Browsings Read online

  “Stippled, flecked, dappled, variegated, speckled, spotted, pied, larded, dominoed, polka-dotted, brindled, freckled—all the words suggesting a mixture of light and dark strike me as one-word poems. Gerard Manley Hopkins called his great lyric about dappled things ‘Pied Beauty,’ and to my ear such adjectives—and the condition they describe—seem homey, down to earth, essentially human. Nothing in our lives is pure and unalloyed; we love and we hate simultaneously, we act well and badly from one moment to the next. Our very souls are pieced together like old quilts or rag rugs.”

  That last sentence is rather poetic, if I do say so myself. I now wonder if I was overstraining for effect.

  Anyone who writes a lot eventually develops, then starts to overuse, certain “fallback” words. When I want an intensifier I often resort to “wonderfully,” as in “wonderfully inventive.” One of my fellow journalists struggles against over-using the phrase “That said” as a convenient way to transition into a new paragraph. When “embonpoint” appeared in one of my book reviews, it was passed over in silence; when it showed up again a week later, my colleagues never let me forget it. “Look at his embonpoint! Did you ever see such embonpoint? I’m not fat, I just have a lot of embonpoint.” I don’t think I’ve ever used the word since.

  Still, I do turn to my thesaurus more and more these days. As my style leans toward the ascetically austere, I really do need the occasional striking word to give it a bit of pizzazz. Or do I mean razzledazzle? Or . . . You see what I mean.

  In the past, the devout or the well educated would often retire for the evening with their Bible, the plays of Shakespeare, or similar improving works. The novelist Patricia Highsmith later adopted this same practice, but she read the dictionary for half an hour after dinner. Sometimes I’ve wondered if even Hamlet might have been brushing up on his Elizabethan, thesaurus in hand, when Polonius asked him what he was reading and he answered: “Words, words, words.”

  Maybe I should emulate the noble prince’s example. (How quickly fancies become facts!) Settle down in the evening with my trusty Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. Memorize a slew of new adjectives. Build up the old vocabulary. But somehow all this sounds more than a little pathetic. For now, at least, I think I’d prefer to spend the early evening with a glass of wine. Or since summer is fast upon us, a cold bottle of beer. Maybe two.

  Cowboys and Clubmen

  During most of my life I’ve thought of myself as a loner, an unexpected consequence of watching far too many westerns on Saturday afternoons when young. Alas, I never quite managed to become a drifter, the easygoing kind who moseys into the sunset as the credits roll. But even now I keep on my desk a silverplated cap gun used throughout my childhood in innumerable games of Cowboys and Indians. The trigger still has a nice feel to it—I’ve just fired off a couple of quick shots, which I sometimes do when frustrated by a piece of writing. No caps, though. They would frighten Cinnamon, the wonder cat of Silver Spring, Maryland.

  For good or ill, my ideal of masculine comportment derives from movies and TV shows about strangers who ride into town, don’t say much about themselves, and inevitably turn out to be the fastest guns alive. Indeed, I remember an old Glenn Ford film with just that title: The Fastest Gun Alive. If I recall correctly, at one point somebody extends his arm and drops a silver dollar. Before it hits the ground, Glenn has drawn his sidearm and put a bullet hole smack in the center of the coin.

  Despite many years in which I secretly imagined myself as James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven or as the equally taciturn Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, I’ve recently come to recognize that I’ve been living a lie. How can you think of yourself as a black-garbed “knight without armor in a savage land,” as Richard Boone was called in Have Gun, Will Travel, if, in fact, you belong to a dozen social organizations and dining clubs? How frou-frou is that?

  What’s more, I’m a proud member of all of them. There’s The Baker Street Irregulars, the nearly 80-year-old literary organization devoted to honoring Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Then there’s Eta Sigma Phi, the national classical organization. My name also appears on the rosters of the North American Jules Verne Society, The Ghost Story Society, the Washington DC Panthans (devotees of Edgar Rice Burroughs) and the Lewis Carroll Society. After giving a talk last year at the Nebula Awards, I was tickled to be made an honorary member of the Science Fiction Writers of America. I attend, all too infrequently, meetings of Capital! Capital!, the local chapter of The P. G. Wodehouse Society. And just this spring I joined the Mystery Writers of America.

