Browsings Page 2

  When a young gentleman was said to be going around 18th-century London shooting cats, Samuel Johnson—in Boswell’s words—“bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, ‘But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.’” He wasn’t. Later, when the poor creature did lay dying, Johnson gave it valerian to ease its agonies.

  My own particular feline companion answers, or rather doesn’t answer, to Cinnamon. One of my kids must have given her the name, even though she’s mostly peppery gray and white. Originally a stray we took in, the old girl has been a valued member of the household for at least a dozen years. Once, Cinnamon was a mighty huntress, roaming up and down the world at night, seeking whatsoever she might devour—or bring home and lay reverently, as a gift, on the back doorstep. But at some point, the wear and tear of nocturnal outings—of nature red in tooth and claw—became too much for her. I think she suffered a run in with a fox or lost one neighborhood battle too many. At all events, she now stays pretty much inside, sleeping in sunbeams and mewing for food twice a day.

  In truth, I’m not really a cat person. Seamus, the wonder dog, still deeply mourned by all who knew him, was just about the only animal I’ve ever really loved. He died about a year ago now. I always found walking around the block with this happy yellow Labrador among the best parts of the day, a time to clear my head, a time to find new energy and ideas. I miss him. Best dog ever.

  Were I more ambitious in the pet department, I would keep tropical fish. Like most people, I find watching the lazy and quiet underwater realm of a big aquarium exceptionally calming. Didn’t someone say that he could happily live with the fishes? Was it Whitman? It certainly wasn’t Luca Brasi, the Godfather’s bodyguard: sleeping with the fishes is quite different. I’ve just checked, and it was Walt, but not fishes—“I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals . . . they are so placid and self-contained.”

  I’ve never been attracted to songbirds. Canaries and parakeets seem so fragile. Dorothy Parker, it’s been said, named her canary Onan because he spilled his seed upon the ground. Now and again, I do think a parrot might be interesting, and it would be fun to teach it to squawk a bit of Pirate English: “There’s none can save you now, missy.” Still, a parrot sounds like more work than a tank of fish. And dirty, too.

  The English critic Cyril Connolly kept lemurs—but they were very dirty, and in a fecal way. Many years ago, I knew a slatternly blonde who acquired a pet pig, one that followed her around like a dog. It was rather unnerving. Of course, pigs are quite literary creatures: We have Dick King-Smith’s Babe and E. B. White’s Wilbur and the pigs of Animal Farm, some of whom are more equal than others.

  Because of Kipling, I’ve sometimes wondered about keeping a mongoose about the house. But given the cobra population in Silver Spring, Maryland—zero, when last I checked—we hardly need a Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Still, maybe it would frighten away the deer who eat the flowers and shrubs and the bark from our young trees. As it is, my wife has begun speaking darkly about acquiring a hunting bow. Neither Rudolph nor Bambi would be spared if she has her ruthless way.

  Last, but not least, there are horses. Yet somehow these noble quadrupeds don’t strike me as pets, despite every young girl’s passion for a pony or a palomino. The animals seem too massive, too demanding, and as expensive to maintain as an old Jaguar XKE. William Buckley once summarized what it was like to own a sailboat: stand fully dressed in a cold shower, he said, and tear up hundred dollar bills. Owning a horse appears to be a comparable business. Forgive me, Flicka, Black Beauty, Misty of Chincoteague, and all you other heroic steeds.

  Of course, children’s literature is a virtual petting zoo. What kids’ book doesn’t feature an animal, usually a dog? There’s Clifford, Lassie, Lad, Shiloh, Buck, Big Red, Ol’ Yeller, and on and on. There are more exotic animals too, such as Henrietta, the 266-pound fowl beloved by Arthur Bobowicz in Daniel Pinkwater’s The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, or the eponymous protagonist of My Father’s Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett. Joan Aiken produced a delightful series, exuberantly illustrated by Quentin Blake, about a girl named Arabel and her troublesome raven Mortimer. While Beatrix Potter’s little albums are all about animals—especially naughty ones, like Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin—her woodland characters aren’t really pets. They’re children in disguise.

