`I Can't Imagine Life Sans Books'

W.H. Auden wrote the following in 1939, near the start of World War II. It was part of a longer, abandoned work published posthumously as The Prolific and the Devourer:

“My father’s library not only taught me to read, but dictated my choice of reading. It was not the library of a literary man nor of a narrow specialist, but a heterogeneous collection of books on many subjects, and including very few novels. In consequence my reading has always been wide and casual rather than scholarly, and in the main non-literary.”

The father was George Augustus Auden, a physician and scion of a family his son described elsewhere as “phlegmatic, earnest, rather slow, inclined to be miserly, and endowed with excellent health.” We’re relying on Auden’s memory and sense of filial piety, of course, but his father's library, for all its obvious limitations, sounds like excellent preparation for the poet who would write "In Praise of Limestone." It also defines his eccentric book predilections for life. Judging by his collected reviews and essays, Auden was happiest reading poetry, science and theology. He shared a century with Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Faulkner and Beckett but makes little mention of them. The novelist on whom Auden dotes most enthusiastically is Trollope, and his favorite thinker is Kierkegaard. As a reader, he found what he needed, as all of us do.

I happened upon a column I wrote in January 1989 for the newspaper I worked for in upstate New York. It carries the headline, written by a copy editor, "I can't imagine life sans books." My oldest son, now 20 and a junior in college, was then 17 months old. The occasion was a new, much-touted literacy project in New York. I mentioned the importance books already played in my son's young life, and compared it to the relative absence of books in my parents' house. A friend working on his master's degree in social work had recently used me as a case study, and I cited his findings:

"My friend discerned that as a child I gravitated to literature as an antidote to a miserable home life. Books were solace. They were funny and suspenseful and fed my already active fantasy life. After the usual children's books, I consumed shelves of Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. I collected all of Edgar Rice Burroughs, hardcover and paperback. I wallowed for years in science fiction, at the same time discovering Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Sartre and Kafka."

In the column I mentioned a book I read repeatedly as a kid. All I remembered, oddly, was the story -- no author or title. I described the plot -- an Indian boy in the upper Great Lakes carves a canoe, releases it in Lake Superior, and the toy boat floats to the Atlantic Ocean -- and asked readers to identify it. In the next week or so, in those pre-Internet, pre-email days, I received almost 100 letters (paper, ink, envelope) and innumerable calls at the office telling me the book I sought was Paddle-to-the-Sea, by Holling C. Holling, published in 1941. I bought a copy and introduced it to my son, though it never captured his imagination as it had mine. Here's the third-from-last paragraph in that column written 19 year ago:

"Today, the great writers are my teachers. I can't imagine living my life without the wisdom left by Chekhov, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Shakespeare, Thoreau and Whitman."

Nothing has changed. If we look long enough, and are willing occasionally to ask for help, we find the books we need.