Browsings Read online

  Soon after starting at M&M Home Improvement, I grumbled one particularly miserable afternoon—when everything seemed to be going wrong—that a two-by-four I’d just sawn was the wrong length. An old carpenter from West Virginia immediately quipped that I’d “cut it twice already and it was still too short.” If you want to work efficiently, he explained, you can’t be slapdash. Measure precisely, mark your sawcuts carefully, then double-check everything. Sound advice, I think, even for those who try to build readable paragraphs rather than fancy additions and back-yard decks.

  Books on Books

  I never collected books in a serious way until my mid-20s. On a long-ago trip through upstate New York, my then-girlfriend (now my wife) and I happened to call on an old bookseller named Roger Butterfield. Probably enchanted by Marian, Butterfield invited us to have coffee in his specially built “office”—it was half book barn, half gentleman’s study, and completely wonderful. I yearn for something like it to this day.

  In the course of the afternoon, this former Life magazine journalist suggested a half dozen “books about books” that I should read and, being a docile young man and eager to learn, I went out and read them. These included David Randall’s Dukedom Large Enough, an elegant memoir of the author’s years working in Scribner’s rare book department; Charles Everitt’s lively and opinionated Adventures of a Treasure Hunter; and Edwin Wolf and John Fleming’s sober biography of that dealer in only the rarest of literary rarities, A. S. W. Rosenbach. Later, in Washington, I enjoyed Percy Muir’s reprinted radio talks on collecting and John Carter’s magisterial lectures, Taste and Technique in Book Collecting. One day I even bought my own copy of Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors, among the most entertaining of all lexicons.

  These days I don’t read very often about the “gentle madness,” as my friend Nicholas Basbanes dubbed collecting in his case-studies of the affliction. But I still keep a large woven basket by my bedside loaded with a dozen or more “books on books,” and these I pick up from time to time, usually at the end of a long day. At the moment that basket contains the following:

  Indexers and Indexes in Fact & Fiction, edited by Hazel K. Bell

  Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War: Letters & Diaries. 1938-46, edited by Peter J. Conradi

  The Glory That Was Grub Street: Impressions of Contemporary Authors, by St. John Adcock (“With thirty-two camera studies by E. O. Hoppé”)

  Ian Hamilton in Conversation with Dan Jacobson

  The Folio Book of Literary Puzzles, by John Sutherland

  A Book of Booksellers: Conversations with the Antiquarian Book Trade, 1991-2003, by Sheila Markham

  In Pursuit of Coleridge, by Kathleen Coburn

  The London Library, edited by Miron Grindea

  Second Reading: Notable and Neglected Books Revisited, by Jonathan Yardley

  What Can Be Saved from the Wreckage? James Branch Cabell in the 21st Century, by Michael Swanwick

  Arnold Bennett: The Evening Standard Years, Books & Persons, 1926-1931, edited by Andrew Mylett

  The Pleasures of Reading, edited by Antonia Fraser

  Seeing Shelley Plain: Memories of New York’s Legendary Phoenix Book Shop, by Robert A. Wilson

  Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home, by Susan Hill

  As you can tell, I have a distinctly Anglophile penchant. But then the English do carry on the best literary correspondences. Just recall, for instance, the wildly funny epistolary exchanges between Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, as when the author of Brideshead Revisited confesses to the author of Love in a Cold Climate: “My little trip to London passed in a sort of mist. Did I ever come to visit you again after my first sober afternoon? . . . On the last evening I dimly remember a dinner party of cosmopolitan ladies where I think I must have been conspicuous. Were you there? I awoke with blood on my hands but found to my intense relief that it was my own. I sometimes think I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.” Then there’s the hilarious, politically incorrect Letters of Kingsley Amis: “I hope the Tatler asked you,” scribbles Amis to poet Philip Larkin, “for your views on Ronald Firbank. I told them he summed up all the crappy things about novels that Saul Bellow left unsummed up, though I didn’t put it as elegantly as that.”

  Of course, no serious Anglophile book-lover should be without The George Lyttelton/Rupert Hart-Davis Letters—the bookchat to end all bookchat of a former Eton master and a noted London publisher, both of whom are extremely well read, gossipy, and often grumpy about the state of the modern world. I reread the six volumes every few years. Just recently I enjoyed The Acceptance of Absurdity, a chapbook containing the charming letters between English novelist Anthony Powell and American bookseller Robert Vanderbilt, mostly concerned with the publication in the United States of Powell’s early comic novels Venusberg and Agents and Patients. Still, just as good as any of these, and with an American slant, is Memorable Days, the correspondence between novelist James Salter and literary journalist Robert Phelps. Don’t miss the introduction.

  These days, The Paris Review has repackaged its long-running series of conversations with authors, and even made them available online. I’m glad for this, and yet the original Writers at Work volumes, especially the first three, possessed a magic all their own. As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again. Georges Simenon provided one of the most inspirational interviews: he began by saying that Colette had warned him that his early stories were “too literary” and from that moment on he cut out adjectives, adverbs, and any word that was there just to show off. Needless to say, I treasured those underlined and asterisked trade paperbacks, keeping them in a little nook on my bed’s headboard, just above my pillow. I probably hoped they would work some subtle Muse-like influence while I slept and one day I would awake a writer. It goes without saying that I was a weird kid.

