The Enchanted Hour

by Meghan Cox Gurdon

  “What is he going to do?” Flora cried, jumping up. “Is he going to kill Dracula? Where’s he going to go?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Please keep reading!”

  It took me a moment to find my place again, at which point I resumed my feeble imitation of a Dutch accent.

  “‘—where I must go, where that sunlight, though snow and mist obscure it, will be to me a safety. I will strengthen me with breakfast, and then I will to my terrible work. Madam Mina still sleeps; and God be thanked! She is calm in her sleep . . .’”

  Two paragraphs later, the other two parties of good guys—Jonathan Harker and Lord Godalming from one direction, and Dr. Seward and Quincey Morris from another—come within sight of the convoy of Romany bodyguards transporting the undead count in his sinister box.

  “‘With the dawn we saw the body of Szgany before us dashing away from the river with their leiter-wagon,’” I read, realizing a split second late that I had got the emphasis wrong. I had pronounced body as if it were a dead thing, rather than a complement of men.

  I glanced at Flora. “Did you get that bit?”

  “I think so, but whose body was it?”

  I’d been right. “‘The body of Szgany’ in this case is not one person, but a troop of men who are called the Szgany. You can have a single body—let’s say a dead body. You can also have a group or assembly that also goes by the collective noun body.”

  “Oh.”

  “For instance, the United Nations is a deliberative body, and the US Senate is a legislative body.”

  “Got it. Could you—”

  The pedagogue was just warming to her work.

  “So,” I went on, “you could talk about a person having a body of work. For example, we could say that in Bram Stoker’s body of work, the novel Dracula is—”

  “Okay!” Flora was jumping in her seat again. “That’s good to know, but can you please keep reading!”

  We both laughed, and I resumed: “‘With the dawn we saw the body of Szgany before us dashing away from the river with their leiter-wagon. They surrounded—’”

  “A what-wagon?”

  “Leiter-wagon. Long, wooden, not very heavy,” I guessed (correctly, as it happens). “‘They surrounded it in a cluster, and hurried along as though beset. The snow is falling lightly and there is a strange excitement in the air . . .’”

  From that point to the cataclysmic ending eight pages later, neither of us interrupted. We gaped as Van Helsing thumped stakes into the hearts of the count’s female companions, freeing their souls. We winced as Quincey Morris took a mortal Szgany knife-thrust just as Flora predicted. We held still as, in a single sentence, Dracula’s assailants pierced his heart, sliced off his head, and watched his body crumble into dust.

  When I finished reading, there was silence. Flora looked shocked and regretful. The story was over.

  We had been reading Dracula every night for a couple of weeks, now side by side, now settled a short distance from each other, always close together during the scariest bits. Flora had rattled in a carriage through the Romanian countryside, wondering as villagers flashed the sign of the evil eye. With Jonathan Harker, she had noticed the count’s long fingernails, the hair on his palms, his ability to creep up walls like a lizard. She had stowed away on the Russian ship Demeter and, with its appalled captain, seen the crewmen disappear one by one. She’d visited poor Renfield behind the bars of his cell, feeling horror and pity as he ate flies and spiders and waited for his “master” to arrive in England. She had seen Lucy vivid, then languishing, then restored and ferocious in vampire form, and she had seen Lucy’s friends administer a terrible cure with blade and garlic.

  Flora had, in short, run the full course of Stoker’s famous gothic horror story, and she had loved every page. It’s not a book all eleven-year-olds (or all fifty-year-olds) would enjoy, but again, that’s one of the satisfactions of reading aloud at home: to each his own.

  Flora’s expression was still dismayed. Then her face brightened.

  I should have known what was coming.

  “Again!” she cried. “Let’s read Dracula again!”

