How Reading Changed My Life Page 5

  And then finally there are a few sharply remembered moments that are mine alone: Home from school, suspended for bad behavior, I come to the end of To Kill a Mockingbird and hear the crack as Jem’s arm breaks as clear as I can hear the kitchen clock tick. Lying on the beach listening to a transistor radio, I feel midway through Main Street the claustrophobia of small-town life, particularly for women, so acutely that the shiver runs all through me that’s said in superstitions to be a ghost walking over my grave.

  And one afternoon in college I skip my seminar on writers of the Renaissance so I can finish Sons and Lovers, so swept away am I by the passion that a disappointed woman feels for her sons. And I know that I will never, ever write as well as this, but that if anything even dimly like this power, to enthrall, to move, to light up the darkness of daily life, lies hidden like a wartime cryptogram within the Royal manual typewriter on my dorm room desk, I must try to make a go of it. Why would anyone aspire to be president of the United States or of General Motors if they could write like D. H. Lawrence instead? That’s what I remember thinking.

  That’s not to say that I immediately set myself the work of constant writing; that, too, is a writer’s life story that I suspect. But I did begin to think of myself as a writer, although I was not sure what sort of writer I was. Like most young people, I went through a romance with poetry, enamored of the music and the rhythm of the words, and by the soothing notion that there need be so much less to the product than there was in even a slender novel. In my own life, this romance fell in a predictable period. It came after the end of elementary school, when poetry was something between a punishment and a spelling bee, “The Children’s Hour” committed to memory, and college, when I took a modern poetry course from the same professor who found Galsworthy beneath notice. He had a fine, sonorous voice that rang in the small stuffy classroom, vying successfully with the sound of traffic on Broadway, and those half glasses that I still associate with intelligence even though I now wear, and loathe, them. And when he read Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” aloud, dipping his out-sized shaggy head to the page—“For three years, out of key with his time/He strove to resuscitate the dead art/Of poetry; to maintain ‘The Sublime’/In the old sense. Wrong from the start”—I knew that, whatever else I might be, I was no poet. My books from that course are full of painstaking marginalia, as though if I paid close enough attention the bird would fly in my breast. But I didn’t have poetry in me. I wrote fiction in college, and then for many years I wrote fact, as best I could gather, discern, and describe it, as a newspaper reporter. Then I wrote fiction again. Reading taught me how to do it all.

  “Books are over,” the editor of a journal to be found only on the Internet told me one day at a conference on the future of the newspaper business. Just my luck. After all these years of reading books I’d finally written one; when I took time to alphabetize my shelves, it came between Proust and Ayn Rand, which seemed representative of how I’d read all my life, between the great and the merely engagingly popular. I could still remember the time I had held my first hardcover book. The Federal Express truck raised a cloud of gravel and dust on a country road as I ripped into the envelope, removed the book, and lifted it up and down in my outstretched hands, just to feel the heft of it, as though it was to be valued by weight. I held it the way I’d seen babies held at religious ceremonies, a bris, perhaps, or a baptism. Hardcovers: every writer’s ultimate ambition, whether she admits it or not.

  It was a fearsome frisson that ripped through the business, the business of writing, the business of publishing, the business of newspapering, when I was well into all three. The computer had become like the most miraculous sort of technological Swiss Army knife: each time you thought you knew what it could do, it turned out that it could do more, faster, better, more accurately. I wrote my first novel on a big clunker of a machine that wheezed slightly when it stored information and had a mere 256 kilobits of memory. It just managed to hold the book, the word-processing program, and a few other odds and ends. My third novel was composed on a machine that fits into my handbag and weighs slightly more than a premature baby. The program corrects my punctuation and capitalization as I type; when I try to type a stand-alone lowercase I, it inflates it into a capital letter, correcting me peremptorily, certain I’ve made a mistake. I could keep a dozen copies of my book on its hard disk and it wouldn’t even breathe hard.

  And there was less than a decade between the publication of those two books.

  So it became easy, as the age of the computer washed in a wave of modems and cybersurfers over the United States at the end of the twentieth century, to believe those who said that books need never leave the soul of this new machine at all, that the wave of the future was this: The Age of Innocence on-line, to be called up and read with the push of a VIEW button; The Fountainhead via the Internet, perhaps with all the tiresome objectivist polemical speeches set in a different font for easy skipping-over (or even the outright deletions that Ayn Rand’s editor should have taken care of). No paper, no shelf space, and the ultimate democratization of reading: a library in a box much smaller than a single volume of the old leather-bound Encyclopaedia Britannica. To all the old fears—of lack of literacy, of interest, of quality—was added the fear of microchips.

