by Zadie Smith
“I live on Tenth and Fourteenth,” protested Cassie, but Polly had moved on, and was now accosting her small audience as they tried to take their leave. And how did you come to hear of the Polly Kendal Puppet Theater? A friend? An advertisement? The unlucky few looked up rather desperately; more fortunate, dexterous women had already managed to wedge their children back into their coats and were halfway down Hudson by now. So which was it: “Word-of-mouth” or “Publicity”? It took a moment to understand that the latter category referred to those little four-by-six cards, poorly illustrated and printed, that were to be seen in practically every café, dive bar, jazz den and restaurant beneath Union Square.
“On the first of the month, we go to the November cycle: The Musicians of Bremen, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Cinderella. Tell your friends!” Across the hall, Donovan lingered, half-hidden by the stage curtain, trying to choose between a number of things to say. He was still preparing the sentence, checking it for what he thought of as “snakes” and “goblins,” when Cassie Kent simply ran past him, into the church, down the aisle—and was gone.
The Kendals were alone. Shoeboxes were numbered, closed and placed in a suitcase in their correct order. The three-sided “stage” was flattened, and care taken to fold the green velvet into a clean square. Irving switched off all the lights and collected a handful of dollars from the jar. Polly sat lightly on the closed suitcase and pressed its brass clips down.
“What happened to your little friend?”
Donovan pulled the nightcap off his own head and held it in both hands.
“But Donny . . . why would you even want to spend your time with a girl like that? Oh, I’m sure she’s nice enough—I don’t want to put you off her if you really like her, but she seemed to me to be so clearly—well, she has so little, oh, I don’t know: fancy. Imagination. Whimsy. Trust me: you don’t want that. Irving has no imagination whatsoever and look how hard that makes just about everything. A sense of imagination is so much more important to me than what color someone happens to be or how much money they have or anything like that—if that’s what you think you’re standing there frowning about. The only thing I care about is what’s going on in here,” she said, and thumped her narrow chest, but Donovan only looked at his shoes.
“Listen to me. Why do you think she doesn’t like you? Because you have a little trouble sometimes when you speak? Because you’re skinny? Don’t you see that if she had even a scrap of vision she’d see what a first-class kid you are? But she’s got no vision to speak of. I bet she’s going home right now to turn on that idiot box and just vegetate.” Now his mother performed a funny mime—eyes crossed, tongue tucked in front of lower teeth—and Donovan found it impossible not to smile.
“All she does is watch TV,” he confided, and let the cap drop to the stone floor where he worried it with his foot a little. “All weekend. She told me one time. Her mom doesn’t care what she does, she really doesn’t care one bit,” he added, employing a little imagination, “and they never read or anything. The whole family thinks reading’s a big waste of time. She’s never heard of Thor or the Sirens or anybody!”
“Well, there you are.”
Polly bent down, picked up Wee Willie Winkie’s nightcap and, with great tenderness, brushed the dust off it and placed it back on her son’s head.
“People find their natural level, Donny. You’ll see when you’re older. It all works out.”
PARENTS’ MORNING EPIPHANY
Welcome to the Narrative Techniques Worksheet!
Feel free to take this worksheet home and review it with your child.
Let’s get going!
Narrative Writers Use Techniques Such As . . .
Dialog
The illustration underneath, on the children’s worksheet, is a blank speech bubble. Nothing in it—just empty space. And yet in this matter, the worksheet is surely correct: these days it’s best to say nothing.
Revealing Actions
Here we have three sets of stick figures, all with big bellies. They are racially ambivalent (although one stick figure in each set has curly hair). Nobody has genitals, but one figure in each pairing has long hair, so come to your own conclusions. In the first set, let’s say that the male—the one with short curly hair—is pushing over the long-haired girl. Stick figures are not by their nature expressive but she looks traumatized. In the second illustration, she has given her attacker a balloon. It’s not clear why. Maybe to apologize for being the victim? They’re both smiling. In the third iteration, they’re hugging. Much has been revealed, but much remains unspoken.
Multiple Points of View
A girl looks through a magnifying glass. Next to her, a boy looks through a magnifying glass. Next to him, a cat looks through a magnifying glass. This apparently exhausts the question of perspective.
1st Person Narrator
A boy looking mightily pleased with himself holds a pencil bigger than his own head. Out of his actual head come three separate speech bubbles: “I” and “ME” and “MY.” Well, exactly.
Inner Thinking
Very curious. It’s the blank speech bubble again, but this time, instead of its own emptiness being described by a nice, smooth line, now the line is crinkled and fluffy, like a cloud. Is what we think somehow more crinkly and fluffy than what we dare to say out loud? Or more dreamlike? Or more empty? The worksheet, intended as it is for fourth graders, avoids these secondary questions.
