Fantastic Metropolis

I have a distinct image of myself at age eight, occupying a large upholstered green chair of nubbly early fifties vintage, “lost” in a book. Sometimes my memory has me sprawling in that chair with my scrawny stick-figure legs dangling over one of the arms. Or it has me lying on the floor with those same legs propped above me on the cushion, my toes curling or my legs scissoring in the air, soles clapping smartly together. Or even sitting up properly with my infant brother warm and heavy in my lap sucking up a bottle of formula. But in every memory I have of that chair, I am reading. I remember reading, in that chair, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the first time. And Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. And Little Women. And countless Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Bobbsey Twins mysteries. And biographies of famous women, which because they often tended to conclude with the subject’s death, sometimes made me cry.

I also read at night under the covers with a flashlight. Scratching up the money to buy batteries posed a constant challenge to my deviousness and ingenuity. So many people I know cop to having read under the covers with a flashlight as a child that I now imagine children all over the world, hunched over in the dead of night, unwilling to exchange the magic to be found in a book for the mundane oblivion of sleep. When my mother rearranged my bedroom furniture with the bed next to the closet door, I had the luxury of reading for hours every night by the light of the closet. The instant I’d hear a parental hand on the doorknob to my room, I’d close the closet door (with the light still on), shove my book under my pillow, and play possum. I knew that once the secret of my middle-of-the-night reading were exposed, my parents would likely figure out a way to keep me from ever experiencing that particular illicit pleasure again. And I couldn’t have that.

I recall vividly the occasion on which my first-grade teacher took the entire class to the library and I not only acquired my first library card, but beheld, for the first time, the glory of shelves holding more books than I could (at that time, anyway) ever imagine reading. Recently, Zoran Živković’s “The Night Library” evoked the recollection of a book I had read when aged seven or eight about a “bookworm” who, “lost” in the book she is reading, fails to notice that the library is closing for the night. The very idea enchanted me: to spend the night alone with all those books! The protagonist didn’t have to go hungry from missing supper because on raiding the librarians’ drawers she found chocolate, the perfect food for any adventure. And when her adventure was over, her parents took an indulgent if nominally scolding attitude. The only obstacle to this bookworm’s pleasure, in fact, proved to be herself. If I’m correctly recalling the story so many years later, as the evening wore on she became scared and miserable long before she figured out how to get herself rescued.

In spite of the girl’s wimping out on me, the prospect the story opened before me itself inspired many hours of pleasurable daydreaming. I knew that under similar circumstances my parents would not be so understanding at my “pulling such a stunt.” And I also knew that were I to be locked in the library, I would simply call my parents and ask them to get me out. The story’s scenario lay far beyond the reach of ordinary reality, for it violated my sense of what is profoundly.

Which is why, of course, I loved it.

I must have been in about the sixth grade when my mother asked the librarians to give me access to the adults-only section of the library, a tantalizing set of shelves that filled the mezzanine level directly behind the librarians’ main desk. Once I gained access to the adult section, my mother took to borrowing my library books, which felt odd and almost perverse to me. Throughout childhood I experienced reading as a private pleasure evoking every manner of imaginative thought and fantasy. The very idea that my mother might have been experiencing the same private pleasure as I did unnerved me. I did not understand then that because we brought such utterly different experiences and imaginative tendencies to the texts we shared, our readings probably bore only a slight resemblance to one another.

It is probably because I experienced reading as a strictly private activity that it never occurred to me that my grandmother, who was on a long visit to us at the time I first read Jane Eyre, might actually have an acquaintance with that book. I had never in my life actually seen her reading anything other than a newspaper or magazine. Whenever she visited us, my grandmother, a 4’ 8” woman of some three-hundred odd pounds, shared my small double bed. The day being a Saturday, I had awakened early for the express purpose of reading while everyone else in the house was still sleeping. When I came to the scene in which Mrs. Reed locked Jane in the Red Room, I began sobbing. My grandmother woke, took one look at the title of the book I was reading, and said “My land! That a girl your age should be reading a book like that!” Played up by a guilty conscience, I had no doubt that she meant that the spectacle of Jane’s rebelliousness was wicked and likely to make me even more rebellious than I already was. But how, I wondered, did she know what kind of book it was and that its heroine was rebellious? Because I had until then experienced reading as a strictly private pleasure, I had no idea that literature constituted a cultural heritage and tradition in the same way that music did. This I discovered only later, when we began reading the canon in high school because it was “good” for us (rather than fun). And why should it have occurred to me? Having discovered that sentencing me to grounding in my room simply gave me more time and privacy to devote to the pleasure of reading, my mother always made a point of confiscating my library books and card when punishing me.