Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

by Anne Fadiman

  It would take an epic—to which I fear my abilities as a poet are unequal—to do justice to the tools purveyed by the Sempiternal Rose of mail order, the 1902 Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Its offerings included twenty-two different blacksmiths’ hammers, twelve watchmakers’ files, and seven cattle dehorners. Six hundred thousand people paid fifty cents apiece to read it, not a small sum if you consider that the same amount or less could have bought them one four-hook corset, two turkey calls, three solid-silver thimbles, four boxes of foot powder, or five false mustaches. The best thing about the Sears catalogue—a feature sadly missing from almost all its descendants—was the thirteenpage index. Who could read

  Abdominal Belts 466

  Accordions 205-206

  Account Books 261

  Acme Gall Cure 412

  Acme Harness Soap 411

  Adjustable Combs 498

  Adzes 515-516

  Air Tight Stoves 827

  Albatross Cloth 836

  Albums, Celluloid and Plush 269-270

  and remain unmoved? And who could resist such blandishments as “LADIES, YOU CAN BE BEAUTIFUL. No matter who you are, what your disfigurements may be, you can make yourself as handsome as any lady in the land by the use of our FRENCH ARSENIC WAFERS”?

  Note that the estimable copywriters of Sears, Roebuck & Co. said “You can be beautiful,” not “Be beautiful.” This is an important distinction. The tiny bit of wiggle room they left has since been lost, buried deep beneath the Catalogical Imperative:

  • Cut tough toenails easily.

  • Stop ugly fungus.

  • Stop grinding your teeth at night.

  • Stop bad breath in pets.

  • Turn your home into a massage parlor.

  • Enjoy bagels. Without a detour to the emergency room.

  • Make 12 incredible-looking styles of paper shoes and then go for a walk.

  • Serve up a deadly charge with the Swatter Electronic Insect Terminator.

  • Shoot yucky green goo over 35 feet.

  • Fill the plastic mold with peach flavored gelatin and a few hours later, out pops a flesh-toned left hand.

  Even the ever-obedient Anne F. rebels. I won’t!

  But such boorish commands (quoted verbatim from Healthy Living, The Sharper Image, and Brainstorms) tarnish only the low end of the catalogue-writing spectrum. At the top, although the second person prevails, the mood—as it was in the golden age of arsenic complexion wafers—is declarative rather than imperative. Q.v., from the J. Peterman catalogue: “Tonight your Lucia was the best in a generation.” “Someone may notice your resemblance to Ava Gardner.” “You still have your alto sax.” How did they know?

  The day J.P. arrives in the Fadiman-Sadiman household, the world stops. No one is permitted to interrupt. The references to Henry James, Anna Akhmatova, and the Chogyal of Sikkim lull me into thinking I’m reading something worthwhile. The instructive excursi on Sir Francis Galton’s hat (it had retractable shutters so his brain would not overheat) and the kind of shirts worn by polo-playing Persian princes in 1472 (open-necked) provide excellent fodder for dinner-party conversations. And who needs an atlas when you can master the spellings of Sylt, Krk, Sukhumi, Tetuán, Muhu, Bjugn, and Husøy just by reading your mail?

  My analysis of J. Peterman’s appeal is that it is a Harlequin romance for the kind of people who vacation in Krk. For example (to quote from the blurb for an ankle-length crêpe-de-Chine floral dress with leg-o’-mutton sleeves):

  He spends the morning repairing the deer fence. The next job is to start a compost pile. It’s getting warm. As he takes off his flannel shirt, he observes that you are no longer reclining in the bay window reading Proust.

  This paragraph makes a number of assumptions, all exceedingly pleasant:

  1. I own a country house.

  2. I own a deer fence.

  3. I own a compost pile.

  4. I have enough time to read Proust.

  5. While reading Proust, I wear ankle-length dresses with lego’-mutton sleeves.

  But I didn’t order the dress. My problem—and it has made Anne F., though a devoted reader of catalogues, a faithless patron—is that I never want the item, I want the associated fantasy. I don’t want the leg-o’-mutton sleeves, I want the country house, the window seat, and the Proust.

  In fact, I threw out the entire Nordstrom catalogue except for the cover. Forget the clothes. After I get the country house, I want the goat.

  MY ANCESTRAL CASTLES

  When I was four, I liked to build castles with my father’s pocket-sized, twenty-two-volume set of Trollope. My brother and I had a set of wooden blocks as well, but the Trollopes were superior: midnight blue, proportioned to fit a child’s hand, and, because they were so much thinner than they were tall, perfect, as cards are, for constructing gates and drawbridges. I own them now. Before I wrote these sentences, I took down three of the volumes from my shelves, and before you could say Sir Raffle Buffle, The Last Chronicle of Barset had become a lintel balanced precariously atop the twin posts of Lady Anna and Doctor Thorne.

  I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them. It’s a wonder to me that the young Diana Trilling, who had to wash her hands before she extracted a volume of Twain or Balzac from her parents’ glass-fronted bookcase, grew up to be a booklover. Our parents’ model was the playground; her parents’ model was the operating room. By buying his set of leatherbound classics en bloc from a door-to-door salesman, Trilling’s father committed the additional heresy, unimaginable to us, of believing that a library could be one-size-fits-all rather than bespoke. My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents’ tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closets. Their selves were on their shelves.

  Our father’s library spanned the globe and three millennia, although it was particularly strong in English poetry and fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The only junk, relatively speaking, was science fiction; the only wholly extraliterary works were about wine and cheese. My favorite shelf held the books he had written himself. I liked seeing my own name up there—FADIMAN FADIMAN FADIMAN—especially around the age of five, since it was one of the first words I learned to spell. When my reading skills improved, I remember imagining that Erasmus must have looked like Ed Wynn because he had written something called In Praise of Folly. My brother remembers thinking (more accurately) that Kierkegaard must have been a terrifying fellow because he had written The Sickness unto Death and Fear and Trembling. And we both believed that our father, because his books did, somehow managed to incorporate both folly and terror, as well as every emotion in between.

  Our mother’s library was narrower, focusing almost entirely on China and the Philippines. Paging through A Primer in the Writing of Chinese Characters (published in Shanghai!) and I Was on Corregidor (it mentioned her!) was thrilling, like discovering one was the illegitimate offspring of Mata Hari. But the excitement was not unalloyed. Our father, who often boasted that he had never actually done anything except think, was still the same person he had been when he started collecting books in the early 1920s. He and his library had never diverged. Our mother, on the other hand, had once led a life of action. And why had she stopped? Because she had had children. Her books, which seemed the property of a woman I had never met, defined the size of the sacrifice my brother and I had exacted.

  Between them, our parents had about seven thousand books. Whenever we moved to a new house, a carpenter would build a quarter of a mile of shelves; whenever we left, the new owners would rip them out. Other people’s walls looked naked to me. Ours weren’t flat white backdrops for pictures. They were works of art themselves, floor-to-ceiling mosaics whose vividly pigmented tiles were all tall skinny rectangles, pleasant to the touch and even, if one liked the dusty fragrance of old paper, to the sniff
. Vladimir Nabokov once recorded in his diary that at the age of eight, his son associated the letters of the alphabet with particular colors. C was yellow; F was tan; M was robin’s-egg blue. To this day, imprinted by the clothcovered spines of the books that surrounded me thirty years ago, I feel certain that Sophocles is terra-cotta, Proust is dove gray, Conrad is cinnamon, Wilde is acid green, Poe is Prussian blue, Auden is indigo, and Roald Dahl is mauve.

  There must be writers whose parents owned no books, and who were taken under the wing of a neighbor or teacher or librarian, but I have never met one. My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don’t read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children’s rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parents’ rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says PRIVATE—GROWNUPS KEEP OUT: a child sprawled on the bed, reading.

