Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (5 page)

It was a grievous blow when Miss Farrar tacked up the class’s star sonnets on the bulletin board and mine was not among them. Her favorite was about the Acropolis. Twenty-eight years later, I still remember that its author called the Parthenon “a ruined crown.” It never occurred to me that this metaphor alone was worth a hundred of my entire sonnet; all I noticed, in my wounded condition, was that my rival’s verse
didn’t scan
. It was only at sixteen, when I read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments. Love is not love …”) and Hopkins’s “The Windhover” (“Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!”), that I realized that these poets had failed to stick to iambic pentameter not because they couldn’t but because they didn’t want to.

By that time I had written twenty or thirty sonnets, of which—I know this will come as a grave disappointment to future anthologists—only four are extant. In form, they were all Shakespearean (three quatrains and a couplet) rather than Petrarchan (an octave and a sestet), because Shakespearean sonnets, having seven rhymes rather than only four or five, were easier. (My success-grubbing disposition craved a certain amount of challenge but was loath to assume an optional handicap that the more philistine members of my imagined reading public might not even recognize.) The Fadiman oeuvre was uniformly bleak. One sonnet written at fifteen, about a seedy section of Hollywood Boulevard upon which I had cast my cynical gaze while waiting in a movie line, ended with the couplet “While in the movie many people died / I saw more death while killing time outside.” It scanned well.

All this time, like Molière’s
bourgeois gentilhomme
, who congratulated himself for having spoken prose all his life, I was under the impression that I was writing poetry. My sonnets looked like poems. They quacked like poems. But at seventeen, when I got to college and my critical faculties suddenly kicked in, I had to admit that they weren’t really poems. I had mistaken for lyric genius what was in fact merely the genetic facility for verbal problem-solving that enabled everyone in my family to excel at crossword puzzles, anagrams, and Scrabble. Since that awful realization, I haven’t written a single poem aside from the doggerel I trot out at friends’ weddings. How I envy Mr. Kunstler for the suspension of disbelief that has enabled him to carry on for half a century!

The question remains: During my brief career as a soidisant poet, why did I restrict myself almost entirely to sonnets? In retrospect, I believe I saw the form as a vindication of both my temperament and my physical self. I was small and compulsive; I was not suited to the epic or to free verse; in work as in life, I was fated to devote myself not to the grand scheme but to the lapidary detail. The sonnet, with its epigrammatic compression and formal structure (never twelve lines, never sixteen), hearteningly proclaimed that smallness and small-mindedness need not go hand in hand. A sonnet might
look
dinky, but it was somehow big enough to accommodate love, war, death, and O. J. Simpson. You could fit the whole world in there if you shoved hard enough.

That was why I was particularly drawn to two Wordsworth sonnets about the sonnet. One was called “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room.” Its theme is the paradoxically liberating power of restriction. Just as a nun does not feel cramped in her cell because, however tiny, it is roomy enough to admit God, so the poet may find his imagination emancipated by the sonnet’s modest compass: “In truth, the prison, into which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is; and hence for me, / In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.”

In the second poem, “Scorn Not the Sonnet,” Wordsworth summoned a glorious procession of poets—Shakespeare, Petrarch, Tasso, Camoëns, Dante, Spenser—who, tormented by lost love, exile, or depression, had found consolation in the sonnet form. He ended with Milton, who wrote his greatest sonnets after he went blind in his early forties: “… when a damp / Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand / The Thing became a trumpet.”

T
he theme of the sonnet’s consolatory power has special meaning to me because of what happened to my father two years ago, when he was eighty-eight. Over the period of a week, he had, for mysterious reasons, gone from being able to read
The Encyclopaedia Britannica
to being unable to read the
E
at the top of an eye chart. I took him from the west coast of Florida, where he and my mother live, to the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami. He was informed there that he had acute retinal necrosis, improbably caused by a chicken-pox virus that had been latent for more than eighty years. He was unlikely to regain much of his sight.

I spent the night on a cot in my father’s hospital room. We talked about his life’s pleasures and disappointments. At some point after midnight, he said, “I don’t wish to be melodramatic, but you should know that if I can’t read or write, I’m finished.” Never retired, he was accustomed to working a sixty-hour week as an editor and critic.

“Well, Milton wrote
Paradise Lost
after
he
went blind,” I said, grasping at straws.

“So he did,” said my father. “He also wrote that famous sonnet.”

” ‘On His Blindness,’ ” I replied. I had read it at thirteen, the year I wrote my own first sonnet.

” ‘When I consider how my light is spent’—then how does it go?” he said. “Isn’t there a preposition next?”

