Encounters with Inscriptions

Encounters

with

Instrictions

a memoir

Kristin Czarnecki

Legacy Book Press LLC

Camanche, Iowa

Copyright © 2024 Kristin Czarnecki

Cover design by Kaitlea Toohey (kaitleatoohey.com)

Cover artwork by Su Blackwell: Book of Butterflies © 2022

Author photo by Leigh Slingluff

As it is with all personal narratives, this one is subjective. This story is told from the author’s perspective and her memories; she recognizes that everyone remembers events differently.

The views expressed in this book are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 979-8-9891170-4-8

Library of Congress Case Number: 1-14153734241

For NAK and DPK

Table of Contents

Preface

1. A Light in the Attic

2. A Child’s Christmas in Wales

3. Reading in the Dark

4. Luka and the Fire of Life

5. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury

6. When the Trees Say Nothing

7. Wuthering Heights & Jane Eyre

8. The Love of a Good Woman: Stories

9. When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

10. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

11. The New Basics Cookbook

12. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Afterword

Complete List of Inscribed Books

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Preface

Home alone one night, I perused my Brontë shelves: a complete set of the novels from 1902; Folio Society editions of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; an assortment of biographies; The Brontës: A Life in Letters; coffee table books on Haworth Parsonage; a graphic biography of Charlotte; and Isabel Greenberg‘s Glass Town, a graphic work about the Brontë sibling juvenilia—the elaborate tales Branwell, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne spun together for years about their make-believe worlds of Angria and Gondal. I have Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth, Deborah Lutz’s The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, and other books on Brontë lore of which fans all over the world never seem to tire. On this night, I reached for one book in particular: an edition of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights together that my father had given me for Christmas when I was 14 years old. It’s bound in plush red leather with gold writing on the cover and gold-edged pages. Opening it, I read the inscription: To Kristin, for her 14th Christmas. Read with delight and pleasure, my dear. Love, forever and ever, Dad 1983.

Tears welled up in my eyes, for my father had recently died. Seeing his handwriting again and his lovely inscription was like getting a little hello from him when I least expected it, and when I most certainly needed it. I remember reading Jane Eyre in that volume shortly after receiving it, but it would be another ten years before I’d read Wuthering Heights, in a graduate course called Novels of the Brontë Sisters, which sparked my Brontë mania. My mother shared my delight and pleasure in the Brontës, and we enjoyed talking about their lives and writing. When I visited the Brontës’ home, Haworth Parsonage, for the first time in June 2004, I couldn’t wait to tell her about it—especially since my friend and I happened to visit on the 150th wedding anniversary of Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nicholls. We attended a reenactment of their wedding in the church, and Haworth residents wandered about in period clothing.

My mother would have loved it. She died nine months after my father, and my husband’s father had died five months before that. I was Brontë-gazing alone in the house because my husband was out of town at our sister-in-law’s funeral. She passed away at age 52, just four weeks after my mother died. It had been a brutal stretch of time, and on this rainy October night, reflecting on our losses, I turned to my books for solace and distraction. And, upon seeing my father’s inscription, for remembrance as well. Of the countless things I miss about my parents, exchanging and discussing books with them might be what I miss the most.

A few months later, I found myself combing through books on another night, pulling this or that from the shelves to refresh my mind on storylines, look at beautiful dustjackets, feel the heft of a book in my hands, and inhale the aroma of creamy new pages or musty old ones. I came across another book with an inscription from my parents—and then another, and another after that. Soon, I had a stack in my arms and headed to my laptop to type the inscriptions out. The books were birthday or Christmas presents spanning my entire life. Some I had read several times, others not even once.

I decided then that I would read—or reread—all these books, not necessarily in the order in which I received them. Instead, I would let the process unfold organically and turn to them as the mood struck for a particular genre or author. I would think about what I glean from each book now. I would head down rabbit holes for related research and exploration. I would try to stave off expectations and just enjoy the reading experience. At the same time, I would reflect on where I was in life when the books were given to me: a child of 12, a teenager, an adult turning 25, then 35, then 50 years old in the blink of eye. What did my parents hope I would find in these books? Or did they simply love the fact that I was a voracious reader, like they were? How fitting that the inscription in the Brontë book sent me down this path, for as Debora Lutz explains, The Brontës were incessant inscribers, a practice copied from their father. Inscriptions accrued as books were exchanged, gifted, and passed on to others. Charlotte wrote in her little diary of 1829 that ‘once papa lent my sister Maria a book. It was an old geography book and she wrote on its blank leaf, Papa lent me this book.’ Charlotte felt a sense of awe for this textbook that had belonged to her sister, dead already for a few years, Lutz writes. She then describes a Branwell/Brontë family Bible, with its series of inscriptions recording who gave it to whom and when. What is crucial about this Bible, Lutz explains, why it still exists today, is not the printed text but the chain of relationships it represents, made tangible by handwriting on the page. I see a similar chain of relationships in my parents’ inscriptions to me over the years.

My parents gave me the gifts of life and literature. Delving into the books from them might, I thought, allow me to commune with them once again. I longed for our comfortable language of plot, character, chapter, and stanza. Reading these books would be a nostalgic enterprise but one that would allow me to contemplate the present and look to the future as well, for as Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One’s Own, books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately. They reflect, respond to, and resonate with each other across time and space. They collapse the boundaries often imposed by academia and the marketplace. In their infinite variety, they make room for readers everywhere, inviting us to consider what it means to be human in a complicated world. And so my journey began.

Chapter 1

A Light in the Attic

Poems and Drawings by Shel Silverstein

To Kristin

with all our love

Merry Christmas!

