The Whole Five Feet by Christopher Beha

Christopher R. Beha

The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About, Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else

New York: Grove Press, 2009.

When Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins released their Great Books of the Western World, Alex Beam reports, Adler boasted that the set measured 62 inches, two inches more than the five-foot shelf of The Harvard Classics.  Really? When I think of the myriad ways in which to artificially and arbitrarily ensure that mine is bigger than yours, I have to laugh.  Of all things on which to base a comparison of sets of great books!

Interestingly, his boast foreshadows the rather masculine form of stunt journalism, reading through these sets of books in a set period of time.  (Is that fair?  To call it masculine?  There’s Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, and Robyn Okrant’s Living Oprah.  But conquering sets of books seems to be male terrain.  There is Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21, 730 Pages by Ammon Shea.  Then there’s The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs’s book about his reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, and his Year of Living Biblically, about, you guessed it, living by the 800 or more rules in that book.) 

David Denby did the great books project well, by going back to school rather than simply holing up with a great pile of books.  By being part of a community of readers, his re-reading of the classics has a wonderful dynamism and depth.  His book also predates the other examples of stunt journalism I mention above, and it has a leisurely feel to it that distinguishes it from the other races to read/do/write.

Christopher Beha, by contrast, reads his way through the whole five feet of the Harvard Classics over the course of one year, but alone and as a direct consequence of feeling adrift in his life after moving back into his parents’ apartment.  In one of my favourite passages, he describes his boomerang angst:

Of course, as a necessary condition of our post-belated age, one can never merely feel adrift or turned against oneself.  One must also hold certain awkward feelings about these feelings.  One must recognize such malaise as banal and used up, as a kind of American consumer indulgence.  One must stand detached even from one’s sense of detachment, alienated from one’s own alienation. (3)

Wonderful insight.  We are so worldly that we no sooner have feelings than we dismiss them as clichéd.  Nothing can be felt as new, as insight, but as always already yesterday’s news.

Perhaps that is the appeal to immersing oneself in a set of the classics for a year.

The set of Harvard Classics appeared in 1909, and they were edited by Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard for four decades spanning the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I.  He wrote, “It is my belief that the faithful and considerate reading of these books … will give any man the essentials of a liberal education, even if he can devote to them but fifteen minutes a day.”  The idea was to democratize higher education at a time when only 3% of the adult population finished undergraduate education.

Beha’s grandmother owned a set, and he remembers investigating their contents, tentatively, as a child and young man.  Unlike the Great Books of the Western World, the canon established by Eliot was never revised.  This was a one-time-only offer of what constituted the great, and his grandmother seems to have taken that on faith.  When he tells his mother and aunt about his plan to read them, he is thrilled to hear their stories about their mother’s discussions of individual books from the set.  The books were not just decoration, and Beha knows that his own reading of them is not simply about acquiring knowledge, rather, “I had started reading them with the idea that they might bring me closer to her.  Perhaps this is the knowledge we are always after, though it’s destined to remain out of reach: the knowledge of those we have lost.” (120)  Indeed, much of the narrative is given over to his discussion of his relationships with parents, siblings, grandparents and aunts, and they make charming secondary characters.

Unlike the Great Books of the Western World, Eliot’s set of classical texts is not ordered chronologically.  After working his way through the first several volumes, which appear to him to have been ordered randomly, Beha has a revelation:

All the knowledge I might gain from reading these books, Socrates seemed to be telling me, would be worth little beside the knowledge of how little I still knew. … The earliest parts of the Harvard Classics were trying to turn me into the person I needed to be in order to read whatever came next.  (30, 33)

I am particularly fond of this trick: let the book tell you how to read it, let the book define you as its reader.  I performed this trick in many graduate school papers, and with considerable success with Britomart and The Faerie Queene. 

But, and by my use of the word trick you may have guessed where I’m going with this, it is a trick, and its novelty does wear off.  Beha did not capture and keep my attention in the same way that Denby did, and again, I have to put it down to too limited a canvas.  Beha devotes very little space to discussing the actual works he reads, and it is a lack that weakens the book.  Denby goes back to the classics because he knows that these books have formed him but he no longer remembers why.  He wants to steep himself in the books again.  Beha’s pace is much faster, and more shallow as a result.  By the end of his book, we know that Denby has worked the classics back into the fabric of his life.  Beha, on the other hand, has been on holiday from his life:

It must seem an odd thing for one to “realize” about books at such a late stage in the game.  But somewhere in my months of checking titles off a list I had forgotten the simple fact that great books were meant to be reread.  In many ways, this is precisely what makes them great.  It felt invigorating to be reminded of this truth, to be reminded that I could live with these books for as long as I wanted, that I never had to return to the cultural landscape I’d left behind for the most of this year.

