Dr. Metablog

What We Heard in the Fifties

Regular readers (and even stray internet pilgrims) know that Dr. M. has composed a series of entries called What We Read in the Fifties, in which he's revisited books that were noteworthy or notorious during the days of his youth. It's been a rewarding exercise, at least for him. Some of the books have been canonical novels that were required reading in English class at Erasmus Hall High School, some have been pop best-sellers which his more earnest teachers would have scorned, and some have been cheap sensational paperbacks passed under the desk from hand to grimy pubescent hand.

In the years that have passed since I first read these books, rivers have changed course, glaciers have melted, and American society has altered almost beyond recognition -- and yet the books have remained exactly the same. Reading them has been an exercise in nostalgia and a test of memory, and also an unwelcome insight into the incalculable callowness of adolescence. And yet, Dr. Metablog has found readers -- or, at least, he thinks he has, for in May and in December, when high school students all over America, yea, even across the waters, write their assigned term papers on Lord of the Flies or The Catcher in the Rye, blague-traffic spikes, and the dissenting views offered in these essaylets are plagiarized and offered to a new generation of English teachers, who reward them with grades of D or F. 

I fear, however, that my readers might have gathered an erroneous impression of 1950s Flatbushian youth -- that they might have been literate or intellectual. Let me clear my conscience and confess that for every hour that I spent reading books that had actual bindings, I spent ten hours reading comic books and an equal measure with my ear to the radio. It was the comics that taught me how to read; I was well along in years before I came to realize that there were such things as lower-case letters and that there could be sentences that didn't end with exclamation points! In my neighborhood, super-heroes (Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman) were as common as squirrels or starlings. But radio -- radio serials-- affected us even more than the comics. Radio stimulated the imagination, took us to worlds far way, presented us with alternative realities. Members of my age-cohort will not forget the glories of radio:Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy, who trotted the globe in support of native ideals and Wheaties; Bobbie Benson, the youth who inherited the B-Bar-B ranch in the Big Bend country, and who, along with Tex, Windy, and Harka, triumphed daily over snakes, droughts, famines and outlaws; the Shadow, who had the power to "cloud men's minds so they cannot see him," and who taught us, every day, that "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit"; Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Mounted, who fought crime and bad guys in the Yukon with horse and dog ("Well, King, this case is closed"); and the Lone Ranger, who with the aid of Tonto and the "thundering hoof beats of the great horse Silver" and with the marvelous voices of exotic Detroit's Fred Foy and Brace Beemer, created an enduring mythology of a spacious but vague and unlocatable west. 

Radio gave scope to the listener's imagination. When television came along, and these programs were translated into a visual form, they were all inevitably diminished. It's no wonder that the great epics (Gilgamesh, the Odyssey and Iliad, Beowulf, the Icelandic sagas) are oral creations. The spoken word can cast spells that are beyond the capacity of visual forms. When it comes to heroes, a single word is worth a thousand pictures.

Radio prepared me for Shakespeare. It's a fact that when Londoners crossed the Thames to attend the Globe, they did not go to "see" a play; they went to "hear" a play. There's a world of difference between seeing and hearing. When we "see" a movie, 90% of the information comes to us through the eye. In a Shakespeare play, it's exactly the opposite -- 90%, or more, of the information comes to us by way of the ear -- which is why recordings of Shakespeare's plays can be so entirely successful and so true to the original intent. And because the plays are primarily oral, with their big speeches and complicated rhetorical patterning and brilliant displays of verbal acuity, they can also be larger-than-life -- and they can be heroic. Shakespeare's plays are closer to radio than they are to any other modern literary form. Those of us who grew up with radio bring to Shakespeare an intuitive understanding of oral forms that precede television, film, and even precede the theater itself  -- especially decadent modern theater with its compulsive and distracting visual distortions.   