Description
A painting rests upon an easel. A paintbrush is suspended in air, near the easel, but not in anybody’s hand. The picture itself is a realistic pastoral scene: a little house, with smoke coming from the chimney, a field, a tree, the moon. Is the worksheet implying that description can and should only concern itself with the visible? That the work of description is to reinscribe the real? That the real, as it is conceived by the artist, should be by definition picturesque or pastoral? What kind of a worksheet is this?
Use Transitions
A clock shows the time. It is a featureless clock with only hands, no numbers, but the time looks to be about ten past four. (I do not believe there is a hidden meaning in this.) Around the clock are some helpful suggestions: A little later. Later. After that. The following day. Next!
Turn Over the Worksheet
Okay.
Narrative Writers Aim Toward Goals Such As . . .
Set Up the Problem
A car is speeding toward a cliff edge. The cliff edge is icy, it is midwinter. There is also a random tree branch sticking out halfway down the side of the icy cliff. An exclamation mark is written into the sky itself. You have to hand it to the worksheet: that’s a hell of a setup.
Introduce the Characters
Small stick kid with what looks like Bantu knots and glasses. Tall stick woman with Lana Del Rey haircut. Tiny baby stick figure, crying, with single curl springing from head. Old stick figure with grandmotherly hair tied in a bun, walking with a cane. Arrows point to all of them, as if to say, LOOK AT ALL THESE CHARACTERS. But perhaps there are other ways to do this, beyond the worksheet’s ken.
Show the Character’s Motivation
The Bantu-headed kid, glasses gone, is holding a gift-wrapped present. In his innermost thoughts—represented within a cloud-like bubble—he is dreaming of giving his gift to the girl with the Lana Del Rey haircut. And this, the classic love story, is indeed the motivation for many a narrative writer and yet how can I confess to the worksheet that it has never interested me in the least?
Stir Empathy
Stir empathy! Here is a bowl, on which is written EMPATHY. The bowl appears to be filled with a thick, dark, swirly liquid, like melted chocolate. It is stirred by a spoon with a heart on it. Stir empathy! An aesthetic principle or an ethical one—or both? Hard to say. But on the main point there can be no argument: to stir empathy is the aim and purpose of all stories, everywhere,
always. How can you doubt it? It’s written right there in black and white on the worksheet!
Create the Setting
The easel is back, with the same painting, and the suspended brush. The New York Public School Board turns out to be a very insistent proponent of literary Realism.
Show the Resolution
The car is gone, the man is out of the car, and he’s standing on the edge of the ice-covered cliff, clearly relieved, stick hand to his stick head, just saying PHEW. Don’t ask me how that happened. Plot is not my strong point.
Draw in Your Reader
A recognizable human boy with sneakers and hair and actual legs lies on his belly upon the floor, reading delightedly from a book, lost in it completely. Oh, I remember that feeling!
Clarity of Ideas
A magnifying glass. Just that. No one’s holding it and nothing’s being magnified. It’s like some kind of Zen kōan. It may have gone over my head.
I Made Revisions with My Goals in Mind
It’s a notepad being worked over by a pencil but the absence of a human figure suggests to me that the worksheet knows full well (but daren’t tell the children) that the goal never truly comes before the revision but is created precisely by the revision itself.
The Theme Is Woven Through the Story
It’s the same notepad, but now the pencil is a needle and thread and the word it’s sewing into the pad is: theme. I can imagine, a hundred years from now, this worksheet being found in the flooded wreckage of what was once New York, and a small religious sect forming around its precepts, and this penultimate instruction being the holiest tenet of their faith.
Clearly Move Through Time
A boy is running. Behind him it says SPEED THINGS UP. A turtle passes him, heading in the opposite direction. Behind her it says SLOW THINGS DOWN. Well, that’s the whole trick of the thing, right there.
DOWNTOWN
A great Austrian painter—he lives in a forest in Hungary—came by the apartment one day with his daughters, both red-headed with pigtails, pale-faced, silent. They wore the kind of clothes you can’t buy in any shop, you have to get them delivered direct from the turn of the century. Fucking angels, both of them. Meanwhile my kids raged around the place, dressed as tiny long-distance truckers, hyped-up on sour gummies. They clung to their tablets as if to items necessary for their very survival—colostomy bags, say. But I refused to be ashamed. Like everyone else in America these days, I stand in my truth.
On the other hand, he is a terrific painter. Of all the living painters he is the most livingiest and also the most painterly. About four years ago he found a whole new vernacular to the point that nobody sees much point in painting anymore, and so he has somehow both revivified painting and killed it off simultaneously. Of course, we’re all terribly jealous. His occasional visits to the city mean an awful lot and I was honored this time to get to be the one to host him and his pair of silent angels. I’d invited a few of my downtown crowd to touch the hem of his garment, but when he walked in with his girls we all saw straight away that there would be no garment-touching and no way would he agree to come to Café Loup with us to chew on some tough schnitzel and get blasted till the early hours. He’s the real deal, and therefore, like his daughters, mostly silent. Honestly, it was how I imagine it might be to have Schopenhauer round to tea. An honor and a privilege, sure, but socially pretty hard work. He stayed about an hour and a half. Said maybe two paragraphs of human words, none of which turned out to be metaphysical or existential or even aesthetic. How to get to x or y on the L, at which hotel he was staying, when and where the children might eat. Long silences in between. Finally, it was time to go. At the doorway he said, as if it had just occurred to him: “I don’t understand how you can live here, and be an artist, among all this social noise and all of these people. I myself live in an Hungarian forest.” It was the kind of statement calculated to drive me into a frenzy of self-hatred. I thanked him for his inquiry—and his “an”—and pointed him in the direction of the L. Then I sent everyone home and got in a funk for a few days.
