Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I did not believe, though the film insists on it, that the hero (J oel McCrea) turned in the gangster in order to save the children. I had never seen any children saved that way. In my own experience, on the contrary, and not only because I was watching Bill, I had observed that those who really wished to save the chil dren became themselves, immediately, the target of the police. I could beli eve-t hough the film pretends that this consideration never entered the hero's mind-that the hero turned in the gangster in order to collect the reward money: that reward money which will allow the hero and heroine to escape from the stink of the children: tor I had certainly seen attempts at that. Should the hero and heroine take the younger brother with them into that so celebrated American mainstream, the boy, having no friends, and finding, therefore, no resonance, no corroboration of himself any where, will become either a derelict, or the most monstrous of patriots. Or, perhaps {trying to escape and atone, or, per haps, simply trying to live) the boy will become a kind of revolu tionary, a superior and dedicated gangster: for there is a reason that the heroes of the poor resemble so little (and yet so closely resemble!) the heroes of the rich. I do not wish to be misunderstood as suggesting, for example, that the late CHAPTER ONE 4-99 Adam Clayton Powell was in any way whatever a bandit, but that is what the white world called him. Harlem's position, therefore, as concerned Adam, was that Adam might have his faults, but that he was certainly a better man than any of his accusers, his accusers being on our backs: and that is why Harlem never abandoned him. Of course, I could not have said any of that then, either. I knew about Adam only that he was the son of "old" Adam, the pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, of which ch urch we had been members when I was little; and that he had been instrumental, in the wake of the 1935 Harlem riot, in getting bla ck people hired-f or the first time-in the stores on 12 5th Street where we spent so much of our money-the word, "money," here being meant to con vey the image of black fistfuls of nickels and dimes. In any case, the happy resolution of Dead End could mean nothing to me, since, even with some money, black people could move only into black neighborhoods: which is not to be interpreted as meaning that we wished to move into white neighborhoods. We wished, merely, to be free to move.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Alabama courts had almost never reversed a conviction because the trial judge had refused to change venue. When the court scheduled a hearing in October 1987 on pretrial motions in Walter’s case, Chestnut and Boynton showed up with no expectation that any of their motions would be granted. They were more focused on preparing for trial, which was scheduled to begin in February 1988. The pretrial motion hearing was a formality. Chestnut and Boynton presented their change-of-venue motion. Pearson stood up and said that due to the extraordinary pretrial coverage of the Morrison murder, he agreed that the trial should be moved. Judge Key nodded sympathetically; Chestnut, who knew his way around the Alabama courts, was sure something bad was about to happen. He was also certain the judge and the DA had already conspired. “The defendant’s motion to change venue is granted,” the judge ruled. When the judge suggested that it be moved to a neighboring county so that witnesses wouldn’t have far to travel, Chestnut remained hopeful. Almost all of the bordering counties had fairly large African American populations: Wilcox County was 72 percent black; Conecuh was 46 percent black; Clarke County was 45 percent black; Butler 42 percent; Escambia was 32 percent black. Only affluent Baldwin County to the south, with its beautiful Gulf of Mexico beaches, was atypical, with an African American population of just 9 percent. The judge took very little time deciding where the trial should be moved. “We’ll go to Baldwin County.” Chestnut and Boynton immediately complained, but the judge reminded them it was their motion. When they sought to withdraw the motion, the judge said he couldn’t authorize a trial in a community where so many people had formed opinions about the accused. The case would be tried in Bay Minette, the seat of Baldwin County. The change of venue was disastrous for Walter. Chestnut and Boynton knew there would be very few, if any, black jurors. They also understood that while jurors from Baldwin County might be less personally connected to Ronda Morrison and her family, it was an extremely conservative county that had made even less progress leaving behind the racial politics of Jim Crow than its neighbors. Given what he’d heard from other death row prisoners about all-white juries, Walter worried about the venue change as well. But he still put his faith in this fact: No one could hear the evidence and believe that he committed this crime. He just didn’t believe that a jury, black or white, could convict him on the nonsensical story told by Ralph Myers—not when he had an unquestionable alibi with close to a dozen witnesses. The February trial was postponed. Once again, Ralph Myers was having second thoughts. After months in the county jail, away from death row, Myers again realized he didn’t want to implicate himself in a murder he had not committed.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  543 her boyfriend has given her to buy something at the drugstore. Tricked into having sex with a drugstore clerk as a way of aborting her child, Dewey ruefully tells herself afterwards, “It ain’t going to work.” Anse wants a new set of teeth and a new wife. After the burial of his wife, Anse returns with a new set of teeth. Appearing with an odd-looking woman, he introduces all of them to her with the words, “Meet Mrs. Bundren.” With his very last words, Anse brutally erases all memory of the fi rst Mrs. Bundren. Together with the deep pathos underlying it, the bitter comedy of the ending exemplifi es the power of William Faulkner’s work. ■ Faulkner, As I Lay Dying. ———, The Sound and the Fury. Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’ s Novels, from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August. Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (one-volume edition). 1. Given that Addie speaks in just one section of As I Lay Dying while other characters speak in several of them, why is she the “I” of the title? 2. What does Faulkner gain by telling the story of As I Lay Dying with the aid of so many narrators (15) instead of just one? Questions to Consider Essential Reading Supplementary Reading

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Most men who are thrust into this role don’t understand how hard it is to build a new parent-child relationship. This is one of the many roles in the divorced family for which there is no dress rehearsal. People getting married a second time assume that an interested stepfather will slide smoothly into the shoes of an absent father. The new man arrives on the scene with great expectations and energy. But in my experience, the transition rarely works quickly or easily, especially if the biological father is still front and present in the child’s life. There are of course circumstances when a stepfather truly replaces a biological parent and is acknowledged as such—for example, when a child is very young and has limited contact with the biological parent. Compared with cultivating the interests of an older child, reaching out to little children is easier for stepfathers. It’s fun to toss toddlers into the air, hold them on your laps, read them stories, or put them to bed. And young children have an easier time responding because they usually don’t have conflicting loyalties that hinder their new attachments. But finding common ground with an older child takes a lot more time because it depends on gradually building a genuine friendship, winning the cooperation of the child, and making it clear that the stepfather does not intend to displace the biological father in the child’s affection. Time, patience, and persistence are key components to becoming a successful stepparent and to creating a happy remarried family. Good intentions are important, but that’s only a bare beginning. Building a close bond with a child takes as much time as building a close relationship with an adult. It requires sustained effort and most of all genuine affection that can outlast the child’s resistance and anxiety about trusting a new adult whom they fear may disappear. Stepparenthood in the child’s heart is never a given. It is earned. Billy’s stepfather wanted to be a parent to Billy and made many overtures to the boy during the first year of the marriage. So why did he fail? He was not in direct competition with Billy’s father and he did not expect Billy to choose between them. I suspect one reason is that he did not need Billy in his life. He already had a son and very soon he and Billy’s mother had a new baby boy. Thus he had little incentive to pursue a relationship with a difficult, angry boy. Essentially, after a few attempts, he gave up trying to build a relationship. To make matters even harder, his son was good-looking and athletic—everything Billy was not.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Ironically, if the father were deceased, the same young person would be eligible for scholarship aid. Blunting of Father-Child Relationships I CAN THINK OF several reasons for the sad state of affairs of college-bound children of divorce. First is the fact that in the vast majority of divorce settlements, college is not discussed and rarely is it covered. Like the whoosh of a falling guillotine, the law states that child support terminates at age eighteen. Except in a small number of states (Massachusetts, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, and New Jersey), a judge cannot order support to continue even if a young person can show in court that her parents have the financial resources to send her to college, that higher education is a core family value, and that the student is serious and diligent. In other states like New Jersey, New York, and New Hampshire, support can be ordered up to age twenty-one if the family meets the criteria just mentioned and can show that, had the parents remained married, the child almost certainly would have had title to an “educational birthright” with full or partial funding of higher education. Pennsylvania used to have a similar law, but it was challenged successfully on constitutional grounds by a wealthy father who argued that he fully planned to pay for his daughter’s college education but objected to being ordered to do so because parents in intact families have no such obligation. The court upheld his plea. Despite court orders, collection of child support long relied heavily on voluntary cooperation and was rarely enforced. It took many years of seeing women and children intolerably impoverished before people realized that a system of child support would not work without serious enforcement measures. Thankfully, community attitudes have changed. Recent legislation has made it possible for states to go after “deadbeat” dads more vigorously and more efficiently, although a great many women and children are still in serious financial straits after divorce. Child support for college, however, remains in the voluntary realm of yesteryear. 7 Family law attorneys tell me that they avoid negotiating college support at the time of divorce because it’s likely to backfire. Introducing the subject into already delicate and difficult settlement talks, they say, is like pouring gasoline on a fire. It may further inflame the parties, resulting in a reduction of child support when the child is young. In a kind of twisted logic, a promise of support for a child’s college education is regarded as a benefit for the mother, for which she will have to give up something in return. Attorneys tell their clients that if a father values education, has financial means, and regularly visits his child, he will assume responsibility for paying college tuition, just as if no divorce had occurred. Oh that it were so. The sad truth is that many fathers feel differently about their voluntary responsibilities to their children after divorce.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Parents who have gone through mediation are indeed more likely to abide by their agreements than parents who have been involved in traditional adversarial proceedings. But does mediation protect children? When mediation began to emerge as an important alternative method for settling disputes, proponents claimed that children would benefit enormously and that it would significantly improve their psychological adjustment. This has not happened. Long-term studies show no significant differences in the child’s adjustment at home or in school whether the parents use lawyers or mediators to settle their differences. 1 A child’s present and future are not shaped by the method of negotiation used by parents and courts. Mediation doesn’t help children because the child is hardly present in the planning—either in body or spirit. Mediation brings together the contesting preferences of the parents. But the mediator is not charged with developing a plan that will suit the child’s developmental or emotional needs. Nor is the mediator charged with inquiring into the child’s interests or wishes or preferences. The extent to which the parents are able or willing to speak for the child is not asked. And the merit of their conflicting claims for the child’s interests are not weighed on behalf of the child. Mediators have very limited training in child development, especially when it comes to the needs of very young children. The law does not instruct or require them to consider different developmental needs. Moreover, the mediator is not an independent agent. He or she operates within the legal framework of the court and in the shadow of its policies. If the prevailing court policy is extended visiting or dual residence, it’s not incumbent on the mediator to ask whether the infant or the two-year-old child has ever been separated from the primary parent. Mediators do not have to ask about the child’s reaction or whether the plans were ever discussed with the child. Nor do they offer advice to parents for preparing the child to handle the transitions that she will be called upon to make. It appears, in fact, that the mediation outcome continues many of the disadvantages of court judgment—locking children and parents into rigid agreements that ignore how children change as they grow up. Parents are told that they can return to mediation if the arrangements are not working. But that is not the same as giving an older child a place at the table and recognizing her voice as a participant. Nor is it the same as building in a review process that, after an appropriate time interval, would see how the child is faring. Another difficult issue that I mentioned earlier bears elaboration.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Many of the states that do authorize some monetary aid severely limit the amount of compensation. No matter how many years an innocent person has been wrongly incarcerated, New Hampshire caps compensation at $20,000; Wisconsin has a $25,000 cap; Oklahoma and Illinois limit the total amount an innocent person can recover to under $200,000, even if the person has spent decades in prison. While other states have caps of more than a million dollars, and many have no cap at all, several states impose onerous eligibility requirements. In some jurisdictions, if the person lacks the support of the prosecuting attorney who wrongly convicted him, compensation will be denied. At the time Walter was set free, Alabama was not among the handful of states that provided aid to innocent people released from prison. The Alabama legislature could pass a special bill granting compensation to a person wrongly convicted, but that almost never happened. A local legislator introduced a bill seeking compensation on Walter’s behalf that prompted the local press to report that Walter was seeking $9 million. The proposed legislation, of which Walter had no prior knowledge, went nowhere. But the news coverage about the possible $9 million payoff outraged people in Monroeville who still questioned his innocence and titillated some of Walter’s friends and family, a few of whom started soliciting him aggressively for financial help. One woman even filed a paternity suit falsely claiming that Walter was the father of her child, a child that was born less than eight months after Walter’s release. DNA tests confirmed that he was not the father. Walter at times expressed frustration that people didn’t believe him when he told them he had received nothing. We pressed ahead in our efforts to get compensation for him through a lawsuit, but there were obstacles. Our civil suit ran up against laws that give police, prosecutors, and judges special immunity from civil liability in criminal justice matters. While Chapman and the state officers connected with the case now readily acknowledged Walter’s innocence, they were unwilling to accept any responsibility for his wrongful prosecution and death sentence. Sheriff Tate, who seemed most active in Walter’s wrongful pretrial placement on death row and whose racist threats and intimidation tactics seemed the most actionable in a civil suit, reportedly accepted Walter’s innocence upon his release but then started telling people that he still believed Walter was guilty. Rob McDuff, an old friend of mine from Jackson, Mississippi, agreed to join our team for the civil litigation. Rob is a white native Mississippian whose Southern charm and manner enhanced his outstanding litigation skills in Alabama courts. He had recently asked me to help him with an Alabama civil rights case involving law enforcement misconduct. That case involved a police raid on a nightclub in Chambers County during which black residents had been illegally detained, mistreated, and abused by local authorities who refused to accept any responsibility for their misconduct.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He looked at me with a suddenly summoned attentiveness. ‘I’m quite over all that nasty business now,’ he said patiently. ‘In fact,’ I pursued, ‘it was I who looked after you, you know …’ This seemed to knock him rather, and he started to shamble off into the changing-room and then to think better of it, coming back to me in a sideways manner. His eyes ran down my front and he looked at my long, gappy toes as he said, ‘You were the chappy that, er, puff-puff, bang-bang … I say, goodness me. My dear fellow!’ He did not know what to do. ‘Anyway,’ I said, disappointed of a show of gratitude, ‘I’m glad to see you’ve recovered’—and I moved away feeling foolish and a little cross. It was the year of Trouble for Men, a talc and aftershave lotion of peculiar suggestiveness that, without any noticeable advertising, had permeated the gay world in a matter of weeks. Every bar and locker-room hummed with it, you picked it up on the Tube or waiting to cross the road. It was in the air and, had it been advertised, it could have been called decadent and irresistible. Re-entering the changing room I passed through a cloud of it, registering at first its quite bracing, outdoor quality before discovering the paler bluey-green femininity within. I found my locker that evening was next to Maurice—a lean black boxer, straight, and one of the most attractive men in the Corry, with a high forehead and a mischievous, sentimental expression. I asked him about a match that was coming up next week, and he made a few feint swipes at me as he talked. I involuntarily flinched a centimetre or two, and my stomach muscles clenched. ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ he said, ‘I won’t hit you—hard,’ and he grinned and cuffed me round the ear. If only life were always so simple, I thought, as he tugged off his singlet and his Lordship, looking perturbedly about, came back into view at the end of the alley of lockers. ‘I really am most frightfully obliged,’ he said loudly when he saw me, and I readied myself, half-dressed, to conduct this conversation under the casual scrutiny of all the other men who were sitting and standing around us. ‘Don’t mention it,’ I said brightly, embarrassed by the crass double entendre that might publicly arise.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Sadly, children of divorce who divorce are not better at protecting their children. I’d hoped that they might draw on their own experiences and treat their children with more understanding when their marriages failed. But I was bitterly disappointed. Although all those in our study complained that their parents didn’t explain the divorce to them and failed to ease their adjustment to the new circumstance, they made the same mistakes with their own children. Nor did they welcome the children’s questions or try to understand their troubles. Like their own parents, they were overwhelmed with the demands of their new lives, finding a place to live, making do with less money, and planning for the future. I knew before seeing Racer that Paula hadn’t learned much from her own childhood, although she remembered vividly how angry she was at her mother and how she worried that her parents would disappear. Like many parents, Paula assumed that Racer was a resilient child who’d understand what was happening. He was expected to manage. But she didn’t see that he might feel as lonely and abandoned as she had as a child or that he might develop the same kind of anger that had shaped her life for many years. I’ve come across Paula’s attitude many times in my work with divorcing parents. It’s common for them to have strong concerns for their children and equally strong, if not stronger, feelings that the other parent is falling down on the job. They know that life after divorce isn’t easy and truly want advice about how to make things better and easier. But there are no easy solutions. Things that can make a significant difference in the child’s life always involve sacrifice and change on the part of one or both parents. They require flexibility in both parents in deference to the child’s concerns. These changes are required at precisely the time when the parents, depleted from the travails of separating and setting up a new life, are at their lowest ebb. Who wants to cooperate at a time like this? Who wants to make more sacrifices? In an ideal world, what’s good for parents should be good for children. Happy, successful parents should produce happy, successful children. This is an axiom of our culture, but it breaks down in the complexity of real-life families. Some very happy, competent parents have children who feel excluded from their orbit—forever on the outskirts of deep affection. And when families come apart, the needs of every member diverge. What feels good for the divorced parents may not satisfy the needs of the children at all. It is at this point that many divorced parents draw the line and harden their hearts. Often they lose touch with their children and expect them to be little adults. “He has to compromise, too,” one newly separated mother of a five-year-old told me when her therapist suggested that she not move in with her boyfriend right away.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Whatever we couldn’t say, we showed, so I put her coat on her and led her by the hand all the way across town. Her face lit up when she saw it. It’s not like we didn’t communicate; we just didn’t talk.” When Too Much Is Still Not Enough I am not convinced that unrestrained disclosure—the ability to speak the truth and not hide anything—necessarily fosters a harmonious and robust intimacy. Any practice can be taken to a ridiculous extreme. Eddie and Noriko remind us that we can be very close without much talk. And the reverse is also true—too much self-revealing talk can still land us on the outskirts of intimacy. In the wonderful movie Bliss , a scene of passionate lovemaking—dim lights, vague body parts, and the roaring groans accompanying orgasm—is immediately followed by a couples therapy session. The therapist, played by Spalding Gray, adheres to an ideology of openness which the husband finds more than a little difficult to take. Therapist: How’s the sex? Joseph: You go first. Mary: OK. I have a confession to make. I fake my orgasms. I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to hurt you. Joseph: You’ve never had an orgasm? Mary: Not with you. Therapist: Joseph, it’s important that Mary can tell you how she feels, and for you to be able to hear it. Obviously, knowing everything about the other, and having him know everything about us, does not always promote the kind of closeness we want. If words serve as venues of connection, they can also stage insuperable obstacles. Needless to say, I don’t advocate this kind of therapeutic intervention. The mandate of intimacy, when taken too far, can resemble coercion. In my own work, I see couples who no longer wait for an invitation into their partner’s interiority, but instead demand admittance, as if they are entitled to unrestricted access into the private thoughts of their loved ones. Intimacy becomes intrusion rather than closeness—intimacy with an injunction. “You have to listen to me.” “Take care of me; tell me you love me.” Something that should develop normally, that is part of the beauty and the wisdom of a loving relationship, is forced on the partner who is less inclined to communicate verbally. In his book Passionate Marriage , David Schnarch deftly illustrates how the wish for intimacy can lead a person to impose forced reciprocity as a way to stave off the threat of rejection. The bargain of reciprocity goes something like this: “I’ll tell if you will, and I want to, so you have to.” We don’t like to be intimate alone. Some couples take this one step farther, confusing intimacy with control. What passes for care is actually covert surveillance—a fact-finding approach to the details of a partner’s life. What did you eat for lunch?

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Either way, the volatility of passionate eroticism is expected to evolve into a more staid, stable, and manageable alternative: mature love. Even the biochemistry of passion is known to be short-lived. The evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher says that the hormonal cocktail of romance (dopamine, norepineprine, and PEA) is known to last no more than a few years at best. Oxytocin, the cuddling hormone, outlasts them all. The fruits of this ripening love—companionship, deep respect, mutuality, and care—are considered by many to be a fair trade for erotic heat. If attraction and desire were the central actors in your courtship, now they retreat backstage to make way for the main act: building a life together. Eroticism is conspicuously absent from our idea of marriage. Of course, committed couples are expected to have sex, and even to enjoy it these days. Sex solely for the sake of reproduction is, theoretically, passé. But sex and eroticism are not the same, and the lascivious, intimate, ardent, needful, frivolous, erotic sex of lovers becomes rare after the housewarming party. In spite of the sexually saturated media that promise unfettered excitement provided we follow the ten ideas suggested in this week’s issue, there is still some anti-hedonism surrounding domesticated sex. Could it be that we’re inundated with articles about how to make sex hot with our partners because we don’t actually believe it can be hot with our partners? More to the point, could we believe deep down that it’s not supposed to be? Could we believe that regardless of how sexually free we might have been before tying the knot, marriage is no place for the naughtiness of lust? If marriage is about love, as we like to believe, then married sex must be a declaration of love. It has to be meaningful. But, the sex therapist Dagmar O’Connor says: For [married] sex to be “meaningful,” it must always be an expression of love—preferably of lifelong, abiding love—every time we climb into bed with one another. And what an incredible burden that is! It eliminates sex stimulated by a whole array of other emotions and sensations: playful sex and angry sex, quick, “mindless” sex and “naughty” sex. It eliminates, in fact, just about every occasion for having sex there is. After all, who can feel “lifelong, abiding love” that regularly—especially at eleven o’clock at night? Marriage, we’ve been taught, is about commitment, security, comfort, and family. It’s a serious business, a responsible and purposeful enterprise; it’s all the things we need, and all the things we need to do. Play and its playmates (risk, seduction, naughtiness, transgression) are left to fend for themselves outside the solid architecture of our homes.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  We could not solve a quadratic equation or write a book. All of these wonderful talents have evolved, however, because an archaic consciousness helped us to avoid being eaten by a stalking predator and to be cunning in pursuit of our prey. With crisp parsimony, the father of modern neurophysiology, Sir Charles Sherrington, a gentleman of few words, put it this way: “The motor act is the cradle of the mind.” Our basic survival instincts are the evolutionary engine upon which the castle of consciousness was built. While consciousness is not a uniquely human attribute, conscious awareness varies in quality and quantity in relationship to the complexity of each organism’s nervous system, but not in the essential phenomenon itself. I am reminded of a “trick” performed by my dog, Pouncer (an exceptionally bright dingo–Australian shepherd mix), suggesting a fairly sophisticated form of conscious awareness. I shall use him as an example: Pouncer loved to go cross-country skiing with me and resembled a snow-dolphin as he joyfully leaped through the flaky white mounds by my side. However, when I chose downhill skiing, he would have to spend most of the time in my truck with only an occasional run around the parking lot. One morning, ready for a downhill day on new powder, I brought my downhill boots and skis up from the basement. Resigned, Pouncer flopped to the floor in apparent disappointment. However, after a bit, he got up, marched out of the room and returned a few moments later from the basement with one of my cross-country shoes gripped firmly in his mouth. He shook it in front of my face as though to tell me he had a different plan for the day. His point was so well made, and I was so touched, that I couldn’t help but change my course of action accordingly. Had Pouncer possessed full linguistic capability, words couldn’t have made his point any more clear than did his disarming unspoken response. As evidenced by Pouncer’s response, the give-and-take game of predictive consciousness does not involve symbols or abstractions but, rather, has its elementary roots with “plus-and-minus” values and purposive action; or, how do I get from here to there in a way that imparts an overall positive outcome ? Both successful attack and escape are promoted by a basic strategy that incorporates past experience in the service of imagining (“imageing”) future outcomes. The spanning of time allows choice of the imagined options. This strategy, however, is only effective when the organism is fully present in the now . If, on the other hand, we view the future solely in terms of the past—without a robust anchoring in the present—then, in the words of the country-and-western singer Michael Martin Murphy, “There ain’t no future in the past.” In other words, a future that is overly determined by the past ain’t no future at all.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  The entire spectacle had disgusted her, and most of all my own losing part in it. She said she’d been so mortified she had to put her face in her hands. I resented this. I thought I had run a pretty close second, and so did Dwight, who praised the use I had made of his coaching. The truth was, I hadn’t made nearly enough use of it. During the first round I followed my intention and fought like a crazy man. Arthur was all over me, his craziness proving more radical than my own. Twice his windmilling gloves came straight down on my head and knocked me to my knees. He knocked me to my knees again during the second round. After I got up he rushed me, and without calculation I sidestepped and threw him an uppercut. It stopped him cold. He just stood there, shaking his head. I hit him again and the bell rang. I caught him with that uppercut twice more during the final round, but neither of them rocked him like that first one. That first one was a beaut. I launched it from my toes and put everything I had into it, and it shivered his timbers. I could feel it travel through him in one pure line. I could feel it hurt him. And when it landed, and my old friend’s head snapped back so terribly, I felt a surge of pride and connection; connection not to him but to Dwight. I was distinctly aware of Dwight in that bellowing mass all around me. I could feel his exultation at the blow I’d struck, feel his own pride in it, see him smiling down at me with recognition, and pleasure, and something like love. I had done well on the tests I’d taken in Seattle. But not long after my scores came in I got a rejection letter from Andover. Then St. Paul’s turned me down. Then Exeter. The letters were polite, professed regret for the news they bore, and wished me well. I never heard back from Choate at all. The rejections disappointed me, but I hadn’t really counted on these schools anyway. I was counting on Deerfield. When I got their letter I went off by myself. I sat by the river and read it. I read it many times, first because I was too numb to take it all in, then to find some word or tone that would cancel out everything else the letter said, or at least give me hope for an appeal. But they knew what they were doing, the people who wrote these letters. They knew how to close the door so that no seam showed, no light glimmered at the edges. I understood that the game was over. A week or so later the school secretary summoned me out of class to take a telephone call in the office. She said it sounded long distance.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined. It had been awkward, a bit scary, my legs were stung by nettles, we'd only kissed a lot, really, then quickly stroked each other off, but it was wholly different from the heartless occasional jerk-offs at school with someone who called you a queer afterwards. Next day my head was full of the heat of it, the lovely certainty we did it for each other. When we met tonight, it would be a step further into the dreamy underwoods of love. By the time I went out for my walk after supper I was prospecting far into the future. I had coached Dawn to some surprising exam results, he had moulded me into a runner and swimmer who commanded respect. I wrote long letters to an imaginary friend abroad, dotingly detailing Dawn's sweetness and beauty. For all our open-air beginnings I had him closeted with me in des Esseintes-like privacy, in a sealed world of silk and fur and absolute indulgence. But Dawn didn't come. I sat on the bench reading Tennyson, but not taking it in, looking up every few seconds for a bike or just for him in dark running gear. It was breezier than last night, the wood was stirring in tumultuous slow-motion, the pond broken and bickering. I waited through a muffled sunset till the wind had blown off the cannon-smoke of low cloud and opened up a sky of densening stars. Of course we hadn't said we'd meet. I walked nervously under the wood's edge for a minute, and looked out the way I thought he would come, for a light swivelling over grass and bushes. But there were only the lights of planes, high up, climbing out of Gatwick, the intermittent yawn of their engines, and when they'd gone just the gusting of the trees. I was shivery in a T-shirt, and jogged home for warmth, working out a story about how I'd come back safely along the road.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  (It cannot honestly be said that he ever writes well.) His car fc:>r speech is accurate if it is not sensitive; his characterization is vivid-like Sinclair Lewis, or, more accu- 588 LOCKRIDGE: ' THE AMERICAN MYTH ' 58 9 rately, like Dickens, he depends on a series of carefully exag gerated foibles-but it is never revelatory; his people are as clear as the sunlight in which they always seem to be bathed and, ultimately, as static and uninteresting. Incorporating the nature of the American Myth between the covers of any novel is admittedly a gigantic task; and it is made almost impossible by the fact that so many versions of the same myth are used for so many warring purposes. Which America will you have? There is America for the Indians which Mr. Lockridge mentions hastily and drops. There is America for the people who settled the country, concerning whom Mr. Lockridge is vehemently lyrical but no more star tling than a Thanksgiving hymn. There is America for the laborer, for the financier, America of the north and south, America for the hillbilly, the urbanite, the farmer. And there is America for the Protestant, the Catholic, the Jew, the Mex ican, the Oriental and that arid sector which we have reserved for the Negro. These Americas diverge significantly and some times dangerously and they have much in common. All of them bound doubtfully together create a picture and a climate not indicated in Raintree County. Mr. Lockridge is not en tirely unaware of these national contradictions; he simply docs not know what to make of them. ('The