  Twenty-five years ago I once even belonged to the exclusive Arthur Inman Society. Inman was a notorious recluse, who kept a voluminous diary, eventually edited by Daniel Aaron into two extremely thick volumes. The club comprised people, then living in Washington, who had actually read the diary. There was no other requirement. Besides me, the group included my late (and much-missed) Washington Post colleague Reid Beddow, the longtime New Yorker editor and novelist Jeffrey Frank, and the Bangkok Post columnist Bob Halliday.

  As it happens, I also helped establish an even more chi-chi group: the Dawn Powell Society of Washington. It was founded in a bar when four journalists—all winners of a prize that starts with P—were sitting around drinking too much and talking about their shared admiration for the novelist Dawn Powell. I happened to have a copy of Powell’s diaries with me, so on its endpapers I scribbled out the name of the organization, along with its board of directors. Music critic Tim Page, novelist Lorraine Adams, New Yorker writer Kate Boo, and I all signed it. The DPSW, its members now long dispersed, has never met again.

  But The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is, happily, still going strong. This organization, it should be explained, facetiously adopted its grandiose name from Alan Moore’s graphic novel, though such a self-designation isn’t altogether inappropriate. The League’s membership remains top secret, in part because it exercises immense power in our nation’s capital, albeit from the wings, sub rosa. The current Gentlemen include two leading scientists for the Secret Service (one an expert on documents, the other on fingerprints), arguably the country’s foremost forensic anthropologist, an authority on early cinema, a professor of classics, a distinguished science journalist, the director of African Studies at a major university, a freelance editor, a guy who has read every one of the 100 best books in the Western canon (not I), a leading scholar of the English Romantics, and our chief, the master of those who know or need to know—a former New Orleans private eye, now universally esteemed for his authorship of the standard guide to library research. Just as The Baker Street Irregulars reveres Sherlock, so the League pays homage to his smarter brother, Mycroft Holmes, who sometimes “is the British government.”

  Enough. I fear that all this talk of exclusive clubs and sodalities must sound elitist as all get out or at least a bit discomfiting. But let me add that there’s one outstanding organization I don’t belong to: Phi Beta Kappa, the organization that sponsors The American Scholar and, consequently, these essays. My first two years of college were—shall we say?—checkered. Still, I’ve always fancied owning a waistcoat from which one of those little keys would dangle on a thin gold chain. When people noticed me casually twirling it about, I would say, “This? Oh, it’s just my Phi Beta Kappa key. Got it as a sophomore, don’t you know? Something about mine being a special case. It was back about the time I won that chess championship and was elected president of Mensa. . . .”

  Hmm. I think I’d better stick with the cowboy fantasy. The Hash Knife gang has been getting out of hand lately, threatening those sheepherders, the old marshal’s taken to drink, and the good townfolk need serious help. Picture the pretty schoolmarm or the feisty dance hall girl—I can go either way on this—as she hurries to the telegraph office. In her gloved hand is a business card, and you can just make out a few words: Wire Paladin, Silver Spring, Maryland.

  Grades

  The spring semester officially ended earlier this week at the University of Ma
ryland. Last Sunday, May 20, under a perfect blue sky, seniors tossed their mortarboards into the air, then went on to open houses and lawn parties to celebrate. I confess that I can’t help but envy all those smiling graduates just starting out in life, so full of youth and energy and dreams. When I look back. . . .

  Stop. Let’s not go further down that path toward corny commencement-style remarks, shall we? After all, my own thoughts on such occasions can generally be boiled down to: “Best of luck, kids. Have fun.”

  I filed the grades for my class on “The Modern Adventure Novel” last Friday. Setting aside the demands of marking 35 final exams and as many term papers in little more than a week, I would say that assigning grades is the worst part of being a teacher. Do you judge by performance and accomplishment alone? How important is effort or improvement? Should one err on the side of kindness—more grade inflation!—or insist on a return to standards, whatever those are?

