My Reading Life

by Pat Conroy

  At the end of the first month I made my first serious purchase at the Old New York Book Shop. I bought a lovely four-volume set of novels by George Sand, a French writer I’d only just discovered was a woman. The set was well made and exotic. The De Vinne Press certified that only two hundred fifty copies of this book had been printed on Dickinson handmade paper in August 1894. My copy number was one hundred thirty and the previous owner, J. H. Haven, had inscribed his signature on the first page of two of the four volumes. Later I would learn that his signature would render the book anathema to “real collectors,” a defilement of the first order. To me, it added a personal touch because I got to admire the literary taste of Mr. Haven long after his death. The top edge of each volume was gilt and the fore edge untrimmed. It marked the moment when I became aware of the art of bookmaking. I found it a privilege to own such books, and I take immense pleasure at staring at them more than thirty-five years after I bought them in Atlanta.

  Since I was certain that I’d like spending a lot of time in this store, my first order of business was to make friends with the owner. Cliff Graubart was a compact, muscular man who flitted about his store with the overwrought metabolism of a hummingbird. Though he was not unfriendly, he was withdrawn and unforthcoming and lacked the mannerliness that Southerners perform with such thoughtless grace. But my personality has always struck some people as too obsequious for their tastes. When I lived in Paris for a short time, some Parisians found my ebullience and sunny nature offensive to the very character of the city. In Minneapolis, I felt like a fireball as I tried to make friends with the Swedes and Danes who made up the inner circle of the poets and journal keepers in my sister’s poetry circle. In the early days, Cliff treated me with all the suspicion of a trapdoor spider. From his early reaction to me, I could tell that Cliff considered the innate courtesies of Southerners a minor form of madness. He was also part of that innumerable tribe of outsiders who found Southerners stupid.

  On my third visit, as I was paying him for a small stack of books, I said, “You never say hi to me when I come into your store.”

  “Hi,” he said, unamused.

  “What warmth, what charm!”

  “You want a hand job instead?” he said as he wrote up the bill of sale. “I don’t know you. I say hi to my friends.”

  “Would you like to know me?” I asked, extending my hand. He looked up at that hand as though I were offering him a live electric eel.

  As we exchanged names, I asked, “Where you from?”

  “You taking a census?” he said. “The city. New York City.”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Good for you. Where are you from?”

  “The city. Beaufort, South Carolina.”

  “That supposed to be a joke?”

  “Yep.”

  “It ain’t funny.”

  “But it’s a start,” I said.

  And so it was. The friendship took off in the next couple of months and has continued to build momentum over the years. While I had assumed Cliff got into the antiquarian book trade to satisfy his own passion for reading, I could not have been more wrong. As I continued my own patient survey of his stock, I became gradually aware that Cliff was poorly read and that his starting up of a bookstore was more of a business opportunity than it was for literary enrichment. Though he could look up and reveal to me the value of any book, he had read remarkably few of them. He told me he had once had a first edition of The Great Gatsby that he had cataloged in his mystery section because it sounded like a mystery title to him. Plus, he’d never heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald. His self-education in the book business was “slow as humidity.” It took him a good fifteen years before he felt as if he had mastered the trade. In the first month of our acquaintance, Cliff told me I’d never be a collector of books because I was too fascinated by reading them. A collector wants possessions, and a book in pristine, flawless condition that is displayed, but never sullied or contaminated by the barbaric act of reading itself. He told me that I had never noticed or remarked upon the condition of any book I purchased and hadn’t bought a single volume that any self-respecting collector would allow in his library.

  Since I showed genuine curiosity about what made a book collectible, Cliff had a stack of five books waiting when I next visited the store. He picked up a first edition of Robert Ruark’s The Old Man and the Boy. He pointed to some light mottling at the edges of the boards and some light foxing to the endpaper. Shaking his head, he called the dust wrapper slightly rubbed and soiled. Next, he took the glassine wrapper off Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain and showed me some light chipping to the spinal extremities and two short vertical tears at the crown. He showed me a first edition of Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom that was missing the dust jacket and had a half-moon imprint of a coffee cup on the title page.

  Cliff said, “The only thing bad that did not happen to it was being tossed in the toilet.”

  In April 1973, Barbara and I threw our first party in Atlanta, gathering together both neighbors in the Emory area and writers I’d encountered at a dinner for Georgia writers that Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter held at the Governor’s Mansion. That event felt like our arrival at the big time for Barbara and me, even though I still hear writers griping about the absence of wine or liquor. Several writers claimed they experienced delirium tremens twice during the course of the evening and that the lack of booze had disoriented them so completely that they’d been forced to eat the food. It was the night I met the writers Paul Darcy Boles, Paul Hemphill, Terry Kay, Larry Woods. I can still remember seeing the dazzling Anne Rivers Siddons coming down the corridor with her dapper husband at her side. For many years Annie had been an all-star writer for Atlanta magazine and its mercurial editor, Jim Townsend. The entire room turned around to watch her butterfly-like entrance as she joined the receiving line to shake hands with Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter. Annie was a Southern knockout that night, and she would soon become one of the best friends I ever made. For more than forty years, we’ve supported each other and served as each other’s head cheerleader, and she has represented a charming, centering force in my life. Many of the writers Barbara and I met that night with the Carters we invited to our first party on Briarcliff Road.

