While You're Up, Get Me A Grant
Back in January, I mentioned a book-in-progress (Meetings with Remarkable Men
...and a Few Others) in a substack post. I’m still working on that book, adding significant “influencers” (to use the currently over-used term) whenever they occur to me. Among them, of course, are teachers. There have been so many who have—for better or worse—made each of us whatever it is that we are. One teacher (whose influence on my development was so profound that I’m finding it difficult to decide where to start) taught eighth-grade English.
Donald Grant was more than a teacher; he was my first mentor.
Mentors (such as Merlin to young Arthur—not that I think of myself as The Once and Future King) are challenged by certain blocks to their efforts in guiding the young. First is their greater experience; it distorts their perception of the world in ways that are very different from the way their students’ more limited experience distorts their world view. In short, they each see the world from very different perspectives. For example, some History teachers find, when giving lessons on the Vietnam War era (that was personal for them), that—for their students, those events were so remotely ancient that they could have been battles of The Civil War or the Revolution of the eighteenth century.
A more immediate hindrance to the mentor’s efforts is that their English is not the same English that their students use. We old folks don’t understand—and never will understand—the language that “kids” use today. It has always been that way. The subtle flip-side* is the unfortunate truth that “kids” will never fully understand us, either.
* “Flipside,” for example, is meaningless to people who have never used a phonograph—let alone one that played 45rpm records.
I have written about Mr. Grant, briefly, but only in an essay about language. That essay (in slightly altered form) was included in The Digressions of Dr Sanscravat: Gastronomical Ramblings & Other Diversions.
Alas, resurrecting this essay does nothing to help in writing the Grant entry for the Meetings with book…
Neon
Around nineteen-sixty-one or two, I showed one of my poems (I was very young, and still imagined myself to be a poet) to Mr. Grant, a favorite teacher—a man who mentored me long after I had been just one of his many pupils. He was, himself, a poet, and I respected his opinion over all others.
I no longer remember much about the poem, but I recall that I had used “neon” as a metaphor for something ineffably beautiful. I was stunned when he told me I needed to change that specific word. He said it was wrong—that it sent the wrong message—because it had so many negative connotations.
At the time I didn’t understand his objection.
For me, “neon” suggested glowing brilliance, the sort of thing that turns urban wet pavements, at night, into magical vistas, replacing the mundane horizontality of the daytime world into a maelstrom of swirling color, one that is limited by neither top nor bottom, but simply is, in omnipresent glory.
For him, the word had only one meaning: “tawdry.”
I know, now, why he felt that way: he grew up in a different time, in a different cultural context. Our conversation was an example of generational language differences.
Imagine a confrontation between a painter of the Ashcan School and a Pop artist. Both look at the ordinary world, and portray it as they see it—but they see it through very different eyes. One wants to reveal the squalor of ordinary life, while the other celebrates the sheer exuberance of it. Both, in effect, preach to the art-buying intelligentsia, the sort of people who don’t live in anything like the worlds they paint—but their sermons couldn’t be more different. Warhol might understand the Glackens' point-of-view—intellectually, if not viscerally—but Glackens would be mystified by Warhol.
Jacob Riis spoke to one generation, Tom Wolfe to the other. The city of one smelled of stale cabbage and trash, the other of incense and hashish.
I was still writing in the JFK era—before my generation had found its modus operandi—but the language we would eventually need was already evolving. Before the decade was out “neon,” and all it implied to the adolescent me, would epitomize the very spirit of the psychedelic generation.
I hadn’t understood Mr. Grant’s objection because I didn’t realize that we weren’t speaking the same language. Dylan had not yet written “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” but they already were.
Will this be a lesson we will apply when we try to communicate with the next generations?
It seems unlikely.
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