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| Random House US edition, 1987 |
'That's it!' Mark said excitedly, forgetting about his head and starting to sit up. He remembered suddenly because he yelped and lay back down with a rueful grin. 'Like we got into those gang fights — it was so important, it was the whole world if we won or lost — and the buddies we had then. We were like brothers, not just you and me, but all of us together. We woulda died for each other then. And now everybody's kinda slipped away, and then we woulda died for each other. Really, man, remember? It was great, we were like a bunch of people makin' up one big person, like we totaled up to somethin' when we were together.'
'Now we total up to something by ourselves just as easy,' I said. I understood exactly what he was talking about. Mark had the habit of thinking the way I did; the difference was that he said it and I usually didn't.'Yeah, but still, don't you kinda miss that one-for-all, all-for-one routine? It's kinda sad, really, when you get to where you don't need a gang — I mean, like you did before.''It's kind of a good thing too,' I said, 'when you know your own personality so you don't need the one the gang makes for you.''Yeah,' Mark sighed, 'but there's a difference. I wonder what the difference is?''The difference is,' I said evenly, 'that was then, and this is now.'Mark flashed me that lion-like grin. 'Bryon, you are brilliant.'We didn't say much the rest of the afternoon. We were thinking.
The Novel: Bryon Douglas and his orphaned best friend Mark live with Bryon's mother on the poor side of town. The Douglases are so short of cash that they've recently been forced to sell their television set along with the family car to pay for an operation that Mrs Douglas needs but has been putting off for months because she's lacked the money to pay for it.
Rather than driving them apart, adversity brings Bryon and Mark closer together. They remain as inseparable as they were as children when they used to play cowboys and indians and Mark — 'with strange golden eyes and hair to match and a grin like a friendly lion' — still lived up the street with his own parents who had yet to murder each other. Only sixteen, they are smart, cocky and already wise to the ways of the world, hanging out at the local bar owned by their older friend Charlie where they occasionally earn a little money by hustling his customers at pool. They have a lot of freedom and relish every minute of it — getting into gang fights, drinking beer with friends out by the lake or on the town's dry river bed and, in Mark's case, stealing cars and being put on probation for it.
But their familiar world is changing. Bryon is losing interest in fighting and belonging to a gang, while Mark continues to lead the same, seemingly charmed life he's always led, somehow managing to steer clear of getting himself into any serious trouble. The situation is further complicated when Bryon meets Cathy Carlson, the pretty, dark haired sister of their younger friend M&M whom he and Mark affectionately tease and sometimes borrow money from. Cathy works part-time as a waitress in the hospital snack bar, which is where she and Byron meet again after not having seen each other for a few years. Cathy is sweet-natured, goal-oriented and not at all like Angela Shepard, the beautiful but ruthlessly opportunistic girl that Bryon dated before her. Again unlike Angela, Cathy comes from a close and loving family and worries about her brother M&M who gets criticized a lot by their father for wearing his hair long, flunking his school courses and generally behaving like a hippie.
Bryon's first date with Cathy proves to be a memorable event for all the wrong reasons. They go to a dance at the school hall and, while they're inside enjoying themselves, fail to realize that Mark has intervened to stop a fight breaking out in the carpark between Ponyboy Curtis and another boy who's been conned into attacking him by the beautiful but wily Angela as a form of payback for Curtis having spurned her sexual advances. (Ponyboy Curtis is one of the main characters in Hinton's debut novel The Outsiders, although That Was Then, This Is Now is not, strictly speaking, a direct sequel to that book.) Mark gets clobbered with a beer bottle for his trouble and has to go to hospital to have his eye sewn up. "Y'know, when I first came around tonight," he confesses to Bryon when they finally make it home several hours later, "after that kid cracked me, I was scared stiff. I thought I was dyin', I was so scared. I really felt weird. But after I got to thinkin' you were there with me, I calmed down. Bryon, you're the only family I got, you know that? I mean, your mom's been great to me and everything, but I don't feel like she's really my old lady. But I feel like you're my brother. A real one."
The friendship is tested again soon afterwards when, back at Charlie's bar, they hustle a pair of Texans out of $25 at the pool table. The disgruntled men confront Bryon and Mark in the alley after the bar closes, intending to get their money back and teach the boys a lesson about who and who not to mess with into the bargain. Thankfully, Charlie appears with his shotgun before the Texans can do them any serious harm, only to have one of them pluck his gun from the ground where he was ordered to drop it and squeeze off a shot at him. Bryon and Mark both hit the dirt, with Mark somehow managing to fire an answering shot from Charlie's own dropped weapon. The next thing Bryon knows, Charlie is on top of him, his weight crushing the air from his lungs. 'I rolled out from under him…Then, in the white, sickly light from the street lights I saw that there was a neat, perfect hole above Charlie's left eye. He was dead.'