A Recurring, Violent Nightmare

I wish I had pleasant dreams but I only have nightmares. Here's one of them. Beginning with early adolescence and continuing to this day, I've had a recurring dream in which I've murdered someone--I don't know whom. The victim is always an unidentifiable male, and his death is always violent. Ordinarily, I beat him to a bloody pulp with a shovel. I have problems disposing of the gory body, but usually I bury it next to the neglected garage that lay behind our house on East 9 Street in Flatbush where I lived my first seventeen years. It's an anguishing dream not because I've killed someone, but because I've failed to conceal the body properly and because I'm going to be arrested and punished. It's amoral  -- I don't feel guilty that I'm a murderer -- just embarrassed because I'm incompetent. It's a very realistic nightmare. A couple of times it's been so vivid to me that even after I was wide-awake, it took me ten or fifteen seconds to realize that I was not being hunted by the police and that I could proceed normally with my life.

I don't know why I should be so oppressed with this fantasy. In the daylight hours, I'm your run-of-the-mill peaceful person. Never killed anyone.

Imagine my surprise when I read (and studied the illustrations of) J. M. DeMatteis's 100% autobiographical "graphic novel" Brooklyn Dreams (Paradox, 2003) and discovered that my nightmare is not entirely my own. DeMatteis suffers from exactly the same recurring dream. "I remember the body -- buried out behind my apartment building... or maybe stuffed in a trash can across the street....  Some poor, innocent schmuck I've either hacked up with a machete... or machine-gunned with Cagney-like ferocity... or maybe just kicked down a flight of stairs."  DeMatteis labors under the guilt that's provoked by this dream, and, like me, he can't explain it except to speculate that his life is a nightmare from which he's trying to awake.  But here's what's so fascinating to me: DeMatteis is a product of the exact same Brooklyn neighborhood as I (see map).  He grew up at the corner of Ocean and Foster, and he hung out at Newkirk Plaza, a commercial island that would nowadays be called a shopping center, where I endured painful haircuts, carried my mother's dry cleaning back and forth, and entered and exited the BMT subway.  Was there something about Flatbush, or, more particularly, something about "the Plaza" that made us killers in our dreams. Yes, I rather think there was.

Is it significant that DeMatteis is a kind of replacement child? He is the survivor of a pair of fraternal twins. His potential sibling was spontaneously aborted -- although DeMatties speculates, that, prescient about life's forthcoming difficulties, he might have "jumped." DeMatties' mother was about to be "scraped" when the doctor had second thoughts. In Brooklyn Dreams, DeMatteis describes his mother's and father's hysterical, debilitating and inconsistent protectiveness -- traits often discovered in parents who haven't properly grieved the loss of a child. 

Is it possible that the person whom DeMatteis thinks he murdered is, on some level, the unborn twin?   

And so we have still another variation of the replacement child syndrome. 

An East 9th Street Memory

It was an entirely different world -- East 9th Street in the old days. Sometimes it seems so long gone that I find it hard to believe it even though I was there: the last horse-drawn vegetable trucks and milk-wagons in America, an "old-clothes man" shouting his cry in the street, an itinerant knife-sharpener with his pushcart. On the street, a few, very few, rusting 1930s automobiles (it was the war, and all the factories were turning out tanks). And me, in first grade, wearing hand-me-down knickerbockers with long socks as if I were some turn-of-the-century waif.

Next door to us was a two-family house. On the first floor, the very ancient Mr. and Mrs. Pynn, who tended their gladioluses in the tiny backyard. He was a retired merchant marine. (How did an old Cornish sailor come to live in our neighborhood?)  On the second floor were the Pynn's tenants the Rhodins, Thor and Pearl, who were at least a generation or so older than my parents and who had three adult children (Thor Jr, Yammie [actually Hjalmar] and Peggy) none of whom I ever met and whose existence I was aware only because Mrs. Rhodin would boast of their exploits -- Thor Jr. was a physicist who, she said, worked on The Bomb. The Rhodins were very quiet people. He, a tall, thin, aloof man who never spoke, was either unemployed or retired;  he emerged from the house twice a day to walk his poodle. Mrs. Rhodin "went to business," as the saying was in the neighborhood.

