The Wild Girls Read online

To reinforce the dire news the article refers to a 2004 NEA report that 43% of their respondents had spent a year entirely book-free. The NEA blamed the decline of reading on TV, movies, and the Internet. Understandably. We all know that the Average Adult American spends from sixteen to twenty-eight hours a day watching TV (my margin of error there may be a little broad) and the rest of the time ordering stuff from eBay and blogging.

  That we read so little appears to be newsworthy, even shocking, yet the tone of the article is almost congratulatory. The AP story quotes a project manager for a telecommunications company in Dallas: “I just get sleepy when I read,” adding, “a habit with which millions of Americans doubtless can identify.” Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems misplaced. But I think the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly jubilant—of the imminent disappearance of reading is misplaced too.

  The thing is, not very many people ever did read much. Why should we think they do, or ought to, now?

  For a long, long time most people couldn’t read at all. Literacy was not encouraged among the lower classes, laymen, or women. It was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless, it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue. The ability to maintain and understand commercial records, the ability to communicate across distance and in code, the ability to keep the word of God to yourself and transmit it only at your own will and in your own time—these are formidable means of control over others and aggrandizement of self. Every literate society began with literacy as a constitutive prerogative of the ruling class.

  Only gradually, if at all, did writing-and-reading filter downward, becoming less sacred as it became less secret, and less directly potent as it became more popular. The Chinese Empire kept it as an effective tool of governmental control, basing advancement in the bureaucratic hierarchy strictly on a series of literary tests. The Romans, far less systematic, ended up letting slaves, women, and such rabble read and write; but they got their comeuppance from the religion-based society that succeeded them. In the Dark Ages, to be a Christian priest usually meant you could read at least a little, but to be a layman meant you probably didn’t, and to be almost any kind of woman meant you couldn’t. Not only didn’t, but couldn’t—weren’t allowed to. As in some Muslim societies today.

  In the West, one can see the Middle Ages as a kind of slow broadening of the light of the written word, which brightens into the Renaissance, and shines out with Gutenberg. Then, before you know it, women slaves are reading and writing, and revolutions are made with pieces of paper called Declarations of this and that, and schoolmarms replace gunslingers all across the Wild West, and people are mobbing the steamer bringing the latest installment of a new novel to New York, crying, “Is Little Nell dead? Is she dead?”

  I have no statistics to support what I am about to say (and if I did I wouldn’t trust their margin of error) but it appears to me that the high point of reading in the United States was from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, with a kind of peak in the early twentieth. I think of the period as the century of the book. From around the 1850’s on, as the public school came to be considered fundamental to democracy, and as libraries went public and flourished, financed by local businessmen and multimillionaires, reading was assumed to be something we shared in common. And the central part of the curriculum from first grade on was “English,” not only because immigrants wanted their children fluent in it, but because literature—fiction, scientific works, history, poetry—was a major form of social currency.

  It’s interesting, even a little scary, to look at old textbooks, schoolbooks from the 1890’s, 1900, 1910, like the McGuffey’s Readers of which a couple of battered copies still lay around the house when I was a child, or the Fifty Famous Stories (and Fifty More Famous Stories) from which my brothers and I, in the 1930’s, learned much of what we still know about Western Civilization. The level both of literacy and of general cultural knowledge expected of a ten-year-old will almost certainly surprise you if you look at these books; it awed me a little even then.

  On the evidence of such texts and of school curricula—for instance, the novels kids were expected to read in high school up through the 1960’s—it appears that people really wanted and expected their children not only to be able to read, but to do it, and not to fall asleep doing it. Why?

  Well, obviously, because literacy was pretty much the front door to any kind of individual economic advancement and class status; but also, I think, because reading was an important social activity. The shared experience of books was a genuine bond. To be sure, a person reading seems to be cut off from everything around them, almost as much as the person shouting banalities into a cell phone as they ram their car into your car. That’s the private element in reading. But there is a large public one too, which consists in what you and others have read.

  As people these days can maintain nonthreatening, unloaded, sociable conversation by talking about who’s murdered whom on the latest big TV cop or mafia show, so strangers on the train or co-workers on the job in 1840 could talk perfectly unaffectedly together about The Old Curiosity Shop and whether poor Little Nell was going to cop it. Books provided a shared field of entertainment and enjoyment facilitating conversation. Since public school education, fairly standardized and also widely shared, was pretty heavy on poetry and various literary classics all through that period, a lot of people would recognize and enjoy a reference to or a quote from Tennyson, or Scott, or Shakespeare, those works being properties in common, a social meeting ground. A man might be less likely to boast about falling asleep at the sight of a Dickens novel than to feel left out of things by not having read it.

