In Rhode Island: Book Talk Among Friends

A few minutes late on a Thursday evening, Hope La Salle bundles herself up the stairs to the second floor of the Warwick (R.I.) Public Library. Palpitations of the heart. She breaks out a prescription bottle. “We may be dying in bed, but we’ll get up and drag ourselves here,” she gasps, before choking down a pill. “I’ll pop my nitroglycerine.”

“I’ll use my asthma medicine,” says Daphne Shein, also late, pulling her face away from the plastic mouthpiece on an aerosol inhaler.

“We don’t miss Great Books,” they agree.

They settle down at the conference table with their colleagues and address , their shared addiction. Time for another fix of . . . literary talk. What we have here is a Great Books discussion group, and the pure love of words has been bringing these good people together twice a month for 22 years now. The membership has changed some, but altogether, the group has logged almost 400 two-hour sessions without a single college credit being offered. Back when she started, says Shein, the books were still written on papyrus.

They have worked and reworked the familiar ground of Shakespeare and Vergil and have taken the measure of lesser Greats like Galen’s On the Natural Faculties and Fichte’s The Vocation of Man. The Great Books Foundation, which sponsors 2,500 such groups around the country, once actually ran out of reading material to suggest. For a few years, these stalwarts of Warwick had to scrape by on books that were merely “pretty good.” Middleweights like Hemingway. Now they can handle anything literature can dish out.

It is perhaps a little easier than it sounds, La Salle interjects. Great Books, which is based in Chicago, leans heavily on excerpts, and in a year a group can polish off 15 masterpieces condensed in three slim paperbacks. La Salle, a droll gargoyle, founded the Warwick chapter and considers herself its elder stateswoman. She recalls that the readings were weightier back in her day. When The Iliad came around again on the reading list not long ago, she disdained the 144-page abridgment and brought in her own complete edition. Unhappily for the cause of purism, she confessed that age and rank having their privileges, what she’d really read that week was a murder mystery, Presumed Innocent. This is why the others, who are more dutiful, like the excerpts: “The goal,” one of them says, “is to read the damned thing before it’s time to discuss it.”

The 15 or so regulars are mostly over 50. They are a nice mix of personalities: Shein, who prints slogans on T shirts by day (IT’S BETTER IN A SKIFF), is the wit, casting mordant glances over the rims of her reading glasses. Ray Finelli, an adman, is the old philosopher, with his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his vest. Marguerite Allen, a retired nurse, is a bulwark of feminism and familial love. Her patience is frequently tested by a newcomer who tends to blurt out opinions. On Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale, for instance, the Blurter remarks, “Talk about whoredom!” Allen’s chin comes up and the corners of her mouth pull down, but she remains polite. They are a civilized group.

Their literary criticism has a New England flavor. In their discussion of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, for example, everyone agrees that Professor Serebryakov is an “old codfish.” But another character in the play elicits genuine bewilderment: “If he’s idle, how can he be happy?” No one has an answer.

At times, they display every reader’s urge to pluck up a character by the lapel and offer advice: “I think if Astrov would give up his drinking, he and Sonya would make a terrific couple.”

“Nah, he’s too old.” Astrov is also too busy making eyes over his cognac at Elena, Serebryakov’s beautiful young wife.

“Elena’s a piece of furniture; she’s a couch,” says Shein, outraged on poor Sonya’s behalf. And when Astrov tries to woo Elena with talk of the reforestation work on his plantation, Shein sneers, like a heckler in the audience, “A likely story — ‘Come out and see me seedlings.’ “

“He never even looks at Sonya,” someone else laments.

Ray Finelli tilts his head to one side and presses his lips together in disappointment, the gesture of a would-be father-in-law. “He was a fool,” he says.

Woman predominate in this group, and they are inclined to rescue female characters from a chauvinist world. When a man in the group, Pat Waters, suggests that the Wife of Bath has been “fadoodling around” on her unfaithful fourth husband, Shein goes to the text and points out that she merely gave the appearance of fadoodling. The question of what-women-really- want arises, and they try to reconcile the Wife of Bath’s answer — mastery over husband and lover — with their own convictions about equality.

“Maybe what she’s saying,” a woman ventures, “is that if the man is king, the woman doesn’t want to be queen, she wants to be king too.”

“She wants to be King I,” Waters retorts.

The discussion never becomes heated. The women back off from the Wife of Bath, and Waters redeems himself a few minutes later by calling the husband in another Chaucer tale “kind of sick.” (It is, in truth, an easy redemption. The husband in question has tested his wife’s obedience by pretending to kill their children.) They argue not out of the familiar morass of self-interest and ideology but out of intellectual curiosity. “It’s more objective, more like you’re adding to what you already know,” says one.

Their shared love of books makes them tacitly respectful. Waters joined the , group when he was construction supervisor remodeling the library building where they meet. “When I was working here, I could walk down the aisles and see all the titles and hear all the noises — the love stories and the battles,” he recalls. Now he drives 45 minutes to recapture that feeling. Finelli comes because he gets to ponder bookish ideas that do not figure in a typical advertising campaign. He is sometimes pleased with the copy he writes: “We Put In Some Tall Orders Yesterday So You Wouldn’t Go Short Today.” But writers like Plato and Conrad plumbed the meaning of life. “I do love to think in depth,” he says.

They know one another’s families, work and travels almost entirely through books. When Marguerite Allen says Dickens and Thackeray made her feel at home on a visit to London, the others nod. No one corrects her when she refers to Leningrad as St. Petersburg. They are appreciative when Daphne Shein reports that her son phoned home to complain that he was feeling like Ivan Ilyich. He was depressed; she was delighted — another 25-year-old might have felt like Billy Idol. These are the small bonuses of reading.

They could, of course, reap these benefits on their own. But reading on your own, says one, “is like saying you read it in high school.” They need the talk and the perspective of other minds to fix a book in the memory. They need the discipline of the group schedule, without the dreaded rigmarole of college literature classes. “It’s like a painting. Each time, it has a new meaning, a new delight,” says Hope La Salle, utterly undaunted by her neglect of The Iliad and her dalliance with “that boy Scott Turow.”

At 8:45, the library lights blink off, then on again, for closing time. They have been trading ideas about Homer’s warriors. The Blurter, having described Paris as a “good-looking dude,” is now doing her worst for Achilles: “He fluctuated, and I like that because I’m a fluctuator too.” Marguerite Allen prefers Hector, but is more interested in the question of moral vs. merely physical courage. Finelli wants to theorize about why soldiers are willing to die.

A janitor appears at the door long enough to register his impatience. La Salle urges the group to continue: “When the lights go out, we grab our coats and run for the door.” Briefly, they debate whether glory seeking can be a force for civilization, and the conversation continues on out into the parking lot. They will have plenty to think about on the ride home.