With the assistance of friends in the YMCA, who supplied him with $8,500, Comstock was able to set up the society for which he became famous. Two years before his death, he told an interviewer in New York, “In the forty-one years I have been here, I have convicted persons enough to fill a passenger train of sixty-one coaches, sixty coaches containing sixty passengers each and the sixty-first almost full. I have destroyed 160 tons of obscene literature.”18
A contemporary American caricature of the self-appointed censor Anthony Comstock. (photo credit 20.3)
Comstock’s fervour was also responsible for at least fifteen suicides. After he had a former Irish surgeon, William Haynes, thrown in prison “for publishing 165 different kinds of lewd literature”, Haynes killed himself. Shortly afterwards, Comstock was about to catch the Brooklyn ferry (he later recalled) when “a Voice” told him to proceed to Haynes’s house. He arrived as the widow was unloading the printing-plates of the forbidden books from a delivery wagon. With great agility Comstock leapt onto the wagoner’s seat and rushed the wagon to the YMCA, where the plates were destroyed.19
A justification for censorship in a nineteenth-century American comic strip entitled “The Influence of the Press”. (photo credit 20.4)
What books did Comstock read? He was an unwitting follower of Oscar Wilde’s facetious advice: “I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.” Sometimes, however, he dipped into the books before destroying them, and was aghast at what he read. He found the literature of France and Italy “little better than histories of brothels and prostitutes in these lust-crazed nations. How often are found in these villainous stories, heroines, lovely, excellent, cultivated, wealthy, and charming in every way, who have for their lovers married men; or, after marriage, lovers flock about the charming young wife, enjoying privileges belonging only to the husband!” Even the classics were not above reproach. “Take, for instance, a well-known book written by Boccaccio,” he wrote in his book, Traps for the Young. The book was so filthy that he would do anything “to prevent this, like a wild beast, from breaking loose and destroying the youth of the country.”20 Balzac, Rabelais, Walt Whitman, Bernard Shaw and Tolstoy were among his victims. Comstock’s everyday reading was, he said, the Bible.
Comstock’s methods were savage but superficial. He lacked the perception and patience of more sophisticated censors, who will mine a text with excruciating care in search of buried messages. In 1981, for instance, the military junta led by General Pinochet banned Don Quixote in Chile, because the general believed (quite rightly) that it contained a plea for individual freedom and an attack on conventional authority.
Comstock’s censoring limited itself to placing suspect works, in a rage of abuse, on a catalogue of the damned. His access to books was also limited; he could only chase them as they appeared in public, by which time many had escaped into the hands of eager readers. The Catholic Church was far ahead of him. In 1559, the Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquisition had published the first Index of Forbidden Books — a list of books that the Church considered dangerous to the faith and morals of Roman Catholics. The Index, which included books censored in advance of publication as well as immoral books already published, was never intended as a complete catalogue of all the books banned by the Church. When it was abandoned in June 1966, however, it contained — among hundreds of theological works — hundreds of others by secular writers from Voltaire and Diderot to Colette and Graham Greene. No doubt Comstock would have found such a list useful.
“Art is not above morals. Morals stand first,” Comstock wrote. “Law ranks next as the defender of public morals. Art only comes in conflict with the law when its tendency is obscene, lewd or indecent.” This led the New York World to ask, in an editorial, “Has it really been determined that there is nothing wholesome in art unless it has clothes on?”21 Comstock’s definition of immoral art, like that of all censors, begs the question. Comstock died in 1915. Two years later, the American essayist H.L. Mencken defined Comstock’s crusade as “the new Puritanism”,… “not ascetic but militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to knock down sinners.”22
Comstock’s conviction was that what he called “immoral literature” perverted the minds of the young, who should busy themselves with higher spiritual matters. This concern is ancient, and not exclusive to the West. In fifteenth-century China, a collection of tales from the Ming Dynasty known as Stories Old and New was so successful that it had to be placed in the Chinese index so as not to distract young scholars from the study of Confucius.23 In the Western world, a milder form of this obsession has expressed itself in a general fear of fiction — at least since the days of Plato, who banned poets from his ideal republic. Madame Bovary’s mother-in-law argued that novels were poisoning Emma’s soul, and convinced her son to stop Emma’s subscription to a book-lender, plunging her further into the swamps of boredom.24 The mother of the English writer Edmund Gosse would allow no novels of any kind, religious or secular, to enter the house. As a very small child, in the early 1800s, she had amused herself and her brothers by reading and making up stories, until her Calvinist governess found out and lectured her severely, telling her that her pleasures were wicked. “From that time forth,” wrote Mrs. Gosse in her diary, “I considered that to invent a story of any kind was a sin.” But “the longing to invent stories grew with violence; everything I heard or read became food for my distemper. The simplicity of truth was not sufficient for me; I must needs embroider imagination upon it, and the folly, vanity and wickedness which disgraced my heart are more than I am able to express. Even now, tho’ watched, prayed and striven against, this is still the sin that most easily besets me. It has hindered my prayers and prevented my improvement, and therefore has humbled me very much.”25 This she wrote at the age of twenty-nine.
