The Romans had a different bed (lectus) for each of several different purposes, including beds for reading and writing. The forms of these beds did not vary much; the legs were turned, and most were decorated with inlay and bronze mounts.23 In the darkness of the bedroom (in the cubiculum, usually in the farthest corner of the house) the Roman sleeping-bed would sometimes serve as a not very congenial reading-bed; by the light of a candle made from wax-soaked cloth, the lucubrum, the Romans would read and “lucubrate”24 in relative quiet. Trimalchio, the parvenu of Petronius’s Satyricon, is brought into the banquet room “supported by piles of miniature cushions” on a bed which serves several functions. Boasting that he’s not one to look down on learning — he has two libraries, “one Greek and the other Latin” — he offers to compose a few impromptu lines of verse which he then reads to the assembled guests:25 both Trimalchio’s writing and the reading are performed while lying on the same ostentatious lectus.
The Roman nobleman portrayed on the inside wall of his sarcophagus would have read his scrolls in this reclining position. (photo credit 10.2)
In the early years of Christian Europe, and well into the twelfth century, ordinary beds were simple, disposable objects, often left behind during the forced retreats from war and famine. Since only the rich had elaborate beds, and few but the rich had books, ornate beds and books became symbols of the family’s wealth. Eustathius Boilas, a Byzantine aristocrat of the eleventh century, left in his will a bible, several books of hagiography and history, a Dream Key, a copy of the popular Romance of Alexander and a gilded bed.26
Monks had plain cots in their cells, and there they could read in a little more comfort than that provided by their hard benches and desks. An illuminated manuscript of the thirteenth century shows a young, bearded monk on his cot, dressed in his habit, a white pillow behind his back and his legs wrapped up in a grey blanket. The curtain separating his bed from the rest of the room has been hitched up. On a trestle table are three open books, and three more lie on top of his legs, ready for consultation, while in his hands he holds a double wax tablet and a stylus. Apparently he has sought refuge in bed from the cold; his boots are sitting on a painted bench and he is working on his reading in seemingly happy quietude.
A monk sits reading in his bed on a cold winter’s night, in an illuminated thirteenth-century French manuscript. (photo credit 10.3)
In the fourteenth century, books passed from the exclusive hands of the nobility and the clergy to those of the bourgeoisie. The aristocracy became the model for the nouveaux riches: if the nobles read, then they too would read (a skill the bourgeois had acquired as merchants); if the nobles slept on sculpted wood among ornate draperies, then so would they. To be seen owning books and elaborate beds became indicative of one’s social standing. The bedroom became not only the room in which the bourgeois slept and made love; it became the repository of collected goods — books included — which at night could be guarded from within the stronghold of the bed.27 Aside from the books, few other objects were on display; most of them would be shut away in chests and boxes, protected from the corruption of moths and rust.
From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the best bed was the grand prize of a forfeited estate.28 Books and beds were valuable chattels (notoriously, Shakespeare bequeathed his “second-best bed” to his wife, Anne Hathaway) which, unlike most property, could be owned by individual members of the family. At a time when women were allowed to possess very few private goods, they owned books, and passed them on to their daughters more frequently than to their sons. As early as 1432, a certain Joanna Hilton of Yorkshire left a Romance, With the 10 Commandments, a Romance of the Seven Sages and a Roman de la Rose to her daughter in her will.29 Excepted were the expensive prayer-books and illuminated bibles, usually part of the family patrimony and therefore of the eldest son’s inheritance.30
The Playfair Book of Hours, a French illuminated volume from the late fifteenth century, shows on one of its pages the Birth of the Virgin. Saint Anne, the Virgin’s mother, is being presented with the infant by the midwife. Saint Anne is depicted as a noble lady, probably not unlike Chaucer’s Duchesse (in the Middle Ages, Saint Anne’s family acquired a reputation for having been wealthy). Saint Anne is sitting upright in a half-tester bed that has been draped in a red cloth with a golden pattern. She is fully clothed; she’s wearing a blue dress with gold embroidery, and her head and neck are decorously covered by a white mantle. (Only from the eleventh to the fifteenth century did people normally sleep naked; a thirteenth-century marriage contract included the stipulation that “a wife should not sleep in a chemise without her husband’s consent”.)31 A lime-green sheet — green is the colour of birth, the triumph of spring over winter — hangs on both sides of the bed. A white sheet is folded over the red cloth that covers the bed; on this sheet, in Saint Anne’s lap, lies an open book. And yet, in spite of the intimacy suggested by the little book (probably a book of prayers), in spite of the protective curtains, the room doesn’t look like a very private place. The midwife appears to have walked in quite naturally; one thinks of all those other depictions of the birth and death of Mary, in which the bed is assiduously surrounded by either well-wishers or mourners, men, women and children, and sometimes even the occasional dog drinking distractedly from a basin in a corner. This room of birth and forthcoming death is not a space Saint Anne has created for herself.
