Childhood reading and the map of life

In the essay “The Lost Childhood” (1947), Graham Greene writes that, for a child, “all books are books of divination.” I stumbled at that word “all,” but by the end I understood what he meant: a child is always looking for “a map,” a path that one will follow into the world, and that certain reading, in giving shape to the child’s imagination, fears, and so on, provides the material for that map. Of course, not all books are able to supply that map.

I felt both envious and superior to Greene when he claimed to recall “the suddenness”  with which he found that he could read, not just the sentences in a reader, but “a real book.” He doesn’t say how old he was, but he was evidently eight or nine years old. In contrast, reading itself was a skill that I mastered very early. In the first grade — we were living in Lynn Acres in the south end of Louisville— I read the Sunday comics page to other kids living in the same block of apartments. I seem to see us sitting on the steps leading up or down to one of the apartments in our unit. One of my earliest memories of "letters" were those of the keys on the Remington keyboard. The machine belonged to my mother, who worked as a secretary, and I have a sort of fixed image of myself standing on a chair -- the typewriter was on a chest of drawers -- with my parents on either side of me as I stared at the keyboard and of asking them about the odd unalphabetic arrangement of the letters, the "a" next to "s," and not to "b," for instance.

My childhood reading did not include the kinds of adventure stories that captivated Greene. He speaks highly of Marjorie Bowen and The Viper of Milan. Indeed, I was a haphazard reader of fiction as a child. Weekly trips to the local library led to historical fiction for girls, but nothing too demanding. The book that most affected me and that provided the kind of map of which he speaks was instead a large book of World War II photographs that was in my parents’ possession. That book, containing very little in the way of text, aside from the captions, was certainly a work of divination, for the story told there, through photographs, inaugurated a lifelong journey to understand myself and the America I lived in. The images of children, for instance, cowering in trenches in Finland, as the Russians strafed their country, made a deep impression on me. I would say they were my first intimations of the underside of life. Greene writes of "the haunting" felt by reading of life lived "on the edge of life." That is what those photos conveyed to me.

It took me a long time to look forward to reading fiction, to escape into novels. In fact, my favorite novel in high school was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. And, like Greene, I admit that, as an adult, I do not have the expectation of pleasure when encountering a new novel. I have to return to Jane Austen for such pleasurable anticipation. Indeed, having just gone through half a dozen copies of the New York Times Book Review, I feel the opposite of anticipation at the prospect of reading any of the novels reviewed. Indeed, the opposite of anticipation … what would that be? If anticipation provokes a smile, a lifting of the muscles around the lips, I feel something like a grimace on reading even the first paragraph of the reviews of these books. How many novels about dysfunctional families can one take? How many memoirs of addiction and childhood sexual abuse? Sad lives galore, but nothing comparable to those Finnish children. But even novels that I choose to read — for the book group that I run — seldom prompt me to rush home and start reading. I dutifully  make my way through them.

Again, I turn to Greene for what one hopes for in a novel: writing in which the visible world still exists, where the characters have the solidity and importance of men and women with souls "to save or to lose."