An Incomplete Education Read online

  What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High School:

  Edwards’ historical importance as quintessential Puritan thinker and hero of the Great Awakening, the religious revival that swept New England from the late 1730s to 1750.

  What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:

  What Edwards thought about, namely, the need to get back to the old-fashioned Calvinist belief in man’s basic depravity and in his total dependence on God’s goodwill for salvation. (Forget about the “covenant” theory of Protestantism; according to Edwards, God doesn’t bother cutting deals with humans.) Also, his insistence that faith and conversion be emotional, not just intellectual. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790)

  Product of:

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

  Earned a Living as a:

  Printer, promoter, inventor, diplomat, statesman.

  High-School Reading List:

  The Declaration of Independence (1776), which he helped draft.

  College Reading List:

  The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1771– 1788), considered one of the greatest autobiographies ever written; sample maxims from Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732–1757), mostly on how to make money or keep from spending it; any number of articles and essays on topics of historical interest, ranging from “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” and “An Edict by the King of Prussia” (both 1773), about the colonies’ Great Britain problem, to “Experiments and Observations on Electricity” (1751), all of which are quite painless.

  What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High School:

  Not a thing. But back in grade school you presumably learned that Franklin invented a stove, bifocal glasses, and the lightning rod; that he established the first, or almost the first, library, fire department, hospital, and insurance company; that he helped negotiate the treaty with France that allowed America to win independence; that he was a member of the Constitutional Convention; that he was the most famous American of the eighteenth century (after George Washington) and the closest thing we’ve ever had to a Renaissance man.

  What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:

  That Franklin had as many detractors as admirers, for whom his shrewdness, pettiness, hypocrisy, and nonstop philandering embodied all the worst traits of the American character, of American capitalism, and of the Protestant ethic. WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859)

  Washington Irving’s house, Tarrytown, New York

  Product of:

  New York City and Tarrytown, New York.

  Earned a Living as a:

  Writer; also, briefly, a diplomat.

  High-School Reading List:

  “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” both contained in The Sketch Book (1820).

  College Reading List:

  Other more or less interchangeable selections from The Sketch Book, Bracebridge Hall (1822), Tales of a Traveller (1824), or The Legends of the Alhambra (1832), none of which stuck in anyone’s memory for more than ten minutes.

  What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High School:

  That Irving was the first to prove that Americans could write as well as Europeans; that Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle’s wife both got what they deserved.

  What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:

  That Irving’s grace as a stylist didn’t quite make up for his utter lack of originality, insight, or depth. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851)

  Product of:

  Cooperstown, New York.

  Earned a Living as a:

  Gentleman farmer.

  High-School Reading List:

  Probably none; The Leatherstocking Tales, i.e., The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841) are considered grade-school material.

  College Reading List:

  Social criticism, such as Notions of the Americans (1828), a defense of America against the sniping of foreign visitors; or “Letter to his Countrymen” (1834), a diatribe written in response to bad reviews of his latest novel.

  What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High School:

  That Cooper was America’s first successful novelist and that Natty Bumppo was one of the all-time most popular characters in world literature. Also that The Leatherstocking Tales portrayed the conflicting values of the vanishing wilderness and encroaching civilization.

  What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:

  That the closest Cooper ever got to the vanishing wilderness was Scarsdale, and that, in his day, he was considered an insufferable snob, a reactionary, a grouch, and a troublemaker known for defending slavery and opposing suffrage for everyone but male landowners. That eventually, everyone decided the writing in The Leatherstocking Tales was abominable, but that during the 1920s Cooper’s social criticism began to seem important and his thinking pretty much representative of American conservatism. RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)

  Product of:

  Concord, Massachusetts.

  Earned a Living as a:

  Unitarian minister, lecturer.

  High-School Reading List:

  A few passages from Nature (1836), Emerson’s paean to individualism, and a couple of the Essays (1841), one of which was undoubtedly the early, optimistic “Self-Reliance.” If you were spending a few days on Transcendentalism, you probably also had to read “The Over-Soul.” If, on the other hand, your English teacher swung toward an essay like “The Poet,” it was, no doubt, accompanied by a snatch of Emersonian verse— most likely “Brahma” or “Days.” (You already knew Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” from grade-school history lessons, although you probably didn’t know who wrote it.)

  College Reading List:

  Essays and more essays, including “Experience,” a tough one. Also the lecture “The American Scholar,” in which Emerson called for a proper American literature, freed from European domination.

