This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (20 page)

“If there's any problem during your speech,” the president told me, “just step away from the podium. There will be someone there to take you off the stage.”

“A problem?” I asked.

Over a salad of sliced chicken and fat berries, I was assured that problems were unlikely. Parents and protesters would be watching my speech as it was simulcast to them in an auditorium across campus. Only the incoming freshmen would be in the coliseum. And if a problem arose, I'd have a bodyguard.

I felt that someone should have mentioned the bodyguard to me sooner, as well as the protesters at their off-site location. It would have influenced my thinking on how to proceed, because while I believe in academic freedom and the right to chose a book without legislative consent, I did not believe in them as much as I believed in my safety, at least not in the state of South Carolina. Maybe I could see laying myself down on the altar of higher education in Tennessee, but as far as I was concerned, South Carolina was on its own.

I was to address the incoming freshman class of nearly three thousand in the Littlejohn Coliseum, home of the Clemson Tigers. When I arrived, the place had the bristling energy of a rock concert waiting to happen. The arena had been cut in half by a series of high black drapes so that the students would fill every seat, shoulder to shoulder, all the way to the nosebleed section four tiers up. In the middle of the basketball court, near the toe pads of the giant orange paw print that marked the floor, was a boxlike stage, a temporary affair decked out with a few potted palms and a lectern with a microphone. Behind it was a projection screen that would have been a reasonable size in any suburban cineplex. The screen would show a giant movie of my face that could be clearly seen by both the students in the rafters and the angry mob on the other side of campus.

After the president had made his remarks about all the wonderful things the next four years of a Clemson education would bring, I walked through the pitch-black darkness, climbed the stairs, and stepped into the klieg lights. I received a very healthy round of applause. After all, only seven of the nearly three thousand students present had bothered to show up at the protest. I had never thought that Wingate and his people spoke for Clemson. I only believed he spoke loudly enough to drown out all the voices around them.

I
put a ridiculous amount of effort into the writing of that speech, and no small amount of energy into the delivery. I made an impassioned plea for the right to read, for the importance of going to the primary source to form one's opinion and not to rely on secondary sources to make the decisions for you. These students were, for the most part, old enough to vote and go to war. They had seen cable television, visited Facebook, listened to rap music. To say that a book could be so potentially corrupting was to say we had no faith in their ability to make decisions for themselves. Would
Anna Karenina
lead them to affairs and then a tragic death beneath a train? I told them that the people who had tried to protect them from my book and from me thought they lacked the maturity and judgment to make their own decisions, and then I ran through a list of all the other books and authors and classes they would need to be protected from. Goodbye, Philip Roth! Farewell,
Lolita
. So long, Jay Gatsby. I explained how they could so easily lose science and history and art. On I went, a marvel of civility and common sense, while behind me the giant projection of my head kept pace. There in the blackened arena I raised a mighty cry for the right to read, and implored the students to never let anyone take their books away from them. It wasn't until later, weeks later, that the stupidity of my argument began to sink in.
Anna Karenina
?
The Great Gatsby
? How many of those kids even knew what I was talking about? Was it such a perilous threat to say, Let them take away
Truth & Beauty
and the next thing you know you'll lose a really great book like
Lolita
? Don't you have to first love
Lolita
to imagine the magnitude of that loss?

Back at the basketball court, we were experiencing technical difficulties. The question-and-answer portion of the event was falling apart. The microphones weren't working at first, and soon students were shouting out questions in the dark:
Is there anything you regret about your friendship with Miss Grealy? Do you feel differently about other friends because they'd never measure up to Lucy?
Some of the questions had a nasty edge:
Lots of people have friends and lots of people have cancer so why should we care about what you have to say?
Some of them were sweetly goofy:
Do you have any advice for finding true love?

One kid found a microphone that was working. He wanted to know how long I'd known my husband.

“Twelve years,” I told him.

“Well, after reading your book and hearing you talk, I just wanted to ask you, how many times have you cheated on him?”

