I Never Loved Your Mind

Winning, Losing, But Above All Taking Risks: A Look at the Novels of Paul Zindel Stanley Hoffman

I Never Loved Your Mind followed. Something was changing which I think a lot of readers didn't like. Unlike Pigman and Hamburger, novels which, like nearly all of Zindel's works, revolved around the actions of couples—boy meets girl and they team up to move the plot along—the "couple" in I Never Loved Your Mind rarely team up and one of them doesn't even live with her family. This last fact is a major departure for Zindel and the atmosphere of the novel, in part because of this, weaves a spell of potential hopelessness. Dewey, the male of the couple, may move forward at novel's end but the commune-living, free-loving Yvette might not turn out as fortunate. As with all of Zindel's couples, along the way of the story a certain innocence is lost, but the innocence is often heavy baggage without which the real world can be seen more clearly—and the clearer one can see, the better one might be able to cope. Indeed, if there is any one "message" that runs through Zindel's works, it has to be this: if reality is ugly, in facing it we can prepare ourselves to see beyond the ugliness to something hopeful. Thus, Dewey, after all his tribulations at [End Page 79] Yvette's hands, closes out the novel on an up note. I don't really know what I'm going to do. It's not going to be that Love Land crap. And I'm not going to give civilization a kick in the behind, because I might need an appendectomy sometime. But I'm going to do something, and I have a strange feeling it's going to be phantasmagorically different.1

The detractors of Zindel—a growing number, I suspect, though it's a safe bet his admirers are also on the increase—point to his seeming inevitable pessimism and its potential infectiousness on the young reader. Representative of this view is Myles McDowell, who writes, I think that the newer sub-Salinger writers, such as Zindel, despite their virtues of freshness and an authentic teenage voice are on the whole unsuitable for children. There is such an overall cynical depressive quality about Zindel's books, which seems to me to be destructive of values before values have properly had time to form. It is the depression I would want to protect emergent minds from.2

McDowell is, I think, both right and wrong. Cynical depression is assuredly a large part of Zindel's teenage universe, yet to "protect emergent minds" from it recalls John Milton's warning in Areopagitica to the effect that "A cloistered virtue is no virtue at all." The question is whether Zindel's world is a real one and, if it is, should it be kept hidden from impressionable young minds. To this, Beverly A. Haley and Kenneth L. Donelson have some suggestive thoughts on the matter. Paul Zindel is one writer who speaks to young people about man's cruelty. . . . In these amusing, provocative, and very-much-ofour-time works, Zindel presents questions to his readers, and if they care (and they do), they will search for answers. Their own answers.3

In short, if Zindel is dangerous then we are all in trouble. More to the point seems to be not whether Zindel is dangerous [End Page 80] as a philosopher, but rather whether his approach to the realities of life is vastly oversimplifed. By that I mean are his novels constructed along formulated, predictable lines which ultimately render them shallow—the worst sin of a novelist, short of being boring, being that of emptiness. And, if so, why is he so popular? Is it because he does have something vital to offer or simply that he has fooled so many?

