Wednesday
I had the honor of addressing a University of Illinois bibliotherapy class recently—online, of course—and the teacher has alerted me to a 1919 novel about the subject. Oberlin librarian Valerie Hotchkiss sent me Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop, and although I’m only a few pages into it, I can already report that we are on the same page.
A placard in the bookshop announces,
THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED by the ghosts
Of all great literature in hosts;
We sell no fakes or trashes.
Lovers of books are welcome here,
No clerks will babble in your ear,
Please smoke—but don’t drop ashes!
And further on down:
Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
Let us prescribe for you.
Early on we see proprietor Roger Mifflin explaining to a young advertising salesman why he doesn’t advertise. As you read his explanation, recall that the novel was written in 1919, when the world was just emerging from not only World War I but a world-wide flu pandemic:
And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don’t know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it! People don’t go to a bookseller until some serious mental accident or disease makes them aware of their danger. Then they come here. For me to advertise would be about as useful as telling people who feel perfectly well that they ought to go to the doctor. Do you know why people are reading more books now than ever before? Because the terrific catastrophe of the war has made them realize that their minds are ill. The world was suffering from all sorts of mental fevers and aches and disorders, and never knew it. Now our mental pangs are only too manifest. We are all reading, hungrily, hastily, trying to find out—after the trouble is over—what was the matter with our minds.
If I may quote myself, I say something similar in the book I have just completed, which I’m currently sending out to agents. I too refer to a world war, but a later one:
In some ways, literature resembles religion: many people who barely give it much thought in ordinary times turn to it when life gets rough, just as they flood into churches following a cataclysmic event. During the London blitzkrieg, to cite one example, city bookshops sold out their poetry and their Jane Austen as well. People find themselves grateful that artists have provided these powerful words and images for moments when they really need them.
In his essay on “The Rise of English” (in Introduction to Literary Theory) Terry Eagleton points to the explosion of reading that followed World War I, which he says propelled literature to the forefront of academic disciplines. To quote again from my book:
If before the war the English ruling class saw literature as a way to soften striving women and rough working-class men, after the war sweetness and light seemed like a good idea for everyone, a way to make England whole again. Eagleton remarks that “it is a chastening thought that we owe the University study of English, in part at least, to a meaningless massacre.”
In his book Eagle quotes Professor of English Literature at Oxford George Stuart Gordon, who in 1922 wrote,
England is sick, and … English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.
This is very much how the bookseller in Morley’s novel sees things. At one point Mifflin implies that great books are better for us than lesser books, a point I also make in my own book:
It is small use to jeer at the public for craving shoddy books, quack books, untrue books. Physician, cure thyself! Let the bookseller learn to know and revere good books, he will teach the customer. The hunger for good books is more general and more insistent than you would dream. But it is still in a way subconscious. People need books, but they don’t know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence.
Mifflin then qualifies his remarks slightly as he explains his role as a bibliotherapist:
I am not a dealer in merchandise but a specialist in adjusting the book to the human need. Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a “good” book. A book is “good” only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you.
And further:
My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms. Some people have let their reading faculties decay so that all I can do is hold a post mortem on them. But most are still open to treatment. There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it. No advertisement on earth is as potent as a grateful customer.
Nina George’s novel The Little Paris Bookshop (2015)features a bookseller who does exactly this. I critiqued the novel for that, noting that, in my experience, it’s very difficult predict how a story or a poem will fit someone’s needs (as Roger Mifflin acknowledges). There’s also something off-putting about someone pushing a book in one’s direction and saying that it will be good for you. Far better to discover it on your own—or at least, think you are discovering it on your own. As the Roman poet Horace notes, the best literature is that which delights while instructing (Sir Philip Sidney calls this “medicine of cherries”), with initial emphasis on delight.
If you read enough, however, you’ll find books that will heal what ails you. Sometimes you’ll find the right book for you when scanning a bookstore shelf. At times in my life, sometimes the life-changing work has seemed to jump off the shelf and into my hand (although I’m willing to acknowledge this might just have been skillful marketing).
Mifflin makes one other point in the early pages that I thoroughly agree with. “Living in a bookshop,” he contends, “is like living in a warehouse of explosives”:
Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world—the brains of men. I can spend a rainy afternoon reading, and my mind works itself up to such a passion and anxiety over mortal problems as almost unmans me. It is terribly nerve-racking. Surround a man with Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Chesterton, Shaw, Nietzsche, and George Ade—would you wonder at his getting excited? What would happen to a cat if she had to live in a room tapestried with catnip? She would go crazy!
For gender balance, how about if we add (honoring the book’s 1919 publication date) Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, and George Eliot. But yes on a bookstore as a “warehouse of explosives.” To quote from my book once again:
Several times in these pages I’ve compared reading literature to playing with dynamite or waving a loaded gun, and many rightwing extremists would agree. They fear that once young readers—or readers of any age—immerse themselves in books, powerful feelings, ideas, and even movements will be unleashed.
In other words, rightwing book police and liberals like myself believe that books change us. It’s just that we liberals contend that, by challenging us, poems and stories cause us to grow, both as individuals and a society. We contend that, if literature is introduced so that it stimulates rather than bores students, students’ perspectives are widened, often in ways that are bound to unsettle traditionalists.
When fending off rightwing parents and reactionary school boards, administrators, teachers and librarians will sometimes point out that they’re just teaching stories, not radicalizing the young. But as Laguna Pueblo novelist Leslie Marmon Silko points out in her novel Ceremony, stories
aren’t just for entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.
So yes, stories and poems will get readers to think outside conventional boxes. But if they read good books as opposed to books that have been carefully selected as inoffensive (“shoddy books, quack books, untrue books”), they are less likely to succumb to the damaging and toxic narratives that are all around us. They will be better able to navigate society’s complexities, which includes dealing with a wide diversity of people.
Mifflin’s discussion of literature’s explosive potential draws a logical query from the ad salesman:
How is it, though, that libraries are shrines of such austere calm? If books are as provocative as you suggest, one would expect every librarian to utter the shrill screams of a hierophant, to clash ecstatic castanets in his silent alcoves!
Mifflin has a humorous, if not altogether convincing, reply:
Ah, my boy, you forget the card index! Librarians invented that soothing device for the febrifuge of their souls, just as I fall back upon the rites of the kitchen. Librarians would all go mad, those capable of concentrated thought, if they did not have the cool and healing card index as medicament.
And then:
[P]aradise in the world to come is uncertain, but there is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.
Amen to that.