The Man Who Forgot How to Read Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Also by

  Epilogue

  Afterword by Oliver Sacks, MD

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  In memory of Arthur A. Hamilton and Sheldon P. Zitner

  The Rev. A. A. Hamilton always encouraged me in my work and I had often sharpened my wits on his original, enquiring and omnivorous mind. My friend Sheldon, known in print as the poet S. P. Zitner, stimulated me over long lunches with his crystalline, dark wit.

  “Much of my unassisted self … I struggled through the

  alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably

  worried and scratched by every letter. After that,

  I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed

  every evening to do something new to disguise themselves

  and baffle recognition.”

  —Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

  MY NAME IS HOWARD ENGEL. I write detective stories. That’s what I tell people when they ask me what I do. I could say I’m a writer or a novelist, but that raises a false echo in my brain, so I’m happier with the more modest claim of writing detective stories. I’ve written quite a few of them.

  Before I started writing I was a reader. I read widely, everything from the John, Mary and Peter primer of my early childhood to Corn Flakes boxes when there was nothing more inspiring handy. I’ve been a reading junkie since public school. I played little baseball because I was searching with Lancelot for the Holy Grail and helping to free the widow’s sons from the Sheriff of Nottingham’s henchmen. I came home from summer camp without a tan because of books and comic books. I was reading about astronomy before I knew where the nearest drug store was located. My universe began at Betelgeuse, not at Binder’s Drug Store. When I came home from university, my family didn’t know how to talk to me; I was so full of books, I was no longer able to understand a request to pass the salt without a philosophical discussion on the nature of joint ownership of property or state capitalism. When I lived in Europe, and I became frustrated with my lack of fluency in French, Greek or Italian, I sought out the local English bookstore.

  I was in fact a very busy fellow, writing about my home town, St. Catharines, Ontario, and turning it into the murder capital of the world. Benny Cooperman, my personal private investigator, has been successful in more than a dozen novels, several short stories, radio broadcasts and two films. His name has turned up in crossword puzzles in the Los Angeles Times. He is doing well. Or, at least, he was doing well when I, the author of his being, was stricken with a sudden stroke in 2001, which put us out of the writing business by robbing me of the thing I loved above all things: the ability to read.

  This book is about the road back. About how I coped, the people who helped me along the way and how I found my road back into the mysteries of what reading and writing are all about. It’s a success story, in a way, because at the end of this story I am writing again. Not only that, but I have had another Benny Cooperman book published. It is a story with palpable commercial possibilities, but that is not the reason I wrote it. For me it is much more important to look back and remember all the steps that got me where I am. I need to know that so I won’t forget that there was a struggle along the way and that there was a small army of people who helped me climb all those steps.

  1

  DAVID COPPERFIELD BEGAN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY with a chapter called “I Am Born.” In this book, which is more of a memoir than an autobiography, I will not dredge up all the facts about my life the way young Copperfield did. Copperfield had a lot more trouble than I’ve had and he had an amanuensis, Charles Dickens, to do his heavy lifting for him. This memoir will concentrate on a significant but short period of my life. Yet in order for you to begin that part of the story, it is necessary to know who it is that is preparing to lift some of his veils and masks.

  The facts of my life are simply told: I was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on the second of April, 1931, in the Private Patients’ Pavilion of Toronto General Hospital. My mother enjoyed telling people that. I gather that in 1931 in Toronto the Private Patients’ Pavilion was the place to be born. Lolly Greisman Engel, my mother, always liked to go first class. She almost always got it, too, whether she asked for it or not. According to family tradition and an album full of photographs, mostly falling from their triangular black moorings, I was a bright, active child with endless curiosity. One of the pictures shows me standing in underpants—which would make me one and a half years old, or two—staring up the nozzle of a garden hose in our back yard.

  At my birth it was found that I had an unfinished left hand. It looked more like a paw with tiny ball-like fingers. My boyhood friend Garth Dittrich used to call it “My little doggie.” My parents hauled me off to see the leading specialist in such things.

  I think it may have been Dr. Alan Brown, the developer of Pablum, who also urged them to have another child as soon as possible in order to belay any growing sense of specialness or singularity in me. Enter brother David twenty-one months later. During my early days, my hand never bothered me. In fact, in spite of David’s presence and Dr. Brown, I did think I was special. The hand didn’t keep me from any of the activities a child gets into. And I developed a normal jealousy towards the baby of the family. I still wear the scar on my thigh from trying to climb into the high chair that had been lately mine and was now David’s. I tumbled out and gouged a chunk of flesh from my leg. Despite this incident, I climbed and romped with my friends, up and down trees and across rooftops with the rest of the neighbourhood children. It was only when I became a teenager and interested in acting that my hand became a problem.