One hot summer day, I was reading in the back bedroom. Windows (ours and the Rhodins) were wide open. Across the narrow driveway, I heard Mrs. Rhodin launch into a furious tirade. All the promises Mr. Rhodin had made to her. How little he had accomplished. The kind of place they lived in. Stuck in Brooklyn. She supported him while he lazed around at home. And other complaints that I couldn't understand or don't remember -- but there could be no doubt about her fury. Her litany of objections was loud and it seemed to go on for hours. A one-way street, though; I never heard Mr. Rhodin's voice.  Stunned, I shamelessly eavesdropped. 

Was it days, or weeks, or months later that Mr. Rhodin was run over by a bus on 18th Avenue and instantly killed?

Was there a connection between the tirade and the accident? And was it an accident?  Even in my childish naivete, I thought suicide. And because I knew Pearl and Thor's secrets, I felt as though I were a bit of an accomplice. 

Radio Baseball

Yesterday the Yankees were drubbed, absolutely demolished, by the Detroit Tigers. Sent home packing. Their loss joyed my vindictive, Yankee-hating heart.   

When I was a boy hanging out at the P. S. 217 schoolyard and learning about life, there was no question but that the pin-striped Yankees were privileged bland tea-sipping Republicans, while the Brooklyn Dodgers were a bunch of upstart and underachieving heroes to whom we neighborhood kids could relate;  they were colorful, they were multicultural (before the letter), they were Democrats, and they were ours. 

I watched this week's games on the TV and savored not only the outcome, but all the pealing bells and slick technological whistles that modern TV can offer: the multiple replays, the ball-tracking systems that allow the viewer to inspect both the pitcher's grip and his release and also the spin he puts on the ball.  I could count the number of rotations on Kenny Rogers' lovely curve. 

Although TV is amazingly informative, in my heart I prefer baseball on the radio -- the radio of my youth, that is. In those days, baseball was radio and radio was baseball. It's no wonder that baseball was the nation's game -- and it's only game -- when radio was the dominant medium.

I love the perennial rhythms of radio baseball: "Steps to the plate... digs in... closed stance... takes a few practice swings.... steps up on the rubber... round comes the right arm...  slider low and outside....  checks the runner on first...  looks down for the sign...  the pitch... high fly to left...  settles under it... two gone in the third...."  It's an enduring, comforting sound. 

Radio baseball as I remember it transformed the players into larger-than-life figures. It romanticized them. Radio baseball was a never-ending oral epic, Homeric in dimension. TV, with all its wealth of detail, turns the players into ordinary mortals; it makes them too familiar, too common. It plucks out the heart of the mystery. It's impossible to believe that these young men with their stringy beards and their horrid tattoos and their acneed faces are reincarnations of the bronze-age superheroes of my childhood. If an announcer were honestly recording what the TV sees, it would be, "steps up to the plate... digs in...  adjusts his nuts...  steps out of the box... spits a huge goober into the dirt...  now he's really excavating his left nostril."

Radio was reverent; television is intrusive.

Radio baseball was noble, and radio listeners were the better for listening to it. Radio baseball brought us together. On East 9 Street, where I grew up, there was very little in common among the Petrantos, the Burkes, the Bernsteins, the Constantinos, the Pynns, the Rhodins, and the Meinekes who populated the block  -- except that we could all talk about Cox, Reese, Snider, Robinson, Campanella. I have a strong memory of riding my Ivor Johnson (later my Raleigh three-speed) on a hot summer evening when there were so many people sitting on their porches, or on their stoops, or on the fire escapes listening to Red Barber and Connie Desmond that I could bike for many a mile and not miss a single pitch. Radio baseball turned us into a community. Which is why we'll never, ever, forgive that foul black-hearted traitor Walter O'Malley.

But I'm cheerful. It's autumn and the Republican Yankees have lost. It's a favorable omen. Is it too much to hope that, inasmuch as the Yankees have lost in October, the Democrats could win in November?   

Did Roz Chast Attend P. S. 217?

Diligent readers of this blague (a "fit audience though few," as John Milton said in a slightly different context) will remember that I've reported on the language, the culture and the sexual politics of P. S. 217 and its neighborhood. 

