He squinted at me with his mean little eyes and didn’t say anything. Walt had told me his father used to beat him. He’d stopped that by now, but he looked as if he wanted to beat me. But I stood my ground. And all the while his timid, ineffectual mother cowering in the background. I’m sorry, Mr. Snelling, but I really cannot respect a member of the fair sex who will not fight for her young. Had I ever been privileged to bear a child like Walt . . . But that’s hardly germane to our interview, is it?
“I am prepared to pay for the lessons myself,” I told Elias Disney. “All you must do is excuse Walt from work on Saturday. His obligation to his own talent is a higher one than to commerce.”
Elias looked at me and spat his tobacco on the ground—a filthy habit, that, and one I was glad to see disappear. He said, “I always heard you was an interfering old maid.”
Well, you can imagine the effect that had on me. I am directly descended from Ebenezer Zane, the frontier hero who saved the Ohio Valley from the savages. On my mother’s side. I just drew myself up to my full height and said calmly, “Mr. Disney, I don’t care how you insult me, that boy must have his chance. Art has called him, and your feelings and mine are irrelevant. If you will not allow me to give him the opportunity he deserves, then I will see that he wrenches it from you by moral force.”
Well, Elias looked a little confused, and to tell the truth, so did Walt. He was still very young. But Elias’ older three sons had already all run away from home, so maybe that’s what made Elias back down. Or maybe Art can even touch a man like him, in his secret soul—would you be so rash as to deny the possibility, Mr. Snelling? I think not. At any rate, he spat again and said, “Ain’t my lookout how you spend your money.” Immediately I pressed my advantage. “Then Walt may have Saturdays off? And carfare to the Art Institute?”
Elias nodded. I hid my triumph—it wouldn’t have been Christian to gloat—and the very next week I took Walt to register at the Institute.
He didn’t? Not anything about the Institute? Well, I’m afraid there’s a reason for that. Let me just find the words to put this diplomatically.
There, I’m ready now. Are you writing this down? The Art Institute is a good and worthy institution. But Kansas City, after all, is not New York. Had the young Walt Disney enrolled in an art school in New York, the greater sophistication and perspicacity of the teachers would have immediately led them to recognize his unusual talent. But in Kansas City, provincialism meant that his teachers were not as impressed with Walt as they should have been. That explains the mediocre response he received there. As I’m sure you know, the same negative reception initially greeted the Impressionists and the Pre-Raphaelites—why even Rosetti and Burne-Jones were initially scorned!
Not, of course, that I can approve of Rosetti’s manner of living. But his art—
Please don’t keep looking at your watch, Mr. Snelling. I assure you I’m telling this as fast as I can without leaving anything out.
Walt actually made good progress at the Art Institute. At the proper time, I bought him oils, brushes, and an easel. As much of my salary as was necessary went to support his art. That’s what the profession of educator once meant to some of us. It was a calling, no less sacred than that of physician or minister, not merely a job to be unionized like any common workmen, as we see happening today. Put that in your paper.
The next thing that happened was that Elias Disney moved his family to Chicago. The newspaper route scheme had failed, of course, and now Elias was ready to try something else. A jelly factory, I believe. Walt went, too. I was devastated. Chicago was too far to visit regularly. But the Lord helps us to bear what we must, Mr. Snelling, and Art anoints her servants. Walt found a place on the McKinley High School paper, doing drawings and photography both.
Here I must trust you, Mr. Snelling. I want to tell the whole truth—you remember that I told you at the beginning of the interview that I revere truth—and yet not give you the wrong impression. Walt and I were as close as ever. We wrote each other every week. He was studying at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and every month he sent me his work to critique. He relied utterly on my guidance, my greater education, my superior taste. But at this point in his life—he was seventeen, remember—young men are apt to be rebellious. That’s only natural.
