Adam Wilson's Schooldays
By JONATHAN WILSON
In February 1960, on my 10th birthday, my father, an
observant London Jew who was the company secretary of the United Synagogues of
Great Britain, the United Kingdom’s central Orthodox authority and
administration, gave me two books as presents. A small 1854 leather-bound
edition of Keightly’s Mythology and a
paperback copy of Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales
of King Arthur and His Knights of the
Round Table. The following year I
received two faux-leather books bound in navy blue with their titles in gold
lettering: Alexandre Dumas’s The Black
Tulip and Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays. This ecumenical
gift-giving in the literary sphere was of a piece with the broad culture of my
father’s Anglo-Jewish appreciations. He abided by all the, for him, liberating
restrictions of Jewish life, but in his intellectual pursuits he embraced the
open society.
When the time came for me to pass on books to my sons I followed, quite
unconsciously, the liberal path that my father had trod. I distinguished myself
from my father, however, in at least one significant area. My father recoiled, to an extent, from what he
considered to be vulgar art. He didn’t like “bad language” and while he could
certainly appreciate, let’s say, a nude by Matisse, he was enough of a puritan
to purchase a dark plastic cover in which to hide his copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover (he was not alone
in choosing modesty for D.H.Lawrence; Penguin, knowing its audience, had
offered the jacket to all shoppers who went out to purchase the book after its
1963 obscenity trial). My own view has always been that there is no “bad
language,” only bad writing. To this end, and perhaps in a strange inversion of
my father’s desire to have me embrace the world of the Greek, French, and
British classics, when my oldest son, Adam, was a teenager, one of the first
books that I urged upon him was Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. I also
gave him Leonard Cohen’s two strange and remarkable Montreal-based novels, Beautiful Losers and The Favorite Game, and I threw on his
bed Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas along with Charles Bukowski’s Post Office. What was I thinking?
Clearly, I did not have any “educational” ends in mind, except in the broadest
sense. Primarily, I wanted to share some books I had loved with someone I loved
who seemed to be at an age and developmental stage of consciousness when
certain works might appeal. After all, we lived in the heart of middle-class
Jewish suburbia, and my son seemed pretty interested in the things that grabbed
the attention of most middle-class Jewish boys in Newton, Massachusetts: sex,
drugs, and rock n’ roll. I wasn’t trying to encourage
him to take LSD trips in the desert á la Hunter S. Thompson, any more than I would
be urging him to murder an old lady by suggesting that he read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. What I was trying
to do was excite his imagination, demonstrate that the world of books was wild,
strange, and various.
I didn’t anticipate that we would actually talk about the books after Adam had
read them. Book-reading is a private matter, and despite the dictates of book-club
culture you don’t have to share your
reading experience with someone else; although it is, of course, frequently
pleasant to do so. But we did talk
about the books: I can’t remember what we discussed but I do recall that our
voyages around these novels made me very happy.
Portnoy's Complaint is, I affirm, as
important a rite of passage for a young Jewish boy as his bar mitzvah. I have
taught Roth’s great novel—as wonderful an American work as The Great Gatsby—in college for three decades. It has stood the
passage of time. Over the years, of course, Sophie Portnoy and her constipated
husband have come to embody the familiar character traits of my students’
grandparents rather than those of their parents. Nevertheless, a core
identification with Jewish desire and Jewish guilt remains. Perhaps I offered Portnoy’s Complaint to Adam as an explanation: “This is how it was for me
with my mother, have pity on your old Dad.” Or perhaps as an act of expiation:
“I’m sorry to have laid all the guilt—but as you see, it’s endemic to our
people.” Maybe my presentation of Fear
and Loathing was intended as a corrective: “You don’t have to stay imprisoned
in the Jewish suburbs. You can go off to Vegas with your Samoan attorney, and
when 'White Rabbit' peaks you can demand to have the radio thrown in your
bath.”
But all this is stuff for the analyst’s couch and, negligently, I didn’t get to
it during the quarter of a century that I was on one. “La chair est triste, helas! et j’ai lu tous les livres,” (“The
flesh is sad,alas! and I have read all the books”) Mallarme says. I have
friends who once led literary lives and who now, for one reason or another,
have more or less given up on reading. I don’t think I will ever do that.
Reading, for me, is an antidote to sadness. That’s
what I wanted to pass on via the novels. Mae West famously opined “If in doubt,
take a bath.” My (Jewish?) version would be “read a book.” Let’s see what Adam has to
say.