by Gene Wolfe
From this letter and a hundred more like it was born a real imagination, the subculture that calls itself fandom. From club meetings came meetings between clubs, at which members of the Outsiders might smof (this fan verb is derived from Secret Masters of Fandom and indicates the forging of fannish political deals) with Insiders, and at which everyone discussed favorite stories and story concepts far into the night. These people ranged (as they still do) from teenagers to grandparents and came (again, as they still do) from all sorts of educational and economic backgrounds. What they had in common was that they were all readers, and indeed readers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, which is to say of stories that require a willingness to accept premises usually thought unlikely. In short, they were people like you and me.
More recently, many cons have been dominated by the fans of movies and television series, and of role-playing games. No one objects to such fans having conventions; but some of us have begun to feel we have lost the cons that were originally ours. Readercon was an attempt to re-create them. Mark Ziesing, whom some of you know as a bookdealer and a producer of small-press books, was our publisher guest of honor. I was the writer guest of honor, and I feel it was an honor indeed. One of my jobs was to make a speech in which I was to try to sum up what Readercon was all about, and enough people have asked permission to reprint it for me to hope that it will be worth your while. You’ll have a good idea of the sorts of people present if you imagine the kind of audience for which the following talk was written.
I would like to begin by asking you to contemplate a statistic and a quotation. The statistic is that in America today one person in seven is completely illiterate—unable to read IN CASE OF FIRE BREAK GLASS, for example. Let me admit immediately that this figure—which was given me by a nurse who is involved in adult education—may be considerably in error. The fact is that no one really knows what proportion of the U.S. population is illiterate; any figure that may be quoted to you is an estimate. And if you are given a Government estimate, you should keep in mind that no government is really proud of its illiterates. However, the Adult Performance Level—APL—study funded by the U.S. Department of Education estimated that 27 million U.S. adults were completely illiterate; that is roughly one in five.
The quotation is Mark Twain’s: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
One of the reasons it is so difficult to get good figures on illiteracy is that illiterate people are ashamed of it, even though in nine cases out of ten it is not their fault. Thus the Census Bureau cannot simply ask whether this person or that cannot read. It would be told that he or she certainly can; and although it would know the answer was often untrue, it could not know how often.
The people Mark Twain spoke of are, if anything, rather more difficult to detect. Let me give you an example. A few years ago, I came across a remarkably fine two-volume set of what I think is one of the best books of fantasy ever written—Washington Irving’s The Alhambra. This edition had appeared in 1891, and its marvelously florid white-and-gold bindings were still protected by dust wrappers of thick black oilcloth. If its paper was not acid-free, it had certainly acted like it: the pages had not yellowed, and their decorative borders of bronze and vermilion could almost have been printed the year before. The two volumes were $7, and I bought them at once.
Halfway through the first volume, I began to hit unopened pages. I was forced to read with a letter-opener in one hand, separating them as I went. No one had read more than the first half of the first volume, though the books had been in existence for nearly a century. I ask you to consider, please, just why the owner of those books had bought and kept them.
Of course it is notorious that some rich people buy books merely to decorate their rooms. I have been told—and I’m sure it’s true—that many interior decorators offer to supply up to so many yards of gold-tooled red or blue leather bindings. And though I hesitate to disillusion you, I fear that it’s equally true that there is a stage set in the basement of the Senate Office Building made by cutting away everything but the spines of hundreds of good books. It permits a senator to face the cameras against a background as false as his own.
The original owner of this set—let’s assume him male—was clearly not that sort of man. He had kept its white-and-gold bindings hidden beneath their oilcloth jackets, remember; and in those jackets the two books are as dismal, and as plain, as you will ever see. What’s more, he had begun to read them.
That he never found the time is the conventional guess, to be sure. But when books published nearly a century before are discovered in near-mint condition, it’s generally safe to assume that they have spent most of the century in the possession of a single owner. And since he bought them well before the advent of modern labor-saving machinery, he presumably had a good deal of leisure time. It’s hard to imagine how decade after decade might roll slowly by without ever an illness or a vacation, a layoff, a summer Sunday, or a blizzard that would have allowed him to read.
We are left, then, with the books themselves; and we must consider whether they are dull or overly complex. I very much regret that I didn’t mark the exact point at which the previous owner ceased to read. But I remember the approximate place:
In one of my visits to the old Moorish chamber where the good Tia Antonia cooks her dinner and receives her company, I observed a mysterious door in one corner, leading apparently into the ancient part of the edifice. My curiosity being aroused, I opened it, and found myself in a narrow, blind corridor, groping along which I came to the head of a dark winding staircase, leading down at an angle of the Tower of Comares. Down this staircase I descended darkling, guiding myself by the wall until I came to a small door at the bottom, throwing which open, I was suddenly dazzled by emerging into the brilliant antechamber of the Hall of the Ambassadors; with the fountain of the Court of the Alberca sparkling before me.
