I had particular trouble with long narratives. The worst were in high school, when our English courses included Silas Marner by George Eliot and Great Expectations by Dickens. Even though they were probably abridged versions, they were excruciating. I especially didn't enjoy being forced to spend so much time with such an awful and scary person as Miss Havisham. That drudgery put me off nineteenth century English novels for a very long time.
But it is also true that I got some exposure to a breadth of literature, especially English and American, in high school English classes. We were not assigned individual novels or poetry anthologies. We were required to purchase sets of paperback collections, approved for Catholic school students. But even though there was the usual Catholic slant in descriptions of authors and works, and Catholic authors like Cardinal Newman were raised to equal rank with more recognized writers, I did get a taste of a range of writers, including many not covered in any of my college literature courses. In particular, I recall we read a lot of essays, by the likes of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith (in fact, I recall one of the volumes was entitled "Shakespeare to Goldsmith:), William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey and--yes--John Henry (Cardinal) Newman.
Especially in my public library reading before high school, I got through other books if the story was exciting, even if I didn't understand all the other stuff. I read some awful stuff, too. I had a paperback copy of Strive and Succeed by Horatio Alger. I think this is when I was a hotshot paperboy and fancied myself a businessman (even if my profits went largely to snacks at the neighborhood stores along my route.) I now have a paperback reprint of that exact edition, and it is truly a terribly written book.
Sometime before high school I enjoyed reading Tom Sawyer which encouraged me to go on to Huckleberry Finn. That was a bit more difficult, though it was episodic enough to keep me going. I may have tired a bit in the middle, until it got exciting again.
One author I recall reading, probably in high school, was William Saroyan. I got his books out of the library: The Human Comedy, My Name is Aram (short stories), probably one or two more. I may have seen on television the James Cagney movie adapted from his play, The Time of Our Lives. I really liked Saroyan, his small town stories about growing up, learning tolerance and integrity. I did not have the same kind of experiences but I could imagine them, and some of his characters were like some of the older people I encountered.
Saroyan was a popular and prize-winning author from the 30s to the 50s, but has largely been forgotten. He was never mentioned in any of my lit courses at college. Probably judged as too sentimental. Even Steinbeck (who I also read at this time, though sporadically) was a bit suspect.
As was Sinclair Lewis, for stylistic reasons I suppose. I read Main Street or Babbitt on my own in high school, after I tried to read Kingsblood Royal, which was about racial prejudice. It was one of his more obscure novels, which I read because a girl I had a crush on said she liked it. I was excited by the satiric edge--satire was big in the early 60s, particularly political satire-- and the ideas, but I didn't follow the story lines of these novels completely.
Sometime before high school I enjoyed reading Tom Sawyer which encouraged me to go on to Huckleberry Finn. That was a bit more difficult, though it was episodic enough to keep me going. I may have tired a bit in the middle, until it got exciting again.
Saroyan was a popular and prize-winning author from the 30s to the 50s, but has largely been forgotten. He was never mentioned in any of my lit courses at college. Probably judged as too sentimental. Even Steinbeck (who I also read at this time, though sporadically) was a bit suspect.
As was Sinclair Lewis, for stylistic reasons I suppose. I read Main Street or Babbitt on my own in high school, after I tried to read Kingsblood Royal, which was about racial prejudice. It was one of his more obscure novels, which I read because a girl I had a crush on said she liked it. I was excited by the satiric edge--satire was big in the early 60s, particularly political satire-- and the ideas, but I didn't follow the story lines of these novels completely.
Possibly for the same satiric reason, I read George Orwell's Animal Farm, as did some of my high school friends. We knew enough about Nineteen Eighty-Four to talk about it, although I'm not sure I read it. I probably tried to. I know I saw the 1956 film version on TV, which graphically presented the basics. We couldn't miss such elements of it as the thought police in regard not only to totalitarianism we studied, but tendencies of the Catholic school environment we existed in.
