Meanwhile, the administrator who’d been on her lunch break returned. I introduced myself and she offered me a brief contract that promised a modest fee. After I signed it the administrator, glancing at her wristwatch, said I should come to her office in a half hour and she’d take me over to the hall where the meeting was scheduled with the students, and then she vanished into her office.
I leafed through brochures for a few more minutes, now already noticeably followed by the darting glances of the young staff member at the “front desk”; I felt like an intruder who’d snuck into the Pentagon without a pass. My attention was drawn to two books on the shelves, part of a series called Rescue the Story. The series offered a recipe for saving great literary masterpieces from oblivion (!): the works were given to the finest illustrators to illustrate and then to accomplished contemporary writers to re-tell. The credits at the end of these impressive picture books—“Special thanks to Will Shakespeare” or “Special thanks to Nick Gogol”—meant that it was only a matter of time until there’d be no credits at all. The Rescue the Story project did not also necessarily include a “Rescue the Author” clause.
The school is housed on the premises of a former bomb factory, with a large rectangular courtyard in the middle. That is why the promotional brochure said that the objective of the school was to “produce storytellers instead of bombs”; that the goal was “to shape a new world-wise generation of storytellers by exposing our students to a plurality of references and insights.” There was also mention of “cross-fertilization,” which was intended, presumably, to mean the same thing. All in all, the brochure promised that Holden was a school that “Holden Caulfield would never have been expelled from.” True, the nameless author of the promotional brochure seems to have forgotten that if Holden Caulfield had never been expelled from school, there never would have been a Holden Caulfield.
The “bombastic” rhetoric of cultural management reminded me of Prof. Banerjee or Dr. Chaterjee, international clairvoyants, experts in the occult sciences, who regularly stuffed their leaflets into the mailboxes of the building where I live, promising tenants protection from spells, claiming their work to be speedy and effective, with one hundred percent satisfaction guaranteed. And these “results,” they promised, would be forthcoming within two days at most.
I strolled around the courtyard and realized I’d never have guessed its initial purpose. A munitions factory? In my head rang the cheap Zen advice I’d picked up from the brochure. Holden, in the words of the unbridled brochure-writer, rose up to become “Holden Mountain,” and it was expected of the students that, in the hands of the experienced “masters” (their teachers, instructors, and tutors), they’d choose their individual style and path along which they’d climb said “mountain.”
I went back to the office. The administrator was waiting for me there and brought me to the hall where I was to meet the “mountaineers,” who had come here to learn the mastery of writing, from the “messages on medications to the wording on a bag of potato chips.” As if wishing me luck, a quote from Raymond Carver winked at me from the brochure: “That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
9.
When she was smaller she loved the use of peculiar words . . .
“For lunch we’re having pitiful gnocchi and glum lettuce, just so you know . . .” I’d say.
“Why’d you say the gnocchi are pitiful?”
“Because they look pitiful. Pale. Quaking here before us on the plate.”
She giggles, pleased. The “pitiful gnocchi” entrance her.
“Should we sprinkle parmesan on them?” she asks.
“Every Lady Gnoccho longs for her champion, Sir Parmesan!” I quip. “Gnoccho and Parmesan are sweethearts.”
She laughs, this sort of banter tickles her.
“So why is the lettuce glum?”
“Because it’s wilted, lost its verve. It’s dejected, sad . . .”
“I, too, feel glum just like that,” she says.
“When?”
“When we have Croatian class.”
“Is it really that boring?”
“Oh, Auntie. It is sooooo boring! You, too, would wilt with me in Croatian class.”
Drama queen.
“Really?”
“Auntie, you have no idea!” she sighs.
I once bought a cube that was a tool for storytelling with a symbol engraved on each face; it was called the Rory’s Story Cube. (I have a deep-seated aversion to manufacturers who use literary tropes and figures, and I especially despise assonance!) Along the way I discovered that the toy industry offers a whole array of storytelling toys. Instead, I suggested we make our own cards from cardboard on which we’d draw the elements necessary for assembling a story: the characters, houses, towns, roads, rivers, bridges, vehicles, animals, adults, children, landscapes, witches, fairies, wizards, magic wands, and so forth. True, it took us forever to draw the cards, and the drawing amused us far more than the telling of the stories . . .
“We’re not so good at spinning stories,” say I.
“They turned out a teentsy bit boring . . .”
“And we spent so much time on the cards!”
“Then why did we make them?”
“So we’d have options.”
“Options?”
“An option means a choice, a possibility . . . The little girl we invented . . .”
“Karamela!”
“When our Karamela decides to go on a trip she might choose to travel by: a) airplane; b) boat; c) car; d) bicycle; e) hot-air balloon . . .” I notice it’s the listing of things by a, b, c, d, and e that she likes much more than the options themselves . . .
“Five options! And still she didn’t use any . . .”
“That’s because we rushed our story a little. Next time around we’ll give it more time . . . But if you only knew how stories come to be written!”
“Stories come from your head. You thinvent them up,” she says.
