The Final Fifteen, or My Formative Friends

by Stacy Ake

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."
- Francis Bacon (the philosopher, not the painter!)

"Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us."
- C. S. Lewis

The task was a formidable one: "to list fifteen books [I] think [I] would have to save if anything were to happen to [my] library," and I was not sure what it would entail. However, as an assigned task, it came at a propitious time — when I was culling my library, for I have found that books are like friends but that they are also like clothes. Sometimes we outgrow them while at other times we have so incorporated them into ourselves that they somehow become part of ourselves and remain physically present even when physically absent. So, here in the midst of editing my library, I was asked to list what books I should keep were such a thing to prove necessary — and it had.

But then I was struck by another thought, specifically, a memory. When I was a greenhorn graduate student in Ecology at Penn State, the tale went round of how one was asked on one's candidacy exams which two books one would wish to have if suddenly marooned on a desert island, a kind of Robinson Crusoe literary quiz. And the debate ensued: should one impress the profs by naming texts by Plato and Shakespeare, or perhaps The Bible or the Rig Veda for the more religiously inclined? Or maybe, it being biology and all, one should mention Darwin or Ernst Mayr or some such luminary? I, however, am kind of stupid, and it seemed to me that the logical answer would be two books along the lines of "How to make a boat out of damn near anything" and "How to hunt and cook good roadkill."

People stared. And then they laughed.

Perhaps this had something to do with how or why I ended up in genetics.

Nonetheless, given this, one can understand how my first response to the question of which fifteen books in my library I might save, would obviously have been "the fifteen I haven't read yet." But, in a certain sense, this assignment was not really a practical task about culling books per se, nor was it a task about which books I thought important for creating "an educated person" or a "well-rounded human being." Rather, it was actually an assignment asking which books I would save in virtue of their being important to me. So, I studied my library, and here is the list I came up with. Moreover, all of these are among those books I actually retained!

Little Women (and sequels) by Louisa May Alcott
What Katy Did (and sequels) by Susan Coolidge
Little House on the Prairie (and sequels) by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Summer of My German Soldier (and sequel) by Bette Green
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller
The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm
The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz
The Diary of Anne Frank by (oddly enough) Anne Frank
Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

After I created my list, I studied it, and I, too, needed to understand why I had made such a list. Am I not a serious person, after all? Heck, I am a philosopher, and there's not an official philosopher in the group! Moreover, the list, as I was writing it, automatically subdivided itself into three categories: (a) (children's) fiction about the female self, (b) (children's) fiction about the self in the world, and (c) non-fiction about the self in the world.

The first grouping — fiction about the female self — made sense to me, as I find myself to be a female self, and all the books listed reflect the unique, and thus differing ways, one can be a female self. But all these novels — Little Women, What Katy Did, Little House on the Prairie, Summer of My German Soldier, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — are all now considered to be "children's literature," not because they were originally written for children, mind you, but because adults no longer care to read them. They are rather like my dad's old college sweatshirts, in a way. Those sweatshirts weren't intended to be adolescent clothing, but I wore them in junior high school because he no longer cared to wear them at all.

Consider Little Women. Reaction to this book has always puzzled me. When certain feminists deplore the lack of "good" role models for girls in "traditional" children's literature, they often mention the very "bad" female role models girls find in such works as — you guessed it! — Little Women. Apparently, Moll Flanders and Becky Sharp and Rosamond Vincy (and if there's any book to be ambivalent about as a feminist, methinks it would be Middlemarch) are better role models, then?

As an example, one person who criticizes Little Women severely is Simone de Beauvoir, and yet I would be hard pressed to find a more sexist book anywhere than The Second Sex. Besides, how "liberated" is any woman who would let her significant other's girlfriend move in with them? See She Came to Stay. Why didn't someone say, "Look, Simone, just face it. You're smarter than Jean-Paul. Get over it. Get over him, and move on!" Nope. Instead we get a bazillion pages of her lack of self-esteem reified and expressed in her erstwhile boyfriend's jargon in what is supposed to be a classic of feminist thinking. I place The Second Sex in the category of books that probably ought to be read but shouldn't be believed, and it lies right beside Kate Chopin's The Awakening on the floor of my mind — and that Chopin book should have really been titled The Drowning.

