Browsings Read online

  As a young reader, I particularly loved boys’ adventure books and comics. Certain names are holy even now: Uncle Scrooge, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Rick Brant and Ken Holt, Green Lantern, The Flash, Jules Verne, The Hardy Boys, Dr. Fu Manchu, Robert A. Heinlein, H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany. We never do read again with that wonderful, breathless excitement that is ours at 14, the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Mystery, and Romance. Or do we?

  I was thinking back recently to some of the books I discovered in later years, at college and in my twenties, that do seem to me comparably life-changing. We should, I suspect, be vigilant in over-mythologizing early reading at the expense of later, more grown-up books. As Randall Jarrell pointed out, in all those Golden Ages people actually complained about how yellow everything was.

  In college, for instance, I was idly wandering through Oberlin’s co-op bookstore one afternoon when I noticed a paperback with a big number 7 on an otherwise white cover. I picked it up and began to read William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. The book came as a revelation: Beneath the surface of even the simplest-seeming poem, I learned, there crackled unsuspected energies, connections, and meanings. The scales dropped from my eyes and suddenly I could see poetry.

  As a junior I enrolled in a one-semester French course devoted to reading, in its entirety, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Our teacher, Vinio Rossi, doubtless underestimated the time it would take for 20-year-olds to work their way through three thick Pléiade volumes. But I was enchanted by the classic simplicity of that well known opening line—“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure” (“For a long time I went to sleep early”)—and completely seduced by the languorous beauty of Proustian prose. Most of all, though, the almost stand-alone novella, Un Amour de Swann (Swann in Love), seemed written for me. Is there a better account in literature of sexual enthrallment? I was then madly infatuated with a Titian-haired beauty who seemed a lot like Odette de Crécy. I, too, knew the racking torments of jealousy and possessiveness. In the end, of course, Swann recognizes that he had spent years of his life, even wanted to die, because of a woman who was, he finally realizes, “not my type at all.”

  During my early years in graduate school, my main interest was medieval literature. Which explains why, in a happy moment, I signed up for a course on the Icelandic saga. I didn’t really know much about Northern Literature, which I then basically associated with myths about Loki and Thor, marauding Vikings, and Wagner’s Ring cycle. But the Laxdaela Saga, Grettir’s Saga, and Njál Saga swept me back into a world of adventure not unlike that of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, only with swords, in the winter, on ice. The foster son of Njál, the lone survivor of a massacre, methodically tracks down the 40 men responsible for the destruction of the only family he has ever known. Cursed by a demon, Grettir—the strongest warrior in Iceland—suddenly finds himself afraid of the dark. I soon read every saga I could find, and there are quite a few of them. A hefty one-volume compilation is The Sagas of Icelanders, with a preface by novelist and fellow fan Jane Smiley.

  In graduate school I also discovered that certain scholarly books could produce an intellectual exhilaration that rivaled the more visceral thrills of childhood reading. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature made me wish to become an erudite, multilingual, European polymath. I soon realized that was never going to happen, though one could still, in a small, provincial way, try. Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo brought the fourth century and its philosophical crosscurrents to blazing life. We all know about young Augie’s famous plea, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.” What Brown’s book does, however, is reveal the astonishing evolution of that capacious, world-altering intellect, and he makes it an unputdownable page-turner. Because of Augustine of Hippo, late antiquity came to seem as exciting, as revolutionary and ideologically riven, as the 1960s.

  In fact, for a long time biographies and autobiographical books replaced novels as my favorite genre. Rousseau’s Confessions bewitched me away with its limpid prose-poetry, and I’ve never forgotten many of its episodes, in particular the evening Jean-Jacques entertains a celebrated Venetian courtesan. When this toast of the canals disrobes, he notices a small blemish on her breast and slightly recoils. Immediately, she gathers up her clothes and sweeps out the door, brusquely dismissing Rousseau with the phrase, “Lascia le donne e studia la matematica!”—“Give up women and study mathematics!”

