Diary: (1) Donna Seaman, “River of Books”

Like many book-obsessed kids, I was often told not to read

Conservation tools, Newberry Library

Like many book-obsessed kids, I was often told not to read. My habit verged on the antisocial, the hermetic, the transgressive. I was the kind of girl who was told to put down the book and go out and play or join the family or pay attention in class. Reading is protest; it is subversive, a withdrawal, a refusal. Reading is deeply pleasurable. There is a voluptuousness to giving oneself over to language and all that it conjures, an erotic charge in communing with the thoughts and feelings of another. The reader is physically at ease and mentally attentive, gliding away from the actual, the practical, the tedious, the aggravating and into an alternative realm imagined or reported or created in a heady combination of the two.

The reader enters a world incandescent with ideas and feelings translated into language as alive as flowers, birds, vines, dolphins. Words are infused with energy like sun dapples on water, embers, rain, surf, wind, bioluminescence. Words are faceted and bright like crystals, shimmering like aurora borealis. As we study the page, we hear the lines, feel the vibration, see the patterns of vowels and consonants and all the images those little symbols magically evoke. Reading is a form of inebriation, but not of abandon. It’s an active state of heightened receptivity. It’s transporting. It bestows a sense of accomplishment.

We are also natural-born narrators, continually telling ourselves our stories in our minds, editing and revising as we go. Human nature and life are shaped by this inner commentary. By a continual pulse of language. For those of us fortunate enough to be literate and free to read what we want when we want to, reading is second nature.

One summer I was a passenger in an old rowboat, enjoying a leisurely turn on a small Wisconsin lake. I found myself looking intently at each pier and house along the shore, and a strangely powerful sensation swept through me: I was reading my surroundings. I was focusing on each detail as though it was a word, each construction a story. The habits of attentiveness and interpretation engendered by reading tunes up one’s perception in every circumstance.

What to say to Jamaica Kincaid, whose books I find hypnotic and lacerating? I told her, “I feel as though I read your books with my whole body.” Kincaid replied, “I rather like you saying that. I read that way as a writer. I find reading very active. When I was little, we’d recommend books to each other and the highest thing we could say was this book is sweet … we meant it as if it were something you could taste and feel and wear.” I was even more struck when Kincaid continued, “and I like that writing is work. I think that I like all the things people say are pleasures to be work because I like working. I like reading because it’s working, and I have actually turned reading into a job.” Kincaid’s comment reverberates. I feel the very same way about my bookish work, my bookish life.

The Library Club at Krieger Elementary School in Poughkeepsie, New York, a handsome brick building bracketed by generous playgrounds, confirmed my childhood preference for quiet spaces alive with the clamor of books, for physical order and inner wildness. All those upright spines contained storms and conflicts, love and pain. The library was an arsenal and a pantry, a pharmacy and a temple. I loved that sunny room of honey-varnished wooden shelves, big solid tables, and high-backed chairs. I loved shelving books and neatening slippery stacks of magazines stacked in reverse chronological order. I liked the rubber date stamp which we struggled to advance with a straightened paper clip so as not to get ink all over our hands and put books at risk. I purred over the lined cards in the cardboard pockets pasted inside the books. The flapping due-date sheets. The little wooden boxes in which we filed the cards. I admired the librarian, Mrs. Madison, who was kind and demanding, dishy and proper. I read my way through that little school library, industriously consuming a series of kids’ biographies and armloads of fiction. Library posters featured a cartoonish bookworm, and it was considered cute to use that term to describe a reader like me, but I loathed the name. Insecure as I was, at least I wasn’t a spineless, wriggling creature, nor a creepy insect that destroyed books.

Exhilarated in the library, I was bored and impatient in the classroom, always doodling, watching the slow second hand on the big wall clock, looking out the window, and daydreaming. I disliked being a child, annoyed at the condescension with which adults addressed us and keenly aware that most of what we were told was lies or mere shards of the truth dispensed to keep us in line. I bristled. I seethed. I read National Geographic and Life magazine cover to cover as an antidote to the dopey Weekly Reader.

Exasperated by my indignation and gloominess, my chic, socially conscious, activist and artist mother called me an “old woman” when I was all of seven years old. At least in the library, surrounded by books and magazines, free to browse the shelves and think about what to read next, I felt hopeful and inspired instead of belittled and oppressed. I still have my Library Club pin.

Years later, I landed a trainee position as a finisher in the pioneering conservation department and laboratory at the Newberry Library in Chicago, a research library founded by the wealthy book-loving railroad man William Loomis Newberry. The imposing granite Spanish Romanesque building, constructed out of stone fittingly sourced from its founder’s birth state, Connecticut, and opened in 1893, commands an entire block on Chicago’s Near North Side, standing across the street from the city’s oldest park, Washington Square. A plaque attests to its memorable nickname: “Washington Square Park 1842 / Also known as BUGHOUSE SQUARE / Chicago’s Premier Free Speech Forum.”

The surrounding neighborhood fluctuated between wealth and poverty. During a dramatic financial downturn the adjacent mansions were turned into flophouses, slang for rooming houses, sheltering the working poor and the destitute. Its nickname marked the park as an arena for the politically agitated and oratorically inclined, the soapboxers and the rabble-rousers. When he was young, Studs Terkel, Chicago’s legendary oral historian, writer of conscience, radio host, and raconteur-on-a-mission, lived within walking distance of the park. In his autobiography, Touch and Go, Terkel recounts life at the Wells-Grand Hotel, a residence for men run by his father in the 1920s, where on “the glory nights at the lobby [there] were debates between the retired Wobblies and the good ‘company men.’” Studs also relished the open-air debates at Bughouse Square, “In its heyday, during the 1920s and 1930s, there were five soapboxes on which the most celebrated speakers were allowed twenty minutes and then afforded the privilege of passing the hat.” After profiling some of the more colorful soapboxers Terkel writes, “On the north side of Bughouse Square stands the Newberry Library. Miss Polly Fletcher was there at the library, third-floor reading room. She was of Dorothy Parker mien, and, seeing a student hanging around Bughouse Square, suggested some book or other for me to fool around with. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle of course. Ida Tarbell on the Rockefellers. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Miss Fletcher definitely played a role in my political growing up.”

Read Part Two of this post here!

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After working her way through a graduate degree as a librarian by day, Donna Seaman got a job as an editorial assistant at Booklist, the book review magazine of the American Library Association in Chicago, and soon began writing freelance book reviews for them. She is today the editor in chief and adult books editor of Booklist. This post is drawn from her memoir, River of Books, to be published next month by Ode Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press.

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