The Best American Essays 2013

by Robert Atwan

  STEVEN HARVEY

  The Book of Knowledge

  FROM River Teeth

  IN 1952, WHEN I was three, my parents bought a set of The Book of Knowledge, ten hefty volumes bound in maroon leather, each filled with questions from the “Department of Wonder.” Like sentinels posted at the gates of wisdom, the books stood proudly on a shelf between the glossy forelocks of equestrian bookends, each volume embossed with a golden torch. It was, my mother explained in one of the hundreds of letters she wrote to my grandmother, a purchase as much for her as for her boy: “I have really been enjoying it. I’ve been studying the subjects of music and art so far.” Reading in The Book of Knowledge was one of the ways she fended off the depression that swept over her during these years, especially when my father traveled. “That is how I’ve been spending some of my evening while Max is away.”

  The Book of Knowledge evolved from The Children’s Encyclopædia, the inspiration of Arthur Mee, born to a working-class family in Stapleford, England, whose formal education ended when he was fourteen. Questions posed by Mee’s daughter, Marjorie, were the direct inspiration for the encyclopedia. In his letter “To Boys and Girls Everywhere,” published in the first volume of The Children’s Encyclopædia, Mee writes that Marjorie’s mind was filled with “the great wonder of the Earth. What does the world mean? And why am I here? Where are all the people who have been and gone? Where does the rose come from? Who holds the stars up? What is it that seems to talk to me when the world is dark and still?” Mee’s wife had “thought and thought” about these questions “and answered this and answered that until she could answer no more. Oh for a book that will answer all the questions!” she complained. The Children’s Encyclopædia was born.

  What set his book apart, Mee explained, was the belief in children’s eagerness for knowledge and their capacity for wonder. But he knew that his book also filled an important gap for adults. It “had the power to make plain to the average man, woman, and child the aspects and imports of the problems which the very men who had wrested them from nature could not make so plain.” It offered up the mysteries of the few for the rest of us. By the time The Children’s Encyclopædia had evolved into The Book of Knowledge, Mee had added the “Department of Wonder,” and each volume contained sections devoted to “wonder questions” like the ones Marjorie posed to her perplexed parents.

  For my mother, who had dropped out of nursing school when she was nineteen to marry my father, the gaps in her education were becoming an embarrassment. Born Roberta Maxine Reinhardt and called Bobbie, she had been the darling of her parents and of the small Kansas town of Glen Elder where she grew up. Pretty and bright, she made nearly perfect grades, but not without help. “As I remember I used to make A on every theme you wrote for me,” she mentioned in one letter to my grandmother. A little unsure of herself when she entered nursing school in 1946, she created elaborate study schedules, but soon she found that she was good at school and liked her classes, which included American literature as well as courses in child guidance, microbiology, the history of nursing, nursing arts, physical education, home economics, and something called “the Home Project.” As she pursued her studies she became more confident: “I’m so thrilled about my subjects. There is an awfully lot of reading to do, but it is interesting.” Anxieties about how hard the classes would be proved unfounded, and she flourished in the program. “I’ve been wondering how I would like my nursing subjects—it is play to study them.”

  After she married, that confidence in her abilities slowly eroded, especially when my father joined the pharmaceutical company American Cyanamid as a managing director and our young family moved from Dodge City, Kansas, to Nanuet, New York, a suburb of the city. In the 1952 letter about buying The Book of Knowledge, she describes a lavish dinner party served by maids. “Of course the conversation got around to operas and plays,” she complains, “as it always does here”; she did not feel comfortable again, she adds wryly, “until they all started talking about the pigs in Missouri.” She admits that it was “an educational evening” and, after it was over, “a nice experience to have” but laments that she was caught off-guard: “Had I known beforehand I would have studied up.” The Book of Knowledge was her way to “study up.” “I’ve done very little brain work since I got out of school,” she writes. “All you have to do is move around and meet new people to realize how dumb you really are.” For my mother the gilded volumes of The Book of Knowledge served as a self-help textbook on culture.