  In my late 20s, I devoured Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, the portrait of the modernist as a literary saint, Rupert Hart-Davis’s underappreciated Hugh Walpole, a stunning depiction of an ambitious young writer on the make during the early 20th century, and S. Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives, which tracks the multiple ways we have imagined and distorted the biography of our greatest playwright. All these were utterly riveting, and remain among my favorite books to this day.

  In my 30s and after, the books that seemed to catch me at the heart or change my inner life grew fewer, but there are at least a dozen—Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, for instance, and Casanova’s exhilarating memoirs. But they will keep for another day, another column.

  According to Longfellow, a boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. Sometimes very long. So even now I still keep a deck of cards at my desk and sometimes practice dealing seconds. There’s a rumpled trench coat in the closet, and I’m on my guard around dames named O’Shaughnessy. Not least, I’ve made sure that there’s a black flag displaying the skull and crossbones neatly packed away in a dresser drawer, just beneath my old French mariner’s sweater. Who knows? Someday, yet, I may still hoist the Jolly Roger.

  Anthologies and Collections

  As a kid, I loved anthologies, all those fat volumes with titles like The Golden Argosy, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Reading I’ve Liked, Ghostly Tales to Be Told, The Omnibus of Crime. Some of these tomes—several ran to 700 or more pages—I would check out from the library and devour, story after story, over the course of the allotted three weeks; others I might discover at a thrift shop and take home for a dime or a quarter and then just dip into from time to time. In the cellars of a few of my relatives one could even find old Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club volumes, with titles like Stories to Remember or A Treasury of Great Mysteries, each edited by a literary eminence of the day—Clifton Fadiman, Howard Haycraft, Bennett Cerf, John Beecroft, or the novelists Ellery Queen and Thomas B. Costain. I’d borrow these from my cousin Marlene or Aunt Stella, and sometimes I’d give them back.

  In those days an author’s name meant almost nothing to me. Who were W. W. Jacobs and Ambrose Bierce? Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Richard Connell? E. M. Forster and Anthony Berkeley and Shirley Jackson? I hadn’t a clue. What mattered were those evocative titles: “The Monkey’s Paw,” “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “The Most Dangerous Game,” “The Other Side of the Hedge,” “The Avenging Chance,” “The Lottery.”

  So it was that during my adolescence I was gradually introduced to the classics of short fiction, in nearly all the genres. I’ll never forget the first time I read the late Ray Bradbury’s “Zero Hour” in an author’s choice volume called My Best Science Fiction Story. Bradbury’s wonderful conceit—spoiler alert!—is that aliens secretly persuade children to play a game called Invasion. On the last page a little girl skips lightly up the stairs of her house, followed by the heavier trudge of Something behind her, and opens the door to where her terrified parents are hiding—at which point Bradbury brings this macabre miniature to its perfect and chilling close, as the child murmurs: “Peekaboo.”

  Throughout adolescence I sought out all sorts of storytelling showcases. In The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, I first read Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain”—note, again, that haunting title—and the heartbreaking “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes. Alfred Hitchcock anth
ologies such as Stories That Scared Even Me, Stories for Late at Night and Stories to be Read with the Door Locked introduced me to myriad chillers and thrillers, including that tour de force of logical deduction, Harry Kemelman’s “The Nine Mile Walk” and Jack Finney’s unnerving “I’m Scared.” (The versatile Finney’s novels include that classic of 1950s paranoia, The Body Snatchers, and the most romantic of all time travel stories, Time and Again.) In more general anthologies I discovered work by other great practitioners of commercial short fiction: O. Henry, Somerset Maugham, Irwin Shaw, and John Cheever, as well as modern mini-classics by such literary folk as Maupassant, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and Frank O’Connor.

  Today, though, I hardly ever pick up an anthology. At some point, I realized that I had grown more interested in collections, that is, volumes of stories gathering the work of a single author. Rather than read just one of Lord Dunsany’s tall tales about Joseph Jorkens, or one of Robert Aickman’s “strange stories,” or one of P. G. Wodehouse’s misadventures of Jeeves and Wooster, I found that I wanted to read them all. Or at least a lot of them. What attracts me these days aren’t short fiction’s high-spots so much as an individual writer’s overall voice and style, the atmosphere he or she creates on the page. I want to immerse myself in an entire oeuvre rather than flit from one short masterpiece to another.