  My parents were merely passing on the legacy they had received from their own parents. When my mother moved from Utah to California at age nine, her father covered a sixteen-foot-long wall with bookcases, and her mother sheathed each shelf with nubbly beige wallpaper. My mother spent that summer reading the complete works of Dickens. My father grew up in Brooklyn in an immigrant family too poor to take him to a restaurant until he reached his teens, but not too poor to fill two black-walnut bookcases with the likes of Scott, Tolstoy, and Maupassant. “I read Ibsen when I was eight,” he told me. “Even before that, Ibsen was there. I knew he was a great Norwegian dramatist, part of a world I was somehow moving toward.” Last week he startled me by reciting, in an Irish accent, several lines spoken by Private Mulvaney in Kipling’s Soldiers Three, which he had read (in a red edition with the title stamped in gold) eighty-five years earlier.

  When I was fourteen, I noticed that the Late Augustan shelves in my father’s British section contained a book that was turned spine in. Naturally, I made a beeline for it. It was Fanny Hill. (The effort to shield my innocent eyes was so obviously destined to backfire that a couple of years later, when I borrowed Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life from the Austrian shelf, I concluded my father had unconsciously wanted me to find Fanny Hill.) It is my opinion that parental bookcases are an excellent place for teenagers and erotica to meet for the first time, especially if the works are of high literary quality (John Cleland, Frank Harris, and Anaïs Nin, let us say, rather than Xaviera Hollander). Not only are the books easy to access, but the teenagers learn that, incredible as it may seem, their parents have sexual feelings too. Fanny Hill looked well thumbed.

  When I asked several writers I know what books they remembered from their own parents’ shelves, a high proportion were lubricious. Campbell Geeslin, a novelist and editor who grew up on a West Texas ranch, spent many hours in the embrace of A Treasury of Art Masterpieces, particularly the color reproduction of Manet’s Olympia, whom he describes as “wearing nothing but a black ribbon around her throat, with her legs slightly crossed to hide the part I most wanted to see.” The scholar and poet Charles Bell, whose father owned the second largest library in Mississippi, pored over the more risqué passages in Richard Burton’s sixteen-volume translation of The Thousand and One Nights. When he inherited the set half a century ago, he discovered an oh-so-faintly penciled list of numbers on the back flyleaf of volume 4: page references to his dead father’s own favorite salacities.

  Those sixteen volumes now grace Charles Bell’s library, one of the largest in Santa Fe. Campbell Geeslin did not inherit A Treasury of Art Masterpieces, only the fruitwood coffee table upon which it once reposed. He did, however, inherit the family Bible. Sixty years ago, his father read a chapter from it every night, leading Campbell to believe that Saul and David spoke with West Texas accents. During the readings, his mother sat at her dressing table, applying Pond’s cold cream. “Whenever I open the Bible today,” says Campbell, “I hear my father’s voice and I smell my mother’s face.”

  Some of my friends do not intend to leave their books to their children, believing that they would be a burden: a never-ending homework assignment, boxed and unboxed with every move, that would reproach the legatees from on high. I do not agree. I intend to leave my library to my children. My daughter already likes to look at our books and imagine what they might be about. (Rabbit at Rest is “the story of a sleepy bunny”; One Man’s Meat is “a mystery about some men at a dinner table, and one of them gets steak but the others only get broccoli.”) Someday she will read them, as I read In Praise of Folly, whose Holbein frontispiece of Erasmus looked nothing like Ed Wynn. My disappointment was part of growing up.

  Seven years ago, when my parents moved from a large house to a small one, my brother and I divided the library overflow. My brother, who helped them pack, telephoned me from California, announcing each author as he emptied the bookcases. “Chekhov?” he asked. “Sure,” I replied. “Turgenev?” “Uh”—I was mentally gauging my shelf space—“I guess not.” Later, of course, I kicked myself for having spurned Turgenev. The four hundred volumes that passed to me (which included the Trollopes but, unfortunately, not Fanny Hill) were at first segregated on their own wall, the bibliothecal equivalent of a separate in-law apartment.

  “You just don’t want your father’s Hemingways to be sullied by my Stephen Kings,” said George accusingly.

  “That’s not true.”

