How Reading Changed My Life Read online

  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.

  “Of course people read,” said one of the women. “Every night I read before I went to bed, and I was raising nine kids. I needed to escape, and I needed to use my imagination, and whatever part of my brain was left. It was my greatest pleasure.” And, as it had been for me, it was her greatest sense of connection to others, mainly women.

  As I grew up enthralled by books, I began to think that women read differently than men. Statistics, although slippery things, suggest some of those differences: a Gallup Poll taken in 1991 showed that women were more likely than men to find reading a more relaxing pastime than watching television. And women are more prolific readers; college-educated women reported reading an average of twenty-five books over the space of a year, while their male counterparts had read only fifteen. Some bookstore owners say their women customers are more likely to read novels, while the men more often choose biographies and history. Perhaps women feel more of a need to escape their own lives and take up those of others than men do.

  But it also seemed to me, listening to members of various book clubs ruminate about what they did and why, that, like so much else, women seem to see reading not only as a solitary activity but as an opportunity for emotional connection, not just to the characters in a novel but to those others who are reading or have read the same novel themselves. We pass on beloved books to friends, discuss them on the phone. A collision of two female cultures may have resulted in the sudden glut of book groups in recent years: the women’s movement insisted that we do something, be something, use our minds as well as our hearts, while in daily life many of us were still surrounded by the mundane, the sink full of dishes, the car pools, the endless flotsam and jetsam of children. A book group provides one small way for the two selves to coexist: a carefully scheduled occasion for intellectual exercise leavened with female companionship.

  And a book provides what it always has: a haven. I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for the fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed, into the dark and placid English rooms of Anita Brookner’s newest novel, into the convoluted plots of Elmore Leonard’s latest thriller, into one of my old favorites, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Goodbye, Columbus, Our Mutual Friend, Wuthering Heights. The romantic ramblings of Heathcliff make a piquant counterpoint to dirty diapers, that’s for sure. And as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one’s own.

  The mere brute pleasure of reading—the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

  —G. K. CHESTERTON

  THE FIRST BOOK that ever seized me so completely by the throat that I read and reread it several times turned out to be one that epitomized both this utter falling into a book that is the hallmark of the way women often read, and the kind of intellectual snobbery that characterizes much of the discussion of books among those people who are considered experts in them. Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the secrets of life and love, all the mysteries of the universe. There are other things in life like this as well: the meal perfect in the aspic of memory; the afternoon along the seashore with a breeze and a boat, in hindsight translucent as an opal; a moment of lovemaking. But none of these others can be conjured up exactly as they were. A book—the book that was, for some reason, the book—can be reread, unchanged. Only we have changed. And that makes all the difference.

  For me that book was a novel written in the early years of the twentieth century. I say a novel, but it is really three novels, or perhaps nine, depending on how you count. But by the time I read it it was called by one name, and known to most readers as one book: The Forsyte Saga. Its author, John Galsworthy, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 on the strength of it, although when undergraduate reading lists are handed out heavy with Fitzgerald and Hemingway there is rarely even a mention of Galsworthy, a man of this century whose work indubitably feels as if it was written in the one before. While the book was a huge success in England in the years between the two world wars, and enjoyed a renaissance when public television networks in America aired a dramatic series based upon it, it has never, to my knowledge, showed up on one of those ever-popular best-book-you-ever-read lists.

  Yet for many years I believed it the best book ever written, for no other reason than that I believed in it completely, in the convoluted family relationships, the suffocating Victorian mores, and especially in its characters, particularly Irene, the bea
utiful and sensitive woman married to the cold, unlovable Soames Forsyte. It is one of those great doorstops of a book that I still approach with delight and then suffer the greatest disappointment if it does not merit the poundage. To me The Forsyte Saga was worth every ounce, and every time I came to page 700 my heart would start to sink at the thought of it finishing—and to soar at the thought of starting it again. Even today it is impossible for me to read the final sentence without tears, recognizing in Soames’s cri de coeur the universal human yearning of us all: “He might wish and wish and never get it—the beauty and the loving in the world!” To end a novel with an exclamation point—how audacious I found that!

