At the age of 26, when I returned to
New York after an inglorious stab at graduate work in medieval history
on the frozen steppes of Chicago, I had a horrifying realization: I was
illiterate. At least, I was as close to illiterate as a person with
over 20 years of education could possibly be. In my stunted career as a
scholar, I’d read promissory notes, papal bulls and guidelines for
Inquisitorial interrogation. Dante, too. Boccaccio. . . . But after
1400? Nihil. I felt very, very stupid among my new sophisticated New
York friends. I seemed very, very stupid, too. Actually, let’s face it,
I was stupid, and it was deeply mortifying, as so many things were in
those days. But I have since come to realize that my abject ignorance
was really a gift: to be a literarily inclined illiterate at age 26 is
one of the most glorious fates that can befall mortal girl.
Of course I could not know that then, and in a panicky attempt to
rectify the situation, I slunk in shame to the Strand and stood,
paralyzed by the yawning vastness of the store and of my ignorance. I
have a very distinct memory of coming home, sitting on the mattress on
the floor of my tiny apartment, and staring hopelessly at the forlorn
little collection of books on my window sill. A fat Latin dictionary. A
fat dictionary of Christian saints. To which I added the skinny gray
novel I had just bought. Out of every book in the Strand’s famous miles
of volumes, I had desperately, randomly, impulsively grabbed a beat-up
Modern Library edition of Anatole France’s “Penguin Island.” Oy.
Anatole France? Not Balzac. Not Flaubert. I’d never heard of them. I
didn’t know them from Maupassant. Or Anatole France, for that matter.
As for English or American literature, I had never read Austen or Eliot
or Dickens or Melville or James or Wharton or. . . .
I blame Dostoyevsky.
When I was a child, I was always allowed to stay home from school
with even the flimsiest of maladies (had I known the word
“neurasthenic” I would have employed it weekly) if I promised to sit
quietly and read. I read “The Cricket in Times Square” and Beverly
Cleary and books about horses and young Indian braves and biographies
of George Washington Carver from the school library. At home, there
were books by Albert Payson Terhune about collies (we had a collie) and
my father’s Hardy Boys collection and my mother’s Louisa May Alcott novels. I read a lot. I was one of those children they used to call “readers.”
So what happened between “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” and “Penguin Island”?
“The Idiot” happened. In seventh grade I saw a copy of Dostoyevsky’s
novel in the library and, thinking it would be a funny book about a
stupid person, began to read it. I read and I read and I read. I
developed a crush on Prince Myshkin. He seemed so sweet. I did not know
what epilepsy was, and I was too lazy to look it up in the dictionary.
I did not know what naïve meant and was, again, too lazy to look it up.
But I kept going, in my own naïveté, fascinated and absorbing perhaps a
tenth of what was there. A tenth of Dostoyevsky is plenty for a seventh
grader, I think. The problem is that now, when as an adult I might
understand the other 90 percent, I have no desire ever to read
Dostoyevsky again. Ever. Dostoyevsky ruined Dostoyevsky for me.
Which is why I am grateful to him. My Dostoyevsky phase, in which I
lugged one heavy volume or another everywhere (there are photos of me
stubbornly pretending to read on a sailing trip, on a ski trip, on the
beach), lasted through most of high school. If you spend all your time
reading books that you only pretend to understand, year after year,
there isn’t much room for anything else. In school, we were
inexplicably forced to read “The Ox-Bow Incident,” I recall, and there
was some Shakespeare. But it was the ’60s, and for one entire year I
managed to get away with reading “The Forsyte Saga” (the television
series, which was fantastic, was being shown on public television) as
an independent study. I also wrote a paper on existential despair in
“Crime and Punishment,” “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (assigned to the
class) and (my one foray into contemporary American literature)
“Portnoy’s Complaint.” Look, I didn’t say I wasn’t pretentious; I said
I wasn’t well read.
A few oddities cropped up on my high school reading list, some
unfortunate (like Robbe-Grillet: I had never read Emerson, but I’d read
Robbe-Grillet?); and others like gifts from the gods (a heavy dose of
Colette, thanks to my mother). But these were tiny islets upon the
great, heaving ocean of my ignorance.
So, that day, the day of my illiteracy epiphany, I came home from
the Strand and sat shamefaced on my mattress staring unhappily at
“Penguin Island,” which I had started and put down in confused boredom
several times. Then I remembered a bag in the closet with stuff my
ex-boyfriend had left behind, including a paperback copy of “Our Mutual
Friend,” his favorite novel. A few days later I emerged from that
exquisite book and cursed myself for wasting so much of my life doing
things other than what God in all his wisdom clearly meant for me to do
for the rest of my life: read Dickens.
This was a defining moment; it was my discovery of the English
language. It could never have happened if I had not been blessedly
illiterate.
Imagine the satisfaction, the exhilaration when, not long after, I
stood as a newlywed surveying my husband’s bookcase. It reached from
one wall to the other, from floor to ceiling. It had been culled and
collected by a person of knowledge and taste, a product of Columbia’s
core curriculum, and . . . it was arranged alphabetically. I started at the upper left hand corner (Jane Austen!
J. R. Ackerley!) and worked my way to the lower right (Waugh!
Wodehouse! Woolf!). I got to read “Huckleberry Finn” for the first time
when I was 35 years old. And when I eventually moved on to a different
partner, there waiting for me was a new bookcase full of other books. I
read “My Antonia” for the first time last month. That is a kind of grace.
If Dostoyevsky had not overwhelmed me at such a young age, and I had
read “Huckleberry Finn” at 14, would I have reread it at 35? Maybe, but
it wouldn’t have been the same transcendent experience as discovering
it as an adult. And maybe I never would have gone back to it: it took
me decades to recover from “The Old Man and the Sea” and try Hemingway
again. On the other hand, I did just recently reread “Buff: A Collie,”
and was stunned at how good the prose is. Italo Calvino,
in “Why Read the Classics?,” said that a work read at a young age and
forgotten “leaves its seed in us.” If that’s true, and I think it must
be, then I thank you, Albert Payson Terhune, and I suppose I must thank
you once again, too . . . Dostoyevsky. And, oh all right — even though
just the sight of your name reminds me of a time when I thought it was
O.K. to walk around Manhattan barefoot, I guess the day has come to
give “The Idiot” another shot.
Cathleen Schine’s most recent novel is “The Three Weissmanns of Westport.”
