Wednesday
Sorting through my parents’ children’s books—and the books I read as a child—is proving to be more emotionally fraught than I anticipated. The past weighs heavily so that each choice—whether to keep, to move on, or to throw—tears at me. Given that there are hundreds of such books, you can imagine my mental state.
Our collection includes books that meant something to my paternal grandparents and my great aunt Rose but probably not to my father. And books that he loved as a child but that seem no more than interesting historical artifacts to me. And books that I loved to death as a child that will mean nothing to my children when, in 10-30 years, they will have to deal with them if Julia and I don’t dispose of them first.
And then, of course, there are the books that were meaningful to them, which I’m being careful to keep.
All of this culling is occurring after my three brothers, my niece, and my nephew went through the collection. Nephew Fletcher took the Doctor Doolittle books and he and his sister split the Oz books (all 30 of them). Brothers David, Sam and Jonathan picked at books here and there, including the Tintin and Asterix books (in French). But it feels like they did no more than pick up a few pebbles from the shore.
I’ve mentioned before that, by having so many books, my parents essentially buried them so that I—and perhaps they—forgot they existed. Some obviously have not been handled since the day they were put on the shelves.
I have Proustian moments with some of what I’m seeing for the first time in decades. For instance, a colorful book on children from around the world stands out to me because I was given it when I woke up from a tonsillectomy at age 7. My throat was horrifically sore but this brightly colored book helped compensate. I’ve come across some beloved books, illustrated although not authored by Maurice Sendak, that I’d forgotten about, such as “What Can You Do with a Shoe?” (Wrong answers only follow.) I’ve also discovered some Winnie the Pooh books that are so worn that they are held together with rubber bands. My father had them as a child and read them to me.
So here’s a question: Do I hold on to them for sentiment’s sake, even though I have exact modern replicas in much better condition? And if I do, should I make sure to revisit them periodically rather than allow them to be buried? Or is enough to recall, somewhere in the back of my mind, that they lie somewhere in the collection, perhaps to be rediscovered in the future as I am rediscovering them now? I really don’t know.
The same question applies to my grandfather’s complete collection of Robert Louis Stevenson. These old leather bound books would fall apart if I opened them up to read them, and since I own modern editions of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, and A Child’s Garden of Verses—and since I can find all the rest on line or in the library—should I hold on to them? Or do I just display them as one does an antique china vase that one doesn’t use. Or, for that matter, an elegant clock that no longer works. (We have several of these.) Please tell me what you think.
Returning to our collection of children’s books that I began reporting on last week, memories are flooding back about the following:
–Rudyard Kipling was very important to us as children, especially the Just So Stories, The Jungle Books, and Captains Courageous. Returning to a story like “How the Elephant Got His Trunk” years later, I was astounded at the violence. Everyone flogs the little elephant for his “insatiable curiosity” but boy does he make them pay once he gets his trunk.
–Selma Lagerlof’s Wonderful Adventures of Nils, about a boy who shrinks in size and then flies all over Sweden on the back of a goose, introduced me to sadness and death, which I hadn’t encountered before in children’s literature. Still, I was enthralled by the adventures, which function as a Swedish geography lesson.
–Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle books were special to us, in part because my nature-loving father was so in love with them. He read all six or so of them to us.
–George MacDonald was big in my life (as he was in C. S. Lewis’s), especially The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. I was intrigued by At the Back of the North Wind but ultimately felt it to be suffocating, given the North Wind is a figure of death.
–And speaking of Lewis, I can’t leave out the Narnia books. Along with sThe Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, they towered over all other books of my childhood.
–All the Pooh books were also very big when I was younger, and I may owe my name in part to Christopher Robin. (“Robins,” with an “s,” is also a family name.) Many of the poems in When We Were Very Young and Now I Am Six I had memorized.
–E. Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, The Would-Be-Goods, and The New Treasure Seekers taught me the importance of point of view since the narrator—who tries unsuccessfully to hide his identity and pass himself off as a neutral reporter—is the older brother (as was I). That the five children in the family are all book lovers, especially of The Jungle Books, helped me identify with them. My youngest brother Sam, on the other hand, was more drawn to Nesbit’s fantasy novels, like The Five Children and It, The Book of Dragons, and The Phoenix in the Carpet.
—We own all of Mary Norton’s Borrower books, along with Bedknob and Broomstick (although I didn’t encounter the latter until later in life). I found them fun although not compelling.
–On the other hand, I was riveted by The Scarlet Pimpernel, which was just the kind of dashing adventure and love story that would appeal to a bookish kid like me. I remember the joy I felt when I discovered there were sequels.
–If we don’t own all 26 of the Lucy Fitch Perkins’s twin books, we certainly own most of them, almost all in first editions. Perkins’s books about twins of different nationalities and historical periods were immensely popular, and I especially liked the ones with adventures (like The Twins of the War of 1812).
–Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (upon which the movie Braveheart is based) strikes some as overly long, but I recall receiving this novel about William Wallace’s rebellion against the British as a Christmas present staying up all night reading it. The N.C. Wyeth pictures contributed.
–Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and its many sequels is a series about kids who have sailing adventures. I found the series somewhat tame (except one where they have to escape modern-day pirates) but my two youngest brothers loved them.
–I couldn’t get enough of Margery Sharp’s Miss Bianca books when I encountered them in 8th grade. We have all of them.
–We also have all of my mother’s Little Pepper Books. I enjoyed the first but wasn’t drawn to read the sequels, as she did.
–My father used to read us Booth Tarkington’s Penrod books, about a misbehaving boy who is partly modeled on Tom Sawyer. I wasn’t that kind of boy—I followed all the rules—but I was intrigued by his misadventures.
–Speaking of Tom Sawyer, we have not only that book and Huckleberry Finn but two further sequels, Tom Sawyer Aloft and Tom Sawyer Detective. All of which I loved.
–We enjoyed Jules Verne’s adventures. My brother Jonathan was drawn to his science fiction, like 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, but I preferred Around the World in 80 Days.
–We have all of E.B. White’s children’s books although the only one I remember reading was Charlotte’s Web. That one, however, haunted my imagination, especially Garth Williams’s image of the father going after Wilbur with an axe.
–I conclude with one of my very favorites, T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose. Lilliputian citizens, kidnapped by the 18th century captain who rescues Gulliver from sea, escaped and have been living ever since on an estate. Maria discovers them and then, together, they thwart her wicked guardians.
I can’t overstate the pleasure that these books brought me, and I have confined myself to noting the better ones. I haven’t even touched on others books we own, like ones from the Hardy Boy, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, and other series. And these are only the children’s books, not all the novels, plays, and poetry and essay collections. And then there are all the cartoon books and the mysteries and the art books and the literary theory and the travel books and the history books and the biographies and the nature books and the books on feminism and civil rights and…
We can’t keep them all—or rather, we technically could but then we’re back to my original problem, which is that too many books–or too many things–means that you can’t fully appreciate them.
So what would you do? Or what have you done? I’m hungry for answers.