  For me they were simply wondrous. I liked to lie on my stomach on the floor in front of the bookcase, my feet kicked up behind me, just taking in the strange and glorious pictures: color illustrations in soft pastels from The Book of the Dead, which was left, the caption inaccurately tells us, “in the tombs of Egypt for the dead to read.” A black-and-white cartoon of the globe in a ball cap, beaded in sweat and pulling down on a scale, to illustrate “Volume, Mass, and Weight.” A four-page spread called “The Glory of the Grass” with detailed colored drawings of foxtail, rye, oat, timothy, manna, bearded darnel, broom, barley, reed, and wheat. Another four-page spread of “Beautiful Birds of the World,” with a peacock in full array on the first page, surrounded by a blue-crowned motmot, a Leadbeater’s cockatoo, and a Groove pygmy goose, along with nine other brightly colored birds. And in Volume Eighteen, the fourteen-page spread of butterflies and moths and beetles that begins with a peacock eye, an American species of butterfly, and concludes, 236 individual illuminated drawings later, with the European beetle called the great agrilus.

  The famous frontispiece to the first edition of The Children’s Encyclopædia shows a boy in knickers and girl in bloomers looking into a universe: a system of eight planets, alongside comets, stars, and galaxies, surrounding the sun, which sends a halo of sunbeams out into the darkness. But the inside cover illustration of each volume of The Book of Knowledge that I grew up with suggests a similar grandeur with a modern twist. In it, a boy in shorts and girl wearing a skirt stand alert and excited on a red book floating toward an island of worldly wonders, including a telescope, a pagoda, totem poles, a factory, the faces of Mount Rushmore, and a giraffe. Overhead soar a rocket, a dual-propeller commercial airliner, a helicopter, and some sort of futuristic V-shaped spacecraft. “Here is a gift to the nation,” Arthur Mee wrote to the readers of The Book of Knowledge. “It is a story that will never fail for children who will never tire; and it is the best of all stories, told in the simplest words, to the greatest of all ends.”

  And what is the end? On April 6, 1961, when I was twelve, my mother drove into a park near Deerfield, Illinois, where we lived at the time, and killed herself with a gun. Whatever knowledge she had gleaned from those books, as well as all that was left in her heart and mind of love, joy, sorrow, and agony, was swept away too. The obliteration ripples out from there. My father did not talk about the past, and the subject of my mother rarely came up after my father remarried and the family began anew. I remembered almost nothing of my life or her life before the suicide except a few vivid flashes—images, really—with the rest blown away by her death, and for years I was resigned to my ignorance, and perhaps even content with it. I grew up, raised by a caring stepmother who probably got more than she bargained for when she took on, along with my dad, my brother and me, and I acquired a wonderful older stepsister who socialized me, and we did not dwell on our history. I went to college and married, and when I was in my thirties, my grandmother gave me the letters of my mother, but by then I had a job and a family with four children. I worked hard and was not depressed or suicidal. Why would I want to read the letters of a mother who killed herself before I could even get to know her?

  When I turned sixty, I was given a new office at work, and I used that change as an opportunity to discard files, magazines, and correspondence—the stuff that I had accumulated over the years. I threw away books that I thought I would never part with. My wife, Barbara, gave me a rule of thumb: if you feel the urge to sneeze when you
open it, toss it out. In the end I threw away or recycled fourteen large plastic bags of junk, and I drove back from the transfer station feeling lighter. But when I got to the boxes of my mother’s letters, I could not throw them away. I held them in my hand—they were dusty and definitely gave me the urge to sneeze—but I could not shove them in a plastic trash bag.

  I made a vow that if I kept them, I would read them.

