'A Holiness to the Written Word'

“I began to build my own castle of Modern Library classics, with one bookcase piled upon another. I fingered every book with a rabbinical devotion, scanned every word, groped about with a blind king called Oedipus, shared Philoctetes’ festering wound and his magic bow, became an ax murderer like Raskolnikov . . .” 

Department stores once had book departments. When I was old enough to ride the bus on my own to downtown Cleveland, I visited the bookstores – Kay’s, Publix, Schroeder’s on Public Square – but also the book departments in the May Co., Higbee’s and Halle’s. All are now defunct and the Higbee’s building has been turned into a casino.

 

Halle’s had a store on the West Side, in the Southland Shopping Center, where my mother often shopped. I would ride the escalator to the second floor and browse the shelves. The Modern Library, including the Giants, were arranged numerically in a tall wooden bookcase. I remember buying the Giant that combined The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and The Complete Poetry of William Blake on the same day I bought Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man in one volume. On another day, Tolstoy’s Short Novels, Vols. 1 and 2, and Short Stories, Vols. 1 and 2. I no longer have any of those books.

 

I’m surprised by how few Modern Library books I own today: Studs Lonigan, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb, Thomas Pynchon’s V., Liebling’s Between Meals, Murray Kempton’s Part of Our Time, James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor and V.S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil in a single volume. The last four titles date from the 1990’s when the series was revived.

 

The Modern Library made the basic texts of the West and beyond available in sturdy, inexpensive editions. Working-class families like mine could afford them. The precursor to the Modern Library as we know it was founded in 1917 but Bennett Cerf took over in the late 1920’s, expanded the list and issued the books in uniform editions. It’s a child, in a sense, of the Great Depression, and a very American phenomenon.  

 

The quoted passage at the top is taken from Jerome Charyn’s essay “Silence & Song” (In the Shadow of King Saul, Bellevue Literary Press, 2018). He recounts his youthful reading and how it helped turn him into a writer:

 

“There was a holiness to the written word, and a danger. It was filled with a fire that could sear your guts and scar your soul. There was no other route than surrendering to this danger zone. I imagined a lifelong apprenticeship, as I learned and relearned my craft. I would become a poor man’s Spinoza, a polisher of words.”