Recently,
on Facebook, folks have been passing around a post about “books that have stuck
with you,” or some such wording. I usually don’t respond to requests that
require me to post my list then tag a bunch of friends. I don’t like to bother
friends with stuff like that. Friends usually have enough to keep them busy.
Most of my friends are writers, artists – people who have to keep busy to keep
going. Also, a lot of these Facebook requests require to rate your “favorites,”
or something you think is best, or better than something else. I don’t like
ranking books or movies or songs – I keep things fluid in that regard.
But
John Carl, I believe, tagged me in particular, and since part of the directions
were that I don’t give the selections that much thought (“fifteen books in
fifteen minutes”), I quickly came up with a list of books I remember and that
have become part of my consciousness. The books are me and I am the books.
Even
when you give something “little thought,” thoughts take a lot longer to play
through. I listed the books, and the list generated discussion, and the
discussion generated more discussion.
A
book that has stayed – or “stuck” – with me. Did it mean a book I read in my
youth, or just any book I’ve encountered over the years? Some of my earliest
memories are of exploring books, going through the pages, whether I could read
them or not. From age three on, I was poking around in books.
There
were lots of books whose titles I don’t remember – just picture books. If I
don’t remember the titles, did they stick with me? Well…
My
dad made a bookcase. A long one, with two shelves. Plenty of books on there,
but with the exception of some Reader’s Digest omnibus collections of condensed
books, some cookbooks and a ten- or eleven-volume thing that was a sort of
children’s encyclopedia, I think it was called the “Childcraft Library,” the
books were all in Polish. It didn’t matter much at the time, since I could read
neither Polish nor English. I didn’t read so much as sense the presence of words. And I also sensed that there was
something important about these things, these “books.” If they weren’t
important, why would someone build a case to hold them?
There
was book of illustrated bible stories. I think it came out from Golden Books. I
remember in particular an illustration for the David and Goliath tale – a
marvel to me for depicting a decapitated giant without resorting to blood and
gore. The artist posed the body of Goliath in such a way that his body reclined
over a downward turn in the terrain. Further back, David walked away, holding
high Goliath’s head. His posture and expression seemed quite triumphant. I
wondered over that picture for a long time and on many occasions. I think I
wondered why he so triumphant, walking away with a head that was of no earthly
good to him. I mean, why not just leave it there next to the body? Was he going
to get some sort of prize for bringing the head back? Was he going to have it
stuffed and hang it on his wall? I couldn’t guess. Bible stories were like
that. They made no sense to me, and yet they were apparently very important to
grownups and older kids. I think I was less interested in the stories
themselves than in the fact that people found those stories so important. Adam
and Eve, Noah, Moses – Moses had to be important; they had made a whole movie
about him, and about the ten commandments. God split the sea in half, made
pillars of fire, sent lightning down to smash golden idols. They didn’t make a
lot of sense to me, but visually they were fascinating.
The
most I could make out about God, though, was that “He” had a really bad temper.
Of
the Polish books, I found out later that one impressive set of volumes – in uniform
size and binding – were the works of Henryk Sienkiewicz and the epic poem Pan Tadeusz. My parents revered these
works, but they never read them, not where I could see them. Of course, they
read them when they were children, remembered them vividly, and both my parents
could quote passages from Pan Tadeusz.
You
might think I’d have learned more Polish from my parents, but I didn’t. I think
my parents were sorely divided on the subject of teaching my brother and I
Polish. On the one they, they wanted us to learn the language of our heritage.
On the other, when they spoke in Polish they knew we wouldn’t understand them.
They had their own language – the secret language of adults. In the end, I
think, the most I learned of Polish were the basic Catholic prayers, the Lord’s
Prayer and the Hail Mary. My mother typed them out, in Polish, and taped them
on the wall of our bedroom, just above the nightstand and below the crucifix
that hung above it.
I
do remember my dad reading to my brother and me a children’s edition of Robinson Crusoe. I vividly remember his
reading of the scene where Crusoe comes upon the footprint in the sand, his
placing his foot within it and discovering that it did not fit his own foot,
that there must be someone else occupying the island. At this time, I won’t
place too much significance on my remembering that scene, although I can. It is
fraught with significance. But I will say that it impressed me because of its
vividness – words making a picture in my imagination – and because the scene
illustrated a basic sort of deduction – reality could be tested and examined. I
needed to test reality because my home life did not resemble the “normal” world
I encountered by watching television, or observing the behavior of the other
kids in the neighborhood. The world of home and the “normal” world did not
match up. I just couldn’t figure it out.
Another
bunch of books that have stayed with me: no, not comic books; that’s a whole
other story. It was a stack of paperbound books that sat in the lower right
corner of the bookcase. Not “shelved” – stacked. They weren’t like American
paperbacks. They were what we call now “trade”-sized paperbacks. No illustrations
on the cover; no blurbs. The paper was cheap and thin and smelled with a
distinct “non-American” scent. The covers weren’t even made of paperboard, just
a slightly heavier grade of paper. The covers, titles, texts – all in Polish.
They
did, however, have pictures.
There
were pictures of soldiers in uniforms. They were pictures of soldiers holding
guns. There were pictures of big cannons, of bombers flying overhead, of
demolished cities.
Pictures
of war.
I
understood war in terms of action and activity – shooting, fighting, bombing.
