Living in the Library: Writers Reading, Writers Writing
With Special Attention to Carl Sandburg and Thornton Wilder

–Penelope Niven
April 22, 2006

It is an honor and a privilege to be here with you today for the dedication of the Upjohn Library Commons. I congratulate you on the fusion of energy, vision, and dedication so apparent in this beautiful structure, and in the very atmosphere it generates.

I am especially happy to be here to help celebrate during your new president’s inaugural year. Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran was my dean and colleague and friend for nine years at Salem college, and I could happily spend the rest of the afternoon recalling the highlights of her service at Salem, and conveying the greetings and messages I bring to her and to Sope from their countless friends in North Carolina. You already know how very fortunate you are to have Eileen at the helm of this distinguished college. Suffice it to say that every day we miss her smile, her wisdom, her courage and her selfless devotion to the community at hand-- and to the larger global community beyond. Thank you, Eileen, and Lisa Palchick and Kalamazoo, for letting me participate in this special day.

“Living in the Library: Writers Reading, Writers Writing.” For twenty-five years, I have been writing biography–and spending a good part of every year living in libraries. Therefore, as I salute this library today, I speak from the perspective of a writer as well as an avid reader. When my daughter Jennifer was growing up, we lived in Richmond, Indiana, where Jennifer’s father was an administrator at Earlham College, and I was doing the research that led to a biography of Carl Sandburg. On the first day of school one year, Jennifer’s new teacher asked her about her parents. “Well, my father works at the college,” she said. “And my mother–is obsessed–with this dead guy.”

My obsession has taken me into libraries all over the world–and I am happy to report that my daughter grew up to become a writer and develop her own obsession with her own dead guys. She is working on her third book as I speak.

I have been living in libraries from the Library of Congress, to the National Library of Scotland, to the Beinecke Library at Yale, to the University of Illinois, to the National Archives of Canada, and libraries large and small across the country. “A man will turn over half a library to make one book,” Samuel Johnson told James Boswell. The library is the biographer’s habitat for reading, studying, doing research in books, journals and manuscript collections, and writing.

But my love affair with books and libraries goes back to earliest childhood.

I grew up in the village of Waxhaw, North Carolina-- 800 people in all, most of them my relatives. My great-aunt Geneva Walkup Rone was the librarian at the Waxhaw Public Library–a room about eight feet wide and ten feet long, with dark oiled wooden floors, a couple of tables rimmed with mismatching chairs, and shelves of dog-eared books. As a child, I became addicted to the fragrance of books in a library–as well as to the magical worlds that books contain. I prized my library card, along with my Sky King secret code ring and my official Lone Ranger mask. The library card was my passport to worlds beyond Waxhaw–and to the unfolding worlds within my own heart and head and imagination.

Once I had read all the library books that Aunt Geneva thought it was appropriate for me to read, I discovered the gypsy delights of the book mobile, which rolled into town once every other week, stocked with books yet to be read. There were books on the shelves at home, of course, but there was a special mystique about the library, so full of lives and voices and adventures and knowledge. Eagerly, I ventured into worlds beyond Waxhaw–entering the world of each book, and living there until the last page was turned. I lived in some books long after the reading was finished–remembering, imagining, creating my own chapters about what might happen next, after the book was done. In the library I roamed THE SECRET GARDEN, traveled with THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, grew up with LITTLE WOMEN, healed the sick with CLARA BARTON, STUDENT NURSE, and invented things with Thomas Edison.

I also felt there was something magical about holding in MY hands a book someone else had read. What had THEIR eyes seen? What did THEY imagine and hear? What did THEY take away from the book?

I especially loved biographies, having no idea then that I would grow up to write biography. I simply loved living with Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale and Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington.

I look back, with appreciation, and see how crucially the library and the book mobile helped to expand my world, and to shape my life. Regardless of its size or place, the library possesses a great reverberating power. The library is a life force. Lives are energized here, nurtured, challenged, expanded, even transformed. That has been true for me. It is surely true for many of the students whose academic lives connect with your library. And I can testify to the importance of libraries and books in the lives of the biographical subjects who have been my creative obsession.

