Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (6 page)

The most permanent, and thus to the courtly lover the most terrible, thing one can leave in a book is one’s own words. Even I would never write in an encyclopedia (except perhaps with a No. 3 pencil, which I’d later erase). But I’ve been annotating novels and poems—transforming monologues into dialogues—ever since I learned to read. Byron Dobell says that his most beloved books, such as
The Essays of Montaigne
, have been written on so many times, in so many different periods of his life, in so many colors of ink, that they have become palimpsests. I would far rather read Byron’s copy of Montaigne than a virginal one from the bookstore, just as I would rather read John Adams’s copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s
French Revolution
, in whose margins he argued so vehemently with the dead author (“Heavenly times!” “A barbarous theory.” “Did this lady think three months time enough to form a free constitution for twenty-five millions of Frenchmen?”) that, two hundred years later, his handwriting still looks angry.

Just think what courtly lovers miss by believing that the only thing they are permitted to do with books is
read
them! What do they use for shims, doorstops, glueing weights, and rug-flatteners? When my friend the art historian was a teenager, his cherished copy of
D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths
served as a drum pad on which he practiced percussion riffs from Led Zeppelin. A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker. Menelik II, the emperor of Ethiopia at the turn of the century, liked to chew pages from his Bible. Unfortunately, he died after consuming the complete Book of Kings. I do not consider Menelik’s fate an argument for keeping our hands and teeth off our books; the lesson to be drawn, clearly, is that he, too, should have laminated his pages in plastic.

”
H
ow beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn-out appearance … of an old ‘Circulating Library’ Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield!” wrote Charles Lamb. “How they speak of the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages with delight! … Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to see them in?” Absolutely none. Thus, a landscape architect I know savors the very smell of the dirt embedded in his botany texts; it is the alluvium of his life’s work. Thus, my friend the science writer considers her
Mammals of the World
to have been enhanced by the excremental splotches left by Bertrand Russell, an orphaned band-tailed pigeon who perched on it when he was learning to fly. And thus, even though I own a clear plastic cookbook holder, I never use it. What a pleasure it will be, thirty years hence, to open
The Joy of Cooking
to page 581 and behold part of the
actual egg yolk
that my daughter glopped into her very first batch of blueberry muffins at age twenty-two months! The courtly mode simply doesn’t work with small children. I hope I am not deluding myself when I imagine that even the Danish chambermaid, if she is now a mother, might be able to appreciate a really grungy copy of
Pat the Bunny
—a book that
invites
the reader to act like a Dobellian giant mongoose—in which Mummy’s ring has been fractured and Daddy’s scratchy face has been rubbed as smooth as the Blarney Stone.

The trouble with the carnal approach is that we love our books to pieces. My brother keeps his disintegrating
Golden Guide to Birds
in a Ziploc bag. “It consists of dozens of separate fascicles,” says Kim, “and it’s impossible to read. When I pick it up, the egrets fall out. But if I replaced it, the note I wrote when I saw my first trumpeter swan wouldn’t be there. Also, I don’t want to admit that so many species names have changed. If I bought a new edition, I’d feel I was being unfaithful to my old friend the yellow-bellied sapsucker, which has been split into three different species.”

My friend Clark’s eight thousand books, mostly works of philosophy, will never suffer the same fate as
The Golden Guide to Birds
. In fact, just
hearing
about Kim’s book might trigger a nervous collapse. Clark, an investment analyst, won’t let his wife raise the blinds until sundown, lest the bindings fade. He buys at least two copies of his favorite books, so that only one need be subjected to the stress of having its pages turned. When his visiting mother-in-law made the mistake of taking a book off the shelf, Clark shadowed her around the apartment to make sure she didn’t do anything unspeakable to it—such as placing it facedown on a table.

I know these facts about Clark because when George was over there last week, he talked to Clark’s wife and made some notes on the back flyleaf of Herman Wouk’s
Don’t Stop the Carnival
, which he happened to be carrying in his backpack. He ripped out the page and gave it to me.

 T
R U E
 W
O M A N H O O D
 

S
ix years ago, the week my first child was born, my mother sent me a book that had once belonged to my great-grandmother. The timing was coincidental. My parents were about to move from California to Florida and were divesting themselves of everything that wouldn’t fit in their new, smaller house. Because I had been allotted the silver candlesticks, the mother-of-pearl fish knives, and the cut-glass pickle dish, my mother threw in the book, which she had never read, because it, too, was decorative and ancestral.

The book was called
The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the World
. The binding was umber, with an ornate design of flowers and leaves embossed on the cover. The pages were edged with gilt. When I grazed my fingernail down the title page, I could feel the letterpress indentations. The bottom of the spine was ragged, evidence that it had been frequently teased off a high shelf with a crooked finger.

Inside the front cover was a bookplate from St. Mary’s Academy in Salt Lake City. Five lines of microscopic Spencerian script—the upstrokes were as fine as a baby’s hair—reported that the book had been awarded to Miss Maude Earll on June 21, 1886, for excellence in “Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Grammar, Rhetoric, M. Philosophy, Logic, Botany, Literature, G. History, Penmanship, Astronomy, Elocution, Comp. and L. Writing, Plain Sewing, Ornamental Needlework, Guitar & Bookkeeping.”