  My mother, Lolly, was one of seven sisters, the family of a sewing-machine operator in the garment district of Toronto’s colourful Spadina Avenue, a Canadian version of New York’s Third Avenue. My father, Jack Engel, had six assorted brothers and sisters. His younger brother, Bill, was a well-known sprinter. An Olympic hopeful, he once beat the amazing American Ralph Metcalfe. While Uncle Bill was very fast on the public track, at family picnics he was usually beaten by his sister, my aunt Hannah. My father’s high-school education had abruptly ended when he punched his football coach on the jaw. Unfortunately, the coach was also the school principal. He ended his teenage years selling women’s hats throughout eastern Canada. Instead of becoming bitter, he developed an admiration for education in others.

  Shortly before my birth, my father opened a ladies’ ready-to-wear store in St. Catharines, across Lake Ontario from his Oshawa birthplace. It was 1930 and the Great Depression was upon them. The store already had a name and a big sign out front—Edward’s Women’s Wear—at 200 St. Paul Street, at the top of James and above the Old Canal that ran along the back of the city’s main street. It was one of the best locations in town. Edward’s kept the family in comfortable circumstances, sent us to summer camps, gave us holidays and put me and David through university.

  My interest in the theatre began while I was still in public school, where the senior students and choir entertained the rest of us at assemblies. Edith Cavell Public School had been built across the Old Canal from the main business and residential section of the city. The school was on a tract of wasteland at the top of a gully that drained into a ravine that led to Twelve Mile Creek. The CNR station was located there, and the new (in 1930) High Level Bridge led traffic to it. On the city map our enclave was called West St. Catharines, but we knew it as Western Hill.

  There is a tarnished silver cup before me as I write that has my name on it, dated 1949, one of my high-school years. It reads: “Dramatics Trophy.” My uncle Bill, the runner, always used to greet me with the remark, “So, you’re in plays!” And I was. In spite of the malformed left hand, I trod whatever boards that had plays on them. I played Shylock in my last year. I was an undistinguished Malvolio at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, a year later. I played a dozen other characters before I decided I was not the next Laurence Olivier. But I still followed what was happening in the world of theatre.

  Long before I discovered the stage, I was putting on marionette shows with my brother. Together, with the help of friends, we put on shows in church basements, public libraries and school auditoriums all over St. Catharines. We did one show at the YMCA, where we were shocked to see all of our schooteachers out front watching. Our most ambitious production was a drama, in several scenes, of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. For this we made Jack, his mother, the giant and a rather unconvincing cow. Other puppets in the troupe were a dancing girl, Al Jolson in blackface, Pépé the Clown and Meatball, a comic piano-player.

  I recall one night when we were putting on a show in a public school on Queenston Street, David and I and whoever was helping out on that occasion, probably Don Webster, went to get a hamburger near the canal. It was a dark, blustery night in late October and we took a shortcut through Victoria Lawn Cemetery on our way back. We frightened ourselves telling ghost stories for half of the journey, then ran the rest of the way with self-conjured spooky images. I seem to remember nearly tripping over pieces of wood that barely covered an open grave. We added
a ghost to our cast of puppet characters soon after this.

  When I wasn’t actually putting on shows, I read books from the public library, beginning with those about puppetry. Clem Bartlett and I put together a stage that eventually stood six feet high and measured ten feet across the curtained front. My brother, David, Wally Gillcrest and Don Webster made up the crew. I made the marionettes myself, although I had an assist from my mother in the knitting and sewing departments. Once the heads of the marionettes were either carved or modelled from an asbestos-like compound, hands and feet had to be fashioned. Then the strings had to be added, and they had to be attached to a control bar. I am skipping the part about making hair—I could write a whole chapter on hair. Then the faces had to be painted. The stage and boxes of marionettes were bulky enough to fill a small truck. It took us an hour to set up the stage and hang the puppets behind the scenes.

  I DID MY FIRST WRITING FOR THESE PUPPETS. To me, writing did not seem to be a special, somewhat elevated task; it was just another of the many jobs that had to be done once the paint was dry and the hair was pasted on the puppet heads. I had to give the marionettes words. And that was the beginning of writing for me. No one could ever claim that I learned how to write in an ivory tower. Still, even in the magic world of Jack and his beanstalk, there were stresses and problems. For a youngster who lived not far away from losing control when strings became tangled or when my father teased me about not being available to drive some of the equipment and the crew to the church hall or library on show night, I got on very well for the most part. But there were incidents, and it was my mother who picked me up and untangled my strings.

  The puppet show was important to me in many ways. Whatever skill I have in practical matters goes back to those days. Building the puppet theatre in the dug-out basement of an unfinished church with the help of Clem Bartlett was one of them. More importantly, preparing the marionette productions got me into writing. The puppets needed words, scripts, written material. And I had to provide it. My version of Jack and the Beanstalk has not survived—probably a good thing—but it did get me started in the writing game.

  While all of this was going on, I was dipping deeper and deeper into the shelves at the public library. Here I started a habit that I maintained throughout my life. I became addicted to print. I have always had two or more books on the go wherever I’ve been. There is a book on my bedside table now, and one in the living room. In my office, I’m swamped with shelf after shelf of them. I’m an addict of the printed word.

