Ruined By Reading Read online

  In 1873 things began to change at Kalaupapa with the arrival of Father Damien, a Belgian priest who voluntarily took on the task of ministering to the sick and shaping a humane society out of chaos, pain, and disarray. Conditions were such that Father Damien spent his early days in Kalaupapa living under a tree. He worked at digging graves, nursing the sick, and building shelters, until bit by bit the colony was transformed into a community and the lives of its exiles redeemed. Damien was regarded as a living saint and others came to join his efforts. He contracted leprosy himself, died in 1889, and is still revered.

  Today only a small number of people remain in the neat village on Kalaupapa. Now that the stigma of Hansen’s disease has abated they are free to return home, but they do not choose to. They take pride in what was once a place of shame. The peninsula can be reached only by plane or mule or a hike down the mountains, and guided tours are offered. I didn’t make the trip; the idea of being a tourist in this former hell with the features of paradise somehow didn’t sit well with me. I stood on the Kalaupapa Overlook sixteen hundred feet above and gazed down the steep mountain at the strip of scalloped beach. It was a misty day. I was so high up, or it was so far down, that banks of clouds separated us. For minutes at a time I could see nothing but cloud, until suddenly the clouds would part to reveal the blue and white glory below, dotted with small buildings and palm trees. Then the mist quickly gathered anew and within seconds I was isolated on the mountain—I could forget there was anything below. Just so the lepers must have been forgotten, behind their barrier of mountain and mist. An instant later, when the clouds broke again, all was clear and serene. Pain appeared to have left no trace on the landscape, or perhaps the special beauty of that pristine beach was the redemptive calm of pain visited and eased by love.

  As for Miracle at Carville, seminal book of my youth, I can’t vouch for its outcome, but given the title I suppose the lovers eventually passed the tests and lived happily ever after. Does the long reach of its influence lead me to invent torturous plots, suffering and relief in maddening alternation? Not at all. Next to Miracle at Carville my own novels are uneventful. I wish this were otherwise, but it does not seem within my control. I was surprised to hear a writer once say she wrote the sort of books she wanted to read, since no one else was writing them. Many people, most of them dead, have written the sorts of books I want to read. But not me. What we love to read is not necessarily what we write. The great Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, who in her early years translated Proust, has described her longing to write lush, allusive prose entwining the complexities of soul and universe into every helical sentence. When she set pen to paper, what appeared was terse and straight as a bone.

  But the tests, those twelve tests. They were what gripped me so tight, because my childhood was fenced at every turn with tests—from performing the New York Times to attending school, where understanding was quantified by tests, a world of measurements light-years from the way things felt inside. I tangled my insides trying to shape them to the world of quantification, quite like the leper who, however well she felt, however much in love she was, got tied in knots every month, her inner truth twisted by numbers popping out of a test tube and labeled, unaccountably, with her name.

  My parents were people of the book: my mother read family sagas, historical romances, popular fiction by the current household names—Anya Seton, Faith Baldwin, Rumer Godden, Taylor Caldwell. My father read mysteries and, like many men, was in thrall to the New York Times. The relation between these pale loiterers and their belle dame sans merci is visceral, more potent than any mere sexual or emotional connection, and would require a Keats to do it justice. Some can loiter for fifteen minutes or more on a single page. An observant woman once informed me, “Don’t you know? They’re not really reading. It’s their way of daydreaming, but they have to have the paper in front of them to justify it.”

