Tuesday, May 19, 2009

The breaking of boys and men: part seven

BEYOND BROKEN BOYS




Contemporary culture has lost touch with its children, and as a result children are experienced as a proliferation of “problems.” The continuing stream of journalistic and analytic attention to perceived crises in children’s health, learning and viability intensifies rather than clears the fog. This is because the apparent attention is not really focused on children—that is, on individual beings with distinctive natures—but on the inconvenience, difficulty or threat children pose to civil order. To commerce children are a promising and readily manipulated market. To an educational complex dedicated to the maintenance of its established assumptions and protocols children present a collective bundle of under achievement, disabilities and behavioral management challenges. Medical and therapeutic establishments identify a bewildering profusion of new pathologies in children: rampant, lethal allergies, attention deficits and hyperactivity that must be treated with powerful psychoactive drugs. More and more children are reported to suffer from autism and Asperger’s syndrome, pathologies in which children appear unable to feel what others feel and to respond to them appropriately. Children are found to be profoundly susceptible to debilitating conditions formerly confined to adults, including addictions, severe depression, and suicide. Millions of children are lost to the world, transfixed before video or computer screens for most of their unassigned waking hours. Children give up their personal identities to groups and gangs. Children are in danger of being hurt or killed, of hurting and killing others.

In such a culture the remedies are as problematic as the pathologies and dysfunctions they set out to remediate. Parents obsessed over their children’s potential failure to gain impressive college admission pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for special tuition, test preparation, and college brokerage. They are called soccer moms and helicopter parents, providing and demanding too much of everything for children already overstocked with possessions and privileges and unnaturally buffered from developmentally necessary disappointments and losses. At the same time there are legions of “latch-key” children who are unstimulated, unsupervised and otherwise uncared for by working or otherwise preoccupied parents. As for pathology, suspicions mount that medicines are cause, not cure. Perhaps required inoculations cause autism. Perhaps antidepressants stimulate suicidal thinking. Perhaps the attention deficit prescriptions are medicating not a boyhood pathology but boyhood itself. Does a lack of scholastic rigor “leave children behind?” Or do we do children worse harm by hurrying them along? Is the school year long enough? Have we lost the pastoral ease and occasions for inventive play children experienced when school ended sooner and started later?

Not surprisingly, there are no satisfying answers to such questions, only mounting new concerns. This, again, is because these concerns are not really about children; they are about adult ease and unease. In this cultural climate the most urgent and compelling features of a child’s life will not be recognized or even seen. The problem of understanding a child’s experience is similar to the problem of understanding a prior historical period or a geographically remote people. We bring to the task the conceptual apparatus, language, and values we have acquired in our own time and circumstances. Without knowing it or even wanting to, our attempt to understand becomes little more than a reduction of the alien to the familiar, of their way to our way. Where reduction fails, we attribute the inassimilable material to inferior or primitive practice, or we simply fail to recognize certain features and practices at all. Thus it is with our attempts to understand children. This is not to say the enterprise is hopeless, just extremely difficult.

In order to understand and appreciate children, to love them and to help them make their imaginative and practical way, we must willfully suspend anything like certainty that we know what children are like and how they are supposed to think and behave. We must put aside, if not abandon outright, our most cherished notions of child development, of stages and phases. Our allegiance must be to children, not to conceptual models, tests, and norms. Even more important is a willingness to reconsider what constitutes data about children, especially if that term is regarded scientifically, as in measurable, replicable units of something or other. Pace social science, but reducing childhood experience to that kind of data contributes to the fog we are trying to dispel. Here one might well ask: what have we got then? This is what we’ve got. We have a loving disposition to actual, particular children, we have memory, and we have a treasure trove of stories. These are necessary but perhaps not sufficient conditions for understanding and appreciating children. There is also a biblical injunction to do something very basic and humbling—to become as little children. Perhaps the surrender of assumptions suggested above will, if it is a real surrender, amounts to the same thing.

Memory is crucial to accessing childhood, and memory is gendered. As a man, my consideration of childhood has taken me to boyhood where, in our era, all is far from well. Was it ever thus? No, it was not. Great and enduring stories remind us that boys once made rapt progress through beckoning worlds, worlds worth exploring, however perilous the way ahead. Memory, if we dare, will do the same.


Boy spirit is not understood through analysis but through witness. The first impression is more feeling tone than describable quality. We sense a spark, something infectious in boy’s urge to get up and out and away. He wants to move, to touch it, hold it, grab it, put it together, build it up, knock it down. He wants to make it move, get inside it, drive it, fly it away. He loves the look of it, the feel of it, the noise if it. He wants to take it outside, take you with him. He wants to show you, wants you to watch him. Maybe, for a minute, he wants you to help him. He wants to be amazed. He wants you to be amazed. He wants to run off, and he wants you to chase after him. He wants to get away, and he wants you to catch him. He wants to do it again.

He loves that you love him, and that is how he begins to love. In this he is irresistible. He is outraged but not cowed by meanness, neglect, and injury. He is neither aware of nor grateful for safety and comfort, but he thrives in them. Safety and comfort are the beginning of his understanding of home, of glad return. If he has been sufficiently loved and safe, if he knows home and loves home, he will play the hero and then one day possibly be a hero, a protector of loved ones, a savior of the city. He may also, even if he is safe and loved, play other parts. He may play villain or fool or rascal or wizard, but if he has been safe and loved, he will hold the hero above the rest.

He does not have to be taught place or how to feel about place. He is born prepared. His senses and his heart are keenly receptive to the print of places. Here you can serve. Take him outdoors, to parks, ponds, darkly canopied stands of trees, to stream beds studded with climbable rocks. Take him to the shore. Let him peer up into the faces of cliffs. From great heights let him gaze out over vast expanses. Hold him tight.

You cannot know and needn’t bother about the thousands of place impressions that he will treasure and store when he is alone: the swirl of the wall paper by the bed, the geometry of the dormered window, the pattern of tiles on the bathroom floor, the snow curled over the eaves, the creak of the stairs, the beckoning dark behind the furnace.

In pictures and in your travels, stand him in front of handsome structures: the classical court house, the cathedral, the castle, the imposing fortress. Let him behold the skyline of a great city .Tell him stories of great cities, great kingdoms. He already holds an intimation of such places and will store the images and stories in his deep knowing. He will go to animals, take their measure. Let him. Watch him watch them, squirrels, yard birds, rabbits, cats. Have a dog. Have two dogs.

Understand that he can lash out suddenly, that he can hit. Understand that he will throw things, drop things, break things on purpose. He can push. He can knock down. He can snatch what he knows is not his, hide and hoard it. He will press every boundary, and he will long to trespass. Understand these things. Feel them as he is feeling them. Remember feeling them. Then correct him. Then stop him. In time he may feel a helpless longing to set fires, to shoot, to stab, to pierce, to blow things up. You must acknowledge these urges, too, perhaps remember them. Then instruct and correct. When you must, stay his hand, tell him no.

As soon as he can, he will turn his imagination and longing to remote times. He is equally charmed by the deep past and the deep future. He seems always to have known that there was a time of dinosaurs. Dark forests and remote jungles are equally familiar. Just as readily he will extend himself into the future, outer space, worlds beyond worlds.

He will be drawn to the trappings and the clothes of prior eras: the knight’s armor, Robin Hood’s tunic and tights, the pirate’s buckled shoes, the tricorn hat, the cape, the sword, the bow and arrow, the chaps, the spurs, the six guns. These dreams will flow seamlessly into dreams of sport, of colossal work. He will be enchanted first by the uniforms and equipment, tools and vehicles. He will treasure, then scatter and forget hats, helmets, balls, mitts, clubs, bats, rods, reels, skis, goggles, fins. He will mount and ride anything that moves. He will quickly learn to steer but not to slow or stop. He does not love the big machines but wonders how to reduce them to his size.

He is responsive to music, even when he seems oblivious. He can feel music carrying him. He will mouth the words without regard to their sense but feeling their attitude. In music he will sense crisis, sweetness, danger, love’s longing and its loss. He will rise at once to making music, to the instruments, their burnished wood and gleaming brass, the thrilling complexity of stops and valves and felts and hammers. He moves at once to percussion.

He will enter stories earlier than you think, even as he fidgets, looks, away, squirms off your lap. You must understand he enters the story long before he follows its sense.
He enters the characters and the creatures. He enters the colors and the shapes. He is able to make them pulse with his own feeling. Show him, read him, tell him stories. When he has sufficient language to follow a story’s sense, some stories will hold him fast, confirm him. Grimm tales of abandoned or imperiled children who make their way will do this almost certainly. Stories of the destined, miraculous birth will do this, stories of Moses in the bull rushes, Romulus and Remus, Jesus in the manger. Do not interpret or explain his stories. Do not tell him the moral of stories. He has already gone deeper than that. He has lived in those stories, and there is every chance that he will go on telling the story because it is now the story of himself.

He enters stories before he reads. Reading does not unlock stories or open them up. Reading is only the medium for accessing stories in texts. Reading, even facile reading, can deaden stories, even as the reader is carried along in the act. The effort and awareness of reading will begin to form a barrier, distancing the boy from the world in the story, so that in time he will be able to say and begin even to believe that it is only a story.

A boy’s experience of other people, of his parents, siblings, adults and other children compose his first stories. Before he enters texts, he enters them. He does not come to know them as he learns their names and qualities. He enters into them, absorbs them before he names and categorizes them. In this he is utterly indiscriminate. If he is safe and loved, he will enter, know, and love others eagerly. He will observe, he will wait before touching, before imposing. He will play along side, listening, watching. Then he will risk offering a gesture, an exchange. He will follow or he will lead. He will do what the others are doing. He will play. He plays long before he is “taught” to play; he is not taught to play.

Boys who are loved and safe, boys who are witnessed rather than guided and shaped, are neither fearful nor fearsome. Such boys enter an open world, a story with all the elements, including loss, danger, evil, and death. In an era when boys, at least some boys, were loved and safer, there was no harm in martial play, in stories of boy orphans, boys kidnapped, boys taken up into a band of child thieves. In that era there was no harm in fantasies and cartoons of edgy cats alternately pursuing and fleeing mischievous mice or canaries. There was a zest, a lilt to the breakneck pursuit of predator and prey, heads flattened with frying pans, falls from cliffs, spectacular electrocutions. In that world the hapless and foolish sufferers always recovered and resumed the chase.

By contrast, in a culture in which children are really neither safe nor loved, where they are shaped and guided and lavishly provided for but insufficiently witnessed, danger lies everywhere. It lies in the coloring of apples. It lies in peanuts and in bees. It lies in fiber glass and household cleansers. It lies in competitive sports, in hurtful toddler games like musical chairs, in sadistic playground games like dodge ball. It lies in animal fat, in milk, in new strains of bacteria, in viruses, in the medicines devised to treat the viruses. If children ride their bikes down the street on an errand, they may be abducted and disappear. Pedophilic predators arise in profusion, insinuating themselves into children’s chat rooms, their vans idling just outside the school yard. Teachers and coaches and counselors are pedophiles. Scout leaders are pedophiles. Priests and rabbis and congressmen are pedophiles. There is no end to the succession of new child pathologies and syndromes and disabilities. Desperate efforts to shield children from threats on so many fronts give rise to monstrous parental excesses, resulting in new pathologies and syndromes. The ambient mood in such a world is terror. It is an age of terror.

One cannot—and should not!—say with certainty how the world will look, how conditions will improve, what fears will be dispelled and what errors will be corrected once we regain an understanding and appreciation of children. To do so would be to set up as if one had figured it out, drawn closure, adjusted the engine, patched up the infrastructure. That is the last thing children need.

Whether born of arrogance or desperation, the assumption of certain knowledge about children and what is good for them is the heart of the problem. There is no such certainty, no such knowledge. Every boy, if he is safe and loved, is a work in progress. If he is lovingly and appreciatively witnessed, he is very likely to emerge a surprise, possibly a pleasant surprise, perhaps the last thing you expected. Hedged in by knowing expectations of what he is like, of how and what and how fast he should learn, of how he should behave, whom he should love, and what kind of work he should do, he will refuse in the now familiar ways: he will draw inward, act out crazily, rebel, get sick.

Because we cannot nurture viable children with certainties does not mean we cannot nurture them. It is disposition, not certainty that is required. The basic dispositions have already been named: the disposition to love, to appreciate, to witness. When these dispositions are central and uncompromised, they are more than capable of resisting seemingly enormous cultural pressures to nurture and school children otherwise. Rightly disposed parents, joining will to instinct, have always done this, but because this disposition is by its nature unformulaic and fluid, there has been no movement or theory or school to carry it forth.

The first condition sought by the loving parental disposition is safety, and this cannot be overemphasized. Abraham Maslow rightly put a child’s safety at the foundation of any possible future realization. This is real safety, the soul’s apprehension of safety. It cannot be materially produced. It cannot be abstracted to suburban or rural refuges. It certainly cannot be gated. No privilege can buy it. A child can be safe and loved in a tenement or in a trailer park. Children who live in unworldly opulence, with every toy and diversion, can and do live in hellish anxiety and fear. For many western children unworldly opulence has become normative, generating its own stream of anxiety, the anxiety of not getting it, of not having it yet, of losing it. It is harder than almost any idealist imagines to shake compulsive acquisitiveness in a culture predominantly dedicated to material acquisition. In that culture, so fundamentally lacking in real safety, acquisition holds out the desperate promise, a promise never fulfilled. Children who sense their parents’ desperation in this regard become doubly so.

If a loving disposition can rise to resist crippling, dead-end acquisitiveness, it can also stand guard against and resolutely refuse to practice what the angry Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing called psychic robbery. Psychic robbery is the practice of substituting one’s own desires for what a child is thinking and feeling. Psychic robbery occurs in seemingly benign ways, as when a child declares, “I hate broccoli,” and a parent responds, “You don’t hate broccoli.” It also occurs—normatively—when children express their darkest and most intense feelings: “I hate baby,” “I want to kill you.” When parents and other nurturers answer “no you don’t,” “you don’t feel that way,” the child is not reassured; he is made anxious and hurried into despair, because the truth has not been acknowledged.

Psychic robbery is exponentially worse than disagreement. A child’s dark or challenging declaration can be met with sheer witness, with questions, with consolation, or with objection, but if it is met with a knowing, manipulative, or perhaps angry insistence that his feeling is not felt, that what was actually felt is an alien mental state, that is the beginning of a child’s profoundest anxiety and despair. The child is easily cowed into verbal denials and recantations, but the underlying and now inaccessible interior condition is deepening anxiety and despair. To deny and replace any true mental state felt or declared by a child is in effect to negate him, to cut him off from connectedness to others, to undermine his safety. Children detached in this way do not forsake the dark or unwanted sentiment. To the contrary, because the sentiment has been unwitnessed and unmet, it will become a fixation. Only in a detached, unreachable condition can a child live on in a world of psychic robbers. He will not relate to or find himself in seemingly well-intentioned but actually frightened classrooms and school curricula where the dark thought is unutterable on pain of expulsion, where it cannot be found in the assigned texts or even in the libraries, where organized exercises to identify and express “feelings” are highly manipulative, transparent attempts to lighten and sweeten the real thing, not to open it up, but to seal it off. There is ultimately no denying the darkness. Psychic robbery is both a selfish and futile practice. It is generated by a fearful disposition, not a loving one. The culture in which psychic robbery is normative will find itself overwhelmed by the very terror it refuses to witness in children.

I hope by now it is understood that all of this is offered out of a particular disposition, not out of certainty. This is not to say that disposition is weak or somehow inferior to certainty. Love and appreciation of children can infuse disposition with great strength and clarity—but again, not certainty. Beware of certainty, of the need for certainty. Certainty can only close off and cut short the continuous process of our understanding. Forsaking certainty does not mean you cannot know things. Knowing is not confined by certainty. It is possible to know, for instance, that the pursuit of certainty is futile, that the assumption of certainty does not satisfy.

All of so-called “self-help” is driven by the illusion of certainty: that some sage or therapist knows for certain why what’s wrong is wrong and how to make it right. Like addicts on the prowl for a fix their enfeebled forebrains know full well will not permanently satisfy, like unlucky gamblers emptying their wallets to place yet another bet, like school girls prowling the malls for yet another tank top or lip gloss, strangely aware that these items will not transform or satisfy them any more than any of their prior purchases, the self-helpless continue to kneel at the alters of certainty.

It is by no means certain but perhaps very promising that in addition to a loving disposition to children, certain pathways ahead beckon brightly—in fact, have always beckoned brightly. Again, my experience limits me here to the experience of boys.

I believe boys can thrive. In the past some have thrived. We have their stories. Loved and safe as they begin, boys have and perhaps can again make their way vigorously through experiences both enlivening and self-affirmingly great. In this condition their lives unfold as in a story. The first is the story of boyhood itself, the limitless exuberance and danger and wonder of the puer-spirit, the puer-spirit played out in every way, in every place, with whatever kind of gear, and with whatever companions happen to be at hand.

The boyhood story is busy and charged with movement, but there is no forward motion. Forward motion begins in another story, the story of a passionate quest. This is a love story. The boy is taken up, consumed in, enchanted by someone beloved, someone perfectly good, perfectly beautiful. The nearer he gets to the beloved, the deeper the communion, the more vaulting the love. There is no end to this, but even as the lover feels and seems to have it, it is at risk, it is elusive, it is gone. There must be a quest to regain this. Its allure is at the same time utterly chaste, deeply sexual and holy. The quest is for something like the legendary grail or a magic ring. It is for somebody like Dante’s Beatrice or Romeo’s Juliet. There is no certain end to this quest. There is every peril and obstacle. The quest could fail, could end in disappointment or even death. The very sadness of that prospect intensifies the beauty of the condition. The great boy does not care. He wants only to try. He wants to be consumed in the trying.

There is another boy’s story, perhaps the final story. This is the story of saving the city. The very best of cities has enemies within, enemies without. The great boy realizes early on and will continue to realize through the course of his life that the city, like his loving parents, has been his playground, his school, his home and his safe return. He has always loved his city, and even as he quested far from home, he realizes that without the city he could not have been. His happiness and all of his beloved could not have been.

His love helps him to see that the city is in peril and he musk risk everything, face every danger to save it. Saving the city is now the quest. It will require every thing he has mastered and understood. He will not, or not for long, attempt political reforms. He will not fall back on reasons and arguments. He is driven by no vision of clean streets, prosperous commerce, or civic conduct. He will of course create or preserve order, but he wants to save to soul of the city, its vitality, its loving disposition. We cannot of course know exactly how this new order will be constituted. It will be the kind of order a spirited boy who wants to save the city would create. It would be an order good for spirited boys. It might be the salvation of all of us, although nobody can say for certain.

The breaking of boys and men: part six

BOYS WITHOUT A STORY:
Broken Boys in the World

Boys reveal their broken condition in two ways. They tell us how they feel in written and spoken utterances, and they act out their inner state in increasingly dramatic and violent ways. If the broken boy’s connection to what sustains him has been severed so completely that he can no longer even recognize it or long for it, he fills the void of what has been lost with visions of negation. He alternately wants to destroy himself, to destroy others, and to destroy the world in which his life grows increasingly desolate.
Boys entering junior high school and on the brink of biological puberty are profoundly aware that the days of their true boyhood, such as they might have been, are numbered. They know just as surely as Peter Pan what the story of their future promises to be: an increasingly consequential progression of school requirements and then work. They feel the looming weight of the unstated expectation that a boy will one day assume domestic responsibilities as a husband and a father as well as civic responsibilities as a citizen, perhaps a community leader, and, if needed, a soldier. These prospects carry no allure or romance. Boys are more or less aware of them, but, except for certain fantasies of soldiering and combat, they do not long for them. Boys with nothing to long for attempt to fill the void with intense, reality-obliterating stimulation. They seek it with whatever materials are at hand: street drugs, liquor or pharmaceuticals filched from their parents, toxic inhalants, violent fantasies, and, once they are able to amass a suitable arsenal, violence itself.
Perhaps the least remarked aspect of the grim progression of American schoolyard shootings in recent years is that many of the young perpetrators had hoped that, in addition to drama, catastrophe, and annihilation of the people and things, their outing might provide some “fun.” Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson were 11 and 13 when they bundled a collection of rifles and handguns pilfered from Andrew’s grandfather into one of the Johnson’s vans and drove off to shoot their classmates and teachers at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro Arkansas, March 24, 1998.
Neither boy was an innocent. Andrew, his schoolmates claimed, had previously tortured and killed a friend’s cat and had shot another child in the face with a pellet gun. Mitchell boasted that he had formerly been a member of a violent gang, talked about getting high and “having a lot of killing to do.” At the time of the shootings, he was awaiting trial for having molested a little girl while he was visiting his estranged father.
The morning of the shooting the boys, dressed in army-fatigue outfits, drove to school and parked the van nearby. While Andrew ran inside and set off a fire alarm, Mitchell hauled the guns into the woods directly across from the school entrance. As the children streamed outside, the boys opened fire, killing four girls, a teacher, and wounding nine others before fleeing back to the van, where they were overcome by police.
In their school photographs the boys look, if anything, younger than their years, but each had already developed a canny sense of what he needed to do to appear to meet adult expectations. After their arrest, when their parents and other adults were present, they wept, expressed remorse, and asked for bibles and a chance to see their minister. With the other young inmates and out of their elders’ view, the boys talked excitedly and boastfully about what they had done, especially shooting a teacher Andrew particularly disliked.
Because of Arkansas’s relatively lenient sentencing laws for juvenile felons (since revised), Andrew and Mitchell were detained in juvenile detention facilities until their twenty-first birthdays. Mitchell was released in 2005 without a public record as a felon, legally able, if he should so choose, to purchase firearms. One New Years Day, 2007, he was arrested, along with another young murderer who had been convicted and released, for possession of marijuana and illegal possession of a loaded handgun. Andrew was released from detention on his birthday in May, 2007.
Six weeks after the Jonesboro school shootings, Kip Kinkel, 15, shot and killed his mother and father at home after they found out he had been expelled from school for having a stolen handgun in his locker. The following day, he packed up an assortment of his pistols and rifles and opened fire on his classmates at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon., killing two of them and injuring 25 before being subdued by police.
Kip’s mother and father were high school Spanish teachers. The Kinkels lived in a commodious suburban house where Kip was virtually an only child, his older sister by six years having departed for college. The extensive media coverage of the massacre stressed how unlikely it seemed to those who knew him that Kip would be capable of such brutal murders. Teachers and schoolmates described him as “boyish and likable.” His parents were reported to be attentive and loving. Commentators searching for possible psychological factors in the outburst pointed out that in a family of achievers, Kip was dyslexic and had to struggle scholastically, also that he was physically awkward in a family that prized athletic prowess.
In a journal he kept and in some of his assigned school writing, Kip tried to express what he was feeling about himself and his place in the world. These documents make clear he was suffering miserably, even as he presented a “boyish and likable” face to the world. He is boyish and likable in the note of confession he left after shooting his mother and father: “I have just killed my mother and father! I don’t know what is happening. I love my mom and dad so much. I just got two felonies on my record. My parents can’t take that…I’m so sorry. I am a horrible son. I wish I had been aborted…I don’t deserve them. They were such wonderful people.”
He is boyish and likable in his statement of contrition to the survivors of those he killed at school. “I have thought about what I could say to make people feel just a little bit better. But I have come to the realization that it really doesn’t matter what I say. Because there is nothing I can do to take away the pain and destruction I have caused. I absolutely loved my parents and had no reason to kill them. I had no reason to dislike, kill or try to kill anyone at Thurston. I am truly sorry this happened…”
It is almost unbearable to look at the photographs of Kip Kinkel’s face that appeared in the press at the time of the incident. Dark bangs fall over the forehead of a troubled, wistful boy’s face. It is a face one cannot help liking. It is a boy one somehow wants to embrace. His dark and desperate journal entries indicate no viable path forward in his school life or beyond. At one point he remarks that he would be unthinkable as anyone’s father. He reveals a powerful infatuation for a certain girl whom he is sure will never really know him and penetrate his isolation. He cannot imagine easy, satisfying friendships. He cannot imagine succeeding on the school’s terms or his parents’ terms. There was never for him a secret garden or Neverland or any kind of boy-realm where he felt invigorated, inspired and secure just as he was. The only way ahead he acknowledges is the world’s way, and toward that world he feels no tug or welcome, only alternating waves of murderous anger and self-loathing. And while he cannot see a place for himself within it, he does not fault the world of his family or the world of school. “They were wonderful people. It’s not their fault…My head just doesn’t work right…I wish I made my mother proud. I tried so hard to find happiness. But you know me, I hate everything.”
Kip Kinkel was by no means an eloquent or practiced writer, but in the personal journal found in his room, he may have come very close to realizing what was at the heart of his dreadful impulse to hate and to harm. “I don’t want to see, hear, speak or feel evil, but I can’t help it. I want to kill and give pain without a cost. And there is no such thing. We kill him—we killed him a long time ago.” The transition from expressing his desire to kill and give pain to the statement, “We kill him—we killed him a long time ago,” is surprising, seemingly irrational. That transition is revelatory, however, if one assumes, as Kip Kinkel quite possibly did, that the “him” referred to is boyhood itself.

On April 20, 1999, a little less than a year after Kip Kinkel opened fire on his classmates at Thurston High, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both seniors at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, entered the school in late morning heavily armed and dragging duffel bags filled with home-made explosives. Over the next 55 minutes, they wandered about the cafeteria, library and corridors of the school, tossing bombs and firing rifles and handguns at students and faculty. At times the shooters seemed to be firing randomly at display cases or banks of windows. At other times they would focus murderously on students they knew, taunt them and ridicule them before shooting them at point blank range. A little after noon, the school had grown quiet. Twelve students and a teacher lay dead. Twenty-four others were wounded. What students and staff remained were either silently hiding or dead. Police S.W.A.T. teams were massing outside, preparing to storm the building. A school surveillance video captured the final moments of the assailants’ lives as they paced agitatedly about the library before sitting down and shooting themselves fatally in the head.
Of all the school massacres of the past decade, none has been more troubling or gruesome than the Columbine shootings. The killers were older, farther along in their personal development, more effective, better planners. Both boys were facile with computer technology and shared a passion for firearms and explosives. Neither came from abusive or especially troubled households. Neither expressed hostility to his family. In documents discovered after the shootings, both boys stated explicitly their families were in no way at fault. On a calendar kept by Harris and found after his death, he wrote “good wombs have born bad sons” in the Mother’s Day square. Of the two friends, Harris was the more volatile and angry. Earlier in high school he had posted on his computer what appeared to be death threats to a former friend but local police did not see grounds for a formal response. At the time of the shootings Harris was taking a prescription drug, Luvox, to treat depression.
Klebold, best friend to Harris throughout high school, was quieter, harder to read. Some of his classmates thought him merely shy, but others, including some of his teachers, were aware of an angry, rebellious streak. He was inclined to inappropriate language in class, and one of his senior year creative writing assignments was felt by his teacher to be violent and mean-spirited enough to warrant a concerned conference. Klebold served for a time as a technology aide in Columbine’s computer facility, but he had to be disciplined for stealing one of the school’s lap tops and taking it home. In January of their junior year, Harris and Klebold were arrested for breaking into a car to steal computer equipment, for which both were required to undergo psychological counseling and to perform community service. Both boys complied and expressed contrition in the course of their mandated rehabilitation but secretly vowed to wreak a terrible “judgment” on those who had caught and disciplined them for what they cryptically called “the incident.”
The massacre appears to have been planned for over a year. Not old enough to purchase firearms legally, they found intermediaries through whom they could buy shot guns, pistols and semi-automatic weapons. On the internet they learned how to make pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, and other explosives, more than a hundred of which they brought to school on the day of the attack. They kept meticulous track of their growing arsenal, including a video inventory. They logged time at a nearby firing range to practice shooting, also documenting these outings with video recordings. The boys periodically exchanged coded messages about the apocalyptic event they had conceived. The attack they were planning was sometimes linked to the film Natural Born Killers, in which a deranged young couple goes on a cross-country shooting spree.
There is a decided grandiosity in the way the boys referred to the impending event. The date of the shooting, April 20, seems to have been a last-minute postponement; the boys had hoped to launch their attack on April 19, commemorating the Branch Davidian shootout in Waco, Texas, the Oklahoma City bombing, and Hitler’s birthday. A year before the massacre, Klebold referred to it as the “holy April morning.” The day prior to the event he filled up pages of his school notebook with excited musings: “About 26.5 hours from now the judgement will begin. Difficult but not impossible, necessary, nervewracking & fun.”
When Klebold was confronted by his parents about the violent fantasy he had handed in to his Creative Writing teacher, he protested, “It’s just a story.” There is a clear sense in the documents they left behind that both boys were hungry for a story; more specifically, that their own lives might rise to story quality. But besides Natural Born Killers, the only stories in which they could locate themselves were those structured into their favorite video games, Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. In both games, one set on Mars, the other in a kind of Nazi prison, the challenge is for an armed and embattled individual to prevail against a teeming onslaught of attackers. In both games the embattled individual is decidedly righteous, and the attackers—sinister humans, extra-terrestrials, demons—are evil. In both games the world in which the combat is carried out is utterly spoiled. Combatants battle on ramparts suspended over putrid seas of toxic waste. No better world, no prior world awaits the lone victor. He exists to prevail in an endless and escalating succession of violent encounters in which one can either kill or be killed. Crucial for survival in each game is the acquisition of ever more lethal weapons.
Klebold and Harris seemed to be arming themselves for such a contest. A few generations earlier or in the cultural context of another hemisphere, their fantasizing might have been played out on the open range, with a lone cavalry officer on horse back confronting an Apache war party ascending the ridge before him, or perhaps with a masterfully skilled martial artist leaping, kicking and chopping his way through a never ending swarm of deadly attackers. But for Klebold and Harris, the story they were attempting to compose was an angry, ugly blend of Doom and Wolfenstein and Waco and Oklahoma City and Jonesboro. In their story they would be the lone, pitiless, against-the-world combatants, and their enemies would be all who had ever slighted them, ignored them, shamed them, or irritated them, even if the provocation was no more than living, looking, behaving and believing as they did.
The ruined world was school, Columbine High School. In it, as Klebold inscribed in Harris’s yearbook, “my wrath will be godlike.” Harris confided in his journal, “Before I leave this worthless place, I will kill whoever I deem unfit.”
Since the inception of the plan to attack their school, both boys were aware that one way or another they would lose their lives. Harris pledges he will “leave this worthless place” without regret. Three years before 9/11 he mused about hijacking a plane in Denver and crashing it into a building in New York City. The day before the shootings, Klebold wrote in his notebook, “It’s interesting, when I’m in my human form, knowing I’m going to die.” Elsewhere in the same notebook he hopes that the rampage might be at least “fun.” “What fun is life,” he wrote, “without a little death?”
In the event, the Columbine school massacre was, even by the perpetrator’s standards, a terrible story. Sensational as the breaking news of the shootings was, the attack did not go as planned. The initial event was to have been the detonation of two substantial propane bombs in the cafeteria. The bombs they assembled were to have been powerful enough to blow up the entire cafeteria and cause the library above to collapse over the wreckage. The attack plan called for the boys to plant the bombs, withdraw to their cars to observe the devastation and then to open fire on students and faculty as they fled from the building. When the bombs failed to detonate and Harris and Klebold reentered the building, students were slow to realize their gun-toting classmates posed a danger.
As the two armed shooters ranged through the building, they shot some students at close range. They spared others. They fired idly in the direction of distant students, missing most of them. They shot out banks of windows, prominent display cases. Every few minutes they would toss an explosive—pipe bomb, Molotov cocktail—over a railing or under a desk where students were cowering, but most of the bombs failed to explode. A boy who knew Klebold asked him what he was doing. Klebold answered, “Oh, just killing people.” To a girl he encountered praying out loud that she would not be killed, Klebold pointed his gun at her and asked, “Do you believe in God?” He taunted her for a while and then apparently lost interest.
There were brutal, cold-blooded moments. Discovering a tangle of students hiding under a table, Harris said “peek-a-boo,” then shot and killed them at point blank range. At one point in the library, the shooters demanded that “all the jocks” stand up so they could shoot them. None did. Witnesses report another girl was asked if she believed in God and was shot when she answered affirmatively.
In less than an hour the school was quiet. The gunshots and a few of the explosives had damaged the facility, but it was not the smoldering ruin the boys had envisaged. Twelve students and a teacher lay dead in or around the building. Twenty-four others had been hurt. As police SWAT teams positioned themselves outside, Harris and Klebold paced distractedly about the library. Harris was bloodied and suffering from a broken nose caused by the recoiling stock of his rifle. Sensing there was nothing more to do, the boys sat down and shot themselves. No one can know their final thoughts, but they would have been aware that the attack had not gone very well, that they had failed to cause the kind of devastation they had imagined. There is no indication that either boy experienced any kind of revelation, however dark. Klebold was not seen to have had any “fun,” sadistic or otherwise. The events combined to no coherent story.
At seventeen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were as tall and rangy as men. Unlike Kip Kinkel, they could not have been—and in fact were not—called “boyish and likable” by anyone. And in fact they were not at all like boys; they represent, rather, something vacant and devastating that boys might become.

The breaking of boys and men: part five

BOYS BROKEN

When, on the brink of suicide, young Werther makes his final, desperate case to his beloved—that his boy-spirit, his very vitality depends on her undivided love and attention—Lotte, now married, responds with the last thing he wants to hear. “Be a man. Put an end to this dismal attachment to a creature who can do nothing but pity you.” (115)
Lotte’s mature and practical perspective is worthy of Freud in its psychological acuity, but the insight is no help to Werther, as the pitch of his feeling—inflamed, impossible, or otherwise—is the very condition that sustains him. He has experienced the ecstasy of living at that pitch, a psychic frequency to which uncompromised boys become easily attuned. When Lotte implores him to “be a man,” to get over the condition he has experienced as life itself, he witheringly responds that her words “could be printed and commended to the use of teachers.”
Werther had been schooled enough to sense that the purpose of culturally mandated education is not to enlarge or exercise a child’s spirit but to tame and subordinate it to culturally approved purposes, a process which from the spirited child’s standpoint is an unbearable violation.
By the time Barrie composed Peter Pan, the protocols of compulsory schooling were so firmly established in western minds as to be virtually unquestioned. There has long been and continues to be a proliferation of schemes for educational reform, but any serious reconsideration of compulsory schooling itself has been all but non-existent—except in stories.
For Barrie, who remembered being happy in school but not at university, submission to schooling was fundamentally opposed to the free expression of boy-spirit. In Peter Pan the embodiment of schooling is Hook, who loathes the very idea of Peter Pan, who confesses to being unable to look at him while he is sleeping, because there is something so untroubled about his posture.
Hook’s character, Barrie discloses to his readers, was fashioned in the crucible of school, and it is school’s central aim to capture and eliminate the likes of Peter Pan.
“Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in ablaze; but as those who have read between the lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments…and he still adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all he retained his passion for good form.” (229) The imposition of good form is the ultimate accomplishment of schooling, but it requires the gradual mastery and then the elimination of boy-spirit. Peter knows this instinctively. When Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s mother, asks Peter if she may adopt him, the first thing he asks her is “Would you send me to school?” Mrs. Darling tells him that she would, and then to an office, and then he would be a man. Peter tells her without reflection that he doesn’t want to go to school and learn “solemn things.” More direct than young Werther, he tells her, “I don’t want to be a man.”
The adopted lost boys ultimately bear out Peter’s reservation. “Before they had attended school a week they saw what goats they had been not to remain on the island; but it was too late now, and soon they settled down to being as ordinary as you or me or Jenkins minor. It is sad to have to say the power to fly gradually left them.” (231)

Later in the twentieth century, after the world wars, a new kind of boy’s story began making an insistent appearance. In these stories there is no rapturous flight, literally or figuratively; there is only falling, loss, and utter wreckage. A boy like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye (1951) may have an intimation of a prior, golden world, but he will fail to locate it in the course of his sad, lonely truancy in Manhattan. Holden has just bolted from a prep school from which he was about to be dismissed for unsatisfactory effort. At the brink of nervous collapse, he imagines stepping off curbsides into an abyss. In this state he pictures himself in a field of rye at the top of a steep cliff where he is patrolling in order to catch wandering children before they can fall.
In John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (l959) Gene, a self-aware young man who has successfully mastered the good form necessary to make his way at his prep school, realizes that his best friend, Phineas, has a quality he longs for but cannot master: an untamable exuberance. Phineas’s playful spontaneity is counter-scholastic, if not downright anti-scholastic, and while it is infectious among his companions, it arouses a poisonous envy in Gene whose determined scholastic attainments have barred all access to such openheartedness. One evening on a study break Gene and Phineas climb up a tree to a limb overhanging a riverbank. To make one’s way far enough out on the limb to clear the bank when he jumps requires exceptional daring, and this prospect is thrilling to Phineas. As Phineas moves out along the limb, Gene, without reflection, jounces it with his foot, causing his friend to fall sickeningly to earth. The resulting injury ultimately kills him.
As the Cold War baby-boom years progressed, stories of fallen, broken boys proliferated. The phenomenally popular Catcher in the Rye was for a time viewed warily by schools and, due to Holden’s frank and sometimes vulgar utterances, banned in some, but within a decade the book, along with Separate Peace and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), became required school reading. But even as the story of the fallen boy became standard school fare, successive tellings grew darker and grittier. By the early nineteen sixties, there is a clear sense in the strongest boys’ stories that the descent is past mattering; the only thing left to report is the hellish quality of the fallen condition.
Even before his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver was widely recognized as a modern master of the short story. One of his earliest published stories, “Nobody Said Anything” (1963), recounts a single truant day in the life of an unnamed middle school-aged boy. He awakes to an overheard quarrel between his parents and immediately goads his younger brother, with whom he shares a bed, into a foul-mouthed exchange of complaints, in which the brother is alternately referred to a “chicken-shit,” an “asshole,” and a “royal asshole.” Unable to face the day and school, the boy feigns stomach trouble, and in the course of an unsupervised morning and afternoon while his parents are away at their jobs, he proceeds, as soon as his mother leaves the house, to smoke some of her cigarettes, watch morning television, masturbate, and rummage through the drawers in his parents’ bedroom in search of condoms and lubricants before deciding to go outdoors and fish.
Like the world inside, the world outdoors is ruined. The boy’s father has periodically taken him fishing, and in those outings, close to the elements, the boy vaguely senses a spark of vitality. As he proceeds through the mean streets of the working class town where he lives, a woman stops her car and asks if he needs a ride. The boy observes her warily: “She was thin and had pimples around her mouth. Her hair was up in curlers. But she was sharp enough. She had a brown sweater with nice boobs inside.” (7) They exchange a few awkward words before she drops him off near the creek where he intends to fish. The brief encounter with the woman arouses him sexually, and he fantasizes about being alone with her under the covers of his bed. He hurries over the embankment down to the creek and masturbates into it.
The creek bed lies adjacent to an airport runway. It is a fouled, forlorn watercourse, fed by drainage pipes. Crawling under a fence bearing a No Trespassing sign, the boy makes his way along the brackish water and begins fantasizing again about the woman, encountering her in her house as she is sitting on the toilet. He is about to masturbate again when there is a strike on his line. He reels in the fish with little effort. He recognizes that it is a trout, but there is something wrong with it. “It was the color of moss, that color green. It was as if he had been wrapped up in moss a long time, and the color had come off all over him.” The boy is troubled that the fish had not put up a fight. “I wondered if he was all right. I looked at him for a time longer, then I put him out of his pain.” (11)
Moving down the stream, the boy comes upon another boy, who excitedly tells him he has spotted the biggest fish he has ever seen. The boy, like the woman in the car, bears a haggard, ruined look: “He looked like a rat or something. I mean, he had buckteeth and skinny arms and this ragged long-sleeved shirt that was too small for him.” (12)
Together the boys pursue the fish and after some failed tries manage to catch it and bring it to land where the narrator breaks its spine and kills it. He sees that there is something wrong with this fish, too. “He was at least two feet long, queerly skinny, but bigger than anything I had ever caught.” (16) The boys immediately begin to argue about who will keep the fish, the smaller boy claiming he had spotted it, the narrator pointing out that he was the one who landed it. They decide to cut the fish in two but argue again about which half each will take home, the head being clearly preferable to the tail. The narrator knows he is bigger and stronger than his companion but decides not to have his way forcefully. He offers the tail end of the fish plus the sickly green trout, and the smaller boy agrees to take it.
When the boy arrives home, he hears his parents arguing in the kitchen. He knows he is late and possibly in trouble, but he hopes to enter the house triumphantly and to show off his trophy. He bursts into the kitchen exclaiming, “”You won’t believe what I caught at Birch Creek. Just look. Look here. Look at this. Look what I caught.” (20) He holds his creel open for his mother to see, and she is horrified. She asks if it is a snake and demands he take it out of the house. The boy excitedly tries to explain what a big fish he has caught and how difficult it was to land it, but his angry father yells at him to “take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddamn garbage.”
Outside, doing as he is told, the boy looks inside his creel at his catch, now a gelatinous, unrecognizable mass. “I lifted him out,” the boy recounts as the story closes, “I held him. I held that half of him.”

Stephen King’s novel, The Body, is set in1960 in a working class town in Maine, a milieu remarkably similar to that depicted in “Nobody Said Anything.” The Body is the story of four twelve year-olds who embark on a kind of quest, but, as in Carver’s story, the quest has no redeeming objective, and it is carried out by damaged children in a ruined world. The narrative is set in motion as the four young friends learn that a boy their age, Ray Brower, is missing from home and is rumored to be lying dead at the base of a stretch of train tracks a few miles out of town. It is summer and the boys are free of school. One of the boys’ parents is criminally abusive, and the parents of the other three are inattentive enough that the boys are able to devise a ruse in which they will pretend to be sleeping overnight together in a tent while they go off in search of the missing boy’s body.
The boys’ stated mission is to find and possibly report the location of the body to the authorities, thereby gaining a kind of bragging rights, but the deeper motive seems to be the morbid fascination of beholding an actual corpse. Along the way, the friends face many obstacles and dangers, but any bracing sense of adventure in the outing is overwhelmed by the unrelieved ugliness of the world and people they encounter—and the ugliness the boys have already begun to incorporate in the conduct of their own lives. They have managed to create a world unto themselves, but it is no secret garden or Neverland. Their improvised clubhouse is, in Gordie’s words “a good place to smoke cigarettes and look at girly books.” Like Carver’s boy narrator, King’s twelve-year-olds are tough-minded and foul-mouthed; one of them, the brutally abused Teddy, is psychologically damaged beyond repair. In their banter they address one another as “you four-eyed pile of shit,” invite one another to “fuck your hand, man.” (297-98) They encounter no humane or accomplished adult. As they attempt to buy provisions for their journey, the grocer tries to cheat them at the counter. The narrator, untroubled by any sense of incivility or disrespect, shouts “Fuck you!” as he runs out of the store. Having trespassed over the fence of a junkyard in order to drink from a water pump, one of the boys finds himself on the forbidden side as the proprietor and his allegedly vicious dog approach. When the boy successfully regains the safe side of the fence, he lingers to taunt the proprietor’s dog—“Kiss my ass, Choppie! Kiss my ass! Bite shit!”—and then the proprietor, calling him “fat ass,” “lard-bucket.” When the proprietor cruelly answers the boy’s taunts, the ugliness of the boy’s invective intensifies: “YOUR MOTHER BLOWS DEAD RATS! I’LL KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKER!” (348)
Gordie narrates The Body from the perspective of his thirties, looking back. He is, like the novel’s author, Stephen King, a writer; moreover he is a writer who has written some of King’s published stories and books. It is by no means clear whether the narrator/author is celebrating the near-feral antics of his principals or whether he is holding them up for concern. The boys go on to face many dangers. Following the rail tracks over a bridge, they are surprised by the rapid approach of a train and must run for their lives. Camping that night by a fire, Gordie entertains the others by telling a yarn about a fat and cruelly teased boy named David Hogan, whom his townsmen call Lard Ass. He enters a pie eating contest, to the mockery and delight of those who come to watch. As he is about to win the contest, he vomits copiously over the other contestants who in turn become ill, resulting in a vomitous chain reaction and, presumably, a kind of justice. The next day the boys go swimming to get some relief from the intense heat and find themselves covered with leeches. To his horror Gordie finds a leech has attached itself to his scrotum. He asks for help from the other boys, but they are too squeamish. Fearful and shaking with tears, he manages to detach the leech which bursts bloodily into his hands.
At length the spent boys spot the body of Ray Brower lying partly submerged in water at the base of the tracks. Gordie notes in exhaustive detail the position and condition of the body. He speculates with precision how the collision must have propelled the body to the spot where it came to rest, how the impact had lifted the boy out of his shoes. Where some kind of catharsis or revelation might be expected, there is nothing—beyond the realization that the boy was indeed dead. “That finally rammed it all the way home for me,” Gordie muses. “The kid was dead. The kid wasn’t sick, the kid wasn’t sleeping. The kid wasn’t going to get up in the morning anymore…The kid was dead; stone dead.” (408).
The dreary quest of the boy who went fishing in Carver’s story resulted in an unviewably grotesque prize: not a fish, but a mangled wreck of a fish. The quest of the four twelve-year-olds in The Body results in nothing at all. Four living boys seek and find a dead one. In their speech and in their actions the boys already bear the mark of the debased culture in which they are suspended, and on that very account the narrator/author seems to want to exonerate them, even commend them to our affection. This intention is made even more stridently in the action that follows the discovery of Ray Brower’s corpse. Soon after the boys arrive on the scene, they are confronted by a menacing band of teenagers who had hoped to discover the body themselves. The older boys, including one of the twelve-year-olds’ older brother, threaten the younger ones menacingly. In the ensuing showdown, Gordie defiantly stands his ground. He tells the boy threatening him to “suck my fat one, you cheap dime store hood.” One of the other younger boys has smuggled his father’s pistol out of the house and threatens to shoot the older boys if they advance. The teenagers back off, although later they will exact vicious physical revenge.
When Stephen King first published The Body, he included a subtitle: The Loss of Innocence. Yet there is no loss of innocence narrated in the tale. The boys have already lost innocence when they enter the story. Their debased language, the unacknowledged cruelty and insensitivity revealed in their “victorious” encounters with the older boys and adults, even the stories they tell for delight reveal how far they have come from the redemptive spirit of the puer aeternus. The boys talk the talk and think the thoughts of failed and bitter men.
Nothing like the lilt and exuberance of Peter Pan can possibly “break through” into the dispirited, gritty world of Carver’s story and King’s novel. Those stories along with the profusion of kindred stories that have followed represent a kind of epitaph to boy-spirit. Barrie began Peter Pan with the assertion that every boy, except one, grows up. As long as there is one, and he is known, boy-spirit might live on to invigorate all that it touches. At the conclusion of The Body, Gordie, now grown to manhood, reveals that the three fellow travelers of his boyhood have all died young. No boy has grown up, except one. That one is the writer, the one left to tell the tale, and the tale is that if a boy sets off to find himself in the world as it is, he will find a dead boy.

BOYS BROKEN

When, on the brink of suicide, young Werther makes his final, desperate case to his beloved—that his boy-spirit, his very vitality depends on her undivided love and attention—Lotte, now married, responds with the last thing he wants to hear. “Be a man. Put an end to this dismal attachment to a creature who can do nothing but pity you.” (115)
Lotte’s mature and practical perspective is worthy of Freud in its psychological acuity, but the insight is no help to Werther, as the pitch of his feeling—inflamed, impossible, or otherwise—is the very condition that sustains him. He has experienced the ecstasy of living at that pitch, a psychic frequency to which uncompromised boys become easily attuned. When Lotte implores him to “be a man,” to get over the condition he has experienced as life itself, he witheringly responds that her words “could be printed and commended to the use of teachers.”
Werther had been schooled enough to sense that the purpose of culturally mandated education is not to enlarge or exercise a child’s spirit but to tame and subordinate it to culturally approved purposes, a process which from the spirited child’s standpoint is an unbearable violation.
By the time Barrie composed Peter Pan, the protocols of compulsory schooling were so firmly established in western minds as to be virtually unquestioned. There has long been and continues to be a proliferation of schemes for educational reform, but any serious reconsideration of compulsory schooling itself has been all but non-existent—except in stories.
For Barrie, who remembered being happy in school but not at university, submission to schooling was fundamentally opposed to the free expression of boy-spirit. In Peter Pan the embodiment of schooling is Hook, who loathes the very idea of Peter Pan, who confesses to being unable to look at him while he is sleeping, because there is something so untroubled about his posture.
Hook’s character, Barrie discloses to his readers, was fashioned in the crucible of school, and it is school’s central aim to capture and eliminate the likes of Peter Pan.
“Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in ablaze; but as those who have read between the lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments…and he still adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all he retained his passion for good form.” (229) The imposition of good form is the ultimate accomplishment of schooling, but it requires the gradual mastery and then the elimination of boy-spirit. Peter knows this instinctively. When Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s mother, asks Peter if she may adopt him, the first thing he asks her is “Would you send me to school?” Mrs. Darling tells him that she would, and then to an office, and then he would be a man. Peter tells her without reflection that he doesn’t want to go to school and learn “solemn things.” More direct than young Werther, he tells her, “I don’t want to be a man.”
The adopted lost boys ultimately bear out Peter’s reservation. “Before they had attended school a week they saw what goats they had been not to remain on the island; but it was too late now, and soon they settled down to being as ordinary as you or me or Jenkins minor. It is sad to have to say the power to fly gradually left them.” (231)

Later in the twentieth century, after the world wars, a new kind of boy’s story began making an insistent appearance. In these stories there is no rapturous flight, literally or figuratively; there is only falling, loss, and utter wreckage. A boy like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye (1951) may have an intimation of a prior, golden world, but he will fail to locate it in the course of his sad, lonely truancy in Manhattan. Holden has just bolted from a prep school from which he was about to be dismissed for unsatisfactory effort. At the brink of nervous collapse, he imagines stepping off curbsides into an abyss. In this state he pictures himself in a field of rye at the top of a steep cliff where he is patrolling in order to catch wandering children before they can fall.
In John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (l959) Gene, a self-aware young man who has successfully mastered the good form necessary to make his way at his prep school, realizes that his best friend, Phineas, has a quality he longs for but cannot master: an untamable exuberance. Phineas’s playful spontaneity is counter-scholastic, if not downright anti-scholastic, and while it is infectious among his companions, it arouses a poisonous envy in Gene whose determined scholastic attainments have barred all access to such openheartedness. One evening on a study break Gene and Phineas climb up a tree to a limb overhanging a riverbank. To make one’s way far enough out on the limb to clear the bank when he jumps requires exceptional daring, and this prospect is thrilling to Phineas. As Phineas moves out along the limb, Gene, without reflection, jounces it with his foot, causing his friend to fall sickeningly to earth. The resulting injury ultimately kills him.
As the Cold War baby-boom years progressed, stories of fallen, broken boys proliferated. The phenomenally popular Catcher in the Rye was for a time viewed warily by schools and, due to Holden’s frank and sometimes vulgar utterances, banned in some, but within a decade the book, along with Separate Peace and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), became required school reading. But even as the story of the fallen boy became standard school fare, successive tellings grew darker and grittier. By the early nineteen sixties, there is a clear sense in the strongest boys’ stories that the descent is past mattering; the only thing left to report is the hellish quality of the fallen condition.
Even before his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver was widely recognized as a modern master of the short story. One of his earliest published stories, “Nobody Said Anything” (1963), recounts a single truant day in the life of an unnamed middle school-aged boy. He awakes to an overheard quarrel between his parents and immediately goads his younger brother, with whom he shares a bed, into a foul-mouthed exchange of complaints, in which the brother is alternately referred to a “chicken-shit,” an “asshole,” and a “royal asshole.” Unable to face the day and school, the boy feigns stomach trouble, and in the course of an unsupervised morning and afternoon while his parents are away at their jobs, he proceeds, as soon as his mother leaves the house, to smoke some of her cigarettes, watch morning television, masturbate, and rummage through the drawers in his parents’ bedroom in search of condoms and lubricants before deciding to go outdoors and fish.
Like the world inside, the world outdoors is ruined. The boy’s father has periodically taken him fishing, and in those outings, close to the elements, the boy vaguely senses a spark of vitality. As he proceeds through the mean streets of the working class town where he lives, a woman stops her car and asks if he needs a ride. The boy observes her warily: “She was thin and had pimples around her mouth. Her hair was up in curlers. But she was sharp enough. She had a brown sweater with nice boobs inside.” (7) They exchange a few awkward words before she drops him off near the creek where he intends to fish. The brief encounter with the woman arouses him sexually, and he fantasizes about being alone with her under the covers of his bed. He hurries over the embankment down to the creek and masturbates into it.
The creek bed lies adjacent to an airport runway. It is a fouled, forlorn watercourse, fed by drainage pipes. Crawling under a fence bearing a No Trespassing sign, the boy makes his way along the brackish water and begins fantasizing again about the woman, encountering her in her house as she is sitting on the toilet. He is about to masturbate again when there is a strike on his line. He reels in the fish with little effort. He recognizes that it is a trout, but there is something wrong with it. “It was the color of moss, that color green. It was as if he had been wrapped up in moss a long time, and the color had come off all over him.” The boy is troubled that the fish had not put up a fight. “I wondered if he was all right. I looked at him for a time longer, then I put him out of his pain.” (11)
Moving down the stream, the boy comes upon another boy, who excitedly tells him he has spotted the biggest fish he has ever seen. The boy, like the woman in the car, bears a haggard, ruined look: “He looked like a rat or something. I mean, he had buckteeth and skinny arms and this ragged long-sleeved shirt that was too small for him.” (12)
Together the boys pursue the fish and after some failed tries manage to catch it and bring it to land where the narrator breaks its spine and kills it. He sees that there is something wrong with this fish, too. “He was at least two feet long, queerly skinny, but bigger than anything I had ever caught.” (16) The boys immediately begin to argue about who will keep the fish, the smaller boy claiming he had spotted it, the narrator pointing out that he was the one who landed it. They decide to cut the fish in two but argue again about which half each will take home, the head being clearly preferable to the tail. The narrator knows he is bigger and stronger than his companion but decides not to have his way forcefully. He offers the tail end of the fish plus the sickly green trout, and the smaller boy agrees to take it.
When the boy arrives home, he hears his parents arguing in the kitchen. He knows he is late and possibly in trouble, but he hopes to enter the house triumphantly and to show off his trophy. He bursts into the kitchen exclaiming, “”You won’t believe what I caught at Birch Creek. Just look. Look here. Look at this. Look what I caught.” (20) He holds his creel open for his mother to see, and she is horrified. She asks if it is a snake and demands he take it out of the house. The boy excitedly tries to explain what a big fish he has caught and how difficult it was to land it, but his angry father yells at him to “take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddamn garbage.”
Outside, doing as he is told, the boy looks inside his creel at his catch, now a gelatinous, unrecognizable mass. “I lifted him out,” the boy recounts as the story closes, “I held him. I held that half of him.”

Stephen King’s novel, The Body, is set in1960 in a working class town in Maine, a milieu remarkably similar to that depicted in “Nobody Said Anything.” The Body is the story of four twelve year-olds who embark on a kind of quest, but, as in Carver’s story, the quest has no redeeming objective, and it is carried out by damaged children in a ruined world. The narrative is set in motion as the four young friends learn that a boy their age, Ray Brower, is missing from home and is rumored to be lying dead at the base of a stretch of train tracks a few miles out of town. It is summer and the boys are free of school. One of the boys’ parents is criminally abusive, and the parents of the other three are inattentive enough that the boys are able to devise a ruse in which they will pretend to be sleeping overnight together in a tent while they go off in search of the missing boy’s body.
The boys’ stated mission is to find and possibly report the location of the body to the authorities, thereby gaining a kind of bragging rights, but the deeper motive seems to be the morbid fascination of beholding an actual corpse. Along the way, the friends face many obstacles and dangers, but any bracing sense of adventure in the outing is overwhelmed by the unrelieved ugliness of the world and people they encounter—and the ugliness the boys have already begun to incorporate in the conduct of their own lives. They have managed to create a world unto themselves, but it is no secret garden or Neverland. Their improvised clubhouse is, in Gordie’s words “a good place to smoke cigarettes and look at girly books.” Like Carver’s boy narrator, King’s twelve-year-olds are tough-minded and foul-mouthed; one of them, the brutally abused Teddy, is psychologically damaged beyond repair. In their banter they address one another as “you four-eyed pile of shit,” invite one another to “fuck your hand, man.” (297-98) They encounter no humane or accomplished adult. As they attempt to buy provisions for their journey, the grocer tries to cheat them at the counter. The narrator, untroubled by any sense of incivility or disrespect, shouts “Fuck you!” as he runs out of the store. Having trespassed over the fence of a junkyard in order to drink from a water pump, one of the boys finds himself on the forbidden side as the proprietor and his allegedly vicious dog approach. When the boy successfully regains the safe side of the fence, he lingers to taunt the proprietor’s dog—“Kiss my ass, Choppie! Kiss my ass! Bite shit!”—and then the proprietor, calling him “fat ass,” “lard-bucket.” When the proprietor cruelly answers the boy’s taunts, the ugliness of the boy’s invective intensifies: “YOUR MOTHER BLOWS DEAD RATS! I’LL KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKER!” (348)
Gordie narrates The Body from the perspective of his thirties, looking back. He is, like the novel’s author, Stephen King, a writer; moreover he is a writer who has written some of King’s published stories and books. It is by no means clear whether the narrator/author is celebrating the near-feral antics of his principals or whether he is holding them up for concern. The boys go on to face many dangers. Following the rail tracks over a bridge, they are surprised by the rapid approach of a train and must run for their lives. Camping that night by a fire, Gordie entertains the others by telling a yarn about a fat and cruelly teased boy named David Hogan, whom his townsmen call Lard Ass. He enters a pie eating contest, to the mockery and delight of those who come to watch. As he is about to win the contest, he vomits copiously over the other contestants who in turn become ill, resulting in a vomitous chain reaction and, presumably, a kind of justice. The next day the boys go swimming to get some relief from the intense heat and find themselves covered with leeches. To his horror Gordie finds a leech has attached itself to his scrotum. He asks for help from the other boys, but they are too squeamish. Fearful and shaking with tears, he manages to detach the leech which bursts bloodily into his hands.
At length the spent boys spot the body of Ray Brower lying partly submerged in water at the base of the tracks. Gordie notes in exhaustive detail the position and condition of the body. He speculates with precision how the collision must have propelled the body to the spot where it came to rest, how the impact had lifted the boy out of his shoes. Where some kind of catharsis or revelation might be expected, there is nothing—beyond the realization that the boy was indeed dead. “That finally rammed it all the way home for me,” Gordie muses. “The kid was dead. The kid wasn’t sick, the kid wasn’t sleeping. The kid wasn’t going to get up in the morning anymore…The kid was dead; stone dead.” (408).
The dreary quest of the boy who went fishing in Carver’s story resulted in an unviewably grotesque prize: not a fish, but a mangled wreck of a fish. The quest of the four twelve-year-olds in The Body results in nothing at all. Four living boys seek and find a dead one. In their speech and in their actions the boys already bear the mark of the debased culture in which they are suspended, and on that very account the narrator/author seems to want to exonerate them, even commend them to our affection. This intention is made even more stridently in the action that follows the discovery of Ray Brower’s corpse. Soon after the boys arrive on the scene, they are confronted by a menacing band of teenagers who had hoped to discover the body themselves. The older boys, including one of the twelve-year-olds’ older brother, threaten the younger ones menacingly. In the ensuing showdown, Gordie defiantly stands his ground. He tells the boy threatening him to “suck my fat one, you cheap dime store hood.” One of the other younger boys has smuggled his father’s pistol out of the house and threatens to shoot the older boys if they advance. The teenagers back off, although later they will exact vicious physical revenge.
When Stephen King first published The Body, he included a subtitle: The Loss of Innocence. Yet there is no loss of innocence narrated in the tale. The boys have already lost innocence when they enter the story. Their debased language, the unacknowledged cruelty and insensitivity revealed in their “victorious” encounters with the older boys and adults, even the stories they tell for delight reveal how far they have come from the redemptive spirit of the puer aeternus. The boys talk the talk and think the thoughts of failed and bitter men.
Nothing like the lilt and exuberance of Peter Pan can possibly “break through” into the dispirited, gritty world of Carver’s story and King’s novel. Those stories along with the profusion of kindred stories that have followed represent a kind of epitaph to boy-spirit. Barrie began Peter Pan with the assertion that every boy, except one, grows up. As long as there is one, and he is known, boy-spirit might live on to invigorate all that it touches. At the conclusion of The Body, Gordie, now grown to manhood, reveals that the three fellow travelers of his boyhood have all died young. No boy has grown up, except one. That one is the writer, the one left to tell the tale, and the tale is that if a boy sets off to find himself in the world as it is, he will find a dead boy.

The breaking of boys and men: part four

J.M. Barrie and Peter Pan


As the ninetheenth century merged into the twentieth, The Sorrows of Young Werther lost favor. The young man held powerfully in thrall of his child-spirit was no longer an appealing, or even recognizable, figure in the larger culture. Spirited boys continued to be rendered, and rendered well, in literature by great masters like Dickens and Twain, but Pip and Oliver, Tom and Huck, bore no relation to the tortured and tremulous figure of Werther. The preferred trajectory of boys on the brink of manhood was up and out into the actual fray of worldly affairs, not a dreamy return to the wonders and sweetness of prior light. Boys on the brink of manhood, many of them unschooled naturals, were spirited enough, but they were determined to make their way, succeed or fail, live or die, in the world in which they found themselves. The favored stories thrust vulnerable boys into challenging and even life threatening situations through which they negotiated with tragic or heroic consequences. Some, like Tom and Huck and Kipling’s Stalky, were inspired rascals, but even in their aversion to established propriety, they were geniuses of practical accommodation; they knew how to get around.

In the decades spanning Queen Victoria’s coronation and the outbreak of the First World War, British stories of boys coming of age were set in distinctive schools, schools in which the remote expectations of the teaching masters bore less on a boy’s daily life than did the infrastructure of an exacting, often lawless boy-code. In tales ranging from Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays through Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That boys endured painful beatings, harsh privations, and injustices—all of it far removed from maternal nurturance and domestic comfort of any kind—as a crucible of effective manhood. The boyhood passage was a test, and while tough and spirited boys like Tom Brown ultimately pass the test, it was quite possible to fail, as the handsome and promising Eric Williams failed in Frederic W. Farrar’s cautionary classic, Eric, or Little by Little. These stories held the promise, as did Horatio Alger’s American stories of determined orphan boys rising through their own determination to great wealth, that boy-energy rightly channeled led to worldly success—along with the unexamined assumption that in such success lay all the satisfaction a boy could hope for.

But against the backdrop of this procession of stories in which plucky or lucky boys made their way in a rough-and-tumble world, there was first a stirring and then a full flowering of an altogether different kind of story. These were stories told both for and about children, stories that wanted nothing to do with the waking, working world. Humphrey Carpenter, in surveying the profusion of children’s literature composed between Victoria’s reign and the Great War, calls the entire enterprise “a secret garden,” after Frances Hodgson Burnett’s l911 book by that name. The landmark books that appeared in this vein were indeed about enchanted arcadian places discovered by solitary and especially dreamy children. These secret places included the underwater world entered by the presumably drowned chimney sweep in Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, the Kingdom of Oz in Frank Baum’s Oz books, Alice’s Wonderland, the lovely riverbank and wood of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, the three-acre wood of A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin and Pooh, and of course J.M. Barrie’s Neverland.

The boys in these stories do not seek to grow up into productive young men. They are not strengthened and improved by hardship; they are sustained by wonder and delight. James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) was arguably a boy in spirit his entire life, but he was in his thirties when he conceived of the character Peter Pan and in his forties when he wrote Peter into the script of his famous play (1904). The inspiration for Peter and the other children in the play were derived directly from children Barrie knew and loved. The prototype may have been Barrie’s older brother, David, who died tragically in a skating accident when he was thirteen and James six. David’s death sank their mother into a grief from which she never fully recovered. Barrie recalled as a boy dressing in his late brother’s clothes to try, without success, to lift his mother’s spirits. David Barrie would represent vividly for his six-year-old-brother the boy who never grew up.

In a number of striking ways J.M. Barrie never grew up himself. Born into a large family of Scots weavers, he became as a young man a phenomenally successful novelist (Sentimental Tommy, The Little Minister) and playwright (The Admirable Crichton, Quality Street, Peter Pan). A good friend to the most admired writers of his day, including George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, he was unassuming and unsmiling in his personal manner, but given to sudden whimsical utterances. In the course of an early conversation with the great Wells, he is reported to have remarked, “It is all very well to write books, but can you waggle your ears?” At full maturity Barrie stood at five feet.
Barrie’s sexless, childless marriage to the actress Mary Ansell ended in divorce. His most intimate, apparently chaste, relationships were with the married Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies and her five boys whom Barrie met and befriended in the course of walking his dog in Kensington Gardens. After a few years of their acquaintance, Arthur Llewelyn-Davies, the boys’ father died, and when, just three years later, Sylvia died as well, Barrie served as personal and financial guardian for all five boys through their maturity. Barrie claimed to derive the character of Peter Pan from the Llewelyn-Davies boys and once told them, “I made Peter by violently rubbing the five of you together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is all he is, the spark I got from you.” (Yeoman,71) There is no indication of any kind that Barrie’s interest in the boys was in any way sexual or pathological. With one of the sons, Michael, Barrie corresponded daily, until Michael’s death, probably a suicide drowning in Oxford when Michael was twenty. Long after Barrie’s death, in 1979, the youngest Llewelyn-Davies son, Nicholas, wrote to a biographer, “I never heard one word or saw one glimmer of anything approaching homosexuality or paedolphilia: had he had either of these leanings in however slight a symptom I would have been aware. He was an innocent—which is why he could write Peter Pan.” (Yeoman 147)
Mainly what Barrie liked to do with the Llewelyn-Davies boys was play. He liked to scuffle about on the grass and, when they boys were younger, dress up with them in American Indian outfits and play out imagined adventures. He liked to preside over standard outdoor games, improvise hikes and fishing trips. Later in life, the middle Llewelyn-Davies son Peter would recall that Barrie’s emphasis with him and his brothers was “on the lighter side of life,” not “culture.”
Despite his extraordinary literary success, Barrie was never a notably happy man. He periodically fell into debilitating bouts of headache and depression. While he never succeeded in restoring his mother to good spirits after his brother David’s death, he remained devoted to her. He fell in love with a series of beautiful actresses, in addition to his wife, and perhaps loved Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies most deeply of all, but the affection he felt was kept largely to himself. He once wrote a jocular account of being forever out of young women’s romantic consideration because of his diminutive height and stature; a man like himself, he concluded, could never be considered sufficiently “dangerous.” He had a gift for male friendship and for imaginative play, but he spent a great deal of time alone. He was throughout his life a self-deprecating man, a cipher. The man who once said famously, “Nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much,” did not outwardly rebel against the cultural requirements of growing up. He managed his financial and other adult responsibilities overall conservatively and responsibly. But the slight, dark little man who would go on to be knighted and a much beloved figure in British national life was always something of a boy in man’s clothing. He was perhaps resigned that boys—nearly all boys—grow up, but the possibility of an exception infused him with an unusual vitality.
The novel Peter Pan begins with the declaration, “All children, except one, grow up.” The exception here is everything, and he is Peter Pan. Peter tells Wendy that he ran away from his mother and father the day he was born because he overheard them talking about what he would become when he became a man. For a time he hid away and played with the fairies in Kensington Gardens but then, because he was able to fly, made his way beyond the stars to Neverland, a verdant and teeming place peopled with pirates and red Indians and mermaids and fairies. In time Peter is joined in Neverland by a band of lost boys, infants who had fallen out of their prams and were lost by their nannies. There are no lost girls in the band because, as Peter later explains to Wendy, girls are too clever to fall out of their prams.
Neverland is almost but not quite sufficient as a superior reality for Peter; it lacks only a mother. This mother-need is not, for Barrie, a flaw in Peter as an embodiment of puer aeternus. Some kind of mother-need is, rather, an essential part of Peter’s nature, because he is a true boy, not a man-in-progress; boys have and need mothers. In the opening chapter of the story, “Peter Breaks Through,” Peter permeates the barrier between the magical confines of Neverland and real England in order to fill the mother-need in the figure of Wendy Darling, an upper middle class girl in the pre-adult flowering of her girlhood.
Neverland, like Oz and other enchanted alternative worlds evoked during this period, bears some resemblance to its characters’ real world, in this case late Victorian England. Peter’s arch enemy, the gaff-handed pirate, Captain James Hook, has, for instance, attended a good boarding school and, although otherwise bent on menacing deeds, is preoccupied with matters of “good form.” But unlike Frank Baum, whose Oz books offered substantial social commentary on American life in the Progressive Era, Neverland is not a corrected England; it is the right and only world for Peter, for a real boy. In this world a mother may be periodically desirable, but she must be a Neverland mother, a girl-mother, someone who shimmers with maternal femininity and nurturance, but who does not actually restrict or in any way shape a boy’s spirited behavior. In Wendy Peter sought and found what the much older Werther sought but only partially found in Lotte. Wendy is a kind of comfort and delight for Peter, but she is not quite essential to him or to Neverland. When after many adventures Peter guides Wendy and her brothers and the lost boys back to the Darlings’ house in London, he alone among his band refuses adoption and returns to Neverland. He pledges to return for Wendy annually, which will mean a spell of renewed child-life for her and a touch of motherly domesticity—“spring cleaning”— for him, but Peter has a boy’s porous memory and for years on end forgets to come. In the interim Wendy grows up and becomes a mother and then a grandmother, but Peter is forever boy, as he alone has the child’s gift, as Barrie put it in the book’s final sentence, of being “gay and innocent and heartless.”
Peter is heartless in that he is holds his inalienable boy-spirit above even the sweetest particular attachments. He is forever drawn to Wendy, but not to the temporal, mutable Wendy who will grow up. Peter, except when he forgets, will return for Wendy in the form of her daughter and then her granddaughter and on into an infinity of thrilling new adventures and play. In this sense the enchantment carried by the figure of Peter Pan does not lie in the familiar story reenacted on stages and screens and inscribed in books. The enchantment lies, rather, in Peter’s invigorating capacity for imaginative renewal, his constancy in inconstancy. He is “heartless” in that he is bound by no sentimental or moral obligation. On the initial flight from London to Neverland, Wendy’s brother Michael drops off to sleep and nearly plummets fatally into shark-infested seas. Wendy cries for Peter to save him. Teasingly, Peter is slow to intervene: “…it was lovely the way he did it; but he always waited till the last moment, and you felt it was his cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human life.” (PP,57)
Years later when Wendy has been restored to her family in London and Peter’s formerly lost boys have been adopted by the Darlings and are now proceeding through school, Peter returns to the Darling nursery. Wendy excitedly asks him about the old things. She tries to reminisce about their nearly fatal encounter with Captain Hook, an adventure that concluded with Peter’s turning the tables and sending Hook to his death in the jaws of the crocodile who had earlier taken his hand. Peter is bewildered. He has forgotten Hook. “I forget them after I’ve killed them,” he tells her.
Peter charms and enchants because he is indomitable and resilient, not because he is naïve or cute or good. It is tempting to say that he is not altogether lovable, but he is profoundly lovable. Peter is hated only by Hook, and the chief reason is Peter’s irrepressible “cockiness.” He won’t defer, to grownups or to anyone else. Wendy loves him, as does her wistful mother and, later, Wendy’s offspring. Perhaps the deepest yet most seldom articulated response to the figure of Peter Pan on the part of audiences and readers is that one loves and longs for him. Peter is lovable, but he cannot be possessed.
Because of his utterly uncompromised embodiment of boy-spirit and Barrie’s remarkable skill in evoking that spirit, Peter Pan continues to invigorate and trouble those who encounter him more than a century after the play’s debut. Steven Spielberg and John Schumacher have revisited the condition of lost boys with great artistic seriousness in two very different films, Hook (1991) and Lost Boys (1987). Even more recently, Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland (2004) explores the relationships between Barrie and Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies and her sons in order to indentifiy the psychological source of the characters in Peter Pan. The deepening relationship between Barrie and the Llewelyn-Davies mother and sons is touchingly enacted in the film, but the film succeeds even more surely in suggesting the transformative power of fantasy and play in real boys’ lives.
Again, Barrie served faithfully as guardian to the Llewelyn-Davies boys after their parents died. Along the way he watched them grow up and begin to make their adult accommodations. There is no indication that he unduly tried to shape their futures or influence their practical or vocational choices. He was devastated when the oldest boy, George, was killed at the front in the First World War and again when the fourth boy, Michael, drowned at Oxford. Barrie knew the boys would grow up, and he continued to care for them personally as they did so. One cannot know with certainty, but one suspects the quality he most hoped to see alive in his adopted charges was the sheer belief in the liberating capacity of imagination and play.
There is a reliably emotional moment in every performance of Peter Pan in which Peter’s sidekick fairy Tinkerbell hovers between life and death. At this point Peter enjoins the audience directly to affirm their belief in fairies by clapping their hands. Invariably the children—and others—mount a crescendo of applause, and Tinkerbell lives. In a preface to an edition of his plays, Barrie recounted an episode while fishing with Michael when the boy was twelve, on the cusp between uninhibited childhood and guarded adolescence. Barrie asks Michael who, at that very moment, Michael would most like to see.

