And then one day my kids began to download music from the Internet. Before long they wanted iPods and iPod docks as Christmas gifts. As usual, I didn’t notice the writing on the wall and blithely went on buying cheap records, tapes, and CDs. Champagne culture on a beer budget—what could be better?
Still, when music that once cost 20 dollars a disc is selling for a buck, you shouldn’t need an angelic hand to write “Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin” to realize that the days of the CD are numbered.
Which they obviously are. But I’m not sure I’ll be making the switch to downloaded music (or downloaded books, for that matter). My much-missed Book World colleague Reid Beddow used to say, “The old ways are best,” and part of me certainly believes this about records. If you bought Cimarosa’s Il Matrimonio Segreto or Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, it once came in a substantial box, with a full libretto in multiple languages. Sometimes there was even a score, as well as a booklet with an essay on the opera and its composer, pictures of the performers and conductor, brief biographies and discographies of everyone involved. The cover of the boxed set might reproduce a painting, perhaps something by Fragonard or Watteau. Every aspect of this lavishness announced that this was an important work of music, deserving one’s care, attention, love, and money.
No more. Audiotape and compact discs started to reduce this extra-musical richesse. And now we’re down to the bare bones: You simply press a button on your MP3 player and the music begins. It’s easy, it’s convenient. You want more information—look online. But hasn’t just a bit of the magic, something of the beauty and aura of the performance disappeared? I think so.
Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Even now I keep a few vinyl albums in frames, and not just for the gorgeous covers, though, I must admit, one features a portrait of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf looking more glamorous than Greta Garbo, and another, of Erich Korngold’s music for The Sea Hawk, shows two great sailing ships closing for combat. Most of all, though, I still play the records and CDs in my collection, and sometimes even my audio tapes. The old ways may not always be best, but they still work for me.
The Evidence in the (Book) Case
Readers of crime novels know that much can be determined about victims or suspected murderers by taking notice of the titles on their bookshelves. A copy of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics with underlinings on the page devoted to toxic alkalis may generally be construed as a dead giveaway. Bound volumes of Soldier of Fortune magazine might similarly hint that there might be more to the victim—supposedly a pacifist vegetarian Buddhist—than just yogic meditation.
You can tell a lot about a writer, too, from the books stacked on his or her nightstand, or strewn on the floor next to the bed. Or can you? To test this theory, I’m going to list—in no particular order—some of the bookish items I keep close to my pillow for late-night browsing. Most of these fall loosely under the category of reference works and anthologies.
Wodehouse Nuggets, selected by Richard Usborne. Quotations from the Master: “As he reached the end of the carpet and was about to turn about and pace back again, he stopped abruptly with one foot in the air looking so much like The Soul’s Awakening that a seasoned art critic would have been deceived.”
ABC for Book Collectors (Fifth edition), by John Carter. More a series of witty mini-essays than just a lexicon of bibliographical terms. “Sophisticated: This adjective, as applied to a book, is simply a polite synonym for doctored or faked-up.”
The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, by E. F. Bleiler. An expert on Victorian and early 20th-century science fiction, fantasy, and horror, Bleiler offers capsule summaries and brief judgments on hundreds of novels and tales of the supernatural. Of E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, he succinctly concludes: “Still the finest heroic fantasy.” One of the great works of one-man scholarship.
The Faber Popular Reciter, selected by Kingsley Amis; Famous Poems from Bygone Days and Best Remembered Poems, both edited by Martin Gardner. Three volumes of the kind of old-fashioned poetry that people used to declaim in church halls and under the Chautauqua tents: “Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,/Make me a child again just for tonight!” (Elizabeth Akers Allen)
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, by Diana Wynne Jones. A dictionary of the “idées reçues” of fantasy fiction, set down by one of the genre’s finest authors: “Alleys are the most frequent type of Road in a City or Town. They are always narrow and dark and squishy, and they frequently dead-end. You will escape along them when pursued and also be Ambushed there.”
