Can’t you see that I don’t like myself, and for all the reasons you are saying? Can’t you see that I am more disappointed with my life than you could ever be? Can’t you see that this school is only interested in what it sees as its successes and I know I’m not one of them?
He concluded the conference with an admonition that I had better get my act together or I would be in really big trouble. Again I walked out of the office and out of the school.
If it hadn’t been for English, I would have never returned to 15th Street. The teacher, a dark-haired, intense woman, also ran the Creative Writing workshop.
“If any of you want me to read what you are going to write,” she announced at the first class, “you will be responsible for a reading list of my choice.”
She interviewed each of us, the interviews taking no longer than ten minutes, asking what we were currently reading, what we had read the previous year, and what we thought of the books. She already had samples of our writing. She said that she liked my writing, and wrote down a list of four books she wanted me to read. They were: Penguin Island, by Anatole France; Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann; Père Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac; and The Stranger, by Albert Camus.
It was the fall of 1953, and at sixteen I was beginning my senior year in a near panic. Most of the kids at Stuyvesant were just waiting for acceptance letters or scholarship offers. The grades from the junior year had already been submitted, and many of the students knew what schools they would attend. Sometimes I lied about being accepted to some school, at other times I said I hadn’t quite decided, and most of the time I avoided the question altogether by not going to school.
I had not ever fully made the connection between my reading and the writing process. From time to time I had made superficial attempts to identify with an author. This usually meant, when I was younger, copying an author’s style. Later it would mean imagining myself to be that author. Now my English teacher was insisting that I explore the two worlds, that of the books I read and that of my writing, and examine them for common threads. The first book I read was Penguin Island.
I wanted to like this book because I wanted to like what my teacher recommended. Penguin Island is the story of an island inhabited by penguins who, in the mistaken belief that they are humans, are blessed by a nearly blind monk. Blessings are reserved only for people, and it is decided to change the penguins into people. Thus is created a virginal society on which the author can wreak whatever literary havoc he chooses.
The incident that affected me most in the book was the eventual canonization of Oberosia, a rather wicked person during her life whose reputation grew after she died and was manipulated by historians until it had become completely reversed. She was made into a saint, and fragments of her bones were considered to be sacred relics.
I was having problems with my own religious beliefs and did not need this interpretation by France. Could my religious beliefs be based on such convoluted history? It was the wrong time in my life for the book, but the right time as well, because of the clarity with which the author approached his theme. The book was less about what I considered to be the classic story form—the interplay between characters at a point of crisis—than it was about a broad presentation of the author’s point of view. I had not thought about writing, or books, in quite that way.
When I handed in my report about Penguin Island, my teacher gave me back a report pointing out all the weaknesses of the work and reminding me that I did not have to love every word in a book to appreciate it.
My reading prior to my senior year had been largely hit or miss. I still read gobs of comics and an increasing number of trashy novels that promised any amount of sex content. I read God’s Little Acre, by Erskine Caldwell, or at least parts of it, once a month. I also found a tattered copy of Nana by Émile Zola, which might have been a masterpiece, but I was only interested in reading the “hot” parts, so if it was a masterpiece, I completely missed the other parts. I had never had a sustained period of reading really good books before. I borrowed Anatole France’s The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard from the George Bruce Branch and read that while I was reading Buddenbrooks. I had dropped out of school again, so there was plenty of time to do the reading in Central Park or in Riverside Park, where I sometimes hung out just above the 79th Street boat basin.
Buddenbrooks was an intimidating book. The prose was so precise, so clean. The story was so logically laid out, without the gimmicks of Penguin Island. But it was chiefly intimidating because I was comparing my own writing to Mann’s. I had never thought of writing as a competitive effort, but on one level it had to be. Why should someone read my work when Mann was available? Why should someone read my work when all the classic works were available and all of them were better than anything that I could ever produce?
I wrote a long report saying why I liked Buddenbrooks, and came up with as clever a list of negatives as I could. I also looked up how old Thomas Mann had been when he wrote the book and saw that he had been past twenty, which made him old enough for me to disregard, at least partially. Buddenbrooks had taken me into a different world, a different environment from the one I knew about, and the conflict between art and the expectations of the business world had touched me deeply. The book was not about my world, however. It had nothing to do with Harlem or with anyone whom I personally knew. The realm of great literature was still far removed from who I was and reinforced the idea that I was at a crossroads in my life, with only the lesser path available to me. I knew I would always be able to read good books and was fairly sure that one day I would be able to find them on my own. I was less sure that I would ever be able to write a good book.
I next started two books, Balzac’s Père Goriot and The Street, by the black novelist Ann Petry. I bought Petry’s book because I thought it might be sexy. I liked it, but it suffered in comparison to Père Goriot.
