How Reading Changed My Life (6 page)

I
N
1997 K
ATHERINE
Paterson, whose novel
Bridge to Terebithia
has engaged several generations of young people with its story of friendship and loss—and also led to a policy in a school district in Kansas requiring a teacher to list each profanity in required reading and forward the list to parents—gave the Anne Carroll Moore Lecture at the New York Public Library. It was a speech as fine as Ms. Paterson’s books, which are fine indeed, and she spoke of the dedication of the children who are her readers: “I increasingly feel a sense of pity toward my fellow writers who spend their lives writing for the speeded-up audience of adults. They look at me, I realize, with a patronizing
air, I who only write for the young. But I don’t know any of them who have readers who will read their novels over and over again.”

As someone who reads the same books over and over again, I think Ms. Paterson is wrong about that, although I know what she means. I have sat on the edge of several beds while
Green Eggs and Ham
was read, or recited more or less from memory; I read A
Wrinkle in Time
three times in a row once, when I was twelve, because I couldn’t bear for it to end, wanted them all, Meg and Charles Murry and even the horribly pulsing brain called It, to be alive again as they could only live within my mind, so that I felt as if I killed them when I closed the cover and gave them the kiss of life when my eyes met the words that created their lives. I still reread that way, always have, always will. I suspect there are more of us than Ms. Paterson knows. And I think I know who we are, and how we got that way. We are writers. We danced with the words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them:
I can do this. This is who I am
.

For some of us, reading begets rereading, and rereading begets writing. (Although there is no doubt which is first, and supreme; as Alberto Manguel writes in his wonderful
A History of Reading
, “I could perhaps live without writing. I don’t think I could live
without reading.”) After a while the story is familiar, the settings known, the characters understood, and there is nothing left to discover but technique. Why that sentence structure and not something simpler, or more complex? Why that way of ordering events instead of something more straightforward, or more experimental? What grabs the reader by the throat? What sags and bags and fails? There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read. “The rest you learn from books,” the novelist B. J. Chute, my senior writing instructor at college, said after she had taught us to send out submissions in a manila envelope, with a SASE for the inevitable rejection. Here is how one of Dickens’s friends and his first biographer, John Forster, describes him as a boy: “He was never a first-rate hand at marbles, or peg-top, or prisoners’ base; but he had great pleasure in watching the other boys … at these games, reading while they played.”

I don’t know what that boy read as he watched the others, long dead, long dust, play the games he couldn’t master, while he began the pas de deux with sentences that would lead to immortality. But I bet it wasn’t Shakespeare. Show me a writer who says she was inspired to try by the great masters, and I’ll show you someone who is remembering it wrong, or the way she thinks the world wants it remembered. It’s too daunting to read
Middlemarch
and say, even to
yourself, “I can do that!” Kafka cut his storytelling teeth on Sherlock Holmes, when he was a kid. (Kafka as a kid—now, there’s a notion!) And Faulkner’s biographer Joseph Blotner writes that young Billy’s tastes as a child were lowbrow, a magazine called
The American Boy:
he pored over it, over the short stories that might be comic, sentimental, or uplifting; the articles on famous men; departments such as “The Boy Debater” and “The Boy Coin Collector.” Thus was born
The Sound and the Fury
, from riproarers about how the West was won.

That single biographical fact may put to rest one of the other canards of literacy nostalgia, the notion that kids just don’t read the way they used to. In his eloquent, impassioned, ultimately alarmist book about reading and technology,
The Gutenberg Elegies
, the critic Sven Birkerts uses a deflating experience teaching undergraduates to argue a “conceptual ledge,” a “paradigm shift” in the relations between people and prose. Birkerts’s distress stems from his students’ lack of interest in what is a challenging story by Henry James, a story of loss and disintegration that resonates with those of us who have begun to experience loss and disintegration. Birkerts admits that as an undergraduate himself he was engaged by writers like Kerouac and Salinger. Yet instead of
A Perfect Day for Bananafish
, he assigns Washington Irving and Henry James and, when his students are not enthusiastic,
concludes that technology has interfered with our essential understanding of a complex text. The story reminds me of nothing so much as my elementary school librarian, frowning at the sight of Nancy Drew in our unlined, unscarred hands, or the predictions by our parents that the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones meant the end of music as it had heretofore been known.

In fact one of the most pernicious phenomena in assigned reading is the force-feeding of serious work at an age when the reader will feel pushed away, not from the particular book being assigned, but from an entire class of books, or even books in general. So the assigning of
Silas Marner
to high school freshmen is unlikely to make them, later in life, enthusiastic readers of the masterwork
Middlemarch
. At age thirteen,
David Copperfield
often seems less of an invitation to
Bleak House
than a clarion call for Cliffs Notes. (For those who, like me, are determined to raise children with a strong emotional attachment to Dickens, I recommend the reading of
A Christmas Carol
aloud sometime during the holidays.) Perhaps there are indeed children who learned to love books by reading
Moby Dick
, but that sounds like apocryphal remembering to me. Melville could certainly never have made me a writer. My best remembered inspiration, other than a class assignment, which is a source of inspiration to writers mostly overlooked in the
rose-colored haze of retelling, was Booth Tarkington’s
Seventeen
. That was the book that made me say “I can do that.”

Or perhaps it was a combination of two other reading experiences that set me convincingly on the road to becoming a writer. My father had a weakness for humor writing, being a very funny man himself, and I remember how he would laugh over the work of Max Shulman and Jean Shepherd. More than once as a girl I would see him paging through
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
or
In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash
and laughing in the particular way of the human being who is truly tickled, scarcely able to breathe, sometimes seeming to be about to pass out. Another time I remember watching my mother reading a book that she’d loved greatly over the years,
Green Dolphin Street
. It was by Elizabeth Goudge, and was about two sisters in love with the same man. I recall hearing a kind of shuddery sound and turning to see that my mother was weeping. Both these things went deep with me, that words on a page could make my father laugh and my mother cry.

