My Reading Life Read online

  “I’m reading a book, ma’am,” I said. In my high school years I was polite to the point of being oleaginous.

  “I can see that. Do I look like an idiot or something?” Miss Hunter snapped. “It’s against the rules for a student to use the library during lunchtime.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. I didn’t know that,” I replied.

  “What’s that book you’re reading?” She grabbed it out of my hand and examined it as though it were pornographic contraband. She studied the book, then eyed me with a ferocious scowl.

  “This book’s never even been checked out. Are you reading it for the dirty parts?” she asked, as though she had cracked the mystery of this strange encounter.

  “I didn’t know it had dirty parts,” I answered.

  “If it does I’ll toss it with the morning trash. If you find anything dirty report it directly to me. Hugo’s a Frenchman. I don’t like his books. You know what I hear about this Hugo guy?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “His characters,” she said, studying the cover of the book. “He’s depressing. All the folks he writes about are just so … just so miserable. We’ve got another one of his books. You ought to try that. It’s about a football team. Do you like football?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Eileen Hunter seemed pleased at my answer and pulled another volume of Victor Hugo from a shelf. Then she handed me a copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame for my reading pleasure. Though she never demonstrated a shred of affection for me, I heard from other teachers that Miss Hunter thought highly of me and always admired my passion for French literature.

  Checking a book out of the Beaufort High School library required a swashbuckling, adventurous spirit, as Miss Hunter patrolled those aisles with the austerity of a knight-errant. Whenever she checked out a book, she treated the poor student as she would a visiting pirate. For Miss Hunter I think that the state of nirvana would be a library cleaned of all readers and the books all shelved and accounted for. As a librarian, she was legendary in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons.

  When I returned to teach at Beaufort High after my graduation from The Citadel, I encountered Miss Hunter again, but this time as a teaching colleague. She was as cranky and adversarial as ever, and would light into me with her complaints as I would bring four or five novels to check out for my weekly reading.

  “I don’t think teachers should be allowed to check books out of the library,” she said.

  “Pray tell why, Miss Hunter?”

  “You’re just taking a book out of circulation that a student might be reading,” she harrumphed. She was a world-class harrumpher.

  “They’re all virgins. I checked. None have ever been checked out before,” I told her.

  “How dare you bring up the subject of sex in my library!”

  “I only do it to excite you, Miss Hunter. Everyone has noticed your incredible sexual attraction to me. It’s the talk of the faculty lounge.”

  “You repulse me in every fiber of my being.”

  “So you say, Eileen,” I said, leaning toward her. “But I’ve read the secrets of your dark, disgusting heart. I know what you’re really after.”

  “I’m calling Sheriff Wallace!” she said, “He’ll shackle you like a dog and drag you behind his patrol car.”

  “Till our next forbidden encounter, Eileen.”

  “I didn’t give you permission to call me by my Christian name.”

  “Eileen, Eileen, Eileen,” I said as I sailed out to my first-period class.

  My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inextinguishable ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for story lines that show up in both books and the great tumbling chaos of life. Though I have not thought of the forbidding figure of Eileen Hunter for years, she recently roared back to me with her bizarre peculiarity intact. My genuine fondness for Eileen trumps my irritation at the thorny relationship she brought to the librarian’s craft. I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.

  Shortly after I began teaching in Beaufort I tried to read The Complete Works of Charles Dickens. Then I received a handwritten note from Miss Hunter asking if I could meet her in the library after school.

  When I took a seat in front of her desk, I noticed that her pocketbook was open and that she was writing checks to pay her monthly bills. Though she did not greet me, she began talking as soon as I took my seat. “Conroy, I grew up in the country among country people. The finest people in the world. My mother and father were hardworking people and they raised me in the most genteel manner. They raised me to be a Southern lady with impeccable manners. Every inch of me is a Southern lady.”

  “What can I do for you, Miss Hunter?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed it lately, Conroy, but I’ve come down with a summer cold.”

