Laura Waterman

Books in My Life

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.”

-Joyce Carol Oates

When I was small, my father showed me how to prepare a new book for reading. There was a process I must go through, he explained, so as not to break the book’s spine. When my father used the words “break the book’s spine,” a sudden shudder went up my spine. I certainly didn’t want to harm my book! “First,” he directed, “open the book in the center, and flatten the evenly divided halves. Yes, you’ve got it!” he said as I applied a gentle, steady pressure with my palms to the pages. “Now close the book, and open the first quarter.” I did that, and flattened those pages. “Open the book again,” my father said, “this time a quarter of the way from the end.” At this point I’d caught onto the process of breaking in a new book and continued to divide the book into small portions, opening and flattening from side to side, until I was satisfied that the spine, on my brand new copy of The Wind in the Willows, would not be taxed when I began to read.

I can’t say I have followed my father’s instructions to the letter with every new book I have ever owned or read, but his tutorial is a precious memory of my childhood.

My father loved books and imprinted that love on me.

As an English teacher at a preparatory school he was sent books by publishers who hoped he would select them for his classes. I was the beneficiary of many of these books for my library that I was building on my bedroom shelves. I wasn’t conscious of constructing a library, but that was what was happening. I loved to read! If my mother asked me to help her with a task—peeling the potatoes for dinner, weeding a flower bed—my constant answer was, “wait until I’ve finished this chapter.” But my mother was not inclined to wait. Waiting until I’d finished an entire chapter was much too long for my mother! But I could get away with: “Wait until I finish this paragraph.”

My favorite place to read—and it still is—was in bed, before falling asleep. The comfort derived from the bedclothes, the pillow, and the book can only be expressed in a great wordless contented sigh.

One of my early books that I read over and over, and have continued to use as a reference, is Classical Myths That Live Today, by Frances E. Sabin of New York University, published in 1927. In 1940 Ralph V. D. Magoffin, also of New York University, a professor in the Department of Classics, came out with a Revised and Enlarged Edition. That’s the edition I have, one of those books a publisher had sent to my father because it contains questions to be answered and other teacherly aids. I didn’t pay much attention to these; I was interested in the stories. My father had written, on the inside front cover, my full name: Laura Bradley Johnson, followed by “from her father, Christmas, 1948.” I was eight.

Classical Myths That Live Today is the cornerstone of my library. It was far from the first book I placed on my library shelves, or that I read to myself, but it was the first “adult” book, in the sense that it did not tell the stories of these myths in the way a book intended for young children would. The text contained words I didn’t know. Sometimes I looked them up, but probably more often I didn’t—not wanting to interrupt my reading—and guessed at the meaning through the context. Classical Myths was illustrated with photographs and drawings of the classical sites where the myths took place, as well as the mythic figures themselves as they appear in sculptures and paintings. There are more than 200 illustrations and one lovely foldout map showing the Mediterranean lapping at the shores of Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and North Africa where these myths originated. If I were an ancient Egyptian of noble birth such that certain cherished items would be sealed in my tomb to accompany me into my afterlife, Classical Myths That Live Today would be among those objects.

It was our mother who read to us—my younger brother and me—before bedtime. Mother Goose, R. L. Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, Babar the Elephant, Dr. Seuss, Peter Rabbit. We sat on my bed, on either side of our mother. The Blue Fairy Book, Grimm’s Fairy Tales—so delightfully scary—and Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, so sad and so beautiful. (My family spent 1951 to 1952 in Copenhagen where we felt the power of Andersen’s stories firsthand, especially in the beguiling statue of the Little Mermaid in the harbor.) Our copy of The Wizard of Oz finally fell apart, but I still have it carefully shelved, some of its illustrations crayoned—no doubt!—by my brother. I would not have performed such a disgraceful desecration. Though, my little brother’s vandalism could be seen as claiming ownership, even as an act of love.

