Chapter 11
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound
and stab us. . . . We need the books that affect us like a disaster,
that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more
than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone,
like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
and stab us. . . . We need the books that affect us like a disaster,
that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more
than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone,
like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak
I grew up in a house filled with books. They were an important part of the family. My father directed my reading, although I was unaware of this. When I was nine he gave me one of my most prized books, Classical Myths That Live Today, in which he wrote:“Laura Bradley Johnson, from her father, Christmas 1948.” Two years later he introduced me to Dickens with The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. I was swept into Oliver’s world of housebreakers, prostitutes, and pickpockets. For weeks I practiced lifting handkerchiefs from my brother’s back pocket, just as young Oliver was taught to do by Fagan and his boy apprentices, the Artful Dodger and Charlie Bates. I read this book three times before I was seventeen, in the way children do who make a book their friend.
My mother read many books to my brother and me—Dr. Seuss, The Wind in the Willows, much of Dr. Doolittle, The Hobbit. My father read aloud to me only one, Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Perhaps it was the only one he needed to read. It worked its spell. “This is a story about a little girl just your age,” my father had said one winter afternoon as I sat on his lap in his big armchair, and he began to read. From then on I seemed to fit my stride to hers. Like Alice, I was interested in everything and full of questions. Often I received unsatisfactory answers and in this way I learned the world was full of whimsy and odd inhabitants. I was not put off by the unfamiliar and could accept the contradictions of the gauzy world behind the looking glass, even the irrational that Alice found at the bottom of the rabbit hole. I was unafraid of risk and not overly desirous of comfort. Like Alice, I was happy in solitude, even willing to be lonely if I was learning. I walked through the tangle as a curious observer, and though there was much I didn’t understand, I found no murky corners in my world.
I don’t remember conversations with my father about any of these books. But he set them in my path. He flung open the door, then stood aside as I began the long walk into a lifetime of reading. It happened as naturally as dreaming, and I was unaware until I was in middle age how well and permanently he had guided me into the companionable world of books, the refuge of a room with an armchair and a fireplace, my book on the little round table where I had set it down, waiting to be picked up again.
In Guy’s family too, books held pride of place. When he was living in Cambridge, enrolled at the Shady Hill School, he would walk home for lunch to find that his mother had set out a plateful of peanut butter sandwiches and the Shakespeare they were reading was beside his place. He ate while his mother read aloud, and in this way they worked through all the plays, as well as, Guy always added, a lot of peanut butter.
Guy told me about staging Shakespeare with the English twins, Kit and Ted, who lived with the Waterman family during World War II. He had kept a dog-eared copy of Macbeth in which he’d blacked out many lines and written in stage directions, in this way heavily editing Shakespeare so it could be produced by three young boys.
I, in turn, told him that my parents took me to see the Shakespeare put on by the students at the Lawrenceville School. These productions were staged in the round in the cavernous old gym, the audience sitting on bleachers. In my family this was the equivalent of going to Yankee Stadium. My parents talked about Romeo and Juliet or Katherina and Petruchio for days in advance, and I felt that kind of excitement other eight-year-olds might have felt at knowing they were about to see Joe DiMaggio or Jackie Robinson. In the weeks following I struggled to penetrate these plays in my father’s Arden Edition, feeling triumphant when I stumbled on lines I remembered.
Petruchio: Good Lord how bright and goodly shines the moon!
Katherina: The moon! The sun: it is not moonlight now.
Petruchio: I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
Katherina: I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
Katherina: The moon! The sun: it is not moonlight now.
Petruchio: I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
Katherina: I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
The books I shared with Guy formed a cornerstone and forged between us a mind-to-mind connection. Not long after we moved to Barra it became evident that, as Guy put it, I was president of the Slow Eaters Society. His allegiance was to the bolters’ camp. So, to save himself hours of downtime waiting for me to plow through my mashed potatoes and allow me to finish eating at my customary leisurely pace, Guy suggested that he read aloud while I finished my meal.
We began this journey in the winter of 1974 with The Fireside Book of Dog Stories, and it ended on February 5, 2000, halfway through the second volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In all, we completed 269 books, an average of 10 a year.
