Open (The) Door, When Writers First Learned to Write

by Steven Gilbar

Twenty-nine writers, including Dickens, Kipling, Mencken, Welty, and Dillard, recount their first memories of reading.

Genres: Anthologies

Unknown Binding

First published November 1, 1989

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Open Door is a delightful compendium of fictional expressions and nonfictional accounts of learning to read in youth; the common thread, and one familiar to me, is the degree to which the behavior, once learned, gains primacy and becomes all-encompassing, assuming a prominence and a dominance. Stories are repeatedly told of all one’s money going towards books, and then books being sold to buy others, as the urgency of both acquiring and reading them grows. Reading is often done to the exclusion of all, or most, else, including livelihoods and the remainder of money therefrom. Books are kept at hand under all circumstances, privacy and time in which to read is valued above all, and there is a persistent, nearly existential fear of exhausting material in youth, the result of the underestimation of the scope of material and the overestimation of ability, and time; in youth, there is not yet the comprehension that the endlessness of the options are part of what makes reading so great (there is also the pleasure, for the reader of The Open Door—a series of implicit arguments for why these readers became writers—of recognizing that its ranks have further contributed to that endlessness). The other details of life fall away to speculation, with readers reduced to assuming, like Eudora Welty, that eating and bathing and perfunctory conversing occur between trips to the library.

There is a reverence to the treatment of books—they are borrowed with the understanding that they are to be treated in such a manner as to be returned “soon and clean”—corresponding to the reverence of reading, as if there is an understanding that the value of the books transcends that of the value of whatever was used to acquire them; they are recognized as “a means to everything that would make me happy,” and even the trappings of the books themselves—such as titles and authors, which H.G. Wells memorably dismisses as “mere inscription on the door to delay me in getting down to business”—can be perceived as obstacles to the sacred act of reading, as if it is in fact reading in the abstract, above all, that’s what’s key. This sort of purity of feeling recurs, with Rudyard Kipling saying of a verse, "I knew nothing of its meaning but the words moved and pleased.” Dylan Thomas said that, upon discovering ballads, “I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever. There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable.” Reading, to readers, is not only virtually their lifeblood, but almost literally so, as for Upton Sinclair, who deemed the ability to read as rendering him sufficiently “able to take care of myself”; M.F.K. Fisher describes reading, once learned, as no longer “something to beg for,” a guarantor of self-sufficiency. But beyond that, there is a transcendence to what H.L. Mencken described as “a new realm of being” (from personal experience, it is hard to categorize this sentiment as hyperbole); little wonder that the young Jean Rhys visualized God as a book.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who cannot remember when or how she learned to read, it is fascinating to read of how others, especially famous writers..who had to love reading, learned to read.

[Tim Nason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great little anthology of extracts about reading from a good range of writers.

[Godine Publisher & Black Sparrow Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Open Door is a reader's delight, a book to be savored, to browse through time and again. It has an endearingly personal tone, as if the reader had been invited to sit down for a short visit with each of the writers."
— Heather Vogel Frederick, Christian Science Monitor

"Recommended highly for life-long bookworms and readers."
— ABA Booklist

"Amusing, charming, powerful at times, the book is a small treasure."
— The Cleveland Plain Dealer

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sweet little book to read in one sitting.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

An appreciation of the power of the written word. See also "Reading Rooms."