  In my youth I envied Lord Greystoke (sometimes known as Tarzan of the Apes) for myriad reasons, but partly because of his animal helpers and companions—above all, Jad-bal-ja, the Golden Lion. Still, the most glorious, if unfortunate pet in literature is probably the tortoise in J. K. Huysman’s decadent classic, A Rebours (Against the Grain). The novel’s hero, Des Esseintes, encrusts its carapace with gleaming jewels, then sends this ground-level chandelier lumbering through his mansion’s shadowy rooms. Alas, the sad creature, weighed down by diamonds and emeralds, soon sickens and dies.

  Paper

  Two weeks ago, in the column called “Armchair Adventures,” I happened to mention that Heywood Hale Broun used to scrawl his book reviews on lined yellow paper. What I didn’t say, though, was that I recognized that paper. I’d used similar Goldenrod sheets throughout elementary school.

  Every September, kids would stop by W. T. Grant’s or Woolworth’s to buy either Goldenrod or Big Chief school tablets. Today I can’t recall if Goldenrod was a brand name or just a color designation, but I do remember a cover artfully decorated with stems of flowers. To the nine-year-old connoisseur, faded yellow paper seemed distinctly classier than Big Chief’s dull off-white stock, which was speckled with bits of pulp and little better than newsprint. But whichever style you chose, you did need to hand-punch holes in the side of the pages when adding homework to your three-ring binder. Tough guys would show off by seeing how many sheets they could perforate at once.

  Over the years since, I’ve been slightly obsessed with paper and notebooks. Among my most precious possessions is a small light-blue, breviary-sized volume—four-and-a-half inches wide, seven inches tall—made by a company called Denbigh. There are 140 faintly ruled pages, and about half of them are still blank. This is my commonplace book, into which I copy favorite passages and quotations from my reading. The first entry was made when I was in my early 20s: “How fortunate beyond all others is the man who, in order to adjust himself to fate, is not required to cast away his whole preceding life!” That comes from Goethe, and shows the rather lugubrious worldview of my young Wertherian self.

  The most recent addition is an observation taken from the introduction to the Second Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. Robert Aickman, a master of the genre, is talking about Edith Wharton’s most famous supernatural tale: “The important ingredient in ‘Afterward’ is not the past offense but the truth, reaching far beyond ethics, that we can none of us identify what is crucial until it is too late.” I see that my worldview hasn’t grown any cheerier since my college days.

  Near my desk I keep a large plastic carton filled with fresh notebooks and stationery of various kinds, sizes, and qualities. At one point I owned a few of those ubiquitous Moleskines—the kind supposedly used by travel writer Bruce Chatwin—but they tend to be so expensive that I found myself hesitating to mar their virgin whiteness with my doodles, to-do lists, and earth-shaking, indeed paradigm-altering, observations about this and that. Instead I much prefer school composition books, generally those with austere, speckled black-and-white covers, though in moments of giddy abandon I’ve sometimes splurged on the versions bound in masculine dark blue or eye-catching neon green. In the fall one can generally pick up such school notebooks at sale prices, often three for two dollars. I usually look for quadrille ruled—the kind with little squares—but these are often hard to find.

  Quadrille paper always reminds me of Paris, where I bought similar notebooks from the Librairie Gibert. In them I used to record my various misadventures, set down overheard French expressions and idioms, or add to the list of books recommended to me by the global wanderers I’d meet in yout
h hostels. In those golden days, I often wore a navy-blue sailor’s sweater that buttoned rakishly at the shoulder. Sometimes I’d even sport a dark brown cap called a casquette. When sipping pastis and scribbling with my Bic pen, I was sure that I looked every inch an existentialist.

  Poking through my box of unused notebooks, many of them scavenged at thrift stores, I see a large red-covered Standard Diary from 2005, a light green-backed record book from the Federal Supply Service, a large journal of 384 “acid-free” pages, a small black notebook with a ribbon band to keep the covers closed, a dozen student examination “blue books” from the University of Central Florida and the University of Maryland, a couple of very small Oxford Memo notebooks (a gift from the writer Paul Di Filippo), four or five scratch pads from various Marriott and Hilton hotels, and a half dozen reporter’s notebooks. These last I pick up at The Washington Post whenever I go in to see my editors.

