For My Teacher

 

She is the reason I can write more than my name. If that seems both too much and too strange to be entirely convincing, I understand. She might well have challenged the sentence, and the sentiment herself. The woman was not one for rhetorical flourishes or fanciness generally. Sense, that was her singular goal and from that should come everything else: meaning, purpose, expression, emotion, possibly even art -- however doubtful that outcome must have seemed considering the raw materials with which she had to work for forty years, like me, for example.

Her name was Miss Joan Stuck and she died recently. (I don't think she would have approved of saying she'd "passed." She would have acknowledged the social convention, but she disliked euphemisms. Imprecision even in the service of social convention, while understandable, ultimately does none of us any real good. She died at the good age of 91. That's a simple sentence.) She was my ninth grade English composition teacher. I will never forget her. I would like to be able to say that I've never forgotten all she taught me, but that can't be true. I'd be hard pressed just now to describe all the syntactic functions (adjunct?), but I remember that phrase at least.

I learned this morning from her obituary that she retired not long after I graduated. I do not mean to suggest that the two events are related. She'd been a school teacher by then for decades. She taught in the place she was born and where she herself went to high school and to college. Imagine that. Her mother was a school teacher. They looked just alike, according to my mother. When back home in later years, I would occasionally see Miss Stuck on Broad Street, or meet her by chance at County Market. Often as not she was still wearing the same sensible cape and vaguely Tyrolean hat I remembered, a pheasant feather tucked in the band. I see in the picture featured in her obituary that her hair though long since gone white as snow was otherwise unchanged. (She might have forgiven me the cliche, but not I think the personal familiarity. Apologies to her shade.)

On the board in her classroom there was always a quotation. These changed regularly, though I suspect their sources and the schedule on which they were added to the chalkboard did not. I learned years later that one of the first duties of her many student-teachers was to recopy the index cards from which she ostensibly taught, though I do not remember her ever making reference to these when she taught, and I doubt her lessons changed from year to year. Of the quotations she put up I can remember none, though I do remember writing down more than a few and in so doing managing to misspell both Emerson and Carlyle despite the uniform clarity of her hand. I know that I misspelled their names because, first it is a safe assumption that I misspelled most things even as late as my freshman year in high school and second, because I remember I later had trouble finding either gentleman's books in the school library.

"Work alone is noble," said Carlyle.

"Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee," said Emerson.

Miss Stuck was not the sort of teacher one might call a friend. I was blessed with a few of those; kind souls who kept me alive, who comforted and counseled me, who opened my eyes and ears to art and philosophy and life. To them I hope I have expressed my gratitude already and elsewhere. Miss Stuck was of a different school, as it were. There was little of the maternal in her nature, at least as exhibited in her rather cold classroom. She was older than most of my teachers, of an earlier and more formal generation and not one for informality or nonsense. She was not, I should think entirely popular, or better say she saw no reason to cultivate popularity. She was there to do a job, do it well, and to some extent, Devil take the hindmost. Not the stuff of annual Christmas cards and Valentines. To be fair -- another of her absolutes -- she was invariably kind, specially when met in later life, and always eager to hear from former pupils what they may have done since. She must have grown used to disappointment there, though she would never have said so if so. (That sentence smacks of showing off, of which she did not approve, though I remember her smile when she quite rightly called me on just that, more than once.)

She taught me what a sentence was; it's parts and how it worked. She taught me that above all else and despite the thickness of my skull and my ignorance of my own language. She taught me that in the structure was the purpose. She taught me that the intention, my intention meant nothing unless it was expressed in the best selection and order of the words. From her I finally learned why paragraphs happen and why they end (properly) when and where they do. She taught me that an essay was not a task but an attempt. She made me write, and write as well as I might because even I might have something to say. She made a revelation out of rules and rote and work. How hard a thing that must have been to do!

