|
I soon left the town where I had felt so humiliated
for boarding school, graduated, and went on to Duke. I still thought about
that depressing moment. Was I as boring and unappealing as my mother and
that senior boy thought I was? It was true that I spent more time with books
than with boys. Boys were a sometime interest, but books were necessary,
like breathing and sleeping, like food and drink. I read all my textbooks on
the first day of classes, and surreptitiously read novels while the other
students plodded through them for the next nine months. Each summer, asked
to keep a record of the books I read during vacation, my list numbered in
the hundreds.
Most damning, I adored libraries: In the little library
in the small North Carolina town where I lived from the fifth grade
until I went away to school, I checked out armloads of books every week,
working my way through the fiction alphabetically by author. At boarding
school, I volunteered to assist the school librarian, because (although
I didn’t say so) I loved the look of books, the orderly rows of them,
the feel of them, the smell of them. Working in the space where they
were housed was almost a religious experience.
At college, books remained my best friends, but I
continued to worry about that “love of books not boys” label: were they
really mutually exclusive? Couldn’t a bookworm also be admired by the
opposite sex, be sexy and glamorous? I was forced to admit that in the
late 1950s in North Carolina there was a great divide between the
bookish and those bored by books: the latter rarely visited the library,
while the former were seldom seen with football players and other
college heroes at beer joints.
I found few soul-mates at Duke. Some of my most
brilliant classmates—Elizabeth Dole, for example, in those days Liddy
Hanford from Salisbury, NC—doubtless fearing to be called a bookworm,
presented a façade of helpless stupidity, drawling, “Oh, I just know
I flunked my French exam,” while secretly headed for Phi Beta Kappa. I
found the wide-eyed idiot acts of the Southern belles tiresome, but I
also disliked the pretentious girl-grinds, who wore their grubby clothes
and unkempt hair like uniforms. Where were the women who admitted they
couldn’t live without books, who also loved to dress up and go to
parties, and who dreamed of dancing until dawn? Ideally with a man who
loved to read?
After I moved to New York I finally began to
encounter—mostly read about—women who shared my values, feelings, and
experiences. I learned that there were others whose mothers despised
their bookish daughters. Oprah Winfrey told a Life reporter. “I
remember being in the back hallway when I was about nine—I’m going to
try to say this without crying—and my mother threw the door open and
grabbed a book out of my hand and said, “You’re nothing but a
something-something bookworm. Get your butt outside! You think you’re
better than the other kids!”1 Ms. Winfrey’s mother’s
assumption that a bookworm thinks of herself as superior had a familiar
ring; I, too, had been told that I “thought I was so smart,” and urged
to “go play outside” like “normal” children.
To my astonishment, I learned that others had also
fallen in love with libraries. I wish I’d known the eight-year-old Amy
Tan, who wrote “that learning seemed “to turn on a light in the little
room in my mind,”2 and that “books seem to open many windows
in my little room.” I was thrilled with Annie Dillard’s description of
writing a book in the Hollins College library at night—letting herself
into the locked, dark building where she wrote alone till “midnight, one
or two.”3 Despite the eerie atmosphere she described, Dillard
didn’t sound frightened. She wrote about those dark rooms as if she were
in a safe haven, protected by walls of books.
Envy almost overcame my delight when I read about Anne
Fadiman’s childhood. As a part of “Fadiman U.,” she and her family
“gathered around the television set for…GE College Bowl.”4 At
Fadiman U., a bookworm was not a girl criticized for her love of books,
but the hero of a children’s story: Wally the Wordworm had
“lexicographic adventures” and ate only very long words, amusing and
enriching the vocabulary of the Fadiman children and those who, like me,
only discovered Wally as an adult.5
I encountered (on paper) soul mates in Anna Quindlen
and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. We shared both a general passion for books
and reading, and some specific likes and dislikes (all three of us
disliked Moby Dick, and loved A Little Princess.)