The boys have different reactions to the death of their friend and savior. Bryon spends more and more time with Cathy, his sudden neglect of Mark causing the latter to feel jealous of the new person in his friend's life. Mark senses that something special is slipping away and does what he can to hold on to it. But Bryon, while not exactly welcoming the change with open arms, is nevertheless wise enough to realize that there's no point in trying to cling to the past. He also sees that Mark and Cathy do not and probably never will get along with each other, that their claims on his time and attention — differently motivated though they are — can no longer be considered equal because his feelings for Cathy are growing stronger by the day. Not even the arrest and trial of the men who murdered Charlie can stop Bryon feeling confused about what's happening in his life and guilty for placing Charlie in danger in the first place. Mark, on the other hand, refuses to feel guilty, arguing that Charlie knew what he was getting into and was under no compulsion to run outside and defend them as he did. They didn't force Charlie to do that, he reminds Bryon, any more than they forced the Texans to confront them in the alley and pull a gun on them.
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| Viking Press first US edition, 1971 |
The next test of the boys' friendship occurs when, in an effort to patch things up, Bryon takes Cathy, Mark and M&M cruising in the car he inherited from Charlie. They drive up and down the Ribbon, a stretch of road filled with drive-in restaurants where all the local kids hang out at night, and are accosted by some rich boys in a Corvette. One of these rich boys, or Socs as they're called (the term, pronounced 'sosh' to loosely rhyme with 'gauche,' is another carry over from The Outsiders), makes an obscene remark to Cathy, prompting Mark to jump out of the car and punch the boy in the face hard enough to break his nose. Cathy is appalled by what he's done but Mark is quick to justify his actions to her, reminding her that the Soc had it coming for speaking to her as crudely as he did. "A hit don't have to be physical," he says when Cathy lets her frustration show again. ' "I couldn't hit them the way they hit us without hitting you too." ' Cathy is baffled but has no time to continue the argument because Mark soon gets out of the car to join another friend he's spotted, as does M&M a little while later to join some friends of his. When Cathy asks her brother when they should come back to pick him up, M&M answers that he's never going home again and vanishes into the crowd before she can stop him.
Bryon and Cathy drive around for a few more hours in an effort to find M&M, only to abandon the search as futile. They pick up Mark and then Bryon takes Cathy home where she explains to her parents what her brother has done, only to have her father dismiss the entire episode as 'a stage' that M&M is going through. Cathy angrily protests, insisting that it's not a stage, that running off is something M&M has done because their father was "always picking on him about silly, goofy things like his hair and flunking gym!" Although Mr Carlson remains confident that M&M will return because he's a smart and sensible boy underneath it all, Cathy is tearfully unconvinced of this and voices her fear that M&M might be gone for good.
Surprisingly, Mark sides with Mr Carlson on this issue, predicting to Bryon that M&M will return home again sooner rather than later. "Nothing bad happens to you when you're a kid," he reminds his friend as they drive home together in the early hours of the morning. "Or haven't you realized that?"
Bryon continues to search for M&M, sometimes taking Cathy with him and sometimes searching on his own, but never succeeds in finding him. But now he has a new problem — money. With his mom finally released from hospital but not yet strong enough to work, he has to find a job to help support them. He finds one at the local supermarket bagging groceries but still finds time, between work and dating Cathy, to goof around with Mark as they used to do in the old days.
One night while cruising the Ribbon the boys run into Angela. Angela is very drunk so they offer to drive her home, stopping along the way to pick up a bottle of rum that the smooth-talking Mark has no trouble persuading an obliging adult to buy for them. They go to the lake to drink the rum, Angela becoming so intoxicated that she eventually passes out. Seeing his chance to take revenge on her for what her behavior cost him at the dance, Mark cuts off all her hair and dumps her, still unconscious, in her front yard. Bryon, too drunk himself to stop this, becomes a little emotional after they get home, reaffirming that Mark is like a brother to him even as he makes a disturbing discovery about his friend. 'I suddenly knew why everyone liked Mark,' he confesses. 'Who hasn't dreamed of having a pet lion to stand between you and the world? Golden, dangerous Mark.'
The truth of this is borne out the next day when Bryon gets off work only to find Mark waiting for him in his car, ready to take him to the house where he believes M&M has been living since he ran away. Things soon grow tense between the two friends — partly because Mark won't explain where and how he earns the money he's recently begun to bring home in ever increasing quantities — and become even tenser after they argue about Cathy, saying cruel words to each other they instantly regret. They agree to forget their differences and go to the house, a commune inhabited by a group of hippies, some of whom appear to know Mark quite well.
Mark asks an older blonde girl where the boy she calls 'Baby Freak' is, only to be told that he hasn't been around for a while but is 'flying' and is soon 'going to crash.' They leave but Bryon decides not to tell Cathy where they've been or that her brother might be living with a group of drug-addled hippies. He asks Cathy to go steady with him and she agrees, then drops her off and returns to his own house where a surprise is waiting for him in the form of Tim and Curly Shepard, Angela's disreputable older brothers who beat him to a pulp for getting their sister drunk and cutting off her hair.
Bryon regains consciousness to find himself stretched out on his bed with a very anxious Mark hovering over him. It's Mark who takes him to the hospital the following day, where he receives treatment for his injuries and a lecture from the doctor about the risks of fighting he's heard a hundred times before. Mark wants to take revenge against the Shepards, who attacked Bryon in revenge for an act of vengeance that he himself perpetrated, but Bryon says no, he'd really prefer to drop the whole thing. Mark is staggered, so upset and angry that he's soon on the verge of tears — a state that Bryon has never seen him in before. But Bryon remains unmoved by Mark's pleas to let him take further revenge on the Shepards. "I'm sick of this circle of beating up people and getting beat up," he explains. "It's stupid." Mark grudgingly accepts this, although Bryon is shocked to see that his tough, always controlled friend is now crying. 'He didn't understand why I didn't dig fights anymore; I didn't understand how he could accept everything that came along without question, without wanting to change it.'
Bryon makes some important decisions while he's recuperating. First, he tells Cathy that he thinks he knows where her brother is and promises to take her to him. Then he visits Charlie's grave — an obligation he's resisted fulfilling up till now — to thank his dead friend, or at least the memory of him, for saving his life. This done, he drives Cathy to the hippie house, confident that between them they can somehow persuade M&M to return to his family.
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| Speak/Penguin Group US, 2008 |
An unexpected shock awaits them when they reach the house. M&M is there but not in his right mind after having ingested LSD, sitting hunched up in the corner of an upstairs bedroom convinced that spiders are crawling out of his stomach. He's thin, filthy dirty and ravingly paranoid but Mark and Bryon somehow bundle him into the car and drive him to the hospital where they're met by Mr Carlson who, after thanking Bryon for everything he's done, asks him to take Cathy home so she can be with her mother. Bryon does this, but not before the doctor tells them that M&M may never recover from the effects of the drug he's taken. Physically, yes, there's a chance he'll be okay. But not mentally. Mentally, the doctor explains, it's going to be a very different story.
After dropping Cathy off — he doesn't go inside with her because 'this was a family matter, and I wasn't a member of the family yet' — Bryon returns to his house to find his own mother asleep and no sign of Mark anywhere. He feels exhausted by everything that's happened, worn out by caring about people and by observing how complicated his and everyone else's lives have suddenly become. Thinking it might help to smoke a cigarette before he tries to sleep, he reaches under Mark's mattress to find the spare pack he knows Mark always keeps there, only to make contact with 'a long, cylinder-like thing' that turns out to be a bottle of pills. 'I looked at this bunch of pills — there were hundreds of them, and it was like a machine in my head went click, click, click. And it came up with an answer I didn't want.'
That answer is that Mark, his friend and virtual brother, is selling drugs. That's why Mark refused to say where his money came from and why he knew where M&M was. Mark is a pusher. For all Bryon knows, it was Mark who sold M&M the LSD that may have permanently destroyed his mind.
Bryon is faced with an agonizing choice. Does he say nothing and let his friend keep selling drugs and potentially destory other kids' lives or does he call the police? He calls the police and tells them to come to the house so they can take Mark into custody. His call made, he goes into the front room to wait for Mark to arrive, which Mark duly does a few minutes later. Bryon confronts him with his discovery and Mark earnestly tries to defend himself, explaining that he sells the stuff but doesn't use it, that he only began dealing drugs because having a police record made it all but impossible for him to find a regular job. 'He could have talked all night,' Bryon observes, 'and I wouldn't have changed my mind… I wondered tiredly why I had never seen it before: Mark had absolutely no concept of what was right and what was wrong; he didn't obey any laws, because he couldn't see that there were any. Laws, right and wrong, didn't matter to Mark, because they were just words.'
