There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –
Emily Dickinson
My father writes emails on a regular basis, about whatever comes into his mind. Yesterday's email was a musing on finding role models, particularly important when you don't have a family that provides them. He was born in Boston, to a lower-class family at the beginning of the Great Depression.
I asked for his permission to post his writing, and he gave it. You will enjoy what he has to say, below the fold.
Our choices of whom we would like to be change as we age, and I am trying to remember the role models of my early years. The problem was, living in depressed neighborhoods and going to schools that contained gruff and impatient teachers made it difficult. In other words, my choices were limited by my environment, and I could choose only between unattractive alternatives.
In a family of five boys (I came next to last into the world, and narrowly escaped being an April Fool’s baby in 1926), I found none of my three older brothers interested in my problems; none of them ever thought to ask my opinion on any subject. My parents were more than a generation away, and both had concerns of their own, mostly related to lack of funds in Depression-era America. I don’t recall having a real conversation with either of them. Since I was expected to sell newspapers in downtown Boston, I was on the streets racing around with copies of the Globe, Traveler, American, and Transcript (the last named folded even before Pearl Harbor), but the Canada Points who sold me wholesale the copies (which retailed for two cents ) were cheerless and (as I recall) unfriendly if I tried to return unsold copies the next day. In brief, I was forced to discover my heroes, such as they might be, in the books I borrowed from the Public Library that served the residents of the West End.
Penrod, a creation of Booth Tarkington, kept getting into trouble, and his activities were somewhat frenzied and improbable; but he reflected a white-bread universe that I had no access to, and he was fun to read about; but I never wanted to be a Penrod. Jim Hawkins, the boy who in Stevenson’s romance never succumbed to the pressures of a harrowing hunt for treasure. Still, he more closely resembled somebody I might meet some day, but I hadn’t met a real Jim in either Roxbury or Dorchester in the 1930s. I heard tantalizing tales of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, a rough-hewn creation but one doubtless based on fact; a potential juvenile delinquent, given to profane talk, and hopelessly muddled when it came to the opposite sex, this Chicago boy was a life force that Farrell may not have approved of, or even liked. Alas, my library would not allow me to check out the Modern Library edition; I was not old enough, and the copy (or copies) remained available only to adults.
Of course I had nothing to do with the brave and virtuous heroes of fairy tales or, indeed, children’s literature as a whole. I had to grow into an understanding of human nature, and experience some of the growing-up that was the necessary prerequisite for enjoying a hero in a novel. I got a boost from an MGM movie of the mid-1930s, David Copperfield, and when I went to the book, yes, indeed, I recognized many of my own fits and starts of coping with, and often fumbling, the relationships with adults and especially the opposite sex. I had an awful lot of growing up to do. Surely, when I entered the Navy shortly after turning 18, I was still an innocent, but with a changing perspective on life: an innocent abroad, to use Mark Twain’s term. It took me a while to find suitable heroes. They materialized one at a time, and reading provided quicker access to the fact of their existence than ordinary social intercourse.
I’ve been on the lookout for them all my life, I guess. They are not numerous, but my standards may be set too high. The ones I have found are real, and I don’t want to give them up.
(annetteboardman's note: In case you haven't guessed, my father has been a wonderful role model, and I both love him and am so proud of everything he has done in his life. He supported me through undergraduate years, and supplemented grad school fellowships through to my completion of the Ph.D. I am now a professor as he was, although in a different field.)