CARL SANDBURG
Poet and biographer Carl Sandburg grew up in Galesburg, Illinois, the son of Swedish immigrants. As a red-headed, mischievous, curious little boy, he spent as much time as possible in the library of the Seventh Ward Elementary School. Many years later, in his autobiography, he quoted his sixth grade teacher, Lottie Goldquist, who had said, “You don’t know what good friends books can be till you try them, and till you try many of them.” Sandburg devoted numerous pages in the two volumes of his autobiography to memories of the books he checked out of the library–and took home to read at night, often wearing his winter coat to stay warm in his family’s cold, drafty house. He kept lists in little notebooks of the books he read. He was a biographer in the making–especially loving history. He read and re-read Charles Carleton Coffin’s THE BOYS OF ‘76–a book, Sandburg wrote, “that made me feel I could have been a boy in the days of George Washington and watched him on a horse, a good rider sitting easy and straight, at the head of a line of ragged soldiers with shotguns. . .” Lottie Goldquist also introduced Sandburg to poetry, and he memorized Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” along with Longfellow’s “The Psalm of Life.” In the library, Sandburg wrote, he discovered that for all the great men and women he read about in books, “life wasn’t easy, life had often its bitter and lonely hours, and when you grow with new strengths of body and mind it is by struggle.”

After reading Charles Dickens and Charles Lamb, Sandburg marvelled that “In the Illinois Corn Belt. . .looking out on cow pastures and farm wagons hauling hogs, hay, tomatoes and turnips, we could get the feel and the smell and the noises of London a hundred years before. We were learning that books and writers can cross oceans carrying the heart’s blood of [people] who write.”

Sandburg earned part of his tuition at Lombard College in Galesburg by ringing the college bell to begin and end classes. He loved spending time in the bell tower, which was full of an overflow of books from the college library–“books outdated, ragged, and disreputable looking,” he wrote, and “books once quite respectable that had to go somewhere because the space they filled was needed for new arrivals.” Between bells, Sandburg read widely in that overflow of books.

In the 1920s, when he was doing research for what became his six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, he actually lived in libraries on occasion–often persuading a librarian to lock him into the library overnight in those days before copy machines so he could keep on reading and making notes.

Sandburg wrote these words about a semi-autobiographical character in his novel, REMEMBRANCE ROCK: “His books were part of him. . .In the books. . . he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk. . . .” Through books, “He had tried to keep a fellowship with great minds and rare human spirits of the past and the present. . ..” You have built a home in the Upjohn Library Commons for just such a “fellowship with great minds and rare human spirits.”

JAMES EARL JONES
My second book was written with the actor James Earl Jones, who was born in Mississippi but who grew up here in Michigan on a farm near Wellston. My daughter was patient with me as I worked on the Sandburg biography–but she was very excited when I began to work on VOICES AND SILENCES, the book with James Earl Jones. “Mom,” she said one night as we watched James Earl work on a movie, “you have to admit that it is a lot more fun working with a live actor than a dead poet!”

My live actor was a shy, smart little boy who was brought up by his maternal grandparents. They moved their large family from Mississippi to Michigan in the midi-1930s so their children and grandchildren could have more than an elementary school education. James Earl went to a one-room grammar school in Dublin, Michigan and graduated from Dickson High School in Brethren. From the time he was about six until he was fourteen, he stuttered so badly that he became virtually mute. Books were his most comfortable companions. One of his heroes was Jules Verne, and James Earl and a friend drew up plans and maps and began excavating for their own JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH.

James Earl read Emerson, Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe –and Shakespeare. As he gradually reclaimed his power to speak, the boy who would become one of the great Shakespearean actors of the twentieth century walked by himself in the fields of his family’s Michigan farm, reading Shakespeare’s plays aloud.

EDWARD STEICHEN
The great painter and photographer Edward Steichen was Carl Sandburg’s brother-in-law–and one of the pioneers of modern art, as well as one of the first proponents of photography as an art form. He was born in Luxembourg, and his parents immigrated to the United States in 1882, settling in Hancock, Michigan, where Mrs. Steichen ran a hat shop and Mr. Steichen worked in the copper mine until his health broke. While Sandburg and Jones turned to the library for WORDS, Steichen went to the library to look for IMAGES. When he had a school assignment to draw a tulip, he traced a picture in a botany book in the library to get that tulip exactly right. The family had moved to Milwaukee by the time Steichen was a teenager, and there he bought his first camera–a second-hand Kodak box camera. The lanky, blue-eyed teenager worked for almost nothing as an apprentice in Milwaukee, but he wanted to be an artist. He turned to the Milwaukee Public Library for information–and what he found there helped to shape his life. Steichen haunted the library in search of books about art and artists and photographers. In particular, he discovered copies of CAMERA NOTES, the landmark journal published by photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In the library in these clever pages, young Steichen could see for the first time innovative camera work by the leading photographers of the day. These images fired his imagination and his aspiration, and prompted him to try experiments with his rudimentary camera that eventually led him to the forefront of international art photography.