As I went along the adventure of reading books selected by my teacher, I began to write again, began to put my marks on paper in the hope of constructing a world in which I would be comfortable. Putting marks on paper is always only a part of the writing process. The other part is looking at those marks and applying the judgment needed to ensure that the narrative that flies by your mind’s eye will be recognizable to an independent reader. At sixteen I wasn’t always sure what I meant. I also did not know who my audience would be. Would I write for black people like the guys I played ball with? I didn’t think so. Would I write for a white world that I thought might exist but had never really experienced? And if I did, would my writing be accepted?
In the fall of 1953 I wanted to write stories with secret meanings that would relate to people like me, no matter their color or position in life. The stories would be short journeys from the mythical point of my mind to some wildly satisfying and morally logical end. I also wanted to put down on paper the labyrinth of my own fears as well as a safe path through that labyrinth.
During this period my writings from day to day were nearly incomprehensible even hours after I had finished them. All the pieces were there, but the puzzle of fitting them together was escaping me. I sensed I was losing control of my writing. I began to read Balzac.
Where Anatole France’s work had been about ideas and wit, and Thomas Mann had been about precision and the ordering of character and plot, Honoré de Balzac, to me, was all about character. The story is about a retired merchant, Père Goriot, who has raised two rotten, spoiled daughters, and who spends all of his remaining life supporting them in a lavish style that drains him of all his resources. The daughters are thankless and heartless. When their father dies, they don’t even attend his funeral. But no matter how shabbily he is treated, Goriot goes on, living out the obsession of his life. Away from the book I imagined myself to be Goriot, toiling away just beyond the edges of a world he could not enter. I decided immediately that I wanted to write like Balzac.
I imagined myself writing longhand, an old-fashioned dip pen stabbing furiously into a bottle of bl
ack ink and then scratching with amazing precision across sheets of white paper. It almost, but not quite, supplanted my image of myself banging out stories on the typewriter. The old Royal typewriter my father had bought me was saved, I believe, by the fact that I could type really fast and had difficulty in reading my own handwriting even when I wrote slowly.
French was a subject that I had great difficulty passing. It was not that language was particularly difficult for me, but it seemed that I could put the phrases together only if I composed them from my own imagination and did not respond to the questions on the essays. And the oral parts of the course, standing and speaking the language, completely eluded me.
“Can you hear what I am saying?” the red-haired French teacher would ask me, impatiently.
Yes, I could hear, but I couldn’t say the words in French any more than I could say them in English. I wanted to learn French because I wanted to read Balzac’s dialog in French. The rhythms of his dialog, even in the translation, sounded perfect to me. I was so taken by Balzac that, in my imagination, I gave him a typewriter so that we would have more in common.
Sometimes Frank Hall would come to my apartment. He told me how great it was. I found out he was sleeping in hallways or in Morningside Park. Mama took an instant dislike to him, I think because of his eyes. They were always wide, red rimmed, and staring. His sandy hair was discolored in patches to a grayish blond. He looked black and yet nonblack, calm yet on the edge of turmoil, vaguely dangerous. When I read, I conjured images of the characters, and Frank, with his lean and hungry look, reminded me of Cassius in Julius Caesar.
Mama didn’t like the idea of me hanging out with Frank until the small hours of the morning. She asked me what we did, and I told her that we just talked, which was true. He would also drink beer or Half and Half, a cheap wine drink. If he got in the mood, he would sing songs his father had taught him. Frank was the only person I was hanging out with on a regular basis. Other than him it was just the books.
If I didn’t have money to get downtown, I would often climb a tree in the park. I could sit there for hours reading, the world passing below pretending to be real, me above doing the same thing.
The idea of reading a number of good books in a row added something to the process. I had always had trouble doing nothing either physically or mentally. If there were spaces, I was compelled to fill them, and the books were doing that. They also shut out the rattling noise that filled my head with warnings and admonitions—all in the voice of a guidance counselor—about where I was headed. I was now spending clear days reading in Central Park and rainy days in the movies. When I came home each day, I would check the mail and intercept any letters from school, answering those that needed answering and discarding the others. This worked for a long time until, one morning, Mama knocked on my bedroom door.
I was already up and dressed and gathering my notebooks.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” I called through the door.
It was early fall, and the apartment was cold. Mama had put on the oven and opened the door to let the heat fill our small kitchen. I sat at one end of the table, where she had put a plate of toast. I saw that instead of her usual housecoat she was dressed.
“Are you going out?” I asked.
“I’m going to school with you this morning,” she said flatly.
Oh. When had I been to school last? I tried to think. Surely not within the last few weeks. Somehow she had found out, and we were going down to Stuyvesant together to pay the piper. She wasn’t screaming, there were no demands for explanation, just the idea that she was going with me. Fine.
We didn’t speak as we boarded the crowded A train. She had never gone with me to Stuyvesant, and she was probably suspicious when we changed at 14th Street. The L train that went from 14th Street and Eighth Avenue across to First Avenue was an ancient, rattling affair filled, on that morning, with boys wearing red-and-blue Stuyvesant jackets with the familiar pegleg figure on the back. Mama still didn’t speak, and I wondered what was going through her mind. I thought about not going, of letting her go in by herself, but then I would just have to deal with it later. We went to the office.
