I do stay in my mother’s house, my boyhood home, whenever I visit. In recent years the downstairs has been gradually taken over by dolls. There are dolls on the mantel, in glass cabinets, on shelves, on the floor. Many are of Shirley Temple; one—which might actually be worth something—is a two-foot-tall Princess Diana in her wedding dress. Other than my mother’s dolls, the rest of the ground floor had been decorated, until recently, in Home Nursing Care. Accent items included boxes of adult diapers, catheters, trays of meds and skin creams, a hospital bed, a Hoyer lift, and a folding wheelchair.
As you might imagine, my emotions are complicated when I visit. Now that my mother isn’t using my old ground-floor bedroom, I’ve taken to staying in it again. Half a century ago my father built this “addition,” largely because the house only had two bedrooms upstairs and I was growing too old to share one of them with my sisters. My mother, in the way of mothers, eventually decorated this room—after I’d left—with pictures of me and framed newspaper articles about the honors that have come my way, mainly due to hard work and luck rather than any exceptional talent. Still, it’s all a little embarrassing. My middle sister, Pam, regularly razzes me about the “shrine.”
These days, lying in bed, I can again look up at the wall shelves my father installed for my youthful book collection. Many of the original books are gone—they’re in a basement in Silver Spring—but others are still here. In the mornings, waiting to find the energy to face another day, I sometimes scan the titles that remain: Roy Rogers and Dale Evans in River of Peril, The Silken Baroness Contract, How to Make More Money, Essentials of Marxism, Litterature Comparée: L’Etude des Thèmes. Throughout my adolescence, I would study in this room after supper, then read for hour after hour, until my mother, in her old nightgown, would pad down the stairs and say, “Mikey, it’s 2 o’clock in the morning. Go to sleep.”
In very rare, Gatsbyish moments I sometimes think, “Well, boy, you’ve come a long way.” But most of the time, when I gaze upon my beloved mother in her wheelchair or stand at my father’s grave, I just tend to grow thoughtful, which is a slightly more genteel way of saying depressed. I miss my young parents. I miss the boy I used to be. Leon Trotsky, no less, once said: “Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.”
In fact, I even miss this down-at-heels steeltown. Looking out from the McDonald’s in which I’m writing, I can just make out the site of the old branch library, once an integral part of the Lorain Plaza Shopping Center. For years I’d ride my bike over every week or two, browse through the old-fashioned bookcases, then check out The Mysterious Island or Atlas Shrugged or A Shropshire Lad. Of course, that branch library is long gone, replaced first by a Radio Shack, then a cell-phone store. It’s now a second-rate pizza joint, just waiting to become a Dollar General.
Sigh. Since adolescence one of my favorite poems has been Ernest Dowson’s “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae.” This is the one with the famous line, “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.” Its Latin title can be roughly paraphrased and severely shortened to: “Things aren’t as good as they used to be.” Driving home after spending an evening with my mother, I wonder: Is there a room in a nursing home waiting for me? How many good years do I have left? . . . As my father used to say: “Live fast.”
In fact, I’ve lived slow, dithered and dallied, taken my own sweet time, and done pretty much what I’ve repeatedly done ever since my mother first taught me to read so long ago: Found a quiet spot and opened a book. When I turned 50 I remember thinking that just maybe I should have spent fewer hours in libraries and more drunken nights in dives and honky-tonks. Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll never know.
Still, just the other day I noticed The Golden Argosy on my old bookshelves. I discovered this anthology of stories at the age of 12 or 13—it is, I recently learned, one of Stephen King’s favorite books. Of its many great selections, my own rather tell-tale favorite was Joseph Conrad’s “Youth.” Half a century later, I can still remember when I first read its carefully cadenced, if syntactically challenging, final sentences, among the greatest dying falls of English literature:
“‘But you here—you all had something out of life: money, love—whatever one gets on shore—and, tell me, wasn’t that the best time, that time when we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks—and sometimes a chance to feel your strength—that only—what you all regret?’
“And we all nodded at him: the man of finance, the man of accounts, the man of law, we all nodded at him over the polished table that like a still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone—has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash—together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions.”
Mencken Day
Last Saturday my wife and I drove up to Baltimore for Mencken Day. This is the annual celebration, held at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, honoring Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), our country’s most famous, or notorious, journalist, the self-appointed scourge of the philistines.
During the day’s festivities, a morning session is devoted to a meeting of The Mencken Society, with a speaker, and the afternoon to the annual Mencken Memorial Lecture. Last year I pronounced the afternoon talk, my subject being “The Literary Journalist in the Age of H. L. Mencken.” I focused mainly on the Chicago bookman Vincent Starrett, the Saturday Review of Literature columnist Christopher Morley, and, just in passing, that long-lived man of letters and Book-of-the-Month Club judge, Clifton Fadiman.
Last year, being flattered to have addressed the Mencken Society, I felt that the least I could do was join it. Just as rich people congregate at country clubs and crackpots form secret societies, I seem to gravitate to small and specialized literary groups to which I contribute annual dues and occasionally lend somewhat more active support. Some of these organizations, honoring Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Sherlock Holmes, were mentioned in an earlier column. Besides these, I once belonged to the Tilling Society, an association for admirers of E. F. Benson’s comic Lucia novels, and plan to rejoin the Friends of Arthur Machen, devotees of the multi-talented author best known for his supernatural fiction, notably The Great God Pan and “The White People,” the latter one of the genre’s supreme masterpieces. I am also proud to be a member of much larger entities such as the Mystery Writers of America and the Science Fiction Writers of America.
It nonetheless surprises me that I’ve become involved, however minimally, with all these associations and sodalities. For most of my life, I’ve regarded myself as a non-joiner, suspicious of any sort of collective behavior or corporate bonhomie. It was a source of pride that my college, Oberlin, prohibited fraternities and sororities. Every sort of Rotarian glad-handing appalls me. Crowds tend to oppress my spirits. I identify with Kipling’s “Cat that walked by himself.”
And, yet, I’ve discovered, you have to get out, you do need to see other human beings. You can’t just read and write all day, much as I’d like to. After a few hours in a chair, my body grows achy, my brain feels even mushier than usual, my tired eyes start to hurt. To refresh myself I usually go for a walk, or, if I’m feeling virtuous and resolute, I’ll hike over to the gym to lift weights or run on the treadmill. At other times, I just change my workplace, often heading to the library—where I’m typing now—simply to be surrounded by other people while I read or write. It’s somehow relaxing to hear patrons asking about recorded books, or glimpse high-school students quietly flirting.
Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I took to polishing chapters of my dissertation late at night in a local McDonald’s. It should have been distracting, as truckers, prostitutes and police officers dropped by after midnight for coffee or Big Macs. It wasn’t. I remember feeling astonishingly s
erene, with my three-ring binder of notes and the 300-page rough draft of my analysis of Stendhal’s autobiographical La Vie de Henry Brulard.
Did I know then that Bertolt Brecht liked to write his plays in rooms filled with people, in effect, at parties? He felt it kept him connected with his audience. I was certainly aware that Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and all the other existentialists scribbled their treatises and novels and poems over cups of espresso at the Café de Flore or La Rotonde. The air here in the library is fresh, and the susurration of low voices surprisingly restful, a background hum like that produced by those white-noise sleep machines. Of course, I always feel happy in libraries and bookstores. They restoreth my soul.
My affiliation with literary sodalities provides a similar kind of R and R. I love the bookish shoptalk. Being around collectors and passionate readers, whether of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or the Tarzan books or the Voyages Extraordinaires, is exhilarating. I get caught up in other people’s enthusiasm for their favorite authors. Before I know it, I’m daydreaming about spending a winter reading all of Burroughs or Horatio Alger Jr., or of collecting the Hetzel editions of Jules Verne, or of writing a study of classic children’s authors.
