How Reading Changed My Life Read online

  My first real encounter with the controversy that can surround a book taught me all this convincingly and on an exceedingly small and intimate scale, taught me about individual taste, about adolescent insurrection, about that great chasm that sometimes arises between one generation and another. My gentle mother was sitting in our living room when she literally hurled the book she had been reading across the coffee table and onto the floor, where chance—and good fortune—made it land not far from my own feet. “This is a dirty book!” my mother said, leaving the room, leaving the book, leaving me to discover that Portnoy’s Complaint was as funny and intelligent a novel as I had ever read. I have to wonder now, with teenagers in the house, what my mother was thinking that day. Didn’t she know that the book felt deeply true at some level, that its sexual content was merely the garment to clothe its important notions about the nature of masculinity? And, above all, didn’t she know that I would pick it up and read it the moment she was gone, hearing her distress signal as the clarion cry to forbidden fruit?

  It is difficult not to think of that clarion call, of the notion of forbidden fruit, looking at the list of America’s banned books. It is difficult not to conclude, too, looking at the list, that the books dominating it are of two sorts: books that are inarguably excellent, and those that merely have the virtue of some sort of truth. The Banned Books Resource Guide of 1997 documents efforts to ban Sinclair Lewis, Moby Dick (because it “conflicts with the values of the community” in a town in Texas), Of Mice and Men, and Chaucer. It also has three pages detailing efforts to suppress the young adult novels of Judy Blume, which have sold millions of copies to adolescents who recognized their own problems and pain in their pages. Ms. Blume’s Forever, about sex between teenagers, was challenged in Scranton because it contains “four-letter words and talked about masturbation, birth control, and disobedience to parents,” in Missouri because it promotes “the stranglehold of humanism on life in America,” and was moved from the young adult section in Nebraska because it is “pornographic and does not promote the sanctity of … family life.”

  It’s an interesting word, that word “pornographic,” which, along with the adjective “obscene,” has been at the heart of many legal decisions about printed materials. The most entertaining—and telling—exchange was that between Margaret Anderson, the New York bookstore owner who tried to publish Ulysses in the United States, and John Quinn, the lawyer who represented her when she was prosecuted for doing so. At the end of the proceedings—lost by the champions of free speech—Quinn warned his client, “And now, for God’s sake, don’t publish any more obscene literature!”

  Anderson replied, “How am I to know when it’s obscene?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” said the lawyer. “But don’t do it.”

  I repeated that to the eighth grade at the elementary school my three children attend, not far from the store where the intrepid Margaret Anderson sold James Joyce’s masterpiece. The librarian there, who knew as much about books for children as many of the industry’s best editors, approached Banned Books Week by making a lesson of the banning of books. The eldest students studied the First Amendment. They were remarkably laissez-faire about censorship—the consensus seemed to be that everyone should read everything, which was cheering—but there was general agreement that a book that contained a full frontal nude portrayal of the male form was completely inappropriate for a six-year-old and could be adjudged obscene. I whipped out Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book In the Night Kitchen, which portrays a small boy named Mickey floating nude, penis and all, through a landscape of enormous flour bags and milk bottles. The eighth grade groaned: gotcha, they knew I was saying. But the utter rightness of Mickey’s nudity had not been so easily accepted elsewhere; in a school in Missouri shorts had been drawn on the character, and elsewhere the book had been moved from low shelves so only taller, older children could get to it.

  As a Catholic girl who grew up in the sixties the matter of banned books had always fascinated me. Until Vatican II elevated individual conscience to a more central place in the faith, the church kept an Index of Forbidden Books, or Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Balzac was on the list; so were Dumas and Richardson’s Pamela. Writing of Catholic culture, the psychologist Eugene Kennedy describes an “acceptable” Catholic novel as “generally a pious work that supported and encouraged Catholic ideals and practices and justified the institution and its control over the lives of its adherents. In such works, the good were rewarded, the erring, terribly punished.” In my own Catholic home, and at the homes of my relatives, I remember the works of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, whose radio show was enormously popular, or The Day Christ Died by Jim Bishop, a dramatized account of the road to Calvary. (For the more secular audience, there was also The Day Lincoln Was Shot by the same author.)

  These books were on the bookshelves of many of our homes when I was growing up. By contrast, the dirty books—for it was a simpler, more black-and-white time, when books were not objectionable or titillating, just dirty—were almost universally to be found between the box spring and the mattress of our parents’ beds. To read them—and read them we did—we had to make sure that we were alone in the house and that the bedroom door was latched, much as our parents had to do when they were actually engaged in the acts described in the books, which were far less likely to be novels than so-called marriage manuals. (In the case of my own parents, there was a copy of Tropic of Cancer, which I think of rather proudly today, being the only evidence I ever saw that they were forward-thinking in matters of literary taste.)

