How Reading Changed My Life (5 page)

This ability of a book to lessen isolation is important, not simply for personal growth, but for cultural and societal growth as well. Before the advent of television, books were the primary vehicle for discovering
both the mysteries and the essential human similarities of those a world away. By the fiftieth anniversary of the author’s death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp,
The Diary of Anne Frank
had sold twenty million copies in fifty-five languages; while its validity as a Holocaust document or a work of art has been debated over and over, there can be no doubt that for several generations of American children who had never heard of the death camps and perhaps never met a Jew, the universality of Anne’s adolescent experiences and the horrible specificity of her imprisonment began to open a window on prejudice that might otherwise have longer stayed shut.
The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Naked and the Dead:
the great novels of war have helped create both patriots and pacifists, among those who have never, will never, see combat. The peculiar jacket copy for
Catcher in the Rye
when it first appeared in paperback, with an awkward representational drawing that predated the now famous austere red jacket, seems to have some sense of its psychological alchemy. “This unusual book,” it reads, as though no more specific adjective were available, “may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart—but you will never forget it.” And, of course, that is how Salinger’s novel has been thought of since it was published in 1951: not in terms of its literary merits, but as a book that has enabled generations of adolescents
to feel more like human beings and less like visitors from another planet. Scarcely anyone reads it after age twenty-one, which is irrelevant, perhaps even desirable, to readers under the age of eighteen who find in it proof positive that no one understands them—and that this is a universal condition.

Catcher in the Rye
is a signal example of what reading does so well, not only because it has resonated with so many but also because it has enraged so many. When, each year, the American Library Association issues its report on the banning of books by school libraries, it is full of titles about gay life, about sexuality, about witchcraft and the occult. But Salinger’s novel is an evergreen on the list, challenged and removed from shelves in virtually every part of the country year after year, even as it continues to be one of the most consistently assigned books on high school reading lists. Parents who have opposed it most frequently complain that it shows a complete disregard for the authority of adults. And indeed it does, which is why adolescents, whose need to disregard the authority of parents is deep and real and transient, perennially place it on their list of favorite books. It challenges the established order, as do many great books—as do many of the books on the banned books list.

My first real encounter with the controversy that can surround a book taught me all this convincingly
and on an exceedingly small and intimate scale, taught me about individual taste, about adolescent insurrection, about that great chasm that sometimes arises between one generation and another. My gentle mother was sitting in our living room when she literally hurled the book she had been reading across the coffee table and onto the floor, where chance—and good fortune—made it land not far from my own feet. “This is a dirty book!” my mother said, leaving the room, leaving the book, leaving me to discover that
Portnoy’s Complaint
was as funny and intelligent a novel as I had ever read. I have to wonder now, with teenagers in the house, what my mother was thinking that day. Didn’t she know that the book felt deeply true at some level, that its sexual content was merely the garment to clothe its important notions about the nature of masculinity? And, above all, didn’t she know that I would pick it up and read it the moment she was gone, hearing her distress signal as the clarion cry to forbidden fruit?

It is difficult not to think of that clarion call, of the notion of forbidden fruit, looking at the list of America’s banned books. It is difficult not to conclude, too, looking at the list, that the books dominating it are of two sorts: books that are inarguably excellent, and those that merely have the virtue of some sort of truth. The
Banned Books Resource Guide
of 1997 documents efforts to ban Sinclair Lewis,
Moby Dick
(because it “conflicts with the values of the community” in a town in Texas),
Of Mice and Men
, and Chaucer. It also has three pages detailing efforts to suppress the young adult novels of Judy Blume, which have sold millions of copies to adolescents who recognized their own problems and pain in their pages. Ms. Blume’s
Forever
, about sex between teenagers, was challenged in Scranton because it contains “four-letter words and talked about masturbation, birth control, and disobedience to parents,” in Missouri because it promotes “the stranglehold of humanism on life in America,” and was moved from the young adult section in Nebraska because it is “pornographic and does not promote the sanctity of … family life.”

It’s an interesting word, that word “pornographic,” which, along with the adjective “obscene,” has been at the heart of many legal decisions about printed materials. The most entertaining—and telling—exchange was that between Margaret Anderson, the New York bookstore owner who tried to publish
Ulysses
in the United States, and John Quinn, the lawyer who represented her when she was prosecuted for doing so. At the end of the proceedings—lost by the champions of free speech—Quinn warned his client, “And now, for God’s sake, don’t publish any more obscene literature!”

Anderson replied, “How am I to know when it’s obscene?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the lawyer. “But don’t do it.”

I repeated that to the eighth grade at the elementary school my three children attend, not far from the store where the intrepid Margaret Anderson sold James Joyce’s masterpiece. The librarian there, who knew as much about books for children as many of the industry’s best editors, approached Banned Books Week by making a lesson of the banning of books. The eldest students studied the First Amendment. They were remarkably laissez-faire about censorship—the consensus seemed to be that everyone should read everything, which was cheering—but there was general agreement that a book that contained a full frontal nude portrayal of the male form was completely inappropriate for a six-year-old and could be adjudged obscene. I whipped out Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book
In the Night Kitchen
, which portrays a small boy named Mickey floating nude, penis and all, through a landscape of enormous flour bags and milk bottles. The eighth grade groaned:
gotcha
, they knew I was saying. But the utter rightness of Mickey’s nudity had not been so easily accepted elsewhere; in a school in Missouri shorts had been drawn on the character, and elsewhere the book had been moved from low shelves so only taller, older children could get to it.

