Leading Character a Librarian?

Meridth Wilson’s “The Music Man” hums in our ears, whether we are watching the show or film or not. The musical hit on Broadway dates to 1957. The story has its roots in Wilson’s Iowa boyhood.

Howard Hill, the very-much-a-traveling-con-man played famously by Robert Preston, is the leading male character. He is as loveable as a con man can be. Marian Paroo, the well-bred and prim librarian in River City, Iowa, is the female lead. She sings a yearning “Good Night, My Someone” early in Act I, and they together sing “Till There Was You” late in Act II. An unlikely pairing that comes to be ends magically well. You cannot leave the theater or exit the TV channel without feeling good, and without a smile.

That is the fictional librarian who is perhaps best known in the world of the arts. But there is another to be found, one whose creation actually precedes Marian’s. It is the character of Charity Royall, who is the protagonist in Edith Wharton’s wrenching “Summertime” (1917). Charity’s story is quite different from that of the comfortably situated Marian in small town Iowa.

Charity lives with her stern but caring - in his own way - guardian in the very small and poor New England town of North Dormer. She doesn’t know her own history except in a most cursory way, which is important to the story. She comes from the nearby Mountain of her very early childhood; the Mountain figures large in the story. She, like many around her in North Dormer, has little formal education, although she is bright, but the poor of the Mountain are even poorer and less literate.

However, North Dormer does have a Library, a very meager one of no repute. It is not at all well maintained, and it has only limited open hours, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Its name is the Honorius Hatchard Memorial Library, in remembrance of North Dormer Miss Hatchard’s great uncle. In life he was celebrated modestly for some small literary gifts.

Charity is starved of literary gifts. She is certainly not a trained librarian as we know the profession today and cares not a wink about either preserving the meager and stagnant collection against a threatening mold or building upon it. She often does not even keep the Library open for its full advertised hours. She cares for the job only as a vehicle for earning enough money to physically escape North Dormer and what she feels is an oppressive existence. Physical escape is a running thread of the novel, not literary escape; it does, however, include a romance of literary dimensions.

The main story is preceded with Edith Wharton’s wry introductory note, “The Vice of Reading.” She contrasts reading “reflexively” and “mechanically.” “Real reading is reflex action; the born reader reads as unconsciously as he breathes;” Not everyone is able to read reflexively, and Charity is not a reader in either way. “To the mechanical reader, books once read are not like growing things that strike root and intertwine branches, but like fossils ticketed and put away in the drawers of a geologist’s cabinet; or rather, like prisoners condemned to lifetime solitary confinement. In such a mind the books never talk to each other.”

Maybe that is Wharton’s real point about Charity and her storyline, although other strands there are. Being neither a reflexive reader nor a mechanical one, the escape that she could not see was the one that was all around her in that Library, in books.