Dr. Metablog

Edward Dmytryk's The Caine Mutiny (1954)

In my experience, film memories are generally sharper than book memories. Film images crowd out the words. An exception is The Caine Mutiny. I remembered the novel very well, and I was astonished that the film version, which I saw last night and must have seen in 1954 or thereabouts, had almost completely evaporated from my increasingly porous mind. I thought that I remembered something in black-and-white, but this film is in very bright colors.  

 

Perhaps my memory faded because the movie can't hold a candle to the novel.

 

Some of my many reservations: a) the actors are just too darn old. The novel is about young men, dislocated in early maturity, coming to terms with harsh new experiences. But the sailors who are supposed to be in their early twenties were played by Van Johnson (38), Fred MacMurray (46), and Jose Ferrer (45). Captain Queeg, who should be about thirty years old, was Humphrey Bogart, who was 55 and looked it, and who had, in fact, been wounded in World War I. The casting completely compromises the story and skews naive into conspiratorial. Robert Francis, who played Willis Seward Keith, was in fact twenty-four;  because he's so much younger than his shipmates, he looks more like their mascot than their contemporary. B) the romance between Keith and May Wynn (Marie Minotti in the novel), which is marginal or decorative rather than intrinsic in the novel, occupies far too much time in the film, and considerably dilutes the tension. C) the ship model that’s used in the typhoon scene was ludicrously inadequate. D) the ethnic tensions that are a source of complexity in the novel are elided: May Wynn is no longer an Italian Catholic, so it’s impossible to understand exactly why Keith vacillates about marrying her; Barney Greenwald (the defense lawyer) is no longer Jewish. Simpler, in this case, is not better. 

 

It seems that the U. S. Navy wouldn’t cooperate with the project until the writers made certain changes in the script. It would be fascinating to learn how much of the film was censored, and for what reasons.  

What We Read in the Fifties: The Caine Mutiny

In 1951, Herman Wouk won a Pulitzer prize for The Caine Mutiny. The novel itself was a giant best-seller and along with it came the movie with Humphrey Bogart and also a Broadway play. It was a big 1950s literary event. 

 

It's almost exactly fifty years since I last read the book, and it's obvious why it was such a triumph. The Caine Mutiny is a first-rate popular novel: it’s long but fast-paced, clearly written, literate, suspenseful, timely, and patriotic. The characters are carefully differentiated (although they veer toward stereotypes). It’s memorable. Parts of it were as vivid as if I had read them five months rather than five decades ago. I imagine that anyone who read the book, no matter how long ago, will remember “the strawberry incident,” “old yellowstain” and especially Captain Queeg and the two little steel balls that he rolls in his hand when he is under stress.  

 

The Caine Mutiny is not a novel that requires sophisticated exegesis. Wouk is heavy-handed; he has a few points to inculcate, and he doesn’t allow his readers much wiggle room. Perhaps the lack of ambiguity accounts for the novel's popularity. While the The Caine Mutiny raises important questions about war and authority, it resolves them too easily. Wouk lays on the patriotism with a trowel. Although his navy is a nasty, inefficient place, individuals (at least American individuals) regularly rise above their institutions. Wouk preserves the optimism about war that Tolstoy lost in the Caucasus.

 

The main action of the novel turns on the mutiny and on the subsequent court-martial. There’s also an engaging secondary story that could have been extracted from a novel by John Marquand. Willis Seward Keith is an upper-class Princetonian whose mother opposes his romance with Marie Minotti. Marie is Italian, Roman Catholic, working-class, unschooled, and a night-club chanteuse to boot, and she may been to bed both with her (gasp!) Jewish agent and with her (horrors!) saxophonist. Is it possible that Willie can free himself from maternal authority and marry her? In the Marquand universe, he would jilt Marie, marry Constantia de Vere Buff-Orpington of the Newport Buff-Orpingtons, and live a respectable bland country-club (and sexless) existence. But Marquand was a proper Bostonian born in the nineteenth century, while Wouk was the son of Jewish immigrants who was born in the twentieth. At first, Willie Keith bows to his mother and puts an end to his romance, but Wouk rescues him. When the U. S. S. Caine is kamikazeed, and Keith thinks he’s going to die, he realizes that he’s made a big mistake. He survives, writes a long, eloquent proposal of marriage, and in the very last pages of the novel seems to have persuaded Marie to come aboard. She's amenable and he's euphoric, but whether or not Willie and Marie can make the marriage work is left very much in doubt. 