My father read the Alice books to me when I was seven-and-a-half exactly, Alice’s age, as he made a point of telling me. This was the only book my father read aloud to me, I believe because he loved it so much himself. I heard years later, from a colleague of my father’s, that he had memorized many pages, and, that after the lubrication of several stiff drinks, could be coaxed into reciting. He was a graduate student at Harvard then, some years before I was born.

However, my father put many books in my hand, and I read them all. Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River. So I was heavily indoctrinated by the Victorians from the beginning. Indeed, if Classical Myths is the cornerstone, the British writers of the 19th century form the rock-solid foundation of my reading life. I return to them as a palate cleanser when I’ve had a bit too much of late twentieth and 21st century fiction. Sinking into Dickens or Scott or the Brontës or my beloved Jane Austin, or Middlemarch, is like easing myself into a warm, welcoming bath. The tub is long—I can stretch out—and on sturdy clawed feet. There is a window, and I look out on a view of mountains. I breathe in, and then slowly out. That’s what reading those 19th century Brits does for me. And the Americans too: Twain, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne.

My mother, a life-long reader, always a book on her bedside table, was born in western New York state. She had grown up with Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales, also Scott’s Kenilworth was a favorite of hers, as it is for me. An English major at Mount Holyoke College, she’d been invited to participate in an honors English seminar. When finding out the time the group met, she replied “Oh, I can’t possibly do it. I play golf then.” She told me this story more than once, always accompanied with a wry regretful look that said: How stupid we are when we are young.

When my husband Guy’s mother, a Vassar graduate, moved into her retirement home, she took with her only a few books. That they were ones she had already read many times reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates’s words:

“. . . the voices of strangers closer to us than the voices of friends, more intimate, in some instances than our own.”

I began keeping a book list in a small notebook, leather-covered, measuring 4½ by 7¼, lined paper, six-hole punched, the summer I graduated from eighth grade, 1954. I wish I had started it sooner. Books that are not on my list, but are still on my bookshelf, include The Yearling, Swallows and Amazons, Oliver Twist, most of Dr. Doolittle, The Wind in the Willows, the Alice books, Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. And because I can’t stop writing down these titles that continue to shape my life, I’ll add, Mutiny on the Bounty, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki, Stevenson’s Treasure Island with the N.H. Wyeth illustrations, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Annapurna by Maurice Herzog, and The Conquest of Everest by Sir John Hunt. I mention these last two only because they struck a chord in me that revealed itself later, when I was in my late twenties and discovered climbing. That is the beauty of books. We never know where they will lead us.

My book list now occupies three notebooks, the same size, the same six-hole punch, on lined paper. I include solely the author and title. I knew myself well enough to realize that if I attempted to write a book report or any kind of description, I would fail. My book list would stop before it had even gotten started.

I particularly love this quote from James Boswell that I pasted into the front cover of the third notebook, started in 2012:

“If a man would keep an exact account of everything that he reads, it would much illustrate the history of his mind.”

“If a man . . .” Yes, it’s impossible to overlook that Boswell has only men in mind here, but what he says rings true. One of the great pleasures of looking through my book list is remembering what I was doing when I was reading, for instance, Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution. Guy and I read this aloud. We had embarked on writing a large history of the Northeast’s mountains and wanted to read a revered history written on a very different subject, but one in which we could learn the art of writing history.

From June 1972 to June 1973, I read only four books. (To explain: since I had started my list in June 1954, I continued to make my reading year go from June to June.) Those four books all had something to do with the mountains and climbing that had taken over my life. The sparsity of the list was because that year we were in the midst of a major life change that took us from working in New York City to becoming homesteaders in Vermont. The idea driving this move was to have more time for mountains and climbing. The next year, June 1973 to June 1974, I read twelve books, that again reflected my interest in climbing except for five that featured the Brontës, their works as well as biographies.

I can turn to any page in my book lists and tune into what currently occupied me. I can often spot, from a title, a book suggested by a friend. Guy and I read books aloud. I noted those with an asterisk. We favored British and American 19th century writers but there is a smattering of children’s books, (such as Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, that are so loved by adults), and Shakespeare.