THORNTON WILDER
That brings me to my current subject, Thornton Niven Wilder. When I first read Wilder’s OUR TOWN in high school, I wondered if his Niven family and mine were related–and I hoped so. When my younger sister Doris was about five years old, someone asked her if the actor David Niven was our father. “Not that we know of,” she answered.

Until recently, when people asked me if I was related to Thornton Niven Wilder, I echoed Doris: “Not that we know of,” I said. Recently, however, we’ve discovered that Mr. Wilder’s Niven family and my Niven family hail from the same very small village on the island of Islay off the west coast of Scotland. Some of the current Niven-Wilders and members of our Niven family are hoping to make a joint pilgrimage to that little island.

Unlike the Sandburg, Jones and Steichen families, the Wilders were well educated, and books and libraries were very much a part of their daily lives. If anything, Thornton Wilder loved libraries and books to excess. “My weakness is that I’m too bookish,” he confessed in an interview when he was thirty, after he had achieved international success with his novel, THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY. “I know little of life,” he went on. “I made the characters of THE BRIDGE out of the heroes of books.”

From his boyhood, his letters and journals are full of references to his reading. His parents read aloud to him and his brother and three sisters, and the children were encouraged to read to each other–especially from Dickens, Scott and Thackeray, and spiritual classics. The public library and certain university libraries provided sanctuary for young Thornton, and a source of endless pleasure. Here is just a snapshot, in 1913, when Thornton Wilder is sixteen, shy and awkward, dressed in hand-me-down clothes. He is an average student, but a precocious reader. He is already writing stories and plays. He is a student at Berkeley High School in California, and after school he practically lives in the library at the nearby University of California campus. When he was not reading the classics, or the great plays, or the work of Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Dicken or Willa Cather, he was researching one of HIS obsessions–details about the dramatic productions of German and Austrian theater companies.

Whereas young Edward Steichen turned to the library for magazines, books and journals about art and photography, Wilder depended on the library for novels and plays, for magazines about the theater, and for music, another of his passions. Here is a snapshot from the journal he kept when he was a student at Oberlin College: “I deliberately stole half-an-hour from the eight-to-nine period, when I should must urgently be studying Chemistry, in order to copy some music from a magazine in the Library. As I worked I felt again that childish shame of being seen pursuing one’s unconventional enthusiasms in a public place, the same feeling I felt so often when I copied music for days on end in the California University Library. . . I was like to have cut all my classes in order to continue copying, but I possessed my soul and waited until after lunch. . . .”

My live actor and my dead poet, photographer and playwright discovered lifelong companions living in libraries. Sandburg and Wilder read there, wrote there, and found some of their subjects and themes there. Steichen discovered, studied and conceived photographic images there. Jones rediscovered his voice there, in the enduring voices of Shakespeare and others.

We can step into the Upjohn Library Commons and speculate about all the men and women who are living in the library today. How are their futures being forged here? How are their lives being shaped? You have built a library that will empower minds, inform the future, and enrich the human spirit. Your commitment will help to sustain all the people who live in this library–reading, studying, doing research, or simply coming here to think, to imagine, to explore, to dream–and even to pursue their own “unconventional enthusiasms” in this welcoming public place.

And what, I wonder, would Sandburg, Wilder and Steichen have made of the state-of-the-art technology that exists here–where the remotest corners of history and culture converge with the contemporary world that the technology enables us to touch.

In a poem called “For You,” Sandburg wrote, in part,

“The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.”

Your beautiful library shelters great books, great technology, great resources–and great people. I wish for each of you the peace of great books, and the enduring pleasures living in the library.      

–Penelope Niven

Copyright@Penelope Niven, 2006