Monday, April 25, 2022

Did the teacher sexually abuse the student?

The Head of School asks Sam Brandt, a former student at the exclusive Leverett School and now a long-time English teacher at the school, to investigate a letter from one of Brandt’s classmates which alleges that he was sexually abused by a teacher when he was a student.

That’s the setup for School Days. An exclusive boy’s prep school in Connecticut. Two time lines—the 1960s and the present. Fifteen characters—Sam’s friends and teachers during his student days at Leverett and today’s colleagues. The reader sees the school from both student and teacher perspective. How it was, and how it is.

The plot—was the student abused or not—is secondary. Rather, the novel is a consideration of love and sex, friendship and rivalry, desire and power, and the dance of benevolence and attraction between teacher and student. As the publisher notes, “Sam is flooded with memories of attending Leverette in the sixties: the beautiful reaches of the campus, the constellation of boys whose lives were, at one point, knit up with his own, the support and friendship of his most inspiring mentor, Theodore Gibson, and above all his overwhelming love for his friend Eddie.”

Jonathan Galassi is the chairman of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, the former poetry editor of the Paris Review, a former chairman of the Academy of American Poets, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship for poetry. He has published three books of original poetry and translations of the poetry of Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, and Primo Levi. His first novel, Muse, set the world of publishing, was published in 2015.

With Galassi’s background as poet and editor, the writing in School Days is superior without calling attention to itself. The book is filled with interesting observations and thoughts. Although Galassi has never been a teacher, here is a representative paragraph:

“Sam loved teaching. True, the kids were unchanging, predictably fresh-faced and self-preoccupied while he and his peers grew ever hoarier and more crotchety. What kept him engaged was the hunger of some of them, their desire to take hold. To devour life whole, with the help of a well-timed nudge or two from their mentors. The moment when a student understands how a book makes its impact not frontally but by stealth, how it imperceptibly changes us, when it does, forever, was for him, as the saying goes, better than sex. He’d seen kids literally come alive, as had happened to him: slough off their families’ need to shroud them in security and open themselves up to riskier ways of becoming themselves, at times with spectacular results. These were the achievements he was proudest of.”

On reflection, School Days seems to spend a lot of time on sex and the adolescent confusion of sex with love, entirely expected in the hothouse of a private boy’s school and turbulent teenage hormones. Sam as a middle-aged man still seems undecided about his own sexuality. He was married, but retains sexual feelings for Eddie and, late in the book is hooking up with men he finds online. (Although, where is it written that you have to decide your own sexuality? That you can be sexually attracted only to people of your own sex?)

Perhaps more importantly, Galassi explores the issue of teacher/student power relations and the opportunities and dangers of abuse. There is also the issue of entitlement. Leverett’s students are entitled. They have affluent, if not wealthy, parents. They are on escalator to an ivy league school; Harvard welcomes them. It influences the way they see themselves and the world.

(I once asked a friend on the staff of a private girls’ school what percentage of their graduates go to college. She looked at me with surprise at my innocence. A hundred percent, she said.)

In an author talk, Galassi said, “Sam has a lot of unfinished business in his life,” and in the last quarter of the book we follow him as he looks up former classmates to try to finish some of that business. I’m not sure he does. In a last, first-person chapter, Sam muses, “We were all . . . trying to slough off the selves we’d been handed and become someone else: to rise and fly where we like, break fully out and away. We never could, though, try as we might.”

Nevertheless, Sam’s effort to do so makes School Days superior and engaging literary fiction. 

No comments:

Post a Comment