  After the Times and the mysteries, my father liked books on political and historical topics: biographies of the presidents, Theodore White on the campaigns, William Shirer on the Third Reich. He was always interested in a new book on Roosevelt. He read as I do, slowly, absorbedly, the book at arm’s length from his eyes, but as I cannot do, he read lying down, stretched diagonally on the bed, stockinged feet crossed. His right hand, which held a cigar, was behind his head, the right elbow sticking out at a sharp angle. His cigar of choice was likely to be a Corona Corona, in those days when Havana cigars were readily available, and I might even have gotten it for him. For when I was quite young he would occasionally summon me with the special charm of people about to ask a favor, hand me a few coins, and ask if I would run out to the candy store to buy him a cigar. This five-minute trip entailed crossing an avenue that at the time seemed broad and perilous, and which my mother did not allow me to cross alone until I was seven. I was proud of the privilege. I felt very grown up pocketing the coins and setting out on my mission, and I liked partaking of the wider world by abetting such an adult pleasure. I liked it even better if, as often happened, my father was relaxing on the front porch with a friend when he made his request, for then I could show off my speed and efficiency as I returned promptly, cigar in hand. He would always reward me with the gold-embossed paper ring adorning the cigar, which I liked to wear until it broke. This little errand was our joint performance, and it felt pleasant and fitting that I should oblige him. It was a far more reasonable request of a child, it seemed to me, than performing from the New York Times for his assembled guests. If he could read this he would be startled to know how bitterly I resented showing my reading prowess, just as I am startled myself, as I write of it.

  Anyway, when he read he would lie on the bed with the cigar in his right hand burning down. His left arm was extended, the hand supporting the book from the bottom and turning its pages at the lower spine with a right-to-left flick of the thumb. He was still in his business clothes, white shirt unbuttoned at the neck and tie either hanging askew or removed, for he did not change into casual clothes when he came home from work. He had very few casual clothes, shorts for the summer and a few sport shirts he paraded around in on rare occasions, looking jauntily pleased with himself but slightly awkward too, seeking approval. He dressed in the morning and undressed when he went to bed and that was it, and he hated our walking around in pajamas or bathrobe once the day had officially begun. Or rather it was the dressing that made the day official—without our wearing the proper clothes, the day could not take hold, was tentative, amorphous, unpredictable, and he needed to have the day official and under control as soon as possible. When I lounged around in a robe on weekends, his look of distaste conveyed that my dishevelment was morally inadequate. To this day I have trouble walking around in a bathrobe past eleven in the morning, even though I am in my own house and he is dead. I feel unprepared for what life might require of me.

  He could read in that position for a couple of hours so I guess he found it comfortable enough, and then he would fall asleep, his glasses slipping awry, the book coming to rest on his leg, the right hand still behind his head with the dead cigar between two fingers. I fall asleep reading too, and the last sentences filter into my dreams, where I continue writing the book. After spending several late evenings reading Ved Mehta’s biographies of his parents, Daddyji and Mamaji, in dreams I invented long passages about Indian marriage rituals and domestic life, spinning off from the facts. I picture my father in his habitual pose whenever I see new books he would have taken pleasure in, about Entebbe or Watergate or the assassination of Kennedy, biographies of Johnson or Truman, books about the Vietnam War and PACs and oil conglomerates and the misdeeds of Congressmen. Sometimes I feel a funny urge to read them for him.

  As much as my father approved of reading, he objected to my habit of reading at the table. He wanted civilized dinners with the family gathered round in conversation. Reading at the table is uncivil, yet few acts are so completely satisfying. The two infusions, food and words, intermingle. The rhythms of chewing and
swallowing join with the rhythms of sentences in a fantastic duet where the ear can barely separate the melodic strands. Parallel lines meet: food and story converge in mouthfuls of narrative, and the misleading duality of flesh and spirit is overcome. I will never be able to dissociate Heidi, a book I read again and again, from the accompaniment of lamb chops and mashed potatoes—a far cry from the fresh goat’s milk her grandfather was forever pressing on her—just as some people cannot dissociate sex from marijuana or baseball games from hot dogs.

  I would get to the last page and flip back to the first, unwilling to let it go, have it end. It didn’t matter that I knew what was going to happen. I never read for the story, only for the taste. I can’t say how many times I read Heidi before I moved on to Heidi Grows Up and Heidi and Peter, each one more attenuated, like succeeding cups of tea from the same tea bag (and indeed I recently learned that the sequels to Heidi were written by the French translator, Charles Tritten). For some reason, maybe the alien sound of the name, I assumed the author of Heidi, Johanna Spyri, was a man, even though I knew women wrote books: there was Louisa May Alcott, whose entire sunny oeuvre I had read (only lately, with serious studies of women’s writing, have her darker works been reissued). When I had had my fill of Heidi I found a new book by this remarkable “man”: Cornelli, addressed directly to me. How could “he” have known?

