Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

The only other complete works I recall around the house was my great-aunt Betsy’s Dickens. I was proud of both sets. Complete works and uniform editions are something you don’t often see any more except in big libraries, but ordinary people used to own them and be proud of them. They have a majesty about them. Physically they are imposing, the uniform row of bindings, the gold-stamped titles; but the true majesty of a complete works is spiritual. It is a great mental edifice, a house of many mansions, into which a reader can enter at any of the doors, or a young reader can climb in the windows, and wander about, experiencing magnanimity.

My great-aunt was very firm about not letting us get into Dickens yet. She said nobody under eighteen had any business reading Dickens. We would merely misunderstand him and so spoil the pleasure we would otherwise take in him the rest of our lives. She was right, and I am grateful. At sixteen, I whined till she let me read David Copperfield , but she warned me about Steerforth, lest I fall in love with him as she had done, and break my heart. When Betsy died she left me her Dickens. We had him re-bound, for he had got a bit shabby traveling around the West with her for fifty or sixty years. When I take a book from that set I think how, wherever she went, she had this immense refuge and resource with her, reliable as not much else in her life was.

Except for Dickens, nobody told us not to read anything, and I burrowed headlong into every book on the shelves. If it was a story, I read it. And there stood that whole row of pebbly red books, all full of stories.

Obviously I got to Tom Sawyer very soon, and Huck Finn; and my next-older brother, Karl, showed me the sequels, which we judged pretty inferior, critical brats that we were. After The Prince and the Pauper , I got into Life on the Mississippi , and Roughing It —my prime favorite for years—and the stories, and the whole Complete Works in fact, one red book after another, snap, munch, gulp, snap, munch, gulp.

I didn’t much like the Connecticut Yankee . The meaning of the book went right over my head. I just thought the hero was a pigheaded, loudmouthed show-off. But a little thing like not liking a book didn’t keep me from reading it. Not then. It was like Brussels sprouts. Nobody could like them, but they existed, they were food, you ate them. Eating and reading were a central, essential part of life. Eating and reading can’t all be Huck and corn on the cob, some of it has to be Brussels sprouts and the Yankee. And there were plenty of good bits in the Yankee . The only one of the row of red books I ever stuck at was Joan of Arc . I just couldn’t swallow her. She wouldn’t go down. And I believe our set was lacking the Christian Science volume, because I don’t remember even having a go at that. If it had been there, I would have chewed at it, the way kids do, the way Eskimo housewives soften walrus hide, though I might not have been able to swallow it either.

My memory is that it was Karl who discovered Adam’s and Eve’s Diaries and told me to read them. I have always followed Karl’s advice in reading, even after he became an English professor, because he never led me astray before he was a professor. I never would have got into Tom Brown’s School Days for instance, if he hadn’t told me you can skip the first sixty pages, and it must have been Karl who told me to stick with Candide till I got to the person with one buttock, who would make it all worthwhile. So I found the right pebbly red book and read both the Diaries. I loved them instantly and permanently.

And yet when I reread them this year, it was the first time for about fifty years. Not having the Complete Works with me throughout life, I have over the years reread only my favorites of the books, picked up here and there, and the stories contained in various collections. And none of those collections contained the Diaries.

This five-decade gap in time makes it irresistible to try to compare my reading of the Diaries as a child with my reading of them now.

The first thing to be said is that, when I reread them, there did not seem to have been any gap at all. What’s fifty years? Well, when it comes to some of the books one read at five or at fifteen, it’s an abyss. Many books I loved and learned from have fallen into it. I absolutely cannot read The Swiss Family Robinson and am amazed that I ever did—talk about chewing walrus hide!—but the Diaries give me a curious feeling of constancy, almost of immortality: because they haven’t changed at all. They are just as fresh and surprising as when I read them first. Nor am I sure that my reading of them is very different from what it was back then.

I will try to follow that then-and-now response through three aspects of the Diaries: humor, gender, and religion.

Though it seems that children and adults have different senses of humor, they overlap so much I wonder if people don’t just use the same apparatus differently at different ages. At about the age I first came on the Diaries, ten or eleven, I was reading the stories of James Thurber with sober, pious attention. I knew they were funny, that grown-ups laughed aloud reading them, but they didn’t make me laugh. They were wonderful, mysterious tales of human behavior, like all the folktales and stories in which people did the amazing, terrifying, inexplicable things that grown-ups do. The various night wanderings of the Thurber family in “The Night the Bed Fell Down” were no more and no less strange to me than the behavior of the Reed family in the first chapter of Jane Eyre . Both were fascinating descriptions of life—eyewitness accounts, guidebooks to the world awaiting me. I was much too interested to laugh.

When I did laugh at Thurber was when he played with words. The man who came with the reeves and the cook who was alarmed by the doom-shaped thing on top of the refrigerator were a source of pure delight to me, then as now. The accessibility of Mark Twain’s humor to a child surely has much to do with the way he plays with language, the deadpan absurdities, the marvelous choices of word. The first time I ever read the story about the blue jay trying to fill the cabin with acorns, I nearly died. I lay on the floor gasping and writhing with joy. Even now I feel a peaceful cheer come over me when I think of that blue jay. And it’s all in the way he tells it, as they say. The story is the way the story is told.

Adam’s Diary is funny, when it is funny, because of the way Adam writes it.

This made her sorry for the creatures which live in there, which she calls fish, for she continues to fasten names on to things that don’t need them and don’t come when they are called by them, which is a matter of no consequence to her, as she is such a numskull anyway; so she got a lot of them out and brought them in last night and put them in my bed to keep warm, but I have noticed them now and then all day, and I don’t see that they are any happier there than they were before, only quieter.

Now that is a pure Mark Twain tour de force sentence, covering an immense amount of territory in an effortless, aimless ramble that seems to be heading nowhere in particular and ends up with breathtaking accuracy at the gold mine. Any sensible child would find that funny, perhaps not following all its divagations but delighted by the swing of it, by the word numskull , by the idea of putting fish in the bed; and as that child grew older and reread it, its reward would only grow; and if that grown-up child had to write an essay on the piece and therefore earnestly studied and pored over this sentence, she would end up in unmitigated admiration of its vocabulary, syntax, pacing, sense, and rhythm, above all the beautiful timing of the last two words; and she would, and she does, still find it funny.