  Cliff was the first guest to arrive. He surprised me by handing me a white pastry box wrapped in string. “I brought you some cake.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the way you do it in New York.”

  Looking at the Atlanta skyline from my front porch, I asked, “Cliff, you noticed you ain’t in New York anymore?”

  “You got something against cake? Got something against eating? Hey, I was raised right. I wasn’t raised in a potato-chip bag.”

  “What’s in the bottle?” I asked him.

  “Liquor. I hear that the goyim like to drink. So I brought you some liquor. It’s a bottle of sake.”

  I took the bottle of sake and held it up to the light for inspection. “Hey, Cliff, you ever noticed I’m not Japanese?”

  “Liquor is liquor.” He shrugged. “The goyim are goyim.”

  Many of the people who attended that distant and barely remembered party would become some of the great friends of my life. The party also marked a turning point in Cliff’s life in Atlanta. I watched him move around the room meeting people and continually saying things that made these groups holler with laughter. He’d had a life of solitude since opening the bookstore and it took me several years to fathom the depths of his loneliness. Even though he had a natural instinct for comedy, he did not trust this gift to travel well when he migrated so far south of the Mason-Dixon Line. He had a natural distrust of the Southerner’s willingness to incorporate a Brooklyn Jew’s mannerisms into Atlanta social life. But Cliff possessed an unshakable, adamantine sense of friendship and he’s something of a workaholic in the care and feeding and attention that he expends to keep his friends in an invisible circle around him. I learned that night that his father still work
ed in the fur district in Manhattan and was known as “the fitch king.” His brother was born in Palestine, and his aunt Fanny had failed to escape Warsaw in time, so that she and her entire family perished at Auschwitz. That evening, Cliff would begin the career that would make him famous in the writing world around the South. Laughter followed him around the house that night as though he were spreading fairy dust over a lighthearted, pixilated world. When I visited the bookstore later that week, Cliff interrogated me as soon as I walked through the door. The party had enlivened him to the point of fascination.

  “Hey, you told me you were a writer,” he said, “but you could’ve bowled me over with a pubic hair when I found out you really were one.”

  “Why would I lie about that?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. I thought it was probably a pickup line. Something you might use to get laid.”

  “Southern girls like an MD after their husband’s name. Or an ‘esquire’ on a bank account with lots and lots of cash in reserve. Writing books doesn’t pay many bills.”

  “Barbara gave me this paperback as I was leaving,” Cliff said as he handed me the Dell paperback edition of The Water Is Wide with an illustration of Jon Voight on the cover. “They’ve already made a film out of this one.”

  “Yeah. Don’t know how that happened.”

  “Who cares? It means you’re something. Not nothing like I thought when you walked in here with your dick in your hand. Something, not nothing. You get it?”

  “You’re treating me a thousand times better than you ever have, so, yeah, I get it.”

  “That crowd the other night. High rollers. Big shots. Movers and shakers. Wheelers and dealers. How’d you meet those highfalutin hoi polloi?”

  “I told them you were going to be there,” I replied.

  Cliff bought a house at 1069 Juniper Street the next year, where he relocated the Old New York Book Shop, and I was part of the move. I remember arranging the poetry section in alphabetical order. This would become my second home in Atlanta for the next twenty-five years, and a time soon came when I realized that I knew where to find every book in the store. I was almost as familiar with the stock as Cliff himself was. My relationship with the books themselves began to change. Once, I shadowed only the literary sections in the front of the store, but I started to spread my wings. I found Arabia Deserta by Charles Doughty in the travel section, a coffee-table book with bright illustrations of the works at the Prado in the art section, and a facsimile edition of Audubon’s birds in the nature section, all of which I added to my growing collection. I was on my way to buying between four and five thousand books from the Old New York Book Shop. I carried that bookstore with me wherever I went. I bought the books I had to have, and I still regret the loss of the books I was thinking about when they were bought out from under me by strangers who purchased some precious items because of my hesitation or unwillingness to write a check. I lost the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche because I needed to think about making such a large commitment to the German philosopher. In the same way I lost a set of Dostoyevsky and a signed first edition of Nabokov’s Lolita. It took years of losing great books before I quickened both my reaction time and draw.

  Over time, I became acquainted with the odd assortment of human fauna that compose the most often glimpsed inhabitants of a used-book store. It is a withdrawn subspecies of marsupials, nocturnal by both inclination and habit, who drift through the high branches of the book world. They tend to be harmless creatures not automatically drawn to chatterboxes like me. Out of habit, I would begin conversations with them that they would cut off in midsentence, also out of habit. The “coffee man” would come in once or twice a day to avail himself of the free coffee Cliff handed out to his customers. Though the coffee man was addled and unwashed and homeless, he struck a curious figure with me. He had a long key chain that he decorated with discarded bottle openers and house keys he would find as he searched through the trash cans of the city on his morning run. Not once in the twenty years we knew him did he utter a word to Cliff or me, but his solitude intrigued both of us and we could never agree whether we were invisible to the coffee man or he was simply buried alive in his own private world. His key chain would jingle when he walked, so I always heard him coming to look for me. Without saying a word or putting out his hand, he would wait for me to put some money on a bookcase near me. I would lay a one or a five or a ten before him. He would take the money, and I could hear him walk down the main hallway to the front door. If Cliff would allow it, he would sometimes consume a whole pot of coffee while standing guard at the coffee machine. He never looked at a single book, nor uttered a single word. When he stopped appearing, Cliff and I assumed he was dead. He was never heard from again. On occasion, when drinking a cup of coffee together, Cliff and I will toast the coffee man.

