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 read 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 in 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.
Dubby had a lovely swing, Stan Musial reborn, and his eye was sharp from all that time in the poolroom hustling younger kids and splitting the money with me. (One day when we were driving along in Dubby’s beat-up convertible, I saw a piece of paper flash, pass like a fast-blown leaf, in front of the windshield. “Haaah!” said Dubby. “That’s ten bucks each.” He’d not only identified it as legal tender; he’d made out the denomination.) I can still see him smashing one liner after another into right field. With every hit, he stood bigger and bigger at the plate, until he looked like Chief Bromden about to stride out of the ward. The coaches, however, didn’t bother to watch. The team was picked from the beginning. They had their guys. So they stood in their tired circle and barely gave Doober a look.
I heard that when they cut Dubby, he went up to them, the old tobacco-squeezing gang, and told them that they’d made a stupid mistake and then invited them to enjoy what would probably have been their first erotic consummation in years, albeit in private. He took off then; he hopped the fence in a big bound. No one was willing to tell the coaches what his name was.
He also got himself a date. With Margaret Kellerman, a red-haired girl, whose bra strap Hicky Daniels traced in English class while Miss Cullen suffered her persecutions. “I liked her,” said Dubby. “You could talk to her. It was like she was a guy.” No higher praise than this. But she already had a boyfriend, from whom she was taking a brief sabbatical. Dubby went back to hanging with me and John Vincents, the Navajo. We played games of floor hockey in the D’s room, where Dubby was goalie, using a ruler to defend the net (the space between his dresser and bed) against the flight of a balled-up sweat sock.
At the time, Dubby could not skate. But two years later Dubby was the star goalie for Graham Junior College. He was, I understand, the best baseball player the place had seen in a while, too.
So, he read a book and he went out and got a date and swung at a baseball and passed geometry. My, my. Then he went to junior college and put his floor-hockey game to work. Thank you, Mr. Lears. Thank you, Ken Kesey.
But it’s more than that. Things that would have floored Dubby before became material for a brisk routine, a self-deflating, self-congratulatory tale. When he drank beer, he stopped breaking into sudden tears and repeating the words “My poor mother, my poor, poor mother.” Poor, because he had disgraced and disappointed her so. Now, he’d drink two or three, stop, and insist that we go to the dance at Arlington Catholic Girls High School, boasting that Catholic-school girls found large-scale maniacs like himself just the thing to lead them into temptation. In fact, such girls were remarkably fond of Dubby and even of me, we being among the forty or so boys in a room three hundred strong with the flower of Catholic girlhood.
The person who became a junior-college hockey goalkeeper could easily have become somebody who graduated from high school (barely), lived with his parents, took a crummy day job, with drinks every Friday at the Shamrock Grill, beer twenty-five cents a pop, accompanying shot for a dollar, ranting about Jews and blacks thrown in gratis. But he didn’t go that way. I can’t tell you what happened to Dubby, not in the long run. But the last time I saw him, skating away from the goal after winning (about 8 to 6, I think) a hockey game played on an actual noncarpeted surface, with no balled-up sweat sock in evidence, there wasn’t a place in him for that kind of life. Dubby, at least for the foreseeable future, was going to enjoy his being rightly in the world. May he never have ceased doing exactly that.