I will not say I was altogether ignorant of grammar and the like when I met her. I'd been instructed in much of this before I came to her class, how could I not have been, even in a place like Grove City? So what then was so different in what she did from what had been done in all the classrooms through which I had already passed? That is a question I cannot satisfactorily answer even now. Perhaps it was simply time I leaned something that would really matter to me thereafter. I was already a reader. Perhaps she gave me the tools to do more and somehow convinced me at last that I might. Others had told me I was clever. Other teachers had encouraged me to write and praised what I'd written. Of praise she was sparing so maybe it meant more. All I can say is that somehow, from that unchanging lesson-plan on those unalterable index cards, she managed to open my eyes to the workings of something I assumed I either already knew or otherwise had no right to. She taught me what I owed to the words I used and to the language that might make of me something more than what I was without it.

For four decades then she went to work with an enviable optimism that into even the hardest heads she might pound a little sense. How did she not despair of the task?! I think she was confident of the soundness of what she taught. That may not be so easy nowadays, for good and bad. Teachers now, as I understand it, learn more of theory and methods and perhaps less of grammatical rules and the benefit of offering "Thought of the Day" quotations from great, white, dead men. I can't now imagine what might be involved in telling a student to memorize "The quality of mercy" and be prepared to recite it by the end of the week.  In many if not most ways the why of what she taught must by now be nearly as old fashioned as the what and how. There are those I do not doubt who benefited little or at least less than I did from her class. Certainly there was even then reason to question some of what she did and what she believed she was doing. I am glad she never did, or that if she did, she nevertheless still saw the sense in it.

Life requires change. A good life also requires that which does not. It is good to know that we are loved and to be told so. It is a joy to read and to own books better than we've any right to by income and formal education. There are things that it is simply good to know and things without which we could not learn anything new. I said that if I can now write anything more than my name that I owe this to Miss Stuck. I meant it. What she taught me has proved to be the means of every thought and sentiment I have expressed since and if I am not yet the writer she would have had me be, it is no fault of hers.

I wish her rest well earned and send after her my love, and no apologies for the noun. It is not, as she might have thought it, too strong. 

Dickens Lost & Found

Back to visit the old people in October, I was finally able to see for myself if the set of Dickens I sent was on the shelf of my hometown library.  In an earlier post I'd described buying and boxing up a full set of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens to donate.  Earlier still, I'd described in a post my horror at finding naught but busted Book Club editions, and old strays on the Grove City Community Library shelf.  Not true any more.

A full set, twenty-one little hardcover volumes, with the original illustrations are now available on the open shelf, where they belong.  Done and done.

When I was in the library anyway for the free WiFi, I announced myself, and asked if I mightn't have a picture of someone from the staff, posing with the set.

Here's Librarian Heather Baker with her favorite of the novels, Little Dorritt.

Lovely.

No secret, my less than happy experience of public libraries in general, and of the one in my hometown in particular.  Growing up, I had to lie about my address to even use the library.  (We lived outside of town and I had to claim my town-grandma's place as my own to take out a book.)  More than once as a child I was forbidden certain books from the general collection because some busybody librarian didn't think the title "appropriate" to my infant intelligence.  (That ended when my little, unassuming mother told the party at the desk that thereafter, I "could read any damned thing" I wanted, as she was my mother and it was nobody else's business to raise me.  Thus I first read Don Quixote, whores and all.  Still proud of the old girl for that brave day.)  My experience in most public libraries since has done little to convince me that most are any better than they should be and that most are almost infinitely, tragically worse than might be imagined.

That said, I still believe in the mission of the institution, respect the sincerity and enthusiasm with which most public librarians go about their business, and believe absolutely in the necessity of public libraries for the health and stability of the Republic.

I have however come in just the past few years to despair of anyone finding on their own anything much that's worth reading in a public library, the one in my hometown not excepted.  Before my donation, there was no copy of David Copperfield, no Oliver Twist or Great Expectations!  I walked the stacks this last visit and found but one, old, badly translated and much abused novel by Dostoevsky, but three Austen, no Middlemarch, no Vanity Fair.  Forget for a moment the great 19th Century masters.  I saw no Bellow, no Joyce, one Updike, no Beckett, and so on and on, nothing and nothing.

The Grove City Community Library, as now situated is a handsome building; brightly lit, inviting and well arranged.  The limitations of the space would not allow for any but the most judicious selection even if the staff were granted carte blanche with their acquisitions budget and every awful, bad and or busted old book was thrown out.  Still, what is there is far from good, much of it, and much that might, and ought to be isn't.

