You or Someone Like You (9 page)

He was turning a page. “Apparently you did.”

By the next day, I've gone over the matter in my head. Why not use a personal approach to
Lord of the Flies
? It was an idea. I've never taught before. And Howard doesn't do it this way at all. But maybe for me it will work.

In my garden on Thursday evening, I preface for them why the book has particular meaning to me. I don't really talk about my own past much—and as I begin to speak I realize that, oddly, Howard and I have never talked about this novel—and I feel my way forward.

My father, I say to them, was born, in London, in 1914. I was born, in 1949, in Islington, where he had imported my mother after their wedding in 1938. She, languid and smooth as a cat, was from the Upper East Side, born in New York's St. Vincent's Hospital in the summer of 1918, “in the middle of the war,” she liked to say, though of course it was not; the Central Powers were collapsing, and it was only months before the Armistice of November 11.

I was a certain time in distinguishing war from militarism, because militarism was my father's culture. One could live as an Englishman then, as he did, never actually in the Royal Army, as he was not, and yet be of the Royal Army in almost every way. That was British culture. The books he read as a child, a diet of Kipling, the poet laureate of Victoria's Imperial rule, and volumes of
Chatterbox
, a series of Edwardian “boys books” that contained a sampling of moral
rah-rah, semi-Byronesque male poetry of the over-the-top variety, and heady adventure fiction—shipwrecked English boys on sunny desert islands, English boys solving murders on holidays in the Scottish Highlands, “endlessly brave, resourceful, and Christian,” as Ian Gregor once put it. William Golding's
Lord of the Flies
, which would be published in 1954 (
Catcher in the Rye
had just come out three years before), cruelly took this romantic story, turned it inside out, and showed it in a nightmare version. “We've got to have rules and obey them,” says Jack at the start, above the lagoon, before the darkness comes. “After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.” So when I read
Lord of the Flies
as a schoolgirl, my father snapped into focus.

A diplomat in the British foreign service, my father was a proud member of the “pinko-gray” race, as E. M. Forster called the masters of the British Empire. It was a better world then, and they were better people. “Alas,” a friend of my parents' once said longingly, “for the time when civil servants somehow connected the well-being of the British Empire in India with a quotable knowledge of Browne's
Pastorals
.” Browne, 1588 to 1643.

If my father did not engage me in conversation, he did impart to me something else, verse, lines he'd memorized as a schoolboy. My mother simply listened and smoked.

My father had his tastes, and if Browne ran to them he also enjoyed more pungent—and in a sense more viscerally English—English pastorals. There was an old British army lyric, which he recited while he shaved; I loitered quietly in the hall:

(“Matt,” remarked my mother dryly as she passed by, “you're gonna have to explain that to her.”

“Right!” Frowning down at me with great surprise, “Now what are
you
doing here?” he said every time.)

The provenance of that one is pretty clear; poetry born among innumerable Tommy Atkinses, the Queen's soldiers, defending Her Majesty's interests in distant, dusty countries. I overheard a friend of my father's fondly recounting a different kind of informal sexual education.

(Why, one wonders, the British obsession with sodomy?)

I mention to them that Howard adored this one. At parties he would beg my mother to recite it. She obliged, in a decent imitation of my father's accent.

My parents attended to each other, and they attended to me as necessary, and they defined “necessary” in their own way. I was never
lacking, though being a diplomat then, or a diplomat's wife, meant lengthy separations from one's children, Asia to Europe, Europe to Africa, going away, leaving me behind, but there were nannies of various colors and various languages—I tended to absorb the languages—and various schools. I assured my mother and father that I never minded because they wanted that assurance, and they chose to believe me. I grew very good at taking care of myself, and the older I got, the better I got at it.

So. William Golding, I say, looking down at my notes, born in Cornwall in 1911 and educated at Oxford, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. Of course he had seen the systematic destruction aimed at the Jewish race and the two mushroom clouds in Japan, so he took the sunny desert islands and the brave, resourceful boys, and the rest of my father's world, and turned them inside out and made them the Holocaust. One understands the resentment in the trick.

I go to my next note card and say, John Peters commented in 1957, “Like any orthodox moralist, Golding insists that Man is a fallen creature, but he refuses to hypostatize”—(it means “to treat or regard as a separate substance or reality”)—“evil or to locate it in a dimension of its own. On the contrary Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, is Roger and Jack and you and I.” The novel, and its literary precedent, Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
, defined a thing for us. It was this thing that my Anglican religion teachers, then on the theological cutting edge, identified as Original Sin.

All of this, in my father's youth, was yet to come. I tell them how my father at age fourteen would put each new precious
Chatterbox
in his book bag, ride his bike in his schoolboy coat-and-tie up Sloan Street, and eagerly plunk down somewhere in Hyde Park, a glorious green garden inviolate since assured by Her Majesty's Police, who patrolled like stern, blue-suited nannies. (I have a distinct memory of my father as a boy, with a book, in a garden. Which is, of course,
impossible, I wasn't alive. But I can see the garden.) He would read until closing time, when the light grew dim and the calls of the blue-suited nannies would bring him back from the hot, dusty depths of India and Burma and into the city of London.

In England, even paradise must close.

 

HOWARD, IN THE MORNING, DRESSED
for work, whistles. It can be Mozart, it can be Radiohead. He leaves a trail of musical notes down the hallway to Sam's door, opens it. “Sam-oh, get
up
.” When Sam was younger, Howard would go to the bed and with great innocence sit on Sam, humming Irving Berlin and pretending not to see him, and Sam would battle him, howling with laughter. Then the car keys, and a trail of Bob Dylan out the kitchen door to the car. The times, they are a changing, he whistles.

 

Stanley Jaffe called to chat. So this club of mine.

