Truth is, we don’t know how the Tree of Life will fall, and we don’t know when. It could happen in five years, in 40 years, or tomorrow; perhaps, as you read this, it has already happened. But we do know this: The Tree of Life has led a singularly strange existence.
On the one hand, I am aware that every generation complains that the kids who come next are doing everything wrong and have gotten stupider and less respectful. I fear falling into this trap myself, becoming an old man yelling at cloud.
On the other hand, with every new story, I find myself asking: … Can the kids read, though?
In Havoc, Waits mines the rich seam of girls’ school fiction to delirious and rewarding effect. There are welcome echoes of St Trinian’s – the shade of Alastair Sim hovers over the staffroom, comforting and anarchic at once – and there is abundant Ealing comedy in the madcap chases through school corridors and machinations in the lighting gallery during the school play. Yet beneath the comedy lies a distinctly unsettling undertone: the girls experience a convincingly visceral terror that edges towards Shirley Jackson territory and gives their hysteria an extra dimension. This, along with a genuine unexpectedness in the characterisation and a lot of very funny dialogue, loosens things up and brings real originality to the game.
In 1950, during her junior year at Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich attended a reading by Robert Frost, then in his mid-70s and comfortably exercising his rustic poet persona. Afterward, in a letter, Rich gushed to her parents that the acclaimed poet “talked so acutely and honestly about poetry that I sat there swelling inside with a great and joyful assent.” That reaction epitomizes Rich’s lifelong, single-minded dedication to the craft of poetry, which was, as Hilary Holladay writes in a preface to her The Power of Adrienne Rich (published in 2020 and newly released in softcover by Princeton University Press), “as close to a religion as anything she would ever know.”