Touchstones for writers

The Book That Changed My Life, subtitled “71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them” is the kind of work you can dip into during the holiday season and feel you have learned something. Edited by Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen, the book features mostly American writers talking about the book that led them round the bend – out of boredom, out of loneliness – into a brave, new world. In The Art of Possibility, Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander write that books help “in rearranging us, creating surprising juxtapositions, emotional openings, startling presences, flight paths to the eternal.”

The notion of books as a form of transport – as a way of freeing us from the prison of the room, of our own skin – lies at the heart of this book. Small-town Carolina girl Dorothy Allison sees a parallel between herself and the young, black girls in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. “I knew absolutely that Claudia was black and that The Bluest Eye was most of all about the hatred and contempt directed at little black girls, but in my white heart what rocked and shifted was my sense of great contempt directed also at me and mine.”

As a young girl, the English writer Kate Atkinson read “books.” Later, in school, she was forced to read “literature,” something that she studied in great detail did not merely read. “And it was magnificent, it was transcendental. It was the light at the end of Daisy’s clock, it was the wind howling above the moors above Howorth, it was the whale, for God’s sake.”

All of the writers here first learned to love books as children. James Atlas of Chicago was visiting Paris for the first time, and entered the iconic Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, where Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein used to hold court. The young man bought three books – all of them dealing with Chicago, so he could hear its accents, view its vistas once more, while on a trip to the Old World.

He bought Dangling Man by Saul Bellow, Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell and Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks. Brooks wrote about the black slums of South Side Chicago, but wrote about them in a formal voice, her poems following the strict forms of the sonnets and quatrains. If not that, she wrote very modern poems where echoes and internal rhymes piled up on each other like the wrecks of junked cars. Listen to “We Real Cool,” written for the pool players at the Golden Shovel.

“We real cool. We/ Left school. We/ Lurk late. We/ Strike straight. We/ Sing sin. We/ Thin gin. We/ Jazz June. We/ Die soon.” Its brief, terse lines with their one-syllable words sound like bullets bursting in a borough of Chicago hardened by poverty.

If that is short, then The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien is very long indeed. When Graeme Base first saw the thick book that his brother owned, he thought, “I will read all 1,086 pages of it? Are you kidding?”

But he did. “I can’t remember starting the book, but I can remember finishing it. I cried. How dare it come to an end? Only 1,086 pages? I wanted it to go on and on, not because I had escaped into another world – but because I had been utterly captivated by the romance, the fantasy, the sheer epic enormity of the thing. More a prisoner than an escapee!”

And if Tolkien’s opus was vast and meandering, another favorite of the writers here is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, for the intimacy of its voice. Before Salinger burst onto the American literary scene like a firecracker, the reigning novelists were Hemingway, with his macho novels, and Faulkner, with his novels of doom and decay in the American South. Sure, the self is also present in their novels, but the thumb mark of the “I” character, with its distinctive voice, captured the attention of an American reading public after the war.

Elizabeth Berg is one of them. Her English teacher, Mrs. Yeatman, had assigned Chaucer and Beowulf, which she dutifully read. “I read about J.D. Salinger because I’d heard about The Catcher in the Rye. What I’d heard was that it was dirty. My friend, Donna, who’d transferred to our lame school after being kicked out of her fancy private one, said no, Catcher was good . . . I opened the book and read the first sentence and thought, Huh!? And then I devoured the book and when I finished I went right back to the first page and started over again. I kept thinking, I didn’t know you could do this! I didn’t know you could write this way! It was so open. So close to the bone. . . “

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Let me also take this occasion to note the deaths of two close friends of mine, the writer, Mike de Guzman and Sylvia Mayuga. Mike wrote short stories, one of which I published in the third part of Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Literature, published by Anvil. He also wrote a pioneering short story for children called “Dalawa ang Daddy ni Billy” for which I wrote a blurb. This was published by Tahanan Books for Children and still selling in our book stores. He was also an advocate for LGBTQ  rights and an officer in several organizations working to spread awareness on HIV-AIDS here and overseas. Sylvia, or Mama Ibyang, wrote three books of essays that I admire greatly. Her Spy in My Own Country was a touchstone for me when I was starting to write personal essays. Her prose was lucid and lyrical, cutting right to the very heart of the matter. She was also a tireless advocate of women’s rights, environmental protection, and human rights in general. Godspeed, dear writers and friends, into a world beyond finity and pain.

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