TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 91

[Tobie Shapiro]

December 16, 2000000000000006


Dear Aficionados,

	Today is Beethoven's birthday.  Just 
thought you'd like to know.  If you've ever read 
anything about Beethoven, you'll know that he 
wasn't your regular guy.  He was disgusting.  His 
landlady once came in to collect the rent.  She 
looked all around and didn't find him in, so she 
left.  He'd been there.  Just lost in the mess. 
I read, "The letters of Beethoven".  I find 
reading the correspondence of historical figures 
tells me much more and in much more human a way 
than reading a history book with all the dates 
and the chronologies, but none or very little of 
the characters and parallel progress in the 
world.  Mozart's letters are charming and rowdy 
and full of personality.  A delight.  Brahms' 
letters are dark and dense, and then every once 
in a while passionate or funny.  But Beethoven's 
letters are full of him suing this person or that 
person, complaining about everyone, generally 
disgruntled and arrogant.  There are exceptions, 
and I can't say for sure, because I stopped 
reading the letters when they got too terrible, 
so I may have missed something.  But, anyway, the 
man wrote miraculous music and here's to 
Beethoven, curmudgeon or lovesick flounder. 
Happy Birthday.



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Pyrrhic Victory

	At Willard Junior High School, all of the 
eighth grade English classes plodded through 
Charles Dickens', "David Copperfield".  There was 
no reading assignment that was short enough.  I 
tired nearly immediately of Dickens' style.  I 
just couldn't slog my way through two page 
descriptions of a vase, and I loathed the 
cardboard characters, especially the one 
dimensional women who were either angels or 
poltergeist, and the Jews who were always 
villains of the lowest stripe.  I know, I know. 
Charles Dickens was a great writer and I've heard 
him cited as one of the greatest novelists of all 
time.  Yes, a good exposure to Charles Dickens 
would seem to be a requisite part of a study of 
classic literature.  So, yes, we all suffered or 
enjoyed ourselves through the same book.  As I 
recall, it was a hefty book, and dense with 
descriptive passages.

	Originally, the whole book was written in 
serial form, appearing in monthly installments. 
That makes it hard for the natural rhythm of a 
novel, and that bothered me, too.  Oh.  I was 
definitely bothered by David Copperfield.  I 
actively hated Charles Dickens, and it was no 
secret that I was struggling terribly to keep up 
with the awful reading assignments that took up 
way too much of my time.  I was a rather slow 
reader, deliberately going over every word, and 
pronouncing them in my head for dramatic value, 
never leaving a single, "the", out as I 
enunciated my way through thirty page 
assignments.  And it wasn't as if I didn't have 
other homework.  I was taking Math and Science, 
History and Orchestra, Home Economics, a 
requirement for all the girls, as shop was 
required for all the boys.  Yes, we young girls 
learned, en masse, how to cook and sew, to get us 
ready for our lives as wives.  And the boys, off 
in the shop, learned how to hammer and nail, saw 
and fix a carburetor so they could claim to be 
real men.  There was no mixing of the genders.

	So I had tons of homework on top of 
thirty page assignments in English to plow 
through David Copperfield and his goings on.  I 
remember nothing from David Copperfield.  As 
sweet about it as Miss Cobb was, she could not 
inspire me to read the book.  Every night, I 
would open the damn book up to the same page, and 
try to catch up with the rest of the class. 
Actually, I don't know how many kids read the 
assignments.  Some openly said they did, and they 
took part in class discussions.  I, however, 
stepped back from making false impressions.  I 
even spoke to Miss Cobb about it.

	"I can't get past page fifteen," I told 
her.  "It's so boring, and the women are all 
drips or witches.  I can't stand it."

	She encouraged me to catch up on the 
weekend.  After all, the rest of the class was 
reading pages ninety through one hundred twenty. 
The gap would only get worse the longer I 
stalled, and our grade would be based largely on 
our performance with the Charles Dickens portion 
of the semester.  Was thirty pages really that 
awful much?

	Yes.  It was.  It was when your eyes were 
falling out of your head from ennui, and every 
word was a torture.  I just saw a copy of David 
Copperfield, a nice copy, at a bookstore, stacked 
up next to other Dickens classics.  It took up a 
sizeable portion of the shelf, and stood half a 
foot thick.  I have to wonder if this was with or 
without illustrations, but it looked like a 
replica of how it first appeared in print, the 
font and page layout, so antiquated.  I've heard 
all the accolades, the enthusiastic praise of the 
depth and importance of Charles Dickens.  I've 
listened to the stories of how he acted out his 
characters' behaviour right there in his study, 
like a mad man, crawling on the floor, shaking 
his head, jabbering and blithering aloud.  I've 
even seen samples of the man's handwriting which 
was, to put it bluntly, that of an hysterical 
personality.  And blathering out loud in his 
study would normally hold great appeal for me.  I 
like those little eccentric touches of insanity, 
though from my own private experiences, I have to 
feel an empathic ache of anguish for  his wife 
and family.

	But with all these things to recommend 
him, I still loathed the book and reeled from the 
author.  I simply couldn't read it.  This became 
even harder on me as the plans of the Berkeley 
Unified School District were unveiled.  It was 
not just Willard Junior High School, but the 
other two junior high schools in Berkeley, 
Garfield and Burbank,  as well, whose eighth 
grade classes were tackling David Copperfield. 
What was this punishment addressing?  Had all the 
thirteen year olds in Berkeley taken part in some 
communal act of disobedience?  But this was not 
all.  Every single eighth grader was being 
assigned David Copperfield, and every single 
eighth grader was assigned a term paper on David 
Copperfield, choice of topics left open, and all 
these term papers were going to be judged somehow 
by a team of expert representative English 
teachers.  There would be a prize awarded for the 
best paper.  I am sorry, but some prizes are just 
not worth earning.  I did not intend, on this 
occasion, to reach for the gold ring.  I did, 
however, have to write a decent term paper in 
order to pass English.  I had never gotten as low 
as a B+ in English.  This was not a time to get a 
C.  I was afraid to make another trip to miss 
Cobb to drum up sympathy for my cause.  The fact 
was that I hadn't read the book.  I'd managed to 
get through the first chapter, falling asleep at 
the switch, and pulling myself together in time 
to wipe off the drool collecting on my chin. 
What was I going to do, now that the rest of the 
classes had conquered the entire novel and were 
busy on page two thousand  to my sixty five? 
Honestly, I don't know how many pages long the 
entire text of David Copperfield was, but the 
feeling was that of approximately two thousand. 
How could I even fake a paper given my 
inexcusable malfeasance?

	On a crash course, I took the last 
weekend before the due date, and instead of doing 
anything else that I wanted or had to do, I 
picked one chapter in the middle of the book, and 
read it.  Laborious.  Excruciating!  Then I 
flipped ahead a thousand pages to the last 
chapter of the book and read that.  Arduous. 
Odious!  It took me the whole weekend, leaving 
Sunday night to write the paper.  Hellish. 
Laughable!  How I suffered.  I wrote a joke of a 
paper, faked within an inch of Charles Dickens' 
life, and I decided to put a lot of effort into 
the title of the paper.  Maybe Miss Cobb would be 
as tired of David Copperfield as I was once she 
worked her way to the "S"es, and would be reading 
titles, skimming papers and passing judgment on 
less information than I'd written my paper on.  I 
could always hope.

	I entitled my term paper, "The Four Faces 
of Steerforth," about one of the characters who 
means nothing to me now.  I remember him only as 
a name in a loathsome book.  I have no idea how 
old he was, where he was, what he did, what other 
characters he interacted with, how he came out. 
In fact, all I know about him is his name, 
Steerforth, and I don't even know whether that's 
his first name or his last name.  I had never 
gotten a failing grade on anything before.  I was 
not pleased with myself, but I'd done more than 
could have been expected of me, given the 
circumstances and my sorry proclivities.

	And after I'd turned in the final copy of 
the report, all worry left me, as ice leaves the 
road when the sun beats down upon it.  My 
perseverations on the whole topic, the whole 
experience, evaporated.  At that point I didn't 
care if I failed or succeeded, just so that it 
was over.  My ordeal was over.

	Then a couple weeks after I'd turned in 
my dismal excuse of a paper, there was a general 
announcement at an assembly.  My paper had won 
first prize for the whole district.  "The Four 
Faces of Steerforth," whipped the competition.  I 
don't know what that proves, but it isn't happy. 
I was awarded the grand prize.  It was a very 
fancy copy of David Copperfield, with all the 
original illustrations.


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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net