Title-page of the Catholic Index, revised for the last time in 1948 and not reprinted after 1966. (photo credit 20.5)
In this belief she brought up her son. “Never in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble, ‘Once upon a time!’ I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with humming-birds, but I had never heard of fairies,” Gosse remembered. “They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in an unquestioning spirit.”26 The parents who took the Hawkins County Public Schools to court in Tennessee in 1980 had obviously not read Gosse’s claim. They argued that an entire elementary school series, which included Cinderella, Goldilocks and The Wizard of Oz, violated their fundamentalist religious beliefs.27
Authoritarian readers who prevent others from learning to read, fanatical readers who decide what can and what cannot be read, stoical readers who refuse to read for pleasure and demand only the retelling of facts that they themselves hold to be true: all these attempt to limit the reader’s vast and diverse powers. But censors can also work in different ways, without need of fire or courts of law. They can reinterpret books to render them serviceable only to themselves, for the sake of justifying their autocratic rights.
In 1967, when I was in my fifth year of high school, a military coup took place in Argentina, led by General Jorge Rafael Videla. What followed was a wave of human-rights abuses such as the country had never seen before. The army’s excuse was that it was fighting a war against terrorists; as General Videla defined it, “a terrorist is not just someone with a gun or bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilization.”28 Among the thousands kidnapped and tortured was a priest, Father Orlando Virgilio Yorio. One day, Father Yorio’s interrogator told him that his reading of the Gospel was false. “You interpreted Christ’s doctrine in too literal a way,” said the man. “Christ spoke of the poor, but when he spoke of the poor he spoke of the poor in spirit and you interpreted this in a literal way and went to live, literally, with poor peopl
e. In Argentina those who are poor in spirit are the rich and in the future you must spend your time helping the rich, who are those who really need spiritual help.”29
Thus, not all the reader’s powers are enlightening. The same act that can bring a text into being, draw out its revelations, multiply its meanings, mirror in it the past, the present and the possibilities of the future, can also destroy or attempt to destroy the living page. Every reader makes up readings, which is not the same as lying; but every reader can also lie, wilfully declaring the text subservient to a doctrine, to an arbitrary law, to a private advantage, to the rights of slave-owners or the authority of tyrants.
Sebastian Brant, author of The Ship of Fools. (photo credit 20.6)
THE BOOK FOOL
hey are all common gestures: pulling the glasses out of a case, cleaning them with a tissue or the hem of the blouse or the tip of the tie, perching them on the nose and steadying them behind the ears before peering at the now lucid page held in front of us. Then pushing them up or sliding them down the glistening bridge of the nose in order to bring the letters into focus and, after a while, lifting them off and rubbing the skin between the eyebrows, screwing the eyelids shut to keep out the siren text. And the final act: taking them off, folding them and inserting them between the pages of the book to mark the place where we left off reading for the night. In Christian iconography, Saint Lucy is represented carrying a pair of eyes on a tray; glasses are, in effect, eyes that poor-sighted readers can pull off and put on at will. They are a detachable function of a body, a mask through which the world can be observed, an insect-like creature carried along like a pet praying mantis. Unobtrusive, sitting cross-legged on a pile of books or standing expectantly in a cluttered corner of a desk, they have become the reader’s emblem, a mark of the reader’s presence, a symbol of the reader’s craft.
It is bewildering to imagine the many centuries before the invention of glasses, during which readers squinted their way through the nebulous outlines of a text, and moving to imagine their extraordinary relief, once glasses were available, at suddenly seeing, almost without effort, a page of writing. A sixth of all humankind is myopic;1 among readers the proportion is much higher, closer to 24 per cent. Aristotle, Luther, Samuel Pepys, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Schiller, Keats, Tennyson, Dr. Johnson, Alexander Pope, Quevedo, Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Kipling, Edward Lear, Dorothy L. Sayers, Yeats, Unamuno, Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce — all had impaired sight. In many people the condition deteriorates, and a remarkable number of famous readers have gone blind in their old age, from Homer to Milton, and on to James Thurber and Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, who began losing his sight in the early thirties and was appointed head of the Buenos Aires National Library in 1955, when he could no longer see, commented on the peculiar fate of the failing reader who is one day granted the realm of books:
Let no one demean to tears or reproach
This declaration of the skill of God
Who with such magnificent irony
Gave me at the same time darkness and the books.2
Borges compared the fate of this reader in the blurred world of “pale vague ashes resembling oblivion and sleep” to the fate of King Midas, condemned to die of hunger and thirst surrounded by food and drink. An episode of the television series The Twilight Zone concerns one such Midas, a voracious reader who alone of all mankind survives a nuclear disaster. All the books in the world are now at his disposal; then, accidentally, he breaks his glasses.