But a certain sadness came with this realization.  After all, one wants to go home. (216)

Home is a world where no one else reads Wordsworth, whose “Tintern Abbey” inspired the insight.  Home is where no one else partakes of the Great Conversation, and because Beha does not want to be a “scold” and prescribe a course of the canon to his contemporaries, his reading of the classics is cast as, well, a stunt, an exercise with a limited shelf life.  It can be bracketed off and left behind.  I prefer Denby’s model of excavating, re-inhabiting and reviving books that can continue to live in us, to enrich our lives.

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Sunday Morning Books about Books

There is an article in the weekend Globe & Mail by Joe Queenan about his year of trying to read a book a day.  (An interesting exercise in stunt journalism given his over-the-top railing against  A. J. Jacobs’s The Know It All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, in which Jacobs chronicles his year spent reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.  Hats off to Jacobs for his humorous rejoinder to the hatchet job.) 

In order to be able to meet his goal, Queenan decided he’d have to limit himself to books of less than 200 pages.  He discusses the many wonderful books he discovered simply by virtue of having to scan the library shelves for slim volumes, including Penelope Fitzgerald’s book about books, The Book Shop.  He fell off pace six months into the project, so has not met his goal, but he does meet like-minded readers.  Queen Elizabeth II speaks for him on the pages of another book about books, Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, a wonderful little book about the queen and a bookmobile, when she thinks,

one book led to another, doors opening wherever she turned, and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

No.  They never are.

But how, even when not keeping up the pace of a book a day does one keep up the enthusiasm?

I loved these books.  They were in my life for only a day–two days at most–but that made those days special.  Reading longer books, no matter how good they are, can turn into a chore.  Reading Moll Flanders is hard work.  Reading Germinal is drudgery.  Reading these 250 tiny volumes was never drudgery.

How do  the days stay special when there are so many of them?  I loved reading the article, but as it drew to a close, I found myself feeling panic, of all things.  It was a vicarious experience of sharing the rush and push to meet the goal.  How can pleasurable reading happen when one is facing an entire year of a daily deadline of completing a book?  Buried in Print is, amazingly, back to regular posting after taking part in Dewey’s 24 hour Read-a-Thon, and I can just about wrap my head around a weekend of non-stop reading, but it’s not a pace I could sustain for a year. 

Have you read under conditions of extreme pressure, self-imposed or not?  What were the advantages?  Is it just about reaching a goal or are there some more long-lasting rewards?

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Bibliophile Book Challenge

A challenge made for me!  I completed it a while back, but I continue to post links to my reviews, and I have loved finding out what books about books others are reading.  If you are keen on reading more books about books and want to join, here is the link.  I have found several suggestions from the other participants, and I love Lesley’s blog A Life in Books.

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David Denby’s Great Books

David Denby

Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

 In the fall of 1991, at 48, David Denby went back to school.  Thirty years after entering Columbia University, he returned to repeat the two required core curriculum courses, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, the great books courses that have been on the curriculum at Columbia since the 1930s. 

Like Susan Hill’s year of reading from home, this is another one of those brilliant ideas I wish I had had, and I know I’d make better work of repeating courses from my undergraduate years than I would of swearing off buying new books, at which I have failed, albeit rather gleefully.  (At least it’s not shoes!!)  I feel ready to circle back, and that is precisely what Denby has done so beautifully in this book.

Denby’s decision to repeat his great books courses originated in his irritation with the debates in the culture wars, but underlying the irritation with others is the realization that he has forgotten much of what he studied:

I had read, I had forgotten, and I felt the loss as I did the loss of an old friend who had faded away.  I was filled with longing and curiosity.  What was the actual experience of reading such books? …  I needed to start work on this book in part because I no longer knew what I knew.  I felt that what I had read or understood was slipping away.  I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.  The foundations of the building were turning to sand…. 

