeologist.

  Like that was ever going to happen.

  I knew in my bones that I was going to be an archaeologist like I was going to be the principal in a production of La Cage aux Folles. I could pirouette around the living room all I liked, but it wasn’t going to change the fact that I was a clumsy oaf.

  What these aptitude tests never told you was that you were bound to be a mid-level cipher in the IT department of some insurance company. Which was far more likely.

  You may not fail in life, but the odds that you would succeed in the way they kept telling you was possible in school were so remote as to be statistically insignificant. No one had the courage to tell you that. Most teachers were by definition people who’d pulled up short on their aspirations—why teach science or drama rather than be a scientist or an actor?—though they hadn’t the salt to explain to you that that was how things worked.

  Our high-school football coach once told us, with a straight face no less, that if we really worked at it—hit the gym early, listened carefully, lived right—any one of us could play pro football. Maybe not in the NFL, but Canadian football for sure.

  We were all down on a knee at the time, getting the old pep talk after a game. A lot of kids in the room had this “Really?” look, as if they believed what he was saying. Several faces had a moony, dream-a-little-dream cast, as if they were making a decision. I was looking a little lower, at their chubby/scrawny/averagely sized teenage bodies, thinking a different sort of “Really?” Like, really? REALLY?! Were we supposed to buy this nonsense?

  This wasn’t inspirational. It was a bald-faced lie. No one in this room was playing professional football unless they survived an overnight stay in a nuclear accelerator.

  What he should have been doing was telling us to spend less time working out and more time force-feeding ourselves algebra. Get a job at McDonald’s and start buying Apple stock. Invest 10 percent of your take-home pay. Marry someone you like who likes you. Don’t be a jerk to people. It all comes around.

  Most important of all, acclimate yourself to the idea that none of this will play out the way you think. Don’t accept that you don’t know. Know you don’t know.

  Teachers wouldn’t tell you that, but George Orwell did. You will be an office drone. You will shuffle paper all day long and be alone at night. You will suffer quietly and, if lucky, take pleasure in small diversions. You will not be remarkable in any way. In the end, you will let yourself down. Life might not turn out quite so grim, but I thought it best to be prepared with that in mind. Better a pleasant surprise than a certain disappointment.

  Which brought me to the third stage of Orwell—his reportage.

  This worked in opposite order to Orwell’s own life. He’d begun as an idealist and was disabused of his notions. The journalism was his first work. Though real, this writing was Orwell’s true fantasy. That you could pack up and go to cover a war in Spain, then be so moved by what you saw there that you signed up to fight instead. Was that really possible? Apparently, since he’d done it.

  Like most of the people I grew up with, we did not travel. A couple of sporadic trips back to Ireland that I can only barely recall. Once to Niagara Falls. Relatives in Northern Ontario. But there were no vacations, as such, no explorations abroad. There wasn’t the money to do so and there was no peer pressure, either. People stayed home. The schoolyard was our cottage. We paid taxes toward public pools and were goddamn well going to use them.

  I didn’t do much more than hang around, which seems in retrospect good preparation for life. That’s what most of us spend our adulthood doing—accepting responsibilities no one has prepared us for and muddling through.

  But here was a counter-example from an arch-cynic. Though he didn’t seem to believe such a thing was possible—not if you were to judge him on the writing I was familiar with—Orwell had done something with himself. I absorbed these works—Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and most especially Homage to Catalonia—as time travelogue and escapism. The politics were beside the point. I was bound up in the adventure of them. I perceived Orwell like I did all writers—as old—but his self-destructive enthusiasm shone through. In his middle thirties, he was the teenager I would have liked to have been.

  Eventually, if you are lucky, as a child you will meet someone who can show you how to be a man. Not in the hagiographic “good person/full life/leave a legacy” sense. But how to cope.

  I knew that my options in this regard were limited. I was never going to join anything. I couldn’t be part of a movement, or sign on to a popular way of being. That wasn’t in me. I was always going to be apart. Orwell was to me the type I might aspire to—the interested observer; the self-contained loner. He could be near great events without feeling the need to influence them. He found meaning in existing on the periphery.

  Of course, this doesn’t exactly jibe with hooking up with anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, but that isn’t the point of Homage to Catalonia. His martial participation is cut short by a bullet wound. He spends most of the book in some stage of escape. Most of what he does in there is see things and tell you about them. He’s just wandering around writing things down, not at all sure that any of it will be read.

  But it all seemed to me purposeful. And more to the point, useful.

  The most fascinating things about life are the banalities we so rarely discuss amongst ourselves but that we devote most of our energies to navigating. How did that day you’ve forgotten look? What did it feel like? Were you lonely? Did you have the sense you were progressing anywhere? Probably not. Yet string a few thousand of them together and that’s a life.

  Orwell had a particular gift for drawing deep impressions from shallow encounters. He could glance past someone—the unnamed Italian militiaman who opens Homage, for instance, the one he liked so much despite not speaking with nor ever seeing again—and make that person real to you.

  This was to me true art. Not making something great seem so. That’s easy. But finding something meaningless and giving it its due.

  I was fourteen or fifteen years old and beginning to come to terms with the idea that nothing I would do would impact more than a few people. And that whatever impact I did create would not last.

  The world fought me hard on this realization. It needed me to believe that this all had some ultimate purpose. Otherwise, I might give up on it and become a problem.

  Over his short career (fifteen years or so before an untimely death) and in his roundabout way, Orwell taught me
how bad the deal was. But also that you do not have to be in the system, nor do you have to exist outside it. All you need do is hang around the edges, watching. No one can force you out of something you don’t have any desire to join. There is some hope for life’s conscientious objectors.

  And there is some happiness to be had in it. The less you depend on the big successes, the more you can enjoy those small diversions. It’s all a matter of proportion and expectation.

  It is a marvel to me that they are still banning Orwell’s books. China just struck 1984 off the official list in 2018. But that fear misapprehends his true power, for me at least. Though he wrote about revolutions, Orwell wasn’t trying to incite one. Rather the opposite. He told certain young readers that life was a phony war that always ended one way. Your only course is girding yourself for it. Whatever fight there is will be internal and, in the end, will have meaning only insofar as you provide it.

  In other words, don’t let other people decide for you. Decide for yourself.

  I never did get that Orwell tattoo. And if I had, I’d have had to have it removed. It was the opposite of what I learned.

  THE UMBRELLA

  LOOKING BACK, I suspect that most of us know exactly when our childhoods ended. Assuming you weren’t forcibly married in your teens to a village elder or feudal lord, this probably happened somewhere in your twenties. Or your thirties (smarten up). Or I suppose it could be your forties (though that is wrong and I pity your spouse).

  The umbrella was my moment.

  At age twenty-five, lacking a job, a girlfriend, an apartment and any prospects, I went to Belgium for the summer. I’d gone there after meeting a producer named Erik at a documentary film festival. Erik was my idea of what an auteur looked like—good hair, limpid blue eyes, a permanent expression of bemusement. Most impressively, he smoked like a movie Nazi—cigarette held between middle and ring finger.