Miss Engler’s List

During my last two or three years of high school (way back in the ‘70s of the previous millennium), if we had a substitute in English class, it was usually Miss Engler. Oh, Miss Engler! She always seemed so happy to be there with us, so we were always happy to have her there. She knew her English grammar, spelling, punctuation, and rhetoric, too, and was always able to help us with whatever topic we were studying at the time. She never got a chance to help us with literature assignments, of course, because we didn’t read literature in those days; the educators had written better things for us to read – more educational things.

But Miss Engler found her chance to shape our reading lives. One day she came in with her usual smile and a pile of mimeographed sheets. The eager anticipation of the whole class palpably filled the atmosphere in the room. It didn’t much matter what was written on the mimeographs, as long as we got to smell them while they were still warm! “I have something for you,” she said, still smiling, and handed out not one page but four. The underlined title on the first page, A BOOK LIST, created its own kind of copy, no less pleasant than a warm mimeograph: it placed a replica of Miss Engler’s smile on my face.

An introductory paragraph explained the organization of the list into four groups:

• “Group I: those ‘classics’ which are recommended to be read at the first opportunity.” I forgive Miss Engler for her use of the passive voice; I knew what she meant. At last someone was telling me what I ought to read! What was school for if not for this? This first part of the list included Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Macbeth, Moby Dick, and much more. Famous works of Dickens were there, because, of course, Dickens’s novels should be read at the first opportunity!

• “Group II: those books which include the more important modern writers or the works that the student has no doubt already read in the early stages of high school.” OK, Miss Engler looks less than perfect again; books don’t “include” writers. But look how clever she was! She gently presented us with the expectation (“no doubt” you’ve already read these) along with a kindly escape hatch: any book I hadn’t already read might be by one of “the more important modern writers,” leaving me with no cause to fear that I had disappointed Miss Engler! The “more modern writers” included Graham Greene, J. D. Salinger, and Robert Sherwood. The books I had “no doubt” read included the adventure novels of Cooper, Verne, and Stevenson. Don’t ask me why these two categories belong together; I’ve never figured it out. But there must be an explanation for the combination, because Miss Engler saw it.

• “Group III: those works on a difficulty and interest level which require greater maturity on the part of the student.” Good! A list for the future. Here are Balzac and Dostoevsky and Henry James and James Joyce and all their difficult and mature friends.

• “Group IV: those standard works which have become the basis of our literary culture and should be read at least in part.” In part?! Come on, Miss Engler! This is the best group in the list! Beowulf, Antigone, City of God, The Life of Johnson, Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, The Iliad, Paradise Lost, The Republic! This is the light reading that I enjoy over and over!

I’m as certain as I am about any fact of human behavior for which I have no statistics that I am the only student who still reads, marks, and digests Miss Engler’s list. The group with the highest percentage of underlined titles on my tattered copy is Group IV. Samuel Butler’s Erehwon is one of the few works in that last quarter not marked yet, but it’s on my plan. The section with the lowest percentage is Group III; I guess I’m still not mature enough. But The Son of the Middle Border and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, both from Group III, are on my reading schedule, so I’m still making progress even on this sublist. (I must admit, though, that I think I will never get around to François Mauriac’s Viper’s Tangle.)

Now that I have my own ten-year schedules, I don’t check Miss Engler’s list often. But I got it out just a few weeks ago and underlined quite a few titles from the last four or five years: The Rise of Silas Lapham, The Good Earth, The End of the Affair, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln, Culture and Anarchy, and a few others. And it makes me happy to know that I have a definite plan to mark several more particular titles from A BOOK LIST over the next twelve years or so.

The last time I saw Miss Engler, I myself was substituting at my old high school. I had brought a book, as usual, to read while the classes did their work, and in a divinely appointed encounter, I passed her in the hallway as I was filled with the glow of having just read the last chapter of one of the perfections of literature. “Miss Engler!” I called to her, misty eyed, across the busy streams of criss-crossing students. “I just finished David Copperfield!” And there was that smile again.

Experiencing the Past

I’ve written about Edward Rutherfurd’s multi-generational novels a few times before. They can’t be considered classics or Great Books with a capital G and a capital B. But they get me thinking about history and large themes, and so, on the whole, I’ve enjoyed reading them and rereading them. The first of his books that I read was Sarum, which centers on the U.K. area around Stonehenge and the town of Salisbury. I’m rereading it now and don’t like it quite as much this time, and I’m not sure why. I reread London a couple of years ago and loved it. Perhaps my problem lies in the fact that I’m listening to all 50 hours of Sarum in the car, an experience which has taken months. Perhaps it’s simply a consequence of it being Rutherfurd’s first book, before he learned how not to lose the character trees in the historical forest.

But I liked Sarum enough the first time to read several of his other offerings, and I do remember what tickled my fancy so much fifteen or twenty years ago: I’m a sucker for novels that give a sense of a sweep of history, with characters having to deal with, in this case, Saxon invaders, the Plague, the reign of Bloody Mary, and other people and events I’ve read about in histories. C. S. Lewis tells us that what he calls a myth is the only way of getting the reader inside a world so as to feel what it’s like to see things, do things, and believe things beyond our ability to experience. Think about the difference between reading a clinical description of love and the experience of being in love. Huge, right? The shelves are full of descriptions of historical settings, but, without time machines, how can we experience any of those times with an intensity the lover feels? Through stories we can. I can read a history of the Wars of the Roses, but what was it like to live at the time, with neighbors and family taking different sides? Through Rutherfurd’s fictional account of the Wilsons and Shockleys of Salisbury, I can get a taste.

I also enjoy little mentions of things like the source of the name Charing Cross or Shakespeare visiting the town with a group of players. But herein lies the problem. Sometimes in Sarum there are too many mere mentions and not enough storytelling. And sometime the storytelling takes the form of dry narrative exposition rather than that of an interaction of characters. Take the chapter I’m in now, which covers the eighteenth century. We’re told at the beginning that Samuel Shockley lost all of his money in the South Sea Bubble, but then the details of the investments and the crash are all given in past-perfect narrative; we learn practically nothing about Samuel and don’t get inside the story of the ruin by seeing how it affected an individual. (When a novel presents me with more than a couple of sentences in a row in past-perfect tense, I start to get bored. Why is the book telling me about a previous event from the outside instead of placing me in the middle of it?) A little later in the chapter we learn (in the past perfect again) that Thomas Arne has written “Rule, Britannia”; but what was it like to sing that anthem? We learn narratively that the characters read Pope and Johnson and Voltaire, but we don’t experience a scene in which characters talk about this contemporary literature. Did they like it? Agree with it? Understand it? Without the experience, the mention of these authors just seems like name dropping.

OK. So much for me trying to change The Way Novels Are Written. Even if Sarum might have too much exposition, the parts that tell stories about characters do exactly what I want historical fiction to do. The chapter on the first century, for instance, gets me a sense of the experience, like no other book I remember, of what it felt like to live in a Roman outpost town. The chapter about the fifth century sets me down in the middle of a civilization that has a Roman legacy but that has largely accepted Christianity, although the Roman-British Christians in question debate the legitimacy of the theology of Pelagius. And debate it they do. Here Rutherfurd doesn’t just inform us that Pelagius had ideas and Augustine had other ideas; he gives us believable conversations between characters that show how diverging doctrine affected relationships. So maybe the novel isn’t a Great Book with a capital G and a capital B. But experiencing the life of a fifth-century citizen of Roman Britannia is kind of lower-case great.