  Cornelli is another displaced Swiss girl. Her mother has died, and to ease, or, more accurately, correct her inconsolable grief, her father sends her to live with a wholesome mountain family, where her gloom makes a sharp contrast. The mother of the family tells Cornelli that if she persists in frowning she will grow two little horns between her eyes, like the ubiquitous goats. Cornelli was as literal minded as I. We didn’t realize that the horns were the bumps between the eyes on a perpetually furrowed brow. Since she cannot stop frowning, Cornelli takes to wearing her hair hanging over her eyes to mask the horns. Everyone in the happy family mocks her messy hair and tries to get her to comb it back, but she is horrified that the horns, sign of her grief, will show, that suffering will have deformed her into an animal. Meanwhile her pain has been forcibly shifted from the loss of her mother to her dehumanized state. She is made ashamed of feeling as she does, being what she is. Naturally I didn’t see all this when I read it. I worried endlessly and indignantly over Cornelli. She was entitled to her horns, I felt, entitled to sulk and shield herself with her hair, just as I felt entitled to the sulks I had to fight for.

  At last someone, probably the well-meaning mother, breaks through the veils of misunderstanding to the source of Cornelli’s trouble and explains that she will not grow horns, it was only a figure of speech. Relieved, reached, Cornelli allows her hair to be combed back. The furrows in her brow smooth out, her mourning recedes, and she can regard the world without a protective mask. If I could uncover why I cherished this book so deeply, what exactly I was grieving for and why I clung to the grief, it would be a great unmasking.

  There were some books I wanted to possess even more intimately than by reading. I would clutch them to my heart and long to break through the chest wall, making them part of me, or else press my body into them, to burrow between the pages. When I was eight I felt this passion—androgynous, seeking both to penetrate and encompass—for Little Women, which I had read several times. Frustrated, I began copying it into a notebook. With the first few pages I felt delirious, but the project quickly palled. It was just words, the same words I had read over and over; writing them down did not bring me into closer possession. Only later did I understand that I wanted to have written Little Women, conceived and gestated it and felt its words delivered from my own pen. But that could never be, unless I did as Borges’s Pierre Menard, who undertakes to rewrite Don Quixote, but in order to do so must reinvent in himself the sensibility of a seventeenth-century Spaniard. I did not want to feel and think like Louisa May Alcott, however, or even to know more about her. I wanted to write my version of Little Women, what Louisa May Alcott would write were she in my place, or if I were she, yet living my life. But the notion of “if I were she” or “if she were I” boggles the mind, an absurdity even grammatically. (If I were she I would no longer be I.) When we yearn to be someone else, what part of the “I” do we imagine detached and transplanted? The self has no discrete movable parts.

  Since then, from time to time I have felt the urge to copy certain books: The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Middlemarch and Margaret Drabble’s early novel, The Millstone; stories by William Maxwell and Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg (I have translated some of hers, a more useful way of possessing); and Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, a paean to the act of reading in all its richness, infused with tenderness to readers, a novel whose narrative thread is drawn by the needle of reading.

  I don’t copy them. I do recognize them as books I want to have written, which, given enough talent and ingenuity and time, I might have written. I was groping toward them and might have reached them in a few centuries, but others reached them first. And it appears that the critical thing these others were able to do was identify and localize a subject that for me remained undefined and elusive—until I read their books and saw it clear and elegant. In that light, writing seems less a craft than a quality of mind and discernment, a rarefied focusing. Or sometimes the other writers have lit on the perfect form, which obviates any struggling for subject—Proust’s ruminating novel or Herbert Morris’s meditative poems like an intimate conversation, both unabashed about their length, or, in the short department, Robert Walser’s idiosyncratic essays like messages found in bottles, comically wry and desperate. Then I think, Had I only known you could do it that way … and writing seems a function of inventiveness and nerve. In any case, the books I have wanted to write brood about what I brood about, and they move in uncannily familiar rhythms. Reading them, I feel caught out. Some stranger, like the author of Cornelli, has preempted my secrets. I am disarmed, but less alone.

