Ruined By Reading Read online

  My favorite of Martin Pippin’s stories was “Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep,” set in the village of Glynde, under Caburn Hill, where the children “lived mostly on bread and butter, because their mothers were too poor to buy cake.” When she is three years old Elsie Piddock hears the bigger girls outside skipping rope to the rhyme,

  Andy

  Spandy

  Sugardy

  Candy

  French

  Almond

  ROCK!

  Breadandbutterforyoursupper’sallyourmother’sGOT!

  She starts skipping at that early age—just the age I learned to read—and her fame spreads throughout the country, for she is a born skipper. The fairies soon hear of her, and she becomes the protégé of their skipping master, Andy-Spandy. Every month at the new moon, fast asleep, she joins their midnight skipfests on Caburn Hill, where Andy-Spandy teaches her the magic skips. She can skip high and low, fast and slow, she can skip over the moon or to the earth’s core; she can skip through a keyhole and land on a blade of grass as lightly as a drop of dew.

  Andy-Spandy is the source of art, imagination given shape; as his apprentice, Elsie Piddock follows all he says without question. When her training is done he licks the wooden handles of her rope and they become Sugar Candy and French Almond Rock. “You shall therefore suck sweet all your life,” he tells her, and though I was too young to know the links between Art and Eros, I must have known somewhere, as I knew about death, that they were holographic, sliding into each other depending on the slant of light and the tilt of the mind contemplating them. Elsie Piddock can return at any time to the tool of her craft, touched by the lips of imagination, to find solace and nourishment. After a lifetime of skipping, “when times were hard, and they often were, she sat by the hearth with her dry crust and no butter, and sucked the Sugar Candy that Andy-Spandy had given her for life.”

  Years later, when Elsie Piddock has become a legend, a great Lord, a prototypical industrial magnate, decides to fence off the skipping ground at Caburn Hill and build smoky factories. The village girls, their mothers and grandmothers who grew up skipping there, are heartbroken. But what good are feeling and tradition against the march of industry? Suddenly an old woman appears, tiny as a child, and bargains with the Lord for one last moonlight skip. Only when everyone from lithe girl to achy crone has skipped till she stumbles, the Lord agrees, will he start building his fence. He waits impatiently. Just as it seems over, the tiny old woman reappears: Elsie Piddock, one hundred nine years old. “When I skip my last skip,” she announces, “you shall lay your first brick.” But she never does skip her last skip. She goes on forever. She is skipping even now. Thanks to her moonlight dreaming sojourns among the fairies, she has become immortal. Her art will outlast the greed of entrepreneurs and the machinations of city councils and the carelessness of parliamentary decrees. It will last as long as the hill she skips on and the moonlight she skips under.

  Here was a story for me to lean on, and live on. It said that the things I loved were not foolish or frivolous. Elsie Piddock may have been dreaming when she apprenticed herself to Andy-Spandy, but in the end art is not only dreaming but action.

  MAYBE that early impulse to possess the books I loved by copying them is what moviemakers feel. Ever more avidly, they have been dusting off old books like costumes found in the attic, to rip them apart at the seams and redesign them for their screens. I’m aware that money is a powerful motive here, but I like to think love plays a part as well. Certainly love, of the reverential kind, inspired the “Masterpiece Theatre” television series, which brought us the likes of Henry James and Jane Austen in living color, with fatherly Alastair Cooke as mediator: he would explain the subtle points and refresh our memories week to week, like the little summaries heading each serialized novel installment in the women’s magazines. “Masterpiece Theatre” had its charms—Purcell’s heraldic trumpet music summoning us to the TV set, the camera panning over those dignified leather bindings, and the Sunday night time slot, which gave the sense of starting the week on a virtuous note—and yet the aura of pomp made for distance. Great books are best enjoyed as intimates, not decked out in regal trappings. Did The Golden Bowl find more readers as a result of its TV excursion? Or did relieved viewers heave a sigh: Well, now I know what that’s all about, I don’t have to read it. Is it “better” to have seen the televised version than never to have encountered James at all? Assuming, that is, that watching television can in any sense be an encounter with James, the writer.

  One way or another, “Of making many books there is no end,” according to Ecclesiastes, and of making movies out of books there seems no end either. I get a bit edgy whenever I hear of yet another one being remodeled for film. Edgy not so much over what “they” will do to or with it, but rather over what I will do. “Are you going to see A Little Princess?” a friend inquires. Certainly not, is my visceral reply, but I pretend to think it over. And while pretending, I do in fact think. Why this intransigence, this unlovely refusal? For I can’t bring myself to see the film version of A Little Princess any more than I could Mr. and Mrs. Bridge or Housekeeping or The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, no matter how “faithful” or “sensitive” they are reputed to be. The terse chapters of Evan Connell’s Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, an accumulation of searing episodes in limpid, uninflected sentences, seem especially uncongenial to movie treatment. Movies are pictures in motion, not designed to shape a patient and dazzling mosaic. And Housekeeping stays with me as an underwater dream, not something I would want to see dredged onto solid earth.

  Least of all could I see The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which I read as an adolescent. Like The Little Mermaid, it turns on the ambiguities of speech, as well as the ramifying issues of human connection—nothing to do with the visual. Together with McCullers’s troubled characters, I imagined the silence of Mr. Singer (canny name for a deaf-mute) as richly comprehending, a salvation from loneliness. I had fantasies of telling him my secrets too, and having them finally understood. What a shock to find that his all-embracing acceptance was pure silence—blank and neutral. That all along we had been talking to ourselves. It cast doubt even on those who give us back words: can we ever be understood? Or is language only an elaborate sustaining lie, every sentence a soliloquy? I knew even then I would have to pursue it anyway, but I could never again be quite sure my words weren’t falling on deaf ears.

  Despite all that, I don’t much care for my purism about filmed books. Or any purism, for that matter. What is it afraid of? What am I afraid of? The most ready answer is that I want to keep my own images, not have them replaced by a set designer’s, nor have the characters take on the forms of actors I’ve seen before and will see again in other roles. A book’s characters are not hollow molds to be filled by living flesh. They have more permanent forms—they are already embodied in words.

  A commonplace objection, and cogent enough on the face of it, except it doesn’t stand up to experience. In unsuccessful books-into-films, the images are usually too weak to do lasting harm. And in the successful ones I’ve been dragged to see—Great Expectations, Howards End, Jean Rhys’s Quartet, or Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (obviously I’m not as pure as I’m claiming to be)—the actors for the most part “fit” the characters well. Even so, their images faded fast, leaving the books—my versions of the books—intact. The only film that has left its actors indelibly fixed in my mind is Billy Budd, and not a bad thing, as it turns out. My own imaging apparatus couldn’t do better than Terence Stamp as the hapless Billy or Robert Ryan as Claggart (killed, I must constantly remind myself), not to mention Melvyn Douglas as the old Dansker and Peter Ustinov as Captain Vere; I feel quite comfortable with their faces shimmering through Melville’s words. Meanwhile, The Dead, John Huston’s triumph of literal and literary faithfulness, has all but vanished from my memory, leaving only an aura of truth, of Joyceness made visible. And perhaps that is as it should be. What must be conserved, after all, is not the integrity of
the reader’s vision but of the writer’s. And since film is a flight of images through time, it is fitting that they should fly off, leaving the vision that is beyond ordinary imaging.

  Which makes me wonder if I visualize at all as I read: Terence Stamp and Robert Ryan have not really replaced anything I can recall. Some readers may run their own private films as each page turns, but I seem to have only spotty fleeting images, a floaty gown, a sofa, a grand ballroom, or a patch of landscape. Language, that is, may lend itself to visual translation, but does not require it. It is its own universe of sound, rhythm, and connotation, which generate the occasional visual flare.

