It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘Up the Down Staircase’ by Bel Kaufman
July 7, 1965
Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman
#1 on the New York Times Best Seller List (Fiction), May 16 – July 10, 1965
Much of post-World War II popular culture is set in the newly developed land of suburbia, starring such familiar images as white picket fences, the housewife in pearls and heels, and the neighborhood cul-de-sac where well-scrubbed kids ride their bikes. Of course, that stereotypical view of the 1950s only applies to one sliver of the American population: the white middle class who could afford to leave the cities for the larger homesteads and private communities on the outskirts of town. Meanwhile, the urban areas they left behind, now largely inhabited by immigrants, the poor, and people of color, fell into disrepair and disrepute.
The pop culture portrayals of the new inner city in this era tend to break down into two categories: either crime stories of “the naked city,” or tales of young teachers trying to make a difference in urban high schools. This latter category was particularly relevant in the ’50s and ’60s, given the new teenage culture that emerged during these decades. The academic setting also provided a bridge for the “mainstream” audience into this mysterious new world, via teachers who typically originated from better-off backgrounds than their poorer students. The popularity of the 1955 Oscar-nominated film Blackboard Jungle kicked off the trend, which produced countless exploitation movies, as well as critical and commercial successes like E.R. Braithwaite’s 1959 novel To Sir, with Love (adapted as a hit 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier) and Bel Kaufman’s 1964 bestselling novel Up the Down Staircase.
At the time of the novel’s publication, Kaufman had been teaching English in the New York City school system for nearly three decades, submitting short stories to magazines on the side. One of these, the three-and-a-half-page “From a Teacher’s Wastebasket,” was published in The Saturday Review of Literature in 1962. After the story caught the eye of an editor at educational publisher Prentice Hall, Kaufman expanded the fragment into the semi-autobiographical novel Up the Down Staircase, telling the story of a novice English teacher, Sylvia Barrett, and her first year at the fictional Calvin Coolidge High School in New York.
The most immediately arresting aspect of Up the Down Staircase is its unusual structure. Apart from the opening and closing chapters, which consist of snatches of unattributed dialogue between teacher and class, the book is told strictly through written correspondence: letters between Sylvia and an older teacher, Bea; memos sent from the school administration; homework and test essays; information listed in students’ files; and notes left in Miss Barrett’s suggestion box by her students. This structure is both clever and deeply relevant to its subject matter. A teacher’s job is defined by paperwork: not only school assignments and tests, but also the bureaucracy inherent in the work, in which educators must find a compromise between helping their students and following the demands of their administrators. It’s this glimpse inside the oxymoronic and baffling administrative directives where Kaufman shines. The title of the book itself refers to one of these petty, arbitrary rules, originating from a disciplinary note by the school’s assistant principal: “[Student] detained by me for going up the down staircase and subsequent insolence.”
While Kaufman amusingly captures the flavor of academic bureaucracy, her eye for character is much less well developed. The students whom Sylvia claims to adore are portrayed as one-note, typically derogatory, clichés: the secretly brilliant juvenile delinquent; the airhead romantic with a crush on a male teacher; the African-American kid who blames all his misfortunes on being black; the fat, homely girl who hates Miss Barrett for being beautiful. The adults fare little better, whether it be the uptight assistant principal, the male teacher who fancies himself a poet, or the “hep spinster” in love with one of her students. (Kaufman/Sylvia’s ridicule for the latter seems especially hypocritical, considering the exceptional interest Sylvia takes in “bad boy” Joe Ferone.) Even Sylvia herself is largely one-dimensional. Other characters continually talk about how beautiful and kind she is, and how inspiring she is to her students, but the book never shows how she inspires them, and her personal correspondence shows her constantly mocking students and colleagues alike. (The book would gain points for portraying its heroic teacher hero as not always likeable, except that it doesn’t seem to realize that she’s anything but perfect.)
In addition to the underdeveloped characters, Up the Down Staircase features little in the way of a plot. This would not necessarily be a problem — after all, the book works perfectly well for its first two-thirds as a collection of comic anecdotes and jokes. Yet Kaufman tries to up the stakes in the third act by throwing in a student’s attempted suicide, a wild shift in tone that comes off as an awkward jab at injecting gravity into an otherwise featherweight book. (It doesn’t help that Kaufman/Sylvia constantly, though privately, ridicules the student in question for being not very smart and for being in love with a teacher — incidentally, the same teacher whom Sylvia happens to be dating.) Likewise, Sylvia’s decision at the end of the novel to stay at Calvin Coolidge, rather than take a job at a well-to-do private school upstate, feels unnatural, as if she makes the choice for the sole reason of giving the novel a warm, conventional resolution rather than a believable one.
Problems aside, Up the Down Staircase became a massive hit, topping the New York Times fiction bestsellers list for eight weeks and spending another 32 weeks at #2. It later spawned both a stage adaptation and a 1967 film version, the latter directed by Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird) and starring Sandy Dennis as Sylvia. The book has since become a classic of teachers’ literature, selling over six million copies since its publication. Yet the fact that Kaufman produced only one other novel, 1979’s poorly-received divorce story Love, Etc., emphasizes the fortuitous alignment of author, subject matter, and postmodern style that contributed to the success of this book. Up the Down Staircase is a gritty, but not too bleak, glimpse into a then-hot topic; told in a novel, but not too artsy, format; by a teacher who had enough insight and experience to give it credibility. Whether it is still relevant today is far less certain.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
(Header image from the 1967 film adaptation of Up the Down Staircase.)
