Hildegarde

So, I’m going to tell you right off. I don’t know how this post is going to go.  AOL is doing that wonky thing where things will and won’t load, or whatever, and then it all starts over again.

At the moment, I’m having one of those odd experiences that I can’t quite find an adjective for.

Yesterday, having come to the end of The Imitation of Christ and not knowing what I wanted to read, I started looking through the TBR pile.

The TBR pile at our house is not exclusive to me.  Matt’s books are there, even though he’s seldom in Connecticut.  Greg’s books are there.  Both Matt and Greg have their own TBR piles in their own bedrooms, but that doesn’t stop them from putting stuff on mine.

At any rate, whatever the rationale, other people’s books are on my TBR pile all the time, and this time, when I went looking through what’s there for something I could get interested in, what I found was a trade paperback copy of Oliver Twist.

Oliver Twist is a book I have–well, I don’t want to say a long history with, because that’s not quite true.

What it is is the first book I ever read–well, a real book.  Not something for children.  Not something for school (although I read long before I went to school).

I was about eight years old, and at the time we were living in Bethel, Connecticut.  The main street in Bethel is called Greenwood Avenue, and the library was in an old house there on a corner near Mullaney’s five and dime store and the railroad tracks that took people to New York to work.

This was, quite literally, a house.  It had been given to the town for use as a library by somebody or the other.  The ground floor had been converted into what you’d expect of a library, with shelves and stacks and a counter to check books out. 

Almost everybody went to that floor almost automatically, but there was another part of the place.  If you took the front staircase to the second floor, you found a small landing with bookshelves and a door that led to a largish room with even more bookshelves and a big conference type table.

On that landing and in that room were the books the library had decided were “classics.” 

Oliver Twist was one of those classics.  It was the first one I found.  I was the first one I read.  And if I read today, endlessly and compulsively, Oliver Twist is why.

I’m not sure this makes a lot of sense in terms of what my later tastes in literature have been, but there it was.  I found the book.  I sat down on the floor.  I opened it up.  I started reading it.  An hour and a half later, my mother charged at me, wanting to know where I had been and what I thought I was doing.

I checked out Oliver Twist and David Copperfield both, on the assumption that if I loved one thing by Dickens I would love too–and I was never the same after that as I have been before.

I think it’s odd that I can remember both when I learned to read–or, at least, when other people first knew I could read–and when I knew that if I could find a way, all I wanted to do was read. 

The when other people knew I could read thing is probably my second oldest memory, because I could not have been more than two years and eleven months old at the time. 

I know that, because I found the entire scene bewildering.  We were at my Aunt Mary’s house, before she married my Uncle Austin.  This was in or around Washington, DC, and Aunt Mary worked for an Admiral.

Later on in that trip, the Admiral would take us on a short tour of a submarine that wasn’t underwater. 

At any rate, at some point during this trip, my Aunt Mary bought me a Little Golden Book called, I think, The Ugly Platybus.  For some reason, I’m choking on the title at the moment.  It was a story about a duck-billed platybus, though, and it was an ugly duckling story. 

And I took the book, and sat down in a chair, and read it out loud.  My mother and my aunt were talking, and it took a while for them to realize what I was doing.

In fact, they probably didn’t believe it at first, because my Aunt Mary came over to see what the book really said, and when she saw that it said what I was saying, she got excited beyond belief. She ran around, hugging me and exclaiming that it was wonderful, it was wonderful, I could read!

I thought she was completely addled.  Of course I could read.  Everybody could read.  My mother, on the other hand, was having a baby.

That’s how I know how old I was.  My mother was pregnant with my brother, which I thought was a very big deal.  My brother was two years and eleven months younger than I was.

The revelation on the second floor of the Bethel Public Library, though, was something else.  It was, in more ways than one, irrevocable.

I rose from the floor a different person than I was when I sat down on it.  I have never been anything but that same person since.

And that makes it all the odder that, in the many years since, I have never reread Oliver Twist before now.

I am, let’s face it, the kind of person who rereads books.  I reread some books over and over again.  There were a couple of decades when I reread The Razor’s Edge and Rebecca every Christmas season. 

I even reread mystery novels, including ones (like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express) that I couldn’t help remembering the solution to if I wanted to.

Still, whatever the reason, I never reread Oliver Twist, and I never reread David Copperfield, either.

I got started on the books on the second floor and just went through the shelves as if I’d die if I didn’t finish them.  I read The Scarlet Pimpernel and Anna Karenina.  I read The Great Gatsby and The Count of Monte Cristo. I read volume after volume of The Best American Plays, 19–. 

And let me tell you, Tennessee Williams was quite an education–if a very confused one I didn’t straighten out until I was about 13.

So–what do I think of Oliver Twist now that I’m rereading it?

I think it’s a wonderful book, as wonderful as I thought it was the first time, although there are now parts of it that make me very uncomfortable. 

I know some of you just can’t stand Dickens, but there is something about Dickens’s narrative voice that just pulls me in.  It always feels to me as if, in this book, somebody in particular is talking directly to me. 

On the other hand, this is not where my taste came to settle.  This is not the kind of thing I read when I go looking for something I know I want.  I still love Victorian novels, but I prefer the “grown up” ones, like Trollope and James.

But it does strike me that many of Dickens’s points about the treatment and especially of the children of the poor–well, it strikes me that they sound a lot like what we sometimes discuss here.