  In effect, anthologies resemble dating. You enjoy some swell times and suffer through some awful ones, until one happy hour you encounter a story you really, really like and decide to settle down for a while with its author. Of course, this doesn’t lead to strict fidelity, except in the cases of fans who spend their entire lives researching and obsessing about, say, Arthur Conan Doyle or H. P. Lovecraft. Rather, one adopts a pattern of serial monogamy. Weeks go by or even months, as you read The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, but inevitably there comes a day when you decide you just can’t face another page about the inhabitants of Morgana, Mississippi, and you find yourself suddenly, irresistibly attracted to James Salter or Sarah Orne Jewett or Alice Munro. Your friends may shake their heads over the break-up—you were so crazy about “A Worn Path” and “Why I Live at the P. O.”—but still, it’s the modern world, what can you say, these things happen. Besides, more often than not, after a few mad, wonderful weeks or months with J.G. Ballard or Robert Aickman you’ll find yourself remembering “The Petrified Man” or “No Place for You, My Love,” and then one evening you’ll be standing at Eudora’s front door. This being literature, not life, she’ll take you back without a word.

  Rocky Mountain Low

  There’s an old saying—adopted by Leonard Woolf as the title for one of his volumes of autobiography—that “the journey not the arrival matters.” There’s also an old slogan—first used by Cunard ocean liners—that enthusiastically proclaimed that “getting there is half the fun.” Obviously neither Virginia Woolf’s husband nor the elegant passengers of the QE II ever tried to go hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park in June 2012.

  Let me point out, before I begin my apoplectic rant, that once upon a time I viewed myself as a resourceful and easygoing traveler. At the age of 14 I ran away from home for four days and hitchhiked around western Pennsylvania and southern Ohio. At 17 I traveled to Mexico in a lemon yellow Mustang and saved money by bunking down in cheap, cockroach-infested flophouses. Great times both. In my early 20s I went on to thumb rides through Europe, readily sleeping in train stations, my backpack as a pillow. Once I even hunkered down for a night on a sidewalk grate—for warmth—in Paris.

  Somehow travel was an adventure then, not simply an endurance test. In the early 1970s my parents dressed up in their Sunday best—my father in coat and tie, my mother in a severe gray outfit—to take the Greyhound Bus from Lorain, Ohio, to Ithaca, New York. I remember when riding the train still felt, just a little, like an adventure on the Orient Express, and when TWA might hand out free flight bags, and canapes would be served by a uniformed stewardess, and when you could count on a knowledgeable travel agent to advise you about trains and planes and hotels in far-off places.

  Gone, all gone.

  Today, we expect travel to be a prolonged nightmare. And it is. You spend hours online searching for a cheap flight, then discover that your air miles have all expired. Ever worsening traffic jams slow your rush to the airport. Pause too long at dropoff or pick-up, and police shout at you to move along. Inside the terminal, pythonesque lines snake their way slowly toward the distant security checkpoint. You feel hot, your luggage is heavy, you wonder if you’ll miss the plane. Eventually, you find yourself disrobing in public, removing your shoes, coat, belt, watch, cellphone, laptop, and pocket change while the people behind you grow restless, wishing you would hurry up. TSA agents pounce on your normal-sized can of shaving cream and ask, “Is this yours?” Out it goes. The X-ray machine, or sometimes a gloved official, intimately examines your body in all its flabby glory. Finally, you rush to repack all your items and relace your shoes, before discovering that the scheduled flight has been delayed for 20 minutes, 45 minutes, three hours, and finally canceled because of bad weather in Chicago. If you do board, tension mounts and tempers flare as the overhead luggage racks fill up because no one wants to pay extra to check a suitcase or risk losing one. Finally, when you settle into a middle seat just in front of the back lavatory, stressed and hungry, the only food available arrives in cellophane snack-packs, and . . .

