seventeen. Then _Les Miserables_, _Nana_, and _Anna Karenina_ set me off
like a forest fire. There was no stopping me. I had to read everything.
I plunged into Hardy’s _Return of the Native_ with pencil in hand,
underlining and writing my thoughts in the margins. I loved to argue
with the author and the need to make notations made it terribly
important to own my own books, no matter how long it took to save the
money to buy them. It was fun to look at books, to touch them, to think
of the next purchase.
I read Dickens until I couldn’t see straight. I read Goethe’s _Faust_
and thought secretly that the author was a pompous ass. Years later I
again read it and became fascinated with the entire Faustian legend.
This is the way it should be. You don’t have to get it the first time.
I can remember when I first read _The Brothers Karamazov_ and how it
unnerved me. The book created such fierce anxieties within me that I
couldn’t finish it. I had to wait a number of years before I could
tolerate the strain it put on my nervous system.
Later Jesse gave me my first introduction to Thomas Mann and Jules
Romain. I read Henry Hudson’s _Green Mansions_ and to this day I can’t
forget Abel and Rima. I read Dreiser’s _Sister Carrie_ and loved his
social criticism, his amazing bitterness, his terrible writing. I
memorized the _Ode to the West Wind_ and began my Shelley imitations,
adopting, among other things, his habit of reading standing up. I read
Galsworthy and wrote long précis of his wonderful short stories. My
reading was for myself, my notebooks were for myself, my thoughts and
ideas were for myself.
Although I was seldom without a book at any time, the very best time to
read was on Saturday mornings. Normally my mother baked on Friday and
she had a genius for failing to remember that something was in the oven.
So if I was lucky, there would be plenty of cookies or cake or strudel
left, slightly burned, that nobody else would touch. I loved it. Then,
too, the house was strangely still on Saturday mornings. No one was home
and I could turn up the volume on the phonograph as loudly as I wished
and sit and listen and read and eat cake. It was marvelous.
Sometimes a single vivid line was the reward for days of desultory
reading. I remember first coming across Carlyle’s remark in Heroes and
Hero-Worship, “The Age of Miracles is forever here!” and how I plucked
that phrase and kept repeating it even in my darkest moments. Again,
after finishing _Moby Dick_, a book I took straight to my heart, I began
a research job on Melville and encountered a letter written to Hawthorne
that marked me for life. I was reading at the public library, and as
closing time approached I began to race madly through the books I had
gathered, trying to find something that would tell me what Melville was
like. Suddenly my heart skipped a beat and I knew that I had found it
(child of innocence that I was, bent on researching the whole world,
ancient and modern): “My development,” Melville wrote, “has been all
within a few years past. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development
at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have
scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not
unfolded within myself.”
Closing time was called and I went out into the solitary night, walking
thoughtfully home, thinking, thinking, thinking. I didn’t want money or
success or recognition. I didn’t want a single thing from anybody. I
wanted only to be alone, to read, to think ... to unfold.
One year I’d be interested in literature, the next in philosophy, the
following in physics or chemistry or even neurology. Everything
interested me. Who cared what I ate or how I dressed? I cared only for
the words between covers. I was safe so long as I didn’t fall in love
... this I knew from Schopenhauer. Spengler fascinated me. _The Decline
of the West_ was so brilliantly written, it had a scheme ... and it was
such a fraud. But I was learning how to read and how to think through
what I was reading. I disliked Nietzsche and only later came to see him
as one who was saying in very bald terms: Don’t sell out! Stop wasting
your time predicting the future of mankind, but become an active part in
creating it.
I had long known the Old Testament, but now I became attracted to the
New Testament and the figure of Jesus. I memorized the Sermon on the
Mount and spent sleepless nights arguing with myself. I went wild over
Tawney’s _The Acquisitive Society_ and Max Weber’s _The Protestant
Ethic_ had a tremendous effect on me and sent me back to reading
Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. I was beginning
to suspect that I was too deeply influenced by European literature and
not enough by American. Why was I drawn to Kafka and Mann and Gide and
Proust and Anatole France and Huysmans and not to Howells and Emerson
and Whitman and Hawthorne and Melville and Thoreau? I set myself a
course of study and luckily started with Hawthorne. Had I started with
Howells, I have a strong notion I’d have given up. But I liked
Hawthorne, and this led to Melville and here I found my God and my
America. His involuted writing was perfect for me and this in turn led
to Henry James. When James made the remark about the gorgeous
wastefulness of living, I knew he was right. In the eyes of the world I
lived in, I was wasting my time. Many of my friends by now had good jobs
selling insurance or automobiles or were on the way to becoming
successful junior executives. And I? Well, I was reading! I always
worked, to be sure, but at odd jobs only. If I went to school during the
day, then I worked at night. If I attended night school, then I worked
during the day. But what the job was made no difference to me.
Sometimes I did pause to ask myself where this was going to lead. There
was the day I was being interviewed for a job at Woolworth’s and the man
asked, “What do you know?” I started to tell him what I knew about the
various schools of literature and philosophy and he stopped me cold,
saying, “You know too much about the wrong things. We can’t hire you.”
This knocked me out for days.
What did I want to be? Did I have to become something? Did I have to
have some land of social approval? For a time I went around in a state
of near collapse. First I decided upon medicine as a good practical
profession with a lot of good basic knowledge behind it. Then I felt
that perhaps I should be a lawyer. I was generally regarded as a good
speaker and I had an idea that criminal lawyers were exciting people.
Then I thought possibly I ought to be an architect. But nothing fitted.
Finally I decided. I was going to teach.
To my shocked amazement, I discovered that all my years spent at
college, all my study, the range of knowledge I had sought to embrace,
meant absolutely nothing in the eyes of the master educators. I was
deficient in what were called Education Courses. There was nothing for
me to do but to take them.
In all my life in the classroom, I had never encountered such a waste of
time, such stupidity, such a moral outrage! The courses were insipid and
the teachers themselves knew nothing whatever. It was either insane
nonsense or an organized racket from top to bottom: courses on the
theory of education (I had already gotten my theory from Samuel Butler
and George Meredith, neither of whom the educators seemed to have heard
of), courses on educational psychology (something completely occult),
courses on techniques, courses on I.Q. measurements, courses on the art
of choosing a textbook. By the time I had finished my required work in
education, I could not have been less inspired to be a teacher. I had
heard a great deal about the smug middle class and their valueless
world, and have since encountered them and it, but I shall be happy to
exhibit any group of typical specimens of this order as examples of
vibrant living and exciting intellect compared to a meeting of
“educators.” No wonder books are dying!
In those depression days, it seemed to me that the education world was
something invented to keep some walking zombies busy. But it turned out
that the educators got in on the ground floor of a good thing. With the
present hue and cry for education and more education, their job is cut
out for them: tests and more tests, techniques and more techniques.
We don’t need more educators; we need more _teachers_. And especially
teachers of literature. Not teachers who are smug in their learning and
want to impose value judgments on others. But teachers who are alive
with love and enthusiasm, whose own experience with art and letters has
made them a little less ashamed to be members of the human race. Not
teachers armed with a book list, but with a personal addiction to
reading as a never ending source of generous delight. Not experts in
testing and guidance, but people with enough faith in youth to inspire
them to find their own way and make their own choices, to taste the
exhilaration of stumbling and bumbling on their own amid all the wonders
and ups and downs of the human quest for understanding. We need teachers
who will stimulate, provoke, and challenge, instead of providing
crutches, short cuts, and easy directions. There is just no point in
building all those new school buildings unless we have more Jesse
Feldmans to fill them with the realization that the aim of education is
to help man become human.
I seldom go back to where the Seven Stairs used to be. It is hard to
visualize it as it once was. The old brownstone has a new face, the
front bricked up and the door bolted. Business is good on the Avenue,
but many of the people who come in seem tight-lipped and hurried. The
Seven Stairs is not there either.
