If You've Got the Itch

Kate Zambreno writes in her book, To Write As If Already Dead, “What is the space of literature for if not as a scratching pad for our irritants.” I’ve long been an active, eclectic reader with not an insignificant number of irritants. I’m considering now not merely how I choose a book to read—what irritant I mean in the reading to scratch—but also why I continue to read any one book to its last page—and what relief I realize in the tome. Or conversely, why do I interrupt and/or cease my read of a book! On my reading desk at the moment (but more of that later) is Melville’s Moby Dick and James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I’m considering by them what irritant I am trying to scratch.
            I had read Moby Dick several times years ago in the effort of scratching some itches, though then I did not consider the motivation for the read as the need of scratching pads for my irritants. I not then even consider literature a scratching pad for my irritants. For that purpose I possessed other though eventually ineffective instruments. I then recognized that my reading was a social engagement I could enjoy without others. I read a great deal. I still do. I know that over the years I had come across in people’s memoirs an acknowledgement that in their youths they had read books that absolutely overwhelmed them and opened for them a passionate writer-readerly existence. I do not believe that this was my experience: I required the solitude and I was, well, curious. I suppose at some point I considered that becoming a writer might provide me with the solitude I enjoyed as a reader but except for some aborted attempts to author somethings I maintained my solitude in the company of books. My reading habits were eclectic and I was curious, and though curiosity might be a scratching pad for some irritant, I did not consider it so. But I recall being accompanied by The Hardy Boys series, the sports novels of John Tunis, The Microbe Hunters, Catcher in the Rye, One Hundred Great Sports Heroes, and The Complete Sherlock Holmes. But I did not then consider curiosity to be an equivalent to irritancy, nor did I then ascribe my passion for books as the need for scratching pads for what troubled me: maybe I was too naïve or just too repressed. Nor was I precocious. But I know that with a book I never felt alone or scratchy; nevertheless, I am certain that back then I had not read Moby Dick, nor did I experience any compelling passion for the work of Herman Melville. That would eventually change and I found welcome relief in “Billy Budd” and “Bartleby the Scrivener.” 
            I am thinking that I might have first read Moby Dick as an English major at Roanoke College in pursuit of an undergraduate degree, though I acknowledge that of that assignment I remember relatively nothing if indeed the reading occurred at all! At the time I was enrolled in so many literature courses that I probably experienced myself as some type of reading machine mechanically (and sometimes mindlessly) turning pages. I suspect that if the novel had been assigned it would have been in Zebulon Hooker’s American Literature survey course, but of that class I remember only that I thought that he was an abysmal teacher—damn, I still think so—and so if, indeed, I was assigned Moby Dick, and assuming that I read it, perhaps that reading lacked all context and motivation except to earn an A in the course. Actually, I think that I might have been able to achieve that grade without even reading the novel! The irritant I experienced probably derived from having to attend Hooker’s classes at all and probably too early in the day! 
            The next time Moby Dick entered my horizon was in a graduate course at Hofstra University in study for my master’s degree. The subject of the course was the Romantic period in American literature: Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Longfellow, Dickinson, Poe, and I know there were others assigned. The professor, Steven Brodwin, evinced great enthusiasm for Melville and particularly Moby Dick; during the semester he attended a conference concerning it down at the South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan. In class the next week he described how the session had met in the bowels of a ship (not a whaler, I think) at which one or three scholars reported that they had run Moby Dick through a computer- generated analysis accounting for word incidence in the novel. The professor drolly asked us to conjecture what word in the book was most often repeated. When no one ventured a correct guess, the professor with a smirk answered that the word most commonly appearing in Moby Dick was “whale,” as if that big surprise might now add some shattering insight into the novel’s meaning. But my reading of Moby Dick in that course was directed by the subject matter of the entire course and by the professor’s enthusiasm for the period and his interest in the novel. My irritant then was still the completion of the degree. I did not recall studying Moby Dick; I just read it. I believe that the 20-page paper I wrote for the course was concerned Edgar Allan Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In that course I earned my A.
            The third reading and this time careful study of Melville’s novel took place when my daughter chose it as the subject of her Honor’s thesis at Ithaca College. What she had proposed to investigate in her work was Ishmael’s identity before he became Ishmael. After all, we would discuss, the novel began, “Call me Ishmael,” but it was left to the reader to wonder who Ishmael might have been before he demanded to be called by that name. Who indeed might Ishmael have been before he became Ishmael; Ishmael was—and still is— a loaded term in Western culture, and this question probably served as some form of irritant. I have always felt great sympathy for Abraham’s eldest and cast out son: I am an eldest son myself. But this time, of course, I read the novel having in time earned my doctorate in English, possessed now of an arsenal of critical perspectives, and having written a book or two in the field of education into which I ventured at the very moment when literary criticism began to inform the field of curriculum studies. My published works were academic tomes of which I am yet proud though they have had only a select, small but discerning readership. Melville’s book, too, had been poorly received at publication, though I am certainly not comparing my published work to that of Moby Dick. Alas! Nevertheless, I was intrigued by my daughter’s topic. And I had as I have suggested by then acquired the tools to study the text with her. There was also by now plenty of irritants that I could scratch with the novel. 