Six Characters in Search of the Family The Novels of Paul Zindel* James T. Henke Since the appearance of The Pigman in 1968, the novels of Paul Zindel have been the objects of a good deal of contradictory discussion and evaluation. These works, The Pigman, My Darling, My Hamburger, and I Never Loved Your Mind, have been hailed as delightfully humorous, refreshingly honest attempts to deal with a number of the classic themes of modern literature. On the other hand, they have been condemned, with equal fervor, as squalid pieces of trash, as slick "con jobs," and as simple-minded hack work.1 Obviously, the resolution of such controversy, if indeed any resolution is possible, is an undertaking far too ambitious for a single essay. Therefore, in this discussion my goals will be much more modest. First, I will sketch one thematic approach to Zindel's novels and then attempt a brief evaluation of the literary worth of each. In so doing, I anticipate that, rather than providing a resolution, this discussion will intensify the Zindel debate. In any case, for the moment we will put aside the problem of the literary quality of Zindel's novels and turn instead to the ideas contained in those novels. Better yet, we will focus upon one idea that, with varying degrees of clarity, informs all three of the author's books. The tracing of this major theme may possibly prove rewarding regardless of the merits of the works themselves. …That Zindel does indeed share with his adolescents their view of contemporary society becomes even more apparent in his last novel, I Never Loved Your Mind. In this frst-person narration by Dewey Daniels, the seventeen-year-old high school dropout, the family, which in the earlier novels stood as the chief symbol of a sterile society, has all but disappeared. On one occasion when Dewey asks Yvette Goethals, the heroine of the book, why she does not live with her parents, she responds: "Because they're bastards. My mother's a dumb one. My father's a mean one" (p. 29). But this is virtually the only time they are mentioned. To Yvette, they seem to be merely a part of the general corruption and brutality of society, a society for which her own neighborhood becomes a kind of malignant biopsy sample blighted by such as a crooked judge, a cheating doctor, a thieving cop, and a host of other parasites. As Yvette herself says, "practically every house has some type of lousy, sneaky, illegal, bloodsucking scrounger in it" (p. 62). Nor, indeed, do Dewey's parents play a more prominent role in the story. As with Yvette's, the reader never sees them, but Dewey does say: "My folks happen to be plain, nice, detached, insignifcant people, and nobody has the right to pin any rap on them" (p. 33). Rather than parents, then, in this last novel, the principal symbol of a degenerate society is the hospital in which both Dewey and Yvette work, a hospital steered by a vacuously authoritarian administrator, staffed by indifferent nurses, and stocked with deformed or dying patients. In the midst of this pain and despair, Dewey discovers Yvette, another high school dropout. The girl, who once waged a futile battle with bulldozers to save a plot of woods in her old neighborhood, becomes a symbol of new life. In fact, Yvette Goethals appears to be a twentieth-century, adolescent reincarnation of the Greek [End Page 134] goddess Demeter, the Earth Mother and Goddess of Grain. Consider that throughout the narrative, Dewey, with what appears to be unconscious intuition, speaks of her in such a way as to link her with all things natural. For instance, when he frst meets her, she appears to him to "look like an owl with a thyroid condition" (p. 3). On their frst date Yvette wears a huge, furry mouton coat which, Dewey tells the reader, makes her look like a grizzly bear, a "wolf-woman" (p. 46), and a "koala cub" (p. 58). When she runs and the wind catches the coat, she reminds him of a pterodactyl, spreading its wings (p. 59). At the end of this frst date, he walks her to Clove Lakes Park, but she will not allow him to take her home. As Dewey describes it: "She just took off into the brush, like a bear at Yellowstone National Park . . ." (p. 67). Probably, she is headed for her house on "Van Pelt" street. This house Dewey will later see and will

describe as being surrounded by "landscaping that resembled an acre of overfertilized rain forest" (p. 75). Even more than the narrator's intuitive descriptions, however, the actual events of the story suggest that Yvette is a twentieth-century version of the Earth Mother, who, in addition to her role as fertility goddess, is also a goddess of rebirth. That Zindel does indeed intend to endow the girl symbolically with the Goddess' power of rejuvenation is apparent in the fact that Dewey frst actually meets his love in the autopsy room, as he awakens from a fainting spell to see her bending over him. The symbolic signifcance of this episode is underscored some eight chapters later when Dewey describes his thoughts and emotions on the morning after he and Yvette have made love: "When I woke up in my own room on Saturday morning, I felt like I had just been born. . . . I kept myself in a luxurious somnolent state, trying to relive everything all over again. . . . I remembered her gently nursing me back to health in the autopsy room" (p. 91). This, then, is symbolic rebirth, but before complete rebirth Dewey had had to ply his Demeter with "sacrifcial offerings." When he frst courts Yvette, he gives her fowers and candy. However, she tells him that instead of these she would prefer bags of seed, especially wheat and barley (both grains are traditionally associated with Demeter). Moreover, on the night they make love, Dewey brings her a ffty pound bag of Burpee radish seed. Nevertheless, even though he thinks himself born anew, the goddess ultimately rejects him. Although she loves him, she feels that he has been corrupted by society, and she fees with the Electric Lovin' Stallions, a rock music group with whom she has been living. [End Page 135] Now, Dewey and the reader discover the literal reason for the girl's bizarre taste in gifts: she and the Stallions are leaving in a horsedrawn covered wagon for New Mexico, there to establish a commune. Does Dewey follow? Zindel does not tell the reader. He lets him see only that Dewey has indeed undergone a rebirth of sorts. In the fnal pages of the novel, having learned the address of Yvette's commune, the hero resigns his position at the hospital and closes his story: "I don't really know what I'm going to do. . . . I'm not going to give civilization a kick in the behind, because I might need an appendectomy sometime. But I'm going to do something, and I have a strange feeling it's going to be phantasmagorically different" (pp. 134-35). Zindel's fnal novel, then, presents a mythically translated and exalted treatment of the theme of the adolescent aspiration for parenthood. After all, while John and Lorraine become surrogate parents and while Sean and Liz almost become real parents, Dewey may have the chance to embrace the family of the Earth Mother. And because, as Yvette has told him several times, her relationship with the Stallions is platonic, if the hero is accepted as being worthy of the honor, he will become the goddess' consort and patriarch of the communal family. But Zindel may be hinting at much more here. Should the Earth Goddess mate, the result would be a general rebirth of nature. Thus, the author may be telling the reader that from the zest for life, from the compassion for nature of such young people as Dewey and Yvette a new order is possible. Such vital young parents may beget not just children, but a whole new world. The question is whether or not one must turn his back on contemporary society to create this world. Here, perhaps, Zindel's attitude toward contemporary society may soften. Although Yvette has fed, Dewey has resolved not to do so completely. He is not, as he says, "going to kick civilization in the behind." Maybe this is just a cowardly evasion on Dewey's part. Or maybe Zindel is saying that society can be rejuvenated and purifed by the union of the hero, who will not forsake it, and the goddess: the one representing the rebirth of civilized humanity's love for nature, the other representing the lifegiving forces of nature itself. Is this a Pollyannic interpretation of Zindel's meaning? Perhaps. But before we dismiss it, we ought to remember that in the hospital, that symbol of a dying society, both Dewey and Yvette worked in the inhalation section. Their jobs were to resuscitate patients with [End Page 136] oxygen, literally to revive them by providing a breath of fresh air. We ought to remember, too, that when Yvette leaves the hospital