The Pléiade edition of Voltaire’s Romans et Contes. As Somerset Maugham once said, if you would write perfectly, you would write like Voltaire.
Quotable Sherlock, compiled by David W. Barber: “You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.” Quotable Alice, compiled by David W. Barber: “‘And what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’”
A Catalogue of Crime, by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor. An annotated listing of detective fiction and true-crime nonfiction. Idiosyncratic and provocative—the authors favor the classic puzzle rather than modern ultra-violence—but no less magisterial for that. One favorite recommendation: The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, a “true-crime” masterpiece by that specialist in the locked-room puzzle, John Dickson Carr.
Edward Gorey’s The Unstrung Harp and The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary: “Alice, quite exhausted, was helped to bed by Lady Celia’s French maid, Lise, whom she found delightfully sympathetic.”
Three omnibus volumes of Christmas Crackers: Quotations from the commonplace book of John Julius Norwich. I love commonplace books; the most recent entry in my own is from the photographer Alfred Stieglitz: “Nearly right is child’s play.”
Collected Books: The Guide to Identification and Values, by Allen and Patricia Ahearn (fourth edition); Guide to First Edition Prices, by R.B. Russell (8th edition). Whenever I browse in these pages and see what some modern firsts are going for, I realize I should take better care of my books.
The Hundred Headless Women and Une Semaine de Bonté, both by Max Ernst. Two exceptionally disturbing graphic novels by the great surrealist. Similar collagist masterpieces: E.V. Lucas and George Morrow’s lighthearted What A Life! and Tom Phillips’s touching A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (four editions, all different, all necessary).
An inscribed album of Gahan Wilson’s macabre cartoons. My favorite: several seedy, unshaven guys, sporting crooked haloes and dressed in dingy robes, are standing near a broken lopsided sign that reads, “Heaven.” One guy, clearly dismayed, says to his neighbor: “Somehow, I thought the whole thing would be a lot classier.”
Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days, by James and Kay Salter, who are two of my favorite people (and he is one of our finest writers). Each day brings its own short essay: January 3 is “Dinner with Lord Byron”; March 24, “Waiters”; May 23, “Michelin Guide”; December 22, “Candy Canes.”
Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, compiled by James Geary. “In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.”—Emerson; “God will forgive me. It’s his job.”—Heine.
The Gramophone Classical Music Guide (several editions). Should I try Simone Dinnerstein or Angela Hewitt in Bach’s Goldberg Variations? Or shall I just stick with Glenn Gould’s exceedingly slow, and immensely moving, 1981 recording?
The Englishman’s Room, edited by Alvilde Lees-Milne. Pictures—by Derry Moore—of libraries, studies and book-strewn living rooms, each accompanied by an essay: The stuff of Anglophile daydreams.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, et al.; The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute, John Grant, et al. The most intelligent literary reference books in the world.
The Literary Life: A Scrapbook Almanac of the Anglo-American Literary Scene from 1900 to 1950, by Robert Phelps and Peter Deane. Its p
rincipal author, Robert Phelps, was the first “literary man” I ever met—and the kindest and best.
The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Our anti-modern Voltaire.
Despite all these books being close at hand, I still tend to gravitate to specialized periodicals at bedtime. Some of my favorites include All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society; Wormwood: Literature of the Fantastic, Supernatural and Decadent; Locus, the trade magazine of science fiction and fantasy; The Baker Street Journal; Extraordinary Voyages: The Newsletter of the North American Jules Verne Society; Knight Letter, the magazine of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America; old issues of Million: The Magazine About Popular Fiction; and The Journal of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society.
Like many other people, I also find several Asian classics particularly restful late at night, especially the works of Chuang Tzu, Mencius, and Confucius. The Tao Te Ching, in particular, offers not only gnomic injunctions on how to live but at least one essential piece of advice for any writer: “Know when to stop.”