* * *
• • •
The New York Public School Calendar does not recognize funks, personal, existential, artistic or otherwise. School starts on September 4th and that’s that. The only way to get out of it is to take an ordinary belt, tie it round your neck, loop it round a door handle and then sit suddenly upon the floor. Although this method likely won’t get your kid out of having to turn up on that first day, it will at least mean you don’t have to take them. It was September 4th—I had to take them. In the line to get through the school gates—a momentous line, which snakes from Café Loup all the way down Sixth Avenue like a tapeworm of the Devil—a parent started talking to me about his family’s transformative summer break to the jungles of Papua New Guinea. It had taken three planes to get there, they’d gone to bed with monkeys and woken up with sloths and the whole trip had been utterly transformative: transformative to escape the American “situation,” transformative for him personally, and for his wife, and for the children, but especially for him. Transformative. I peered at this dude very closely. I hadn’t seen him since last September 4th but to my painterly eye he didn’t appear especially transformed. Seemed like much the same asshole.
* * *
• • •
On the sad, childless walk home, I heard a very old white lady outside Citarella exclaim loudly into her phone: “But he’s not my friend, he’s my driver!” To which a tall boy in sequinned culottes with a Basquiat ’fro—who happened to be passing—replied: “Lady, you are GOALS.” My concern about both jungles and forests is that you can’t really imagine anything like that happening in them.
* * *
• • •
I was in such a funk I left town for a few days, taking a train down the Eastern Seaboard. I read E. M. Cioran and agreed with him when he said he agreed with Josep Pla who had previously agreed with himself that we are nothing but it’s hard to admit it. In the Potomac, at seven in the morning, I saw four men in a little canoe, all facing forward, with a heroic cast to their faces. You’d have thought they were bringing a body back from a fatal duel. I watched as their craft moved silently through the water and the fog, past the Washington Monument. At the bow, a single pilot light. It was all so beautiful. It was a symbol of something. I considered looking into local forest real estate. But I missed the city.
* * *
• • •
By the time I got back (I’d spent longer away than I’d thought), Café Loup had closed, Dr. Ford was testifying, and the combination of these events was causing mass hysteria below 14th Street. The café had actually closed in the summer, the very same day somebody (the city?) had installed a large yellow megaphone at the crossroads of Greenwich and Sixth, at which megaphone what happens is, when you press the button beside whatever historic Greenwich Village writer’s name is by that particular button, well, what happens is you hear them reading a few lines of their writing, thus affirming the past cultural significance of the Village despite all present evidence to the contrary. You can press Willa Cather you can press Amiri Baraka you can press Frank O’Hara you can press Jimmy Baldwin I could go on. But because of the culturally insensitive timing, what was actually happening as we walked by was a crazy young man with a fashion haircut was running up to the megaphone at intervals and screaming into it: CAFÉ LOUP HAS CLOSED! CAFÉ LOUP HAS CLOSED! Me and my kids sat down on the bright red wrought-iron furniture the city has set up at that traffic circle and watched him go. CAFÉ LOUP HAS CLOSED! Then he’d run down the street and you’d think that was the end of it but a minute later he’d be back, tight white jeans all sweaty, fashion hair whipping around in the breeze, still screaming: CAFÉ LOUP HAS CLOSED! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! CAFÉ LOUP HAS CLOSED! My son asked me if the young man was “sick in the head,” which is our downtown euphemism for batshit crazy, but my daughter who is very, very savvy said, “No way—look
at his clothes!” I thought that was an interesting answer. It meant she was becoming an American. It meant she now refused to believe rich people can be batshit crazy.
* * *
• • •
On Sunday, I went to Black Church to worship Monie Love and Dead Prez (featuring Jay). The minister led us through the catechism:
Monie in the middle
Where she at?
In the middle
Amen to that! Then we moved on to the body of the sermon, which was on our daily struggle:
You don’t like that do ya?
You fucked up the hood?
Nigga, right back to you!
Hell yeah!
You know we tired of starving my nigga!
And lo, I was in awe. To heareth the mode in which Dead Prez doth breaketh it down, economically. Seeingeth the whole game from top to bottom. Maybe there is no such game in an Hungarian forest, but I don’t live in an Hungarian forest, I live right here, and I was listening to the stone cold truth. I was deeply moved. We came together in prayer. We prayed for:
