My Life with Bob

by Pamela Paul

  The Norton Anthology of English Literature was positively riddled with poetry, much of it in older forms of English that brought back eighth-grade memories of stumbling through The Canterbury Tales. I read the words dumbly, I reread them, I thought about what to eat for breakfast and about the StairMaster and about Joe, who with his rumpled rugby gear and prep-school face sat rapt during the entire discussion of The Faerie Queene and, what’s more, participated, his palpable appreciation leaving me shorn of depth and cultivation. Even Joe the rugby player got it.

  I understood that The Faerie Queene was meant to transport me, but I failed to take flight. I never even got off the ground, my mind darting furtively to Joe, who always slid nonchalantly into his chair just moments before class began looking like he’d tumbled directly out of a frat-house bunk bed. My crush on him was unbearable and unquestionably apparent to all others in the class who no doubt looked on me with pity. Maybe Joe, too, hoped to meet someone “serious” in English. But surely he had his eyes set on the kind of girl who liked poetry; girls who liked poetry were more alluring. My romances with him and with verse felt equally hopeless. (Years later, on a moonlit night in Istanbul, I walked along, silent and deflated, as my boyfriend at the time and my friend Mindy rapturously quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins from memory in an escalating back-and-forth. I had only two poems memorized: “Clouds” and “The Woodpecker,” both by Shel Silverstein.)

  Soon, and even worse, I encountered a class that completely defeated my pledge to finish assigned reading. All the other students in Martha Nussbaum’s “Love and Literature” philosophy course sat at attention as the exalted philosopher expounded on her own impenetrable book and others equally opaque while I mentally took off for SeaWorld. I couldn’t get through a single book she assigned, opening each one, slogging through two pages, and closing it, beaten. I couldn’t even manage To the Lighthouse, earning the black mark for those failed women who somehow get through a liberal arts education without developing a reverence for Virginia Woolf.

  College was full of lessons about just how much I didn’t know. Despite what I’d learned growing up in a proud suburban school district, I quickly discovered that private education wasn’t just for kids thrown into Catholic school as a form of punishment. Boarding school was not, in fact, a Dickensian prison sentence. Even my “good” suburban high school wasn’t nearly as good as the “really good” suburban high schools—the ones in Brookline, Massachusetts, and Winnetka, Illinois. Lots of people knew a lot more than I did, and I was behind, no matter how diligently I completed my assignments.

  I was haunted by the blackest scar on my record, one I never spoke of and rarely admitted to myself. When I’d moved to my new town back in second grade, I hadn’t been placed in the highest reading group, but in the second highest. It was a setback so humiliating that I never told my parents, and when I was later moved up to the higher group, it was an achievement I could share with no one. Perhaps that second-grade teacher had known something about me, some inherent intellectual flaw that I would never shake, no matter how hard I tried.

  Worst of all was the realization that mere effort wouldn’t catch me up. I may have considered myself a “book person,” but that didn’t mean I was a good reader. My college classmates seemed to read better than I did, drawing meanings and making inferences I hardly noticed. They shared this greater understanding in seminars, speaking with an eloquence I could hardly muster. In English class, I grew progressively quieter, retreating into early-childhood shyness.

  This failure to master the greats of the Norton robbed me of the literary confidence with which I’d swaggered into college. My B. Dalton mall experience reshelving Nelson Demilles paled in comparison with the learned discussions private school kids had enjoyed in their Western Civ seminars. Here, I was not even cut out for the basics. I wouldn’t major in English after all. I wouldn’t, in fact, take a single writing class in college. I rejected it preemptively, deciding to major in history instead.

  While some people feel pressure to read the latest novel, my particular neurosis has always been to catch up on writers who died long ago yet endure still. Their words had achieved a kind of permanence; they mattered. That’s why the Norton was so important, and so crushing in its judgment. Even when an authority figure didn’t outwardly assign reading, my internal schoolmarm did the job, berating me for various deficiencies. Why haven’t you read Trollope, I’d scold myself. If you’re going to read Richard Ellmann’s Wilde, you also have to read his Joyce. Read Greek plays.

  This was the era of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Like most Americans, I didn’t have a clue, and I took the blow personally. How to traverse the gaping crevasses of ignorance without risk of exposure, in a way that didn’t involve Joe?

  I’d just have to work the canon on my own; only Bob would know what was going on. That summer, I took it on myself to become the one person alive to read through The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, a book clearly never meant to have been read cover to cover. E. D. Hirsch, I figured, would tell me “What Every American Needs to Know.” I proceeded to fill Bob with fundamental text after fundamental text, trying to find out what it was that everyone else seemed to know already. To prove that the identity I’d staked out—reader, writer, student, serious person—still held. I marked all this remedial reading in my Book of Books, where no one else could see what I was doing.

  Oh, the shame of being underread, incapable of keeping up with even my own demands, let alone the expectations for the Ivy League English major. I didn’t realize until much later in life that nearly everyone, except those lucky bastards who can devote themselves 24-7 to the task, feels this way, too. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I understood it was okay and even right to read what you wanted rather than what you ought.