  “Should I drive you to a doctor? Or buy you some medicine?”

  “That’s the problem. Cold medicine never seems to work. At best, it has a placebo effect on me. My father was a gentleman farmer and he had theories about the common cold. He was famous in our neck of the woods for making his own remedies. Oh, this light bill is preposterous! He made a hot toddy which he claimed could cure even pneumonia.”

  “I don’t see how I can help you.”

  “Be patient. Young men are so tiring when they let their impatience show. Now, a hot toddy would include many herbs and spices. But what makes them really effective is the addition of a shot glass of bourbon. In Beaufort it would be unseemly for a woman of my social standing to be seen entering a liquor store and emerging with a telltale brown paper bag.”

  “So you want me to buy you a bottle of bourbon?”

  “A half gallon of Jack Daniel’s Black. There is a delivery box for Coburn Dairy beside my front door. Come after nightfall. Be discreet. There’ll be an envelope with the exact amount of the purchase waiting for you. This is for medicinal purposes only. I’ve had trouble shaking this cold.”

  “How long has it bothered you, Miss Hunter?”

  “I’ve had this cold for—let me try to guess—I couldn’t produce an exact date, but I’ve had this summer cold for about the last twenty years.”

  It was the first and only joke Eileen Hunter ever shared with me, but I supplied her with cold medicine for the next two years, always with discretion and under the cover of darkness. Her loneliness seemed unbearable. In the years I knew her I never saw her reading a book or talking about a book she’d read. Her familiarity with literature was suspect, and she famously placed the Sherlock Holmes collection in the biography section. I can’t approach the word “librarian” without her austere image rising in my consciousness. Even though she had a genius for being contrarian and disagreeable, there was an integrity she displayed in her fanatical need to control her small corner of the world.

  Our relationship ended badly and it grieves me to say it. She wore her Southernness like an impenetrable armor, and the integration of the schools was a constant agony to her. She could not hide her contempt for the black students and the personal injury she felt with the collapse of the Jim Crow laws of the South. Her relationship with the black students was venomous and her discomfort with them undisguised. She and I would clash often over her treatment of my black students.

  “I’d like you to be fair to them, Miss Hunter,” I said during one encounter.

  “They’ve no right to be in my school,” she said. “They’ll get no special treatment from me.”

  “I only ask you to treat them as badly as you do the white students. That’s not too much to ask.”

  “It’s well known that you prefer the coloreds to your white students,” she said. “It’s the talk of the teachers’ lounge.”

  “I like both; there’s no harm in that.”

  “I’ve never liked the colored, Conroy. They scare me. Always have.”

  “Then try to get to know some of them. Try Grady Lights or Julia Buckner. They’re t
he nicest kids you’ve ever met.”

  “You don’t understand one thing about the South Carolina way of life. You don’t know what you’re playing with. This colored thing’s going to reach up and bite you.”

  And bite it did. In less than two years, I would be back in Miss Hunter’s library addressing the Teachers’ Association, trying to explain why I’d been fired from my job teaching black kids on Daufuskie Island. It was not my best day as a speaker, and my fury leaked in at the edges as I described my volatile year teaching those wonderful kids who didn’t seem to have a chance to succeed in the world they were born into. Though I did not know it as I spoke in the library that was such familiar ground to me, I would never be hired to teach another day in my life. The teachers voted with a show of hands and they chose to support me by a wide margin. Eighteen teachers voted against me, all of them white, and all of them teachers I had known at Beaufort High School, all as colleagues and some who had taught me in high school. It nearly killed me to see Eileen Hunter’s hand raised in support of my firing.

  When it was all over, I had lost a court case to win my job back, I was in the middle of that white heat of creation that would produce The Water Is Wide, and I went to visit Miss Hunter at her home. I came in bright daylight so as not to alarm her. She cracked the door open and stared at me from the shadows.

  “What do you want, Conroy?”

