Browsings Read online

  Casting decorum aside, people would race toward the laden tables, the traditional wisdom being that the really good books would be snatched up within the first 20 minutes. Sometimes this was true, albeit less so now, with the advent of “continuous restocking.” I’ve sometimes even found more interesting titles on the second day of a three-day sale. One year, for instance, I picked up first editions, albeit ex-library, of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Isaac Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky. Each was a dollar. Another time I bought—admittedly for $50—a copy of The Good Soldier, one of my favorite novels, signed by its author, Ford Madox Ford. Because I’m drawn to a lot of writers that few other people still read, I can often find works by, say, Martin Armstrong or T. F. Powys or Gerald Bullett or Stella Benson, authors quickly passed over by fans desperately seeking to complete their collections of John Grisham or Charlaine Harris. Above all, though, big book sales remain marvelous realms of serendipity, and one never knows what will turn up. I once acquired the many-volumed complete works of William Hazlitt for a buck a book. As Larry McMurtry’s character Cadillac Jack reminds us in the novel of that name, “Anything can be anywhere.”

  Despite some serious competition, Stone Ridge has always been my favorite biblio-blowout, so I’m glad it’s still going strong. [But see below.] While standing in line there one year, I joked with a group of friends that we should design a denim jacket for book collectors. On its back would be the stenciled words: “Born to Read.” For a couple of years the Stone Ridge organizers actually had me conduct “bookman’s tours” of the gym’s tables. In the quiet of the afternoon I’d walk around with a small group of people, pluck titles from Travel or Biography or Poetry or Children’s Literature, and explain why these particular volumes were collectible, underpriced, or simply well worth reading.

  Sadly, I’ll only get to the Stone Ridge Sale this year on Saturday, because of a talk I’m giving at a conference at—lah-dee-dah—Princeton. Still, it’s not as though I really needed to bring home any more books. No, what I most cherish is that inexplicable feeling of buoyant youthfulness that overtakes me as I wander among the tables and shelves, gradually filling up one of those sturdy L. L. Bean canvas boating bags. And maybe a box or two as well. After a couple of hours I’ll feel grotty and tired and very happy. At the checkout, I’ll spring for a coffee and a pastry from the schoolgirls selling refreshments. And come the evening I’ll wonder what ever possessed me to shell out good money for half the books in my trove—though a month later I’ll congratulate myself on having been so wise as to secure all these really quite remarkable treasures. Memory of their cost will have long vanished. As book collectors know all too well, we only regret our economies, never our extravagances.

  [Alas, in 2014 the Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart hosted its last used book sale. Sic transit gloria mundi.]

  Memories of Marseille

  Back in 1970-71 I lived in Marseille, where I taught English at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry. The year before, I had graduated from Oberlin College and failed to win a Rhodes Scholarship—a long shot, at best, given that I played no sports, earned mediocre grades as a freshman and sophomore, and had participated in absolutely nothing extracurricular. It turned out that zeal for learning and boyish charm weren’t quite enough for the Rhodes committee.

  Somehow, though, I was later awarded a place on a Fulbright-sponsored teaching program in France. I asked to be assigned to a school located anywhere but Paris. In 1968 I’d spent a thrilling May and summer in France—“bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / but to be young was very heaven”—and had quickly realized that Paris was full of university students, tourists, and Americans. I didn’t want to see any of these. My goal was to speak nothing but French and to learn the language well. As it turned out, by the time I left to return home to the United States, a native French speaker needed as much as two or three minutes before realizing I was a foreigner. My Marseille accent was even remarked upon.

  As an “assistant d’anglais,” I taught courses in pronunciation and conversation, sometimes to just a few students at a time. On my first day I was immediately warned never to hold a class if only one person showed up. The school—a “mixed” lycée—was exceptionally sensitive about any possibility of teacher-pupil hanky-panky. I was 21, some of my students were 17, and several of the young women dressed with a sexiness and sophistication that took my breath away.

  So I could readily understand the school’s concern. But there was another reason: it was at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in 1968 that Gabrielle Russier—in her early 30s—had taught and fallen in love with one of her 17-year-old male students. Their affair, illegal to begin with, was further complicated by the leftist politics and rivalries of the day. In the end, Russier was sentenced to prison for what was called, I believe, “le détournement d’un mineur.” From jail she sent love letters to her burly and bearded young man and then, after her release, committed suicide when prohibited from seeing him. After the letters were published, they became a French bestseller, the same year that Erich Segal’s preppy Love Story was the No. 1 American tearjerker. (Ethnologists may want to reflect on what this indicates about the two cultures.) As it happened, I taught the brother of the boy involved in this tragic romance, and a movie about it appeared in the spring of 1971: Mourir d’aimer (To Die for Love), starring Annie Girardot.

  During that academic year I lived on the school grounds in a small room above some faculty and staff apartments. The bleak dormitory-like quarters on the second floor were largely empty except for me and my fellow “assistants” Uli, who taught German, and Paolo, who taught Italian. Uli usually sported a beat-up leather coat he’d found in a flea market, loved the work of William Burroughs, and was a passionate fan of Pink Floyd and Deep Purple, in particular the latter’s concerto for rock band and orchestra. He soon found a girlfriend and moved in with her.

