When Charles Darwin was a boy, he collected beetles. He was so passionate about this that once, when both hands were full of beetles and he spotted one he had never seen before, he used his fingers to pick it up and put it is his mouth for the journey home. As a boy, I was as passionate about reading as Darwin was about collecting beetles.
Neither of my parents read, nor do I recall seeing any of my grandparents, aunts or uncles reading a book. But during the Depression books helped me escape the talk of my father's latest cut in salary and the danger of losing our house; the tension of having to sleep squeezed into one room with five brothers in two double beds; the repetitive boredom of a Catholic school designed more to maintain discipline than to stimulate or satisfy curiosity.
I easily learned to read in first grade. I still remember the thrill of sounding out the letters on a billboard on the way home, L-E-G, and saying aloud, leg. By third grade I was called upon frequently to read aloud for the class. When I finished, Sister Theophila would say: "Boys and girls, Robert is reading the way we should all read."
I grew up in the 1930s in Columbus, Ohio. The fireplace in our living room was flanked by built-in bookcases with glass doors. The only books inside were 29 volumes of The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910 edition. The pages of these books were as thin as onion skins, the tiny type hard to read. No matter. No one ever used them. The fly leaves of these volumes were covered with the crude drawings of six boys. These shelves also contained a sewing basket, a prayer book and a tiny red vase.
When my grandmother lived with us for a year, I devoured each month a magazine she subscribed to called The Victorian, published by a Catholic orphanage in Lackawanna, New York. The page of jokes was my favorite. My classmates loved the ones I whispered to them during class.
The short stories were also hits with me. In one standard plot, a burglar rifles through someone's dresser drawer and finds a set of rosary beads. These remind him of his dead mother and of his long absence from his boyhood church. Overcome with emotion, he leaves the house without taking anything and goes to a nearby Catholic church where he confesses his sins. He decides to give up his life of crime forever. It would not be long before I recognized the flaws in these stories, but at the time I was moved by the piety and by seeing religion presented through stories instead of questions and answers.
By fifth grade, the only books I had seen other than our encyclopedias were textbooks. The fifth-grade books were for arithmetic, spelling, geography and English; we also had a Fifth-Grade Reader and The Baltimore Catechism -- the thinnest book of all -- with such questions as "Why did God make you?" and the answered memorized: "God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy forever with Him in the next," I read and reread the stories in the Reader during the first week of class.
One day Sister Jean, the fifth- and sixth-grade teacher, announced that the school was opening a library. I had never heard of a library but was first in line when ours opened. That night I took home Holy Man, Father Damien of Molokai, the story of a Catholic priest who chose to live in a leper colony in Hawaii. I was hypnotized by Father's adventures, fascinated to discover his unselfishness, his powerful commitment to helping these sick people. He had no regard for his safety. He talked to the lepers about their fears, their dreams, their loneliness, their life before they contracted the disease. He helped build houses for them. They loved this kind and humble man, whose softness contrasted to our grumpy pastor, Father Nolan. Most of the students were afraid of our priest.
After returning the Father Damien book, I could not find another to equal it in realistic detail. So many of the other books were about saints and martyrs from earlier centuries, full of pious talk about their sanctity but weak on details of their daily life. They bored me. I read about five more books from the school library and was suddenly bereft. This library had been my baptism at the font of reading. I thought it was going to save me from dying of thirst in the cultural wasteland of home and school.
At about this time, my father took me to the public library, and I got a library card: one of the greatest gifts anyone ever gave me. Suddenly I had the key to a palace of inexhaustible treasures, riches I had never imagined. There were enough books to keep me reading - and so it turned out - for the rest of my life.
My first discovery in this secular library was a series of novels written by Horatio Alger. His titles ranged from Brave and Bold, Fame and Fortune, Slow and Sure, Rough and Ready to the less musical Ragged Dick, Phil the Fiddler and Struggling Upward.
The hero was always a poor orphan boy who earned his own living by shining shoes as a bootblack or selling newspapers. Each hero was hard-working, honest, more virtuous than most boys brought up in a home with parents. The hero was always fighting off swindlers who stole his money or cheated him out of his earnings. In spite of all the setbacks, an Alger hero remained loyal to his fellow newsboys or bootblacks and was always honest, virtuous, and above all, optimistic. In the end, Ragged Dick or Phil the Fiddler or Hector Roscoe always came out ahead. In some novels, the hero became wealthy. Occasionally, sheer coincidence joined with hard work and honesty to reward the hero. Ragged Dick, for example, is on a ferry in New York when a young boy falls overboard. Dick rescues the boy, and the boy's father rewards him with new clothes, a job and advice on his way up the corporate ladder.
