The cover letter clipped to the manuscript began, "She lived in a dream."
I looked back at the brown glassine envelope, addressed to "Director," to see the return address -- All Saints Church/Speke, Merseyside, UK -- and at the fountain-pen message on the back, "Do not mail until 2018."
Inside, the letter repeated the address at the top, along with a date -- 23 May, 1956 -- and began, "Dear sir or madam:"
"She lived in a dream. She showed up one day straight from the Speke airport right across the street. American. 'I'm looking for a Wet Nelly and a flat.' A flat in postwar Speke? When they couldn't throw up council houses fast enough? But dreamlike the estate agent knew of an old woman way over on Western just across from the 86 line stop who needed a lodger. Eleanor came to see me every day, always bringing me a coffee and a Wet Nelly, which she'd also had no problem finding. She lived on them.
"And died of them. Wasn't here long. Seven years? Every wedding we had she was there. She collected the rice after and then made a little sachet with a lovely note, all smiley faces and hearts and congrats, very American, for the couple. 'I borrowed them anyway, so it's only fair,' she told me, meaning she put the people into one of her novels that she never published ('Horrors! The stain of publicity!'). She would also sit at the front window of her flat and look out of it at passersby. She was borrowing them as well. Another thing she did was keep a paper face in a jar by the door for when an unexpected visitor rang; she would slip it on and open the door, so that the unexpected visitor would be faced with a bearded man in a Highland bonnet wearing -- horrors -- pants. This gave her such a laugh. And the visitor's reaction was something else to borrow. She would even go outside with it when a bus passed by and "flash" (her word) schoolboys. 'They are so easy to scandalize!'
"One day, along with the customary coffee and afters (with her there were no befores) she brought me the enclosed manuscript. It was, she said, 'the sermon that no one will hear.' Why not? I asked. Her answer: 'Thomas Jefferson is my only communicant, and he is dead. And really, padre,' she went on, 'you must read something besides Westerns. They're not good for you. Eisenhower reads them.'
"Not long after, she died right in front of me. Lights out, just like that. Probably the Wet Nellys. They're good but you're meant to eat other things as well. Westerns for the body is what they are. I should've thought of that for Eleanor Rigby. She'd have taken umbrage, which would've been good for a laugh. Anyway nobody came to her funeral because I didn't need any witnesses to my dodgery. I had the undertaker bring the coffin back to a spot in the churchyard as close to the gate as possible so she could have a view. Had the hole dug but filled it in myself and was just wiping the dirt from my hands when two lads walked by, back towards the estate from the airport. "George here was just showing me where Birdman was killed the other day," said the more gregarious one by way of a conversational device by which to mine me of information. They asked who it was and where was her stone? I said it was Eleanor Rigby, but now she was buried along with her name. Even though she was unsaved I gave her the ground; it went a wee bit shy of protocol, but I didn't care -- and that is what I told them. Was it a good thing for me to put the truth onto these young and accidental witnesses? For me it was a scapegoat mechanism, I suppose. By putting it onto them, my secret was safe. No one would ever hear more of Eleanor Rigby.
"They walked away. I heard the reserved one, the one named George by his baby-faced companion, muttering, 'With a story like that, it was probably the lady from that wedding who picked up the rice and who flashes our bus with that Highlander mask. All the crazy people. Where do they all come from?'
"They walked away. I heard the reserved one, the one named George by his baby-faced companion, muttering, 'With a story like that, it was probably the lady from that wedding who picked up the rice and who flashes our bus with that Highlander mask. All the crazy people. Where do they all come from?'
"As to their question about the stone, I finessed it into silence. How could there be a stone with the dates 'Born Dec. 25, 1990 - Died May 21, 1956' on it?
"There, it's told. All this writing! It's night and no one is here. Anybody walking by would think I was writing a sermon! Now I can get back to darning socks.
The letter was signed Fr. H. M. McKenzie.
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The sermon that no one will hear:
My text for today is Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963, in that heyday of America when the U.S. President -- himself not only a Harvard man but the author of a slim tome -- possessed a broadly-informed and questioning mind, which inspired the wisecrack that he was less the successor to Eisenhower, who read Westerns, than to Jefferson, who read Adam Smith. This, together with a certain Cold-War, post-Sputnik mobilization of expertise, made it a moment of promise for the American intellectual. It was nonetheless tenuous, since it came only a few years after a junior senator from Wisconsin gave his name to an era of publicly slandering the patriotism of those who exhibited broadly-informed and questioning minds. And that, wrote Hofstadter, was just the lurid worst of a general condition.
