November ends and now I'm after weaving a memorial for William Styron, who passed away on November 1 this year.
A few dog years ago, I had the dubious and fascinating pleasure to student teach in a class of 60 high school juniors. Our subject was US History and I was allowed to follow a curriculum of topics of my choice through the semester that settled on the years between the Great Depression and the Vietnam War.
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"Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever."
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It's an interesting and sad fact that many of the classes of History taught to high school students in those days (the late eighties and early nineties) skimped on that span of years. Those forty-odd years often wound up as the last shortened units at the end of the final semester for history-weary juniors. I think this was mostly due to the structure of the history texts that schools purchased and the materials that were available then – we were just starting to use the internet and supplemental resources were nowhere as abundant as they are now.
Many teachers, especially long tenured teachers, were not motivated to move much beyond familiar, outdated lesson plans. It is indeed easier to assess the progress of students on material that one is comfortable teaching year after year. Easier, also, to produce consistent grading results to a parental and educational community focused on standardized achievement testing.
I was fortunate to be paired with a master teacher who was at the end of his teaching years and he derived great pleasure in allowing me to set the tone and content of what we taught. I provided the teaching materials and covered lecture content with him and also developed the means of assessment.
(In my mind, I've taken on that teacherly tone that my kids are always chastising me about. If I were speaking out loud and you were listening, you'd hear a deeper tenor, a bass resonance, in my voice. I was never an alto as a singer to my great sadness, and there are no women bass singers, are there? I begin to inhabit an intimidating and rather fierce expression when I start to inform. I'll calm down.)
"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis."
So gently, let me say that History, with a capital "H", is a living thing. At times, as with my books, I wrap the past like a shawl around my shoulders and historical oddities and people enter my mind's room. History and I have freedom to place the heroes next to the criminals, departed family and friends adjacent to Abe Lincoln, Runymede next to Constitution Hall if we so choose. As all of us absorb our history, though, we should pay attention to history's truths. And recognize the history of false constructs, "facts" which beautify dishonorable actions or eulogize events that were in reality an ugly hell. At times, to tell a story or construct an engaging narrative for a disinterested audience, it's illuminative to refashion events in a compelling way. Other times, enhancing or obscuring the often horrific and painful events of the past leaves us helpless as we face the future.
A young William Styron
How do we decide what is accurate and what is embellishment? Where is that line between fact and fiction? Writers, and teachers, run frantically along that uneven line as a tale is designed. When the ingredients of the story contain real emotions, real events, but fictionalized characters, will intent and result collide or marry?
"I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell."
I taught a lesson on the Kennedy administration and the Cold War late in that semester, and I dressed up as Khrushchev in a rumpled and dark men's suit with tie, a pair of my husband's older and beaten up dress shoes, several sizes too large, and carried into the classroom a copy of The Manifesto of the Communist Party. I wholeheartedly described and acted out the dance of nervous power between the two men. I discussed the perspectives of Communism and imperialism and Western Democracy and how the superpowers arranged their toys and spoke their lines on the world stage. My vas pokhoronim!, or "We will bury you!", I shouted as I pounded that oversized shoe on the teacher's podium in front of the class to mimic what I thought at the time was an accurate rendition of Nikita shouting at the West in a UN address in 1960. I had the attention of every student. How many teachers yell out in muddled Russian and bang shoes in class?
"If we do not find anything very pleasant, at least we shall find something new."
I think I accomplished two things that day that were positive. I established some underpinnings of why the Cold War was a war and the importance of delicate diplomacy and personality, later on, in the Cuban Missile Crisis. I also took students beyond books and endless papers with further discussions on parallels in current politics of the time – this class was in 1990-91, post- Reagan and Gorbachev years.
I taught a fiction, as I later uncovered. Khrushchev did say something close to "We will bury you"; further research reveals that a more complete translation of his statement, actually spoken in 1956 in Moscow, reads "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.".
The shoe banging? Well, that may or may not have happened, and if it did, it likely happened as an incident directed at the Philippine delegation to the UN, but it surely was not done at the same time as his previous burying statement.
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The head of the Philippine delegation, Senator Lorenzo Sumulong, expressed his surprise at the Soviet Union's concerns over western imperialism, while it, in turn, swallowed the whole of Eastern Europe. Khrushchev's rage was beyond anything he had ever shown before. He called the poor Filipino "a jerk, a stooge and a lackey of imperialism", then he put his shoe on the desk and banged it.
from Nina Khrushcheva - The case of Khrushchev's shoe
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These two historical novelties, the challenge and the shoe, are now coupled together in time. Indeed, perhaps it is as as Nina Khrushcheva sagely states, "The best anecdote is always the one that reflects the morality and character of certain times."
The other lesson that I taught in that class of middle class and lower middle class, mostly white Protestant and Catholic students, was a series of classes on the Holocaust. The visual and the narrative are so important, especially to teenagers and I showed a movie based on a William Styron novel - Sophie's Choice. Time was short, and Sophie's Choice is not a novel easily excerpted for students unfamiliar with either the Holocaust or suicidally dysfunctional relationships, or for parents uncomfortable with the mature, violent, and sexually graphic scenes throughout. So what did I do? I showed a small portion of the film on screen in class. Specifically the scene as Sophie arrives at the choice, in Auschwitz, with her children, Jan and Eva.
"You may keep one of your children," he repeated. "The other one will have to go. Which one will you choose?"
I taught around this choice as best I could. I used the film as a dramatic tool. I attempted to draw my students into the meaning of a choice that is no choice, in a world where extreme evil competes with lesser evil, where history does not educate the morals of the future. My lesson that day was a somewhat dishonest manipulation undertaken with the best intent; and this is much the way I feel about Styron's complex novel. Styron's Stingo is at once all-knowing and all-feeling, yet naïve, frustrating, insensitive and ego-centric. The truth of the story Stingo digs out is a chimera, ever-changing and unstable.
When Styron wrote Sophie's Choice, he received criticism for his fictional grappling of universal souls caught in the Holocaust and minds struggling with both choices and sanity. There is much to be Googled about this criticism and I would leave it to the reader to decide how best Styron walks that uneven line.
What do I think, you may ask? He was a writer and sometimes you'll like him and sometimes you won't. Styron's ability to set character and dialog and evoke time and place is nearly unmatched. "The best anecdote is always the one that reflects the morality and character of certain times."
"It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul."
Styron's final book Darkness Visible, his memoir and a literary journey into depression, was published in 1990. It is written with Styron's lush Virginian voice and covers a breadth of observations of other public figures who have lived with depression. He talks of the void of existence that depression can foster.
William Styron produced a handful of novels and books over the course of five decades. I've mentioned just two. I exhort anyone who hasn't read his work to find a rainy December day and a warm fire, a cup of decent coffee or a shot of whiskey, and few unfilled hours and just...read. William Styron was a writer. For Mr. Styron, I'd like to think that might be both eulogy and praise enough.
History is now on the side of the angels.
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As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv'd onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace [ 65 ]
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd
John Milton – Paradise Lost (Book 1) |
"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it."
William Styron, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, dies at age 81
(Note: All quotations in blocks attributed to Styron in essays, interviews, or from Sophie's Choice, with the exception of the Khrushcheva excerpt.)