            Of the second book on my reading desk: I don’t recall that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was ever assigned in any course in which I enrolled, and so my possession of the text itself was probably not acquired for any class assignment. However, in the margins of my copy of the book that I have drawn from the bookshelf there are faded pencil markings in the margins, but these annotations end early on. I must not have finished the book and I certainly remember nothing from what could only have been an aborted reading: apparently, the irritant was not irritating enough. Or maybe the scratching occurred in all of the wrong places. I probably was reading the book because I felt Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with accompanying photographs by Walker Evens was something that I ought to have read. Alas, it must remain so. In all humility I must admit that my present reading of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men created more itches that it could scratch and I had to put it aside. The prose was too thick and at times impenetrable. Or I was. And this must serve for as good an explanation as any other, I think.
            I recognize that one need not begin a read from a particular irritant: a book can also stimulate an irritant that the reading might then address as a scratching pad—Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights had that effect on me: the characters of Heathcliff and Cathy burned me and impelled the reading. I believe that I learned something about passion from reading that novel. There have been other books that served as scratching pads for my various irritants, and I can now ascribe what I earlier called curiosities as irritancies; over the last years I have scratched myself with the novels of Philip Roth and Iris Murdoch, for example. More recently I have returned to Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady and to Poe’s short story, “The Purloined Letter.” Sometimes the irritant that the space of literature might scratch comes from within and only certain literature could relieve. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 comes to mind as does the work of George Eliot or Primo Levi. Or as do the novels of Anthony Trollope, though at the time I did not know what itch they scratched. But in reading I felt relieved. Dickens’ David Copperfield and Great Expectations, or the work of Howard Jacobson, and particularly Shylock Is My Name offered me comfort and I have read them more than once over the years. I have read so many books. But as I might have suggested in some earlier readings of Moby Dick without some irritant the novels slip away as water over stones and are forgotten. 
            But now those two books—Melville’s Moby Dick and James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—I had set on my reading desk. What irritant I meant them now to scratch? I recognize that the political, social, and environmental climates that threaten my freedoms and even my life and those of my daughters and daughters and sons everywhere horrify and frighten me. Both books address with sympathy this dangerous state and espouse a belief in democracy that is bracing. Moby Dick has a democratic foundation, and Ishmael is an unabashed democrat: “I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—if they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the places one lodges in.” He is a man with seemingly no prejudices. He notes how the work of whalers broke the colonial enterprise of Old Spain in South America and how those “whalemen at least eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chile, and Bolivia from the yoke of old Spain and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.” Ishmael’s closest companion and bed mate, indeed in the chapter ‘The Monkey Rope’ even cast as his spouse, was the cannibal Queequeg. Ishmael acknowledges with sympathy human frailty:, “Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.” One hundred years later the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott will aver that we are all insane. He writes, “I suggest that all of us are ill or, on the other hand, that the mentally ill are sane.” James Agee in his study (and as far as I got in the reading) acknowledged the oppressiveness that sharecroppers suffered at the hands of the tyrannical landlord; Agee also understood the effects of racial prejudice and Jim Crow laws that terrified the Black population. Agee writes of his meeting with a young Black couple walking along the road. And during his interaction he suddenly realizes how terrified they are of him: “Their faces were secret, soft, utterly without trust of me, and utterly without understanding; and they had to stand here now and hear what I was saying, because in that country no negro safely walks away from a white man, or even appears not to listen while he is talking . . .” In 2023 things have not changed very much at all: I am horrified when I read stories of young Blacks shot and killed by bigots simply because they were the wrong color in the wrong place and at the wrong time. I am appalled by the violent rhetoric that spews from the mouths of the nation’s supposed leaders, the repulsive behaviors of Marjorie Taylor Greene who seems to possess no sense of decorum or civility. I wish someone would wash her mouth out with soap! I am appalled by the daily reports of the deaths of children and others by gunfire and the remarkable silence of those with the power to do something to end the slaughter. Oh, the irritants from the social, political world run very deep. And there remain yet my own personal anxieties and demons. But in these grim and ghastly times of violence, political failure and lack of almost all civility, I am comforted in the beauty of the prose—even the poetry—that I embrace in those two books. My itches were scratched. Consider this sentence from Moby Dick: “The warmly, cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing redundant days were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet; heaped up, with rose-water snow.” The very rhythm and image of that sentence soothes me. As does this sentence, though its subject speaks of Ahab’s destructive madness: “All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil to crazy Ahab were visibly personified and make practicably assailable in Moby Dick.” And I found comfort in the beauty and humility in Agee’s prose despite the horror of the subject matter. Here James Agee suggests how inadequate he feels to write the lives of the very poor sharecroppers in the South in the 1930s: “As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it; and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly bear to live.” When I come to sentences such as these—and there were pages of such beauty—I am relieved of some of my irritants as when often during a long run there would arrive a moment when all the tensions and anxieties and irritants with which I had started dissolved and no matter how long the run would be—6,10 or 20 miles—there appeared relief and joy in body and soul. That relief I enjoy in the reading of these books and others like them, though they narrate difficult even impossible environments, events and consciousnesses derives in large part from the beauty of the prose. For just a while my irritants are relieved from the horror of the world by the scratching of literature.