by Anne Fadiman
“How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn-out appearance … of an old ‘Circulating Library’ Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield!” wrote Charles Lamb. “How they speak of the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages with delight! … Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to see them in?” Absolutely none. Thus, a landscape architect I know savors the very smell of the dirt embedded in his botany texts; it is the alluvium of his life’s work. Thus, my friend the science writer considers her Mammals of the World to have been enhanced by the excremental splotches left by Bertrand Russell, an orphaned band-tailed pigeon who perched on it when he was learning to fly. And thus, even though I own a clear plastic cookbook holder, I never use it. What a pleasure it will be, thirty years hence, to open The Joy of Cooking to page 581 and behold part of the actual egg yolk that my daughter glopped into her very first batch of blueberry muffins at age twenty-two months! The courtly mode simply doesn’t work with small children. I hope I am not deluding myself when I imagine that even the Danish chambermaid, if she is now a mother, might be able to appreciate a really grungy copy of Pat the Bunny—a book that invites the reader to act like a Dobellian giant mongoose—in which Mummy’s ring has been fractured and Daddy’s scratchy face has been rubbed as smooth as the Blarney Stone.
The trouble with the carnal approach is that we love our books to pieces. My brother keeps his disintegrating Golden Guide to Birds in a Ziploc bag. “It consists of dozens of separate fascicles,” says Kim, “and it’s impossible to read. When I pick it up, the egrets fall out. But if I replaced it, the note I wrote when I saw my first trumpeter swan wouldn’t be there. Also, I don’t want to admit that so many species names have changed. If I bought a new edition, I’d feel I was being unfaithful to my old friend the yellowbellied sapsucker, which has been split into three different species.”
My friend Clark’s eight thousand books, mostly works of philosophy, will never suffer the same fate as The Golden Guide to Birds. In fact, just hearing about Kim’s book might trigger a nervous collapse. Clark, an investment analyst, won’t let his wife raise the blinds until sundown, lest the bindings fade. He buys at least two copies of his favorite books, so that only one need be subjected to the stress of having its pages turned. When his visiting motherin-law made the mistake of taking a book off the shelf, Clark shadowed her around the apartment to make sure she didn’t do anything unspeakable to it—such as placing it facedown on a table.
I know these facts about Clark because when George was over there last week, he talked to Clark’s wife and made some notes on the back flyleaf of Herman Wouk’s Don’t Stop the Carnival, which he happened to be carrying in his backpack. He ripped out the page and gave it to me.
TRUE WOMANHOOD
Six years ago, the week my first child was born, my mother sent me a book that had once belonged to my great-grandmother. The timing was coincidental. My parents were about to move from California to Florida and were divesting themselves of everything that wouldn’t fit in their new, smaller house. Because I had been allotted the silver candlesticks, the mother-of-pearl fish knives, and the cut-glass pickle dish, my mother threw in the book, which she had never read, because it, too, was decorative and ancestral.
The book was called The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the World. The binding was umber, with an ornate design of flowers and leaves embossed on the cover. The pages were edged with gilt. When I grazed my fingernail down the title page, I could feel the letterpress indentations. The bottom of the spine was ragged, evidence that it had been frequently teased off a high shelf with a crooked finger.
Inside the front cover was a bookplate from St. Mary’s Academy in Salt Lake City. Five lines of microscopic Spencerian script—the upstrokes were as fine as a baby’s hair —reported that the book had been awarded to Miss Maude Earll on June 21, 1886, for excellence in “Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Grammar, Rhetoric, M. Philosophy, Logic, Botany, Literature, G. History, Penmanship, Astronomy, Elocution, Comp. and L. Writing, Plain Sewing, Ornamental Needlework, Guitar & Bookkeeping.”