But my feeling of being set apart—different—welled up
again when all around me I began to hear the voices of those who would
replace my beloved books with computer screens. How could they? I agreed
with Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who pointed out that “living by the word, by
organized series of words, which is narrative, is a handicap when it
comes to operating modern electronic devices like telephone answering
machines or VCRs (not to mention computers and the phantasmagoric
reaches of E-mail). Such ineptness is not due, as laughing children
suppose, to quaintness or premature senility. It is simply that readers
are accustomed to receiving information in the narrative mode.”6
Yes, dear reader, and we are also used to
responding in writing. A post-graduate school IQ test I took was
oral, because, I was told, so many people today lack reading and writing
skills. I, on the other hand, felt disadvantaged, as I am used not only
to reading questions, but answering them in writing.
I say “Hear, hear” to Anna Quindlen, who wrote that, “a
computer is no substitute for a book” and “It is not possible that the
book is over. Too many people love it so.”7 Nevertheless, I
am troubled by some frightening steps towards ruining the wonderful
world of books by what is described as “advances” in technology.
More and more, access to books and other research
material has become computerized. I was horrified when years ago I
arrived at the library of The Museum of Modern Art, and discovered that
the card catalog had been removed. The only way to research the files of
clippings on art and artists was by computer. The absence of a card
catalog spoiled that library for me. Its soul was gone. I regretted that
I had contributed financially to that library. I shuddered at the
possibility that my dollars might have been used to help assassinate the
card catalog.
Few people share my interest in card catalogs, so I was
fascinated by Nicholson Baker’s essay, “Discards,” in which he points
out the problems and difficulties, the shortsightedness, of discarding
card catalogs. He discusses the huge number of errors in computerized
card catalogs. He wrote, “the real reason to protect card catalogs is
simply that they hold the irreplaceable intelligence of the librarians
who worked on them.”8
After reading Baker’s essay, and experiencing vanishing
card catalogs, I struck a small blow for readers. Some years ago, my
husband and I moved our thousands of prints and the library to support
them—hundreds of books and files—to a building we acquired to house
everything, and established The Print Research Foundation (PRF). At the
same time, we bought a card catalogue for the book collection. Yes,
those old-fashioned drawers are still being made, as are the cards,
hole-punched to fit on the rods that hold them in place in the drawers.
Our card catalogue was in a prominent location at PRF, and when in 2008,
we donated our prints and our art library to The National Gallery in
Washington, we kept the card catalogue. I continue to treasure it.
After several graduate school experiences (I loved
writing my dissertation), I accepted my role in life. Anna Quindlen
wrote that she’d received a letter from a girl “who had been given one
of my books by her mother, and began her letter, ‘I guess I am what some
people would call a bookworm.’ “So am I,” Quindlen wrote back.9
And I cheerfully declare—so am I!
_______________
1 Lowe, Janet.
Oprah Winfrey Speaks, 21-24.
2 Tan, Amy. “What
the Library Means to Me.” Paul Mandelbaum, ed., First Words.
184.
3 Dillard, Annie.
The Writing Life, 27, 29.
4 Fadiman, Anne. Ex Libris, 14.
5 Fadiman,
Clifton, TK6 Schwartz, Lynne Sharon.
Ruined by
Reading,
23.
7 Quindlin, Anna. How
Reading Changed My Life,
64, 68.8 Baker, Nicholson, “Discards.”
The Size of Thoughts, 125.
9 Quindlin, 14.
Works Cited
Baker, Nicholson. “Discards.”
The
Size of Thoughts.
Dillard,
Annie. The Writing Life.
New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Fadiman, Anne.
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common
Reader. New York:
Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1998.
Fadiman,
Clifton.
Wally the Wordworm. 1964. Owings Mills,
Maryland: Stemmer House, 1983.
Quindlen, Anna.
How
Reading
Changed My Life. New York:
Ballantine, 1998.
Schwartz, Lynne Sharon.
Ruined by
Reading.
Boston: Beacon, 1997.
Tan, Amy. “What the Library Means to Me.”
First Words. Ed. Paul
Mandelbaum. Chapel Hill,
N.C.: Algonquin, 2000.
|
|
