Ruined By Reading Read online

  That children could love passionately was not a phenomenon adults took into account. But here the word “love” was repeated over and over—six times in the first two stanzas—as if the poet’s mouth couldn’t get its fill, insatiable for it. In my family we rarely used that word to each other or about each other, or about anyone else. When my mother spoke of couples who were “keeping company” or getting engaged, she would say, “Of course she likes him,” or, “She seems to like him,” never that they loved each other, far less that they could be “in love,” a phrase that seemed to denote a silly, weak-minded condition, embarrassing to own up to, bordering on the irresponsible or disreputable, and certainly not to be bruited about. Romantic love, from what I could gather, was for far less decent and intelligent people than we, who should know better. At the same time I had the impression that we took love (serious, abiding love) so much for granted, dwelt so intimately with it, that it was beneath our dignity to mention it; it would be as superfluous and vulgar as people mentioning that they bathe daily or pay their bills. Love might even be too powerful or holy a word to use, just as we were not supposed to write the word “God” but “G-d” instead, which offended me aesthetically, a distraction in the flow of reading, besides calling attention to a figure already receiving more than adequate attention.

  Later on I was surprised, in books and in life, to find love named explicitly: “But Father, I love him,” or indulgently, “What could the poor girl do? She loved him,” or soberly, “Are you sure you really love him?” or fatefully, “He took one look at her and fell in love.” In other families, evidently, love was neither too holy nor too foolish to name. But there in the poem, “love” was all over the place: my sister was enunciating it in her clear voice and mellifluous diction, in the bedroom with the casement windows that would be mine when she left to get married (having, tacitly, fallen in love).

  There were a number of words in “Annabel Lee” that I didn’t understand. I figured out from the context that “seraphs” were something like angels. “Coveted” soon became bitterly clear—I heard its echo farther on in “envying.” “The angels, not half so happy in heaven, Went envying her and me.” My sister explained “kinsmen.” But, strangely, I didn’t ask about the crucial word, “sepulchre,” so oddly shaped and spelled. I couldn’t acknowledge—didn’t want to—that Annabel Lee’s kinsmen put her in a tomb. A mere child with a slight chill? How could a draft kill anyone? Maybe she wasn’t really dead, maybe her kinsmen just took her away because they didn’t like the narrator—he wasn’t as highborn as they were. Besides, how could angels kill out of envy? Angels were supposed to be good. To chart the precise degree of my comprehension and where it crossed with my ignorance is impossible. I have lost the child’s ability to know and not know simultaneously, which is the most savory part of aesthetic pain, like the salt in tears.

  I loved the outrageous ending—the narrator says he sleeps every night next to Annabel Lee’s tomb—yet it made me uneasy. I took everything literally. I had often seen the sea—Brooklyn too is a kingdom by the sea—and even at five I knew what would happen if you buried someone in the wet sand at the water’s edge. But no matter. The narrator is mad with grief, and madness makes all things feasible. I imagine the stories told to five-year-olds today, in the therapeutic era, feature narrators who diligently “work through” their losses to reach some emotional stability. With all the rampant conformity of my early years, eccentricity was still tolerated as a mode of being in itself, not a stage on the way to cure.

  Above all, the poem was about loss, my perennially favorite theme. I sensed I had lost something too, though what it was I have yet to discover. Maybe I lost it when I learned to read, or learned to speak, or first opened my eyes: that fullness of being of the infant—empty yet full, the Buddhists’ and Mr. Cha’s paradox—before it begins to detach self from surroundings.

  On some shelf or other in the small bedroom I found Eugene Field’s “Little Boy Blue,” a masterpiece among tearjerkers. If you don’t cry at “Little Boy Blue” you have to laugh, and I am not quite ready to laugh. Along with “Annabel Lee,” it gave enchantment of the heart and set a standard for all future reading. Or rather it wasn’t the poems themselves that set the standard, but the strong emotions they aroused. Lycidas never wrenched me as “Little Boy Blue” did, which can hardly mean it is the lesser poem, but does mean something about the capacities of childhood and the powers of simplicity.