  “There are no hard feelings, Miss Hunter. None at all. I came to tell you I understand why you voted against me,” I said.

  “I’d do it again.”

  “I know you would. But it’s okay.”

  “I think you’re a dangerous man,” she said.

  “No, you don’t. I think you’ve always liked me.”

  “Then you’ve got another think coming.”

  “You know what’s in my heart.”

  “I don’t like what’s in your heart.”

  “Yeah, you do,” I said. “You still got that summer cold?”

  I could hear her hesitate; then she said, “It comes and goes.”

  “Look in your Coburn Dairy milk case. I left you a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. For medicinal purposes only, of course.”

  “Don’t come back here, Conroy.”

  “It’s okay, Miss Hunter. It’s all okay,” I said as I left. We never spoke again.

  I was living in Atlanta when I heard Eileen Hunter died. I sent flowers to her funeral at the Beaufort First Baptist Church and had a Mass said for the repose of her soul. She had found me in her library, reading Victor Hugo in 1961. I was born to be in a library and there wasn’t a thing she could do to intimidate me or run me out. I think I was as fond of Eileen Hunter as anyone she ever met, and I believe she knew that. Despite her denials, I’ll always believe she knew what was in my heart.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE OLD NEW YORK BOOK SHOP

  I moved my family from Beaufort to Atlanta in the winter of 1973. Without quite knowing it I had become a controversial figure in Beaufort, an undistinguished fact that was disclosed to me at a neighbor’s oyster roast in a backyard on the Point, the historic district. I had gone to high school with his children, and this lanky, outspoken man told me he had just finished reading my “nigger book.” He’d tack my worthless hide on a barn door if I ever put him in one of my “nigger books,” he said. When finishing up The Great Santini, I took immense satisfaction in the secret knowledge that I used this man’s name for one of my characters, and that he would limp forever through my fictional world as a black man. But the encounter disturbed me and I was hearing rumors of my brothers and sister being hassled by sullen white students at the high school. By then, I was also certain that I had no chance to land any kind of job in Beaufort. I looked toward Atlanta as the place of my birth and the city that would allow me both anonymity and some measure of redemption.

  In Atlanta, my wife, Barbara, and I bought a two-story brick house on Briarcliff Road near Emory University. Rather than work from home, I rented an office in a warren of haphazard rooms on the third floor of a Victorian house on Fifteenth Street. There was a lovely woman named Judy who had a seamstress shop in a guardhouse that protected the entrance to the house known locally as “the Castle.” On the bottom floor was a small, intimate theater with smells of mildew and abandonment coming from the folds of its curtains, a place that delighted my imagination. I dreamed of writing a play that would open in that castoff theater, bringing the whole building back to some radiant, creative life. As I made my way to my office each day, I passed through a small village of marionettes, in all the suggestible muteness of their half-opened lifeless jaws. Here, I would continue the work of creating a fighter pilot and his long-suffering family. Though I’d begun the novel in Beaufort, I wrote the pilot’s arrival from Europe at the Atlanta Naval Air Station, where I was born. I had the fictional family of the Meechams depart in the middle of the night from my grandmother’s house on Rosedale Road. I imagined the trip to Beaufort down those two-lane highways before interstates as they cut through pine forests and over rivers with Indian names. When I finished writing for the day, I would make my way down the unlit hallways watched by the unhappy puppets who were my constant circle of friends.

  Since I am a man of ingrained habit, my life has fixed points of immovable behavior that can make my daily schedule seem neurotic to the point of inertia. To me, the writing life requires the tireless discipline of the ironclad routine. The writing of books does not permit much familiarity with chaos. Each morning I would leave my house just after rush hour and make the ten-minute drive to the Castle. I made the same journey for months without detecting a nondescript store on Piedmont Road that awaited my notice and inspection. It was called the Old New York Book Shop, and I drifted into its unprepossessing interior in early April and found myself released among a wonderland of books that would utterly change my life. I had first noticed the store for the most fatuous reasons—in the mornings I passed a mismade, two-tiered trolley of hardbound books for sale at a dime each. On the way back home in the afternoon, the trolley would advertise another sad grouping of books, each priced at a quarter. The prices seemed insulting to any self-respecting book, hardback or not. Out of curiosity, I decided to check the store out, not knowing I was answering an invitation to my own interior fate in Atlanta.

