I PREFER STEINBECK

In 1989 I was hired to teach English at the start-up high school in Heart Butte, a village in the foothills of the East Slope of the Rockies.  The superintendent tried not to hire me, because he wanted a young man who was supposed to be a good high school basketball coach.  The whole purpose of a new high school was to produce a winning basketball team of Blackfeet, because on the rez and in Montana in general, winning at sports is what counts.

The young man was having an adventure that summer and couldn’t be contacted.  The superintendent wouldn’t give me my copy of the contract we’d signed.  If that guy had showed up, the superintendent would have claimed the contract never existed.  I knew that.  I moved my furniture into teacher housing so people would see I’d been hired.  They don’t think much of paper around there anyway.   Too many ignored treaties. 

Let’s be clear.  Teaching English in a traditional way on a rez where kids have shuttled all over the continent and were sort of emotionally suspended among a half-dozen languages and cultures including undergrounds (there are multiple), kids who had flunked three years of supposedly sequential subjects like grammar, where there was no library, thirty miles from the next town, where materials had to be created by the teacher who was assigned six classes plus coaching and monitoring — it was simply impossible.  The xerox machine burned out.  Then it was ridiculous.

The only thing to do was improvise but no one agreed on what principles.  Some thought we should make this a folk school, a tribal school.  The two main administrators that year were hugely overweight former football coaches.  (The Blackfeet kids didn’t like football — a person could get hurt.)  One administrator had taught history and had a decent education.  The other, the main one, was a deeply ignorant and conventional man.  He had grown up on a reservation as a white man with contempt for Indians except that they were good athletes.  He didn’t have much use for faculty either, but his impressive salary showed he was not the same as us.

Pretty soon he was eager to get rid of me.  I was not proud of my teaching, but I was trying to the point of exhaustion, experimenting.  The superintendent sent the educated administrator to evaluate my teaching, hoping for justification for firing.  Wedging into a desk seat, he would sit in the class for an hour, going down a checklist about whether the bulletin boards were appealing and so on.  The class would have to sit quietly, unlike their usual selves.  So I took advantage.

Ernest Hemingway

Since Post WWII, American literature has been dominated by the Saturday Review of Books point of view, which held up a trinity:  Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner.  We have never recovered from this.  Everyone else is arranged on those terms:  the terse Parisian existentialist, the California natural, and the ruined Southerner.  So I drew a chart on the white board, handed out individual copies of it and lectured my way through by location, philosophy, style, social period, readership, prestige — so that if by some fluke they went to college they would remember the names.

My evaluation was positive.  The students were baffled.  “You never taught this way before!  You are a hypocrite just trying to look good!”  Bet your sweet bippy this was exactly true.  The kids weren’t dumb.  They just didn’t know anything because they wouldn’t shut up and listen but why should they?

"The Red Pony"  First Edition

I took my copy up to school and the kids drew saddles on all the horses.

I was thinking about this because of a post at  https://medium.com/the-banterbury-times/hemingway-is-overrated-c4e0777fb79#.vqe9aufbg  entitled “Hemingway Is Overrated”.  No kidding.  But like everyone else, I prefer my Faulkner in movie form, and because of my constant divergence to theatre, I know Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neil better.  My not-secret love has been Steinbeck, very unfashionable.  I stole my brother’s copy of “The Red Pony.”  I taught it next to Wallace Stegner’s “Carrion Colt,” a short story about Eastend, Saskatchewan, where I always stopped on the way to Saskatoon.  Stegner grew up there in a house his father built for his mother with the money he made bootlegging. 

For a while, a high school student myself, I had the opening paragraph memorized:

“At day break Billy Buck emerged from the bunkhouse and stood for a moment on the porch looking up at the sky. He was a broad, bandy-legged little man with a walrus mustache, with square hands, puffed and muscled on the palms. His eyes were a contemplative, watery gray and the hair which protruded from under his Stetson hat was spiky and weathered. Billy was still stuffing his shirt into his blue jeans as he stood on the porch. He unbuckled his belt and tightened it again. The belt showed, by the worn shiny places opposite each bole, the gradual increase of Billy's middle over a period of years. When he had seen to the weather, Billy cleared each nostril by holding its mate closed with his forefinger and blowing fiercely.” 

(Hollywood miscast Robert Mitchum as Billy Buck, but he somehow became Billy anyway.)

