'The Privilege of Being Able to Read'

“Using the toilet seat is the first step towards literature. I learned to read off the Bromo carton – ‘succeeded after long experiment in combining the curative properties of Bromo-chloratum’ – when you’ve cleared that fence, the world is before you.” 

All true, though I learned to read while moving between the kitchen and living room. Two words I could read because I had learned how to write them – Zorro and Bosco.  

The former I knew from the Disney television series that premiered the year I started kindergarten. With his sword, Zorro would inscribe the letter Z on the ample belly of Sgt. Garcia. My pencil became a rapier when I wrote Zorro with a flourish on paper. Bosco was a chocolate syrup that sponsored a Cleveland kids’ show hosted by Captain Penny. Both words are five-letter, two-o trochees, and may have appealed to me musically. Both I learned from television. That medium is said to have launched our multigenerational wave of illiteracy and aliteracy. Perhaps, but my experience says otherwise.

 

The passage at the top is dated April 23, 1957, in a letter the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to her friend and editor William Maxwell (The Element of Lavishness; Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell 1938-1978, 2001). I‘ve read nothing else by Warner though I’ve read every word Maxwell published. Based on her letters, which are thoughtful, tough-minded and witty, and deeply appreciative of Maxwell’s gifts as an editor, I’ll try her fiction. You wouldn’t know from her letters that Warner was a Communist. How often is a reader moved to read a writer’s fiction based on her letters? I can’t think of another example. Maxwell writes to Warner in a letter dated December 30, 1958:

 

“Someone gave me a copy of a paper-backed one-volume edition of the journals of the brothers Goncourt, and I am beside myself with pleasure over it. Every night I get through one page, and then sit and hold it, all of it, in my mind, with rapture. At such times, knowing, alas, that it isn’t true, I say to myself that all I ask of life is the privilege of being able to read.”