 

Is it mere coincidence that my two favorite novels during adolescence were The Caine Mutiny and Mutiny on the Bounty?  If it's not coincidental but meaningful, what ever happened to the incipient, budding mutinous spirit?

"Nature to Advantage Dress'd": Polite Conversation in the P.S.217 Schoolyard, c. 1955

Sheldon: Hey, look what the cat dragged in. Arnie: Well as I live and breathe. Sheldon: You know what?  Arnie: What. Sheldon: That's what. Mel: Big shot. Sheldon: Who died and made you king?  Mel: Ask a stupid question and get a stupid answer. Sheldon: Where were you when the brains were passed out?  Arnie: Yeah, eat this. Sheldon: You wouldn’t know your ass from a hole in the ground. Mel: So what. Arnie: You’re so full of shit it’s coming out of your ears. Sheldon: Takes one to know one. Arnie: You know what's a good match?  Mel: What? Arnie: Your face and my ass. Mel: When you're finished, you can take the spoon out of my ass. Sheldon: Come again?  Are you cracked? Mel: Eat me. Arnie: You and what army?  Sheldon: Ain’t that the limit?  Mel:  Hey, honey, shake it don’t break it. Arnie: Hubba hubba, ding ding.  Sheldon: What a pair! Arnie: Built like a brick shithouse. Mel: You got the money, honey, I got the time.  Sheldon: Don’t mean maybe. Arnie:  All talk and no action. Mel:  Any more at home like you?  Sheldon: She can put her shoes under my bed anytime. Arnie: Hard work but somebody’s got to do it. Mel: Saving it for the worms?  Sheldon: Well, back to the salt mines. Arnie: Another day, another dollar. Sheldon: That ain’t hay. Mel: Long day, no. Arnie: We were just talking about you. Sheldon: that’s what she said. Arnie: Well, that’s that. Mel: I don’t bust my hump for anyone anymore. Arnie: Couldn’t care less. Sheldon: If you don’t like it, lump it. Mel:  Who cut the cheese? Arnie:  Another county heard from. Mel: Do me a favor. Drop dead. Sheldon: I'm feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed. Mel: Have a coffin nail? Arnie: Don't mind if I do. Mel: I’ve been smoking all my life and I ain’t dead yet. Arnie: I could eat a horse. Mel: He’d lose his head if it wasn’t tied on. Sheldon: He has as much chance as a snowball in hell. Arnie:  He’s pissing against the wind. Sheldon: Just a spit in the ocean. Arnie: Well, doesn’t that beat the band. Mel: Be my guest. Arnie:  Can you beat that? Sheldon: Can’t complain. Arnie:  Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun. Sheldon: Who pulled your chain?  Arnie: Yeah, clear as mud. Mel: You haven’t got the brains you were born with. Arnie: Cool it. Sheldon: Heads I win, tails you lose. Arnie: Cross my heart and hope to die. Sheldon: It’s curtains. Arnie: Do it, or else. Sheldon: Does a bear shit in the woods? Arnie: That and a nickel will get you on the subway. Sheldon: Close but no cigar. Mel: You know what time it is? Half past a cow’s ass. Arnie: Same to you. Sheldon: What a crock! Arnie: Your mother goes down for wooden nickels. Sheldon: Your mother! Arnie: Age before beauty. Sheldon: All dressed up and nowhere to go. Mel: Doozie pots. Arnie: You know what. Sheldon: What?  Arnie: That's what.