  The bookstore could always provide a carousel of camouflaged tenants who would hide their bizarreness or social discomforts behind the shields of discarded books. For many of them, books were the lifelines to unbearable lives. They used Cliff’s store as a travel agency that specialized in both disguise and escape.

  In my drifting among the stacks of the Old New York Book Shop I would meet hundreds of people in search of that single book that would provide certainty as they looked to move ahead in troubled, dreamless lives. I met a pale, ethereal man who had exquisite taste in both literature and rare books, and he would entertain me with his shy but accomplished monologues on the works of Milton or T. S. Eliot. His intelligence was scholarly and precise, yet noticeably passionate when speaking of an unknown work of some obscure Romantic poet. He had developed an unswerving devotion to Algernon Swinburne and could recite sections of his poetry that made the language glitter in its stream of polished and opaline words. Cliff dimmed my affection for the starry-eyed man when he told me that my poetry-reciting friend, David, was one of the biggest shoplifters in Atlanta. Periodically, Cliff would banish him from the shop but David would come back, settle his accounts, and beg for reinstatement in a world that he couldn’t live without. Later I would find rare illuminated books from old London publishing houses in the pet or travel sections and bring them up for Cliff to put under lock and key again. If you were scrupulous and patient in the hunt, you could find treasures that David had squirreled away in corners all over the store. I discovered a rare copy of The Canterbury Tales beside a diet book for pregnant women.

  When I took over the shop for Cliff one day when he had a doctor’s appointment, David stole the rarest book in the shop even though I didn’t take my eyes off him a single time. His skills were so effortless that I became a fan of his uncanny aptitude for theft. Later, when David quit coming to the shop, we heard that he went off to die of AIDS, ashamed of his gayness and what his family’s reaction to it might be. He never went to a doctor for treatment but simply retired from the world to die among his lovely, well-selected, and stolen collection of books. His taste in literature was impeccable, and he told me he had never owned a single copy of one of my books and had no intention of ever buying one. When I knew our friendship was on solid footing, David told me, “I wouldn’t even steal one of your books, Conroy.”

  It delighted him to make me laugh, and Cliff and I always wished he’d let us help him during the cruel solitude of his death.

  Whenever Cliff left me to run the store, I could read a book deeply and with no concern for the passage of time. Over the years I’d gotten to know the regulars well and could even tell them if a new shipment of books in their specialty had arrived. In one of the first times I was running the store, an unprepossessing man with timorous eyes entered. He was looking for Cliff, and I told him that Cliff was having a drink with a cousin who had missed a plane at the airport.

  “Can I help you instead?” I asked.

  “Do you have any books on the torture and execution of Jews?” he said, looking around to observe whether he’d been overheard. “I collect books on the torture and execution of Jews.”

 
“What a delightful hobby,” I said. “Beat it, sir. And don’t come back unless you hear we get a shipment of shin-bones from Treblinka.”

  When Cliff bawled me out for insulting a customer, I protested that I enjoyed throwing the creep out and would do it again if I had the chance. Cliff then explained to me the nature of obsession and the peculiar habits or areas of interest that could stimulate men and women to pay him real cash. Of course, the man was an anti-Semite in the worst way, but there was no law against human stupidity. His real specialty was his belief that Jewish merchants had intermarried with Indian women as they traveled by the back roads between Atlanta and Savannah in the early days of the colony. These liaisons between Jews and women of the Cherokee nations resulted in American Jews having noticeable Asiatic tendencies.

  “Okay,” I said, “so the village dimwit thinks Jews have Asiatic tendencies because they mated with Pocahontas. What’s that got to do with torturing Jews?”

  Cliff said, “Hey, he’s branching out. He’s showing some intellectual growth. He’s going to think I hired Elie Wiesel to run my cash register.”

  At a later time, I was manning the desk while reading Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill, and growing impatient with the play because I wanted it to be better than it was. I selected all my books for the possibility of some flare of candles along the road toward illumination or enchantment. Often the bookstore frustrated me when my own vast pools of ignorance made me pass by books that contained the real hard stuff I needed to make me dive deeper into the drop-offs in my own imagination. Though I was reading O’Neill’s most accomplished play, he wore me down in gloomy rain forests of dialogue that seemed both exhausting and fruitless. But the moment froze when the front door opened and three large, muscle-bound men walked into the store like an offensive line breaking out of a huddle. The largest man signaled someone outside in a limousine and a lithe, watchful young man with a terrific hat and expensive sunglasses entered the store. When he asked me a question, he appeared shy as a mollusk.