Book by Book (9 page)

Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horror of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will be the tragedy of the bedroom.—Leo Tolstoy

The best of men and the best of women may sometimes live together all their lives, and . . . hold each other lost spirits to the end.—Robert Louis Stevenson

It is never any good dwelling on good-bys. It is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting.—Elizabeth Bibesco

For a dark play-girl in a night-club I have pined away. ... If this thoughtless woman were to die there would be nothing left to live for, if this faithless girl forgot me there would be no one for whom to write.—Cyril Connolly

After discovering that his wife had left him for another man: “I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.”—Evelyn Waugh

She wasn't too big, heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any one human female package to contain, and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I don't know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instant with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew that there never would be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do.—William Faulkner

We were never to be alone together again, except in remembrance. —Walter de la Mare

I'm ninety-four years . . . and my mind is just a turmoil of regrets. ... In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what's the result? I had two wives, good, Christian women, and I can't hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face of that woman so clear it hurts, and there's never a day passes I don't think about her, and there's never a day passes I don't curse myself. “What kind of a timid, dried up, weevily fellow were you?” I say to myself. “You should've said to hell with what's right and what's wrong, the devil take the hindmost. You'd have something to remember, you'd be happier now.” She's out in Woodlawn, six feet under, and she's been there twenty-two years, God rest her,
and here I am, just an old, old man with nothing left but a belly and a brain and a dollar or two.—Joseph Mitchell

Occasionally in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.—Vladimir Nabokov

The only victory over love is flight.—Napoleon Bonaparte

The novelist Arnold Bennett once estimated that “not in one per cent, even of romantic marriages are the husband and wife capable of
passion
for each other after three years. So brief is the violence of love! In perhaps thirty-three per cent passion settles down into a tranquil affection—which is ideal. In fifty percent it sinks into sheer indifference, and one becomes used to one's wife or husband as to one's other habits. And in the remaining sixteen per cent it develops into dislike or detestation.”

This is bitter wisdom indeed, and yet it conforms to what science now tells us about hormones, endorphins, and the shortlived phenomenon called limerance. Sexual infatuation requires separation, obstacles, distance. One cannot dwell in a white heat for long.

But a fortunate marriage offers more than mere “tranquil affection.” It is, in essence, a civilization of two, and its greatest joy
is a conversation that goes on for decades. Such intercourse between husband and wife, or between committed partners of any sex, requires time to develop and is, along with children, the real foundation for domestic happiness. Yet there is, wrote the novelist Robertson Davies in a letter, “a persistent idea that a marriage must be the continuation of a romance, when a minute's reflection shows that it can be nothing of the kind. It must be an association of people of similar or complementary tastes who enter it with a firm resolve to make it work.”

Shared memories, common pursuits, reliable support during times of crisis, even the same old arguments—these matter more than young people commonly realize. As the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell once wrote: after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue comes the deep, deep peace of the double bed.

What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the Coffin.
                                                                                    
—HENRY WARD BEECHER

Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) has written more immortal works than any other twentieth-century American author. Think about it: Virtually every child in this country has read, is reading, or will read
The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who, And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, The Butter Battle Book
, and perhaps a dozen others equally splendid. Consider too that each of Seuss's more than forty titles is read not once, not twice, but scores of times, usually to pieces. In a library they become, literally, things of shreds and patches.

And what do we learn from Seuss? The joy of words and pictures at play, of course, but also the best and most humane values any of us might wish to possess: pluck, determination, tolerance, reverence for the earth, suspicion of the martial spirit, the fundamental value of the imagination.

This is why early reading matters. At any age, but especially in childhood, books can transform lives. As Graham Greene once wrote, “In childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future.” For the young are all what college English professors would label “bad” readers: They identify with a story's hero or heroine, and they daydream about being as resourceful as the Boxcar Children, as brave as Brave Irene, as clever as Dido Twite or Ulysses. And what children behold, they become.

As a boy I never read
Winnie-the-Pooh
or
The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan
or
Charlotte's Web.
Perhaps our local library didn't stock them, or maybe I judged such works too feminine for the tough guy buried inside my pudgy, nearsighted body. Once I could actually read, and my mother turned her pedagogical attentions to my younger sisters, my dad started to take me regularly to the Lorain Public Library. There I checked out
Curious George, The Five Chinese Brothers
, and Danny Dunn's series of misadventures with antigravity paint and homework machines. I vividly recall
Miss
Pickerell Goes to Mars
and
Treasure at First Base
and the maritime derring-do of Howard Pease's young heroes. A little later my elementary school class joined a paperback book club, and I soon began to build my own personal library:
Big Red, Secret Sea, Mystery of the Piper's Ghost, Snow Treasure, Revolt on Alpha C, Mystery of the Spanish Cave.