Kinesis. Motion. It was fascinating. Have
to admit it was fascinating. I’d seen some war movies on TV and I think my folks
took me to see Pork Chop Hill, Ski Troop Attack – a few other war
movies. War was in the movies, and I don’t think it could really be avoided.
War was reality, or so it seemed. My parents both lived through the Second War
War. My father lived in Lublin during the occupation. Nearly all his friends
had died by 1945. My grandfather served in the Polish Army and nearly ended up
as one of the officers executed by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest – though I
didn’t learn that last fact for years. My mother went to school in Scotland
after she, her mother and her sister nearly circumnavigated Europe to escape
the Nazis.
Which
is to say, there was some talk about “the war” in the household. Not a lot of
talk. But talk of the war could not be avoided.
So
these pictures of the war fascinated me. Unlike what I saw in the movies, they
were “real.” It wasn’t the sort of sharp, well-lighted, “pretty" photography
that an American cinematographer could perform. They were black and white – and
gray. Gray upon gray. Everything gray. The images were often grainy and muddy,
the sun too bright, the shadows too deep. I was a kid, but I could sense the
authenticity of these images.
Then
I reached the last pages of the book.
These
were photos taken in the concentration camps.
Remember,
I wasn’t much older than four, and I was looking at photographs of bodies –
human bodies, naked bodies, bodies so starved you could make out the ribs, the
knobby joints of every limb, the skin tightened against every cheekbone, the
eyes fallen into the hollow recesses of their skulls. Dead eyes, hollow mouths,
twisted teeth, wide open nostrils.
Bodies
stacked in brick niches next to what I later discovered were oven doors. Bodies
piled on little carts, stacked high – higher than you could imagine a cart so
rickety and primitive could bear.
I
stared at those photographs as much as I stared at the ones of all the military
hardware and the uniformed combatants “doing their jobs.”
I
stared at them more. And when I stopped staring I could still see them.
To
a four-year-old, war makes a sort of sense. Not a “good” sense. An insane,
twisted sense – it’s still a sense. A bunch of guys on one side shoot a bunch
of guys on the other side. The other guys shoot back. Somebody “wins,” the way
you win a ball game, or a game of checkers. That’s what it seemed like. And
World War Two “made sense” in that “we” were fighting some very, very bad guys.
Even for a kid, there was no way to mistake Hitler for George Washington – no way
to mistake David for Goliath.
But
those photos from the camps –
I
will not pretend to understand them. I will not pretend to have derived lessons
from them. I can’t say that I felt that what happened, what the pictures
documented, was evil, because the placing of meaning to words and images is a
complicated thing, and I was just too young to comprehend anything so big.
All
I knew was that it was awful, it was terrifying, and I was frightened.
It
was out there. The war was over, clearly enough. We were living in Chicago, in
America, and everything was “all right” now, wasn’t it?
At
least that’s what my parents tried to tell me, when I asked them about the
pictures.
Nevertheless,
it was out there. Whatever made what I saw in those photos a reality could
still be out there.
Could.
I
knew nothing about history as
history. The difference between what was, what is, and what will be was too
much for a four-year-old imagination.
It’s
probably too much for a fifty-eight-year-old imagination, still remembering the
afternoon I came upon that stack of books, in my dad’s den, in the bottom right
corner of the bookcase.
So
that book, whose name I don’t remember, whose words I couldn’t read, but whose
pictures I could see, and did see – that’s the book that has probably stayed
with me the longest and has had the most profound effect on whoever it is I
have turned out to be.
+ + +
For
the record, though, this is the first list I came up with:
1. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
2. The Man With the Purple Eyes by
Charlotte Zolotow
3. The Haunting of Hill House by
Shirley Jackson
4. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
5. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
6. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
7. Invitation to a Beheading by
Vladimir Nabokov
8. The Man in the High Castle by
Philip K. Dick
9. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
10. Who? by Algis Budrys
11. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by
Muriel Spark
12. The Left Hand of Darkness by
Ursula K. Le Guin
13. A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson
Algren
14. Native Son by Richard Wright
15. Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym
After
some discussion, I added these (I was on a roll): What Is Cinema? by Andre Bazin: The
Parade's Gone By by Kevin Brownlow; The
Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith; The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy by Ernst
Cassirer; The Canterbury Tales by
Geoffrey Chaucer; Labyrinths by Jorge
Luis Borges; The Professor's House by
Willa Cather; A Good Man is Hard to Find
by Flannery O'Connor; The Confidence Man
by Herman Melville.
And
after some more discussion, I added three more books from my misspent youth
that have stayed with me: Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut; Revenge of the Lawn
by Richard Brautigan; Journey Beyond
Tomorrow (aka The Journey of Joenes)
by Robert Sheckley.
And
yet three more: Been Down So Long It
Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina, which I read in one sitting and
drove me nuts because I could not accept what the fictional character of
Gnossos does at the end of the story; a book that wasn’t very good (by my
standards, whatever they are) but that I also finished in one sitting: The Butterfly Revolution by William
Butler; and I would be remiss not to mention Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller, who had the courage almost
forty years ago to say what some folks still find difficult to acknowledge
today.
Poetry?
Like comics, that’s a whole ’nother story that would fill another entry at
least as long as this.
And
you will notice not one inclusion of a book about (or by) dinosaurs. Again,
dinosaurs deserve their own sweet, generous chapter. Ask me no more questions and I will tell you no lies.