What We Read in the Fifties: The Return of the Native

In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye are brimming with impetuous youthful lust. They meet at a deserted spot on Egdon Heath -- a “vast tract of unenclosed wild” in southwestern England. Here’s how Hardy describes their moment of passion:   

 

          “’My Eustacia.’

          ‘Clym dearest’

          They remained long without a single utterance, for no language could reach the level of their  condition: words were as the rusty implements of a bygone barbarous epoch, and only to be occasionally tolerated.

          ‘I began to wonder why you did not come,’ said Yeobright when she had withdrawn a little from his embrace.”

 

Instead of the eager hands and tongues that a modern novelist would supply, Hardy substitutes a sentence about the inadequacies of language. Even so mild an allusion to physical pleasure was shocking to Victorian moralists, who regularly rebuked Hardy for ‘vulgarity.’ Hardy’s last and best novel, Jude the Obscure, was derided as Jude the Obscene.

 

I myself had no idea that Hardy was a breaker of sexual taboos when I first read The Return of the Native in 1955. During the fifty intervening years, I’ve read almost every one of Hardy’s many books, some of them--Jude the Obscure in particular—repeatedly and with great admiration. Why did I not revisit The Return of the Native until this past week? The silly truth is that the novel was required reading in English class, and inasmuch as I was an alienated and unhappy high school student, I made it a point of honor to dislike assigned books.

 

There’s also a second and more substantive reason:The Return of the Native was truly disorienting for provincial city kids like myself simply because so much of it turns on landscape. The novel is all about the way various characters respond to Egdon Heath, a furze-covered “somber stretch of rounds and hollows,” that is isolated, extensive, unchanging, brooding, dotted with primeval pagan barrows, and populated by sheep, shepherds and heath-croppers. To understand Hardy’s Wessex landscape,I would have had to overcome two barriers: my appalling lack of imagination and my inexperience with geography. Perhaps some of my classmates could visualize Egdon Heath. Many of them came from families that owned automobiles, and had consequently voyaged beyond city limits. They had looked upon an expanse of land larger than a baseball field and upon feathered bipeds more exotic than the flocks of pigeons that guanoed the steps of the Newkirk Avenue subway station. 

 

Had I been less put off by unfamiliar scenery and less hostile to assigned texts, I might have recognized that sparse Egdon and my crowded concrete neighborhood had much in common. Both places were backwaters untouched by modernity. Neither offered much in the way of education -– either individuals who possessed any, or schools that were genuinely dedicated to providing it. My territory, like Egdon Heath, was a place which anyone who happened to prosper, even a little, speedily abandoned -- to the port city of Budmouth in Hardy’s world, and to “the island,” that is, the new prosperous suburbs of Queens and Nassau, in mine.

 

In the 1950s, I myself had only one big idea -- that there must be a world elsewhere. Why then did I not sympathize with Eustacia Vye, whose sole and only desire is to get herself away from Egdon?  She is as out of her element treading aimlessly on the heath as I felt myself to be when I bicycled an endless series of claustrophobic streets. More to the point, why didn’t I identify with the reddleman Diggory Venn? Diggory lives alone in his spring-van and wanders the heath selling reddle (a red dye used for marking sheep). If I had been capable of reading imaginatively, I would have taken Diggory to heart. He is Romanticism’s archetypical outsider and a character whom I should or could have recognized as a fellow sufferer. I too was solitary, introspective, and on a quest for knowledge, but these traits were not understood –- as I understand them now -- as healthy questioning but instead were stigmatized as psychological disability (“Why are you moping? Why is your nose always in a book?”) An understanding of Diggory Venn might have lent dignity and historical context to my private woes.