  At that time in my life, hardbound books were still an unaffordable luxury. I had never set foot in an antiquarian bookstore. By then, I had written two of the hardbound books on the modest bookshelves of my house. As earthly treasures, I had kept possession of my college textbooks and considered them highly prized mementos of my early years. My histories of England, my Norton Anthologies, and my works of Milton and Shakespeare satisfied some itch of acquisition in me. My favorite was The World in Literature, which I read after my graduation from The Citadel. That book introduced the works of Euripides and Catullus and Montaigne, those bright, singing names of writers whose works I’d never encountered and names I still couldn’t pronounce. Though I had not excelled in my academic life in college, I had performed well in my English and history courses, yet still carried the unshakable thought that I was ignorant and unschooled. My mother’s incurable sense of inferiority about her education would contaminate my own bloodstream and would cloud the arteries of self-esteem in me for all the days of my life. I could read a million books and still consider myself a half-baked, mediocre thinker. But, by accident, I had discovered the nerve center of my deliverance in a nondescript bookstore in Atlanta. I had stumbled upon the secret watchman of the most profound and illustrious intellectual life I would ever experience. Thousands of books roared out my name in joyous welcome when I entered that shop for the first time. Their presence both attracted and intimidated me. Already my calling as a writer had altered the course of my life, yet the two books I’d written seemed anemic to me, boilerplate at best, and I lacked the understanding, the sheer depth of culture I’d need if I were to touch the sourceless, incandescent seas that roared inside me. I could feel them but not
set them loose; I could imagine but not articulate. As The Great Santini began to form the storm warnings inside me, my parents were covering the opening movements of their own tempest-tossed divorce, and I found myself the reluctant chronicler of their flawed, remorseless love for each other, as well as the raw hatred that fed it. Whenever I wrote the word “Santini” it felt like a razor cutting across a vein in my wrist. At an early age, I had turned to reading as a way for the world to explain itself to me. Here, at last, I had stumbled into the store that would open up a hundred universities for my inspection. I had dropped out of nowhere and found myself at the gates of my own personal Magdalen College in Oxford. Here I could punt down the Cam through the hallowed grounds of Cambridge University, take notes on Balzac at the Sorbonne, rush to my morning class on Dante in Bologna, or sprint toward an honors class in Harvard Yard. The great writers of the world sang out in darkness and greeted me with the pleasure of my arrival.

  Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next ten years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart. From Jane Austen to Émile Zola, all the great writers watched as I passed in careful review, walking the aisles of the bookshop. I paused at the four-volume set of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I had never heard of Proust or his magnificent literary achievement. Reading the first two pages of Swann’s Way, I found the Moncrieff translation of the French magisterial but intimidating. The price for the complete set was twenty dollars, which at the time I thought was sinfully overpriced.

  I entered into a maze of handmade, unpainted bookshelves; and I wandered through sections of poetry, British literature, general fiction, travel, nature, psychology, and American literature. It was during my slow voyage through this dusty labyrinth of a store that I experienced a lust for ownership that had never burdened me before. Though I’d always turned to books for completion and solace, I had become aware ever so gradually that I was one of those rare readers—I could change the direction of my life if the right book came my way to offer its subliminal powers for my inspection. The Old New York Book Shop would become the source of abundance where I would begin a lifetime safari on a headlong search for the great books of the world. If I were patient and observant, every celebrated book would pass by me on those shelves. That day, I bought three paperback books of literary criticism, but I was back the next day and the next. Familiarity with the store made me bolder; intimacy with the stock made me a collector. I began to buy in earnest, and the more I bought the more I wanted.