Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays
Page 33
FOR THE FIRST TIME, some American school and college students are being issued electronic books instead of printed textbooks. Their arrival feels to me not like technological progress but like the first notes of a death knell. In a society in which relatively few people read books for pleasure to begin with, still fewer will do so if they do not encounter books—real books—as students.
There are many reasons to love the old-fashioned paper book: the subtle differences in how different kinds of paper smell, for instance, and that promising, virginal crackle of the spine as you open a new hardcover for the first time; the sense of accomplishment as you look at the shelves of what you’ve read, and of humility as you look at the shelves of what you haven’t.
I have been feeling sad about the imperiled state of printed books for an additional reason: what books tell us about the person who owns and loves them. In this way, books give a small measure of immortality not just to writers but also to readers.
Each year my wife and I spend time in what was once the summer home of her late parents, and the room where I work is lined with her father’s books. He was a career Foreign Service officer, a staunch Cold War liberal and a man who believed that the best of human virtues were incarnated in Puritan New England. His picture of the United States was far rosier than mine; particularly during the Vietnam War, we argued furiously, although he was a good man and we eventually made our peace. But whatever the limits of his worldview, what strikes me now is how much of it I can still see, in the books on his shelves. They are a portrait of his mind.
There are books about the various places where he served as a diplomat—Ghana, New Zealand, Israel, Tunisia—for, each time he was sent to a new country, he read up on it enthusiastically, looking for upbeat parallels to the New England experience. There are books by the hundred about the United States, for the most part portraying it as a country where everything works as wondrously as the Founding Fathers planned. Their titles alone tell the tale: This Glorious Burden, Chance or Destiny, The First New Nation, This Is the Challenge, The Pilgrim Way, The Discipline of Power. Sometimes a slip of paper marks a passage he especially liked.
Some of his books are from a phase when he read biographies and memoirs of the famous—no dissidents or women but many presidents, great writers, and Supreme Court justices. He was trying, he once told me, to figure out what were the early life experiences that made people into Great Men. But that interest must have been a resurfacing of an earlier one, for here in another section of the shelves I can see a row of dusty biographies in a series called American Statesmen, which perhaps were passed on to him by his parents, for they were published in the 1890s, the decade before he was born.
Another group of books reflects his ardent Unitarianism and the writings of a minister, A. Powell Davies, he knew and admired. Other volumes clearly represent less what he actually read than what he would like to have read, for books also form portraits of our unfulfilled ambitions: an ancient leather-bound set of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (perhaps a graduation present when he finished law school), a huge family Bible, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Emerson’s Complete Writings. None of them have the creased spines of books that have been frequently opened. It is also revealing what is not among these more than a thousand volumes: not a single book about business.
Finally there is his beloved collection of books on New England, including the 795-page Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire, which I pull out every summer to try to imagine the mysterious controversy alluded to in its preface. This acknowledges the contributions to the volume made by one Charles Thorton Libby, who “acted as a consultant in problems in which he was known to have a personal interest, but his deep-seated conviction that the book should not be published at all did not make for an entirely happy situation.”
The point is this: I can look around the room and see a landscape of my father-in-law’s passions, quirks, and beliefs. His four grandchildren, one born after his death, will be able to do this for years to come. Collections of books, large and small, transcend time. Sometimes the collection is as carefully preserved as the library of the great seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys, which sits at Magdalene College, Cambridge, on the shelves that the naval official Pepys had built for him by dockyard carpenters. Sometimes it is just the shelf of books over a bed: How many times, as a guest in someone else’s house, staying in the room of a son or daughter no longer at home, have I looked through a bookshelf for clues to the tastes and dreams of the person who once slept here?
Such voyeurism is not a forbidden one but one to be celebrated. It is not just the writing of books that expresses who we are but also the freedom to collect them, to arrange them, and to enjoy the collections of others. Once a man who had recently been released from many years as a political prisoner in Pakistan was visiting our house. Sitting in our living room talking, at one point he paused, jumped up, and began running his hands over the books on our shelves. “You must excuse me,” he apologized. “I have not been able to do this for years.”