I have kept a list of the number of books I read in a year. The high point was June 1961 to June 1962, my senior year in college with 102 books, skewed by the books I read as an English major. Those four books from 1972 to 1973, were the rock-bottom low point. I’m not a fast reader. I’m a slow reader who prefers to savor. For many years I averaged about two books a month, or three, that is, around 24 to 46 books a year. In the last two decades, with more time for reading, the number has increased to a book a week, or even a book and a half a week.

At some point in the 1990s, Guy indexed my entire book list by author and by title, two separate lists. By that time, many years had gone by. It had become difficult to find whether I’d read a book or not. I’d experienced several embarrassing occasions of reading a book, recording it, then discovering that I had already read it. To add to this humiliation was that I hadn’t the faintest memory of reading the book!

One of my missions in life is to encourage anyone, but especially children, to keep a book list. Guy, who was a record keeper on all sorts of data having to do with our homestead—weather, our garden produce, vegetables and fruit canned, sap per tree during sugaring season, wood sawed and stacked—claimed my book list was the most important statistic kept at Barra, our homestead. Perhaps. Perhaps not. But if you look at keeping a book list as a lifetime occupation, as Boswell seems to, it’s a list worth keeping. If you are a lover of reading and you decide to keep a book list, I can promise that ahead of you are hours of pleasure from reading over your lists, a pleasure that only accumulates as the years roll out.

Guy Waterman! I knew he was the man for me when, shortly after we got together—it would have been on our first commute into New York’s Grand Central from the Beacon rail station—Guy pulled out Macaulay’s History of England. My eyes opened very wide. This was one of the great literary works of the 19th century! I gleefully added what I’d read, in terms of great histories, Herodotus; he had read Herodotus, too, and Thucydides. This news made me very happy. In high school I had not had much luck with the young men I had an interest in when I disclosed what I read. In college, this got better. But when it came to conversations when titles were exchanged, I generally felt I held the aces, and was not happy to sense myself holding back from appearing excessively literary. With Guy, this was not going to be an issue. And as it turned out, books and reading would be our lives.

“You don’t need to take a book off a shelf [in the library] to know there

is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who

truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.”

-Susan Orlean, The Library Book

I spent many hours looking through my father’s books, that is, the books he had collected that were housed in our living room, on floor-to-ceiling shelves on either side of the picture window. There was very little fat. Indeed, none. This was a working reference library for a man who was a scholar. The little fiction that had wedged its way in came from me, contributions from my college English courses. I must admit that John Dos Passos’s USA and Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury seemed light fare beside Edmond Gosse’s Life of William Congreve, or Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log, or Dumas Malone’s Jefferson, in five volumes.

A number of these books were written by my dad’s friends and colleagues, like Perry Miller and Kenneth Murdock, authorities on the Puritans. Or the above-mentioned Jay Leyda, an Emily Dickinson contributor, as was my father. Willard Thorp of Princeton and Robert Spiller of the University of Pennsylvania had their share of shelf space. They were men I knew, and some were my friends, too. Friendships that began when I was very young and have formed my life. I have my father’s edition of Samuel Eliot Morison’s The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages with the frontispiece, a colored plate, tipped in upside down.

(Alas, these publishing goofs happen. A book of mine omitted the endpapers, a crucial map, though this was on a short batch of print-on-demand copies needed for a bookstore reading. No great harm done. A shock at the time, but nowhere near the shock for Professor Morison when he realized his whole first print run displayed this frontispiece, a colored plate entitled “Frobisher’s fight with Eskimos at Frobisher Bay,” turned on its head. Ah well, because of it, the book is among my most cherished.)

After my parents had moved into a nursing home, it fell to me to disperse my father’s library. Guy aided me greatly in this task by listing all my father’s books, sorting them into categories. I got in touch with the librarian at the Lawrenceville School, where my father had taught for thirty years, and invited him to come take what would be useful. Then Guy and I picked out books for friends and family, particularly my brother, and we made our selection.

