Wordsmith

Anne Fadiman makes me jealous. When I open her books, the words fly off the page and blow me away with little puffs of knowledge—words I’ve never seen before, words I once memorized when studying for the SAT whose meanings I never quite internalized, words I use every day but reconfigured in fresh, exotic combinations that only Anne can create. Who else can describe a bookworm as a “squiggly little vermicule?”¹ Who else can conceive of university English departments as “the ICUs of literature” whose “tenuous resuscitations” keep dead authors alive?² Her writing at once inspires me and depresses me with the knowledge that I am leagues behind.

Anne grew up in, for lack of better word, a literary family. In her essay, “The Joy of Sesquipedalians,” she writes of her family’s love of words. Her father was an author, editor, radio and television personality, her mother a screenwriter and journalist. Their Saturday afternoons were spent gathered around the television set, competing against televised teams on G.E. College Bowl. For bedtime entertainment, Anne’s father composed a series of stories titled Wally the Wordworm, in which our squiggly little vermicule eats words. The bigger the better.

I grew up in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Toledo, Ohio. My parents can name every bone in the body but can barely scrape together the titles of three Shakespeare plays. They claim to have read Jane Eyre in Chinese during secondary school but regularly confuse its plot for that of Anna Karenina. When we browsed the bookshelves at Heatherdowns Library, my mom didn’t show me around or point out her favorite authors. The only books in the library my dad had read were the car manuals, out of sheer necessity, to teach himself how to drive stick.

In my creative writing classes at Yale, I met students whose parents narrated Aesop’s fables when they were four and Dickens when they were ten. Unknowingly, they grew up schooled in the Western canon—even if they hadn’t read Socrates or Aristotle themselves, the names were at least familiar, and their writings lined the family bookshelves. They could ask their parents for help on their English homework or trade thoughts on whether Sisyphus was truly happy. When I read their writing, I could sense that they were infinitely more competent than me. They were at home in the English language, whereas I was still making my way through Customs, worried about overstaying my visa.

I visited Professor Langdon Hammer today, my former freshman adviser. I’ve taken two classes of his: Daily Themes and Poetry Since 1950, for which I will soon be submitting the final piece of literary analysis of my college career. I asked him about the book he is writing (a biography of James Merrill), what his day-to-day life is like, whether he misses teaching Daily Themes, how to maintain one’s personal library (the answer: sacrifice half a dozen books in a culling ritual on the last full moon of spring). Then I asked him if he grew up in a literary family.

“No.”

“Oh. Me neither.”

We talked about Lev Grossman; I mentioned that I am currently rereading his novel, The Magicians. “He was a graduate student here,” Prof. Hammer said. (I can’t tell if we’re on a first name basis yet, so I will continue referring to him as such.) I remembered reading something like that on Wikipedia. Prof. Hammer gestured to a poster on the wall. “His father was a poet.” The poster advertised a series of readings. The headlining poet was Allen Grossman. I had been staring at the poster intermittently since walking into the office, but I hadn’t noticed the name.

Lev Grossman’s writing has the sort of hyper-educated, more-eloquent-than-thou style I admire in Anne’s essays. I turn the pages of The Magicians. Little puffs ruffle my hair like a summer breeze. I confessed to Prof. Hammer my jealousies: Anne, Lev Grossman, my better-educated classmates. It felt unfair, that they had spent their whole lives befriending words and idioms with whom I had barely made an acquaintance.

“But think of Anne’s essay,” Prof. Hammer said, “on Hartley Coleridge.” The son of renowned poet Samuel Coleridge, Hartley grew up in a literary family but spent his life crouching in his father’s shadow. The sad thing, Anne wrote, was that he was a fine poet of his own accord, but no one seemed to care. “It’s tough, having so much to live up to,” Prof. Hammer pointed out. “You, on the other hand, have something to call your own.”

English is mine. I discovered it—a bumbling conquistador, groping my way around uncharted territories without my parents to guide the way. At school, all my questions were answered, but at home I was lost at sea, left to my own devices. I think back to my strange encounter with the word dashboard and my mistaken assumption that it was so named because people always dashed off in their cars to avoid being late. I remember being confused over sprinkles and glitter, spending weeks trying to figure out which one went on cupcakes and which one on construction paper (or more crucially, which was edible and which was not). When my fifth grade school supplies list told me to buy a novelty eraser, I stared at the adjective for hours, begging it to reveal its meaning, frustrated that neither my parents nor my children’s dictionary would give me the answer. Perhaps there is something valuable in my little adventures with words: I have created my own literary heritage accessible only to me, my small collection of haphazard encounters with letters and ink. Would I trade it all for the chance to write like Anne? Hell, yes. But until then, it’s all I’ve got.

Prof. Hammer is currently working on the preface and conclusion to his biography of James Merrill, lining up his references, sorting through the acknowledgements. And so am I, tying up the loose ends of my college career, the last coffee shop conversations, the final follow-throughs of “Let’s get a meal!” called out in passing on Elm Street. So here is a hasty acknowledgement, one of many to come:

My thanks to Prof. Hammer, for reminding me that growing up without a literary pedigree may be a blessing in disguise, that discovering a language on your own can make up for the bedtime stories I missed. Not all who wander (in libraries) are lost.

I recently turned in my Writing Concentration project: four nonfiction essays totaling 51 pages—17,436 words. The little girl who once squinted at picture book titles in Heatherdowns, soon to be a Yale alumna. I think I did alright.