I received wild applause when I read my poem. Or was it perfunctory applause? Or, for that matter, was it sarcastic? 1959 is a long time ago, and I’ve never read a poem in public since, so maybe the reception was, uh, less than enthusiastic.
This was for the fifth-grade talent show at a suburban Long Island elementary school; some of the boys were doing a Philippines folk dance with bamboo poles, and Elaine Houseman, our superstar, was singing Musetta’s waltz from La Boheme. When they finished to standing ovations, it was the turn of a shy, awkward, overweight 11-year-old to shuffle to the front of the stage, blink in the footlights, and in a barely audible mumble start reciting.
“Maybe some day in June
Perhaps when you look at the Moon
You’ll see two monkeys instead of a Man
One named Starry and the other is Ann.
What are they doing way up There?
Running and jumping and scratching their Hair.”
Moon Monkey it’s called, and I still have it, written on composition paper in blue ink with better cursive than I can manage today. All I can say in my defense is that it was topical poetry, not meant for immortality. NASA had just shot two monkeys into space from Cape Canaveral named, not Starry and Anne, but Able and Miss Baker, and apparently this really made a big impression on my 11-year-old psyche.
But (obviously!) I was never going to be a poet; my ear, even then, was more attuned to the cadences of prose. This side of me got an important boost a few years later when I was lucky enough to get Mr. Goodwin as my eighth-grade English teacher.
Mr. Goodwin was the most unconventional teacher in junior high. He called us by our last names, which made us feel grown-up; he dressed like a cross between a beatnik and a professor; his voice was naturally shrill, and he tried keeping it soft and gentle to compensate. He was crazy nuts over literature, and let us see that he was. When Dead Poets Society with Robin Williams came out I thought immediately of Mr. Goodwin.
Perhaps because he was so unconventional, he had been assigned a lopsided classroom set off by itself in a dark, lonely corridor — to get there was like climbing up to a Left Bank garret. Here on a rainy autumn day in l962 he stood before us reading a short story from a slim paperback book.
A Perfect Day for Bananafish it was intriguingly called. It’s about a troubled young man with a snarky, spoiled wife, and how he befriends a young girl on a Florida beach, and then, for no explicit reason, returns to his hotel room and blows his brains out.
“They waded out till the water was up to Sybil’s waist,” Mr. Goodwin read in his softest voice. “Then the young man picked her up and laid her down on her stomach on the float.”
“You just keep your eyes open for any bananafish,” he said. “This is a perfect day for bananafish.”
“I don’t see any,” Sybil said.
“That’s understandable. Their habits are peculiar. Very peculiar. They lead a very tragic life.”
I listened, entranced, to every word. The innocence of the girl. The quiet desperation of the man. The tragic last line with him shooting himself with an “Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic.” This got to me! And what got to me more was that for the first time in my young life I realized stories could be about, not just animals, spacemen or cowboys, but real people who were alive, not once upon a time, but right now.
(I re-read Salinger’s story last night, and it hasn’t aged well. A grown man flirting with a 6-year-old girl not his daughter and playfully kissing her foot may have seemed the acme of innocence in the l950s, but seems something very different to us now.)
Literature, through Mr. Goodwin, was recruiting me to its cause. The clincher came a few weeks later when he read us another story, this one about a lonely Cornish farmhouse (that’s Cornish as in Cornwall, England) and some very unusual things that begin happening on a cold, windblown afternoon as the birds, as they always do, swarm over the fields to begin their autumnal migration.
But something is very different this year. A sparrow flies into the window glass and the family pities it — but then another does the same, then a crow, then the window shatters from a diving gull, and they realize they are under attack from the birds.
“There are nearly fifty dead birds in here,” Nat said, trying to make sense of it during a pause. “Robins, wrens, all the little birds from hereabouts. It’s as though a madness seized them, with the east wind.”
Well, no; it’s not the east wind, but everything we take for granted about man’s relationship to nature.
“The hawks concentrated their attack on the door. Ned listened to the sound of splintering wood and understood how many years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them the instinct to destroy mankind.”
What Mr. Goodwin was reading from was The Birds by Daphne du Maurier. Half-forgotten now, she was a writer who combined a popular Gothic touch with real literary skill; “The Mistress of Menace” critics called her, and for good reason.
Her story holds up well; while it may originally have been meant as a parable on the effects of atmospheric nuclear testing, it now reads as an environmental cautionary tale, with an outraged, coldly efficient animal world deciding it’s time for humanity to go. (Hitchcock adapted the story for one of his least successful films.)
I can’t exaggerate the effect it had on me, listening in that dark classroom; did Mr. Goodwin deliberately turn out the lights? All I can say is that between the moment he started reading and the moment he finished, I knew I had to become a writer — had to do whatever it took to write such a story myself, combining maximum imagination with maximum believability. It was the first time that I realized stories didn’t just exist on their own, but that an artist consciously created them — and the moment I understood that I wanted to be the creator.
I got my chance later that week. Mr. Goodwin had us write a short story for homework, and mine — though I don’t retain a copy like I do my poem — was about two eighth-graders sitting through a lecture in the school auditorium about world hunger and how it was imperative for them to do something about it.
“So Africans are starving?” the meaner, more sarcastic of the boys says at the end. “Swell. I am, too. I wonder what the cafeteria has for lunch?”
Brilliant, that last line. All unwittingly, I had stumbled upon the dominant post-modern literary tone — irony — on my very first try.
Mr. Goodwin liked it. He stopped me in a crowded hall between classes the day after I turned it in.
“Wetherell? That was a great story you wrote. I’m giving you three A-pluses — an A-plus cubed.”
In all these decades of writing, it’s still the praise that’s meant most to me.
And so that is why when I attend my 50th high-school reunion this autumn, after all the usual pleasantries and white lies — “You look just the same!” “Three marriages! And you were always so shy!” — I’ll be asking my old friends if by any chance they remember an eighth-grade English teacher named Mr. Goodwin.
W.D. Wetherell writes stories and essays from his home in Lyme. He can be contacted at www.wdwetherell.com.