Denby’s account of the year has three main threads.  First there is the course content itself, which he summarizes and with which he engages in a thoughtful and focused way.  This is no Coles Notes version of the great books; he concentrates on one theme from the text and explores it in depth.  He also gives us sketches of the students (anonymous) and faculty (by name), and thus provides a wider cast of characters for this year of study.  This is a necessary strand, and he lays out the works, the academic setting, the changing seasons and moods on campus as the ground on which he paints his own encounters with the texts.

There is also frequent discussion of the debate about the place of the Great Books in the university curriculum.  He is for their inclusion, and though he empathizes with the views of those who bridle at not seeing themselves reflected in the course content, he argues that recognition is rather beside the point.  The point is to examine those texts that have shaped, and that continue to shape, Western civilization.  This is the most plodding of the three themes, but since the idea to go back to school originated with his fulminating about the culture wars, and his wife challenging him to do something about it, he has to address it directly.  Polemic is never my favourite genre, and at more than 400 pages, the book could have been tightened up in places; much of his discussion about the general merits of the Great Books could have been more concise.

Nevertheless, this was a compelling read, and Denby’s prose is just a delight.  Most interesting by far is the third strand of the book: how he attaches the goings on in the ivory tower to his own life as a movie critic, husband and father, former teenager, New Yorker, son and citizen.  Why do we read if not to be enlivened by the material, to take it not only into our intellect but into the machinery of our daily lives?  He has an existential crisis about his career in the world of spectacle after reading Homer and Plato; he reads Hobbes and Locke through his experience of being mugged in the subway; he remembers his years in the 60s, throwing tomatoes at politicians, through Rousseau; he connects his fear of street crime to women’s fear of rape when he attends a Take Back the Night rally and reads de Beauvoir; and gloriously, gloriously, he falls in love with Virginia Woolf after 30 years of loathing her. 

And over and over and over again, he gets it, he gets a glimpse into the shimmering greatness of a work as it slips into place in his life and intellectual history.

His chapter on King Lear, a version of which appeared in The New Yorker as “Queen Lear,” is worth the price of admission alone.  Denby compares his mother to the needy king, and his raw account of her difficulties and demands in old age is enriched by girding it with this comparison.  He pays tribute to her life as a canny, successful and independent business woman, and he describes how her independence and strength all but disappeared after the death of her husband.  It was a total transformation, and she became a needy handful.

…when [my mother] died, my tears were produced as much by relief as by sorrow.

The devastating power of King Lear, I now realized, is derived from emotions that we barely admit.  We are obsessed, so many of us, with power, with work, with money, with love, sex, and art, and meanwhile two of the most essential and unfathomable tasks in life—raising our children and lowering our parents into the earth—pull away at us steadily, unacknowledged and sometimes unattended.  After all, there is a structure to professional success; once you get over the early tremors, the early opposition, you learn the way, and there are many places to pause and take stock.  But no rules or guidelines, no training or expertise, really helps you take care of children or elderly parents. 

The play brings you back to the inescapable struggle for power between the generations.  It suggests that the basic human relations in begetting and dying can be intolerable.  … Lear is hardly the only parent to demand too much love from his children.

I love that last line, the colloquial ordinariness of his assessment.  He forgives Lear his foolishness; he sees that his mother is not the first unreasonably demanding parent.  His own experiences with his mother give him insight into the king’s folly, and by reading Lear, he can find the missing guideline for his struggle with her, a struggle that was all the more puzzling for its late appearance. 

This is what great essays do: they connect the very personal and local to the tectonic plates that underpin our culture, and, as Denby argues, those tectonic plates are in part the great books themselves.

Great Books, Great Essay, Great Read.

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Last of the Books about Children’s Books for a Spell

“Foreword: On Rereading”

by Anne Fadiman

from Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love

My son, Griffin, who is nine, recently appeared as Peter in his drama club’s production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

I wanted to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to him and his brother, Rowan (almost 5), before they met the bowdlerized stage version, so we spent several nights escaping through the back of the cupboard with Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter. 

(For those of you unfamiliar with the story, four siblings find a passage to a frozen land called Narnia at the back of a cupboard.  Narnia is frozen because it is under the thrall of the White Witch, but the appearance of the four human children heralds the fulfillment of a prophecy that will see the great lion Aslan return to Narnia, melt the neverending winter freeze, and vanquish the White Witch.  In the process of this triumph, Edmund is seduced by the White Witch, by means of enchanted Turkish delight, betrays his siblings and is only saved from death and dishonour by Aslan’s offering to die in his place.  Aslan is duly killed by the white witch but comes back to life thanks to a bit of old magic that promises eternal life to those who die to redeem others.)