  In my own life, grades have always been a vexation. When I was very little, my report cards tended to be speckled with U’s—for Unsatisfactory—or with hand-scrawled remarks saying “Needs Improvement.” In high school I regularly flouted pedagogical authority, such that I would often receive shockingly poor marks. For the first grading period of my senior year, I earned—and let me stress that verb—a D in English. As for college: well, I struggled manfully for two years to break out of the category of the hardworking B-minus student. I did eventually, but by then the psychological damage was done.

  At any given moment since, I’ve always assumed that nearly everyone around me was smarter than I was, more naturally gifted, quicker-witted, and probably capable of understanding Heidegger and Derrida. Even now people frequently snicker when I admit that I can’t fathom what Wittgenstein meant by “The world is everything that is the case.” They look pitying when I confess that all those “intuitive” aspects of digital technology aren’t intuitive to me. Yes, with concerted effort I can follow written instructions, but don’t ask me to simply grasp how to operate a smartphone. My own $20 Nokia from Radio Shack has features that even now remain mysterious to me. What, for instance, is a Media Net? Don’t even start to explain. It won’t mean anything to me.

  No, long ago I realized that my only real talent can be reduced to a single word: doggedness. I’m sometimes willing to put in vast, even inordinate amounts of time if I find a project that interests me. I will then study with Talmudic devotion, consult experts, adopt training regimes that would inspire Olympians, and then, suddenly, drop whatever it is and move on. For years I ran or exercised every day and wore size 33 slacks. That’s in the waist, not the length. Then, one day, I stopped, and now I’m embarrassed to get into my pajamas at night. My house itself is a shambles, being awash in vinyl LPs, classic men’s clothing, manual typewriters, luggage of all kinds, scores of thrift-shop neckties and quite a few books. Okay, thousands of books. Many of them in boxes. In the basement. I’ve actually got six hulking double-sided bookcases, purchased from Borders when they went out of business, just sitting in my garage, waiting for a space to put them in. My wife draws the line at the dining room, even though we could easily eat our meals on trays.

  People can be so judgmental too, and I have even heard words like “compulsive-obsessive” and “hoarding” spoken in my presence. That last sounds especially harsh. I really need all these heaped-up newspapers in the hallway. Okay, that was a joke, though I do have some pretty impressive stacks of old issues of the Times Literary Supplement. You never can tell when you’ll want to settle down with an article about Roman coins of the fourth century.

  Anyway, that’s why I dislike grades. People are individual, so how can you reduce them to an A, a B, or a C? Or even, sometimes, to a D—along with an invitation to stop by for a quiet chat with Dr. Calta, the high school principal?

  Anglophilia

  In Richard Ford’s new novel, Canada, a provincial hotel owner mingles one evening with his guests: “Remlinger had on the brown felt fedora he often wore, and one of his expensive Boston tweed suits that made him stand out strangely in the bar. His reading glasses were hung around his neck. He was wearing a bright red tie, and the tweed trousers were pushed down in the tops of his leather boots. I didn’t know this at the time, but later I understood he was dressed like an English duke or baron who’d been out walking his estate and come in for a whiskey.”

  Like many Americans, I suffer from a mild case of Anglophilia, currently in higher gear than usual due to this week’s celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s 60-year jubilee. Since adolescence, I’ve frequently wondered, in the deepest chambers of my heart, whether my name might one day simply appear on her majesty’s birthday honours list, pricked down for a knighthood or an OBE. And why not? I certainly spend enough time daydreaming about wax cotton jackets from Barbour, Harrods picnic hampers, box seats at the Grand National and the Henley Regatta, and pub lunches of shepherd’s pie and bitters. Nor should we overlook the reveries about pheasant hunting near Balmoral with my trusty Purdey shotgun, rainy Saturday afternoons at the Tate studying the Turners, chill evenings spent sipping single-malt Scotch whiskey at The George and Dragon, long autumn tramps through the Lake District or along the fells, and, of course, those riotous weekends at Oxford or Chatsworth with Evelyn, Cyril, Paddy, and all the Mitford sisters (even Jessica). To me at least, it really does seem a gross oversight that I never attended university at Cambridge or Edinburgh. As P. G. Wodehouse once said of Lord Ickenham, even now I retain the bright enthusiasms and the fresh, unspoiled mental outlook of a slightly inebriated undergraduate.