I raised my hands up against the blinding lights. I had no idea where the voice was coming from. What eighteen-year-old asked this kind of question when the lights were up, when you could see him and knew his name? I asked what made him think I would cheat on my husband.

“Well, you seem to be okay with all that after writing your book.”

I gave some decent-enough answer about compassion and not judging other people, the kind of answer you later rescript a thousand times in your head, but I didn't actually understand what he was talking about, not while I was leaving the stage, not during the mockery of a press conference that followed. I didn't understand him when my bodyguard put my sister and me in a van that had been driven up under the coliseum to speed us to the other side of campus and to my car so that we could get away before anyone figured out where we had gone. The rain, which had started at some point during my talk, was coming down in blinding sheets now, rendering the campus a muddy pit as we made our mad dash for the car. In three steps we were soaked through. We drove away as fast as the weather would allow, and still I didn't understand him. Not until the middle of the night, when I was back safely in my sister's guest bed, did I realize that he wasn't saying I was immoral for not judging Lucy. He was saying I was immoral for the things I had done myself.

C
lemson was kind to provide me with all the documents I needed to write this article. They not only sent me copies of all the newspaper articles I'd ask for, but they also sent me letters that had been written to the president, cries of outrage and revulsion at the thought of my work and my person.

If Clemson continues to offer pornographic material such as Patchett's book, my daughter, and my money, will go elsewhere . . . I cannot fathom what led Clemson to build a class around this drivel.

For reasons I know you are aware of, it was an inappropriate selection. I've not read the book, nor do I intend to.

Surely the university could have picked other subject matter to stimulate the minds of entering freshmen, such as the AIDS epidemic on the continent of Africa, the ongoing Middle East crisis or the flattening of the world in respect to technology's effect on the global economy. [Why Africa? I wondered. This one was from a state senator.]

I believe in academic freedom. I believe however it is freedom to do good. After all, what is the basic original founding purposes of the institutions of higher learning in the United States of which I'm sure you are most knowledgeable?

I guess I am accustomed to hearing about cases like this at liberal havens like Harvard, or even Chapel Hill, but I am shocked that Clemson has now stooped to this. No matter what the supposed motive behind this assignment, it is nothing more than another attempt by liberal academicians, given over to depraved minds, to force a deviant sexual agenda on young students.

I am very proud of Clemson University for continuing to have a prayer before each football game even with threats of law suits from the ACLU. I do not have the same feelings about this summer reading assignment.

In 2002, right after 9/11, the University of North Carolina assigned a book composed of selections (or suras) from the Koran for its incoming freshman to read. UNC followed several years later with a socialist tome (
Nickel and Dimed
, by Barbara Ehrenreich). Now Clemson is getting into the act. But instead of religion or politics, Clemson has chosen sex.

It was this last letter that made me realize the extent to which I had never understood the rules of engagement: if
Nickel and Dimed
was a socialist tome (albeit a slim one), then
Truth & Beauty
was pornography. Like beauty itself, pornography turned out to be in the eye of the beholder.

The only letter I kept was one written in pencil on a sheet of notebook paper. A student had slipped it to my bodyguard, who had given it to me: “Dear Mrs. Patchett, On behalf of the entire state of South Carolina, I am sorry for what happened.”

After it was over, my sister told me I should look at the online Bible-study guide to
Truth & Beauty
. She had read it with plans to wage a battle against the Palmetto Family Council, but in the end she changed her mind. “It's not as bad as you'd think,” she said.

Not as bad, but still, in my experience there is no equivalent to seeing yourself as a character in a series of Bible-study questions (helpfully accompanied by scriptural references), or in seeing a neat explanation of the suffering and death of your friend.

Question Five: How would you characterize Ann and Lucy's friendship? In what ways was common grace exhibited in Ann's friendship toward Lucy? What is a friend? Describe the qualities.

Question Six: When Jesus was accused of being a “friend to tax collectors and sinners,” do you think Lucy would have been included in or excluded from His circle of friends? Why? Can you think of instances in which Jesus befriended the “Lucy's” of His day? How did He deal with them? What do we learn from Him?

