Browsings

by Michael Dirda

  An hour later Chris texted me back that he was in class and couldn’t call and that he hadn’t gone to the movies the night before. I was relieved. His mother, with her usual sang-froid, had figured he was okay all along. His grandmother, however, broke down in tears, and it took a while before she recovered her composure. I reprimanded Chris for not letting us know he was safe sooner.

  But for an hour or two I experienced just a tiny fraction of the nightmare that so many families and friends went through that Friday morning, as they waited to find out about their loved ones. Throughout my own anxiety I kept saying to myself, “He’s sure to be okay,” but I kept envisioning a friend stopping Chris after class and saying, “Hey, dude, a bunch of us are going to the midnight showing of the new Batman movie. Want to come?” On an impulse, Chris just might have gone along. As it happened, there was no invitation, and even if he had decided to catch the film he would probably have headed to a different theater. But it so easily could have been otherwise.

  In that “otherwise” lies so much of the agony of the bereaved. Why? What if? Those impossible questions can never be answered, and yet they tear at our hearts. I don’t presume to comprehend the grief, the unbearable grief, of those who lost friends and children in Aurora, or those who will live with the memory and wounds, physical and emotional, of that night. My mother is 89, and she will die one of these days, and I will be heartbroken. Yet this is the natural, the expected order of things: the old die, parents die. But not the young, not one’s teenaged children, not like this.

  In an editorial the other day my Washington Post colleague E. J. Dionne called wearily for reform to our gun laws. Such pleas have been going on for decades now. But somehow the National Rifle Association’s lobbyists and supporters manage to override all common sense. It’s an outrage. Semi-automatic weapons sold to 24-year-olds? Bullets bought freely over the Internet? Come on. We’re not talking single-action .22s or Red Ryder BB guns. These days almost anyone can readily acquire what are, in essence, weapons of mass destruction.

  There’s an old story by the science fiction writer Fredric Brown. A stranger—possibly a visitor from the future—tries to persuade a scientist, on the brink of inventing the atom bomb or some similar doomsday weapon, to give up his research. The scientist argues that his work is pure; he is pursuing knowledge for its own ends. As it happens, this great genius has a beloved, but mentally handicapped child, who is playing in the next room. After the visitor leaves, unsuccessful in his mission, the father looks in on his son, who is fingering a new toy. Appalled, the scientist thinks: “Only a madman would give a loaded revolver to an idiot.” Today, alas, we could say with even greater truth: “Only an idiot would give a loaded revolver to a madman.”

  Enough. We all mourn for those whose lives were ended or shattered in Aurora, at Virginia Tech, at Columbine—and who knows where next. But it will happen again. Unless guns are more closely regulated in this country, and anything more destructive than a hunting rifle restricted to the police or the armed forces, sooner or later we will all read the same horrible headlines once more. Only the faces will differ, only the death counts will be new.

  [Note: On December 14, 2012, only a few months after I wrote the above, twenty very young children and six adults were shot to death in Newtown, Connecticut at Sandy Hook Elementary School.]

  Out of Print

  As readers grow older, their tastes often become more rarefied, more refined, more recherché. Certainly mine have. These days I gravitate increasingly to books almost no one else has heard of, let alone is interested in, books that are odd and quirky and usually out of print.

  Simultaneously, I’ve also come to feel that if I don’t write about a book in a review or essay, then I haven’t actually read it. Gathering my thoughts, outlining an author’s argument, framing a few apt quotations, trying to make inchoate impressions coherent—all these activities give substance to my experience of a work, make it real in a way that “reading” alone doesn’t.

  So given 1) this liking for the obscure and 2) my desire to write about what I’ve read, you may 3) glimpse my problem. Most literary publications don’t publish essays, no matter how enthusiastic, about fiction or nonfiction that is out of print or otherwise unavailable. But suppose you want, as I do, to write about T. S. Stribling’s satirical fantasy These Bars of Flesh, or Cutcliffe Hyne’s Atlantis novel The Lost Continent, or Stella Benson’s Living Alone, or Leonard Merrick’s The Man Who Understood Women, or J. A. Mitchell’s Life’s Fairy Tales, or Amanda Ros’s famously godawful Irene Iddlesleigh or any number of other worthwhile books that have fallen off our 21st-century radar. What can you do?

