This never came to pass. In the fall I rented a room near school and began growing up. My life was no longer centered on home. What my parents read or didn’t read stopped mattering. I had to learn to cook for myself. I asked my mother how come she had never taught me to cook; aside from using the meat grinder, all I knew were the grilled cheese sandwiches and cocoa and spaghetti in tomato and onion sauce from junior high. Why had she never trained me in the various housewifely arts for which I had had such scorn? She replied that I was always reading and she hadn’t wanted to interrupt me.
I asked my parents if I might have a few of my favorite Harvard Classics in the black leather and gold trim, which had looked so intimidating when I graduated to my sister’s room years earlier. Of course, they agreed. I might have convinced myself, in my intellectual pride, that I was finally ready for Plutarch’s Lives or Virgil’s Aeneid, but I knew in my heart that what I really wanted near me in my solitary room was volume 17, Grimm’s and Andersen’s fairy tales. And that was the one I couldn’t find. I turned the house upside down, with no luck. It was lost, as if my passion had smothered it out of existence. I grieved, and it didn’t help to know the stories could be found in libraries and bookstores: it was the particular volume that I grieved for. Then after a while I accepted the loss. The book became a memory, like a friend who died young, though at that stage of my life I had never had a friend who died young and didn’t know what that felt like. This was the closest I came.
Long after, when I was fully adult, I mentioned my loss to a friend. She had inherited the same set from her parents, she said, and could easily give me her copy of volume 17. I was overjoyed, as if my dead friend had come back to life. So some losses are recoverable, I thought. The book she presented a few days later had the same gold trim, but instead of black leather it was a maroon or mahogany color. Not quite my old friend, even a bit of a violation. I hadn’t known the Harvard Classics were issued in varied colors; that seemed a frivolity out of keeping with their sober mien. I had to amend my thinking: even if some losses are recoverable, what we recover may not be exactly the same. Still, I might as well be humble in accepting fate’s gifts or I would have nothing but memories. I gave the new book a place on the shelf and willed myself to love it. When I passed by, I would gaze fondly at its mahogany spine and try to make it feel welcome, like a foster child—not my own flesh or adopted as my own flesh, but a stranger granted a temporary home—never letting it know that its warm maroon color reminded me of my loss, the stern black book. I didn’t open it very often; it was enough to know I had it.
Just the other day I went to hunt it up and it was gone. Maybe I loaned it to somebody (though I can’t imagine doing that) or gave it to one of my children. But its loss seems curious and symbolic. Not that it felt itself insufficiently loved and therefore slipped away, no, nothing so mystical. Simply that I wasn’t fated to keep it. The story of the book in the longer story of my life flouted the happy ending I had willed. It insisted on ending in real loss, which makes us treasure the intangible gifts of memory. For in the end, even if all my books were to vanish, I would still have them somewhere, if I had read them attentively enough. Maybe the words on the page are not even the true book, in the end, only a gateway to the book that recreates itself in the mind and lasts as long as we do.
In my solitary room near school I often ate alone and had the privilege of reading uninterrupted to my heart’s content. I would feel myself once again—since only when you move on can you truly get anything back—sitting at the kitchen table reading Heidi, the book propped up on the flowered tablecloth and the old silver fork weighty in my hand. Whenever I eat alone and read, I retrieve the whole emotional apparatus that was mine before education and independence and all the experiences that make us unable to respond to books as children do.
Despite the lesson of the Harvard Classics volume 17, I can’t help trying to recoup my losses. After my mother died, my sister and I went through her things and discovered the old meat grinder. We laughed at its primitiveness, recalling the endless grinding. “What shall we do with this old thing?” We had no use for it and tossed it out. Too hastily, for later on I would think of it with regret. And then there came a day when I saw one exactly like it at an outdoor flea market on Cape Cod. I seized it in a passionate embrace, almost staggering under the weight. I paid an absurd sum. When I got it home I didn’t know what to do with it. I wasn’t about to use it, yet it hadn’t quite passed over into the realm of sculpture. I put it in a closet, where it remains. Sometimes in passing, I offer a nod of greeting. I like to think it might be the very same grinder I watched my mother use, and which she allowed me to use when she had the time and patience.
