The Enchanted Hour

by Meghan Cox Gurdon

  Laura Ingalls Wilder captures the sense of relief and transport that pioneer families got from these luxuries—as well as their frustrating rarity—in The Long Winter, which, like the other novels in the Little House series, draws on real events. A few days before Christmas 1880, in the small Dakota Territory town of De Smet, Laura’s father returns from the post office with an armful of magazines and newspapers sent by well-wishers. Laura and her sisters, Mary and Carrie, are dying to dig into the tantalizing stuff, but there’s work to do first. Instant gratification was not a feature of the Ingalls household.

  “Come girls,” Ma says, “put the bundle of Youth’s Companions away. We must get out the washing while the weather’s clear.” By the time the girls finish their chores, it’s too dark to read; the Ingalls are almost out of kerosene, and with the trains blocked by snow, there’s no more to be had. The next day, Ma proposes delaying their reading enjoyment yet again by holding off on the magazines until Christmas.

  After a moment Mary said, “I think it is a good idea. It will help us to learn self-denial.”

  “I don’t want to,” Laura said.

  “Nobody does,” said Mary. “But it is good for us.”

  Sometimes Laura did not even want to be good. But after another silent moment she said, “Well, if you and Mary want to, Ma, I will. It will give us something to look forward to for Christmas.”

  “What do you say about it, Carrie?” Ma asked, and in a small voice Carrie said, “I will, too, Ma.”

  Come Christmas, the girls have to finish all their work first, and only late in the day does the yearned-for moment arrive:

  “You girls choose a story,” Ma said. “And I will read it out loud, so we can all enjoy it together.”

  So, close together between the stove and the bright table, they listened to Ma’s reading the story in her soft, clear voice. The story took them all far away from the stormy cold and dark. When she had finished that one, Ma read a second and a third. That was enough for one day; they must save some for another time.

  Around the time that Ma Ingalls was portioning out those stories, some two thousand miles to the south and east Cuban immigrants were reviving in Florida a wonderful practice that the colonial Spanish had outlawed at home. In 1865, as Alberto Manguel recounts in A History of Reading, a poet and cigar-maker named Saturnino Martinez had founded a newspaper expressly for workers in the cigar trade. As Manguel explains, “Over the years, La Aurora published work by the major Cuban writers of the day, as well as translations of European authors such as Schiller and Chateaubriand, reviews of books and plays, and exposés of the tyranny of factory workers and of the workers’ sufferings.” There was a problem with the newspaper, though. Most of the cigar workers couldn’t read it; the literacy rate among the working class was around 15 percent. So Martinez came up with the idea of organizing public readers who could read the paper out loud to the men as they worked. In 1866, the first of these lectors, as they were known, pulled up his chair in a Havana cigar factory and began to read the news. The cigar-rollers pitched in to pay his wages, and in return they received hours of intellectual diversion.

  Alas, it was not to last. Six months later, the authorities cracked down. If illiterate workers could “read” the newspaper by listening to it, they might get dangerous ideas. The authorities repressed the practice, and in Cuba it seems to have died away.

  When large numbers of Cubans moved to Florida in the 1870s, however, the fashion revived. The son of a lector who read aloud to cigar workers in Key West at the turn of the twentieth century recalled his father’s daily routine: “In the mornings, he read international news directly from Cuban newspapers brought daily by boat from Havana. From noon until three in the afternoons, he read from a novel. He was expected to interpret the characters by imitating their voices, like an actor.” (The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, was apparently a great favorite of the Cuban cigar men.) Rolling cigars by hand all day may be dull work, but at this remove there seems something almost romantic about it. An 1873 magazine sketch shows a row of mustachioed men, all in short-brimmed hats, seated at a wooden table making cigars while, behind them, a fellow in spectacles sits upright with his legs crossed, reading aloud from a hardback book. It is a scene of calm, order, and industry.

  Five years after that etching appeared in print, there was a momentous evolution in the very idea of reading aloud. Using a hand-operated mechanical roller fitted with tinfoil, Thomas Edison made the first recording of the human voice. The original phonograph track was restored several years ago, and if you listen closely, beneath a rush of crackle and noise, you can hear a man (it may be Edison) performing a loud recitation of “Old Mother Hubbard” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The man’s voice has an amused sound, and he laughs now and then, as if he knows himself to be play-acting. Edison was in fact amazed to find that his contraption worked. “I was never so taken aback in my life,” he said; “I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.”

  If Edison had anticipated the significance of the moment, he might have chosen poetry of a more exalted type. Still, in a way it seems appropriate that the first lines recorded by machine should come from nursery rhymes. After all, the technology itself was in its infancy. When it grew up, it would change everything.

  * * *

  IN THE 1930S, a new kind of rhapsode entered private homes in the United States and Great Britain. These readers were inhuman in their untiring diligence with long texts because they were, in point of fact, machines that played “talking books” on records. For one group of people in particular, these readers arrived not a moment too soon.