But Hofstadter also includes some less likely candidates in his league of "antis." Among them are educators: the Presbyterians and especially the Methodists of the Great Awakening, who -- while prompted to convert through inarticulate spiritual processes -- nonetheless championed basic education as the key to unlocking the Biblical source of the holy djinn; also progressive education reformers of the first half of the 20th century whose goal was to make the child -- each and every one of them -- the font of his or her own education, which, given the culture in which he or she was raised, might favor manual over textual or linguistic learning.
With these it becomes clear that Hofstadter's intellectualism is the bookishly studious descendent of traditional humanism and its regnant modus sciendi. Not the downstream branch that in the 21st century has become almost synonymous with atheism, traditional humanism hails from halls of classicism that rang with grammar-based learning of languages (at first Latin and Greek) and the close reading of texts (at first Latin and Greek), which became the basis for logico-rational argumentation, most often in writing. Not for nothing did the Puritans of New England call their primary schools "Latin schools." They meant "Latin (and Greek)", and it was the only real way to proof the Holy Writ and rub the djinn-bottle.
And from thence the way to arrive at the linguistic jungles of Finnegan's Wake or the inundations of Infinite Jest or the efflorescence of the New Textamental, parabolic fictions in search of reality. How did we get from the Puritans to Handmaid's Tale?
It was not so much a tortuous path as it was an amazement, the cultivation of a semiconscious state of ratiocination in which to lose oneself, never caring to find the exit because it is the only reality that matters. More: it is reality itself. In the beginning was the word, and from there it's words all the way down.
Garden of Eden become Garden of Earthly Delights, it has become the only reliable way by which things are known, understood, given meaning, and proliferated to each fresh generation. The rubbing of the djinn bottle produced more and more exotic and non-Biblical djinni -- here a Declaration of Independence and a U.S. Constitution, there a Uniformitarianism leading to the idea of a blind evolution of species -- but the methodical exploration pushing back the horizon of truth continued unabated, even if its refinements, grotesqueries, and idiosyncrasies made it a puzzle to the uninitiated that remains unsolved. It is an acquired taste, the apprenticeship is long and lonely, there is no guarantee of material gain, and no one in the family understands what the hell it is you do or why. But with the right reading and writing materials, the self-exiles in this garden are happily stuck with even such a boor as Socrates for a neighbor. "The unexamined life is not worth living": etched, cross-stitched, or aerosol-painted?
Theirs is the quest in questioning, the inheritance of the great salvific torment: How do I know I am saved? With death holding the answer, all life becomes an ever-larger question that winds up burying the afterlife. That is the great, the important, the only thing, burying all else: the Vesuvius to the Pompeii of the world; the destruction that is an ending and a beginning.
Seek and ye shall find that which keeps you seeking.
Hofstadter does well to question why, in the minds of progressive educators, this text-based enigma-cracking was not something that most children wanted to do and thus why it should be replaced by wood shop and home ec; and also to castigate them for organizing entire schemes of instruction that gave preferment to this displacement. But is the progressive response a thing to be lumped with foaming-at-the-mouth Billy Sunday's learning-is-from-the-devil vituperations? It is not, and Hofstadter is wrong to cast them from the same mold.
The progressives were not antipathetic to the project of solitary, book-based exploration; they just didn't see why a kid curing Sitzfleisch in the library should be the beneficiary of public resources when he or she was obviously perfectly happily being left alone with legible crumbs. What help did they need? They're fine by themselves. Look at all the others! They need wood shop and home ec!
Interestingly, there is a parallel story, one that comes from the [ahem] temple of learning itself: the public library. It is the story of the "library faith" that puts Jefferson with his Adam Smith on the same plane as Eisenhower with his Westerns. If Hofstadter-style American anti-intellectualism were looking to make a Hollywood blockbuster, this is the story it should tell. But Hofstadter missed the story altogether.
In his epic the [ahem] temple of learning is overlooked; it doesn't even make green room cash bartender, much less understudy. The closest he gets is to mention Andrew Carnegie and his "munificent gifts to education." This generic munificence is linked, however, to Vanderbilt and other tycoons' investment in the reform of higher, i.e. university education, stultified in their view by the dead hand of reliance on dead languages and much in need of a modernizing lava bath. There is also mention of Carnegie's own love for "liberal" education, which in Carnegie's words "gives to the man who really absorbs it higher tastes and aims than the acquisition of wealth, and a world to enjoy, into which the mere millionaire cannot enter."