  So, at the age of sixty-one, I bought a set of the 1952 edition of The Book of Knowledge, like the ones that I’d had as a child, and I read my mother’s letters. Barbara raised an eyebrow when I mentioned The Book of Knowledge, a twenty-volume set bound in ten thick books, since she had been trying for several years to weed old books from our shelves at home, just as I had at the office.

  “Are you going to buy them?” she asked. I think she was making soup or maybe spaghetti.

  “They have a set for $350 at Amazon.”

  Barbara, poker-faced, just kept stirring the pot.

  Eventually I found a complete set available at AbeBooks online for $150 and put in my order. Sheepishly, I promised Barbara that I would keep the box they came in and resell them online as soon as I had finished with them.

  When they arrived they were as magnificent as I had remembered, each handsome volume feeling heavy in the hand. Substantial, I thought, cracking open the cover of Volume One. Quotations by the likes of Louis Bromfield, Eleanor Roosevelt, aviation pioneer Captain Harry F. Guggenheim, and Lou Little, the head football coach at Columbia University, added authority to weight.

  “The poet Marlowe might have been thinking of The Book of Knowledge when he spoke of ‘infinite riches in a little room,’” Mrs. James P. McGranery, a member of the National Executive Committee of the Girl Scouts of the USA, explained.

  “There is only one good. That is knowledge,” John S. Knight, the publisher of Knight Newspapers, announced, quoting Socrates while glowering at me from his photograph. He added a stern admonition:

  “There is only one evil. That is ignorance.”

  We fanned the books out on the floor and began leafing through them, stopping at the colored spreads, Barbara running her fingers over the brightly illuminated pages. The books spoke of a time after the Second World War when knowledge and progress and hope were allies, a time that she and I remembered dimly now as we ended the first decade of the twenty-first century. Barbara found a page that asked, “Could We Ever Travel to the Moon?” and I cringed at the outdated question, but she smiled. “Listen to this,” she said later, reading at random an article in Volume Thirteen called “Government and Taxes,” which argued that simply taxing in proportion to income, as the Constitution says, is unfair. “Taxes should be levied in such a way as to establish equality of sacrifice between rich and poor.”

  “Equality of sacrifice,” she repeated, “imagine that.”

  Before long she was eyeing the bookshelves we had been hoping to clear. “We’ll make space right there.”

  “These books are pretty out-of-date,” I said apologetically, opening a volume and resisting the urge to sneeze.

  She was thinking about our new grandchildren.

  “They could stand to read this.”

  She rapped the book with her knuckle. Decision made.

  In retrospect I regret that I waited so long to read my mother’s letters. There were 406 in all, carefully arranged by my grandmother in shoeboxes. Over time, as the family leafed through them, they had gotten out of order and had been placed in different areas of the house before most were carted off to the office. It was not until six months after I finally brought them home that I spread them out on a pool table and put them in order. I boxed them and marked off each of the years with strips of manila cardboard, tickets to the past extending back in time from 1960 to 1945, and one chilly morning in November 2010, some fifty years after my mother’s death, I started to read the entire set through.

  My mother’s writing style is direct and friendly, and—since she saw my grandmother as a confidante, especially in the early years of her marriage—often candid. As she got older, and more troubled, she tried to hide her depression, but she had become so used to confiding in her mother that the truth comes out anyway in the letters. As I read about her life, my memories, lying like ashes in me, were sparked. The steady chronology of a letter or two each week allowed me to place the few vivid memories I had left in a context, so that I saw how they fit and understood why they, of all in my lost past, had remained as a glowing remnant. My dad, in that time before I remembered him, came back clearly as well. Most of all, I got to know my mother at last—not the stereotypical fifties mother forced to play an uncomfortable role, though she was that, but the real person with her achievements and flaws and hopes and many, many fears. As she married, left college, moved away from home, and had children of her own, I watched her change and grow, darken and retreat. The return addresses evolved from Bobbie Reinhardt, a young nursing student in 1942 at the University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City, to Mrs. M. J. Harvey in Dodge City in 1947. By the time the family had moved to New York, she dropped the Mrs. altogether, and in Chicago in 1959 she retreated entirely by writing the return address using my father’s name and title: Dr. M. J. Harvey.

