by Ann Patchett
Certainly even people coming from the most intellectually restricted backgrounds imaginable know that books far more salacious than mine have been published and widely read. The problem isn’t that Lucy and I made the choices we made in our lives because, again, the faintest brush against society would show that plenty of people make worse choices. The problem isn’t even that you read my book, because chances are you’ve played a round of Grand Theft Auto in your day. You’re on Facebook, you’ve watched HBO, watched the news. No matter how pure your hearts are, I seriously doubt that anyone thinks that my book was the very first time you’ve seen any mention of sex, drugs, depression, or abiding friendship. People may not like the idea that these things are going on or that I wrote about them or that you read about them, but none of that is enough to start a protest or make the news. The problem here is that your chosen institution of higher learning has given you this book as an assignment. It’s the fact that if you want to enter this freshman class at Clemson you pretty much have to read it.
The people who oppose the assignment of Truth & Beauty and who oppose my presence here on campus today do not do so for themselves. After all, nobody’s making them read my book. They are opposing on your behalf. They want to protect you from me, even if they were unable to protect you from Grand Theft Auto. Since you’re just starting out as freshmen, let’s take a few minutes to think of what else you’re going to need protecting from. I used all possible restraint in making this list because I could go on for the entire four years you are in college: You don’t want to pay good money to have to read about immoral behavior, so Anna Karenina is out. It’s about adultery, a married woman’s affair with another man, and her eventual suicide. It’s scandalous, but it’s also really long. The Great Gatsby has more adultery, in addition to alcoholism and murder, so that has to go as well. It will be harder to let go of that one because it’s short, and you may have already read it in high school. One Hundred Years of Solitude? You’ve got incest, which is a shame, because it is a spectacular novel. My uncontested pick for the best novel of the twentieth century is Vladamir Nabokov’s Lolita, and if I start talking about Lolita I feel certain the National Guard will come and remove me from this stage. Faulkner is gone. Hemingway is gone. Toni Morrison, John Updike, and Philip Roth, our greatest living American authors, are off-limits to you. There is so much sex and filthy language in their books that I should probably not even say their names.
But maybe those books aren’t the problem because they’re all fiction. Maybe what’s upsetting about my book is that it’s true. So let’s make a pact not to read any nonfiction that could be upsetting. If stories about girls who are disfigured by cancer and humiliated by strangers, and turn to sex and drugs to escape from their enormous pain are too disgusting and pornographic, then I have to tell you the Holocaust is off-limits. The Russian Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, the war in Vietnam, the Crusades, all represent such staggering acts of human depravity and perversion I could see the virtue of never looking at them at all.
But it doesn’t stop there. Almost every field you can think of has a history of controversy: art, economics, philosophy. Will you not read Nietzsche if he says there is no God? In which case science is out because science can also conflict with faith. Math is fine. Calculus, physics, chemistry. Plan to take a lot of those classes.
The implicit assumption in trying to protect you from the likes of me is that you have no filters, no life experience, no judgment, and very little intellect. You are so malleable that reading an assigned book, one that mentions drugs and sex, will make you throw the book to the floor and rush out to engage in all of those activities yourself, the chances of which seem about as likely to me as the chances that reading Anna Karenina will make you throw yourself beneath a train. It also assumes that Tolstoy’s book is not, more importantly, about the inherent beauty of life and that my book is not about the deep value of loyalty.
Since this is your first week of college, it’s a good time for you to think about why you’re here. Unlike your first twelve years in school, your education is no longer compulsory. What that means is that you are choosing to be here. No one, not even your parents, can make you go to college. Your education is an enormous privilege that sets you apart from most of the people of the world, including most of the people in your own country. Just over twenty-five percent of Americans your age will receive a college education. One in four. I want to emphasize this: higher education is a privilege and a choice. It is perhaps the first real choice of your adult lives. Many of you are taking out loans, getting jobs, and shouldering some or even all of the cost of this choice. The rest of you, I trust, are appreciative of the people and institutions in your life who are making this education possible. The number-one purpose of your time at Clemson is to broaden and deepen the scope of your intellectual ability. Everything else—sports, social life, fraternities, sororities, campus politics, everything else—comes behind academics. You are here to learn. The time-honored way that people learn is through apprenticeship. If you wanted to be a glassblower, you’d go and study with a master glassblower; you would follow his movements and try to absorb his knowledge. A university is basically a large consortium of individuals who have expertise in their respective fields so that you have the chance to apprentice yourself to those who have done advanced work in mathematics and literature and economics. You can sample an enormous range of intellectual pursuits and in doing so you can discover who you are and what you’re best at.
