Love and Death in a Hot Country
Johnston, George Sim
social detritus, maintained because people can't think how to get rid of it. If that's the case, the high school will gradually come to be of major interest only to governmental economists...
...If the political ideas do not blend with the fictional landscape, the game is up...
...Marx, after all, did predict that the im- _9 position o f socialism on an undeveloped country would lead to further impoverishment while reinforcing feudal social structures_9 Naipaul not only covered Guyana and Jonestown, but also went to California to interview the left-wingers who had championed Jim Jones to the bitter end...
...She finds marriage and motherhood a bore, and so, like every wife in modern fiction, hunts around for a little psychic space...
...The Eloi play childish games and fashion garlands for one another in an Eden-like garden, but, as the Time Traveler eventually learns to his horror, they are hunted and eaten at night by the ravenous Morlocks, their mutant counterparts who live deep underground...
...He is one of those people who live by neat theoretical constructs and so always come to grief...
...So do the men and women who cling to the ideas_9 A swirling vapor of assorted idealisms-ecology, feminism, heightened consciousness--clouds the brain...
...Retrospective back-filling--the origins of Aubrey and Dina's marriage, Dina's ghastly upbringing--takes up much of the limited narrative space...
...He is the kind of modern progressive whom Lionel Trilling _9 characterized as being motivated by "an ever more imperious and bitter refusal to consent to the conditioned nature of human existence," whose real goal is " t o do away with those defining elements of politics which are repugnant to reason and virtue, such as mere opinion, contingency, conflicts of interest and clashes of will and the compromises they lead t o . " Aubrey's sort cannot accept the fact that human affairs will never submit to a perfectly rational order...
...Banditry, cynicism and lies had been made a way of life...
...She reminds me of the heroine of Kate Chopin's The A wakening, only instead of swimming out to sea to drown in a state of pantheistic bliss, she settles for little walks around the festering city...
...Not something I've invented...
...Julius Nyerere of Tanzania...
...The country is run by a gang of bandits who spout Marxist slogans, and, as the novel opens, the President has just announced, much as Burnham did, a People's Plebiscite, whose only purpose is to rewrite the Constitution so that the President and his party can permanently rule the country...
...At first, as Mr...
...We see the country through the eyes of a rather hopeless couple, Aubrey and Dina St...
...The fundamental weakness of our educational system is that it does not attract well-read, imaginative persons into its ranks...
...So long as "in-service" training concentrates on "how-to" issues and neglects the material to be taught, teachers will recognize that humanistic learning is to be supported only by lip service...
...If that's the case, the high school will gradually come to be of major interest only to governmental economists and the bureaucrats who draw their salaries from it...
...Freedom of the press" was redefined, Cuban-style, as the right to publish only news which helped the "class struggle," i.e., which buttressed the regime...
...Five of them are worth reading whereas the others exemplify, in varying degree, the quality they claim to be against...
...The latter gains it.s quality by containing an unusual number of stories about what actually happened in schools...
...The minor characters, especially Aubrey's journalist friend and his wife's servant girl, are masterfully done in a few strokes (the confrontation between Dina and her servant girl could stand alone as an excellent short story...
...Sizer's considerably so...
...but the political mess around him is partly the result of a totalist mindset in which he himself remotely participates...
...This is a collection of sixteen essays treating the teaching of the humanities in high school...
...Naipaui's task is all the more difficult because instead of portraying the sort of revolutionaries found in Dostoyevsky and Malraux, who lend themselves to melodrama, he is dealing, in the person of Aubrey, with a pale and watery strain of liberalism_9 I think he brings it o f f - - barely...
...Like good socialists, they simply moved their search for the earthly paradise to other unlikely quarters...
...Aubrey is the scion of a Portuguese family which had once controlled a large estate but is now ruined...
...he spent a few harrowing months in the bush and returned with the inspiration for his best novel, A Handful of Dust...
...Unlike her husband, she is inured to the violence and corruption around her and does not want to hear about his melioristic schemes...
...It's all nonsense and you know it...
...The problems, though, are serious...
