What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High Schooclass="underline"
What happened to Uncle Tom, Topsy, and Little Eva. That the novel was one of the catalysts of the Civil War.
What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:
That you’d have done better to spend your time reading the real story of slavery in My Life and Times by Frederick Douglass. That the fact that you didn’t was just one more proof, dammit, of the racism rampant in our educational system. HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862)
Product of:
Concord, Massachusetts, and nearby Walden Pond.
Earned a Living as a:
Schoolteacher, pencil maker, surveyor, handyman, naturalist.
High-School Reading List:
Walden (1854), inspired by the two years he spent communing with himself and Nature in a log cabin on Walden Pond.
College Reading List:
“Civil Disobedience” (1849), the essay inspired by the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), inspired by a few weeks spent on same with his brother John, and considered a literary warm-up for Walden; parts of the Journal, inspired by virtually everything, which Thoreau not only kept but polished and rewrote for almost twenty-five years—you had fourteen volumes to choose from, including the famous “lost journal” which was rediscovered in 1958.
What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High Schooclass="underline"
That Thoreau was one of the great American eccentrics and the farthest out of the Transcendentalists, and that he believed you should spend your life breaking bread with the birds and the woodchucks instead of going for a killing in the futures market like your old man.
What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:
That Walden was not just a spiritualized Boy Scout Handbook but, according to twentieth-century authorities, a carefully composed literary masterpiece. That, according to these same authorities, Thoreau did have a sense of humor. That Tolstoy was mightily impressed with “Civil Disobedience” and Gandhi used it as the inspiration for his satyagraha. That despite his reputation as a loner and pacifist, Thoreau became the friend and defender of the radical abolitionist John Brown. And that, heavy as you were into Thoreau’s principles of purity, simplicity, and spirituality, you still had to figure out how to hit your parents up for plane fare to Goa.
Henry David Thoreau’s house, Concord, Massachusetts HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)
Product of:
New York City; Albany and Troy, New York; various South Sea islands.
Earned a Living as a:
Schoolteacher, bank clerk, sailor, harpooner, customs inspector.
High-School Reading List:
Moby-Dick (1851; abridged version, or you just skipped the parts about the whaling industry); Typee (1846), the early bestseller, which was, your teacher hoped, sufficiently exotic and action-packed to get you hooked on Melville. For extra credit, the novella Billy Budd (published posthumously, 1924).
College Reading List:
Moby-Dick (unabridged version), The Piazza Tales (1856), especially “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno”; and the much-discussed, extremely tedious The Confidence Man (1857).
What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High Schooclass="underline"
That Moby-Dick is allegorical (the whale = Nature/God/the Implacable Universe; Ahab = Man’s Conflicted Identity/Civilization/Human Will; Ishmael = the Poet/Philosopher) and should be read as a debate between Ahab and Ishmael.
Herman Melville’s house, Albany, New York
What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:
That Melville didn’t know Moby-Dick was allegorical until somebody pointed it out to him. That his work prefigured some of Freud’s theories of the unconscious. That, like Lord Byron, Norman Mailer, and Bob Dylan, Melville spent most of his life struggling to keep up with the name he’d made for himself (with the bestselling Typee) before he turned thirty. And that if, historically, he was caught between nineteenth-century Romanticism and modern alienation, personally he was pretty unbalanced as well. He may or may not have been gay, as some biographers assert (if he was, he almost certainly didn’t know it), but whatever he was, Nathaniel Hawthorne eventually stopped taking his calls. MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)
The Clemens family
Product of:
Hannibal, Missouri; various Nevada mining towns; Hartford, Connecticut.
Earned a Living as a:
Printer, river pilot, newspaper reporter, lecturer, storyteller.
High-School Reading List:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Also, if you took remedial English, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
College Reading List:
The short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), as an example of Twain’s frontier humor; the essays “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895, 1897) and “The United States of Lyncherdom” (1901), as examples of his scathing wit and increasing disillusionment with America; and the short novel, The Mysterious Stranger (published posthumously, 1916), for the late, bleak, embittered Twain.
What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High Schooclass="underline"
That Huckleberry Finn is the great mock-epic of American democracy, marking the beginning of a caste-free literature that owed nothing to European tradition. That this was the first time the American vernacular had made it into a serious literary work. That the book profoundly influenced the development of the modern American prose style. And that you should have been paying more attention to Twain’s brilliant manipulation of language and less to whether or not Huck, Tom, and Jim made it out of the lean-to alive. Also, that Mark Twain, which was river parlance for “two fathoms deep,” was the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:
That Twain grew more and more pessimistic about America—and about humanity in general— as he, and the country, grew older, eventually turning into a bona fide misanthrope. And that he was stylistically tone-deaf, producing equal amounts of brilliant prose and overwritten trash without ever seeming to notice the difference.
The Beat Goes On
So much of what we’ve all been committing to memory over the past lifetime or so—the words to “Help Me, Rhonda” typify the genre—eventually stops paying the same dividends. Sure, the beat’s as catchy as ever. But once the old gang’s less worried about what to do on Saturday night than about meeting child-support payments and stemming periodontal disease, it’s nice to have something more in the way of consolation, perspective, and uplift to fall back on. Good news: All the time you were glued to the car radio, a few people with a little more foresight were writing—and what’s more, printing—poetry, some of which is as about as Zeitgeisty as things get.