  The only kind of notebook I actively dislike is the Steno Pad, entirely because of that vertical line down the middle of the page. I presume it has some arcane secretarial use, but to me it’s both ugly and confusing.

  Over the past couple of years I’ve occasionally tried to use my computer’s stickies and online calendar for notes to myself, but to no avail. My Great Thoughts arrive all too often while I’m reading or out taking a walk or trying to fall asleep. So I like to be able to reach for a notebook, wherever I am. Almost every time I flip one open, especially if it’s horizontally ruled, I find myself automatically murmuring one of my favorite mantras: “If they give you lined paper, write crosswise.”

  This Is a Column

  Some years back Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett joined forces for a comic novel about the apocalypse called Good Omens. Almost immediately, fans of this jeu d’esprit, in which the newly born Antichrist is mixed up at the hospital with an ordinary baby, clamored for a sequel. Though it seems unlikely that such a book will ever be written, the two authors do have a title—664: The Neighbor of the Beast.

  Just saying that title over in my mind makes me smile. It’s funny, ingenious, and unforgettable. You can hardly ask for more.

  Book titles are definitely tricky. I’ve brought out several essay collections, but I really like only two of the titles I came up with: Bound to Please and Classics for Pleasure. The first involves triple word-play, one of the meanings being quite naughty; the other recalls a vinyl record label from years gone by. Both, however, underscore my conviction that we don’t read for high-minded reasons. We read for aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual excitement.

  Sometimes, on long car trips or while awake at 3 A.M., I make up mental lists, and one of my go-to categories is “Favorite Book and Story Titles.” Many of them, as it happens, are also among my very favorite novels and stories, period. Now, without question, my all-time No. 1 title is Persuasion, Jane Austen’s great novel about second chances. Here are a baker’s dozen of others, restricting myself to English and American authors:

  The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

  “Casting the Runes” by M. R. James

  A History of English Prose Rhythm by George Saintsbury

  The Well at the World’s End by William Morris

  “By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benét

  Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

  An Armful of Warm Girl by W. M. Spackman

  You’ve Had Your Time by Anthony Burgess

  Pavane by Keith Roberts

  Trent’s Last Case by E.C. Bentley

  The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

  Sanctuary by William Faulkner

  Naked Once More by Elizabeth Peters

  The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

  Looking over the list, I note that I gravitate to concise, even one-word titles, so long as they provide a frisson of wistfulness or bravado or humor. In my younger days I favored much more poetic phrases like Tender is the Night and Appointment in Samarra, but these now seem just a tad melodramatic.

  Organizations, pieces of music, and art works obviously have titles too. For instance, I don’t think you can find a better name for a newspaper than the Youngstown Vindicator. By contrast, all those Posts and Times and Tribunes seem utterly bland. Consider, too, the thrilling nicknames for Carl Nielsen’s fourth symphony, The Inextinguishable, and Mahler’s second, The Resurrection. Two of my most beloved records are of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs and Leontyne Price performing Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915—haunting titles, even more haunting music. My favorite painting, by Watteau, just happens to come with a wonderful name: The Embarkation for Cythera.

  Many of the classics in the American Songbook bear tenderly evocative titles: “Anything Goes,” “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Embraceable You.” I think the most romantic of them all, by far, is “The Way You Look Tonight.” Then there’s that great musical library of love gone wrong—country and western songs—which gives us, among many others, “Ring of Fire,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and Patsy Cline’s immortal ballad, “Faded Love.”

  But back to books: Perhaps the cleverest of all titles, befitting a Taoist logician who loves paradox and puzzles, are two by Raymond Smullyan: What Is the Name of This Book? and This Book Needs No Title. Both take their origin, I suspect, from Denis Diderot’s 18th-century short story “Ceci n’est pas un conte,” that is, “This Is Not a Story”—which only goes to show, as if there were any doubt, that many philosophers are cut-ups at heart. Still, whatever Diderot’s work may or may not be, this really is a weekly column, and it’s time to stop.