Technology now lets us put a twenty-volume encyclopedia on a DVD, with movies and music as well; before long, I’m sure, we’ll be able to get the contents of a Barnes & Noble superstore on a microchip. But when we’re gone, will someone ever be able to look at the chips and disks we used and clearly see, as one can through a collection of books, some glimmer of the shapes of our souls?
1999
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Over the course of more than two decades, many people kept my spirits up, helped with the articles that compose this book, and had a hand in its final form. Every writer knows that honest criticism is the greatest gift he or she can receive, and I’ve been lucky to have reaped much of that. My thanks to the editors of the various books and magazines where these pieces first appeared; particularly helpful in improving them at that stage were Anne Fadiman of the American Scholar, Monika Bauerlein of Mother Jones, and the late Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books. Mark Danner, Zachary Shore, Elizabeth Farnsworth, Robert F. Worth, Michael Meyer, and an anonymous reviewer for the University of California Press all read the whole collection and gave me their feedback, for which I’m most grateful. Naomi Schneider and her colleagues at the Press have helped midwife this book into the world. A particularly low bow to its copy editor, Peter Dreyer, who corrected not only errors of grammar and syntax but some of historical fact as well.
My literary agents, Georges and Anne Borchardt, have steered me skillfully through the waters of the book world for more than thirty years. And, for almost that long, I’ve been fortunate to be able to teach at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California at Berkeley and to enjoy the company of talented colleagues and students in that community. Many of the people in these pages are activists who’ve worked to make this a more just world. Harriet Barlow, to whom this book is dedicated, is model of how to be one today, and has taught me and many others more about fighting the good fight than she will ever know.
My wife, Arlie Russell Hochschild, was with me on the trips to India and Russia that I report on here, and on many more for which there weren’t room, all the while writing remarkable books of her own. Always my best critic, she edited all of these pieces before they were first published, and then again once they were collected and revised for this volume. I have learned so much from her over more than fifty years that it’s impossible to imagine this book, or my life, without her.
ARTICLE SOURCES
In slightly different form and usually under different titles, these articles appeared in the following publications:
“Lessons from a Dark Time,” “Hoover’s Secret Empire,” “Prison Madness,” “The Listening House,” “Sunday School History” and “A Nation of Guns” in the New York Review of Books; “The Father of American Surveillance,” “All That Glitters” and “The Brick Master” in Mother Jones; “Students as Spies” and “The Impossible City” in Harper
’s; “A Showman in the Rainforest” in the New Yorker; “Heart of Darkness: Fiction or Reportage?”—introduction to Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Penguin Classics; “On the Campaign Trail with Nelson Mandela” in the Village Voice; “India’s American Imports” in the American Scholar; “Palm Trees and Paradoxes” in the San Francisco Examiner Magazine; “Our Night with it Stars Askew”—foreword to Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge, New York Review Books; “Shortstops in Siberia” in the Times Literary Supplement; “A Homage to Homage”—foreword to Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, Mariner Books; “On Which Continent Was the Holocaust Born?”—introduction to The Dead Do Not Die by Sven Lindqvist, New Press; “Pilot on the Great River”—introduction to Collected Nonfiction, Volume 1 by Mark Twain, Everyman’s Library; “A Literary Engineer” in Understanding the Essay, edited by Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter; “You Never Know What’s Going to Happen Yesterday” in the Public Historian; “Practicing History Without a License” in Historically Speaking; “On the Road Again,” in the New York Times Book Review; “Books and Our Souls” in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Reprinted by permission.
PHOTO CREDITS
Cover photo by Alexander Togolev.
Figure 1:Photo by Paul Weinberg, Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 2:Author’s personal collection.
Figure 3:Photo by Marcus Bleasdale.
Figure 4:Photo by Soman, Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 5:Getty Images.
Figure 6:Photo by A.F. Bradley, Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 7:Photo by Alexander Togolev.
ALSO BY ADAM HOCHSCHILD
Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son
The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey
The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin
Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918
Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939