Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye Read online

  “What are you studying?”

  “Epistemology.” See? Out it comes.

  “Do what?”

  “Epistemology.” Compulsion strikes again.

  “What in the world is that?”

  Would you believe a third time? The police would, they’re used to this sort of thing.

  “Epistemology is the study of knowledge, how we know what we know.”

  “Is that what your mama and daddy are sending you to college for?”

  The “sending” rings like a cash register. Nobody is sending you to college; you won a scholarship, but not a soul at that table remembers it because Bea, with her good ole girl whiskey voice and her warm, down-home manner has planted the idea that you’re a lazy dilettante.

  It’s pointless to try to defend yourself because the defense involves a boast. Utter one word about scholarships and you will receive the ultimate Bea sting.

  “You think you’re better than everybody else just because you went to college.”

  There you have her—Bea, the woman behind the other coffee cup who convinces your mother that she scrubbed floors to send you to college, when in actual fact your mother never even scrubbed her own floors.

  Bea’s magic spell is everywhere. She played a role in the creation of that “effete corps of impudent snobs” who got Spiro Agnew’s goat. Many of America’s professional esthetes are motivated less by a devotion to the arts than by a murderous determination to get back at Bea, the poor-but-bright kid’s anti-Muse. It tends to be a futile battle because she usually wins in the end. Bea-hemians read a lot of books, but just to be absolutely sure they never open one that Bea might have heard of, they skip Madame Bovary and read A Sentimental Education, skip Jane Eyre and read The Professor, skip David Copperfield and read Martin Chuzzlewit, until eventually they end up almost as ignorant as Bea.

  Intellectuals with humble origins who go all-out to change their regional accents often have a Bea in their bonnets. The most Bea-set individual I’ve ever known was a woman I met at the University of Mississippi thirty years ago. Born in Appalachia, she first sought escape from Bea-attitudes by painting over her mountain twang with the chewy lingua malaria of the aristocratic South Carolina low country. Just when she was beginning to sound like Gullah Jack, the civil rights movement came along and made being a Southerner unfashionable. She responded by rolling back both of her accents and adopting enlightened Boston Kennedy pronunciations. Meanwhile, like so many of our Bea-stung intellectuals, she did not want to sound too American, so she stirred in some BBC and imitated Churchill’s lisp. When she combined all of this with her avant-garde commitment to obscenity, “cocksucker” took on new meaning.

  Bea is one cause of elitism in the media, for the simple reason that media people usually major in subjects that she can get a handle on. She’s incapable of twitting physicists and mathematicians, but literature, history, political science, and journalism are general enough to give her a toe in the door. The supercilious sneers emanating from America’s television screens and editorial pages are frequently triggered by the successful poor-but-bright kid’s remembrance of things pissed.

  If the masses object to media elitism they could end it very quickly by abandoning their contradictory American game of worshipping education while simultaneously hating the educated, but they show no signs of doing so. The plaster ducks are gone now, replaced by oil paintings of deer on black velvet, but life in the poor-but-bright kid class still sucks.

  3

  GOOD KING HEROD

  One night after a lecture, a woman asked Ambrose Bierce for some advice on rearing children. He replied, “Study Herod, madam, study Herod.”

  My aversion to children took root the day I started kindergarten in 1941, but it didn’t flower until a few weeks later when something else happened.

  Shortly before Thanksgiving, Granny’s Aunt Cora Whittaker died at the age of ninety-four. It was fitting that she went when she did because she considered Thanksgiving a Yankee holiday and had always observed it with a sickroom menu of boiled eggs and junket.

  The day before her death she summoned me to her bedside and reached painfully under her pillow with purplish arthritic fingers.

  “I want you to have this,” she said in a labored whisper.

  It was a miniature Egyptian mummy case. Inside was a tiny enameled pharaoh holding crossed canes on his chest.

  “It’s a pendant,” she explained. “You can wear it on a chain when you grow up. Mr. Whittaker gave it to me. He bought it at the World’s Fair the year that woman named Little Egypt did the belly dance.”

  Aunt Cora’s was the first death I ever experienced and I felt it deeply. She and I had taken warmly to each other during our brief time together on earth. She had entertained me with stories about the Civil War, which she called “the War of Northern Aggression,” describing in vivid detail her memories of watching the battle of Bull Run from atop a barn on her father’s farm.

  For the next several weeks, I watched a war of my own making unfold in my mind. I was haunted by an irrational fear that one of my kindergarten classmates would steal my mummy—irrational indeed, because I never took it to school. At Herb’s suggestion, I had given it to him for safekeeping and he had put it in his strongbox.

  Still, the fantasy surged on, battering me with red cyclones of interior rage. Soon it was not just one thief but all of my classmates in a conspiracy to hide the mummy so I would never find it. I imagined grinning child faces, grubby child fists held out tauntingly, piping child voices saying “Pick one.” I committed mental mass murder-choking, beating, stabbing children until I got my mummy back.

  This reasonless fury started me on my lifelong habit of grinding my teeth in my sleep.

  “What’s that?” said Granny from her side of the convertible sofa we shared. “I swear, there’s a mouse in the wall.”