 

Even more to the point: there I was, awash with the imperious hormones of adolescence, and yet unable to notice that, although reticent about gropings and thrustings, The Return of the Native attaches enormous importance to sex. While I was mesmerized by the superficiality of Blackboard Jungle and suchlike novels, I somehow failed to observe that Thomas Hardy was very very serious about love and lust, loyalty and betrayal, passion and jealousy — and that The Return of the Native challenges its readers to acknowledge that sexuality was as dangerous as it was redemptive. Was there a more important lesson for me to have learned? Did my sixteen-year-old self catch the least glimmer of it? Not the slightest.

Sonia Green

My daughter continues to urge me to write something autobiographical. To which I reply, it’s all autobiographical. But since she wants hard news, not indirect revelation, I offer this account of my grandmother, born Sonia Chafetz, later, by marriage, Sonia Usilewski and finally, after a legal name change, Sonia Green. She was born in 1884 somewhere in darkest White Russia (now called Belarus). I have no idea exactly where, but I know that she was a distinctly rural girl -- she loved to fish, to pick berries, to grow plants. Of her life in the old country, I know almost nothing -– only that she was raised in a cottage with a dirt floor and that the family brought the cow inside in the winter to keep the place warm. I know that she didn’t have a proper bed, and that at least for part of her childhood she slept on the mantle over the fireplace, which sounds mighty precarious to me. She couldn’t have had much in the way of formal education, but she did read and write Yiddish and still understood Russian in her old age. I know this because in the late 1940s or early 50s I would occasionally sit with her and listen to the broadcast of debates at the United Nations (in those days there were subsequent rather than simultaneous translations) and she would render the Russian to me, as best she could in her halting English. She never did become fluent in the only language I knew so our conversations were stilted and confined to utilitarian topics.

 

When she was young -- I’ve seen the pictures—she was dark, attractive, and voluptuous. By the time I came to know her, when she was close to sixty, her looks were long gone and she was disfigured by goitre and other diseases and no doubt by the consequences of her many self-induced abortions. The family story was that both she and Joseph were engaged to other people when they eloped to America (my grandfather deserting from the Russian army, where he had been drafted for the usual twenty-year term, and where his salary was a ruble every other month). They arrived in New York in August of 1904 from Rotterdam. How they found their way from Minsk to Rotterdam I was never told, but the Ellis Island records report that they came through London.

 

My mother was born in June of the following year, or just about ten months after her parents arrived in this country. My mother’s story was that at first her parents had only one pair of shoes between them, so that Sonia had to stay at home until Joseph returned from work. The family settled in Harlem; my grandfather, who was urban and more sophisticated than Sonia, had been trained as a pharmacist, but never found work in his field in the new world. I don’t know what they did for a living (was he some sort of salesman?) except that for a short time my grandparents owned a delicatessen at the corner of 4^th and 10^th streets in Greenwich Village. I’ve gone to that corner many times and tried imagine such a restaurant, but of course not a clue remains.

 

As far as I can guess, their marriage was uneasy. My grandfather was frequently absent (my father once darkly hinted, “I don’t know whether it was other women, or what”) and my grandmother frequently ill. My father also told me that when he and mom married, he laid down a prohibition — it was in the days when men made prohibitions -- that she wasn’t to act as intermediary between Sonia and Joseph any longer.

 

I know that my mother had to leave school six weeks into the ninth grade to care for her mother and two younger brothers. But that’s about all I was told and there are no documents. I have a few memories: Sonia trying to teach me to play fan-tan and five hundred rummy -– I was as bad then as I am now at card games; Sonia planting in wooden Philadelphia cream-cheese boxes every orange or grapefruit seed that came into her house, so that her tiny apartment had the pleasant aroma of a hot-house; Sonia growing avocados in the winter but setting them in my father’s garden (just around the corner from her third-floor walk-up) in the summer. And I also remember her attempt to cure my father’s sterile apple tree with an old-country remedy — rubbing the cut half of an apple on the tree trunk in midwinter. I remember also stuffed cabbage, the world's finest blintzes, and jars of apricot jam sealed with paraffin. In her last years, Sonia lived with my parents; she had her own kitchen, a room that had been remodeled from my former bedroom. She was weary of life and I suspect that she died at least in part of malnutrition. I remember also that she owned a pressed-glass ruby bowl that was always filled with hard candies. I was allowed one candy per visit.