  2

  I CAN SCARCELY REMEMBER A TIME WITHOUT BOOKS. Before I could read them, they were my giant building blocks. I drew pictures on the fly-leaves of my parents’ books. I was so happy that the publishers supplied blank pages at the beginnings and ends of popular novels for me to draw steam engines on. The drawings show that although I had reproduced the general look of a locomotive, I had missed out on the quantitative aspect. There was no limit to the number of wheels, bells and bumps I added to the silhouette of a train engine. I could be inventive with the alphabet as well. I taught myself to make black marks that stood for letters. When I was pretending to write a piece I knew by heart, I tried to get my recitation to end at the same time as I wrote the last words. It was Miss Alton at Edith Cavell Public School who properly taught me to read and to write.

  My first book was a collection of Mother Goose nursery rhymes, which sits beside me as I write this. It is spineless and incomplete, with tattered binding and torn pages. But somehow it has managed to stay with me down through the years. The strong illustrations stand out now as they did when I first opened the book when I was three or four. I asked Margaret Maloney, who was once in charge of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books at the Toronto Public Library what she could tell me about the book. I thought that the knobbly English faces would immediately announce the name of a well-known illustrator from the 1880s. But no. There wasn’t much she could tell me. It wasn’t a rare book, except to me, and I will continue to treasure it.

  I still find inspiration in it because these were the first pages I learned to read by myself. Take, for example, the form of “The House That Jack Built.” It’s a kind of cumulative narrative that goes back to an ancient Hebrew form, still sung around the Passover table in Jewish homes, and in naughty verses about male prowess beginning “We were fifteen days out of Port Darwin …” Another of the nursery rhymes was about the old woman and her pig who couldn’t get home until a score of things happened first. She complained:

  Ox, ox, drink water:

  Water won’t quench fire,

  Fire won’t burn stick,

  Stick won’t beat dog,

  Dog won’t bite pig,

  Piggy won’t get over the style.

  And I shan’t get home tonight.

  The old woman ends this long train of intractability when she fills a leaky bucket with pebbles so that it will hold water enough to refresh the cow. Then: “the cat began to kill the rat, the rat began to gnaw the rope, the rope began to hang the butcher …”

  My father always fell asleep under the spread-out print of the Toronto Daily Star. My younger brother and I had to dig our way through print to get him to tell us the story about his fictional adventures in darkest Africa. My mother read novels all the time and shared some of them with me at an early age. Her favourites were historical novels, like Forever Amber, Leave Her to Heaven and The Sun Is My Undoing. I suppose that many of them would now be called “bodice rippers.” She also read Proust, because, she told me, she liked family stories.

  When my father acquired the contents of a lending library, our reading branched out. There was a biography of the French spy from the First World War, Mata Hari. I was very moved by her brave end. Somehow my father found and brought home most of an encyclopedia in about twenty volumes. When I discover that there are areas of knowledge of which I know nothing, I often blame the missing volumes. The books contained a few modern photographs, of politicians from around the time of World War I, but most of the illustrations were steel engravings of stern, unsmiling male faces, growling at the world. The books must have come from the States, because they made a great fuss about the American presidents. I still remember that the article on Washington said, “Providence left him childless so that a nation might call him father.”

  Later came the Grolier Society’s Books of Knowledge, with its fenced-globe colophon. David and I had favourite volumes: he liked the one with a large black Newfoundland dog in it, and I preferred the articles on things to make and things to do. I remember reading here Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and a long story by Ruskin called “King of the Golden River,” which meandered through several volumes of the set of blue-covered books. I liked the historical pictures, too: young Walter Raleigh talking to a sailor pointing out to sea, youthful Peter the Great working on the English docks. There were a few sepia plates of birds and flowers, but most of the illustrations were in a murky black-and-white, which gave the impression that all of European history happened after dark, which probably isn’t far from the truth.

  While I learned to struggle through Barney Blue-Eyes on my own, my mother encouraged my reading by filling me full of Tom Sawyer and, later, Huckleberry Finn. I was also exposed to regular doses of Arthur Ransome, Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame. After a time we read all of the Howard Pyle books about King Arthur and the Round Table. I was astonished, years later, to learn that my earliest reading coincided exactly with that of the writer Mary McCarthy. As she once told a group at Harbourfront’s reading series, this early reading shaped her interest in writing. It hit me the same way, not so many years later.

  When I was little, I loved being read to, of course, like most children. I still like it. I had my share of Mother Goose, who led me through the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Hearing the words of The Secret Garden or The Prince and the Pauper and sharing them with another was heaven. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Treasure Island kept me out of the sun for weeks, as did The Story of a Bad Boy. Not only did I swallow the texts of these books but I loved the illustrations that went with them. Later on there was a parade of Mark Twain books. Some my mother read to me, but I recall getting through most of Huckleberry Finn by myself.