Why this exercises me so is not just outrage on behalf of Dickens' ghost, in this, the 200th anniversary of his birth. While I understand the argument that libraries must change to meet the new requirements of a changing community and new technologies, I still believe with all my inky old heart that nearly no one ever wanted to read a book they never saw, that more readers find the books they need by finding them on a shelf than will ever find them in a dedicated "search."  Public libraries must be as much about happy accidents as they are about reference and recommendation, or they are just the poor man's Google, with ugly carpeting and poor lighting.

Now at least some other, younger, unknown myself may come across, as I did, The Christmas Books.  Someone who may never have read any further than that, may find Barnaby Rudge.  Great Expectations may lead to the journalism, or "Boz," anywhere, on.

I was more than a little miffed that I had to ask if the library had received the books I'd shipped.  I was not pleased to have had not so much as a "thank you" for a donation made in spite of rather than in memory of my own childhood experience of the place.  (Please note that despite my very best intentions, I could not make it quite to the end of this without mentioning the insult.  Pooh.)  Nevertheless, I am convinced that what I've done, I did well and someday, should I have occasion still to return, I may see someone, some boy or girl, some old party or some recent immigrant -- they have those nowadays, even in Grove City, PA -- with his or her nose in a book I sent.

Perhaps the Spirits will give me a glimpse, some Christmas.

"Lead on!"

Sending Boz Away

I bought mine, new, when I was working at Stacey's in San Francisco. In those far-off days, this was the sort of thing bookstores, the larger ones anyway, kept in stock. I remember mine was in a dusty white box when I bought it. Someone fetched it down for me from some dangerously narrow overstock-shelf, high off the sales floor. (I suppose there was some discreet little sign on the actual shelf in fiction, mentioning the Oxford Illustrated Dickens, complete in 21 volumes, "above.") I don't remember the price I paid. This would have been in the late Eighties, I should think, so I can't imagine the set cost me more than one hundred dollars, though it may have been at least that, at least had I paid full retail, without my employee discount. I don't remember if I asked for a ride home with the whole set, as I didn't drive back then, or if I took the books home, on the M Car, in bags, or one or two at a time, rather than fetching the whole thing home at once. Never was much for holding off, so I probably had to at least open the box and roll around in them as soon as I'd paid for them. Of that, I'm quite sure.

My dearest friend, R., collects the set in an earlier and more attractive iteration from the 1960s, I think. The dustjackets aren't that rather awful wine color, mixed with orange and green and so on. His are brighter and more variously colored. The boards on his books, as I remember them, are better too, less plain and homely. Still, my own set has served me very well, ugly as it is. True, the same squarish, squat format that makes these books so sturdy and portable also jostles the illustrations out of place; so that the scene in prose on page 138 may be illustrated three pages previous to that or ten pages after. There are other obvious imperfections in the reproduction of both pictures and type. Doesn't much matter. For the money, new or used, these are well made books. They will last.

To my knowledge, we never carried the set "new" in my time at the bookstore where I now work -- maybe, before my time, probably, in fact, but not since. I don't know that the set was even still available as late as 2003, when I moved to Seattle. I do know that by then some dealers were already asking silly prices for it used. The price seems to have settled, at least online, at around two hundred dollars in the passing decade or so, which seems high to me, but not unreasonably so. I've sold it for that. In fact, we've bought and sold the set, used, at the bookstore more than once, to customers other than me, I mean. I've bought it used, so to say, twice. When a coworker retired a few years ago, after some decades' service, the Dickens seemed just the thing. Man doesn't own a television, or a computer. Doesn't even keep a phone. A full compliment of Dickens constitutes, in its way, a home entertainment center, admittedly of a rather Victorian kind, but then the gentleman in question was a rather Victorian gent. The set was sitting right there at the Used Books desk -- too big to go upstairs into Fiction. Perfect. I marked the thing down to cost, basically, we all chipped in and bought it for the fellow's parting gift. He seemed pleased. After that, I remember selling the set to someone no older than I must have been when I bought mine. I remember giving the young fellow a banker's box with that set, so that he could get them home. Him, I didn't give a discount. and then most recently, sold this last set to come in to date -- the set in these pictures -- to myself, again, roughly at cost, back around October of last year. The idea was to buy the books, box them and send them off to replace the shockingly shabby collection of odd Dickens volumes on the shelf in my hometown public library.