  And some would say I’m a weird adult. Despite the rising popularity of the downloadable e-text, I still care about physical books, gravitate to handsome editions and pretty dust jackets, and enjoy seeing rows of hardcovers on my shelves. Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information. I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life.

  Text Mess

  Early in his writing career Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)—poet-laureate of childhood, master of the subtle ghost story, and idiosyncratic anthologist—produced an eerie novel called The Return. Its theme is possession: a man falls asleep by a grave and discovers, upon waking, that he has been transformed into the image of a long-dead suicide.

  I don’t know much more about the plot, and even that summary might be slightly off, since only this week did I decide to read the book. To do so, I first went rooting around in my basement until I’d unearthed the shelf containing a half dozen or so de la Mare titles. Upon closer inspection of these treasures, I discovered that my copy of The Return was a shabby ex-library first edition, published in 1910. Nearby I noticed an old Viking Portable anthology titled Six Novels of the Supernatural (1944) edited by Edward Wagenknecht. It included The Return.

  A digression: Wagenknecht was a huge de la Mare admirer, especially enthusiastic about Memoirs of a Midget (1921), which he regarded as the greatest English novel of its time. (I’m not sure I’d disagree with him, even if nobody seems to read the book anymore: those interested can consult the essay on Memoirs of a Midget in my book Classics for Pleasure.) Born in 1900, Wagenknecht lived until 2004, publishing a book on Willa Cather when he was 94. I’ve sometimes wondered if he ever changed his mind about de la Mare or Memoirs of a Midget. I hope he didn’t. End of digression.

  As it happened, Six Novels of the Supernatural showcased The Return. Naturally, I opened the book,
scanned the introduction, and, to my dismay, discovered that Wagenknecht had reprinted a “revised” edition of The Return published in 1922. My old bookman’s heart almost broke.

  I wanted to read my beat-up first edition, if only because this was the way the book initially appeared to the public and because this was the text awarded something called the Polignac Prize. The worn cover, the thick paper, the good printing, the slight foxing, the lending library stamps—all gave the scruffy volume a winningly dilapidated, properly romantic character, suitable for a novel about spiritual possession. The clean, neat text in the Viking Portable seemed antiseptic by comparison. It wouldn’t be half as much fun to encounter the story in such a format.

  Still, that was the version I probably should read, right? But questions remained. Had de la Mare gone back to improve what he regarded as a juvenile effort? Or had he mucked about with the text to its detriment? And should I follow his authorial wishes? I did have a vague memory that his children’s novel The Three Mulla-Mulgars (also 1910, a good year for de la Mare) had been slightly toned down, almost bowdlerized, when he republished it as The Three Royal Monkeys (1927). Could this be a similar case, and might it actually be better to read the unrevised text? Sigh. Perhaps one of my reference books could advise me about these arcane matters.

  But E. F. Bleiler, in his Guide to Supernatural Fiction, merely noted, without comment, that de la Mare had reworked The Return in 1922. I then consulted an essay on de la Mare by John Clute, our greatest living critic of science fiction and fantasy. Double whammy: Clute revealed that de la Mare had tinkered with The Return yet again in 1945, apparently still dissatisfied with its text. But were these changes significant? Clute didn’t say. Was I going to have to track down—somehow, somewhere—a copy of this 1945 edition?

  Hoping to avoid this, I emailed Mark Valentine in England. Valentine edits Wormwood, a scholarly journal devoted to “literature of the fantastic, supernatural and decadent”; he also introduced Strangers and Pilgrims, a handsome volume of de la Mare’s ghost stories published by Tartarus Press. Had he ever compared the three editions? Alas, he had not. Stymied again.

  At this point, I thought of L. W. Currey, the leading American dealer in first-edition science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I went to his website, clicked around until I found de la Mare, zeroed in on one of his several copies of The Return. And there, in a description of the book, was my answer: “The author revised the text in 1922, toning down the supernaturalism, and this text was the basis of reprints until the recent (1997) Dover reissue which utilized the text of the first edition.” Given Dover’s reversion to the 1910 edition, it would seem that critical opinion now favors that text. I could read my beat-up copy, after all.

  Most sensible people, I’m sure, never experience such neurotic compulsions and fussy qualms. They pick up a book at the library or bookshop, or maybe they download its text from Project Gutenberg, and, without further ado, they read it. But, alas, I Am Not As Other Men. I like first editions, though I’ll sometimes settle for a later printing if it’s within a year or two of the book’s original publication date. Only these editions possess that distinctive aura of the original, a glamour that subsequent reissues can never recapture. That said, I do gravitate toward well printed, scholarly treatments of certain classic texts, with lots of notes and a good bibliography. If I’m going to spend my life reading books, I want my experiences to be optimal.

  Enough of this. With a burden lifted from my soul, I can now settle down and happily read The Return. “The churchyard in which Arthur Lawford found himself wandering that mild and golden September afternoon was old, green, and refreshingly still. . . .”

