14 Books and Brent
When I began to read, I fell in love with such a consuming passion that I became a threat to everyone who knew me. Whatever I was reading, I became: I was the character, Hamlet or Lear; I was the author, Shelley or Stendhal. When I was seized by sudden quirks, jerks, and strange gestures, it was not because I was a nervous child—I was being some character.
One morning when I awoke, I looked into the mirror and discovered that one part of my head seemed bigger than the other. I ate my breakfast in silence with my three sisters gathered about the table watching me. When I suddenly looked up, I thought I saw them exchanging meaningful glances.
“Do you see something strange about me?” I asked.
They shook their heads and suppressed a giggle.
My mother, washing dishes at the sink, stopped and looked at me, too.
“Do you see anything unusual about me?” I said. She didn’t.
I got up and, standing in the middle of the floor, bent my head to one side and said, “Look, my head is swelling!”
My sisters laughed wildly, while my mother cried, “What are we going to do with this silly boy? What are we going to do?”
My knowledge, they assured me, was coming out of my head. And I told them this was not funny at all.
When I went back to the mirror, I liked my face much better. The forehead was showing some wrinkles. Lines were appearing at the mouth. The eyes seemed more in keeping with what might be expected of a thinker or poet. Before I had begun to read, this face certainly had appeared more ordinary—just smooth and clean and nothing else. Now that I had begun to peer a little into the minds of great men, something was entering my soul that reflected itself in my face. I was sure of it. Naturally, the idea that filling my head with knowledge might cause it to burst was nonsense, but I certainly was cramming in an oddly miscellaneous assortment of facts, dates, events, phrases, words, snatches of everything. I never read systematically. I read everything, and I think still that it is simply stupid to tell boys and girls to read certain books between the ages of nine and twelve, other books between sixteen and twenty, etc. I got lost in the paradise of books and it wrecked me forever—destroyed any possibility of my becoming a “successful” man, saved me from becoming a killer in the jungle of material ambition.
I think prescribed reading is the enemy of learning, and today it is probably the end of culture. As a boy, I devoured all the Sax Rohmer mysteries, the Rover Boys, the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Men of Mars and the Tarzan series; I read Penrod and Sam, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer—all with equal enthusiasm. This is where it begins. Taste can come later.
There is a certain point, once enthusiasm is engendered, when a good teacher can open doors for you. I had such a teacher, and later a friend, in Jesse Feldman. His enthusiasm supported my own, and at the same time he held the key to the wealth of possibilities that literature offers. He was a scholar, but his real scholarship resided in his love for people. He believed ideas could change human hearts. He inspired me by making me wonder about everything. He showed me that the worst sin of which I might be capable would be to become indifferent to the human spirit.
It was Jesse who introduced me to Jack London’s Martin Eden. I was seventeen. Then Les Miserables, Nana, and Anna Karenina set me off like a forest fire. There was no stopping me. I had to read everything. I plunged into Hardy’s Return of the Native with pencil in hand, underlining and writing my thoughts in the margins. I loved to argue with the author and the need to make notations made it terribly important to own my own books, no matter how long it took to save the money to buy them. It was fun to look at books, to touch them, to think of the next purchase.
I read Dickens until I couldn’t see straight. I read Goethe’s Faust and thought secretly that the author was a pompous ass. Years later I again read it and became fascinated with the entire Faustian legend. This is the way it should be. You don’t have to get it the first time.
I can remember when I first read The Brothers Karamazov and how it unnerved me. The book created such fierce anxieties within me that I couldn’t finish it. I had to wait a number of years before I could tolerate the strain it put on my nervous system.
Later Jesse gave me my first introduction to Thomas Mann and Jules Romain. I read Henry Hudson’s Green Mansions and to this day I can’t forget Abel and Rima. I read Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and loved his social criticism, his amazing bitterness, his terrible writing. I memorized the Ode to the West Wind and began my Shelley imitations, adopting, among other things, his habit of reading standing up. I read Galsworthy and wrote long précis of his wonderful short stories. My reading was for myself, my notebooks were for myself, my thoughts and ideas were for myself.
Although I was seldom without a book at any time, the very best time to read was on Saturday mornings. Normally my mother baked on Friday and she had a genius for failing to remember that something was in the oven. So if I was lucky, there would be plenty of cookies or cake or strudel left, slightly burned, that nobody else would touch. I loved it. Then, too, the house was strangely still on Saturday mornings. No one was home and I could turn up the volume on the phonograph as loudly as I wished and sit and listen and read and eat cake. It was marvelous.