  Not all books live by language or style, though: a host of other virtues—plot, situation, character, suspense, topical relevance—may keep them afloat. Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga or Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City fall into that genre and have made spectacular television series; I would have to be absurdly pure not to enjoy them. (The Forsyte Saga was so vivid that the actor Eric Porter could travel to remote parts of the world and find himself hailed on the street as Soames Forsyte. When he died recently I felt as if the unhappy Soames had died—a greater tribute, alas, than the actor might have wished.) In yet another genre, these days, are books written with the movie version in mind. But they are not properly books at all, just prefabricated scripts.

  I’ve heard a thousand times that ours is a visual age. But I cannot uproot my passion for words for fashion’s sake, even if I wanted to. I suppose what I fear is that movies, however ambitious and excellent, can never do for me what a book can do. (I seem, unwillingly or unwittingly, to have worked my way back to my—or my father’s—ancient opposition of language and pictures. A picture is not worth a thousand words; it is worth only itself, as are the thousand words.) Films, to grant them their tony name, are an art form, but in my heart a movie is still a movie, an entertainment, a voyage in the dark, a plush seat, a bag of popcorn, Technicolor, air-conditioning, the most luscious of escapes. I do not ask that it feed my soul, only my fancy. When it does feed my soul—more often than I expect—I am surprised and grateful. Still, its words are not crucial or even many; new movies, with their visual elegance and slender scripts, use fewer words than ever. I know I should follow the story through the images, or rather follow the story of the images. But where, I keep wondering, is the story of the story?

  It’s clear even to me that my judgment is off the mark: movies are not competing with books but offering something else, a different sort of story. Why can’t I appreciate each on its own terms? Because when I’ve read the book, I stubbornly don’t want anything else. Why should I, when I’ve had the real thing, as originally conceived? Form and content are inseparable, and Greta Garbo, bewitching as she is, is not the Anna Karenina Tolstoy envisioned. If the form changes, the content must change.

  Well, so what? Perhaps what I am afraid of is change itself. As if Anna Karenina could not withstand an ephemeral change! Can it be that I don’t trust the works enough, that I secretly think them too flimsy to survive their adaptations? They are sturdier than I give them credit for. It must be my own responses that are not so sturdy: yes, there is always the danger that they might change on seeing an adaptation. So I catch myself out. Unwilling, it seems, to risk a new thought or feeling—like the people who won’t read books in the first place, or yank them off the library shelves to protect the innocent.

  Few, if any, stories are pure invention. Invention needs something to invent from, or with. Stories come from history, or from reality—lived or observed—or, as any quick survey will show, from other stories. But by my petulant logic I would refuse to see Racine’s Phèdre, and Martha Graham’s too. I would have to forswear much of Shakespeare, as well as West Side Story and Tennyson’s Ulysses or Joyce’s for that matter, not to mention Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and the host of paintings on classical themes, and on and on to absurdity.

  Imagination is the refiner’s fire; the sensibility of each new generation is the lens. Everything made has been transformed, just as language itself is translation from the inarticulate chaos within. To be a purist about adaptation is to attempt to halt an endlessly evolving process midway.

  I didn’t expect to argue a piece of my mind away. I should repent and repair to the movies. To A Little Princess. But will I have the courage?

