a conference for
graduate students,
faculty, and
professionals

Books of Real Influence
One Gourmand's First Courses

by Albert Louis Zambone

Recently on a grant application I had to answer the following question: "What three books, other than Scripture, have had the greatest influence upon you?" Oh dear, I thought, and chewed a bit on my pen.

This is always a difficult question for an omnivorous and gluttonous reader to answer. I have had it posed to me in coffee houses that had their jury-rigged plywood tables covered with newsprint you could use crayons to draw on, in greasy spoons as I waited for an order of waffles and scrapple, and once in the restaurant on top of the Kennedy Center in Washington. Never have I been able to give a satisfactory answer.

I think this is in part because I have a great deal of regret about my life as a reader. Too often I have been a gourmand rather than a gourmet (as perhaps my reference to scrapple will have revealed). From the earliest days of my reading career I have spent vast amounts of time reading trash, indeed reading whatever written words were within arm's length. So I find myself often wishing that I had been reading E. Nesbit rather than the Hardy Boys, or regretting that I never could get through the looking glass into Alice in Wonderland. I have read widely, but not well. Modern fiction is terra incognita. The only story of Dickens I have ever read is A Christmas Carol, an admission which confirms me as a Dickens hater. It took me roughly seven years to get beyond the first three pages of A Portrait of a Lady, and despite having been gripped, moved, and wrung dry by the rest of it when I finally did get to page four, I have never read another novel by Henry James. Looking at other people's bookshelves used to be an instinctive and yet pleasureable reflex. Now it is a gloomy asessment of all that I haven't read, and probably won't get around to reading. Regret and guilt are intimate parts of my reading career.

Not that this negative picture is completely truthful. The gluttonous reader has known great delight, but this gluttonous reader can't always remember where he found it. The delights crowd together, and overlap and merge, so that I can't quite remember where exactly it was that I read that really good...thing (whatever it was). Thus I fall back on remembering certain periods as golden periods of discovery through reading. Freshmen year at college, for example, is a period in the personal calendar marked with a series of red-letter days. The temptation then exists to refer to Locke's Second Treatise on Government, or Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, or Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. But that would be misleading. The creation of my intellectual world began well before I encountered any of those books in my freshman year at Johns Hopkins.

It is the books of my early life as as a reader which made the deepest impact upon me, that shaped my reasoning and imagining life. Looking back to the early Albert Louis Zambone, I think the books that made the most influence upon me were Hello, David!, D'Aulaire's George Washington, and Richard Tregaskis's Guadacanal Diary.

Hello, David! was and remains a work of genius, a 1940s children's civics text which I was given by my grandmother. It is the winsome story of a certain David which begins with him living on the family farm in the deep country and attending a one-room school. He rode to school on his pony Tim and had a rabbit named Mr. Carrot, as I recall. ("Recall"? That's a lie. Though I can't remember my current phone number, I remember Mr. Carrot as if he had been my own pet.) One sad day, about ten pages into the book, David announces to his school that he is moving away to a bigger farm near the "city." The rest of the book I regarded as a pretty sad come-down after an excellent beginning. This was probably because I, too, lived in the deep country and was destined within a couple of years to attend a one-room school, so that bit of the book was the most like my life and therefore the most interesting part. But I hung in there for the other 85% of the book without too much trouble, as my poor mother can attest: she claims that for months on end the only book that I wanted read to me every morning was Hello, David! Surely that does something to you, having a book read over and over to you, something perhaps as formidable as reading John Locke.

One of the first books I can remember actually reading for myself is D'Aulaire's George Washington, yet another masterpiece. It is a children's picture book in the way the Pieta is a sculpture. The D'Aulaires' art was a sort of "soft realism," using gentle colors, strong lines, and often a sort of pointillism to create simple pictures with a special grace and elegance. The same can be said for their prose, which was simple and direct, and never condescending. Through this alchemy of art and words the D'Aulaires lifted up Washington's life into myth and then simultaneously took the myth they created and made it seem very real and present once again. I think I must have been convinced after poring over that book almost every day that George Washington was my own contemporary. He gained an immediate relevance which actual contemporary things lacked. Those simple pictures and simple words allowed me space into which I could project my own thoughts and imaginings. Without my knowing what was going on, the D'Aulaires gave me an historical imagination.

The third book comes from a little later in life, when I was about eight and working my way steadily through the collection of the Morris Goodwin Elementary School library. At the time I was deeply in love with the United States Marine Corps and ambitious to become the commanding officer of the First Marine Air Wing, thus neatly combining my love of the Marines and of everything that flew. I had a Marine Corps battle flag sticker on my lunch box and recruiting posters from World War I on my wall. In the grip of this obsession I came across Richard Tregaskis's Guadacanal Diary and read with rapt attention as he described the casual heroics of the First Marine Division as he had seen them. I remember several times, after reading sections of the book, how I walked down our hill over the soybean stubble and up through the woods to the home of Gunnery Sergeant Donald Murray, USMC (Ret.), a veteran of Guadalcanal. There I quizzed him on whether or not Tregaskis was telling the truth about this detail or that action; what had happened the night of the banzai charges on the airfield; did the rest of you guys really not like the Marine Raiders; and so on. I thought at the time that I was preparing myself to be a Marine who commanded Marines. It didn't quite turn out that way. But I was learning how to be an historian: learning how to be empathetic to the subject of my enquiries and yet simultaneously cross-checking my sources.

It's true that I often think of Locke, Bailyn, and Kuhn. But I was made by Hello, David!, George Washington, and Guadacanal Diary. As I sit in the library at my desk, words swimming in front of my eyes after three or four hours of reading, it is good to ask myself, "Why am I doing this?" And I don't think back, always, to Professor Forster teaching us the French Revolution from out of the depths of Remsen One. I think of Mr. Carrot, of the anticipation of moving to a new home near a big town, of a crisp yet dreamy picture of young George Washington surveying the Shenandoah Valley, of Marines crouched in foxholes and grimly looking into the dark jungle, and of an old man staring into the sun-stippled woods as he saw that jungle once again.

These are the evidences of things yet unseen. They are the markers of my vocation, and my faith in the future is based on their existence and on the goodness which they have given my life. 

Al Zambone, a contributing editor for FollowingChrist.org, uses his historical imagination (and cross-checks his sources) as a D.Phil. candidate in modern history at the University of Oxford.

An extended form of this essay is forthcoming in The Cresset, Valparaiso University's literary magazine.

© 2002 by Albert Louis Zambone.