But how did Carnegie get there? Hofstadter doesn't say. The contextual implication is that it must have been through some pre-reform institution of higher learning. In fact it came through a disciplined, self-directed program of reading books borrowed mostly, in Carnegie's telling, from the 400-volume private library of an iron manufacturer with a soft spot for broadening the horizons of ambitious but impecunious working boys. That was the learning device that Carnegie wanted to make available to every ambitious but impecunious working boy out there, by planting a public library in every American town.
The common school? Provide this kind of education? Whom are you fooling? You can stuff a turkey, but you can't stuff a brain. Real learning was an inner-directed, lifelong habit of mind. It didn't need classrooms. It didn't want classrooms! It wanted libraries full of books.
Public libraries, of course, already existed, but Carnegie's enthusiasm for them kicked the institution into national high gear. It was in its original conception to be the university for the Carnegie-style Everyman, where a person of sufficient passion for learning would find the resources (books) to advance his knowledge. It is a very American story with many pre- and post-Carnegie exemplars, notably such as Benjamin Franklin, the mid-19th century Boston Brahmins, and the women's club movement of the Progressive era that changed the civic landscape: by building temples of learning, where the American masses would achieve their higher education.
Give me an [ahem] somebody! The American Everyman showed his interest in disciplined, self-directed learning through reading books by staying away from the public library in droves. There were a few little Carnegies, people like Thomas Edison, just not most people. What was a library to do? Mr. Carnegie hadn't said; he didn't know; he thought everybody was like him. Librarians ensconced in their cobwebbed reference collections consulted their existential tea leaves and lo! Out of whole buckram appeared the notion that leisure reading led ineluctably to serious reading. Mirabile dictu! The "library faith" was born. It didn't matter what you read. Reading = good. A pulp diet inexorably leads to dolmata with Socrates.
Despite the offer of free popular reading, most people continued to favor the alternate technologies of radio and long automobile drives in the country to the point that, after World War II, there was serious concern about the viability of the entire public library project. It was time for a reckoning. The Carnegie Foundation sensed that something had gone awry. It funded the Social Science Research Council to carry out a "Public Library Inquiry," national in scope, that would study the "empirical research literature on the users of public libraries and what they use them for." Involved in the project were such library lights as researcher Lester Asheim, who helped formulate the library gospel on censorship ("We're agin' it."), and Mary Utopia Rothrock, library consultant to TVA, who served as the only woman and one of two librarians on the 7-member project committee.
The PLI released a number of reports. One of them, published in 1949 as The Library's Public, was the first to document and define the unempirical "library faith" that put all reading on the same plane and posited the existence of what became known as the "reading ladder": as a person read more and more, he/she naturally and effortlessly went up rung-by-rung from good (it's all good!) to better, or more challenging. Despite the lack of evidence for this, librarians to this day embrace the notion without a second thought, or remove the ladder altogether (it was blocking the reading rainbow). Intelligent design, meet library science.
The Library's Public also delivered the bad news: 10% of adults used the public library on a monthly basis. The slightly better news was that a third of children/youth did the same. However, this positive finding was darkened by the apparent fact that this use was dictated by school requirements. Information? "As a source of information, the public library has little reality for most people." Bottom line: "The general public has little knowledge about the public library and its services and seems to regard the public library as a fine thing for a community to have--for other people to use."
Here was the report's silver lining: those other people -- that 10% -- made really good use of the public library, to the point that the report referred to them as "a kind of 'communications elite'" because they were also heavy users of such mass media like newspapers, magazine, and radio (this was before the widespread use of TV). This was an elite formed not by maldistributive factors, which is the case with wealth and class, but by the mere personal use of a generally-available public resource.
The report recommended in very general terms that public libraries should embrace the reality of being a niche service and should provide more direct support to the 10% of the people who used them. Public libraries as a mass institution? Fuhgeddaboudit.
What public libraries then did fuhgeddabout was the PLI, except when they wanted to trot out a scapegoat. Its recommendations were entirely ignored. Public libraries doubled down on scratching the public itch for popular reading. In libraryland the catchphrase became "Give them what they want." With the advent of feature films on video, public libraries enjoyed the same brief seventh heaven as Blockbuster. Popular culture trumped everything. Self-education was a cynical rationale to be trotted out at budget time, arrayed in the vestments of the library faith.
Along came the computer-Internet revolution. Many public libraries, particularly small ones, were lifted into the new era by the philanthropy of Bill Gates, the Carnegie of the Information Age. But Gates has in mind more than just a technology upgrade. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is making an ongoing, global effort to "support the transformation of libraries as engines of development" as well as "to foster innovation in libraries." If this effort has an analogue to the PLI report, it is the 2014 report of the Aspen Institute Dialogue on Public Libraries entitled Rising to the Challenge: Re-Envisioning Public Libraries.
