Landmarks

by Kirk Woodward

[Soon after his last two contributions to Rick On Theater in March and April, my friend Kirk Woodward is back now with an article paying homage—he calls it a “valentine”—to a series of books for children which he read  . . . well, when he was one!  (In point of fact, I believe I read some of the titles Kirk mentions in “Landmarks.”  Just as his parents got them for him, mine must have gotten some of them for me—or I took them out of the school or local library.) 

[The remarkable things, at least to me, are that he held the series of histories and biographies in a special place in his memory (he reread them for this article) and that he kept the books all these years—surely going on 60 for many of them.  (I suppose it’s also remarkable that so many of them survived so long; as you’ll read, Kirk didn’t treat them all very well.)

[Nostalgia is one thing, but as you’ll learn, Kirk found some lasting lessons in his reading of the Landmark Books that have fed his adult mind.  Reacquainting himself with the books, he’s also found some points he was too young to see when he first read the books.]

This article is a valentine to a series of books.

I was fortunate to be born into a reading family. I’m not certain that my parents read all the books they bought. For example, they signed up for a book of the month club of some sort, and some of those books turned out to be instrumental for me, like In Search of Theater (1953) by Eric Bentley, an eye-opener for me if there ever was one – but I know for certain my parents never read it.

Around that same time, my parents started to buy books about history that were intended for me. How old I was when they started, I’m not sure. I also don’t know if they bought them on some sort of program or if they just picked one up whenever they saw it in a bookstore – I suspect that was the case, because my family has spent a lot of its time in bookstores. (Fairly late in her life, my mother became a librarian.)

In any event, as I said, when I was very young, in the early 1950s, I began to be given these volumes, from a series called Landmark Books, published by Random House. (Sometimes these were hand-me-downs, originally read by my cousin Bucky.)

Altogether there are 122 volumes in the Landmark Books series, which began in 1950 and published its last book in 1970. Although out of print today, books in the series can still be found on the Internet. The idea of the series was to provide works of history and biography for children, written by the best authors of the time.

What a splendid concept! The books were commercially successful, and I know they were crucial for my own education. I have twenty-nine of the books today, and my daughter has asked me to save them for her, for the time when they have a new audience. A friend urged me to buy the rest of the books and read them as part of the preparation for this article, but here I’m going to limit myself to the ones I read as a child.

I have re-read all my Landmark Books, and I’ve noticed things I hadn’t noticed before, some literary, some not. For example, an alarming number of the books have food stains on them. Many also have the corners of pages torn off. My vague memory is that I would eat the corners. I don’t do that anymore, but I do still get food stains on books sometimes, since I tend to read while eating. I know that’s not the best way to eat (or read), but there it is.

With rare exceptions, the Landmark Books don’t talk down to their child readers. They are quite frank about history – about death, and about the fragility of good things. One might expect that a series of books for young readers might make a point of turning their leading characters into heroes and heroines. With minor exceptions, this is not the case.

The books are illustrated, ordinarily with drawings, but once in my collection with photographs (The U.S. Frogmen of World War II, 1964, by Wyatt Blassingame, 1909-1985, a gripping story, vividly told). Few of the books list references or sources. Indexes are standard equipment.

An exception is King Arthur and His Knights (1953), my least favorite of the Landmark Books I’ve read, which has no index. It’s a dull retelling of the story as written around 1460 by Thomas Mallory (c. 1415-1471). The first fifteen pages of my copy of the Landmark volume are missing, and in those pages the author, Mable Louise Robinson (1874-1962), may explain why she decided to limit herself to Mallory, but the rest of the book doesn’t interest me enough to find out. Another book in the series that I do not like much is The Story of San Francisco (1955) by Charlotte Jackson (1903?-1989), which contains a great deal of pedestrian writing. These are, however, the exceptions.

Occasionally authors describe their processes in detail. For example, in Adventures and Discoveries of Marco Polo (1953), Richard J. Walsh (1887-1960), who was also the editor of the John Day publishing company, writes that every quotation is taken from Polo’s book (Book of the Marvels of the World, also known as The Travels of Marco Polo, c. 1300), while “some of the facts have been taken from other books.” The book does not come across as a series of quotes, however; Walsh tells its story well.

In general, the books are splendid, and in many cases I find them as useful as much longer volumes on the same subjects. (In a recent interview in the New York Times, the enormously successful Jeopardy winner James Holzhauer says that he typically locates a book written for children when he wants to learn a new subject.)

One of the rewards of rereading the Landmark Books is that I had almost no awareness when I was a child of who the authors were, and now at least some of their names are meaningful to me. Although few of the Landmark Books authors are household names today, many in their own time were quite well known, or even famous.

As a thought experiment, we might put ourselves in the place of the editors of the series, and try to imagine how we’d select authors for the books we wanted to include in our project.  

For example, if we want a biography of Jesus Christ or the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, we might go to an eminent clergyman of the time. It’s hard to think who would best fit that role today; in 1956 (the date of the Luther biography) or 1959 (the date of the book on Jesus) it would almost certainly have been a clergyman, of course.

So it was – both books are written by Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), for decades the “voice” of liberal Protestantism. Fosdick’s biography of Luther is respectful but also aware of Luther’s faults. Writing a biography of Jesus must have been a daunting assignment. Fosdick handles it with aplomb, choosing to write in a way that suggests “it might have happened this way,” rather than strictly retelling the gospel accounts.

Fosdick’s books are not the only ones in the series to cover religious topics. There’s The Explorations of Pere Marquette (1951) by Jim Kjelgaard (1910-1959), who was not a religious figure but a dedicated outdoorsman, particularly fond of bears! Marquette (1637-1675) was a Jesuit priest who explored much of the northern Mississippi River valley. Religion obviously plays a part in this story, but Kjelgaard doesn’t over-stress it, and doesn’t steer away from the dangers of exploration either.

What about a choice for a book about Alexander the Great? Well, he traveled over much of the known world of his time, conquering and building, so a logical choice might be John Gunther (1901-1970), the author of the sophisticated series of “Inside. . . ” books of world reporting (Inside America, Inside Russia, and so on) that were famous for decades.

Gunther’s account is extremely well told. One of the features of Gunther’s work, echoed in many of the others, is that, as I mentioned above, although Landmark Books are designed for children, they do not shy away from the subjects of death and suffering. Gunther provides much foreshadowing of the dissipation that was to shorten Alexander’s life. My copy of this book is in disrepair – I must have read it a lot, and as I began to read it again I recalled it vividly.

For the story of the end of the Civil War, Lee and Grant at Appomattox (1950), we might very likely turn to MacKinlay Kantor (1904-1977), a Pulitzer Prize winner, who was a highly regarded Civil War historian, the author of Gettysburg (1952) and Andersonville (1955), and of the novella that was the basis of the film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Kantor writes vivid vignettes that carry the dramatic scene at Appomattox along.

And who else would you want to write The Barbary Pirates (1953) ther than the novelist C. S. Forester (1899-1966), who wrote a twelve-volume series of naval adventure novels about the fictional seaman Horatio Hornblower? His account of the struggle of the young United States with the Barbary pirates is beautifully, excitingly written.

One of the best books in the series, Genghis Kahn and the Mongol Horde (1954), was written by the historian Harold Lamb (1892-1962), who had written a full-scale biography of its subject in 1927. Lang treats the reader to a particularly judicious summary of the Great Kahn’s life on the last page of the book.

Similarly, The Monitor and the Merrimack (1951) was written by Fletcher Pratt (1897-1956). Pratt was a prolific writer, and, appropriately, he frequently wrote on naval subjects. The result is splendid storytelling, clear and forward moving, highly informative, with no waste of words. Pratt puts a premium on ingenuity and invention. Pratt’s book is illustrated by John O’Hara Cosgrave II (1908-1968), another appropriate choice – he was known for his many pictures of boats.

