Chapter VII: Part 7

I had long known the Old Testament, but now I became attracted to the New Testament and the figure of Jesus. I memorized the Sermon on the Mount and spent sleepless nights arguing with myself. I went wild over Tawney’s _The Acquisitive Society_ and Max Weber’s _The Protestant Ethic_ had a tremendous effect on me and sent me back to reading Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. I was beginning to suspect that I was too deeply influenced by European literature and not enough by American. Why was I drawn to Kafka and Mann and Gide and Proust and Anatole France and Huysmans and not to Howells and Emerson and Whitman and Hawthorne and Melville and Thoreau? I set myself a course of study and luckily started with Hawthorne. Had I started with Howells, I have a strong notion I’d have given up. But I liked Hawthorne, and this led to Melville and here I found my God and my America. His involuted writing was perfect for me and this in turn led to Henry James. When James made the remark about the gorgeous wastefulness of living, I knew he was right. In the eyes of the world I lived in, I was wasting my time. Many of my friends by now had good jobs selling insurance or automobiles or were on the way to becoming successful junior executives. And I? Well, I was reading! I always worked, to be sure, but at odd jobs only. If I went to school during the day, then I worked at night. If I attended night school, then I worked during the day. But what the job was made no difference to me.

Sometimes I did pause to ask myself where this was going to lead. There was the day I was being interviewed for a job at Woolworth’s and the man asked, “What do you know?” I started to tell him what I knew about the various schools of literature and philosophy and he stopped me cold, saying, “You know too much about the wrong things. We can’t hire you.” This knocked me out for days.

What did I want to be? Did I have to become something? Did I have to have some land of social approval? For a time I went around in a state of near collapse. First I decided upon medicine as a good practical profession with a lot of good basic knowledge behind it. Then I felt that perhaps I should be a lawyer. I was generally regarded as a good speaker and I had an idea that criminal lawyers were exciting people. Then I thought possibly I ought to be an architect. But nothing fitted. Finally I decided. I was going to teach.

To my shocked amazement, I discovered that all my years spent at college, all my study, the range of knowledge I had sought to embrace, meant absolutely nothing in the eyes of the master educators. I was deficient in what were called Education Courses. There was nothing for me to do but to take them.

In all my life in the classroom, I had never encountered such a waste of time, such stupidity, such a moral outrage! The courses were insipid and the teachers themselves knew nothing whatever. It was either insane nonsense or an organized racket from top to bottom: courses on the theory of education (I had already gotten my theory from Samuel Butler and George Meredith, neither of whom the educators seemed to have heard of), courses on educational psychology (something completely occult), courses on techniques, courses on I.Q. measurements, courses on the art of choosing a textbook. By the time I had finished my required work in education, I could not have been less inspired to be a teacher. I had heard a great deal about the smug middle class and their valueless world, and have since encountered them and it, but I shall be happy to exhibit any group of typical specimens of this order as examples of vibrant living and exciting intellect compared to a meeting of “educators.” No wonder books are dying!

In those depression days, it seemed to me that the education world was something invented to keep some walking zombies busy. But it turned out that the educators got in on the ground floor of a good thing. With the present hue and cry for education and more education, their job is cut out for them: tests and more tests, techniques and more techniques.

We don’t need more educators; we need more _teachers_. And especially teachers of literature. Not teachers who are smug in their learning and want to impose value judgments on others. But teachers who are alive with love and enthusiasm, whose own experience with art and letters has made them a little less ashamed to be members of the human race. Not teachers armed with a book list, but with a personal addiction to reading as a never ending source of generous delight. Not experts in testing and guidance, but people with enough faith in youth to inspire them to find their own way and make their own choices, to taste the exhilaration of stumbling and bumbling on their own amid all the wonders and ups and downs of the human quest for understanding. We need teachers who will stimulate, provoke, and challenge, instead of providing crutches, short cuts, and easy directions. There is just no point in building all those new school buildings unless we have more Jesse Feldmans to fill them with the realization that the aim of education is to help man become human.