Sometimes a single vivid line was the reward for days of desultory reading. I remember first coming across Carlyle’s remark in Heroes and Hero-Worship, “The Age of Miracles is forever here!” and how I plucked that phrase and kept repeating it even in my darkest moments. Again, after finishing Moby Dick, a book I took straight to my heart, I began a research job on Melville and encountered a letter written to Hawthorne that marked me for life. I was reading at the public library, and as closing time approached I began to race madly through the books I had gathered, trying to find something that would tell me what Melville was like. Suddenly my heart skipped a beat and I knew that I had found it (child of innocence that I was, bent on researching the whole world, ancient and modern): “My development,” Melville wrote, “has been all within a few years past. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself.”
Closing time was called and I went out into the solitary night, walking thoughtfully home, thinking, thinking, thinking. I didn’t want money or success or recognition. I didn’t want a single thing from anybody. I wanted only to be alone, to read, to think... to unfold.
One year I’d be interested in literature, the next in philosophy, the following in physics or chemistry or even neurology. Everything interested me. Who cared what I ate or how I dressed? I cared only for the words between covers. I was safe so long as I didn’t fall in love... this I knew from Schopenhauer. Spengler fascinated me. The Decline of the West was so brilliantly written, it had a scheme... and it was such a fraud. But I was learning how to read and how to think through what I was reading. I disliked Nietzsche and only later came to see him as one who was saying in very bald terms: Don’t sell out! Stop wasting your time predicting the future of mankind, but become an active part in creating it.
I had long known the Old Testament, but now I became attracted to the New Testament and the figure of Jesus. I memorized the Sermon on the Mount and spent sleepless nights arguing with myself. I went wild over Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic had a tremendous effect on me and sent me back to reading Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. I was beginning to suspect that I was too deeply influenced by European literature and not enough by American. Why was I drawn to Kafka and Mann and Gide and Proust and Anatole France and Huysmans and not to Howells and Emerson and Whitman and Hawthorne and Melville and Thoreau? I set myself a course of study and luckily started with Hawthorne. Had I started with Howells, I have a strong notion I’d have given up. But I liked Hawthorne, and this led to Melville and here I found my God and my America. His involuted writing was perfect for me and this in turn led to Henry James. When James made the remark about the gorgeous wastefulness of living, I knew he was right. In the eyes of the world I lived in, I was wasting my time. Many of my friends by now had good jobs selling insurance or automobiles or were on the way to becoming successful junior executives. And I? Well, I was reading! I always worked, to be sure, but at odd jobs only. If I went to school during the day, then I worked at night. If I attended night school, then I worked during the day. But what the job was made no difference to me.
Sometimes I did pause to ask myself where this was going to lead. There was the day I was being interviewed for a job at Woolworth’s and the man asked, “What do you know?” I started to tell him what I knew about the various schools of literature and philosophy and he stopped me cold, saying, “You know too much about the wrong things. We can’t hire you.” This knocked me out for days.
What did I want to be? Did I have to become something? Did I have to have some land of social approval? For a time I went around in a state of near collapse. First I decided upon medicine as a good practical profession with a lot of good basic knowledge behind it. Then I felt that perhaps I should be a lawyer. I was generally regarded as a good speaker and I had an idea that criminal lawyers were exciting people. Then I thought possibly I ought to be an architect. But nothing fitted. Finally I decided. I was going to teach.
To my shocked amazement, I discovered that all my years spent at college, all my study, the range of knowledge I had sought to embrace, meant absolutely nothing in the eyes of the master educators. I was deficient in what were called Education Courses. There was nothing for me to do but to take them.
In all my life in the classroom, I had never encountered such a waste of time, such stupidity, such a moral outrage! The courses were insipid and the teachers themselves knew nothing whatever. It was either insane nonsense or an organized racket from top to bottom: courses on the theory of education (I had already gotten my theory from Samuel Butler and George Meredith, neither of whom the educators seemed to have heard of), courses on educational psychology (something completely occult), courses on techniques, courses on I.Q. measurements, courses on the art of choosing a textbook. By the time I had finished my required work in education, I could not have been less inspired to be a teacher. I had heard a great deal about the smug middle class and their valueless world, and have since encountered them and it, but I shall be happy to exhibit any group of typical specimens of this order as examples of vibrant living and exciting intellect compared to a meeting of “educators.” No wonder books are dying!
In those depression days, it seemed to me that the education world was something invented to keep some walking zombies busy. But it turned out that the educators got in on the ground floor of a good thing. With the present hue and cry for education and more education, their job is cut out for them: tests and more tests, techniques and more techniques.
