by Rick Gekoski
My books were gone? What a relief: they’d done their work, and I’d done mine. All of a sudden there was a new sense of lightness. This didn’t merely consist of more space in which to hang pictures, it meant that I felt less surrounded by my own history. I was a bookish person. I still am, only without many books. It was a giddy sensation. I felt deracinated, disassociated. And free.
I suppose you need to be a certain age (I was fifty-five) to feel thus unencumbered; I would have taken it worse twenty years before, when I needed the books not merely as working tools, but as objects of self-definition. But now? Now they had become memento mori, and I was glad to take my eyes from them. I came to feel that if Barbara hadn’t initiated the process, I would (or at least should) have done it myself. I began, even, to feel grateful to her, for releasing me from these fusty appurtenances. She’d always had an acute sense of the fatuousness of academic life. Well, now all those books were her problem.
After all, reading is what matters, and has always mattered to me. I can’t not do it, any more than I can stop eating or breathing. Left on my own for the briefest of moments – on a bus, in the toilet, waiting for the dentist – I am acutely uncomfortable without something, anything, to read. In extremis I take my wallet out and read my credit cards. (One of them has five sevens in the number!) I can’t stop reading without feeling anxious, and extinguished: I read, therefore I am.
We are accustomed to talking of things and events ‘influencing’ our ‘development’: of the formative power of parental support or abuse, gifted or sadistic schoolteachers, changes of faces and venues, disappointment and delight in the pursuit of love, successes and failures in search of some goal or other. When we think of such experiences we too often neglect the way in which reading, too, has made us. Who would I be abstracted from what I have read, how would I have been formed? If I try to extract some sense of myself now, at the age of sixty-four, which is in some way independent of the myriad effects of my reading, there is only puzzlement. The same sort of bemusement that occurs when I wonder what it would have been like to have been an astronaut or a lion, grown up in Bangladesh or Peru, met an angel or been abducted by aliens.
I am inconceivable without my books. You can’t take them away, they are inside me, they are what I am. Yet when the relations between reading and living are considered, it is often in passing, and frequently results in a formulation similar to that once made by Angela Carter: ‘You bring to a novel, anything you have read, all your experience of the world.’ That’s an unremarkable thing to say. What else would you ‘bring’ to a novel? A prawn cocktail? But if you reverse Carter’s formulation, and also claim that you bring to life everything that you have read in novels – some version of the Emma Bovary thesis – you get a much more interesting, and less studied, topic.
How do books make us? I don’t know. Putting the question at this level of abstraction suggests a topic for a psychologist or sociologist, and I have no taste for such generalities. What I want to know is how my books have made me. To recall, to reread and to re-encounter the books that filled my mahogany bookcase, and continue to fill my present self.
What fun to pursue such a train of thought. To go into my (sparsely) book-lined study, turn that reading lamp inwards, and to reflect. To look at those (few) books in the dawning recognition that what they furnish is not a room, but a self.
1
HORTON AND MAYZIE
Then they cheered and they cheered and they CHEERED more and more.
They’d never seen anything like it before!
‘My goodness! My gracious!’ they shouted. ‘MY WORD!
It’s something brand new!
IT’S AN ELEPHANT BIRD!!’
Dr Seuss, Horton Hatches the Egg
I like things big. I adore Palladian villas, monumental Mark Rothkos, vases of gladioli, eagles, sixteen-ounce T-bone steaks. I can grasp the attractiveness of cottages, Indian miniatures, lilies of the valley, guinea pigs and roast quail. But it seems to me that, with a little more effort, any of these might make more of itself.
It is of course typically American to equate mere largeness with abundance and generosity. The country has vast spaces and majestic vistas, but that doesn’t explain it. So does Tibet, and Tibetans rarely drive Hummers. When I grew up in the 1950s, size was an index of post-war prosperity: developments of four-bedroomed tract houses flourished like (large) mushrooms, cars sprouted fins and expanded in all directions, people gorged on the abundant food, and expanded to inhabit the capaciousness of their domiciles and transport.