As a Catholic girl who grew up in the sixties the
matter of banned books had always fascinated me. Until Vatican II elevated individual conscience to a more central place in the faith, the church kept an Index of Forbidden Books, or Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Balzac was on the list; so were Dumas and Richardson’s
Pamela
. Writing of Catholic culture, the psychologist Eugene Kennedy describes an “acceptable” Catholic novel as “generally a pious work that supported and encouraged Catholic ideals and practices and justified the institution and its control over the lives of its adherents. In such works, the good were rewarded, the erring, terribly punished.” In my own Catholic home, and at the homes of my relatives, I remember the works of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, whose radio show was enormously popular, or
The Day Christ Died
by Jim Bishop, a dramatized account of the road to Calvary. (For the more secular audience, there was also
The Day Lincoln Was Shot
by the same author.)

These books were on the bookshelves of many of our homes when I was growing up. By contrast, the dirty books—for it was a simpler, more black-and-white time, when books were not objectionable or titillating, just dirty—were almost universally to be found between the box spring and the mattress of our parents’ beds. To read them—and read them we did—we had to make sure that we were alone in the house and that the bedroom door was latched, much
as our parents had to do when they were actually engaged in the acts described in the books, which were far less likely to be novels than so-called marriage manuals. (In the case of my own parents, there was a copy of
Tropic of Cancer
, which I think of rather proudly today, being the only evidence I ever saw that they were forward-thinking in matters of literary taste.)

These were the books from which I learned about the mechanics of sex, but of course mechanics was not really what was wanted at all. I learned about sex, among other things, from another Catholic girl, Mary McCarthy, and the enormously popular and controversial roman à clef about her Vassar classmates entitled
The Group
. I have my original paperback copy, published in 1964, its cover softened with a smattering of daisies, and it still falls open, automatically, to the sections in which the reserved Dorothy loses her virginity and then goes to a clinic to buy a birth-control device. Both the description of female orgasm, and of the hot burning embarrassment that a clinic visit can provoke in a newly sexually active woman, remain quite vivid despite several decades and a sexual revolution. I don’t know how other young women learned to identify the sensations of climax, or how mortifying a first visit to a gynecologist can be. I know I learned from Mary McCarthy. Come to
think of it, she was my first introduction to lesbianism as well.

But, looking back, I realize it was not so much the sex as the sedition in the book that I found seductive. Like
Tropic of Cancer
, which I did indeed filch from my parents’ bedroom, or
Portnoy’s Complaint
, or
Peyton Place
or
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, the events of
The Group
were matters that I was not supposed to know about, or even be capable of understanding. The attention of our elders focused on sexual activity, but perhaps other elements were even more corrosive of the conventions: disappointment, infidelity, duplicity, hypocrisy. In all of those books, too, there was a sense of forbidden female license that translated, at some subconscious level, into female freedom. I can remember my mother poring silently over a copy of
The Feminine Mystique
, the revolutionary book by Betty Friedan describing the worm at the core of the fruit of marriage and motherhood. But I was too young to have either husband or children; I found feminism, my eyes wide at the infinite variety of the unknown, in
The Group
, in Kay’s suicide, Lakey’s lesbianism, the sad settling that Dorothy makes of her life after her one sexual adventure. All seemed to shout, to belie those daisies on the cover by shouting, that the lives of intelligent women had to amount to more than this.

Sedition has been the point of the printed word almost since its inception, certainly since Martin Luther nailed on that church door his list of ninety-five complaints against the established Catholic hierarchy. The printing press led to the Reformation, and to revolutions, political and sexual. Books made atheists of believers, and made believers of millions whose ancestors knew religious texts only as works of art, masterpieces hidden away in the monasteries.

And the opposite was true. Ignorance was the preferred condition of the people by despots. In the essay that begins her book on multiculturalism, a movement toward more inclusionary art and literature which has been both promulgated and ridiculed by books, Hazel Rochman recalls the prevailing ethos of the South African police state that led her and her husband to put their books in a box and bury them in the backyard: “Apartheid has made us bury our books. The Inquisition and the Nazis burned books. Slaves in the United States were forbidden to read books. From Latin America to Eastern Europe and Asia, books have been trashed. But the stories are still there.”

For some portion of the human race, political upheaval and reform have come through experience, through the oppression of hereditary monarchs and the corruption of established churches, through seats
at the back of the bus in the Jim Crow South or sexual harassment in a heretofore all-male assembly line. But that cannot explain the moral and ethical awakening of those raised in relative comfort and ease, never faced with prejudice or denigration. That was the case with me, and I suspect that it was two books that began the process of making me a liberal. One was the Bible, or at least the New Testament, in which Jesus seemed to take for granted as a necessary part of existence the need to help those who were disenfranchised. The other was by Dickens, who used the gaudy show of character and circumstance so effectively to communicate the realities of social injustice. He does it in
Bleak House
with the stranglehold of law, with debtors’ prisons in
Little Dorritt
. But I remember best my first reading of
A Christmas Carol
in which Scrooge bellows, of those who would rather die than go to the workhouses, “They had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” Visions, not words, change Scrooge’s mind, and his heart, but when he begs the Ghost of Christmas Present to assure him that his clerk’s son, the crippled Tiny Tim, will not die, the spirit taunts him: “What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

“Man,” adds the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have
discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is.” A call to social action, a spiritual invocation, and a climactic moment in a wonderful, and wonderfully well wrought, bit of storytelling—so can a book be personal, political, and entertaining, all at the same time.