You pick up a novel. If it’s any good, before long it has you trying to get into its characters’ heads. What are they feeling? What will they do? Can they be trusted? But, behind such thoughts, broader and subtler questions arise: What is the author aiming at? What was he or she feeling when these paragraphs were written? As for the book’s perceived inconsistencies: Was the author being inattentive, or were you? Literary reading soon grades into complex efforts at mind reading.
But more complicated still—and, in some ways, more rewarding still—is the attempt to read a book through someone else’s eyes. Your thoughts triangulate. You wonder, What did person X feel when he read Y’s book?
It needn’t be a novel. Maybe it’s a collection of stories, poems, even essays. Somebody you’re interested in—your person X—found this book entrancing. It’s no longer sufficient to know what the author was thinking. Now you want to know what person X thought the author was thinking.
Perhaps you read a book that you don’t much care for. Then you discover that some writer you adore, and with whom you feel psychologically aligned, loved it. So you open it once more, this time attempting to apprehend it through his eyes. “What did he see in it?” you ask yourself. The question provides a rhythmic march through its pages: What did he see? What did he see?
Some books are read chiefly in a triangular fashion. I was surprised recently to discover that Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, first published in 1567, remains in print. Likely, this is not purely a result of its literary merits—Golding’s translation was the one from which Shakespeare absorbed the transformations of the Roman poet who was, arguably, his greatest influence. Needless to say, Shakespearean scholars have sifted through Golding’s soil with a fine-toothed rake, seeking to turn up a familiar glint—a borrowed phrase, a recycled simile.
Helen Vendler has a fine passage in “The Odes of John Keats” about a singular edition of Milton: Keats’s own underlined copy. She is contemplating a volume that embodies two miracles. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is, of course, miraculous in itself. (Had Milton not done the impossible in creating it, modern critics would have had a field day concocting arguments about why an authentic epic—a worthy shelf-mate to the Odyssey or the Aeneid—was impracticable in English.) But likewise miraculous is the vision of young Keats—not much older than a modern undergraduate—assimilating Milton as his great odes gestated within him. And the bridge between these two miracles lies before Vendler: “To read ‘Paradise Lost’ through Keats’s eyes is to see it in part as a poem of Shakespearean characterization, but chiefly as a poem of luxuriant and opulent description, full of growth, change, ripening, delectable sweets, and golden profusion.”
Though I spend too much of my income on books (I can’t bear to read anything lengthy without physically marking it up, which renders libraries of little use as sources of extended reading matter), there are few items in my ragbag collection that have any serious retail value. But I do own a pair of unusual books that I treasure, and which may actually have some monetary worth. They are collections of poems, written by Howard Moss, poetry editor of The New Yorker from 1948 to 1987. They originally belonged to the poet May Swenson (1913-1989), who has been a favorite of mine since I stumbled on her “Half Sun, Half Sleep” in high school. Swenson was also a great favorite of Moss’s, who over the years published more than fifty poems in the magazine, and, to judge from my pair of books, Moss was a favorite of Swenson’s. The books are “The Toy Fair” (1954) and “A Swimmer in the Air” (1957). Each is heavily underlined, in both pencil and ink—an emphatic, and ugly, green ink, seemingly more suited for some censorious schoolmistress than for Swenson, a nicely calibrated nature poet.
Still, I take great pleasure in her scarring underscorings and in her occasional approving check mark or cryptic annotation. There’s pleasure, too, in contending with her, or amplifying her. Under Moss’s “The Hermit,” Swenson has written one word, “Baudelaire,” and I’ve neatly printed another, “Auden.” (Could the poem’s opening lines be more Audenesque? “Always there is someone who has turned away / From the important mornings and the evening’s eye …”) Here and there one meets a puzzling abbreviation: “MM.” My first thought was that Swenson was noting the influence of Marianne Moore, but the indicated words or phrases hardly sounded Mooreish, much as I tried to read them that way. The solution to the riddle came on a page where Swenson spelled out the abbreviation: multiple meanings. In this passage from “Widow’s Walk,” for instance, the phrase “lost
in action” is approvingly marked “MM:”
Sometimes her abbreviation served as a helpful goad, urging me to glimpse ambiguity and bifurcation where I’d initially seen only straightforwardness.
The Moss whom Swenson admired differs from my Moss. She likes passages where the restrained rhetoric abruptly turns baldly romantic—”Love is the only place we live”; “I saw the heart of summer start”—which often strike me as breezy and a little glib, and she leaves unmarked moments I find poignant and quietly true. Still, I view the books as a lovely and serendipitous summons—an unlikely invitation to read anew, to read afresh. How could Swenson have imagined, half a century ago, what would happen to this pair of books? How would she ever have supposed that her dialogue with Moss would become a trialogue, in which another reader would materialize to question and puzzle over her annotations?