I suffer from some of this. But I rather suspect that in my case this predisposition to the outsized is also caused by that admirable pachyderm, Dr Seuss’s Horton the Elephant, to whom I was exposed at the impressionable age of four. (Elephants figure in the American imagination in a way that they don’t in the European: consider that American attempt to render the small and cute – Dumbo the baby flying elephant.) Horton is himself a symptom of this culture of largeness, but in me he is its cause.
I adored Horton Hatches the Egg, one of the lesser known Seuss books, but my favourite by far. The reason for this doesn’t entirely reside in the text, which is unforgettably delightful, though hardly more so than many other of the Seuss books. I wonder, all these years later, whether I didn’t have, at that time, some obscure recognition that this particular story applied to me?
The poem concerns a charming and winsome, but flighty, bird called Mayzie who, bored by the longeurs of egg-sitting, wishes instead to go on an extended holiday to Palm Beach. She flirtatiously prevails upon the kindly elephant Horton to take her place up in the tiny tree, in spite of his considerable misgivings:
Why of all silly things!
I haven’t feathers and I haven’t wings.
ME on your egg? Why, that doesn’t make sense. . .
Your egg is so small, ma’am, and I’m so immense!
He gives in, of course, flattered by her eyelash batting, and reassured by the promise that she will hurry right back. Which of course she doesn’t, she’s having too much fun.
Stuck up his tree for months, covered by snow and buffeted by wind – you quite understand why Mayzie didn’t fancy it – Horton is mocked by his fellow creatures, and eventually towed away, still sitting on his nest, to become the star turn of a travelling circus: Look at this unnatural, laughable fellow! He thinks he’s a bird! He’s so fat he must be pregnant!
The egg, when it eventually hatches under the immeasurable placidity of Horton, reveals a hybrid creature, representative of both earth and air: a baby elephant with wings. Although Mayzie, visiting the circus when it arrives near Palm Beach, wishes to claim her chick, the baby (complete with tiny trunk – like Mayzie with a penis) flies directly into the arms of the estimable Horton, whom it recognizes as its androgynous progenitor:
And it should be, it should be, it SHOULD be like that!
Because Horton was faithful! He sat and he sat!
He meant what he said
And he said what he meant . . .
. . . And they sent him home
Happy,
One hundred per cent!
I’d beg: Again! Read it again! And if it was too late, or I’d asked too often, I’d snuggle up under the covers repeating to myself that final, immensely comforting verse: ‘Because Horton was faithful he sat and he sat . . .’ I loved this line so passionately, I suspect, because that was how my father, Bernie, was. He loved being at home, was happiest with a book, and an opera in the air. My mother, Edie, was in spirit a Mayzie: she hated sitting around, liked a drink, a fag and a party, loved travelling and seeing the world, had a rage for company and good talk. She didn’t so much dislike children as ignore them – they weren’t much fun – though she got on better with hers as they became more reasonable and responsive. But motherhood was never, she was happy to acknowledge, entirely her thing.
‘Babies? Ugh!’ she’d say.
‘How do you think that makes me feel, mom?’ I would
ask.
‘You’re not a baby now, I can talk to you. I like children when you can talk to them.’
She’d suffered badly from post-natal depression, and my father liked to claim, ruefully but proudly, that he had done much of my mothering: feeding, changing, bathing and putting me to bed and reading at night. My father was that sort of elephant, and my mother that sort of bird. It was a compelling contrast, and if at first glance the dice seem loaded in favour of Hortons, there’s a lot to be said for Mayzies. Mine was full of laughter, a great talker and a good listener, engaged, vibrant, attractive. On a good day. But like many Mayzies she was also self-absorbed, suffered violent mood swings, and could be as cruel and critical as she was kind and supportive. And the problem was: you never knew which side of her you were going to meet. She might light on the branch with you and chirp away or, for no obvious reason, peck you in the eye and fly off in a huff. And so childhood, with such a mother, consisted of a constant oscillation between connection and disconnection, elation and despair.