We don’t need more educators; we need more teachers. And especially teachers of literature. Not teachers who are smug in their learning and want to impose value judgments on others. But teachers who are alive with love and enthusiasm, whose own experience with art and letters has made them a little less ashamed to be members of the human race. Not teachers armed with a book list, but with a personal addiction to reading as a never ending source of generous delight. Not experts in testing and guidance, but people with enough faith in youth to inspire them to find their own way and make their own choices, to taste the exhilaration of stumbling and bumbling on their own amid all the wonders and ups and downs of the human quest for understanding. We need teachers who will stimulate, provoke, and challenge, instead of providing crutches, short cuts, and easy directions. There is just no point in building all those new school buildings unless we have more Jesse Feldmans to fill them with the realization that the aim of education is to help man become human.
I seldom go back to where the Seven Stairs used to be. It is hard to visualize it as it once was. The old brownstone has a new face, the front bricked up and the door bolted. Business is good on the Avenue, but many of the people who come in seem tight-lipped and hurried. The Seven Stairs is not there either.
But when we start looking up old places, it means we have forgotten them as symbols. The Seven Stairs was an adventure of the heart... a personal search for the Holy Grail, a quest that still continues. Each step up the stairs has brought crisis and someone to help me overcome that crisis and move on to the next. And seven being an enchanted number and stairs moving inward and outward as well as upward and downward, the ascent is unending, and every step a new beginning, where we must stand our ground and pay the price for it.
There is a Seven Stairs lurking unbeknown down every street as there was for me on a summer day, getting off the bus at the wrong corner on my way to meet my brother-in-law for lunch and walking along Rush Street, fascinated with the strangeness of the neighborhood. I was reading all the signs, for no purpose at all, but one that said, “Studio for Rent,” stuck with me. I turned back to look at it again before rounding the corner to go to my appointment.
I met Mel in the kind of restaurant that is exactly the same everywhere, the same I had been in a few weeks earlier while awaiting my army discharge in San Francisco, the same fixtures, the same food, the same waitresses, the same voices. But as I leaned across the table and began talking, I experienced a sudden excitement and an idea generated which I announced with as much assurance as though it had been the outcome of months of deliberation. Fifteen years later, I can still see Mel’s jaw drop and his momentary difficulty in breathing when I told him I had decided I wanted to go into business.
“What kind of business?” he said, finally.
I told him that what Chicago needed was a real bookstore. It seemed to me that I had always had visions of my name across a storefront: Stuart Brent, Bookseller. I made him go with me to look at the “for rent” sign, then together we went to see the landlord—my terrible, mincing, Machiavellian, fat little landlord.
We borrowed the keys and went back to see the studio. Mel didn’t really want to go along, but somehow I had to have him with me. If the quarters turned out to be disappointing, I didn’t think I could stand it. But when we opened the door, the hot, dirty room was magic. As I looked up at the sixteen foot ceiling, I imagined pretty Victorian society girls dressing here for the ball. I wasn’t seeing the room. I had just stepped through the door from Berkeley Square.
“Isn’t this rather small for what you have in mind?” Mel said.
“No, no,” I said, “it’s just fine. Everything is just fine!”
The footnotes were moved to the end of the e-text.
The numbers below reference the page and line in the original book.
| reference | correction | original text |
|---|---|---|
| 7.4 | occupied | occuped by a painter |
| 34.32 | bookstore | moving her Gold Coast book store |
| 37.31 | sometimes | sometimes tight and drawn, some times |
| 41.20 | impression | and the only inpression you can |
| 44.10 | bestseller | who wrote a best-seller thirty |
| 65.19 | similar | who hold similiar views on |
| 66.19 | became | if one of the “faithful” become |
| 68.2 | conflict | my inner conflct remained |
| 88.29 | bestsellers | under the pop numbers and best-sellers |
| 88.31 | Malcolm | Malcom Cowley, the distinguished critic |
| 95.26 | Terkel | Turkel’s famous “Studs’ Place” |
| 100.13 | stick-up | ‘This is a stickup!’ |
| 106.13 | and | ad civic responsibility |
| 106.17 | café | at a small cafe |
| 111.39 | interrupted | was often interupted |
| 121.6 | sing-song | low, almost singsong voices |
| 131.2 | We | we lived at 1639 South |
| 150.9 | interrupted | interupted whatever I was |
| 101.26 | hardcover | copies of the hard-cover book |
| 174.19 | say was | really meant to say that |
| 175.1 | old-time | old time actor in it |
| 186.4 | success | as the sucess of the book |
Notes
1. Conroy’s works consist of two novels, The Disinherited and A World to Win, several children’s books, and They Seek the City, a history of Negro migration written in collaboration with Arna Bontemps with the assistance of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
2. An informative pamphlet on literary agents can be obtained from the Society of Authors Representatives, 522 Fifth Avenue, New York 36.