  Chapter 6

  The Power of Paying Attention—and Flying Free

  Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  With Alice’s dash down the hole under the hedge, Lewis Carroll captures what happens when listener disappears into a story that someone is reading out loud. He doesn’t know where he’s going or what he’ll find. His adventure may begin, like Alice’s, with a momentary scramble. There’s a book to be chosen, a seat to be claimed. As he settles in to listen, his surroundings are still ordinary, just as Alice, pursuing the white rabbit, travels along what at first appears to be a normal burrow that runs straight on, “like a tunnel.” Then without warning, the rabbit hole dips down, and Alice finds herself falling into what seems to be a very deep well.

  “Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next,” Carroll writes, as if he were deliberately trying to reproduce the experience of a reader dropping into a fictional world, entering what novelist John Gardner calls a “vivid and continuous dream.”

  Everyone loves a good story. As the folklorist Sybil Marshall observed, “It seems that mankind is born with an avid appetite for details of other lives beside the one his own small span of corporeal existence grants to him; it is as though he seizes from his earliest years upon this way of enlarging the bounds of his own life.”

  Something special happens when this fictional transport takes place in the intimate setting of a read-aloud. The listener enters a cycle of thought, imagination, and practical behavior that can have surprising and even profound ramifications. Rather than taking prefabricated entertainment off a screen, he brings the smells, sounds, and sights of a story to life in his own mind.

  In the view of the psychologist James Hillman, oral storytelling is not only good for the soul but also prepares children for life. Those who experience it in childhood, he argued, “are in better shape and have a better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced. . . . Coming early with life, it is already a perspective to life.”

  In literature, we are freed from physical constraints and from the orthodoxies of our time and place. We meet characters we would never encounter in the real world. In a vicarious way, we experience life through them, and one result is an expansion of emotional understanding. As Britain’s former children’s laureate Chris Riddell said, “A good book is an empathy machine.”

  Complicated and mysterious things happen inside people when we give them time to listen. The trick is to make it happen.

  * * *

  ON A RECENT winter day, I got to watch a roomful of fourth-graders teleport to medieval Persia. The mechanism was a picture book by Diane Stanley. The medium was the voice of a school librarian, the celebrated writer Laura Amy Schlitz. The launch site, so to speak, was a Baltimore school library, a midcentury modern place of exposed brick and blond wood with a large window at one end that showed a bleak and overcast sky.

  I had only just arrived and shaken hands with Schlitz when there was a sudden rush and bubble of voices from the hallway and in came a horde of nine- and ten-year-olds. Pouring past us, the children threw themselves on a terrace of upholstered benches, chattering and jostling. After a moment, without saying a word, Schlitz planted a yardstick on the floor with one hand and raised the other, rhapsode-style. The talk died away. These children were evidently in the habit of being intere
sted in what their librarian had to say.

  Schlitz pulled up a chair to face the class, made a few preliminary remarks, and held up a copy of Fortune. The front cover shows a man in a turban and robe gesturing toward an elegant woman who has knelt to embrace a tiger. Flowers and curlicues decorate the margins in the style of an illuminated manuscript.

  “‘Long ago, in the poorest corner of Persia, there lived a farmer and his son, whose name was Omar,’” Schlitz began. “‘When Omar came of age, all his father could give him were his blessing and a small purseful of money. With that he would have to make his way in the world, but poor Omar had no idea what to do or where to go . . .’”

  Apart from the single voice, the room was silent. The children’s faces had slackened. One boy had pulled his knees up under his shirt so that only his feet peeked out. A girl sat cross-legged, leaning forward on her elbows. Another boy lay on his back, gazing at the ceiling. Everyone was listening.

  “‘You there, young man!’” Schlitz said, giving an imperious edge to the voice of a veiled stranger. The woman proposes to sell Omar a tiger on a leash: he can make the animal dance on its hind legs for money, and secure his future. Omar agrees.

  “‘Sure enough, everywhere he went with his tiger he was showered with money. And with the beast curled up beside him at night, he never feared robbers . . .’”

  A teacher’s aide reached across and raised a boy who had folded over. Otherwise, the listeners sat still. Their faces were blank. They had gone to Persia.

