Secrets and Forgery

Reading isn’t private; it’s done in public all the time. Yet without actually asking, you wouldn’t be able to tell what kind of reading life a person cultivates, if any at all. Other things you can’t tell about people you know: if they carry grudges. You don’t know how many or how far back they go. You don’t know if someone has been seriously ill, lost a sibling, or where they stand with god. What about day dreams? At age seventeen, did this person lay an arm across a desk in the back of Spanish class, gaze out the third story window at the treetops swaying in a late May buzz and wonder about himself? Did he wonder what would become of him in thirty years time, or when and how his parents might die? Has he, in adulthood, remained current with his brother and  sister?

Think of the legions of people you sort of know. Neighbors. Your doctor, your postman, people you’ve known for years. Your grocery store checker. Other parents, people you know through your kids’ school or sports or clubs. Even friends don’t always discuss what, or whether, they read. You might have a favorite co-worker, someone you look forward to seeing every day, and you can’t tell.

You might think you can tell. The language a person uses or his comfort level with speaking might be a clue. An individual who meets your eye and clearly expresses opinions must be a reader. But consider shyness. Not all readers make eye contact, and there were those in school who never raised their hands, the sort that blended rather than joined, who learned by quiet but acute observation. Many readers I know are exiles: they feel out of sync with mainstream life. They are not sports fans; they can’t abide rowdiness. And if a reader can be unable to draw attention to herself, surely the converse could be true: the well-spoken extrovert might turn out to be a non-reader, or a reader of romance novels.

Readers I know generally fall into one of two camps: kamikaze readers and hammock readers. Kamikaze readers can read anywhere. In the car, on a bus, on family road trips, even at the breakfast table. A lot of kamikaze readers developed their abilities as a survival mechanism: books saved them. They escaped family trauma by diving into a fictional world safer than their own. Other kamikaze readers developed this way simply because they could; they had the temperament and focus to drop out of their surroundings. One of my best friends in high school read every day in the back row of senior English class, heavy stuff like Thoreau and Ayn Rand. Funnily enough, I don’t remember a single thing Mrs. Cantrell said that year. And I was listening.

The other camp, hammock readers, are just as enthralled by reading but are more easily distracted. Less able to fully disengage, this group can’t read just anywhere. I lean towards this group, but I have some kamikaze tendencies. As a kid, I always had my book with me, on the bus, at school, on family trips, even on the fishing boat. I was comforted by it even if I didn’t open it. I couldn’t read in the boat, I didn’t read in class and I still can’t read in the car, or in any room with music or television. In sum, hammock readers are people who do not read to drop out, they drop out in order to read.

Kamikaze readers read more, there’s no doubt about it. I’ve made peace with this. I’ve heard a lot of people groan about wishing they could read more. They don’t have the time, they’d rather watch Netflix, or they read at night and they’re tired, they fall asleep, so it takes a month to finish a novel. Oddly, I’ve never been jealous of other readers. When I’m listening to my kamikaze friends describe the titles they put away in the previous month, I don’t feel competitive. I don’t disbelieve them or secretly wonder how much they could possibly take in, reading so fast and so often. And when I’m giving my reading report, I don’t feel shame about how little I’ve read any more than I feel puffed up about it. Reading is the one area of my life where I accept myself exactly as I am. I don’t defend or belittle it, nor do I try to outpace anybody else.  I don’t feel insecure about what I read, either, though I’ll sometimes keep the self-help to myself. I get a little fed up with myself when I can’t remember what I’ve read or who wrote it, and sometimes I’ve longed for better retention, but mostly I take my reading life as it comes. I buy books and don’t read them. I check out books, can’t get interested and return them. I keep books for a decade and still believe I’ll get to them.

Right now I’m on another whodunit kick, inspired by the decidedly-not pulp novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. This novel, written by one of my Warren Wilson professors, Dominic Smith, is about a fictional, ancient Dutch painting and the woman who forged it. I love the subject of art forgery, one of those crimes committed by people you can’t help but admire. Forgery questions the nature of authenticity, which in turn leads to the puzzle of ethics, the root of all crime novels, really. Malfeasance is, in fact, at the heart of most fiction I love.

I read Josephine Tey’s 1929 novel, The Man in the Queue because I discovered that Tey wrote under a pen name (forgery!); she was actually Elizabeth MacKintosh, born in Inverness, Scotland. She used her grandmother’s name to write her crime novels, and another name, Gordon Daviot, to write plays. She was considered a lone wolf, doodled through classes in her youth and as an adult had an almost pathological unwillingness to meet new people. Her work does not follow the formula of crime fiction’s golden age, a period between the world wars when readers devoured whodunits. Researching Tey,  I discovered this era existed, had an actual name, and even rules. Tey did not play by the rules, which poo-pooed intuition, accidental discoveries and unaccountable hunches. Her detective, Inspector Alan Grant, derides modern crime fiction for it formulaic sameness.

In a Vanity Fair article about Tey, I learned of the Detection Club, a 1930s London dining society founded by mystery writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. The oath for initiates stated outright that members’ fictional detectives must avoid Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition and other “Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God.” If the novel featured a Watson-like “stupid friend,” he shouldn’t conceal any thoughts that pass through his mind, and his intellect must be “slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.” This club still exists. Though its oath is worded differently, it meets three times a year and has elected officials.

Next I found John Dickson Carr, an American writer also a part of the golden age of detective fiction. Carr is most famous for his biography, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1949, but I read Dead Man’s Knock, a crime novel that reads like a screenplay, and includes characters with no depth whatsoever, with a twisting plot that I was happy to figure out halfway through, only to find I was wrong in the end.

Carr’s detective, a rotund bumbler called Gideon Fell, turns out to have been modeled after a largely forgotten English writer and thinker of the last century, G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton, who died in 1936 at age 62, wrote biographies of Charles Dickens and Thomas Aquinas. He wrote novels, published thousands of essays, and his work, according to the American Chesterton Society, influenced such thinkers and social activists as C. S. Lewis, Michael Collins and Mohandas Gandhi. The man “stood 6’4″ and weighed about 300 pounds, usually had a cigar in his mouth, and walked around wearing a cape and a crumpled hat, tiny glasses pinched to the end of his nose, swordstick in hand, laughter blowing through his moustache.” Chesterton argued against “materialism, scientific determinism, moral relativism, and spineless agnosticism.” He argued against both socialism and capitalism as enemies of freedom and justice.

He could be a zealot. At the top of the society’s Frequently Asked Questions page is: “Was Chesterton an Anti-Semite?” Still, I admit it; I’m interested. And there’s only one way to find out.