  But at college this did not feel like a smart state of mind. All around me, semiotics majors had an ambitious agenda, busily deconstructing every subject into smithereens. A surfeit of criticism swirled around campus, yet I still didn’t understand what it was we were meant to critique. I still wanted to take in what they wanted to tear down. I wanted to believe, not disdain. I wanted to absorb, not fend off. I wasn’t ready to have a critical opinion. To quote Virginia Woolf, “If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.” Instead, Woolf urged, “open your mind as widely as possible … and it will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other.” If only I’d read her at the time.

  CHAPTER 6

  Into That Darkness

  Voyeurism

  “I’m going to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” I informed my dad the summer after freshman year of college. Now I’d done it. My ambitions had been made public and I couldn’t lose face. The book would have to be read.

  For years, I’d stared up at William Shirer’s doorstopper of a history, looming from my father’s war bookshelf among endless guides to military aircraft and illustrated weaponry, like a dare. Someone had once suggested with probable sarcasm that if I wanted to know anything when it came to World War II, I’d have to read Shirer.

  And so I would, and, I also knew, despite the dauntingly thick spine, I would love it. Give me a dark premise—dying, death, murder, genocide—I am there. This is more a confession than a boast. Many people I knew, several in my own family, almost religiously avoid books and movies about the Holocaust. Why would you even want to go there, they wonder, as if learning about it made you complicit, a sick curiosity. (My father, however, could read endlessly about the war’s killing machinery, to me equally baffling.) It wasn’t the acts of violence that fascinated me; it was how they could happen, and what it meant once they did.

  I don’t think the desire to read about these things can be entirely
reduced to prurience. Part of it, I tend to think, is the opposite, a kind of yearning not only for answers but also for comfort. Dark books say to us, “This isn’t about you. You are in fact alive and safe.” Yes, there’s an implicit and unavoidable warning, an edge of danger; these things happen, the books say. And yet, as bad as it gets inside this book, you, the reader, are securely outside.

  If I’d actually bothered to complete any of the reading for Martha Nussbaum’s class, I might have come across her own writing about the purpose suffering in literature holds for readers. “When we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy, we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting,” Nussbaum observed. This not only allows us to access our own emotions, it also enables us to cultivate empathy for others. You can’t truly know how something feels unless you experience it, but reading about those experiences gives you a semblance.

  Like many other morbid kids with Jewish ancestry, I was drawn to Holocaust reading from the moment I entered adolescence, seeking out the death and torture and deprivation and evil. The high point (or low) may have been Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, based on interviews with Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Treblinka, which I immediately followed up with Sereny’s The Case of Mary Bell: A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered. Reading these books about how tenuous and scary life is, I feel, at a gut level, more alive and more keenly aware of the startling tenuousness of that existence.

  My old friend from France, Franz Kafka, perhaps put it best, describing not just the draw but also the necessity of dark reading. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?” he wrote to a childhood friend. “We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

  Back and forth on the Long Island Rail Road to the city, where I was spending a summer working for my stepmother’s promotional items company, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich did more than just break through the tedium. I ran the gamut of human emotion every day on that train. I’d flinch and tear up and tremble as I turned the pages, if the skin on my body had been scrubbed and exfoliated raw—and yet somehow, at the same time, I felt more reassured each time the train pulled into the station, safe.

  This was not my first foray into the Holocaust nor would it be my last, because I wanted to take it one step further. A year later, while on a semester abroad in France, I developed a penchant for a kind of literary tourism unavailable to me on Long Island. My mother came to visit me in Paris, where I was then studying, and offered to take me to a city of my choice for a mother-daughter vacation. “Anywhere you like!” she said with visions of Saint-Tropez.

  “I want to go to Besançon,” I told her. I not only wanted to see the provincial hell Julien Sorel had been so anxious to flee in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, I also was keen on visiting a small exhibit devoted to the artwork of concentration camp victims from inside the camps. The collection featured tiny decrepit figurines carved out of soap and drawings etched in human ash. My mother, not sharing my unholy fascination, did not appreciate our destination as much as I did.

  Luckily, I shared this particular if troubled passion with another family member: my cousin Kirsten. If there was one person to whom I could pass along a book about Josef Mengele’s twin experiments and not get a look of sickened dismay in return, it was Kirsten, the daughter of my mother’s only sister. Though she lived across the country, she and I had more in common than I did with most of my brothers. Over time, the four-year age gap between us collapsed, and she went from being my little cousin to the sister I’d always yearned for.

  I considered it my personal mission to rescue Kirsten from the crystal meth–strewn cultural wasteland of her Colorado Springs high school. That summer, I begged my aunt to allow Kirsten to join me on a six-week Eurail tour of Europe. “I think she needs it,” I said obliquely. To our shock, she consented. I brought along the books and the deal was I’d pass each one afterward to Kirsten, who also was the only person on the planet—how I loved her for this!—who read everything I asked her to read. Not only that, she read it immediately and remarkably fast, polishing off in a day what took me a week. That very summer when she got home to Colorado, she started a Book of Books of her own; the growth of her tally was swift. (Years later, when I wrote about Bob in the Times, she e-mailed at once: “So that’s where I got the idea!”)