The timing seemed perfect, not just because of Griffin’s upcoming performance, but because winter was loosening its grip on us here in Toronto, and the great thaw in Narnia was mirrored on our own street, in our own garden.  There was a new smell to greet us when we opened the front door to go to school each morning, damp earth and warmth, and I liked ending the day going through the magical cupboard door, with its powerful sensory reminders of spring’s arrival.

I cannot remember when I first read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  Unlike Anne Fadiman and Laura Miller, I do not have clear memories of reading or being read the Narnia books, but I also cannot remember a time when I could look at the big wardrobe in my grandmother’s bedroom without thinking that it led to another world.  The possibility of infinite regress out of the back of the musty cupboard, like Alice’s looking glass and rabbit hole, just always seemed there, and I was looking forward to my boys’ initiation into this realm of possibility.

I was prepared, also, for the disillusionment of rereading, for the discontinuity I knew to expect between my own and the boys’ perception of Narnia.  Anne Fadiman, in her Foreword to Rereadings, and Laura Miller, in her The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, both eloquently recount their disillusionment with Narnia on rereading the books as adults, and I had their experiences fresh in my mind.

Here is what Anne Fadiman has to say about reading another of the Narnia books to her eight-year-old son:

Reading a favorite book to your child is one of the most pleasurable forms of rereading, provided the child’s enthusiasm is equal to yours and thus gratifyingly validates your literary taste, your parental competence, and your own former self.  Henry loved The Horse and His Boy, the tale of two children and two talking horses who gallop across an obstacle-fraught desert in hopes of averting the downfall of an imperiled kingdom that lies to the north.  It’s the most suspenseful of the Narnia books, and Henry, who was at that poignant age when parents are still welcome at bedtime but can glimpse their banishment on the horizon, begged me each night not to turn out the light just yet: how about another page, and then, how about another paragraph, and then, come on, how about just one more sentence?  There was only one problem with this idyllic picture.  As I read the book to Henry, I was thinking to myself that C. S. Lewis, not to put too fine a point on it, was a racist and sexist pig. …

It was difficult to read this kind of thing to Henry without comment: the words, after all were coming to him in my voice.  I held my tongue for the first hundred pages or so, but finally I blurted out, “Have you noticed that The Horse and His Boy isn’t really fair to girls?  And that all the bad guys have dark skin?”  … Henry shot me the sort of look he might have used had I dumped a pint of vinegar into a bowl of chocolate ice cream.  And who could blame him?

I love how she gets at the complexity of the emotion of herself as a re-reader: gratification, smugness, pleasure and pain.  What costs us our own (adult) total immersion in the books we loved as children is our education:

Your education becomes an interrogation lamp under which the hapless book, its every wart and scar exposed, confesses its guilty secrets: “My characters are wooden!  My plot creaks!  I am pre-feminist, pre-deconstructivist, and pre-postcolonialist!”  (The upside of English classes is that they give you critical tools, some of which are useful, but the downside is that those tools make you less able to shower your books with unconditional love….)

Not wanting my boys to look at me like I had poured vinegar on their ice cream, I kept my education and my criticisms to myself.  I reveled, instead, in what Lewis’s book offered my senses: the taste of Turkish delight, magically enhanced to an addictive state, the feel of fur against a cheek, the crunch of snow underfoot, the sound of frozen streams coming to life. 

When we had only a few chapters left to go, my mother died, suddenly of a heart attack, and I was not sure I’d make it through the last chapters of Aslan’s sacrifice and reincarnation.  The real and the fictional spring were too much of an assault on my senses, too much of a stark contradiction to my mother’s death.  Aslan’s death was too much of a parallel to the awful fact of our family’s loss.  As a long-lapsed Catholic, I did not take comfort in Aslan’s apotheosis.  For me, there was only the cold, bare fact of my mother’s absence.

It is true that you can never return to the innocence of a first, childhood reading, but I did not expect to be deprived of an attachment to Narnia in so stark a loss. I did finish reading the book to the boys, and was, frankly, numb to Aslan’s appeal to the children’s loyalty.  I felt excluded, not on the basis of education, but simple incomprehension.  How, with apparently so thin a description, did Lewis manage to inspire his readers and his characters with love for Aslan?  The boys did not ask many questions about the Old Magic that brought Aslan and Narnia back to life, and I did not offer explanations.