“Walter, how are you?” The guidance counselor I had spoken to earlier looked at me.
“Fine,” I said, shrugging.
All the notes I had sent in were produced. Mama was amazed at how well I had forged her signature. No, I hadn’t been ill, not at all. No, she hadn’t known I had missed nearly thirty days of school. Mama was taken into an inner office for a private conference, and I was made to sit outside. Several teachers came into the guidance office on business. My English teacher was one of them. She looked at me.
“Are you in trouble?” she asked.
“I think so,” I answered.
“Whatever happens,” she whispered, “don’t stop writing.”
I waited and waited, and then the door opened and I was invited into the interior office. I was asked about the time I had had scarlet fever. Scarlet fever?
My bout with scarlet fever came the summer when I was eight, and I had all but forgotten it. I had been hospitalized for three weeks, most of it in a glass-walled cubicle in Williard Parker Hospital on the East Side. At the end of the three weeks, when I was cured of the fever, the doctors had recommended that I be put into a facility for disturbed children until my “nervousness” subsided. Mama had refused and brought me home. But what was that about now?
“Are you having problems?” asked a school administrator, wearing his look-how-calm-I-am expression.
I didn’t answer. It was clear that Mama had told them about the scarlet fever incident and must have explained that I was a nervous child. Still, I had violated the rules of attendance and certainly the rules of Stuyvesant. Mama and I were asked to sit in the hallway. A secretary brought Mama some coffee. We didn’t speak as we waited.
Finally we were asked in again. I could remain in the school if Mama and I agreed to put me under the supervision of a city agency. Mama asked if I would go along with it and I said yes. I was officially disturbed.
THE STRANGER
As part of the new attention being paid to me I had to report to someone at a city bureau for an interview. Here a stern-looking man with white hair looked over my record and then announced, gravely, that I was in trouble. He became annoyed when I smiled and informed me that my truancy was “no laughing matter.” I knew that, of course, but what had struck me as funny was that every time I got into trouble, the first thing that happened was that someone would think it their official duty to inform me of the fact.
He told me that if I continued staying out of school, I would be eligible for a juvenile facility. There was, on the cluttered desk between us, a badge that added weight to his argument. He had me agree to a lot of obvious things, such as that I knew my situation was serious, and that I was aware that I wouldn’t be given many more chances. I had been warned about my attendance during my junior year, but my records hadn’t been turned over to a city agency at that time.
It was apparent that the man interviewing me took my reluctance to answer his questions as insolence. He asked me if I thought I was better than everybody else. I answered no, of course. What we never discussed was how desperately I wanted to hide my feelings from him, or how ashamed I was of my predicament. I listened as he told me how I should be living my life, what I should have been doing with my opportunities, and how ashamed I should have been for giving everyone so much trouble. I looked down at my shoes. Thoughts of suicide flickered through my mind.
By the time I left, my stomach was churning. I got the A train at Chambers Street and stood as it lurched up to 125th. I had my books with me and looked through one of them. The words didn’t make any sense, as all I could hear was the last recitation of my sins.
That night I met Frank. I had promised Mama I would be home early, but I needed someone to talk to in a bad way. There was nothing Frank could do to help me, but I didn’t know anyone else who could, eithe
r. We sat on the park bench across from my house as it grew dark.
By this time I knew Frank’s story well. His father had been a vaudeville dancer and singer and had achieved quite a bit of success in the black entertainment outlets. Some blacks were able to cross over into the white markets in the forties if their talents were not too much connected with the blues or low-down black music. The singing Mills Brothers, the dancing Nicholas Brothers, and Fats Waller had all crossed over, establishing their popularity in both white and black venues. Frank’s father had bought a house in a fairly exclusive neighborhood on Long Island, which is next to New York City. Most of the year he traveled throughout the United States and Europe while Frank and his mom stayed home. Things were good for them until the father died.
Neighbors who had been kind to the black family of a famous entertainer were less than kind to the widow. Frank was beaten up a lot by neighborhood kids who taunted him because he was black. His mother couldn’t or wouldn’t do much about the bullying, and Frank responded by staying in the house as much as possible. Things went from bad to very much worse in one horrible incident.
Frank and his mother were on a bus going from New York to Long Island. His mother had been drinking and was loud, and the bus driver decided to put them off the bus. Mrs. Hall refused to get off the bus, and the driver tried to push her off.
Frank didn’t remember anything that had happened after that. His next memory was of waking up in a hospital, secured to a bed. Later he learned that he had stabbed the bus driver and two other passengers to death. He was locked away in Creedmore, a New York City mental institution, from the time he was thirteen. When he was sixteen, his mother was able to get him out. She sold the house and moved into an apartment, and they lived together for a while. Then there was another incident. He and his mother were at a party. There was an argument, and he passed out. This time there was one dead victim.