It's not a “club,” Stanley.

“Whatever the hell it is. What are you reading next.”

Glengarry Glen Ross.

“
Huh
,” he said. “Stanley Zupnik will like that. He produced the movie. You invite him?”

No, actually.

“You should invite him.” (Of course, Stanley's right, I need to improve at this.) Perhaps, Stanley added as if stretching his limbs, he himself would come, too.

Well certainly, I say, if you like. It will be our sixth.

“Your sixth book group.”

It's not a book club, Stanley. Call Max Mutchnick. He'll give you the details.

 

So the reason I've assigned the Mamet, I explain to them when everyone has a drink and is settled into the garden, is that during
Sam's class trip to New York last October I had a run-in at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And, I say, I would be interested in your views on it.

They smile, nod. I thought I would open the evening by situating you in my personal relationship to the work.

Sam's art history teacher had organized the thing. Three days, four museums. I went as support staff and kid wrangler. Howard and I know two of the trustees, and the trip was doing double duty: I would attend a Met fund-raiser one of the evenings, and Sam would be blissfully without his mother.

Our group was standing around on the second floor of 1000 Fifth Avenue at the entrance to European Paintings, waiting for it to clear out a bit. We happened to be bumped up next to a New York City public high school group. Sam goes to a private school since the United States has, fascinatingly enough, decided that educating Americans in good, well-funded, safe public schools is unnecessary. An interesting policy. The public school group's docent was taking her time with a not overly competent, in my view, lecture on portraiture.

So there, I said to them in my garden. That's the scene. Now, the Met is, as everyone is, obsessed with “the democratization of the museum experience.” They bring groups of public school students to the museum on Saturdays, guide them through exhibitions, give them a talk, and so forth. The public school students were dressed in what Howard calls “Bergdorf Goodman of Papua New Guinea,” huge, untied shoes, layers of garbage, underwear out. They shuffled in place, vacuous. Our teacher checked his watch. That was when a sullen young woman wearing a T-shirt with the Puerto Rican flag interrupted the docent midstream. (I'd noticed her fascination with a Vermeer; she had attempted to conceal her interest from the other students.) What, she now asked loudly, was the Metropolitan doing to “combat elitism.” She was very smart, and—one saw instantly—politicized in that juvenile way. She'd learned the question recently, and her immature intelligence had pounced on it. She had been
holding it in her little arsenal of resentment and launched it now to gain her moment in the spotlight.

The docent had a small cardiac arrest. So I, wanting to get them done but also because it was such a silly question, replied quite clearly across the narrow channel of marble that separated us, “You're an elitist.”

Everything froze. Our students stopped bumping theirs. Our teacher's eyebrows went up his forehead.

The young woman stared at me. Then she vigorously and haughtily denied it. The denial, stated with admirable self-possession, was formatted in the standard leftist terms, peppered with clichés (she used the verb “to marginalize” repeatedly), and predictably dogmatic.

After she'd gone on a bit, I cut in and said, This is Saturday, and you're not hanging out on a street corner by some bodega in Queens. You've come here because you want to learn something, to better yourself in some way. That makes you an elitist.

No, no, no, elitism, she said, was patriarchal people who think they're better than other people, who they then marginalize.

If, I said, she meant “to act pompously and insufferably,” those people are called “snobs,” and they are fools. I said that elitism, by contrast, is acknowledgment, in word or action, of the fact that some people are better than others. I'm not interested (I cut her off ) in an epistemological treatise on the word
better
. I mean that they know more, and more sophisticated, things, that's my definition. More things than the kids hanging out on the street corner or watching television will know. They like Vermeer, for example. (I pointed at the painting she had been covertly absorbing; eyes swiveled over to it, then to her, then back.) That means
you
are better, I said to her, assuming you're paying attention to him (the painter), which you seem to be doing. You're elitists. All of you are better.

I'm an elitist, too, I added. And smiled at them. They were lovely kids, and I wanted to hitch up their sagging trousers and touch their cheeks.

The docent hurried them out in the direction of Nineteenth-Century Sculpture. (One of Sam's friends leaned toward him and in a very low voice said: “Whoa.” Suddenly I thought, Oh, dear. Had I embarrassed him? I looked at Sam. He wore one of Howard's unreadable expressions.)

I noticed that their group, on leaving, shuffled a bit less.

And that led to Mamet. To me, the thing about Mamet, I said, is that it is art—we're all in agreement here? (they nodded)—that is stylistically accessible but substantively elitist (according to my definition). Art must communicate, I said to them. (Yes, they agreed.) “Democratizing” art just means “to the greatest number possible.” And I thought Mamet was arguably the most interesting elitist democratizer around. No matter what you thought of him, here he was creating a devastating, often hilarious, often vicious new idiom in which a great number could, in the most sophisticated way, follow his dissection of the follies of American life.

Some of Mamet's personal affectations I could do without. “The crewcut is an honest haircut,” he has written, “of the two-pair-of-jeans working man.” Please. This sort of thing bleeds into his writing at times as well. And though he gives a voice to a sort of close violence that absolutely exists, that voice can be rather melodramatic. “You take a knife” (he said this came from a blues singer), “you use it to cut the bread, so you'll have strength to work; you use it to shave, so you'll look nice for your lover; on discovering her with another, you use it to cut out her lying heart.” You see what I mean. But accept it as the art form it is, and here is a refreshing, a wondrous, exhilarating helix of language that ascends, I admit, to nowhere in particular, but who cares. “It was stuff you heard in the street,” said Mamet. “It was the stuff you overheard in the taxicab. It wasn't writerly.” Mamet's drama teacher, the renowned Stanford Meisner, at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, urged him to “fuck polite,” and he did. What he wound up with was inherently, biologically male writing that a New York public school student understands immediately: