In Defense Of Literary, Rationality And Civility-Long Gone, Sadly

In Defense Of Literary Flourishes, Rationality And Civility-Long Gone, Sadly   

By Phillip Larkin

Recently I did a short archival caption piece here recounting the effect that one Miss (yes Miss in those days) Rose Enos, English teacher at North Adamsville High had on a bunch of unruly, yes, unruly, Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys back in the early 1960s. In the end she saved many of us from strange and sullen fates by her perseverance in one matter-language matters, literature matters, the written word matters. Almost sixty years later I can still recite the party line. Thanks Miss Enos.

Thanks Miss Enos but that is not the end of it, or rather that was the end of it. As I noted in the previous caption in the early 1960s from 10^th to 12^th grade at least in Math and English you would have the same teacher. We were all terrified at the end of ninth grade that we might get her and mortified at the beginning of 10^th when almost all of us got her, although not all in the same class. We put up some minor struggles but in the end we conceded the point that what she had to teach us was worth the hell that she put us through especially with those infinite number of book reports and oral debates on weird subjects. The only one who loved it all was our “in-house intellectual” Pete Markin, the Scribe although in the end he fell down, couldn’t be saved against the forces of his own hubris.  

Miss Enos might have had our numbers in class but we were basically devoted to the corner boy ethos otherwise. Meaning, except again as always Markin, that we didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything except girls, cars and figuring, legal or illegal ways to get some dough for the former two. Some of us were into school sports and the like but mainly we were into our own little sub-culture. That is why it was surprise when we got our yearbooks at the end of senior year to see that the school had an after school Great Books club. None of us at the time had we known it existed would have given a rat’s ass about it.

But that was then and now with egg over at least several faces we surviving corner boys finally get what Markin, the Scribe was talking about after graduation when he damned himself for not having joined club with all hands and maybe the coin of fate, his fate in particular might have gone in a different direction. Just maybe the debates, the smell of the books, the printed word in those days could have spared us a lot of wasted time and foolish hubris.