A detail from the fifteenth-century Playfair Book of Hours, chronicling the life of the Virgin. (photo credit 10.4)
In Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bedrooms — like almost every other room in the house — were also passageways, so that a bedroom did not necessarily guarantee peace and quiet for such activities as reading. Even curtaining a bed and filling it with one’s personal belongings was obviously not enough; a bed required a room of its own. (The wealthy Chinese of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had two types of bed, and each one created its own private space: the movable k’ang, which served the triple purpose of sleeping platform, table and seat and was sometimes heated by pipes running underneath it, and a free-standing construction divided into compartments, a sort of room within a room.)32
By the eighteenth century, even though bedrooms were still not undisturbed spaces, staying in bed to read — in Paris, at least — had become common enough for Saint Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, the philanthropic French educator canonized in 1900, to warn against the sinful dangers of this idle pastime. “It is thoroughly indecent and unmannerly to idly chit-chat, gossip or sport in bed,” he wrote in The Rules of Decorum in Christian Civility, published in 1703. “Imitate not certain persons who busy themselves in reading and other matters; stay not in bed if it be not to sleep, and your virtue shall much profit from it.”33 And Jonathan Swift, at about the same time, ironically suggested that books read in bed should be given an airing: “In the Time when you leave the Windows open for Air,” he advises the chamber-maid in charge of cleaning her mistress’s bedroom, “leave Books, or something else on the Window-seat, that they may get Air too.”34 In New England in the mid-eighteenth century, the Argand lamp, improved by Jefferson, was supposed to have furthered the habit of reading in bed. “It was observed at once that dinner parties, formerly lighted by candles, ceased to be as brilliant as of old,” because those who had excelled in talking now took to their bedrooms to read.35
Complete privacy in the bedroom, even privacy in bed, was still not easy to come by. Even if the family was rich enough to have individual beds and bedrooms, social conventions demanded that certain communal ceremonies take place there. For example, it was customary for ladies to “receive” in their bedchambers, fully dressed but lying in bed, propped up by a multitude of pillows; visitors would sit in the ruelle or “alleyway” between the bed and the partition. Antoine de Courtin, in his New Treatise of Civility as Practised in France by Honest Folk,36 sternly recommended “that the bed-curtains be kept drawn” to comply with the laws of decency, and noted t
hat “it is unbecoming, in the presence of persons of whom one is not a superior, to fling oneself on the bed and from there conduct a conversation.” At Versailles, the ritual of the waking of the king — the famous lever du Roi — became a highly elaborate procedure in which six different hierarchies of the nobility took turns proceeding into the royal bedchamber and carrying out appointed honours such as slipping on — or off — the royal left or right sleeve, or reading to the royal ear.
