Shoe Vanilla

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Goody Two-Shoes (cover): artist and author unknown, New York, 1888 (text first published London, 1765 as The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, authorship attributed to Oliver Goldsmith [?]); image by Inductiveload, 22 March 2010

In secondary school I was introduced to poetry by a brave, seemingly not very experienced and very probably badly underpaid instructor named Mr Hlavin. Mr Hlavin was the first person I had ever encountered who knew things about poetry.

My fellow students were unappreciative, disrespectful, uninterested. This was on the West Side of Chicago, where poetry had never been and probably never would be at home.

It was a sophomore English class, normally conducted by a white-robed Dominican priest. Mr Hlavin, in his neat grey suit with white starched collar, came only once a week. He was an outsider; he knew that; we knew that. Making matters even more difficult for him, the sophomores were the most unruly students in the school. The sheepish freshmen had devolved into wolfish sophomores whose conduct was so consistently sophomoric that a special wing of the school had been built specifically to house them, and to quarantine them off from the remainder of the student body.

"The Spelling Lesson": illustration in Goody Two-Shoes: artist and author unknown, New York, 1888 (text first published London, 1765 as The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, authorship attributed to Oliver Goldsmith[?]); image by Inductiveload, 22 March 2010

Mr Hlavin, a tall, evidently underfed not very old man dressed in that neat grey suit, entered the classroom one autumn day and, bravely ignoring the sneers with which he had been greeted, began writing some lines in chalk upon the blackboard:

When I was one and twenty...

Muffled sniggers spread about the room. It was cruel really, to unleash these rude sophomores upon any teacher. But the priests, who employed corporal punishment, vigorously and impressively, to maintain order, had their own very effective methods of control. The few part-time "lay" teachers, however, were not similarly given to employing beatings to enforce a semblance of order in the classrooms, and were thus, by this significant omission, rendered helpless before the merciless moronic sophomore barbarian hordes. (It should probably go without saying that this was an all-male school. We had no idea what went on in the schools girls were sent to. Can things have been this atavistic? We could only dimly wonder... and perhaps, if courageous, or doomed like Mr Hlavin, imagine.)

A French female violin student wearing high-heel shoes getting spanked with a violin bow by a strict female teacher: photo by Jacques Biederer, Ostra Studio, Paris, 1930s

Mr Hlavin suffered most.

He had brought wondrous things to put before these hordes. But every time he turned his back to inscribe a poem upon the blackboard, barely-subdued pandemonium broke loose.

When he turned to face the music, relative quiet fell over the room. In later years, when I came into that circle of the underworld in which it was required that I experience such unendurable moments myself, I realised that, for a teacher, confronted by a yawning, dazed barbarian horde, the next breath taken may well depend, not perhaps upon a thing as lovely as tree, or as iconic as a red wheelbarrow, but upon the next word spoken -- no not so much spoken as desperately flung into this gap surrounded by a void beyond the outer ring-road of literacy.

Tom Clark, in his home schoolroom, with John Keats pondering upon one shoulder: photo by Mark Gould, 2005

Mr Hlavin spoke to us of many things that became incomprehensible even as they left his mouth.

He spoke of "redge-rick", for example. The mysterious term seemed to refer to a category of literature in which poetry was included. But I had no idea, really, what he was talking about. To raise one's hand and politely enquire about the meaning of this term would have been to risk the general scorn of the entire class. Better therefore to wonder on in silence.

It must have been years before the moment of illumination finally came. Mr Hlavin had been talking about Rhetoric. When at last the lightbulb flickered on, I felt chastened, and ashamed. By then Mr Hlavin had gone out of my life forever. I would never have a chance to go to him, confess my terrible ignorance, and beg his forgiveness for being no better than the rest of the lowing herd of sophomoric barbarians.

Vanilla planifolia (flower): photo by H. Zell, 29 April 2009

In one of his poetry classes, Mr Hlavin used another term that, in my terrible state of innocence and endarkenment (not quite as bad as the truly awful "invincible ignorance" which, we were told, inevitably afflicted those poor savages who had no souls, because they dwelt beyond reach of the word of God), equally mystified me. He was, I now surmise, attempting to make a certain poem -- I can't remember which one -- seem a bit less intimidating to us, by explaining that the author had written it in youth. He wanted to let us understand that it was possible for a young person to write poetry that was perhaps of itself not very good, but was, in effect, "good practise", preparing the way for later, better efforts.

Such youthful poetry, he explained, was called "Shoe Vanilla". At least that's what I thought he was saying. The misunderstanding was perhaps only natural. Mr Hlavin had an unusual way of speaking -- educated, that was it. An unfamiliar accent. And then too this world of which I speak was a vanilla world. I imagined a pair of vanilla shoes -- something like white bucks (I had a pair of those, part of my marching band uniform, they were very hard to keep clean, indeed the job of marching on a muddy halftime football field, while simultaneously playing the clarinet, I found nearly as difficult as, and for that matter quite a bit less interesting than, the job of trying to figure out poetry).

"Two Shoes, Ma'am, Two Shoes": illustration in Goody Two-Shoes: artist and author unknown, New York, 1888 (text first published London, 1765 as The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, authorship attributed to Oliver Goldsmith[?]); image by Inductiveload, 22 March 2010

Would you like to see some of my Shoe Vanilla, people?

Vanilla planifolia (flower): photo by U.S. National Park Service; image by Toapel, 23 July 2005 (USNPS)

Well, I must confess my Shoe Vanilla archive, alas, has become, over the years, almost as impoverished as poor Mr Hlavin had looked, back then, in the aforementioned early barbarian days. But there are one or two bits of the stuff still left, breeding around semi-harmlessly like small funguses in the depths of the mildew-forested closets.

Vanilla planifolia (flower): photo by H. Zell, 29 April 2009

I was reminded anew of this by accident, recently, in the course of a Google search. Google searches are often like fishing expeditions in polluted rivers. One is as likely to hook an old shoe or a deflated bicycle tire inner tube as whatever it was one had been looking for.

An old shoe... and then it hit me. An old specimen of Shoe Vanilla.

And at last, after all these one-and-twenty-and-many-more years, I understood that Mr Hlavin, that lovely, earnest, doomed poetry teacher, had been talking about juvenilia.

Vanilla planifolia (flower): photo by H. Zell, 29 April 2009

Drugs are a tuition,
and tuition is teaching,
but in French tuer is to kill,
and so in France drugs are killing

What does it mean to “make a killing”?
It means to make money,
and money is a means
to certain kinds of killing,

as for instance dropping millions of pennies
on someone from a helicopter.
Money can also be used to buy drugs, helicopters,
or to pay for your tuition,

but money, drugs, and killing
are not the sort of pursuits
a person should pursue with his tuition
if he is a student in France or America.

TC: Going to School in France and America, from Airplanes (1966)

Airplanes by Tom Clark (cover by Tom Clark), Once Books, 1966

Nouveau logo officiel de l'École normale supérieure, Paris: image by Edelagrandiere, 1 September 2010