  For the purposes of intellectual argument I am prepared here to mount critical opinion against the greatness of The Forsyte Saga. I still find it a good read, but no longer a masterwork. In the rereading the book feels less satisfactory than it once did, more plotted than lived, Irene more an idea of a woman than a reality. Perhaps I have read too much since I first read it, at age thirteen—the book was in Mrs. LoFurno’s basement, bound in blue cloth—but the triangle between Soames and Irene, Irene and her lover, the architect Philip Bosinney, seems to owe more to Anna Karenina than it should, and has less real passion.

  But saying this feels like criticizing the face of a lover. The nose may be large, but, oh, the net effect! The Forsyte Saga still entrances me; I still find it full of the real roiling emotions of ill-matched marriage and thwarted passion, age and regret and parental love as velvet and thorny as a rose. I own it in a very old edition, the pages of which are loose from their binding, a paperback issued to commemorate the television series, and a well-preserved hardcover edition with an only slightly damaged dust jacket, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Unlike most books I love, I do not press it upon other readers, even the ones I know best. It would be difficult for me if, for example, my eldest child, my inveterate reader, pronounced it boring or foolish. As for casual acquaintances, I do not care if they read it or not. This is my book.

  But I cannot read it without remembering the one-word reaction of the chairman of the English department at my college, when I timidly mentioned it during a discussion of the Great Books, two words which he always said in a way that seemed, ineffably, to emphasize those capital letters. He was talking Tristram Shandy at the time; I should have known better. I own perhaps 5000 books today. Tristram Shandy is not among them. I do not miss it.

  “Galsworthy!” he spit out with a mixture of condescension and disbelief, as though he had found a pit in a fruit that had promised to be seedless. And so a dream died.

  (In defense of the professor, he was not alone; V. S. Pritchett wrote a withering assessment of The Forsyte Saga, describing it as “the skill of a gentleman amateur on the surface of social life.”)

  That was how I learned that The Forsyte Saga was something I was expected to outgrow, like sucking my thumb, and that it was not likely to be found on any learned reader’s list of the so-called Great Books. What books would appear on such a list has become the subject of endless, often tiresome discussions about The Canon (again those capital letters). The discussion took fire, producing much heat, little light, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, when both women and people of color moved from the shadows of some sort of intellectual half-life to a place, more or less, among their male Caucasian peers. Students began to read Ralph Ellison and Anaïs Nin, Colette, and Toni Morrison. As a result there were endless discussions, papers, and books about whether The Canon was being replaced by a polyglot assortment of lesser, more politically correct readings. At an intellectually lively Ivy League university like, say, Columbia, it was possible to start a pitched fight on a walk across campus merely by suggesting that the name “Sappho” should join the names of Plato and Locke on the limestone frieze of Butler Library. The despotism of the educated was in full flower: there was a right way to read, and a wrong way, and the wrong way was worse than wrong—it was middlebrow, that code word for those who valued the enjoyable, the riveting, the moving, and the involving as well as the eternal.

  Any reader with common sense was easily lost in this debate, which, among other things, produced critical prose so turgid that anyone who loved the act of reading was easily thrown into confusion, and a blue funk, by it. Besides, most of those so-called middlebrow readers would have readily admitted that the Iliad set a standard that could not be matched by What Makes Sammy Run? or Exodus. But any reader with common sense would also understand intuitively, immediately, that such comparisons are false, that the uses of reading are vast and variegated, and that some of them are not addressed by Homer. Promoters and protectors of The Canon, who were really reeling from the democratization of literature and sudden inclusion of all those women and African-Americans, nevertheless liked to couch this argument in terms of an abandonment of taste of any sort, in both reading and publishing.