In the darkness, we managed between us to reconstruct six and a half of the fourteen lines. “When you get back to New York,” he said, “the first thing I want you to do is to look up that sonnet and read it to me over the telephone.”

There was no way to know at the time that over the next year my father would learn to use recorded books, lecture without notes, and gain access to unguessed-at inner resources—in short, to discover that the convent’s narrow room that he had been forced to occupy was, though terrible, considerably wider than he had expected. All these things lay far in the future, but that night in Miami, Milton’s sonnet provided the first glimmer of the persistent intellectual curiosity that was to prove his saving grace.

When I returned home, I called him at the hospital and read him the sonnet:

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve there with my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”
I fondly ask; But Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o ’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait

“Of course,” said my pessimistic, areligious father. “How could I have forgotten?”

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W
hen I was eleven and my brother was thirteen, our parents took us to Europe. At the Hôtel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen, as he had done virtually every night of his literate life, Kim left a book facedown on the bedside table. The next afternoon, he returned to find the book closed, a piece of paper inserted to mark the page, and the following note, signed by the chambermaid, resting on its cover:

SIR, YOU MUST NEVER DO THAT TO A BOOK.

My brother was stunned. How could it have come to pass that he—a reader so devoted that he’d sneaked a book and a flashlight under the covers at his boarding school every night after lights-out, a crime punishable by a swat with a wooden paddle—had been branded as
someone who didn’t love books
? I shared his mortification. I could not imagine a more bibliolatrous family than the Fadimans. Yet, with the exception of my mother, in the eyes of the young Danish maid we would all have been found guilty of rampant book abuse.

During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book. The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book’s physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us, a book’s
words
were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.

Hilaire Belloc, a courtly lover, once wrote:

Child! do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.

What would Belloc have thought of my father, who, in order to reduce the weight of the paperbacks he read on airplanes, tore off the chapters he had completed and threw them in the trash? What would he have thought of my husband, who reads in the sauna, where heat-fissioned pages drop like petals in a storm? What would he have thought (here I am making a brazen attempt to upgrade my family by association) of Thomas Jefferson, who chopped up a priceless 1572 first edition of Plutarch’s works in Greek in order to interleave its pages with an English translation? Or of my old editor Byron Dobell, who, when he was researching an article on the Grand Tour, once stayed up all night reading six volumes of Boswell’s journals and, as he puts it, “sucked them like a giant mongoose”? Byron told me, “I didn’t give a damn about the condition of those volumes. In order to get where I had to go, I underlined them, wrote in them, shredded them, dropped them, tore them to pieces, and did things to them that we can’t discuss in public.”

Byron loves books. Really, he does. So does my husband, an incorrigible book-splayer whose roommate once informed him, “George, if you ever break the spine of one of my books, I want you to know you might as well be breaking
my own spine
.” So does Kim, who reports that despite his experience in Copenhagen, his bedside table currently supports three spreadeagled volumes. “They are ready in an instant to let me pick them up,” he explains. “To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you’ve only pressed Pause.” I confess to marking my place promiscuously, sometimes splaying, sometimes committing the even more grievous sin of dog-earing the page. (Here I manage to be simultaneously abusive and compulsive: I turn down the upper corner for page-marking and the lower corner to identify passages I want to xerox for my commonplace book.)

All courtly lovers press Stop. My Aunt Carol—who will probably claim she’s no relation once she finds out how I treat my books—places reproductions of Audubon paintings horizontally to mark the exact paragraph where she left off. If the colored side is up, she was reading the left-hand page; if it’s down, the right-hand page. A college classmate of mine, a lawyer, uses his business cards, spurning his wife’s silver Tiffany bookmarks because they are a few microns too thick and might leave vestigial stigmata. Another classmate, an art historian, favors Paris Métro tickets or “those Inkjet-printed credit card receipts—but only in books of art criticism whose pretentiousness I wish to desecrate with something really crass and financial. I would never use those in fiction or poetry, which really
are
sacred.”

Courtly lovers always remove their bookmarks when the assignation is over; carnal lovers are likely to leave romantic mementos, often three-dimensional and messy.
Birds of Yosemite and the East Slope
, a volume belonging to a science writer friend, harbors an owl feather and the tip of a squirrel’s tail, evidence of a crime scene near Tioga Pass. A book critic I know took
The Collected Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
on a backpacking trip through the Yucatan, and whenever an interesting bug landed in it, she clapped the covers shut. She amassed such a bulging insectarium that she feared Poe might not make it through customs. (He did.)