JUNKIE
Works Mentioned in this Piece:
Secret Garden, Poor Little Rich Girl, Five Little Peppers, Prince and the Pauper, Boxcar Children, Children of Other Lands, Flying Carpet, Complete Book of Marvels, Red Pony, Wayward Bus, Cluny Brown, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Beach Red, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, American Guerilla in the Philippines, Hiroshima, Up Front, Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, Four Saints in Three Acts
JUNKIE
My name is Elinore and I am a reading junkie. If there were a step program for this addiction, I’d be in it. Actually, no I wouldn’t. I really don’t want to change and I don’t see any reason to, not at this point in my life.
If I were a kid, they’d be saying:
“Go outside and get some fresh air.”
“Take your nose out of that book.”
“You’ll ruin your eyes.”
“Sit up straight, you’re all hunched over.”
“Do something useful for a change.”
Then, I read covertly and feared getting caught. I snitched a little time here, sneaked a little there, and experienced the thrill of thinking I was doing something wrong. Once, when I was supposed to be practicing the piano I propped up a novel on the music stand and was running mindless scales just to make the sound and my mother, who had been ironing in the basement, sneaked up and gave me such a whap, it knocked me off the piano stool.
I trudged a mile to the municipal library, going up the steep granite steps, through the heavy bronze doors, and down the hallway, past the police station with the two-cell jail. The library occupied a large one-room space with a corner for children’s books. There I found The Secret Garden, The Poor Little Rich Girl, The Five Little Peppers, The Prince and the Pauper, and The Boxcar Children. Some books I read more than once, reviewing the delicious details and thinking about lives and times quite different from my own. Nobody drove me to the library and nobody directed my reading. I got there by walking, and I read what I pleased. My library card was a passport to freedom.
My grandmother gave me Children of Other Lands, a large book that described places such as Lapland and Fiji. It had maps with clouds puffing winds and sea serpents bobbing through wavy waves and compass roses and little vessels making their way under full sail. Some maps had white spaces -- terra incognita -- lands yet unexplored. But a great portion of the world, including Canada and Australia, was colored British Colonial deep pink. Consider this bit written for children late in the 19th Century by Robert Louis Stevenson and understand that since then we have evolved at least a little:
Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little Frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Don’t you wish that you were me?
It goes on and it gets worse. You don’t want to know.
Although we may have been reading stuff like the above, we were taught geography as a separate subject. In fifth grade, I was introduced to books by the American adventurer and explorer, Richard Halliburton, who described his world travels to places such as the Taj Mahal and Mt. Everest. In those pre-TV days, Halliburton’s "The Flying Carpet," "Seven League Boots," and "Complete Book of Marvels" included photographs he took from an upside-down airplane! We drew maps (lots more British Colonial pink) and filled in the boundaries, cities and capitols. We drew sheaves of wheat and smoke stacks and sutured the lands with hatch-marked railroads. We memorized all of the counties in the state and named the Great Lakes from West to East. We knew where to find Sault St. Marie and the Skagerrak and the Kaategat. From the geography books of the day, we learned about Suez and the Panama Canal and the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. In quizzes we wrote out the fastest route to get from New York City to, say, Hobart, Tasmania.
At home, there was a six-shelf bookcase which held many works of current fiction that were there because my parents failed to return them to the Book-of-the-Month Club, so I had handy access to books such as Steinbeck’s "The Red Pony," and "The Wayward Bus;" Marjory Sharp’s "Cluny Brown," Betty Smith’s "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," P. Bowman’s "Beach Red," Captain Ted W. Lawson’s "30 Seconds Over Tokyo," Ira Wolfert’s "American Guerrilla in the Philippines" and John Hersey’s "Hiroshima." This kind of reading gave me a kind of premature look into worlds of adult love and war. I memorized all of the captions on the Willy and Joe cartoons in Bill Mauldin’s "Up Front." I read cartoon collections by Bennett Cerf and humor by Max Schulman. At the age of thirteen, I was giving myself a liberal education.
After high school, I went to a major university that had a strong English Literature department. Willy-nilly, I read a lot of good stuff beginning with "Canterbury Tales" and “Beowulf”, but I don’t remember required reading going much beyond literature from the mid-1930s. I went through a bohemian period that amounted to hanging around the one coffee shop downtown, listening to a scratchy recording of Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein’s “Four Saints in Three Acts.” On my own, I read Arthur Koestler and H.L. Mencken and painted my room black.
After graduation, when real life was supposed to begin, I was so busy working I had to suspend serious reading. About a dozen years passed until my life attained the kind of orderliness and stability I needed to really read. I then embarked on what I can only think of a grand indulgence and what writer and teacher Robert Alter calls a “privileged pleasure.” I read through works by some authors and went from one line of reading to the next and from that on to another. I delved. I wallowed. I basked. I embraced the reading habit and, once again, I was hooked.
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MY READING LIFE is an ongoing series by Elinore Standard, co-editor along with Laura Furman of Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading (NY: Carroll& Graf, 1997.)
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