  There are equally fine books that, much as I admire them, I would not have wanted to write, indeed have been relieved I didn’t need to write: Madame Bovary, The Idiot, Mrs. Dalloway, Dubliners. Too difficult, too impossible to sustain such crushing moods and temperaments. But I am judging by my own powers of endurance. Again, were I those writers, I could and would be they; the issue evaporates into tautology.

  Ticklish questions of identity inform another treasured book, which few people seem to know: Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field, by the prolific British writer of children’s books, Eleanor Farjeon. The French surrealists would have approved of it—arbitrary, dreamy, mystifying, leaning heavily on the non sequitur and the extravagant. Martin Pippin, part rural Prospero, part Puck, is in the daisy field with six little girls—Sally, Sophie, Selina, Sue, Sylvia, and Stella—who insist he tell them each a bedtime story, which he does. Meanwhile, in interludes, a riddle of identity is worked out. Martin Pippin must guess who the girls’ parents are, with nothing to go on but six pairs of names and a handful of character traits. The girls tease and confound him by mixing up names and clues, cavorting with the mysteries of identity; the narrative often sounds like Virginia Woolf rewriting The Waves for young readers. In the end the girls, and their fathers and mothers, are figments of Martin’s bucolic dreams, projections of the child he may someday have—for he has gotten married that afternoon, it turns out.

  Martin Pippin embodies a name game of the highest order, playing with the protean nature of names, which can empty or swell like a bellows according to what we know or imagine of the reality behind the name. It is the sort of game Proust plays with the names of towns in Normandy and Brittany, or with Florence and Venice, whose syllables, he finds, not only evoke but contain, in tiny quanta of impressions, the light, the smells, the flavors and texture of the place.

  Our sense of a name and the people who bear it may depend on someone we knew in childhood, a Katharine, perhaps, prim and chirping and knock-kneed, so that we expect every Katharine thereafter to wear Peter Pa
n collars and be a soprano. If we find a variant, Katharine Hepburn, for instance, we must laboriously detach the original qualities from the name and graft on new ones. And still the name is never entirely free. No matter how many variants, it keeps vestigial traits of its original. So, with primitive attachments, parents name their children Richard (the Lion-Hearted) or Arthur or Helen, but rarely Cassandra—few want a truth-teller. Many such names are chosen for their singular destinies—kingly Davids and wise Samuels—while others are shunned: who names a child Cain or Goliath or Judas? And naming boys after their fathers is not only a bid for literal immortality but a wish that the boy carry on the virtues of his father, be his father. Among Jews that particular hubris does not operate. Children are named after the dead, so that the dead won’t be lonesome but will, as my mother used to say, “have someone.” In the end it is the names, not the people, that are immortal, absorbing the history of everyone who has borne them. The delicate infant, innocent of the density of her name, unwittingly adds her bit of character and fate.

  Besides the intrigue of names, Martin Pippin’s game hinted at the enigmas of heredity, which children love to ponder. They dazzle themselves with fantasies of being adopted, and the adopted ones dream of finding their “real” parents and grasping the ineffable. Why are we who we are? I would ask, sitting on my bed under the casement windows. I imagined springing from different, idealized parents, but then I would not have been myself. Had I been conceived on another day or in another room, even, I might have been someone else.

  How energetically we resist becoming updated versions of our parents. Of course we cannot create new genes, but with effort, we believe, we can grow new traits and modes of life: self-generated mutations. Yet when we do manage to create ourselves anew, isn’t there always a suspicion that the new identity fits over the old like a second skin, at times itchy or uncomfortably tight, not quite covering the most vulnerable patches? Caught unawares—awakened from sleep or weakened by illness or stress—we find ourselves behaving exactly as our parents did, the genes asserting themselves through the flimsy new skins, their power unabated.