In a way Lears eventually helped me see, I wasn’t quite the uncultivated, unwashed alien I imagined myself to be: For a few hours a week, listening to the radio, putting on records, I was a member of a ragtag tribe initiating its mythology. I wasn’t seeing the deities being born, exactly, but I was present while the demigods—Mick’s devil, John and Paul’s Walrus, the Beach Boys’ surfer girl; there was no end to them—were being set loose to stumble or fly in the world, to be worshiped in good, vulgar fashion as newborn glowing deities, archetypes to be adored and (maybe) emulated, or cast aside as too campy, inspired by dreams far too vapid for the times or just flat-out dumb. (Little surfer girl! Jayzus!)
These musicians, Lears might have told me if he were the sort who’d assert much of anything, were trying (and often enough failing) to be the Shelleys and Byrons of the moment, similar in their aspirations for shifting their audience’s inner weather and just as readily detested by all the paragons of tired virtue. (“Shelley the atheist is dead,” a British paper cried after he drowned. “Now he knows whether there is a hell or not.”) For were the rockers not here to do something on the order of what the Romantics had tried to do: to re-create consciousness—sometimes with an assist from a mind-blasting substance, sometimes not—and in so doing renew a portion of the world?
The reason Lears got ticked off when we didn’t come up with the drug-connection answer wasn’t that we were all being so dim. We’d behaved in much dumber ways without provoking his mild ire. The reason was, I think, that all of us, or a good many, knew the answer—I did—and wouldn’t break the taboo against talking about something like drugs in school. We were keeping the conversation timid and artificial when, as Nora had showed us, and Socrates had long ago averred, it ought to be conducted full-out: “This discussion is not about any chance question,” the philosopher says, “but about the way one should live.”
Dubby was trying to answer. He was offering the best he could. And, to his credit, he hung in, undaunted by Lears’ dismissal. He kept listening, tossed in a word or two. Once he was on the road, even his guide and mentor wasn’t going to boot him off.
Why did I listen to this stuff? Why was I, by this time, something like a rock addict? Prodded by Lears, I groped around for some answers. The Stones were here to unfold a jump-back-rat’s vision of the world—crumbling, smoke-blackened, teeming and fetid, with, here and there, behind polished, bolted-oak doors, a pocket of pleasure for the lucky and bold. The only way to counter this world, they knew, was to follow their lead and live without illusions, to be a grinning predator rather than squealing prey. The Stones hated the world as it was, or affected to, and stored some contempt for the worldliness they had to develop in order to get along, and more than along. In a way, they were chanting the secret history of Medford life: Never kept a dollar past sunset; never want to be like Papa, workin’ for the boss every night and day. Just gimme some love, fast and loose, to keep my grin up, keep me happy.
With the Beatles, you dreamed and then awoke to live inside the dream and never leave. In their most memorable songs, memorable at least to me—“Strawberry Fields,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—and dozens more, the iron law of compensation was off. You simply didn’t have to pay for your pleasures. The colors were soft and pure, all gentle sunset wash, and the world was an opium vision that never faded. You floated across cloud fields, free for once, and never had to come down. The Beatles looked out on Medford High life and said, “No, thanks”; rather than diving deeper and deeper into the wreckage, like the Stones, they set sail, on perfumed breezes (and a little of whatever the dealer had today), for another world. Tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
Perhaps I never quite had these thoughts—not full-out, anyway. But I began to feel intimations of them, began to feel that I lived in a certain singular time, had a culture, was part of something, and largely because Frank Lears simply asked me to lift up my head, hear what I listened to, and see where the music might lead.
TEACHERS WHO matter sow seeds like this all the time. Some land on the rocks, some in sand, some flow away with the river, as the Bible assures us. But some take root, too, and they produce and yield. The sad part is that often it takes the seeds twenty years or so to break ground and produce green shoots, and because the beneficiary doesn’t remember who tossed them from his bag, or because the sower has sped away to some other world, he never knows. He acts simply on faith, knowing that someone did it for him and that, maybe, he can do it for another. Lears, with an assist from a thug genius, the sort of guy he probably couldn’t have spent a comfortable ten minutes with, did that much for Dubby—and for me, too.