  Every letter stood alone—capturing a particular time and, more important, mood—and yet each danced in consort with the others. As my mother married and had children, the mobile of her life grew heavier and more complicated, with many moving parts, and by the time of her death the structure groaned under the weight of accumulated anxieties and regrets. Armed with letters and a children’s encyclopedia, I was determined to know who this woman was and, with luck, claim a legacy of beauty and wonder from a devastating event.

  Wonder Question: “Does the earth make a sound as it rotates?”

  “No,” The Book of Knowledge answers, the “earth spins silently in space. It spins all in one piece, and that means not only the solid earth and the waters but the blanket of air above us as well. All spins round, never pausing.” Like some enormous carny ride, the globe rotates at a thousand miles per hour, and yet the mobile over my shoulder hangs motionless by a thread and going nowhere, expectant and watchful as an acrobat holding a pose. “If the air stood still we might hear the earth whooshing through it,” but the “air is part of the earth and moves with it,” creating the illusion of stillness.

  Even if we could step off the earth—like the boy and girl in the illustration for The Children’s Encyclopædia—and stand on some promontory separate from the planet and listen hard, we would not hear the earth spinning. The scene would unfold like a slow-motion silent film, the incredible rush of the whirling planet registering on our eyes like the imperceptible motion of the slow hand on a watch and on our ears as a held breath. The other celestial objects would lumber along in mute procession, with vast stretches of nothing at all between them. To hear any sound, “we must have vibrations, or waves, or trembling.” But space is a nearly empty vacuum, and no matter how dark and gloomy and terrifying emptiness may be, trembling requires “something substantial” to be felt.

  In space there is “no substance to be set trembling.”

  When she was five or six, Roberta trembled beside a toy tricycle that was built to look like a single-prop airplane. My grandparents took a Brownie photograph of her standing beside the new toy, with the shingled side of their house as the background. The front of the trike had a propeller with a circle of pistons behind it, and the tailpiece at the end had numbers stamped in it to make it look authentic. The cockpit swooped down so that the rider could sit down completely and pedal. The toy is large—longer than she is tall—and it is clearly made of metal, with dimples where bolts attach the wheels to the body. The wheels are inflatable rubber tires with shiny metal hubcaps. In the photograph my mother poses proudly, wearing Mary Janes, stockings, a pleated dress, a V-neck sweater, a beaded necklace, and a knit cap. She is dressed for cold weather, and since she was born in June, this is probably not a birthday gif
t but a Christmas present. A shadow of some sort, perhaps the shadow of a tree, rises like a thin stream of smoke from behind her shoulder and spreads across the shingles of the wall, the adumbration folding ominously, like the black contrail of a plane in trouble, and turning on her. Hurtling through space at a thousand miles an hour, my mother may be trembling a bit from the cold, but otherwise she does not feel the future rushing toward her. She cannot see the crash ahead. The air, after all, is moving too, at one with a planet of rocks and stones and trees and spinning silently in a universe largely without substance. The girl who is my mother leans casually with her open hand on the wing of the toy while a ribbon of black smoke billows across the shingles behind her. Unaware and smiling, she looks directly at me.

  Wonder Question: “Why do faces in some pictures seem to follow us?”

  “The rule is very simple,” The Book of Knowledge says. “If the sitter is looking at the painter or at the camera, then wherever you stand, he will seem to be looking at you.” I lift the photo of my mother beside her new toy and tilt it under the lamp, first to the right and then the left, and her eyes stay on me even though the nose of the airplane seems to bob away and return, the world of the photo turning on the axis of her eyes. And her smile—yes, it also seems to keep smiling at me, no matter which way I turn the stiff and fading image.