I contacted Richard Ludwig, the Princeton Librarian for Rare Books and Special Collections. Mr. Ludwig ended up taking 69 books and pamphlets that had been collected by my father about Emily Dickinson, as an aid to his own work on the poet, work for which my father, Thomas H. Johnson, was best known. My father knew Dick Ludwig well since he had taken over the work on the further editions of the Literary History of the United States, a three-volume effort my father had been a part of with among others, Willard Thorp and Robert Spiller.

All this work on behalf of my father’s library was wonderfully rewarding for me. Particularly I value Dick Ludwig’s note to us expressing his gratitude, that ended, “I shall be seeing Willard tomorrow for Thanksgiving dinner and sharing with him the good news that Tom’s books and papers have found their proper storage place. And I know Bob Spiller will also be pleased. What those three men have done for the study of American literature in this country is tremendous.”

Libraries have the power to reverberate down through our lives, as my father’s library has for me. Susan Orlean writes, “It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here. . . In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”

It was in my father’s library that I made tentative stabs at reading Shakespeare. The boys at Lawrenceville put on a Shakespeare play every year, and when I was old enough, I was taken, sequentially, to The Taming of the Shrew and to Romeo and Juliet. After each one I pulled the play off the bookshelf in our living room, attempting to find the parts I remembered: Petruchio’s many attempts to “tame” the beautiful and witty Katharina (Kate) by, for instance, getting her to say she sees the moon when, clearly, it is the sun that shines so bright. In Romeo and Juliet it was, inevitably, the “balcony scene.” Seeing the plays was a good way to begin my acquaintance with Shakespeare, with his language, that was pushed a little further by spending the occasional half-hour with his words on the page. Strange words, but they held a fascination that kept me coming back to the bookshelf.

Orlean, in her book, The Library Book, writes about the fire that laid waste to the Los Angeles library, the Central Branch, in 1986. Hundreds of thousands of books were lost to fire, smoke, water, and mold. The city pulled together and built a new library, a decade-long project.

The library in my Vermont village, East Corinth, the Blake Memorial Library, suffered a similar devastation. In November 1945 the library burned and the only books that survived were those few hundred in circulation.

The idea for a library in our rural community originated with three young men from farm families, one of whom became a minister, who in 1893, went from house to house in the village collecting books in a wheelbarrow. The idea took hold and neighbors began weeding their own collections, bringing books to a house in the village where they were given temporary shelf space. Library hours were established and the three young men who had the idea took turns as librarian. This was the beginning. It took several years to raise the money for a building, for which the town was helped by the generosity of the family for whom the library was named.

I love this story. It’s the story of a community pulling together to build a house for books. And at the story’s heart shines the beauty of libraries themselves: that anyone can borrow a book, take it home, read it, and return it. Libraries are free. They are built on trust. Everyone is welcome.

In Vermont there are more public libraries, per capita, than in any other state in the union. There are 237 towns and nine cities and our state has 195 public libraries. All of them would have their own origin story to tell—a story that would speak to perpetual learning, to gaining knowledge, or, perhaps most important, the ability to enjoy a pleasurable read. Vermont towns, when our town library was founded, were separated, if not in miles, in the geography of steep-sided narrow river valleys. Travel between them was slow. A village needed a library of its own.

We, of course, had begun using the library as soon as we became residents, in 1973. Then, when we began research for a book we were writing about the mountains of the northeast, that was when we became acquainted with the amazing service of the interlibrary loan system. For those who live in a rural area, interlibrary loan is like a miracle. It’s also like a magic trick. You fill out the request form, wait a week, and the book appears out of thin air. I always look to see the library it came from. Many come from libraries in Vermont or in New Hampshire, just across the Connecticut River. But one came from a library in Oregon once, and I like to imagine that librarian across the country, pulling the book off the shelf, knowing that she (or he) was going to make a reader in a small New England town very happy.