Stonewall Jackson (1959) was written by Jonathan Daniels (1902-1981). Daniels was briefly press secretary to both Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) and Harry Truman (1884-1972), but more to the point, he was from North Carolina, and a prolific author of many books about the Civil War. His illustrator, William Moyers (1916-2010), was best known for iconic paintings of the West, and he provides clear and vivid illustrations.

Many of my Landmark Books are so worn and covered with food stains that it’s clear I read them repeatedly. Stonewall Jackson, on the other hand, looks like I’d never opened it. (Ironically, when I went to college at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, I walked by Jackson’s grave every night – it was my best shortcut home.)

Daniels tells Jackson’s story sympathetically, and from the Southern point of view, with bare mention of slaves (Jackson owned some), but he does describe the complexities and even peculiarities of Jackson’s character.

Similar complexity can be found in the life of Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), and for Robert E. Lee and the Road of Honor (1955) Landmark chose, again, a Southern writer, Hodding Carter II (1907-1972), a Louisiana journalist and publisher and the father of President Jimmy Carter’s aide of the same name.  (Those are a lot of Carters to keep straight.)

Hodding Carter II wrote Pulitzer Prize winning articles about the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, and shows at least mixed feelings about the Civil War and slavery, but in Lee’s biography he chooses to put heavy stress on Lee’s “honor,” and it’s difficult for me to understand what’s honorable about slaveholding.

For The Story of the U.S. Marines (1951), the series publishers chose George P. Hunt (1918-1991), logically enough a former Marine, who spent most of his career as a writer and editor for Time Inc. I see that my copy is one of the books originally owned by my cousin Bucky. I wonder if he wants it back.

Hunt tells the story with no awareness of the impact of the Vietnam War, a decade or so in the future, and the book ends with the Marines still in Korea (1950/51). The stories of heroism in the book would make great movies (maybe they have), but occasionally there are hints of other things as well, for example, “As was usually the case in these [wars with the Indians], white men wanted Indian land.” Similarly, Hunt writes about “America’s ambition to spread out over the southwest and western regions of a continent it considered its own,”  and one detects a nuance in tone.  

Another example of appropriate choice of author is The West Point Story (1956), by Colonel Red Reeder and Nardi Reeder Campion. Red Reeder (1902-1998) – what a wonderful name! – was himself a cadet at West Point, earning 6 demerits in his first two hours there. He rebounded well, however; he was a leader in the Normandy Invasion, lost a leg, was awarded eight medals, and originated the idea of the Bronze Star medal. (Nardi Campion, 1917-2007, was his sister, an author and screenwriter herself.) For twenty years he was the athletic director at West Point (1947-1967).

The tone of the book, not surprisingly, is more or less awestruck. Men are amazing! World War II “was won by combined effort – by sacrifices in the homes, by men laboring in the factories and shipyards, by men serving in the air, on the sea and on the ground.” Ahem – there were women involved, sir. Sometimes the effect of his book can be chilling: “The government sent more troops into the field and the ‘Indian Fighting Army’ gradually wore down the savages.”

Another kind of service is described in Royal Canadian Mounted Police (1953) by Richard L. Neuberger (1912-1960), a Senator from Oregon and a good choice to write that particular book because he knew many Mounties and their families, and is able to report a number of personal experiences he had with the Mounties and their families. It’s a superlatively written book, dedicated to his wife Maurine (who succeeded him in the Senate after his death), “[w]ho went on patrol and baked the famous chocolate cake just as good as the Mountie’s wife!”

The author of Captain Cook Explores the South Seas (1955), Armstrong Sperry (1897-1976), had a great grandfather who was a sea captain! Sperry wrote a number of historical novels for children. Possibly as a result, his book about Captain Cook contains lots of visualized scenes that couldn’t possibly be based on historical record. At one point Cook says to his wife, “A good sailor makes a poor husband, Elizabeth.” “Not my husband. . . ” she replies. Possible, I suppose . . .

Exploring the Himalaya (1958) is written by a Supreme Court justice, William O. Douglas (1898-1980), who might seem a strange choice for the subject, but he was an environmentalist and spent time in the Himalayas. Douglas appears in the book a good deal, telling what he observed. The book also follows the story of a young Tibetan woman and an Indian man who marry, under the shadow of increasing Russian and Chinese domination.

The Story of Scotland Yard (1954) comes from Laurence Victor Thompson (1914-1972), a British author who also wrote 1940 (1966), a fascinating account of that year from an “inside” political point of view. He writes a riveting account of Scotland Yard, making the reader – this one at least – think vaguely about joining the force, and he includes many personal stories.

The Pony Express (1950) is by Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871-1958), an investigative journalist, a major exposer of health frauds, and a prolific writer in many genres. He is quite clear about the authenticity of his book:

The record here set down is intended to be faithful to period and event without being strictly factual. Detailed data on the Pony Express are scanty, vague, and often contradictory. With a few exceptions it is not even known with certainty what men rode what routes.

Permitting myself a certain license of treatment, the better to round out the picture, I have attempted to present in broad outline the character and atmosphere of [the] enterprise.

Adams acknowledges the unfairness of treatment the “Indians” received at the hands of U.S. citizens. He has a personal connection with the Pony Express, too: he met one Pony Express rider himself, an experience he tells about in the book.

The Story of the Naval Academy (1958) comes from the pen of Felix Riesenberg, Jr. (1913-1962), the son of an historian with the same name and the author of naval books. It’s a pretty straightforward history, with a slightly idealized idea of the Navy, but with acknowledgment of pranks, odd traditions, and misbehavior at the Academy, some of them remarkably dangerous.

Geronimo: Wolf of the Warpath (1958) is by Ralph Moody (1898-1982), a colorful American author and an authentic cowboy, who drew on his upbringing and adventures for over 50 Western-themed books. Appropriately, he provides a vigorous narrative.

One of my favorite books in the entire series is Queen Victoria (1958) by Noel Streatfeild (1895-1986), a genuine British aristocrat from an “historic” English family from Chiddingstone, Kent, that traces its ownership of its house there to the 1500’s. There is an easy, chatty, almost gossipy feel to the book, appropriate for someone comfortable in high British society, and she provides wonderful insights about royalty:

. . .  the country was suffering from a surfeit of expensive royal Dukes.

. . .  a monarch in a rage is not easy to deal with, since no one may answer back.

. . .  there is nothing in the history of Britain, or indeed of any other country, to suggest that heirs to the throne dreaded wearing the crown. In fact quite the contrary. History is full of examples of would-be heirs fighting to retain it, and of dethroned monarchs who could not endure existence amongst commoners.

Unconsciously [Victoria] was giving a large section of her peoples something which, without knowing it, they had always wanted: pomp and circumstance in quantity, allied to a thoroughly normal home life in the best middle-class tradition.

Historical novelists are an obvious source of writers for the Landmark Books Series. For Remember the Alamo! (1958), the publishers recruited one of the best, Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), notably the author of the celebrated and Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the King’s Men (1946). Even Warren’s chapter titles (“Stephen Austin Was an Honest Man,” “Sam Houston Gets a Razor”) are memorable, and his book is full of evocative details, with no words wasted. It is hard to imagine a better retelling of the disastrous story, or a better way to get both the facts and the atmosphere of the Alamo.

Thomas B. Costain (1885-1965) was also known for his historical novels, and The Mississippi Bubble (1955) is a serviceable retelling of a remarkable economic catastrophe, with a great deal of information about New Orleans along the way. Similarly Joan of Arc (1953), by Nancy Wilson Ross (1901-1986), an American novelist and an expert in Eastern religions, is patiently, thoroughly told. Garibaldi – Father of Modern Italy (1956) is by Marcia Davenport (1903-1996), a novelist, memoirist, and music critic. Perhaps she got her sympathy for Garibaldi from Italian opera?  

Journalism should be a good source of writers for a series like the Landmark Books, and many of its authors have journalistic backgrounds. Quentin Reynolds (1902-1965) was a well-known newspaperman in his day, and he wrote three of the books in my collection. Custer’s Last Stand (1951) is a novelistic telling of the story rather than straight history, effective and notably sympathetic to Native Americans – “We made hundreds of promises to the Indians and broke almost all of them.”