...Evelyn Waugh passed through in the early thirties...
...Like many foreigners, Naipaul was amazed at the range of the technical vocabulary employed by the natives to describe various states of self-absorption, and the second half of Journey to Nowhere is worth reading just for the specimens of psychobabble mounted in its pages...
...It's a well-documented phenomenon, Mother...
...Also, the story really does not go anywhere...
...Conferences, of course, have to be addressed...
...by then, of course, the country had been debauched by various colonial powers...
...Professional" as it is generally used is one of the biggest cant words now going, but Professor Moline manages, through careful definition, to restore some integrity to it, and to convince one that it would be a good thing for teachers to become more professional than they are...
...But what the Big Chief had in mind was soon made clear...
...In the absence of that basic change, says Delattre, other measures will be futile...
...Remember...
...Naipaul was quick to see that Jonestown was not the only story down there...
...In 1970, however, Burnham, who until then had been an oddly regressive neocolonial, gave in to intellectual fashion and became a born-again Marxist along the lines of Dr...
...I wish I could be as enthusiastic about Against Mediocrity...
...But it wouldn't turn the world around...
...he writes impassioned letters to the London Times...
...If, however, it is to be reformed, and again perform functions vital to the life of the mind, Sizer's prescriptions will be a good place to start, l recommend Horace's Compromise to anyone still believing there is hope for the schools...
...Nations, as someone said, are born stoic and die epicurean...
...The first requirement of school reform must be teachers and principals who love learning so much they are driven to have it for themselves...
...What was called corruption had blossomed into a transcendence of its own...
...Vanderbilt University has an Institute for Public Policy Studies which sponsors an Educational Excellence Network...
...Jones's ministry, which attracted middle-class whites as well as poor blacks, was not difficult to explain...
...Dina may not conform to the archetypal image of a mother...
...Greer echoes Edwin Delattre in arguing that teachers will not improve instruction in the humanities until they are led by administrators who themselves know what the humanities are...
...But there was also Guyana's political life, a potent brew of farce and tragedy even by the standards of the region...
...That is also why treatises on education are usually dull...
...It's true that determined public action might raise test scores a few points, and that would be fine...
...Pierre...
...political strongman suddenly gets his head turned by Marxism and Third World liberationist rhetoric...
...After the massacre, Naipaul found, most of them either absolved themselves of any complicity or developed a sudden amnesia on the subject...
...Ever since Sir Walter Raleigh drifted three hundred miles up the Orinoco River and came back to write of "a country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought," British Guyana has been a favorite of touring literary mandarins...
...The writing is tight and evocative...
...As he says: " I f the roots of the decline in literary interest and clear and powerful thinking among students are beyond the school, then the school must confront those deeper roots by addressing the challenge of motivating the student to employ the language in the first place...
...become, it could be said, an ideology...
...Almost 50 years later, after Jim Jones and his followers had passed around the Fla-Vor-Aid (a holocaust which at least corrected the impression abroad that the country was located in Africa), Shiva Naipaul was among the mob of journalists and Third World aficionados who flew in for the media wrap-up...
...Even his private relationships are lost in a haze of abstraction, and there are many bits of dialogue, such as this exchange with his mother, which seem to have strayed from Naipaul's California collection: "Dina's probably suffering from a form of post-natal depression," he hazarded...
...Naipaul was disturbed, however, by all this inward turning of the psyche...
...9 . . You become your abstractions--a bio-energy mass, a set of relationships, a Growth Process, a higherconsciousness machine, a Gestalt...
...He calls for heroic action by individual schools and teachers, not a very hopeful formula for widespread change but perhaps the only practical option we have...
...The arrival on the scene of Aubrey's cynical journalist friend, Alex, provokes some good dialogue, a little soul searching, but little in the way of plot...
...He runs a bookshop with a sign in the window which says "Books to Free the Mind and Gladden the Soul...
...Delattre gets to the heart of the teacher problem with a succinct statement of his theme: "It is the fate of narrow minds to be the victims of fashion-or worse, the perpetrators of it...
