Though she’s a child of the mid-century, having come of age in the ’50s, Lynne Sharon Schwartz sounds as straitlaced as a Victorian maiden when she talks about how she was “ruined” by books. During her formative years, she got so high on the sensual and emotional pleasures of reading that it became a lifelong addiction. As a teenager, she devoured many of the pulpy fictions her wayward peers were reading, such hot books as Irving Shulman’s “The Amboy Dukes” and Harold Robbins’ “Never Love a Stranger,” but her real downfalls were “Heidi,” “Pride and Prejudice” and, perhaps most seductive, “The Little Princess.”
Quoting that ancient maxim “No girl was ever ruined by a good book,” Schwartz submits herself as evidence to the contrary and cites the deleterious influence not only of Jane Austen and Frances Hodgson Burnett but also of Dickens, Flaubert and Hans Christian Andersen, plus a score of other writers, most of them deceased. Schwartz is neither contrite nor apologetic but blissfully upfront about her book habit, saying, “It’s good to be ruined in this way.”
Like so many of her contemporaries with addictive personalities, Schwartz has gone public with a book, a confessional memoir called “Ruined by Reading” (Beacon). As Schwartz’s irreverent attitude suggests, however, the title is more ironic than literal. Reading has been as much her salvation as her ruination. Though it’s an “incredibly selfish” form of escapism, she says, “You’re not escaping into nothingness but into something real and important and alive. My knowledge of the world comes from reading.”
Schwartz is as helplessly drawn to words as some people are to sugar and other granular white substances. Her addiction has been a handicap only in that it has prevented her from learning to surf, browse, cruise, navigate or master any of the other digital skills necessary to becoming a well-rounded and multi-functional inhabitant of cipherspace. It has also spoiled her for television. “After 10 or 15 minutes, I get so bored I have to read a book.”
`A heightened way of living’
It’s apparent that Schwartz suffers from an irreversible case of compulsive reading disorder, which is not uncommon among people brought up with a book in their hands rather than a mouse, channel changer or any other device designed to keep reality at a safe distance.
“Reading is a heightened way of living for me,” she says. “Whatever else I do, I’m waiting for the time when I can just sit down and read a book–as if that’s the real experience in life–the real reality.”
Despite the severity of her condition, Schwartz is exemplary proof that the remaining (if diminishing) few who share her compulsion can become useful and productive citizens of our technocracy. She is the author of nine other books besides “Ruined by Reading,” among them four novels (including “Leaving Brooklyn” and “Disturbances in the Field”) and two collections of stories.
Highly regarded by critics and “common” readers alike, Schwartz’s books have made her a prominent figure on academic and lecture circuits, frequently bringing her visiting professorships, writer-in-residencies and conference sinecures at home and abroad. That explains her presence in this Midwestern city, where Schwartz–a hardcore New Yorker, born in Brooklyn and a resident of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights–is finishing up the first of three consecutive spring terms teaching at Washington University.
“I get around more than I want to,” says Schwartz, whose immediate itinerary included a couple of trips to Chicago. (The second of these will bring her here for two performances Tuesday, one at Women & Children First bookstore, 5223 N. Clark St., at 7 p.m. and then an appearance on Milt Rosenberg’s “Extension 720” WGN radio show at 9 p.m.)
“I’m going to Prague this summer to teach. I wouldn’t turn that down,” she says. “But whenever I’m doing these things, I think, Yes, a person has to go out in the world and see what’s happening, but I really wish I could be at home in bed with a book.”
There are limits to that pleasure, as Schwartz learned to her distress a few years ago when she came down with chronic fatigue syndrome. That gave her more time than she had ever wanted for reading in bed, but it was the perverse inspiration for her 1995 novel, “The Fatigue Artist.”
Constant comfort
While reading may be an “exalted, spiritual exercise,” Schwartz wistfully acknowledges in her new book, “The world does not turn on words alone.”
“You can’t allow yourself to live that way,” Schwartz says, amplifying on that passage. “I’m not a recluse. I’m sociable. I believe in living in the normal Zen way. But I need the constant comfort of a book. I don’t just read a book once in a while, the way ordinary people do. For me, living and reading are somehow in conflict, competing for my time.”
Schwartz certainly seems sociable enough, if not entirely comfortable, while talking about her reading habit in a coffeehouse in St. Louis’ Central West End, during a recess from academic duties. Her eyes wide and earnest, her long hair a neo-Victorian bundle of curlicues, ringlets and corkscrews, she has the hesitant, whimsical urbanity of a Woody Allen heroine.