  What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High School:

  That Emerson was the most important figure of the Transcendentalist movement, whatever that was, the friend and benefactor of Thoreau, and a legend in his own time; also, that he was a great thinker, a staunch individualist, an unshakable optimist, and a first-class human being, even if you wouldn’t have wanted to know him yourself.

  What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:

  That you’d probably be a better person if you had known him yourself and that almost any one of his essays could see you through an identity crisis, if not a nervous breakdown. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Hawthorne’s house, Concord, Massachusetts

  Product of:

  Salem and Concord, Massachusetts.

  Earned a Living as a:

  Writer, surveyor, American consul in Liverpool.

  High-School Reading List:

  The Scarlet Letter (1850) or The House of the Seven Gables (1851); plus one or two tales, among which was probably “Young Goodman Brown” (1846) because your teacher hoped a story about witchcraft would hold your attention long enough to get you through it.

  College Reading List:

  None, since you were expected to have done the reading back in high school. One possible exception: The Blithedale Romance (1852) if your prof was into Brook Farm and the Transcendentalists; another: The Marble Faun (1860) for its explicit fall-of-man philosophizing.

  What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High School:

  What the letter A embroidered on someone’s dress means.

  What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:

  That Hawthorne marked a turning point in American morality and a break from our Puritan past, despite the fact that he, like his ancestors, never stopped obsessing about sin and guilt. Also, that he’s considered something of an underachiever. EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)

  Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage, New York City

  Product of:

  Richmond, Virginia; New York City; Balt
imore, Maryland.

  Earned a Living as a:

  Hack journalist and reviewer.

  High-School Reading List:

  “The Raven” (1845), “Ulalume” (1847), “Annabel Lee” (1848), and a few other poems, probably read aloud in class; a detective story: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) or “The Purloined Letter” (1845), either of which you could skip if you’d seen the movie; one or two of the supernatural-death stories, say, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) or “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), either of which you could skip if you’d seen the movie; a couple of the psychotic-murderer stories, e.g., “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Black Cat” (both 1843), either of which you could skip if you’d seen the movie; and a pure Poe horror number like “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), which you could skip if you’d seen the movie. Sorry, but as far as we know, they still haven’t made a movie of “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), although somebody once wrote to us, claiming to have seen it.

  College Reading List:

  None; remedial reading only, unless you chose to write your dissertation on “The Gothic Element in American Fiction.”

  What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High School:

  That Poe invented the detective story and formulated the short story more or less as we know it. That maybe poetry wasn’t so bad, after all. Also, that Poe was a poverty-stricken alcoholic who did drugs and who married his thirteen-year-old cousin, just like Jerry Lee Lewis did.

  What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:

  That once you’re over seventeen, you don’t ever admit to liking Poe’s poetry, except maybe to your closest friend who’s a math major; that while Poe seemed puerile to American critics, he was a cult hero to European writers from Baudelaire to Shaw; and that, in spite of his subject matter, Poe still gets credit—even in America— for being a great technician. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-1896)

  Product of:

  Litchfield and Hartford, Connecticut; Cincinnati, Ohio; Brunswick, Maine.

  Earned a Living as a:

  Housewife.

  High-School Reading List:

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–1852).

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  College Reading List:

  The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862) and Old Town Folks (1869), if your professor was determined to make a case for Stowe as a novelist. Both are considered superior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High School:

  What happened to Uncle Tom, Topsy, and Little Eva. That the novel was one of the catalysts of the Civil War.

  What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:

  That you’d have done better to spend your time reading the real story of slavery in My Life and Times by Frederick Douglass. That the fact that you didn’t was just one more proof, dammit, of the racism rampant in our educational system. HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862)

  Product of:

  Concord, Massachusetts, and nearby Walden Pond.

  Earned a Living as a:

  Schoolteacher, pencil maker, surveyor, handyman, naturalist.

  High-School Reading List:

  Walden (1854), inspired by the two years he spent communing with himself and Nature in a log cabin on Walden Pond.

  College Reading List:

  “Civil Disobedience” (1849), the essay inspired by the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), inspired by a few weeks spent on same with his brother John, and considered a literary warm-up for Walden; parts of the Journal, inspired by virtually everything, which Thoreau not only kept but polished and rewrote for almost twenty-five years—you had fourteen volumes to choose from, including the famous “lost journal” which was rediscovered in 1958.

  What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High School:

  That Thoreau was one of the great American eccentrics and the farthest out of the Transcendentalists, and that he believed you should spend your life breaking bread with the birds and the woodchucks instead of going for a killing in the futures market like your old man.

