by
Helen DeWitt
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I never meant this to happen. (L is reading Odyssey 5. He has read four books in four days. I would carry on from where I left off but I have misplaced my notes.) What I meant was to follow the example of Mr. Ma (father of the famous cellist), who I read somewhere started teaching Yo Yo when he was 2.
Coupez la difficulté en quatre was his motto, which meant that he would reduce a piece of music to a number of very small short tasks; the child was to master one task a day. He used the same procedure with Chinese characters, the child learning a character a day—by my reckoning that makes two simple tasks but you get the picture. I thought that this would be an enormous help to L for very little trouble to myself, & when he was 2 I started him on flashcards.
I think that the first simple task was supposed to be cat. No sooner had he mastered this simple task than he wanted to go on, he wanted every single word in his vocabulary on a card, he sobbed PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE when I tried to stop before writing it down. The next day he started his first book, Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss, no sooner had he started than he started to cry because he did not know Hop and Pop. I saw in a flash that the time required to teach a two-year-old workaholic by the look-and-say method would leave perhaps 6 minutes a day for typing, & so (doubting my ability to make ends meet on 55p a day) I hastily went over a few principles of the phonics system. He learned to say huh when he saw an h and puh when he saw a p and by the end of the week he could read as follows: Hop. On. Pop. The. Cat. in. the. Hat.
I thought: Let’s think of another simple task.
I thought arithmetic could be the simple task. So I taught him to count past 5 and he counted up to 5,557 over a period of three days before collapsing in sobs because he had not reached the end & I said with the genius of desperation that the good thing about infinity is that you know you’ll never run out of numbers. I taught him to add 1 to a number which seemed a simple task & he covered 20 sheets of graph paper with calculations: 1+1=2 2+1=3 3+1=4 until he was carried sobbing to bed. I once read a book in which a boy who studied too much at an early age came down with brain fever and was reduced to imbecility; I have never come across a case of brain fever outside a book, but still I was concerned & would have liked to stop but he sobbed if I tried to stop. So I taught him to add 2 to a number and he covered 20 sheets with 2+2=4 3+2=5.
How old was he asks a reader. I think he was about 3.
As soon as I sat down L came up to look at the book. He stared & stared. He said he couldn’t read any of it. I said that was because it was in Greek & had a different alphabet & he said he wanted to learn it.
The last thing I wanted was to be teaching a 4-year-old Greek.
& I said: There’s the alphabet.
He looked at the table and he looked at the page.
I said: It’s perfectly simple. As you can see a lot of the letters are the same as the ones you already know.
He looked at the table and he looked at the page and he looked at the table.
The Alien said: He is only four
Mr. Ma said: Coupez la difficulté en quatre
I said patiently:
I said patiently a lot of things which it would try my patience even more to repeat. I hope I am as ready as the next person to suffer for the good of others, and if I knew for a fact that even 10 people this year, next year or a thousand years from now would like to know how one teaches a 4-year-old Greek I hope I would have the decency to explain it. As I don’t know this I think I will set this aside for the moment. L seems to be transferring Odyssey 5 word by word to pink file cards.
Also in the interests of sanity I have written nothing more for posterity in several days. I have been finding this rather depressing to write—writing of Mozart I thought suddenly of my mother blundering through the accompaniment to Schubert lieder with my Uncle Buddy, Jesus, Buddy, said my mother, what’s the matter, you sing like a Goddamned accountant, and slamming down the lid stormed out of my father’s latest half-finished motel & off down the highway while my Uncle Buddy softly whistled a little tune & said nothing much. What’s the use of remembering that?
I would like to watch the rest of the film, but there is Advanced Angling to consider. I tell L that I have to go downstairs & put the heater on to type, & that he will have to stay in bed and watch the video. Of course he instantly begs to come too. I say You don’t understand, we need £150 for the rent and £60 for the council tax, that alone is £210 and as you know I make £5.50 an hour before tax, 210 divided by 5.50 is approximately 40—
38.1818
38.1818, fine,
18181818181818
the point being
1818181818181818181818181818
that if I work 10 hours a day for the next 4 days I can get the disks in Monday, we’ll get the cheque on Friday, and we can pay two bills, and if we stretch out the £22.62 we now have in the house we can also buy food.
My mother’s father was a jeweler. He was a handsome, shrewd-looking man; he was an accomplished amateur musician. He spoke excellent English, but he could hear his own accent and he knew there was something comical about it.
Buddy said he did not want to be an accountant and his father told him he had no idea the amount of work it took to be a professional musician. Five years you studied the violin his father said and did you practice five minutes? Five years piano.
Something looked through my grandfather’s eyes and it said Werner and du and mein Kind in tones of tenderness and authority. Buddy could more or less understand what was being said but he could not argue back, he tried to think of something from Schubert lieder or Wagner but it all seemed too melodramatic. Something looked through my grandfather’s eyes. It said Being an accountant, it’s not the end of the world.
Something looked at my Uncle Danny. Something looked at my aunts and it said A secretary, is that so terrible?
Linda had seen four before her do something that was not so terrible and already there was something about them, their whole lives ahead of them and the best thing cut off, as if something that might have been a Heifetz had been walled up inside an accountant and left to die.
Doom. Doom. Doom.
My mother went to the piano and sat down. She had not practiced, but in the last week she had played Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor 217 times. She began to play Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor for the 218th time that week, and for the first time the homely man looked up from his knee.
I have to practice, said my mother, and she went to the piano. The memory of her heavy arm, with the weighted hand stumbling over the keys, was still new. She put her hands on the keys and for an hour a terrible, jerking noise came from the front room. All of the children had played the piano attractively from the age of three; no Konigsberg had ever played a scale in living memory; my grandparents had never heard anything so horrible in all their lives.
My grandparents had previously thought that nothing could be worse than to hear Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor 30 times a day. They now thought they should have known when they were lucky. My grandmother went so far as to say Why don’t you play that lovely piece you were playing the other day, Linda?
I am finding it rather hard to concentrate however so may salve conscience by just touching on highlights like Sound of Music cutting from Doe A Deer to seven-part harmony or heptaphony as some people (naming no names) would probably call it.