The police arrive and place Mark under arrest, leaving Byron to deal with the consequences of his own previously unthinkable actions. While he sincerely regrets betraying Mark, his conscience keeps insisting that it was the only choice he had given the prevailing circumstances. But that doesn't mean he forgives himself for it. Having gotten even with Mark on behalf of Cathy and M&M, he gets even with himself by treating Cathy very coldly when she comes to visit him, telling himself that he'll never call her again despite promising her, before she leaves the house in tears, that he definitely will.
A few weeks later Bryon appears as a witness at Mark's trial, feeling chilled to the bone when he tells the judge that the two of them were like brothers and hears how quickly Mark is able to laugh this off. He's even accused by Angela — who is now married to some friend of her brothers' and appears unexpectedly at the grocery store one day — of being the lowest of the low, someone who should feel totally ashamed because he so callously betrayed his so-called 'best friend.' Bryon doesn't disagree with her. He tells her that her hair looks good, after which she promptly shuts her mouth and leaves.
Bryon's life becomes a matter of going through the motions after this. He goes to school and concentrates on his studies, getting straight As for the first time in his life but taking no pride in this achievement and even less pride in himself as a human being. He asks to visit Mark in the reformatory several times, only to have his requests denied because Mark, the authorities tell him, has become a problem inmate. They finally renege and agree to let Bryon see him, feeling this might help Mark straighten himself out before he takes his one-man rebellion too far and gets sent to prison. The visit doesn't go well, with Mark declaring that he has no intention of ever seeing Bryon again after serving his sentence and being released. Bryon protests, reminding him as he did so often in the past that they're like brothers. Mark answers with a mirthless laugh, his golden eyes as hard and flat as those of a lion preparing to go in for the kill. "Like a friend once said to me," he tells Bryon before they part for what will be the final time, "That was then, and this is now."
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| Penguin Books UK, 2017 |
In the afterword she wrote for the 2008 reissue of her second novel, SE Hinton makes the point that 'The difference between the years sixteen and twenty are almost as great as the difference between eleven and sixteen. You learn things. Sometimes hard things. You learn that the so-called right thing is sometimes not the right thing. You learn there will be roads to choose, some you never believed you would travel.' This is certainly what happens to Bryon Douglas who, in my view, is one of the most credible teenaged characters ever to be depicted in modern North American fiction.
What makes That Was Then, This Is Now such an outstanding novel is Hinton's ability to portray its characters reacting and changing in ways that are totally uncompromising and completely true to life. Or, to put it more bluntly, the kids in the story act like kids and the adults act like adults, the worlds they inhabit as different and separate from each other as planets spinning in different orbits. Nor does Hinton opt for the easy trick of making the kids morally superior and the adults crass moral weaklings. Every major character is a fully rounded individual, no matter how old he or she may be or what philosophy of life they happen to subscribe to. They are people who stumble. People who lie and fail. People who make mistakes, sometimes very bitter ones, that they then have to pay for and somehow learn to live with whether they're prepared to do this or not.
In a time when Young Adult fiction — a term I dislike as I tend to dislike all labels — has become a multi-billion dollar industry, it's important to remember that the genre didn't properly exist in 1971 when That Was Then, This Is Now was published. While The Outsiders may be everybody else's favorite SE Hinton novel, I consider her second novel to be a vast improvement on it, an unflinchingly unsentimental examination of what it really means to grow up and be forced to make choices that, without you necessarily being conscious of it at the time, permanently sever you from the past and everything you thought it represented in your life. The novel's language is taut and concise and its ending is one of the most thought-provoking that an intelligent reader, of any age, could ask for. As Hinton herself explained: 'The Outsiders made you feel. That Was Then, This Is Now will make you think.'
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| SE HINTON, c 1971 |
The Writer: The only word suitable to describe the career of SE Hinton is extraordinary. Frustrated as a teenager by the lack of literature that spoke authentically and honestly of the lives of herself and her peers, she began writing her own debut novel in 1965 at the unlikely age of fourteen. This novel would be published two years later as The Outsiders, one of the best-selling so-called 'children's books' of all time and one that still sells approximately half a million copies every year. What makes this accomplishment even more remarkable is that, by publishing a book aimed directly at teenaged readers, Hinton almost singlehandedly invented the genre known today as 'YA' or 'Young Adult' fiction.