It wasn’t The Stranger, the book that touched Nora as it had, that got to me and the Doob. No, the book that conquered us was Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Cuckoo’s Nest is now something like an American myth: You know all about it; you’ve read it even if you haven’t turned a page. It’s a little like the Frankenstein story: You seem to get the basics simply by virtue of living for a decade or so.
So everyone knows the story of how Randall Patrick McMurphy—initials RPM to denote force, dynamism, unruly power—turns up in a mental hospital dominated by the Big Nurse. Big Nurse is the queen of the Combine, the system that keeps the patients (that keeps us all?) docile and cowed. She uses fancy psychiatric diagnoses, subtle humiliation, head-on ridicule, and, when need be, electric shock to hold the patients in line. Big Nurse and McMurphy recognize each other as blood enemies from the start. The opposition is nearly Manichaean, as though a couple of comic-strip antagonists, or maybe a pair of warring deities, are facing off. Big Nurse is all for order, routine, submission, the dream of all-conquering Apollonian perfection. McMurphy is a throwback to an earlier, rowdier, more righteous time. He’s grit and self-reliance, a two-fisted Emerson, scarred, sexy, always ready for a brawl, made to rumble. He’s a high Romantic avatar, who wants to be all in all in himself.
It was on about the fifth day of reading Kesey aloud in class and discussing him (I and most of the rest of the group would still read nothing at home) that a chance remark that Lears made caught my attention. He said that prisons, hospitals, and schools were on a continuum and that Kesey, with his bitter portrait of the mental hospital, might be seen as commenting on all these places at once.
The idea, elementary as it was, smacked me like revelation. Here was a writer who was not on the side of the teachers, who in fact despised them and their whole angelic apparatus. Here was someone who found words—gorgeous, graffiti-styled, and apocalyptic—for what in me had been mere inchoate impulses, unheard groans of the spirit laboring away in its own darkness.
I can hardly express how I savored that novel. When McMurphy and his crew of sickos broke free and went fishing and partied and got drunk and thumbed their noses at Big Nurse and the pip-squeak shrinks she controlled, I had to throw the book up in the air and holler. They were rebelling against Medford High as well as against that hospital. And when they put McMurphy on the gurney and wheeled him back to the ward after his lobotomy, I was stunned with grief. This is what they would do—the omnipresent they—if you stood too squarely in the way of their machine, the ever-threshing Combine. When the Chief smothers the “fake” McMurphy and sends the humongous tub through the window, breaks out of the institution, and goes sane, I myself jumped up and danced around the periphery of my room at 58 Clewley, gleeful that for once, if only in someone’s roaring imagination, the Combine had lost.
I had no idea such books existed. I thought that all the volumes on the library shelf had been written by the MHS teachers or their surrogates. They were put there to enforce good manners and proper deportment, or simply to bore us to death. But here was someone who was clearly on my side. And perhaps there were more like him.
I asked Lears about it one day. “Are there other books like this?” For I feared, truly, that Cuckoo’s Nest might be the only one of its sort and that I would have to r
ead it over and over again for the rest of my life. Lears caught what I meant immediately. “Sure, sure. Try Allen Ginsberg, try Jack Kerouac. You might even like William Burroughs.”
What he didn’t say was nearly as important as what he did: He gave me a few more addresses where similar enlighteners might be found. But he didn’t start talking about a group called the Beats, whom we all already know and understand and can discuss in dispassionate prose. No, these were, potentially, liberating gods, however flawed he himself might take them to be (and from some later hints I suspect that he took them to be more than a little), and he wasn’t going to try to dispel their powers. He wanted us to be influenced by books—to face them as nakedly as we could and to see what would happen. The results might be dangerous; they might send us down the wrong road as well as the right. Good, then: Human beings are meant for danger, and for failure, sometimes, too.
