45. Schooling: Fictions and a Cultural History, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
What better time to read about (and think about) education than during the pandemic lockdown, when public schooling is reduced to on-line education and home schooling has been revived out of necessity? As our sage Mme Sesostris has predicted, more and more Americans will work from home, and from there they can give private lessons to their progeny. I am a big proponent of the latter since my own experience in the California system of junior high and high school was not one that I cherish in memory, and that was before students around the country began bringing heavy artillery to classrooms. Clearly, our national public school system leaves much to be desired. I recall without any relish the high school English teacher in San Diego who brought her doll collection to our classroom; she wanted us to register that we were not the only “children” in her spinster life. And the brutality of your typical American teenager (you cannot beat the pack-mentality of adolescents, but it can beat you) has furnished the entertaining plots of many a film and television series over the recent decades. (My favorite was Carrie with Sissy Spacek. So prophetic.) Why are Americans surprised at the mass murder of their native children by disaffected young yokels? The weapons are available.
The only answer for most will be home schooling, and for those who cannot manage the time or money involved, no education will simply have to do. Perhaps the young can be given lessons in basic reading via the internet and television? (As they are now.) Then our great national library system (both home town versions and the enormous libraries of our universities) can be thrown open for the only kind of education that really sticks: self-schooling. Luckily, we residents have the vast Ebersdorf library here on the thirty-fourth floor of our Tower. Aren’t our national geniuses usually autodidacts, at least past a certain point? The real problem, always, is that parents don’t really want to deal with their children on any terms or about anything, especially when it comes to the sustained, years-long transmission of knowledge. It is possible that your typical adult American just doesn’t have the psychic energy to engage with the young. Since our schools have demonstrated a failure to supplement the home in Preparations for Life, their abolition will allow institutional expenses for general education no longer to be wasted on the young. (First, we defund the police; then we end the dream of public schooling. No more polished apples. No more teachers.) America will have the uneducated classes (ready to become a permanent caste of service providers) and the privately educated class (ready to guide and govern, like dear Louise). As they are now.
The exception, of course, would be those skills that require close master-student contact, like martial arts and the dance. Again, my own mistress, Louise Ebersdorf, and I are currently in discussion about the training for artists of The Ballet, our revived company. Education in such an art has to be one-on-one.
A 1949 novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Two Worlds and Their Ways, reaches pretty much the same conclusion. The Shelley family has arrived at that point in the upbringing of their children, Clemence and Sefton, where schooling by their nurse, Miss Petticott, may be replaced by sending them to boarding school. Their father, Sir Roderick Shelley, has two sisters-in-law who keep schools for children: Lesbia Firebrace runs the one for girls; Juliet Cassidy’s husband maintains one for boys. Naturally, these relations assume that Clemence and Sefton will be sent to their respective schools. Since the parents are eager for success for their progeny, they decide to send the children there.
This desire for “success” turns out to be the problem. In the new, strange environments (and Compton-Burnett is particularly brilliant at making each school novel and strange), the boy and the girl separately distinguish themselves by cheating on their exams. When the miscreants are charged by their teachers and exposed to parental judgment, Sir Roderick and his wife Marie come to realize that the two scholars have been forced into deceit out of love of their parents, fear of abject failure, and the absence of any preparatory ethical guidance on the part of both home and school. A decision is made that henceforth the two children will return to the tutorial services of Miss Petticott, whose lectures on ethics may have left a little something to be desired.
The discovery of the children’s moral failure is accompanied (as often in this author’s work) by revelations about the tendency of the adult male characters to father children out of wedlock upon other family members and females in the nearby populace. One such by-blow is revealed to be a teacher in the boys’ school. He forms an “inappropriate relation” there with another Shelley, a witty young music teacher, Oliver, and they indeed turn out to have genetic ties (via cousinage, I believe). The family is aware that exposing innocent lives to the dangers found in a typical boarding school is perhaps one strong reason to keep the children at home. The real possibility is a “shadow” that is “dark, sinister and hovering”. Little do they realize initially that the immediate shadows will be cast from within their own family. Two Worlds is deeply ironic and wonderfully entertaining.
All of Compton-Burnett’s novels are formally distinguished, close as they are in themes and style. I was particularly amused by the way the schools’ instructors here are characterized as physically clumsy. The female teachers have a way of regularly bumping into one another, literally. But then members of the extended Shelley family have a way of bumping into one another, across time and taboo. Two Worlds and Their Ways is set in England in the early twentieth century. The details of student behavior and educational cant have not changed. Reading this novel would not encourage a parent to send a child away from home to institutional schooling. Not even down the street. Not even for a day. By doing so, parents may reveal something about the home environment that is not for show.
