By Joseph Ross
Foley Hall, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
When I was a senior at Damien High School in La Verne California, I took an elective English class on Shakespeare. It was taught by Mrs. Carney in a basement typing classroom. I remember the room was always cold, at least by Southern California standards, and the desks were covered with these huge Adler typewriters. All dinosaurs now. Ms. Carney led us through several of Shakespeare’s plays, reading the Folger Shakespeare Library paperback editions. The cover of each paperback showed one of the friezes that adorn the front of the Library here in Washington, D.C. It’s always moving to me to walk right up to those magnificent sculptures now. It takes me right back to that cold basement classroom. Mrs. Carney also used records, LPs of the plays, so we could hear them, as well as read them. I can still hear Richard Burton’s booming voice emerging from an old, scratchy phonograph perched on the teacher’s desk.
But in that modest setting, I fell in love. I fell in love with words, images, and their power to affect us. I remember Mrs. Carney commenting on the multiple times Shakespeare uses images of melting and decomposition in Julius Caesar. I almost didn’t believe her until I found them myself—these repeated, deliberate images, which contributed in their quiet, subtle way, to the overall doom present in that play.
Some years later, on the third floor of Foley Hall at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, (pictured above) where I was an English major, I experienced another remarkable teacher. Sr. Teresita Fay, my professor, was settling into her desk to begin my oral final exam in an upper division poetry class. I was in awe of this learned woman and wanted to prove my knowledge to her. She asked me several questions and I thought I was cruising along fine when suddenly she put her pen down and looked hard at me, asking: How has what we’ve read in this class helped you to live better?
This was a question I had not studied. I was not prepared to make the obvious and essential connection between what I was reading and the quality of my own life. Her question threw me and nothing has been the same since. I don’t remember what I said in response to her question. I guess I got by.
Ever since that exam interview with Sr. Teresita, I have been trying to see and live the connections between literature and life. I have found poems that push me forward into new relationships. I have been compelled by novels to imagine myself in other parts of the world, in the lives of people far from my own. I have to say too, that I have used that question, or some version of it, with many students through my years as a teacher. Simply put, it’s a very good question.
Those efforts, to connect literature to life, are part of the traditional liberal education. I deeply value the conviction that the stories humanity remembers can make us more human. The words and images I fell in love with so many years ago—and have loved since—can make us more insightful, less judgmental, more compassionate, less dismissive, more peaceable, less angry—if we can only keep reading. I hope to keep trying to answer her excellent question. So let me pose it to you: How has what you’ve read helped you to live better?
An avid reader of Poe and works tied to Hitchcock prior to entering Damien HS, I remember little appreciation to literature there. Sure, I took the freshman typing class in that cold basement room, but never returned for a look into Shakespeare as Joe did.
I wish I had. Only recently, as an actor who desires to relive the glory of teenaged community theatre, have I had the desire to delve into Shakespeare, using it as a tool toward understanding not so much life itself, but how we tell stories. I’ve only begun to taste the delicious ways he turned a phrase and reiterated themes.
Same with Twain, Dickens, Wells, Chekhov, Kaufman & Hart and Hammett and on into contemporary play writers. The body of work on which we can draw has more depth and breadth than Earth itself.
To the good Sister’s question, literature has helped me to live better by exposing my strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, judgments and acceptances, preconceived notions and surprises, and understandings and misunderstandings. Granted, I tend to hear writers more than read them (I have seen over 90 plays this year alone), but the effect is the same.
Specifically, I played Martin Vanderhof this fall in K&H’s “You Can’t Take It With You.” I played him old, yes, but not a crotchety coot. The text, to me (and thankfully to my director), gave him space to be warm and funny and beloved among his family. What a kind and gentle reminder.
That said, Santa, I’ll take a Kindle please.
I don’t remember wanting to be a writer until I randomly chose it as my major in undergrad – chickening out at the last minute from auditioning to be a theater major. But I was always a reader. I don’t know as it was an escape in particular, but I do remember very late nights tented under the covers with a flashlight trained on a paperback. I remember being incredibly proud of myself for reading chapter books so young, and wanting to finish a whole book in a single day. I remember when I did. Reading was something I knew I did well, but it wasn’t just some kind of self-competition, I genuinely thrived on losing myself in story.
“Little House on the Prairie” was the first series I read start to finish. As I completed the final book, I remember bursting into tears. I was going to miss the characters.
And that’s what literature is to me as both reader and writer — it’s also what movies, TV shows, and art are to me: studies of the human condition. It sharpens my empathy; places me in the shoes of despicable and weak, strong and patient, disenfranchised and proud; and it moves me to never take for granted types and first impressions. I still think Mr. Darcy is an ego-maniacal ass, for example, and every time I read Pride & Prejudice I have to search hard to unravel his appeal, where I can find cause to forgive him, occasionally pulling the old “it was different back then,” to make sense of some things. But the examination of who and how we are contained within the book is the real draw for me anyway.
I read and write to learn about people–not always myself, but who can escape that?