Newsflash!! It now appears that P. S. 217 contributed to the worldview of the century's finest cartoonist, the New Yorker's Roz Chast.

I had long suspected that Roz Chast was a neighborhood girl -- where else but in darkest Flatbush would a nine-year-old go to bed with "The Big Book of Horrible Rare Diseases?" The most overt clues to her place of origin are found in the 'cartoon a clef' "Ultima Thule," in which a young girl imagines life in various exotic non-Flatbush neighborhoods: "Red Hook, which was filled with drunken sailors, loose women, and stevedores; Flatland, which stretched flatly and unpopulated, into oblivion; and Sea Gate, with its maze of Venetian canals, from which, once you entered, you'd never emerge." In the last panel of this masterpiece, a girl in a green pleated skirt floats freely in outer space: "I just wanted to see what was on the other side of McDonald Avenue."

McDonald Avenue, during my childhood, was the outer limit of homey Flatbush. Every once in a while, when I was feeling particularly adventurous, I'd ride my bicycle across McDonald, but I always hustled back. Two reasons: a) it was different there -- different architecture, different kinds of stores, different people, and b) the streets ran at a 45 degree angle to the norm. Very scary, very 'here be dragons.' 

I had a job on McDonald Avenue when I was in high school: I shelved books at the Kensington Public Library (which was scarcely more than a storefront operation), but the building was on our side -- the Flatbush side -- of the street. I don't think that I ever crossed to the foreign side -- why would a sane person want to do such a thing? So my intuition was that if Roz Chast grasped the mystical end-of-the-earth aura of McDonald Avenue, she had to have grown up somewhere in the vicinity of P. S. 217.              

More evidence:  In the New Yorker for September 4, there's a Roz Chast bildungscartoon called "What I Learned." After nursery school, where she was informed that "if you swallow your gum, your guts get all stuck together, and you die," our young heroine "went to grade school in [her] neighborhood." And there's a full panel of a square featureless brick building labeled "P. S. 217."  The building doesn't resemble the P. S. 217 of my memory except for the concrete schoolyard and the chain-link fences that surround it, but it must be the real thing. The curriculum is ever-so-familiar: Vasco da Gama, "Our Friend, Corn," chain-stitching. Although nothing about the compass and the protractor, for some reason.   

I had read that Roz Chast grew up in Brooklyn, and that her parents still lived in the old neighborhood. Just for fun, I looked up the surname Chast in the white pages. It's an uncommon name;  in fact, there's just one Chast in all of richly-populated Brooklyn. Here's the relevant map. The Chast apartment on Webster Avenue is a block or so from the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island Avenue where P. S. 217 is located; even more startling -- it's no more than a couple of hundred feet from East 9 Street, where I lived from age zero to age 17. Case closed.

Roz Chast's genius cannot be circumscribed.  She's the master of the mock-heroic for which Flatbush is famed; she's to the cartoon what Woody Allen is to movies -- someone who interprets the world through Brooklynish eyes. She's the sly queen of kvetchitude. And she's a graduate of fabled P. S. 217. I'm so proud.   

 

Angels and Fools

"Earth Angel," by Jesse Belvin's Penguins, offered, or seemed at the time to offer, a succinct and accurate distillation of relations between the sexes. The song appeared in 1954, when I was a vulnerable 15-year-old, and was a monster hit, perhaps because of its ideological clarity. "Earth Angel" is of the genre that has lately come to be called "doo-wop"; in the P. S. 217 schoolyard, we just called it "juke-box music." Here's a pithy stanza: "Earth angel, earth angel, will you be mine/ My darling dear, love you all the time./ I'm just a fool, a fool in love with you." The heart of the matter, and the essence of life as we knew it -- the simple-minded, retro-Victorian doctrine that  girls are angels, boys are fools.