  What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:

  That Walden was not just a spiritualized Boy Scout Handbook but, according to twentieth-century authorities, a carefully composed literary masterpiece. That, according to these same authorities, Thoreau did have a sense of humor. That Tolstoy was mightily impressed with “Civil Disobedience” and Gandhi used it as the inspiration for his satyagraha. That despite his reputation as a loner and pacifist, Thoreau became the friend and defender of the radical abolitionist John Brown. And that, heavy as you were into Thoreau’s principles of purity, simplicity, and spirituality, you still had to figure out how to hit your parents up for plane fare to Goa.

  Henry David Thoreau’s house, Concord, Massachusetts HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)

  Product of:

  New York City; Albany and Troy, New York; various South Sea islands.

  Earned a Living as a:

  Schoolteacher, bank clerk, sailor, harpooner, customs inspector.

  High-School Reading List:

  Moby-Dick (1851; abridged version, or you just skipped the parts about the whaling industry); Typee (1846), the early bestseller, which was, your teacher hoped, sufficiently exotic and action-packed to get you hooked on Melville. For extra credit, the novella Billy Budd (published posthumously, 1924).

  College Reading List:

  Moby-Dick (unabridged version), The Piazza Tales (1856), especially “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno”; and the much-discussed, extremely tedious The Confidence Man (1857).

  What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High School:

  That Moby-Dick is allegorical (the whale = Nature/God/the Implacable Universe; Ahab = Man’s Conflicted Identity/Civilization/Human Will; Ishmael = the Poet/Philosopher) and should be read as a debate between Ahab and Ishmael.

  Herman Melville’s house, Albany, New York

  What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:

  That Melville didn’t know Moby-Dick was allegorical until somebody pointed it out to him. That his work prefigured some of Freud’s theories of the unconscious. That, like Lord Byron, Norman Mailer, and Bob Dylan, Melville spent most of his life struggling to keep up with the name he’d made for himself (with the bestselling Typee) before he turned thirty. And that if, historically, he was caught between nineteenth-century Romanticism and modern alienation, personally he was pretty unbalanced as well. He may or may not have been gay, as some biographers assert (if he was, he almost certainly didn’t know it), but whatever he was, Nathaniel Hawthorne eventually stopped taking his calls. MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

  The Clemens family

  Product of:

  Hannibal, Missouri; various Nevada mining towns; Hartford, Connecticut.

  Earned a Living as a:

  Printer, river pilot, newspaper reporter, lecturer, storyteller.

  High-School Reading List:

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Also, if you took remedial English, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).

  College Reading List:

  The short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), as an example of Twain’s frontier humor; the essays “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895, 1897) and “The United States of Lyncherdom” (1901), as examples of his scathing wit and increasing disillusionment with America; and the short novel, The Mysterious Stranger (published posthumously, 1916), for the late, bleak, embittered Twain.

  What You Were Supposed to Have Learned in High School:

  That Huckleberry Finn is the great mock-epic of American democracy, marking the beginning of a caste-free literature that owed nothing to European tradition. That this was the first time the American vernacular had made it into a serious literary work. That the book profoundly influenced the development of the modern American prose style. And that you should have been paying more attention to Twain’s brilliant manip
ulation of language and less to whether or not Huck, Tom, and Jim made it out of the lean-to alive. Also, that Mark Twain, which was river parlance for “two fathoms deep,” was the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

  What You Didn’t Find Out Until College:

  That Twain grew more and more pessimistic about America—and about humanity in general— as he, and the country, grew older, eventually turning into a bona fide misanthrope. And that he was stylistically tone-deaf, producing equal amounts of brilliant prose and overwritten trash without ever seeming to notice the difference.

  The Beat Goes On

  So much of what we’ve all been committing to memory over the past lifetime or so—the words to “Help Me, Rhonda” typify the genre—eventually stops paying the same dividends. Sure, the beat’s as catchy as ever. But once the old gang’s less worried about what to do on Saturday night than about meeting child-support payments and stemming periodontal disease, it’s nice to have something more in the way of consolation, perspective, and uplift to fall back on. Good news: All the time you were glued to the car radio, a few people with a little more foresight were writing—and what’s more, printing—poetry, some of which is as about as Zeitgeisty as things get.

  It is, however, a little trickier than the Beach Boys. For one thing, it’s modern, which means you’re up against alienation and artificiality. For another, it’s poetry, which means nobody’s just going to come out and say what’s on his mind. Put them together and you’ve got modern poetry. Read on and you’ve got modern poetry’s brightest lights and biggest guns, arranged in convenient categories for those pressed for time and/or an ordering principle of their own. THE FIVE BIG DEALS EZRA POUND (1885-1972)