Some Notes on Reading

Editor’s Note: The following essays by Sherman Alexie, J.D. McClatchy, Robert Pinsky, Mona Simpson and Ted Kooser are included in a recent anthology published by Milkweed Editions, entitled “The Most Wonderful Books: writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading.” They are reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher and the authors.

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I long sometimes for that early, ardent perception when all narrative provided one engulfing reality. In that Eden I saw little or no distinction between movies and stories in books. Neither was there any essential difference of kind distinguishing dreams from daydreams, or daydreams from conscious fantasies, or separating all those private narratives from the collectively composed dramas of kids playing Robbers or War or Cowboys: “Say, we got our guns back, and you don’t see us coming.” OK. And then say, “I see you from the roof.” And so forth.

This doesn’t mean that I was stupid or innocent. I recognized the different levels of expertise, vividness, plausibility among such different kinds of made-up story. But underneath such qualities was a single unquestionable essence: a populated, imitative reality, as seamless and coherent as the world itself. Available when the real world grew tedious or oppressive, or merely at whim, there was a reality of imagination. Genre and form did not come into it. Though one collaborated in those clumsy, derivative dramas of shootouts and pursuits, slapping a thigh while running to simulate horseback riding, the idea had not emerged that this was a particular kind of making, with an essential character different from that of Errol Flynn in “Robin Hood,” which was, in turn, different in nature from a book about Robin Hood.

I know a woman who as a child used to be afraid to begin a new book. In the inert little object, in the squared-off ranks of black sentences, lay terrible power she had not elected: Within a few pages she would become subject to that power. She might start to care about the fate of a character the author could thwart, humiliate, even kill, the character a hostage not even to fortune but to the authorial need to create just that caring my friend dreaded while also craving it.

Reading at this stage is as ecstatic and unfathomably vivid as the movie screen and as inward as dreams. The film technologies of projection, synthesized sound and so forth--if I was aware of them at all--were theoretical, like an older boy’s explanation of special effects, the collapsible arrow that exploded backward out of an actor’s shirt simultaneously with a bursting sack of catsup. Despite the explanation, I flinched at the movie. And I think I was even more innocent, once, of the technology of narrative in words. The creation of the stories I experienced had a density I did not see through.

My favorite reading for many years was the “Alice” books. The sentences had the same somber, drugged conviction as Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations, an inexplicable, shadowy dignity that reminded me of the portraits and symbols engraved on paper money. The books were not made of words and sentences but of that smoky assurance, the insistent solidity of folded, textured, Victorian interiors elaborately barricaded against the doubt and ennui of a dreadfully God-forsaken vision. The drama of resisting some corrosive, enervating loss, some menacing boredom, made itself clear in the matter-of-fact reality of the story. Behind the drawings I felt not merely a tissue of words and sentences but an unquestioned, definite reality.

I read the books over and over. Inevitably, at some point, I began trying to see how it was done, to unravel the making--to read the words as words, to peek behind the reality. The loss entailed by such knowledge is immense. Is the romance of “being a writer”--a romance perhaps even created to compensate for this catastrophic loss--worth the price? The process can be epitomized by the episode that goes with one of my favorite illustrations. Alice has entered a dark wood--”much darker than the last wood”:

[S]he reached the wood: It looked very cool and shady. “Well, at any rate it’s a great comfort,” she said as she stepped under the trees, “after being so hot, to get into the--into the--into what?” she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. “I mean to get under the--under the--under this, you know!” putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. “What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it’s got no name--why to be sure it hasn’t!”

This is the wood where things have no names, which Alice has been warned about. As she tries to remember her own name (“I know it begins with L!”), a Fawn comes wandering by. In its soft, sweet voice, the Fawn asks Alice, “What do you call yourself?” Alice returns the question, the creature replies, “I’ll tell you, if you’ll come a little further on . . . . I can’t remember here”.

The Tenniel picture that I still find affecting illustrates the first part of the next sentence:

So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arm. “I’m a Fawn!” it cried out in a voice of delight. “And dear me! you’re a human child!” A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.

In the illustration, the little girl and the animal walk together with a slightly awkward intimacy, Alice’s right arm circled over the Fawn’s neck and back so that the fingers of her two hands meet in front of her waist, barely close enough to mesh a little, a space between the thumbs. They both look forward, and the affecting clumsiness of the pose suggests that they are tripping one another. The great-eyed Fawn’s legs are breathtakingly thin. Alice’s expression is calm, a little melancholy or spaced-out.

What an allegory of the fall into language. To imagine a child crossing over from the jubilant, passive experience of such a passage in its physical reality, over into the phrase-by-phrase, conscious analysis of how it is done--all that movement and reversal and feeling and texture in a handful of sentences--is somewhat like imagining a parallel masking of life itself, as if I were to discover, on reflection, that this room where I am writing, the keyboard, the jar of pens, the lamp, the rain outside, were all made out of words.

That may seem an exaggeration, but Alice’s loss, which reflects the loss of that Edenic illusion, has behind it a whole Romantic authority: The Fawn bounding away is also Keats’s nightingale, fading into the dim forest. Artfully capitalizing every reference to the Fawn--its name--Lewis Carroll makes it by that much more a specific, unique reality. When it fades far away, what is left behind is the surrogate of language--the categories and rhetorical choices of writing:

Alice stood looking after it, almost ready to cry with vexation at having lost her dear little fellow-traveler so suddenly. “However, I know my name now” she said, “that’s some comfort. Alice--Alice--I won’t forget it again. And now, which of these fingerposts ought I to follow, I wonder?”

The brisk cheerfulness that takes up the next narrative move is another joke on the scenic effect of verbal causes. The omnivorous pressure of Story moves on.

Was there the specific moment or occasion I imagine, unmasking the happy illusion of words as read dramas, discovering that those panoramic densities were a series of propositions? Possibly not. My passionate childhood escape into reading, perhaps driven by the fearful prospect of my mother’s mental illness, may have been doomed to drive itself behind the seamless, frail screen of the surface and, in among the gears, the grease, and wheezing pumps of sentence and paragraph, the capital “F” of Fawn.

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I still find the miracle of narrative prose almost unattainable. I marvel at the ability of even the humblest genre writer to assert the existence of a world: A man came into the room. I read it and I behold a man, and a room; but if I write it, I feel a kind of embarrassment, even shame: There is no man, no room, only my own voice. In a poem, which is my own voice, relying on the physical presence of consonants and vowels formed by my body I feel as if I can talk about anything, include anything. But fiction asserts that a world exists. In a couple of published stories, in unpublished strivings and hopes, I try to take up that proposition, but unlike speech, it does not come easily to me.

My mother was a passionate escape reader; sometimes even in the midst of her worst episodes she would read thousands of words of science-fiction a day. She and I traded volumes and magazines from the boxfuls she traded with another devotee she found somehow, a soldier at Ft. Monmouth. Even at her worst, even when I was in deepest retreat, we maintained a decorum of taking turns with a given volume, a tacit courtesy maybe resembling that of drug addicts.

She had a withering doubt of the actual world, and I suppose that magazines like If and Galaxy were her Lewis Carroll--and mine, too, and I would say my successor to Carroll except that I have never abandoned him. In the grave, formal strangeness and practicality of his books, in his actual poems and in his ability to suggest always an ineluctable meaning in words that is behind or under the words, he conducted me toward poetry. Poetry for me is possibly a route to the real world, a way of respecting the actual--and all the more vital a route for twists, obliquities, compressions and shadowy implications. Possibly, it is after all the form that brings me closest to that old, blessed belief in Creation.