The Battle of Britain (1953), also by Reynolds, is mostly told from his point of view as a war correspondent – he was allowed to fly as a passenger in British bombers, and was also in London during the 84 days of the Battle of Britain. His first person account of that desperate period is highly effective.

Reynolds was not present for the story of The Wright Brothers: Pioneers of American Aviation (1950), of course. He only takes the story up to the brothers’ first major success. His narrative is apparently mostly fictionalized, and it makes oddly slow reading since it spends a great deal of its time describing how the brothers developed their experimental method.

Another notable journalist in the book series is the author of The American Revolution 1760-1783 (1958), Bruce Bliven, Jr. (1916-2002), a well-regarded writer for the New Yorker and author of many books, including children’s books, noted for their fresh perspectives on historical events. His account of the Revolution is clearly told, and he has strong opinions about the events of the war which he is not shy about expressing.

Abe Lincoln: Log Cabin to White House (1956) by Sterling North (1906-1974), a noted writer of books for children, is notably well written. It does become a little rushed in recounting Lincoln’s first election campaign, has nothing about his famous and dangerous train trip to Washington through Baltimore, and ends with Lincoln’s first inauguration. (Other books in the series, of course, cover later events in the Civil War.)

The Story of the Secret Service (1957) by, Ferdinand Kuhn (1905-1978), a distinguished diplomatic correspondent, is a well reported book, clear and useful in understanding what the Secret Service does – not only its famous duty of protecting the President and other officials, but also its activities against counterfeiters.

Of course many of the books are written by authors chosen simply because they can write well. For example, Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo (1953), by Frances Winwar (1900-1985), is exceptionally well told, with an excellent final summary:

He showed what a man can accomplish through strength of purpose, courage, and imagination. He destroyed the last remnants of feudalism in Europe and abolished the Inquisition in Spain. He helped to build the modern code of laws. He encouraged art and science and education.

But once he gained power he paired it with his colossal ambition. The two, like fiery steeds driven recklessly for his own glory, plunged him and his empire to destruction. So great was his fall at Waterloo that since then all defeat has been known by its name.

In many cases I feel the Landmark books are as good in their way as more famous books by writers specifically for adults. For example, Leonardo da Vinci is written by Emily Hahn (1905-1997), a prolific writer, especially for the New Yorker, and an ardent feminist who spent years in China – a fascinating character in her own right. (So is the book’s illustrator, Mimi Korach, known for sketching numerous soldiers during World War II in the United States and Europe.)

Hahn is independent minded. Concerning the famous painting Mona Lisa she writes

For my part, I am glad that Leonardo had this work to comfort him when his “Battle of Anghiari” went wrong, but I don’t think “Mona Lisa” is beautiful.

She narrates an extremely well told story, especially since Leonardo didn’t always have an exciting life. Her book, I would say, is as good in its way as Walter Isaacson’s book of the same title (2017).

I realize that I have given the illustrators in the series short shrift. Many of them were notable in their time, for example the illustrator of The Pony Express, Lee J. Ames (1921-2011), well known for his Draw 50 learn-to-draw books; Geronimo’s Nicholas Eggenhofer (1897-1985), a famous specialist in Western illustrations; William Moyers (1916-2010), a well-known Western artist suitably chosen for the story of the Alamo; and Valenti Angelo (1998-1982), a much collected artist in his time, with his icon-like pictures for the book about Joan of Arc. Clayton Knight (1981-1969), who illustrated the air fights of the Battle of Britain, had been a combat flier in World War I!

Perhaps my favorite of all the books in the series I have read is Will Shakespeare and the Globe Theater by Anne Terry White (1896-1980), a prominent non-fiction writer for children. She admits at the outset that “this book does not pretend to be a biography; for the known facts of Shakespeare’s life are too few to warrant such a designation.” Within those limits she tells a vivid story as well as any of the much longer adult biographies of Shakespeare that I have read. 

The illustrator, C. Walter Hodges (1909-2004), spent much of his career writing and illustrating books about theater, ultimately leaving his collection of Elizabethan theater artifacts to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. His drawings in the book are imaginative and convincing.

Looking back, I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity to read (and re-read) the Landmark series of books. They filled my mind with history and, just as importantly, with stories, in an intelligent and comprehensible way. They genuinely are a landmark in the telling of the long narrative that is history.

Why does this particular series of books strike me as so important? I can think of several reasons. One is that they represent a respect for history that I believe we all need. Mark Twain said (or didn’t say), “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” It’s important for people to learn as they grow up that the same themes resonate in life over the years – heroism, determination, respect, ambition, striving, the impulse toward war, the struggle for peace. History prepares us for what the world is like.

The Landmark Books also represent a respect for children and young adults that I feel is lacking in a great deal of what is written for them today, when fantasy in particular receives such an emphasis. Certainly imagination is important, although we certainly can argue about the uses to which it is often put.

But history is also important, and history is happening now, in remarkable ways, just as history was made in the age of the Alamo or of Genghis Kahn. The Landmark Books pay young readers the enormous compliment of telling the stories straight.

The books also introduce their readers to great personalities. The great Greek historian Plutarch (AD 46-120) wrote, “I’m not writing history, but lives,” and for millennia the study of character was a staple of education. In my opinion there is still great value in that approach, particularly since today we don’t need to think just of “great men,” but of “great people,” including women and people of varied nationalities and races.

Additionally, the Landmark Books represent good and sometimes exceptional writing. We have already noted how the editors of the series went for the “best in their fields,” and came up with some remarkable choices. Surely an exposure to literary excellence must be of great value in education.

And, speaking for myself, reading these books has given me both facts and perspectives that have been of great assistance to me, as much as possible, in acting and in playwriting. The great scenic designer Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1954) wrote, “Keep in your souls some images of magnificence,” and those words are good advice for anyone interested in working in theater. They also point out an important contribution of the Landmark Books.   

[If you are a book lover as Kirk clearly is—and ROTters will know that I am, too—you’ll appreciate Kirk’s fondness for these estimable books.  I don’t know if there’s anything in print that approximates the value and quality of the Landmark Books of the 1950s and ’60s, and the original titles are no longer available except in used bookstores and on book websites (Bookfinder.com is one I use to track down titles I want), but if you have children in the preteen years, it might well be worth looking for some of them.  Many libraries also still have copies of some if the titles.

[I haven’t thought about the Landmark Books for decades, unlike Kirk, but his having reminded me of them, I recall being engrossed in some of them, especially the Civil war books like The Monitor and the Merrimack and Lee and Grant at Appomattox.  (As I told Kirk after reading “Landmarks,” I was completely hooked on the coverage of the centennial of the Civil War in the early 1960s.  I read everything I could find and subscribed to Life and Look magazines which did illustrated stories on the war over the five years of the centennial.]

Calvino Is To The Mind What Exercise Is To The Body (Part 2)

[This is the second part of my two-part article on Italo Calvino, my report on his novella, If on a winter’s night a traveler.  Readers who haven’t read Part 1 are urged to go back and read it as it contains some background on this remarkable writer.  It may help illuminate some of what I have to say about the book.

[“I feel suspicious about writers who claim to tell the whole truth about themselves, about life, or about the world,” said Calvino shortly before his death. “I prefer to stay with the truths I find in writers who present themselves as the most bold-faced liars. My goal in writing If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, a novel entirely based on fantasy, was to find in this way a truth that I would have not been able to find otherwise.”   I, for one, feel grateful that he pursued this instinct.  Like his Neo-realist writing after World War II, however, Calvino’s fantasies are not undirected flights by any means.  An unnamed interviewer asked him : “The struggle between the man trying to be organized amidst randomness seems to be a theme that pervades much of your work. I’m thinking especially of If on a Winter’s Night and the Reader, who keeps trying to find the next chapter of the book he’s reading.” 

[Now, here’s my own opinion.]

IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER

(13 December 1988)

If, as English playwright and essayist Sir Richard Steele wrote at the turn of the eighteenth century, reading is the mind’s exercise, then Italo Calvino’s works are at least mental aerobics and his If on a winter’s night a traveler (translated by William Weaver; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981) may be an entire decathlon for the mind.  Calvino’s 1981 novel is, among other things, about reading as action.  For the Italian writer, who’s made the tale his vehicle and the fantastic his countryside, reading’s not at all a passive occupation, but a very active one, requiring great energy and attention and considerable effort on the part of the reader.  While the writer and even the publisher often struggle to make a book, according to Calvino, it’s the reader who must do the most work—and on whom the act of reading has the profoundest effect.

The specific action to which Calvino most often likens reading is traveling.  Books are worlds or universes, and reading’s a voyage into each new creation and from one to the next.  “I prefer novels,” one of his characters explains, “that bring me immediately into a world where everything is precise, concrete, specific” (30).  Later, another character describes his experience being read to: “Now, around you, there is no longer the room of the department, the shelves, the professor: you have entered the novel . . .” (69).

Calvino demonstrates his notion of reading as journeying by creating a novel that’s actually the beginnings of ten separate books by ten different fictional authors.  Between each of these incipits, as he calls them, we follow the ordeal of the Reader, whose name, like the identities of each story’s narrator, we never learn, as he tracks down the rest of each novel he’s begun but can’t finish.  As each of the novels evokes various far-flung worlds—a small European town, an East European city, a Japanese estate, a Latin American village, and so on—so does the Reader travel from bookstore to university to publisher to author to translator, “circling the world from book to book” (253).  His travels take him to Switzerland, Central America, and several imaginary places where books and reading are controlled by the state and fought for by underground organizations.  He encounters radical supporters of such strange associations as the Organization of Apocryphal Power (OAP) and the Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works (OEPHLW).  He’s even attacked by a young gang who believes he holds the text of a book unknowingly dictated to its author by extraterrestrials.  The trail of unfinished novels has been laid, the Reader learns, by a mysterious translator, Ermes Marana, who’s flooding the world with incomplete works with false titles attributed to the wrong authors.  As soon as the Reader thinks he’s found the continuation of his last interrupted story, he not only discovers that it’s a different book from the one he’s left off, but that the one he was reading isn’t the one he thought he was reading at all.  Thus, he’s led on a treasure hunt into the world of reading, writing, and publishing.

But the Reader, who’s addressed in the second person throughout to make it clear that each of us is Calvino’s “reader,” also journeys into life as a result of his reading.  When he discovers that the first novel he’s bought, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, has been bound together with only the same first sixteen pages repeated, the Reader returns to the bookstore to replace the defective copy.  [To avoid confusion from here on, the full title If on a winter’s night a traveler will refer only to the fragment within the larger novel; the whole work will be referred to by the abbreviated title, If on a winter’s night. ~rick]  There he meets the Other Reader who’s come for the same reason.  Together, between the interrupted readings, the Reader and the Other Reader, whose name is Ludmilla, search for the completions.  The Reader’s voyage into reading literally changes his life as he and Ludmilla grow closer as a result of the search.  “This hunt excites you,” the Reader realizes, “because you’re pursuing it with her, because the two of you can experience it together” (93).

It’s inevitable that the Reader and Ludmilla make love since Calvino equates reading with this other act as well: “What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space” (156).  It’s a different kind of voyage, and when the Reader and Ludmilla take it they experience it as a reading: “Ludmilla, now you are being read.  Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading . . . .  And you, O Reader, are meanwhile an object of reading: the Other Reader now is revealing your body as if skimming the index . . .” (155).

In fact, Calvino acknowledges the relationship of reading and lovemaking in his own life.  In an interview with author Francine du Plessix Gray in the New York Times Book Review he says, “. . . I want to constantly add to the image that my reader has of me.  That is like being a good lover, that is definitely an erotic relationship.”  The relationship’s not always kind; it may even be sadistic, according to Calvino.  When the narrator of Looks down in the gathering shadow, one of the fragments, shoots his enemy Jojo dead, he has interrupted the man’s lovemaking with Bernadette who becomes the narrator’s accomplice.  The interrupted lovemaking, like the ten interrupted novels, must be picked up at the point where they left off.  Bernadette finds her completion with the narrator, though the Reader does not find his; the sexual climax is reached, but the narrative climax never  is.  Calvino admits, “In this new novel I may be a more sadistic lover than ever.”

Having followed the tortuous path of his reading-inspired adventure, the Reader finally returns to his native city.  In the library, trying again to locate the ten unfinished books, he joins a discussion of reading with other readers.  One asserts, “In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died” (259).  Unable to finish the novels he’s started—all the library copies are unavailable, too—the Reader understands how his own story must end: “You decide you want to marry Ludmilla” (259).  The act of reading, having affected the Reader’s life at each turn, now effects its ultimate life change, still in terms of reading: “Now you are man and wife, Reader and Reader.  A great double bed receives your parallel readings” (260).

Like readers, the worlds created by reading aren’t passive, either.  Books and the worlds they create are living entities, too.  Describing Cavedagna, the publisher whose works have led the Reader on his chase into life, Calvino notes that “he sees books being born and die every day” (101).  Ludmilla’s ideal books, for instance, are produced “as a pumpkin vine produces pumpkins” (189): naturally, growing as if from their own source.  The illusion for her that these worlds are sui generis must not be disturbed by contact with the book-makers, the authors or publishers.  Authors, to be sure, have no existence for Ludmilla outside the books themselves.  When she meets one, she explains, “You are two separate persons, whose relationships cannot interact. . . .  I have no doubt that you are concretely this person and not another . . . but the one who interested me was the other, the Silas Flannery who exists in the works of Silas Flannery, independently of you, here. . .” (191-92).

Still, though the worlds of the books and the real worlds of the Reader and Ludmilla may be separate but parallel, they do occasionally meet, at least in Calvino’s cosmos.  First, each of the novels the two encounter share common elements which bind them together.  Each is the start of an adventure, tinged with danger and malevolence, and in each the narrator or main character, a man, pursues a woman for whom he undergoes some violence or threat of violence.  According to Calvino, “The existence of a mysterious, unnamed danger . . . exists in all my favorite American and British novelists. . . .”

In If on a winter’s night a traveler, the first incipit, a man sits in the café of a railroad station.  Gradually he learns of a vague conspiracy by “the organization,” possibly involving a spy whose place he seems to have taken.  He’s approached by the mysterious Madame Marne, but before he can learn anything about her or the conspiracy, he’s ordered out of town under threat of arrest.

In On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, an erotic Japanese novel, the narrator’s trapped by unexplained circumstances in the estate and employ of Mr. Okeda.  Attracted to both Mr. Okeda’s wife and daughter, the narrator’s caught by Mr. Okeda making love to the wife while observed by the daughter.  The incident, rather than provoking Mr. Okeda to immediate violence, places the narrator deeper in the master’s power with less hope of escape.

Similar twists occur in each of the ten stories begun by the Reader and Ludmilla.  Tying them to the lives of the two searchers, Calvino has fashioned like circumstances for his Reader.  With each step in pursuit of the lost novels, guided by Ludmilla at each juncture, the Reader becomes increasingly involved in more and more fantastic adventures.  Rescued from arrest for importing a banned book into one totalitarian state, he’s protected by an underground that’s itself a conspiracy inside a conspiracy inside a conspiracy.  Imprisoned in another dictatorship where the books he seeks are banned, he’s enlisted to perform a secret mission in an opposing dictatorship where books are also controlled.  Books, it seems, are living things, and reading can be quite dangerous.

To make the connection between the stories and the Reader’s life the more clear, Calvino’s included in many of the novels he begins direct references to the act of reading.  If on a winter’s night begins, for instance, this way:

The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.