So sometimes—only sometimes—he sent me crude little line drawings, sketches of cute animals or smiling flowers. They were amusing, I suppose, but they represented a regression. He was so much better than that. His still lifes and rural landscapes were beginning to have real power. I remember especially a pastoral, somewhat in the style of Turner, that was remarkable for a boy his age. And then to spend his talent on debased line drawings!
Do you know the Biblical story of Onan, Mr. Snelling?
There, I’ve shocked you. Well, I did warn you that a life dedicated to Art can brook no evasions. And that was what young Walt, in his inexperience, was doing. Evading service to the highest ideals of Art and turning to the vulgar because it was easier.
I wrote him so, in the strongest possible terms. He replied by sending me drawings illustrating a children’s fairy tale. It seems that he had gone to the motion pictures with a friend and seen Marguerite Clark in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” It had sparked something in his fertile mind, and he had translated that crude film into line drawings that, he thought, might illustrate a children’s book.
How can I tell you what I felt? What would any mentor feel who sees real talent turning, in its youth and inexperience, to the lures of commerce that will corrupt it utterly?
I caught the next train to Chicago. I found him after school hours outside his father’s factory, a pitiful concern already on the brink of failure. When Walt saw me, he turned as white as your shirt, Mr. Snelling.
“You are betraying yourself,” I said quietly. I wanted him to be shocked by my lack of social preamble. I wanted him to realize how important this was.
We went to a tearoom and talked for hours. He had grown; he was good-looking, manly in figure but still unformed in soul. Oh, can you blame me that I fought so hard for that soul to belong to Art? If only more of our young people had someone to care about their futures!
And I reached him. At least, I think I did. He was sullen, which is certainly natural at seventeen, but he did promise me he would not stop painting what was best and true in the world. However, he didn’t promise not to continue with his vulgar little line drawings.
And I didn’t ask him to. I hadn’t taught children for twenty-three years for nothing. One can only push so far, and then one must rely on righteous guilt.
I remember clearly one thing Walt said that day. I didn’t hold the comment against him. I still don’t. He was so young. He said, “There’s no money in real art.”
I said gently, “But there’s soul in it.”
And, of course, he had no answer to that.
The next month America entered the war. Walt wrote me that he’d joined the Navy. But all during his time at the Naval base in Connecticut, and all during his time in France driving supply trucks, he wrote me that he kept studying and learning, copying fine paintings. He wrote that he had a copy of Whistler’s “The Little White Girl” in his kit bag, and wrinkled and stained though it became, he looked at it every night, drinking in the lines and composition.
It was only later that I learned about the cowboys he drew on the supply trucks, and the fake Croix de Guerre he painted on soldiers’ leather jackets for ten francs each.
Well, I’m sure you can see where this is going, Mr. Snelling. I notice that you’re not looking at your watch now. Isn’t it amazing how all the epic human battles can be fought on such humble grounds? Altruism versus selfishness in every hospital. Civilization versus barbarism in every classroom. And the highest ideals of Art versus base commerce in letters carried by the humble Postal Service.
We had it out when Walt come home. He came to see me in Marceline, the first time he’d been back since he was nine. He used
a portion of his Navy pay. That alone was proof to me that the values I had tried to give him had not been dulled by the roughness of war. He came to see me even before he visited his mother.
I waited for him in the parlor of my boardinghouse. I can still see that room, with its plush green sofa and red figured rug and Tiffany glass lamp above the round table. I remember it seemed incredible to me that the other boarders going in and out, good respectable souls that they were, had no idea of the importance of the meeting to come. And how Walt had changed! He was a man, still in uniform, with a man’s power. But I knew that my power, that of Art, was at least equal to his. In fact, there is no power greater, save that of the Creator Himself.
“Hello, Miss Peeler,” Walt said. He seemed nervous, and a little defiant. But so glad to see me!
“You’ve returned,” I said, and then—I don’t blush to admit this, Mr. Snelling—I cried a little. No one knew the fears I’d had for Walt’s safety during the war. I made it my business that no one should know.