When I was back there in September, I went into the library regularly, to check my email, etc. on the library's computers. Now and then, I would have to wait for a terminal to become available. Then I'd wander a little through the stacks, such as they were. It is a small town, my hometown, and far from well off, mostly. When I was a child, the library was housed in a very old building, with bare wooden floors that groaned under even the smallest step, and shelves, being of at least equal antiquity, were likewise swayed with years, if never really with any notable weight of books. The library now is new, brightly lit where the old was dim, clean when the old was dirty. Everything about the new library is essentially better. Everything, that is, but the books. The books are still bad; either bad in the sense of being not very good books, or in bad condition, or both. None in such bad shape, may I say, at least to my eyes, as the few sorry copies present of just a few books by Charles Dickens.

There's nothing in my experience of public libraries in recent years, libraries from Seattle to Southern California, and from Wisconsin to Wyoming, to suggest that this disgraceful state of things was in any way unique to my hometown. In a beautiful new library building very near where we live, I found just one or two books by Austen on the shelf, and those were sorry things; nothing by Gaskell, nothing by Eliot but Middlemarch in multiple grubby copies, and so on. Our own local branch is a charming old building, handsomely restored, with nothing in it. When I inquired there a few days after it reopened after repairs, I found that the answer to everything missing was that other books, good books, even great books were available mostly via "interlibrary loan." If the browser, like me, was not entirely clear on that concept, this is not unlike being issued a "voucher" for an overbooked flight, or offered a coupon for one's canceled entrée.

We could order you a copy of Great Expectations from elsewhere, perhaps one without detached covers...

... OR, would madame rather have one of these lovely -- available -- titles by the ever-popular LaVyrle Spencer?

Anyway, feeling most uncharacteristically civic-minded last September, I approached the desk in my hometown public library and offered to replace their disgraceful hodgepodge with a set of actual, readable Dickens. (No, really, I was nice, I swear.) Dickens bicentennial birthday was February of this year. I wanted there to be a set of his complete works in that library where someone might find them, someone like my younger self, perhaps a first time reader, or someone like my present self but without the means of having a set of his or her own. A good idea, did everyone agree? The answer was, yes, please. Smiles, skeptical smiles, but smiles all 'round.

True to my word, I came back to Seattle, and sent the set of Boz. The books I sent were unread, pristine copies all. I put each dustjacket in a new mylar-cover I bought. I packed them carefully and included a letter reminding the librarian of our conversation.

Well, some months later, having had nothing in the way of acknowledgement of my gift, yes, I finally could stand it no longer and I called to see if the books had arrived. They had. Thanks. Oh. Well, were they on the shelf in time for Boz's birthday? No. Not yet. Oh.

And that, my darlings, was that. I'm ashamed to say how often I've been to the hometown library's rather primitive website, in search of any listing for the books I sent. If the books are on the shelf now, I can't tell. They may be in the library's inventory by now, they may not. They may never have made it out of the box into which I packed 'em. They may, those lovely books, have been put out on the stoop for the mice to nest in. From the little I know of unsolicited library donations, even or perhaps specially those already discussed with a smiling staff, that set of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens may have been busted up, or put out for a yardsale.

Whatever their fate, it is long since out of my hands. I won't ask after them again. I can only hope those books, one way or another, have found new readers somewhere out there in the wide world.

"'Hope, you see, Wal'r,' said the Captain, sagely, 'Hope. It's that as animates you.'" Who am I to argue the wisdom of dear Captain Cuttle? Hope it was that animated me. Hope I still have, and librarians be damned.