My great-grandmother Maude has always been considered an exotic character in my family because in our denominational hotchpotch—I’m descended from Jews, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Mormons, and a Christian Scientist—she was the only Catholic. Her Protestant parents had sent her to a convent school on the condition that the Sisters of the Holy Cross never attempt to convert her. The nuns must have valued Maude’s soul more highly than their promise, for she was a devout believer by the time she graduated. The prize they chose for her is the only book I own that belonged to a great-grandparent, or even a grandparent. When my mother sent it to me, all I knew about Maude was that she had knee-length auburn hair, so heavy it gave her headaches, which she eventually cut off and sold for twenty-five dollars, the same price Jo got for hers in Little Women; that she had refined manners; and that she could sew stitches so fine they were invisible.
I first read The Mirror of True Womanhood while nursing my daughter in a rocking chair, in the midst of the tumult, part ecstasy and part panic, into which all firsttime mothers are thrown by sleep deprivation and headlong identity realignment. The book appalled me. It belonged to that hoary genre of women’s advice manuals —it shares a call number at the Library of Congress with such descendants as Having It All; Strategy in the Sex War; and Help for the Hassled, Hurried, and Hustled—which, in 1877, when it was published, were almost invariably written by men. The author was the Reverend Bernard O‘Reilly, a New York priest who had been chaplain of the Irish Brigade of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. Into twenty-two hortatory chapters (“The True Woman’s Kingdom: The Home”; “The Wife’s Crowning Duty: Fidelity”; “The Mother’s Office Toward Boyhood and Girlhood”), Father O’Reilly managed to stuff everything he thought a woman should know. This was the bottom line: “Woman’s entire existence, in order to be a source of happiness to others as well as to herself, must be one of self-sacrifice.” If she toed the mark, her home would become “the sweetest, brightest, dearest spot of earth.” If she transgressed, she might end up like the selfish mother, en route to Europe, whose vessel was “wrecked amid the icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland,” or the lazy housewife who suffered the even more dire fate of having her disappointed husband “migrate to California.” Father O’Reilly! I would mentally chide the author, as I rocked my daughter. You never had a wife! You never had children! How dare you tell my great-grandmother how to lead her life? How dare you tell ME?
Father O’Reilly was damnably sure of himself, or maybe it just seemed that way because, at the time, I was so unsure of myself. I mocked his Victorian priggery, but I was secretly afraid that he was right about motherhood—that, in fact, my id was about to be permanently squashed by my superego. I was working at home as a writer; for the first time, George was the principal breadwinner. “Men are born to be the providers in the home: they are formed by nature and still further fitted by education for every species of toil,” I read. “Theirs is the battle of life on sea and land. The home with its quiet, its obscurity, its sanctities, is for woman: she is made to grow up in the shade.” What if I got stuck in that shade and never managed to crawl back out?
Of course Father O‘Reilly called us “the weaker sex,” but I got the feeling he was just bluffing. His heroines nurtured their children with enough motherlove to suffocate a small army. They ministered to lepers, adopted disfigured orphans, and brought bread to poor families “during the most inclement winter’s weather.” His men were sad sacks by comparison, forever courting disaster either through their own weakness (intemperance, adultery, dimwitted investments) or through rotten luck (maimed hands, amputated legs, paralytic rheumatism). But the wives unfalteringly stood by their men, coaxing them out of their vicious habits and compensating for their infirmities by working ever harder themselves. My favorite O’Reilly anecdote involved a particul
arly churlish husband:
Coming home one day at his dinner hour, and finding that the meal was not ready, he flew into a furious passion, and began to upset and break the furniture in the dining-room. His wife—a holy woman—endeavored to pacify him, and, while urging the servants to hurry forward their preparations, she argued sweetly with her husband on the unseemliness of such displays of anger, and begged him to read a book, while she would go to aid the cook. He flung the book away from him, and stalked back and forth in a rage, while the lady hastened to her kitchen.
After a while, chastened by his wife’s example (and perhaps by the eventual arrival of dinner), the husband picked up the book and began to read. By an amazing stroke of luck, it happened to be The Lives of the Saints. The husband reformed his character on the spot and “added one more name to the long roll of Christian heroes, who owed, under Providence, their greatness and heroism to the irresistible influence of a saintly woman.”
