LITERATURE

I don't have many books that look like this.

By May of this year, I will have my PhD to add on to my MA in English Literature. Currently, I am Lecturer at a small, private Catholic college, a position that I have held for the ten years I have been in my PhD program, and will continue for at least another year and a half. For me, teaching offers the balance I have sought for for much of my life: the private life of reading, writing and thought, and a public life of service in the community.

Richard Scarry

I have been fascinated with books since I can remember. The first books I became obsessed with were Richard Scarry’s children’s books. The numerous pages filled with illustrations, activities, color and narratives allured me, and I would make my own picture books. I became aware of the power of words for the first time when I was six years old, and I wrote Richard Scarry a fan letter and gave him one of my picture books. He responded, sending me a few of his own drawings. That moment of reciprocated communication when I opened the exotic, thin envelope with a stamp from Switzerland and read the letter on an even more thin piece of paper solidified for me the magic of words. I not only expressed myself to a hero, my hero responded. The one letter was the beginning of dozens over a few year period. I would send Richard Scarry drawings and little stories, and he would send back some of his drawings and little stories about his work. We finally met in Westport when I was eight, and he and his wife, Patricia invited me to spend a summer with him in Switzerland.

I regret I never took them up on the offer, as after a year passed, and I turned nine, I progressed into more complex books and narratives. But I will never forget the almost spiritual magic of my correspondence with Richard Scarry, and the influence it had upon my love and hunger for reading and writing.

My Uncle Joe

When I was in elementary school, my Mom’s brother, Joe, lived with us. A bona-fide hippie who endured the traumatic year of 1968 at the traumatic age of eighteen, “Joey,” as we called him, and his nomadic wanderings was endlessly exotic for me, my siblings and friends. After dropping in and dropping out for several years, Joe received his BA in English, and the many books he always had in his knapsack fascinated me. I wanted to understand all of the different things that he read, because I believed that his books offered entrance into his life in which he would wander to Europe, Mexico, Ireland, the West, returning with fabulous adventure stories.

The cover of a 1968 copy.

He gave me a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, which I tried to read. But at the age of ten, I suffered the fate of any person at any age who could not get past the first twenty pages. It would not be until I was sixteen years old that I would break past page twenty, and encounter one of the greatest mystery stories I had ever read. But it was what I perceived to be the otherness, the mystery, with which his books surrounded Joe that made me desire an entrance into literary discourse.

My Dad and Slaughterhouse Five.

When I was twelve, my father gave me Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. I rank reading this novel in the top five of momentous occasions in my life, just below the birth of my son and the day that Father McSheffery first molested me. I recall my father giving me the book as though he imparted a valuable gift, something both necessary, initiatory and dangerous at once. Before reading this novel, I had been engrossed in science fiction–Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clark, Issac Asimov, Ray Bradbury–and fantasy–C.S. Lewis, Tolkien. Vonnegut, however, fuses science fiction, fantasy and real, existential human angst in Slaughterhouse Five. He unites disparate human experience and traumatic history into a trasformative narrative. In short, as I read the novel I had an epiphany about what literature is.

Narratives can teach and entertain; they can console and unsettle; they are cozy and dangerous; they invite a reader into a world, but one enters that world at a risk. Narratives transform time at the same time that they transform existence. I realized this because, at the same time that Slaughterhouse Five changed me–I would forever desire to read literature–it opened my life to new dangers: the world of literature is not a safe place. Vonnegut’s novel crystallized a belief that I still carry with me: great art is both urgent and intense.

Graham Greene.

In my senior year of college, I saw the movie version of Our Man in Havana. The movie charmed me. It had the perfect cast of characters: Alec Guinness, Ernie Kovaks, Burl Ives, Maureen O’Hare. Out of what seemed to be providence, I found a copy of the novel at a tag sale while on vacation in Cape May. I sat on a patio at at hotel facing the ocean, and read the entire novel as I sipped a gin and tonic. The story of a widowed vacuum cleaner in pre-Castro Cuba attempting to raise his precocious daughter. After she talks him into buying her a horse, he finds himself desperately close to bankruptcy. (I’ll finish this page tomorrow–it’s late and I’m falling asleep.

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