CONFESSIONS OF AN OUTSIDER

CONFESSIONS OF AN OUTSIDER, OR HOW TO BE A FAILURE
IN LIFE WITHOUT REALLY TRYING

By Herman Pevner

There is an old proverb – or is it an ‘aphorism’ – anyway, one of those concise “wise sayings” that seem to embody an eternal truth about human nature – the one I’m thinking of, translated into street English, basically says: “Tell me who you hang out with and I’ll tell you who you are” -- which is a variation on the theme of “Birds of a feather” .... which sort of goes; “If you tell me what kinds of birds you flock around with – I’ll tell you what kind of bird YOU are” ---
Well, most of my life I have found myself hanging out with outsiders, losers and weirdos of one kind or another – so, I guess that makes me an outsider and/or a loser – of one kind or another ...or a weirdo!

Let me point out, however, before going any further, that the outsider never really wants to be an outsider – He would much prefer to be an INSIDER – a member of the “in-crowd”, if he had any say in the matter, but it is always conditions over which he (or she) has no control which force him to be an outsider – “laughing on the outside, crying on the inside”, as a very popular song used to put it way back when ... In any case, my own personal outsider-hood started before I was even born. My mother who was already an outsider, the ‘black sheep’ of the family so to speak – decided to have a child out of wedlock, and that was me. Not only was I born outside of wedlock, but my mother died in a mental hospital when I was merely fifteen months old, leaving me to her parents – who were Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia – to raise. Thus I grew up in a Yiddish-speaking environment, in an entire community of outsiders – who were so outside the American mainstream that they didn’t even understand the language of the country they were living in! – let alone the ideas and the mentality of the American world all around them.

When I started school at the age of six, although I had somehow managed to absorb English along with the Yiddish which had far and away dominated my linguistic environment up till then – I soon realized that all the other little kids in the first grade, coming from more assimilated English-speaking Jewish families – already knew all kinds of things about which I had not the slightest clue.
For instance, the “Mother goose” rhymes which all the other kids seemed to be familiar with, were totally strange to me. An old woman who lives in a shoe?? – What the hell are they talking about! The Elson Gray readers with the dark green covers and the funny pictures, which told stories about “Dick and Jane” and their dog “Spot” and had these ridiculous English sentences in them like: “This is a ball. See the ball, Spot? – Look and see! – Run, Spot, run!” -- -- seemed to me like stories from another planet. Yet, this is what we had to learn to read from, and, as far as I could see, all the other kids seemed to be quite familiar with the weird world of “Dick and Jane” -- whereas to me it was utterly strange – a little funny, like when the cat got all tangled up in the ball of wool – but basically, strange.

I knew lots of things about Ukrainian shtetl culture – “back in the Old Country” -- which was what my family talked about most of the time – and I knew what a “pogrom” was, but mainstream American culture was almost an entire blank to me. So, I just sat there at the back of the room, kept my mouth shut, and listened in awe – hoping that eventually I would “catch up” to the other kids. This feeling of not knowing what everybody else was taking for granted has been with me all of my life, and I have spent much of my life trying to “catch up” – with an entire culture that passed me by in my earliest formative years and all the other things I thought I absolutely needed to know if I was ever going to be accepted into the pack.

I tried so hard – studying by myself – everything I could lay my hands on; comic strips in the newspapers -- (Prince Valiant, Popeye, Nancy and Sluggo, Jiggs and Maggie, Mutt and Jeff) -- comic books – (especially The Flash, Captain Marvel, and the Human Torch ) – then there were the “ big-little” books, and newspapers, and my war picture cards (I would read the stories on the backs of them until I knew them by heart – especially the campaigns of the Spanish Civil War) – I even studied the Yellow Pages of the phone book and was fascinated by the cartoon images of “The Pep Boys”, Manny, Moe and Jack. Then, of course, there were the Baseball cards – featuring guys with “real” American names like “Arkie” Vaughan, “Pinky” Higgins, “Taft” Wright, “Dolph” Camilli, “Babe” Dahlgren, “Luke” Appling, “Soupy” Campbell, and the like --I memorized all their capsule biographies and statistics -- and then there were the Superman cards and Uncle Sams – -- depicting handsome young Americans in training for the war that was coming soon …
I also listened to “my stories” on the radio – religiously – every day between five and six – Little Orphan Annie, Jack Armstrong – the ALL American Boy! – Mandrake The Magician, and – best of all – Captain Midnight and the Secret Squadron – then I got interested – really interested, in science and languages – astronomy, chemistry, and all kinds of languages – and history and geography, and The War, and Aviation – all the WW II military aircraft – I knew everything about all of them – P-40s, Airacobras, Mustangs, Spitfires, Hurricanes, Grumman Avengers, Stukas, Gull-winged F-4Us, DeHavilland Mosquitoes, the Focke-Wulf 190, the Japanese Zero, the “Flying Fortress”, the heavy bombers -- the Avro Lancasters and Short Stirlings – with the 99 foot wing spans, because British hangars were exactly 100 feet wide -- the attack planes, B-25 and B-26 -- I followed the war and geo-politics avidly, and then I started taking all kinds of books out of the library and devouring them, quietly, on my own ... and then one day I turned around and realized that I knew about ten times as much about everything as most of the people around me – not only the kids but the adults as well ... But by then it was too late. The outsider mentality which was to hound my existence for the rest of my life, was fully formed and firmly established -- and nothing was ever going to change that!

I should add, however, that the various naive childhood media which I made use of in order to work my way out of the peculiar immigrant world of my family and their Yiddish-speaking sub-society – basically the Russian shtetl transplanted to the streets of Philadelphia -- out into the wider world of American culture -- my first contact with which had left me feeling totally lost and left out -- these media, the comic books, picture cards, radio programs, etc. – were in fact much more sophisticated than the Elson Grey type ecucational pablum and drivel that was being spoon-fed to us in elementary school.