Looking back, I have no doubt that such an oppressive formula was painful for girls. It must have been hard for young women who knew themselves to be flesh and blood to pretend to be angelic. But I didn't concern myself with the effect of the song on them -- girls were clearly and obviously different from us. Not that I knew anything at all about female culture; the world in which I lived was rigidly segregated by gender. I didn't have sisters and while the guys talked obsessively and ignorantly about girls, we almost never talked with them. Even in the high school lunchroom, girls sat to one side, boys the other. On the stoop, and In the schoolyard and the drugstore, we talked baseball, flipped cards, played softball and basketball and stickball, and practiced spitting for distance. I didn't have a clue what girls were doing -- probably at home starching their crinolines. It was therefore easy to believe what "literature" told us: girls were or should be beautiful, aloof, distant, polite, ethereal, sugar and spice and everything nice, and certainly not sexual -- in short, angels. Boys, on the other hand, were not just nasty and foul-mouthed, as we knew from first hand experience, but also pathetic, filled with longings that they gratified imperfectly several times a day, fumbling, awkward, big-eared, pimpled, and sloppy. The girls were all Bettys and Veronicas -- desirable but unattainable. Perhaps in better neighborhoods there was an occasional Archy, but at the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island, there were only Jugheads. We were, in brief, exactly what "Earth Angel" had described: anguished adolescent fools.

The notion that girls were unburdened by the flesh took a big hit when I found myself in one of those lower-level high school English classes where the disorder was such that weeks would go by without the teacher attempting a single lesson. Two very young but very tough girls (huge hair, pounds of makeup, stiletto heels, and bras so pointy that they could a bore a hole in the chest of any guy brave enough to risk an embrace) were discussing a "health" class in which chastity had been advocated by one of the maiden-lady teachers. One of the girls whispered: "She should take up a candle and see how it feels." Whoa, daddy! And then, a few days after I arrived at college, on a dark, moonless night, I overheard one "older" woman say to another, "there must be a mile of cock on this campus and I can't get six inches." At the sound of those words, "angels" all over America plunged to earth. 

And a few months afterwards, "fool," too, gave up the ghost. 

William Merritt Chase; Makamah Beach

The American artist most dear to me is the impressionist William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). Chase painted plein air scenes in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and Coney Island and also produced a truly wonderful series of landscapes set in the south fork of eastern Long Island. I knew nothing of these Shinnecock paintings nor of Chase himself until one day in 1987 when I happened upon an exhibition of his work in the National Gallery in Washington. Even though I was much taken with the paintings, I was too frugal to buy the catalog. By virtue of Amazon, I've at last located a copy (D. Scott Atkinson and Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr, "William Merritt Chase, Summers at Shinnecock 1891-1902 [Washington:  National Gallery, 1987]). 

In "At the Seaside" (1892), a group of women and children enjoy a lazy day on an otherwise empty beach. In the distance to the left is a sailboat and to the right, almost at the horizon, a sandy point. The costumes are of the 1890s, but the sea and the surf and the clouds are timeless. It's a busy but very peaceful scene. Similar Chase landcapes depict sea-grasses, scrubby trees, sandy beaches, empty roads. Many of his canvasses are populated by his wife and children. 

Fully as idyllic as Chase's "Summers at Shinnecock" were my own Wordsworthian "Summers at Makamah Beach, 1947-1949." Although Makamah was on the Sound (on the north shore), it was as like as like could be to Shinnecock in the 1890s. My family spent three magical summers there -- the best summers and by far the best times of my otherwise entirely citified, asphalt childhood. We rented a very simple wood-frame beach house. If my memory is correct, the house was mostly deck with a minimal kitchen and a few sleeping rooms. It seemed like a great distance to the nearest neighboring beach house, but, in retrospect, it was probably no more than five hundred or at most a thousand feet. But to a kid from the schoolyard, a thousand feet was more than plenty. I loved the emptiness -- no trolleys, no radios, no people. I remember wandering alone for hours at low tide examining, with the patience of childhood, the crabs, snails, seaweeds and the infinite variety of dead fish. To my vocabulary, I added such novelties as inlet, point, cove, high tide, squall, blowfish, starfish, perch, sea urchin, shiner, sinker, fiddler crab, hermit crab, razorback, softshell, float, outboard and inboard, "sheared a pin," oarlock, dinghy -- words and concepts previously beyond the outer limit of my imagination. There were porpoises almost every day -- once I was all alone on the beach when two of them battled furiously for several minutes right in front of my astonished eyes. No one else saw them, and no one believed me. There was also an abundance of horseshoe crabs-- not crabs at all, as I later discovered, but trilobites left over from the Paleozoic. I think it was the horseshoes that started me reading about paleontology. I remember also old Mr. van Etten, already more than a child when Chase was painting at Shinnecock, who took me out in his rowboat to trawl for bluefish.