Through another gift of serendipity I also retrieved, just lately, a trace of Miracle at Carville—in the New York Times, of all places, the very medium of my childhood reading performances. A front-page article leaped toward my idle glance, reporting that the Gillis W. Long Hansen’s Disease Center, known to the world as Carville, would probably close very soon. Only 130 patients remained, most of them elderly, and no new residents were being accepted. The article described life at Carville in its early years. What I had read as a boarding-school atmosphere had felt more like a prison, to which the sick were literally spirited away: if they refused to enter, they were forcibly taken by police or bounty hunters. Patients were incarcerated for life under rigid controls, including strict separation of the sexes. “The patients were not allowed to vote or to marry, and outgoing mail was steamed to sterilize it. Escapees were returned in handcuffs. Young women who got pregnant here were not allowed to keep their babies or even to touch them.” Conditions eased slightly over time, as research undermined myths about Hansen’s disease: for one thing, it is not very contagious. Today—as in Kalaupapa—despite their harsh memories, residents are not eager to leave what has become their only home.
One of those interviewed was Betty Martin, author of Miracle at Carville, who, like her heroine, married a fellow patient. They escaped through a hole in the fence but later returned for more treatment. Betty Martin’s life, as sketched in the article, did not resemble the life I recalled from the book. Perhaps, in a writerly mode, she had made all that up. Or perhaps I made it up, my faulty memory falsifying her book: this would make me co-author of a book that never existed. Also the secret sharer of an imagined life, in a way even more convoluted than in my childhood.
I kept waiting, throughout the long article, for a mention of the book that had so ignited my imagination, but it never came. To this day, Betty Martin was labeled as a leper, but not as a writer. Even the name, Betty Martin, attached to her many monthly blood tests over the years, was not her original one. “We changed our names when we got here,” she told the reporter, “to protect our families.” The name was erased, the life thwarted. But the book remains.
On a long car trip some years ago, the kids in the back seat were restless—they were seven and four—and we had run through all our car-trip games. I found my mother’s solution leaping to mind—the genes, in moments of weakness, reasserting themselves. But there was nothing in the car to sew and my daughters didn’t know how to sew anyway; they would never make aprons and caps but would take woodworking and metal shop and bring home funny-shaped boxes of indeterminate use. “Why don’t you teach her to read?” I burst out to the older one, hardly thinking of the implications, only that this would be a long project, longer than the car trip, surely. A few minutes later, having supplied pad and pencil, I heard her explaining the “at” family—cat and rat and fat and hat. (Why does it always start with the “ats”? Because cats and rats and hats figure prominently in nursery rhymes?) Some miles later it was the “an” family, and by the time we arrived, the “its” and “ots” and “ets” had been traversed. And so the younger one was launched on the perilous journey, crossing the bridge that can never be recrossed. I could only watch as mothers do when children leave home to seek their fortune, knowing that from now on her advent
ures would be beyond my ken, I could neither protect nor accompany her. The written word was about to carry her off like the tornado that took Dorothy.
I might have given her some good counsel about reading, except I had yet to find it out for myself. Just as every wine has its time, as a comically sober TV commercial used to inform us, so does every book. There are some we had better read while we are young, for their time will pass along with ours. Not that they’re children’s books; for a true reader, that sort of designation is immaterial, even arbitrary. Little Women has held up through several rereadings, and not through any cozy appeal to my putative inner child. It offers the same enduring qualities it always did: the allure of character shaping destiny, and a certain harmonious vision of personal evolution. Nor do books fail us—or we them—because they are fairy tales: as André Breton writes in The Surrealist Manifesto, calling for grown-up fairy tales, “The faculties do not change radically. Fear, the attraction of the unusual, chance, the taste for things extravagant are all devices which we can always call upon without fear of deception.”