Question Eight: Self-righteousness is an insidious spiritual disease which is a betrayer of the gospel of grace and a great hindrance to evangelism. What is self-righteousness? Why is it such a hindrance to evangelism? How does the gospel of grace enable us to repent of our self-righteousness and free us to share the gospel with compassion?

Maybe I was all right with it for a while. I read their answers, too, and in those answers Lucy and Jesus walked together as friends. The self-righteous exuded a condescending air of moral superiority that non-Christians are rightly repulsed by. I appreciated that. It was Question Ten that stopped me: “How would you share the gospel with Ann?”

I looked at that one for a long time, and I knew without checking that the answer sheet and I were no longer in accord.

In my better moments, I tell myself what happened was a noble battle between freedom and oppression, but I know it is equally possible that nothing so lofty occurred. Some people find sex and suffering and deep friendship between women unpalatable subjects, and seeing this book bearing down on their children, they no doubt felt they had to try and stop it. They didn't succeed, but I seriously doubt that anyone was harmed by completing the assignment. If I am the worst thing the students of Clemson have to fear, then their lives will be very beautiful indeed.

(
Atlantic Monthly
, October 2007)

The Right to Read

The Clemson Freshman Convocation

Address of 2006

I
WOULD LIKE TO
thank the people at Clemson who extended this invitation to me, and I'd like to thank them for sticking by it. I am very glad to be here. I would like to thank my supporters for their kindness and my detractors for their patience. When I consider the state of our public education system, the state of health care, the facts of poverty and war that we live with, I would hope that the passions of protesters could be put to greater use, but I didn't get a vote on this one, so here we go.

Imagine if you will a very little girl of nine who gets hit in the head with a volleyball one day during recess. She goes to the hospital, and it turns out her jaw is broken. But it won't heal and it won't heal and her parents keep taking her back to the doctor, and finally, months later, somebody figures out that her jaw is full of cancer. It's a Ewing's sarcoma and it has a five percent survival rate. Nobody tells Lucy this because they figure she's a child and she's going to die anyway. Nobody tells her when she's going into surgery, or all that time after surgery that she has bandages on, that she's lost half her jaw. When she finally gets out of the hospital, she starts chemotherapy. She's one of the first children in the country to have chemotherapy, and because chemotherapy then was a much stronger and less refined business than it is now, she described it as being burned alive. She goes in five days a week for a combination of chemo and radiation, and together they last for a total of two and a half years. All but six of her teeth fall out. For all of that time she is bald. When she finally goes back to school, none of the girls will sit with her at lunch. The boys wait for her in the stairwells to bark and scream and chase her. In the course of her life she has thirty-eight reconstructive surgeries. Muscles, bones, tissue, and veins are stripped from every part of her body to try to put her face back together again, but because of the enormous amount of radiation every graft eventually fails. And despite all of this, or because of it, she turns out to be the smartest person you'd ever want to meet, the most widely read, the most intellectually curious, the funniest, the best dancer.

When she got fed up with people staring at her, Lucy wrote a book called
Autobiography of a Face
. It's the story of what happened to her. It's about her belief that none of us ever really feels we are good enough, beautiful enough, loved and accepted enough. For a while she was a celebrity. She wound up on CNN and
Oprah
and the
Today
show. She looked straight into the camera and hoped that someone out there would fall in love with her. You have never known anyone so brave in your life. Not fearless, mind you, she was too smart, too experienced, not to understand how terrifying life could be, but she faced it anyway. I cannot begin to tell you how much I loved her and admired her, and when you love someone, really love them, it would never occur to you not to stick by them.