A new work by the British novelist James Scudamore, English Monsters (Jonathan Cape, 2020), accomplishes a similar demonstration of educational failure in our contemporary world. It deals with the pervasive presence of skilled sadists and sexual predators in English boarding schools. Max is sent to such an institution at age ten. His parents travel internationally for business reasons (Max’s father works for a conglomerate), and remunerative perks include a paid-for education for their child. (The other excuse for the child’s incarceration is that kidnappings are frequent for the children of the Jet Set.) At the school, Max is maltreated (physically beaten by instructors) alongside his pals and enemies among the students. Later, after graduation, certain of his adult friends reveal to him that they were not only subjected to physical harm but to covert sexual abuse at their school. The details come out in their eventual reports, and they are not pretty. One victim eventually commits suicide. One periodically toys with shooting himself – because it calms him, he says. One buries himself in his work, perhaps to forget. The arch-predator of the school eventually comes to a bad end himself.
What is interesting about Scudamore’s novel is that it is told in the first person by a grown-up Max who is married and has a son by the end of his story. Not only is Max something of a drifter through life, with a tendency to fall down man-holes in the street and a persistent vagueness about his relations with the several women in his life; but, also, our narrator claims not to have been subjected to sexual exploitation during his school days, while all around him other boys were being initiated right and left. Toward the end of the novel, Max collaborates in the identification to the police of the school’s long-lived chief predator, but the grown Max has taken his time in the disclosure, indicating an ambivalence in his view of the situation. (His best friend, Simon, the adult workaholic, has even renewed Platonic relations with his childhood predator.)
What the reader begins to suspect is that there is missing time in Max’s personal story – that he was himself sexually abused and has buried the trauma from memory. This might explain the drifting quality that women discover in him. There are two strong suggestions of such a possibility in the novel. One is a description of the busy predator’s relation to Max as his one and only comforter at school, when the boy suffered from loneliness and crying jags. This is termed “grooming”, I am told. The other is a “ghost story” adventure that young Max and Simon share, since their school is claimed to be haunted. The vignette bears comparison to an equivalent scene in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and Scudamore is too sophisticated and knowing a novelist not to have intended the analogy. The horrors of English Monsters are not that of the supernatural. They are all too present in ordinary school life past and present in England and elsewhere. Scudamore’s highly developed writing skills pull one through the scenes of sad exploitation of the young and helpless. Otherwise the details of the narrative would be almost unbearable. This is an extraordinary novel.
In order to find specimens of intelligent women in the arts who experienced something other than traditional schooling before entering the adult world and distinguishing themselves, I turned to Diana Souhami’s new book No Modernism Without Lesbians (Head of Zeus, 2020). Souhami provides compact biographies of Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. Only one of the four women submitted to an institutional education with any real enthusiasm (it was a school run by a Sapphic), and this exception may prove the rule in more ways than one. Once again, I have read a new book “between the lines” – locating certain interlinear evidence beyond the author’s more generalized intent, to my own quite specific ends. Here is what I found.
Sylvia Beach is famous for single-handedly publishing the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses out of her Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company (founded 1919). Beach did not come from a monied family, but she inspired vital assistance from Adrienne Monnier, her lover, whose bookstore La Maison des Amies des Livres (founded 1915), served as a model for Beach’s enterprise. Beach loved Paris and literature. Shakespeare and Company sold books, lent books, and eventually published Joyce’s masterpiece. All the biographical evidence suggests that Beach educated herself by solitary reading. She hated a boarding school her family sent her to in Lausanne; she claimed she was uninterested in its curriculum. For a time, Beach worked as a research assistant for a professor of English at Princeton. But her love was travel and especially trips to France. (Her sister, Cyprian Gilles, was an actress and appeared in the multi-part serial Judex [1916], directed by Louis Feuillade.)
Subscribers to the S&C lending library included such notables as Gide, Romains, Labaut, Fargue, Maurois, Valéry, and, initially, Gertrude Stein. (The latter withdrew when Beach indicated her fealty to Joyce.) The First World War brought Ernest Hemingway to the shop. S&C became a cultural nexus, a welcoming commercial salon, although it is clear that the business never made Beach all that much money. Luckily, when Joyce arrived in Paris with his publishing, familial, and health troubles, Beach acquired a stalwart colleague in Harriet Weaver in London, who helped Joyce and his family float financially. The great novelist did not treat Beach with much consideration after her publication of Ulysses. In fact, he treated her badly. Joyce lived “high” and was not faithful to his novel’s first publisher. When World War Two came, Beach was interned by the Nazis in a concentration camp as an “enemy alien” and because she had Jewish associates. She was eventually released on grounds of ill health, but only after strings were pulled. Beach died of a heart attack in 1962. She was living alone in an apartment in Paris.
The wealthy Bryher (born Annie Winifred Glover) supported many artists, but especially the poet H.D. (Hilda Dolittle), whom she loved and whose career she underwrote for life. Bryher hated her shipbuilder father, her life as a child of wealth, as well as her own female body (she wanted life as a boy). When her father refused to allow her a place in the family business, she was sent to Queenswood Ladies’ College in Eastbourne. She experienced extreme “dislocation” there, although she did make one friend, Doris Banfield, who was the child of another ship-owning family. Bryher apparently self-educated herself in the arts by reading the poetry of Mallarmé. This prepared her for meeting H.D. in the summer of 1918. Subvention of the poet was never easy because H.D. was unsure of her own aims in life and art. Bryher adored her and rescued the beloved from various “messes”. For example, H.D. gave birth to a child, Perdita, out of wedlock. The poet could not be faithful to Bryher, but her patron stood by H.D. across decades.
