Ruined By Reading Read online

  Of course there were human beings in my world, but I imagined the ones beyond, in the great world I sensed was out there, to be more glittering and sunlit. The mermaid had to wait years until she was permitted to rise to the sea’s surface and glimpse the wonders her older sisters described. “Oh, if only I were fifteen,” she lamented—quite as I did, for I too had an older sister who got dressed up and went gallivanting.

  In time the mermaid, as we all know, trades her fish’s tail for earthly legs, in the hope of winning her beloved prince as well as an immortal soul. The world, though, is not without its price: in a supreme sacrifice, she must let the sea witch cut out her tongue and she loses her voice, “the most beautiful voice on earth or sea.” As a child I loved irony—each new turn was a painful and delicious surprise. Here the ironies are tortuous: the mermaid becomes the prince’s companion, but has no way to tell him it was she who saved his life in a shipwreck. Instead he loves the girl who found him on the beach, mistakenly believing her to be his rescuer. “Oh, if only he knew that I gave my voice away forever, in order to be with him!”

  At seven years old I had no prince, and was even less exercised about having an immortal soul. What I did care about was having a voice. I wouldn’t have given mine up for anything, I thought, as if even then I sensed that it would become a vocation, the means to a life. I agonized over the mermaid’s lost tongue. If only she could write! Yes, she could learn to read and write, then give her prince a letter explaining everything, untangling the knots that hold stories in place and smoothing the way for a future. But there is nothing so mundane as reading and writing in fairy tales, and in the sad ones (as distinct from the happily-ever-after ones) there is no future either.

  The little mermaid, the story intimates, will have her soul eventually, because she has suffered so much. But what good is a soul without a voice to give it expression—sound and words? I’m not even sure, now that I think of it, that the part promising her a soul was in the Harvard Classics volume 17 version of Andersen’s story. I may have encountered it only in the unadulterated translation I just read, which does indeed feel longer and sadder and infinitely more lyrical, and whose introduction complains of the “distorted and mutilated” Andersen often presented to children, “with bits left out here and there, and other bits—freely invented and quite out of tune with the real story—put in at random.” The simplest thing would be to go to the shelf and check my old Harvard Classics volume 17, but that I cannot do. It is mysteriously gone.

  Not gone is the Little Leather Library, preserved in my dining room, looking, feeling, and smelling exactly the same as when I was ten: several dozen books the size of a cigarette case and bound in soft forest green, their crumbling pages the color of weak tea. Rudyard Kipling, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Conan Doyle, side by side, strange bedfellows, sticking together damply, crackling when you pulled one volume out. Next to Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince,” the saddest story I knew, was the almost equally sad but unpoetic story of The Man without a Country, by Edward Everett Hale. Here too the hero loves his country and ends unappreciated, in ignominy. Philip Nolan, no prince but a Navy officer, in a moment of rage denounces the United States, wishing never to hear of it again. His words are taken literally. His punishment is to live out his life aboard ship, never permitted to hear a word about home. It was a fairy tale horror—those thoughtless wishes!—in the Harvard Classics volume 17 come true: a flaring impulse rashly given voice, a slip of the tongue really, becomes destiny. Words are indelible, said the story. Watch each one before it hits the air!

  Alongside The Man without a Country were Hiawatha and Carmen and Alice in Wonderland, “Pippa Passes” and Sonnets from the Portuguese, those last not so strange bedfellows, and strangest of all, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “ ‘Is this Mr. Hyde a person of small stature?’ he inquired. ‘Particularly small and particularly wicked-looking, is what the maid calls him,’ said the officer.” I was small too. Was that a bad omen? Tales from the Arabian Nights flanked Tales by Poe and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám. I had barely begun life when I was told how dispensable I was:

  And fear not lest Existence closing your

  Account, and mine, should know the like no more;

  The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour’d

  Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.

  Another volume contained A Message to Garcia, which my mother spoke of with reverence. The author, Elbert Hubbard, a turn-of-the-century journalist and editor of a periodical called The Philistine, rightly calls it a “literary trifle” and describes how it was written in an hour, printed in the March 1899 issue, and to his creditable surprise sold in the millions. It was translated into “all written languages,” with a copy given to every railroad employee and soldier in Russia and every government employee in Japan. Starting with the example of a dutiful messenger dispatched to Cuba by President McKinley during the Spanish-American war, the little homily extols the employee or underling who gets the job done, no questions asked. Who can fault diligence and efficiency in the performing of one’s work? At eleven all I managed was a shrug for such unexciting virtues. But today the call for unquestioning obedience rings ominously. No accident that its context is military (were the Russian soldiers given Tolstoy too?). Had the reading public, in 1899, possessed the imagination to see where slavishness could lead, they might well have preferred the “slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work” that Hubbard finds so offensive. A precursor of trickle-down economics as well, he sees too much sympathy wasted on the “ ‘downtrodden denizens of the sweatshop’ ” and the “ ‘homeless wanderer searching for honest employment’ ” (his skeptical quotation marks), and suggests it be redirected:

  Let us drop a tear, too, for the men who are striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through the struggle to hold in line … slipshod imbecility and the heartless ingratitude which, but for their enterprise, would be both hungry, and homeless.