Guy and I began volunteering at our library in the 1990s. The librarian at that time, Alice Thompson, suggested we go through the basement, where musty old books and long-out-of-circulation magazines were stored. It seemed that nearly everyone in the towns of Corinth and Topsham, who found their library shelves cracking under the weight of old National Geographic magazines, had shuttled them over to the Blake Memorial Library. Alice wanted to do a house cleaning so that the basement space could be turned into a children’s library. We spent most of a winter there, with our dog for company. It was a dusty, dirty job, but the end result was a lovely space for a children’s collection.

My favorite library in all the world is the main branch of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. When I walk up the wide steps between the two guardian lions today, I’m happily awash in memories of when I lived in New York in the 1960s. One of my jobs as an editor at the publishing company where I worked was to fill out my authors’ bibliographies. This work took me to the card catalog at the NYPL. The card retrieval system was housed in wooden drawers that could be easily slid out from the wall. The main sound under the vast ceiling of this room that included the circulation desk was the sound of these drawers—scaled to fit a 3x5 card, sliding open, and then shut, with a dull wooden thunk. Through this work I got to know the young people who worked behind the circulation desk, a few of whom became my friends.

I couldn’t have foreseen, then, what this great public library would come to mean to me. After Guy and I had moved to Vermont, once a year or so I would find myself walking up between the Library Lions, up the long flight of stairs to the catalog room, where, as the decades moved along, I witnessed the change when the card catalog drawers were replaced by computers. I felt the loss. I had enjoyed such an intimacy with those 3x5 cards, some with penciled notations from librarians of the distant past. I wondered what had happened to those lovely wooden drawers.

But change is constant, perpetual. The old is made obsolete by the new. There is a gain, but there is also a loss, though the library, itself, remains. The books are housed and anyone can walk into a library anywhere in the world and request a book. They can use their computers, search for articles, put in an interlibrary loan request, seek out a reference librarian. Here is a community based on books and learning, or a happy few hours spent browsing.

In the New York Public Library we sit with hundreds of other readers in the reading rooms—spaces with ceilings three or four stories high, or so it feels, sturdy wooden tables and chairs with arms, stretch down for seeming miles, shaded lamps on the tables, chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, paned windows letting in the natural light. A community of readers, researchers, and a few who have just come in from the cold, are gathered here.

The same scene goes on at my library in the village. A volunteer is at the circulation desk (“circ desk” for short). Readers sit at our one long table, some at work on their computers, or on the library’s computers, some with a book or magazine or the newspaper. The natural light filters in, though I would not say there is the sort of dusty hush I have experienced in the New York Public Library. Our library is a community gathering space where friends come to drop off a book, comb the shelves for another one, and have a chat, too. But the space is sacred in the same way the NYPL feels to me, a public house for books, for learning, for enlightenment, for sharing. It is perpetually open to anyone who steps across the threshold.

If we are lucky enough to begin to build our own libraries when we are very young, we find, as we grow older, that we have kept many of the books we started with. Some of these books have moved with us when we have moved. We feel protective of them, and it is likely that they have protected us. They allow us to recover our childhoods, and recall the many changes in our lives. Our libraries reveal our own histories. I find it nearly impossible to weed my own shelves for our twice-a-year book sale at the Blake library. I pull a book off the shelf, determined, this time, to put it in the box marked For The Library Sale. But I can’t resist opening it and I begin to read its opening paragraph. I remember what stage of life I was in when I bought it, or who gave it to me, and I put it back on the shelf, where it immediately looks at home. Not yet. Because, really, I know I’ll never be able to part with that book or any of its neighbors. The bonding is too strong. It’s permanent. Face it, I tell myself, only in death will we part.

Elizabeth HuntMarch 15, 2021spring, 2021, Spring 2021, laura, waterman, Laura Waterman

Laura Waterman

Books in My Life

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