  Scribble, Scribble

  My three sons—all in their early- to mid-20s—can sign their names when they concentrate, but that’s just about it. During their elementary school years, Chris, Mike, and Nate were patiently taught the mysteries of cursive handwriting, but since then they’ve tapped their thumbs on smartphone keyboards far more often than they’ve gripped a pen or pencil. Though their typing may eventually lead to repetitive stress syndrome, they’ll never develop a callus on the top knuckle of the middle finger of their right hand.

  My own handwriting is essentially illegible to anyone other than myself, and, after a few days, even I can’t always make out the meaning of my scribbles. Deciphering my lists of Important Things to Do would challenge Champollion far more than breaking the secret of the Rosetta Stone. Eminent doctors, envious of a scrawl of such complete and utter opacity, have come to me and humbly asked if I might conduct seminars or offer master classes at medical conventions.

  Emily Dickinson told us that success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed, and so it’s inevitable that I deeply admire elegant penmanship. Long ago, my friend Sheila Waters—arguably the finest calligrapher in the world—designed the interlocking initials on my wedding announcement; her son Julian Waters, the former calligrapher for the White House, scripted the invitation itself. Their seemingly effortless swirls of ink, their elegant descenders and gorgeous loops, are things of living, interlaced beauty, joys forever.

  Inspired by such examples, I’ve sometimes gone out and bought “calligraphy sets” or pens with italic nibs. I once acquired the simplified booklets of Marie Angel and read through the magisterial Writing & Illuminating & Lettering of Edward Johnston. At night I’d practice forming my vowels, carefully mind my Ps and Qs, and daydream about Carolingian minuscule. And, lo!, before long, my handwriting did improve, though no one was ever going to confuse my letters with the timeless italics of papal scribe Ludovico Arrighi.

  But handwriting apparently isn’t quite like bike riding: it is something you can forget if you don’t practice. As the upright Dr. Jekyll reverted to the vicious Mr. Hyde, so too my beautiful penmanship gradually degenerated until it once more slouched and shambled hideously across the page. At which point I gave in completely to the dark side. My ink dried up, my nibs clogged, and my Pelikan fountain pen was finally set aside, replaced by d
isposable ballpoints swiped from Marriott hotels.

  Still, I do love what kids facetiously call writing implements. Some travelers collect souvenirs, postcards, or bumper stickers; I bring home a pencil from the various places I visit. In mugs on my desk are pencils inscribed Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center, The Morgan Library, Kennedy Space Center, Indiana University, the Space Needle, Villa Emo, Old Capitol Museum (Jackson, Mississippi), The State Library of Ohio, Denison University, and Newport, Rhode Island, among dozens of others. When I pick one up, I remember campuses, certain people, happy times.

  Writers, of course, often grow obsessive about their tools. Nabokov composed his later novels on index cards with a Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil. In old age Colette preferred a Parker fountain pen when she wanted to describe the gardens of her childhood with Sido. I myself own an Esterbrook pen that once belonged to Glenway Wescott, author of The Pilgrim Hawk. The magus-like Robertson Davies used to sign his novels with what looked like a Montblanc: no author had a more attractive signature. When Terry Pratchett “personalizes” books, usually for hours on end, he asks for a fistful of felt tip pens. Bookstores, being old hands at hosting autograph sessions, usually supply visiting authors with a couple of Sharpies. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson once scribbled in my copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with what might be a thick black marker or crayon: “For Mike, with thanks for getting me the crack cocaine in Boston. Your friend, Hunter.”

  Still, I guess my own favorite “writing implement” remains a very battered carpenter’s pencil. Made by Craftsman and inscribed “America’s Highest Quality Tools—Medium,” it looks like one of those large wooden pencils used by very young children, but one that has been pressed flat. This is so you can set the pencil down anywhere, even on a pitched roof, and it won’t roll away. The wood casing is bright red—for extra-visibility—and the only way to sharpen the blunt graphite is with a knife. I used pencils like this for several summers when I worked for a home improvement company, wore a leather nail apron, and carried a 20-oz. hammer on a loop next to my hip. Today I keep a lone survivor of those hot July days as a memento, but also as a reminder that good carpentry, of any kind, demands a close attention to detail.