Now
that I commute to work, I read the New Yorker cover to cover on the train each week.
In this, I imagine that I am following in the footsteps of my forebears,
specifically my Uncle Charley, who took the train every day from Plainview, Long
Island, to his law firm in Manhattan. He took me along one day. I had landed at
his house as I tried to decide whether to move to the East Coast. In
California, we went everywhere in a clunky Ford station wagon that my mother
had decided would look good painted bright yellow, so a train into Grand
Central Station at the height of rush hour was quite an adventure for me. For
my uncle, who groused on the crowded platform when we made the switch from the Long
Island Railway to the grittier subway, it was just his routine, an everyday
occurrence. I was seeing famous people rushing off to various assignations. He
was seeing a bunch of people in his way.
I didn’t move back East. At
nineteen, I couldn’t bridge the gap between wondering around wide-eyed to
actually living there. Part of me didn’t want it to become routine. I keep that
romantic attachment to the place alive by reading The New Yorker. It was a
guilty pleasure because I worried that if I indulged every week I would start
believing that my “real life” and that Grand Central fantasy could merge
somehow, or that they already had, in some “Letter from California” way. So there must be some kind of small irony in
the fact that now I too commute to work by train, here on the other side of the
continent. And what a surprise, I am around the same age as my uncle was then, with
a teenage daughter who wants to move to, you guessed it, New York.
I just
finished reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s article “The American Boy” about the role
Mary Renault’s novels played in his personal coming of age saga. It is not a
profile of her; although there are biographical details I was not familiar
with, about her having grown up wanting to be a boy. This article was something
different, and is called by the magazine a personal history. It describes, among
other things, that intensity with which
a literature-obsessed adolescent approaches a newly discovered author. He
relates devouring books like The Persian
Boy practically in one sitting, much as I remember reading Mary Stewart’s
Arthurian novels. These are not Literature with a capital L, but a world of the
author’s making, although the young reader does not realize the art involved,
or necessarily even acknowledge the author’s existence.(He did, which is why we’re
reading about it now.) Instead we are
the Ringbearer, or young Hal, or even Elizabeth Bennett.
The
trouble is that as adulthood approaches, we are told that those books are
fiction, wonderfully written, but not “real.” Instead, we are assigned the
books that have been deemed meaningful for us by the adult world. We forget the
miracle of literature’s personal nature, the joy of stories, written by
individuals separated from us by space and time, and yet so immediate that we can
use them as building blocks in our own lives here and now. Thank you, Daniel Mendelsohn,
for sharing your story, and thereby reminding me why to read.