  A small skirmish in these technowars broke out in the summer of 1997 in the pages of The Horn Book, the journal of children’s literature, and it was representative of both the worst-case scenarios and the realities of the future of publishing in an era of tear-away technology. A writer and librarian named Sarah Ellis tried an experiment: she read on a laptop computer a book for children called The End of the Rainbow. But this was not just any book: it exemplified the greatest fears of those who love children’s literature, and know how difficult it can be to publish in a cost-conscious age. The End of the Rainbow was part of a series of Danish books about a boy named Buster published by Dutton; the sales trajectory of its predecessors had convinced the publisher to offer it free on the Internet rather than go to the expense of publishing it in book form.

  Ms. Ellis gave Buster on the computer a fair shake, but she found the experience ultimately unsatisfactory. She concluded that the process of scrolling down, reading in a linear fashion, on a machine she associates with haste, were all antithetical to reading for pleasure. “The screen,” she says, “turned me into a reluctant reader.” When she went to the library and took out an earlier bound Buster book, her reluctance disappeared. “I experienced that feeling of surrender, of putting myself in someone’s hands, which is one of the great pleasures of fiction,” she wrote. And she reclaimed the experience of a book, pure and simple: “the soft scrape of my fingers against the pages, the glissando sound of flipping back to a previous chapter.” The scrolling of the screen had not been the equivalent of turning the pages. A laptop is portable, but not companionable.

  Ms. Ellis believed her experiment raised many questions about the future of reading in the face of the ascendancy of computers, questions that will be raised over and over again in the years to come. But, reading her words, I found more questions answered than asked, and one essential one settled to my satisfaction. At the time that technocrats had predicted the imminent death of the book as we knew it, all of us in the world of print were in a kind of frenzy about how new technology would change our old businesses. In the five years between my first job as a copy girl and my hiring at The New York Times as a reporter, big papers had begun to retire their typewriters and bring in computer systems on which reporters would produce the day’s copy and editors edit it. It was a modest revolution, given the advances still to come, but a revolution not without pain; one of the Times’s most venerable reporters insisted he was too old to learn new tricks, and his copy had to be transcribed into the computer from the copy paper he continued to use in his old manual typewriter.

  But the real revolution was said to be coming in the product itself. Panel after panel was held at journalism conventions about whet
her newspapers would be replaced by the downloading of the day’s news onto a computer screen. It seemed only sensible to those whose correspondence had become characters sent by modem from one computer to another instead of a file of business letters, inevitable that the collection of folded newsprint that landed on the doormat with a thwap before daybreak each morning could simply be replaced by a virtual newspaper in a computer in the kitchen, coffee cup beside the keyboard.

  Perhaps that may someday come to pass, in one form or another; perhaps someday it will seem quaint that anyone ever doubted that the printed book between hard or soft covers was in its twilight at the end of the twentieth century. But the decade after the initial panic over the demise of printing upon paper seemed to foreshadow a very different end. News indeed appeared on computers; so did magazines, some created expressly for on-line users. There were even books like the Buster book that Dutton put on the Internet rather than risk commercial failure. But none of them convincingly supplanted the more conventional product. Both those in the business of books and those in the business of computer technology realized something that we readers apprehended most deeply in our hearts: that people are attached, not only to what is inside books, but to the object itself, the old familiar form that first took shape four centuries ago. A laptop computer is a wondrous thing; it is inconceivable to me now that I ever did without one, particularly in writing and revision. (There are still, of course, those novelists who like to speak fervently of writing by hand in special lined journals, or using the old Royal typewriter they were given when they went away to Choate forty years before. Not me.) But a computer is no substitute for a book. No one wants to take a computer to bed at the end of a long day, to read a chapter or two before dropping off to sleep. No one wants to take one out of a purse on the New York City subway to pass the time between Ninety-sixth Street and the World Trade Center. No one wants to pass Heidi on disk down to their daughter on the occasion of her eighth birthday, or annotate William Carlos Williams on-screen. At least, no one wants to do it yet, even those who are much farther along the cybercurve than I am. The dis-ease Ms. Ellis felt reading a book on the computer, which she described so eloquently in her Horn Book article, is what so many of the rest of us feel, and why the book continues to prosper. Ms. Ellis wonders if this is generational, if she finds reading a screen less satisfactory than do children born to its blandishments. But I have three of those children, and while they play games, trade mail, and do plenty of research on their computers, they do most of their reading in plain old ordinary books, some that belonged to me years ago. They seem to like it that way. My youngest grew up with a copy of Arthur’s Teacher Trouble on CD-ROM, an interactive version of the picture book that allowed her to use her mouse to make desks open and birds fly. But she never gave up reading the version on paper. “I like the real book,” she said.

