Beacon Lights of Literature

As I was growing up, my parents had a home-made bookshelf made of bricks and planks with two shelves full of books.Considering how much my mom and dad encouraged me to read and bought me any book I wanted, that doesn’t seem like a lot of books for themselves. The collection included, among other things, some of my dad’s books from his engineering degree, John Blackburn’s A Scent of New-mown Hay, and three of my parents’ high-school literature books. I said a few months ago that I should write a post about those textbooks, and here it is!

Sadly, I have to start by saying that I gave all three to a used bookstore a few years ago and then, quickly regretting my decision, tried to replace them with copies I could buy online. I found two of the three but couldn’t remember the name of the third. The two I have are from a series called Beacon Lights of Literature. They are the ninth-grade and eleventh-grade books. I believe the book I haven’t recovered was a tenth-grade book. Either my parents’ high school didn’t teach literature in the twelfth grade, or neither of them bothered to keep the textbook.

The introduction to the ninth-grade offering says that each section is arranged so that students will actually enjoy the experience. “Poems, stories, plays, and novels,” that preface says to the student (and possibly teacher), “are not merely examples for dull analysis. They were written either to thrill, to entertain, or to uplift.” I doubt that that explanation changed things for many people, but my dad experienced all three reactions in his reading and talked to me about books as if that’s just what happens, so it happened with me, too.

The ninth-grade volume starts with short stories. The first is Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” What could cause more horror than a Poe story? Finding out that the last page was missing from my parents’ book! Fortunately, the copy I now have has all the pages of that classic. As a kid, I also enjoyed “The Most Dangerous Game,” by Richard Connell. Section two has a good chunk of the Odyssey, which didn’t interest me when I was young. (It does now.) Section three presents Ivanhoe, the book I reread a few months ago that made me think to mention these old lit books. I read it the first time out of this school anthology, but, thinking that it might have been abridged (to keep it thrilling and uplifting!), I bought a separate copy this past February. Section four includes “Ballads,” and the editors have classed under that rubric some “ancient” ballads, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which I think I gave up on when I was young, and “The Highwayman,” which I LOVED! “Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!” Section five has some American poetry by Bryant and Longfellow and Whittier and their pals. I don’t remember having any reaction to this part from my early years; I can guess why. Now that I understand more how to enjoy poetry, I should actually read this section. I may even have read all of the poems separately before, but reading them as a small anthology would be nice. Section six has A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and since The Patty Duke Show and Flipper taught me that Shakespeare was boring, I missed out on the fun for another couple of decades. *sigh*

The eleventh-grade book has a lot iof excerpts. It starts with a portion of Sandberg’s biography of Lincoln. I think I said in a post a few years ago that my dad just talked to me like I would read the whole thing “some day,” so I skipped this part at the time. (When I finally read “the whole thing,” I read Sandberg’s one-volume condensation.) Shakespeare pops up again. This time it’s Julius Caesar, which I would have loved if I hadn’t listened to ‘60s sitcoms. It also includes a one-act play called Sam Average, which I remember liking. But I don’t remember why, so I should reread it. Next comes English poetry, which I know I skipped. Maybe it’s for the best. Would I enjoy Wordsworth and Tennyson today if I had read these when I was 10 and didn’t understand them?  Eleventh-graders are apparently ready for some essays, because they get a lot of those next. I definitely don’t remember anything about any of them, so I think I wasn’t ready to be “thrilled” by non-fiction. The last section, disappointing again, has, instead of one good novel, excerpts from five novels. I never bothered. But much more interesting to me was a list on the final pages of “THE FINEST NOVELS IN THE WORLD.” Here’s the list (its in chronological order):

1. Robinson Crusoe
2. Gulliver’s Travels
3. Clarissa
4. Tom Jones (They got away with recommending that one to students!)
5. Eugenie Grandet
6. The Three Musketeers
7. David Copperfield
8. The Scarlet Letter
9. Henry Esmond
10. Madame Bovary
11. Fathers and Children
12. Les Miserables
13. Anna Karenina
14. The Brothers Karamazov
15. Huckleberry Finn

I possibly haven’t looked at that list in forty years. I’m pleased to say that I’ve read all fifteen. I think fourteen of them are good; I don’t understand how Clarissa pleased so many readers so much for so long. The editors admit that nothing from the previous fifty years made the list, but they suggest that Moby-Dick may one day be considered a classic. They also include a list of “interesting novels” that includes some of those more recent books, including some detective fiction: Main Street, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Of Human Bondage make the cut along with about fifty others.

For some reason, I didn’t grow up thinking that I had to read or understand everything in those engineering books. But I did grow up thinking that I should read the contents of Beacon Lights of Literature. Together with Classics Illustrated (a series of adaptations in comic-book form that I’ve mentioned before in these posts), these books gave me an idea of a canon. Flawed though the idea may be, this literature does tend “to thrill, to entertain, and to uplift” me, and I understand that both writing it and reading it require knowledge, wisdom, creativity, and technical skill, and that applying those accomplishments is satisfying. So I’m OK with idea of a canon, even if no one comes up with a perfect list. (I’ve heard that physicians know the idea of a perfectly healthy human body even though they’ve never seen one.) Having these books on those makeshift shelves certainly gave me an idea that literature was once taught in American public schools, and their influence surely weighs heavily in the disappointment I felt when my school gutted its English curriculum just as I reached high school. We had to learn what was “relevant” then, and Shakespeare & Co. were deemed irrelevant. In the end it’s OK, because I eventually decided to work hard to give myself the education in literature that the school denied me, and then I started a blog, and then I wrote this post, and then you read it!

Oh! Just remembered. I also read A Scent of New-mown Hay. It’s good!