What we do leave behind are half-conscious paradigms of the world that we held tentatively, on spec, as it were. And if we love a book for its correspondence to one of these tentative visions, our love will evaporate along with our vision. I have not been able to take Hemingway seriously since my senior year of high school, when I wrote a heartfelt paper on For Whom the Bell Tolls. Since then, Hemingway imitations and parodies have become a fad among young writers, but to me Hemingway himself is the unmatchable parody. A sadder loss was Tender Is the Night, which won my eighteen-year-old heart; seductiveness is Fitzgerald’s chief talent, and eighteen-year-olds are eminently seducible. Some twenty years later I decided it was time to revisit his work. The Great Gatsby was happily unaltered, or at least I was unaltered in relation to it. But some strange sea change had overtaken Tender Is the Night; I couldn’t finish it; it had become a babble of silliness. It isn’t, of course, only I have lost the exaggerated romanticism required to read it. I wish the book no ill. I hope exaggerated romanticism still thrives elsewhere.
Even though I shunned the movie of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter out of misbegotten loyalty, I can’t say I reread Carson McCullers’s books. I’m afraid I’d feel a certain dismay, like coming upon a photo of a great love of one’s youth with the eyes of middle age. Imagine pining over that! Not that I’d find her books unworthy, just so oppressively young, so weighted by youth’s Gothic glooms, manias, and succulent indulgences. Why violate all of that by my more stringent reading of today? No doubt it’s my own Gothic glooms and adolescent manias—their purple afterglow—that I don’t care to violate. I may be past them, but that is no reason to reject them.
(An opposite case is Willa Cather, who was standard high school reading in my day: teachers favored her direct language and presented the novels as healthful—like whole grains—and somehow patriotic. Yet Cather is the most adult of writers, full of irony and tragedy, of promise seeping away. Along with Robert Frost, she was for a long time mislabeled as benign, a tonic, and her work accordingly prescribed for the young.)
In a practical sense, too, books have their times; at the wrong moment, even great ones can prove as noxious as Mozart blaring from next door at two in the morning. While my father was in the hospital with cancer, I came home from a typical afternoon of watching him die slowly and idly plucked The Death of Ivan Ilyich from the shelf. What better distraction than Tolstoy? And high time I read such a famous work. (But was it such an idle choice? Maybe I didn’t seek distraction at all but wanted to prolong the afternoon past visiting hours, for as long as I dwelt with my father’s illness he was still alive.) The novella gives a graphically detailed account of a Russian bureaucrat’s death from stomach cancer. That’s what the reader sees, anyway; Ivan Ilyich is convinced until nearly the end, when it no longer matters, that he injured himself by falling from a ladder while he hung the new dining-room curtains. Beyond the single case, it is about all of us—our misspent lives and pain-ridden deaths, exactly the sort of death I was witnessing; I hardly dared think about what sort of life. They say no girl was ever ruined by a book, but we can certainly be convulsed. The Death of Ivan Ilyich made me physically sick, yet I read on to the end, out of habit and fascination. A perverse yet fitting pleasure. The wrong book, but right too.
Others suffer from being untimely in a more provocative way. A Little Princess, spiritual guide of my childhood, is a highly conservative book in the best and worst senses. On its small scale, it exemplifies the extraliterary issues that are now heating up literary discussion. (Calling them extraliterary is, of course, fanning the flames.) To bristle at A Little Princess’s superannuated politics—the strict class stratification, the colonial attitudes toward India—would be to deny its organizing principle: disrupting the status quo by casting the heroine into poverty and pain, only to set it right again. This is precisely what yields its special radiance and harmony. What is hard to take is the complacent acceptance of social inequity. Mr. Carrisford, a charitable Victorian, muses, “How many of the attics in this square are like that one, and how many wretched little servant girls sleep on such beds, while I toss on my down pillows, loaded and harassed by wealth that is, most of it—not mine.” But his friend Mr. Carmichael, the lawyer, “cheerily” offers balm for the conscience: “If you possessed all the wealth of all the Indies, you could not set right all the discomforts of the world.” And that is that. It’s not their politics that puts me in an extraliterary quandary. It’s their nonchalance.