I’ve got your number, Father O’Reilly, I thought. It’s the old pedestal trick. We’re better than men, so we don’t need to be equal to them. Of course, a little pedestal deployment wouldn’t entirely spoil my day. Once, looking up from a passage on the ideal wife, I asked George, “Do you consider me a peerless flower of beauty and spotless purity which has been laid upon your bosom?” George responded with a neutral, peace-preserving, but not quite affirmative grunt.
Five months ago, after our second child was born, I picked up The Mirror of True Womanhood again. It seemed to go with nursing a baby. This time I felt far more confident —motherhood had, in fact, turned out to be a source of joy that had shanghaied neither my brain nor my id—and, perhaps as a result, Father O‘Reilly seemed far less confident. His sacralization of the hearth no longer seemed smug; it seemed anxious. In 1877, he could feel the ground shifting beneath his feet. The “home sanctuary” seemed to him the last bulwark against irreligion, evolutionism, crime, alcoholism, prostitution, political corruption, industrial labor, disrespect for the older generation, and female emancipation. “Close and bar the door of your home at all times,” he cautioned, “when you know that wickedness is abroad in the street or on the highway.” It’s okay, Father O’Reilly, I told him. There are lots of people today who feel exactly the same way.
This time around, the prescribed distaff virtues didn’t sound so awful. (In fact, I decided that if they were compulsory for men as well, the world would be a kinder and gentler place.) One night I compiled a brief O’Reilly list and asked George to rate me on a ten-point scale. Here’s how I stacked up:
Discretion 7
Discipline 5
Religious fervor 0
Power to soothe and charm 6
Truthfulness 10
Thrift 3
Avoidance of impure literature, engravings, paintings, and statuary 2
Kindness 10
Cheerfulness 6
Order in the Home 5
Abjuration of fashion 10
Self-control 9
Excellence in needlework 2
My scores wouldn’t have earned me a prize book from the Sisters of the Holy Cross, but I confess to a small, retrograde flush of pride at not having utterly flunked.
After the second reading, I started asking my mother and my aunt about the woman who had won it. I learned that Maude’s husband, Joseph Sharp, a wealthy young man who had studied the classics at Harvard, was superintendent of the coal mine in Sunnyside, Utah, a position that placed him at the top of the local social ladder. His beautiful wife was a renowned hostess until Joseph quit his job over a matter of principle. My mother remembers that there was an explosion in the mine, and the mine owners forbade him to open the doors to let the trapped miners escape, lest the oxygen spread the fire. My aunt remembers that there was a labor strike, and that the owners turned the miners’ families out of the company houses in midwinter, forcing them to live in holes they dug in the snow. Whatever the reason, Joseph and Maude moved without servants to a dairy ranch, where the winner of the trigonometry and elocution prizes scrubbed laundry on a washboard, killed mice by smashing them with a coal shovel, and rose before dawn to bake bread for a kitchenful of ranch hands wearing unwashed longjohns.
When their farmhouse burned to the ground, they lost all they owned except a few things, including Maude’s prize book, which she had given to their daughter. Unable to afford rebuilding, they hauled a four-room miner’s shack to the ranch on a horse-drawn wagon. It was unpainted and uninsulated. There were no pictures on the walls, no rugs on the floor, no gewgaws on the mantel, no mantel. Maude slept on a plain metal cot whose legs rested in cans filled with bedbug-deterrent turpentine.
In a subchapter called “How a Noble Husband Was Sustained by a Devoted Wife While Passing Through Financial Difficulties,” Father O’Reilly told the story of a rich man who suffered a reversal of fortune. His “proud little housewife” offered to sell some of their furniture, saying, “You shall see how easy it will be to me to part with thy treasures, provided I have a little home for you and our darlings.” The family, accompanied by their servants, cheerfully set themselves up again in a more modest house. “The carpets were plain, it is true, and the furniture was of the commonest kind; but chairs and sofas and ottomans had been covered with a chintz so pretty that no one stopped to inquire what was beneath the covering … . The little ones saw no change around them, save that the light of their mother’s smile was even more sunny than ever.”
