Back to Wonderland

I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read.  I can’t remember a time when I lived in only one world.   For that’s what books gave me:   a secondary world, an imaginary world, an extra world.  Long before technocrats took over our lives with their own visions of virtual reality, books offered me a chance to escape the temporality in which I lived.   Not that I wanted a replacement  for my world — my own childhood was happy and warm (at least until I hit adolescence!). But books enriched the life I inhabited, offering an alternate reality that co-existed on a plane somehow horizontal to my own, hovering on the edges of my day to day life, as real as the corporeal world that surrounded me.

Books did not provide my only virtual reality, however.  My own imagination did that.  As children growing up before the digital age, my best friend Peggy and I spent endless unsupervised hours entertaining ourselves, limited only by the scope of our combined creativity.  On those crisp afternoons after school, or on warm hazy evenings of summer, what we liked best was conjuring worlds of make believe, fueled primarily by whatever we were learning at the time in school.  Our favorite games were Civil War spies, or Cherokee Princess and Pioneer Girl.   I loved our time-traveling adventures,  but they only augmented, not supplanted, the worlds in my books.  Those were my private kingdoms, my secret gardens, that I shared with no one, not even my best friend. Peggy liked books, but she didn’t love them the way I did.  No one did.

I was fortunate to be born to exactly the right kind of parents for a girl like me.  Older than other parents I knew, they encouraged my love of reading and listened patiently to my lengthy reviews of whatever tome I was immersed in at the moment.  My father read books to improve his skills — whether golfing or public speaking — along with two newspapers each day:  one with a conservative slant at breakfast and another with a liberal slant after supper.  Often I would crawl onto his lap, and he would put aside his own reading to share my book with me.  My mother’s tastes were more like mine;  she read fiction primarily and she read voraciously — best sellers, romance, mysteries.  I can still picture her looking up from a book with that slightly glazed expression inherent to one suddenly yanked from one world into another.

Not just my parents were different.  Our house looked different, too.  My mother’s grand piano took up most of our dining room.  The avocado tree she grew from a seed sat in front of the picture window.  Books and magazines were everywhere:   spilling from shelves,  scattered on tables, piled beside our beds.  Most of our books came from the library — we could never have afforded to buy all those we read!  Some had been my mother’s when she was a girl, like the copy of Eight Cousins that I loved best. Each Christmas at least one book would be waiting for me under the tree.  Sometimes,  I would use my allowance or gift money to buy books of my choice — that’s how I accumulated the collection of Bobsey twins mysteries, that I’ve now passed on to the child of a friend.  Books were a constant presence in our lives,  in our house, in our conversations, in our minds.

As I grew older, my tastes and habits changed, of course.  In college I majored in English.  ( naturally!) and studied the Western classics.  Armed with a Masters degree in English lit ( and another in Gifted Education ) I embarked on a career teaching high school English.  My own reading, the reading in which I released my fictive self, was set aside, supplanted by research and preparation for class, but I didn’t mind.  I loved teaching and I loved my students.    Watching their own discoveries as I led them through Hamlet or Wuthering Heights or The Great Gatsby provided enough visceral adventure for me.

I’d thought I would teach forever — one of those white-haired stalwarts instructing their third generation of students in the same classroom where their career began. Life has its tricks, however, and following a series of personal crises and health issues, I decided to step away from the career I loved.  It was a difficult decision, although I have come to view it as the right one, given the circumstances.  Without my routine, however, I lost my moorings.  I missed my colleagues and students. I missed feeling needed.  I missed talking about books.  Adrift from home and friends, I sought the companionship books had always given me, but my mind couldn’t seem to focus and my reading seemed to bore me.  I tried a book club, but it didn’t seem to help, either.

One day, too restless to stay still, but not well enough to venture outside, I found my eye caught by the bright yellow cover of Betsy and the Great World.  The Betsy-Tacy books, as you may know, were written by Maud Hart Lovelace; they follow Betsy Ray and her friends as they grow up in Deep Valley, Minnesota around the turn of the last century.   The earlier books in the series are staples of children’s literature, but I had always preferred the later, less famous books for older readers, that followed the characters as they moved through high school to college and even to the early years of marriage.

The particular book I chose that day finds Betsy at one of her lowest points: she has left college early after doing poorly there, has become estranged from the young man she has loved since high school, and has struggled in her efforts to become a writer. Disappointed with herself and the way her life has turned out, she chooses adventure and sets out for a year in Europe.  It is early 1914.

Lovelace traces Betsy’s journey — literal and metaphorical — through the beauty of  the Azores, Munich, Venice, Paris, and London.  In each stop, along with the humor and effervescence that marks this series, Betsy finds a new challenge, an obstacle to overcome, that teaches her about herself and the world.  The pattern is familiar and one Lovelace has followed in earlier books about Betsy, but this time the stakes are higher.  She’s no longer a child; her careless errors in judgment can have life-altering consequences.  As if to emphasize the essential seriousness that underlies the book,  there is always, like music underscoring a scene, subtle and omnipresent, the inexorable approach of the Great War.

The ending of this novel has always been my favorite of all the Lovelace books.   In the last pages, as the Great War finally explodes, we are carried along to the conclusion, when suddenly, in the penultimate paragraphs, arrives a gesture of love that is wholly unexpected that late in the game, entirely romantic and entirely pragmatic at the same time.  It is, in some ways, the pay-off for those of us who have watched Betsy grow up through eleven books.

A lifetime has passed since I first grew teary-eyed over that ending.  The Betsy books sat on my shelf for thirty years, lugged from house to house and state to state,  but aside from a few pages here or there, no longer read.  I worried that I would now find the books too childish,  that their magic could not survive.  I was wrong. If anything, the books hold a resonance for me now that they didn’t before.  Lovelace’s writing is charming, sparkling even, but she never tiptoes around the harsher realities of life.  Illness and death provide a constant motif that runs through the books.  Love does not always find its happy endings, even for some of the kindest, worthiest characters.  Yet those characters who suffer the deepest disappointments in the novels still pick themselves up and carry on.

This sense of resiliency seems to be one that runs through my favorite childhood characters  — certainly in the Alcott books which I discovered in my school library and devoured in the years before I found Lovelace’s Betsy.  Now, as I find myself in a time of transition in my own life, these classics of children’s lit often seem to offer characters to me that are more recognizable than many in the “adult” books I’d been reading.  Fundamentally decent and optimistic,  privileged but not indulged, curious and, most of all, resilient, the characters I loved as a girl have come into my life again, bringing with them hope and humor as they battle the slings and arrows of their fortunes

I’ve loved encountering these old friends again, and I hope one or two of you will join me as I reconsider these classics.

Author: booksfromwonderlandblog

When I was a girl, the worlds in my books were as real to me as the one in which I actually lived. After a career spent teaching "grown-up" books, I'm returning to the series I loved as a child. View all posts by booksfromwonderlandblog