  Even now literature keeps that social quality, for some; people do ask, “Read a good book lately?” And it is institutionalized, mildly, in book groups and in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making dull, stupid, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere PR, because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them. Movies and TV don’t fill quite the same slot, especially for women.

  The occasional exception proves my rule: the genuine grassroots bestseller, like the first Harry Potter book. It hit a slot the PR people didn’t even know existed: adults hungry for the kind of fantasy they’d stopped reading at ten. This was a readership Tolkien, despite his permanent bestsellerdom (an entirely different matter, unrecognized by the PR crowd), couldn’t satisfy, because Tolkien’s trilogy is for grownups, and these grownups didn’t want grownup fantasy. They wanted a school story, where you can look down on outsiders because they’re all despicable Muggles. And they wanted to talk to each other about it. When the kids really got in on it, this became the extraordinary phenomenon, fully exploited by the book’s publishers of course but neither predictable nor truly manageable by them, exhibited in the excitement at the publication of each new book of the series. If we brought books over from England by ship these days, crowds would have swarmed on the docks of New York to greet the final volume, crying, “Did she kill him? Is he dead?” It was a genuine social phenomenon, as is the worship of rock stars and the whole subculture of popular music, which offers the adolescent/young adult both an exclusive in-group and a shared social experience. And it was about books.

  I think that people have not talked enough about books as social vectors, and that publishers have been stupid in not at least trying to understand how they work. They never even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them.

  But the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless. They think they can sell books as commodities.

  Corporations are moneymaking entities controlled by obscenely rich executives and their anonymous accountants, which have acquired most previously independent publishing houses with the notion of making quick money by selling works of art and information.

  I wouldn’t be
surprised to learn that such people “get sleepy when they read.” But within the corporate whale are many luckless Jonahs who were swallowed alive with their old publishing house—editors and such anachronisms—people who read wide awake. Some of them are so alert they can scent out promising new writers. Some of them have their eyes so wide open they can even proofread. But it doesn’t do them much good. For years now, most editors have had to waste most of their time on a very unlevel playing field, fighting Sales and Accounting. In those departments, beloved by the CEOs, a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don’t comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the profit that can be made out of them. Or occasionally, for the top execs, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit.

  And not only profit. Growth. Capitalism As We Know It depends (as we know) on growth. The stockholder’s holdings must increase yearly, monthly, daily, hourly. Capitalism is a body that judges its well-being by the size of its growth.

  Endless growth, limitless growth, as in obesity? Or growth as in a lump on the skin or in the breast, cancer? The size of our growth is a strange way to judge our wellbeing.

  The AP article used the word “flat”—book sales have been “flat” in recent years, it said. Smooth, in other words, like a healthy skin, or flat like a non-bulging belly? But no; fat’s good, flat’s bad. Just ask McDonald’s.

  Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunity for expansion.

  There’s the trick: Expansion. The old publisher was quite happy if his supply and demand ran parallel, if he sold books steadily, “flatly.” But how is a publisher to keep up the 10–20% annual growth in profits expected by the holy stockholder? How do you get book sales to expand endlessly, like the American waistline?

  Michael Pollan’s fascinating study in The Omnivore’s Dilemma explains how you do it with corn. When you’ve grown enough corn to fill every reasonable demand, you create unreasonable demands—artificial needs. So, having induced the government to declare corn-fed beef to be the standard, you feed corn to cattle, who cannot digest corn, tormenting and poisoning them in the process. And you use the fats and sweets of corn byproducts to make an ever more bewildering array of soft drinks and fast foods, addicting people to a fattening yet inadequate, even damaging, diet in the process. And you can’t stop the processes, because if you did profits might get “listless,” or even “flat.”

  This system has worked only too well for corn, and indeed throughout American agriculture and manufacturing, which is why we increasingly eat junk and make junk while wondering why tomatoes in Europe taste like tomatoes and foreign cars are well engineered.

  Hollywood bought into the system enthusiastically. The emphasis on “the Gross”—often the only thing you hear about a movie is how much money it grossed the first day, week, etc.—has enfeebled film-making to the point where there seem to be more remakes than anything else. A remake is supposed to be safe: it grossed before, so it will gross again. This is a predictably stupid way to do business involving an art form. Hollywood’s growth-directed sellout is exceeded only by the modern fine-art market, where the price of a painting constitutes its entire value, and the most valued artist is one willing to make endless replications of safely trendy work.

