A Home Without Books

This room of yours, my Jenny, looks 
A change from mine so full of books, 
Whose serried ranks hold fast, forsooth, 
So many captive hours of youth, — 

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Jenny” 1870

The speaker of this Victorian poem—a dramatic monologue—is a man who has visited the room of a prostitute, whose name gives us the title of the poem. The encounter with Jenny is unconsummated; exhausted by a night of dancing, the young woman has fallen asleep and thus become the unconscious (in all senses) occasion of a long mediation on the part of her unnamed john. The speaker seems throughout to be nervously negotiating his connection with Jenny. Is she like or unlike him? His sense of distinction from the sleeping prostitute depends on many things: his gender, of course; the class difference that allows him to pay her in gold coins that he nestles in her hair as she slumbers, but also something that combines the two—the profound difference between his lodgings and her room. Quite apart from anything else, Jenny’s room has no books it, only a mirror on which past clients used their diamond rings to scratch their names. The speaker is so invested in his connection to and possession of books, that later in the poem he actually turns Jenny into one: “You know not what a book you seem,/Half-read by lightening in a dream.”

This imaginary room in a Victorian brothel is one version of a home without books. The homes of some of my childhood friends were others. And here, my mother played, dare I say it, the part of the speaker of “Jenny.” “No books,” she would say, shaking her head. “Not one, “I would say, or sometimes, somehow, even more smugly, “only coffee table books.” My head shake would mirror my mother’s. Pity, superiority, complacency yes, of course. Also, a genuine love of books, a desire to sort people and things into binaries, and a reliance on what I have called the home/owner metonymy by which we have learned to judge (that is to say, “read”) people by the places they live.

Although I did not think about this at the time, my mothers’ bibliophile standards were a little strange, since she did not own many books and I never knew her to read one written for adults from cover to cover. In retrospect, I see what I identified as a puzzling failure to read as a symptom of what must have been undiagnosed and quite serious and life-limiting ADHD. My mother certainly read about books in the New York Times; once I moved away from home she would send me clippings of reviews from the Sunday paper. There is something about my 5-foot-tall mother, with her tiny waist, that makes me always think about size: the tiny crustless sandwiches she liked to eat, the coffee cups that fit inside the span of her small hands; the miniature purses, big enough for a pack of cigarettes, a few dollar bills, a lipstick and a picture of my father and me when I was small. The New York Times reviews, even the ones that spread out over several pages, were the just-right in the Goldilocks-world in which my mother lived—a world in which, as she made clear even as she read stories aloud to me, she was the small and not the middle-sized bear. An advocate for books if not a reader, my mother was, movingly, a proselytizer for those I wrote, especially my first, the one that was published during her lifetime. As soon as it was published, she ran out to every bookstore within her Manhattan orbit, buying copies if they had them and berating them if they did not. While I am not sure this campaign increased the actual readership of the book, it certainly helped sales figures. In the days when academic books actually sold, my first royalties—and thus my first trip to England—probably came courtesy of my mother. I was especially moved when she told me she had read the chapter section on “Jenny.”

By contrast with my mother, even and especially as a child, I never met a book that was too long for me—and there could never be too many of them. When we came on our biannual visit to New York during my childhood years living in Italy, my uncle the surgeon would take me to one of the secondhand bookshops in the Strand where a grateful patient would let “Doc’s niece” take anything she wanted off the shelves. No matter how many books I chose, they would be what I thought of as gone—consumed, swallowed—by the end of the trip. We never had to pack them or mail them back to Italy. I left them in my grandmother’s house, a growing library to which I returned every visit with an appetite for rereading.