Our writers of choice were nineteenth-century British and American authors. Aside from telling first-rate tales, these books unfolded at a leisurely pace that fit right into the rhythms of Barra, where we lived free of interruptions such as telephones, traffic noise, or even the hum of a refrigerator. In fact, we lived closer to the world of Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, whose characters strode about the countryside on foot and lived with candlelight and privies.
In the course of twenty-six years of reading aloud we worked our way through all but the odds and ends of Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, Kipling, and Hardy. We read heaping portions of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Cooper; George Eliot and George Meredith; Jane Austen, the Brontës, Trollope, and Thackeray. By no means excluding the twentieth century, we ranked among our all-time great reads The Great Gatsby and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.
Perhaps our favorite reading-aloud book of all time was The Count of Monte Cristo. Or Beau Geste. Or The Scarlet Pimpernel. (We both could handle embarrassingly large helpings of the swashbuckling.) Or maybe it was The Wind in the Willows. A good dog story—heck, even a bad one—could choke Guy up to the point where he had to turn the book toward me so I could read the last paragraphs, silently, since I’d also be unable to get through it out loud.
Both of us contributed sets of Shakespeare when we blended our libraries. Guy brought his Kipling with the inscription “Guy Van Vorst Waterman, 1 May 1935” in the first volume, a gift to him on his third birthday. Our friend Walter Peters sent us the complete sets of Dickens and Scott, which arrived at our post office that first December. We sledded the boxes in from the road and wrote Walter that we couldn’t imagine what they contained, but whatever it was it sure weighed like the dickens.
For Christmas 1979 Guy’s gift to me came in a slim, orange-colored binder entitled “The Most Ultimately Challenging Ever Barra Reading-Aloud Quiz Book.” It contained twelve quizzes that Guy described in the subtitle as “Head-Scratching, Rib-Tickling, Heart-Stopping, Mind-Numbing,” and they were based on books we’d read aloud after dinner at Barra from 1974 to 1979.
The first question in the first quiz was: “What activity had Mole been engaged in when he suddenly said:‘Bother!’And ‘O blow!’and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat? 5 points for correct answer.”
This was easy.
The tenth and last question in the first quiz was: “Several books’ titles refer explicitly to leading characters within their pages—but not by name. For 3 points each, what was the name of:
a. the last of the Mohicans
b. the master of Sunnybank
c. the bride of Lammermoor
d. the merchant of Venice
e. the count of Monte Cristo
f. the fair maid of Perth
g. the prisoner of Zenda
h. the three musketeers (name all three)
bonus point: If you can name any one of the seven against Thebes.”
This was harder. I was able to answer only five of the eight here and struck out on the bonus point. (For the answers, turn to the last page of this chapter. But no peeking until after you’ve tried the quiz!)
For Christmas 1992 Guy gave me another quiz book.The hand-drawn card that came with it read: “Blessed are the quiz-takers for they shall inherit ‘The Christmas 1992 Barra Reading Aloud-Quiz Book.’” This book contained fifty glorious quizzes, broken down into twenty-five General Quizzes and twenty-five Specialized Quizzes that featured the authors we’d read most: Shakespeare, Scott, Kipling, Dickens, and our favorite category of dog stories. In this quiz book Guy also included a list of all the books we’d read aloud to date—190—as well as a score sheet and the answers (no cheating).
These quizzes were hard, asking the quiz taker to match first lines with the work they opened and last lines with the work they closed, as well as such brain testers as:
Name book titles, and their authors, which mention the following numbers (five points for each book, five for each author):
1. 1,876
2. 31
3. 12
4. 7 (name one of two titles here)
5. 6
6. 4
7. 3 (name two of three titles here)
8. 2
9. 1
10. 0
(See the last page of this chapter for the answers.)
Guy gave me one other book-gift based on our reading aloud. This he called “A Harvest of Shared Memories,” the title drawn from our beloved George Eliot. The whole quotation, which comes from Middlemarch, reads:
Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve. . . . It is still the beginning of the home epic—the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.