The Kennedy campaign of 1960 plunged me into politics, so in addition to the paperbacks I've mentioned (by and about JFK as well as the James Baldwin books that largely led me to the March on Washington in 1963) and the Reader's Digest Condensed Books version of the Washington novel Advise and Consent, I read two other novels about politics: All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren's fictional portrayal of Huey Long, and The Last Hurrah, Edwin O'Connor's evocation of old style Boston politics. If I couldn't follow them completely, they left definite impressions.
So by the end of high school, the recognized literary works I read (as opposed to tried to read but failed) were mostly poems, essays, short stories, short novels, or episodic novels, as described in my post on paperbacks: Updike, J.D. Salinger, etc.
I read the classic poems and essays mostly as school assignments (I was much taken with the few poems by William Blake included in the school anthology), but once I discovered The College Survey of English Literature (Harcourt Brace 1951) that had belonged to my uncle Carl Severini, I read poems and essays in that volume. In the winter of 1963 I found solace there when President Kennedy was assassinated, in two poems by Shelley: the long poem "Adonais" he wrote on the death of Keats, and a short poem, "Mutability." I read Robert Frost and I was intrigued by E.E. Cummings, but for awhile "Mutability" became my favorite poem:
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest--a dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise--one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;
It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free;
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Naught may endure but Mutability.
Mutability, but I copy this poem from the very volume I read in high school.
In trying to remember which classic adventure stories I actually read when young, as distinguished from encountering as movies or comic books, I only recently recalled The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Once I remembered it, the experience of reading it came back to me. I read an old hardback from the library, which added to the thrill.
That book had a feature that leads me to my second point about my pre-college reading: I was the model of an NCB (Nice Catholic Boy.) I went to Catholic schools for 12 years. By high school I was starting to see the Church a bit more objectively, and eventually I was troubled by hypocrisies and lame rationalizations for activities like the Inquisition. I remember being both uneasy and thrilled that the villains of The Three Musketeers were the Catholic Cardinal and his men.
In high school I read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in paperback, with just enough comprehension to get the basic story and mood. The idea of being ostracized for dissenting behavior, being literally marked for going against the dominant beliefs of the community, was haunting, given the doubts I was starting to have.
Many of the questions I had in high school questions came from actual Church history, and from applying principles we were learning in, say, Problems of Democracy class, to what we were analyzing in Religion. Many of the questions I had in high school questions came from actual Church history, and from applying principles we were learning in, say, Problems of Democracy class, to what we were analyzing in Religion. I was attracted to the subject of individuality versus the conventional wisdom, and of the liberty to dissent. This led me to books like David Reisman's Individualism Reconsidered, Edgar Friedenberg's The Vanishing Adolescent, and the work of John Stuart Mill. I write more about these books in a subsequent post.
But there was one extraordinary reading experience, one literary novel, that became formative for me in a number of ways. How I got my hands on it was perhaps the most extraordinary element.
My sophomore year of high school I joined the Speech Club and began going to tournaments at other schools, giving extemporaneous speeches ("Extemp.") My junior and senior year I participated in Debate. My partner Mike and I won district championships our senior year in both the National Forensic League and Catholic Forensic League competitions.
The speech club advisor was Sister Ronald. Almost all of our teachers were nuns, of various denominations. I believe she was a Sister of Mercy, which (along with the Sisters of Charity who taught me in grade school) were begun and/or headquartered in our local region.
I had a complex relationship with another of the Sisters of Mercy, who at first championed me--made me editor of the high school newspaper as a freshman (not quite as radical as it seems--we were a new high school with only two classes at the time, first and second years) and promoted me into the first bunch of the National Honor Society inductees. Later she fired me from the newspaper and tried to get me thrown off the NHS, after lecturing me about my lack of humility. She also seemed particularly bothered by observing that I talked to too many girls.
Her fixation on me even became a source of embarrassment for the school administration, as I learned when the principal asked me to "forgive and forget." I answered with a quote from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, whose biography I had recently read for some unknown reason. "I can forgive, but if you ask me to forget, you ask me to give up experience."
Anyway, Sister Ronald must have known about this situation, and my ongoing emotional turmoil. She was a bit of a mercurial character as well. One day out of the blue she slipped me an old, hardbound copy of a book. She suggested I read it and return it to her, with the clear implication that I should not tell anyone else about it.