I stuck by Lucy after she died, too. Her death, like her life, was the subject of great rumor. I heard she died of cancer. I heard that she had overdosed over a canceled book contract. I heard she jumped from the roof of an apartment building where she no longer lived. I wanted to set the record straight, to tell the truth about what had happened, but that's really only a small part of what set me writing. Lucy was as complicated as the giant books of philosophy she loved to read; I knew that I would never be able to hold her in my mind exactly the way she was. I knew that every year she was dead her memory would become simpler. She would be easier and sweeter, and I didn't want that to happen. It was, after all, Lucy's bravado and her ferocity that I loved so much. I thought that if I wrote it all down, the story of the two of us, the story of friendship and what we had done together, that I could press her between the pages of a book like a maple leaf and keep her.

Certainly even people coming from the most intellectually restricted backgrounds imaginable know that books far more salacious than mine have been published and widely read. The problem isn't that Lucy and I made the choices we made in our lives because, again, the faintest brush against society would show that plenty of people make worse choices. The problem isn't even that you read my book, because chances are you've played a round of Grand Theft Auto in your day. You're on Facebook, you've watched HBO, watched the news. No matter how pure your hearts are, I seriously doubt that anyone thinks that my book was the very first time you've seen any mention of sex, drugs, depression, or abiding friendship. People may not like the idea that these things are going on or that I wrote about them or that you read about them, but none of that is enough to start a protest or make the news. The problem here is that your chosen institution of higher learning has given you this book as an assignment. It's the fact that if you want to enter this freshman class at Clemson you pretty much have to read it.

T
he people who oppose the assignment of
Truth & Beauty
and who oppose my presence here on campus today do not do so for themselves. After all, nobody's making them read my book. They are opposing on your behalf. They want to protect you from me, even if they were unable to protect you from Grand Theft Auto. Since you're just starting out as freshmen, let's take a few minutes to think of what else you're going to need protecting from. I used all possible restraint in making this list because I could go on for the entire four years you are in college: You don't want to pay good money to have to read about immoral behavior, so
Anna Karenina
is out. It's about adultery, a married woman's affair with another man, and her eventual suicide. It's scandalous, but it's also really long.
The Great Gatsby
has more adultery, in addition to alcoholism and murder, so that has to go as well. It will be harder to let go of that one because it's short, and you may have already read it in high school.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
? You've got incest, which is a shame, because it is a spectacular novel. My uncontested pick for the best novel of the twentieth century is Vladamir Nabokov's
Lolita
, and if I start talking about
Lolita
I feel certain the National Guard will come and remove me from this stage. Faulkner is gone. Hemingway is gone. Toni Morrison, John Updike, and Philip Roth, our greatest living American authors, are off-limits to you. There is so much sex and filthy language in their books that I should probably not even say their names.

But maybe those books aren't the problem because they're all fiction. Maybe what's upsetting about my book is that it's true. So let's make a pact not to read any nonfiction that could be upsetting. If stories about girls who are disfigured by cancer and humiliated by strangers, and turn to sex and drugs to escape from their enormous pain are too disgusting and pornographic, then I have to tell you the Holocaust is off-limits. The Russian Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, the war in Vietnam, the Crusades, all represent such staggering acts of human depravity and perversion I could see the virtue of never looking at them at all.

But it doesn't stop there. Almost every field you can think of has a history of controversy: art, economics, philosophy. Will you not read Nietzsche if he says there is no God? In which case science is out because science can also conflict with faith. Math is fine. Calculus, physics, chemistry. Plan to take a lot of those classes.

The implicit assumption in trying to protect you from the likes of me is that you have no filters, no life experience, no judgment, and very little intellect. You are so malleable that reading an assigned book, one that mentions drugs and sex, will make you throw the book to the floor and rush out to engage in all of those activities yourself, the chances of which seem about as likely to me as the chances that reading
Anna Karenina
will make you throw yourself beneath a train. It also assumes that Tolstoy's book is not, more importantly, about the inherent beauty of life and that my book is not about the deep value of loyalty.