If Schwartz suffers from a genetic imbalance, symptomized by a low resistance to printed material, it’s a condition she passed along to her daughters, Miranda, 28, a book reviewer, poet and essayist, and Rachel, 31, who was an editor at the Village Voice before entering law school.
“We’re both `ruined’ as well,” Miranda jokes, adding that she and her sister were both early readers who quickly picked up one of their mother’s more unsociable practices. “We read at the table constantly.”
Cherished titles
“Ruined by Reading” is confessional literature, but it is also a nostalgic, free-associative family history, an annotated catalog of cherished book titles, spliced with the author’s memories of ice trucks, green glass orange juicers and her brief flirtation with the Mets. It opens in the family kitchen with the author’s mother’s discovery that 3-year-old Lynne could read the label on the box of Diamond Crystal Kosher Coarse Salt. That “freakish achievement” made her the family prodigy, a Mozart with words rather than music, encouraged by her father to perform for guests by reading aloud from The New York Times.
“Reading was the ticket that entitled me to my place in the world,” writes Schwartz. As she grew up, her reading was random and capricious. At first it consisted of “whatever I found in the house,” mainly the leather-bound Harvard Classics. They were her introduction to Dickens, St. Augustine, the Brothers Grimm and Andersen, whose “Little Mermaid” would be one of the 10 literary works she considers her ruination.
The other nine were a serendipitously mixed bag, ranging from “Madame Bovary” to Carson McCullers’ “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” to Shunryu Suzuki’s “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.” But at the very top was Burnett’s “The Little Princess,” a book she read when she was 9 or 10 that “told me more about who I was than anything before or since.”
Schwartz also acquired a lasting affection for some genuine curios: Eugene Field’s “Little Boy Blue,” a poem she calls a “masterpiece among tearjerkers,” and Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” because “it possessed a quiddity. . . .I felt an enchantment of the heart.” Less enchanting perhaps, but equally affecting was “Miracle at Carville,” a factual story set in a Louisiana leper colony that she encountered in a Reader’s Digest condensation.
With only a few exceptions, Schwartz’s personal canon amounts to a Dead Authors’ Society. “I really just want to read what’s special,” she says, “great authors, not yet another imitation of Raymond Carver. I’ve read enough of those already.”
Enough already with John Updike as well, she says. “His `Rabbit’ books were the only ones I could read, but there was something mean-spirited about them that I didn’t like. Saul Bellow is an author I read when I was young, but I open his books now and I fall asleep.”
Among the handful of living authors whose books she approaches with enthusiasm are Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alice Munro, Graham Swift and William Trevor. “But as far as I’m concerned, they’re as good as dead,” she adds with a smile. “I don’t mean to kill them off. It’s just that these are authors worth reading–lasting, universal.”
Hemingway and Fitzgerald have no place in Schwartz’s pantheon, even if their “late and lamented” status eminently qualifies them. She hasn’t been able to read Hemingway since high school, calling him “the unmatchable parody,” while Fitzgerald is another of those authors “you have to read at the right time of life. If you haven’t read him before you’re 30, it’s too late. He’s wonderful before that.”
Because of her occasional duties as a teacher and a judge of writing competitions, Schwartz can’t totally isolate herself from current fiction, however mundane. Nor does she truly want to.
“You have to read contemporary authors to get a sense of your society and how they’re portraying it,” she says. “I don’t watch television, so I have to know what’s going on.”
For that same reason, Schwartz hasn’t completely signed off on technology. She’s learned how to E-mail messages and letters, most of them directed to her daughters, but without any real gratification. “What I write on the computer is so glib and superficial,” she says. ” `How are you today?’ `What did you do?’
“But the letters I write with a pen are thoughtful, and I feel like I’m really communicating, that they’re going somewhere, not into this strange place. Letters touch me in a way that a conversation with a close friend does. But what are you touching with E-mail? There are layers of experience and emotional intensity that are untouched.”
After more than a hour of cross-examination about the effects of habitual reading on her life, Schwartz looks a little weary, as if all this confession was not so good for her soul. Was she starting to suffer remorse for a youth and adulthood misspent between the covers of books? Not in the slightest, she says, mentioning a song by Edith Piaf, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”
“After a life of dissolute behavior, she regretted nothing, which is how I feel. It would be like regretting the color of my hair. It’s what I am. It’s what I’ve been given.”
A COMPULSIVE READER’S TOP 10
The 10 literary works that ruined Lynne Sharon Schwartz
1. The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. The Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett
4. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
5. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
6. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
7. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
8. Annabel Lee, Edgar Allan Poe
9. Heidi, Johanna Spyri
10. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki
