In my Book of Books, I appended an asterisk to those Famous Books I’d personally selected: Madame Bovary, The 42nd Parallel, The American Political Tradition. Unlike my earlier teenage childhood diaries, which made me squirm when I looked through them, Bob’s entries, I determined, would make me proud.
Even as a preschooler, I instinctively believed that certain picture books were better than others; they had silver and gold embossed medals on their covers or had managed to survive alongside boldly colored stories despite black-and-white engraved illustrations. I could sniff out books that were clearly unworthy like a bedbug dog. Bad books were cheap and poorly produced; they had garish illustrations or dumbed-down text; they were about visits to the dentist or stupid-looking bears trying to get along. Who thought this was okay for young people? If you’re trying to lift a child up, the last thing you should do is talk down to her. I took this underestimation personally.
This is how you get primed from an early age to worship at the canon’s imposing altar. In high school, I enrolled in AP English, where we read only Great Books: Faulkner and Joyce and Conrad and Fitzgerald. Our teacher was a believer in modernism and close textual reading. I was not. Where were all the proper nouns? I struggled to keep my eyes on the page and not on my teacher’s nose, which, with its spiky mesh of hair protruding from each nostril, drew me in like a beacon. At any moment, he might demand we locate a specific phrase from Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, and even insist that we understand it. I could ill afford to get lost in the tangle. He was especially fond of quizzing us on the first three pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I lived in fear of not knowing something about the moocow.
It never once occurred to me to skip my assigned reading, no matter how unappealing. I even went one maddening step further: I read it early. I read everything as soon as it was assigned, did all my homework, wrote my essay, and handed it in. This drove friends and roommates crazy, but what they didn’t understand was that I was driven by fear, and also, perversely, by a form of laziness and impatience. I really wanted to just get it over with now and move on to the next item. There were lots of books needing to be read.
I remember the precise moment in grade school when I bailed on procrastination, which up until then had been my standard modus operandi, as it is for most daydreamy children. I was pushing a pencil through the grayish-pink carpet of my bedroom, avoiding one task or another, when I had an epiphany: If something needed to get done, I could put it off and worry about it and then do the actual task. Or I could just do it right away and then go back to pushing pencils through the carpet. I chose the latter, because it meant that in the aggregate you had less to do. Also, you had less chance of getting in trouble for not getting something done. Cowed by authority, I went about life convinced that, at any moment, someone would give me a good, hard look that said, “You there. Yes, you. Did you really do what you were supposed to do?” I was not going to get caught.
Conquering The Norton Anthology of English Literature felt fundamental to this plan. The most required of all requirements, the Norton Anthology is the bedrock of every college English literature survey, and the foundational text for any English major. By college graduation, anyone who considered himself remotely literary was supposed to have a well-worn duct-taped copy on his shelf.
“The Norton Anthology was based on the idea that it actually matters to plunge into a comic masterpiece written in the 1300s or to weep at a tragedy performed in the 1700s,” Stephen Greenblatt, one of its editors, has explained. “It is vitally important to remind people that the humanities carry the experience, the life-forms of those who came before us, into the present and into the future. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.”
I wasn’t the only person to bow before the Norton’s demands. “It turns out many students—without the compulsion of their teachers—feel that they really shouldn’t go through their undergraduate years without reading the great imaginative works of the past,” Greenblatt said. This describes precisely how I felt in the fall of 1989, my first semester in college, a budding English major. If I was worth anything as a reader, I was going to read that Norton—if not quite cover to cover, then at least enough to constitute a thorough sampling of the essentials, no matter how mind-numbing.
So eager was I that I preenrolled in the English Department’s yearlong survey of English literature, where the Norton ruled supreme. I would soon know “the basics,” once and for all. At the Brown bookstore I splurged on a brand-new copy, a brick of a book containing 2,616 paper-thin pages, which I intended to make bountiful use of so that every sign of wear signified an acquired bit of knowledge. My Norton, the first volume of the book’s fifth edition, included Shakespeare and Swift and Johnson. It also contained Middle English lyrics like “Fowls in the Frith” and “My Lief Is Faren in Londe,” along with the interminable “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” part of the so-called Alliterative Revival, written in unfathomable Old English verse. (“The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes,” etc.)
And it contained Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a nefarious bit of doggerel disguised beneath a deceptively enchanting title. Is there any more dispiriting way to enter the canon than The Faerie Queene? I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Years later, I took comfort in the unimpeachable literary critic Terry Castle’s own recollection: “I still have my old paperback copy of Spenser’s poem and just looking at it—the pages and pages of bewildering verse in tiny print, the demented little crib notes I’ve scribbled in the margins—can induce in me a sort of mental seasickness … so dense with weird archaisms and arcane symbols, bizarre characters, confusing plots and subplots.”
But I didn’t know Castle’s work at the time. When I looked around my English class, the other students appeared to be fully absorbed. It didn’t occur to me in my greenness that they might all just be exceptionally persuasive fakers. I took it as an indictment of my ill-preparedness.