  When she realized it was me, it kicked off a long, rambling seminar that was neither dental nor psychiatric but entirely genealogical in the best Southern manner, participated in by all of our relatives, most of our neighbors, and several Daughters from Granny’s chapter.

  Does teeth-grinding run in our family? No. What about Augustus Fairbanks who smiled with his gums? No, Augustus just had stubby teeth. He got them from his mother. She was a Wheeler—all the Wheelers have stubby teeth. Wait! You remember Olive Upton whose ears closed up? They say it had something to do with her jaw bone. Yes, but Olive was adopted so there’s no blood there. Then why is the child grinding her teeth?

  To Granny, if it wasn’t a family trait, I wasn’t really doing it.

  “It’s all in your mind,” she said, with more truth than she knew.

  “No, it isn’t. I do it because I’m mad at them,” I blurted.

  Mama turned around from the front seat of the car.

  “Who?”

  I hadn’t planned to tell them about my private war, but it was too late now. I hesitated, gazing out the car window at the red mud of Montgomery County. It was Sunday; in keeping with the de rigueur custom of pre-World War II Washington, we were taking a pleasure drive through the Maryland countryside.

  “The kids at school,” I said at last. “I’m afraid they’ll steal Aunt Cora’s mummy.”

  Herb looked at me in the rearview mirror.

  “That’s in my strongbox.”

  “I know, but suppose it wasn’t?” My voice began to tremble. “Suppose I took it to school?”

  “Suppose one thing, suppose another, suppose a monkey was your brother?” Granny singsonged.

  “But if—”

  “‘If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs,’ da-dum-da-dum … . How does the rest of that go?”

  The chapbook hour came to an abrupt end. Suddenly there was a heavy thud from the rear of the car, followed by a dragging sound. I looked out the back window and saw a long piece of rusty pipe lying in the middle of the road.

  “The bloody drive shaft fell off!” Herb yelled.
/>   He coasted over to the muddy shoulder and went to retrieve our transmission system. A few minutes later a farmer came along in a truck and promised to send somebody back to tow us. We settled in to wait.

  “Might as well listen to the radio,” said Mama, reaching for the knob.

  “ … bombed Pearl Harbor shortly after seven A.M. Hawaiian time … .”

  See? I told you there was a war going on. Granny inadvertently kept things perking along with her Gay Nineties songs. When she wasn’t singing about fallen women, she was singing about children in extremis or worse. My favorite was “The Snowy Night.” When I sang it on Sing Me a Song Day in first grade the teacher sent a note home.

  Just then the church door opened,

  The wedding guests turned ’round.

  And seeing the intruder,

  They dared not make a sound.

  “Stop!” the ragged woman cried,

  “My story must be told!

  The bridegroom is the father

  Of this dead child that I hold!”

  The situation heated up when I read Gone With the Wind at the age of eight. Granny laid low for once, obviously hoping that it would inspire me to stop reading altogether and become the Southern belle she wanted me to be. She refrained from saying “Get your nose out of that book!” and waited for me to identify with Scarlett.

  I identified with the Tarleton twins—both of them. It turned into an obsession. I read the scenes in which they appeared over and over until I could recite them by heart. I spun long plotless fantasies of them dressed in gold-braided gray uniforms and sitting together on the steps of Tara—without Scarlett. I ached to see what they “really” looked like. I had seen the movie at the age of four but remembered nothing of it except the burning of Atlanta and the horse dying in the traces. In effect, I had “missed” the movie, as we said in pre-VCR days, and there were as yet no plans to re-issue it. I lived with a dull sense of miserable certainty that I would never see it, never see them.

  Literal-minded Granny assumed that my Tarleton mania was a desire for siblings.

  “Do you want twin brothers?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you want twin sisters?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you want one brother?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you want one sister?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You’re so selfish.”

  She was so right. I wanted no interference with my only child’s balance of power.

  Her next interpretation was exquisitely in character. She decided that I was becoming precocious in the correct Southern way and wanted Stuart and Brent Tarleton for my beaux.

  “I knew a girl who had two brothers in love with her. They shot each other.” She sighed fondly.

  Next to genealogy, Granny’s favorite subject was gynecology, so one way or another she was always talking about blood. When it finally dawned on her that I wanted to be the Tarleton twins—both of them—she banished the psychological aspects of the case with a wave of her wand and pulled a gynecological rabbit out of the hat.

  “You know,” she said pensively, “your mother had two waters when you were born. The first one broke very early. We thought you were coming then, but you didn’t. Then, about three hours later, the second one broke and you were born.”

  She gazed off into space, her voice taking on the oh-the-aching-wonder-of-it-all note that always accompanied her old wives’ tales.

  “They say a baby can start out to be twins, but if one baby is strong and the other is weak, something terrible happens.”

  “What?” I asked.

  The upshot of her theory was that I had committed murder in utero. A Darwinist at heart despite her good works, she believed that I, the stronger of the two fetuses, had overpowered my weaker wombmate, consumed all the available nourishment, and finally devoured my wombmate in my struggle for existence.

  “That’s why some people have a fingernail or a tiny sliver of bone embedded in a mole,” she concluded. “That’s all that’s left of the poor little baby they ate.”

  Thereafter, I examined my moles with maniacal scrutiny, and I am still an inveterate picker of scabs. As the yuppie said when he skipped the sex scenes in the steamy novel about Wall Street entrepreneurs: “I want to get to the good parts.”

  America is not a democracy, it’s an absolute monarchy ruled by King Kid. In a nation of immigrants, the child is automatically more of an American than his parents. Except in families that go back so far it no longer matters, Americans regard children as what Mr. Hudson in “Upstairs, Downstairs” called “betters.”

  Aping their betters, American adults do their best to turn themselves into children. Puerility exercises droit du seigneur everywhere. Television weather reporters affect guess-what tones and breathless gasps while pointing at cartoons of sad-faced clouds. Naughty allusions to “the F word” have inspired infantile discussions of taxes (the T word), liberals (the L word), and race (the R word). On Halloween, some hospitals station costumed technicians in emergency rooms to X-ray candy to make sure nobody murders the little wartlings with tricky treats.

  “Precious Cargo Aboard” signs decorate car windows and LOV KIDS vanity plates bring up the rear. Like Nero, who couldn’t sing but sang anyway, kiddie artists get their smeary creations framed and hung on the walls of public buildings and medical clinics, and more and more novels are being written in the present tense because “he fucks her hard … she moans and writhes” is the way children would say it if they did it. We tolerate inarticulateness because it’s the adult’s way of hanging on to goo-goo; the only time we say what we mean is in commercials that imitate playground contentiousness. The coffee couple yah-yahs their way through “it’s rich … it’s mild … it’s rich … it’s mild,” while the budget-motel couple chimes in with “price … style … price … style.”

  European men wax sentimental over older women but the American man dwells lugubriously on kids in telethons that go on for twenty hours; we get tributes to kids, songs about kids, stories about kids, and of course, kids—in person! Liberals take up mess-making politics and conservatives trade McGuffey’s Readers like baseball cards. Hostage relatives like Mrs. Barbara Timm, mother of Iranian embassy Marine Kevin Hermening, practice do-it-yourself diplomacy in defiance of government travel bans out of an unshakable belief in the power of personal appeal—the power of the cinematic cute kid whose “Please, mister” melts hearts of Lewis Stone.

  A few years ago, Meg Greenfield wrote a column about the “Lesson Syndrome”—the lesson of Vietnam, the lesson of Watergate, and so forth. Since then the blackboarding of America has grown even more intense. Whenever the president or some other public official is au courant, we say “he’s done his homework.” Moderators ask guest pundits, “What grade would you give the President?” and the pundits bestow approval with, “He deserves high marks.”

  Picketers and protesters throw themselves down like spoiled children holding their breath, refusing to move and going limp so that police must carry them to the vans. Single-issue politics is coming more and more to resemble the one-track mindedness of children, and their intensely partisan lapel buttons bear scurrilous messages about the opposition that are not far removed from recess battle cries of “Johnny eats worms!”

  Antiwar protesters of the sixties chanted “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” as if adult deaths didn’t matter. The same contempt for adults cropped up in the Senate hearings on toxic waste some years ago when a New Jersey father broke down and sobbed, “I am thirty-three years old. I don’t care what happens to me in the future. But I have two children. Are they going to live?” Only thirty-three, and he doesn’t care what happens to himself? Even Edward Kennedy looked shocked.

  Our long love affair with the Shirley Temple movie in which the moppet solves all the adult problems and resolves the plot has given us the spectacle of the snotnose as expert witness. The Senate Subcommit
tee on Child and Human Development observed Save the Children Day by listening to wartlings from all over the country who “came armed with foreign policy strategy and counsel for presidential candidates,” said the AP, adding: “Dumped on the table were two mail bags containing 16,000 letters from children.”

  They’ve moved in on the Supreme Court, too. The July 29, 1981 issue of Time noted: “A year and a half ago, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart received a letter from a high school student in St. Cloud, Minn. The Justice had done well, wrote the young woman, but why had he stayed on the job so long?” Stewart, who was then only sixty-six, told the press: “That sort of started me thinking.” Eighteen months later, Stewart resigned. If this story is true, it illustrates the audacity of adolescents who dare offer a Supreme Court Justice unsolicited advice on matters they know nothing about. If it’s not true, it illustrates something even worse: the American adult’s need and eagerness to pretend to be guided by children.

  Our cult of the child is a Protestant cult. Catholics urge children into theological adulthood at age seven, when spiritual responsibility begins with the first confession, but Protestants have no comparable rite of passage. Catholics also have the Virgin Mary and numerous female saints to serve as symbols of perfect purity, but Protestants bumped women from the celestial line-up and dredged up the child to fill the void.

  Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer (Pat Robertson smiles and laughs so much while he talks that it’s sometimes hard to understand what he’s saying), its anti-intellectualism (just close your eyes and let it wash over you), its puerile hymns (“Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam”), and its faith healing (Jesus will kiss it and make it well) are made to order for King Kid America. In no other country could the invitation to “Come as a child” ring so sweetly in the national ear.