  Usually, I just wait and hope that a small press or paperback house will reprint a book that interests me. For instance, by labeling them reviews, I could rhapsodize recently about William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, J. R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday, and G. B. Edwards’s The Book of Ebenezer LePage—all these reissued in handsome paperbacks from New York Review Books. Occasionally, too, some wise editor will ask me to reintroduce a lost classic. Because of a Barnes and Noble line of “rediscoveries,” I was able to write short appreciations of Stendhal’s Memoirs of Egotism, George Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets, and Anthony Burgess’s ABBA ABBA. Specialized publishers by their very nature often seek out the lost and neglected. Tartarus Press generously invited me to contribute a foreword to Tales of Love and Death, a volume of Robert Aickman’s wonderfully “strange” stories. A few years back, Night Shade Press requested introductions to the fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith and to Lord Dunsany’s tall tales about Joseph Jorkens. Barbara and Christopher Roden solicited a preface to an Ash-Tree Press collection of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short supernatural fiction. I remain immensely grateful for these opportunities.

  But will the chance ever come to write about Vincent McHugh’s fantasy I Am Thinking of My Darling (in which people lose all moral constraints) or William Plomer’s The Diamond of Jannina: Ali Pasha, 1741-1822 (once praised for its author’s prose style by Edmund White), or the four Great Merlini mysteries of Clayton Rawson (who grew up in Elyria, Ohio, eight miles from my hometown of Lorain), or the historical swashbucklers of Stanley Weyman, or G.B., by W. F. Morris, once selected by Eric Ambler as one of the five best spy novels of all time? Who knows?

  As you can guess, I own all these books. They have been patiently gathered over the years, though I have often been guided by knowledgeable friends. For instance, Mark Valentine, editor of the journal Wormwood: Writings About Fantastic, Supernatural and Decadent Literature, recommended G.B. (also known as Bretherton). Bob Eldridge, whom I mentioned in the recent column about Readercon, suggested that I look into the work of Clemence Dane, Gerald Bullett and Martin Armstrong. He himself introduced a welcome reissue of Emma Dawson’s supernatural fiction An Itinerant House. Tolkien scholar Douglas Anderson, who runs a blog called “Lesser Known Writers,” urged me to try David Lindsay’s gigantic fantasy Devil’s Tor, currently available only through a print-on-demand publisher. Of course, most book sections don’t review POD publications. While I’ve written about Lindsay’s famous A Voyage to Arcturus, will I ever find a venue in which to explore Devil’s Tor? Or Maurice Baring’s Daphne Adeane or the novels of Claude Farrère or T. F. Powys’s Mr. Weston’s Good Wine or Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew?

  There is one possibility. . . .

  Let this be fair warning: It may come about that I will, from time to time, interrupt the usual personalia and literary musings of “Browsings” to present, instead, a little essay about some odd or forgotten volume that has caught my attention and deserves yours. I hope you won’t mind such occasional pieces. Indeed, I hope you’ll enjoy them.

  [Note: I never really followed through on this threat or promise. But I have written, and continue to write, about neglected books quite frequently and hope, some day, to collect some of these essays. Others may be repurposed for my current project, a study of popular fiction during the lat
e 19th and early 20th centuries.]

  Thrift Stories

  Last Saturday morning I visited Antiques Row in Kensington, Maryland, my mission being to accompany my wife to the farmers’ market there. But as my Beloved Spouse began to check out the organic produce and baked goods, I naturally enough wandered away to the Prevention of Blindness thrift store across the street. I believe I whistled as I did so, and my step was jaunty.

