What Censonr Prefer to Forget; N. Clark

Here! Try something good" something he considers good. A Federal bureaucrat soberly tells a House subcommittee that any thought of controlling the subject matter of Federally-aided text books is far indeed from his mind; yet he adds that certainly there are ways of encouraging the use of "good" books or discouraging "bad" ones in Federally-aided in stitutions. Money can be granted judiciously or withheld, can't it? Mr. Clark is well known for his freelance writ ing in The American Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Nation's Business, and many other magazines. All censors, including some parents, seem to like to forget an important fact about reading: namely, that no one knows for sure what's a good book for any one at a particular time - or a bad book, either. Serendipity is an un predictable factor in reading. A chance-found book, even one com monly considered \vorthless, can have something in it of little sig nificance for ninety-nine readers, yet for a hundredth it may be a magic key that opens doors and changes his life. There is in it, for him, a treasure such as the princes of Serendip were always running into without conscious purpose.

lVIany will remember how the young sub-editor of an obscure gazette in Pakistan, looking for 371 372 THE FREEMAN June something light to read after work one night, picked up a nov el he hoped would enable him to pass a few hours. It was Sir Walter Besant's All in a Garden Fair. That author and his book are forgotten now, and never set the world on fire. This book was a simple narrative about a girl and three boys. One of the boys hoped to become a writer. The young editor had not read far when he was hit a solar plexus blow. The hero, he was suddenly telling himself, was no better fitted for a writing career than he himself was. Further, by some process which he did not analyze, the book conveyed to him the thought that there was no reason why he had to stay on in his humble job. In London, book men, publishers, and endless ex citing literary activities were waiting. Why not go and try that city's doorsteps?

The young man read and reread Besant's novel, and his thought hardened into intention. With the help of the book he fashioned a dream for his future and began saving money to put it into effect. This he did. Soon he was far bet ter known than Besant. His name was Rudyard Kipling. In writing the story of his life, Kipling gives Besant's chance-found book high credit for shaping his career. A particular book's impact on any given reader can never be ac curately forecast: too much de pends on his circumstances when he reads it. Treasures neither sought nor expected can leap out of printed pa.ges in the strangest ways. A Youth and a Rabbit A youth who had no taste for reading because he had never read anything except what he was told to, crawled under a church to cap ture his pet rabbit when it escaped from its pen. That youth, Joseph Henry, is not forgotten in the history of American science. He pioneered in electromagnetic re search and was a leader in many fields. He initiated our weather report system, was the first secre tary of the Smithsonian Institu tion, and his name continues to designate the unit of electrical in duction. As a boy in tiny Galwa.y, New York, he quit school to go to work in the village store at the age of ten. He gave no ea.rly signs of special qualities, and was him self unaware of possessing talents that could lead to a distinguished career.

But he loved his rabbit. And when he saw it disappear through a hole in the foundation of the village church, he disappeared after it. In the dark there, adven ture came. A glint of light caught his at1968 WHAT CENSORS PREFER TO FORGET 373 tention. Wondering what caused it, he bellied his way to it and found daylight sifting through loose boards. He shoved them aside and squeezed through the opening, emerging in a little room which housed the village library. lIe took a book from the case. It happened to be Henry Brooke's A Fool of Quality, a slushy novel once famed for "passionate and tearful sensibility." The boy read a few sentences and was snared by the magic of printed words. For the first time in his life he experienced the joy of reading a book he didn't have to. It luade him a booklover. He crawled back there time after time, eventually leaving few of those books unread. This new passion led to his great reading adventure. Having to stay indoors one day because of a slight accident, Henry looked around for a book. The only one he hadn't read proved to be some thing printed in London "for the use of students and young per sons." The author, George Greg ory, was a vicar, a doctor of phi losophy and the arts, and one-time chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Landaff; and his book was entitled Lectures on ExperiJnental Philos ophy, Astrono1fvy, and Chemistry.

The owner of the book was Henry's mother's Scottish boarder. When the boy opened it, he found his curiosity deeply stirred. Soon he was more deeply lost in its con tents than he had been in Brooke's soggy novel. Gregory's book asked questions, suggested mysteries, opened vistas which to that boy's mind needed looking into. Here, this boy told himself, was some thing he could devote himself to passionately. The boarder saw his interest in the book and gave it to him. IIA Remarkable Influence ll What was a rabbit's role in Henry's career? Or, a book read because of a rabbit? James Clark \Velling, the scientist's early biog rapher, repeated the rabbit story but discounted its importance. "The strong intellectual forces which are organic in a great ca'reel'," he wrote, "do not depend on the casual vicissitudes which ripple the surface of human life." To think so, he declared, is to "convert human history .... into the fortuitous rattle and chance combinations of the kaleidoscope."

