'A Love That the Book Itself Appears to Return'

I envy those who recall their early reading vividly and in detail. I don’t. I have a studio portrait of me, not yet two years old, holding a book titled Baby Animal Friends.  I know I was learning to read while in kindergarten. My mother and I would sit at the kitchen table and review the front page of the Cleveland Press, the Scripps Howard afternoon newspaper that folded in 1982. We didn’t have many books in the house. Miss McClain, my first-grade teacher, wrote on my report card: “If Pat continues reading the way he does now, nothing will stop him.” But what was I reading? A year or so later I had moved on to field guides and brief biographies of people like Marie Curie, but early grade school is otherwise a blank. This recollection by the poet Edwin Frank, founder and editorial director of the New York Review Books Classics series, is from “Habits of Reading: Alissa Valles and Edwin Frank in Conversation”:  

 

“So my childhood reading was a mix of children’s books and ‘grown-up’ books. I suppose the first book I read that I thought of as an altogether different kind of book, a book that—and isn’t this what we mean by ‘grown-up’ books—demanded things of me, rather than just being fun to read, was The Brothers Karamazov. There I fully encountered the kind of book whose demands we respond to, if we respond, with love, a love that the book itself appears to return to us, telling us all sorts of new things that only it knows.”

 

The first book by a “grown-up” I remember reading was James Thurber’s The Wonderful O (1957), but it was marketed for children. I remember Paddle-to-the-Sea (1942) and Blueberries for Sal (1949), and regular trips to the public library – two were soon within walking distance. I have no recollection of the transition from kids’ books to grown-up fare. I know I was reading science fiction and Edgar Rice Burroughs (surely a marker of puberty) at the same time I was reading The Grapes of Wrath and Studs Lonigan, books I recognize today as ostensibly for grown-ups but aimed low and kid-friendly. No book corresponds in my life to Frank’s experience of Dostoevsky, whom I  first read in junior-high school, around the time I discovered T.S. Eliot. Other guys were reading Ayn Rand, whom I quickly figured out was a tiresome crank.

 

I know Valles as the translator of Zbigniew Herbert, about whom she says: “I started working on Zbigniew Herbert in the first place because I wanted his kind of clarity, control, comedy.” The conversation is interesting because Valles and Frank sound like two well-read people sharing enthusiasms. One wishes more book talk were like this. There’s no sense of competitiveness or one-upmanship. Listen to Frank:

 

“[M]y happiest reading is probably rereading—Middlemarch, Our Mutual Friend (the one everything a great book should be, and a bit more; the other a work of unadulterated genius)—or reading a book by an author I am already attached to, most recently Henry James’ The Awkward Age.”

[I read the Valles/Frank conversation again after writing this and found even more to wonder at. Here's Frank quoting the line from The Tempest I quoted earlier this week and in the process making hope almost defensible:

“Anyway, it’s a strange moment. Serious reading, the place of reading as an activity in the culture, is declining. On the other hand, there’s a saving remnant, it seems to me—though saving may be optimistic—of people, I think young people, aware of the anxious joylessness prevalent in the academy, but also of the limited opportunities outside of it, no doubt appalled now at this reactionary spasm we’re going through, who seem to be seriously concerned about that, seriously concerned to keep the vital spark alive, seriously concerned with the world of literature as a world that has a history and climate and character of its own that needs to be preserved. That the dreary flatness of globalization has to be offset by—a word you never hear anymore—cosmopolitanism. There’s something wonderful and even innocent about it: ‘O Brave New World that has such creatures in it!’”]