  I am something of an aficionado of thrift stores. In my youth, I regularly searched their shelves for old books. In fact, Clarice’s Values in my hometown of Lorain, Ohio, supplied a sizable portion of my early reading matter. There I bought science fiction and mystery paperbacks for a nickel apiece and sometimes unearthed finds such as the second American printing of Ulysses. A price of 45 cents was scribbled on its front endpaper with a crayon, but I may have talked Clarice down from that. Once, in a fit of utter madness, I purchased a complete set of the novels of Sir Walter Scott for $5. Getting them home—I was a 15-year-old on a bicycle—was, shall we say, challenging.

  Here in D.C., the major secondhand emporiums—Goodwill, Value Village, and their ilk—only seem to stock fairly recent bestsellers, cookbooks, and the complete works of James Patterson. In short, the sort of titles they feel are “salable.” I, by contrast, am mainly interested in books published before I was born, largely by authors who are now virtually forgotten. What I like to see on bookcases or steel shelves are lots of pre-World War II fiction, most of it looking just slightly better than shabby.

  Despite my rather eclectic taste, one fateful day, at the Georgia Avenue Thrift Shop, I couldn’t find a single book of interest and so decided to look around the rest of the store. For some reason I meandered down a row of men’s shirts, just fingering them idly until I noticed a half dozen dressy ones in a row. They were obviously by the same maker and two were white, two were cream, and two were blue. I soon observed three further salient details: 1) the shirts had French cuffs; 2) the initials LES were stitched just above the holes for the left-sleeve cufflink; and 3) they had been made in France by a company called Charvet.

  I knew nothing then about men’s fashion or tailoring, but I could tell that these elegant garments were a cut above your ordinary J.C. Penney’s wash-and-wear. They were also my size—15 1/2 neck, 33-inch sleeve—and each was marked $2. Since I bought all six the cashier let me have the lot for 10 bucks. Through the wonders of my computer search engine—this was before Google was ubiquitous—I learned that my new acquisitions were quite exceptionally good shirts. Expensive shirts. In fact, the kind of shirts that Gatsby would keep in his closet to impress Daisy Buchanan. As a result, on those rare occasions when I’m invited to a classy dinner or semiformal event, I tend to wear one of these Charvets. People sometimes ask about the monogram LES on my cuff, since they’re obviously not my initials. Putting on a conspiratorial air, I quietly hint that Michael Dirda is just one of many names I use and that there’s far more to my life than just sitting at a keyboard writing book reviews and columns for The American Scholar. If only.

  But every blessing, it’s been said, is also a curse, and today I’m not entirely sure that my discovery of those designer shirts was an entirely good piece of luck. Mine is not a temperate nature. A little too much is just enough for me.

  I soon started to read GQ and Esquire, acquired copies of the complete works of Alan Flusser, the leading authority on men’s clothes, studied websites like Will Boehlke’s “A Suitable Wardrobe” (very upmarket) and Giuseppe Timore’s exceptionally lively “An Affordable Wardrobe.” At the same time I took to stopping by thrift stores everywhere, seeking other ritzy garments at bargain prices. I now own enough shirts from Thomas Pink, Burberry, and Brooks Brothers to outfit a Wall Street brokerage house or major law firm. My attic is packed tight with suits by Armani, Brioni, and Canali, as well as the rest of the alphabet, all the way down to Zegna. There are vintage J. Press jackets, cashmere sweaters galore, and a collection of shoes that the late Imelda Marcos would have envied—though none of mine boast stiletto heels.

  Had I begun this “hobby” 20 years ago, I might be able to justify or at least rationalize this sartorial excess. But do I now go to an office every day? No. Do I attend lots of fancy parties and receptions? No. Do I work as a banker or professional escort to women of a certain age? No. Do I really need more than three or four good suits and the same number of sport jackets? No.

  This past spring I loved teaching at the University of Maryland in part because I could dress up for class. I didn’t repeat an outfit the entire semester. The only other time I tend to wear a jacket and tie—did I mention my tie and pocket square collection?—is when I give a talk. And even then I often feel overdressed. Authors these days are expected to wear jeans, work shirts, and a ratty blue blazer.

  Having three sons—now all in their 20s—I’ve been able to pass along some of my thrift shop treasures. But my strapping offspring are taller and skinnier than I am, so a lot of my “pieces” don’t work for them. But I’m happy knowing that if they need to be dressed up, they own the clothes to do it with.

