SCARS: THE READER. Serious traumatic memories make for easily understood, paradigmatic examples of the usefulness of forgetting. But to focus on the worst kinds of wounding hides the more subtle work—the self-forgetting—required to detach from the more or less benign scarification acquired as we grow. To illustrate with a case close at hand, my own father and mother never stinted in their child-shaping duties or, to tell the tale with a bit of distance, Lem and Betty left sufficient tribal markings on young Lewis that he might well remember who he was when he left home.
They were both big readers, Lem and Betty, as was my older brother, Lee, who would lie on his bed with a book (The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Father Brown Stories), while Lewis begged him to come out and play. Lewis was not a reader; he was a collector—butterflies, coins, rocks—and he liked to be outdoors building a lean-to in the woods, or playing baseball, or walking with his butterfly net or his rifle (for he was of the people who hunt the swallowtail and the woodchuck).
Urging him to read, Betty once told him that someday he would be in the army and that he would be crushingly bored unless he had the habit of reading. The admonition conjured a mental image in which he saw himself, a young soldier lying on his cot in the bunkhouse, reading. Sunlight streams in the windows. Deep silence. Where are the other men? They are scattered around the camp, lying limp beneath the cannons, collapsed on the mess hall tables, slack-jawed in the gym, zombified with boredom. Not Lewis. He is reading a book. He is not like other people.
Betty once paid him to read—fifty cents per book. She told him not to tell his father. The next time they went to the library he checked out The Story of Ferdinand and read it in one clip. Betty paid up, but allowed as to how she had had something more substantial in mind. Then he read Farmer Boy (a real fatty; he got a fifty-cent bonus). He read that one aggressively, flamboyantly, deliberately. The school bus came at 8:00, and he would get up at 6:30 to log a few pages before leaving the house. In later years, he could still see the image: dawn light (always that light!) fills the front hall of the house, he is on his way to the kitchen, but he has paused to read his book. Memory now splits the image, for he is both holding the book and looking down at himself from the landing of the stairs, the Reader performing for his elevated audience.
These are my own memories of young Lewis, but I have other testimony as well, for, week after week, decade after decade, Lem and Betty used to write to their own parents a “Family Letter” that gave accounts of all their doings. These I now have in my possession, and from them I learn, for example, that the year Lewis turned ten, Lem read Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (“a heavy book,” he wrote to his parents, but “showing great talent”). He read a biography of Lord Melbourne, the first volume of The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History (“fascinating; 643 pages”), Anna Karenina, The Old Wives’ Tale, The Way of All Flesh, The Aztecs of Mexico, The English Middle Classes, Medieval People, Flower Gardening, and a book “about the Roman Empire around Constantinople at the end of the eleventh century.”
Meanwhile, during the winter holiday, they “worked on [Lewis’s] reading endlessly, or so it seemed to me,” wrote Betty, “as he is a scatter-brain, not stupid I keep saying to myself, but certainly not very well organized.” In early summer, “Lewis was down sick for a week,” she reported, “but managed to read a 200 page book and seemed to enjoy it, and this gives us some delight because it seemed all too probable he would grow up illiterate.” But by August he is said to be in the tree house “reading comics” (while “all the time” his older brother “reads more books”).
SWEEPING THE TOMB. The Mumonkan, or Gateless Barrier, is a collection of Zen koans, or “cases,” gathered in the thirteenth century. Case 5 tells the story of Hsiang-yen, a smart young monk who, like many intellectuals, had a hard time with the practice. One day his teacher said to him, “A cerebral understanding of Zen is not much use. I suggest you work on this koan: Who were you before your parents were born?”
Hsiang-yen couldn’t figure it out. He went back to his room and looked through all the notes he had taken during his years of training, but he found nothing. He tried to get his teacher to tell him the answer, but the teacher said, “I really have nothing to say. I could tell you, but later you would revile me. Whatever understanding I have is my own and will never be yours.”
Hsiang-yen gave up. He burned his notes and decided he’d just be a rice-gruel monk and face the question moment by moment rather than trying to think it through. Hearing that the tomb of Nan-yang was being neglected, he said to himself, “I’ll go there, tend the garden around the tomb and lead a simple life. I can’t do any better.” He did that for years. He gave up trying to approach the Way through study. He didn’t give up completely: he didn’t kill himself or lead a life of debauchery. He just lived as simply as he could, keeping the koan in mind.
One day, while he was sweeping fallen leaves, his broom sent a stone flying. It hit a stalk of bamboo: tock! What a sound! The universe opened up. He understood. It was as if for all those years there had been ice melting invisibly from below and then, of a sudden, the ice was gone.
Hsiang-yen composed a poem that opens with the line “One tock! and I have forgotten all I knew.”
TRIBAL SCARS: THE SPELLER. There is a touching moment in a French movie about little children going to school when we see a young boy writing the number 7 on a blackboard: he draws the horizontal top line and then pauses because he can’t remember if the downward slash comes from the right or the left side of the line. He gets it wrong, but of course what we’re seeing is how utterly arbitrary is the correct form, how conventional and local for an as-yet-unmarked mind.
Just so with spelling, especially in English. Lem and Betty preserved a note that Lewis wrote when he was turning ten: BE SURE TO ATTEND LEWIS’S BIRTHDAY SELIBRACHON / ADDMISHON 15¢.
Not that getting Lewis to read and teaching him to spell wounded him in any way that didn’t soon scar over, but that’s the point. Gentle as their touch might have been, these folks were shaping the boy. He still remembers the tune by which they got “bicycle” lodged in his mind, and the tip Lem offered for remembering the difference between “principal” and “principle” (the principal of the school should be your pal ). Nor did Lem defend the English language or lack in sympathy for its victim. One report reads that “poor Lewis got only 90 in spelling today because he knew that as between ‘bridge’ and ‘canal,’ one of them ends with an ‘e’ and the other doesn’t. But he got the ‘e’ on the wrong one. He tries without success to apply logic to spelling.”
Lucky child to have that sympathetic father, but still, both man and boy are of the people who celebrate the principle that “bridge” ends in an e and whose children, if they are to thrive in this tribe, must leave home with that and all the other weird (wierd? weerd?) words on the weekly test incised on the mind like tattoos on the shaved head of a slave.
“EASE AND CHEER.” Emanuel Lasker was one of the greatest chess players of all time, holding the world championship for a full twenty-eight years beginning in 1894. His classic Manual of Chess, published in 1927, ends with some “final reflections on education in chess” that include this remark: “Chess must not be memorized. . . . Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I had learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without.”
TRIBAL SCARS: THE HANDYMAN. In later years, one of Lewis’s friends, a successful Ivy League literary critic, passingly described him as being “handy,” a remark that irked him, for it felt as if it named a mere eccentricity, as if he knew Hittite grammar, say, or could recite the Pledge of Allegiance backward, whereas in the Hyde family being handy was a mark of the truly human (or at least of the truly human male).