  And a real book, not a virtual version, is more often than not what’s wanted. After all, the publisher of Dutton Children’s Books did not decide to publish The End of the Rainbow on-line because children were clamoring to read it on the computer. His reasons were financial, not philosophical; he simply did not believe he could afford the loss that the book would incur in conventional publication. The prophets of doom and gloom and the virtual library may use this to generalize about a future in which hundreds, perhaps thousands of wonderful books are never published at all. But the fact is that publishing in all its incarnations—small presses, large presses, vanity presses, university presses—produces many more new titles today than it did fifty or a hundred years ago. More than 350,000 new books were added to the Library of Congress in 1995 alone; that institution, founded with funding of $5000 two centuries ago, now has 200 times the number of items once found in the legendary library in Alexandria.

  And if some new books only manage to make their way onto the Internet, isn’t that better than losing them entirely? New technology offered the publisher of Dutton Children’s Books, Christopher Franceschelli, some useful middle ground between taking a substantial financial loss and not offering the book to readers at all. He wrote eloquently in a letter to The Horn Book, “We live in an era of transition perhaps not all that dissimilar to that of five hundred years ago. Then an entire culture had to wrestle with the meaning of the Western re-invention of movable type. Even then there were those who bemoaned the loss of texture, when the individually crafted, individually illuminated manuscript, with rubricated initials and tooled leather bindings, gave way to the radically simple black and white pages mechanically produced by Gutenberg and his descendants. Indeed there are those who would argue that the entire Protestant movement was only possible once the Book had lost its totemic value as literal manifestation of the divine Word to reappear as the book—cheap, portable, with a mutable text accessible to (and interpretable by) one and all.”

  And in his history of reading, Albert Manguel concludes, “It is interesting to note how often a technological development—such as Gutenberg’s—promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede.” Consider, for instance, the thousands of books sold every day on-line. In at least one way, those computer services that were said to spell finis to book buying in America have instead succeeded in making it easier for the technologically adept.

  Katherine Paterson, in her library speech, took the long view, too, describing her despair at trying to find information on an on-line service and turning to an old encyclopedia and finding it there instead, but noting, too, “I think it well behooves us to realize that we are not the first generation to fear the changes that seem to engulf us. Plato, lest we forget, argued in the Dialogues that if people learned to read and write, poetry would disappear, for it was only in the oral tradition that poetry could be preserved properly.”

  Well, Plato was wrong. And so, I believe, are those people predicting the demise of the book, particularly its death by microchip. The discussions surrounding the issue always remind me of the discussions from my childhood about the gastronomic leap forward occasioned by the development of astronaut food. Soon, we heard, we would be able to eat an entire Sunday dinner in the form of a pill. Soon a Creamsicle could be carried around in your pocket, run under the hose, and reconstituted on a warm day, almost as good as new.

  It’s thirty years since man first walked on the moon, and when people sit down to a big old-fashioned supper it is still a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes, not a capsule and a glass of water. When they buy a Creamsicle, it’s three-dimensional, wet and cold and wonderful. That’s because people like the thing itself. They don’t eat mashed potatoes with gravy because they just need to be nourished, but because mashed potatoes and gravy are wonderful in so many ways: the heat, the texture, the silky slide of the gravy over your tongue. And that is the way it is with books. It is not simply that we need information, but that we want to savor it, carry it with us, feel the heft of it under our arm. We like the thing itself.

  It is not possible that the book is over. Too many people love it so. It is possible that it has fallen upon hard times, but finding the evidence to prove this is more challenging than many people may think. It is true that there are almost no serializations of books in magazines anymore, a form of book that once made novels accessible for millions of readers who could not afford hardcovers. It is true that department stores no longer sell books, and that many of what pass for bookstores seem closer to gift shops, with far too many datebooks and trinkets. It’s a little terrifying, the fact that in many of the mall stores there is an entire long wall classified as Fiction and a small narrow section to one side of it called Literature. That second, smaller, section is reserved largely for dead people, dead people who represent much of the best the world of words has had to offer over its long span.

  But the ultimate truth is that they aren’t dead, those people. The writers of books do not truly die; their characters, even the ones who throw themselves in front of trains or are killed in battle, come back to life over and over again. Books
are the means to immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens, and Dr. Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky. Over and over again Heath-cliff wanders the moor searching for his Cathy. Over and over again Ahab fights the whale. Through them all we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

  I still remember sitting in the fading afternoon one day in a rambling old house in the country speaking to the elderly matriarch of one of America’s great publishing families, a woman known for her interest in all things political, social, intellectual. Near the end of our conversation she squared her shoulders, looked sharply into some middle distance behind me, and said, as though to herself, “I can’t read any longer.” The words were sad and sonorous as a church bell, and I felt that she had pronounced a sort of epitaph upon herself, and I felt that she felt it too: I can’t read any longer.

  Yet in her sorrow there was joy, the remembered joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others. Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world’s great nomads, if only in our minds. I travel today in the way I once dreamed of traveling as a child. And the irony is that I don’t care for it very much. I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books. This is what I like about traveling: the time on airplanes spent reading, solitary, happy. It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.