The book was A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce. I knew pretty quickly why it had to be kept secret.
Our Catholic high school strictly controlled what we read. Our textbooks, even the literature collections, all displayed the nihil obstat and imprimatur indicating the contents were free from doctrinal and moral error. James Joyce, while not on the official Church Index of forbidden books, was not exactly approved either.
Joyce's novel Ulysses had been notorious, even banned in the United States until a landmark court case. His collection of short stories, Dubliners, was mostly considered acceptable--one of the stories may even have been in our paperback collection of modern authors. A Portrait of the Artist was somewhere in between, but it soon became clear to me why we weren't encouraged to read it.
The novel follows the childhood and adolescence of Stephen Dedalus in and around Dublin in the very late 19th century. The early set piece scene of a Christmas dinner exposes the tensions among Stephen's elders regarding the Church's treatment of a hero of Irish independence. Stephen goes to a Jesuit school, where he is bullied by students and clergy, but also supported by other students and clergy.
At 16, Stephen becomes obsessed with sex and on one of his long feverish walks finds himself in Dublin's red light district. He returns to prostitutes often. Then his school holds a retreat: several days during which ordinary school work is suspended and students are expected to concentrate on spiritual contemplation when not attending lectures by a priest brought in especially for the retreat.
This priest gives several sermons--fulsomely reproduced--describing the physical and mental torments of hell in great detail. Stephen subsequently repents and becomes a saintly figure. But when he is invited to consider whether he has a vocation for the priesthood, Stephen just as suddenly recoils against it. By the last few chapters, he has rejected the Church and is preparing to leave Ireland, for a life of "silence, exile, cunning" to artistically "forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
Anti-clerical diatribes, sex with prostitutes (though at best I only vaguely understood this section), rejection of the Church--no mystery as to why this book wasn't approved, or was treated like it didn't exist. Why did Sister Ronald give it to me? I'll never really know. I remember that I just as secretly returned it to her.
The Viking Library annotated edition of Portrait notes that the sermons on hell were very similar to those the Jesuits gave from the 16th through the 19th centuries. Well, it didn't end there. Sometime after I'd read this book, in my junior year of high school, we had the first of our retreats--and the priest engaged to give the lectures devoted one of them to an exact echo of these graphic descriptions of hell.
I had my spells of being especially devout--I was an altar boy for several years--but I don't recall being particularly moved by this lecture. Perhaps I'd been immunized. But while the hell sermons stood out--I recall reading them at night in bed, my cold arms holding the book outside the bed covers--the influence of the book was probably subliminal, suggesting that I wasn't alone in questioning the immediate world pressing around me.
A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man was the only book I read in high school that I subsequently read again for a class in college. It had more of a direct impact that time, the fall term of my junior year in a course on modern novels with Howard Wilson. James Joyce became a literary hero and model in the years immediately following. As for "silence, exile, cunning," I never got the silence quite right--I was a loudmouth, though I yearned for silence around me. I was soon to learn that when necessary, I could engage the cunning--with mixed success.
But exile I understood. It was the future I saw for myself with increasing definition over those late 60s years.
So by the end of high school, the recognized literary works I read (as opposed to tried to read but failed) were mostly poems, essays, short stories, short novels, or episodic novels, as described in my post on paperbacks: Updike, J.D. Salinger, etc.
I read the classic poems and essays mostly as school assignments (I was much taken with the few poems by William Blake included in the school anthology), but once I discovered The College Survey of English Literature (Harcourt Brace 1951) that had belonged to my uncle Carl Severini, I read poems and essays in that volume. In the winter of 1963 I found solace there when President Kennedy was assassinated, in two poems by Shelley: the long poem "Adonais" he wrote on the death of Keats, and a short poem, "Mutability." I read Robert Frost and I was intrigued by E.E. Cummings, but for awhile "Mutability" became my favorite poem:
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest--a dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise--one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;
It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free;
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Naught may endure but Mutability.
Mutability, but I copy this poem from the very volume I read in high school.