Even the nineteenth century was reluctant to recognize the bedroom as a private place. Demanding that attention be paid to this “sleeping-room in which nearly half of one’s life is passed,” Mrs. Haweis, in the chapter “Homes for the Happy” of her influential book The Art of Housekeeping, complained that “bachelors — why not brides? — sometimes disguise and adorn the bedroom, where space is precious, with sofa-beds, Chippendale or old French closed washstands, palm-plants and gipsy-tables, that it may serve as a thoroughfare without a suspicion that anybody but a canary ever sleeps in it.”37 “Commend us,” wrote Leigh Hunt in 1891, “to a bedchamber of the middle order, such as it was set out about a hundred years back,” in which he’d have “windows with seats, and looking upon some green place” and “two or three small shelves of books”.38
For Edith Wharton, the aristocratic American novelist, the bedroom became the only refuge from nineteenth-century ceremony where she could read and write at ease. “Visualize her bed,” suggested Cynthia Ozick in a discussion of Wharton’s craft. “She used a writing board. Her breakfast was brought to her by Gross, the housekeeper, who almost alone was privy to this inmost secret of the bedchamber. (A secretary picked up the pages from the floor for typing.) Out of bed, she would have had to be, according to her code, properly dressed, and this meant stays. In bed, her body was free, and freed her pen.”39 Free also was her reading; in this private space she did not have to explain to visitors why she had chosen a book or what she thought of it. So important was this horizontal workplace that once, at the Hotel Esplanade in Berlin, Wharton had “a minor fit of hysterics because the bed in her hotel room was not properly situated; not until it had been moved to face the window did she settle down and begin to find Berlin ‘incomparable’.”40
Colette’s social constraints differed from those imposed on Wharton, but on her personal life too society constantly intruded. In her time, Wharton was seen to write — at least partly — from the authority granted her by her social standing; Colette was considered far more “outrageous, audacious, perverse”,41 so that when she died, in 1954, the Catholic Church refused her religious burial. In the last years of her life Colette took to her bed, driven by illness but also by a wish to have a space entirely of her own devising. Here, in her apartment on the third floor of the Palais Royal, in her radeau-lit — “the bed-raft”, as she christened it — she slept and ate, received her friends and acquaintances, phoned, wrote and read. The Princess of Polignac had given her a table that fitted exactly over the bed, and served her as desk. Propped up against the pillows as when she had been a child in Saint-Sauveuren-Puisaye, with the symmetrical gardens of the Palais Royal unfurling through the window to her left, and all her collected treasures — her glass objects, her library, her cats — spreading out to her right,42 Colette read and reread, in what she called this solitude en hauteur,43 the old books she loved best.
Colette celebrating her eightieth birthday in 1953. (photo credit 10.5)
There is a photograph taken of her a year before her death, on her eightieth birthday. Colette is in bed, and the hands of the maid have deposited on her table — which is cluttered with magazines, cards and flowers — a birthday cake ablaze; the flames rise high, too high to seem mere candles, as if the old woman were an ancient camper in front of her familiar fire, as if the cake were a book alight, bursting into that darkness sought by Proust for literary creation. The bed has become at last so private, so intimate, that it is now a world unto itself, where everything is possible.