The detailed explanations on the backs of the penny bubble-gum war cards made no concessions to “little kid English”. They were, in fact, capsule reports on the state of the wars then going on in Spain, China and Ethiopia – written for adult readers. It was here that I learned words like “bombardment”, “atrocities”, “besieged city”, “artillery”, “cavalry”, “aggression”, “barricades”, “defense, “loyalists” and “rebels” – in short, the entire vocabulary of adult newspapers – at the age of six and seven. The cards also made me familiar with important World figures such as Generalissimo (great word!) Franco and Chiang Kai-Shek. Moreover, through them I became thoroughly familiar with the geography and landmarks of Spain – the Alhambra in Toledo, the Alcazar in Seville, the University battle grounds in Madrid, the Ebro River, Barcelona, the cities of the north – Santander, Oviedo and San Sebastian – all scenes of military activity. From these war cards I learned that the main North-south railway in China passed through Hankow, a major junction city – and ogled images of street battles in Shanghai and Nanking. From these cards I actually had a fair idea of what The Bund in Shanghai looked like and understood the military strategy of the invading “Japs”.

I doubt that other kids studied the captions on the backs of the cards as carefully as I did – and I was certainly the only kid around who drew realistic war scenes with colored crayons, derived from the images on these cards. An odd footnote to all this: at the bottom of the back of every card – many of them bearing extremely gory images of torn bodies and blasted buildings –was the slogan; ‘TO KNOW THE HORRORS OF WAR IS TO WANT PEACE” – -- Hard to believe; ( The official title of the series -- in all 240 numbered cards which are today a rare and coveted collectors item, is; “Horrors of War Cards”) – because all these cards did for a little boy like me, besides teaching me a much higher level of English than I was learning in school – was make me think that war was simply glorious and colorful – the greatest thing around -- And the sooner it comes, the better!

As for the comic pages in the Sunday papers: The language spoken in “Prince Valiant – ( In the Days of King Arthur) ” -- my favorite comic strip of many – was a kind of exalted Arthurian English which was clearly aimed at adult readers, and was a subtle introduction to British literature and legend as well as an introduction to Art History, since the ‘sets and costumes’ were so carefully drawn in high realism, that one could admire a single panel for ten minutes at a time. The artist was a minor genius by the name of Hal Foster. And Mandrake The Magician who “gestured hypnotically” also spoke no-nonsense adult English. From Popeye one learned a hilarious variety of a kind of English one should NOT speak – "arf-arf -- blow me down!" -- and so on. In short, the comics were a far richer and more sophisticated introduction to the English language – and the many varieties of culture at large -- than anything served up at school!

There was an extremely boring hour once a week in school called “music appreciation” which put everybody to sleep, as the teacher struggled vainly to make us understand things like “ the structure” of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. The only thing good about it, I thought, was that he never finished it. (Today I think otherwise) – But my real introduction to classical music came from the stirring trumpet blasts of the William Tell Overture which introduced The Lone Ranger on the radio – or the background music of the Flash Gordon movie serial – which was Liszt’s “les Preludes” – I didn’t know this was "classical" music – I just liked it and learned it… Then, later on there was Sibelius’ “Valse Triste” on “I Love a Mystery” – spooky music, but the kind you couldn’t forget…

From “Planet Comics” – a wondrous comic book that wasn’t around very long,

because it couldn’t compete with the super-hero type editions flooding the market – I developed an early interest in Astronomy, which has never waned. Then, of course, there was the Saturday Matinee at the Movies – every Saturday, without fail -- another form of “alternate education” which enriched me in ways I didn’t even realize until years and years later.

If the movies could make a nice Jewish guy like John Garfield, a criminal – (“They Made Me A Criminal”, 1939) – they made a shaggy Yiddish-speaking shtetl kid like myself, into an AMERICAN! – as I identified a mile-a-minute with Errol Flynn splitting the other guy’s bulls-eye arrow in two, in “Robin Hood”, or waiting for the Indians to charge in “They died With Their Boots On”, or James Cagney standing the cops off in Sing-Sing as the tear gas comes pumping in – or Ronald Reagan as “The Gipper’ in “Knute Rockne, All American” – or, discovering that “there is no such thing as a bad boy”, from Spencer Tracy in “Boy’s Town” or discovering the telephone itself with Don Ameche in “Alexander Graham Bell”, or standing off the Riff on the ramparts of the Foreign Legion fortress in Morocco with Gary Cooper in “BEAU GESTE” – or having madcap adventures with Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in India in “Gunga Din”, and -- maybe most important of all – realizing that I could speak better English than Olympic hero Johnny Weismiller in my absolutely favorite movie series of all, “TARZAN’ – I especially got a big private kick out of the scene in “Tarzan’s New York Adventure” where Tarzan shows up in court in a baggy suit and the judge says to him, “Now, Mr. Tarzan -- Do you swear to tell the truth – the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” – to which Tarzan replies with profound dignity, “TARZAN NOT LIE!” – here I felt a small surge of superiority as I privately corrected his English – You dope – you shoulda said; Tarzan DOES not lie! – you can’t win this case with shitty English like that …

In short, with the help of the comics in the Sunday papers, various kinds of picture cards, all kinds of comic books, kiddies radio programs, and the marvelous adventures up there on the silver screen – I gradually “caught up ” – and eventually surpassed the other kids, but I never got accepted into their clubs, because now I knew Too Much, which also made me different – and anyway, I was born to be an outsider.

Warsaw, Tuesday, June 08, 2004
To be continued – Next, my early playmates ... my imaginary friend “Frank” and how I became a loner at an early age ...