  Kirsten alone understood that I had to make a brief stop at Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s getaway in southern Germany, on my way to meet up with her in Vienna. But Berchtesgaden had been turned into a restaurant and tourist destination, dulling the anticipated impact. Luckily, Kirsten and I had further plans. In Vienna, we met at the airport, and after a week of eating strudel in Viennese cafés, the two of us embarked on a much-anticipated tour of anti-Semitic Europe, heading first to Budapest and then to the Hungarian hinterland; the more wretched the history the more eager we were to check it out. We gave each other nicknames, Krakow Kirsten and Potsdam Pam, and decided to spend the majority of the trip speaking in heavy Borscht Belt accents. We were excited to hit all the major former ghettos of Eastern Europe.

  Kirsten had been to Dachau as a young child, when her father was stationed at an air force base in Germany, but her memories of the experience were sketchy. We plotted our trip carefully, taking two days’ worth of trains to get from Eger, the second-largest city in Hungary, to our final destination: Auschwitz. We’d always wanted to go.

  En route, we were awakened repeatedly, first by Hungarian border guards, then by Czechs, and finally by Poles, each demanding various documents and, maddeningly, a ticket supplement that we didn’t have and couldn’t possibly obtain at this stage. In an effort to divert attention from the missing ticket, Kirsten and I took to photographing each official who entered our car. The officials, men in their early twenties with pasty Eastern European complexions, wrapped their arms around our shoulders as they blushingly posed for each shot, occasionally kissing our cheeks with shy enthusiasm. We made it to Krakow without paying the supplementary fare.

  Upon arrival at Oświęcim, just outside Krakow, a throng of guides descended on us with signs meant to entice: “Come to Auschwitz! Lunch and Birkenau included. Good morning!” Freaked out to see our gruesome interest thrown back in our faces so crassly, we rushed past them and took a local train, walking through a small town and then a field to get to the former death camp, asking people along the way, “Can you tell us how to get to Auschwitz?” Posing the question aloud to strangers sounded terribly wrong. There was no good way to translate with hand gestures to the uncomprehending locals.

  We had planned to spend the entire day at Auschwitz. I’d thought reading books prepared me for anything. But what I had experienced as a kind of literary rubbernecking, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I, read from the safety of the Long Island Rail Road, affected me in a profoundly different way when I actually encountered the cavernous furnaces of Auschwitz. Within moments, Kirsten and I lost our sense of humor and the ironic remove. We stopped making fun of the kitschy guides and the absence of food stalls and the unnerving fact that we had chosen to be there. We found ourselves silenced by the immense oven doors, the glass-walled rooms filled with forever-lost eyeglasses and decaying leather shoes. Without the protection of a book cover, we had no way to distance ourselves from the implications.

  “Do you want to leave?” I asked Kirsten when we walked out of a chamber we’d realized was a room-size oven.

  “Yes,” she said immediately.

  Afterward, subdued and haunted, we headed to Berlin. That summer, a street parade of disaffected youth was all the rage. Massive floats and loud music crashed their way down the main thoroughfare. Instead of celebrat
ory punks and drunken teenagers, we saw neo-Nazis and just plain Nazis. It was as if Auschwitz had spilled out the contents of the books we’d read and forced us to examine how they fit into the real world. We checked in at a few art museums but avoided the one dedicated to the war. Then we took off for Denmark and spent a drunken night at Tivoli on the park’s giant roller coaster, trying to shake it off. It would be ten years before I went back to Germany.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Grapes of Wrath

  Among Readers

  It’s the spring of 1992, and I’m sitting at a massive dining room table piled with obscure meats and homemade pâté and torn baguettes and overflowing ashtrays and a bunch of French people. The children are sitting with the adults rather than shunted off to a kiddie table, the way it’s done at home. Extremely French authors like Le Clézio and Patrick Modiano are the subjects of animated conversation. Teenagers are allowed to talk, and the adults listen to them. It is a revelation.

  So there were people who talked about books and ideas at dinnertime, quoting and debating and rhapsodizing—and it turned out they were in Paris. There were parents who recommended books to their children and discussed them together afterward. Students who read even when their grades didn’t depend on it. Teenagers who could assume their friends also read—for fun, and not just “fun” reading. After a childhood of dinners at which people fought over how much broccoli they had to eat, sat in dogged silence, or monologued through their day’s schedule, I entered this new dining landscape at age twenty. Never mind that they were eating stewed bunny rabbits; I felt at home.

  And though my French wasn’t the best, I very much wanted to be a part of it. When the talk at the dinner table turned to Steinbeck, I decided to muster my way into the conversation. This was American literature, after all, and they had a bona fide American on hand. Everyone would be dying to hear what I had to say. Bursting with collegiate ardor, I waited for an appropriate lull before making my contribution.