Before the invention of glasses, at least a quarter of all readers would have required extra-large letters to decipher a text. The strain on the eyes of medieval readers was great: the rooms in which they tried to read were darkened in summer to protect them from the heat; in winter the rooms were naturally dark because the windows, necessarily small to keep out the icy drafts, let in only a dusty light. Medieval scribes constantly complained about the conditions in which they had to work, and often scribbled notes about their troubles in the margins of their books, like the one penned in the mid-thirteenth century by a certain Florencio of whom we know virtually nothing except his first name and this mournful description of his craft: “It is a painful task. It extinguishes the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the viscera and the ribs, it brings forth pain to the kidneys, and weariness to the whole body.”3 For poor-sighted readers the work must have been even harder; Patrick Trevor-Roper suggested that they likely felt somewhat more comfortable at night “because darkness is a great equalizer”.4
In Babylon and Rome and Greece, readers whose sight was poor had no other resource than to have their books read to them, usually by slaves. A few found that looking through a disk of clear stone helped. Writing about the properties of emeralds,5 Pliny the Elder noted in passing that the short-sighted Emperor Nero used to watch gladiator combats through an emerald. Whether this magnified the gory details or simply gave them a greenish hue we can’t tell, but the story persisted throughout the Middle Ages and scholars such as Roger Bacon and his teacher, Robert Grosseteste, commented on the jewel’s remarkable property.
But few readers had access to precious stones. Most were condemned to live out their reading hours depending on vicarious reading, or on a slow and painstaking progress as the muscles of their eyes strained to remedy the defect. Then, sometime in the late thirteenth century, the fate of the poor-sighted reader changed.
We don’t know exactly when the change happened, but on February 23, 1306, from the pulpit of the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Giordano da Rivalto of Pisa delivered a sermon in which he reminded his flock that the invention of eyeglasses, “one of the most useful devices in the world”, was already twenty years old. He added, “I’ve seen the man who, before anyone else, discovered and made a pair of glasses, and I spoke to him.”6
Nothing is known of this remarkable inventor. Perhaps he was a contemporary of Giordano, a monk named Spina of whom it was said that “he made glasses and freely taught the art to others”.7 Perhaps he was a member of the Guild of Venetian Crystal Workers, where the craft of eyeglass-making was known as early as 1301, since one of the guild’s rules that year explained the procedure to be followed by anyone “wishing to make eyeglasses for reading”.8 Or perhaps the inventor was a certain Salvino degli Armati, whom a funeral plaque still visible in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence calls “inventor of eyeglasses” and adds, “May God forgive his sins. A.D. 1317”. Another candidate is Roger Bacon, whom we have already encountered as master cataloguer and whom Kipling, in a late story, made witness to the use of an early Arab microscope smuggled into England by an illuminator.9 In the year 1268, Bacon had written, “If anyone examines letters or small objects through the medium of a crystal or glass if it be shaped like the lesser segment of a sphere, with all the convex side towards the eye, he will see the letters far better and larger. Such an instrument is useful to all persons.”10 Four centuries later, Descartes was still praising the invention of glasses: “All the management of our lives depends on the senses, and since that of sight is the most comprehensive and the noblest of these, there is no doubt that inventions that serve to augment its power are among the most useful there can be.”11
The earliest known depiction of eyeglasses is in a 1352 portrait of Cardinal Hugo de St. Cher, in Provence, by Tommaso da Modena.12 It shows the cardinal in full costume, seated at his table, copying from an open book on a shelf slightly above him, to his right. The glasses, known as “rivet spectacles”, consist of two round lenses held in thick frames and hinged above the bridge of the nose, so that the grip can be regulated.
Until well into the fifteenth century, reading-glasses were a luxury; they were expensive, and comparatively few people needed them, since books themselves were in the possession of a select few. After the invention of the printing press and the relative popularization of books, the demand for eyeglasses increased; in England, for instance, pedlars travelling from town to town sold
“cheap continental spectacles”. Makers of spectacles and clips became known in Strasbourg in 1466, barely eleven years after the publication of Gutenberg’s first Bible; in Nuremberg in 1478; and in Frankfurt in 1540.13 It is possible that more and better glasses allowed more readers to become better readers, and to buy more books, and that for this reason glasses became associated with the intellectual, the librarian, the scholar.
The first painted depiction of eyeglasses, on the nose of Cardinal Hugo de Saint Cher, painted by Tommaso da Modena in 1352. (photo credit 21.1)
From the fourteenth century on, glasses were added to numerous paintings, to mark the studious and wise nature of a character. In many depictions of the Dormition or Death of the Virgin, several of the doctors and wise men surrounding her death-bed found themselves wearing eyeglasses of various kinds; in the anonymous eleventh-century Dormition now at the Neuberg Monastery in Vienna, a pair of glasses was added several centuries later to a white-bearded sage being shown a hefty volume by a disconsolate younger man. The implication seems to be that even the wisest among scholars do not possess sufficient wisdom to heal the Virgin and change her destiny.
A History of Reading Page 30