In addition to her regular mood swings, she suffered severe pre-menstrual tension, and could fill the house – indeed, fill the entire neighbourhood – with a bleak and dangerous friability. (To this day I am convinced that I caused it and, indeed, that I am still the cause of all pre-menstrual tension.) The lesson was learned painfully early, and continued to inform my sense of women thereafter: when they are more than usually difficult, it is prudent to hide in an upstairs closet. There was nothing more delightful than connection to such a woman, and nothing more dangerous.
One day she disappeared. She’d become rather large, and there was apparently a baby in her tummy, though that seemed preposterous to me. Just like a woman, just like a Mayzie, to fly off and leave you on some obscure mission, and then come back with an adored stranger in her arms. When the week-old Ruthie arrived home, a gigantic vase of orange gladioli appeared on the table in the hall, which is one of my earliest visual memories. I was apparently supposed to be excited by this gratuitous addition to the family, but spent my time in my room twisting coat hangers (I couldn’t find any way to attach screws or nails to them) making a ‘baby swatter’. My father came up to examine it: ‘Quite a good baby swatter. Shall we put it away? I’ll read to you, if you want.’
Connection to a man that you could count on one hundred per cent. If Hortons are – let us admit it squarely – perhaps a little unexciting in their placidity and steadfastness, they aren’t just out for a good time, they can be counted on. Not in some paltry way, as you might rely on your accountant: Hortons are mature, reasonable and great suppliers of love and reading.
But, sadly, you couldn’t just be read to for the rest of your life. Would you like to learn how to read yourself? I wasn’t so sure. Being read to was better, surely? Faster, more comfortable. I could drift off to sleep lapped by language, hardly aware of the last sentences, though my lips still moved with them. And then, right away, it would be morning. Could anything be better than that?
There was certainly something worse. When you learned to read two unpleasant and frustrating things came together. First of all you didn’t get any more stories: no Babar and Queen Celeste, no little nuns, no Hansel or Gretel, no Dr Dolittle and his gang of animals. Having inhabited this enchanted realm, I was conscious of some going backwards, a regression, a fall. No stories, no sentences, not even any words. Only the acute sensation of beginning again, puzzling out, the frustration of, say, a native speaker confronted with a foreign tongue.
I began singing and sounding my ABCs, well before they might be assigned the utilitarian task of being made up from sound to word. The first pleasure was simply in mastering the connections, the sounds, the sequences. As if I were learning to count, because B follows A as surely and satisfyingly as two follows one. I would follow my mother around the apartment for hours, counting to a hundred, doing it again, then singing my ABCs, incessantly. It drove her crazy.
But when I got my first reading books, a process was initiated which was rather frightening, consisting of repeated experiences of puzzlement, frustration, and resolution.
C – A – T
Three sounds, in a slow order, then a faster one, as they are elided. What do they mean? Reading begins in anxiety. It is up to me to decipher and decide. Can I do this?
A dawning recognition, a smile, a great sense of incipient achievement and relief. I get it! CAT!
And on to the next word, and to the yet more creative and complex process of assembling those words into sentences. I am in my pyjamas, sitting on the edge of the bed. It’s night-time, the lamp is on, and the milk and Oreo cookies are on my bedside table. I sit on a lap, cuddle and squirm into some mutual organic rhythm, reach out and tentatively touch each letter, secure in the warmth and visceral encouragement of being held. My father smells better than my mother: a cigarette, closets and stuffed teddy smell; mom smells sharper, sometimes she almost stings my nose, with a smell mixed up of metal, marigolds and the wolf enclosure at the zoo.
We’d sound out the words together. The reiterated moments of triumph as one overcomes those spurts of anxiety and learns to read is forever associated, I suspect, with warmth, proximity and physical comfort. People like me, who are compulsive lifetime readers, are unconsciously prompted as we turn the page by memories of this Edenic collaboration, in which the book ultimately replaces the breast or bottle. (Goethe says, ‘in all things we learn only from those we love.’)