Bryher used her inherited wealth to travel with Havelock Ellis and H.D. to Greece. She supported the writer Robert McAlmon, whom she also married for the “convenience” of both. Together, McAlmon and Bryher established a publishing company, Contact Editions, in Paris and issued various literary works that were regarded as “advanced”. With their POOL production company, they made several avant-garde films. A magazine, Close Up, was founded and published. Bryher commissioned and built a Bauhaus villa, Kenwin, near Montreux. Later in Berlin, Bryher had a love affair with the actress Elisabeth Bergner (wife of the film producer Paul Czinner). And through all of H.D.’s several breakdowns and illnesses, Bryher was loyal. H.D. died in 1961. Bryher died at Villa Kenwin in 1983.
Natalie Barney was the Lesbic petronius arbiter of Paris. She was also the lover of countless women about whom she wrote many poems. Barney is the exception among Souhami’s quartet. (Although perhaps not.) She studied poetry one-on-one with a poet, Charles Brun. And the boarding school she was sent to in Fountainbleu, Les Ruches, had a headmistress, Marie Souvestre, who was a well-known Lesbian. The French know how to arrange these things.
Barney had a very wealthy, alcoholic father who left her $75 million when he died an early death. (That made her wealthier than Bryher.) Her first lover, Eva Palmer, was her companion for the first decade of her well-documented life. The two studied the poetry of Sappho. Eve was followed by a series of women-who-loved-women: the grand horizontal Liane de Pougy, the poets Renée Vivien and Olive Constance, and, possibly, the budding novelist Colette. That is the short list.
In 1909, Barney rented 20 rue Jacob, which became a showcase for advanced art in Paris. Every Friday in season, Barney held her salon showings. They were attended by tout Paris. Among the many visitors: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Janet Flanner, and Solita Solano. (There were many male visitors, as well.) Among Barney’s lovers across the following decades were Lily de Gramont, Romaine Brooks, Winnaretta Singer (the Princessse de Polignac), Violette Trefusis, and Marion “Joe” Carstairs. Barney died in 1972 at the age of 96. It was a full life.
Gertrude Stein might also be an exception, but, then again, perhaps not. Her main early tutors were her brother Leo and William James. Otherwise, education seems to have been a matter of just books, “musty books”. When Stein read the Bible, she was disappointed: too little information about the nature of “eternity”. She dropped out of high school in Oakland, California to roam the hills with Leo. Briefly, she was a student-at-large at the University of California (Berkeley). For a time, she considered becoming a psychologist. To this end she entered John Hopkins Medical School. She was taught by William James, who encouraged her to use “automatic writing” as an approach to the psyche. She did.
Eventually Leo took his sister to Paris so that he could study painting. Leo and Gertrude began to buy modern art under the tutelage of the art dealer, Ambroise Vollard. Now Gertrude’s true education may have begun. Leo and Gertrude met many artists, including Matisse and Picasso, and bought many paintings. They especially admired the work of Cezanne. Gertrude became a close confidant of Picasso. Oh, to have overheard those conversations. The siblings exhibited the purchased works of art at their home at 27 rue de Fleurus, with a salon every Saturday evening. Eventually, Leo (who did not take his sister’s writing seriously) was definitively replaced by a live-in companion, Alice B. Toklas (who did – quite seriously).
As the years passed, Stein’s fame as a hostess and arbiter of taste grew. She began to take certain visiting American writers under her wing: Sherwood Anderson, Thornton Wilder, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. It was possibly Hemingway who learned a little something from Stein’s prose and aesthetic. The composer Virgil Thomson became an acolyte and wrote two operas on Stein texts. My own favorite Stein work is the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, especially in the RCA Victor recording of an early cast. Stein and her Alice survived World War Two. Gertrude died in 1946. Her life had been an education. She learned, and taught, for the most part outside hallowed halls.
The women discussed in No Modernism all educated themselves for their roles in the fine and literary arts (and in the arts of love) on their own or with immediate help from modernist leaders in literature, painting, music, dance and science in the early twentieth century. No one book and no conventional schoolroom would have provided the necessary background for their concentrated and highly energetic labors.
After finishing Souhami’s enlightening book, I asked myself where is Parisian Lesbian culture today? Goodness knows, Susan Sontag exploited it at the end of the twentieth century – surreptitiously, of course. Perhaps we now may need a book entitled No Lesbians Without Modernism. Perhaps it took a revolt in artistic sensibility to bring the Sapphic strain into the visible public sphere. Could there ever be a book entitled No Post-Modernism Without Lesbians? Must research. Enquiring mind wants to know.
P.H.
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