  As a confirmed Dickensian who had reread Bleak House more than I’d read either Dostoyevsky or Stendhal, I was a little puzzled when I arrived at college to discover that there was a kind of covert cloud hanging over the serious discussion of Dickens’s work. It took until my senior year to fully apprehend that the great man’s great popular success had made him a little suspect, even a century later, in the minds of some literary critics, who clung to the notion that selling well meant pandering, and talent was in inverse proportion to readership.

  A look at the best-seller lists of the twentieth century reinforces some of this prejudice: there is plenty of Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins and those historical novels—The Silver Chalice, The Robe, The Black Rose—that were a staple of middle-class home bookshelves. But there is also Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Great Gatsby, both Animal Farm and 1984, Lolita, and The Gulag Archipelago, none of them what anyone would characterize as beach books.

  So what does it mean, that Peyton Place by Grace Metalious sold more copies than Sanctuary by William Faulkner? It means that reading has as many functions as the human body, and that not all of them are cerebral. One is mere entertainment, the pleasurable whiling away of time; another is more important, not intellectual but serious just the same. “She had learned something comforting,” Roald Dahl wrote in Matilda of his ever-reading protagonist, “that we are not alone.” And if readers use words and stories as much, or more, to lessen human isolation as to expand human knowledge, is that somehow unworthy, invalid, and unimportant?

  Discussions about the kind of reading that constitutes a core college curriculum too often ignore those alternate uses of reading, uses that are quite apart from educating. Too much of that discussion concerns itself only with the cerebral and not with the emotional. Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychosocial one. When the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress commissioned two reporters to travel the country and ask a cross section of Americans which books had made the greatest difference in their lives, learning was only a part of what they got back from their respondents. One man spoke of the book that helped him overcome alcoholism, another of a book that helped comfort him after his mother’s death. And more than a few were like one woman, who said of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, “I read it when I was fourteen, when I didn’t feel like anybody understood how I felt. And here is this book about a fourteen-year-old girl who had the same feelings I did.”

  This ability of a book to lessen isolation is important, not simply for personal growth, but for cultural and societal growth as well. Before the advent of television, books were the primary vehicle for discovering both the mysteries and the essential human similarities of those a world away. By the fiftieth anniversary of the author’s death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, The Diary of Anne Frank had sold twenty million copies in fifty-five languages; while its validity as a Holocaust document or a work of art has been debated over and over, there can be no d
oubt that for several generations of American children who had never heard of the death camps and perhaps never met a Jew, the universality of Anne’s adolescent experiences and the horrible specificity of her imprisonment began to open a window on prejudice that might otherwise have longer stayed shut. The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Naked and the Dead: the great novels of war have helped create both patriots and pacifists, among those who have never, will never, see combat. The peculiar jacket copy for Catcher in the Rye when it first appeared in paperback, with an awkward representational drawing that predated the now famous austere red jacket, seems to have some sense of its psychological alchemy. “This unusual book,” it reads, as though no more specific adjective were available, “may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart—but you will never forget it.” And, of course, that is how Salinger’s novel has been thought of since it was published in 1951: not in terms of its literary merits, but as a book that has enabled generations of adolescents to feel more like human beings and less like visitors from another planet. Scarcely anyone reads it after age twenty-one, which is irrelevant, perhaps even desirable, to readers under the age of eighteen who find in it proof positive that no one understands them—and that this is a universal condition.

  Catcher in the Rye is a signal example of what reading does so well, not only because it has resonated with so many but also because it has enraged so many. When, each year, the American Library Association issues its report on the banning of books by school libraries, it is full of titles about gay life, about sexuality, about witchcraft and the occult. But Salinger’s novel is an evergreen on the list, challenged and removed from shelves in virtually every part of the country year after year, even as it continues to be one of the most consistently assigned books on high school reading lists. Parents who have opposed it most frequently complain that it shows a complete disregard for the authority of adults. And indeed it does, which is why adolescents, whose need to disregard the authority of parents is deep and real and transient, perennially place it on their list of favorite books. It challenges the established order, as do many great books—as do many of the books on the banned books list.