It was particularly hard when, at the same time, often in the same session, my own halting reading of some banal book or other might be interrupted and replaced, before going to sleep, with a chapter from, say, Dr Dolittle. Dr Dolittle! That was terrific, even with its paucity of elephants. And Jack and Jill? Junk. The lesson of this was obvious, and – learned early – has been a tenet for most of my adult life: never do for yourself what others can do better for you.
It was the same with writing, for learning to read is also learning to write: why bother? Other people were much better at it than me. Let them write and me listen or, if I had to, read. For my earliest efforts at writing were even less interesting than the Jack and Jill books on which I painstakingly learned to read. I wrote my first book at the age of six. It consisted of a few sheets of scrappy paper, cut clumsily with scissors into pieces, chunks really, about two inches square, and stapled together. It bore its title in crayon on the front page: A Friend for Mickey. The text followed on the next four pages, also inscribed in crayon. It read: ‘Once upon a time a boy went wakking down the street to see his friend his friend was a good friend.’
It was probably the product of a task set on a difficult day, buying my mother a few moments’ respite from my relentless counting and general fidgetiness. There is something rushed and uncommitted about my fulfilment of the assignment, characteristics that are an abiding part of my nature. But my mother, nonetheless, was sufficiently proud of my little book that it became the foundation document of her Old Age Box. It rather surprised me, rediscovering Mickey after she died in 1974, to find myself embarrassed by this palpable reminder of my early lack of anything approaching high intelligence or, at the very least, some small creative spark.
Neither of the above. There was nothing promising in A Friend for Mickey. If it vaguely echoes – as I later imagined – the opening paragraph about Baby Tuckoo and his friend the moocow of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it can only be at the most fundamental archetypal level: an isolated child, the voyage down the road, the search for a boon companion. No, if books were to be a part of my life it was likely that somebody else was going to have to write them.
But once I had read, indeed memorized, the available Dr Seuss books, it wasn’t entirely clear what to read next. Nothing was as good as them. My parents cast about for tempting material, but their frustration reflected something about the culture in which they found themselves: the choices were limited. There were the Babar books, but he (King of the Elephants!), his Queen Celeste and their children Po
m, Flora and Alexander were rather inferior elephants compared to Horton. They didn’t hatch a single egg between them. A series of deliciously illustrated books about Madeline and some nuns interested me for a time, but the texts were dull compared to Dr Seuss, and Madeline was too small and inexplicably fond of lining up in rows. No, children were better catered for by the comics (the years 1949/1950 alone saw the first strips of Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, Pogo and Dennis the Menace), and shortly by that captivating new medium, television, than by the written word.
By the middle of the 1950s the effect of television on reading was becoming evident. We loved The Howdy Doody Show, a captivatingly inane programme hosted by a toothy, freckled, red-haired puppet who had absolutely nothing to say for himself. He didn’t need to. He was there. At the age of four Ruthie, a beautiful and silent child who loitered on the edge of things, partaking rather than participating, was asked, as dessert was being served by our neighbours in the upstairs apartment, if she liked jelly roll?
‘I love him!’ she replied. ‘What channel is he on?’
Within a year we got a TV too, and we spent our time either in front of it, or begging to be in front of it, though there was almost nothing worth watching. But it sure was better than reading.
In 1955, Rudolf Flesch’s bestselling book Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It caused such national consternation that even Life magazine, hardly a bastion of high literary culture, took up the cause. Its answer? We needed more Seuss books! In 1957, the obliging doctor responded with The Cat in the Hat and, sure enough, it sold huge quantities. Kids know quality when they see it: to this day 25 per cent of American children read a Dr Seuss title as their first book. But Rudolf Flesch missed the real point, because he thought that American child illiteracy resulted from bad teaching, whereas it is clear in retrospect that the very activity of reading was being superseded. Within a couple of generations, not merely many children, but their parents too, would admit without shame that they have never read a book.