1981

Before writing about A Light in the Attic, given to me by my parents when I was 12 years old, I need to backtrack to its predecessor, Where the Sidewalk Ends, which I first encountered in the fourth grade, when our class gave it as a going away present to one of our classmates, Susan Choi, whose family was moving to another state in the middle of the school year. We were happy and excited to give her a gift. Even at ten years old, we all knew Susan was special—brilliant and kind. (She would go on, unsurprisingly, to become an award-winning novelist.) We gathered around as she unwrapped her present and unveiled Where the Sidewalk Ends. She thanked us as she flipped through the pages, and our teacher, Mrs. Sylvester, asked her to read a poem aloud. She stood at the front of the room and read Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out, laughing as she read. And so it piled up to the ceilings: / Coffee grounds, potato peelings, / Brown bananas, rotten peas, / Chunks of sour cottage cheese. I found it magical—the rhyming, the drawings—and when I got home from school that day, I breathlessly told my mother all about it. Never one to refuse a child begging for a book, she bought it for me, and my friend Mia and I pored over it together countless times.

I came across A Light in the Attic in a bookstore in Chicago over Christmas break a couple of years later, on a day when our family had taken the South Shore train from South Bend to see the decorated windows at Marshall Fields. I remember the slow shuffling of people along the sidewalk gazing in delight at the elaborate Christmas displays: scenes from Nutcracker, elves, Santa, ice skaters, gingerbread houses, snowmen, and the like. On those excursions, we would have lunch at Fields’s famous Walnut Room, with its towering, fragrant Christmas tree. In fact, I think we may have been in the basement of Fields, which used to have a book section, when I found A Light in the Attic. (I vividly remember picking out a couple of Nancy Drew books there once, too.) I’m a little fuzzy on the details, though. Were we in Chicago? I think we must have been, because I remember my father being there, and on an ordinary day in South Bend, the entire family wouldn’t have been out together browsing a bookstore. Either way, I had the book in my hands and asked my parents if they would buy it for me. No dice. But there it was a short time later under our Christmas tree. Today, it’s not quite as battered and worn as my copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends, but it’s clear that I thumbed through its pages many times.

Reading it now after many years, I revel again in Silverstein’s writing, with its humor, wordplay, rollicking rhythms, and whimsical, sometimes sinister drawings that accompany the poems or, more often, play a key role. Have Fun depicts a girl happily swimming because I guarantee / There are no sharks, while a giant octopus lurks just below the surface, unbeknownst to her. Deaf Donald incorporates drawings of a child saying I love you in American Sign Language. His friend, Sue, not understanding him, grows frustrated and walks out of his life forever—one of the book’s many poems on miscommunication and lost opportunities. The speaker of Something Missing rehashes his morning routine. I remember I put on my socks, / I remember I put on my shoes, he says, Yet I feel there is something / I may have forgot— / What is it? What is it? . . .. Next to the poem is a drawing of a man in suitcoat, tie, and jaunty cap—but no pants.

Many of the poems explore the imaginative possibilities in seemingly mundane objects, such as Picture Puzzle Piece. One picture puzzle piece / Lyin’ on the sidewalk, the poem begins. One picture puzzle piece / Soakin’ in the rain. / It might be a button of blue / On the coat of the woman / Who lived in a shoe. / It might be a magical bean, / Or a fold in the red / Velvet robe of a queen. We need only let our minds roam freely to create a whole out of a tantalizing part, and Silverstein’s poems encourage such creativity, like Rock ‘N’ Roll Band, with its motley crew of kids dreaming big: If we were a rock ‘n’ roll band, / We’d travel all over the land. / We’d play and we’d sing and wear spangly things, / If we were a rock ‘n’ roll band. No matter that we ain’t no rock ‘n’ roll band, / We’re just seven kids in the sand / With homemade guitars and pails and jars / And drums of potato chip cans—they’re having a ball being noisy and exuberant. A tiny lighthouse and sailboat shimmer in the distance behind them. Such details enliven every page.

Put Something In strikes a similar chord as Rock ‘N’ Roll Band: Draw a crazy picture, / Write a nutty poem, / . . . Put something silly in the world / That ain’t been there before. A few years ago, I began painting with watercolors and drawing with colored pencils, new endeavors for me spurred by a book arts course I took at the college where I used to teach. In addition to our class projects, our professor, Daniel—my colleague and friend—gave us weekly assignments involving painting, drawing, and collaging. I took to it instantly, but I wasn’t very good, I feared. Early in the semester, we went outside with our scratchbooks, behind the art building, and were told to have fun—for two hours—with chalk, spray paint, charcoal nubs, bricks, and the bits of the natural world within reach, like twigs, leaves, dirt, and rocks. I stood there looking around, feeling bewildered and intimidated. The undergrads dived right in. They sat cross-legged on the ground. They sprayed their hands with paint and made prints and swirls and lines on their books’ clean white pages. They drew, glued, and collaged. I’m pretty sure matches were lit. By the end of class, my own book’s first few pages reflected a haphazard, but not half-hearted, effort at creativity. I got into the spirit of things but fell flat when it came to creating anything special.

*****

Once I bought watercolors and colored pencils, I began to stretch my wings a bit. Even then, though, I struggled with self-consciousness. Although I don’t particularly care for representational art, I wouldn’t paint or draw unless I had an object, or a picture of something, right in front of me. I would pick up a pencil and draw and erase, draw and erase. Knowing that Daniel would be collecting our scratchbooks a couple of times during the semester, I would imagine him looking at my pages over my shoulder (something he never would have done), not unlike the way Virginia Woolf imagines the Angel in the House—that Victorian-era phantom demanding that women write in deference to patriarchal