  [Note: I did read The Return and later wrote about this unsettling novel, and several other “mystical” fictions, in an online essay for Lapham’s Quarterly.]

  Twilight of an Author

  While I love most, not to say all, of James Thurber’s cartoons, there are a handful that seem especially choice. An example? Picture a courtroom, with a judge, a startled man in the witness box, and a prosecuting attorney who is pointing, triumphantly, at a large kangaroo. The caption: “Perhaps this will refresh your memory?” My absolute favorite, though, depicts a guy sitting hopelessly at a typewriter, surrounded by crumpled sheets of paper, while his wife looks down at him and asks, “Has your pen gleaned your teeming brain?”

  Her question is based on a famous quotation from Keats: “When I have fears that I may cease to be/Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.” Certainly, the fears of that doomed tubercular genius, dead at 25, were wholly justified. But I suspect all authors occasionally sit down at their keyboards or open their notebooks and find that Nothing Happens. Every idea seems stale, every sentence hackneyed. At such moments, writers—whether of novels, essays, poems, or book reviews—adopt various coping strategies.

  Perhaps a walk around the block or a new environment will clear the head, reopen the floodgates. For some, a move downstairs to the dining-room table or a weekend escape to a friend’s condo on the Chesapeake will be enough. Alternately, one can just hunker down for the duration. Flannery O’Connor resolved to be at her worktable every day between 9 and 12, no matter what. If inspiration struck, she was ready. And if it didn’t, she still couldn’t leave her desk, and so she might as well scribble away at something.

  Occasionally, of course, full-fledged Writer’s Block sets in. The harder you try, the worse it becomes. Frustration intensifies exponentially before ushering in a long visit from that Pilgrim’s Progress favorite, The Giant Despair. His voice echoes in your head: everyone knows you’re not any good. Never were, really. Just an untalented phony from the get-go. Face it, you’ve been kidding yourself for years. Your so-called work is completely hopeless, not even a joke. Whatever gave you the idea that you could write in the first place? Look at this pitiful stuff. No one cares, anyway.

  Sometimes Writer’s Block can be overcome with luck, persistence, and various subterfuges. Robert Sheckley, a master of the black-humored science fiction story, suddenly found that his hitherto steady flow of ideas had dried up. There’d been too many drugs, too much hard living. But eventually he started to produce saleable material again by telling himself: I can no longer write real Sheckley stories—that’s obvious even to me—but I can certainly turn out imitation Sheckley stories. And so he did. For readers these “imitations” were okay, not great, but still enjoyable, still Sheckleyesque.

  In effect, this is what many writers gradually end up doing in their later years. More and more, they become pale imitations of themselves, reworking old themes, retelling the old stories, relying on professional smoothness to cover up the lack of freshness and originality. While kindly friends assure them that they’ve still got it, editors seem to blue-pencil their submissions more and more, or refuse their work altogether because they’re “overbooked.” Eventually, the day arrives when Robert Frost’s “Provide, Provide” pops into the graying head: “No memory of having starred/Atones for later disregard/Or keeps the end from being hard.”

  But what’s a writer to do? Should he or she just pack it in? How, then, will the rent get paid and what about the car insurance? So you put a Willy Loman shine on your shoes, a Gene Kelly smile on your face, and you soldier on: “Hey, Sid, I was wondering if you could use an article on. . . .”

  At night, though, the writer stews, blaming the hated Literary Establishment which refuses to acknowledge real talent. Younger people—nothing but good looks, probably sleeping with the judges—take home the awards and the big fellowships. There really is no justice. Before long, the tab at the local saloon is running into triple digits. If illness strikes, so much the worse, especially with so much left unaccomplished. All you want is to bring out one more book, the one that will finally redeem all the dashed hopes and dreams. “Not since The Great Gatsby has any novel so beautifully captured the American experience. . . . These are the poems Keats would have written had he lived. . . . Flaubert would envy such prose. . . .
Such essays change forever the way we think about literature.” And on and on. But finally, instead of such praise and plaudits, one hears only the rasping voice of the eternal pub-keeper: “Hurry up, please, it’s time.”

  Let me stress, though, that none of this applies to you or me. Nope, could never happen to you or me. Not in a million years.

  Provide, provide.

  Spring Book Sales

  Springtime in Washington brings cherry blossoms, azaleas, girls in their summer dresses, and the Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart Used Book Sale. It opens today, April 20, and runs through the weekend.

  When I first came to our nation’s capital back in the mid-1970s, there were a half dozen major used-book extravaganzas each year. In fact, a good proportion of my library was founded on buys from the Vassar, Brandeis, Goodwill, State Department, and Stone Ridge sales. In those days dealers and scouts would arrive from up and down the Eastern seaboard, and the especially stalwart would start queuing the night before, hunkering down in sleeping bags with Thermoses of coffee and bags of doughnuts. It was said that Larry McMurtry—then owner of Booked Up, a high-end shop in Georgetown—sometimes hired a college kid to camp out at the front of the line, so that the novelist could stroll in just before the 9 A.M. opening, take the student’s place, and be among the first through the doors into the school gymnasium.