  These were the books from which I learned about the mechanics of sex, but of course mechanics was not really what was wanted at all. I learned about sex, among other things, from another Catholic girl, Mary McCarthy, and the enormously popular and controversial roman à clef about her Vassar classmates entitled The Group. I have my original paperback copy, published in 1964, its cover softened with a smattering of daisies, and it still falls open, automatically, to the sections in which the reserved Dorothy loses her virginity and then goes to a clinic to buy a birth-control device. Both the description of female orgasm, and of the hot burning embarrassment that a clinic visit can provoke in a newly sexually active woman, remain quite vivid despite several decades and a sexual revolution. I don’t know how other young women learned to identify the sensations of climax, or how mortifying a first visit to a gynecologist can be. I know I learned from Mary McCarthy. Come to think of it, she was my first introduction to lesbianism as well.

  But, looking back, I realize it was not so much the sex as the sedition in the book that I found seductive. Like Tropic of Cancer, which I did indeed filch from my parents’ bedroom, or Portnoy’s Complaint, or Peyton Place or Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the events of The Group were matters that I was not supposed to know about, or even be capable of understanding. The attention of our elders focused on sexual activity, but perhaps other elements were even more corrosive of the conventions: disappointment, infidelity, duplicity, hypocrisy. In all of those books, too, there was a sense of forbidden female license that translated, at some subconscious level, into female freedom. I can remember my mother poring silently over a copy of The Feminine Mystique, the revolutionary book by Betty Friedan describing the worm at the core of the fruit of marriage and motherhood. But I was too young to have either husband or children; I found feminism, my eyes wide at the infinite variety of the unknown, in The Group, in Kay’s suicide, Lakey’s lesbianism, the sad settling that Dorothy makes of her life after her one sexual adventure. All seemed to shout, to belie those daisies on the cover by shouting, that the lives of intelligent women had to amount to more than this.

  Sedition has been the point of the printed word almost since its inception, certainly since Martin Luther nailed on that church door his list of ninety-five complaints against the established Catholic hierarchy. The printing press led to the Reformation, and to revolutions, political and sexual. Books made atheists of believers, and made b
elievers of millions whose ancestors knew religious texts only as works of art, masterpieces hidden away in the monasteries.

  And the opposite was true. Ignorance was the preferred condition of the people by despots. In the essay that begins her book on multiculturalism, a movement toward more inclusionary art and literature which has been both promulgated and ridiculed by books, Hazel Rochman recalls the prevailing ethos of the South African police state that led her and her husband to put their books in a box and bury them in the backyard: “Apartheid has made us bury our books. The Inquisition and the Nazis burned books. Slaves in the United States were forbidden to read books. From Latin America to Eastern Europe and Asia, books have been trashed. But the stories are still there.”

  For some portion of the human race, political upheaval and reform have come through experience, through the oppression of hereditary monarchs and the corruption of established churches, through seats at the back of the bus in the Jim Crow South or sexual harassment in a heretofore all-male assembly line. But that cannot explain the moral and ethical awakening of those raised in relative comfort and ease, never faced with prejudice or denigration. That was the case with me, and I suspect that it was two books that began the process of making me a liberal. One was the Bible, or at least the New Testament, in which Jesus seemed to take for granted as a necessary part of existence the need to help those who were disenfranchised. The other was by Dickens, who used the gaudy show of character and circumstance so effectively to communicate the realities of social injustice. He does it in Bleak House with the stranglehold of law, with debtors’ prisons in Little Dorritt. But I remember best my first reading of A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge bellows, of those who would rather die than go to the workhouses, “They had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” Visions, not words, change Scrooge’s mind, and his heart, but when he begs the Ghost of Christmas Present to assure him that his clerk’s son, the crippled Tiny Tim, will not die, the spirit taunts him: “What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

  “Man,” adds the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is.” A call to social action, a spiritual invocation, and a climactic moment in a wonderful, and wonderfully well wrought, bit of storytelling—so can a book be personal, political, and entertaining, all at the same time.

  Read the greatest stuff but read the stuff that isn’t so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you’ll go away and only deliver telegrams at Western Union.

  —EDWARD ALBEE

  IN 1997 KATHERINE Paterson, whose novel Bridge to Terebithia has engaged several generations of young people with its story of friendship and loss—and also led to a policy in a school district in Kansas requiring a teacher to list each profanity in required reading and forward the list to parents—gave the Anne Carroll Moore Lecture at the New York Public Library. It was a speech as fine as Ms. Paterson’s books, which are fine indeed, and she spoke of the dedication of the children who are her readers: “I increasingly feel a sense of pity toward my fellow writers who spend their lives writing for the speeded-up audience of adults. They look at me, I realize, with a patronizing air, I who only write for the young. But I don’t know any of them who have readers who will read their novels over and over again.”

