And a little later, Dan said: “It was his voice—you’re sure it wasn’t something I said that you heard? It was his voice?”
I replied rather testily: “How many voices have you heard, Dan, that could ever be mistaken for his voice?”
“Well, we were both drunk—weren’t we? That’s my point,” Dan Needham said.
I remember the summer of 1967, when my finger was healing—how that summer slipped away. That was the summer Owen Meany was promoted; his uniform would look a little different when Hester and I saw him again—he would be a first lieutenant. The bars on his shoulder epaulets would turn from brass to silver. He would also help me begin my Master’s thesis on Thomas Hardy. I had much trouble beginning anything—and, according to Owen, even more trouble seeing something through.
“YOU MUST JUST PLUNGE IN,” Owen wrote to me. “THINK OF HARDY AS A MAN WHO WAS ALMOST RELIGIOUS, AS A MAN WHO CAME SO CLOSE TO BELIEVING IN GOD THAT WHEN HE REJECTED GOD, HIS REJECTION MADE HIM FEROCIOUSLY BITTER. THE KIND OF FATE HARDY BELIEVES IN IS ALMOST LIKE BELIEVING IN GOD—AT LEAST IN THAT TERRIBLE, JUDGMENTAL GOD OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. HARDY HATES INSTITUTIONS: THE CHURCH—MORE THAN FAITH OR BELIEF—AND CERTAINLY MARRIAGE (THE INSTITUTION OF IT), AND THE INSTITUTION OF EDUCATION. PEOPLE ARE HELPLESS TO FATE, VICTIMS OF TIME—THEIR OWN EMOTIONS UNDO THEM, AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OF ALL KINDS FAIL THEM.
“DON’T YOU SEE HOW A BELIEF IN SUCH A BITTER UNIVERSE IS NOT UNLIKE RELIGIOUS FAITH? LIKE FAITH, WHAT HARDY BELIEVED WAS NAKED, PLAIN, VULNERABLE. BELIEF IN GOD, OR A BELIEF THAT—EVENTUALLY—EVERYTHING HAS TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES … EITHER WAY, YOU DON’T LEAVE YOURSELF ANY ROOM FOR PHILOSOPHICAL DETACHMENT. EITHER WAY, YOU’RE NOT BEING VERY CLEVER. NEVER THINK OF HARDY AS CLEVER; NEVER CONFUSE FAITH, OR BELIEF—OF ANY KIND—WITH SOMETHING EVEN REMOTELY INTELLECTUAL.
“PLUNGE IN—JUST BEGIN. I’D BEGIN WITH HIS NOTES, HIS DIARIES—HE NEVER MINCED WORDS THERE. EVEN EARLY—WHEN HE WAS TRAVELING IN FRANCE, IN 1882—HE WROTE: ‘SINCE I DISCOVERED SEVERAL YEARS AGO, THAT I WAS LIVING IN A WORLD WHERE NOTHING BEARS OUT IN PRACTICE WHAT IT PROMISES INCIPIENTLY, I HAVE TROUBLED MYSELF VERY LITTLE ABOUT THEORIES. I AM CONTENT WITH TENTATIVENESS FROM DAY TO DAY.’ YOU COULD APPLY THAT OBSERVATION TO EACH OF HIS NOVELS! THAT’S WHY I SAY HE WAS ‘ALMOST RELIGIOUS’—BECAUSE HE WASN’T A GREAT THINKER, HE WAS A GREAT FEELER!
“TO BEGIN, YOU SIMPLY TAKE ONE OF HIS BLUNT OBSERVATIONS AND PUT IT TOGETHER WITH ONE OF HIS MORE LITERARY OBSERVATIONS—YOU KNOW, ABOUT THE CRAFT. I LIKE THIS ONE: ‘A STORY MUST BE EXCEPTIONAL ENOUGH TO JUSTIFY ITS TELLING. WE STORYTELLERS ARE ALL ANCIENT MARINERS, AND NONE OF US IS JUSTIFIED IN STOPPING WEDDING GUESTS, UNLESS HE HAS SOMETHING MORE UNUSUAL TO RELATE THAN THE ORDINARY EXPERIENCES OF EVERY AVERAGE MAN AND WOMAN.’