 

When Sonia died in 1971, she had no money and precious few possessions, but I inherited the bowl. It was pretty, and I’m sorry to say that after a few years I accidentally broke it. But it was easily replaced (it was in a popular pattern and every second-hand store had the item for sale) and I bought one for about $25.00. Some years afterward I broke the second one and bought another, but by that time the price had gone up to $50.00. So, although my inheritance in cold cash was a negative $75, I was left with grateful appreciation and many warm memories.

Words New to Me

There's a small mystery in Tolstoi's Sebastopol in 1855. An officer drives "a telyezhka, which [says Tolstoi] stands halfway between a Jewish britchka, a Russian travelling-cart, and a basket-wagon." How in the arithmetical world can any object be "half-way" between three different kinds of wagons? A translation problem, let's hope. Moreover, the word "telyezhka" doesn't appear in any of my English dictionaries. An internet search located the not very precise definition, "baggage cart." And what the heck is a "Jewish britchka?" In nineteenth-century Russia, did horse-drawn vehicles have religion?  Not according Gogol in Dead Souls, where a britchka is specifically located in terms not of ethnicity, but of class; it's a "light spring-carriage of the sort affected by bachelors, retired lieutenant-colonels, staff-captains, and land-owners possessed of about a hundred souls." (Is it like or unlike a troika or a drozhky?) "Telyezhka" and "britchka" made me realize that my notions about horse-drawn vehicles are extremely hazy, and that when I read pre-internal-combustion novels I pay too little attention to the distinctions that separate Jaguars from jalopies; they're all coaches to me. But surely it makes a difference whether our hero arrives in a fly ("a horse drawn public coach") or a trap ("a light, often sporty, two or four wheeled carriage in which passengers sit face-to face") or a landau ("a large four-wheeled covered carriage"). Not to mention chaise, phaeton, cabriolet, sulky, surrey, curricle, barouche, brougham, gig, hansom, buggy, victoria, four-wheeler, and dogcart.

Also in Tolstoi's Sebastopol; frequent references to "gabions," which are "hollow cylinders of wicker or strap-iron like a basket without a bottom which are filled with earth and used in building fortifications." If they have no bottoms, how are they filled?

Other words new to me: from The Return of the Native, a number of lovely dialect words from Thomas Hardy's county of Dorset: "nunnywatch," predicament; "stunpoll," blockhead; "gallicrow," scarecrow; "kex," the dry, hollow stem of a plant; "knap," the summit of a small hill; "vlankers," sparks; "huffle," a gust of wind; "fess," lively; "withywind," bindweed; "scroff," firewood debris; "scammish," clumsy; "twanky," complaining; and, most relevantly, "spring-van," a van "resembling a large wooden box with an arched roof that opens from behind."

My Campaign for City Council

My positions:

1)  NO DOGS WITHIN CITY LIMITS. Rationale: fatal and near-fatal dog attacks, dog bites, barking dogs, whining dogs, ubiquitous dog "waste," dogs annoying citizens in parks and open space, the indulgence of dog owners. But what about seeing-eye dogs? Slippery slope, that. Sorry, no dogs (except for purposes of vivisection).

2)  NO CHRISTMAS LIGHTS. Rationale: waste of electricity and other scarce resources. Global warming. Bad taste.

3)  NO MUSIC WRITTEN AFTER 1897. Rationale: obvious. Why 1897? Death of Johannes Brahms. Also, no amplified music in a motor vehicle that is audible outside the vehicle.

4)  NO SMOKERS. Rationale: lung cancer, heart attacks, emphysema, ashes, bad odors. Note: not "no smoking" -- "no smokers."  No going outside of city limits to light up and then re-entering.