Maude must have read this. Did she want to smash its author with a coal shovel for suggesting that reduced circumstances meant asking your servants to plump chintzcovered cushions insted of satin ones? (I would have. I didn’t really deserve that 9 in Self-control.) Or was she in some way consoled?
Father O’Reilly, I think as I sit with my baby on one knee and a worn brown volume on the other, you and I don’t exactly see eye to eye. But thanks for letting me get to know my great-grandmother. And I tell him that someday I’ll ask my daughter what she sees reflected when she looks into The Mirror of True Womanhood. She’ll have plenty to go on, since she’ll inherit her great-great-grandmother’s book the week her first child is born.
WORDS ON A FLYLEAF
Long ago, when George and I were not yet lovers but seemed to be tottering in that general direction, we gave each other our first Christmas presents. Of course, they were books. Knowing that I liked bears, George gave me The Biography of a Grizzly, by Ernest Thompson Seton. Modestly sequestered on the third page was the following inscription: To a new true friend. No Talmudic scholar, no wartime cryptographer, no deconstructionist critic ever scrutinized a text more closely than I did those five words, hoping that if they were just construed with the right emphasis (“To a new true friend.” “To a new true friend.” “To a new true friend”), they would suddenly reveal themselves as a declaration of undying devotion.
Knowing that George liked fish, I gave him Old Mr. Flood, by Joseph Mitchell, a slim volume of stories about the Fulton Fish Market. The author had autographed the book himself in 1948, but did I leave well enough alone? Of course not. I wrote: To George, with love from Anne. Then I mistranscribed a quotation from Red Smith. And finally—on the principle that if you don’t know what to say, say everything—I added fifteen lines of my own reflections on the nature of intimacy. My cumulative verbiage, not to mention the patency of my sentiments, exceeded George’s by a factor of approximately twenty to one. It’s a miracle that the book, its recipient, and the new true friendship weren’t all crushed under the weight of the inscription.
Unfortunately—since George married me anyway and has retained his affection for both fish and Joseph Mitchell—my words were preserved for good. Unlike the card that accompanies, say, a sweater, from which it is soon likely to part company, a book and its inscription are permanently wedded. This can be either a boon or a blot. As Seumas Stewart, the proprietor of an antiquarian bookshop in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, has observed, “Imagine how delightful it would be to own an edition
of Thomson’s The Seasons with this authenticated inscription: To my dear friend John Keats in admiration and gratitude, from P. B. Shelley, Florence, 1820. Imagine, too, how depressing to have an otherwise fine first of Milton’s Paradise Lost with this ball-point inscription scrawled on the title page: To Ada from Jess, with lots of love and candy floss, in memory of a happy holiday at Blackpool, 1968.”
My inscription, a specimen of the candy-floss school, did not improve Old Mr. Flood in the same way that, for example, To Miss Elizabeth Barrett with the Respects of Edgar Allan Poe improved The Raven and Other Poems, or Hans Christian Andersen / From his friend and admirer Charles Dickens / London July 1847 improved The Pickwick Papers. In the bibliomane’s hierarchy, such holy relics of literary tangency eclipse all other factors: binding, edition, rarity, condition. “The meanest, most draggle-tailed, foxed, flead, dog’s-eared drab of a volume” (as the critic and bibliophile Holbrook Jackson once wrote) is instantly transfigured by an inscription with a sufficiently distinguished pedigree. Whose hands could fail to tremble while holding the well-worn copy of Corinne, by Madame de Staël, on whose flyleaf Byron wrote a 226-word mash note to the Marchesa Guiccioli that ends, I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you. Think of me sometimes when the Alps and the ocean divide us,—but they never will, unless you wish it. (Now that’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t have minded finding inside The Biography of a Grizzly.)