“YOU SEE? IT’S EAS
Y. YOU TAKE HIS HIGH STANDARDS FOR STORIES THAT ARE ‘EXCEPTIONAL’ AND YOU PUT THAT TOGETHER WITH HIS BELIEF THAT ‘NOTHING BEARS OUT IN PRACTICE WHAT IT PROMISES INCIPIENTLY,’ AND THERE’S YOUR THESIS! ACTUALLY, THERE IS HIS THESIS—ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS FILL IN THE EXAMPLES. PERSONALLY, I’D BEGIN WITH ONE OF THE BITTEREST—TAKE ALMOST ANYTHING FROM JUDE THE OBSCURE. HOW ABOUT THAT TERRIBLE LITTLE PRAYER THAT JUDE REMEMBERS FALLING ASLEEP TO, WHEN HE WAS A CHILD?
“TEACH ME TO LIVE, THAT I MAY DREAD
“THE GRAVE AS LITTLE AS MY BED.
“TEACH ME TO DIE …
“WHAT COULD BE EASIER?” wrote Owen Meany.
And thus—having cut off my finger and allowed me to finish graduate school—he started my Master’s thesis for me, too.
This August in Gravesend—where I try to visit every August—Dan’s students in the summer school were struggling with Euripides; I told Dan that I thought he’d made an odd and merciless choice. For students the age of my Bishop Strachan girls to spend seven weeks of the summer memorizing The Medea and The Trojan Women must have been an exercise in tedium—and one that risked disabusing the youngsters of their infatuation with the stage.
Dan said: “What was I going to do? I had twenty-five kids in the class and only six boys!” Indeed, those boys looked mightily overworked as it was; a particularly pallid young man had to be Creon in one play and Poseidon in the other. All the girls were shuffled in and out of the Chorus of Corinthian Women and the Chorus of Trojan Women as if Corinthian and Trojan women possessed an interchangable shrillness. I was quite taken by the dolorous girl Dan picked to play Hecuba; in addition to the sorrows of her role, she had to physically remain on the stage for the entirety of The Trojan Women. Therefore, Dan rested her in The Medea; he gave her an especially rueful but largely silent part in the Chorus of Corinthian Women—although he singled her out at the end of the play; she was clearly one of his better actresses, and Dan was wise to emphasize those end lines of the Chorus by having his girl speak solo.
“‘Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgment,’” said the sorrowful girl. “‘What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contrives.’”
How true. Not even Owen Meany would dispute that.
I sometimes envy Dan his ability to teach onstage; for the theater is a great emphasizer—especially to young people, who have no great experience in life by which they might judge the experiences they encounter in literature; and who have no great confidence in language, neither in using it nor in hearing it. The theater, Dan quite rightly claims, dramatizes both the experience and the confidence in language that young people—such as our students—lack. Students of the age of Dan’s, and mine, have no great feeling—for example—for wit; wit simply passes them by, or else they take it to be an elderly form of snobbery, a mere showing off with the language that they use (at best) tentatively. Wit isn’t tentative; therefore, neither is it young. Wit is one of many aspects of life and literature that is far easier to recognize onstage than in a book. My students are always missing the wit in what they read, or else they do not trust it; onstage, even an amateur actor can make anyone see what wit is.
August is my month to talk about teaching with Dan. When I meet Dan for Christmas, when we go together to Sawyer Depot, it is a busy time and there are always other people around. But in August we are often alone; as soon as the summer-school theater productions are over, Dan and I take a vacation together—although this usually means that we stay in Gravesend and are no more adventuresome than to indulge in day trips to the beach at Little Boar’s Head. We spend our evenings at 80 Front Street, just talking; since Dan moved in, the television has been gone. When Grandmother went to the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly, she took her television set with her; when Grandmother died, she left the house at 80 Front Street to Dan and me.