That book had a feature that leads me to my second point about my pre-college reading: I was the model of an NCB (Nice Catholic Boy.) I went to Catholic schools for 12 years. By high school I was starting to see the Church a bit more objectively, and eventually I was troubled by hypocrisies and lame rationalizations for activities like the Inquisition. I remember being both uneasy and thrilled that the villains of The Three Musketeers were the Catholic Cardinal and his men.
Many of the questions I had in high school questions came from actual Church history, and from applying principles we were learning in, say, Problems of Democracy class, to what we were analyzing in Religion. Many of the questions I had in high school questions came from actual Church history, and from applying principles we were learning in, say, Problems of Democracy class, to what we were analyzing in Religion. I was attracted to the subject of individuality versus the conventional wisdom, and of the liberty to dissent. This led me to books like David Reisman's Individualism Reconsidered, Edgar Friedenberg's The Vanishing Adolescent, and the work of John Stuart Mill. I write more about these books in a subsequent post.
But there was one extraordinary reading experience, one literary novel, that became formative for me in a number of ways. How I got my hands on it was perhaps the most extraordinary element.
My sophomore year of high school I joined the Speech Club and began going to tournaments at other schools, giving extemporaneous speeches ("Extemp.") My junior and senior year I participated in Debate. My partner Mike and I won district championships our senior year in both the National Forensic League and Catholic Forensic League competitions.
The speech club advisor was Sister Ronald. Almost all of our teachers were nuns, of various denominations. I believe she was a Sister of Mercy, which (along with the Sisters of Charity who taught me in grade school) were begun and/or headquartered in our local region.
 |
| GCCHS |
Her fixation on me even became a source of embarrassment for the school administration, as I learned when the principal asked me to "forgive and forget." I answered with a quote from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, whose biography I had recently read for some unknown reason. "I can forgive, but if you ask me to forget, you ask me to give up experience."
Anyway, Sister Ronald must have known about this situation, and my ongoing emotional turmoil. She was a bit of a mercurial character as well. One day out of the blue she slipped me an old, hardbound copy of a book. She suggested I read it and return it to her, with the clear implication that I should not tell anyone else about it.
Our Catholic high school strictly controlled what we read. Our textbooks, even the literature collections, all displayed the nihil obstat and imprimatur indicating the contents were free from doctrinal and moral error. James Joyce, while not on the official Church Index of forbidden books, was not exactly approved either.
Joyce's novel Ulysses had been notorious, even banned in the United States until a landmark court case. His collection of short stories, Dubliners, was mostly considered acceptable--one of the stories may even have been in our paperback collection of modern authors. A Portrait of the Artist was somewhere in between, but it soon became clear to me why we weren't encouraged to read it.
 |
| from the 1977 film of A Portrait |
This priest gives several sermons--fulsomely reproduced--describing the physical and mental torments of hell in great detail. Stephen subsequently repents and becomes a saintly figure. But when he is invited to consider whether he has a vocation for the priesthood, Stephen just as suddenly recoils against it. By the last few chapters, he has rejected the Church and is preparing to leave Ireland, for a life of "silence, exile, cunning" to artistically "forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
Anti-clerical diatribes, sex with prostitutes (though at best I only vaguely understood this section), rejection of the Church--no mystery as to why this book wasn't approved, or was treated like it didn't exist. Why did Sister Ronald give it to me? I'll never really know. I remember that I just as secretly returned it to her.
The Viking Library annotated edition of Portrait notes that the sermons on hell were very similar to those the Jesuits gave from the 16th through the 19th centuries. Well, it didn't end there. Sometime after I'd read this book, in my junior year of high school, we had the first of our retreats--and the priest engaged to give the lectures devoted one of them to an exact echo of these graphic descriptions of hell.
I had my spells of being especially devout--I was an altar boy for several years--but I don't recall being particularly moved by this lecture. Perhaps I'd been immunized. But while the hell sermons stood out--I recall reading them at night in bed, my cold arms holding the book outside the bed covers--the influence of the book was probably subliminal, suggesting that I wasn't alone in questioning the immediate world pressing around me.
But exile I understood. It was the future I saw for myself with increasing definition over those late 60s years.
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