Union forever!' he cries desperately. '0, beautiful, unanalyzable concept!') At each impasse similar rhetoric is trotted out. The book, which had no core to begin with, becomes as amorphous as cotton candy under the drumming flow of words. These words are designed less to illuminate than they are to conceal; or, more accurately, Mr. Lockridge uses them as a kind of shimmering web, hiding everything with an insistent radiance and proving that, after all, everything is, or is going to be, all right. This dependence on the Word, especially as illustrated by this novel, strikes me as something quite peculiarly Amer ican. (In the beginning-and the Word was God.) Here is evinced a remarkable and touching regard tor all things writ ten and an almost slavish respect for anyone who writes. This does not, as one might think, lead to taste or discrimination or insight: the devotion is unqualified. Mr. Lockridge behaves in the presence of the Word like a child let loose in a well stocked ice-cream parlor. This allows him to speak, in the 5 90 OTHER ESSAYS same affectionate, admiring tone, of Shakespeare and Shaw nessy, both boy poets.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The one unspeakable thing that no one had been able to tell me threw light on everything else, and only left obscure the degrees of calculation and coincidence in Charles’s offering me his biography to write—a task he must have known I could never, in the end, accept. And as for my grandpa … As I shaved I looked at myself quizzically, yet his image was also in my mind, the groomed, sharp-eyed, authoritative face, ‘handsome suaveté’ … I remembered the rather frightening figure of my childhood, the trenchancy and reserve, and what I could now see as a slow softening of outline as he left politics and received his viscountcy. In retirement he had grown more accommodating, and with the arrival of Philippa’s children and the death of my grandmother had taken on something of the remote glamour of abdicated monarchy. His power was exercised with deference, calling on remembered allegiance. Yet his dynasty was not, in any strict sense, secure. Perhaps his fear that I would never have children explained the nervy familiarity of our relationship these days, the sense I had of being encouraged and yet kept at a hygienic distance. Perhaps it explained my own wariness of him, and the exaggerated obligation I felt under for the help he had given me. Oh, I wanted the flat and everything, but I was irked, graceless, I knew, and coltish about recognising its provenance. I loved my grandfather, too. Whether by the hoped-for sunbursts of our childhood holidays or the more watchful indulgence of his old age, he made one feel part of something superior and precious. All that could hardly change now that he turned out to be in part a tyrant and bigot—not just the elder statesman I had been so proud of at my tother, but (the first saddening strands of evidence suggested) a kind of bureaucratic sadist, a man who had built his career on oppression. Perhaps his precious and superior coterie was not so desirable after all. I was at a loss what to do. I wanted somehow to record my dissent but without callow scenes. I needed, without altogether wanting, to know more. I gave Gavin a ring, and was relieved when the long-suffering Spanish maid answered the phone: I didn’t want to bring it up with Philippa. After a few moments Gavin came amiably through. ‘Gavin, you must think me the most frightful fool.’ ‘Good heavens …’ he laughed. ‘About Charles Nantwich—I hadn’t the faintest idea the other evening what you were talking about.’ ‘Oh, yes.’ ‘I have now, though. It’s so ghastly—have you known for ages?’ ‘Mm—quite some time. I mean that whole episode is more or less forgotten now, it was what?—thirty years ago. You must feel pretty awful about it, I suppose.’ ‘You’re right.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And I won dered about that, the well-meaning accomplice and his fate: he is murdered because Fonda does not believe him, even though he is, in fact, speaking the truth. But the prisoner has no way of knowing with whom the priest is playing ball at the moment and so dares not risk believing him. This dread is underscored by the film's last line, delivered (in the dying prisoner's memory) by the priest: the gates are open. I knew damn well that the gates were not open, and, by this ti me, in any case, the lovers were dead. Dead End, on the other hand, left me cold, and so did Street Scene, for the same reason: my streets were funkier and more dangerous than that. I had seen the gangster, Baby-Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart), in my streets, with his one-hundred dollar suits, and his silk shirts, and his hat: sometimes he was a pimp and sometimes he was a preacher and often he was THE DEVIL FINDS WORK both: but Baby-Face always had the same taste in women, boys, and cars. I knew no one like the heroine, Drina (Sylvia Sidney), except certain high-yellow bitches, whose concern for their younger brother, if they had any concern, would long before have forced them to hit the block, hit the road, or hit a clean old banker, and steal the keys to the long old highway; or, in other words, the severity of the social situation which Dead E11d so romanticizes (somewhat like its direct descen dant, West Side Story) utterly precludes the innocence of its heroine. Much closer to the truth are the gangster, his broken mother, and his broken girl-yes: I had seen that. The script is unable to face the fact that it is merely another version of that brutal fantasy known as the American success story: this helpless dishonesty is revealed by the script's resolution. I was by no means certain that I approved of the hero's decision to inform on Baby-Face, to turn him over to the police, and bring about his death. In my streets, we never called the cops, and whoever turned anyone in to the cops was a pariah. I did not believe, though the film insists on it, that the hero (Joel McCrea) turned in the gangster in order to save the children.