The Depression, meanwhile, hit us harder. While my family was not starving, my father's mediocre salary was finally cut in half, the bank foreclosed on our house, and there was no money for candy or movies until I sold papers on a street corner in the Alger tradition. On frigid winter nights, I stood on Grandview Avenue near Palumbo's Market shivering, feeling a kinship with Ragged Rick or Tom Tracy or Luke Walton. Unlike these heroes, I had a home to go back to instead of a shelter in downtown Manhattan for newsboys. I had a family waiting for me, and we were never as poor as the Alger heroes.
When I moved up from selling papers on a corner to my own paper route of 62 customers, I imagined I was struggling upward, moving from not-quite-rags to future riches.
I read every Alger book in our library, about 35 novels. Years later I learned Alger actually wrote 135 novels.
Alger's undeveloped, cardboard characters were more alive than anyone in my textbooks. Even the literature in our Reader was boring. Most of it seemed far removed from our lives. We lived in a city of half a million, but we read about going "Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house" at Thanksgiving. One of my grandmothers lived in Detroit, the other in Florida. We read about "The Man With the Hoe," "The Village Blacksmith" and Longfellow's "The Children's Hour," books about the past that only made us feel good to be living in the 1930s -- and in a city, not on a farm.
Our Reader introduced us to things that were out of date but safe, presenting no occasion of sin, no references to the human body, no temptations toward lust. Safe -- and irrelevant and boring.
The novels contained real action, young orphan boys earning their food and shelter on the streets of New York, confronted daily with snowstorms or rainstorms, vicious cold weather, accidents from horse-drawn wagons that killed fellow newsboys, grown men who stole from them or cheated them out of their money. While I was enjoying the stories, I also was imbibing the American work ethic, the "can do" attitude - and becoming aware of people who did evil things to honest boys.
At age 13, I discovered Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This was a big step up in literary quality and the beginning of a new chapter in my reading. I found Tom Sawyer a real leader among boys. He had great ideas. He could dream up wonderful adventures of kidnapping and treasure hunts and could inspire all of the boys to join him, to do what he told them to do. He made an adventure out of having to whitewash the fence around his family's house. He found gold in a cave. He was my ideal until I discovered The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
I felt sad reading about Huck Finn, whose mother had died and whose drunken father beat him. I sympathized with him when he lived with Aunt Polly and the Widow Douglas, who constantly nagged him about religion and good manners. But I envied him for having a room of his own in their home, something I had always yearned to have.
Early in this novel, Huck's father shows up in town and captures him. He ties Huck up in an old shed, which Huck not only escapes but cleverly plants with evidence that he has been killed. I admired his knowledge of how people would react to situations such as his fake murder. He knew more about adults than any boy I knew, including my wise classmate Bill Campbell.
Hiding on Jackson Island, Huck catches some fish and cooks it over a fire. I had never been fishing, did not know how to build a campfire, and I had only fantasized about leaving home. I yearned to be on the island with Huck, smelling the fish as it cooked, the wood as it burned, the river as it flowed by. Huck discovers Jim, a runaway slave, on the island, and he and Jim set forth on the raft.
Twain's book about Huck and Jim was good reading all the way, as they went down the Mississippi River to Cairo, where Jim would be a free man. I found especially poignant the passage where Jim told Huck about chastising his little girl for not answering when he called to her and later finding out she was deaf. After hearing this from Jim, Huck suddenly sees the Negro slave as human. I was as struck as Huck by this revelation. Almost 60 years after Twain's book was published, I had never heard of any adult talk about the family life or personal feelings of Negroes.
Huck is confronted with moral choices knotted and tangled with strings from his background. What I had learned in school was as black and white as the habits of nuns wore. We memorized someone else's questions and someone else's answers. There was no room for our questions. There were no choices such as the ones Huck was forced to make at 14: Do I do what is legally right and turn Jim in or do what seems to me morally right and save him? That issue hardly fit the question and answer framework of a Catechism.
I enjoyed Huck's escapades, his escapes, and above all, his freedom. If he made a mistake, no one scolded him or slapped him. His life on a raft away from rules and discipline and all the Thou Shall Nots at school or home appealed to me. And I liked Huck's feel for the good life: "Jim, this is nice. . .I wouldn't want to be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot cornbread."
Huck had a way with words that appealed to my 14-year-old sensibilities. I enjoyed the many lyrical descriptions throughout the book. One of my favorites:
"Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. . .It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or just happened."
In this short passage, Huck conveys his feelings for the river, the joy of living on a raft, his remoteness from "civilization," and some of the theological speculations he and Jim shared during the trip. I read this passage over and over, intrigued by all of it but especially by a boy's ability to ask "whether the sky and stars were made, or just only happened." Huck's descriptions brought me back to the sense of wonder I had in my preschool years, a sense that was missing from our textbooks and our classrooms.