  “Little Boy Blue” was satisfying to my ear, though it did not swarm and buzz with Poe’s inner rhymes. It too had some fine new words: “stanch” and “moulds”: “His musket moulds in his hands,” an admirable line. And “trundle-bed,” which sounded like something children in poems would sleep in. There were two odd, unfamiliar phrasings: “The soldier was passing fair,” which I read as “passably” fair, fair enough; only years later did I realize “passing” meant, literally, “going beyond.” And “Time was when the little toy dog was new,” one of those locutions you seldom hear but grasp immediately (though hard to parse or justify to a non-native speaker). How compressed and forceful: “time was,” irony laced into the syntax like threads of chocolate in a marble cake.

  I must have been five or so when I read “Little Boy Blue,” and I wondered, as did his bereft toys, what happened to him. Where did he go, why did he never wake? I thought the poem was a mystery (indeed there is an awful mystery at its heart), a sort of detective story that didn’t give enough clues, or else I didn’t get them. If I had suspected the truth, I would still have been put off by the “angel song” that “awakened” him, for “awaken” suggests life and action. The boy had awakened from life into death, meaning we are only sleeping before the eternal day. I could never have accepted that. So far as I could see, he vanished into his sleep. For as with “Annabel Lee,” that children could die without warning was unthinkable.

  I wasn’t aware that two babies in our extended family, both boys, had died not long before. They would have been my first cousins, which was no inconsiderable bond: we were a large and close family, seven pairs of aunts and uncles on my father’s side and five on my mother’s, all of them constantly visited and visiting with their two or three or four children, a huge array of characters whose progress through life was an open book. With so many near destinies to keep track of, the critical intelligence my parents brought to bear on the ongoing vicissitudes of the families was positively literary.

  On Saturday afternoons my mother and her three sisters would gather around my grandmother’s kitchen table to report and analyze the doings of their late adolescent daughters. Since I was a good deal younger than most of my cousins, I got to sit and listen while they were out providing us with material. Some went to college, some worked, a few were idle; some had boyfriends and some didn’t. Where had they been and with whom and what had they said and worn? Here was the patient building up of character I was used to and enraptured by in novels, and so what I was really doing, as I sat silently drinking glasses of tea and cracking walnuts, was reading, without a tangible book.

  The presiding spirit of the book, supplying context and narrative tone, was my small, august grandmother with her sky-blue eyes and smooth white-gold hair. In her youth the hair had been red, I had heard tell, and the vanished red had left behind the golden tinge. During the day she wore her hair in a neat bun at her neck, but early in the morning and at bedtime it was combed out, released in a long, thick coil down her back. I knew this because I had slept over a few times and caught a glimpse of her in her bathrobe, looking remarkably girlish with that mane of powerful hair. During the Saturday afternoon chronicling sessions she invariably wore an apron, and now and then circled the table to scrape the oilcloth clean of bits of walnut shells. She made swooping arcs with her knife; the sound of the dull blade against the oilcloth was portentous, like a Beethoven motif. Then she scraped the assembled crumbs and shells into her waiting palm at the edge, never dropping a crumb. Every now and then she would shoo her
useful but unloved cat into the cold pantry beyond. On a cot in the corner sat her half-brother, who rarely spoke but was a fairly benign presence, more than a plant but less than a full participant. Now and then my grandmother would hand him a glass of tea or a piece of sponge cake. The sisters could say anything they liked in front of him because he was deaf.

  During the Depression, I was told, the sisters, with their husbands and children, had each lived on separate floors of the old brownstone; later, as times improved, they moved one by one into places of their own. My own sister would tell me about growing up with a litter of cousins strewn on every floor, and I listened with envy, just as I listened to fables of far-gone eras. Our present house was small, neat, and ordinary, and I could imagine nothing remotely fabulous happening in it. Never, I was sure, would I experience anything as picturesque as the Depression.

  The large kitchen where we gathered was at the end of a long, dark hallway and was joined to the dining room by a pair of swinging glass doors in which I watched my reflection swell and shrink as I played at opening and shutting them. Outside was a small front yard with a lone tree and a flight of fourteen stone steps leading to the second floor, but I never saw anyone climb them. Their use was for stoop-ball, which I spent hours playing with the children across the street. Ten points if you caught it on one bounce, twenty for a fly, and a hundred if it hit the edge of a step and ricocheted right back. Our other pastime was riding on the iron gate which swung around almost three hundred sixty degrees and had convenient places between the slats, big enough for a child’s feet.

  Besides the talk, the stoop, and the gate, the other great charm of the house was the icebox. My grandmother would hold open its waiting door as the iceman ran down the long dark hall with a great block of ice in his huge tongs, scattering a wake of sparkles. Sometimes he left another block on the sidewalk while he made his delivery and, along with the children from across the street, I would rub my hands down its sleek sides and watch it diminish under my touch. In summer we crowded around the ice truck hoping to draw in some of its chill. Slivers fell from the truck; we grabbed them up to roll around in our palms. When the truck drove off it left an arc of ice slivers in the street, glinting like spilled gems from a treasure chest, too soon leaving a mere puddle as a remnant of their glory.

  One day, with as little warning as Little Boy Blue’s disappearance, men came and took away the icebox. In its place they brought a shiny new refrigerator. All my aunts congratulated my grandmother on this long overdue step into the modern world, and she beamed proudly as she cleaned the inside with a rag, then loaded it with food. But what would become of the iceman and the ice truck? Never again to smooth down those cold blocks with hot hands, or come dashing downstairs only to be warned sharply from the kitchen, “Wait, the iceman! Let the iceman pass!” Later I learned there was a famous play called The Iceman Cometh and I yearned to see it, to recapture some of the lost glamor of that old icebox. When I finally got my wish, at the age of seventeen or so, what a letdown: nothing but a bunch of played-out drunks sitting around in a sleazy bar. No iceman or icebox at all. The title derived from a cheap joke that by the end became a macabre metaphor. So much for nostalgia.

  I don’t know whether the two babies who would have been my cousins died unaccountably, like Little Boy Blue, or caught a chill, like Annabel Lee. I didn’t discover their brief passage until decades later, through words dropped here and there. Death was the untold story, grief not graced with words. No wonder I read. In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

  For I must have known, somewhere, about Little Boy Blue. Why else would I have wept at the image of the toys “stanchly” awaiting the child who will never come, their dignity a blend of loyalty and ignorance? My sympathy was all for them. The poem is skewed in that direction, making the boy a renegade and betrayer, and the toys abandoned victims. The skewing is what rescues it from being a maudlin set piece. To side with the toys, as we are led to do, is to avoid the danger of siding with the child. But our safety is a delusion; as the poem rights itself in the mind, we feel the aftershock. Even today it is startling that Little Boy Blue should vanish so suddenly. He didn’t even have a chill. He fully expected to return the next morning from his dream voyage: “Now, don’t you go till I come,” he tells his toys, “And don’t you make any noise!” But it is he who will never again make noise.

  We realize we are mortal very early, as soon as we begin to put inkling and evidence together, and “Little Boy Blue” trades on that secret the way other works trade on sex or cruelty. Anything that nudges so temptingly at the forbidden, and offers the lures of sonority besides, can hold us hostage forever, just as the clever witches of fairy tales capture innocents by preying on their vulnerabilities.

