I get the alumni bulletin from my high school, and I sort of breeze through it just to see if there’s any pictures of people I know who have aged dramatically while I have remained my winsome boyish self. When the latest edition arrived this week, I learned that the most influential teacher in my life had passed away. He was well along in years, and to be honest, when I learned not long ago that he was still alive I was quite surprised. Still, to now see him unequivocally gone stopped me in my tracks. I am here most likely because he was there.
I was always a reader, from as far back as I can remember. Like any reader, certain milestones and rituals stick out. The library loomed large, in an era before there was such a thing as young adult books, or perhaps more precisely, before there was such a thing as young adult books that you would want to read. Until a certain age, to wit, until the end of sixth grade, one was limited to the children’s section. However, if one could demonstrate otherwise, one was granted limited access to the adult section. You could only take out two books at a time, and the librarians studied them carefully to make sure you hadn’t snuck in a Fanny Hill or whatever (or at least I guess that’s what they were looking for). I gravitated first to mysteries and then to science fiction, because they were the easiest sections in the adult area to figure out. And the books, of course, were perfect, and I was on my way.
Book sections in department stores (imagine that!) also loomed large. My parents would go shopping and drop me off in the book section for as long as whatever they were doing took, and pick me up at the end of it. I didn’t necessarily buy books. As much as anything, these were exploratory sessions. One looked at the wealth of books available, and began to get a sense of which ones were classics and which ones were popular and who was who and what was what. It was a way to anchor oneself in that particular world, mixing new and old, getting a feel for all of it. A similar experience later on, during my high school years, was the occasional visit to the bookstores in Grand Central. Beyond the exterior lure of the latest bestsellers, these were mostly stocked with arty, intellectual books that befit Manhattan and a big city intelligentsia. You would see covers of so-called underground classics and City Lights poetry collections and the like. Another learning experience.
While this was all in my background, I was as a youth poised for something vaguely referred to as an engineering career, because I scored through the roof in math. It wasn’t that I was shabby on the language side, but when the balance tilted one way rather than the other in what was obviously pure instinctive aptitude, one went down the obvious path. In high school, where the curriculum inviolably split students into either the language path or the science path, I was set for life on the science path. I did continue to excel in math, but quite honestly, the various sciences courses were my worst. Whatever aptitude I had for numbers did not extend into plant cells, rock formations or the periodic table of the elements.
I had Bernie McMahon as a teacher twice. The first time, it was for my regular English class, if I remember correctly as a sophomore. He was smart and funny and all that, one of my favorite teachers, but that was it. I had other good teachers too, and he was just one of them. Then senior year came around. Back then there were not a lot of AP classes. Our school offered exactly two, math and English. Math was calculus, our first exposure to this precise math of imprecision, and it was the first time in my life math and I did not get along. After a month of proving definitively that there were certain sorts of logic that my brain did not find logical, I somehow managed without penalty to switch from AP Math to AP English. Father McMahon (he was a priest, Bernard McMahon, and the nickname Bernie was as unlikely and as perfect as can be) taught the AP class. And this was where he was not simply a good teacher, he was a magician. He turned me (and many others—he was a school legend) into something totally different from what I had been before. He helped me find my real calling in life, i.e., books. Writing. Publishing. The whole thing. I had only thought of books before this as entertainment on the side. Bernie McMahon turned them into my life.
He talked about books and writers with reverence, but more than that, he treated his students' interest in books and writers with reverence. He let us write ourselves, and, for instance, created dozens of little T.S. Eliots, first by teaching us about Eliot in such a way that we saw him as a god of literature, and then by encouraging us to stimulate our own inner Eliots. Never has so much bad poetry come from the pens of adolescents as when Bernie McMahon was standing behind them, encouraging them to explore and dream. He cracked novels in such a way that we didn’t look at them from some academic theme/plot paradigm, but as living, breathing organisms created by living, breathing organisms. We took from them whatever we could, not some set body of dull approved ideas. And then we were encouraged to look at books not in the curriculum the same way, and attempt to learn from them as well. I was on a real Lewis Carroll binge in those days, and Bernie McMahon encouraged me to go as far in that direction as I wanted, rather than telling me that Alice was not on the reading list and that I should stick instead to Sir Walter Scott, who was. (Someday I will read Scott, I promise. But only when I’m ready. That would be the Bernie McMahon way of handling it.)
Father McMahon also taught at the College of New Rochelle, but I’m not sure how much or what. When I knew him he was deeply into admiration of Anais Nin—now that’s my kind of priest! I loved being with this guy, talking informally about what I was reading, or what he was reading, or what any of a small coterie of his other followers (and this guy had followers, nay acolytes) was reading. No other teacher I had so encouraged our minds both to go their own way and yet to follow the ways of those who had gone before. In the end, in me, he made final the switch of track, so that when I went to college I did nothing but the humanities, with the barest minimum of math and science. In fact, the only math course I remember, I also remember never attending, showing up only for the final, on the assumption (correct) that I could pass it easily (it was not a calculus course). Interestingly enough, all those cut classes had an effect on me, and I do, and this is true, occasionally dream that I should be in that class and I’m not, and my world is about to end because of it. It is a classic nightmare, the last lingering vestiges of my life in the world of math.
So Father Bernard McMahon got me not into books but realizing that books were where I was supposed to be. Forty years plus of a career in publishing, with a couple of published books of my own under my belt, is the end result.
My most fervent wish is that everyone in high school find a teacher like that, a teacher who doesn’t just show you things you don’t know about the world, but things you don’t know about yourself. R.I.P. Father McMahon.
No comments:
Post a Comment