Most of our reading material, aside from our Bibles and catechisms, came from my mother’s sisters in the US. Caroline, a teacher, would pack up a box of castoff library books every few months and send it to us. We looked forward to those boxes pretty intensely. It was luck of the draw, but there was usually something in there for each of us. I was most excited about novels of the rockets and rayguns variety. I liked Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov a lot. All of us read Edgar Rice Burroughs, and reread him until we couldn’t stand it any more.
Every time we moved my dad would clean out his four or five 55-gallon oil drums, repaint them and stencil our new address on the top and sides. Into them would go all our clothes, records, toys and cooking stuff. One or two of the barrels were for books. Dad’s study had maybe 500 books, and between us the kids had another 100 or so. Some of the ones that started out Dad’s books eventually became mine by a slow process of appropriation.
My dad, in his wild youth, had acquired the strange hobby of collecting right-wing kook literature. Maybe collecting is putting it too strongly: that stuff was all over the place where he grew up, and collecting it probably amounted to little more than not throwing it away. He had a copy of the Blue Book of the John Birch society (which proved that Eisenhower was a Communist agent) and two volumes of Henry Ford’s bizarre series about the international Jewish conspiracy, and a few other things. He made a token attempt to keep this stuff on the higher shelves and out of our hands, but there wasn’t much there that I didn’t know about. There was his complete collection of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s works in paperback; this was during the 70s, at the height of the pathetic windbag’s popularity.
My favorite kook was Ayn Rand, whose books my dad tried especially hard to keep secret. I happened on them, fortuitously enough, when I was about 12 or 13. An early teen is a perfectly receptive audience for appeals to logic, objectivity and most of all self-interest. I couldn’t follow the philosophical tracts (although their titles – The Virtue of Selfishness! – thrilled me), but I ate up the novels, especially We the Living, the only one that took a sort of science fiction tack. It was like a shorter, chest-beatinger version of Orwell’s wan and pitiable 1984, which I had only managed to finish because it was set in the future, so it qualified as science fiction. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were mysterious and interminable, and I read them as fast as I could by flashlight under the blankets. They each featured breathy love scenes in which women said stuff like “Take me,” and the guys did, saying nothing. And each book included a long speech by the manly hero near the end, in which the contents of the nonfiction tomes were conveniently boiled down to a dozen or so pages of concentrated rhetoric perfect for reciting to annoying teachers and parents.
Years later, when I first read Marx, I remember noticing that same thrill of clarity, and the same urge to memorize, and I’ve always wondered, running into something mentally stirring like that (Martin Luther, Roque Dalton, Trotsky), how closely the things I think are tied into the things I feel, despite all my efforts to act like I’ve reasoned things out in the approved cold, dispassionate fashion.