I’ve spent most of my life as a devoted close-reader. But it’s only lately, in my ninth decade, that I’ve begun to wonder how the close-reading passion was kindled, and why it has burnt merrily all these years, with no sign of abating. And what exactly is close-reading, anyway, that it should shape my or anyone’s life in such a profound and durable way?
It did help, though, that I grew up in a house filled with books. Lots of them. Many of them mysteriously old and impenetrable. Ornately bound sets of Dickens, Gibbon, Francis Parkman, Macaulay. A whole floor-to-ceiling bookcase groaning under leather-bound copies of Harper’s Weekly from the 1860s on. Elsewhere, stacked horizontally because wildly oversized, Frank Leslie’s lithographs of the Civil War. That old book I could at least treasure for its depictions of battle, which still haunt me, as do Gustav Doré’s imaginings of Hell from our massive three-volume version of the Divine Comedy, in Longfellow’s translation.
But there, magically, sandwiched among those ancient tomes, but actually accessible to me, resided a complete series of 1900s-era boys’ books my dad and his brothers had doted on and dogeared when they were ten-year old kids like myself: the fifteen-volume Dave Porter series, “by” Edward Stratemeyer.
Why the quotation marks around “by”? Because while Edward Stratemeyer (1862-1930) might well have written the Dave Porter books (or some of them), he was also a founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a publishing company which produced (with the help of journeyman writers using pseudonyms) 1300 titles and which together sold a total of 500 million copies. Fortune magazine wrote, “As oil had its Rockefeller, literature had its Stratemeyer.”
Dave Porter, it turns out, was just one of those inky geysers. Little did I know at the time that the same syndicate produced Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins series (and many others). If I had known this, I might not—disdaining such girlish and babyish nonsense—have learned to close read.
That’s because I associate close reading with what I learned from the endless fun my dad and I had reading the Dave Porter series aloud and in detail. Detail was and is the key to close-reading: paying careful attention to every word, savoring the flavor of them as they combine with other words, sometimes laughing at the absurdities that result, sometimes memorizing favorite lines, but always as a form of play with a co-conspirator, my dad. We would read choice parts of the dialogue or narration aloud to each other, we would act them out, we would go so far as to make up quizzes about them in hopes of stumping each other with an obscure name or gesture or turn of plot from an earlier volume. Close-reading Dave Porter wasn’t a solo activity but a pursuit we played together, like cribbage or pitch-and-catch in the back yard. We bonded over these books by helping them come alive again for each other.
The immediate benefits of our readers’ conspiracy were that my dad got to relive his own boyhood, and I began to absorb a fascination with language that has bloomed from that time on. One lesson I learned from that absorption is how reading a book can instill an ethic, in this case the very American pluckiness ethic of Horatio Alger. No surprise there: Stratemeyer edited and wrote many of Alger’s books. The Dave Porter series was Stratemeyers’ own version of a rags-to-riches story, with a quest for identity built in, because when we first meet Dave, he’s a foundling whose only way forward is up.
But seeing how language can instill an ethic, a kind of theme or form of living, wasn’t the first thing I learned. The first and most important was how language can embody a voice. It happened when my dad began reading aloud the opening of volume one, Dave Porter at Oak Hall (copyright 1905). All of a sudden, without warning, we plunged right in to the snappy dialogue between Dave and his pal Ben:
“Hello, Dave, where are you going?”
“I’m going up the mountainside, to look for huckleberries, Ben. Do you want to go along?”
“How much is there in it?” asked Ben Basswood, with a grin. “I never work unless I get paid for it.”
“Well, you can have all the huckleberries you find. Mr. Jackson is paying eight cents a quart for them,” answered Dave Porter.
“Eight cents! And how many quarts do you think I can pick in an afternoon?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, Ben—six or eight quarts at least.”
“That wouldn’t pay me,” said Ben Basswood, whose parents were well-to-do and who was furnished regularly with spending-money. “But I’ll go along, just the same, to keep you company,” he added.
The voices drew us right in, as Edward Stratemeyer knew they would do. Literature is a representation of someone speaking, no matter what its subject is, whether the speaker is plucky Dave Porter or Dante in his dark wood. If we can’t “hear” what the words are saying, we can’t connect with those words. All life is relational, and never more clearly so than when our unique means of expression, language, opens up to us in some way, as it did for me in the words provided by Edward Stratemeyer and reanimated by my dad as he brought alive the voices of resolute, money-conscious Dave and genial, carefree Ben, talking at high speed before we even know who they were. Of course my dad would make Dave’s voice low and firm, Ben’s a bit squeaky: the reader’s own liberty was part of the fun of it.
Dave and Ben continue yakking as they head up the hill. Then a narrator materializes, distancing us from the scene at just the right moment to give one of those voices substance:
Dave Porter was a youth of fifteen, of medium size, with dark eyes and curly dark hair. He was healthy, with muscles hardened by constant work in the open air. His look was both fearless and frank, and there was an expression about his mouth which spoke of a will power bound to assert itself whenever needed.
My dad would deepen his voice for the narrator, of course. No boyish chatter now as the narrator moves with sober sureness from the outside in: first sketching an external view of Dave, then getting closer to him by parsing Dave’s expression, then delving deeper into Dave’ moral qualities as they affect his likely behavior.
Deftly done, Mr. Stratemeyer! One element is missing, though. Plot. Oh! But here it comes, just in time, in the next paragraph:
Dave was a poorhouse boy, and of unknown parentage. About twelve years before this story opens he had been found, one summer evening, wandering near the railroad tracks just outside of the village of Crumville.
Here I learned that narration isn’t just about setting up scenes or interpreting expressions. It’s also about suggesting questions (How on earth did three-year old Dave land on the Crumville tracks? etc.), getting them to scamper off like rabbits, with the reader in hot pursuit over, say, as many volumes as the reader can bear without flagging. Not in lonely pursuit, though, but with a companion or two to help him keep the pace, his eye on the trail, and his spirits high.
Maybe my initial question isn’t about how I became a close-reader. It’s about how I could have become anything else.
After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.
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