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. 

CHARISMATIC ALPHA PREDATOR MAMMALS

Cecil Rhodes

Cecil Rhodes was an imperialist.  (1853-1902) Whether or not that made him a shit depends on your point of view.  Rhodesia was named for him and so was Cecil the lion, much lamented.  Whether he was a glorious symbol of kinghood (whether or not kinghood is all that glorious) or a trophy for either camera or arrow so a dentist to boast about killing him by cheating/baiting the protected and named animal and then botching it (48 hours with an arrow sticking out of Cecil, who hid, while someone else hunted for him with a proper gun) or a great money raiser for the professionals who make millions by playing on heartstrings, Cecil was a strange name for a lion.  (A better name for a seasick sea serpent -- remember that puppet?)  But the lion was a good-looking and innocent creature.

Jamalya

When I was an AC officer, there was a lion -- half-grown -- named Jamalya.  She got loose.  She belonged to the son of the King of the Gypsies -- this was in Portland, OR.  I lived only a couple of blocks away so had spotted her and talked to the son not long before.  He was treating her like a big dog on a leash, while inevitable kids stood just barely out of reach.  I don’t know whether he was strong enough to restrain her if she really wanted to lunge at a kid.  

She was loose early in the morning just as I was leaving for work as Education Coordinator for animal control and I thought maybe I could walk up to her.  After all, I’d slept with bobcats.  But scale matters and by the time I got over there, people had gathered -- all of them full of useless advice and heedless of their own safety -- she was confused and scared.  I held out my hand, she held out her taloned paw, and she won.  Rock, paper, and claws like scissors.  I backed off.  We were on the cover of the Oregonian the next morning.  We finally used the tranq gun.

Then came the problem of who would clean her cage, which was really the sick bay for the dogs.  The answer turned out to be me.  There were two chainlink enclosures, so I would open the clean empty one, encourage her to go in there (with the mop), close that door and clean the other.  We got a bag of Lion Chow from the zoo and found a source for meat.  During the switch of enclosures she could easily have torn my throat out.  My hair stood up stiff with adrenaline.  The shelter supervisor stood outside the windowed door, but she got bored and left.  She thought she was looking at a tame animal.  There were no male personnel at hand.  Finally the lion went back to the boy with orders to get it out of town fast.

Ernest Hemingway  (not a dentist)

If that miserable dentist, who has lost his comfortable life and had best change his name, wanted to prove what a great hero he was, he ought to have done it the traditional African way: hand to hand with a spear.  Or he could have done it the Hemingway way -- a big gun, a couple of bearers, and a bottle of whiskey.   These days, he had better have inquired whether there were a village with a predator that needed killing and then done a good job of it.  Village predators are not usually very good-looking.  They tend to be old or sick.

Getting back to Portland, we heard there was a black leopard in town.  A few years later there was a tiger.   But the deaths -- an average of one a year -- were due to dogs, usually it was the pet of the owner which killed the owner’s baby or the victim might sometimes be a small woman.  But it seems impossible to raise the consciousness of the sentimental public, neither the end that wants to take all charismatic megamammal predators in their arms nor the end that wants to shoot them, trundle them to the taxidermist, and never see the transition to a mounted head.  I helped do that.  I’ve skinned a lot of bears.  I know how it is -- neither as gruesome nor as magical as people imagine.  

It’s a great irony that the great-granddaughter of the taxidermist/sculptor I married is an investigator for HSUS.  I greatly value that young woman and even admire some of the other work of HSUS, but not their money-making.  In my day the outfit was run by a Presbyterian minister who had a touching speech about a pair of geese.  Bonding for life, you know.  That was before it became unfashionable for humans to do that.  And HSUS is not about animals in situ, not about real life, but about animal shelters.  Captive animals.  Zoos, farms, labs. They do not talk about street or domestic animals.

The other big recent animal story was the zoo that dissected a giraffe with kids looking on.  The mommies were horrified.  The kids were veeeery interested.  The head of the zoo claimed it was scientific -- they didn’t KILL the giraffe and they wanted to know what did.  This was true, but the head of the zoo was stupid to not predict the reaction.  Marius the giraffe became lion chow, a change from the usual cows.

In the days when I was still in the neighborhoods with a truck, I stopped to collect one of the many dead mother possoms with the babies still attached.  They are born helpless but as soon as they get hold of a nipple -- which is long like a noodle -- they lock on until they are old enough to function.  The “pouch” of a possom is not a pocket in front like a kangaroo, but two sort of jacket-like flaps, one over each row of nipples.  This animal was not playing possom -- she was really dead but her babies weren’t.  

The kids were just going home from school and they were very interested, so I was giving them a tutorial of possom anatomy when a cop showed up.  A neighborhood woman had interpreted the scene as the kids assaulting me and called for a cop.  The cop came on strong, then saw the scene was innocent, so tried to make friends with the dachshund that had come with the kids.  It bit him.  Things dispersed fast.  I couldn’t even find out where the dachshund lived so the cop wouldn’t have to have rabies shots.  If it had been the possom that bit him, he wouldn’t have had to worry.  My line was “possoms are too dumb to catch rabies.”  That seems to be pretty much true.

What always bothered me was that I had no efficient way to kill those baby possoms humanely.  They were too immature to raise, couldn’t seal onto a bottle nipple, were considered varmints -- not much charisma unless you like primitive animals with a lot of pointy teeth.  The easiest thing would have been to carry surgical scissors and cut their heads off.  Neat, quick, lab rat technique.  The mommies would have been rabid.

People don’t know stuff.  Even the ones who ought to know better miscalculate.  Hitchbot, the friendly charismatic robot, was fatally beheaded in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia.  The outcry was just like the one for Cecil.  

In the meantime, who’s looking out for the African animals?  Hunters, tourists who shoot with cameras, and the industries based on them.  Who’s looking out for the people of Africa? Who’s repairing the damage done by Cecil Rhodes and his tribe?

Incidentally, a Yellowstone Park employee was killed by a bear a few days ago.  The killing of the bear comes next.  She has a cub, but it hadn't been caught the last I heard.