  Friends tell me that I should sell the designer suits and Sulka ties on eBay. That sounds like a lot of work—taking pictures, figuring out measurements, packing and shipping, keeping records. Once I did try a consignment shop, which took some of the better jackets and suits, sold half of them, and never paid me a penny. The check was always in the mail.

  No, I suppose that what I’ll do is reseed the thrift stores of greater Washington. One of these days some idealistic young bookworm will be browsing through Value Village, on the lookout for a first edition of The Great Gatsby, and instead he’ll come across some Charvet shirts. . . . There won’t be six of them, though. I’m keeping at least two, maybe three, just in case I’m asked to the White House for a long weekend.

  Musical Chairs

  Last week I mentioned a visit to the Prevention of Blindness thrift shop in Kensington, Maryland. Doesn’t ring a bell, you say? Well, let’s just note that attentive students of this column, men and women of intelligence, refinement, and exceptional good looks, will recall that I had escaped from the local farmers’ market to seek out more substantial treasures than whole wheat bread and organic squash, just the kind of treasures, in fact, that St. Matthew warns us against storing up on this earth and that are prey to moth and rust.

  Somehow this led to a column about Charvet shirts and thrift stores.

  As it happens, I didn’t buy any clothes at the Prevention of Blindness shop—oh, okay, I couldn’t resist a green Richel tie with ducks on it—but I did pick up a dozen compact discs. Each was a dollar, and many were obviously the former property of a Maria Callas fan. But why had he—Callas fans tend to be he—divested himself of the diva’s repertory? Was he (or possibly she) now worshipping at the feet of Renée Fleming or Angela Gheorghiu? There was Maria Callas: Live in Milan 1956 and Athens 1957, as well as several operas: Madama Butterfly, Lucia di Lammermoor, Carmen.

  While I left a good many other CDs that I already owned, I still brought home Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater (with The Sixteen, under Harry Christophers), Leonard Bernstein conducting Favorite Russian Spectaculars, Puccini’s Turandot with Birgit Nilsson, Renata Tebaldi and Jussi Björling (my favorite tenor), an album of Elizabethan songs called Shakespeare’s Kingdom, featuring mezzo-soprano Sarah Walker and pianist Graham Johnson, Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète, performed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Jukka-Pekka Saraste, and Michael Tilson Thomas conducting Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing and Let ’em Eat Cake.

  Good music, all of it, and cheap. Which is the disturbing part. Compact discs are clearly on the way out.

  It wasn’t so long ago—25 or 30 years—that CDs first appeared and began to oust vinyl records and audio cassettes as the preferred medium for serious music. For me, this development was a real boon. In my younger days I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only r
arely was I able to find the money for such luxuries. I do know that the first opera I ever owned—I still have it—was Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the classic performance with a star-studded cast under the baton of Carlo Maria Giulini.

  But once CDs, supposedly unscratchable and permanent, entered the market, collectors began to dump their vinyl. You could buy an opera for a few dollars, readily pick up multiple versions of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique or the Brahms violin concerto, find spoken-arts rarities like Charles Laughton reading stories from the Bible—no one ever forgets his performance of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in “the burning fiery furnace”—or even acquire the original Broadway cast performance of Waiting for Godot. As my old car’s sound system only played cassettes, I also snatched up lots of cassettes, usually for a quarter apiece. I found taped lectures from The Teaching Company deaccessioned at the local library, heart-breaker collections of Patsy Cline, Lorrie Morgan, and Reba McEntire, the unabridged Lolita read by Jeremy Irons.

  As a result, my LPs soon overflowed their shelves, and the cassettes filled up entire plastic bins. Worse still, I gradually began to be lured into acquiring compact discs. Used bookshops sometimes stocked secondhand CDs, and I started to trade glossy hardbacks for irresistible boxed sets of Ella Fitzgerald singing the American Songbook and Mitsuko Uchida playing the Mozart piano sonatas. When the CDs needed more space, more and more of the vinyl and tape migrated into the basement.