How Reading Changed My Life

  There was certainly no talk of comfort and joy, of the lively subculture of those of us who forever fell asleep with a book open on our bedside tables, whether bought or borrowed. Of those of us who comprise the real clan of the book, who read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves. Of those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers. The silence about this was odd, both because there are so many of us and because we are what the world of books is really about. We are the people who once waited for the newest installment of Dickens’s latest novel and who kept battered copies of Catcher in the Rye in our back pockets and our backpacks. We are the ones who saw to it that Pride and Prejudice never went out of print.

  But there was little public talk of us, except in memoirs like Ms. Kincaid’s. Nothing had changed since I was a solitary child being given embossed leather bookmarks by relatives for Christmas. It was still in the equivalent of the club chairs that we found one another: at the counters in bookstores with our arms full, at the front desks in libraries, at school, where teachers introduced us to one another—and, of course, in books, where book-lovers make up a lively subculture of characters. “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing,” says Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Reading is like so much else in our culture, in all cultures: the truth of it is found in its people and not in its pundits and its professionals. If I believed what I read about reading I would despair. But instead there are letters from readers to attend to, like the one from a girl who had been given one of my books by her mother and began her letter, “I guess I am what some people would call a bookworm.”

  “So am I,” I wrote back.

  Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep; but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.

  —WALT WHITMAN

  IT STILL SEEMS infinitely mysterious to me that there are some of us who have built not a life but a self, based largely on our hunger for what are a series of scratches on a piece of paper. There remain in the world, six millennia after a list of livestock on a clay tablet created reading, cultures in which the written word is a mystery, a luxury, even a redundancy. Stories are still told beside fires and streams by people bent almost double from working in the fields, told as richly as the ones my father and his brothers tell when they have a meal together and set to work embroidering the ever-changing tapestry of their past. There is something both magical and natural about the told story, the wise man spinning a tale at a table in medieval Europe giving way to the mother talking about family history in the kitchen with her children in a small apartment in Chicago. That power of the spoken word was even given a new kind of life at the tail end of the twentieth century, when publishing houses began as a matter of course to do what beforehand only libraries for the blind had done: to release audio versions of books, although audio books sometimes seem to me to have more to do with saving time and alleviating the tedium of travel by car than they do with the need to hear the syllables of a sentence caressed by the human voice.

  But the act of reading, the act of seeing a story on the page as opposed to hearing it told—of translating story into specific and immutable language, putting that language down in concrete form with the aid of the arbitrary handful of characters our language offers, of then handing the story on to others in a transactional relationship—that is infinitely more complex, and stranger, too, as though millions of us had felt the need, over the span of centuries, to place messages in bottles, to ameliorate the isolation of each of us, each of us a kind of desert island made less lonely by words. Or, not simply by words, but by words without the evanescence of speech, words that would always be the same, only the reader different each time, so that today, or next year, or a hundred years from now, someone could pick up A Tale of Two Cities, turn to the last page, and see that same final sentence, that coda that Dickens first offered readers in 1859: “It is a far, far better thing …”

  The Sumerians first used the written word to make laundry lists, to keep track of cows and slaves and household goods. But even in such primitive form, the writing down of symbols told of something hugely and richly revolutionary: the notion that one person could have a thought, even if that thought was only about the size of his flocks, and that that thought could be retained and then accessed—rethought, really—by another person in another place and time. The miraculous and transformative quality of this was immediately apparent to some and denied by others: Aristotle turned Alexander the Great into a great reader and champion of books, which led Alexander’s successor, Ptolemy I, to create the world’s first great library in Alexandria. But Socrates thought books were a waste of time, since they could only “remind one of what one already knows.”

  Perhaps, seeing his disdain rekindled on the printed page 2500 years after he first felt it—and understanding, surely, that some readers, reading his words, were indeed learning something about Socrates that they had never known before—the great thinker would change his mind. The clay tablet gave way to the scroll and then to the codex, the folded sheets that prefigured the book we hold and sell and treasure today. Wealthy households had books of prayers hand lettered and illuminated by monks; great soldiers kept their dispatches on paper. The French and English modified Gutenberg’s press and then mechanized it to set down religious texts and the books of the Bible. Martin Luther nailed his written manifesto against the excesses of the Catholic hierarchy to the door of a church in Wittenberg and began a war of words that led to the Reformation and, eventually, to Protestantism; the Declaration of Independence was set in type and fomented, in relatively few words, a new way for men and women to look at their own government.

  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 g
irl 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.