‘ “Of course,” said Michael, “I would most like to see Johnny Mackay.”
“Well then, wish for him.”
“Oh rot.”
“It can’t do any harm to wish.”
‘Contemptuously he wished, and as the ropes were thrown on the pier he saw Johnny waiting for him, loaded with angling paraphernalia. I know no one less like a fairy than Johnny Mackay, but for two minutes Michael was quivering in another world than ours. When he came to, he gave me a smile which meant we understood each other, and thereafter neglected me for a month, being always with Johnny…’(Yeoman 148)

It was Barrie’s singular gift to be able to make people quiver in another world than ours—even while standing squarely in the latter. Barrie had known that kind of elevation, that transcendence himself. He had known it when he was a boy, and he could sense it in the boys he came to know and befriend when he was a man. Boys may grow up, and the world may work on, but as long as there is just one who does not, then the membrane between the golden world and the working world is still permeable—a boy like Peter, or Michael for that matter, could still “break through.”

Monday, May 18, 2009

The breaking of boys and men: part three.

The Sorrows of Young Werther




At certain historical moments even a story can challenge the prevailing civic order. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe was twenty-four when he published his tragic novella, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Today it is largely forgotten and unread, but when it appeared in Germany in 1774 it created a sensation that would resonate powerfully for more than a century. Within a few years of its publication Werther was translated into every European language. It made an especially strong impact in England and France, where it inspired operas, plays, songs and a profusion of poems. The book was read by all literate classes, including royalty. Bowers and benches and rustic expanses in which the story was set became commercial shrines. The book generated profitable trade in Werther-related paintings, porcelain, jewelry, and scent. Werther’s suicide at the story’s conclusion was widely believed either to have caused or contributed to the suicides of countless lovesick and otherwise troubled European youth, some of whom were found with copies of the book in hand or close by as they perished. There is some scholarly debate as to the actual extent of Werther-inspired suicides, or Liebestod, in the decades following the publication of the novel, but no such disagreement about the depth of the story’s impact. The Sorrows of Young Werther has been called the first modern tragic novel, and it created the kind of fervor J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye would evoke in the Cold War era.

Werther is the tale of an educated and rarefied young man who, in the course of a rustic idyll as he is about to embark on a career in statecraft, meets and falls deeply in love with a young woman, Charlotte (Lotte), with whom he shares a carriage ride to a ball. Lotte is both girl and finished woman, daughter and mother. When Werther meets her, her own mother has recently died, and she has risen resolutely to assume the care of her eight younger siblings. Lotte’s girlish beauty and grace combined with her warm nurturance enchant Werther and preoccupy him for the rest of his foreshortened life.

Immediately on making her acquaintance, Werther is informed that she is “as good as engaged” to an upstanding young man. Her intended, Albert, is indeed a man of parts and, more than a little strangely, Werther feels no resentment of his privileged and secure place in Lotte’s life. To the contrary he is admiring and fond of Albert, and he is equally fond of Lotte’s younger siblings, with whom he enjoys playing and telling stories. At first Werther’s love seems, except in its intensity, unlike the star-crossed passion of Tristan or Romeo, in that he recognizes no ominous obstacle. He seems too ethereal and genteel—and possibly too immature—to desire Lotte sexually. It takes him weeks to realize that Lotte’s and Albert’s impending marriage will mean the end of his almost limitless access to her company and of the emotional release he feels when he is with her. When it does dawn on him that he cannot continue to be her constant and adoring companion, he becomes agitated and volatile, to the point that he makes Lotte uncomfortable.

Abruptly Werther departs the village where Lotte lives, leaving only a letter explaining his tortured reasons for going. As he tentatively enters the social and diplomatic circles necessary to advance his adult career, Werther is unable to free himself from his obsessive attachment to Lotte. Unhappy in his work and reacting intensely to a class-based personal snub, he takes leave of his duties and drifts back to the beloved places of his happy childhood, only to find them painfully altered, “developed” in the name of a progress he reflexively disdains. Helplessly, he returns to lodgings near Albert and Lotte, now married, and resumes the acquaintance. More obsessed and despairing than ever, he presses his declarations of love, his tears, and, finally, even his kisses upon his distressed beloved until she forcibly absents herself from him, telling him that they must never meet again.

Having entertained mounting thoughts of suicide for some months, Werther borrows a brace of Albert’s pistols on a pretense, shuts himself up in his bedroom on a rainy night, composes a final note to Lotte, and then, just past midnight, fires the pistol into his forehead above his right eye. Werther does not die instantly, but lingers incoherently until noon the next day, during which time a number of people keep vigil and pay him last respects, including Lotte’s younger brothers, one of whom repeatedly kisses Werther on the mouth as he expires. He is carried off and buried that very night. “No priest attended him,” Goethe wrote in a chilling final sentence.

The world into which Goethe grew up and in which Werther is faithfully set is an altogether different world from that of the heroic lovers of the medieval era. Chivalric training and estate management are no longer the highest callings for men. There has been a renaissance of classical sensibilities throughout Europe. There has been an Enlightenment, a culturally endorsed celebration of scientific and rational understanding, understanding unaided by religious faith or any kind of submission to irrational or trans-rational forces. Wars continue to be waged, but in more calculated ways, in ways that might advance the interest of emerging nations, as opposed to the divinely sanctioned prerogatives of kings. In the enlightened eighteenth century a fortunate man’s highest aspiration might be to become a statesman, a scientist, an artist. In the eighteenth century the way had been cleared for generations of landless peasants and artisans to enter and then rise up into the now burgeoning complex of manufacture and trade. The new wealth produced by the emerging commercial class had created for increasing numbers of people the leisure with which to consider abstract and purely esthetic dimensions of experience.

Such was Goethe’s world and that of his sorrowful young Werther. The story of Werther is divided into two roughly equal parts. The first recounts his life in a lovely rural village, his meeting with and subsequent infatuation with Lotte, and the mounting unhappiness he feels in being unable to have her for his own. The second part is an account of his suffering and suicidal despair after he departs Lotte and her fiancé. Goethe based the first half of Werther’s story very closely on events in his own life, the second half somewhat on the life of a young acquaintance, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem who, like Goethe, was well off, well educated, entering public service, and miserably unhappy in love. Goethe incorporated the precise details of Jerusalem’s actual suicide in his account of Werther’s. In overlaying Jerusalem’s grim end onto his own passage through early love and love lost, Goethe is able to convey the heroic passion of romantic love—Tristan’s love, Romeo’s love—to its inevitable psychological conclusion without perishing himself.

Goethe made no effort to disguise the similarity of his personal feelings and circumstances to those of young Werther. The actual young woman who captured Goethe’s heart was Charlotte Buff, whom he would come to address familiarly as Lotte. She met and became fond of Goethe in the course of a ball they attended together. Lotte was oldest sister and virtual mother of eight younger siblings who delighted and often played with Goethe in the course of many visits and outings. Lotte’s fiancé, Christian Kestner, became an admired and beloved confidante to Goethe, as the fictional Lotte’s Albert became to Werther. Thus the “autobiographical” half of the novel proceeds very much as Goethe lived the summer of his twenty-third year.

As Werther begins his story, he is ecstatically happy. His formal schooling and legal studies have been successfully completed. He is free, at least for a time, to lose himself in his favorite books, especially Homer and Pindar and the astonishing Ossian. It is May, and he has arrived in a new, handsomely settled place. Everything is in bloom, and Werther has time on his hands to explore the countryside and observe the locals in all walks of life. “A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul,” he writes to his closest friend. (Hulse, 26) But it is not a static serenity; Werther confesses that the amplitude and beauty of his meadow walks, the falling of dusk, the complexity and elegance and hum of so many natural unfurlings threaten to overwhelm him. He longs to be able to render his experiences of Nature in drawing or some kind of art, but the force and beauty of everything before him seem almost to paralyze him. Transported in the grip of so much feeling, he reports, not yet with any regret, that “it will be the end of me” (27).

Werther has read deeply in the literature and lore of the west. He senses where he has spiritually found himself, and it is in the heart of Pan’s arcady.

…You go down a little slope and come to a vault of some twenty
steps to where the clearest of water pours forth from the marble rock.
The low wall about the spring above, the tall trees that shade the place,
The coolness of the spot, all of this has something both attractive and
awesome. Not a day goes by but I spend an hour sitting there. And the
girls come out from the town to fetch water…and I sense the
benevolent spirits that watch over springs and wells…(27)

Werther reports a sublime self-sufficiency in this state of being. It is a return, a return to something rich and satisfying from his childhood. He claims to want nothing more. He writes his friend that he is beyond the lure of books—“for God’s sake, keep the things from me!” (28) He knows that to fall back willingly into childhood happiness is to lose his civic place, but Werther surrenders: “I am treating my heart like an ailing child; every whim is granted. Tell no one of this; there are people who would take it amiss.” (28) Werther’s opening up to the childhood condition includes a renewed affinity for actual children: “the common people of the town already know and love me, the children in particular.” (28)

As soon as young Werther becomes aware of the superior, irresistible claims of the child-state, he is overcome with revulsion for the post-child impostures and mindless busy-ness of his fellow men.

That the life of Man is but a dream has been sensed by many a one,
and I too am never free of the feeling. When I consider the restrictions
that are placed on the active, inquiring energies of Man; when I see that
all our efforts have no other result than to satisfy needs which in turn
serve no purpose but to prolong our wretched existence…all of this
leaves me silent. (28,29)

.Werther discourses on the adult order’s smug condescension in attributing to children mere impulsivity in the face of life’s practical business, and he further faults adults for failing to recognize their own impulsivity and blindness in following safe and culturally sanctioned protocols. Of the two conditions—that of the spirited child and that of the prudent adult—Werther chooses the child.

I gladly confess that…they are the happiest who, like children,
live for the present moment, drag their dolls around and dress them
and undress them and watchfully steal by the drawer where Mama has
locked away the cake and when at last, when they get their hands on what
they want, devour it and with their cheeks crammed full, cry, “More!”
(30)

While celebrating the child—including childish excess—Werther is not impervious to the adult virtues of prudence and self-denial. He acknowledges that discerning, prudent adults will never do poor work, and that law-abiding citizens will never be bad neighbors. He feels certain, however, that such adults will never do the most inspired kind of work, and that they will never be people it would be really satisfying and exhilarating to know.
The child’s condition, if considered honestly, is preferable, because it is natural, uncorrected, and because it is susceptible to inspiration. Even compromised adults, Werther claims, are inwardly aware of this. Some of them are able to wall off private spheres within their compromised lives in which they can attempt to “make an Eden” of their own allotted gardens. Even those unable to do this, those who might not be fortunate enough to have a private garden to cultivate, can maintain the child’s link to vitality by holding fast to the “sweet sensation of freedom,” however fleeting, along with the knowledge that they can “quit this prison” whenever they wish. (31)

Held powerfully in his own sweet sensation of freedom, Werther, seemingly by chance, meets his beloved. It is now mid-June, and Werther, a passenger in a carriage on the way to a summer dance, is informed that they must stop to pick up another guest along the way, Charlotte: Lotte. Like Romeo first beholding Juliet at the Capulet ball, Werther is transformed forever. It falls to him to enter the house and escort Charlotte down to the carriage. His first and indelible impression is of a mother-girl.