I recently made my way through another pair of books, again trying to read through someone else’s eyes. These were “Little Miss Oddity,” by Amy E. Blanchard, published in 1902, and Martha Finley’s “Elsie Dinsmore,” published in 1867. Finley’s book was the initial volume in a wildly popular series that would eventually number twenty-eight volumes—the “Elsie books” that are a cornerstone of American children’s literature. Many are still in print, thanks in part to “faith publishers.” (Elsie was one pious girl—as well as being, surely, the most lachrymose heroine in our literature.) But Blanchard’s heroine, Cassy Law, tauntingly nicknamed Miss Oddity for her daydreamy ways—”Her world of fancy was a very different one from that in which most people live”—seems wholly lost to time.
My mother, who had lifelong literary ambitions, and who published a juvenile novel, “The Dinosaur Dilemma,” in 1964, often told me that she had read these books over and over as a child. When she was about eight, living in Depression-era Detroit, her construction-worker father lost his job and, eventually, his home, and the family moved back to the rural Tennessee hills where he’d grown up. Theirs was a dark farm without central heating, indoor toilets, running water, or electricity. “Little Miss Oddity” and “Elsie Dinsmore” would have been pondered by kerosene light.
After a year or so, the family regrouped and returned to Detroit. That Tennessee sojourn, two decades before my birth, has always tugged at my imagination. In her characteristically sunny way, my mother always spoke of it as an unforeseen blessing. She felt as though she’d voyaged back to the nineteenth century, she told me, and she attributed some of her abiding taste for Victorian literature to this unexpected time travel. But, the more I’ve thought about it, the more convinced I’ve become that it must also have been a haunted and terrifying time.
My grandfather (about whom I’ve previously written) was a timid and headstrong autocrat who must have felt that any journey back into the nineteenth century represented a humiliating personal defeat. Years before, he had, with uncharacteristic boldness, made his way from the Southern hills to a great Northern metropolis, only to discover with time that he couldn’t support himself and his family there. Surely, the Tennessee farmhouse must have felt painfully confined, and smelled of shame.
Insert into this dark atmosphere an eight-year-old girl, who reads and rereads “Little Miss Oddity,” a novel whose heroine has also suffered a lowering in the world. Her father, a railroad worker, was killed in an accident, and the hapless family was bilked of any fair compensation. They live in a tenement whose back yard is a scatter of broken barrels, empty cans, shattered crockery, and iron scraps, and they dine on mush and molasses. Our delicate Cassy is surrounded by brutes and bullies, though she somehow maintains a buoyant outlook. And her optimism turns out to be justified—it transpires that the kindly, knowledgeable gardener at a fancy estate in town is actually her long-lost uncle, who eventually becomes head of the family and leads them all to a beautiful house in the country.
Elsie, too, has a missing father. Like Cassy, and like the Tennessee reader I’m envisioning, she’s eight years old. Her mother is dead and her father, whom she has never seen, is away in Europe, on mysterious business. While awaiting his return, she is endlessly persecuted by her governess and her unloving relatives.
Father finally shows up, and he is handsome and youthful but stern and remote. He exhibits the stiff and sudden caprices of the born despot. At the climax of the novel, one Sunday afternoon, he commands Elsie to sing and play the piano for a party of his guests. Elsie politely refuses, since she will not profane the Sabbath. She is then ordered to remain at her piano bench until she changes her mind. But, naturally, Elsie will not bend, and she sits immobile until—overheated, underfed—she eventually faints, cracking her head on some unspecified piece of furniture and nearly dying as a result.
All preposterously melodramatic—and I remember my mother, as she evoked this scene she’d first read some seventy years earlier, being overcome with gentle laughter that was nonetheless so irrepressible it brought tears to her eyes. The climax was yet to come. For, while little Elsie lies crumpled on the floor, in her death-like swoon, her father is sharply, unforgettably reprimanded by one of his guests: “Dinsmore, you’re a brute!”
True enough. But this is a painful reality that the ever-respectful Elsie cannot express. Still, if I judged aright my mother’s tearful mirth as she repeated the line—“You’re a brute!”—she was harkening back to a vindication that echoed through the decades, born in an eight-year-old Tennessee bookworm’s hunger to see familial injustices acknowledged and amended.
Of course, it’s a highly conjectural, iffy business—trying to read through someone else’s eyes. Or even, I’d add, through one’s own. Given enough years between visits, rereading a book can feel startlingly alien. Recently, I opened a collection by a contemporary poet who had meant much to me in college. Here was a stanza beside which I’d written in the margin, in a penmanship larger and somehow more hopeful-looking than my present hand, “Brilliant!” I stared and stared at the passage, seeking to reawaken a distant excitement: What did he see in it? But I couldn’t. The moment would have been less unnerving, I suppose, if I’d scrutinized the passage and determined, with some comforting recourse to the superior discernment of age, that it was, in fact, clumsy or orotund or emptily romantic. But it seemed merely bland. I longed to get back into the head of that fervent undergraduate, to read sympathetically through his eyes. I was naturally quite interested in him, and approached him with goodwill, but for all his fervency he remained stubbornly aloof. In the end, he was a stranger.
Illustration by Keith Negley.