But when we start looking up old places, it means we have forgotten them
as symbols. The Seven Stairs was an adventure of the heart ... a
personal search for the Holy Grail, a quest that still continues. Each
step up the stairs has brought crisis and someone to help me overcome
that crisis and move on to the next. And seven being an enchanted number
and stairs moving inward and outward as well as upward and downward, the
ascent is unending, and every step a new beginning, where we must stand
our ground and pay the price for it.
There is a Seven Stairs lurking unbeknown down every street as there was
for me on a summer day, getting off the bus at the wrong corner on my
way to meet my brother-in-law for lunch and walking along Rush Street,
fascinated with the strangeness of the neighborhood. I was reading all
the signs, for no purpose at all, but one that said, “Studio for Rent,”
stuck with me. I turned back to look at it again before rounding the
corner to go to my appointment.
I met Mel in the kind of restaurant that is exactly the same everywhere,
the same I had been in a few weeks earlier while awaiting my army
discharge in San Francisco, the same fixtures, the same food, the same
waitresses, the same voices. But as I leaned across the table and began
talking, I experienced a sudden excitement and an idea generated which I
announced with as much assurance as though it had been the outcome of
months of deliberation. Fifteen years later, I can still see Mel’s jaw
drop and his momentary difficulty in breathing when I told him I had
decided I wanted to go into business.
“What kind of business?” he said, finally.
I told him that what Chicago needed was a real bookstore. It seemed to
me that I had always had visions of my name across a storefront: Stuart
Brent, Bookseller. I made him go with me to look at the “for rent” sign,
then together we went to see the landlord—my terrible, mincing,
Machiavellian, fat little landlord.
We borrowed the keys and went back to see the studio. Mel didn’t really
want to go along, but somehow I had to have him with me. If the quarters
turned out to be disappointing, I didn’t think I could stand it. But
when we opened the door, the hot, dirty room was magic. As I looked up
at the sixteen foot ceiling, I imagined pretty Victorian society girls
dressing here for the ball. I wasn’t seeing the room. I had just stepped
through the door from Berkeley Square.
“Isn’t this rather small for what you have in mind?” Mel said.
“No, no,” I said, “it’s just fine. Everything is just fine!”
-----
Footnote 1:
Conroy’s works consist of two novels, _The Disinherited_ and _A World
to Win_, several children’s books, and _They Seek the City_, a history
of Negro migration written in collaboration with Arna Bontemps with
the assistance of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Footnote 2:
An informative pamphlet on literary agents can be obtained from the
Society of Authors Representatives, 522 Fifth Avenue, New York 36.
-----
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Transcriber’s Note:
● The errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have
been corrected, and are noted here.
● Where hyphenation occurs on a line break, the decision to
retain or remove is based on occurrences elsewhere in the
text.
● Errors in punctuation and quotes have been silently
restored.
● The footnotes were moved to the end of the e-text.
● The numbers below reference the page and line in the
original book.
reference correction original text
7.4 occupied occuped by a painter
34.32 bookstore moving her Gold Coast book store
37.31 sometimes sometimes tight and drawn, some times
41.20 impression and the only inpression you can
44.10 bestseller who wrote a best-seller thirty
65.19 similar who hold similiar views on
66.19 became if one of the “faithful” become
68.2 conflict my inner conflct remained
88.29 bestsellers under the pop numbers and best-sellers
88.31 Malcolm Malcom Cowley, the distinguished critic
95.26 Terkel Turkel’s famous “Studs’ Place”
100.13 stick-up ‘This is a stickup!’
106.13 and ad civic responsibility
106.17 café at a small cafe
111.39 interrupted was often interupted
121.6 sing-song low, almost singsong voices
131.2 We we lived at 1639 South
150.9 interrupted interupted whatever I was
101.26 hardcover copies of the hard-cover book
174.19 say was really meant to say that
175.1 old-time old time actor in it
186.4 success as the sucess of the book
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