Canon Fodder

I read a disturbing article by Casey Cep in The New Yorker a few days ago.  It examined some of the history behind Harper Lee's father, the autobiographical inspiration for Atticus Finch.  A lot of articles about To Kill a Mockingbird have been published lately in reaction to the opening of the play on Broadway with Jeff Daniels in the Gregory Peck role.  This article, however, did not come to praise Atticus, but to bury him.  Wait.  That's an exaggeration.  The article, "Power of Attorney," showed that Lee's portrayal of her father was, to put it mildly, idealized.  Lee's father may have started out as a liberal Democrat, but he ended up applauding the prosecution of the Scottsboro Boys and even joining a thinly veiled chapter of the Klan as a reaction to Brown vs. Board of Education.

But that was not the most troubling part of the piece.  Cep suggested that Mockingbird "is now a kind of secular scripture, one of only a handful of texts most Americans have in common."  I find it incredibly depressing that Mockingbird would be the text most Americans have read.  I read it as a junior high kid and I taught it to freshmen.  It was readable, occasionally clever, filled with great speeches and as such, easy to teach.  But I didn't like the whole idea of a wise and wonderful white father figure helping a poor black guy.  My favorite line in Cep's article is when she suggests that the real tragedy for the white readers of the book isn't that a black man dies, but that a white man loses his case.

But that's enough about the book.  The other troubling thing is the whole idea of a literary Canon that Americans should share.  It used to be just accepted in department meetings and college classrooms that there are some books that simply should be read.  Of course, we couldn't agree on what those books might be, but it was fun to talk about.  Toward the end of my career, that changed.  I know I'm beginning to sound like an old curmudgeon, the kind of person I went into education to overthrow, but I noticed that in department meetings with baby teachers, the idea of a Canon was anathema.  Kids should be allowed to choose their books.  That's the only way to get them interested. Blah, blah, blah.

I argued for the value of reading assigned books as a class precisely because I believed in and continue to believe in the idea of a Canon.  Even if the idea is absurd, reading books in concert with others fosters critical thinking and that's what I was trying to teach.  As a literature teacher, I think a lot of the tribalization of our country is because we have lost sight of a Canon.  What follows is a list of books that are my nominees for inclusion in the Canon.

First, some rules.  I'm a literature teacher, so my choices will all be fiction.  Since this is a list of books we all should have under our belts, the reading level can never rise above the eighth grade (Most published books are at that level anyway.).  My choices may not have footnotes or bibliographies.  That pretty much eliminates David Foster Wallace and all works by Thomas Pynchon.  My choices will obviously be limited to American authors.  Most importantly, my choices are simply that.  My choices.  However, I think the world would be a better place if we all, like one giant book club, read them over coffee and cookies.

THE EGG AND I - Betty McDonald
-Both my mother and grandmother insisted I read this very funny little book.  I was only about nine or ten, so my memory is sketchy, but it is about the trials and tribulations a lady has running her chicken farm and her family.  It made me laugh and if I was being pompous I could say that it gave me a rudimentary understanding of life in rural America.

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN - Betty Smith
-I read this about the same time I read McDonald's book and for the same reason:  Mother and grandmother twisting my arm.  To this day it is one of the funniest books I  have ever read.  It does for life in the big city what the first book does for the farm.

THE LORAX - Dr. Seuss
-This is just the most obvious choice to list, but I think all of Dr. Seuss should be included on the list. There is just no way that Donald Trump and the rest of the Republicans in Washington have read any of Dr. Seuss' work.  Instead of starting congressional sessions with the pledge, wouldn't we all be better off if they all did a choral reading of Green Eggs and Ham?  I would also include here the complete oeuvre of Pete the Cat.

THE SCARLET LETTER - Nathaniel Hawthorne
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN - Mark Twain
THE GREAT GATSBY - F. Scott Fitzgerald
-I list these together because they are the obvious choices on any Canon of American literature.  Furthermore, I don't need to say why.  I might want to include something by Sinclair Lewis here, or Hemingway.  The names are all familiar and, for canonical purposes, pretty much interchangeable.

MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES - James Thurber
-I think our drearily exceptional country is suffering from a lack of wit.  No one is better at wit than Thurber, plus his collection of pithy stories make great humor pieces to read if you ever find yourself in a forensics tournament.  As long as we are being witty, I would strongly suggest Phillip Roth.  I just didn't think it would be appropriate to put Portnoy's Complaint in a Canon.

THE BLUEST EYE - Toni Morrison
-Her most accessible and maybe most beautiful novel.  Morrison has to be on the list not only because she speaks so movingly and with such authority about race, but because she writes better sentences than anybody.

CIDERHOUSE RULES - John Irving
-Irving's best novel.  It, like everything he has written, is an epic that explores moral issues that need exploring.  We need to make our own rules rather than ignore the ones written by others.

CATCH-22 - Joseph Heller
-This is the most difficult book to read on my list.  It is also funny, violent, sexy, horrifying, and hopelessly confusing.  Just like life.

TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY - John Steinbeck
-The quintessential book about America.  It is also a great book to read by the fire.  I would add here that this book violates my all fiction rule.  So sue me.

INVISIBLE MAN - Ralph Ellison
-A monumental piece of writing that also happens to chronicle racial tensions in the mid-twentieth century.

Okay.  There could be more women on this list.  More black authors.  I don't have a single hispanic author!  I could always go back and add some, but that would be cheating.  The south is under represented, but most southern novels I know are above the reading ability of lots of folks.  I don't think Faulkner would be a good choice here.  You will notice that To Kill a Mockingbird is nowhere on my list.