Walt Whitman in his house in Camden, New Jersey. (photo credit 10.6)
METAPHORS OF READING
n March 26, 1892, Walt Whitman died in the house he had bought less than ten years before, in Camden, New Jersey — looking like an Old Testament king or, as Edmund Gosse described him, “a great old Angora Tom”. A picture taken a few years before his death, by the Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins, shows him in his shaggy white mane, sitting by his window, thoughtfully watching the world outside, which was, he had told his readers, a gloss to his writing:
If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,
The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key,
The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.1
Whitman himself is there for the reader’s gaze. Two Whitmans, in fact: the Whitman in Leaves of Grass, “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” but also born everywhere else (“I am of Adelaide … I am of Madrid … I belong in Moscow”);2 and the Whitman born on Long Island, who liked to read romances of adventure, and whose lovers were young men from the city, soldiers, bus drivers. Both became the Whitman who in his old age left his door open for visitors seeking “the sage of Camden”, and both had been offered to the reader, some thirty years earlier, in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass:
Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms — decease calls me forth.3
Years later, in the “death-bed” edition of the often revised and augmented Leaves of Grass, the world does not “second” his words, but becomes the primordial voice; neither Whitman nor his verse mattered; the world itself sufficed, since it was nothing more or less than a book open for us all to read. In 1774, Goethe (whom Whitman read and admired) had written:
See how Nature is a living book,
Misunderstood but not beyond understanding.4
Now, in 1892, days before his death, Whitman agreed:
In every object, mountain, tree, and star — in every birth and life,
As part of each — evolv’d from each — meaning, behind the ostent,
A mystic cipher waits infolded.5
I read this for the first time in 1963, in a shaky Spanish version. One day in high school, a friend of mine who wanted to be a poet (we had just turned fifteen at the time) came running up to me with a book he had discovered, a blue-covered Austral edition of Whitman’s poems printed on rough, yellowed paper and translated by someone whose name I have forgotten. My friend was an admirer of Ezra Pound, whom he paid the compliment of imitating, and, since readers have no respect for the chronologies arduously established by well-paid academics, he thought Whitman was a poor imitation of Pound. Pound himself had tried to set the record straight, proposing “a pact” with Whitman:
It was you who broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root —
Let there be commerce between us.6
But my friend would not be convinced. I accepted his verdict for the sake of friendship, and it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I came across a copy of Leaves of Grass in English and learned that Whitman had intended his book for me:
Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants.7
I read Whitman’s biography, first in a series intended for the young which expurgated any reference to his sexuality and rendered him bland to the point of non-existence, and then in Geoffrey Dutton’s Walt Whitman, instructive but somewhat too sober. Years later, Philip Callow’s biography gave me a clearer picture of the man and allowed me to reconsider a couple of questions I had asked myself earlier: if Whitman had seen his reader as himself, who was this reader Whitman had in mind? And how had Whitman in turn become a reader?
Whitman learned to read in a Quaker
school in Brooklyn, by what was known as the “Lancastrian method” (after the English Quaker Joseph Lancaster). A single teacher, helped by child monitors, was in charge of a class of some one hundred students, ten to a desk. The youngest were taught in the basement, the older girls on the ground floor and the older boys on the floor above. One of his teachers commented that he found him “a good-natured boy, clumsy and slovenly in appearance, but not otherwise remarkable”. The few textbooks were supplemented by the books his father, a fervent democrat who named his three sons after the founders of the United States, had at home. Many of these books were political tracts by Tom Paine, the socialist Frances Wright and the eighteenth-century French philosopher Constantin-François, Comte de Volney, but there were also collections of poetry and a few novels. His mother was illiterate but, according to Whitman, “excelled in narrative” and “had great mimetic powers”.8 Whitman first learned his letters from his father’s library; their sounds he learned from the stories he had heard his mother tell.
Whitman left school at eleven and entered the offices of the lawyer James B. Clark. Clark’s son, Edward, liked the bright boy and bought him a subscription to a circulating library. This, said Whitman later, “was the signal event of my life up to that time.” At the library he borrowed and read the Arabian Nights — “every single volume” — and the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. A few years afterwards, at the age of sixteen, he acquired “a stout, well-cramm’d one thousand page octavo volume … containing Walter Scott’s poetry entire” and this he avidly consumed. “Later, at intervals, summers and falls, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a stretch, down in the country, or to Long Island’s seashores — there, in the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old and New Testaments, and absorb’d (probably to greater advantage for me than in any library or indoor room — it makes such difference where you read) Shakespeare, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindu poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante’s among them. As it happened, I read the latter mostly in an old wood.” And Whitman asks, “I have wonder’d since why I was not overwhelm’d by those mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as described, in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading landscape and vistas, or the sea rolling in.”9 The place of reading, as Whitman suggests, is important, not only because it provides a physical setting for the text being read, but because it suggests, by juxtaposing itself with the place on the page, that both share the same hermeneutic quality, both tempting the reader with the challenge of elucidation.
A History of Reading Page 17