I took comfort, instead, in the warmth of the boys’ bodies curled up next to mine, and in the fact that their Grandma’s love of reading seems firmly to have taken root and blossomed in the fertile soil of her grandsons’ imaginations.

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Just in Time for Graduation Season

Instructions: Everything You’ll Need to Know on Your Journey

by Neil Gaiman

illustrated by Charles Vess

Neil Gaiman first wrote the text for this delightful picture book in 2000, when it appeared in A Wolf at the Door, a collection of fairytales retold.  It is a poem that is a set of instructions for what to do if you find yourself in the middle of a fairy tale.  This 2010 edition, with illustrations by Charles Vess, has hit the shelves just in time for graduation season.

You’ve seen those editions of Dr. Seuss’s  Oh! The Thinks You Can Think! that are packaged for gratuates, right? 

I found this book as I stood in line at the University of Toronto Bookstore (I was buying a gift), and I think that it’s meant for graduates, too.

My own graduate is only five, and he will be getting his copy at his Kindergarten graduation.

I don’t think that you can do better than a set of instructions for life based on fairy tales:

Walk through the house.

Take nothing.

Eat nothing.

However, if any creature tells you that it hungers, feed it. 

If it tells you that it is dirty, clean it. 

If it cries to you that it hurts, if you can, ease its pain.

What I love about this book is that Gaiman knows his literature so well that the text just teems with allusions.  Hidden doors, deep wells, dark forests, hungry wolves, castles, cottages and knarled trees; they are all there with instructions on how to face them.  Your hidden door can recall The Secret Garden or Prince Caspian or the Alice or Harry Potter books.  The text will stretch to fit the reader and his or her own set of associations.  The advice is still good: “go through.”

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How the Heather Looks by Joan Bodger

How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children’s Books by Joan Bodger.  Originally published 1965.  Reprinted with Afterword and Notes on Further reading by McClelland and Stewart, 1999.

Joan Bodger’s classic chronicles the summer holiday her anglophile family spent searching for the sites about which they had read in their well-worn reading trails through British children’s literature.  Equal parts travel memoir and sourcebook, this book teems with interesting anecdotes and well-informed discussion of such staples of the British canon as Arthur Ransome, Randolph Caldecott, A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame.

I ransacked our old favorite books, going over the familiar ground like a detective in search of clues.  The Arthur Ransome books, T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, even the Pooh books, had maps in the end papers.  Were they totally imaginary or could we orient them to an atlas?  I searched out more information at the public library and found more books to bring home and read aloud to the children.  My husband, who is a reference librarian, brought home biographies and autobiographies of children’s authors for me to study.  Perhaps something in a writer’s life would give a concrete clue to the places described in his books.  A kind friend presented me with a twenty-year back file of Horn Book, the magazine of books and reading for children.  I combed these for details concerning the lives and works of authors and illustrators.

The more I read the more convinced I became that the children were right.  Most places in children’s literature are real.  We could find them if we searched.  All we needed was faith.  I was reminded of a poem by Emily Dickinson.

I never saw a moor,

I never saw the sea;

Yet I know how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be. (xiii)

The cover illustration for How the Heather Looks, by Mark Lang, is an image perfectly suited to capturing the book’s many charms as well as its weaknesses.

The line-drawn family of four look out from the frame in which they stand and gaze reverently at a watercolour image of a quintessential English cottage, nestled in rolling hills and framed, in turn, by the heather in the foreground.  Fluffy white clouds, grey mountains and the glimpse of a body of water in the distance, complete the idyllic image.

The family is illustrated in a style different than the subject at which they all gaze, highlighting that they are strangers in a strange land.  Although she and her husband are each half English and each spent part of their childhoods in England, Bodger plays up their American identities in this book, referring frequently to her anxieties about her children’s boisterous nature and, like Helene Hanff, to the quirks and foibles of English accommodations.  She is often surprised by the locals’ limited knowledge about the books and authors they have come so far to research and about which they themselves know so much, but I cannot imagine there are many other people who know as much as she does about British children’s literature.  Her knowledge borders on encyclopedic, and she has the layered experience of not only having read some of the books as a child herself, but reading and re-reading them with her own children.  Her being so thoroughly steeped in the text and illustrations of the books, both as a reader and as a researcher, is one of the things that makes this text such a delight.