Unless, of course, you get into the business of being protected from what might offend you or upset you, of having other people decide what you can and cannot learn. The best answer to this I’ve found is in a convocation address given by the poet Adrienne Rich. She titles it “Claiming an Education,” and in it she wrote:
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts. . . . Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions—predigested books and ideas . . . taking “gut” courses instead of ones you know will challenge you, bluffing at school and life instead of doing solid work. . . . This means seeking out criticism, recognizing that the most affirming thing anyone can do for you is demand that you push yourself further, show you the range of what you can do.
You have made the decision to go to college. You are old enough to drive a car, to vote, to pay taxes, and to go to war. You are not children, even if there are days it still feels that is the case. The best way to make sure that your parents and teachers treat you as adults is to act like adults. Take responsibility for your lives and your minds and ask that others respect your integrity. Be very proud that you have enrolled in an institution that considers you to be adults, that respects and defends your right to learn, and does not capitulate to forces that say you’re not up to the task of making a decision for yourselves.
You are about to open your minds. A college education is about expansion. It’s about seeing many different viewpoints, hearing many different voices. You will find that the more you learn, the more complicated things get, because you will have the intelligence to recognize many aspects of a single idea. You will learn to use your mind in the way an athlete uses her body. You will stretch and strengthen and grow. And this is precisely why so many people are afraid of higher education; it’s simply easier for them to see the world in terms of right and wrong. They’ve got one clear answer for everything and they’re sticking to it. But you have the chance to fearlessly move beyond that now if you are willing to explore what is available to you.
I have always been a fiction writer, but over the years I’ve made a lot of my living as a journalist, and one of the first things a journalist has to understand is the difference between a primary and a secondary source. If you can embrace this concept, much of what you do in college will be easier for you. A primary source is the thing itself
and a secondary source is an interpretation of or a report about that thing. Say you’re writing a paper on The Great Gatsby. The novel itself would be your primary source. Articles and books written about that novel would be secondary sources. CliffsNotes, heaven forbid you ever touch them, would be a secondary source. Say you wanted to write a paper on South Carolina’s governor. Your best primary source is to get an interview with the governor himself; other primary sources would be people who actually know him: his assistant, his chief of staff, his wife. When you get your information from newspaper articles, then you’re using secondary sources. Any teacher, and any journalist, will tell you that secondary sources are extremely important. You can look to other people’s opinions to help you shape your thesis and to help you see other aspects of an idea you might not have considered. But whenever possible, you need to go to the primary source to make your decisions. Regardless of whether or not you’re a student, it is never enough to rely on other people’s ideas. You have to look at the thing itself and make up your own mind. That’s what it means to study and to learn. Some secondary sources proclaim their points of view so loudly and with such passion you might be tempted just to take their word for it. You might be tempted not to do the work of checking to see for yourself. But there can be a fine line between obedience and laziness, and if you go through life dutifully taking other people’s word about what’s right, you are putting yourself in the position to be led down some very dark roads.
After the opportunity to learn, the best thing about going to college is all the friends you’re going to make. You may be feeling a little lonely at the moment, but that’s about to change. There are people in this room today you’ve never met who will become some of the most important people in your lives, and long after you’ve forgotten the papers you wrote or the grades that you made, you’ll still have your friends. It was my friends I turned to when I needed to sort through the things I wanted to say to you today. I was especially sorry that I couldn’t give Lucy a call. In light of everything that’s happened, I found myself losing sight of the fact that I was invited here to talk about the book I wrote about my best friend—dear, sweet, scandalous Lucy. She would have thought all of this was hilarious. She did not take her critics to heart. She had cut her teeth on criticism so virulent and vile that it would make what I have come up against seem like a walk in the park.
The ability to have a friend, and be a friend, is not unlike the ability to learn. Both are rooted in being accepting and open-minded with a talent for hard work. If you are willing to stretch yourself, to risk yourself, if you are willing to love and honor and cherish the people who are important to you until one of you dies, then there will be great heartaches and even greater rewards.
I am glad that I was able to give this controversy so much thought, and I’m glad that I’ve come to the conclusion that the objection was to the assignment of my book and not the actions of my friend. If you do judge Lucy, then I suggest you go to bed tonight and pray that what happened to her will never happen to you or anyone you love. She was judged plenty in her life. She was judged every single time she walked out the door. I think that would be judgment enough.