This was my Christmas present in 1988. It was subtitled “The First 150 Books Read Aloud at Barra: . . . together with some observations, perspectives, and reminiscences thereon.” It was a reremembering in the form of lists of all the books we’d read to date. Guy had grouped characters, settings, and scenes together in all sorts of ways in an effort to evoke what we had enjoyed reading aloud together.
We soon discovered that the four candles we used at dinner weren’t enough light for Guy when it came to reading on dark winter nights. So he constructed from our own wood the Candlelight Reader, another gift for me. This came with a card addressed to “Laura Guy & Ralph” (who loved dog stories) and read:
May you enjoy many quiet hours of reading pleasure by soft candlelight down through the years together—
Willy [Shakespeare]
Scotty [Sir Walter]
Kip [Rudyard Kipling]
Chuck [Charles Dickens]
Emily [Brontë]
& A.P.T. [Albert Payson Terhune, creator of great dog stories]
Scotty [Sir Walter]
Kip [Rudyard Kipling]
Chuck [Charles Dickens]
Emily [Brontë]
& A.P.T. [Albert Payson Terhune, creator of great dog stories]
The Candlelight Reader was modeled after a reading lectern, with holes drilled along the top and sides for six candles. Very few guests ever saw the Candlelight Reader. During the day it sat on a low shelf beneath our table. If we had guests for supper, we didn’t read, though if a guest expressed interest, we were happy to oblige. The Candlelight Reader was as important to us as our crosscut saw and symbolized as much. When Guy had finished his supper he would bend down, pull up the Candlelight Reader, and set it on the table. The book we were reading lay on the lectern, as did a box of matches. Guy lit the candles one by one, taking his time. I felt myself slipping into the world that we had left the evening before and that I had returned to in my thoughts during the day.
Our connection in the world of books remained the sustaining pleasure of our lives. The reading aloud never lost its luster. After Johnny died and much in Guy died also, the solace he took in books never failed him.
We might have endured a difficult day—Guy locked away in his own desperate world, me feeling shut out, my attempts to help rebuffed, no hugs exchanged, our dinner consumed in silence—but when, at last, Guy shoved back his chair and reached down for the Candlelight Reader, immediately the tensions eased between us. I felt myself sink into the comfortable place,as into an enveloping armchair. Guy lit the candles one by one, opened the book, and began to read. We had found each other again as together we entered the enchanted place at the top of the forest and joined Christopher Robin and Pooh, or strode across Egdon Heath with Yeobright on his way to meet Eustasia Vye with passionate embrace, or hopped on the raft with Huck and Jim, heading downriver.
Our last night together, February 5, Guy asks me if I want him to read. He has never before asked this question, but he asks it now because this reading will be our last.
Our books are the glue, the mortar in our lives. Books connected us in the beginning. This shared ritual, more than anything, has helped us bridge the hard times. I look into Guy’s face, and I can see that he wants to do what I want. I say yes, a wholehearted yes, to this last reading, and I can feel my own face brighten. We will keep on reading until we reach The End.
So we pick up the thread with Gibbon’s lengthy chapter concerning the invasion of Italy by Alaric and Rome’s pillage by the Goths. This night I have trouble concentrating on Gibbon’s complex sentences. But the music in his phrases calms me, as does Guy’s voice, rising and falling, full of the flow of words. He reads half a dozen pages, then closes the book, far from the end of this chapter. He douses the candles one by one and leans down one last time to slide the Candlelight Reader onto its low shelf beneath our table.
This is farewell.
Answers to the quizzes on pages 158 and 159:
(a) Chingachgook; (b) Albert Payson Terhune; (c) Lucy Ashton; (d) Antonio; (e) Edmund Dantes; (f ) Catherine Glover; (g) King Rudolph; (h) Athos, Porthos, Aramis; bonus point: Oedipus or Eteocles or Polynices or Antigone or Ismene.
1. 1876—A Novel by Gore Vidal; 2. At Midnight on the Thirty-First of March by Josephine Case; 3. Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare; 4. Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus or The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne; 5. Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne; 6. The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; 7. The Three Mulla-Milgars by Walter de la Mare or The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas or Soldiers Three by Rudyard Kipling; 8. K2—The Savage Mountain by Charles Houston and Robert Bates; 9. The Once and Future King by T. H. White; 10. Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare.