Ruined By Reading Read online

  “If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside,” Sara thinks. “It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.” The key word is not “princess”—my fantasies did not run to cloth of gold—but “inside.” I had suspected that the life within was every bit as real as the life without, but no one had ever before reassured me. Sara Crewe, heroic in her rags, demonstrated the fortitude and patience needed until my inner vision could find its way into the actual world.

  When her friend, the slow-witted Ermengarde, is entranced by Sara’s fantasies and whispers, “Oh, Sara. It is like a story,” Sara replies, “It is a story … Everything’s a story. You are a story—I am a story. Miss Minchin [the mean headmistress] is a story.” Story within story, rippling to the far edges of the world. We can make up our own as we go along. How much better to make it up for ourselves than to let others make it up for us.

  Besides validating the life of the imagination, Sara was a lesson in how to confront the awesome and frustrating power of the adult world. Sara is subjugated by the tyrannical Miss Minchin; I grew up in an ordinary family setting, insofar as any family setting is ordinary. Still, I chafed against the shackles of childhood. From as far back as I can remember, I wanted to live the way grown-ups live. The force of children’s yearnings is every bit as great as that of adults, yet they are powerless. So they behave with defiance, willfulness, petulance—I did, anyway—all the modes of showing desire without the means to attain what is desired. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sara’s creator, knew this: she writes in her autobiography of how, even at three years old, she realized “the immense fact that people who were grown up could do what they chose, and that there was no appeal against their omnipotence.”

  Despite Sara’s passionate rage against Miss Minchin’s injustice, she knows it would be useless to protest. “Her heart grew proud and sore, but she never told anyone what she felt.” I, on the contrary, was given to struggling and fretting aloud to no avail. I envied Sara’s silence; I grasped its force; I wanted it. Such silence comes out of a keen sense of reality and of power. For the only way to oppose a greater power is with inner might.

  I don’t answer very often. I never answer when I can help it. When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word—just to look at them and think … When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage… . There’s nothing so strong as rage except what makes you hold it in—that’s stronger.

  I heard a great deal of rage—vocal and terrifying—when I was small; in that way my household was not what I could call ordinary. And I thought rage must be powerful. It was certainly loud. I have spent the rest of my life learning that loudness is not a show of strength, and that the spirit is kept alive by trust in the inner voice and by holding firmly to the unnamed thing that Sara found at age eleven: the stronger thing that makes you hold rage in.

  Nowadays, when the exhaustive—and exhausting—expression of feelings is considered the mark of emotional health, Sara’s reserve is plainly subversive. The patronizing labels it might be given leap readily to mind. No matter. Sara’s behavior, then and now, revives older labels like honor and dignity (not to mention pride), which will outlast our faddish ones. Even Miss Minchin is unsettled by Sara’s demeanor after being reduced to poverty and consigned to the cold attic:

  If she had cried and sobbed and seemed frightened, Miss Minchin might almost have had more patience with her. She was a woman who liked to domineer and feel her power, and as she looked at Sara’s pale little steadfast face and heard her proud little voice, she quite felt as if her might was being set at naught.

  Precisely: Miss Minchin’s might is being set at naught by a will firmer than her own. Giving vent to every feeling may provide quick comfort, but true self-possession—keeping your own mind free, in the words of Mr. Cha himself, the Buddhist who set off these recollections—has more lasting rewards. As Sara knows, the power that must perpetually assert itself is no power at all. True power is confident and has no need of display.

  I WAS often bored as a child, and would complain to my mother that I had nothing to do. Invariably, she suggested I sew something or read. I didn’t like to sew; I had little interest in any of the housewifely arts, although I did enjoy watching my mother casually toss one ingredient after another into her heavy glass bowls or battered gray pots, never using a recipe, so that I imagined cooking to be a kind of God-given wizardry. The setting in which she worked her spells was thoroughly low-tech: she was an artist of the minimal, using only the humblest of tools. Whether she was ignorant of the usual implements or abjured them I cannot say, but she mashed potatoes with a large spoon, not the crisscrossed masher I saw in friends’ kitchens, beat eggs with a fork and not a whisk, and peeled potatoes with a knife rather than the customary peeler. She squeezed oranges on a green glass squeezer—a shallow little bowl with a ribbed mountain in the center, rising to a point; it seemed to violate the orange half placed on top of it which then was rotated excruciatingly in small arcs. The juice gathered in the bowl, which had a spout for pouring right into the glass, using a small strainer if, like my brother and me, you didn’t like the pulp. The fanciest thing our kitchen could boast was the waffle iron, a contraption I adored, with its neat double grid that received the avalanche of batter, then snapped shut and within minutes congealed it into beautiful, sweet-smelling Euclidian squares—a three-dimensional, edible crossword puzzle.

  My very favorite tool among my mother’s small supply was the meat grinder. A large, heavy gray metal device that suggested a medieval torture instrument, it screwed firmly onto the edge of the kitchen table. Its top end was a funnel, but more evocatively curvaceous than a cone, rather like a large open flower, maybe a heliotrope. Into this flower-face turned up to the artificial sun of the kitchen light, my mother stuffed chunks of beef or liver, onion quarters, hard-boiled eggs. She turned the handle in a broad circular motion and the victimized food came out transformed: eggs chopped, onion shredded. Most dramatically, meat emerged from the circular grid in long spaghetti-like strings, dripping into the waiting bowl. There was something magical about this metamorphosis taking place in the innards of the grinder, and metamorphosis—whether it was thoughts into words or meat into dripping strands—was what fascinated me. I would implore my mother to let me use the grinder and occasionally she did, watching closely to see that my fingers were well out of the open flower-funnel before I began my vigorous, sadistic swoops of the handle.

  Still, this was the work of a few moments. I had no greater urge to putter in the kitchen alongside my mother. I didn’t like doing anything much, really, perhaps because children were supposed to like doing certain things—puttering, sports, excursions, arts and crafts—and for me any pleasure was weakened once it was sanctioned, invested with respectability and obligation. What I liked was sitting on my bed and having a book happen to me. No one could manipulate or interfere with that.

  It was during one of those grinding sessions in the kitchen that I complained of having nothing to do and my mother recommended A Tale of Two Cities. I took her advice. For weeks, probably months, I sat on my bed cross-legged, grinding my way through A Tale of Two Cities. It was difficult and tedious, especially at the beginning, but I was determined to read it because my mother had said Dickens was a great writer. Scattered amidst the tedium were magnificent passages like the reunion of Lucie and Dr. Manette, or the trial scene, or the wicked Evremonde’s driving his carriage through the slums, which carried me through the boring stretches as a weekend trip with a lover carries a lonesome person through solitary months. I didn’t hunt for the “good parts,” though, as I did later with books hotly passed from hand to hand—The Amboy Dukes, Never Love a Stranger—whose plots were merely bridges to the moments when fingers began surreptitiously inching up thighs. I read every
word of Dickens, in the belief that I could not properly appreciate the good parts unless I read the boring parts. Maybe this is true, and shows a precocious sense of the relation of figure and ground, or maybe, despite my rebellious passivity, I was caught in the overpowering moralism of the age: pleasure was a reward after suffering or “discipline,” never gratis.

  As it happened, I might have done well to sew when my mother suggested it, for I was about to be humbled for my disdain of the housewifely arts. In the midst of A Tale of Two Cities I entered sixth grade and found that the girls were required to sew aprons and caps in preparation for our junior high school cooking class the following year. The apron quickly became my albatross, though what misdeed it symbolized I didn’t know—a sin of omission, no doubt.

  The white shapes were mercifully cut out for us by the teacher, her only act of mercy. We were to sew a strip of red binding around the apron’s perimeter in a neat running stitch, approximately six stitches to the inch, then turn the binding over and hem it around the whole perimeter. In addition, there was an enigmatic little pocket over one hip, too small for kitchen utensils, and anyway, cooks do not carry their tools slung phallically from their hips like handymen or telephone repairmen. Nevertheless the pocket was required and it too got the red binding, twice around, and had to be stitched to the apron. The cap was a triangular piece of white cotton to be worn bandanna style, also with red binding. This endeavor, with its ripping and repairing, was the work of the entire school year, for I could not do the binding to the teacher’s satisfaction. She was an aesthete: “Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” We would not graduate or embark on junior high school, she warned, unless the aprons and caps were finished, and well finished, no sloppy edges or crooked stitches. I cannot remember doing anything else in school that year except watching one girl’s phenomenal breasts grow. At home I wept and stormed and finally got it done with my mother’s help. She was not a much better seamstress than I but she was more patient and did not have the weight of resistance cramping her fingers.

  I suspected we would never use the aprons, that they were only a refined instance of the sadism the schools excelled in. I was wrong. There was a cooking class in junior high, a large room with eight or ten units of sink, stove, cabinet, and counter, and we did wear our aprons and caps as we cooked cocoa and grilled cheese sandwiches and spaghetti with a tomato and onion sauce. Whatever we cooked we had to eat, under the gaze of cheerful young Miss Sklar, who laughed at our mishaps, and her colleague, Miss Sherry. She was old, with a pinched face and steel-rimmed spectacles and white hair and a stiff rubber collar around her neck which I later learned was a therapeutic device, but since Miss Sherry had reportedly worn it from time immemorial I presumed it had symbolic import, maybe a form of self-discipline like a hair shirt. When Miss Sherry presided, the cooking class had the austerity of a convent.

  Still wearing our aprons and caps, we were promoted in the spring to The Apartment, four fully furnished rooms behind an ordinary classroom door, signaling the wonders that doors might conceal. Several times a week we cleaned The Apartment and cooked in its kitchen; again, under Miss Sherry’s rigid stare, we ate what we cooked. The Apartment contained nothing so charming as the orange squeezer or the waffle iron or the meat grinder, but otherwise there was virtually everything an apartment needed, except bookshelves.

  Meanwhile, at home, I was plodding through the two cities from the first word to the last, alternately hating and loving but ever willing myself to go on, while the light faded beyond the lovely black-bordered casement windows that looked out over a row of backyards. Those were the two halves of my life that year, A Tale of Two Cities and the apron. They were hair shirt, neck brace, discipline.

  …

  My parents were people of the magazine as well as the book: the daily mail—dropped through a slot in our front door—held treasures in brown wrappers. I liked the Reader’s Digest best because of the jokes and anecdotes. Everything in it was short and pithy, numberless capsules of cheap optimism that lodged in my young brain and required painful dislodging later, like bits of shrapnel. I also read the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and several women’s magazines, Redbook, Cosmopolitan (not today’s sexy rag but a sedate guide to female behavior), McCall’s, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping. Each contained four or five stories, sometimes serialized, as well as a condensed novel. The stories were “women’s fiction,” that is, about family and love, and were an invaluable index to the world, or I should say to the prevailing middle-class fantasy of the world. I studied the monthly columns—“Can This Marriage Be Saved?” and “Tell Me, Doctor.” The gray-haired doctor’s kindly face (a photograph accompanied every column) bore an unearthly wisdom, and the tone of his readers’ questions was correspondingly pious. The war, which uprooted so many comforting assumptions, paradoxically reaped an age of belief and submission. Perhaps it was simply exhaustion that made people love advice, rules, anything to relieve the burden of living in the raw.

  The marriages, it seemed, could always be saved with a bit of patience and forbearance. I had little use for forbearance. I liked a good fight, and my judgments were at odds with those of tepid Dr. Popenoe. I wanted the harassed wife to throw her interfering mother-in-law out of the house, or get her snoring husband up from his armchair and over to the sink. I longed each month for a marriage that could not be saved, and I think this happened once or twice in the course of ten years. Probably the husband was an alcoholic or a compulsive gambler, or had even kissed another woman.