and heads for the covered wagon that will take her to a new world, Dewey tries to stop her. In the struggle, her mouton coat faps open, and Dewey sees that the girl has strapped a "Byrd" machine to her waist. At frst, this detail may seem insignifcant, since Yvette previously has pilfered medical supplies from the hospital. Still, on second thought, we must wonder: after all, the function of a Byrd machine is to resuscitate patients dying of asphyxiation. In other words, literally and symbolically Yvette has the means to revive and restore life; all that remains now is for Dewey to have the courage to go after her and teach her how to use it. This, then, is a sketch of the treatment of one of Zindel's themes, an overview which we can use as background for a rough evaluation of the author's individual works. ...Finally, Zindel's last novel, I Never Loved Your Mind, is both his most ambitious and his most diffcult. The craftsmanship here is painstaking, but it is often obscured by the narrator Dewey's cloyingly fatuous prose style, perhaps best described by his own favorite adjective "puerile." Nevertheless, Zindel clearly intends the style to be functionally suggestive. The overused technique of alliteration, [End Page 138] the often-inappropriate diction, and the generally infated rhetoric suggest both the immaturity of Dewey's intellect and the fact that he does possess a vigorous, perceptive intellect capable of growth. 5 In one sense, we should see Dewey as an embodiment of the intellect, of the mind paired with but at the same time contrasted to the unbridled spirit of the fesh, Yvette Goethals. The danger with this novel is that because Zindel chooses to tell the story through the limited, frstperson narration of a hero who does not yet understand either his own or Yvette's role, the inexperienced reader may confuse the story's meaning and accept the girl's fight from society as the intelligent way to deal with evil. But this is not Zindel's meaning. The phoniness of the Loveland commune, to which Zindel devotes an entire chapter, and Yvette's illiteracy, evidenced in the note which Zindel inserts toward the close of the story, suggest both her own very limited intelligence and the impossibility of realizing the pastoral dream. This impossibility is further emphasized by the plight of Irene. In the hospital Irene, eighty years old and dying of emphysema, writes a poem entitled "Let's Go Back." But just as she cannot return to childhood, so neither can society return to an agrarian Eden. As her covered wagon pulls away from the hospital gate, Yvette screams at Dewey: "I never loved your mind." Certainly. The business of the Earth Goddess is not the intellect, but the spirit and the fesh. Zindel seems to be telling his youthful readers that only by a combination of common-sense intelligence (one that appreciates the virtue of civilization represented by the appendectomy Dewey may some day need) and passionate spirit can society be saved. The fnal evaluation, then? Paul Zindel is a fne craftsman, a genuine literary artist. Whether, as many have questioned, his novels are appropriate for the adolescent audience, I will leave to others to decide. I am certain of one thing, however: I will not be the last critic to attend to those novels.