This month I read Required Reading, Why Our American Classics Matter Now, written by Andrew Delbanco. Dr. Delbanco is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University. He has written many essays on American history and literature, (Wikipedia). Required Reading was published in 1997. I became interested in Required Reading after I had heard Professor Delbanco speaking in a podcast this past February. He outlined his belief that American literature whose authors penned their stories around moments in our history, give said history a fuller picture of understanding when an imagined artful created human story was intertwined with those moments. (Please note the preceding is my attempt at summarizing his insight and I recommend you find Delbanco’s exact words about this on line.) In short, my love of reading about our history and our American classics prompted me to explore Delbanco’s insights.
Most of the authors highlighted are as follows; Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Henry Thoreau, Walden, and many essays such as Resistence to Civil Government, Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, and Harriet Beecher Stowe who, the author points out, wrote the first book about slavery that touched a national nerve, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Historical figures such as Lincoln and Henry Adams, son and grandson of the earlier Adams Presidents, are both reviewed by Delbanco highlighting their ability to communicate via their pens. Other authors scrutinized in Required Reading are Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Immediately I could ascertain that Professor Delbanco must have high expectations for his students at Columbia, and why not? Why do I say that? In the first half of his book I noted, eleven words that required me to look up their meaning. I’ll list a few here; calumny-the malicious utterances of false charges in order to damage their reputation. ( Calumny has found rich fertilizer to grow in the present times we live in, that’s for sure!) Another current attitude highlighted by a new word to me; solipsistically (adverb)- the belief that only your own experience and existence can be known or are important. A few others were paean, jeremiad and putative(ly). I do thank the professor for the opportunity to add dozens of words I can add to my Scrabble repertoire. Now I might have a slight chance to finally beat our 12 year old granddaughter at the game. On second thought, probably not as she too is a voracious reader and loves having an old fashion book in her hands at most times, but I digress!
Required Reading opens with a favorite author of mine, Herman Melville. The Professor focuses on Moby-Dick. On page 4, Delbanco explains Melville’s style of writing and I quote; It does not take long to realize that this writer whose relation to words is not so much mastery as it is a kind of hot intimacy in which language will do anything he asks of it. He accosts you; he bends close to you to share a confidence; he wanders away from the point, distracted by a new half-formed idea; he falls away into silence as if stunned by the cost of his own discoveries. Delbanco dissects Melville’s genius looking for a way to represent a whole field of experience that is outside the capacity of the known language, so he scavenges among locally available metaphors-snowshoes, sunshades, the Cross- and assembles them into a picture that works indirectly, by the comparative logic of similes, (page 5). The Professor’s 1st Chapter titled Melville’s Sacramental Style encompasses thirty one pages of the two hundred and fourteen pages of Required Reading. There are countless examples cited of Melville’s extraordinary skill at approaching here the symphonic texture of Moby-Dick,(page 11). I will finish here with one highlight Delbanco shares about Melville’s prose that touched me personally. I won’t reprint the whole paragraph about Nantucket that the author shares on page 4 and 5 as I respect the time you’ve already taken to read my thoughts, but let me highlight a bit of it. Melville writes in Moby-Dick; Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it…..Look at it – a mere hillock and elbow of sand: all beach without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. This passage goes on and at the end Delbanco writes on page 5, Melville speaks in this passage as if he were returning with a report of an alien world to an uncomprehending reception party.
Forty five years ago I spent my first night on Nantucket. I was hired as a health care administrator, a position that would take me on a ten year leg of my forty five year administrative career. I relate to Melville’s Nantucket passage and Delbanco’s summary of a report about an alien world as the first few weeks of my life on Nantucket were spent alone. My wife and two young sons were living with my parents on Cape Cod, thirty miles away but over the horizon. Each week, until I found a year round rental on the island for myself and my family, I took the ferry back to the Cape for the weekend. During that time alone on Nantucket I was fortunate to have a finished room over the garage of an older widowed lady. Her home was located off of Orange Street. It was within walking distance to my offices at the Our Island Home. This was the farthest I had ever been out to sea. The first few nights the sea fog was a salty moist blanket accompanied by the low metronome ten second bass sound of the ever-present fog horn. No other sounds to be heard except for the muffled laughter and haloed light coming from the Brotherhood of Thieves the first restaurant, (and my favorite to this day), I was introduced to by one of the department heads. As we walked over the cobblestones on our way there I was told many of those stones could have been ballast on the whaling ships of Melville’s era. In short, I felt like I was describing an alien world to my young sons and their mother that first weekend together back on the Cape.
Andrew Delbanco highlights, untangles, dissects, and in general, explains the literary genius of the other authors highlighted above. In short he explains that our language, many feel is narrow and linear, actually has the constructs of metaphors, similes and more available to the imaginative wordsmith of an author. Their narratives weave through historical era’s of American life. The Civil War, slavery, nature, feminism, and political incorrectness, just to mention a few. But the Professor hits a home run out of my my park when he unfolds the last chapter of Required Reading, Reading For Pleasure. He debunks the teacher who instructs students to find only what is wrong with this book? He explains on page 208, we have turned literary texts into excretions through which, while holding our noses, we search for traces of the maladies of our culture. On page 209 he continues by highlighting Emerson’s dictum that the metamorphosis of the world by the imagination excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. Joy in reading an author who is talented enough to pen patterns of stress, intonation and rhythm, allowing the reader to hear the rise and fall of the voice though only introduced as a written word to said reader. On page 212 Delbanco highlights the sovereignty of language. Language reveals itself as the medium in which the endless relationships that we call consciousness have their birth and in which they spend their life. On page 214 he ends by stating that notable writers of fiction are themselves important additions to reality.
Professor Delbanco transported me to my metaphorical lighthouse this month. Those of you who have followed me over the years know my journey of self discovery has traveled through ever present bridges of consciousness and, at the young age of seventy five, I am finally mature enough to learn how expansive language really is. Spiritually, communication is introduced as much, much more than our spoken and written word but reading is surely fundamental and the key to unlocking symbolic doors that may open ourselves to an ever expanding awareness!
Thank you for reading.
Be in peace and joy!
Mark