Since this is your first week of college, it's a good time for you to think about why you're here. Unlike your first twelve years in school, your education is no longer compulsory. What that means is that you are choosing to be here. No one, not even your parents, can make you go to college. Your education is an enormous privilege that sets you apart from most of the people of the world, including most of the people in your own country. Just over twenty-five percent of Americans your age will receive a college education. One in four. I want to emphasize this: higher education is a privilege and a choice. It is perhaps the first real choice of your adult lives. Many of you are taking out loans, getting jobs, and shouldering some or even all of the cost of this choice. The rest of you, I trust, are appreciative of the people and institutions in your life who are making this education possible. The number-one purpose of your time at Clemson is to broaden and deepen the scope of your intellectual ability. Everything else—sports, social life, fraternities, sororities, campus politics, everything else—comes behind academics. You are here to learn. The time-honored way that people learn is through apprenticeship. If you wanted to be a glassblower, you'd go and study with a master glassblower; you would follow his movements and try to absorb his knowledge. A university is basically a large consortium of individuals who have expertise in their respective fields so that you have the chance to apprentice yourself to those who have done advanced work in mathematics and literature and economics. You can sample an enormous range of intellectual pursuits and in doing so you can discover who you are and what you're best at.

Unless, of course, you get into the business of being protected from what might offend you or upset you, of having other people decide what you can and cannot learn. The best answer to this I've found is in a convocation address given by the poet Adrienne Rich. She titles it “Claiming an Education,” and in it she wrote:

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts. . . . Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions—predigested books and ideas . . . taking “gut” courses instead of ones you know will challenge you, bluffing at school and life instead of doing solid work. . . . This means seeking out criticism, recognizing that the most affirming thing anyone can do for you is demand that you push yourself further, show you the range of what you can do.

You have made the decision to go to college. You are old enough to drive a car, to vote, to pay taxes, and to go to war. You are not children, even if there are days it still feels that is the case. The best way to make sure that your parents and teachers treat you as adults is to act like adults. Take responsibility for your lives and your minds and ask that others respect your integrity. Be very proud that you have enrolled in an institution that considers you to be adults, that respects and defends your right to learn, and does not capitulate to forces that say you're not up to the task of making a decision for yourselves.

You are about to open your minds. A college education is about expansion. It's about seeing many different viewpoints, hearing many different voices. You will find that the more you learn, the more complicated things get, because you will have the intelligence to recognize many aspects of a single idea. You will learn to use your mind in the way an athlete uses her body. You will stretch and strengthen and grow. And this is precisely why so many people are afraid of higher education; it's simply easier for them to see the world in terms of right and wrong. They've got one clear answer for everything and they're sticking to it. But you have the chance to fearlessly move beyond that now if you are willing to explore what is available to you.

I have always been a fiction writer, but over the years I've made a lot of my living as a journalist, and one of the first things a journalist has to understand is the difference between a primary and a secondary source. If you can embrace this concept, much of what you do in college will be easier for you. A primary source is the thing itself and a secondary source is an interpretation of or a report about that thing. Say you're writing a paper on
The Great Gatsby
. The novel itself would be your primary source. Articles and books written about that novel would be secondary sources. CliffsNotes, heaven forbid you ever touch them, would be a secondary source. Say you wanted to write a paper on South Carolina's governor. Your best primary source is to get an interview with the governor himself; other primary sources would be people who actually know him: his assistant, his chief of staff, his wife. When you get your information from newspaper articles, then you're using secondary sources. Any teacher, and any journalist, will tell you that secondary sources are extremely important. You can look to other people's opinions to help you shape your thesis and to help you see other aspects of an idea you might not have considered. But whenever possible, you need to go to the primary source to make your decisions. Regardless of whether or not you're a student, it is never enough to rely on other people's ideas. You have to look at the thing itself and make up your own mind. That's what it means to study and to learn. Some secondary sources proclaim their points of view so loudly and with such passion you might be tempted just to take their word for it. You might be tempted not to do the work of checking to see for yourself. But there can be a fine line between obedience and laziness, and if you go through life dutifully taking other people's word about what's right, you are putting yourself in the position to be led down some very dark roads.