I seldom go back to where the Seven Stairs used to be. It is hard to visualize it as it once was. The old brownstone has a new face, the front bricked up and the door bolted. Business is good on the Avenue, but many of the people who come in seem tight-lipped and hurried. The Seven Stairs is not there either.

But when we start looking up old places, it means we have forgotten them as symbols. The Seven Stairs was an adventure of the heart ... a personal search for the Holy Grail, a quest that still continues. Each step up the stairs has brought crisis and someone to help me overcome that crisis and move on to the next. And seven being an enchanted number and stairs moving inward and outward as well as upward and downward, the ascent is unending, and every step a new beginning, where we must stand our ground and pay the price for it.

There is a Seven Stairs lurking unbeknown down every street as there was for me on a summer day, getting off the bus at the wrong corner on my way to meet my brother-in-law for lunch and walking along Rush Street, fascinated with the strangeness of the neighborhood. I was reading all the signs, for no purpose at all, but one that said, “Studio for Rent,” stuck with me. I turned back to look at it again before rounding the corner to go to my appointment.

I met Mel in the kind of restaurant that is exactly the same everywhere, the same I had been in a few weeks earlier while awaiting my army discharge in San Francisco, the same fixtures, the same food, the same waitresses, the same voices. But as I leaned across the table and began talking, I experienced a sudden excitement and an idea generated which I announced with as much assurance as though it had been the outcome of months of deliberation. Fifteen years later, I can still see Mel’s jaw drop and his momentary difficulty in breathing when I told him I had decided I wanted to go into business.

“What kind of business?” he said, finally.

I told him that what Chicago needed was a real bookstore. It seemed to me that I had always had visions of my name across a storefront: Stuart Brent, Bookseller. I made him go with me to look at the “for rent” sign, then together we went to see the landlord—my terrible, mincing, Machiavellian, fat little landlord.

We borrowed the keys and went back to see the studio. Mel didn’t really want to go along, but somehow I had to have him with me. If the quarters turned out to be disappointing, I didn’t think I could stand it. But when we opened the door, the hot, dirty room was magic. As I looked up at the sixteen foot ceiling, I imagined pretty Victorian society girls dressing here for the ball. I wasn’t seeing the room. I had just stepped through the door from Berkeley Square.

“Isn’t this rather small for what you have in mind?” Mel said.

“No, no,” I said, “it’s just fine. Everything is just fine!”

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Footnote 1:

Conroy’s works consist of two novels, _The Disinherited_ and _A World
to Win_, several children’s books, and _They Seek the City_, a history
of Negro migration written in collaboration with Arna Bontemps with
the assistance of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Footnote 2:

An informative pamphlet on literary agents can be obtained from the
Society of Authors Representatives, 522 Fifth Avenue, New York 36.

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Transcriber’s Note:

● The errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have
been corrected, and are noted here.
● Where hyphenation occurs on a line break, the decision to
retain or remove is based on occurrences elsewhere in the
text.
● Errors in punctuation and quotes have been silently
restored.
● The footnotes were moved to the end of the e-text.
● The numbers below reference the page and line in the
original book.

reference correction original text
7.4 occupied occuped by a painter
34.32 bookstore moving her Gold Coast book store
37.31 sometimes sometimes tight and drawn, some times
41.20 impression and the only inpression you can
44.10 bestseller who wrote a best-seller thirty
65.19 similar who hold similiar views on
66.19 became if one of the “faithful” become
68.2 conflict my inner conflct remained
88.29 bestsellers under the pop numbers and best-sellers
88.31 Malcolm Malcom Cowley, the distinguished critic
95.26 Terkel Turkel’s famous “Studs’ Place”
100.13 stick-up ‘This is a stickup!’
106.13 and ad civic responsibility
106.17 café at a small cafe
111.39 interrupted was often interupted
121.6 sing-song low, almost singsong voices
131.2 We we lived at 1639 South
150.9 interrupted interupted whatever I was
101.26 hardcover copies of the hard-cover book
174.19 say was really meant to say that
175.1 old-time old time actor in it
186.4 success as the sucess of the book

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