5)  NO IDLE CHATTER. Rationale: incontrovertible.

6)  NO VISIBLE TATTOOS. Rationale: I don't like tattoos. Why visible?  Whole-body inspections would be intrusive. 

7)  NEW ANNUAL HOLIDAY: Charles Darwin's birthday, February 12. Rationale: uncontroversial celebration of a great thinker. I reject out of hand those extremists who want to move the holiday to December 25. I'm a uniter, not a divider. 

My slogan:  Brilliant!  Charismatic!  Omniscient!  Hyperbolic!   

Phrasal Verbs: Put .*.

The caprice of phrasal verbs (formerly called verb-adverb combinations) came to my conscious attention sometime in the 1950s, when I first read Mansfield Park. Fanny Price, the heroine, is lying on a couch; her sailor brother William cries, "Poor Fanny!... how soon she is knocked up! Why, the sport is but just begun. I hope we shall keep it up these two hours." I was shocked. In the P. S. 217 schoolyard where I learned my English, "knocked up" had one and only one definition: made pregnant. There could be no doubt-- especially when the meaning of knocked up was confirmed by such transparent sexual equivocations as "sport," and "keep it up these two hours."  When did proper Fanny Price find time to get herself knocked up and how could I have been so inattentive a reader as not to notice?  And where did Jane Austen learn schoolyard slang?

How in the world was I to know that in nineteenth-century England, "knocked up" was an innocent phrasal verb that meant "tired."

Phrasal verbs are treacherous. There's nothing in the basic definitions of either "knock" or "up" that yields tired (or pregnant either, for that matter).

I was equally confused when Othello, quelling a disturbance, commanded the contending parties to "Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them." Inasmuch as I wasn't familiar with the phrasal verb, "put up," which means "sheathe," I guessed that "put up" meant its exact opposite -- "brandish." "Put up" is misleading: what's "up" about sheathe?

Just as there is nothing "up" about "up", there is nothing "out" about the "out" in "put out." The meaning that I knew was the demotic one to which my dictionary provides the formal "to indulge in promiscuous sexual intercourse." A woman who puts out can get herself knocked up. But "put out" has other equally unpredictable meanings: "make an effort," for one, and "annoyed" ("I was put out by his use of verbs") for another. Moreover, a person who's put out, can also be "put off," or dissuaded; "put on," or deceived; "put up," or lodged; "put up with," or tolerated; "put down," or harshly criticized. A person can be persuasive and "put across" a point, or be insane and be "put away" in an institution, or can be frugal and "put by" money for a rainy day; or can be gullible and "put upon."  Phrasal verbs are exceedingly nasty little critters, and they must drive English language learners off their collective gourds. 

Next week; same time, same station: got .*.   

The Replacement Child: Juliet

In the narrowest definition, a "replacement child" is a being who is intentionally conceived because an older sibling has recently died. Such substitutes must endure the lifetime burden of competing with a lost and often idealized child. Because it is almost impossible for them to please their parents, they easily become confused and frustrated, or worse.

Here's a dry summary from a learned journal: "When bereaved parents give birth to a child or children subsequent to a perinatal death, their constructions of the family necessarily change. The subsequent child is thought to be at risk of psychopathology (the replacement child syndrome) if parents have not sufficiently grieved their losses."  "At risk of psychopathology" is a hesitant, euphemistic formulation. 

The term "replacement child" has also been defined more broadly: it may, for example, refer to any child in a family that has lost one or more of its offspring (rather than solely to one conceived as a direct consequence of a death). In an even larger sense of the term, there are all kinds of 'symbolic' replacements: one psychologist has gone so far as to suggest that any Jewish child born after the European holocaust should be so considered. This idea seems extreme.

In pre-industrial societies, replacement children received no particular notice because infant deaths were so very commonplace. While there must be many replacement children in traditional literature, the earliest who comes to mind is Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which was written in 1595. 

