The Faerie Queene also made one suspected failure official: I would never understand poetry. It was one of my many deficiencies as a reader, but it was perhaps the most damning. Poetry was practically a litmus test for literary credibility. Real book lovers loved poetry, yet for me it remained opaque. When I encountered poetry in a collection, I couldn’t help flipping the pages until the paragraphs reverted to the reassuring tempo of prose.
I’d started off, as most children do, with poetic promise. I adored nonsense verse, full of as much respect for Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein as the next second grader. In third grade, thinking I was possibly gifted when it came to verse, I wrote my first poem, a contemplative ode to the tree, which received a certain amount of praise from the teacher. It was at precisely this point that my ability to create and appreciate poetry stalled. I did have an idea for a follow-up effort, one about a road with two paths, which I shared with my mother. “I think that’s taken,” she said.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature was positively riddled with poetry, much of it in older forms of English that brought back eighth-grade memories of stumbling through The Canterbury Tales. I read the words dumbly, I reread them, I thought about what to eat for breakfast and about the StairMaster and about Joe, who with his rumpled rugby gear and prep-school face sat rapt during the entire discussion of The Faerie Queene and, what’s more, participated, his palpable appreciation leaving me shorn of depth and cultivation. Even Joe the rugby player got it.
I understood that The Faerie Queene was meant to transport me, but I failed to take flight. I never even got off the ground, my mind darting furtively to Joe, who always slid nonchalantly into his chair just moments before class began looking like he’d tumbled directly out of a frat-house bunk bed. My crush on him was unbearable and unquestionably apparent to all others in the class who no doubt looked on me with pity. Maybe Joe, too, hoped to meet someone “serious” in English. But surely he had his eyes set on the kind of girl who liked poetry; girls who liked poetry were more alluring. My romances with him and with verse felt equally hopeless. (Years later, on a moonlit night in Istanbul, I walked along, silent and deflated, as my boyfriend at the time and my friend Mindy rapturously quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins from memory in an escalating back-and-forth. I had only two poems memorized: “Clouds” and “The Woodpecker,” both by Shel Silverstein.)
Soon, and even worse, I encountered a class that completely defeated my pledge to finish assigned reading. All the other students in Martha Nussbaum’s “Love and Literature” philosophy course sat at attention as the exalted philosopher expounded on her own impenetrable book and others equally opaque while I mentally took off for SeaWorld. I couldn’t get through a single book she assigned, opening each one, slogging through two pages, and closing it, beaten. I couldn’t even manage To the Lighthouse, earning the black mark for those failed women who somehow get through a liberal arts education without developing a reverence for Virginia Woolf.
College was full of lessons about just how much I didn’t know. Despite what I’d learned growing up in a proud suburban school district, I quickly discovered that private education wasn’t just for kids thrown into Catholic school as a form of punishment. Boarding school was not, in fact, a Dickensian prison sentence. Even my “good” suburban high school wasn’t nearly as good as the “really good” suburban high schools—the ones in Brookline, Massachusetts, and Winnetka, Illinois. Lots of people knew a lot more than I did, and I was behind, no matter how diligently I completed my assignments.
I was haunted by the blackest scar on my record, one I never spoke of and rarely admitted to myself. When I’d moved to my new town back in second grade, I hadn’t been placed in the highest reading group, but in the second highest. It was a setback so humiliating that I never told my parents, and when I was later moved up to the higher group, it was an achievement I could share with no one. Perhaps that second-grade teacher had known something about me, some inherent intellectual flaw that I would never shake, no matter how hard I tried.
Worst of all was the realization that mere effort wouldn’t catch me up. I may have considered myself a “book person,” but that didn’t mean I was a good reader. My college classmates seemed to read better than I did, drawing meanings and making inferences I hardly noticed. They shared this greater understanding in seminars, speaking with an eloquence I could hardly muster. In English class, I grew progressively quieter, retreating into early-childhood shyness.
This failure to master the greats of the Norton robbed me of the literary confidence with which I’d swaggered into college. My B. Dalton mall experience reshelving Nelson Demilles paled in comparison with the learned discussions private school kids had enjoyed in their Western Civ seminars. Here, I was not even cut out for the basics. I wouldn’t major in English after all. I wouldn’t, in fact, take a single writing class in college. I rejected it preemptively, deciding to major in history instead.
While some people feel pressure to read the latest novel, my particular neurosis has always been to catch up on writers who died long ago yet endure still. Their words had achieved a kind of permanence; they mattered. That’s why the Norton was so important, and so crushing in its judgment. Even when an authority figure didn’t outwardly assign reading, my internal schoolmarm did the job, berating me for various deficiencies. Why haven’t you read Trollope, I’d scold myself. If you’re going to read Richard Ellmann’s Wilde, you also have to read his Joyce. Read Greek plays.
This was the era of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Like most Americans, I didn’t have a clue, and I took the blow personally. How to traverse the gaping crevasses of ignorance without risk of exposure, in a way that didn’t involve Joe?
I’d just have to work the canon on my own; only Bob would know what was going on. That summer, I took it on myself to become the one person alive to read through The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, a book clearly never meant to have been read cover to cover. E. D. Hirsch, I figured, would tell me “What Every American Needs to Know.” I proceeded to fill Bob with fundamental text after fundamental text, trying to find out what it was that everyone else seemed to know already. To prove that the identity I’d staked out—reader, writer, student, serious person—still held. I marked all this remedial reading in my Book of Books, where no one else could see what I was doing.