Part of the reason for this voracious consumption—although only part—had to do with something I came to recognize as my defining skill, the one I always thought I would offer up for the common good under a socialist government. While other children could sing or dance or run fast, I could read faster than anyone I knew. As I (of course) began to read about this gift, I came to realize that in some sense it was an athletic skill, having to do with the coordination of eye and brain. Although I am pretty good at games that involve balls, sticks, and points, there is nothing about my level of skill in them that stands out, unless you take seriously one of my sons’ contention that I “play racquetball better than any old lady I know.” He does not know many racquetball-playing old ladies. My reading skills, physical in their origin, have also diminished with time, although I imagine I still read faster than most old ladies—and many young ones. Here is the key, the prosaic truth behind the magic trick: I see in larger chunks of prose than most people—rather than reading word by word, or word cluster by cluster, I can take in a remember small paragraphs at a time. This used to be the way people were taught to “speed read”—I don’t know whether it worked or whether speed-reading is still a thing. I think of Woody Allen’s comments that after having speed-read War and Peace, he concluded that it was “all about Russia.”

My physical gift, from wherever it comes, is a very useful one. Failing a socialist government, or a withering away of the state, I have always been happy to read long, boring texts and to summarize them for my friends. More importantly, my ability as a consumer of words has been extraordinarily helpful to my career as a scholar of Victorian novels, most of which are over 700 pages long and some of which are considerably longer than that. Just as NYT articles were the right size for my mother, Victorian novels are the right size for me: shorter novels can sometimes seem slight and fragile, my relation to them rushed and cheap. There is, of course, a downside to reading fast: until the invention of the Kindle, my biggest fear on planes, on vacations, and when I was anywhere at a distance from a bookstore or library, was that I would run out of books. Like a snake who must be constantly supplied with mice, like a hummingbird eating through her weight in volumes, like a compulsive eater, I lived with an anxiety about scarcity.

For a long time, I did everything I could to buy and borrow books, which meant, among other things, that I was always trying to find a place to put them. Sometimes I think I became a professor in order to have unlimited library access—and an office full of bookshelves. As a graduate student I turned every alcove into a library. One of the things I liked best about my big shared apartment on Spruce Street in Philadelphia was a small windowless room I colonized for my collection and first enacted my fantasy taxonomy and alphabetization. The latter backfired when a rabbit I inexplicably co-owned with my now-husband, ate all the M’s. The gap in the collection persists in attenuated form to this day—a geological trace of an ancient disaster.

All of this history makes it hard for me to admit that my house is no longer full of books. It is of course not that I don’t read books, but that they are, for the most part, no longer so visible in my home. My Kindle app informs me that I have about 2000 across various devices. 

My husband gave me my first Kindle for my birthday some 20 years ago, when they were still new. I was not, at first, delighted with the gift, for two reasons: first, because I thought of myself as a material girl, particularly when it came to paper, ink, and leather; and second, because I classified the gift as an “electric device,” a category (vacuum cleaners! cell phones!)  I had long made clear I found unacceptable for birthday presents. It took me two days to fall in love. There was only one item on the Kindle when Scott gave it to me—the complete works of Thomas Hardy. I believe they had cost $3.99. Scott’s choice of Hardy was characteristically spot-on for this fabulous gift giver. I had a complete Hardy on the top shelf of my office bookshelf, but it was too high for easy reaching, and the individual volumes, encased in green tooled leather, were in some cases too fragile to read. The electronic file was, I realize now, quite clumsy; it was hard at that time to go back without losing your place, and the word search was next to useless in a text this big. I chose to read with the grain of the item, fitting myself into its chronological structure as I read all the novels in one long immersion. I found the Kindle pages to be a revelation; I could adjust the size of the crisp black font so I could gulp down one screen at a time. The novels were great—the short stories, read together a revelation. This was a different Hardy, a different relationship between my eyes, my hands, and my brain. For the first year, I almost always chose “Complete Works” of beloved and canonical authors: Dickens, Trollope, Eliot. Mostly it was rereading; reading with a difference.