A Melancholy Truth

Here's a sorry state of things. While I was back in the hometown, visiting with the old people, almost every day I drove into town to go to the library and check my email on one of the public computer stations there. Wonderful service. Indeed, the community library back home is now an altogether brighter and friendlier establishment, even much improved from what it was just a few short years ago, and nothing like the dusty knot-hole of a place I remember from childhood. The handsome new interior of the library, and the building as a whole, is filled with light. The furnishings and appointments no longer suggest salvage or at best the second hand, and the computers, I was particularly pleased to see, were modern, fast and well regulated by a bright and attentive staff. It would not be too much to say that I actually looked forward to going to the library every day while I was home. Never thought I would be able to say any such thing.

It is well established by now that I do not think much of public libraries in anything but the abstract. The idea is a vital one. My actual experience of most public libraries, large and small, in almost every place I've lived has been, at best, a mixed bag. In my experience, well-off communities have nicer library buildings, better art, etc., but are no more guaranteed an interesting, or even adequate collection of books than their poorer relations in smaller community and or county systems. If anything, the pressure to keep current with new technologies and the like, while improving systems like inter-library loans, have only further compromised the collections of even the greatest public libraries I've known personally (like Seattle and San Francisco, ) so that traveling the stacks in even the biggest public libraries can now feel like shopping in a thrift shop. It's ugly, and depressing to think of what may well have been discarded to make room for meeting halls, mobiles, and grand staircases leading essentially to... cubicles.

The public library of my childhood was dark, unfriendly, dirty and antiquated even by the standards of the day. The women who worked there were mean, most of 'em, no other word for it, or they were just girls who might just as cheerfully volunteered at summer Bible camp. None the less...

I read Cervantes for the first time in dusty corner of that old building, and Dickens in another, that last in the summer, with only one of those incredibly noisy big circulating fans to keep the place cool. Well, now here's the sorry bit. When I was waiting for my turn at one of the very busy computer terminals, I strolled around the place, admiring this and that, and checking out the inventory, as it were. As with all my explorations in public libraries over the past few years, I did not see nearly enough books. Just me, maybe. What was painfully true was that the state of some of the inventory was pitiable. This then the whole shelf of Dickens, such as it was.

This is just tragic. Donated book club editions, in cheap cardboard covers, ancient bits and pieces from broken sets, and most if not all of these old books hopelessly broken themselves.This, the sorry state of The Christmas Books.

Won't do. Now, I'm not the sort of person who makes donations to public libraries. I now longer use public libraries much if at all, except it seems on vacation. Moreover, as a used books dealer, I have seen too often and first hand the unhappy consequences of most book donations to anything other than the annual book sales organized as fund-raisers. I've personally seen beautiful old books, in some cases rare and valuable books, donated through the front door of a public library, and promptly tossed out the back door and into a dumpster by staff either ignorant of their value or too stupid or lazy to bother ascertaining just what value, if any, an old book might have. (I'm also convinced that most special collections librarians are just silly snobs. I've seen perfectly common books displayed under glass because they were part of a donation from some forgotten potentate, and valuable books treated like back-issue magazines, covered in stickers and ink and dumped in bins like kindergarten toys.) Hell, I've seen a book purchased for a dollar at a library sale, sell out of a used shop a week later for enough money that the sale of that one book that might have bought the library from which it came... a new computer.

I do not recommend trying to give a librarian a book. I sympathize with the librarians, I do. Most books people try to give them are probably every bit as useless and unappetizing as many of the books those same people have probably already tried to sell some used books dealer. Still, at least the dealers will take a look...

But, anyway, what the hell? All I could do was try, right? I happened to know where a perfectly wonderful, unread, complete set of The Oxford Illustrated Dickens could be had, cheap. The Great Man's birthday is just around the corner. The folks I talked to at the library about this seemed genuinely enthused. Worth doing, I thought.

So this then is an experiment, as well as part of what I hope will prove a larger effort to mark of the occasion of Charles Dickens' Bicentennial. Despite my prejudices, and my past experience, I want to thank the hometown library for the use of the joint, and maybe put Dickens into the hands of some other little bumpkin. Worth doing?

Daily Dose

From Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis

SMALL TOWN

"All of them perceived that American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary."

