Mick Travis and the Deadly Quadrangle

I suppose this is as good a time as any to finally get around to watching Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968). I'm getting near the end of the "Up Series" of documentaries, in which at least three of the boys attended schools much like the public school depicted in Anderson's film. And in another ten (?) days, the final volume of the most celebrated series of novels about British public schools ever written, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, will be released.

The first thought that occurs to my mind is that I don't have enough "real-world" evidence to go on about British public schools ("public" here meaning upper-class and exclusive) to make a considered judgment, even though I've been absorbing British culture all my life. How realistic is the depiction of public schools meant to be in If....? Was corporal punishment by other students still allowed in the late Sixties? (I know the young Eric Blair and other Etonians were rejecting it in the early Twenties.) Was OTC mandatory in the late Sixties, as depicted here? The precise nature of reality is important because so much of If.... is a fantasy, and that fantasy is never clearly demarcated.

If.... is the story of three public-school sixth-formers who rebel against their school finally by shooting and blowing up their classmates, masters, and their families. Of course, the shadow of Columbine looms over such a depiction. And issues from that tragedy span reality and fiction: bullying, ostracism, labeling. The ending of the movie, almost everyone seems to agree, is a fantasy (one of the mothers, for instance, grabs a rifle and starts shooting at the rebels). Right here I'd like to make some sententious declaration, but I remember what happened to another maxim-giver at the hands of a college student ("Thou, wretched, rash, intruding fool...").

To J. K. Rowlings's credit, she does show the evils of prejudice (in this case ethnic) and of bullying as well at Hogwarts, but there are still the worship of sport (quidditch is like rugby) and the rivalries among the various houses. Harry Potter, like Mick Travis, is pretty much the outsider (again, often forced to be), and a rebel, but for a good cause.

The first time we see Mick, he is called Guy Fawkes for his hat and the scarf hiding the moustache he grew over the summer.

It's the first time audiences saw those eyes up close, those eyes that could be so faun-like, yet a centimeter wider, become a gargoyle's, and with a little liner, are those of a--well, use your gulliver and supply your own Nadsat phrase.

"La, la , la, la, life goes on"

A lot of what I'm doing lately is so immense (such as reading a three-volume, 1200-page novel written in fragmentary modernist mode) that I don't want to talk about it until I have gotten farther along. One longer viewing experience I can comment upon and recommend highly is Michael Apted's "Up Series," a seven-movie series of documentaries. Few documentaries have been constructed around an individual's chronological life as it is lived: this one does it with a group of people.

It began as a 1964 documentary about a group of seven-year-old British children selected for differences in social class, geographic location, and gender. One boy grew up on a Dales farm, three boys went to a exclusive prep school, three girls are friends at an East London school, two boys are from a children's home, two boys from a Liverpool suburb--the backgrounds and personalities are nicely varied. Most of the program consists of interviews with the children, but the narrator does come in at the end and announces the Jesuits' maxim: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

This bothered me--not because the Jesuits didn't say it (they did) and not because it isn't true (q.v. James Joyce). But I thought the series, which returns to this group of young Britons (and even that fact changes fairly quickly) at intervals of seven years, would show more the accuracy of Wordsworth's statement in his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality": "The child is the father to the man." In other words, we'd see how much of a personality, a character, was present already in childhood and would remain in adulthood. Character is destiny--or would we learn differently?

But as the series wears on, as the filmmakers return to the same group every seven years, I learn that both points are true. What has been ground into these children as thoroughly as their gender roles are their positions in a class-demarcated society. Also, a lot of the adult is present in the child. But those are the generalizations. The heart of the series--and I'm up to 35 Up now--are the individuals. Some people's lives change abruptly--divorce, an unexpected child--some stay the same. I don't want to get into many specifics because, like fiction, one of the joys of "reading" these lives is to see what happens.

But life is not fiction in that it doesn't have an Aristotlean plot. Austen, Dickens, and other novelists often end their fictions with a marriage--but for many people, that's only the beginning. What is the shape of a life as it is lived? Its weight? And in this sense the "Up Series" resembles U.S.A.

The word that keeps returning to me in attempting to describe this series is deep. It is deeply moving at times, deeply human, and deeply humanistic. One story in particular is almost ineffably sad. I'm holding my breath, so to speak, for the last two installments.