  In the story, Omar gets very rich thanks to the tiger, and he decides that it’s time for him to marry. Wealth has made him conceited, though, so Omar resolves to find a fancier bride than his childhood sweetheart, who’s named Sunny.

  “You are a fine friend,” he said, meaning to be kind. “You are not ugly, but you are not pretty, either. You are a farmer’s daughter, you see, and I am now a great man. I should probably marry a princess.”

  And with that he left his village and his little friend Sunny, whose sad, dark eyes reminded him strangely of the tiger’s.

  Soon Omar enters a magnificent city known for the sorrow of its princess. No one has been able to console Princess Shirin since her fiancé disappeared on the eve of their wedding.

  “‘Most people said he had drowned,’” Schlitz read in the voice of a gossipy serving woman who’s explaining the situation to Omar, “‘but some believed he had been enchanted by a witch.’”

  I was impressed that Schlitz wasn’t turning the story into a pedagogical exercise. She didn’t stop to ask the children to predict plot turns or to analyze the characters. She didn’t even turn the book around every few minutes, in that well-meaning but cumbersome way, to ensure that everyone got to see the pictures. She just let the words float out, one after another, trusting the language to work its own magic.

  “Ooh!” gasped a curly-haired boy. His face brimmed with glee as he looked around to see if anyone else had realized something important about the tiger. No one had. He was the first to see that the animal is really the princess’s true love, under a spell. Silly Omar, thinking he could woo the young woman, has instead brought her fiancé back to her. Soon—shazam!—the tiger disappears, and in its place stands a handsome young man.

  Everyone thinks Omar has brought about the reunion on purpose. The grateful sultan heaps him with treasure. Only Omar knows the depths of his own foolishness. Shamefaced, he slinks back to his village to apologize to Sunny, and to ask her to marry him. “Well,” says Sunny, “I don’t know. You’re not ugly, but you’re not handsome, either. And you’re certainly not a prince.”

  A ripple of laughter ran through the children. A moment later, Sunny relents and the couple weds. The class applauded. They were back in Baltimore. It had been a good trip.

  * * *

  THE EPISODE WAS an object lesson in the power of a good story to hold people fast. While Schlitz was reading, the boys and girls appeared to be in a state of suspended animation. They would not have realized it, but the enjoyment they got from listening was feeding a virtuous behavioral circle. If they sat still, kept quiet, and paid attention, they could enjoy the story, even as their enjoyment of the story got them used to sitting still, keeping quiet, and paying attention. An illustrated tale of a tiger, a foolish fellow, and a sorrowful princess had the meta-effect of encouraging these fourth-graders to extend the span of their attention.

  That is no small achievement. In our distracted age, it’s a challenge to keep anyone’s focus. Technology is training us to dart and react like hummingbirds, scrolling, clicking, tweeting, liking. For people in the sustained-attention business, not least book publishers, these developments are unsettling. As Carolyn Reidy, the president of Simon & Schuster, worried aloud to an audience of booksellers not long ago, “You have whole generations being trained for shorter attention spans than books require.”

  The pleasures of technology produce a faster and more frenetic behavioral circle. Scrolling, clicking, liking, and tweeting deliver tiny doses of pleasing chemicals, which fuel our urge to scroll, click, like, and tweet again—a cycle that, Adam Alter points out, makes our devices almost irresistible. One of the effects is a decreasing ability to stay on task. It is said that since the turn of the millennium, the attention span of the average adult has dropped from twelve seconds to eight. If that’s true, then Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is right in saying that human attention is becoming “the true scarce commodity.”

  As grown-ups, we can decide for ourselves whether a longer attention span is something we want to take the trouble to maintain. With children, the matter is more serious. They have to be able to pay attention at school. And they need to understand what’s being said to them, especially in the younger grades, when, as Jim Trelease has pointed out, most instruction comes through speaking.