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  That the movie star is an "escape" personality indicates one of the irreducible dan gers to which the moviegoer is exposed: the danger of sur rendering to the corroboration of one's fantasies as they are thrown back fr om the screen. The danger is as great for the performer: Bette Davis may have longed, all these years, to play Mrs. Alving, in Ghosts, and Spencer Tracy may have car ried with him to the grave an unfulfilled King Lear-nobody was about to let them try it, for tear that their public would feel themselves betrayed. This is one of the reasons that Joan Crawford, for example, doesn't like the film Rain, in which she starred. God knows that it's not a very good picture, but Crawfi.>rd didn't write the abysmal script. She made the mis take, and very honorably, after all, of trying to be Miss Sadie Thompson instead of Miss Joan Crawfi>rd, and the kids didn't like that at all. CHAPTER ONE 5 01 For the tension in the theater is a very different, and very particular tension: this tension between the real and the imag ined is the theater, and this is why the theater will always remain a necessity. One is not in the presence of shadows, but responding to one's flesh and blood: in the theater, we are re creating each other. Clearly, now, when speaking of the the ater, I am not referring to those desperate and debilitating commercial ventures on which Broadway embarks each season, or those grim "revivals" of stillborn plays of which London is so fond, or those "adaptations" of American monstrosities which have been the rage of Paris for so long. Nor, in the present instance, is the term, "one's flesh and blood" meant to refer, merely, to the spectacle of a black boy seeing, for the first time in his life, living black actors on a living stage: we are all each other's flesh and blood. This is a truth which it is very difficult for the theater to deny, and when it attempts to do so the same thing happens to the theater as happens to the church: it becomes sterile and irrelevant, a blasphemy, and the true believer goes elsewhere carrying, as it happens, the church and the theater with him, and leaving the form behind. For, the church and the theater are carried within us and it is we who create them, out of our need and out of an impulse more mysterious than our desire.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  After a while he said, "I only hesitate because it's hard to know where to begin." He smiled at me distantly, but seemed reluctant to meet Lilli's eye. Marcel, opposite me, bundled up his napkin and pushed back his chair—I saw he waited for Lilli's nod before he got down. Then she too stood up and reached for our plates and asked us about coffee. Paul watched her go out with the kind of exasperated tenderness I remembered noticing sometimes between my mother and father. "I wish I'd seen the Villa Hermes," I said, unsure if he was going to tell me about it or not. "I'd like to have seen it in its early days," Paul agreed promptly. "Yes." "Do you mean it had fallen into disrepair when you knew it?" He fiddled with some breadcrumbs on the tablecloth. "The thing is, I never did know it. Orst had moved out years before that brief period when I used to go and see him. It was let to an English artist up until the war, and then stood empty. I knew it as a landmark, of course, if I went to visit schoolfriends on that side of town." I had been hurriedly revising the scenario I had been loosely carrying, of young Paul's visits there and the aesthete blind in his own treasure-house. "No, the only time I entered the villa was in the period before its demolition in the early sixties, when several of us tried to save it and there was a petition signed by, well, by almost nobody really. The Symbolists were still seen as a bit of a sick joke then. Even the children of Symbolist painters were teased about it, as if they had convicts or madmen for fathers. Things which would fetch a fortune today were being sold for their frames." For a moment I found myself regretting those missed chances; I wasn't someone who would ever own anything. "But he was still a well-known figure when you met him?"

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  When a little over an hour had elapsed there was another quick knock and Mrs Altidore stepped in and looked from one to the other of us, as if expecting a decision. There was a moment's silence. Then she asked Luc how it had gone, and he nodded and shrugged, accustomed to evading her fuss. I told her that he had very good English and she said, "I know." She then had Luc show me out, which he did with a telling mixture of reluctance and formality. I shook his big strong hand and he nodded his forelock forward and curtly said goodbye. out in the street I felt almost nothing. I didn't like to inspect my motives—I walked on quite briskly, looking about appreciatively, like someone at ease with himself and not denying a disappointment. though the question insisted on forming, whether I had really come all this way for that. I took a circuitous route home, past the Memling Cinema and down the street where the church of St Narcissus was. It had relatively up-to-date notices on the board at the front, though it was hard to decide whether an announcement of a pilgrimage (by bus) back in April was sufficient grounds to believe that the iron-spiked gate through which I was reading it would ever be opened again to the curious or devout. I noticed litter had gathered between the gate and the door. Over the bridge, where my canal slid sullenly below, and there was the school. It was getting on for lunchtime. I heard a hand-bell ringing in an echoing inner courtyard, and as I crossed the road to look up at the tall, many-gabled building, its buckling purple brick braced all over with iron Es, Xs and Ss, I saw for the first time the historic uniform the boys wore: black breeches and stockings and black bum-freezers with wide collars and the yellow face of a narcissus flower picked out in braid on the pocket. Two of them who must have been quite senior were lounging in the gateway, like figures in an old print, and managed to look foppish and puritanical at the same time. I wasn't quite sure I got this Narcissus business: Luc, in the hagiological phase of our chat, had said that the saint was an early bishop of Jerusalem, whose bones had been brought back by Godefroi de Bouillon from the crusade of 1099. But this plausible legend seemed to have been wilfully confounded with the pagan myth of the boy-flower. Not that I minded.