It is a huge and lonely house for a man who’s never even considered remarrying; but the house contains almost as much history for Dan as it holds for me. Although I enjoy my visits, not even the tempting nostalgia of the house at 80 Front Street could entice me to return to the United States. This is a subject—my return—that Dan broaches every August, always on an evening when it is clear to him that I am enjoying the atmosphere of 80 Front Street, and his friendship.
“There’s more than enough room here for a couple of old bachelors like us,” he says. “And with your years of experience at Bishop Strachan—not to mention the recommendation I’m sure your headmistress would write for you, not to mention that you’re a distinguished alumnus—of course the Gravesend Academy English Department would be happy to have you. Just say the word.”
Not to be polite, but out of my affection for Dan, I let the subject pass.
This August, when he started that business again, I simply said: “How hard it is—without the showplace of the stage—to teach wit to teenagers. I despair that another fall is almost upon me and once again I shall strive to make my Grade Ten girls notice something in Wuthering Heights besides every little detail about Catherine and Heathcliff—the story, the story; it is all they are interested in!”
“John, dear John,” Dan Needham said. “He’s been dead for twenty years. Forgive it. Forgive and forget—and come home.”
“There’s a passage right at the beginning—they miss it every year!” I said. “I’m referring to Lockwood’s description of Joseph, I’ve been pointing it out to them for so many years that I know the passage by heart: ‘looking … in my face so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must have need of divine aid to digest his dinner …’ I’ve even read this aloud to them, but it sails right over their heads—they don’t crack a smile! And it’s not just Emily Brontë’s wit that whistles clean past them. They don’t get it when it’s contemporary. Is Mordecai Richler too witty for eleventh-grade girls? It would appear so. Oh yes, they think The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is ‘funny’; but they miss half the humor! You know that description of the middle-class Jewish resort? It’s always description that they miss; I swear, they think it’s unimportant. They want dialogue, they want action; but there’s so much writing in the description! ‘There were still some pockets of Gentile resistance, it’s true. Neither of the two hotels that were still in their hands admitted Jews but that, like the British raj who still lingered on the Malabar Coast, was not so discomforting as it was touchingly defiant.’ Every year I watch their faces when I read to them—they don’t bat an eye!”
“John,” Dan said. “Let bygones be bygones—not even Owen would still be angry. Do you think Owen Meany would have blamed the whole country for what happened to him? That was madness; this is madness, too.”
“How do you teach madness onstage?” I asked Dan. “Hamlet, I suppose, for starters—I give Hamlet to my Grade Thirteen girls, but they have to make do with reading it; they don’t get to see it. And Crime and Punishment—even my Grade Thirteen girls struggle with the so-called ‘psychological’ novel. The ‘concentrated wretchedness’ of Raskolnikov is entirely within their grasp, but they don’t see how the novel’s psychology is at work in even Dostoevski’s simplest descriptions; once again, it’s the description they miss. Raskolnikov’s landlord, for example—‘his face seemed to be thickly covered with oil, like an old iron lock.’ What a perfect face for his landlord to have! ‘Isn’t that marvelous?’ I ask the class; they stare at me as if they think I’m crazier than Raskolnikov.”
Dan Needham, occasionally, stares at me that way, too. How could he possibly think I could “forgive and forget”? There is too much forgetting. When we schoolteachers worry that our students have no sense of history, isn’t it what people forget that worries us? For years I tried to forget who my father might be; I didn’t want to find out who he was, as Owen pointed out. How many times, for example, did I call back my mother’s old singing teacher, Graham McSwiney? How many times did I call him and ask him if he’d learned the whereabouts of Buster Freebody, or if he’d remembered anything about my mother that he hadn’t told Owen and