Notes in November 5

On Crucibles & Curtain Calls Part 1

Original Post: Sunday, April 11, 2010

 

A house without books is like a room without windows.

Horace Mann

When I think back on the conundrum of why I am so different from just about everyone else I grew up around, I come up with two facile answers. The first is that I was an only child and the second is that I had a powerful role model: my father.

I have two older sisters and two younger brothers, but—although they are truly nice people—they were not around to influence me except in the most superficial ways. My sisters are five years or more older and my closest brother is five years younger—the other is ten years younger.

That means we were never in the same schools at the same time, never had the same friends, never shared the same interests and seldom spent time together as a family. Indeed, we rarely saw each other. By the time I entered high school—one of the defining moments in a person’s life, my sisters were married and gone, and as an angst-smitten, self-involved adolescent, I paid only cursory attention to the two little kids at home. As a result there was little sibling rivalry and little peer or parental pressure for this odd pea to match the others in the pod—I could grow into my own odd, atypical shape.

And odd I was. Although (perhaps, because) I never saw my parents read a book, I was an avid reader. I read all of Shakespeare while exiled in Hellertown, and then discovered the Bethlehem Public Library where I ran up huge fines for overdue books that I didn’t want to part with. An early favorite writer was George Bernard Shaw—an iconoclast whose plays made me laugh out loud and shake my head in agreement. By the time I worked my way through the stacks and reached the end of the alphabet, I was more than ready for Voltaire’s Candide, and for Oscar Wilde, whose Portrait of Dorian Grey presented me with a philosophy for life.

“Anything that is good enough for my father is certainly not good enough for me,” (or words to that affect) Wilde had Dorian say. It was a standard I would live by. I can find a lot of reasons why there was such great antipathy between my father and me and even more for his alternating waves of brutality  (which stopped around this time) and indifference toward me (which never stopped). I wasn’t anything like him and I wasn’t anything like he would like me to be. After Dorian Grey, I didn’t care. We lived in the same house, but months went by without speaking to each other. It was a pleasant time.

My sweet and dutiful mother stayed out of the way. It was the 50s: she was his wife; he was the boss. She would sometimes rebuke me for always having my face in a book, warning me that I would ruin my eyes. What I was ruining of course was my mind, by opening causeways across chasms that they could never cross. But, hidden from my father, she supported my interest in music and helped pay for my monthly subscription to the Great Music Treasures of the World, an LP collection that introduced me to, well, great music, but especially to Richard Wagner.

(My love of Wagner’s music eventually became anathema to my future wife and most of my friends. That prelude in Das Rheingold, a low E flat that flows on and on for 136 bars to suggest the motion of the river Rhine, can still clear a room of my family or friends long before it reaches the end of its four-minute drone; imagine its effect on my father, and he was German!)

The last years I spent in Bethlehem, the three-year period between 16, when we moved back from the farm in Hellertown and I entered Liberty High School, and 18 when I graduated and left home permanently, was the crucible in which my character was fused. My father, unwittingly, was the philosopher’s stone that turned lead into gold.