Wordsworth wrote about his childhood's "fair seed-time" and that he was "fostered alike by beauty and by fear." While it's easy to exaggerate the amount of fear back in 1950s Brooklyn, it's a fact that there was an almost absolute absence of beauty. Makamah Beach offered not only beauty and variety but also the possibility of different kind of life.         

A Brush with Greatness

I'm not generally given to boasting, but it's a fact: the great Don Newcombe once spoke to me -- me! He asked me to refrain from conversing with him. This noteworthy event occurred in 1949.

During summer vacation, it was the custom for neighborhood kids to arrive at Ebbets Field early in the morning. The games didn't start until 1:30, so we'd take a half a day's supply of salami sandwiches and stand outside the players' entrance at 10:00 or so in the morning, hoping to catch sight of Robinson, or Cox, or Furillo walking up the ramp to the clubhouse.  After the stakeout, we'd watch a couple of hours of batting practice, and then some fielding practice, and then there would be a long pause while the groundskeepers spruced up the field, and then we'd listen to Gladys Gooding at the organ, and at last, anticlimactically, we'd watch the actual game. I sometimes paid the 60 cents for a seat in the bleachers, but just as often I was admitted with one of the free tickets that were distributed by neighborhood fraternal organizations -- the PAL (Police Athletic League) or the Sons of Italy or the Sons of Norway. What a treat -- you could go to a Dodgers' game and at the same time be Norwegian for a day!

One morning, there I was, loitering among a crowd of kids just as Big Don arrived. He was huge. I can't remember exactly what I shouted to him, but it was probably something like "Hey Don. Are you going to pitch today? How's the arm?  Do you think you'll pinch-hit. Huh. Huh?" Newk turned and looked directly at me and said, and I quote, verbatim, "Shut up, kid."  What a thrill!  I had been noticed by the great man himself. It was a transcendent moment -- even more exciting than the time when, sitting in the left field lower deck, I scrambled for a home-run ball off the bat of third baseman Bobby Morgan (a ball that, to my eternal regret, I later sold for five bucks. But hey, five dollars could take you -- at 60 cents a ticket, two 5 cent subway fares, and another 5 cents for "a big delicious glass of Nedick's tasty orange drink,/ It's cool refreshing flavor you'll adore" -- to five or six games, one of which might be a double-header.)

How can I emphasize this sufficiently?:  Don Newcombe spoke directly, personally, to me.

Here's another event of titanic importance: in the last innings of a game, when the guards who policed the bleachers were too bored to pay attention, kids would sneak down into the good seats. At Ebbets, the Dodgers' bullpen was along the right-field foul line, so it was possible to sit just behind the relievers and try to engage them in intimate conversation. One day I was involved in an exciting unidirectional chat with Hal Gregg, then on the downside of his career (he had won 18 games in 1945) when the frustrated reliever impatiently swung himself around and said to me, and once again I quote absolutely verbatim, "What are you, kid, a magpie?" 

As long as I'm in full bragging mode, I should also boast that I once possessed, on a treasured scrap of paper, the penciled autograph of Bob Ramazzotti, a Dodger infielder, who, in 1949, batted .154 with one home run and three rbi's.

Let me also add that it was considered the utmost pinnacle of schoolyard wit to sit in the front seats of the Ebbets Field upper deck and drizzle sticky orange Nedick's upon the spectators beneath.   

"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: 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.