Now I admit that is not utterly thrilling. A certain young American enjoying a holiday in Spain has decided to explore a ruined palace inhabited by beggars. He visits the beggar queen (whose friendship he has secured in an earlier chapter), opens a door that has piqued his curiosity, goes down a dark hall and an even darker stairway, and finds himself in the room in which the representatives of foreign powers once waited the pleasure of the Moorish king.
But it is not without interest. One wonders what the young American will find next, and dreams—as he himself does at times—of ghosts and hidden treasure.
Nor is it very difficult reading. There are three foreign words, but two of them are place names, and the third is part of a proper name. A reader who does not realize that tia is the Spanish word for aunt is free to assume that the lady’s name is Tia-Antonia and get on with the story. Irving’s sentences are somewhat long, but they are so filled with familiar words and words of one syllable—in, one, of, my, to, the, old, where, the, good, Tia, cooks, and so on—that they make easy reading. That darkling seems a little strange to us; it is the sort of word William Hope Hodgson and H. P. Lovecraft revived as a mannerism; but it is not a mannerism in Irving, and would not have seemed strange to a reader of 1891.
Why, then, did the original owner stop? Why did he not go down that darkling staircase in an angle of the Tower of Comares with Irving? I think I know.
It has to do with the history of literacy, and particularly with the history of mass literacy. People have been reading and writing for four thousand years and more, but for ninety percent of that time we readers and writers have been a very small fraction of the population. My mother once worked for a man named Appleby who made serious and protracted efforts to trace his own descent in the male line. He had an easier task than most of us would, because these ancestors had been English. Furthermore, he was lucky enough to strike a line of parsons that carried him back almost to the 1500s. But there the trail of ink ended, and no expenditure of time or money—and Mr. Appleby was a rich man—could turn it up again.
&nb
sp; Widespread reading began, as most of you surely know, with the desire to read the Bible; still more, with the desire that others should read the Bible. When William Tyndale said, “I will cause that a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost,” he created thousands of teachers and preachers (then often the same person) whom we have since forgotten.
They made it okay to learn to read. It was a staggering accomplishment. The boy was needed for plowing and sowing and chopping wood and a hundred other labors. The girl was needed to cook, mend, wash, and sweep, to make pickles and jelly, to watch the stove and her small brothers and sisters. All this not just because the wealth of the family depended on it, but because the very survival of its members depended on it. These people were subsistence farmers, as were nineteen twentieths of the population; and subsistence farmers need a good harvest each year with nothing wasted, particularly time. One crop failure may mean starvation. The boy’s father and grandfather could not read a word; nor could the girl’s mother, nor her grandmother.
But God came first.
The question was whether anything came second. Reading the Bible was all right—very much so. Reading a book like Pilgrim’s Progress was probably okay too. But what about all this other stuff?
As you might have expected, there were two answers. The old educated classes, brought up on Vergil and Homer, said yes. The newly literate or semiliterate class said NO!
“I skip forty years,” said the Baker, in tears,
“And proceed without further remark
To the day when you took me aboard of your ship
To help you in hunting the Snark.”
But I really mean to skip a lot more than that. Tyndale died in 1536, and I’m going to jump to 1850 or so, with another quotation most of you are sure to recognize:
Each in her turn stepped forward to the edge of the platform, cleared her throat, held up her manuscript (tied with a dainty ribbon) and proceeded to read, with labored attention to “expression” and punctuation. The themes were the same that had been illuminated upon similar occasions by their mothers before them, their grandmothers, and doubtless all their ancestors in the female line clear back to the Crusades. “Friendship” was one; “Memories of Other Days”; “Religion in History”; “Dream Land”; “The Advantages of Culture”; “Forms of Political Government Compared and Contrasted”; “Melancholy”; “Filial Love”; “Heart Longings,” etc., etc.
A prevalent feature of these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of “fine language”; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them. No matter what the subject might be, a brain-racking effort was made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious mind could contemplate with edification. The glaring insincerity of these sermons was not sufficient to compass the banishment of the fashion from the schools, and it is not sufficient today; it never will be sufficient, perhaps. There is no school in all our land where the young ladies do not feel obliged to close their compositions with a sermon; and you will find that the sermon of the most frivolous and least religious girl in the school is always the longest and the most relentlessly pious.
The scene is, of course, Tom Sawyer’s school. We see that religion as a justification for literacy has lasted more than three hundred years. And we sense that its reign is about over. Here was one of the greatest turning points in its history. Was literacy to become a good in and of itself? An end, and not a means? Or was it to become no more than a fading custom that had lost its justification? (Notice, by the way, that Mark Twain carelessly supposes that village girls were writing themes in the Middle Ages, though he must have known better.)
