The Weekly Screed (#811)

It’s a holey whole hole
and it just - plain - isn’t
by David Benjamin

“For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”
                                ― Louis L’Amour

TAIPEI — Whenever I’m in one of these farflung outposts, I eventually turn to myself indignantly and say, “Hey, Gomer! What the hell are you doing here?”

I know it’s a lousy excuse, but I’m probably here because of the library. In the little town where I grew up, it was the only place for miles and miles around that could even be remotely regarded as a portal to the world. I had no idea of its power. The library ruined me.

It actually started with Dr. Seuss. One day, my first-grade teacher herded her whole class down the hill to the Tomah Public Library, up the stone steps, through the doors, where suddenly you could smell books like the breath of ten thousand dead philosophers, and then down the wooden steps to the “reading room” — I mean, what the hell was I doing there? I couldn’t read yet. And what’s a philosopher?

They sat us down in front of a librarian, who read to me — well, us. But I took it personally, because she was reading Dr. Seuss — Horton, Bartholomew or If I Ran the Zoo, one of those contagious concoctions of verbal melody and subversive fancy that whispered to me, “This is what you want to do.”

I do? Me?

Well, I did. I started writing my first novel in third grade, but it wasn’t exactly my idea. I was mimicking Beatrice Dwyer, classmate, nemesis and sweetheart, who was writing stories and reading them aloud. I said, “Wait a minute. I can do that.” So I did. Forever after. To my mother’s chagrin.

By then, I’d made the library my refuge. Life elsewhere in Tomah was small and hard — my parents busting up, Mom moving us around, my sister Peg hogging the bathroom, other kids kicking my ass in school, the TV on the fritz.

My library card, bent and dog-eared, was my ticket out. Dark wood and a constant hush, except for the creak in the staircase as you climbed, until the altar became visible, librarian presiding with stamp and inkpad. More books than I could ever read, but I could try. I squandered the shank of my childhood in that bar, partly to escape my home, but mostly to discover — and confirm with every book I read — that my destiny wasn’t Tomah at all, but out there. Someplace else.

I escaped for a long stretch into the lyrical South of Joel Chandler Harris. The drawl and blend, peppered with apostrophes, in the voices of Uncle Remus, B’rer Rabbit, B’rer Fox, B’rer Bear, challenged and captivated me. Harris has long been a controversial figure — a white author exploiting the vernacular of just-freed slaves and illiterate field hands, taking credit for their rich oral tradition and the magic fables that sprang therefrom. But my God, if no one capable of writing them down had listened to those folktales, found a way to translate their dense and musical argot into prose and share them with the world, what a loss to human culture— as though The Iliad and The Odyssey had perished on Homer’s deathbed.

During and after Uncle Remus, I prowled the library like Frank Buck in the jungle. I harvested eight, ten books at a time, devouring and digesting them, overnight. The first few times I appeared behind a stack of books half my height, the librarian said, “Are you sure you want all these books?” After a while, she understood, stamped the return date (ironically, because I was supposed to keep them two weeks) and sent me along. I was back the next afternoon.

I sailed the wine-dark sea with Robert Lewis Stevenson and went beneath, at least once a year, with Jules Verne. I read all the Landmark biographies, from Ben Franklin to Bob Hope. I tramped the Yukon with Jack London and Dangerous Dan McGrew. I spent Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo with General Doolittle and six hellish months with Richard Tregaskis on Guadalcanal. When I read Holling Clancy Holling’s classic history of a fictional snapping turtle, Minn of the Mississippi, I fell in love with natural history and checked out every field guide in the library, from bugs and arthropods to birds, mammals, fish, trees, flowers and fungi, reptiles, amphibians, cetaceans and crustaceans, including Pagoo, the hermit crab immortalized by, yes! Holling Clancy Holling. I lived the life of an otter, a cougar, a wolverine, a beaver and a wildlife photographer.

H.G. Wells launched me into space years before Gagarin and Shepard got there. Natty Bumppo led me through the Adirondack woods with Chingachgook and Uncas, and Mark Twain led me away from them with a blast of mockery. But Twain restored my wanderlust, with Tom and Huck on Minn’s Mississippi. A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court made me a time traveler and sent me into the history stacks, where I stumbled across the inimitable Hans Zinsser — Rats, Lice and History — whereat, also, I became a lifelong disease buff.

As a good Catholic, I knew my proper place of worship was St. Mary’s, up on the hill. But I looked around the church, every day (I had to) — whether I was in the pews, serving Low Mass or up in the loft singing the High Mass Agnus Dei with my classmates — and there was damn little to read. The joint had no books.

Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. Every Catholic church has three books, if you count the hymnal in the pew. There’s the Bible, but only one copy, it’s on the pulpit and you don’t dare borrow it. Finally, in St. Mary’s, every kid shlepped around his (or her) Daily Missal, which you used to follow along. It was “required reading,” so nobody actually read it. It contained no adventures and scant romance. There appeared no pirates, no prisons, no Indians, cowboys, soldiers, gangsters, no jungles, no mountains, no guns, not even any missiles, in the Daily Missal.

Which is why inexorably, irreversibly, the Tomah Public Library supplanted St. Mary’s as my place of worship. Because it had books, piles and piles —

There’s this scene in Centerburg Tales. A story called “Pie and Punch and You-Know-Whats” starts out with a mysterious figure entering the lunchroom of Homer’s Uncle Ulysses. He deposits in the jukebox a tune that he warns Homer to never play — which Homer and his pal Freddy immediately play, turning all of Centerburg into a community of compulsive crooners who can’t shake this contagious, maddening song about the holey whole hole in a whole doughnut.

The library looms as the town’s salvation when Homer recalls a book with an earworm antidote, a tune in which you must “punch, brother, punch with care, punch in the presence of the passenjare.” But Homer can’t remember either title or author, only — vaguely — the color of the cover. And so, a great, desperate, caterwauling throng descends upon the Centerburg Public Library, yanking books from shelves, appalling the librarian (until she starts singing, too!) and leafing frantically through every blue-backed or brown-backed book in search of relief.

A towering heap of discards accumulates, creating a scene the reader needn’t imagine because the storyteller, Robert McCloskey, is also a crack illustrator. When I was a kid, I lingered over that image — a mad Babel of flying fiction and exhausted singers — and pictured myself leaping, from the library balcony into that mountain of books.

An ocean, rather, where a fervent reader could paddle and dive, drinking in a paragraph, spitting out a pithy quote, spotting Moby Dick, frightening Pagoo, peering through a porthole of the Nautilus, where Capt. Nemo beckons me inside. Takes me around the world, 20,000 leagues or so, and drops me off… where?

Taipei? Cool!

On the waterfront, if they ask for a ticket, I reply, of course! Right here, in my Roy Rogers wallet, bent and dog-eared, punched with care, hundreds of times,  60-odd years ago in a little brick building — still standing and full of the world — in the 700 block of Superior Avenue.