In Irving Howe’s last book of essays, A Critic’s Notebook, a few scattered references to Henry James’s The Awkward Age made the novel sound so intriguing that I promptly got hold of a copy. How could I have missed it, I wondered, in my period of James worship? I thought I’d covered that territory pretty thoroughly. Starting in college and continuing for maybe ten years, I had watched the world through James’s eyes, so powerfully contagious was his vision. I saw my web of family and friends as a Jamesian “situation”—one of his favorite words; I analyzed the various life stories proceeding around me as he might analyze them; I even tried matchmaking in his characters’ cunning spirit. In my plottings, no vast fortunes or weighty moral issues were at stake, but I could pretend they were. Life was full of subtleties, the very air around each utterance pulsing with implication; simple encounters would provide material for endless speculation, and while I refrained from speaking a Jamesian language in the office where I worked as a typist or with old friends who might think I had been visited by aliens, I spun my private thoughts in orotund Jamesian sentences laden with digressive subordinate clauses, so as to ensnare every conceivable aspect of a subject, regardless of how minute.
It couldn’t last, naturally. Who had the time? There was actual life to be lived, with its press of jobs, children, school, grocery shopping, and repairmen, most of which never appear in a James novel. James’s world, as he no doubt knew better than any reader, is a world of the mind, of embattled intellectual and emotional constructs, not a reflection of physical realities. My coming to this truth did not at all diminish him as writer; if anything, it made his artifices more subtle. But it did leave me free to read and write and live by my own lights. So now I could approach The Awkward Age not as an acolyte, just a reader looking for a good time.
I began with the Preface. It was impenetrable. This was very odd, since I had read most of James’s Prefaces years back for my master’s thesis on his novels. Possibly I had lost brain cells. And yet over the intervening years I had managed to read many books as well as write a number of my own—it was unlikely that my language faculties were impaired. Never mind. I flipped to the first page. This, thank goodness, was not impenetrable. No, it fairly breezed along, as James might say. It was interesting, it was lively, it was even clear as far as subject goes, not that I was ever a stickler for immediate clarity. Except I couldn’t believe any people anywhere, at any time, could ever speak such sentences.
Had they spoken that way in the other novels? Yes and no. They—the Jamesites, we may call them, since they hail from a far country all their own—had always had an unearthly command of extemporaneous speech, but now they sounded even more airy and elliptical, or at least it seemed so to one who hadn’t traveled among them for a while, I knew what they were talking about because I was the reader, immersed in a book whose plan and purpose I had some inkling of, but how did they know what they were talking about? Had I been in their drawing rooms, I wouldn’t have had a clue.
It’s true that James was attempting something unusual in The Awkward Age: he denies himself nearly all the rites of narration, description, and commentary (not that those ever helped characters understand each other) and instead relies heavily on dialogue. As a result, the novel often reads like a play, a form he tried all his life to master but whose economies were very unsuited to his gifts. He also concocts a deliberate obscurity, as Irving Howe points out: everyone in those drawing rooms is meant to be somewhat in the dark about their friends’ motives and desires. Very much like life, in other words.
And very exasperating. But I wasn’t bored; I read on, and little by little I gave in, allowing myself to be entranced all over again. He was a genius, I had to admit. But not the same kind of genius he had been when I was a graduate student. The characters in The Awkward Age simply didn’t care enough about ordinary human fulfillments—love, sex, work—to be credible. Even money, which elsewhere in James is taken very seriously, is secondary. What they do care about exclusively—the “good” characters at any rate—is the moral design of their lives. Even to a James fan, this is hardly like life. When I was young, with the luxury to think life was propelled by moral designs, I thought he knew everything. I defended him against the charge that his characters had no appetites. On the contrary, I said, their appetites were the hidden root of all the action. But I was mistaken. Now I had to acknowledge ruefully that there were things even the master did not know. This discovery is not liberating but limiting: if even genius has its blind spots, what hope is there for the rest of us?
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