Susan Eloise Hinton was born in Tulsa, the second largest city in the North American state of Oklahoma, on 22 July 1948. She attended Will Rogers High School in her hometown where she was exposed to the activities of two rival gangs whom she would transform into the Greasers — poor working class kids, often from broken homes — and the Socs — wealthier middle class kids with the arrogance to match — in her first novel. The book was an immediate success when it appeared in 1967, partly due to its hard-hitting, easily identifiable subject matter and partly because her editor at The Viking Press suggested she use 'SE' as her pen name rather than use her full name. 'The publishers thought that the first reviewers would see [the name Susan],' she told an interviewer in 2014, 'and say, "Well, a girl wouldn't know anything about this," and would read it with a kind of bias…'
Her editor was right. The book was widely praised despite its controversial depictions of underage drinking, smoking and fighting and remains on the syllabuses of many North American schools while a number of other educational institutions have chosen to ban it. (Being banned is often the sign that a book is providing younger readers with certain disturbing but important information that many disapproving adults, including but not limited to their parents, would prefer them not to have.) More than half a century after its release, The Outsiders remains a novel that, according to writer and editor Brandon Tensley, 'centers around a barbed vision of American prosperity, one flanked by the reality that this country takes more from some than it does from others.'
Hinton became uncomfortable with being tagged 'the voice of youth' and suffered an extended period of writer's block after 1967. 'For the first time in my life,' she recalled forty years later, 'I was aware of my audience… I felt like there were people peering over my shoulder, whispering, "What is she going to do next?" The thought of it paralyzed me. It was very depressing.' It was at the urging of her boyfriend David Inhofe, who became her husband in 1970, that she wrote That Was Then, This Is Now. Hinton's future spouse refused to take her out unless she wrote at least two pages of prose per day and, with this to spur her on, she published her second novel in 1971. Like its predecessor, it received mostly positive reviews and has never been out of print. It helped that it shared the same setting as The Outsiders — the city of Tulsa, although it's never directly identified as such in either novel — and a few of the same characters including Ponyboy Curtis, the Shepard brothers and an ex-Soc named Randy who has dumped his former well-to-do friends and become a mellow, pot-smoking hippie. Hinton would use this technique again in her later novels Rumble Fish (1975) and Tex (1979) in which several of her characters, including Cathy and Mark from That Was Then, This Is Now, also reappear.
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| SE HINTON, c 2014 |
The enduring popularity of Hinton's novels virtually guaranteed that they would be adapted for the cinema, which they were beginning with Tex in 1982 and continuing with The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, both directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the following year. The success of these films, all of which starred the hottest young actors of their time, created a new audience for her novels, the latter of which include Taming The Star Runner (1988), her first attempt to construct a third person narrative, and her first 'adult' novel Hawke's Harbor (2004). She's also written two books for young children — Big David, Little David and The Puppy Sister — both published in 1995 and the short fiction collection Some of Tim's Stories published in 2007.
Hinton has combined her writing career with acting — she has appeared in minor roles in several films, including Rumble Fish in which she was cast as a prostitute — and being a stay-at-home mother. Her son Nick was born in August 1983 and caring for him, she explained, used up most of the passion she needed in order to write. While she may not be prolific, her work is certain to endure, with her early novels remaining among the most widely read works of fiction in the Western world. When asked in 2014 if she thought her writing had improved since the publication of her first novel, she said: 'I like to think I've become better over the years, but I am certain I'll never write another book that is so well loved as The Outsiders. I wrote it at the right time in my life. And no, I wouldn't give my young self any advice. I think the point of life is to learn from it.'
Use the link below to visit the website of North American novelist, actor and screenwriter SE HINTON:
Use these links to read a May 2007 interview with SE HINTON posted in the online archive of Vanity Fair and a September 2005 interview with her posted in the online archive of The New York Times:
Like most SE HINTON novels, That Was Then, This Is Now was adapted for the screen in a 1985 production directed by CHRISTOPHER CAIN and starring CRAIG SHEFFER as Bryon, EMILIO ESTEVEZ (who also wrote the screenplay) as Mark, KIM DELANEY as Cathy, FRANK HOWARD as M&M, JILL SCHOELEN as Angela and MORGAN FREEMAN as Charlie. The film changes the story slightly, making Bryon and Cathy older than Mark, ostensibly to emphasize the latter's jealousy of their blossoming relationship.
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