ABlog

My students appeal to me: how do you balance your teaching, your activism, and your writing life?

I say, “I don’t—not at the moment.” They probably don’t believe me. I don’t want them to. It scares me to realize how remote “real” writing feels just now. Long weeks ago, I planned a poem entitled “Strike Sonnet.” And that’s as far as I got. My last journal entry was made on October 16.

But we won our union contract at the New School. At 11:30 on Sunday night, 10/30, we of the Bargaining Committee stood in the fluorescent-lit, windowless conference room where we’ve spent so many tedious, disorganized and at times peevish hours over the past months. The president of our local, UAW Local 7902, Joel Schlemowitz, had thoughtfully provided typed copies of all four verses to “Solidarity Forever,” and we sang them off-key, fervently, locked in a swaying circle-hug. After leaving a voice mail message reassuring the anxious public that there would be no strike at the New School on the morrow, we trooped off to meet one last time with the management team. On the corner of University Place, a beautiful young man in a scanty gladiator costume passed by with a cheerful wave, basking in the post-modern pre-Halloween autumn warmth. Then, just past midnight, another conference room. Smiling, relieved, exhausted administrators. Long-stemmed roses and glowing speeches all around.

You would have thought there’d never been an anti-union campaign.

It was a quick turnaround. On Sunday afternoon, we’d been feverishly (or as feverishly as our weariness would allow) cranking up the strike plan, when it looked like management might dig in its heels. A day later, they would post on the home page of the university’s Web site an upbeat statement about the historic contract agreement that ostensibly makes the New School the first university in the country to offer job security to its part-time faculty.

When I mentioned the irony of such a self-congratulatory conclusion to a classic anti-union campaign, Winston pointed out that it’s a time-honored strategy, familiar from the heyday of affirmative action. Institutions that fought tooth and nail not to adopt programs to remedy patterns of institutional racism would, when finally forced to ante up, immediately begin to advertise their own virtue in being at the forefront of progressive “diversity” approaches.

What’s the English translation of that old Latin phrase? “Let them hate me so long as they fear me.”

Let them love us so long as they know in their institutional bones we would have struck them in a heartbeat.

***

I felt reborn as a teacher when I re-entered the classroom on a slightly delirious Monday morning following a very short night’s rest. I'm teaching, among other texts, Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, a man who, for whatever combination of psychological and social reasons, finished this masterpiece at the age of 28 and then did not publish another novel for another six decades.

I’m in that first flush of being overwhelmed by a great work. (I read the book as a freshman in college and then did not read it again all the way through before assigning it to my advanced fiction workshop; while it may not be the best pedagogical strategy, I’m probably not the first teacher to adopt a book for a course partly to get the chance to really read it.) The new Picador paperback includes, in addition to an introduction by Alfred Kazin that frames the novel as a classic of immigrant experience, a wonderful critical essay by Hana Wirth-Nesher that explores Roth’s depiction of the clash and intersection of different language communities as a new edition of a perennial theme in Jewish culture. There’s no point in my going further into these monumental topics here—dear reader, go read the book for yourself—but in my frustration at not having had a chance to do a closer reading with my fiction class (where the students’ writing is perforce the main focus), I do just want to touch on two other striking dimensions of Roth’s complex achievement.

One is its extraordinarily honest, complex representation of not just an oedipal plot but an almost metaphysical experience of gender. David Schearl’s mother Genya is physically the foundation of his life, the source of all the boy’s (and the novel’s) understanding of physical comfort and beauty. He is grounded in her body to such an extent that he’s psychologically still almost resident in it. The other side of this attraction is the boy’s terror of the dark cellar, associated with an incident in which an older, physically disabled neighbor girl lures/compels him to “play bad” in a dark closet. Any tendency to phallic bragging is displaced onto other male characters: the physically brutal father (who, it’s hinted, suffers from sexual impotence); the handsome, blond, goyish Leo, who uses David to get sexual access to the younger boy’s girl cousins. I told my class that as a woman and a feminist, I’m amazed to find myself empathizing so strongly with a point of view character for whom the female body represents this classic polarity: not the Virgin and the Whore (although there are hints of this in David’s sexual possessiveness of his mother) but, even more fundamentally, Eros and Thanatos. What makes my empathy possible, I believe, is the novel’s relentless exploration of subjectivity, such that we know we are experiencing a child’s distorted, need-born perceptions. The mother—and the novel’s other female characters—are granted an implied identity and consciousness of their own, albeit one largely inaccessible to David and the author. I find Roth amazingly frank about the psychic vulnerability that is both root and consequence of dichotomizing gender projections—a rarity indeed for fictional depictions of masculine identity.

Another aspect of the book that particularly delights me is its celebration of the “death and life of a great American city,” to paraphrase Jane Jacobs’s classic title. (Or should one say: the death-in-life, the life-in-death?) Roth’s novel depicts working-class New York’s gritty élan vital better than any work of fiction I can think of, both through its juxtapositions of scenic glory and squalor and in its lavish portrait of boylife on the streets, which is almost ethnographic in its detail. As an immigrant from the “beautiful” American West, I identify with Roth’s immigrant characters for whom a picture on the wall must suffice to represent the natural beauty left behind in the Old World. Yet even a tenement dweller has access to the wilderness of the sky, and Roth’s incessant preoccupation with light and darkness is not only symbolic but a literal link to the natural world. David walks among forces more elemental than mere brick and mortar:

The air had freshened, the dark became lighter. The wind, cooler now, wrinkled the dark puddles between the flagstones, lifted the wash-lines. From somewhere, large drops of water still spattered down, though walls and fences showed broad dry patches. His fingers still closed around the penny in his pocket, David climbed up the brown, water-stained stairs, passed through the warm corridor and out into the street. Sidewalks and gutter were drying to grey again, dark rills thinning under curbs. In the west clearing toward sunset, clouds were a silver havoc, their light in the rugged stone frame of the street, sombre and silver. (236)

The flying of kites from rooftops; the prestige of having access to a pair of roller skates in the era before skateboards; the sadistic, anthropomorphic delight of feeding a “wing-stripped” insect to a spider (“Bye! Bye! Buzzicoo!” the junior torturers chorus, giving a concrete vernacular twist to the Shakespearean insight, “As flies to cruel boys are we to the gods….”); the utility of a gob of axle grease for a fishing expedition to retrieve a nickel from under a sidewalk grate—a pileup of such vignettes makes of Call It Sleep a trove of childish folk culture, appalling and vital as the city itself.