  As someone who reads the same books over and over again, I think Ms. Paterson is wrong about that, although I know what she means. I have sat on the edge of several beds while Green Eggs and Ham was read, or recited more or less from memory; I read A Wrinkle in Time three times in a row once, when I was twelve, because I couldn’t bear for it to end, wanted them all, Meg and Charles Murry and even the horribly pulsing brain called It, to be alive again as they could only live within my mind, so that I felt as if I killed them when I closed the cover and gave them the kiss of life when my eyes met the words that created their lives. I still reread that way, always have, always will. I suspect there are more of us than Ms. Paterson knows. And I think I know who we are, and how we got that way. We are writers. We danced with the words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.

  For some of us, reading begets rereading, and rereading begets writing. (Although there is no doubt which is first, and supreme; as Alberto Manguel writes in his wonderful A History of Reading, “I could perhaps live without writing. I don’t think I could live without reading.”) After a while the story is familiar, the settings known, the characters understood, and there is nothing left to discover but technique. Why that sentence structure and not something simpler, or more complex? Why that way of ordering events instead of something more straightforward, or more experimental? What grabs the reader by the throat? What sags and bags and fails? There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read. “The rest you learn from books,” the novelist B. J. Chute, my senior writing instructor at college, said after she had taught us to send out submissions in a manila envelope, with a SASE for the inevitable rejection. Here is how one of Dickens’s friends and his first biographer, John Forster, describes him as a boy: “He was never a first-rate hand at marbles, or peg-top, or prisoners’ base; but he had great pleasure in watching the other boys … at these games, reading while they played.”

  I don’t know what that boy read as he watched the others, long dead, long dust, play the games he couldn’t master, while he began the pas de deux with sentences that would lead to immortality. But I bet it wasn’t Shakespeare. Show me a writer who says she was inspired to try by the great masters, and I’ll show you someone who is remembering it wrong, or the way she thinks the world wants it remembered. It’s too daunting to read Middlemarch and say, even to yourself, “I can do that!” Kafka cut his storytelling teeth on Sherlock Holmes, when he was a kid. (Kafka as a kid—now, there’s a notion!) And Faulkner’s biographer Joseph Blotner writes that young Billy’s tastes as a child were lowbrow, a magazine called The American Boy: he pored over it, over the short stories that might be comic, sentimental, or uplifting; the articles on famous men; departments such as “The Boy Debater” and “The Boy Coin Collector.” Thus was born The Sound and the Fury, from riproarers about how the West was won.

  That single biographical fact may put to rest one of the other canards of literacy nostalgia, the notion that kids just don’t read the way they used to. In his eloquent, impassioned, ultimately alarmist book about reading and technology, The Gutenberg Elegies, the critic Sven Birkerts uses a deflating experience teaching undergraduates to argue a “conceptual ledge,” a “paradigm shift” in the relations between people and prose. Birkerts’s distress stems from his students’ lack of interest in what is a challenging story by Henry James, a story of loss and disintegration that resonates with those of us who have begun to experience loss and disintegration. Birkerts admits that as an undergraduate himself he was engaged by writers like Kerouac and Salinger. Yet instead of A Perfect Day for Bananafish, he assigns Washington Irving and Henry James and, when his students are not enthusiastic, concludes that technology has interfered with our essential understanding of a complex text. The story reminds me of nothing so much as my elementary school librarian, frowning at the sight of Nancy Drew in our unlined, unscarred hands, or the predictions by our parents that the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones meant the end of music as it had heretofore been known.

  In fact one of the most pernicious phenomena in assigned reading is the force-feeding of serious work at an age when the reader will feel pushed away, not from the particular book being assigned, but from an entire class of books, or even books in general. So the assigning of Silas Marner to high school freshmen is unlikely to make them, later in life, enthusiastic readers of the masterwork Middlemarch. At age thirteen, David Copperfield often seems less of
an invitation to Bleak House than a clarion call for Cliffs Notes. (For those who, like me, are determined to raise children with a strong emotional attachment to Dickens, I recommend the reading of A Christmas Carol aloud sometime during the holidays.) Perhaps there are indeed children who learned to love books by reading Moby Dick, but that sounds like apocryphal remembering to me. Melville could certainly never have made me a writer. My best remembered inspiration, other than a class assignment, which is a source of inspiration to writers mostly overlooked in the rose-colored haze of retelling, was Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen. That was the book that made me say “I can do that.”

  Or perhaps it was a combination of two other reading experiences that set me convincingly on the road to becoming a writer. My father had a weakness for humor writing, being a very funny man himself, and I remember how he would laugh over the work of Max Shulman and Jean Shepherd. More than once as a girl I would see him paging through The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis or In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and laughing in the particular way of the human being who is truly tickled, scarcely able to breathe, sometimes seeming to be about to pass out. Another time I remember watching my mother reading a book that she’d loved greatly over the years, Green Dolphin Street. It was by Elizabeth Goudge, and was about two sisters in love with the same man. I recall hearing a kind of shuddery sound and turning to see that my mother was weeping. Both these things went deep with me, that words on a page could make my father laugh and my mother cry.