...Naipaul reports in his brilliant book, Journey to Nowhere (1981), the only concrete result was that ministers and civil servants began to sign their correspondence "Yours cooperatively...
...boy, took over as Prime Minister and settled in for what seemed the usual run of equatorial corruption...
...John's College in Annapolis...
...A few clung stubbornly to their admiration for Jones, claiming that the nine hundred deaths were the work of the CIA...
...Aubrey is a well-meaning socialist, a patriot, a dilettante of guilt who tries to expiate the sins of his slave-owning forebears by embarking on various projects for the betterment of mankind...
...This deplorable situation is unlikely to change soon, but Sykes thinks there are opportunities for single institutions to make headway against the stultifying crowd...
...The intellectual lassitude of the majority of people is not a puzzle to be worked out, it's just a fact...
...Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, contributes an explanation of why, and how, Bard has made writing the foundation of its core curriculum...
...Naipaul, who has considerable novelistic gifts...
...Aubrey is, of course, impotent to do anything in phantasmagoric Cuyama...
...and when the reader puts down this brief novel he has the sense of having been somewhere, a pleasure that is withheld by many acclaimed novels twice its length...
...We were talking about Dina...
...Some had made credulous pilgrimages to Jonestown, proclaimed it a marvelous example of the workings of "dialectical materialism," and interfered with attempts of concerned relatives to find out what was really going on down there...
...and anyone with education or technical skills made a rush for the airport...
...A while back this network was given a stack of the taxpayers' dollars by the National Endowment for the Humanities (that's how NEH Chairman William Bennett came to write the introduction) and spent it on conferences held in Atlanta and Denver in the spring of 1983 and, attended by assorted teachers, professors, and school officials...
...His commitment to language is undeterred by erosive developments in contemporary culture...
...Aubrey is, in short, a kind of Eloi, a wimp who cannot see the forest for the trees...
...Jon Moline, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, offers an enlightening discussion of the difficulties teachers face in becoming genuine professionals...
...You can talk about the self as if it were an alien object...
...It was a classic transition from rightwing authoritarianism to left-wing totalitarianism, and the results were the same as they have been in Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, and other Third World countries which have gone this route: The people became poorer...
...Sexual stereotyping is breaking down . . ." His mother broke into the smooth flow...
...Wells's The Time Machine...
...No level of pedagogical skill or administrative acumen can make up for empty, conventional thought about history, literature, philosophy, and modern world culture...
...the only thing missing is a pair of cuckold horns...
...Your wife...
...He starts a progressive magazine which quickly folds...
...Women are beginning to see themselves in a different light...
...The novelist has to be careful that his characters do not turn into disembodied voices peddling various viewpoints...
...the milieu is made vivid without adjectival excess...
...And in the attempt to create the new Guyana Man, thousands of young people were forced into brutal labor camps in the interior...
...Businesses were nationalized and pillaged...
...But whatever the result of the plebiscite, the country has long _9 "passed beyond the stage of mere corruption...
...Naipaul makes an alarming but apt analogy between the laid-back middleclass he bncountered in California and the race of Eloi in H.G...
...So the conference organizers selected a number of educational thinkers to deliver papers on the teaching of the humanities in the high schools...
...Burnham's private goon squad...
...What we are left with in the present is the fact that Aubrey and Dina no longer get along, if they ever did, and that Aubrey is not getting anywhere with his silly ideas...
...Nobody wants to write truthfully about what's possible in education because there wouldn't be much drama in it...
...Strictly speaking, Love and Death in a Hot Country is a long, beautifully written sketch, not a novel...
...The two volumes outlined here are better than average, and Mr...
...Times have changed...
...In "Teacher Education and the Predicaments of Reform," Gary Sykes, a former official of the National Institute for Education, gives a convincing review of recent attempts to revamp the education of teachers...
...but, then, his wife does not have the energy...
...The final entry on my list of the worthy five is by Peter Greer, superintendent of schools in Portland, Maine...
...Thirty pages into the novel, the reader will be looking forward to much more than is finally delivered...