In my opinion, in Little Women (one of its sequels is Little Men, by the way) we find the extremes of what humans can be. We meet vain and ambitious Amy, whose life parallels that of vain and directionless Laurie (a boy). We meet shy Beth, a girl who no doubt would have been prescribed Prozac today and yet whose "pathology" (dare I say uniqueness?) is met with love and affection by her family. They do not change her ways to suit them; no, they change their ways to accommodate her. Merely from that, one can learn a great deal about how we ought to treat each other. Then there is Jo, Alcott's probable autobiographical introject into the story. Quirky, masculine, strong, and self-willed, her "uniqueness" is treated with as much respect as that of Beth's, and she meets her match (literally) in the shape of the equally quirky (and interestingly enough, feminine) Professor Bhaer. Finally, there is Meg, the home-oriented woman who finds herself a single mother after the death of her equally staid and dependable husband, John Brook. If nothing else, from Little Women (and Little Men) one can, if one wishes, draw the lesson that one can be any kind of man or woman and still really be a man or woman.

While Little Women is distinctly New Englandish in flavor — one finds Quakerism, Pietism (it's an allegory of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress), and the occasional Thoreauvian transcendental flight in its pages — both the Little House on the Prairie series and the What Katy Did books are distinctly mid-western. They portray spunky, strong-willed characters who make mistakes — sometimes with dire consequences — regret said mistakes, and learn from them. Like Little Women, with its historical backdrop of the US Civil War, both Coolidge's books and Ingalls Wilder's give us a glimpse into a United States of the past. In Coolidge's case, we are spectators to the transition of the late 19th century into the 20th with its dividing of the coastal states from the midwestern ones, and in the Little House books we are given another view about "how the west was won."

As an aside, one of the reasons I would recommend these books to a child over, say, the Harry Potter series is a psychological one. Harry Potter is never wrong and, as such, he never grows. As a matter of fact, Harry Potter plays up to children's (and need I say any human being's?) vanity, for Harry Potter is special; he is a little misunderstood godlet. Whereas Laura and Nellie and Mary and Katy and Clover and Elsie get into "scrapes," bear up under the consequences, and are better and stronger for it. This calls out to a child's (and any other human being's) reality. Laura's and Katy's stories perhaps do provide their readers with less assurance of self-certainty than those of Harry "See, I am right!" Potter. On the other hand, the adventures of Laura and Mary and Katy and Clover do provide more hope, for they show that no matter what happens (or what I do) I will survive. For Harry Potter can only be loved and admired because he is perfect; Laura and Katy are loved despite the fact that they are not. Which message do you think is healthier for kids?

Summer of My German Soldier and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn are much different. They are "modern." They are about the struggle for individuality in the face of adversity and deprivation. Patty Bergen, a Southern Jew, befriends and then hides an escaped German POW named Anton. Doesn't the premise alone make you want to know what happens? Whereas Francie Nolan, the daughter of poor Irish, simply wishes to learn and to grow, to struggle up and out of the confines of her Brooklyn neighborhood, but she finds this a hard wish to fulfill.

As stories, both Summer of My German Soldier and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn are wonderful; as literature, Tree is orders of magnitude better than Soldier, for the world of Francie Nolan is rich in nuance and redolent of all the complexity that class, gender, and sexuality bring to human life. I am not sure I will ever seriously re-read Summer of My German Soldier, but I have already re-read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and I have found it to be a better book than I remembered it to be.

As for the next five — The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, père; Les Misérables by Victor Hugo; The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne; East of Eden by John Steinbeck, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee — I think what I found in these books was how one chooses between revenge — which always appears to be justice to the wronged individual — and grace — which always appears as "mere" mercy to the wrong-doer. As a matter of fact, I almost failed organic chemistry lab in high school in my stubborn eagerness to see how the Count would make his choice.