  You can cover Iowa border to border with Corn #2 and New York wall to wall with Warhols, but with books, you run into problems. Standardization of the product and its production can take you only so far. Maybe it’s because there is some intellectual content to even the most brainless book. In reading, the mind is involved. People will buy interchangeable bestsellers, formula thrillers, romances, mysteries, pop biographies, hot-topic books—up to a point. But the product loyalty of readers is defective. Readers get bored. People who buy a canvas painted one solid color and entitled Blue #72 don’t get bored with it because when they look at it they principally see the thousands of dollars it cost, and the canvas certainly makes no demand on the aesthetic sense or even on consciousness. But a book has to be read. It takes time. It takes effort. You have to be awake. And so you want some reward. The loyal fans bought Death at One O’Clock and Death at Two O’Clock . . . but all of a sudden they won’t buy Death at Eleven O’Clock even though it’s got exactly the same formula as all the others. Why? They got bored.

  What is a good growth-capitalist publisher to do? Where can he be safe?

  He can find some safety in exploiting the social function of literature. That includes the educational, of course—schoolbooks and college texts, a favorite prey of corporations—and also the bestsellers and popular books of fiction and nonfiction that provide a common current topic and a bond among people at work and in book clubs. Beyond that, I think the corporations are very foolish to look for either safety or continual growth in publishing books.

  Even in my “century of the book,” when it was taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed it, how many of them had or could make much time for reading once they were out of school? During those years most Americans worked hard and worked long hours. Weren’t there always many who never read a book at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? If there never have been all that many people who read much, why do we think there should be now, or ever will be? Certainly the odds are that there won’t be a 10–20% annual increase in their numbers.

  If people made or make time to read, it’s because it’s part of their job, or because they have no access to other media—or because they enjoy reading. In all this lamenting and percentage-counting it’s too easy to forget the people who simply love to read.

  It moves me to know that a hardbitten Wyoming cowboy carried a copy of Ivanhoe in his saddlebag for thirty years, or that the mill girls of New England had Browning Societies.

  Certainly, reading for pure pleasure became rarer as leisure time got filled up with movies and radio, then TV, then the Web; books are now only one of the entertainment media. When it comes to delivering actual entertainment, actual pleasure, though, they’re not a minor one. The competition is dismal. Governmental hostility was emasculating public radio while Congress allowed a few corporations to buy out and debase private radio stations. TV has steadily lowered its standards of entertainment and art until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively nasty. Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when undertaken as art. And the Web offers everything to everybody, but perhaps because of that all-inclusion there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from roaming on it. If you want the pleasure art gives, sure, you can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer: but those artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, but most blogs are merely self-indulgent, and the best I’ve seen function only as good journalism. Maybe they’ll develop aesthetic form, but they haven’t yet. Nothing in the media provides pleasure as reliably as books do—if you like reading.

  And a good many people do. Not a majority, but a steady minority.

  And readers recognize their pleasure as different from that of simply being entertained. Viewing is often totally passive, reading is always an act. Once you’ve pressed the On button, TV goes on and on and on . . . you don’t have to do anything but sit and stare. But you have to give a book your attention. You bring it alive. Unlike the other media, a book is silent. It won’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laughtracks or fire gunshots in your livingroom. You can hear it only in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. It won’t move
your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

  Because they’ve put something of themselves into books, many people who read for pleasure have a particular, often passionate sense of connection to them. A book is a thing, an artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, pleasant to look at and handle, which can last decades, even centuries. Unlike a video or CD it does not have to be activated or performed by a machine; all it needs to activate it is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is there. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though of course you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

  This is important, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely re-usable, an article of value.

  In the durability of the book lies a great deal of what we call civilization. History begins with literacy: before the written word there is only archeology. The great part of what we know about ourselves, our past, and our world has long been contained in books. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all center their faith in a book. The durability of books is a very great part of our continuity as an intelligent species. And so their willed destruction is seen as an ultimate barbarism. The burning of the Library of Alexandria has been remembered for two thousand years, as people may well remember the desecration and destruction of the great Library in Baghdad.

  So to me one of the most despicable things about corporate publishing is their attitude that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn’t “perform” within a few weeks, it gets the covers torn off or is pulped—trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. It wants a blockbuster a week, and this week’s blockbuster must eclipse last week’s, as if there wasn’t room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity of corporate publishers in handling backlists.