  He tried another tack. “Your father wouldn’t want his books to be a shrine. Didn’t you say he used to let you build castles with them?”

  This hit home. I realized that by keeping his library intact, I had hoped I might be able to keep my father, who was then eighty-six, intact as well. It was a strategy unlikely to succeed.

  So his Trollopes are now ensconced in our Victorian section, cheek by jowl with our decaying college paperbacks. But I’ve been thinking of moving them to a lower shelf. Our two-year-old son is beginning to show an interest in building.

  SHARING THE MAYHEM

  When Charles Dickens read aloud from Oliver Twist to a full house at St. James’s Hall, his heart rate shot up from 72 to 124, and no wonder. First he became Fagin. His friend Charles Kent, who watched from the wings, said that for several minutes Dickens resembled “the very devil incarnate: his features distorted with rage, his penthouse eyebrows … working like the antennae of some deadly reptile, his whole aspect, half-vulpine, half-vulture-like, in its hungry wickedness.” (It might accelerate anyone’s pulse to look like a reptile, a mammal, and a bird simultaneously.) Then, after glancing at the stage directions he had written in the margins (“Shudder … Look Round with Terror … Murder coming”), Dickens became Bill Sikes, wielding an invisible club. Finally, he became Nancy, gasping, “Bill, dear Bill!” as she sank to the floor, blinded by her own blood. After bludgeoning Nancy and hanging Sikes, Dickens prostrated himself on a sofa offstage, unable to speak in consecutive sentences for a full ten minutes.

  When I read The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit to my son last night, there was no one around to check my pulse. However, Beatrix Potter and Charles Dickens seem to have attended the same Violent Writers School, and when I got to the part where the man with the gun blasts off the rabbit’s tail and whiskers (“BANG!”), I can tell you that Henry and I were both breathing pretty heavily. Private readings have certain advantages over public ones. We were both already prostrate, and had I been unable to speak in consecutive sentences, Henry never would have noticed. I was also able to insert editorial comments, such as “It wasn’t a real gun.” After describing “the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight,” Dickens could not turn to his audience—even though a physician had forecast mass hysteria among the women—and say, “It wasn’t real gore.”

  We do a lot of reading aloud in our household. If you’re beginning to suspect that, like Dick
ens, we specialize in mayhem, I’m afraid you’re right. One morning last week, I emerged from the bedroom to find Susannah crunching her Rice Krispies while her father read to her from Boy, in which the young Roald Dahl gets caned (twice), has his adenoids removed without anesthesia, and nearly loses his nose in a car accident.

  “Read me again about how his nose was hanging by just a little tiny string,” said Susannah.

  Had I been a better mother, I would have said, “After breakfast.” Instead, I joined the audience. George was once a singing waiter, accustomed to linking dramaturgy and digestion, and he attacked the dangling nose with verve. I could see why he had raked in such big tips. I could also see, with breakfast-table clarity, the truth of something I had long suspected: that all readings are performances, with Dickens merely hogging the histrionic extreme of a spectrum shared by every parent who has ever lulled a child to sleep with Grandfather Twilight. When you read silently, only the writer performs. When you read aloud, the performance is collaborative. One partner provides the words, the other the rhythm.

  No stage is required, no rehearsal, not even an audience. When he was a boy, Heine read Don Quixote to the trees and flowers in the Palace Garden of Düsseldorf. Lamb believed that it was criminal to read Shakespeare and Milton silently, even if no one was there to listen. During the second week of a college course in Greek, I was so thrilled by mastering the alphabet that I paced up and down my dormitory room, regaling my furniture with hundreds of repetitions of the first two lines of the Odyssey:

  ’′Aνδρα μo νν∈π∈, Moσα, πλτρoπoν, ς μλα πoλλ πλγχθη, π∈ì Tρoíης í∈ρòν πτoλí∈θρoν π∈ρσ∈

  I recognized only two words—Muse and Troy—but it didn’t matter. Homer was meant to be spoken, and even though I had no idea what he was saying, I could hear the slosh of the wine-dark sea beneath each quavering dactyl.