He said Henry was too great a man to have lived without making his mark on the age. Within limits, Welling was no doubt right. But without the rab bit, would his mark have been the same? Would he ever have both ered to open Gregory's sober looking volume? At the age of forty, Henry himself penned a paragraph of gratitude on the fly374 THE FREEMAN leaf of Gregory's book. "Although by no means profound," he wrote, he confessed that the book had exerted "a remarkable influence" on his life. It opened a new world of thought and enj oyment to him, he said, "and caused me to re solve at the time of reading it that I would devote my life to the acquisition of knowledge." "Enter at Your Own Risk" The late Charles F. Kettering knew (few better) the numbing effect of conformity and rut think ing even on scientists working on the frontiers of knowledge in a research laboratory. lIe also knew how a vagrant idea unsought can lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

In 1953 he gave Antioch College $750,000 to build the new Olive Kettering Library~ \Vhile building plans were under discussion, he remarked, probably more· than half seriously, that it might be wise to carve these words in stone over the portal: Enter here at your own risk. The risk he envi sioned was that the browser, with out seeking it, might find a book that would alter his whole direc tion of travel. It happens. The late Lew Sarett, a poet of whose verse Carl Sand burg once wrote, "the loam and the lingo, the sand and the sylla bles of North America are here," had a troubled childhood in Chicago. He was beset by fears grow ing out of immigrant parentage a perennially frightened mother and schoolboy bullies. The grea drama of his life was his figh against fear. He once told me tha' from a boyhood in constant fligh from terrors, he emerged into ~ new kind of life as a result oj reading the Dick Merriwel stories. These have never ranke( as great literature, and som« would call them trash. The crud« heroes put Lew to shame because unlike himself, they did not rUT from danger but met it stoutly ai whatever risk.

How naive! Yet this particulal reader sternly resolved to act n( less fearlessly than they. In hh next years, Lew tested himselj physically against rivers in flood hoodlums he knew were lurkin!] to half kill him, grizzly bears me1 eye to eye when he was a Fores1 Ranger and unarmed, and agains1 the subtler psychological menaCE of disapproval on public platforms Inspired by the ridiculous Merri· wells, his war on fear and the vic· tories he won were foundations on which his poetry was built and his career as a deeply respected uni· versi ty teacher. "The Blue Book" A remarkable private library was once housed on an upper floor of a downtown factory and ware· 1968 WHAT CENSORS PREFER TO FORGET 375 house building in Chicago. In its special field of Elizabethan sci ence' it was perhaps the finest of its kind. There were· a number of Shakesperean folios as well as sci ence. Every book was beautifully bound, lovingly cared for; and the owner, poorly schooled but richly educated, was familiar with the contents of every book. Among them was one to which some peo ple would not have given shelf space. It was printed in the Ice landic tongue.

Chester Hjortur Thordarson was born in Iceland and was brought to this country when little more than a baby. His father died soon after arri val, leaving the rest·. of them to find their way perilously in a strange land. Chester's first schooling, and for many years all he had, consisted of two summer sessions in a one-room country school in Dane county, Wisconsin. He learned his letters there, little else. The family moved to the pine barrens of Wisconsin, and later to a North Dakota ranch which was thirty miles from a railroad. In neither place were there schools for the boy to attend. However, in the Icelandic tradition, the Thordarsons carried with them a few books; and one, called "the blue book" by the family because of its blue-cloth binding, was en titled Edlisfraedi, an elementary physics book. Chester spent many stormy win ter days in the house, and reading was his recreation. Edlisfraedi be came for him far more than a time-passer. He read it so often and carefully that he knew it al most word for word. It had what he called a good section on elec tricity, and an exciting definition of a scientific experiment. The book made his career clear· to him, an unlikely one for a boy so sit uated: electrical research and de velopment. At seventeen, having attended no other school in the meantime, he went to Chicago to attend school, and was assigned to the fourth grade with the little fellows. He was small-built him self and didn't object, for in the next two years he was able to march through the eighth grade.

