Lillian Bernice Locke Janovy may
have received enormous pleasure, even an all-consuming happiness, from reading
Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead in 1944,
but most of that pleasure and happiness came, I know, from her appreciation for
the art of writing instead of from Rand’s philosophy regardless of how much she
may have agreed with it. She knew what was happening to her as she read, and she
knew why it was happening, and from that knowledge came enjoyment. The
philosophy was important, even important enough to be a guide to one’s personal
life, but it was also always secondary to the art. The words were the art, the
art that could capture a person’s attention and mentally transport that
individual into settings and circumstances that he or she would never have
access to otherwise. But in all honesty, in the opening years of the
Twenty-first Century, my widescreen Mitsubishi in the basement accomplishes the
same thing as Ayn Rand. With nothing more than a few punches of my finger, in
the course of an hour I’m on the green with Tiger Woods, participating in an
armed robbery, solving an old murder case, dunking a basketball against the
Chicago Bulls, cooking up a Cajun storm, having an affair with some elegant
blond, or completing a long pass into the Pittsburgh Steelers’ end zone. But
Johnny, you don’t have to think about
any of it, Bernice would say were she sitting in her wheelchair beside me. Then
she would pick up her book. The message would be clear: when all you have is
words on a page, then you have to think
about your journey.
.
.
.
By the time an artist finally
painted John
Janovy Petroleum Geologist on the 721 Hales Building office door,
Bernice could clearly see the end of her life, could probably feel the tumors,
so she did what any terminally ill person probably ought to do: she decided to
go to college. At the time, daily family events strung out the clock, hid the
historical perspective that could, in turn, reveal the personality. Fifty years
is barely enough time to gain much historical perspective on a nation’s acts
and their consequence, but it is plenty of time to compress a single human life
into its defining moments, erasing all the breakfasts, lunches, dinners, the
Joseph McCarthy hearings, “I Love Lucy” and Ed Sullivan shows, and Ayn Rand
novels, or at least painting them into a faded background landscape. I don’t
know which of her doctor’s visits was the one in which she finally received her
death sentence. But I can picture the scene clearly; although admittedly
fictitious, it is clearly in character—the truth without being literally true.
“You have a year, maybe two, to
live, Mrs. Janovy,” says the oncologist.
“Oh,” says Bernice, drawing her
gown up around her neck, looking at him in the same way she’d studied all the
other humans who’d entered the range of her x-ray vision, “then maybe I should
go to college.”
The most accessible
post-secondary institution was Central State College—now University of Central
Oklahoma—in Edmond. Edmond exists in its late 1950s form because of the West
Edmond Field, an enormous mineral resource that fuels the financial careers of
a generations’ lawyers, “land-men,” and gamblers, not literal gamblers, of
course, but people betting lots of money on what they’ll find in rocks they
can’t see except through lines on a map, lines drawn by people like Bernice’s
husband. At Central State she will study English, read literature, and maybe
write some papers. Decades after her death, in a casual conversation about
Edmond, someone makes a remark about her driving. When the doctor tells you
exactly how long you have to live, suddenly speed limits disappear. Bernice, it
seems, sentenced to a slow, degrading, painful, death at an early age gets into
her car and drives like the wind . . . to Edmond . . . to college . . . to
study literature.
.
.
.
Were she alive, Bernice from her
wheelchair, and from the depths of her mind, would bring a library’s worth of
voraciously consumed literature to bear on the great Third Millennial
conflicts.
“What makes them think they can
change people who are so different from us?” she would ask. Last month’s issues
of Harper’s Magazine and Atlantic Monthly would be lying on her
lap, just as fifty years earlier Saturday
Evening Post had been lying around for her children to read. Stanley
Karnov’s Vietnam: A History would be
on her night stand, a card marking a page. She would be looking both at and
through her visitor, assuming that this individual had read up on global
issues, assuming that this person knew as much as she did about history,
language, and all those human traits learned best from experience but more
pleasantly from literature—deceit, duplicity, provinciality, ideology, and
belief, the last as capable of metastasizing and killing as the cancerous cells
spreading unchecked through her body. “And what have you been doing today?”
would be her second question, expecting the answer to involve some kind of
intellectual activity, some kind of effort to sustain one’s individuality,
one’s personal dignity, in a world that seemed determined to strip her of hers.
BERNICE AND JOHN is available as an e-book on all readers.
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