Charlottesville
A few weeks back I received, from out of the blue, an email from the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE). This isn’t, I should point out, a professional organization for cinematographers who specialize in the kind of movies shown at the Silverdocs festival of the American Film Institute. In fact, the ADE represents those learned folk who oversee great scholarly editions of, for instance, the papers of George Washington, the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the archives of Willa Cather.
Why were they emailing me?
It turns out that every two years the ADE awards the Boydston Prize for the best review or essay, “the primary focus of which is the editing of a volume of works or documents.” This year’s winner turned out to be—well, aw shucks—me. The award committee was quite taken with a long essay-review I’d written for The New York Review of Books comparing two annotated editions of The Wind in the Willows.
Need I say that I was incredibly chuffed (to use a British verb I’m fond of)? As Harriet Simon, editor of the John Dewey papers, generously said, the piece I wrote “gives the strengths of each edition but also points out such pitfalls as misreadings, misprinted citations, oversights, and bemoans the lack of critical attention to the book’s inner structure, especially its leitmotifs and verbal repetitions.”
When asked if I would come to the ADE’s annual convention to receive the award at the Friday night banquet, I immediately agreed. Happily, this only meant a two-and-a-half-hour drive to one of my favorite cities, Charlottesville, Virginia.
I arrived there at 2 P.M. on a Thursday, checked into a Budget Inn, and immediately set off for the city’s downtown pedestrian mall. Lined with shops and restaurants, packed with tourists searching for souvenirs and local teens just hanging out, it’s one of Cville’s main attractions. It is also the location for three used-bookstores, with two others not far away. All the shops are worth checking out, and two are especially strong in older science fiction and mysteries, but I beelined for the biggest, just off the mall on 4th St: Daedalus Books.
Three hours later I emerged, without buying anything.
To my surprise, the store closed at five, long before I had completed my systematic inspection of its labyrinthine fiction-rich basement. So I simply deposited a box of my selections at the front desk and promised to return the next morning. As I left, I asked if any of the other bookshops might still be open? Yes. Read It Again Sam didn’t close till eight.
So I passed another couple of hours there, and bought three books: The Other Passenger, by John Keir Cross, a 1946 collection of fantasy stories in a near-fine dust jacket; a Folio Society volume entitled Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, compiled by Joanna Richardson; and Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, by Christopher Frayling. This last, based on four BBC television programs, is a lovely picture book, with excellent chapters on Frankenstein, Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and The Hound of the Baskervilles. Years ago I reviewed Frayling’s terrific biography of filmmaker Sergio Leone, then later invited him to address the Sherlockians of The Baker Street Irregulars, which eventually made him a member.
That evening I got back to my motel around 8:30, quickly washed the book dust from my face, and then hurried across the street to an Italian eatery, where I devoured nearly all of a small deluxe pizza. Along with a cold beer. Why not? It had been a very good day.
Friday was even better. That morning I stopped at the Virginia Book Company, which was going out of business, and found on its half-emptied shelves a beautiful copy of A Desert Drama, the American title given to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Tragedy of the ‘Korosko.’ In this eerily contemporary novel, Middle Eastern terrorists kidnap a group of western tourists, intending to sell the younger women, including a recent American college graduate, into slavery and execute the men—unless they all convert to Islam. Will they? Can they? Sir Arthur works the suspense and the melodrama for all they’re worth.
Once I got back to Daedalus I bought the previous day’s books, along with a few more items unearthed that morning. One was a copy of a school novel called Decent Fellows, by an old Etonian named John Heygate, now remembered, if at all, for being the co-respondent in the shattering breakup of Evelyn Waugh’s first marriage. (Waugh said: “I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live.”) Then it was off to Heartwood, a used-book store located near the University of Virginia campus. I bought more books there—including a so-so first American edition of H. G. Wells’s In the Days of the Comet, which I later realized I already owned (albeit in an even more dilapidated condition). By this time, though, I found myself feeling increasingly guilty, seeing that it was the middle of the afternoon and I was really supposed to be at the Omni to listen in on some of the ADE panels.