My little girl fused the verbs invent and think up and coined thinvent up!
“We know where they come to be written, but still we don’t know how . . .” I say and catch straight away that I’m betrayed by my slightly instructive tone.
And she, ever cagey, knows I’m luring her into something, though she can’t tell what; she pulls quickly back, shrugs, picks up a cookie with her little fingers slender as mouse paws, holds it in both hands and nibbles, mouse-like, at it. She chews with the loudest crunch she can muster. She’s acting dumb. She goofs off when she sniffs danger.
“So which fairy tales are your favorites?” I ask and can tell immediately that my question is all wrong. It smells of school . . .
“Tom and Jerry,” she answers, all innocence, and nibbles her cookie.
“Tom and Jerry is no fairy tale,” say I.
“It is for me!”
“Well, my favorite part of a fairy tale are the commands!” I say slyly.
And, bingo, the cookie-crunching stops . . .
“Commands?”
“Do you know what a command is?”
“When a person says somebody has to do something . . .”
“In fairy tales there are heroes who possess powers. When they say certain words, whatever they say has to happen . . .”
“You mean like abracadabra? Words like that?”
“Right! Abracadabra is a magic word. But there are more . . .”
“Like?”
“If a hero from a fairy tale does something nice for a person or a creature, if, for instance, he saves the life of a fish, then the fish rewards him. In a Russian fairy tale, a boy named Emelya saves the life of a pike and the pike tells him it will grant his every wish. All Emelya has to do is say ‘At the pike’s command . . .’ and then say what it is he desires.”
“What’s a pike?” she interrupts me.
“A kind of fish that lives in rivers.”
“Hm . . .” she says.
�
�Or, in another fairy tale, the hero says ‘Forest, bow down!’ and down bows the forest so the hero can pass through without hindrance. Then he says ‘Forest, arise!’ and up rises the forest . . .”
“Cool,” she says. By the flash in her eye I can see she likes the bit about the forest.
“Heroes in fairy tales can do all sorts of things, you know. Like slip through a keyhole . . . And watermelons speak in fairy tales!”
“So where does a watermelon speak?”
“In a Romani tale.”
“The watermelon says, like, real words?”
“Not only does the watermelon say real words, but when Naza Shevkiya speaks, red carnations tumble out of her mouth!”
“Who is Naza Shevkiya?” she says, and I can already see she’s relishing saying the strange name.
“She’s a girl who can’t be touched by evil of any kind because she’s good, beautiful, and silver-tongued.”
“Cool,” she says. This word is currently in fashion.
“What’s silver-tongued?” she asks.
“It means that when Naza speaks, her words flow out like a burbling stream . . . She doesn’t hack at words like a saw . . .”
She laughs. She likes the bit about the saw.
“Do you know the Grimm fairy tale ‘The Magic Table’?”
“I forget . . .”
“A boy’s apprenticed to a carpenter and his master gives him an enchanted table as a gift. All the boy has to do is command it, ‘Table, set thyself!’ and the table is at once splendidly appointed . . .”
“What does ‘splendidly appointed’ mean?”
“It means that ‘the table was spread in the blink of an eye with a fine damask cloth, and on it a plate, and by the plate a knife and a fork, and a serving dish filled to the brim with stewed and roasted meats, and thereupon gleamed a generous flask of ruby-red wine to touch the heart of any banqueter . . .’”
“Those words are all a little strange. Nobody talks like that.”
“Well, that’s exactly why they’re so cool, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you remember in ‘Cinderella’ how she prepares for the ball? How she was able to come up with such a stunning gown?”
“Nope,” she says.
“Thanks to a command. Before the ball she goes to her mother’s grave, stands under a hazel tree, and commands: ‘Shiver, oh tree, your slender boughs, / Down upon me cast silver and gold!’”
She likes a bit about gowns dropping from the branches, she tries to memorize the command but she’s too groggy. Her eyelids droop, she struggles to keep them open.
“And those commands . . . Do they work for stories, too?” she asks.
“For stories?”
“Say I commanded, ‘Story, set thyself!’ Would the story . . .”
I stop her. I see she’s so sleepy she can hardly say a word.
“You’re tired, pumpkin, time for bed.”
I help her undress, pull on her nightgown, tuck her into bed, and lie, just for a moment, next to her. Her breath is sweet, her breathing deeper and deeper.
“Auntie, we’re just little blue dots in the universe,” she mumbles.
“Who said that?”
“Brainy Smurf.”
“Who?”
“The little one, blue, with the glasses . . .”
Her little hand nests a few more seconds in mine, and then, like a tiny mouse, it goes all soft . . .
10.
Some thirty students were sitting in the hall. I couldn’t say for certain how old they were, but they looked as if they might be between the ages of eighteen and thirty. The administrator who brought me there introduced me with a few sentences she’d copied from Wikipedia. Some of them eyed me with curiosity; some, like a young man in the first row, built like a rugby player, sat with his shoulders hunched and his chin jutting, staring vacantly ahead; most of them were playing video games and glanced over in my direction from time to time. The organizers had given me nothing to go on and I started things off on an awkward note, asking them when they’d heard I’d be coming to speak. They were startled; maybe three weeks ago, they said, but they weren’t sure.