  Fine-boned, bespectacled, and aristocratic, Paolo quickly became my close friend. He had brought his Volkswagen Beetle from Pavia, and we soon took to driving downtown to the Canebière, the Vieux Port, and the Opera House. At this last, I watched Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn dance in Swan Lake, attended an early performance of Alban Berg’s restored Lulu, and sneaked into a solo piano recital given by Arthur Rubinstein. At that performance, in the middle of a Chopin piece, a loud voice from the audience suddenly cried out, Plus vite—“faster.” Rubinstein neither faltered nor increased his tempo.

  As it happened, Marseille’s red-light district was also located on the streets around L’Opéra. Hence the smirks Paolo and I would occasionally receive whenever we mentioned spending an evening there. Paolo, in fact, grew quite infatuated with one particular papillon de la nuit—butterfly of the night—and would operatically fling a rose to her as we drove by her corner on our way to a concert or movie.

  As the year went by, I soon began taking my breakfasts at the same working-class café, enjoying a sugary brioche along with my coffee and my copy of Le Monde or Le Canard enchaîné. I took to wandering fearlessly (and foolishly) through the Algerian quarter at night, and vastly enjoyed the rowdy cosmopolitan swarms along the Canebière. I drank pastis, learned to play the cardgame La Belote, ate couscous and bouillabaisse and some far stranger things. I was told that if you spoke the right words there was a place in Marseille where you could dine on human flesh. Who knows?

  In my spare time I read the works of Marcel Pagnol, especially the Marseille plays Marius, Fanny, and César, and such Provençal novelists as Henri Bosco and Jean Giono. Occasionally I’d take the bus to Aix, some 25 kilometers to the north, and saunter up and down its beautiful tree-canopied main street, lined with bookshops, cafes and patisseries. One Saturday I climbed to the top of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, so often painted by Cezanne; on another weekend I went canoeing at Cassis and almost drowned in the Mediterranean surf. During that year a beautiful older woman tried to seduce me—and so did a 16-year-old blonde student. When a celebration honoring the 100th anniversary of the Comm
une grew violent, we all ran from the riot police.

  On school holidays I traveled, spending part of one break with Paolo and his family in Pavia. There, late one night, my friend—even drunker than I—nonchalantly drove his car off the street and down a wide flight of concrete steps. A short cut, he said, but the Volkswagen’s suspension was never the same afterward. At the city’s cathedral I happened upon a film crew at work and so was allowed to glimpse up close the bejeweled cases holding relics of Boethius and St. Augustine. The following day Paolo and I sampled the liqueurs at the local monastery—the supposed original of Stendhal’s “Charterhouse of Parma.”

  Later in Florence, where I had traveled on my own, I happened to notice a guy absorbed in The Golden Bowl while we both waited in line to sign into the city’s youth hostel. Now a longtime editor for Harvard University Press, Lindsay Waters and I are still friends. Like Byron and Proust, I sipped coffee at Florian’s in Venice’s San Marco square, and later went touristing with two Australian women I met there; they ordered me to read Patrick White. On a subsequent trip to Barcelona and Madrid—then still ruled by Generalissimo Franco—I finished André Malraux’s L’Espoir, as a fascist youth corps marched in a nearby park, and during one long weekend in Grenoble—Stendhal’s hometown and Jean-Claude Killy’s—I learned to ski.

  All this was a long time ago, and, though I’ve been back to France, I’ve never returned to Marseille. Why meddle with a fairy-tale year? Even now I can scarcely believe that I used to visit a hunch-backed dwarf who cut hair in an old garage. You’d climb down into a hole in the concrete floor and sit on a rackety kitchen stool, while the barber walked around you, clipping away and chattering about the perfidy of women. If he’d told me his name was Rumpelstiltskin, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised.

  Hail to Thee, Blithe Spirit!

  Last week I was in Manhattan for the Mystery Writers of America awards banquet and, having an afternoon free, dropped by the New York Public Library. I’d already visited the Argosy Bookshop on 59th Street, where I’d browsed through the fiction in the basement and scarfed up a first edition (1880) of Mrs Oliphant’s A Beleaguered City. This, as some readers may know, is one of the novels reprinted in an old Viking Portable called Six Novels of the Supernatural. That anthology should sound familiar since I mentioned it a few weeks back when I wrote about the various editions of Walter de la Mare’s The Return. The Argosy copy of A Beleaguered City was a bit shabby, which meant it was only $25. I was quite chuffed, as the English say, to acquire a first.

  Being in an exceptionally good mood, I decided to walk the 15 or so blocks to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Beware of such moments of exaltation! My shoes were new, and I soon developed a terrible blister on the little toe of my right foot. It’s still bothering me.

  But I digress.