  The Reader’s Digest ran a condensed book each month, the prize at the end. I had no violent feelings, then, about condensation, so I enjoyed these without worrying over what was left out or in what relation the author now stood to her mangled work. For a while my favorite condensed book was Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, about a perilous trip across the Pacific in a raft, but Kon-Tiki was soon outranked by a book even more charged with suspense, which to this day evokes the tenuousness of every mortal moment: Miracle at Carville, by Betty Martin, a true story set in a lepers’ hospital in Louisiana. I have forgotten a good deal about the book but am loath to go back and check it out. I might laugh. Not at the lepers but at what was indiscriminately receptive in my young self.

  The story, in my probably distorted memories, is narrated by a young woman—a wife and mother—found to have leprosy and sent to Carville, which has the feel of an adult boarding school or camp, a less lofty magic mountain where struggle and aspiration are distilled into purer form. Carville’s guiding motif—religion, almost—is illness; salvation is measured by degrees of health.

  The heroine enters the insular society of doctors, nurses, fellow patients, and routines, all described in enormous and, to me, fascinating detail. Life at Carville is structured around the monthly blood tests. Positive means despair, negative means hope until the following month. A patient needs twelve consecutive negative tests to be declared cured and return to the world outside. The book too is structured around the test results, with the tension of a poker game or a tied ball game, where each moment promises a new future or prolongs the agonizing present. Time and again our heroine has four or five or six negatives, dares to dream, then draws a positive and must start all over. I read with every cell alert, curled up tight on my bed, choking with anticipation, hoping, despairing, marshaling new hope out of despair: the leper, c’est moi. Would we ever achieve the impossible twelve negatives and leave Carville? The constant temperature takings of The Magic Mountain are bland compared to Carville’s ups and downs.

  Then there is the love interest. The heroine’s husband visits at intervals, but inevitably some estrangement creeps in. She inhabits an alien world with new premises and uncertain prospects. The very word “leprosy” is a turn-off. At a time when ignorance about the disease engendered panic, who could love a leper if not another leper? Yes, a man leper waits in the wings. They fall in love … Should they stay with the
ir spouses who understand nothing of the critical experience of their lives, or start anew together? Even I, with all my experience of “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” hadn’t the usual prompt solution. I think that after much agonizing the pair decides to stay together. And then the beauty of the structure is made manifest. Just as you expect the easing of a dénouement, the tension thickens. The twelve tests balk the lovers, as in a fairy tale or myth. He’s almost made it, and she fails and has to begin again. She is practically cured, and his next test is positive. Relentless frustration. Years go by, maybe longer than Jacob labored for Rachel. (Are they sleeping together? I hope so. It didn’t occur to me to ask; I was barely eleven.)

  I never forgot Miracle at Carville, but for a long time I didn’t think about it. And then I lived in Hawaii for several months and visited the small island of Molokai. The Lonely Island, it was once called, and with good reason. Molokai was home to the former leper colony on the Kalaupapa Peninsula, a place notorious for its wretchedness and deprivation. In the mid-nineteenth century, Hawaii endured an epidemic of Hansen’s disease. In the grip of ignorance, fear, and heartlessness, authorities resolved to isolate its victims on a two-mile strip of peninsula bounded on one side by the sea and by virtually un-crossable mountains on the other. Starting in 1866, there the sick were ferried with barely the means for sustenance, and there they remained to fend for themselves. Without social structures or organization, the sole support came from those family members who accompanied and nursed their loved ones.

  Ironically, the place of exile was one of the most beautiful sites in the world, the kind of white beach and craggy mountain setting that today would be snapped up by developers for tourist resorts: Eden as a setting for Lord of the Flies, only its residents were not plucky British schoolboys but sick and abandoned adults.