  But why go on? We all know these horrors. Every time I see the crowds inching their way forward toward ticket counters, through airport security, or at boarding gates the same line from The Waste Land goes through my head: “I had not thought that death had undone so many.”

  Anyway, a little more than 10 days ago I found myself in Colorado for a wedding, in company with my Beloved Spouse, and my Number 1 and Number 2 Sons, along with their respective girlfriends. (Son number 3 remained at home, theoretically minding the house but actually throwing three parties in a single week, one of said parties being announced on Facebook, along with an open invitation to any roaming barbarian hordes to stop by if they and their fellow Visigoths had nothing better penciled in on their dance cards.)

  Meanwhile, in Evergreen, Colorado, the bride and groom celebrated their nuptials at a rustic inn, the drink flowed, and a good time was had by all, even if far too much hip-hop music was played to the neglect of the “Beer Barrel Polka” and the golden oldies of the 1960s, back when rock was young.

  After the festivities, my eldest son returned to his studies in Denver, my middle son flew back to his job in New York, and their onlie begetters—those poor lost souls—set off for a day’s hiking in the Rocky Mountains. To begin our excursion Beloved Spouse and I drove our rental car up to Estes Park, a town of motels, boutiques, and restaurants, best known as the location of that imposing compound called The Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for Stephen King’s The Shining—and an obvious sign to all sensible people to turn back before it was too late. To paraphrase Thomas Gray: alas, regardless of their doom, the latest victims play!

  The evening before our much anticipated day of communing with the Colorado sublime we stopped for soup and salad at The Baldpate Inn. En route to Estes Park I had noticed its sign, paused briefly to wonder, then wondered even further when I observed the picture of a gigantic key underneath the inn’s name. Could this possibly be the inspiration for the once famous mystery novel, Seven Keys to Baldpate, written by Earl Derr Biggers some years before he created his famous detective Charlie Chan? In fact, the charming hostelry was established in 1917 and took its name from the novel, with Biggers’s blessing. Over the years since, the Baldpate Inn had gradually created a museum of keys from around the world, including one to the room where Edgar Allan Poe lodged at the University of Virginia. Yet while the darkness fell and Mr. and Mrs. Dirda innocently enjoyed their dinner, little did they know, as old mystery novels used to say, of the horror that awaited them the following morning and afternoon.

  The next day at 9:30 A.M. the doomed couple lef
t their rented Impala at the Estes Park Visitors Center, having been informed that there was construction on the road into Rocky Mountain National Park. Cars were prohibited from entering after 9 A.M., and visitors were required to take a shuttle bus to a ranger station, where they would then change to a second bus that would carry them to the various trailheads. Nothing was said about any serious delays. One imagined a flagman in a hardhat, perhaps a five-minute wait, traffic alternating through the usual single lane around the work zone.

  The day was hot, the bus crowded and without air conditioning. We waited for half an hour at the construction site before we finally got through. Then, as we pulled into the ranger station, each passenger stared with disbelief at a line a block long, where—we soon learned—people had already been standing for 45 minutes in the now vicious sun, patiently or restlessly awaiting the arrival of the second bus, the one that would take them to the trails. When one such vehicle finally appeared, it absorbed 40 or 50 people, then tootled merrily away. The line hardly seemed to have shrunk. When another bus finally appeared, we were lucky to make the cut for standing room. It took off, then halted at a second construction site where another half hour went by. It took us more than two hours to travel a few miles just to begin our John Muir-like saunter through the scrub and scrim up to three mountain lakes.

  The next couple of hours were lovely, despite our gasping for oxygen in the higher altitudes, and we even saw a bluejay, a bird I hadn’t glimpsed since my childhood. And an elk. And lots of impressive rocks, cliffs, and torrents, as well as snow in summer. Unfortunately, we’d been in such a rush to get going early—ha!—that we’d only brought a bag of raisins and nuts. Naturally, the ranger station and trailhead stocked maps and souvenir lanyards, but nothing whatsoever to eat.