I recently read Gail Godwin’s QUEEN OF THE UNDERWORLD. It was mostly a good book, although I thought the ending dribbled away and couldn’t exactly warm to the protagonist Emma. Time for a long digression, (the fun thing about having a blog is how untidy you get to be with your writing; if this were a REAL essay, I’d have to tighten things up and not go off on my huge galumphing tangents. But tangents are FUN aren’t they?

The book is set in 1959 and the just-graduated journalism school gal (in ’59 they are gals and girls) has a job at a Miami newspaper; a real job that comes complete with a awfully interesting place to live, a hotel whose staff and guests are mostly Cuban (much of the book’s interesting stuff is about what Miami was like in 1959) and a real lover, Paul. The character should appeal to me as a bright young thing overcoming all sorts of ...but she doesn’t. I can’t tell if Godwin intends me to like her or not but that’s sort of okay It’s interesting to deal with ambiguous feelings about a character. Emma is the sort of woman who has trouble talking to certain people because they don’t fit into her categories; if a man isn’t a potential father figure, or romantic interest, or best buddy, she is confused. She says this flat out – “he didn’t fit into any of my categories - and that made me squirm. It strikes me as awfully shallow. But maybe in a 1959 world, that might happen more, the need to know one’s place in the world.

Emma’s married lover, 20 years her senior, who never explains/justifies/seems to realize he requires some excuse, was her boss at a summer job at a hotel. Okay I admit that a) that doesn’t wreck the book or the people for me as it’s fiction and these things occur in fiction and often are part of the interesting story. And it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to tsk tsk since I’ve been there and done that. But the situation was different and I thought it went over the line because Emma is friendly with Paul’s wife. She is not a bitch, she is not cold, mad, boring, drunk or evil. And one scene Emma tells about is the afternoon she was in bed with Paul when the wife called to say “let’s go shopping”.

Then in one scene of the book, when someone asks Emma if she’s read a DOCTOR ZHIVAGO she answers “Oh, it’s wonderful.” But in her next line, she tells the reader, that no she had not actually read it, but she’s read enough reviews that she could discuss the book with expertise. And that tiny scene bugged the hell out of me. Does that make sense? It rang up as pretentious. Or shallow. Or both.

So hang on, here’s my very rough segue into today’s topic - “required reading”. Not so much those books we had to read in high school English class, although I know some of you remember what they were and how you reacted to them (me? I hated high school English class and the books we had to read. Hate, hated, hate.)

What I mean is the books that somehow you think (I think, we think maybe even they think) that you should have read at some point. Books that because they were huge, because they are somehow a part of your expertise, your career, your special interest, your background or your politics, that “everyone” else would have read them and would assume of course you’d read them. Not to impress but more because “how can you be an informed student of X?” or “how can you love Y?” or simply how can you be involved in the study of love of Z if you haven’t read the basic text about it? And I suck at that.

The books I’ve tried to read because without them, I don’t have a true literary foundation in some passion of mine. You don’t have to have a literary expertise in something to love or support it but somewhere in my head is this little voice that I know someday will demand that I pull out my blue book and my number 2 pencils because I’m going to be quizzed on something I really care about. And I’ll flunk.

I once sat through a trial of a political activist who was grilled by the prosecution on his knowledge of the details of nuclear weapons; as if not knowing the specifics of these different weapons made him a phony. He knew far more than I realized but that wasn’t the issue for me. It sure was for the prosecution. How could be possibly protest the development of a specific weapon if he didn’t know how it worked? Being anti-war, a pacifist, a peacenik, wasn’t enough. You had to be an “informed” pacifist. It was intended to make the man on trial appear as if he were an uninformed lout who just went along with protests to make trouble, didn’t think for himself, followed the party line (which came right out of Moscow; yes they still believed that in the 80s about anti-nuke protests just as they had in the 60s about anti-war protests. That we were taking “orders” from foreign governments because we could not think this stuff up for ourselves.) The man on trial was my lover Bob, who had been an activist his entire adult life, starting while he was still serving in the Navy and continuing to the day he died.

The tactic has been used often at political trials; to show the absolute naiveté of political protestors, to show what gees we we are for following “the party line”, we’re often asked if we’ve read various great works because how can you possibly call yourself a pacifist, or a communist or a socialist or a humanist without having read Fill-In-The-Blank. DAS KAPITAL?” What? You don’t know this quote from Thoreau’s WALDEN?” or “what Ralph Waldo Emerson said in ‘Self-Reliance’?” as if well heck, if you don’t know the texts, you’re not a real believer and even the prosecutor (or the senator, or the councilmember who’s ragging on you) knows your cause better than you do, you phony.

I’ve never gotten through WALDEN; it was assigned reading in junior high, I think, but I failing to get very far. I’ve never read Marx or Engels or Bakunin. I’ve never managed to finish Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”. I have tried and I cannot explain to you why my eyes glaze over. Eleven pages from a man who for years was my major hero and I can’t get there.

As a government major, a liberal from a family of lifelong Democratic party members (I have such early memories of my parents working on election day), a voter (I think on the DAY I turned 18 I went down to New London City Hall and registered) a political activist for both candidate and cause, there are probably books that should be in my “of course I’ve read them” list and my “I can quote at the drop of a campaign button” list. I’m sure one of those books is Alexis de Tocqueville’s DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. I think I set out to read it at least five times. And never got anywhere. Not only should I have read it as a (at one time card-carrying) supporter of democracy, but the author’s special interest in the American Prison system reflects my own interest, both academic and otherwise. But I couldn’t read the dam book.

Another one I’ve tried and failed to read is “The Port Huron Statement”, an analytical document that formed the basis for the creation of SDS. Tom Hayden was the primary author of the document written in 1962 representing the hottest form of political thought on concepts of democracy, challenging the political structure, the future of war, weaponry, challenging concepts of race and dug-in party elites, all the good stuff that was SDS before things melted into in-fighting, arrogance, frustration, crashed, burned, melted, you-name it – self-destructed ended. It was the basis of some of the movement that still fascinates me.

Do you have books, or essays, like that? Books that, because you have a love of French literature, Canadian history, writing, government, music, Art Deco, jazz, or peanut butter than you simply MUST have read? And you haven’t? You’ve tried and you can’t? Or you did and remember nothing? Did you try anything like Cliff Notes or just give up?

This week I am going to try reading AMERICAN VERTIGO: TRAVELING AMERICA IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF TOCQUEVILLE by Bernard-Henri Levy. And maybe that will do it. I probably won’t go back and read DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA but maybe, if I like this book, I’ll feel a bit what, less guilty” that I’m not educated the way somehow that I feel I “should” be. As Levy retraces the steps of the earlier trip, going much farther afield (“America” in Tocqueville’s day was a lot smaller) and reexamining everything from the prison system apparently to how the country views democracy, well, we’ll see how well I do.