Where Dumas is concerned, I do not think there is a comparable book for moral and human complexity in his repertoire (although The Queen Margot is equally interesting). It asks and gives one answer to a simple human question: if you had all the money and power in the world at your disposal, how would you treat those who have wronged you?

This same question is, however, somewhat inverted in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. For Jean Valjean, the dilemma is this: having received grace (or mercy, depending on your perspective), how do you live your life, given that you have all the power and money of the world at your disposal? This book so outshines (in my opinion) the rather cardboard politics of The Hunchback of Notre Dame that the two Hugo books are not even in the same league. Moreover, the Les Mis theme of grace-mercy-justice, and the fact that grace is just as offensive to justice as criminality is, is so powerfully captured by the musical of the same name, that I would recommend, if you don't have the time or patience to read the book, to see or listen to the musical. (Besides Cosette is less of a dweeb in the musical!)

The Scarlet Letter and East of Eden are two somehow quintessentially "American" stories. In both cases, I much prefer these novels to their more famous siblings; namely; The House of Seven Gables and The Grapes of Wrath. I don't think there are words enough to express how amazing I find these two books, particularly East of Eden. What is good? What is evil? And what is the relationship between truth and a lie? Oh, these are the questions Hawthorne is struggling with. Moreover, don't you just want to know what happens to any clergyman named Arthur Dimmesdale? Arthur: Knight errant (both senses of errant) and Dimmesdale (one who walks through the valley of the shadow of death). Besides, what was Hester supposed to do, married as she was to a man named Chillingworth?

However, while The Scarlet Letter is profound, East of Eden is glorious, because it's not just about good and evil; it's about the fact that human beings may choose to overcome their evil inclinations. As a slice of Americana, as a multi-generational and multi-cultural overview of the development of the United States and the creation of California, it is a wonder. As a psychological study of character (including a detailed analysis of sociopathy in the character of Cathy/Kate), it is superlative. As a reflection of the vagaries of human nature, there is no tale more stunning than the circumstances surrounding the birth of Lee, the Trask family's Chinese servant.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, my two favorite themes — the individual and society and what it means to be a female self (in the character of Scout, a tomboy, who is the daughter of a "feminine" pacifist father, Atticus Finch — a man who only impresses his own son, Jem, when Jem discovers that his father is "the best shot in the county") — come together. To Kill a Mockingbird addresses all our human ills: social injustice, racial prejudice, class division, and sexual stereotyping. Whether you read the book or see the movie, there is no moment more poignant than at the end of Tom Robinson's murder trial — he is found guilty — when Scout, sitting in the "colored balcony" is admonished by the elderly gentleman next to her: "Stand up, Scout, your father's passing." That kind of says it all. Of course, it also adds to the humor of the book when you remember that Scout's childhood playmate, Dill Harris, is, in fact, Truman Capote. That explained a lot about Capote... at least to me!

As for non-fiction, The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton all reflect how certain individuals, to quote the poet Linda Pastan, found "the pure / center of light / within the dark circle / of [their] demons."

In each of these books, I found something that helped me to do the same thing, and I suspect this is what all of that literature that each of us considers "really good" does. It helps each of us find that "pure center of light"; it helps us along on the path to becoming truly human, or it shows us someone who has successfully walked a similar path before us. Then, again, maybe literature is just one beggar telling another beggar where there's food or leaving behind a kind of map showing where the author has been and where he or she hopes to be going to. And perhaps this is why I think of books (and their authors) as friends, because when they finally come to take me away, I have a pretty good idea of just who might be in that padded cell with me, because these were the books that I "chewed and digested," and in doing so they became me, and I them.

Stacey Ake teaches Philosophy in Drexel's Department of English and Philosophy. While much of her primary writing is on semiotics and existentialism, she has also written about the role magic realism plays in women's literature.