His defiance left him immediately. He sat beside me on the sofa and took my hands, and for nearly an hour he entertained me with stories of his gallant comrades in arms. People went past, watching us curiously, but I introduced him to no one. For that hour, doubly precious because of the battle to come, he was mine.
Let me say something here, Mr. Snelling. I count it as not the weakest proof of Walt’s talent that he came to me in his hour of questioning. He was always attached to me, but this was more than mere attachment. Only the most idealistic and noblest of souls recognize that they can profit from the guidance of those that have trod the same way before. I am not, and never was, an artist. I was not entrusted with that gift myself. But I was a teacher, devoting my life to nurturing that which is highest in my students, and Walt at his crossroads recognized that.
He pulled a sketchpad from his traveling case.
“Now, I want you to look at this with an open mind. Promise me!” I had never seen his face so serious.
“I will,” I said, and it was a solemn promise between us.
He opened the pad. Page after page of drawings of a mouse with a human face, dressed in red velvet pants with two huge pearl buttons, grinning merrily. “Mortimer,” it said on some pages. Later in the sketchpad Mortimer Mouse was joined by a lady mouse. Both were shown boarding a plane powered by a dachshund wound up tight like a rubber band. The plane almost hits sketched-in mountains and trees. At the end both mice parachute to safety, the girl with a great display of patched bloomers.
The drawing was unbelievably crude. “Mortimer’s” head was no more than a circle, with an oblong circle for a snout. His so-called legs were mere lines. The whole was merry, mocking, vulgar, nauseatingly cute, without taste or real emotions or any meaning beyond the desire to provoke the most simple-minded laugh.
“It’s preliminary sketches for an animated motion picture,” Walt said. “Roy’s already talked to some fellows at an outfit called The Kansas City Film Ad Company. They do advertising, mostly, little one-minute animated shorts for local theaters. But they might be interested in trying for something bigger. This could be my opportunity!”
I remember that I closed my eyes. It was a prayer for eloquence.
“Walt,” I finally said, “this is a turning point for the rest of your life. If you give your talent to . . . to this, it will be exactly like using a fine horsehair brush to paint a barn door. In a short time the brush is worn and damaged, unfit for anything else. But unlike a brush, dear Walt, your talent is not replaceable—once dulled, you can never obtain another. Your talent is given you only once, and to waste its freshness, its fine edges, on cartoons . . .”
For a moment I thought I couldn’t go on. But then words found me. Art itself came to my rescue, giving my words wings. I spoke of Gauguin, turning his back on his comfortable stockbroker life to paint from his heart in the South Seas. I spoke of Delacroix, staying faithful to the patrician and the sublime despite the scom heaped on him. I spoke of Art’s scared mission to capture the essence of man’s soul, and of—oh!—the emptiness of the lives of those who accept tawdry, secondhand substitutes for that soul. I scarcely know what I said. I would have said anything to keep him faithful to the best that was in him, the highest of which he was capable.
He listened, but I wasn’t reaching him. I could see that. He was only eighteen, and he was on fire with the vulgar hustle the war had brought to the cities. The post-war era—the first war, I mean—was a sad time for true culture, Mr. Snelling. Not that the present day is any better.
A cookie with your tea?
Oh, of course the story’s not over! It’s just that I never quite know how to tell people the next part. It always sounds . . . mystical. And in 1950, who has the spirituality to credit mystical intervention? Especially in what Art has become now? When I think of the soulless so-called Cubists, elevating technical exercises above the—
Yes. Of course. What actually happened on the green sofa.
I could see Walt was not persuaded. I had failed. The greatest talent it was ever my happiness to nurture was voluntarily turning himself over to Mammon. I was distraught. I begged, pleaded, argued. Finally, Walt left me, striding away with that sullen expression I knew so well from two and a half decades in the classroom. But you must remember—he was so young!
