How Reading Changed My Life (3 page)

And soon publishers had the means, and the will, to publish anything—cookbooks, broadsides, newspapers, novels, poetry, pornography, picture books for children—and to publish them in a form that many people could afford and most could find at the library. Reading became a democratic act, making it possible for the many to teach themselves what the few had once learned from tutors. The president could quote Mark Twain because he had read
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, and the postman could understand
the reference because he had read it, too. The Big Lies of demagoguery required more stealth and cleverness, for careful reading of books and newspapers could reveal their flaws to ordinary people. Not for nothing did the Nazis light up the night skies in their cities with the burning of books. Not for nothing were free white folks in America prohibited from teaching slaves to read, and slaves in South Carolina threatened with the loss of the first joint of their forefingers if they were caught looking at a book; books became the greatest purveyors of truth, and the truth shall make you free.

But there was much more than freedom. Reading became the pathway to the world, a world without geographic boundaries or even the steep risers of time. There was a time machine in our world, but not the contraption of metal and bolts and motors imagined even by a man as imaginative as H. G. Wells. Socrates was wrong: a reader learns what he or she does not know from books, what has passed and yet is forever present through print. The mating rituals of the Trobriand Islanders. The travails of the Donner Party. The beaches at Normandy. The smoke from the stacks at Auschwitz. Experience, emotion, landscape: the world is as layered as the earth, life cumulative with books. The eyewitnesses die; the written word lives forever. So does the antipathy that ties two
brothers together in
East of Eden
, and the female search for independent identity in
The Golden Notebook
. How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of
Pride and Prejudice
and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind. “To completely analyse what we do when we read,” wrote E. B. Huey, “would almost be the acme of the psychologist’s achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind.” Yet we take it so for granted, the ability to simply flip the pages and to know what the daughter of a parson, now long dead, once thought of the conventions of matrimony in Regency England, and, certainly, of the relations between men and women into perpetuity.

It is like the rubbing of two sticks together to make a fire, the act of reading, an improbable pedestrian task that leads to heat and light. Perhaps this only becomes clear when one watches a child do it. Dulled to the mystery by years of
STOP
signs, recipes, form letters, package instructions, suddenly it is self-evident that this is a strange and difficult thing, this making symbols into words, into sentences, into sentiments and scenes and a world imagined in the mind’s
eye. The children’s author Lois Lowry recalled it once: “I remember the feeling of excitement that I had, the first time that I realized each letter had a sound, and the sounds went together to make words; and the words became sentences, and the sentences became stories.” The very beginning of a child’s reading is even more primal than that, for it is not so much reading but writing, learning to form the letters that make her own name. Naming the world: it is what we do with words from that moment on. All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers. Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else.

The person who changed my life in this way was named Gertrude LoFurno. She was a friend of my parents, and she owned books. This would seem unremarkable to my children, who have grown up in a house in which virtually every room except for the bathrooms is lined with full shelves. But, growing up, I recall very few houses with books, except for the requisite set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
bound in
faux leather and conspicuous by their obvious disuse. Although the introduction of mass-market paperbacks at a quarter a copy had forever changed the number of Americans who could afford books, we did not even own very many paperbacks, and I didn’t like them much; I liked a book with a certain heft, a kind of solidity of presentation, something heavy as a sack of sugar.

My father had a copy of Machiavelli and a book called
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
by a Jesuit named Balthasar Gracián. I owned an illuminated
Lives of the Saints
and a biography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and while I recall a period during which I had a fascination with, even a thirst for bloody martyrdom, it did not last. My mother subscribed to the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, as did the mothers of most of my friends; the magazine began the series in 1950 because of the success of its book section, and the spines of those books, with four titles ranged horizontally, became instantly recognizable to those of us who grew up in the fifties and sixties. They were as middle class at mid-century as the push mower or the cabinet television.

I loved the condensed books, the random nature of the offerings, John Marquand in the same volume with
To Catch a Thief
, Steinbeck paired with
Karen
, the memoir of a child with cerebral palsy written by
her mother. I still read the way I learned to read then, savoring the variety of those books: one difficult followed by something fluffier as a reward, one dinner, the other dessert. (Although one condensed book I particularly remember included truncated versions of
The Winter of Our Discontent, The Agony and the Ecstasy
, and
The Making of the President: 1960.
) It would be a stretch to say that those books were particularly literary; there was no Updike, no Mailer or Philip Roth, nothing by John Cheever. But Faulkner was condensed more than once, and Truman Capote, and that unlikely Nobelist, Pearl S. Buck. And the list of titles over nearly fifty years suggests a rich middlebrow vein in American fiction of the fifties and sixties that later ran considerably thinner. There was Herman Wouk’s
The Caine Mutiny
and Edna Ferber’s
Giant
, Shirley Jackson’s
The Haunting of Hill House
and Betty Smith’s
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
.

But most of my books came from the library of the small Catholic private school I attended, which as school libraries went was a good one. The jackets of the books there were ablaze with gold and silver; the librarian always bought whatever book had won the Caldecott and Newbery prizes. Because of this I read some of the best books I had ever read and have ever read since:
A Wrinkle in Time, Charlotte’s Web, The Phantom Tollbooth
. But even a good small school
library can be fairly quickly exhausted by an indefatigable reader, and once I had read
Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Witch of Blackbird Pond
, and various biographies of Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc, Molly Pitcher—well, I had read them.