  For the most part, though, my real-life Anglophilia is restricted to Harris Tweed sport coats, some Turnbull & Asser dress shirts, and a Burberry raincoat—all of them acquired at Amvets Value Village. Sometimes I do watch aging VHS tapes of British television’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries, less to guess the identity of the murderer than to look at the wonderful clothes and the idyllic Cotswoldian village of St. Mary Mead. My wife tells me I should check out Downton Abbey, but I gather that series might be almost too intense for my temperate nature.

  In truth, my Anglophilia is fundamentally bookish: I yearn for one of those country house libraries, lined on three walls with mahogany bookshelves, their serried splendor interrupted only by enough space to display, above the fireplace, a pair of crossed swords or sculling oars and perhaps a portrait of some great English worthy. The fourth wall would, of course, open onto my gardens, designed and kept up by Christopher Lloyd, with the help of Robin Lane Fox, who would also be sure that there were occasional Roman antiquities—statues of nymphs and cupidons—along the graveled walks. The fountain itself—did I mention the fountain?—would center on a sculptural group showing Triton blowing his wreathèd horn, while various bare-breasted Nereids drape themselves in mute adoration around and across his rippling thighs.

  But back to the library. It almost goes without saying that the floor would be dark-stained wood, adorned with Persian carpets. Leather armchairs would butt up against the fender of the huge fireplace. On the long library table one would naturally find, neatly stacked, the current newspapers (The Guardian, Le Monde), old issues of Horizon, the Times Literary Supplement and Country Life, and a selection of literary and cultural periodicals from around the world. If I peer closely at the table through the haze—those applewood logs for the fire must have been wet—I can just make out several copies of The American Scholar.

  I’ve never been quite sure whether to have an old wireless in one corner, or whether that properly belongs in the music room, along with my treasured vinyl LPs. Occasionally I do think about adding a Victorian card table for rubbers of bridge in the evening with my neighbors Doctor Hesselius, old Jorkens, and Brigadier Ffellowes (ret.). They’ve had some unusual experiences and each is always good for a story or two. There would definitely be a worn leather Chesterfield sofa, its back covered with a quilt (perhaps a tartan? decisions, decisions) and its corners cushioned with a half-dozen pillows embroidered
with scenes from Greek mythology. Here, I would recline and read my books.

  What books, you ask? Ah, now there I don’t have to imagine. I may actually live in a pokey little brick colonial, its outside wood trim much in need of fresh paint, with an embarrassingly dilapidated kitchen, two bathrooms that were new about 1940, and closets designed by elves to hold no more than two shirts and a belt. But my library would fit right into my daydream. In fact, that’s probably the only place it would fit, given that most of it now resides in boxes in the basement or locked away in a rented storage unit. I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again. Not that I enjoy doing this. Which is why I daydream about the baronial splendor of that country house library. It would gladden my aging heart to actually see all my books—most of them serious-looking hardbacks—arranged and displayed in substantial bookcases. And without being double-shelved.

  But enough of this idle reverie. It’s time to get on with the day. First, I need to go over the field accounts with my new gamekeeper, a highly energetic chap by the name of Mellors. Can’t imagine why old Chatterley let him go.

  After the Golden Age

  All of us remember the favorite books of our childhoods. That’s when stories affect us most, giving us a glimpse of the world beyond our bedroom walls or presenting various options for the kind of life we might aspire to. As a boy, I frequently reflected on the respective merits of becoming a dashing riverboat gambler, professional private eye, or treasure-seeking pirate. There was always a lot of money in these reveries, and, as I grew a bit older, a number of slinkily attired women too. These last often resembled certain female classmates of mine, except that the silken dream lovelies, unlike the classmates, actually seemed interested in me.