News from the World (14 page)

On the sidewalk, John stood still, trying to compose himself. He felt a jab of pain over his navel. He loosened his belt, and the pain ceased. He had been eating stupidly of late and had certainly gained weight. He set off for his apartment.

The ceiling paint in the living room was flaking. Really he ought to do something about it. He took a dust mop from a closet and passed it over the floor. The dust collected in feathery little piles, which he gathered up on a piece of cardboard.

Had any of Grace's puppies survived? For a few minutes, he rearranged furniture. He discovered a knucklebone beneath an upholstered chair, where Grace must have stored it. A question formed in his mind as he stooped to pick it up. Was it only her past that had made her afraid? Her puppies lost, cars bearing down on her, endless searching for food, the worm in her heart doing its deadly work. He stared at the bone, scored with her teeth marks.

As if suddenly impelled by a violent push, he went to the telephone. In a notebook written down amid book titles, opera notices, and train schedules to Boston was a list of phone numbers. He had crossed out kitty-cat's name but not her phone number. Still clutching Grace's bone, he dialed it.

On the fifth ring, she answered.

“Hello, Jean,” he said.

He heard her gasp. “So. It's you,” she said.

“It's me,” he agreed.

“And what do you want?” She was breathing rapidly.

“I'd like to see you.”

“What for?”

“Jean. I know how bad it was, the way I spoke to you.”

“You were so—contemptuous!”

“I know. I had no right—”

She broke in. “No one has.”

They fell silent at the same moment. Her breathing had slowed down.

“I haven't just been hanging around, you know,” she said defiantly.

“I only want to speak to you.”

“You want! You have to think about what other people want once a year!”

“Jean, please . . .” He dropped the bone on the table.

In a suddenly impetuous rush, she said, “It was so silly what I asked you! I'll never forget it. I can't even bear describing it to myself—what happened. All I feel is my own humiliation.”

“We are born into the world and anything can happen,” he said.

“What?”

“Listen. I had a dog, Grace. She got sick. Last night she died at the animal hospital. I guess I wanted to tell someone.”

“I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that news,” she said. “But I'm really sorry.” She paused, then went on. “Poor thing,” she said gently, as if speaking to someone standing beside her.

Something painful and thrilling tore at his throat. He held his breath, but still a sob burst from him. Despite its volume, he heard her say, “John? Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes . . . I don't know.”

“Oh, John, I can come over this minute. I've been running, but I can change clothes in a jiffy. I don't feel you're all right.”

The few tears had already dried on his cheeks. They stood in their apartments, hanging on to their telephones, trying to make up their minds if they really wanted to see each other again.

THE STOP OF TRUTH

In the Night Kitchen

O
N
J
UNE
14
,
1643, the English parliament ordered licensing of the press. All licensing authority was to be wielded by two archbishops who had the power to stop publication of any book “contrary to the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England.”

John Milton, protesting the parliamentary order in his essay,
Areopagitica
, wrote, “(it) will be primely to the discouragement of all learning and the stop of truth, not only by exercising our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made.”

In Camden, New York, in the early 1970s, a mother was reading a book,
In the Night Kitchen
, by Maurice Sendak, to her seven-year old son. In the first few pages, she came upon a drawing that made her shut the book and put it aside. Subsequently she asked school officials to remove
In the Night Kitchen
from elementary school libraries. Children, she said, were already exposed to enough profanity in the media. The school superintendent, Richard McClements, agreed with her. He did not see that the book had “sufficient merit” to be kept in libraries. Schools, he said, have “a real obligation to represent what is moral, what is honest, what is decent.”

Wanda Gray, the director of elementary education in Springfield, Missouri, devised a way to mask the offense in Sendak's story. Several of the drawings in the forty copies sent to forty Springfield kindergarten classes were then altered with a black felt pen. “I think
it
should be covered,” said she (my italics).

The
it
that the Camden mother and Mr. McClements appeared to have found immoral, dishonest and indecent, the
it
which Wanda Gray thought best to cover with what the director of curriculum development in Springfield called “shorts,” was the discreetly drawn penis of a small, occasionally naked boy named Mickey.

The Springfield solution brings to mind certain religious orders which obliged their members to bathe themselves only when their bodies were entirely covered in order to avoid sexual arousal, thus, one surmises, dramatically emphasizing that which the coverings sought to conceal.

In the Night Kitchen
is a dream adventure. Mickey flies through a starry night in an airplane made of bread dough to the night kitchen where three bakers—all of whom resemble Oliver Hardy— lack only milk to make morning cake. Mickey finds the milk, the cake is made, and he slides back into his bed and into dreamless sleep. As Mickey falls out of darkness into the light of the night kitchen, he loses his pajamas.