  The New York Public Library has been much in the news lately because of plans to reconfigure its flagship location. As I understand it, the intent is to turn the “old-fashioned” library into a “21st-century” media center, replacing much of its book collection with computer stations and all sorts of digital technology. To me, this is a deplorable idea. Where else but a library can you check out a real book and sit quietly and read it? Where but a real library will you have available both older titles deserving rediscovery and expensive scholarly works? Sigh. It’s not as though people can’t already access the Internet from any McDonald’s in the land. Nor, so far as I can tell, do any but the poorest people now seem to be without laptops or smartphones. As for the networking young: I recently heard on the radio that teenagers transmit roughly 60 text messages a day. I don’t think we need to encourage greater use of digital technology. Why should our libraries supply what we already have in abundance? They ought to make available material we can’t readily afford or find on our own.

  But I digress again.

  The last time I visited the New York Public Library the main hall had been opened up to display the manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The Beat legend typed on pages fastened together into a single long scroll and seemingly all 120 feet of it had been unrolled for awed visitors. Surrounding it were Kerouac artifacts, photographs, and other memorabilia. It was a terrific show.

  This year the NYPL, in conjunction with Oxford’s Bodleian Library, had mounted a much smaller exhibition called “Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet.” In a darkened room the visitor could peer through glass at Percy Bysshe Shelley’s handwritten text of “Adonais,” his elegy for John Keats, or study four pages from the manuscript of his wife Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. There were documents written by Mary’s parents, too, the philosopher-novelist William Godwin and the great feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the groundbreaking A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The exhibition even included a waterlogged copy of Sophocles’s Tragedies—supposedly the volume in Shelley’s pocket when his boat foundered in a storm and he drowned at age 29.

  However, for me the greatest thrill was seeing a fair copy of “Ozymandias.” This is, of course, one of the world’s most famous poems, but it holds a special place in my heart. When I was around 13 I happened to acquire, from an industrial dumpster behind a department store, a stack of records that had been discarded (or hidden there by a larcenous employee). One of those vinyl LPs was entitled “Vincent Price Reads the Poems of Shelley.”

  That afternoon, when I was sure that my parents and sisters were away, I played the record and was electrified. This cognac-smooth, patrician voice echoed through my bedroom: “I met a traveler from an antique land / Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert. . . .’ ” The poem, as you will recall, builds to that magnificently defiant proclamation: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” There follows, immediately, the deliciously cynical climax: “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  Well, I was bowled over. If this was poetry, let me have more of it. I played the record again and again, practiced reciting the poems in Price’s voice, and memorized three or four of them, including the wonderfully hokey “The Indian Serenade,” now better known as “The Indian Girl’s Song,” which then struck me as the very acme of Romantic love poetry:

  I arise from dreams of thee

  In the first sweet sleep of night—

  When the winds are breathing low

  And the stars are shining bright.

  I arise from dreams of thee—

  And a spirit in my feet

  Hath led me—Who knows how?

  To thy chamber window, Sweet . . .

  O lift me from the grass!

  I die, I faint, I fail!

  Let thy love in kisses rain

  On my lips and eyelids pale . . .

  What I didn’t know then, when I was declaiming to the tiles of my bathroom, was that Shelley’s star had sunk fairly low in the poetic firmament. He was thought to be rhetorical, corny, not quite first-rate. Keats, by contrast—he was The Man. Later, in the 1970s, the young Harold Bloom argued fiercely for Shelley’s imaginative breadth and originality, but with only partial success. Even now Shelley sometimes seems admired more as a radical thinker and free spirit than as a major English poet.

  No matter. To me, he will always be my heady entry-level drug into a lifelong addiction to poetry. These days, I may prefer John Donne or Wallace Stevens, but I still own that Vincent Price LP and sometimes, when my family is out of the house, I still play it. “I die, I faint, I fail!”

  Synonym Toast

  Some years back, Oxford University Press decided to bring out a new thesaurus. The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus would be alphabetical (rather than thematic, as Roget’s original had been), and it would include tables and inserts detailing the graded differences in connotation among groups of synonyms. Thus, on page 427 of the second edition, published in 2008, one finds a little box explaining the nuances distinguishing su
ch similar words as “honor, deference, homage, obeisance” and “reverence.”

  To further enhance the new thesaurus, the Oxford editors also asked 10 very different writers to contribute mini-essays on words they loved or hated. These pieces—on words ranging from “achingly” to “yump”—were consequently scattered throughout the OAWT, little oases of prose among all the wordlists. The lucky contributors included Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Simon Winchester, Francine Prose, David Auburn, David Lehman, Erin McKean, Stephen Merritt, Jean Strouse, and me.

  Sometimes when I use the thesaurus—and, like any shill on the radio, I do use this product myself—I sometimes wonder how many David Foster Wallace fans know about his contributions. He comments, for instance, on the following words: “all of,” “as,” “critique,” “dialogue,” “effete,” “feckless,” “fervent,” “focus,” “hairy,” “if” “impossibly,” “loan,” “mucous,” “myriad,” “privilege,” “pulchritude,” “that,” “toward, towards,” “unique,” and “utilize.” Here, for instance, is what he says about “pulchritude” (it appears appended to the entry on “Beauty”):

  “A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.”

  What of my own favorites and bugaboos? I thought you’d never ask. The run of words that annoy me—they range from “brave” and “limn” to “Faulknerian” and “feisty”—is fairly extensive. But here’s an entry in praise of “stippled”; it appears near the entry for “spotted.”