I was around ten when Mrs. LoFurno began allowing me to borrow books from her basement, books without plastic covers, without cards in brown paper pockets in the back filled with the names of all the others who had read
Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates
before me. Many of her books were older books, with that particularly sweet dusty smell that old books have; they had bookplates in the front, some of them, sepia colored, vaguely redolent to me of a different sort of world, a world of tea and fires in the fireplace and doilies on chair backs and, in some fashion, a world in which people read, read constantly, avidly, faithfully, in a way in which, in my world, only I did. It was both a world in which, I imagined, books would be treasured, honored, even cosseted on special shelves, and a world that had formed its imaginary self in my mind from books themselves. I cannot recall exactly how I came to believe that Mrs. LoFurno herself had a life lifted almost wholesale from a second-rate Edwardian novel, that she had been raised by aunts after her mother died, a father being a parent, surely, but not one suited for day-to-day meals and such; that she had been sent to convent
school of one kind or another. (Actually, it occurs to me now that I may have been confusing her with Sarah Crewe in
A Little Princess.
) There was always a vague whiff of money in my mind about this imagined history, or perhaps it was not money but gentility, a certain sort of Henry Jamesian world that I associated, not only with owning books, but with having whole walls of them. The first time that world actually sprang to life for me was when I was in college and was invited, with the rest of my writing class, to the home of our professor, the literary critic Elizabeth Hard-wick. The living room of her New York apartment was two stories high, with books lining the walls. I even remember a library ladder. It was as though my life had somehow come true at the moment I stepped into that room.

Mrs. LoFurno’s basement was not so grand, not grand at all, and yet the small spread of books ranged around the room was my first taste of that sort of grandeur. Polyglot, eclectic. In the language of literary criticism, which I have learned to speak, or at least mimic (and, covertly, to despise), it was uneven. There was
Little Women
and lots of Frances Hodgson Burnett and some treacly books for girls written between the world wars. There was A
Girl of the Limberlost
, which no one reads anymore, and there was
Pride and Prejudice
, which everyone should read at least once. The truth is that I cannot recall feeling
that there was a great deal of difference between the two. I had no critical judgment at the time; I think children who have critical judgment are as dreadful and unnatural as dogs who wear coats. For some reason I pored over a novel about an adolescent girl entitled
I, Natalie
, which I remember today only as being set in a grim apartment block in Poland and including some suggestion of sex, which was always welcome. There was also
Bonjour Tristesse
, which I found rather flat; I suspect I missed the sense of about half of it, which was true of many books I read at the time.

There was a sense of some torch being exchanged in these trips to the shelves in Mrs. LoFurno’s basement, of one reader recognizing another. It did not occur to me until I was much older, an adult myself, that there was anything unusual about doing this with a girl who was not even a relation when Mrs. LoFurno herself had two sons, both around my age, who stayed upstairs while I looked over her books and made my selection. In some covert way, I began to think then of my indefatigable reading fever as a particularly female phenomenon, and perhaps in some fashion to find it as suspect and peculiar as others clearly did.

This sense of women reading, reading, always reading, was in fact reinforced by what I read: Jo March in her attic in
Little Women
, with a book and a bowl of apples; Betsy Ray in the girls’ series of the Betsy-Tacy stories, whose friends fulfill their reading
requirement for the summer by listening to her tell them all about her beloved
Ivanhoe
; the women of
Gone with the Wind
, sewing and reading aloud while their men were out getting shot. There are very few books in which male characters, much less boys, are portrayed as devoted readers. Actually, there are far fewer coming-of-age books for boys in general, and most are unabashed action stories: raft rides, pirate ships, and battlefields. By contrast, friendship and reading are the central themes of much of the best-loved literature for girls.

When I was younger, I figured that this was because we women had so little to do in the world that the closest we would ever come to real life was to read about it. In fact, that’s probably why I loved reading so myself; part of my dissatisfaction with my life was clearly, in retrospect, a dissatisfaction with the traditional roles available to me as a girl at the time, neither of which—nun or housewife, take your pick—particularly suited my temperament.

But it may also be true that the psychology of women lends itself to a keen interest in the vicarious experience of life. I recall, as a columnist, being told by my editor to “talk about what you and your friends are talking about on the telephone.” And the truth was that I probably could have gotten a column out of most of my phone calls, determined as we all were to explore, analyze, and understand our own lives through
conversation. Perhaps my editor understood intuitively what I came to believe when I considered the abiding interest that so many women have had in reading fiction (and writing it, too): perhaps, as a group, women are more interested in deconstructing the emotional underpinnings of other people’s problems, of parsing relationships, connections, and emotions, of living emphatically. Kafka said “a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” Perhaps we women are more willing to break the ice. Two things that made this possible most often in many of our lives were intimate friendships and reading.

The connection between the two is evident in the invincibility of the book group, that literary coffee klatch which has existed in America for decades but underwent a somewhat surprising resurgence during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It is hard to divine, statistically, who participates and under what circumstances, because there are so many groups in so many places. But the greatest number of book groups seem to be made up of women, and to read very fine books, some of them the same books I found in Mrs. LoFurno’s basement. I thought of those book groups one evening at a dinner when a literary critic insisted that book publishing today was “pitched at the interest level of suburban housewives.” One collection of suburban housewives in Ohio told me that they had decided to dedicate the fifth year of
their book group to Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf; another group, who meet in one another’s homes in St. David’s on the Main Line of Philadelphia, had chosen during their four years together to read the work of Wallace Stegner, Jane Smiley, and William Styron, among many others, and to devote two consecutive monthly meetings to Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
. The accepted notion that Americans don’t read anymore, or read nothing but junk, was greeted by all of the club’s members with disbelief and derision. They personally knew of dozens of book groups: at the local library, at the local bookstore, and at several area churches. Their own had begun on the basis of a list of suggested readings from the daughter of the founding member, who herself had begun a group in New Hampshire. The St. David’s women had had to turn potential members away, lest their group grow too big to be collegial, informative, and serious. Each monthly discussion ended with the reading aloud of a short biography of the author and a selection of the reviews the book had received.