  After World War I, great numbers of men with grievous injuries returned home, many having been blinded in the horrific haze of chemical weaponry. A person who loses his sight in adulthood is not just plunged into darkness but thrust overnight into illiteracy. It was possible in theory for the blinded veterans to learn to read braille with their fingertips, but not so easy in practice. Braille, like any other second language, is much harder to learn in adulthood. The plight of these stranded men added urgency to a project already in motion.

  “There was a real sense that these people coming back needed to be trained in some way, nourished spiritually and emotionally, in every sense you can think of,” said Matthew Rubery, a professor at the University of London and author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book.

  The first full-length recorded books included Bible readings (the Gospel According to John, in the plummy tones of a BBC announcer) and works of fiction (Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd among them). For the war-blind, talking books came as a huge relief. They were free at last to listen to what they liked. They no longer had to rely on relatives or volunteers who might intrude with their own opinions, read without style or skill, or censor passages they thought indelicate or unsuitable for the listening ear.

  Not until the mid-1970s and the advent of recorded books for commuters, however, did audio recordings begin to make real commercial inroads in the wider culture. And for a long time, they carried a whiff of illegitimacy. An audiobook might include all the words that an author had written, the thinking went, but you couldn’t call it a real book. You couldn’t claim to have read it. Listening was like cheating, wasn’t it? Audiobook enthusiasts were inclined to be apologetic and even a little ashamed if the question came up.

  Today audiobooks are a $3.5 billion industry and a huge source of pleasure and education for millions of people. Yet the shift in acceptability has only just happened, and there is no doubt that we have technology to thank for it. When Matthew Rubery set out to write his history of audiobooks in 2010 and was looking for funding, he had a hard time getting senior scholars to vouch for him. The subject seemed too frivolous. A few years later, as he was finishing his manuscript, grant money came pouring in. It was a sign that audiobooks had completed their cultural conquest.

  And why not? It’s a marvel that for a sm
all fee, or for free with a library card, the world’s most gifted readers will deliver any book we like, straight into our heads. Like the Cuban cigar makers, we can vanish into literature or nonfiction even as our hands are drudging—or driving or hanging on to the guardrails of a treadmill.

  For busy readers, podcasts and audiobooks are a boon. For people who cannot see or read well, they’re a godsend. Matthew Rubery told me: “So many people with dyslexia come up to me and talk about what audiobooks have meant to them by taking something they absolutely hated and turning it into a joy.”

  From Edison’s scratchy wax recording came shellac records, then vinyl, then audiotape, then CDs, then streaming, and, as of 2018, a return to vinyl for a hipster resurgence of “spoken word” recordings. Most new cars now come fitted with technology that makes it easy to listen to smartphone audio. Future generations of children will never have to fumble to extract cassette tapes from their brittle, clear plastic cases, nor will their parents ever taste the insouciant terror of hurtling down the highway, one hand on the wheel while scrabbling with the other to slip a CD out of its case and get it into the player, all the while reassuring the restive passengers, “Hang on, the story is coming—”

  I have warm memories of those days, maddening plastic cases notwithstanding. On long journeys, my children and I would listen to Peter Dennis reading A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and Martin Jarvis reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. So loyal were my children to the recordings that when I brought out the books, they insisted that I read in the exact cadences of Peter Dennis and Martin Jarvis. To this day, my children describe a moment of pathetic confusion as being “alone in the moon,” like Piglet, when he’s running along carrying Eeyore’s birthday balloon and it pops in his face.

  Audiobooks and podcasts can be so good, so absorbing, that it may seem churlish to suggest that they could be in any way inferior to books read aloud in person. You might argue that they are, in fact, superior: any given amateur may fumble with language or phrasing, whereas a skilled narrator like Juliet Stevenson or Jim Dale will never falter. A superb audio recording is a work of art, a creation not so different in certain respects from a marble bust or a portrait in oils. Yet as with such works, the relationship between the adored and the adorer is one-sided. Unlike a live reader, a recording has no idea who is listening. It doesn’t know or care what you feel. A recorded story does not spring to life in the moment, in that unpredictable, fugitive communion of voice, ears, and text. The machine won’t stop to ask questions or to raise comparisons or engage you in any way. It will keep playing until the story ends, or you switch it off, or the battery runs down.

  This is why, much as I myself love audiobooks, it seems to me that, outside the car, they must take a narrow second place to live readers—especially when children are involved. I was a little surprised to find that Matthew Rubery, the talking-book historian, agreed. He told me: “People who like audiobooks often try to defend them by saying that they’re hearkening back to the ancient tradition of reading aloud. And of course, we have been listening to stories much longer than we have been reading them silently. But it’s not really true. It’s very different to, say, listen to Homer read by Derek Jacobi on your earbuds than to listen to a rhapsode in ancient times.

  “I think it’s that personal dimension,” Rubery went on. “Even if it’s somewhat impersonal—let’s say a large group and a performer is reading to you—that performer is still going on cues from the audience, whether they’re interested or yawning or whatever. Certainly, when I’m reading to my kids, I respond to them in a lot of ways. If I see they’re bored, I’ll change my approach. I’ll do a voice differently, or emphasize things differently. That’s the virtue of reading aloud.”

  It is the virtue of reading aloud, and it’s what the best reciters, storytellers, and readers have done for millennia. Somehow, though, without thinking it through, in our modern culture we have drifted away from this rich tradition. Some children have stories read to them in the evenings, and that’s marvelous. Some adults have stories read to them via headphones, and that’s good, too. But more often than not, we are doing something else with our time. We are looking at screens, and we’re scrolling—scrolling alone.

  There is a scene in The Odyssey that brings to mind our present predicament. It comes early in the epic. Odysseus and his men have left Troy on their way home to Ithaca and have to make landfall on an island unknown to them. Expecting attack at any moment, Odysseus sends three emissaries to intercept the inhabitants. Far from greeting the strangers with violence, the tranquil island people offer the men a delicious food, the honey-sweet lotus. One taste of the stuff, Homer tells us, and the sailors “never cared to report, nor to return: they longed to stay forever, browsing on that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland.”

  Thus we might describe the effects of screen-based technology on us. Thus the toddler with an iPad, who cares for no other toy; thus the middle-schooler, indoors and online as the sun shines and sets unseen; thus the teenager behind a closed bedroom door, lost for hours in the wonder-worlds of her phone; thus the grown-up so preoccupied with Twitter that he burns the soup.

  Among the lotus-eaters, Odysseus is quick to see the danger, and he has to resort to force to dislodge his captivated crewmen. He says: “I drove them, all three wailing, to the ships, tied them down under their rowing benches, and called the rest: ‘All hands aboard; come, clear the beach and no one taste the Lotus, or you lose your hope of home.’”

  Homer could not have anticipated our tech devices, but he captures their lotus-like allure. He also shows us a way out. If we are wise, we will drag ourselves and our families, wailing if necessary, to ships that wait to sail on what literary historian Maria Tatar calls “the ocean of stories.” If we can ease off the lotus-eating, just for a little, we can clear our heads and return to a different kind of home. Humankind has flourished with the sharing of stories from its earliest days. In reviving the art of reading aloud, we can reclaim an old pleasure, one that has an amazing capacity to draw us closer to one another.

  Chapter 3

  Reading Together Strengthens the Bonds of Love

  In the bright buzzing room

  There was an iPad

  And a kid playing Doom

  And a screensaver of—

  A bird launching over the moon.

  —“Ann Droyd,” Goodnight iPad

  In 2011, the Apple tablet had been on the market for a year and a half when a pseudonymous wit published a “parody for the next generation” of Margaret Wise Brown’s beloved bedtime story. In Goodnight iPad, the serenity of the great green room was blasted away. The tussling kittens were gone. Instead of a little mouse, there was a robotic rodent with an antenna emitting sound waves. The snapping fire in the old illustrations appeared in the spoof as pixels on a screen. And where one little rabbit was preparing for sleep in a room that got darker and quieter with each turn of the page, a whole family of rabbits was sprawled around, each oblivious to the other, in a “bright buzzing room” full of technology. The machines in the illustrations with their cables and wires now look outdated, but Goodnight iPad was onto something: this is the way we live now.

  Rare is the household that does not show the imprint of technology. To the optimistic cultural commentator Virginia Heffernan, the Internet is “the latest and most powerful extension and expression of the work of being human.” Maybe: at any rate, in an evolutionary eye-blink, a vast amorphous network has engulfed modern societies. If there were an easy escape from it, most of us would not care to try. The Internet makes possible all sorts of wondrous things. We can search anything, see anything, communicate with anyone. And yet . . .

  It is possible to appreciate the digital realm, with Heffernan, as “a massive and collaborative work of realist art,” while also harboring unease at the pace and intensity of its advance. Screens have rushed into childhood at the pace of an avalanche, making children more likely to spend their time online
than any other place. According to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, the amount of time kids spent online doubled between 2006 and 2016. In 2008, about half of all high-school seniors used social media. The proportion now is upward of 80 percent. And none of it seems to be advancing the cause of human happiness. Since 2012, with the widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets, Twenge and her colleagues have recorded a plunge in young people’s emotional well-being.

  “We found that teens who spent more time seeing their friends in person, exercising, playing sports, attending religious services, reading or even doing homework were happier,” Twenge has written. “However, teens who spent more time on the internet, playing computer games, on social media, texting, using video chat or watching TV were less happy. In other words, every activity that didn’t involve a screen was linked to more happiness, and every activity that involved a screen was linked to less happiness.”

  We adults, meanwhile, seem to be addicted en masse to our smartphones and tablets. By one recent measure, the typical smartphone owner is on his device for three hours a day. Forty percent of us spend much more time, up to seven hours a day. As tech writer Adam Alter notes, this means that on average, and without apparent qualms, we are dedicating a quarter of our waking lives to our phones. To Alter, this looks not like enrichment but impoverishment. “Each month, almost one hundred hours [are] lost to checking email, texting, playing games, surfing the web, reading articles, checking bank balances, and so on,” he writes. “Over the average lifetime, that amounts to a staggering eleven years.”