  When it comes to paying attention, children from read-aloud families go to school with a triple advantage. They’re used to listening, so it’s easy for them to do it. They’ve heard lots of language, so their comprehension will be comparatively strong. And they know from experience that paying attention brings rewards. These assets are not trivial. Studies have uncovered a strong correlation between the capacity of children to attend when they are small and their ability to do well in math and reading when they are older (it’s a link reminiscent of the one between early language and later math, discussed earlier). In 2013, researchers at Oregon State University found that the “attention-span persistence,” as it’s called, of four-year-olds predicted their math and reading achievement at age twenty-one. Not only that, but age-four attention-span persistence also foretold whether children would finish college by the time they hit twenty-five. So there can be real consequences if children do not develop their capacity to listen at length.

  * * *

  AFTER LAURA AMY SCHLITZ had finished reading to the fourth-grade class, I had a chance to sit down with the children. I wanted to know what they made of the experience. How did it feel? What did they think?

  Their answers gave a wonderful glimpse into the secret work of the imagination, and the gratification of engaging one’s capacities.

  “When Laura reads out loud to me, my brain shuts out everything else.”

  “I feel excited and interested.”

  “I feel like I am the main character when someone reads aloud to me.”

  “When someone’s reading to me, I can do deeper thinking about things, like wondering if the tiger was the prince.”

  “I can be absorbed if I’m reading by myself, but I notice that it’s easier when someone else reads, so my brain doesn’t have to split its attention to the words and what they mean.”

  “I feel like I’m solving a mystery in the pauses. I forget that I’m right here. It feels like I’m in the sky, looking down from above, and can see the whole story.”

  This last feeling, the out-of-body sensation of drifting above events, or within them, or being swept away by them, is both common and extraordinary. The annal
s of personal remembrance and literary memoir are full of these transporting moments.

  Walter Olson (father of Tim, the toddler adopted from Russia) was a little older than the children in Laura Amy Schlitz’s library class when he first had the experience, and it never left him. In fifth grade, his teacher took out a full-length biography of the Indian warrior Crazy Horse and began reading it aloud to her class.

  “This went on for weeks,” Olson remembered, “and I was mesmerized. Oh, my goodness, she is actually going to read us this entire book! It was a luxury like I’d never known before, to absorb an entire book by having someone clearly and expressively read the whole thing to me.”

  Bouts of asthma kept the writer Alberto Manguel confined to his bed when he was a child. Propped up on pillows, he listened to his nurse read the “terrifying” tales of the Brothers Grimm. “Sometimes her voice put me to sleep,” he remembered, “sometimes, on the contrary, it made me feverish with excitement, and I urged her on in order to find out, more quickly than the author had intended, what happened in the story. But most of the time I simply enjoyed the luxurious sensation of being carried away by the words, and felt, in a very physical sense, that I was actually traveling somewhere wonderfully remote, to a place that I hardly dared glimpse on the secret last page of the book.”

  As a second-grader, the novelist Kate DiCamillo “lived,” she has said, for the times when her teacher read The Island of the Blue Dolphins to the class. Reading aloud “can change a child’s life,” DiCamillo said. “It can turn a child into a writer. It can certainly turn a child into a reader.”

  For the French author Daniel Pennac, the experience looks like liberation. In his book The Rights of the Reader, he writes, “Free. That was how our children experienced it. A gift. Time out. In spite of everything. The bedtime story relieved them of their daytime burdens. Freed from their moorings, they traveled with the wind, infinitely lighter. And the wind was our voice.”

  A gift, a luxury, a life-changing freedom: Why would we trade it for anything? Why would we stop? Yet in most households, even when parents have read to the children when they are young, that is what happens. Reading aloud begins to flicker out by the time kids turn five, according to Scholastic’s biannual surveys. For the vast majority of nine-to-twelve-year-olds, story time becomes rare to the point of nonexistence. Yet in the 2014 survey, 40 percent of children between the ages of six and eleven said they wished their parents had not stopped reading to them.