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The other day I was hanging out at my favorite coffee shop, the Alberta Street Coffee House on Northeast Alberta street in Portland, Oregon. This particular establishment has a heavy atmosphere of liberality and attracts a wide range of eclectic folks, from young computer geeks with their laptops, to artists and writers, to political activists, to the retired, and to the most common, ordinary person like myself. It is a very comfortable and small coffee shop with throw rugs, coffee tables, couches and easy chairs. The place is littered with books, magazines and local newspapers. Local art for sale usually adorns the walls. It is a homey place. A place where it is easy to strike up a conversation with a total stranger about anything.
A twenty-somthing man was sitting at the table next to me and reading a section of the Oregonian newspaper about the demise of Russian Nobel Laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I noticed after a few minutes he started shaking his head slightly and murmured, "Why haven't I ever heard of this guy?" Because I have read nearly everything written by Solzhenitsyn that has been translated into English, I struck up a conversation with the young man with the purpose of offering him a few anecdotes about the author.
I told this man that Solzhenitsyn was considered one of the great moral voices among writers of the twentieth century. And because of the state repression, torture and atrocities he experienced first hand it gave him a unique perspective on the world and the human condition. Thusly, his writings will no doubt become timeless. Solzhenitsyn was a giant of a man in many ways that not only survived but outlived the very state apparatus he fought against all of his life.
Since he seemed eager and a willing listener, I further told this young man in order to really understand and appreciate why Solzhenitsyn was so bigger than life, it would be beneficial for him to read the major works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky since Solzhenitsyn was heavily influenced by all three authors. This man had only heard of Shakespeare and Tolstoy but had never read a single word from them. His experience of these two authors was strictly from television specials. This startled me that he was completely unaware of Dostoevsky, and never had the opportunity to read a Shakespeare play or a story or novel by Tolstoy. I asked him how that could be.
The man admitted that during his high school years in Portland Public Schools he never read Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, nor was required to do so for graduation. He further admitted that he read as little as possible and only when he was forced to out of necessity. He offered another striking admission that while pursuing his Bachelor of Social Work degree at Portland State University he only read what was required in order to get his degree. He also said that as soon as he graduated last month he swore that he would never read another book again unless it was required by his job. My stomach did a flip-flop when I heard this man speak so passionately of his lack of desire to read books of any substance.
I told him that he seemed interested in the newspaper article so what held him back from tackling one of Solzhenitsyn's novels. The man told me rather bluntly that he found it easy to read twenty or thirty paragraphs in a newspaper, magazine or on the Internet, but anything longer was too time consuming and too much of a commitment. I shook my head that I understood but deep inside I was raging against this young man's unwillingness to taste the sweet wonders of a great work of literature, and view the world through the eyes of its author and possibly uncover a great truth in the process.
As the man finished reading the newspaper article I thought about how different I was at his age. I had been blessed with a home environment at an early age that fueled my passion for reading. The older I got the more interest I gained in books, especially really great books, really meaningful and significant books. During my twenties I couldn't seem to find enough time to read the long list of books I created for myself. This was by choice and no one forced me into this passionate past-time of reading. When money was low I deliberately missed a few meals just so I had the money to buy certain books. The reading material I was craving at the time couldn't be found at the public library.
The young man finally finished his drink and the newspaper article, got up and left. On the way out he thanked me for the conversation. I sat there for quite awhile feeling very sad for this young man; feeling sad for all the rich delights and wells of wisdom he will never know by being a non-reader. I'm not sure if the public school system failed him, or he just had a basic character flaw against reading in general. I would safely bet that he is the exception and not representational of his generation. It still makes me sad that anybody can go through life and not have a desire to read the great masterworks of world literature.
A teacher in the seventh grade who I greatly admired told our class one day: "Great readers make great writers, and great writers make great leaders." This just poured more fuel on the fire of my passion for reading. I will never forget that teacher or his statement of truth. I graduated from high school in the era when it was a requirement to read and have a passable understanding of Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner before one got a diploma. I found that two years after my graduation the state of California dropped that requirement as well as the study of a foreign language.
This young man is culturally and intellectually crippling himself to the point where he will be unable to focus his mind on sustained high level reading and critical thinking. The experience of attaining any meaningful and significant leadership role in his life may turn out to be an empty sham, causing himself and others around him distress and hurt. Unless he goes through a miraculous turnabout I tremble when thinking that one day this young man could attain a position of grave responsibility in our country.
One day in the Spring of 1979, while sitting with my friend Steffan in a San Francisco Chinese cafe having green tea and egg rolls, he asked me quite bluntly: "Who is the real Ben Douglass?"
Steffan often waxed philosophical about the world and its primary players, especially when he had a bit too much to drink. This was the first time, though, his philosophical searchlight directed itself at me personally. I was intrigued by the question and after a deliberate and measured pause, I decided to play the game.
I told him that the state of my soul at the time was rather complicated and couldn't be adequately explained to another without reading first three novels that had had a moving anf profound influence on my life. These novels were: Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov; Knulp by Hermann Hesse; and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by George Gissing.