  MY parents were people of the book but I did not appreciate this, and as I started college and acquired a dim sense of literary history, I indulged the adolescent’s need to reshape them, to make them fit my ideal. I was sixteen. In the last gasp of identification with parents—which is often the first gasp of separation—I wanted them to share in the great discovery I was marveling at: that there was literary history, that the whole gorgeous landscape I had been flitting through at random, pausing here and there to sniff or taste or swallow, had an order, like a vast English garden. There were maps showing the paths and byways, replete with measurements and arrows, longitude and latitude, charts of the distances and relations between points. The college catalogue listed courses to choose from, to combine into patterns like the suggested tours in travel brochures. Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth Century. Elizabethans, Augustans, Romantics, Victorians. (The moderns, unlike today, were given short shrift: anything current, it was implied, didn’t require formal study—you could grasp it on your own.) Languages too: Anglo-Saxon, Old English, Middle English. Certain writers merited a course all to themselves: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton. As you progressed in an orderly fashion over four years, you would eventually cover every inch of the ground. I hadn’t been so excited by the idea of scope and breadth since my first day of junior high school, when the Western History teacher announced that there had been something called the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy and listed its features on the blackboard. I had never heard of the Renaissance before. Even the word, Renaissance, was exalting, as was its companion word, “humanism.” I was a humanist too, I decided that very day, and left school transformed.

  The college catalogue was a similar awakening. Everything I had been reading over the years was interconnected and fit into a larger design, as if it were all moving toward some grand culmination. I wanted to sample every century and take every course, like a greedy person at a buffet. I had never particularly needed my parents to share in my reading or in anything else I did. I was even rather secretive about my passions. But this discovery was too immense to keep to myself. No life could be complete, I thought, without studying the great works of Western literature. I began proselytizing at home. I burned with the zeal of a born-again reader; my bumper sticker would have proclaimed, Lit Saves.

  I pressed books on my parents, cajoling or commanding, according to the mood of the hour. Though they didn’t often read what I urged, they took the suggestions docilely, never challenging my campaign to educate them. In households where everyone criticizes everyone else, privileges accrue even to the youngest, if they can wait.

  I had my greatest success with The Trial. It was not hard to get my father interested because it fit marginally into his preferred category of political books; also, he was a lawyer and the title promised legal proceedings. I was spending the Fourth of July weekend blissfully alone at home while my parents were in the country, the same dull country they had gone to every summer for as long as I could remember, my father part of the great caravan of men driving up for conjugal weekends. I had refused to go along when I was fifteen, and from then on I spent summers in the city, my father and I keeping house in our rudimentary way, mostly going out to dinner. The city in summer was a novelty, tropically languid, buildings misty with heat, air hushed and heavy, enervated streets. I had an office job. Each morning, I woke early, dressed in working-girl clothes, and rode the hot subway, and all these constraints I treasured as tokens of the independence I had craved since birth. My father didn’t watch over my comings and goings; the most he asked was that I keep him company in air-conditioned movies every few nights, which was no hardship. Still, what I love
d best were the weekends, when he disappeared and I could pretend I was living on my own. On one of those happy evenings, I received a long-distance call.

  “That book you recommended,” my father began with his customary abruptness. “By that Kafka. The Trial.” “Yes?” I said eagerly. “Did you read it?” “Well, that’s what I’m calling you about. Your mother and I both read it and we have very different opinions on what it means. I say it’s about the injustices of the legal system and the modern state, how you can get lost in the bureaucracy and red tape and so on. And she says it’s just about life itself, how you’re always guilty about something or other and you feel you deserve to be punished simply for being alive.” He paused. My heart leaped. This was exactly what I wanted. We should theorize this way every waking hour.

  “So?” he said, “what do you think?” My years of reading had brought forth fruit. I was an acknowledged expert on what things meant.

  “Well, actually,” I said in the cool, patronizing manner I had picked up from my professors, “you’re both right. Those interpretations aren’t mutually exclusive. The beauty of the book is that it can encompass so many points of view simultaneously.”

  My father was disappointed. He liked to have things one way or the other, and he liked to be right. He had probably been counting on me, for I usually supported his tough-minded as opposed to my mother’s more humane, though no less sturdy, formulations. He argued his case for a while, then my mother got on the phone and pleaded hers, but I steadfastly refused to choose one over the other. They must have hung up vexed, but I was delighted, envisioning a future transformed. I would lead them through all of Western Lit, as I was being led, only a few steps ahead.