I’ve often thought since then that much of what passes for literary criticism and the teaching of literature has an effect just the opposite of the one Frank Lears tried to create. The unspoken—and, to be fair, often unintended—objective is to inoculate students against great writing. By setting the work in context, placing it in history, assigning analytical essays of whatever level of sophistication, the teacher is actually demanding distance, detachment: Don’t, whatever you do, be influenced by this. Don’t adapt it to your own situation, use it as a map of your world, then go somewhere with it.
Lears simply helped unfold the visions of these writers, and he trusted us to make what use of them we might. If you want to go the Buddha’s path—we read Siddhartha, after all—then by all means try it. Sure we’d ask a question or two before taking a step. But the questions always bore on life. What would it be like to believe this book? What would happen if you used it as your secular Bible? Could you live it?
In general, teachers do not ask these questions, in part because they are afraid of what will happen if they do. They do not want to be “responsible” for students’ screwing up their lives because they give themselves over uninhibitedly to Whitman and try to live as the old queer anarch would, or to Dickinson, who created her own God and her own cosmology and lived with them. Many teachers, I suspect, don’t trust kids to sift these matters for themselves. Nor do they even really trust other adults to do it. The idea of a society full of people running amok, using the poets and artists to remake their own minds, individually and with only their own judgments and disasters and disappointments as inhibiting walls, can make teachers crazy.
Lears, aloof and benignly superior person that he could be, was much more democratic. He obviously believed, on some level that never needed articulation, that if you impelled people to imagine boldly and judge with some rigor, they could recast their lives a little, maybe more than that, and that the collective result, despite plenty of disasters along the way, would be to the good.
If he did not develop this sort of trust, he would have flopped utterly as a teacher of working-class kids. We would have seen that, really, despite all appearances, he was an ambassador from his class and his university, neither of which have ever given much of a damn for the people who clean the streets and the dorm rooms. Lears was willing to unfold visions, to kick back and see what would happen. When an elitist meets up with this kind of openness, he says it is a recipe for chaos. Lears seemed to feel that his approach was a recipe for change, growth, wonderful mutations, quirky shifts and slides.
He clearly didn’t want to turn us into little Thoreauvians, or make us love SDS or the splinter wing of the Democratic party. Though he might have vaguely approved if these things had happened, he would have recognized that approval as the trivial thing it was. Really, all he seemed to want was to make us look at ourselves from new angles, become judgmental aliens in our own lives, and then to show us a few alternative roads. If we took them, all to the good. If not, who knows?—maybe something else would turn up for us later. Of all the teachers I have had—some of the world’s best-known, in fact—Lears was the purest in his evident wish to make his students freer. He would be sorry about the costs, for relative autonomy can have many, but nothing would deter him.
And it is Lears’ sense of what books can be that I took from him at midlife, in the midst of my own teaching crisis. I had, as I say, become an infinitely diverting guide to the intellectual territories—a “superb lecturer,” as my students liked to call me—who could describe, analyze, interpret literature with no little flair. But none of my students seemed changed by all that pyrotechnic interpretation. On the contrary, it seemed to make them (and me) more complacent than before.
What I was failing to do was to take Lears’ second step. All well and good to ask What does this book mean? But one also needs follow-up questions: Is it true? Can it be the basis for a life? Does Proust know something about jealousy and eros that should change us? Does Wordsworth’s sense of the origins and the cures for depression, or melancholia, as he develops it in “Tintern Abbey,” have any value, any use, in this, a moment where brutal despondency, most often administered to by drugs, has become unbearably common?
It’s a technique for causing trouble, this kind of questioning, now just as much as it was when Frank Lears used it on us in his subdued way. But I’m convinced—and experience has borne me out—that if the reading of secular books is going to matter, we need to look at them as Lears did: not just as occasions for interpretive ingenuity, for showing how smart we might be, but as guides to future life, as occasions, sometimes, for human transformation.
DUBBY, TOO, fell in love with the Kesey book. He began, as temperament and his seeming destiny and the need to be a small-time Samuel Beckett character required him to do, in his project of coloring the o’s (he skipped ahead to get to the Kesey, leaving the Freud book behind, after a lot of agonizing), but he didn’t get beyond the first couple of pages. Somehow he screwed up and began reading the thing. Dubby read the book faster than I did, and more times. He read it, as I recall, until he simply used it up. It fell apart in his hands, it was so worn. It disappeared. Into him.