I sauntered into the hotel’s lobby with perfect timing: one panel had just let out, people were standing around chatting over coffee and cake, and I was soon saying hello to Harriet Simon, who quickly introduced me to a half dozen of her colleagues. I caught the last panel of the afternoon—focusing on a governmental report on the needs of scholarly editors—and then had time to freshen up before the cocktail party and banquet.
At dinner I found myself seated with the officers of the ADE and several people who worked at either Monticello, the University of Virginia Press, or a special institute devoted to the Thomas Jefferson papers. Charlottesville is, of course, ever and always Mr. Jefferson’s town. Over conversation I discovered that one of my tablemates collected 19th-century “Boy’s Books,” in particular those series featuring the adventurous Rover Boys, Gunboat Boys, and similar daring youths. I couldn’t have asked for better company or conversation.
Halfway through the evening’s ceremonies I was presented with my plaque, as well as a small honorarium. When the banquet was over, many of my new friends were off to enjoy a nightcap at the hotel bar. But, alas, I couldn’t join them. My eldest son was arriving from Colorado that night, and the Dirda family was then leaving for two days at the beach. So, just as a violent thunderstorm hit, I drove out of Charlottesville, got lost, asked for directions, and gradually made my way to Washington, where the Beltway was backed up due to either an accident or construction, enough to convince a certain frustrated Boydston Prize-winner to drive off into mysterious northern Virginia at 1 A.M., get completely lost again, plaintively beg for directions at a 7-Eleven, and then finally grope his way back to Silver Spring, Maryland, center of civilization. If ever there was a driver who needed a GPS system, I am that driver.
On my little excursion, I obviously spent more money on books than I should have. ’Twas ever thus. But, hey, I was on “vacation,” away from my family and surrounded by bookstores I didn’t get to visit very often, so really, what else could I have done? Besides, my honorarium from the Boydston Prize almost exactly covered my book purchases. In fact, I came out ahead by a few dollars. Best of all, I’d met some fascinating people, learned a lot more about scholarly editing, and retu
rned home with a standing invitation to a private tour of Monticello.
Then and Now
A few days ago I arrived back in Lorain, Ohio—where I grew up—to spend some time with my mother, who now resides in a nursing home. Her mind is still sharp and she plays a mean game of 500 Rummy, but the after-effects of a stroke have kept her wheelchair bound and rendered her right hand useless. Once upon a time I sat in my mother’s lap, as she turned the pages of Golden Books and I gradually learned to read. These days I bring her children’s picture books, which we enjoy looking at together before she puts them aside as gifts for her first great-grandchild.
Every day when I walk through the hallways of this “long-term care facility,” I see rows of the aged, seated in their wheelchairs, with heads turtled down. Aside from weekly bingo, occasional ice cream socials, and makeshift church services, there’s simply not a whole lot for them to do. In general, the residents watch television and live from meal to meal: People start rolling themselves into the dining room a little after 4, even though dinner isn’t served until 5. Sometimes, in the evenings, I hear a screamer shrieking for help or find myself accosted by a pathetic weeping woman who wants me to take her home. One handsome if vacant-minded patient regularly raises an arm high above her wheelchair-throne to bestow a regal wave that Queen Elizabeth would envy. It’s all quite heartbreaking.
When I come to visit my Mom—every two or three months—I generally spend five or six hours with her each day. She’s always immensely glad to see me, her eldest child, her only son. My three younger sisters live in the area, and they stop by regularly, wash her clothes, bring her favorite foods. But it’s hard on the whole family. My mother’s savings are gone, she’s now on Medicaid, and later this fall the government will try to sell her house. The real estate market in this derelict steel town is, needless to say, pretty dismal. On my mother’s block alone several homes have been on the market for months, even years. Asking prices probably range around $40,000 or so. A house two doors away recently went for $25,000.
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