My great-grandmother Maude has always been considered an exotic character in my family because in our denominational hotchpotch—I’m descended from Jews, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Mormons, and a Christian Scientist—she was the only Catholic. Her Protestant parents had sent her to a convent school on the condition that the Sisters of the Holy Cross never attempt to convert her. The nuns must have valued Maude’s soul more highly than their promise, for she was a devout believer by the time she graduated. The prize they chose for her is the only book I own that belonged to a great-grandparent, or even a grandparent. When my mother sent it to me, all I knew about Maude was that she had knee-length auburn hair, so heavy it gave her headaches, which she eventually cut off and sold for twenty-five dollars, the same price Jo got for hers in
Little Women
; that she had refined manners; and that she could sew stitches so fine they were invisible.

I first read
The Mirror of True Womanhood
while nursing my daughter in a rocking chair, in the midst of the tumult, part ecstasy and part panic, into which all first-time mothers are thrown by sleep deprivation and headlong identity realignment. The book appalled me. It belonged to that hoary genre of women’s advice manuals—it shares a call number at the Library of Congress with such descendants as
Having It All; Strategy in the Sex War
; and
Help for the Hassled, Hurried, and Hustled
—which, in 1877, when it was published, were almost invariably written by men. The author was the Reverend Bernard O’Reilly, a New York priest who had been chaplain of the Irish Brigade of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. Into twenty-two hortatory chapters (“The True Woman’s Kingdom: The Home”; “The Wife’s Crowning Duty: Fidelity”; “The Mother’s Office Toward Boyhood and Girlhood”), Father O’Reilly managed to stuff everything he thought a woman should know. This was the bottom line: “Woman’s entire existence, in order to be a source of happiness to others as well as to herself, must be one of self-sacrifice.” If she toed the mark, her home would become “the sweetest, brightest, dearest spot of earth.” If she transgressed, she might end up like the selfish mother, en route to Europe, whose vessel was “wrecked amid the icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland,” or the lazy housewife who suffered the even more dire fate of having her disappointed husband “migrate to California.”
Father O’Reilly
! I would mentally chide the author, as I rocked my daughter.
You never had a wife! You never had children
! How dare you tell my great-grandmother how to lead her life? How dare you tell ME?

Father O’Reilly was damnably sure of himself, or maybe it just seemed that way because, at the time, I was so unsure of myself. I mocked his Victorian priggery, but I was secretly afraid that he was right about motherhood—that, in fact, my id was about to be permanently squashed by my superego. I was working at home as a writer; for the first time, George was the principal breadwinner. “Men are born to be the providers in the home: they are formed by nature and still further fitted by education for every species of toil,” I read. “Theirs is the battle of life on sea and land. The home with its quiet, its obscurity, its sanctities, is for woman: she is made to grow up in the shade.” What if I got stuck in that shade and never managed to crawl back out?

Of course Father O’Reilly called us “the weaker sex,” but I got the feeling he was just bluffing. His heroines nurtured their children with enough motherlove to suffocate a small army. They ministered to lepers, adopted disfigured orphans, and brought bread to poor families “during the most inclement winter’s weather.” His men were sad sacks by comparison, forever courting disaster either through their own weakness (intemperance, adultery, dimwitted investments) or through rotten luck (maimed hands, amputated legs, paralytic rheumatism). But the wives unfalteringly stood by their men, coaxing them out of their vicious habits and compensating for their infermities by working ever harder themselves. My favorite O’Reilly anecdote involved a particularly churlish husband:

Coming home one day at his dinner hour, and finding that the meal was not ready, he flew into a furious passion, and began to upset and break the furniture in the dining-room. His wife—a holy woman—endeavored to pacify him, and, while urging the servants to hurry forward their preparations, she argued sweetly with her husband on the unseemliness of such displays of anger, and begged him to read a book, while she would go to aid the cook. He flung the book away from him, and stalked back and forth in a rage, while the lady hastened to her kitchen.

After a while, chastened by his wife’s example (and perhaps by the eventual arrival of dinner), the husband picked up the book and began to read. By an amazing stroke of luck, it happened to be
The Lives of the Saints
. The husband reformed his character on the spot and “added one more name to the long role of Christian heroes, who owed, under Providence, their greatness and heroism to the irresistible influence of a saintly woman.”

I’ve got your number, Father O’Reilly
, I thought.
It’s the old pedestal trick. We’re better than men, so we don’t need to be equal to them
. Of course, a little pedestal deployment wouldn’t
entirely
spoil my day. Once, looking up from a passage on the ideal wife, I asked George, “Do you consider me a peerless flower of beauty and spotless purity which has been laid upon your bosom?” George responded with a neutral, peace-preserving, but not quite affirmative grunt.

F
ive months ago, after our second child was born, I picked up
The Mirror of True Womanhood
again. It seemed to go with nursing a baby. This time I felt far more confident—motherhood had, in fact, turned out to be a source of joy that had shanghaied neither my brain nor my id—and, perhaps as a result, Father O’Reilly seemed far less confident. His sacralization of the hearth no longer seemed smug; it seemed anxious. In 1877, he could feel the ground shifting beneath his feet. The “home sanctuary” seemed to him the last bulwark against irreligion, evolutionism, crime, alcoholism, prostitution, political corruption, industrial labor, disrespect for the older generation, and female emancipation. “Close and bar the door of your home at all times,” he cautioned, “when you know that wickedness is abroad in the street or on the highway.”
It’s okay, Father O’Reilly
, I told him.
There are lots of people today who feel exactly the same way
.