Juliet's biological mother is aloof and distant, but she has a second and more loving parent -- her nurse -- who does much of the actual work of mothering. The nurse has lost her own daughter, Susan, and has become wet-nurse to Juliet. "Susan and she -- God rest all Christian souls --/Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God;/ She was too good for me." Clearly, Shakespeare suggests, Susan has been idealized in her natural mother's mind. The Nurse has a replacement child in Juliet, a state of being that goes far to explain the profound bond between surrogate mother and surrogate daughter.

It is uncharacteristic of Shakespeare to discuss the infancy of his heroines, nor can I think of any other pre-modern work that devotes so much space to wet-nursing or to the trauma of weaning. Although he depicts in detail the relationship between Juliet and her nurse, Shakespeare does not seem to anticipate or foreshadow the interest that later centuries would take in the replacement child syndrome. Instead, he focuses on Juliet's sexual alacrity.

The nurse tells a pertinent story (and leaves us with the impression that she has told it many times before): when Juliet had just learned to walk, she fell and "broke her brow"-- cut her forehead, as we would say. "And then my husband --God be with his soul,/ He was a merry man--took up the child,/ 'Yea,' quoth he, 'dost thou fall upon thy face?/ Thou wilt fall backward when thou has more wit,/ Wilt thou not, Jule?'  And by my holidame,/ The pretty wretch left crying and said 'ay.'"  "Falling backward" is bawdy talk for a woman's posture in sexual intercourse. Retelling her husband's tale, the Nurse dramatizes her expectation that when Juliet comes of age, or "has more wit," she will be eager to fall backward. To this proposition Juliet -- "the pretty wretch"-- says 'Ay.'  Juliet's personal psychology, Shakespeare seems to hint, formed itself to gratify the suggestions of her surrogate mother.

The vigorous sexuality that might be appropriate for the nurse's natural daughter Susan, who would have been a servant girl, has been transferred to the bourgeois Juliet, who, if she had followed the example of her birth mother, would have been properly restrained, repressed, and diffident. In effect, the nurse contrives to live her own desires through her replacement child; the result is Juliet's sexual impetuosity and subsequent death.

William Shakespeare was born in 1564, but an older sister Joan was baptized in 1558 and another, Margaret, in 1562. Both died in infancy. The future playwright was therefore doubly a replacement child.

There's an additional complexity in the family drama because the infants he replaced were female. How this oddity affected his own psychological development is open to speculation. Perhaps because he was the oldest son in a family that had lost two daughters, he was especially cherished. Or perhaps a boy who replaced girls developed the empathy to create complex female characters in an English drama that, until Juliet, had limited itself strictly to one-dimensional stereotypes.  

One of the Only

Call me prescriptive, but the all too common phrase "one of the only" offends both ear and logic. What does it mean to say that "the $11 billion Crusader artillery rocket system is one of the only weapons systems canceled by the Bush administration?" If it's the "only" cancellation, say so. If it's "one of the few," or even, one of "very few," why then, let's just go ahead and say that. "One of the only" is an unpleasant and chilling redundancy -- it means no more than "one of the one."  What's wrong with the word "only" that it needs help?  Isn't "only" only enough?  Perhaps "only" is wearing out, and "onliest" -- now confined to rural or comic speech -- will someday replace it. Onliest has the appearance of a superlative, but, logically speaking, "only" can't have a superlative. But logic, as we know, doesn't always govern the path of language. Redundancies and illogicalities abound, and awkward formulations such as "one of the only" aren't all that very one-of-a-kind singly unique.   