Her reverence for great literature is also a delight.

I suppose that an American’s approach to English literature must always be oblique.  We share a language but not a landscape.  In order to understand the English classics as adults, we must build up a sort of visual vocabulary from the books we read as children.  Children’s literature is, in some ways, more important to us than it is to the English child.  I contend that a child brought up on the nursery rhymes and Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales can better understand Shakespeare; that a child who has pored over Beatrix Potter can better respond to Wordsworth.  Of course it is best if one can find for himself a bank where the wild thyme grows, or discover daffodils growing wild.  Failing that, the American child must feed the “inward eye” with the images in the books he reads when young, so that he can enter a larger realm when he is older.  I am sure I enjoyed the Bronte novels more for having read The Secret Garden first.  As I stood on those moors, looking out over that wind-swept landscape, I realized that it was Mrs. Burnett who taught me what “wuthering” meant long before I ever got around to reading Wuthering Heights.  Epiphany comes at the moment of recognition. (184)

The way that the cover illustration keeps the viewing visitors apart from the scene they have come to see also highlights one of the quirks of Bodger’s style over which I kept tripping: that she never seemed to be quite fully in the present, that the self who wrote, the self who read, and the self who saw were often at odds.  She has a complex layering of time, place and knowledge.  Clearly, she and her husband carefully planned their trip and prepared with much research as well as with the passion of devotees to their subject.  Too often, though, she will reach a destination, describe what they came to see, what they have (or have not) seen, and then refer to what they could have seen if only they had done more research beforehand. 

If we had known what to look for, we could have seen Houghton House, the original of Bunyan’s “House Beautiful” at Houghton Conquest, near Ampthill, or we could have searched out Bunyan’s cottage at Elstow.  But we were ignorant, and, besides, in too much of a hurry to reach Leighton Buzzard.  We wanted to see if we could find Firbank Hall and to find out if we could reconstruct the saga of [Mary Norton’s] The Borrowers. (166-67)

The benefit of hindsight is not always a benefit to smooth prose, and the past conditional intrudes too much and too often.  This is a small complaint with a great book, though. 

I also felt that under the surface of Bodger’s often nostalgic and eager tone was a current of something darker.  We get occasional glimpses at her impatience, her irritation with the housewifely chores that must still be done on this wonderful trip.  I’d like to have read more of that kind of thing.  It does no one any favours to romanticize motherhood, even motherhood during the realization of a son’s dream of finding his hero, King Arthur.

The Afterword makes some of the dark undercurrent more clear, and it is in the Afterword that I met the Joan Bodger that I liked best.  There, she is not only erudite, passionate about her subject and painfully honest, she is acerbic. 

Much to my consternation I have … discovered that some young families have viewed Heather as a how-to book for raising children, suffering pangs of guilt because they did not read the same books to their children at a prescribed age.  I caution against any recipe for perfect children, or for perfect families.  I began the book in 1958.  Before its publication, by Viking Press in 1965, our family had suffered death and schizophrenia.  A year later, in 1966, John and I were divorced. (231)

There is a little acid to cut the sweetness of the pilgrimage to childhood, and the Afterword gave me a perspective on Bodger’s difficulties after the idyllic trip that made the joy of their discoveries all the more poignant. 

If you, too, are a devotee of British children’s literature, I recommend curling up with a cup of tea and spending a few hours being regaled by a woman who knows how the heather looks.

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Nick Hornby Is Back

 

Nick Hornby has resumed his post at The Believer.  The May issue sees him taking up where he left off, and it’s … it’s … it’s alright.

I have written about his column before, and I am a big fan.  I eagerly awaited his return.  I was expecting a wonderfully witty homecoming.  I was expecting him to say, “Nathalie, I’m hoooome and here to amuse and delight you.”  I expected fireworks.

Instead, it’s a self-confessed failure to launch.  He has cast himself as a boomerang child.  He’s laconic and snarky.  He’s oddly self-congratulatory.  It’s a wee bit flat.  Oh well.  It can only get better, right?

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The Magician’s Book by Laura Miller

The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia

by Laura Miller

Review Part I (Part II to follow this week)

 

I did not want this book to end.  As soon as I finished it, I went back to the beginning again.  I had intended only to reread the sections I’d highlighted (about half of the book, if truth be told), but I am enthralled by Miller’s prose and am in the middle of reading the entire thing again.  She fell in and out of love with C. S. Lewis’s books over the years, and this is a rich chronicle of her impassioned relationship.