And then finally there are a few sharply remembered moments that are mine alone: Home from school, suspended for bad behavior, I come to the end of
To Kill a Mockingbird
and hear the crack as Jem’s arm breaks as clear as I can hear the kitchen
clock tick. Lying on the beach listening to a transistor radio, I feel midway through
Main Street
the claustrophobia of small-town life, particularly for women, so acutely that the shiver runs all through me that’s said in superstitions to be a ghost walking over my grave.

And one afternoon in college I skip my seminar on writers of the Renaissance so I can finish
Sons and Lovers
, so swept away am I by the passion that a disappointed woman feels for her sons. And I know that I will never, ever write as well as this, but that if anything even dimly like this power, to enthrall, to move, to light up the darkness of daily life, lies hidden like a wartime cryptogram within the Royal manual typewriter on my dorm room desk, I must try to make a go of it. Why would anyone aspire to be president of the United States or of General Motors if they could write like D. H. Lawrence instead? That’s what I remember thinking.

That’s not to say that I immediately set myself the work of constant writing; that, too, is a writer’s life story that I suspect. But I did begin to think of myself as a writer, although I was not sure what sort of writer I was. Like most young people, I went through a romance with poetry, enamored of the music and the rhythm of the words, and by the soothing notion that there need be so much less to the product than there was in even a slender novel. In my own life, this
romance fell in a predictable period. It came after the end of elementary school, when poetry was something between a punishment and a spelling bee, “The Children’s Hour” committed to memory, and college, when I took a modern poetry course from the same professor who found Galsworthy beneath notice. He had a fine, sonorous voice that rang in the small stuffy classroom, vying successfully with the sound of traffic on Broadway, and those half glasses that I still associate with intelligence even though I now wear, and loathe, them. And when he read Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” aloud, dipping his out-sized shaggy head to the page—“For three years, out of key with his time/He strove to resuscitate the dead art/Of poetry; to maintain ‘The Sublime’/In the old sense. Wrong from the start”—I knew that, whatever else I might be, I was no poet. My books from that course are full of painstaking marginalia, as though if I paid close enough attention the bird would fly in my breast. But I didn’t have poetry in me. I wrote fiction in college, and then for many years I wrote fact, as best I could gather, discern, and describe it, as a newspaper reporter. Then I wrote fiction again. Reading taught me how to do it all.

“Books are over,” the editor of a journal to be found only on the Internet told me one day at a conference on the future of the newspaper business. Just my luck. After all these years of reading books I’d finally
written one; when I took time to alphabetize my shelves, it came between Proust and Ayn Rand, which seemed representative of how I’d read all my life, between the great and the merely engagingly popular. I could still remember the time I had held my first hardcover book. The Federal Express truck raised a cloud of gravel and dust on a country road as I ripped into the envelope, removed the book, and lifted it up and down in my outstretched hands, just to feel the heft of it, as though it was to be valued by weight. I held it the way I’d seen babies held at religious ceremonies, a bris, perhaps, or a baptism. Hardcovers: every writer’s ultimate ambition, whether she admits it or not.

It was a fearsome frisson that ripped through the business, the business of writing, the business of publishing, the business of newspapering, when I was well into all three. The computer had become like the most miraculous sort of technological Swiss Army knife: each time you thought you knew what it could do, it turned out that it could do more, faster, better, more accurately. I wrote my first novel on a big clunker of a machine that wheezed slightly when it stored information and had a mere 256 kilobits of memory. It just managed to hold the book, the word-processing program, and a few other odds and ends. My third novel was composed on a machine that fits into my handbag and weighs slightly more than a premature
baby. The program corrects my punctuation and capitalization as I type; when I try to type a stand-alone lowercase
I
, it inflates it into a capital letter, correcting me peremptorily, certain I’ve made a mistake. I could keep a dozen copies of my book on its hard disk and it wouldn’t even breathe hard.

And there was less than a decade between the publication of those two books.

So it became easy, as the age of the computer washed in a wave of modems and cybersurfers over the United States at the end of the twentieth century, to believe those who said that books need never leave the soul of this new machine at all, that the wave of the future was this:
The Age of Innocence
on-line, to be called up and read with the push of a
VIEW
button;
The Fountainhead
via the Internet, perhaps with all the tiresome objectivist polemical speeches set in a different font for easy skipping-over (or even the outright deletions that Ayn Rand’s editor should have taken care of). No paper, no shelf space, and the ultimate democratization of reading: a library in a box much smaller than a single volume of the old leather-bound
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. To all the old fears—of lack of literacy, of interest, of quality—was added the fear of microchips.

A small skirmish in these technowars broke out in the summer of 1997 in the pages of
The Horn Book
, the journal of children’s literature, and it was representative
of both the worst-case scenarios and the realities of the future of publishing in an era of tear-away technology. A writer and librarian named Sarah Ellis tried an experiment: she read on a laptop computer a book for children called
The End of the Rainbow
. But this was not just any book: it exemplified the greatest fears of those who love children’s literature, and know how difficult it can be to publish in a cost-conscious age.
The End of the Rainbow
was part of a series of Danish books about a boy named Buster published by Dutton; the sales trajectory of its predecessors had convinced the publisher to offer it free on the Internet rather than go to the expense of publishing it in book form.