A Reading Life

Today would mark my father’s seventieth birthday. We’re all here on a limited warranty, he’d often say, and his expired two years ago this summer. But throughout his life, he never stopped reading, collecting books on wide-ranging subjects from “Pistol Pete” Maravich to Nietzsche’s sister. His was a reading life, the seven decades’ worth of books filling shelves, stuffed in boxes, but also imparted onto others through his witty references, florid comparisons, and poignant reminiscences. As one friend memorialized, “He was one of the few people on planet Earth that could make an analogy between Czarist Russia and the price of lettuce at Giant grocery store."

A book was my father’s customary birthday gift. “A beautiful name shared by only a few who really are deserving,” his father, Charles, inscribed in Antonia Fraser’s 1979 biography of King Charles II, restored to the British throne after the death of Cromwell. To the Irish, as my father wrote in one college essay at the University of Scranton, “humor is his weapon. A natural defense against an enemy more feared than Cromwell. The enemy is melancholy. It preys upon the weak nature of the Irish.” Reading, though, offered spiritual nourishment—and a reprieve, however temporary, from that age-old Irish enemy.

My father was born on the 78th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, that overwhelming 1876 U.S. defeat that led to Custer’s last stand. The milestone likely engendered his admiration for American Indian history—the lives of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, but also their “Garden of Eden” and the herds of buffalo described by Stephen Ambrose in a favorite book, Undaunted Courage, the story of Lewis and Clark. He also studied the man who died that one June 25th, George Armstrong Custer, the “flamboyant, outrageous figure” examined in another favorite, Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star, published not long after his thirtieth birthday.

My father’s earliest books on American Indian history were at one time tucked inside the built-in, glass-encased bookshelves of his childhood home in Hazleton, Pa. Ironically, it was in the bookshelves of this Craftsman house—before his family moved there from around the corner when he was fourteen—where he’d see local Indian artifacts collected by the original owner, Mr. Wilhelm, when ascending the steps to the porch while “Halloweening.” After Mr. Wilhelm died, they moved there in 1968, and the shelves filled with my father’s literary collection but also atlases and Reader’s Digest condensed books.

In this red-shingled home, my father read voraciously, and decades later, he could still vividly recall the books that moved him during those formative intellectual years. He’d recount one enlightened St. Gabriel’s High School teacher, who assigned Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story and Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy. Then, when seeing my struggles with school reports, he’d compare it to one spring Sunday night, when in an act of procrastination while writing a review of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, he went out and bought the vinyl of Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young’s Four Way Street.

It was on South Laurel Street, too, where he commenced his vast collection of World War I and Russian history books, beginning with Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. And, many years later, he still grew emotional when referencing Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra—how the hemophiliac “Alexis, lying on the floor still in the arms of the Tsar, feebly moved his hand to clutch his father’s coat” when the Romanov family was massacred by Bolshevik revolutionaries.

Though my father especially loved history books, from the Crusades to the Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires, he also collected Paul Theroux’s travel books and memoirs by athletes and actors, including those by Eli Wallach—best remembered for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—and Michael Caine, who offered rich life lessons in his 2018 memoir. And though he preferred non-fiction, he loved the fictional escape, from William Saroyan’s Tracy’s Tiger to James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, in addition to novels by Sinclair Lewis and John Updike, who advised “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” He thought Hemingway was overrated, Fitzgerald at times too flowery, but enjoyed the works of John O’Hara, whose Appointment in Samarra he first read—and then made an annual tradition—one Christmas Eve night in Harrisburg during his thirties.

Over time, my father would share recommended reading lists with me and my two younger brothers. This led us to read those old paperback copies while in Catholic grade school. Today, those books have become an otherworldly bequest. All his life, he had an aversion to underlining book passages with pen, and so he’d mark notable or favorite pages with a gentle fold. Now, in my writings, I often discover these folded pages when consulting his books for research. In Pete Hamill’s memoir Downtown, my father marked the late journalist’s description of John Sloan’s 1912 painting of McSorley’s Back Room, wherein he describes the saloon

…showing a white-haired mustached man sitting in the late-morning light of a side window, his hands loosely enlaced. He wears a full dark blue overcoat, so we know it is winter. He has neither book nor newspaper on the table before him. Only a stein of ale. He seems lost in a pool of solitude and nostalgia. To the side, two other men lean toward each other, obviously murmuring but suggesting neither dark conspiracies nor sullen angers. Behind them a fire burns red in a fireplace while one of the saloon’s collection of clocks ticks away the minutes of their lives.

Recently, when consulting another book—Terry Golway’s biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Al Smith, the twenties-era New York governor and America’s first Catholic presidential candidate—I discovered a folded page referencing when luck appears to be breaking Smith’s way. “Al Smith thought of himself as Irish, and there was nothing so Irish as to consider the appearance of good fortune as a sure sign that something very bad was about to happen.” Such words can only be read and understood by one with Irish humor.

“Life has many detours and obstacles,” my father wrote me on my thirtieth birthday. My father always advised firsthand how nobody skates in life. But by reading, one becomes enriched by learning about the struggles and resilience of others—and how certain passages, as my father marked, could ultimately prove transcendent. And so, on this day, I keep turning the pages.

Charles F. McElwee is the founding editor of RealClearPennsylvania. He’s a contributing writer at POLITICO and City Journal. Follow him on X at @CFMcElwee.