One of my secret shames - now, not so secret - is that, though I’ve read hundreds of novels and stories in my life, once a reasonable amount of time goes by, I don’t remember them.
Yet I have always been a reader. When I was a kid we had a bookmobile that came around our neighborhood, to hold a contest regarding who could read the most books during a certain summer. I won, my prize, a footlong Rainbow popsicle, which melted before I could eat it, sending rainbow sweetness all over my body. But, aside from the entire Hardy Boys series, I don’t remember a single one of the bookmobile books. And all I remember about the Hardy Boys was that they solved crimes.
I was a kid, too, so it couldn’t have been dementia! Right?
This puzzling problem goes for books I actually taught in later years, to engaged and intelligent graduate students, as well. I might have three or four hours of deep and interesting discussion with my students on the inner workings of Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, for example, and then, a year or so later - with only a little exaggeration - not know Dr. Zhivago from Dr. No.
There are a few exceptions. I can still carry on about Lolita, or Junichiro Tanizaki’s masterwork, The Makioka Sisters, but that’s because I read them each a half a dozen times a couple of years apart. Most books, though, are as gone to me as the dinner I had last Sunday. “Mmm, mmm, good! But what was it again?”
Tell me, do you harbor that same secret shame? Or do you, like certain friends of mine, remember everything?
What I do remember about each book I have read is what the edition of it looked like, where I was when I read it, and whether I liked it or not. But that has as much to do with the emotional or psychological impact it had on the person I was at the time, as anything else. If someone were to ask me, “Have you read Anna Karenina or A Tale of Two Cities?” I might very well answer, “Oh yes! Loved them!” though all I remember are their famous first lines - “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
Oh, and that Anna got hit by a train. And that the cities were Paris and London.
One of the first books about which I could say, “Oh yes, I loved that!” was J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I guess because what kid can read - ‘If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap…’ - without embracing the wretched world of teenage angst?
Catcher was published in 1951 but I didn’t read it until 1960, when my angsty self was good and ready. I reread it, maybe 30 years ago, and liked it still, but I have no memory of anything other than that infectious voice, no sense of what actually happened to Mr. Holden Caulfield.
Or wait, wasn’t there something about popping a pimple in a mirror?
Also, in 1960, I read To Kill a Mockingbird. I remember thinking it was great at fifteen years old, but when I reread it a few years later - forgive me, forgive me - I deeply disliked its authorial, lesson-giving, sentimentality.
But, again, were you to ask what made me feel that way, I’d have to shrug and say, “Don’t remember,” for the only concrete images I have are of Gregory Peck pontificating and Robert Duvall standing close up against a tree… or was it a door? And those images came from the movie!
Despite what I said about the voice in Catcher in the Rye, it wasn’t until I was seventeen and checking out Henry Gregor Felsen’s teen novel, Hot Rod, from my high school library for the umpteenth time, that I also checked out, on pure impulse, a collection of Dylan Thomas’s poetry, with his idyllic childhood/growing old poem, “Fern Hill.” Why I checked it out remains a mystery - I had no interest in poetry - but reading that one poem changed my life.
Here is the verse, and the line within it that changed me:
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days,
that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
I think it’s a marvelous poem even now, yet in all the years I taught at the university, I don’t remember any of the professional poetry scions mentioning Dylan Thomas or teaching “Fern Hill.” Could it be they thought it too easy or too sentimental, that were I to ask them about it they would ruin my childhood reverie, like I just tried to do with Mockingbird, for others?
The line in the poem that changed me was “… that time would take me up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,” for I was suddenly able, for the first time, to imagine my own hand’s shadow showing me the passage of my life, and also to know that if I tried hard enough and stayed at it long enough, I might someday write something even half as beautiful.
And so I have kept on trying.
The poem also moved me to read The Life and Times of Dylan Thomas, by Constantine Fitzgibbon some months later.
Alas, I don’t remember it at all.
Ah, Julie, The droghte of Chaucer hath perced to your roote, making that Prologue unforgettable. Maybe that's why the evil English prof required you to memorize it. Not because it would be useful--heaven forfend useful knowledge!--but so it would be memorable.
And I thought I was the only one afflicted! How reassuring to find I am in such good company!