Mr. Sendak's work is always distinguished by imaginative power, wit and tenderness, and it is tenderness that is especially marked in this book, in his drawings of Mickey's infant nakedness.

Yet in the eyes of some beholders one must conclude that Mickey appears primarily as a disembodied sexual organ, and that for them, any nakedness is inherently and inarguably immoral. Most young listeners, and readers, discover their corporeality when they discover their fingers and toes, and Mickey's penis is unlikely to seem a revelation. To this writer, the intensity of the response of so many communities throughout this country reflects that strange stew of prudery and prurience which so characterizes certain aspects of American cultural life.

In Lansing, Michigan, two mothers said the book was pornographic, and opposed the use of school funds to buy books “incorporating such nudity or immorality.” One of them asked, “if nudity is acceptable in a kindergarten children's story, how can I teach my children that
Playboy
is not acceptable?”

One is inclined to suggest—by
teaching
your children that
Playboy
is not acceptable.

John Milton writes: “Impunity and remissness, for certain, are the bane of a commonwealth; but here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and what things persuasion only is to work.”

What I have said about Mr. Sendak's work reflects my own response to it, and the opinion of it I have arrived at. I am permitted to express this opinion by virtue of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The Amendment does not allow me to coerce others into sharing my judgment any more than it allows me to insist that all children be made to read
In the Night Kitchen
.

Wanda Gray, Mr. McClements, and the other indignant parents who found the book offensive are also permitted expression of their opinions. The First Amendment does not allow them to enforce their opinions by censorship.

“Why should we then affect a rigor contrary to the manner of God and nature,” writes Milton, “by abridging or scanting those means by which books freely permitted are, both to the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth?”

In Beloit, Wisconsin, a mother of three children said, “It's our responsibility as parents to protect our children. We have all sorts of laws to protect our children, but why aren't books restricted?”

As reported in the Beloit
Daily News
, this mother promised to become more active in book selections for the schools, and to keep on looking for what she called “bad books.”

From the
Areopagitica:
“. . . how shall the licensers themselves be confided in unless we confer upon them, or they assume themselves to be above all others in the land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness?”

The Beloit mother also asked a question: “What right does a degree give anyone to make unchangeable rules? You don't have to have a degree to know that teaching low morals and disrespect is wrong.”

In these two sentences, she manages to imply the elitism of the educated, the value of instinctive response as opposed to the hard work of informed reflection, and to reveal her own ignorance when she speaks of unchangeable rules. Rules are laws, and the most cursory knowledge of law, to the interested student, shows that it alters constantly as it reflects the contesting and changing views of the people whom it serves.

Roger Baldwin, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920, was a vociferous opponent of capital punishment. A journalist asked him, “What would you feel about capital punishment if your wife was raped and murdered?”

Mr. Baldwin was quoted as replying, “In that circumstance, I would be the last person to ask.”

In crises of grief and outrage, we are all the “last person to ask.” It is then that we most need the principles of law to protect ourselves, and others, against our own impulses. In a less savage situation than that envisioned by the journalist who questioned Mr. Baldwin, we need the same protection against our vagaries and caprices which, when justified by ideology or by the conviction that our interpretation of religious dogma excludes all other interpretations, can lead us to level cities as well as to burn books.

Milton says, “He who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God. . . .”

That some people regarded Mickey's nakedness in
In the Night Kitchen
as “pornographic,” and “incorporating . . . immorality,” and that some others even detected a subtext in Mickey's discovery of milk (i.e., nocturnal emission) did not lead to very edifying argument about the meaning of good and bad, or aesthetics. On the one side, there was rigid opposition to the book; on the other, expressions, often disdainful, of outraged democratic sensibilities.

In the best of all possible worlds, we should show respect for beliefs contrary to our own, an awareness that they are inevitable. In this democracy, we have agreed to differ.

Of course, it is a problem. Democracy is full of problems. E. M. Forster articulated its deficiency in the title of his book,
Two Cheers for Democracy
, and I believe it was Winston Churchill who declared it to be a terrible system of government but the best we have.

Books must not be censored no matter how appalling we find their content. Censorship metastasizes, moving ineluctably, often invisibly, from a part to the whole.

In
Democracy in America
, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “I can conceive of nothing better prepared for subjection in case of defeat than a democratic people without free institutions.”

It is my belief that Mr. Sendak's book, in the long run, will continue to exist as itself, merry and intransigently human, long after the din of argument concerning Mickey's nakedness has faded away.

In any event, Mr. Sendak is in good company.

Paul IV, at a moment during his four-year papacy (1555–1559), ordered that the genitals of naked figures be covered in Michelangelo's fresco of
The Last Judgment
, in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican. Daniele da Volterra, a contemporary painter, was given the task of covering the offending areas of the figures with underwear, or breeches. In Italian
bragha
meant breeches. Thenceforth, da Volterra was nicknamed “Il Braghettone” (the breeches maker).

Michelangelo, in a retort to the Pope concerning the nudity of the figures he had painted, said: “Tell the Pope that this is a trivial matter, and can easily be arranged. Let him straighten out the world, for pictures are quickly straightened out.”

UNQUESTIONED ANSWERS

I
N A CHECK-OUT
line at the market, a young woman in front of me exclaimed to a companion, “Oh! It's like raining.” What is it, one might wonder, that is like raining? But whatever was falling against the plate glass didn't resemble rain. It
was
rain.

Like
has broken loose from hip talk, once its province, and taken root in the daily language of observation and emotion, often as involuntary as a tic. “It's like sad,” said a boy of the shooting death of a classmate in a gang-beleaguered school in Brooklyn. There's a significant shade of difference between
rain
and
like rain
; between
sad
and
like sad
. Meaningless, without a grammatical function,
like
in these two sentences serves to postpone for a second or two the realization of rain and death.

To say, “It is raining”; to say, “I feel sad,” is concrete. But as George Orwell wrote in 1949, the “whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.” To illustrate his statement, he wrote a parody of a verse from Ecclesiastes. First the verse: “I returned, and saw under the sun that the race is not with the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

And now Orwell's modernization of it: “Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

When we hear that the youngest sibling in a family unit, encouraged by his role models, has begun to communicate interpersonally, do we gain more knowledge than if we are told that a baby has begun to talk with his mother and father?

I hope you will bear with me while I read a few scraps from a review of a book I wrote called
The Moonlight Man
. My intention is to illustrate the murder of language, and therefore of meaning, not to complain about an unsympathetic response. The reviewer writes:

The father . . . is an alcoholic and an interesting, but fairly unproductive person . . . the daughter acts as a facilitator for his alcoholism which is not a healthy role model for students who may face this problem. The book is about her separation from her parents as individuals, but it closes with her father abandoning her. The task of final separation from parents does not belong to junior high students and I do not think this age needs to face parental abandonment. Furthermore, if a child is dealing with an alcoholic parent, this book does not give acceptable guidance to work on that problem.

I believe this report to contain a basic perversion of what literature and stories are concerned with—the condition of being human. It is written in the jargon of social science. The writer does not like the book and is unable to say so. Instead, she evokes a contemporary vision of virtue and sin: productivity and unproductivity. The father should be the daughter's client—or patient. The story is not acceptable because it does not give “guidance.”

What I am concerned with here is the deadening of language, an extreme form of alienation expressed in words that have no resonance, and absolutely no inner reference to living people. “This age does not need to face parental abandonment,” the reviewer writes. Leaving aside the question of whether or not abandonment is involved, what on earth is “this age”? Who need not face what? Which boys? Which girls? What human beings?

It appears to be a tendency of some social disciplines to become intellectually petrified and spiritually lifeless if an opposing impulse does not come into play.

The most cursory glance at changes in thinking about human psychology over the last fifty years suggests we can only hypothesize about the meaning of behavior. New information is always arriving; the last word is never in.

Partly, perhaps, because we do not have the steadying forms of older cultures to fall back on, we are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth—until the next
new
comes along.

Nietzsche said, “Everything absolute leads to pathology.” A physicist of our own day, Dr. David Bohm, writes that “most categories are so familiar to us that they are used almost unconsciously . . . it is possible for categories to become so fixed a part of the intellect that the mind finally becomes engaged in playing false to support them.”

There is another consequence of the fossilization of intellect that is both cause and result of a dependence on categories, on everything absolute, on labels. I touched upon it in speaking of the use of
like
to postpone realization. Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase
body count
entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.

The language of labels is like paper money, issued irresponsibly, with nothing of intrinsic value behind it, that is, with no effort of the intelligence to see, to really apprehend.

George Orwell wrote that if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. An example of that is racial expletives which, once used, eat away at the capacity of the imagination to grasp the reality of other human beings, what George Eliot described in her novel
Middlemarch
as “the deep-seated habit of direct fellow feeling with individual fellow men.”

In a terrible event in Queens, New York, several years ago, white teenagers howled racial expletives as they drove one black man to his death and then savagely beat another. What is to become of us all without fellow feeling? How are we to develop it in children if we do not feel it toward them? If we treat them as a race apart, substituting management techniques and hollow classifications for the sympathy and companionship we all long for in the life we share?

Children do not have judgment; they have not lived long enough for that, or for the detachment that is part of judgment. Because of that, they need the protection of adults. But in nearly every other sense, they are simply ourselves when new.

When I was a child, people used to say, “These are the best years of your life. Just wait till you grow up!” My childhood was painful—if these were the best days, I wondered, what on earth was coming next? As I grew older, I learned that people, often born in less obviously difficult circumstances than my own, had suffered disappointment, pain, bafflement, just as I had. The years of childhood are not necessarily the best or the worst, they are the first years of our lives. When we forget that, we forget our mutual humanity, and in so doing, strip children of their dignity and mysteries.

A radio interviewer, in connection with the book of mine that I mentioned earlier, having asserted that he was an optimist, asked me why my story didn't have a more upbeat ending. People like happy endings, he said, in the vaguely threatening voice I have come to expect from optimists. “Some people don't,” was all I could manage to reply. What he wanted, I felt, was untruth, a Disneyfication of story, blandness, looking on the bright side, because that is what is supposed to be good for children. He seemed indifferent to an ending that might be true to the story that preceded it.

We are not the only people in the world who like happy tragedies. From the end of the seventeenth century to 1834,
King Lear
was given a happy ending. Cordelia didn't die.

It is not fitting that children be burdened, in service to some transcendent idea of truth, with the knowledge of all the failures of human society and of individual lives, which in any case they can't assimilate. But there are so many children who have experienced those failures in their flesh and bones, in their spirits! Yet, they are creatures of hope, even in the direst circumstances—and they need hope.

“My mother groan'd! my father wept. / Into the dangerous world I leapt . . . ,” wrote the poet, William Blake. Don't we sense in our very cells that it is a dangerous world? And isn't it because of that deep presentiment, that we can become brave?

I want to tell you about some of the brave children I have known.

Soon after the end of World War II, I was for a year a string reporter—the lowest rung in journalism—for an English wire service. One of the places I visited was a former vacation estate of a Prussian aristocrat in the Tatra mountains on the Polish-Czechoslovak border. The Polish government had converted it into a kind of recovery residence for children who had been born in concentration camps, or who had spent part of their childhood in them. Without exception, their parents had been murdered by the Nazis.

Our small group of reporters arrived one mid-afternoon after a lengthy, bone-chilling drive through the winter-silent landscape. It was not yet dark. There were twelve or thirteen boys and girls, and a small staff, in the grand, bleak house, its walls bare, its floors stripped of rugs and recovered with linoleum, its vast uncovered windows white with the glare from the snow-covered mountains.

It was impossible to tell the ages of the children, they were so stunted. They were very glad to see us, and they clung to us, grasping our hands as they showed us their classroom; then a former salon now filled with narrow, neatly made-up cots; a library long emptied of books, its shelves containing a few toys and games; and the dining room, where we ate an early supper with them at a long trestle table covered with yellow oilcloth.

After supper, a woman from Dublin who was among our group and who sang wonderfully, gave the children a concert. They sat with rapt attention as she sang in her sweet soprano of the Molly Maguires, of massacres and betrayals, and Irish boys with bullets in their breasts fallen on the moors.

A Yugoslav and two Czech journalists spoke Polish. The rest of us depended on an interpreter. The children wanted to know where we had come from and why, did we live in houses, and what were they like? And if we had children—where were they, with us so far away? They did not speak of their own histories except in the most indirect way, and then, not in words. They were painfully alert to any sudden movement on our part; they fell into abrupt silence in the midst of merriment when they seemed to sink into a dream, and they would suddenly burst into laughter that was almost frantic.

A boy whose English name would have been Richard asked me through the interpreter to call him that. He didn't want his Polish name. He asked me to go with him to one of the huge gardens that surrounded the mansion. I thought he was nine or so. I was told he was fourteen.

We went through the French doors of the dining room. It was nearly dark now. He held my hand as we walked along a partly cleared path, snow-laden shrubbery leaning toward us, the bare branches of winter-blackened trees above us. It was a somber, frozen, lonely place, the heart of winter. He ran a few feet ahead of me, and with his arms and hands, brushed the snow from what I thought was a column which might have once supported some heroic or mythological statue. It was a large birdbath.

He smiled at me and pointed to the sky. He made flying motions with his arms, then fluttered his hands more and more slowly as the wings of the bird he was imitating closed around its body, and it landed on the rim of the birdbath. He turned his head at an angle, then stretched forward as though to drink. His hands fluttered once again, his arms waved, the bird flew away. He shook snow from a bush, motioned me to look closely, pointed to a twig, put his hands together beneath his chin, then gradually widened them. I kicked away some snow from the ground. The earth looked like iron. I bent down and pretended my arm was a stalk that was growing up through the soil. I opened my fingers to sniff the petals of an imaginary flower. He let out a small shout of laughter and grabbed my hand and pressed it against his head. I had understood he was describing the coming of spring.

Before we left that evening, the children sang to us. Their pale faces were flushed with the pleasure of giving us their song. When we left, they crowded around the great entrance. They wept. But they stood quietly as we backed down the cleared path to our little bus. And as we drove away, we saw them waving strongly as though to wish us a safe journey.