  …

  The bookshelves were lined with real mysteries, not just metaphysical ones, and of these my favorites were Erle Stanley Gardner’s. Perry Mason, Hamilton Burger, Paul Drake, and Della Street, that all-suffering secretary who I knew even then was missing something, a self, were fleshed out in my imagination long before they became shadows on a television screen. I read racy, hard-boiled Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which arrived every month, and I was astonished when my father casually mentioned that Uncle Dan, his brother, actually knew Ellery Queen. (So what “Annabel Lee” suggested was true: you could know the people in books, or behind them.) What is more, Ellery Queen was not one person but two, neither bearing that distinctive name. They were not detectives at all but partners in the writing business. I was shaken with wonder that this could be, and even more, that Uncle Dan could know them, speak to them, and visit them in, wonder of wonders, an apartment in Manhattan. But if anyone would know a writer (writers, in this case), it would inevitably be Uncle Dan, a figure bathed in sophistication. He wore expensive clothes and drove flashy cars and ate in fancy restaurants where he appeared to know the waiters and liked to pay the check, and was not married. He had started out married but his wife died of a mysterious illness, and so, though a middle-aged man, he actually took women out on dates, women we occasionally met in the fancy restaurants. Their style matched his, and while they were sometimes mothers too, widowed or divorced, they were not like the mothers I knew, plump and sage, who wore aprons and presided over the kitchen and prefigured what their daughters would become. I did not have it in me to become one of these aproned figures, or the other, sleeker kind either. Meanwhile I read, maybe hoping to find out if there was anything else to become.

  Before I could become anything, though, there was the question of what I already was. A great unknown. I think I accepted, in a confused, half-conscious way, that I was whatever my parents described or defined me as being. They were, after all, my parents; they must know, mustn’t they? And they were much given to describing and defining their three children. They observed accurately, then made the error of fitting their observations into a prefabricated design: for instance, I read a lot and did well in school, so I was “intellectual,” or, even more formidably, “an intellectual.” Intellectual was not a complimentary term. My father referred to two second cousins, both women, as “the intelligentsia,” in tones dripping with scorn. I could never get him to say exactly what was wrong with them; when I asked, his sharp look suggested that I should know for myself, but on the few occasions I met them I had liked them—lively and talkative, with fuzzy hair and intriguing accents. They lived on their own and I could practically smell the fresh staunch independence blowing from their pores. He must have found them arrogant know-it-alls, too assertive. It was all very well for women to be assertive—my mother was not meek—as long as they kept their assertions to their realm of expertise, the domestic.

  Still, the label was not appealing. I vaguely sensed that my qualities fit into some other mold, or—did I even guess?—maybe they would fit in no mold at all but shape a design of their own. In the midst of such confusions, perhaps at about eight or nine years old, I discovered a book that told me more abo
ut who I was than anything before or since. That was A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and I read it over and over, as children do with special books. I still return to it every few years; it draws me, the way a certain piece of music or a certain landscape draws people back every so often. Each time it bestows on me, yet again, some crucial knowledge that is all too easy to lose, that the world seems bent on making us forget.

  I was never consigned to a boarding-school attic like the heroine, Sara Crewe, or forced to be a household drudge, nor did I fall from wealth and luxury only to return to it. Though the delicious freedom of the very young child is a luxury, and the darkening years of conformity—which in my case began early, around the time I was consigned to perform from the New York Times— are a kind of drudgery.

  So it was for me, anyway, and I imagine for other child dreamers as well. Occasionally when I mention A Little Princess I find someone who is startled into rapt recall, and we exchange a look of recognition. There is nothing to match the affinity of people who were defined and nourished by the same book, who shared a fantasy life. What we dreamed together, in whatever distant places we grew up, was of something amorphous—large, open, and exotic—something for which there was no room at home and even less in school. We groped for the knowledge A Little Princess confers, which is that we truly are what we feel ourselves to be, that we can trust our inner certainty regardless of how others perceive us or what they wish us to become. This truth comes to everyone eventually, one way or another (at least I hope so), but I was lucky to find it in a book.