  With some streamlining of style and diction and an allusion to the cybernetical Third Wave, these lines could be part of a current conservative think-tank study. Le plus ça change …

  To give righteous Hubbard his due, I should mention that his principles led him to found a community in East Aurora, New York, based loosely on notions of harmonious living and organic farming, and turning out finely crafted furniture; there he also established the Roycroft Press, whose print shop produced handcrafted books in the William Morris tradition. Hubbard met his end on the Lusitania, famous for being sunk by a German submarine in 1915, also doing its duty, according to its lights.

  No shrug of indifference, only of bafflement, for “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” I couldn’t imagine what ailed the knight-at-arms, “alone and palely loitering.” So he went with the fair lady to her “elfin grot,” and when he woke she was gone. Why this outing should leave him drained and doomed was a mystery. Children accept magic; intractable passion is asking too much.

  Equally mysterious was “The Lady of Shalott.” Why was she confined to her island and forced to see the world only in a mirror, to weave webs with “colours gay” depicting scenes she could never be in? Why would she be destroyed if just once she followed her desire and looked directly at Camelot? Why does she inspire fear, what horrid curse could she spread, so that no one comes to save her or cares about her plight? Tennyson feels no more need to explain the “fairy” woman’s imprisonment than Keats to explain his knight’s languishing. But the knight is a thrall to love. The lady? Thrall to what? Some unspeakable curse. The poet delights in the utter arbitrariness of it, and his perverse delight is the power of the poem. As I pondered these perversities—it was a Sunday afternoon, I was about ten, hunched on my bed in confusion—my parents kept calling me. It was time to go visiting, and then, for my uncle the dentist and his wife never gave us more than tunafish salad, w
e would drive out toward the ocean, Rockaway, and stop for hot dogs (fried clams for my father). I went downstairs to be carried off and forgot the Lady of Shalott, as the world forgot her.

  It may have been from that moment that I contracted a phobia for which there is no name, the fear of being interrupted. (It may also be why, as I grew up, I came to prefer reading late at night, when the intrusive world has gone to bed.) Sometimes at the peak of intoxicating pleasures, I am visited by a panic: the phone or doorbell will ring, someone will need me or demand that I do something. Of course I needn’t answer or oblige, but that is beside the point. The spell will have been broken. In fact the spell has already been broken. The panic itself is the interruption. I have interrupted myself. Oddly enough, very often the phone does ring, just as paranoiacs can have enemies. Life is designed to thwart ecstasy; whether we do it for ourselves or something does it for us is a minor issue.

  I envied my older sister her uninterruptability. While I looked up immediately from my book when my name was called, she had the uncanny ability not to hear. I would test her as she read. It was like addressing a stone, except that with a stone, if we are imaginative enough, we can infer some kind of response, albeit in stone language. My sister appeared to be present, but she was in the book. This is a great and useful gift. The stunned petitioner retreats, daunted by an invisible power that can drown out the world.

  When questioned, my sister said that she really did not hear when she was spoken to. Years later I observed the same power in my older daughter. Did she too fail to hear? No, she said, of course she heard, she just didn’t answer. And clearly it was not the same, in her mind, as out-and-out rudeness. Feeling herself elsewhere, she acted accordingly. Perhaps I have never been that absorbed, but I doubt it. What I lack is pure negative self-assertion. These two are oldest children in the family, quite secure about what is their due. Younger children may be so glad to be called upon at all that they respond indiscriminately, ears cocked for any meager chance to be legitimized.

  My younger daughter hears when she is spoken to, but has yet another reading peculiarity. She reads with music playing. Apparently she absorbs both book and music; she remembered that Billy Budd’s blow killed Claggart, while I had read the story in total silence. I regard this tableau—so symmetrical, hands, ears, and eyes plugged in—with no comment, since I know how it feels to have one’s personal habits always scrutinized and challenged. It was the modus vivendi of my youth. But I am confused. For the words are a song entering the ear too, an intricate recitative, and how can anyone listen to two pieces of music at once?

  The practice, by the way, of questioning or criticizing any aspect of a family member’s behavior is not an undiluted evil. It shows attachment to each other’s lives and the curiosity that marks a loving, engaged intelligence, though enemies of the nuclear family would claim it is the loving engagement that kills. I was impressed, at an impressionable age, by a friend’s father who never made any direct personal comments (though as I came to know him I heard plenty of oblique ones). A remarkable freedom seemed to be proffered—nothing you said or did could raise his eyebrows. Of course he never praised anyone either. While such a leveling of affect may be useful in a Zen master with a student, I do not think in this case that it was part and parcel of a transcendent world view. After a while I would feel homesick for the overheated ambiance of my own family, where little went unnoticed. You could never doubt you had made an impact.