...As a political type, Aubrey is fully realized...
...Still, it is well worth reading both for its astute political observations and for its evocation of a sinister land "where the lies fall like rain...
...He converted Guyana into something called a Cooperative Socialist Republic...
...The worm at the core of discursive fruits such as these--and it has eaten away at the eleven I didn't discuss more destructively than at the five sketched here--is that they tend to be offered as solutions to a problem that doesn't exist...
...The country, in fact, provided an object lesson of what happens when a run-of-the-mill George Sire Johnston is a writer living in New York City...
...In what he calls the three pedagogical approaches to language--the philosophical, the etymological, and the aesthetic--Botstein finds the underpinning for all humanistic study...
...I have dwelt on politics, which, no doubt, would not please Mr...
...In the middle of the confusion stood the gurus, and Jim have dwelled on Naipaul's last book not only because ~lourney to Nowhere is one of the best books on the seventies I have come across, but also because his new novel, Love and Death in a Hot Country, can be read as a fictional gloss on its predecessor_9 The "hot country," called Cuyama, " . . . a tract of land perched uneasily on the sloping shoulder of South A m e r i c a . . . on the fringe of an Empire whose interests had always lain elsewhere," is clearly Guyana...
...The constitution was gutted so that even rigged elections were no longer a necessity...
...These efforts were crippled by the inability of the various organizations responsible for teacher training to forgo games of one-upmanship...
...But then many modern women don't...
...Realizing that he had strayed into a cloud cuckoo land, Naipaul poked further around the cultural fringes of California...
...Politics in a work of literature, said Stendhal, is like a pistol shot at a concert...
...but the country remained relatively prosperous and citizens were free to go about their business so long as they did not criticize the Big Chief...
...Aubrey sighed...
...T h i s is a political novel, a fictional guide to certain Third World realities, and it risks the usual pitfalls of journalism continued by other means...
...Greer's solution is for community leaders to insist on substance from school officials, and if that's similar to a directive to pull up your socks and sit up straight, it's still probably useful...
...The ideas float like ghosts...
...the new ruling elite was more arbitrary and brutal than the one it replaced...
...It really isn't as bad as you say, Mother...
...Aubrey stands on his own feet as a fictional creation...
...Five out of sixteen is pretty good when one considers how this book came into being...
...they want the technocrats to come in and clean everything up...
...There was, of course, the usual blend of corruption and social comedy which makes post-colonial societies such a lark for journalists and novelists: the semiliterate ministers racing around in limousines, the curfews and black markets and waterless toilets, the handful of Europeans left drinking in the shadows...
...Elections were rigged, political opposition was snuffed, and the army was turned into Mr...
...Guyana was granted independence in the mid-sixties, and, with the help of the CIA :~nd the British Colonial Office, Forbes Burnham, a black racialist bull3...
...Dina is an enervated, somewhat cynical young woman whose main occupation seems to be blue afternoon moods...
...but the subtitles (THE DOLT IS MAKING ANOTHER STUPID REMARK ABOUT THE THIRD WORLD) are sometimes large and glaring...
...lawlessness increased...
...That, in itself, should be a good lesson for educators...
...And these discourses, duly revised in the light of editorial advice and commentary at the conferences, have now been made into a book...
...Since American society has not taken the trouble to ask itself what teachers should know or how they should learn it, it is not surprising that our schools are staffed mostly by intellectual plodders...
...Guyana itself was a bizarre place...
...Paramilitary organizations (never referred to in the American press as "death squads," presumably because they worked for a left-wing regime) went around assassinating people...
...The overly schematic use of the characters to illustrate the author's themes occasionally dispels the fictive cloud whose maintenance is a novelist's first duty...
...He found that sixties-style political commitment had been largely replaced by a new ethic of "selfrealization...
...The most sprightly of the five essays I can recommend to general readers is "The Intellectual Lives of Teachers" by Edwin J. Delattre, the president of St...
...Taken simply as a novel, the book is a mixed performance...
Vol. 17 • September 1984 • No. 9