Goncharov's Oblomov tells the story of a wastrel member of the Russian gentry class who spends his whole life dreaming and wanting to be happy like other people but dies a very lonely man, passed over by friends, his first love and life in general. Hesse's Knulp was the author's spiritual autobiography so to speak. It tells of a wandering tramp who never does settle down to the domestic life like his former classmates and friends, but always in search of freedom on the road. In the end he's speaking with God and re-evaluating his life and finds that he couldn't have lived any other way even if he had wanted to. While he lay dying in a snow drift, babbling to God about his life, he finds true freedom. Gissing's The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is simply about failed literary ambition.
I told Steffan if he would just take the time to read and try and understand each of these novels, he would fully appreciate the hopes, dreams, failures, and the philosophical condition of my soul. Later that evening I let him borrow copies of these three novels.
Several weeks later we found ourselves at the same Chinese cafe having lunch. Steffan had brought the books along with him. I was eager to know his opinion on my reading material and he didn't disappoint me. He had only gotten half-way through Goncharov's Oblomov before tossing it aside. He claimed he came very close to using the novel as toilet paper.
While going on and on about the novel in particular and Russian literature in general, he used phrases like "moral bankruptcy," "spiritual illness" and "tragic oneupmanship." I remember him leaning across the table and wagging his finger in my face and saying quite loudly so everyone in the cafe could hear, "Keep on reading this crap and you'll end up just like them." He then gave me a big wink.
I immediately felt quite insulted and reminded him rather tersely that when he asks to peek into a man's soul he should be prepared for anything-and if not-don't be asking in the first place. After a dramatic pause on his part and a thousand yard stare, he grabbed the Russian novel, tore out several pages, stuffed them in his back pocket and smiled saying: "I need something to wipe my ass tonight."
The literary form called the character novel has had an immense impact on my intellectual as well as everyday life, ever since I first discovered at the tender age of 15, Willard Motley's prize winning novel, Knock On Any Door. This was the story of Nick Romano growing up in the Chicago slums. He was an alter boy at 12 and dead in the electric chair at 21.
The story of Nick Romano exposed me to a part of the life struggle that was unknown to me at that time. This composite story of a troubled street youth fired up my imagination and left me wanting to read more of the same. I was fortunate enough to have had a sympathetic English teacher at the time who recognized my passion for stories about people, and further exposed me to what he referred to as "protest literature." He gave me a short list to work from and at the top of that list was the novel, Down These Mean Streets by Pere Thomas. Also on the list was the play, Westside Story. From there I jumped into nonfiction literary treats such as Blood In My Eye by George Jackson.
This literature of troubled youth had such a poignant impact on me that I ended up with the unintentional result of working with these same kind of troubled kids later in life. From 1984 until 1988 I worked as an outreach worker and emergency services coordinator for Outside In's street youth program. At the time Outside In was one of Portland, Oregon's premier socio-medical aid stations which provided free counseling, referrals, emergency services, and a medical clinic for the down and out. It was here at Outside In that I met many Nick Romano's with their own unique and passionate stories. One lad went on to spend five years in prison for first degree arson, another committed suicide, while yet another died so very young of A.I.D.S. The lives and stories of these street kids eventually became too overwhelming and I had to leave that part of my life behind for other things.
My fascination with troubled souls is still alive and well today. I have collected around 25 character novels which I consider keepers, to be read and re-read many times over. The characters in these novels are most often dubbed anti-hero's by the mainstream literary establishment, and often referred to in negative terms as: lonely oddballs, self-absorbed individualists, mental cases, contrarians, non-conformists, deviants, as well as many other names too numerous to list here. The better label for these colorful characters would be heretic. Whether these character's heretical lifestyle and thinking patterns are merely self-made protective barriers against normal society, or a way of accessing the ultimate truth about existence, they have one thing in common: they were born heretics, held hostage by their genetics, social culture, and family upbringing and had no choice but to be who they were.
The best of these character novels that truly represents the heretic in my humble opinion is Against Nature by J. K. Huysmans. The copy I own is a translation (and one of the best methinks) by Robert Baldick. The book hit the literary scene of 1884 like a cosmic big bang. Oscar Wilde found this the "strangest book that he had ever read" and it became a key text for his own writings. Zola called the book "a terrible blow to Naturalism." The general public condemned it as a work of depravity. In colorful and flowery prose the book tells about the strange, exotic and perverse pleasures and practices of one Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, a composite character of several "gorgeous dandies of the time."
Some have accused Huysmans of writing about himself in the thinnest of disguises. As Robert Baldick writes in his introduction: "Des Esseintes is more than his creator's alter ego and the quintessential Decadent. He is also, and above all else, the modern man par excellence, tortured by that vague longing for an elusive ideal which we used to call the mal du siecle; torn between desire and satiety, hope and disillusionment; painfully conscious that his pleasures are finite, his needs infinite."
As the charcter Des Esseintes was the epitome of the heretic during his time of the 1880's, so Nick Romano was the epitome of the heretic during his time of the 1950's. Both of these characters in their own uniquely tragic way captured Baldick's "the modern man par excellence." Both Romano and Des Esseintes were very painfully aware that their pleasures were indeed finite and their needs infinite. And I have come to the conclusion that the street youth I worked with and cared so deeply about in the 1980's suffered the same fate. Heretics young or old, from all ages of history and well into the future, will always be who they are and no matter how much we have sympathy for them, or even try to help protect them from themselves, they will continue to follow the path that fate has bestowed upon them.