He had to quit school then and start earning his living. He never returned to any formal school; but he never stopped ex tending his education. He became an electrical engineer and man ufacturer of electrical equipment, especially laboratory equipment for universities. For Purdue Uni versity he built the world's first million-volt 25-cycle transformer. He patented more than a hundred electrical devices. He always said that the shape his career assumed was due to the nlagic of "the blue book," which hardly a censor alive would have considered fit to be 376 THE FREEMAN put into the hands of such a boy. He had Edlisfraedi rebound in blue calf by one of London's best bookbinders, and considered it the chief jewel in his library. From Most Unlikely Sources Acknowledged classics are fine, but they aren't everybody's fare. Unexpected treasures can be found in humble or unlikely books if they serve a reader's need at the time.

Would Luther Burbank's plant creating career have developed as it did had not someone given him, when he was twenty-one, a copy of Charles Darwin's Animals and Plants under Domestication? He often said the basis of his work was nature's method of plant im provement as Darwin described it. Can anyone now say how much Benjamin Franklin's scientific ex periments and social views owed to Daniel Defoe's An Essay upon Projects, a book unknown to most readers of Robinson Crusoe? Franklin said it was one of two books read at an early age which profoundly influenced him. Even a poor book, met fortu itously at a moment ripe for im pregnation, can breed a rich ca reer; and who is to say it's a "poor" book that does that? I once sat in the Pittsburgh office of the man who had just been elected president of the H. C. Frick Coke Company, a United States Steel subsidiary. The man told ml the story of a career, his own that could scarcely be matched to day. He worked underground as ~ miner till he was twenty-seven and at the time of his marriag l had only the rudiments of an ed ucation. But he already had a pow erful dream which he credited b a book sent to him as a Christma present when he was twelve. Un til he got it, he had never read l book.

He had to wade through thi one at a snail's pace in order tl make sure of each word. It wa a campaign biography of Jarne A. Garfield, then just elected Pres ident of the United States. To th boy it was a revelation that any one born in a log cabin, as Gar field was, educated in schools 11< better than those the lad himsel had briefly attended, and earninJ his living at one time as a mule driver on a canal towpath, coul~ rise so high. A little later h himself was driving mules in th mines. That ephemeral campaigl document made him think tha even he could make something 0 himself. "There is no doubt," he told mE "that President Garfield had : greater influence on me than an: other man, even though I met hin only in a book." Hoping to guide readers or "im prove" them, do-gooders and bea 1968 WHAT CENSORS PREFER TO FORGET 377 diedam would impose their notions of what's bad or good in books.

Even proponents of closed shelves in libraries, though without vi cious intent, to some extent share the guilt of restricting adventures in serendipity in reading. It is true that open shelves invite theft, mutilation, or misplacement. Dor othy Cooper, librarian at the Uni versity of Washington, is one who has moaned at the mess freshmen, researching for themes, can make of orderly shelves. But she has observed also that after introduc ing an open-shelf policy, books that had not circulated for ten years were found and read. "Open shelves," she has written, "are good for our patrons, good for us, and good for public relations." The reader who has free choice, opens a book without special in tent, turns pages idly, is caught by something read - and one more life is never again the same. + Uses of History WE ARE NOT ONLY passengers or sojourners in this world, but we are absolute strangers at the first step we make in it. Our guides are often ignorant, often unfaithful. By this map of the country which history spreads before us, we may learn, if we please, to guide ourselves. In our journey through it, we are beset on every side. Weare besieged, sometimes even in our strongest holds.

Terror and temptation, conducted by the passions of other men, assault us; and our passions, that correspond with these, betray us. History is a collection of the journals of those who have travelled through the same country, and been exposed to the same accidents; and their good and their ill success are equally instructive. In this pursuit of knowledge an immense field is opened to us: general history, sacred and profane; and histories of particular countries, particular events, particular orders, particular men; memorials, anecdotes, travels. LOR D B 0 LIN G B R 0 K E (1678-1751 ) On the Study and Use of History A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN A Critical Point HILLEL BLACK is one of those ebullient muckrakers who hits fifty targets and misses fifty others. IIis investigation of the textbooks used in our elementary grades and in our high schools, The American Schoolbook (William Morrow, $4.50), tends to concentrate on secondary matters. Most of these are very well worth considering.