Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

by Anne Fadiman

Like most people with a high tolerance for clutter, George maintains a basic trust in three-dimensional objects. If he wants something, he believes it will present itself, and therefore it usually does. I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.

My defense went like this: Our English collection spanned six centuries, and to shelve it chronologically would allow us to watch the broad sweep of literature unfold before our very eyes. The Victorians belonged together; separating them would be like breaking up a family.

Our transfer of books across the Mason-Dixon Line that separated my northern shelves from his southern ones took about a week.

We kept my Middlemarch, read at eighteen, in which were registered my nascent attempts at literary criticism (page 37: “Grrr”; page 261: “Bullshit”; page 294: “Yccch”);

When I saw the movie Quiz Show, I squirmed in my seat because the literary-hothouse atmosphere of the Van Doren menage was all too familiar. Like the young Van Dorens, the Fadiman children were ritually asked to identify literary quotations. While my mother negotiated a honking traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway en route to a restaurant, my father would mutter, “‘We are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.’ Source?” And Kim and I would squeal in chorus, “‘Dover Beach’!”

I believe that although my father and E. B. White were not misogynists, they didn’t really see women, and their language reflected and reinforced that blind spot.