In fifth grade the book club's newsletter offered three of the best adventure stories ever written: Jules Verne's
Journey to the Center of the Earth
, Arthur Conan Doyle's
The Lost World
and
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
What has ever been better than to be ten years old with books like these to open on dark and stormy evenings? Late one happy fall I settled down with the complete adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown, as well as Verne's
The Mysterious Island
, all checked out from the branch library in the kind of thick volumes you could live in for weeks.

Alas, city libraries then refused to stock many popular juvenile potboilers, in particular the innumerable exploits of the Hardy Boys and Tarzan; still, one could always unearth yet one more new adventure of these and other similarly resilient heroes in the cluttered basements of neighbors and relatives. To this day, I remember a certain Saturday afternoon, a paper bag of candy corn, and the sun streaming onto the glorious pages of
Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire.
Life has been downhill ever since.

By the time I finished elementary school my tastes had shifted to grown-up novels of the fast-moving sort: Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu thrillers, the science fiction of Robert Heinlein, the adventures of James Bond. For many years thereafter I utterly disdained “kiddie lit.” In my midthirties, though, I unexpectedly
found myself asked to add children's literature to my responsibilities as a writer and editor for
Book World.
Being conscientious, I consulted librarians about recommended reading, checked out several dozen juvenile classics, and studied the criticism and history of the field. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself particularly entranced by the complex synergy of words and illustrations in classic picture books.

As I would learn, the late 1970s and '80s ushered in another golden age of children's literature to rival the earlier one of
Peter Rabbit
and
The Wizard of Oz.
Think of just a few of the authors, artists and eye-popping works of that era: Maurice Sendak's complex
Outside over There
, numerous masterpieces by Chris Van Allsburg, including
Jumanji
and
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick
, William Joyce's
Dinosaur Bob and A Day with Wilbur Robinson
, picture books by Leo and Diane Dillon, William Steig's
Dr. De Soto
and
Shrek
, David McCullough's
Black and White
, Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith's
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
, and those are just the beginning. The past thirty or so years have also seen Gary Paulsen's survivalist adventure
Hatchet
, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's classic
Shiloh
, award-winning novels by Katherine Paterson and Walter Dean Myers, Russell Hoban's touching fable
The Marzipan Pig
, the metaphysical comedies of Daniel Pinkwater, Joan Aiken's rambunctious tales of Dido Twite, and the intricate fantasies of Alan Garner, Richard Kennedy, and Diana Wynne Jones. And let's not overlook that most elegantly structured of all juvenile time-travel novels, the gravely beautiful
Tom's Midnight Garden
by Philippa Pearce.

Then came the tsunami of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books,
shortly followed by—in my view—the finer but more controversial fantasies of Philip Pullman
(The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass).
More and more adults began to read “kiddie” books—and not aloud to their offspring but on the beach, in bed, and at the beauty parlor.

Obviously I should have been one happy children's book reviewer, but another development of the 1980s troubled me. In 1950s Ohio, a boy could slide easily into daydreams about King Solomon's mines, mysterious islands, swordplay in Ruritania, cackling master criminals, and dark avengers. Books fed the imagination. Then suddenly CD-ROMs, video games, and digitalized movies began to surpass any child's wildest fantasies. But all they exercised, as far as I could tell, was hand-eye coordination. Yet more and more it grew clear that computer monitors and wide-screen TVs were becoming, in Keats's phrase, “charmed magic casements” to transport us to “faery lands forlorn.”

While I sometimes think it's wrong to be concerned, it
has
been a long while since I glimpsed a kid sprawled under a shade tree lost in a book. After all, we can't count on J. K. Rowling alone to create or sustain a passion for turning pages. Like Aristotelian virtue, reading is a habit. Children need to read, then to read some more. Quantity matters far more than quality—there will be plenty of time for classics. But when starting out, the young should be immersed in a culture of the sentence, not the screen.

Anxious parents—are there any other kind?—long for advice on just how they can encourage their kids to read more. Here are some suggestions, most of which fall into the category of common sense.

1. Read aloud to your children. Joan Aiken once said, “If you're not prepared to read to your children an hour a day, you shouldn't have any.”

2. Read yourself. Grown-ups often pay lip service to the joys of reading, but do the kids see you watching TV or do they see you with a book in your hands? Here is the litmus test: How often have you said to your child, “Just a minute, I want to finish this chapter”?

3. Fill your house with print. There should be paperbacks, comics, magazines, and newspapers everywhere the children look. Books should be a part of a family's daily life, not something special. Ideally, each member of the household should have his or her own bookcase.