Over time, Kindle radically expanded its catalogue of available books: I would check in every few weeks to see if they had an obscure M.E. Braddon novel, or whether their mystery section had published another piece of third- or forth-tier Golden Age detective fiction. I also like to think that the Kindle, bought with so much love by my husband, saved my marriage: the backlit Kindle has completely eliminated the problem of reading in a shared bed. I have found more generally that I love reading in the dark, especially outside: that it adds to the slight thrill of doing something outside that was meant to be done inside—the thrill that has inspired countless sales of outdoor sofas and kitchens among the affluent.

Slowly, over time, the volumes and the furniture that held them have disappeared from my home. I still have bookshelves in the hall, but I rarely open them. I still have piles of books in my bedroom, but they are tucked away largely unvisited in my corner shelf that holds pictures of relatives, a set of Astros good luck candles, and a series of baskets that promise the organization of charging cords and cubes for the various devices on which I now read. After Harvey decimated my cookbook collection I turned more and more often to cookbooks online. (Like my rabbit, the floodwaters were selective—reaching only to the “M”s and below, so above “M” I have hard copies of Indian and Italian cookbooks, but nothing, for example, Mexican or Thai.)

The books I actually use for research and teaching are piled onto one small bookshelf behind the desk Scott built for me early in the pandemic as a Zoom station. There is no space to alphabetize, and the shelves are not deep enough for many of the books to stand on their sides. If they were neater, they might look like the kind of decorative arrangement that you see in home decorating magazines—inconveniently stacked against any attempt to read them. But they are not neat, which makes the whole (non) arrangement look more like a pyre, or perhaps an altar—a sacred space of disordered materiality. It is also something of a time capsule; my Austen novels are all Broadview editions, purchased together to convince students from tree or four years ago to do the same. My edition of Bleak House, on the other hand, dates from three decades ago. Of course, it is full of notes, but it is not quite the full text; the binding came loose and parts of chapter XX (a favorite of mine) have entirely disappeared. Every year I promise myself that I will get a new edition—and I think I actually have one—and each year I return to the one with gaps and loose pages, as if in protest against the students who resist reading it because it has too many characters. My edition has, perhaps, fewer characters, and of course fewer pages, but, even over Zoom it speaks to the importance of reading and rereading.

I realized in the process of writing this entry, that what I have done is not so much to rid myself of books as to outsource them—to relabel them according to a work/home divide. My English department office is still full of books. When a student comes to office hours, especially a first-year student, I register that the act of crossing a threshold into a book-lined place can mark a moment of reorientation. Often such a student will ask if I have read them all. No, I say. And then, because it is true, “Mostly.” I still often engage in what I think fondly of as professorial theater: I get up, examine my bookshelves, pull down a volume or six. If my books are in some sense props, a way of setting a stage and an encounter, I think they are still important. I recognize though that these volumes, like those belonging to Rossetti’s speaker, housed offstage in the poem, mark a distinction between myself and the student, myself and many other visitors. “Real” books—the leather of them, and the closely printed pages, their covers, and their heft, are for conversation, and exchange—for show in what I still insist is not a terrible sense. For show, but also for show and tell.

My mother would be relieved to know that I still recoil when books are used for show in that other sense at home. I still shake my head at  the coffee table book, artfully displayed, or the stack of books angled for viewing and not reading. I prefer the dog-eared books in bathrooms, the unexpected and unstable pile on the floor that shows the books to be in use, the cookbooks with stains that almost obscure favorite recipes. I like books to be read, although I get no thrill when my Kindle, eager to count my progress, marks mine with the banner indication that I have finished. Perhaps what I like best, are signs of rereading, signs that the Kindle seems actively to resist. 

I have learned to live without many books, and without the display that living with them allows. I still, though, feel a small but persistent sense of shame that, except in my office, I am not living up to my identity as professor—or even as a visible transmitter of culture. I am nostalgic for my houses full of books, for objects that can be eaten by rabbits or dogs, or flooded and full of mold. The Kindle, though, remains a personal joy, a private collection where books-- long and short--dance like angels on the head of a pin.