  Besides being preternaturally engaged, my parents were people of the book. Not people who kept up with literary trends but who revered and trusted the civilizing influence of the written word (though my father could be skeptical of its truth). Like me, they never threw away a book. There were books stored in both bedrooms I occupied, first the small one and then the larger one I inherited when my sister got married, my brother succeeding to the small one, all of us like children advancing through the grades.

  The books in the first bedroom were etched into my visual memory along with the design of the wallpaper and angles of the furniture, the shadow a chair cast on the rug and how it was reflected in the mirror: Captain Horatio Hornblower and Hercules, My Shipmate and Down to the Sea in Ships (why the pervasive nautical theme I shall never know) and Stars Fell on Alabama, which I soon learned was a song too—Billie Holiday sings it. Not until decades later, though, did I discover that Stars Fell on Alabama refers to an actual event, a spectacular meteor shower in the summer of 1833, which dazzled and maybe also terrified the spectators and which they interpreted as a portent of heaven knows what. I found this out on a two-week visit to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a flat drowsy town with some magnificent old Victorian houses, the University of Alabama, and a hallowed football tradition. Toward the end of my stay, the university was preparing for its homecoming game, the grandest of the year. Stacks of wooden pallets were piled high as a three-story building on the campus quad—the builders had to use ladders—for the great Saturday night bonfire. People arrived in caravans of trailers and pick-up trucks and set up campsites on vacant lots near the campus; they barbecued over open grills at night, sitting on plastic chairs gazing up at the sky as if waiting for more stars to fall. Just outside of town, past the inevitable strip of malls, was an unprepossessing shacklike restaurant called Dreamland, a fitting name for a place where stars might fall at any moment, and it boasted the best ribs in the country. They arrived, thick and glistening, on huge platters with mounds of packaged white bread to sop up the gravy. Outside was a starry night. As I sucked on the bones I was transported back to my old bedroom with the mysteriously titled book on the shelf.

  Stars Fell on Alabama was written by Carl Carmer, a northerner who came to Tuscaloosa in the 1930s to teach history at the university; he became entranced by the eeriness of the land and its legends (“a land with a spell on it—not a good spell, always”). His book is an odd compendium of folklore, anecdote, and local customs, with lists of superstitions, names of quilting patterns, and fiddlers’ songs. I might well have enjoyed it had I thought to open it back when I was ten years old. I certainly never thought when I gazed at the title on the spine that someday I would find myself under the very sky from which stars fell a century and a half ago, eating a kind of barbecued ribs I never dreamed existed, even in Dreamland.

  I didn’t read those books on the shelf in my first bedroom, but staring for years at their luridly colored jackets, I penetrated them in another way. My conjectures of them are as vivid as the books I read and forgot. And their titles, in my mind, are the opaque emblems of an era, while A Message to Garcia is transparently emblematic.

  I would occasionally be invited into my sister’s room to help her memorize poems. She was already in college while I was barely in grade school. She started young, at fifteen, a fact of which my parents were very proud. It was the custom, for a number of years, to skip bright children through the grades as quickly as possible. Those who took the regulation time and finished high school at eighteen were regarded in my household as dullards. My sister’s record was among the speediest, and neither my brother nor I would be able to surpass or even equal it since there was less skipping in our day. The poems were for her college English class—another, more worthy custom was learning by heart. I was honored to drill her, in the bedroom that would someday be mine. This was before my brother was born and before I ever dared dream I would have a brother, for my mother would come up with a child at widely spaced intervals as if it had just occurred to her. Only later did I learn she had suffered frequent miscarriages—we three were the tenacious ones.

  I sat on my sister’s bed with a couple of fat anthologies on my lap as she flitted about the room tossing her long chestnut hair and reciting, “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,” or, in her excellent clear diction, “Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.” Then she would go out in cars with s
oldiers, leaving me with Louis Untermeyer and the others on my lap. As I pored over their selections, she, in my visions, danced in the romantic arms of men in uniform.

  My favorite among my sister’s poems was Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” There are many decorative things for a child to love in “Annabel Lee,” but beyond all particulars, it possessed a quiddity, the “whatness” Stephen Daedalus defines as Aquinas’s claritas or radiance. “This supreme quality,” Stephen says, “is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination.” And that instant when “the clear radiance of the esthetic image is apprehended luminously by the mind,” he calls “the enchantment of the heart.” I felt enchantment of the heart on the receiving end, the reader’s, when I first apprehended certain works, and I feel it, with some puzzlement, today.

  “It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know …” Whom I might know! How incredible! I never knew any of the people written about in books; I never knew anyone who wrote them. Yet the very suggestion was a gleam of hope. Also, despite being included in the fat gray book and taught in college, this poem was unmistakably written for children, with clippety-clop rhythms and alliteration and predictable rhymes. Other poems in the collection clearly proclaimed Adults Only, Children Keep Out, but this was about children. It said so plainly enough. “I was a child and she was a child.” Children were being taken seriously, in a poem granting, at last, their love life. “But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we—Of many far wiser than we—.” The lines that enchanted me most were, “Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.” It was those “s” sounds, hissing defiance, mourning, passion, threat. Especially “ever dissever”—a palindrome for the ear.