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By Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Associate
Professor of English
 As
a child I had books instead of playmates; and, when I grew
older, I learned to use books as the basis for my friendships.
One of my earliest memories is of my father reading to me
from the Mary
Poppins' series when I was about four-years-old. Daddy was quiet, withdrawn,
and not much given to physical affection; therefore, being allowed to cuddle
against him in "his" living room chair, while he read aloud to me, was very special
indeed. If anyone interrupted him during this time - if my mother came into the
room to ask him something, for example - he would start over a few sentences
earlier, in order to preserve the story's continuity. As soon as I realized this,
I began to figure out ways to interrupt him myself so as to make the reading
last longer.
I don't remember exactly when I learned to read by myself, although I know that
my two older sisters taught me to write long before I entered the first grade.
Because my sisters were 13 and 11 years older than me, I was an only child as
well as a youngest child, and I spent most of my time reading. Most of the volumes
that I read were
ones that I simply discovered in the bookshelves of my parents' home in Maryland
and my grandmother's house in Pennsylvania. I read adult books that were much
too old for me; my mother, for example, used to tell how I asked her, at age
seven, what a "pimp" was, and when she demanded to
see what I was reading - a very racy biography of Rodin entitled Naked Came
I - I smugly replied that she had taken me to see Rodin's sculptures at the
Baltimore Museum of Art, so surely it was O.K. for me to read a book about him.
(I don't think she ever explained what a pimp was, however.)
I also read children's books that were much, much older than I was - from vintage
Nancy Drews, with blue silhouettes of Nancy in flapper dress on the orange flyleaves,
to turn-of-the-century girls' stories and boarding-school
romances like Marjorie's Busy Days and A Little Miss Nobody, to
the complete works of Gene Stratton Porter. It was only much later, in my teens,
that I began to realize what a strangely old-fashioned, secondhand sort of
childhood I had had, not only because I was brought up among people much older
than I was,
but also because I spent so much time devouring books that no one else my age
had ever heard of, let alone read.
I especially liked reading these musty, fragile, forgotten old volumes at my
grandmother's house, where they were quarantined behind the glass doors of old-fashioned
bookcases - and not in the library or the living room, where the proper books
were kept, but in a tiny room
upstairs known as "the sewing room" because an antique Singer sewing machine
that no one ever used was kept there. I actually read these books in the library,
in an enormous leather-covered rocking chair that had belonged to my grandfather,
and that was big enough for even an adult to curl up inside. It was with a special
thrill that I would read, on the flyleaf of one of these books, the name of my
mother or her sisters and brothers,
inscribed "to a very sweet girl" or "to a good boy" by some long-dead great-great-aunt
over 50 years before. Part of the thrill came from the poignant feeling that
someone else, no matter how distant, had also rapturously followed, like me,
the doings of Dora Deane or one of those other goody-goody heroines. (I feel
the same poignancy when I leave a movie theatre by myself, knowing
that I've shared an emotional experience with dozens of others but am now quite
alone again.) In fact, I used to ask my parents, somewhat nervously, if they
had not also "liked to read" when they were little - because, despite the number
of books they owned, I never saw them reading anything but the
newspaper.
By the time I reached high school, I knew that I had had an unusual childhood,
in part because I had read such an oddly large and various assortment of books.
I also discovered, however, that there were other people like me. And I quickly
learned that one of
the few pleasures as profoundly intimate as reading someone's written thoughts
is talking to someone else, in person, about that experience. From that point
on, sharing books, conversing about books, and reading books aloud have been
important aspects of all my friendships and romances.
Long after I had grown up, I came upon Eleanor
Farjeon's marvelous collection of fairy tales for children, The Little
Bookroom, and felt a keen affinity with the book's narrator. As a child,
the narrator says, she had read all the leftover books that overflowed from her
parents' bookshelves and were stored in the little room of the
title - just as I once savored the forgotten riches in my grandmother's sewing
room. A few years later, when Farjeon's long out-of-print book was reprinted
by Dover Press, I bought a copy for an eight-year-old nephew who lived half a
continent away from me. The next time I saw him, he wanted
to talk about The Little Bookroom, because he didn't know anyone else
in the world who had read it. Like me, he had discovered that books were an intrinsic
part of who he was and of how he would relate to everyone
else.
This essay was the result of an assignment
for students and faculty alike in a course titled "Book
as Text, Book as Object." Professor Sweeney co-taught the
course with and Professor Susan Schmidt of the visual arts
department.
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