Steinbeck was straightforward, grounded, and ordinary.  If you didn’t know better, you’d think he wasn’t skillful.  I had a series of texts called “Writing: Unit-Lessons in Composition” which used analysis of one paragraph at a time to make a relevant point.  One series was presented at four levels of increasing sophistication, which was great for my classes of six or eight people, each at a totally different level of understanding and experience.  The textbook writers, all English teachers in California, often chose a bit from Steinbeck.  It was these little analyses that really taught me what Steinbeck was all about.  He was a master of the graceful sentence rooted in reality and since he was writing about Mexicans in California, he was writing about indigenous people.  (You can find copies of this textbook series in used book stores.)

The American book buyer reads for the “dream” of the words, which everyone now calls “immersion.”  But they buy books in hopes of being the author for a while, which may explain why they become enraged to discover that the author isn’t the person in the book.  They’d rather be Hemingway or Faulkner than Steinbeck. “East of Eden” as enacted west of the Mississippi did not appeal to Manhattan.  Luckily, like Faulkner, Steinbeck was redeemed by the movies.  Unluckily, that dropped out his careful, vivid language.

William Faulkner

Just now I was looking at my last diverted copy of “Writing: Unit-Lessons in Composition” and out fell a slip from Ginn and Co. saying that Jack Baier was my “book rep” and had sent this complimentary copy.  I remember the man.  I was teaching in Browning, MT in the early Sixties.  He didn’t just come around drumming up business, he was looking for writers.  He was too early for me.  If I’d written anything then, it would have been trite, predictable and safe.  Maybe that’s what was wanted.  Even in the early 2000’s I was still safe, fact-bound, and Billy Buck wouldn’t have objected, but he wouldn’t have been that interested either. 

This last school year, as part of a cross-discipline learning unit, the Heart Butte kids cut up a real buffalo, dried the meat and called a feast.  Billy Buck would have been very interested and so would Robert Mitchum.  So how many of these “immersion” focused people would be interested?  Could they even relate to what they don’t already know?  And what did the kids write about it?

This man is doing the job with Stone Age tools

Why are we still arguing over Hemingway?  Would Kiefer McKenzie be interested in the technology of dismantling a buffalo?  I suppose it depends on who’s writing. 

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO READ

I well remember what it felt like when, after a lot of flickering while someone read to me, the lights went on and I was actually reading all by myself.  It was like walking into a new space, something like liminal space and something like the cave the twelve dancing princesses entered at night so they could wear out their shoes to music.  

The ultimate intimacy is to read what someone else wrote: vivid and strange, jeweled fruit.  One enters the writer’s head and shares their life.  This is why I am so reluctant to read contemporary run-of-the-mill print.  I hesitate to say genre since it is not even distinct enough to associate with any kind of people outside the advertising world.  From where I’m sitting, genre and literary writing are not different now, simply because there is no true literary writing, just self-conscious compliance with what a publisher will accept.  Publishers are low-brow and competitive.  They like the sensational, sentimental, and salable.  

I like what I must struggle to understand and so appreciate the features of the computer that let me look up background without getting up to visit shelves.  Someone, a friend of mine, just accessed my blog from a place I don’t know.  I looked to find where and see they may be at a music festival.  Once in a while there’s an animal I don’t know, but if there’s a name for it, I can look at photos.  That’s nice, but not what I mean.

An aye-eye

What I mean is the kind of writing that disappears into more than meaning, a shift of understanding, a deepening of life-awareness -- something that I hadn’t known was there.  Not stuff about the cosmos and the meaning of life, but the kind of stuff that must come from adding new neurons to my own brain, like installing some kind of radar or fMRI neurons.  The better TED talks get it, but the Edge often misses. 

And yet I despise the new operating systems in this computer that force configurations and anticipate something that would never happen if I were in control.  Clearly they are devised by young smart aleck boys who think accumulation, competition, and graphs are what life is about.  Our culture created these guys and now these guys are force-feeding it all back to us.  I clench my teeth.  Sometimes I throw up.

In good writing the sound of the words, the lilt, the beat, are silently there.  Alliteration was discouraged in the Fifties but I love it, and rhyme as well.  Sometimes I really enjoy a mixed metaphor.  The point of establishing a norm and a standard seems to me only a way of creating a trampoline surface for REAL writing.  Not necessarily extreme or profane -- sometimes just subtly changing the emphasis.  That’s why I like reading the writing of autodidacts with their malapropisms and slightly distorted words, sometimes moving them from one tense to another or using an unaccustomed preposition.