I followed him out to the street. He started to cross. I grabbed his sleeve. He shook himself free and ran into the street. And at that moment—the neighborhood where I boarded wasn’t at all what it had once been, remember that please—at that moment a rat darted out from behind a trashcan in the adjacent alley. It ran straight toward me, and I screamed. Walt stopped in the middle of the street, and half-turned, and immediately was struck by one of Mr. Ford’s mass-produced model Ts.
Just give me a moment, please.
There.
Walt said that? I am glad of it. You see, he recognizes as well as I do that the accident was his true moment of decision. If it was an accident. Walt has always denied the mystical intervention of Art herself. Still, you men persist in thinking of yourselves as so much more rational than we women, do you not?
At any rate, Walt is certainly right when he says that dreadful time in the hospital changed his life. I visited him every day. We talked for hours. I took a formal leave from my classroom to be with him, and have never regretted it. Teaching goes on in many ways, Mr. Snelling, and education is never confined by four walls.
It was a year before Walt recovered from his injuries, which I’m sure he told you were extensive. There was damage to the lungs, ribs, and hips, followed by infection. Now, of course, we would have these wonderful new antibiotics to aid his recovery, but not then. All Walt had was the sustaining belief in the highest ideals of Art, which I strengthened and girded every day. He came out of the hospital a chastened man. “
The rest I’m sure he’s told you. He’s worked thirty-two years now on the Kansas City Star, in the illustration department to be sure, but only to support himself. His real effort, his real soul, has gone into his painting. He has endured many hardships and disappointments—not unlike the masters before him. It’s a disgrace to the world, of course, that he should only have his first show at forty-nine, but then the world has always been slow to acknowledge genuine merit. And of course Walt paints the true soul of his subjects, not like these cold travesties who think painting is about the paint, Mondrian and Rothko and this Pollock person . . .
. . . When Walt’s show opens next week, you’ll see what I mean. His work bears comparison with the best of past masters. Why, there’s one picture that might almost have been painted by Burne-Jones himself.
Dear me, I had no idea it was so late. Do you really have to go?
Well, let me leave you with just one summary quote for your paper. Let me see, I want to choose my words carefully. How about this: “Miss Annie Peeler has had faith in Mr. Walt Disney’s talent from his childhood. His show at the Kansas City Public Library is long overdue, and th
is humble beginning will undoubtedly be the harbinger of acknowledgment by the art world. Miss Peeler will say of her own contribution to Mr. Disney’s career only that she did no more than any proud member of our educational system should do, striving always to keep our pupils’ eyes fixed on the highest of which humanity is capable. If we do this, our children’s success is inevitable.”
There, how’s that?
One last cup of tea?
SEX EDUCATION
Another genetic engineering story. This one was directly prompted by a news article. A British scientist succeeded in forcing a fertilized human zygote to divide into eight separate embryos. Each of the eight cloned embryos then began to grow normally into a human fetus. Only after this experiment was completed did the scientist check to see if the British equivalent of the AMA had any guidelines about this.
They didn’t. Neither did the United States, then. In the years since, commissions have been formed, recommendations drawn up, laws passed. It is illegal in most of the developed world to fool around with human cloning, which of course doesn’t mean that it won’t happen anyway. The procedures are too easy (at least, compared with, say, building an atomic bomb). The temptations are too great. And—most important—the potential profits are too large. It will happen.
“Sex Education” is set in a world where certain kinds of human cloning are legal. But it explores ethical aspects of genetic engineering that apply in our universe as well.
WHEN THE PEOPLE CAME, MOLLIE WAS PLAYING IN THE BACK YARD with Emily Gowan. They’d made an excellent fort out of the picnic table turned on its side and backed up to the wooden fence. From behind the table they could throw kooshballs, which were too soft and floppy to hurt, at Brandy. He wagged his tail and peered around in this funny way that sent Mollie and Emily into giggles. Mariah Carey played on Emily’s boombox. Mollie threw another kooshball, orange and yellow. She didn’t realize then that these weren’t actually the first people; that there had been others.