In the opening pages of that scandalous classic The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, says, “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.’ ”
I was twelve years old the first time I read that book. I remember because I took it with me to Girl Scout camp. It was a grown-up novel about a young man who longed to fit in with everybody else. I’m sure there were parts of it I didn’t understand, but I got most of it. Certainly I understood what he was talking about in that quote. I’ve read the book probably a dozen times since then, and every time it’s meant more to me. I’ve come back often to the advice Nick Carraway got from his father, and it’s helped me find compassion when I didn’t think I had any. I will tell you I am leaning on it heavily today, because I have felt like criticizing, and then I stop and remind myself that maybe other people haven’t had the advantages that I’ve had. I had the chance to learn from Lucy, from her failures and her successes, from her enormous capacity to love and be loved in return. I’m glad that no one took my book away from you, because now you’ve had the chance to learn from her too. Thank you for your time and attention, and no matter what anyone tells you, keep reading.
(South Carolina Review, Spring 2007)
Do Not Disturb
AS A CHILD I was slight and had a remarkable ability to hold still. These two features, coupled with a good imagination, meant that I was pretty much unbeatable at hide-and-seek. I could just stick a pillow in the closet, climb into the bed in its place, fold the bedspread neatly over my back, and stay there in a pillow shape for hours while other children called my name. All these years later it is appalling how much of my fantasy life has to do with hiding. I’m sure the witness protection program would be a terrible thing, and yet, when life threatens to overwhelm me, I find myself wondering if there isn’t some mobster I could rat out in exchange for a false identity. The same goes for prison: dreadful, horrifying, surely, but the phone would never ring, and couldn’t you get an awful lot of reading done? None of this is to say that I do not love my life; I do. But all those splendid guests who come for dinner, and then come back to stay for long visits (because they love you, because you love them) had turned my life into an overpopulated Russian novel. Sometimes it is the wonderful life, the life of abundant friends and extended family and true love, that makes you want to run screaming for the hills.
This is the point at which I become very clearly of two minds. One mind rejoices, How rich I am to have the pleasure of a full house! While the other laments: If I am ever going to get anything accomplished, I’d better start packing.
And so, feeling the end of my wits approaching, I am driven out of my home by the company, the laundry, the mail and the e-mail, and by my own stupid and compulsive need to keep baking the apple pie out of The Pie and Pastry Bible, even though it is labor-intensive beyond belief and only guarantees that everyone who drops by will drop by again. I make a couple of phone calls, drag the suitcases out of the basement, and offer some brief words of explanation to my husband, who knows me well enough to know that when it’s time for me to go, it’s better just to stand aside.
Then I fly to Los Angeles and check into the Hotel Bel-Air.
In many ways this is not the best choice: I know a lot of people in the Los Angeles area, many of whom are related to me, and none of them will be pleased to learn that I was hiding in their general vicinity without coming to visit. I simply decide not to tell them while temporarily deluding myself into believing that they’ll never read this. For a fraction of what I’m spending on my stylish seclusion I could just as easily have booked into a Best Western in Omaha or Toledo, cities where I know not one single soul whose feelings I could hurt. Seeing as how my goal is to soak up some quiet and get a massive amount of work done, what difference would it have made?
A Best Western? The Hotel Bel-Air? I’m no fool. Life affords us very few opportunities to run away, and so if I’m going to do it I might as well do it up right. Besides, I love L.A., and even though I didn’t grow up here, it is the city of my birth. I love the palm trees and the bougainvillea and the bright blue light of the late afternoons. I find the ways that it is exotic both comforting and familiar. Besides, I’ve been rereading all of Joan Didion’s books lately and she always makes me want to go west. Checking into the Bel-Air for a while seems like exactly what she would have done in the face of too many houseguests.
Because I have no plans to go anywhere, I do not rent a car. I have no desire to sightsee or shop. For one brief moment I think it would be nice to go to the Getty again, and then I put it out of my mind. I am the guest e
ditor for this year’s Best American Short Stories, and so I have arrived with a suitcase full of fiction needing to be read and a laptop computer containing a half-written novel that should be a fully completed novel by now. My idea of a vacation is getting my work done with privacy and quiet, not driving around. Whatever diversions I require will be provided by the sweet gum trees on the patio outside my room.
Californians are never comfortable with the idea of not having transportation. When the desk clerk checks me in, he tells me all the places the hotel car will gladly take me for free, over to Wilshire or down Rodeo Drive, where movie stars drink lattes with shivering Chihuahuas on their knees. I shake my head. “I don’t want to go out,” I tell him. “I’ve come to work.”
“Work isn’t a word we use at the Hotel Bel-Air,” he tells me.
I make a mental note not to mention it again.
I haven’t come to the Bel-Air because I’d stayed here before, but because my father had once brought my sister and me here for lunch when we were girls. I remembered how the grounds were like an overgrown jungle where steep ravines fell into streams and vines twisted up over every available surface. I remembered the swans, enormous floating ottomans with slender white necks that we watched from our table as we ate. It is where Marilyn Monroe used to come, and later Nancy Reagan, and in between them, many, many others who wanted to be left alone.