Throughout this section, Calvino refers to “you, reader,” this time with a small ‘r’ to differentiate him or her from the Reader of the larger novel.  The interconnection of this story and the life of the small-r reader is constantly being reinforced by self-conscious references such as:

Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it—a trap.  Or perhaps the author still has not made up his mind, just as you, reader, for the matter, are not sure what you would most like to read . . . (12).

. . . then a kind of weariness settles on her, perhaps only the shadow of their weariness (or my weariness, or yours) (19).

. . . it isn’t clear whether I really say it or would like to say it or whether the author interprets in this way the half sentence I am muttering (21).

Several of the other novels include similar, though less striking references to the act of reading and reminders that what we are reading is, in fact, a written story.  In the second novel, Outside the town of Malbork, Calvino even invokes the translator:

Here everything is very concrete, substantial, depicted with sure expertise, or at least the impression given to you, Reader, is one of expertise, though there are some foods you don’t know, mentioned by name, which the translator has decided to leave in the original . . . (34).

Here again, Calvino reminds us of our status as Reader, which he now spells with a capital ‘R’ to further blend the lives of the Reader, the narrator, and us:

. . . perhaps I am thinking this only now, or it is only you, Reader, who are thinking it, not I . . . (38).

He also reminds us again that we are reading, not living this experience:

The page you’re reading should convey this violent contact of dull and painful blows . . . (39).

In In a network of lines that enlace, another fragment, Calvino makes the same point, keeping us alert to the fact that, though reading is an act, it’s not the same act as that which we’re reading:

The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring: I say “should” because I doubt that written words can give even a partial idea of it . . . (132).

Calvino explains this tactic in the Times interview: “My principal idea was to write a book in which the reader would not be reading the text of a novel but a description of the act of reading per se.”  Taken together with this technique, the interstitial chapters, particularly the early ones before the Reader’s adventure gets underway, show how Calvino sets up this description.  The opening chapter begins this way:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.  Relax.  Concentrate.  Dispel every other thought (3).

The rest of the opening is a step-by-step depiction of the process of getting ready to read, from choosing and buying the book to finding the right place and posture to read it to getting in the right frame of mind.  Eventually, Calvino projects the final moments as the Reader sinks into the story:

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page.  You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. . . .  Here, however, he seems to have absolutely no connection with all the rest he has written, at least as far as you can recall. . . .  But then you go on and you realize that the book is readable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the author, it’s the book in itself that arouses your curiosity; in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is (9).

Even after the first disappointment, discovering that If on a winter’s night a traveler is incomplete and, in fact, actually a Polish novel called Outside the town of Malbork, Calvino describes pleasure in starting the new book, which the Reader hopes will be the rest of Outside the town of Malbork.  This book’s been bound with uncut pages, and Calvino describes the sensual joys of slitting them: “The pleasures derived from the use of a paper knife are tactile, auditory, visual, and especially mental” (42).  Even the frustration of finding that this new book, not the novel it was supposed to be either, is also defective, doesn’t negate the physical, emotional, and intellectual pleasures of reading.

In fact, the innate stimulation of the act of reading—coupled as it is in the Reader’s mind with Ludmilla—drives the Reader into the experience of life and the world of books.  Reading itself is erotic, believes Calvino.  His wife reports he told her, “Literature was the only aphrodisiac . . . .”  “Reading is a possession,” responds Calvino, “a march toward a possession.  It has many degrees of eroticism.  It can be a caress or a complete intercourse.”  In If on a winter’s night, Calvino leads the Reader—and the readers—on just such a march toward possession.  Of course, he never promises that we’ll reach our destination; as he’s already told us, Calvino can be a sadistic lover.

While exploring reading as an action, Calvino touches extensively on the work of the writer and less substantially on the function of the publisher.  Cavedagna, the publisher, is only a conduit for books to the readers.  The writer of one of the novels, Silas Flannery, however, expounds on writing at some length, but the process of creating the book is oriented toward the reader and geared toward what happens to the book when the reader gets hold of it.  Chapter 8 of If on a winter’s night, subtitled “From the diary of Silas Flannery,” begins with a scene Flannery sees out his window:

In a deck chair, on the terrace of a chalet in the valley, there is a young woman reading.  Every day, before starting work, I pause a moment to look at her with the spyglass.  In this thin, transparent air I feel able to perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven (169).

In describing how the woman reads, Flannery reinforces the idea that reading is action, indeed more than action, a life force:

. . . I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of reading turned into a natural process, the current that brings the sentences to graze the filter of her attention, to stop for a moment before being absorbed by the circuits of her mind and disappearing, transformed into her interior ghosts, into what in her is most personal and incommunicable (169-70).

Flannery is obsessed with the reader and what she’s reading:

At times I convince myself that the woman is reading my true book, the one I should have written long ago, but will never succeed in writing . . . (170).

He’s so obsessed, in fact, that he concocts an elaborate scenario in which two writers, one tormented and one productive, are each convinced that the absorbed woman in the deck chair is reading the other’s work.  Both writers set out to write a novel in the style of their rival in order to please the reader.  Flannery imagines several conclusions to the episode, each one a different failure in the eyes of the reader on the terrace.

Calvino’s apotheosis of the act of reading is, to be sure, a game, not a lecture or even an essay.  His device, in what he calls “a hypernovel, a novel developed to the 10th degree,” is to “play cat and mouse with the reader.”  The novel’s fundamental scheme is that the reader “realizes with a shock that he’s not in control, that it is always I, Calvino, who is in total control of the situation.”  Whenever we—not to mention the Reader—think we know where we’re going next, we end up someplace unexpected.

In the last full chapter, for instance, the Reader’s returned home and goes to the library to find the books he’s been trying to read.  All the books are listed in the library’s collection. but each is unavailable for various reasons—one’s at the bindery, another checked out, another stolen, and so on.  While he’s waiting in vain, he observes other patrons reading, each in a different and idiosyncratic way.  The reader gets into a discussion with seven men about reading.  As if in commentary on If on a winter’s night, one reader remarks, “The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, . . . even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages.  But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust” (254).  Another responds, “. . . At every reading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. . . .  I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before” (255).  When another reader admits, “At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist” (256), it’s almost ironic, for the ten titles of Calvino’s fragments, plus an eleventh title added to the list by one of the readers, form the opening sentence of yet another book:

If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on a carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave—What story down there awaits its end?--he asks, anxious to hear the story.

Though Calvino’s exploration of reading sometimes gets convoluted and dense, the pleasure of the game he’s set up and the extraordinary diversity of the novel fragments he’s created for us make the winding, twisting, endlessly surprising path well worth following to its inevitable, but unforeseeable end.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

[In that same interview I cited earlier, Calvino affirmed:

It is true that in the past, say over the past ten years, the architecture of my books has had a very important place, perhaps too important.  But only when I feel I have achieved a rigorous structure do I believe I have something that stands on its own two feet, a complete work. . . .  It can be said about If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler that it could not have existed without a very precise, very articulated structure.  I believe I have succeeded in this, which gives me a great satisfaction.  Of course, all this kind of effort should not concern the reader at all.  The important thing is to enjoy reading my book, independently of the work I have put into it.

[It’s undeniable that If on a winter’s night a traveler is tightly structured, even tough it seems haphazard when a reader first gets into it.  What defies my comprehension, since I’m not a writer of fiction, is how Calvino managed to keep all the apparently random events of the novel straight in his own mind.  I’ve been known to use an outline to keep the elements of a complex piece organized—but I can’t even conceive of an outline for If on a winter’s night a traveler.  Such a rigid and formal form could never contain such a free-flowing and seemingly formless piece of writing as this book.  And yet, it’s not hard to follow—or even to enter.  Indeed, it pulled me in almost from the very start.  As frustrating as the reading interruptus was, it was equally enticing to see what Calvino could come up with next. ]

Notes on Reading

by Kirk Woodward

[As I promised back in December, Kirk Woodward has favored ROT with another piece of writing to share with the blog’s readers. He addresses the act of reading this time, but he takes a somewhat unique point of view. I think you’ll find it interesting to contemplate this activity Kirk’s way—I know I did—and it may spur you to look at your own reading process a little more carefully than we usually do.