Too Close

"In a small town, past and present stand side by side, almost too close to tell the difference." - Terry Teachout

They've painted Broad Street. When the first little mall opened on the edge of town, and a Kmart came in, there was a sense of progress and expansion, not unlike the excitement I remember in my childhood when my hometown got our first fast food restaurant, a Burger King, was it? Just up the street from the feed store, anyway, easy walking distance from the high school. I remember people lining up in their Sunday clothes for the grand opening, eating burgers in the parking lot, the ladies trying not to get ketchup on their gloves. (It was summer, but yes, ladies still wore gloves then. That's how long ago this was.) When, some years later, after I was long gone, "the Walmart" opened in town, and the the giant outlet mall opened just up the road from where my parents live, spreading out over acres of what had been disused farmland, wetlands, and scrub, the little main street that had constituted nearly my whole experience of "town" in childhood, ceased to be anything much but an anachronism. Such is the fate of small towns in America.

But, it seems, they have embraced their fate, back home. An anachronism, should it survive just long enough, can become quaint, it seems, even historic. All the storefronts in my hometown are, as I said, now freshly painted. Some of the accumulated "improvements" of my childhood have been taken off: false fronts, drop-ceilings, modern doors, and the original details restored. There are curbstones running the length of the street and affixed to three of the four sides of each are brass plaques, each commemorating some local connection to history: a planned but never built streetcar system, a soldier killed in the Civil War, the broom factory founded in the mid 19th Century, eventually inherited and operated by my grandmother's last beau. The whole town now looks much as it might have down in my grandmother's day, though with cross-walks, modern traffic lights, etc. The effort is admirable, at least in so far as making the place considerably prettier. Clearly, a great deal of hard work went into this renovation, a very real concern to retain something of small town charm and a lively diversity of working businesses has motivated a major effort. And if the fierce insistence on period authenticity -- though what period, or periods are meant to be invoked is a fair question -- has resulted in new layers of anachronisms: tattoo parlors in 19th Century storefronts, a bar in what was a dry town, etc., on the whole, the effect is heartwarming.

The place is much as I remember it, just not terribly real. Everywhere there is evidence of a much cleaner, more harmonious, more uniformly dainty sensibility than ever truly occupied this ground. Historically, it was a town of shopkeepers, true, but also of mine and mill workers, farmers, hired-hands, and ditch-diggers. True, there is still a Presbyterian college that has dominated the place for most of a century, and a pretty campus it still is. But the Klan was here in the twenties, if not before. Those good Presbyterians and the Methodists and the rest, once excluded Catholics wherever and whenever they could. Blacks were once all but unknown here, even down to the days of my own childhood, but now stops on the underground railway are commemorated as if the place had been Quaker. I understand the urge to prettify the place, but it is important too to remember just what a narrow, bigoted, Babbitty place this little corner of Pennsylvania once was, and, sadly, all too evidently still may be, behind the pretty painted doors.

Witness one of the houses my mother grew up in. Her parents were poor. It was the Great Depression. Her father rented an old wreck of a house; no plumbing, no heat but fireplaces and a wood-stove, the windows patched with blankets. They lived there because the rent was ten dollars a month. The house was not in town, but out the road, in the country. Town was too expensive then. When I was home, my parents & I went to dinner at a restaurant that sits just next door to the stone house my mother lived in through some very cold, uncharitable winters. Now this house is a registered historical location. It has been, since it was built in the 18th Century, a tavern and coach house, a stop on the old pike frequented by traders, soldiers, migrants west. It was a hotel. Later, it was a roadhouse, with all the usual dancing, drunks, violence and whores. And for a while, it was a rented home of last resort for a poor miner and his cold family.

It is only the quaint condition of the 18th Century tavern to which it has been restored, it is only the clean, respectable past that is memorialized in the gift shop full of faux colonial pieces, Amish quilts and Taiwanese brickabrack. Now maybe that's as it should be, and maybe it isn't, but that's how it is. The past is what we make of it, I suppose. I can't help looking at that old stone house, pretty as it now is, pretty as my hometown now is, without at least a thought for what's been painted over, restored away, intentionally forgotten.

But then, I don't really have to live in the place. I'm still grateful for that.