Even though the report's peppy tone tries to give the impression that libraries are raring to embrace change, it's easy to read between the lines that these are the soothing words to the press of the coach who has just spent half-time in the locker room screaming at a chronically under-performing player: "One more screw-up, and you're done!"
No more being a mere "repository of materials"! It will take on new roles that will extend "far beyond book lending." As for its staff, fewer will be needed "to put books on shelves" and "a lot more" will need to be educators. "What libraries need is to become more intentional in the ways that they deploy resources in the community." And they're going to have to show solid, measurable "outcomes" -- not "outputs" -- that "report how the library is helping to achieve community goals and objectives."
At the same time, the report acknowledges that there is lots of good to build on. Usage is up from the PLI days, with a quarter of the population reporting monthly use according to the 2013 Pew Research survey cited by the study. Score one for popular reading!
And, in almost a direct echo from the PLI study, people still value libraries as a community asset even if they don't use it. The report quotes an Illinois city manager -- one imagines a dyspeptic curmudgeon slumped in the back of the meeting room with an allergic reaction to flip chart brainstorming -- warning against a too-quick embrace of "the next big thing" and saying, "The library is a place you don't know you need but couldn't live without." No stinkin' outcome measures for that guy.
His is very much a lone voice in this report, which in large part is a shitstorm of technocratic, nonprofit management platitudes and cliches for the Information Age: "The emerging value proposition of the public library … knowledge economies … exploitation of means of production and knowledge … entrepreneurial learner … new channels of sharing and distribution of knowledge." And there better be measurable outcomes or you're off the team.
Nonetheless, despite its complete lack of anything resembling authenticity or humanity (can bots commit cultural appropriation?), the report has the unintended value of serving as a progress report of public libraries since the PLI. But what the Aspen report characterizes as passivity is more a stubborn refusal to abandon the notion that libraries should favor leisure above learning. It is the settled habit that understands popular reading or viewing -- elevated by the annual intoning of the mantra of the library faith -- to be its meal ticket.
Ironically, the Aspen report -- for all its futuristic pretense -- effectively brings the public library full circle, to its original, serious, unfulfilled purpose. The Aspen participants may think they are "re-envisioning the role of the public libraries as a vital learning institution and engine for individual, community and civil society development," but in fact there is no re-envisioning at all. The public library founders of the 19th century, Andrew Carnegie, and the Progressive-era women's clubs thought about the role of the library in pretty much the same way. They just didn't have computers, the Internet, or "emerging value propositions" chained to arbitrary outcomes, however measurable.
Where the traditional library and the Gates library diverge, however, is in their understanding of where the library's beating heart lies. The truest conception of the library is that it is where a questing individual can go in search of knowledge. It was knowledge that was to undergird the education of Jefferson's yeoman's farmer, who in turn was to undergird the American republic, and it was this ideal that drove the public library project from the outset. It is still paid lip service in the library faith of the contemporary public library, and a faint echo still reverberates in the Aspen report.
For the most part, however, the Gates project refuses to listen to this voice and, when it isn't trumpeting the next-big-thing version of wood shop -- the 3D printer -- it follows the siren call of the "problems" approach: identify the "problems" facing the community and work on them. Anyone who has ever spent the least bit of time working on an effort to prioritize community "problems" knows that wherever the planning vessel winds up, the outcome is as likely to be a smashup of a politically-influenced, advocacy-laden exercise in social marketing as it is to be the actual, truest need. And the library, as a result being "intentional" in how it "deploys resources," finds those resources disappearing into the maw of more astute players of the game.
Why, with the cornucopia of informational resources showering upon us, do we have to focus elsewhere than on individual learning that can be turbocharged with the help of libraries -- particularly when they cooperate and collaborate. Libraries are among the most collaborative of institutions, but public libraries, especially small ones, depend on local and state funding that If they can doesn't even allow them to keep pace with technology's new added costs, and now the champions of tech want what there its to be diverted to wood shop. That this should be the "next big thing" in the face of the failure of the Internet Public Library (1995 -2015) is clear evidence Hofstadter-style anti-intellectuals are running the show and are thus wasting real opportunities.