There is much to admire about this book, but one of the things I love most is Miller’s description of her first introduction to Lewis’s books.  Miller tells a wonderful tale of her Grade 2 teacher, Wilanne Belden, who lent her a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  Miller remembers even the physical properties of the book in detail: “a slim hardcover bound in grey fabric with the image of a little stag stamped on the front” (22).  Miller dedicates The Magician’s Notebook to Ms. Belden, and credits the gift with turning her into a reader.  The book “really did make a new person out of me” (4)

Most of us persuaded our parents to buy us boxed sets of all seven Chronicles, but I also saved up my allowance and occasional small cash gifts from relatives to buy a hardcover copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, one of the few times in my life I’ve ever succumbed to the collector’s impulse. … This was not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.  I was not yet capable of thinking about it in this way, but I’d been enthralled by the most elementary of readerly metaphors: a little girl opens the hinged door of some commonplace piece of household furniture and steps through it into another world.  I opened the hinged cover of a book and did the same. (23-24)

Aaaaah.  The collector’s impulse.

Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris is my first and most important book about books, and I rejoiced in the collector’s thrill last week when I found a pristine hardback edition.

Alas, I do not have access to enough memories from childhood, let alone memories of childhood reading, to reach the narrative about the book that turned me into a reader.  I would love a narrative about the gift of THE book that would change my life forever. 

I do, however, have a primal scene of reading, or, rather, of being read to.  Like the Freudian primal scene, I did not know its significance at the time, I only knew desire that overcame antipathy, and some of its significance is still lost on me.  But for whatever reason, and beyond reason and the frailties of the least reliable of memories, I can remember a particular poem from when I was nine.

It was read to me by a substitute teacher in Grade 5 at Dhahran Academy, in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia.  I was a lost child at the time.  Saudi Arabia was one move too many for me (I had lived in five countries and had been to five different schools already, and this last one was more change than I could manage).  My accent changed with every new school so that I could blend in better.  North American English at the international American schools and English English in England and at home, with my English mother who insisted that her children not utter hard Rs.

The teacher (I do not remember her name) was unwelcome to me for several reasons.  She was yet another change.  My regular teacher (whose name I have also forgotten) was a kind soul who knew that I was having difficulty adjusting and gave me a lot of space.  The substitute, who was there for several weeks, had an English accent, which represented a threatening blurring of boundaries.  I spoke American English at this school, and switched to an English accent when I went home, and she was doing my head in. 

The worst thing of all, though, was that she made us sit on the carpet at the end of the day and listen to poetry.  We went kicking and screaming at first.  In this, at least, I felt an allegiance with my schoolmates.  The thing she read to us, day after day, was “The Highwayman.”  Imagine a woman in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert choosing that to read! 

She knew what she was doing.  She lulled us in to willing submission.  Again and again she read the poem, and with each hearing, we grew more and more still.  With each telling, we became more and more interested, until finally, we could not wait for the rocking rhythm of the verse that ended our day.  I have an absolutely piss poor memory, but I can hear the lines of that poem, feel its rhythm far below layers of conscious thought.  “The road was a ribbon of moonlight.” 

It is her reading to us, and the puzzling choice of that of all things for my brain to remember, that has convinced me of the wonderful power and joy of reading aloud to children.  Why does this poem, of all the millions of words I’ve read and heard, stick so firmly in my head?  I don’t read poetry often now, and when I do it’s contemporary.  I’d give my eye teeth to be able to remember other things.  What was it that made my memory so uncharacteristically receptive to just that poem?

Is it the text or the teacher who makes the difference?  Or an alchemical mix of text and person? 

I don’t think that there is an answer to which book will strike a chord with a child or when.  That means that frequent and loving exposure to all kinds of literature is essential.  It could be anything. 

I am, right now, reading Zorgamazoo to Griffin (8) and Rowan (4).  It’s a novel-length book told entirely in the rhythm and rhyme scheme of Dr. Seuss.  Will that be the book that the boys hear me reading decades hence?  Heaven help them.

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Narnia Rap

When I told her that I would be writing about rereadings of the Narnia Chronicles, my friend Jacqui told me about this rap from the Saturday Night Live crew.  (Cupcakes?  Where is the Turkish Delight?)

Enjoy.

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