 

Thyme and poppies

I enjoy reading Aad de Gid’s poetry out loud, but maybe it’s a mistake to do that because there’s a bit of loss when just one pronunciation system, one interpretation, prevails.  In print, the eye can go back over and over to add a new way of interpreting the words.  Try this phrase:   "sulphurous hypnotic perfume boudoiriste effusion in situ;  the bridges of thyme reverberate with those microshubes".  I picked it at random from his flood of words.  He’s a perfume-lover so one never wonders about smell.

I love to read what leaves me sore and wet from participating, so that when I go to stand up (only if I must) I feel a little sprained and bruised.  Or I’m surprised that I have hands instead of paws.

Here’s a bit of writing about books that’s not the same old thing:

http://lithub.com/the-pleasures-of-destroying-a-good-book/

JFK and Frost

“As a reader, I want to inhabit a book as a form of communion.”  (Nick Ripatrazone)  I assume he was the one who devised this title for another essay:  “IN DEFENSE OF THE POET LAUREATE:  ON POLITICS, ART, AND INAUGURAL DOGGEREL.”  I haven’t read the essay yet.  I just like the idea of defending the poor old (rarely young) poet laureate (though I’m not in favor of the phenomenon) and esp. the phrase “inaugural doggerel” which is only slant rhyme, but what’s wrong with that?  It doesn’t hurt that the illustrating photo shows the romanticized JFK blowing his nose.

I enjoy the incongruous outrageous as much as the obscene.  They are often topographical:  in, out, ob.  (Now I’ve read the article which is just informative, a discussion of what a poet laureate should be and do.  Are they a kind of librarian and guide, or are they supposed to be “the best poet in the country,” an impossible standard in a multiply-cultured nation.)   How does a poet laureate become “a kind of communion” in a secular country?  I have an answer: write like Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In the past I’ve talked about going to the Portland, OR, Multnomah County library and trying to read about ballet in books written in French. I almost could, I thought.  But writing about ballet in English also requires concentration, even when the dances were all white except for Firebird, which was -- of course -- red.  These days gymnastic dance requires gymnastic language.  

U of Chicago Div School

Reading about reading seems far too precious and incestuous to a lot of people, but “The Sense of an Ending” or “The Mirror and the Lamp” shifted everything.  Stephen Toulmin, who was nearly as unintelligible as some French-speaking Algerian with a sharp blade trying to eviscerate domination, finally opened up the Div School world for me with his explanation of argument.  

I listen to NPR classical music programs partly for the music, but also because the commentary (spoken, not written) is often that kind of unfolding origami.  I wouldn’t know what book to buy to get that quality of “look at this and then consider that detail and comparison.”  (At the moment a woman is discussing the different tastes of the cello versus the viola de gamba (the latter sweeter than the other), though I’m quite sure she’s never licked either one.  I had to look up the second instrument:  “de gamba” means “between the legs.”) I still need to hear the music.

Viola de gamba

I was thrilled to discover that on the Internet I could find one of my most beloved paragraphs, the beginning of Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony,” because it was my brother’s book and in late middle age he still remembered it was his and demanded it back.  I had almost memorized the paragraph but now and then want to check a word.  I don’t care about Hemingway very much.  Faulkner not at all.  

“At day break Billy Buck emerged from the bunkhouse and stood for a moment on the porch looking up at the sky. He was a broad, bandy-legged little man with a walrus mustache, with square hands, puffed and muscled on the palms. His eyes were a contemplative, watery gray and the hair which protruded from under his Stetson hat was spiky and weathered. Billy was still stuffing his shirt into his blue jeans as he stood on the porch. He unbuckled his belt and tightened it again. The belt showed, by the worn shiny places opposite each hole, the gradual increase of Billy's middle over a period of years. When he had seen to the weather, Billy cleared each nostril by holding its mate closed with his forefinger and blowing fiercely. Then he walked down to the barn, rubbing his hands together. He curried and brushed two saddle horses in the stalls, talking quietly to them all the time; and he had hardly finished when the iron triangle started ringing at the ranch house.”

Mitchum as Billy Buck

I’m here because there are people here like Billy Buck.  I suspect he was Metis, maybe Cree/Swede.  But what happened to the walrus mustache?  I want to see Mitchum with a walrus mustache.