What We Read in the Fifties: Blackboard Jungle

In Blackboard Jungle, neither the author Evan Hunter, nor his lead character Richard Dadier, who recently started to work at North Manual Trades High School, can keep their eyes off teacher Lois Hammond's "full and rounded breasts." She's so "busty" and "big-breasted" that every time she so much as shrugs her shoulders, both Hunter and Dadier continually focus on the way that "her breasts move." These remarkable bazooms are at some times concealed by a blouse that is "thin nylon" and at other times by one that is "peekaboo." There are occasions when the Hammond breasts are enhanced by "the delicate lace of her slip and the slender straps of her brassiere," and other times when the "firm abundant cones of her breasts [are] caught tight in a white cotton bra." But whether enhanced or restrained, not only the "thrust of her brassiere," but even more so "the obvious thrust of her breasts" are under constant scrutiny. After an inadvertent sighting, Hunter and Dadier are able to report that one of these breasts (it isn't specified whether the left or the right) is "a youthful breast, firm, with a nipple large and erect."

It is dispiriting to recall that for high school students in the 1950s, this romance-novel twaddle seemed like a breakthrough in the direction of realism. But consider the context: in the novels that were read in Erasmus Hall English classes, none of the heroines (Eppie, Rebecca and Rowena, Lucy Manette) had any breasts at all, or at least, none that came to the attention of author or reader. The Blackboard Jungle seemed to be frank, honest, down-to-earth, and it was recognized in the schoolyard-and-drugstore culture of mid-century adolescents as a "hot" book, and along with The Amboy Dukes and Forever Amber was passed in cheap paperback editions from hand to sweaty hand. It reflected a reality (bad language, sexual urgency, near-anarchic disorder, gratuitous cruelty) far more present and immediate than did our 'official' reading. 

Returning after all these years to Blackboard Jungle has been a sad revelation. As a work of literature, it's piss-poor. The tough-guy prose aims to be hard-boiled, but it's undercooked ("the boys in the class considered English a senseless waste of time, a headless chicken, a blob without a goal"). The story is padded with interminable didactic digressions, and many of its episodes are either woefully overwrought or just simply meretricious -- Dadier's infant son, for example, is stillborn for no earthly reason except to squeeze a sob from the reader.

Nevertheless, and in spite of its amateurism, it's still a disturbing book. Blackboard Jungle covers the first four months of Dadier's teaching career: in the course of one melodramatic semester, he prevents the rape of a fellow teacher, he's attacked and beaten on the street by a gang of students, and he's slashed in a knife-fight in his own classroom. So much violence in so short a period of time seems to be beyond belief. Does it accord with the facts?  Wasn't it the case that the local bully-boy, Herbie W.,, attacked Mr. Proshan, our seventh-grade social studies teacher and wrestled him to the classroom floor?  Didn't the gang leader Runzi Marfeta terrorize the schoolyard? Weren't there fights outside the Bedford Arch almost daily? Wasn't it the case that every tenth student wore a "garrison belt," the three-inch buckle of which was ground razor-sharp, just in case? It was the heyday of "juvenile delinquents" and zip-guns and gravity knives and gang fights, and in many of my classrooms the out-of-control ambience was established and sustained by the psychopaths and sociopaths among whom I was educated. And isn't it also the case that Blackboard Jungle doesn't even tell the whole truth but is a sanitized version of real life? There's not a single mention of drunkenness, of heroin and other widely-used drugs, of accidental pregnancy and illegal abortion, or even of what used to be called, euphemistically, "broken homes."

Almost entirely anti-nostalgic, the novel did nevertheless provoke an occasional smile: Delaney cards, "official class," "daddy-o," street corner harmonizers. There's also one very brilliant comic touch in Blackboard Jungle. At North Manual Trades High School, there's a men's teacher's lounge in which Richard Dadier seems to pass a lot of his time, smoking. In the lounge is a couch, and on the couch is a man -- a teacher -- lying prone, his face concealed. He's asleep at the beginning of the novel, and he's still asleep at the end; Dadier never sees his face and never learns who he is or what subject he's supposed to be teaching. It's an exquisite metaphor for an exhausted and overwhelmed educational establishment. Blackboard Jungle is a bad book, but Evan Hunter earned his place in the story by bringing the scandal of high schools like North Manual Trades to public attention.