Beauty and Permanence

Book Profile: Bequest of Wings and Longer Flight by Annis Duff

In the early months of the pandemic, I read every book-about-books I could find. Bibliomemoir, or memoirs about reading, satisfied my need for klatching with book lovers in the Days of Distancing. A favorite find was Annis Duff, and her long out-of-print volumes on reading and family life.¹ Duff and her husband raised their children in the USA during WWII. Newspaper headlines and radio broadcasts were full of war news, death tolls, and tragedies. Today, as in the 1940s, we hear of wars and rumors of wars. There’s a lot to be afraid of, especially in the understanding of a child. How could Duff cultivate a home that protected childhood, yet did not shield her children from the violence of their world?

She found her answer in books. As a former children’s bookseller, she knew what books were available and what children liked. As a mother, she found reading a means of cultivating the family culture she desired. Duff provides down-to-earth advice (instructions on rebinding books mutilated by small hands) and shares the titles that have brought the most joy to her family. Always, she writes with good humor.

Bequest of Wings was her first book, in 1944, written when her children were ten and four. By sharing literature with her daughter and son, Duff says, she gives them a “bequest of wings.” Eleven years later, she revisits books and family life in Longer Flight (1955) as her fledglings grew up. In her books, Duff covers Shakespeare, fairy tales, museum visits, and how they entered a shared imaginative world on a family hike, thanks to The Hobbit.

When I read Duff, I am reminded of my own bookish childhood. My parents read to us religiously. On family vacations, we were accompanied by Anne Shirley, Johnny Tremain, and other memorable audiobook characters who peopled our familect.² I didn’t grow up during WWII like Duff’s children, but I grew up in the world of 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis. The world of books in our home was a safe place for stretching and growing appropriately in a world that would push us to grow up too fast.

Duff writes, “Reading provides the only way I know of by which children can see the whole view of how people who are in earnest about it grow slowly but surely into the habit of right conduct; how this becomes the very basis of personal stability, durable friendship, and responsible participation in human affairs; and how it brings the blessing of inner peace.”³ Reading allows us to explore the inner worlds of other people, whom we’d never meet in daily life. Reading together allows inner world to speak to inner world, leading us to a meeting ground and teaching us a common language.

Reading Duff during the pandemic reminded me that reading can expand my world, even as my physical world seemed to contract. She writes, “the real value of a satisfactory reading life is that it gives you the key to other minds in all ages. You find a keener pleasure in all that lies about you because of knowing how other human creatures have felt about it, and the unfamiliar comes close and real because you see it through eyes as eager and curious as your own.”⁴

Duff closes Bequest of Wings with “Letter to a Grandfather,” written on Twelfth Night (January 5) in 1943. She regales Grandfather with tales of their St Nicholas celebrations, favorite music, and activities during the Christmas season. The darkness of world news, however, had not receded. Closing the letter, she shares a tender moment with her daughter:

A few days before Christmas I was working in the kitchen, with a news summary coming over the radio in the living-room. The reporter read the newly released account of Nazi losses at Stalingrad, deaths mounting into astronomical figures. [My daughter Deirdre] came to me with tears streaming down her face. “Oh, Mummy, think of all those German children whose fathers will never come home.” I was overwhelmed with compassion for her vulnerable heart, and filled with thankfulness that she can see the pitifulness of human grief in a war that is so much too big for her to understand. But she has a sense of proportion, too, and respect for the toughness and persistence of the human race. She and our little man live with things that have beauty and permanence. Don’t worry about your grandchildren. They’ll be all right.⁵

Because Duff invested in her children’s inner lives through reading, her daughter could see past the us-versus-them mentality and empathize with the humanity of the “other.” Instead of seeing faceless enemies and rejoicing at mass death,⁶ Deirdre thought of children who would never again feel their fathers’ embraces. Theologians and philosophers have spilled wells of ink, albeit fruitfully, to discover what young Deirdre knew: human lives are interconnected, and the loss of any single one grieves living human hearts.

For me, Duff’s books have served the purposes she claims for the books she loves. They have widened my perspective, given me a sense of stability, and reminded me that we humans have a way of sticking it out, even in the darkest days.

In one sense, Duff’s work is impermanent, because her books are out of print. In another sense, her work has remained, since it’s recommended from reader to reader. Vintage copies of her work are cherished, and still held by libraries. Anything truly good is worth keeping and sharing. For me, beautifully written bibliomemoirs always have a permanent place on my shelves, because few things delight like bookish friends across time. And for their book lists, of course.

Books Profiled:

Bequest of Wings, Annis Duff (1944)

Longer Flight, Annis Duff (1955)

1. Amazon reprints that do not appear authorized are available, in addition to used copies that pop up occasionally. I read the books via inter-library loan.

2. Like a dialect, but within a family. A word that sparks joy.

3. Longer Flight, 20-21.

4. Bequest of Wings, 15-16.

5. Bequest of Wings, 191.

6. Which is the very behavior that led to WWII in the first place.