“I know none of you have read my books, but did anyone at least run a search on my name?”
Silence. I assumed none of the speakers before me had been so blunt.
“How can you expect that one day somebody will show even a modicum of curiosity about you if you show no curiosity about others?” Silence.
A man who was employed now at the school as a “cultural animator” or some such thing spoke up, and sounded as if he’d been a student of comparative literature.
“You know,” he said, “the students here aren’t studying just literature.”
“Ah, what else then?” I asked.
“Soccer, for instance . . .”
“Soccer as a form of foot-based storytelling?”
“Yes, literally . . .”
“Ah ha! Then I trust you know all about the great writers who were soccer fans and played soccer themselves,” I said.
Not a peep. Not even from the comp lit guy.
“Albert Camus, as you are all, no doubt, aware. And Vladimir Nabokov, who played soccer for a Russian émigré club in Berlin. Peter Handke, author of The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. Peter Esterhazy, a Hungarian writer whose novel Not Art is about his mother, a soccer enthusiast . . .”
The men in the audience snickered; the snickers were for the comp lit guy.
“Do you know who wrote the most engaging literary description of a soccer game in world literature?” After several seconds of deathly silence, I said, “Yuri Olesha, in his novel Envy.”
“Never heard of it . . .” harumphed the comp lit guy.
“Just because you’ve never heard of something doesn’t mean it’s not so, does it?”
“If it were any good, others would know about it . . .” persisted the comp lit guy.
“And who are these ‘others’?” I asked.
The conversation was not going well, so I switched gears. I began asking each in turn about his or her literary tastes. I learned that two or three of the women were studying medicine; the rugby player, the youngest, had already published a book, a historical novel about Caesar, though he was only eighteen. In the literary industry there are generously compensated literary stars writing for the lucrative Young Adults literary brand. I guessed such writers would be models for many of these students. The rugby player’s model was Christopher Paolini, who, at the age of eighteen, published Eragon, a global bestseller. One student said his only interest was parallel worlds. When asked who her favorite writer was, one young woman gave an unconvincing, one-word answer: “Kafka!” A shrewd fellow threw me a punch when he said De Lollo was his favorite writer, figuring, quite rightly, that I’d assume he’d mispronounced Don DeLillo’s name. Later I discovered that De Lollo, Lucian Lollo, was, in fact, an Argentinian soccer player. I wrote down each name the students gave me and this turned out to be useful; when I later read over the list, I saw it was far more ambitious than I’d expected. True, there wasn’t a single woman among them, not even Elena Ferrante, the local superstar whose name could be heard absolutely everywhere. I struggled with the “parallel worlds,” the “imaginative fiction,” the unfamiliar genres and authors. Not a one of the students mentioned Salinger as a favorite writer or The Catcher in the Rye as a favorite book.
I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of the futility of my situation, which I had, indeed, brought upon myself by consenting to this brief, more random than deliberate, conversation. The artistic strutting of these affluent offspring, this school for apprentices to chic designers, which flaunted Holden Caulfield’s name and upheld, in name at least, the dusty, seventy-year-old concept of “rebel without a cause,” but also the notion of a new kind of writing that would interface glibly with the corporate world—none of this was my cup of tea. On the other hand, didn’t the commercialization of litera
ture begin years ago before I was paying attention? The word industry elbowed its way into literature and culture with the European cultural managers; with them came the vocabulary of business. So it was that the word creative attached itself to the word industry, and the literary craft began subdividing into creative fiction, creative non-fiction, imaginative fiction, non-imaginative fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy fiction and so forth. Digital technology spawned derivatives of the word fiction such as fan-fiction, slash fiction, reality fiction, and the word literature acquired its own derivatives, such as twitterature. The Russians coined the word samizdat and then it morphed, in the digital realm, into self-publishing, the English analog, but with an altogether different twist. Why am I so irked by the online sale of the little sado-maso trinkets mentioned in a porno novel that sold millions of copies? Why am I so appalled by the writing-tips app that an author of children’s hits came up with that can be downloaded to one’s smartphone? Haven’t the foundations and museums of famous writers become souvenir shops for tourists? Haven’t I been seeing for years how people—with far more enthusiasm than they buy books—snap up T-shirts with a famous writer’s face, coffee mugs with writers’ quotes, postcards, movies based on their work, audio books, toys, rag dolls with an author’s face? Is there not a Freud rag doll on the shelf above my desk? And is it not right next to traditional Russian wooden dolls, matryoshkas, sporting the faces of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, which first appeared in Russian with Perestroika? Perhaps museum-goers will be able, soon, to enter the 3-D scene of a literary work and explore the “total” reading experience; perhaps, having ordered Hemingway’s favorite mojito, or tea with Proust’s madeleine, the visitors will be able to settle into a comfy armchair and enjoy, for instance, a visual version of Molly Bloom’s monologue.
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