Are You There, God? It's Me, Matthew

And but so. We (I) generated some momentum, but then it petered out in the cold face of a Judy Blume essay. As the hippest of you are apprised, I had planned on writing a piece on a rediscovered chunk of my childhood – the sudden coming-across, at my ridiculous workplace, of Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing and of Fudge-a-Mania, both by Ms. Blume, and my sudden, flooding realization that these books had at one point been deeply important to me. That essay, appropriately, began like this:

“Here is a quote about arriving at the bookstore, an experience that with effort I can still recall fondly, from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. He has just described the way in which you taxonomize the books you haven’t read, and then:

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large, but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time to Reread and Books You’ve Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It’s Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them.”

That essay was then to go on to talk about the sort of book that it’s time to reread again, and the space that that thing occupied – a shadowy space, that I used to fill in slowly with rereadings – and counter this with this intense and strange Judy Blume phenomenon, in which the lights were not dimmed up but flooded on – I suddenly remembered huge swaths of these books, plot-wise – and, more weirdly, the things I had been doing when I read them, at points throughout my prepubescent life. And this was deeply weird. There was one thing – I remember better than I have any right to, a moment in which my lovely and civic-minded mother and I were tasked to take something, somewhere – and all I remember is the sensation of listening to Adam Sandler’s “The Lonesome Kicker” in her van as she deposited whatever it was, and reading in my copy of Fudge-a-Mania the passage about the families’ baseball game. Other recalled phenomena were similarly accompanied – just quanta of interactions in Lockport, the impossibly dull little place where I tried to learn to be a real person, accompanied in a disturbingly inextricable way by Peter Warren Hatcher, that milquetoast fourth-grade nothing, and his rambunctious brother, Fudge. This disturbed me, in fact, into writing the essay that now lies in shambles in front of me, the essay upon which I am now performing a post-mortem.

What was weird – and what weirdness I had hoped to communicate – was not that I had associated particular events in my young life with books. All I remember of a trip to Carowinds amusement park in the Carolinas was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, all I remember of a spring break 2000 is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; even a very pleasant trip to Bay Shore Long Island, in 2006, is dominated by reading Pynchon’s V. But – and I hope this makes sense – I remember those as discontinuities: “that was the week I read Kesey”, “Such were the days in which I read V” – and they are discontinuities that I remember. Those books may be books that, as Calvino notices, It’s Now Time to Reread – but they are books tagged as such every time I walk, with eyes averted, through the bookstore. So what the hell are these Judy Blume books that provided cross-hatch on all of the cartoony memories I retained of Lockport with my mother? I never, ever thought about these books until I started reading them and they cascaded in upon me. They were different, of course – one of the things I wanted to communicate in the original version of this essay was the decreased capaciousness of these books – but really, what astonished was the way in which this reading pervaded and controlled my memories of early Lockportian life, the way in which the only “there” there was provided by a pair of children’s books about a rowdy three-year-old named after a piece of candy. It is as if all of the time I imagined I spent wasted on slightly educational computer games and mooning about girls had been weirdly matched in importance by this series of novellas.

But what was most marking about this weirdness, of course, was that it was not weird in any palpable way at all. It was alienated not in the way that genius, but in the way that dreams are alienated – they return not with majesty, but with mundanity. I had hoped to tell you just how terribly strange it was that I was reading all of these things and finding them both familiar and bizarre – but that is nothing new under this sun. It is just the way in which we find those rare books that speak to us shortly and dissipate. Trying to tell you the weirdness of rereading Judy Blume would be like trying to tell you about the weirdness of my dreams – yes, you would say, that is peculiar, but is the world in which the peculiar finds its home. The very idea of the essay I see scissored up before me is one of tactibility, and one that the proper way of thinking reveals as a pomposity. You cannot find my relationship to Judy Blume any more interestingly strange than you could find my dreams, the other night, about the claustrophobia of airplanes. My relationship with these Fudge books – like my dreams – are not alien to me, but of my own making. To the rest of the world, this is business as usual. It is only to the suddenly remembering part of me that the system appears remarkable at all.

This is where, to the disappointment of dorks like me, books finally flare sadly out. One of my smarter friends has been telling me, for years, that books are whores – that, whatever their arguments for replacing the humans we know, their essentially mercenary nature will always keep them, well, whorish. What began, in this essay, as a plangent plea for commiseration – didn’t your lovely and civic minded mothers take you out to be amused by Fudge? – has ended in a declaration of, what else, loneliness. I cannot even put before you the passages that most made me feel as I feel – what would be the point? The point, of course, is alienation from a reading past – no different for me, looking ponderously back at a reading nine-year-old self, than it is for you, looking at me reading.

So why bother? Why read what I read, and try to find some common ground? The answer is not an answer, really, but a hope – a fantasia – that I am more different from my bookish nine-year-old self than I am from you, right now, fighting the same literary fights which I am fighting. It is perhaps a foolish hope, but it is what we have got. And isn’t that almost enough? This essay began as a call to common response – a sort of “Don’t you know what it’s like to have the books that mattered to your young self sneak up on you?” But, as such, it fails. And but all is not lost. Because while the weirdness of new readings of old things may not be communicable, there is something in books that is.

Here speaks our second favorite Emerson: “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire” (from “The American Scholar”). I think that what my wise friend pointed out when she accused my bookishness of being a type of whorishness (or johnishness, rather) was that I had meant my recollection of books restored not to inspire, but to be an end in itself. These Fudge books were a source of inspiration that had died. They inspired me when I was nine; their alien quality now seemed difficult to reconcile with the potent force they had been once. But such is the way of reading. They had built me, like (as Emerson notes elsewhere) my meals from the same period, but there is no real call to remember them now. What we, of course, can do, is to talk not about the books that surreally inspired selves no longer current, but tease out the inspirations ongoing – so, tomorrow or the next day, I will tell you what I have thought of re-reading the first chapter of Pnin.