Dubby, you’ll recall, was an actor, and long before Jack Nicholson and Milos Forman diminished McMurphy by depicting him as an individual in a bad situation, not a grand, sloppy metaphor for the way it is, or might be, with us all, the Doober took on the role.
Dubby went after the stride and the grin and the swagger first. He played McMurphy like the archetypal American just arriving in some new place: out of his element, secretly unsure, worried about his lack of education or name, but determined to comport himself as though he might want to purchase the entire operation. Dubby-McMurphy at times put on a pair of invisible suspenders and did some work with them. He stretched the suspenders (red, I imagined) out and let them snap back with a satisfying, silent thwack. He also got the laugh down, big and booming, as Chief Broom described it. All this was done with a nice if mild dash of self-parody. You never forgot that Dubby was a poor beta playing a muscle-bound brawler (but maybe that’s what McMurphy was on certain days). And there was a lot of loud-mouthing and delivering of frivolous threats and expostulations about girls lining up on the left and on the right and waiting patiently for their turn.
But what you couldn’t miss was that Dubby wasn’t so shabby in the role. He was big, though I’d never really noticed it—about six-feet-two, and he had filled out considerably; when he walked the McMurphy walk, you could see that he wasn’t necessarily the chicken-chested crouchling he had so often seemed in the past. He was a big, formidable kid, funny and handsome and, when he was doing the McMurphy, seemingly happy.
Maybe it really all owes to some unnamed hormone that suddenly squeezed itself loose from a still misunderstood gland and began coursing its way through Dubby’s system. Maybe it had nothing to do with Ken Kesey or Frank Lears or anything in the outer world, but suddenly things started looking up for the Doober.
There was, first of all, the breakthrough in geometry. He had, he told me in astonishment one day, been i
n the service of a strange delusion. For quite a while he thought that Mr. Repucci wanted him to do well in math. He believed that Leo—like Mrs. O’Day and like the members of the O’Day family’s equestrian branch, Sweetie and Jack, his fellow riders of the invisible escape ponies—hoped for his eventual success. Leo was, after all, constantly inviting Dubby in for extra help, offering to share an after-school afternoon with Donald, where he could sit and grind over math problems for hours in the thinning light. So Dubby had figured that by not turning up for these sessions, by not doing the homework, by flunking and fucking around, he was sticking it to Leo in admirable style. He figured it must have been pure torture to Repucci to have to hand back another test with the score of 16 out of a possible 100, sad testimony to a dedicated teacher’s failure.
But it struck the Doober suddenly—high school breakthroughs are splendid indeed—that Mr. Repucci really couldn’t care less if Dubby did nothing in class. In fact, Mr. R preferred it that way. It was fun to flunk the Doob. Mr. Repucci was having about as good a time with Dubby as Nurse Ratched generally had with shaking quaking Billy Bibbit, whose life she controlled as if she’d equipped him early on with electronic implants.
So Dubby resolved to continue tormenting Mr. Repucci at every chance he got—he made up a limerick of almost astounding cruelty about recent deaths in Leo’s family—but to pass geometry on this, the third, try. After all, Dubby averred, I know it better than anyone by now, Leo included.
Dubby also went out for the baseball team. I came along to watch him and lend a little moral support. The Dub was terrified. The baseball coaches were crotchety old men, human hemorrhoids, the Doober called them, and brutal in their assaults on all ineptitude. They stood around in windbreakers, spitting on the ground and rubbing their yellowed hands together, grumbling like ancient buffalo. Dubby turned up not in a baseball cap but in a baby blue beach hat tilted low to one side. He did this because Artie Mondello and I had given him a money-saving haircut. There was now a broad, empty track leading from his left ear halfway to the top of his cranium. Without the beach hat, he looked like a particularly friendly alien. Not too long after the immortal haircut, Dubby showed me and Artie a photograph, gleaned from The National Enquirer or a comparable publication. It showed a man beaten and in flames, kneeling in the middle of a highway. Headline: HIS FRIENDS DID THIS TO HIM.
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