Meanwhile the Federal government resolutely refuses to lead and fritters away its "library" money on atomized grants for the industry-subsidizing networking that are the opioids for the poor little libraries' tech addictions. It's not like they have a choice, either. When it was canals and railroads that could tie the country together, the Federal government didn't hesitate. And now that the linkages are virtual, it washes its hands and say, "No can do"? Game-changing projects that would be national in scope are not hard to conceive. The best example I know is the Hathi Trust online collection, with full-text searching inside its 13.7 million scanned volumes, but more is possible.
Why not, at long last, simply respond to the interests of those individuals who come to the library with a serious interest in learning? Yes, help them with the new tools that computers and the Internet have made available. But be intentional in deploying library resources not just to meet their needs but to extend them and elevate them, whatever knowledge they pursue. Libraries have always recognized the full gamut of subject matter to be deserving of support. There is no need to privilege STEM, for example, any more than there used to be a need to privilege Latin and Greek. The processes and patterns of support will be the same for everyone regardless of subject matter:
- Physical books remain not only a huge "value proposition," but are also the enduring "library brand" (much to the chagrin of public libraries, some of whom have called it "an incredible disconnect" from reality). However, the emphasis should be on a collection carefully selected and maintained to encourage and support individual learners.
- The copyright death of Google Books (although alleviated to some extent by the Hathi Trust) places all the more value on a national network of inter-lending libraries, which already exists but the full use of which is hampered by burdensome user fees. Interlibrary loan in support of registered research projects should be subsidized so as to enable borrowing from private research libraries.
- Establish a national purchasing consortium to pay for access to copyrighted material in digital form (ebooks, journals, etc.)
- Make registered autodidacts the library's core constituency and the focus of the mission.
- Offer a READ (Reading-Educated AutoDidact) degree.
- Use data to demonstrate the superiority of the READS degree to the university one. This should be a piece of cake. Hunger beats forced feeding anytime.
- Transition library staffing away from clerical functions (processing, circulation) in the direction of knowledge functions that support self-learning. Establish a "Peace Corps"-style Federal program to develop a new professional program and recruitment for this new focus, with premiums for candidates with high levels of student debt.
- Publish papers, essays, blogs, games, movies, musical compositions, etc., that derive from the work of autodidacts.
- Develop programming (lectures, podcasts, presentations, book reviews/talks, discussion groups) based on the work of library "students."
- Provide lengthy blocks of computer time (4-8 hours) to enable adequate research time and focus, particularly with multimedia. Use equipment logs to insist on appropriate use.
- Embrace the shush along with noise-canceling design and technology.
Why privilege these individuals? In the first place, let us remember what has been privileged, already, instead, with public money: on the education side, an enormously-expensive facsimile of learning via classroom instruction and on the library side Eisenhower's leisure over Jefferson's learning.
In the second place, it's the wrong question. The right question is "why privilege learning?" I won't try to answer that question except to say that our society has said that it does, but then proceeds to go about it in a way that is not only inefficient in terms of resources and results, but also discouraging of those habits of mind that will lead to lifelong learning. Why privilege the classroom instruction of an arbitrary selection of facts or skills, presented as a pre-ordained array, when real learning best proceeds along an inner-directed path?
If this is American "anti-intellectualism" -- as Hofstadter says -- it is a strange beast. It apotheosizes knowledge as the spiritual guarantor of democracy and then builds an educational system that ignores the truest form of it. Well-meaning attempts at re-invention (Carnegie, Gates) have built and outfitted many buildings, but their most important contributions have been to perpetuate a hollow institution.
E. Rigby, M.L.S. (2012), University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
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I went looking for Eleanor Rigby. She was back at her desk, eating a doughnut and drinking coffee as she updated the library website. One feels slightly sorry for a person who's been saddled by her parents with a notorious name. Such an imposition. It's doubly sad to think of her gilding the lily like that, too. If any song had a completely prosaic birth, it was her namesake. Paul noodling "Daisy Hawkins" and something about rice at a wedding and then tossing it like a carcass to his mates -- not including John Lennon -- so they could cure it.
"Nice [ahem] fountain pen font on the back," I said, handing her the envelope with the manuscript inside, "but you can't fool me. Time travel notwithstanding, there is still just one Eleanor Rigby who could've written the review. And she went to Catholic, not UT, didn't she? So no, the review can't go on the library's book review blog. You are staff, Eleanor. You are not one of our wacky autodidact contributors thinking she is writing for the New York Review of Books. You know the rules for adult staff as well as I: only books published in the current year, with 5/1 preference for popular fiction or genre fiction. Books that people will read, Eleanor."
She flipped me off with a 3-beat finger: "WESTerns. FUCking. SUCK! And Goodreads has a character limit of 20,000 characters, so FUCK YOU!" and went back to work.
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