[I will take this opportunity to note that I took a slightly different look at books and reading in “Books in Print,” on ROT on 14 July 2010. The topic also came up in passing in “Library Cuts,” 29 June 2010. ~Rick]

The art of reading probably won't go away, but the details of the process are changing. I used to look over people's shoulders on the train and try to read their newspapers; now I try to see what they've got on their Kindles. Before books join carbon paper, the iceman, and phones with cords in the Land of Obsolescence, here are notes on a few peculiarities of reading.

DON'T GULP YOUR FOOD!

My wife, Pat, has been reading, with no pleasure at all, a currently extremely popular mystery, the first book in a trilogy. She was at it again today. I asked her if she was enjoying it, and she said, "Not a bit." "Have you been able to see why it's popular?" I asked. "Not at all," she said. "I'm not the slightest bit interested in the characters or the events." "Are you going to stop reading it?" "No, I'm going to read it to the last word." "Will you read the rest of the trilogy?" "Not a chance!"

Pat is engaged in obligatory reading. Having started a book, she feels she has an obligation to finish it. If we were to create a flow chart of her reading pattern, we would see that she is actually in a sort of what's known as a decision tree. The decisions run something like this:

Will you keep reading? YES or NO.

If NO, put the book down, preferably where it's surrounded by other books, and try to forget about it.

If YES, read it the way you would a book you like, OR

Do what I do – compressed reading!

In compressed reading, you refuse to admit that you won't finish the book. Instead, you push your way through, continually moving forward, not really reading for comprehension, but noting random points here and there, convincing yourself that if there's anything important to see, you will see it. (This technique, incidentally, also works with short stories. I've applied it to the fiction in The New Yorker for years.)

Is there any value in what I'm calling compressed reading? Maybe. Sometimes even a sentence or two can tell you so much about an author that you can form a fairly decent impression of what's going on just from a sample or two. The problem with this idea, of course, is that if you're forcing yourself to turn pages, eagerly anticipating the end of the book, you probably have dismissed the author already, and could care less about the writing style that the book displays.

Of course the principal reason for finishing a book by, basically, turning its pages fast is guilt. We feel we owe a book we've started the tribute of finishing it. It's almost as though books know what we're thinking. But they don't. Do they?

And are you reading all of this article?

SO WHAT HAPPENED?

Not long ago, two movie reviewers for the New York Times discussed whether it was proper for a reviewer to reveal a surprise plot twist in a film – for example (I think it's safe to use this one) that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father. To my surprise, both reviewers felt it was fine to reveal a secret in a review. Their justification was, "It's part of the movie, and we're reviewing the movie."

I don't agree with them. I feel that the basic standards of behavior apply in this case. Where are the reviewers’ manners? If someone tells you a secret, you have an obligation to keep it, and if you don’t, you have an obligation to feel really, really guilty. On the other hand, the reviewers for the New York Times seem to me to believe that they're more important than the works they're reviewing anyway, so perhaps they don't feel the usual principles of behavior apply to them. I'd be careful eating next to them, in that case – they might steal my food. And if they sat next to me on the train while I was reading a mystery, I'd worry that they'd tell me the ending when they could see perfectly clearly that I was only on Chapter Four.

However, when by myself, reading a book that contains a secret or a mystery, I don't always follow my own principle. Often, that is, I jump to the end of the book and find out who did it, who survived, or what in general happened, and then go back (maybe) and read the rest of the book.

Why do I do this? Why don't I save the ending for the end? The basic reason, I suppose, is that the older I get, the less I enjoy jolts, especially when they're well done and genuinely jolting. I’ve gotten to the point where I really hate to read about people getting hurt. (This, you can imagine, makes newspapers almost radioactive.) If we live long enough, we experience plenty of jolts in real life, and often we don’t take them as casually as we did when we were younger. If we read enough, the same principle may be true.

In my heedless youth, I admired the movie Bonnie and Clyde and could talk intelligently about its artistic values, in particular the way it forced us to acknowledge our emotional involvement in violent events. Today I can't watch a violent movie at all, and have trouble sitting through a film where anything bad happens to anyone. You would think that wouldn't leave many movies for me to see, but there are some, Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris being a recent and welcome example. You would also think that I'm not the audience today's moviemakers in general are looking for, and you'd be right.

Back to books: there is another reason I often peek ahead to see how a book ends, and this one at least makes me look slightly less like a hopeless wimp. The fact is that I don't read much fiction, not because I'm not interested in it, but because I get so involved in it that I can't do anything but read the book. Work, family, everything falls by the wayside until I've finished.

The extreme in this regard, for me, was the Harry Potter books. As I became more and more involved in the series, my first reading of each successive volume became more intense, until by the seventh (and no, I didn't look ahead to see if Harry lived – or did I? I’m not telling), my reading was non-stop, with no room for trivialities like sleeping, eating, and talking with members of my family.

Interestingly, there are people who do what I do, read the end before the beginning (or middle), but for much more respectable reasons. I have always enjoyed reading the works of George Bernard Shaw. When Shaw, who was distinguished as a reviewer of books, painting, music, and theater long before he was known as a playwright, read an unfamiliar book or play, he'd immediately open it to the last few pages. If he found those interesting, he'd go back and read the rest of the work. If he didn't, he wouldn't waste time on it. He defended this procedure as eminently sensible, and although I'm not sure how much of a logical case I could make for his approach, as a practical matter I think he’s right.


MARKS OF DISTINCTION

I am sitting here with a book called The Word of God & The Word of Man by the great Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth. It's not at all an elegant book, physically speaking. I bought it on Amazon for a dollar or so. Karl Barth is a great theologian, warm, insightful, brilliant. He's also one of the most prolix theologians who ever wrote. His great work called the Church Dogmatics runs to volumes, and is complex both in thought and in language. (In English, I mean; I don't read German.) His sermons (he started as a preacher, and for years after he became a professor he preached to the inmates at a local jail) are more accessible. The book I'm reading now, a collection of essays, is somewhere in the middle.

As I said, it's not a prepossessing volume. It's a paperback, published in 1957. The binding is gone; the pages are held together by glue, and they're brown and ragged on the edges. It's seen a lot of use. Most interesting, though, is the fact that it's heavily underlined and marked up, apparently by one Robert Manther, who signed his name on the inside front page.

The thing is, I can't figure out his marking system. There's no question he feels passionately about the book. Just exactly what his thinking process is, though, I can't work out.

Two frequently used marginal marks are "K" and "W". However, "K" may not be the letter K at all. It may be a vertical line, with two angled lines to indicate the passage it's marking. He appears to use "X" in the same way, to mark – double-mark? – sections. The contents of the sections seem to bear out that interpretation – they're definitely important thoughts. And what does "W" stand for? "What"?

All the sections with Ks and Xs next to them are underlined. But some sections, apparently of similar importance, are underlined without any marks in the margins.

Robert really goes to town on pages 20 and 21. In order, moving down page 20: a section is marked "SK", and it's not underlined. Then we have a passage with not one, not two, but three vertical lines and, to their left, the letter "K" underlined twice. A paragraph or so below, we have what appears to be an upward-pointing arrow but what I believe is actually a vertical line and a meandering "X", with one sentence underlined. Continuing down, we then have the words "as if" – also in the text – written in the margin.

On page 21, Robert appears at first to have struck out a sentence, but apparently he has only underlined it a little carelessly, and marked it with both "K" and "X". Then comes an underlined passage with – get this – the letter "Q" beside it. The following paragraph is heavily underlined, and its first sentence has three X's beside it. Finally, one underlined passage is followed by three randomly underlined letters, as follows: "to the great . . . ."

I haven't yet mentioned the check marks, circled asterisks, and obscure comments ("1/1 of Chr.", "V for Bakken") that also dot the text. This cascade of marks continues throughout the book. Robert didn't just start the book, he finished it. And it's clear that it means a great deal to him. His markings are full of passion and energy. Which is not to say that I understand them.

Perhaps that's just as well. Everyone who as a student bought or borrowed a used textbook knows the dangers of being seduced into paying attention to someone else's underlinings. Even if the person warns you, you can't help paying a little extra attention to the sections that someone else, well, paid a little extra attention to. If they've missed something important, or highlighted something misleading, well . . . you get the idea.

At least with Robert's complex system of notation, I don't really understand it, so its effect on my thought processes isn't intense. I will admit, though, that I'm still drawn to his underlinings.

The whole issue of abbreviated markings reminds me of an experience I had as a brand-new secretary (or as we'd say now, Administrative Assistant) at the old Time Inc., now Time Warner. My boss asked me to make an organizational chart of our area. I found some old assignment sheets and transferred their contents to a new diagram. Wherever I saw the initials TK, I put the name Tom Kennedy – one of our people – in the slot.

My boss was highly amused, and so was Tom Kennedy, when he found out that I'd assigned him a great many jobs he'd never heard of. TK, it turns out, was and for all I know still is the abbreviation at Time Inc. for "to come." You will point out that "come" doesn't begin with the letter K, and you're right, but don't tell me, tell the people at Time Inc.

Reading my Barth book turns out to be two experiences: the experience of reading Barth, and the cryptological experience of interpreting Robert's experience of the book, running parallel to my own. All reading involves interpretation. I suppose Robert's markings, whatever they mean, help me to keep that fact in mind.

And, of course, there are the existential questions. If Robert was so interested in the book, why did he give it up? Did he retire? Did he give up on metaphysics? Is he still with us at all? Perhaps that's where Barth's theology comes in. Books are, after all, always about something.

Books in Print

Not long ago, I made the possibly shameful confession that I love libraries. I guess it’s not surprising to learn that I love books, too. I also love newspapers, but I not only love the daily paper and its news stories and editorials, but I love the look of it. No, that’s not accurate. I love the looks of the different newspapers. 

I live in New York City now and I read the New York Times and I occasionally look at the Post, Daily News, and Village Voice. I grew up in Washington where my family took both the Washington Post and the Evening Star. When I was a teenager, we lived in Germany and we read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune and The Stars and Stripes. They all looked different, with different banners, different typefaces, different layouts, even different sizes: The Stars and Stripes, New York Post, Daily News, and Village Voice are tabloids; the others are (or were—the Star is no longer with us and the Paris Trib is now the International Herald Tribune) broadsheets. When I came to New York and got into research, either for graduate school, independent projects, or out-of-town clients, I referred to a lot of newspapers from all over the country and even all over the world and I found a kind of pleasure in seeing the variations on the theme of newspaper format that was both thrilling and comforting at the same time. It was fun, a kind of game like spotting license plates on a long-distance car trip. 

From what I’ve been reading over the past few years, this little corner of civilization is in jeopardy. It’s getting too expensive to publish newspapers and the readership is shrinking. People who get their news from papers are turning to on-line editions and as subscribers and readers migrate to electronic media, advertisers abandon print media, too, and publishers lose their principal source of revenue. Several papers around the country have already closed down and others are abandoning coverage and reducing their sizes. Sooner or later, the act of unfolding a newspaper and thumbing through the day’s stories, ads, and editorials, moving from the front page to the last, from one section to another, will no longer be a common occurrence. Sitting on a subway or in a park with a newspaper won’t be possible anymore. 

It looks like the same future is in store for books, too. E-books are becoming more and more common and, some publishers predict, will soon overtake paper books in terms of sales. Like newspapers, it will eventually become too expensive to publish printed books as readers move to the electronic versions. I will miss books when it comes to that. 

I suppose I have to cop to being something of a Luddite. I got a computer in the mid-1980s, but I didn’t go on line until long after everyone else had done so. I just didn’t see any need for it—until I did, and then I linked up. I still don’t own a CD or DVD player. I got my first cell phone just last winter because until then, I didn’t see the need. (I still rarely use my cell—which, by the way, doesn’t take pictures, play music, or record sounds.) The truth is, I don’t really like reading on a screen. I do it because it’s now a necessity, but if I want to read a long piece from a website, I often print it out and read it on paper. It’s not that I reject technology. I got a wordprocessor during my first semester in a Ph.D. program because I could see the advantages it provided for a writing-heavy course. I gladly gave up my electric typewriter—I’m not one of those curmudgeons who insists on hunting-and-pecking on an old manual because it “feels right.” I don’t see how any writer, teacher, or student can work without a computer (or the Internet) these days. 

But there’s something about a book (and a newspaper) that makes me resist the idea of e-versions. I have a small private library and I can’t imagine living without it. You can’t line bookshelves with e-books. (E-books also don’t have covers that can be little works of art in themselves. Maybe you can’t judge the book by its cover—but an e-book doesn’t have one at all. And can you imagine a coffee-table e-book?) I have books that go back to high school—and I still use them! As useful as the Internet is—and I use it all the time for my work as well as for my amusement—sometimes a book is just the best way to go. 

I also use e-mail, both for private and frivolous correspondence and for work-related communication. For speed and efficiency, you can’t beat it and I find it immensely useful and often entertaining. (I have a friend with whom I exchange daily—often several times a day—messages just chatting about this ‘n’ that—stuff we’ve seen or read, thought up, or heard about.) ROT started from e-mails. But when I was doing a lot of research for some scholars at universities outside New York, digging up references and documents for them, it dawned on me that e-mail is basically ephemeral. I know you can save it, and offices and agencies are required to keep significant messages, but electronic communications are just evanescent. What’s more, they can’t be passed along later on to an archive like a library, and an awful lot of that research I did was finding old letters sent from one historically important figure to another. One project on which I assisted was the publication of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams. The first two volumes cover correspondence from 1920 to 1957. Would a future editor or biographer be able to find e-mails, tweets, blog comments, and so on from 90 years earlier? Someone saved Williams’s early letters (he was nine in 1920); later correspondence—including postcards, telegrams, and random notes—are in various archival collections in libraries and document repositories around the country. Would e-mails ever end up in those kinds of places where they could be retrieved by writers of the future? My parents have kept some of my old letters from school and the army, but if I ever become famous, would any of my friends and colleagues have retained old e-mails for a researcher to look at? Many e-mail systems don’t even save messages older than a week or so. They’re just erased, gone, sent out into the ether. What will happen to the next Tennessee Williams or Elia Kazan (I helped collect his letters for a scholar, too) or Ronald Reagan (Nancy published his old letters to her)? Those letters are often fascinating and revealing. If newspapers are the first drafts of history, then letters may be the notes for that draft. 

I’m not bemoaning “the lost art of letter writing.” I’ve written and received e-mails that are every bit as eloquent as any paper letters I’ve seen. (And not every letter—or everyone’s letters—has literary aspirations. The art of writing letters declined long before computers arrived on the scene.) What I’m questioning is the staying power of electronic correspondence. Even if it’s not erased, it’ll be stored on some obsolete hard drive somewhere, maybe even irretrievable if someone could find it. Technology becomes obsolete—just ask any library or school that still has Betamax videotapes they can’t watch anymore—while paper and ink will always remain accessible. Even if they’re stashed somewhere, someone can find them and read them. We frequently hear reports of hundred-year-old documents that have been discovered hidden away. Will 100-year-old e-mails be available for anyone to reread? I wonder. 

It’s not just e-mails and such that are in this predicament, of course. Websites in general are ephemeral, too. I can’t attest to the worthiness for preservation of anything I post on ROT, but let’s imagine that it’s worth keeping. In 50 years, will anyone be able to find copies of my old posts? I’ve published a few articles in on-line periodicals which don’t have paper editions. There’s no question about the legitimacy of such publication as a career credit, but will the articles still be accessible for someone doing research in 10 or 20 years? (Believe it or not, a few of my essays have been cited by later writers. But those citations were from printed journals.) Even the more prominent Internet writing, like Slate or Politico: will anyone be able to research old articles on those sites in half a century like I can with old newspapers, Time magazines, or books? It doesn’t feel like any of those outlets, which do contain serious writing and opinions that should have some bearing on histories of our time written in the future, will be available for consultation and research. (I certainly can’t put a copy of the e-journal on my shelf among the small collection of my published essays, can I?) 

I’m not making allusions to the dubious provenance of on-line publications in contrast to paper ones. We all know that there are dangers in using Internet information as a reference. Books and printed periodicals have the cachet of editors and fact-checkers, though we also know from many recent revelations that that isn’t a guarantee of accuracy or even honesty. I’m only contemplating the permanence, the lasting availability, the future accessibility of on-line writing versus the paper kind. Libraries keep old books and periodicals we can get to when we want them. There are archival collections that contain the letters and papers of the Tennessee Williamses, Max Lerners, and Elia Kazans and scholars, writers, and historians consult their holdings all the time. Who keeps electronic publications? Where would I go in the future to work with the e-mails or e-publications of a current figure I want to write about? Nancy Reagan kept her husband’s letters; who’s keeping Barack Obama’s private e-mails? My dad collected and bound the letters he and my mom exchanged during World War II. Who’s keeping today’s courting couples’ electronic love messages? A friend once sent me a copy of a wonderful memoir his grandfather wrote covering his life as a frontier lawyer for the first 60 years of the 20th century. Today that chronicle would be written on a computer and, unless the author printed a copy on paper, it would exist only as electronic blips on some disk somewhere. I donated my copy of the reminiscence to the NYPL so that someone interested in that bit of Americana can find it in the local history division; what would happen to a latter-day counterpart? 

There’s a lot more to my feeling of impending loss when I contemplate the shift from paper books to e-books. On Sunday, 30 May, the New York Times ran two pieces dealing with this very topic, a column by Peter Khoury (“In Ink on a Flyleaf, Forever Yours”) and an editorial by Verlyn Klinkenborg (“Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader”). (Klinkenborg had also published an earlier “Editorial Notebook” essay, “Some Thoughts About E-Reading,” 15 April.) These got me thinking about books, e-books, and why I like the paper kind so much. We all recognize the useful attributes of electronic publications: the portability; the searchability; the immediate access from anywhere, even miles from a bookstore or library, in the middle of the night or a fierce snowstorm. I use Google Books on line and other electronic editions of published materials. I use the on-line editions of not only newspapers from far away, by my own New York Times because it’s sometimes more convenient than the print edition I get at home (such as for cutting-and-pasting quotations or e-mailing short articles to colleagues). But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t miss the paper copy of books and newspapers if they should disappear in favor of the electronic versions. 

Khoury’s main point is that we’d lose the pleasure of finding a book with an inscription on the flyleaf, a personal sentiment from one person to someone else. Khoury called this “the personality that authors—and the people who give books to others as presents—sometimes leave for posterity.” Sometimes, it’s a first-edition inscribed and signed by the author, a sort of visceral connection between us and the creator of the work. You can’t have that in an e-book. “[W]here would the extra personality that comes with an inscription go?” asks Khoury. On my last birthday, one of my cousins gave me a couple of theater-related books. You can’t give an e-book and write a personal note inside the cover so that the sentiment expressed remains part of the book forever. In fact, you can’t really give an e-book to someone else at all—unless you want to give up your e-reader as well, a rather expensive gift in the end. You can’t even lend someone an e-book without giving up the reader as well. I exchange books with friends often, sometimes for long periods. (I have one book now that’s a loan from a friend who gave it to me months ago. I couldn’t keep his e-reader that long.) I used to lend books to students; I wouldn’t do that if I had to give them my expensive reader, too. What a sad loss—no more books as gifts, no more loans, no more personal notes inside. It’s not even about the books. It’s about the human connection, the “collaborative discourse” that we lose. “That is not a good thing for readers, authors, publishers or our culture,” writes Klinkenborg. 

Klinkenborg’s principal theme, in both his editorials, is different. He writes about the feel of a paper book, its physical existence in your possession. “I love the typefaces and the bindings and the feel of well-made paper,” he says. And I couldn’t agree more. Holding a book, owning a book, is something. It’s palpable and warm and somehow alive in a way that holding a little computer screen or sitting in front of a big one just isn’t. Turning pages is a kind of positive act that clicking a button on a screen isn’t. As Klinkenborg observes, “The book is the book, whereas, in electronic formats, the book often seems to be merely the text.” (The same, by the way, is true of a newspaper.) Running my hand down the page of even the cheapest edition of a paperback is somehow satisfying, getting a feel for this object with which I’m about to enter into a relationship. You can’t do that with a computer monitor. 

With many books, I do have a sort of conversation when I read. I make marginal notes, little comments that are a sort of dialogue with the author. I make comparisons to other experiences, references to other books or articles, ideas, thoughts, connections. One example of this is the four sections of my remarks on Kirk Woodward’s The Art of Writing Reviews that I published on ROT in November 2009. The basis of those comments were my marginalia from reading the book; I just typed them up and cleaned up the grammar and syntax for public consumption. One of the books I used to lend to students is my copy of Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting. A few years ago, I had to buy a lending copy because my original one had so many notes and highlights in it, it was unreadable by anyone other than me. (It also started to fall apart from use, like my copy of Harold Clurman’s On Directing, now held together by a rubber band! Those books are not just texts; they’re part of my life.) That kind of symbiosis isn’t possible with an e-book. You can’t make marginal notes on an e-reader or a computer. “Reading is a subtle thing,” says Klinkenborg, “and its subtleties are artifacts of a venerable medium: words printed in ink on paper. Glass and pixels aren’t the same.” 

Klinkenborg also makes a point about the look of a book, the words printed on a page as compared to the pixels on a screen. No wordprocessed or electronic document, no matter the selected font, will ever look as good as a printed book, he insists. Books, he suggests, are beautiful—and, of course, that’s true because bookmaking is an art. E-publishing is a technology. The value of an e-book is what it can do beyond presenting a text to read. As Klinkenborg declares, paper books “do nothing. . . . [W]hat I really love is their inertness.” Like a painting, a sculpture, or an architectural masterpiece, a book’s value isn’t in what it does. It’s in what it is. 

Probably I’m a fuddy-duddy. (Okay, no doubt I am a fuddy-duddy.) I was born long enough ago that books (and newspapers) were just the way I grew up. Paper and printer’s ink were all there was. Hell, photocopiers didn’t even come along until I was in college—and the really useful ones that copied onto plain paper and could handle illustrations and photos didn’t exist until I was in grad school. Klinkenborg makes this same point: I grew up reading books, not texts. “The difference,” as he asserts, “is important.” Those of you who came along later and began sentient life with computers and e-books, and didn’t have the formative introduction to the printed word may see all this as a silly resistance to letting go of obsolescent technology. I don’t have any special attraction to horses and buggies; I grew up with cars and airplanes. I was 14 when the first man went into space. I don’t bemoan the effect TV’s had on movies and theater—I grew up with television. So maybe some of you see electronic publishing and e-books the way I see those other technological advancements. That’s fine; I’m not trying to turn the clock back. I just know I’ll miss the feel of a book in my hand when I read, the way it lies open on my lap or on the desk, how I mark my place with a bookmark. I’ll miss putting my bookplate in the front of a new book. When I finished writing the chapter on Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale for Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance, I went out and found a copy of the 1964 volume that first published both plays together. It was my gift to myself for completing the work. What a perfect reward! (I got that book at the old Gotham Book Mart, but the area near where I live used to be chockablock with used bookstores. I used to love to browse through them once a month or so just to see what treasures I might find.) 

A final thought, borrowed from Verlyn Klinkenborg because he nailed it: “The question isn’t what will books become in a world of electronic reading. The question is what will become of the readers we’ve been—quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted—in a world where interactive can be too tempting to ignore.” 

Indeed.