I think that Mark Twain saw the beginning of the change, and that the original owner of my set of The Alhambra was born in the period of transition. I think he stopped reading because he liked it too much.
I realize that’s an outrageous statement; but I think that it is true, like so many other outrageous statements. Consider what a set of books like those must have cost in 1891—only a few dollars, to be sure; but this was still the era of the five-dollar gold piece. Consider too that though he never finished those books, he preserved them beautifully for year after year.
He lived, probably, somewhere in the Middle West. It’s a raw and corrupt country even now, and it was a far more raw and corrupt one then. If he lived in Chicago—which is where I got his books—it was the Chicago of slums and packing houses, of Colonel McNeery and Jane Addams. But he had read of the Tower of Comares and the fountain of the Court of the Alberca, and there was no one he could tell about them.
This, then, is the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read but don’t. Mark Twain saw it coming, and we have spent our whole lives in its shadow. Long ago it lost its own justification, of course; it had lost it before Mark Twain was born. And reading has found new ones even while retaining its old one—for reading’s original justification was never really lost, only for a time “entirely worn out.”
Now for my own little sermon: This new illiteracy is more pernicious than the old, because unlike the old illiteracy it does not debar its victims from power and influence, although like the old it disqualifies them for it. Those long-dead men and women who learned to read so that they might read the Bible and John Bunyan would tell us that pride is the greatest of all sins, the father of sin. And the victims of the new illiteracy are proud of it. If you don’t believe me, talk to them and see with what pride they trumpet their utter ignorance of any book you care to name.
The old illiteracy is with us still, and indeed is growing; but its victims hate it, and escape it when they can. The new illiteracy, though it is so easily escaped, is escaped far less often. It is a jail so good that its doors need not be locked. The prisoners sit staring at the screen—or at the wall—or out of the window at the cell across the way; and they never try the knob.
I suspect that many of you recognized this new illiteracy before I did, and that many of you have despaired of fighting it—as I, too, despaired for so long. For years it seemed to me that the only way to reach the victims of the new illiteracy was through television; and television was and is beyond our reach. But at last I realized that there is a more powerful medium than television, and that it is available to every one of us. It is speech—talk, if you will. Conversation.
We can do two things.
The first is what we’re doing right here at Readercon. We can gather together specifically as readers. In Mark Twain’s time a statesman said, “Books are a delightful society. If you go into a room filled with books, they seem to speak to you, to welcome you.” That is so; and yet the pleasure of reading is doubled at least when you can share it.
The other is simply to talk of books even to those who have not read. It exposes us to their contempt, indeed; and it may be that though they watch us enter their prison a hundred times, and leave it a hundred too, it will suggest nothing to them. But the opening and closing of the doors is bound to let in free air, and who knows what that may do?
What was good about Readercon should be clear now, so let’s move along to the bad things. One was the hotel. The hostility of hotels to science-fiction, fantasy, and horror conventions has become proverbial. We fans have generally blamed it on loud teenagers and hall costumes—a single meeting (it has been said) with a bearskin-clad barbarian with a broadsword can warp the average assistant manager for life. Readercon banned not only TV, movie, and game programming, but rowdiness and costumes of all kinds; and it made those bans stick. The three hundred and fifty or so readers who attended were clean, quiet (except for a great deal of enthusiastic talk), and orderly.
It made no difference. The hotel shut down its only eating facility at noon on Saturday
and gave various other unmistakable indications of its displeasure. If you work for a hotel or a hotel chain and would like to explain to us why most hotels hate these conventions so much, please write to Borderland, in care of Horrorstuck. I’ll certainly be interested, and I’ll pass along your comments. (In fairness to the hotels, I should add that though most are hostile, a few are noticeably friendly. I’ve just returned from Rivercon, the second convention I’ve attended at the Galt House in Louisville, Kentucky; they’ve left me an unabashed Galt House fan. The Galt House found favor with Charles Dickens, so it continues a lengthy tradition; but the Huntsville, Alabama, Marriott, where Deepsouthcon was held last June, was just as hospitable.)
Another bad thing was that Readercon lost money; and the loss would have been much greater but for the generosity of the attendees, who took up a collection to help defray the expenses of Robert Colby and Mr. and Mrs. Eric Van, who organized the convention. Despite the loss, there will be another Readercon in or around Boston next year, with a new guest of honor, in a different hotel. If you’d like to come, write Readercon, P.O. Box 6138, Boston, MA 02209.
And now a suggestion for all you budding horror writers out there. Imagine a convention at which the hotel really hated its guests. What could it do? What would the guests do when it did it? That could make a pretty good novel.