Baron Wormser: The Loss of Literature

My mother and my uncle (my mother’s only sibling) were both high school English teachers. When they got together a couple times a year – she lived in Baltimore and he lived in Cincinnati – they talked about the books they taught. Sometimes they overlapped: both of them taught, for instance, A Tale of Two Cities and were fond of quoting the opening sentence to one another. My mom, however, was more adventurous than my uncle. I recall her teaching, among other books, The Return of the Native, My Ántonia, and Lord Jim. Eustacia Vye, “the raw material of a divinity” (according to Thomas Hardy), was very real to my mother. She talked about her as if she lived down the street. Literature was like that for her. It informed her life. 

   My mother’s classes were not advanced placement classes. I’m sure some students didn’t read those books and fumbled their way through the tests but most of her students did read those books. As my mother liked to put it, if you were serious with your students and gave them serious books to read, they could be serious in return. They certainly wanted to be taken seriously. And it must have plain to her students that my mother had the chief ingredient one looks for in a teacher – enthusiasm. My uncle was one of those English teachers who preferred grammar and debate to literature, but my mother had read the great Russians in translation in her undergraduate days and they stayed with her, that sense of the gravity and depth that literature could bring. 

   To some this seems self-evident but only to some. Increasingly, the sense of vision that literature provides seems beside the point, the point being technological progress, constant entertainment, information overload, powerful societal stresses including but not limited to drugs and abuse, increasingly authoritarian political answers, economic “growth,” and environmental instability. Then there are the sheer facts that go with a distracted life – a limited attention span, an unwillingness to take on challenges, and an utter lack of patience. If it isn’t immediate, why bother with it? If it’s subjective, a matter of a person’s sensibility, who cares? And who is anyone to authoritatively tell anyone else what is worthwhile? Might they not be prejudiced, purblind, behind the times? In a society obsessed for marketing purposes with novelty and the contemporaneous, anything from the past, even a not-that- long-ago past is suspect. Hardy’s England with its rural customs might as well have been in the 16^th century. 

   My mother wanted to help her students understand life better and literature was a help in doing that. An admirer of Albert Camus, she wept when he died. I was eleven and asked her why she was crying. She put the newspaper down and told me that a great writer had died, a special writer. I can still see my mother’s eyes, somewhat unfocused from her tears. I can hear the tremor in her voice. She had lost someone who mattered to her. To me at that age, Camus was no more than a name, but I’ve come to empathize with how she felt. My mother was hemmed in on the usual fronts by female responsibilities. Camus offered a sense of life that was not hemmed in, even though circumstances could be dire. A crucial degree of personal latitude existed that could not be talked away. That latitude was part of what my mother was trying to communicate each day to her students. I say “trying” because my mother was up against the dilemma that was well articulated by Hannah Arendt: “The problem of education in the modern world lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition.” 

   As far as literature was concerned, novels, in particular, spoke to my mother. It wasn’t just the creation of a world within several hundred pages, though, since she relished Dickens, that certainly mattered to her. Rather, it was the sense that the novelist delved into the confused tangle of life and showed through dialogue and dramatic actions how people were with one another and how the emotional range of those interactions was something like infinite. Like anyone who loves literature, especially novels, she had a hunger for that range of feelings. Novels endorsed life and though most people have gotten along more or less fine without such an endorsement, for some, like my mother (and myself) that species of insight is crucial because there is nothing like it. All the inveighing, for example, that goes with politics has nothing to do with what novels can do. That lack of inveighing is a blessed trait of fiction, even fiction that treats of political matters such as, to name another book my mother knew,  All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. 

   Sometimes, my mother got down about her teaching, sighing as she went through a stack of themes, lighting a Salem cigarette, and staring off into space. She rarely had a student who cared the way she cared, who was passionate about literature. She understood her class was just a class and a grade. Or she tried to tell herself that. More than once, she wondered aloud how the country-at-large could understand anything about itself if it didn’t pay attention to the literature that had grown up with the nation and that spoke to the nation’s certainties and uncertainties, the beliefs that also were the fault lines. She adored Adlai Stevenson because he seemed to be someone who esteemed books, not that he was going to raise that inclination in a debate with Dwight Eisenhower. Like many, she welcomed the advent of John F. Kennedy and mourned his shocking death. Then the war in Vietnam became front and center and then, in 1969 at the age of forty-eight my mother died of cancer. 

   It’s plain that the drift of American society, regardless of political inclination, is away from a belief that the vision of literature matters, that the society, as my title indicates, is losing literature. A mass society, after all, is exactly that – a composite in which each person identifies as a particular identity unit among similar units. Since commerce dominates daily life, each person registers foremost as a consumer. Life’s choices seem consumer choices as different identity brands compete for interest. Everything can start to feel like online shopping. Spending time with the random yet intense dramas of life as represented in literature seems more and more a waste of time to more and more people. What is the point of bothering with Thomas Hardy’s England or, even, Willa Cather’s Nebraska? Detestation of the past (or mere indifference) is very strong among people who are flattered day and night by technological wizardry. To feel the past, whether as a locale or a value, takes some imagination, the sort of imagination that literature stokes. To stand up for the vision that literature offers and insist on the value of that vision in and of itself and not as some ideological tool takes a commitment that even so-called higher education has, over recent decades, largely washed its advanced hands of. Yet however much some variety of virtue asserts itself, literature refuses to be about right thinking. Instead, literature challenges the very idea of right thinking, which is one reason tyrants have suppressed literature, though that suppression is ably carried out by any zealous group of chiding, censorious know-it-alls. 

   I see my mother underlining some paperback by Joseph Conrad or Edith Wharton. I hear that sigh when she paused in her reading and looked around as if to remember where she was and who she was. Mere fictions – she could not get enough of them. Not because they turned her away from life but because they turned her evermore toward life. 

Baron Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar. For a list of his books, please click here.

Copyright 2024 Baron Wormser