I…beheld the most charming scene I have ever laid eyes on. In the hallway,
six children aged between eleven and two were milling about a girl with
a wonderful figure and of medium height, wearing a simple white dress
with pink ribbons at the sleeves and breast. She was holding a loaf of
rye bread and cutting a piece for each of the little ones about her, according
to their age and appetite. (37)

Werther is entranced, not merely with Lotte’s figure and presence, but with the children, the littlest of whom he kisses warmly before heading down to the carriage. Even as they proceed to the ball, Werther is made aware that Lotte is promised to another man, and he is undaunted. He learns in their first, rapt conversation that she too is “beyond” the lure of books, due to her domestic responsibilities and her joyful immersion in life as it unfolds moment to moment. But while unstintingly maternal, she is also sheer girl and confesses to Werther that “Even if it is wrong to have a passion for it, there is nothing I like better than dancing.” (39) No admission could be more pleasing to Werther, more consonant with his own views about the relative merits of acceptable attitudes and joyful behavior. “Never in my life,” Werther reports, “have I danced so well. I was no longer a mere mortal.” (41)

In this spirit Werther enters the most fulfilling, and last, summer of his life. The teeming meadows and mountain prospects continue to stir him, but the communion with Lotte in this Arcadian setting completes the picture. Like Juliet after she has met and exchanged loving vows with Romeo, Werther finds himself ecstatically “longing for the thing I have.” At no time is Werther happier in Lotte’s company than when her younger siblings are present and underfoot. Werther gets down on the floor and plays with them: “some of them climbing on top of me, some of them poking me, and me tickling them, and all of us yelling our heads off.”(45) This maturational reprieve, this opportunity to lose himself in uninhibited play elevates Werther. His pleasure is not in tending to or nurturing the children, but in joining them in their abandon and thus, like them, being Lotte’s in this privileged way. “Nothing on earth,” he writes to his friend, “is closer to my heart than children.” (45)

No sooner is Werther able to give voice to his happiness than he becomes aware, in a way familiar to desperate lovers, of the agonizing prospect of losing it. It occurs to him in the course of an afternoon outing with Lotte and the children and other friends that he has fallen into a terrible dependency on Lotte’s adoring attention. “What a child one is!” he realizes when he is briefly unable to catch Lotte’s eye. “How can one be so hungry for a look!” (51) But in Werther’s state the hunger can only mount. He craves Lotte’s undivided attention and approval, but her care-giving responsibilities make that impossible, as does the periodic presence of Albert, Lotte’s intended. And so to Werther’s—but perhaps nobody else’s—surprise, Albert becomes a “rival.” Moreover, maddeningly, he is a worthy and thoroughly appropriate rival. Werther retains enough social sense to know that he, not Albert, is the oddity in the picture, but this awareness is no consolation. He feels himself nearing combustion, growing increasingly ridiculous:

I cannot bear it any more, I behave like a complete fool, and
clown about and talk gibberish.—“For God’s sake,” Lotte said to me
today, “please spare us scenes like last night’s! When you’re
so merry you are terrifying.” (57)

Just as Lotte senses the desperation in Werther’s now inappropriate merriment, Werther is grimly aware that he has passed into perilous mental territory. News of a suicide preoccupies him, and he finds himself defending such gestures during a philosophical argument with Albert, in the course of which Albert makes good ethical sense. But Werther has passed beyond good ethical sense: “for no argument so throws me as when someone trots out a meaningless platitude when I am speaking straight from the heart.” (61)

Unable to temper, defer or, for that matter, consummate his desire for total, uninterrupted communion with Lotte, Werther declines helplessly into obsessive longing. He knows he is making a fool of himself, that the pitch of his desperation makes Lotte uncomfortable. Yet there is no consolation, feeling what he feels, knowing what he has known. “I can no longer pray,” he writes to his friend, “except to her; my imagination holds no figure but hers; and I see the things of the world about me only in relation to her.” As the summer wanes, Werther’s obsession turns to despair. He resolves to leave at once, depart the unlivable scene, although he can imagine no livable scene or breathable air apart from Lotte. Werther cannot sleep the night before his departure.

Here I sit, gasping for air, waiting for daybreak…Ah, she will
be sleeping peacefully, without a suspicion that she will never see me
again…” (69)

The evening before his departure Werther called on Lotte and Albert and engaged them in a long, tearful talk. They discuss the possibility of an afterlife and whether they are likely to recognize one another in that condition. Talk of departed souls gives rise to Lotte’s fond memories of her mother. The presence before him of his beloved girl-mother expressing vaulting appreciation and love for her own mother is too much for Werther. That mothers can be lost at all is too much for Werther.

“Lotte,” I exclaimed, falling at her feet, seizing her hand and
shedding a thousand tears on it—“Lotte! God’s blessing and
the spirit of your mother are upon you!” (71)

Werther takes leave of Lotte until, he believes, they will meet again in eternity. In the time intervening Werther must determine if there is an endurable course ahead for one who has known the sweetness of childhood regained.

Apart from Lotte and immersed in the business of adult pursuits, Werther realizes with clear-headed detachment that the culturally approved way ahead for him is hopeless, that the “model” of the finished man-of-the-world is an empty social construction.

We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very
quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own
qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well.
And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection—
which we ourselves have created. (73)

Realizing that so-called maturity is an empty fabrication, Werther, anticipating the kind of existential despair articulated by later writers, is repulsed by the adult order in which he is now held. “And this glittering misery, the tedium of these awful people cooped up together here! And their greed for rank, and the way they are forever watchful and alert for gain and precedence: the most wretched and abominable of passions, quite nakedly displayed.” (75)

Unable to bear it any longer, Werther resigns his position at court and embarks on a pilgrimage to the treasured places of his childhood in the hope that he can recover some sense of wholeness. “…And since the place of my birth is only six miles out of my way, I plan to visit it again and recall those long-gone days of happy dreams.” (85) He succeeds only in revisiting scenes that remind him that he was once full of hope, believing, like Odysseus, that frontiers were limitless and the seas “measureless.” He asks of what use is the knowledge, pressed upon every schoolboy, that the earth is round and its extent known? He longs for the prior condition, of a life more limited and yet more happy, a life infused with “the poetry and quality of childishness.” (86) Like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, adrift in Manhattan as he tries to reconnect to the saving sweetness of his childhood, Werther revisits his old school. When Holden entered a classroom in his former elementary school, he noted that someone had inscribed “fuck you” on a desk. Werther finds his old school has become a shop.

Werther wanders on, feeling rootless and out of sustaining relationship with everyone he has loved, especially, excruciatingly, Lotte. He struggles to find solace in a broader perspective but succeeds only in realizing his overall insignificance in the vast scheme of creation and that the only thing that had elevated him out of the relentless, transient march of empty lives was his unapologetic surrender to his untempered passions. “Do not children reach out for everything that attracts them?--Then why should not I?” (98)

Werther struggles with an equation he cannot solve. He understands that he came into the world with a robust capacity for joy and loving others. Moreover, he was able to experience that joy to its ultimate extent in his communion with Lotte. But when that kind of love is tempered or unrequited, however reasonable the causes, the lover’s sense of purpose, his very vitality is negated. Werther is sufficiently educated and socialized and reasonable to see why he may not have Lotte exclusively to himself, but the knowledge does nothing to mediate his predicament. For him, unrestrained loving is the completion of his nature; unrequited love is the negation of his nature. Increasingly this sense of negation leads Werther to suicidal thoughts, which he casts as a kind of martyrdom, at times likening himself to Christ in Gethsemane pondering his imminent death. In any event, like Romeo when he is banished from Verona and Juliet, Werther can find no consolation in philosophy, nor in theology. “Dear God in Heaven, was this the Fate Thou hast ordained for Man: that he should only be happy before he has yet attained his reason, or after he has lost it again?” (103)

Werther’s progression to suicide is grimly credible and familiar. He protests that he can no longer bear the practical business of living in the world, and he concludes, with some reason, that the world has no need of him and would perhaps be better off without him. Resolved finally to die, he goes to visit Lotte for the last time. In the course of a long, trying afternoon together, during which Werther attempts to disclose his inward state to Lotte by reading long, morbid excerpts from Ossian fantasy, Lotte correctly senses Werther’s dire intentions and tries to dissuade him. She insists that Werther can continue to see her—and Albert—but on appropriate terms, the world’s terms. Then, stunningly, she tells Werther that she cannot abide his “intense spirit” and “uncontrollable passion.” “Be a man!” she implores him. “Put an end to this dismal attachment to a creature who can do nothing but pity you!” Because Werther is not a man, because he is spiritually and temperamentally a boy, Lotte’s declaration completes his negation. Her pronouncement is devastating precisely because, on the world’s terms, it is profoundly true: “I very much fear,” she adds, “that what makes the desire to possess me so attractive is its very impossibility.” From his wild and tormented boy’s perspective, Werther makes an equally acute rejoinder: “That speech,” he remarked with a cold laugh, “could be printed and commended to the use of teachers.” (115)

Confined now within the terms of his own negation, Werther composes his final letter to Lotte. He is both frank and, at points, coolly lucid, disclosing that he has “harbored furious thoughts of—killing your husband—or you—or myself” but has settled on the latter course. (117) Late in the letter he revisits the prospect of their reunion in the after life. In this vision Werther is affirmative and hopeful, but what is affirmed is something, if not altogether other than Lotte, greater than Lotte:

I am not dreaming or raving! As I approach the grave I see
things more clearly. There will be a life for us! And we will
see each other again! We shall see your mother! I shall see
her, I shall find her, and ah, I shall pour out my heart to her!
Your mother, the image of you. (128)


In their fervid response to The Sorrows of Young Werther European readers spoke and wrote of the novel as a tragic romance, a love story—but is it really? Does Werther really stand in the procession of heroic lovers that began with Tristan, Romeo, and their like? Is it conceivable that Romeo, beholding Juliet for the last time, would evoke in farewell an image of Lady Capulet? Tristan and Romeo and Heathcliffe consummated their love. Upon reaching the threshold of manhood they transferred their puer-spirit into the only outlet in which it seemed possible for it to breathe. The heroic love ideal in the west is as uncompromising and wild as the puer spirit itself, and male lovers in that mode have all been spirited boys. Werther does not consummate his passion for Lotte. He reports dreaming of kisses, but nothing more When, finally and in despair, he actually does impose some desperate kisses on Lotte, both he and Lotte become upset and part in tears. He had long acknowledged that his deepest feelings for Lotte were not carnal: “Have I ever harbored reprehensible desires in my soul?” (112)

What Werther passionately and repeatedly expresses and what readers so powerfully responded to was less the impossibility of requiting his love for Lotte than his inability to live as a spirited child. In his autobiographical writing Goethe revealed that he himself had enjoyed a remarkable happy childhood. His personal troubles would begin with attempts to school him and, like Werther, when he sought to enter the world on adults’ terms. Like the heroic lovers who preceded him, he was able to express his untamed puer-spirit in romantic communion, but in Werther’s case his relationship with Lotte merely satisfied the formal requirements of a romantic pairing. She was not in fact available to him from the outset and told him so clearly. Unlike Romeo who rushed to marry Juliet within hours of making her acquaintance, Werther’s fondest hope was to feel the radiance of Lotte’s girl-mother presence while he gave uninhibited utterance to his dreamiest fancies and tumbled about with the other children. In the end, it was not Lotte but a younger brother--a mere boy—who kissed Werther’s lips as his life slipped away. What so struck Europeans for more than a century in The Sorrows of Young Werther was not the tragic death of a young lover, but the death of a ­puer aeternus, of the invigorating promise spirited children invite the larger society to recall.