After the morning lecture, by H. George Hahn on Mencken’s satire, Marian and I had a little time before lunch, so we visited the impressive Basilica of the Assumption across the street from the Pratt library: If the Shakers or Zen Buddhists were to design a Catholic cathedral, it might look like this—plain white walls and fixtures, an elegant dome, brilliant natural sunlight streaming in, a design of classical simplicity and clarity. After one awed glance, my wife immediately murmured that the church might almost be the work of Benjamin Latrobe, the architect of the Capitol. As it turned out, it was.
We stayed for the afternoon talk, in which Richard Schrader revealed how slanted and inaccurate Mencken’s account of the Scopes evolution trial had been, and afterwards chatted a bit over cookies and punch with some members of the Mencken Society and a young guy who turned out to be chairman of the North American Discworld Convention. He reminded me that the con—a celebration of the fantasy fiction of Terry Pratchett—would be in Baltimore next year. I suspect I’ll be there. [I was.] How can I resist becoming involved with yet one more specialized literary group? Besides, I’ve loved Pratchett ever since I read his novel about a Discworld newspaper with, due to a misprint, the perfect motto: “The Truth Will Make You Fret.”
New and Old
The other day a friend casually remarked that most of the books in what might be called my library probably came to me as freebies. I answered that that wasn’t true at all, that perhaps 10 percent had originated as review copies. In fact, just this morning, while groggily sipping my morning coffee, I scanned the nearest bookcase—built by yours truly some 30 years ago—and realized that on its six shelves, containing perhaps 150 books, only four of them weren’t purchased with my cold hard credit card.
Which four, you ask? The opening quartet of Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey-Stephen Maturin series. In fact, Norton sent me the entire uniform set, back when I reviewed The Commodore. (That novel, by the way, mentions a small boat called the Ringle, its name immortalizing Ken Ringle, a former Washington Post colleague and ardent sailor, who told O’Brian about Chesapeake Bay skipjacks.) The subsequent 15 volumes are in storage. To display them all would take up too much space, so I just keep out the early ones, against the day I might want to reimmerse myself in the salty waters of the Aubrey-Maturin adventures.
Before I came to Washington, I could fit all my books—and all my clothes, indeed everything I then owned—into a 1966 fire-engine red Chevy Impala. But once I arrived in our nation’s capital, I quickly discovered that the place bulged with secondhand books. With my friend David Streitfeld, now with The New York Times, I once visited every used bookstore in the metro area as part of a story for the Washington Post’s Weekend section. There were something like 60 all told. On top of this, there were gigantic annual book sales—Vassar, Brandeis, and Stone Ridge, in particular—and church sales and antiquarian book fairs and thrift shops and even people selling old books from blankets on the sidewalk. I once bought some novels by Carl Van Vechten from just such a guy, after noticing that all the books he displayed were by authors whose names began with V. He told me that when Loudermilk’s bookstore closed down, the fiction was auctioned off by letter and the hot letters—F and W, for instance—were out of his price range.
Before long, I was hammering together one wooden bookcase after another. Two years later my Macomb House apartment, around the corner from the Washington zoo, was lined with books, floor to ceiling. At least then everything was on a shelf, which is more than I can say today.
In those pre-Internet days, each week the postman would deliver one or two book catalogues. Mail-order houses, specialty dealers, remainder outlets, the Strand in New York—once you were on the mailing lists, many happy evenings could be spent sipping a glass of wine and checking off the titles of the books you’d like to buy, if only you had a bit more money. At some point, I even subscribed to AB Bookman’s Weekly, the journal of the secondhand trade, each issue proffering an article or two, a bit of publishing news, ads from dealers around the country highlighting new acquisitions, and, not least, a couple of dozen pages devoted to Books Wanted and Books for Sale.
Mostly I just daydreamed about all these out-of-reach treasures. One fateful afternoon, however, I finally screwed up my courage and actually ordered a collection of stories from the bookseller (and sf/fantasy author) Nelson Bond: it was Brass Knuckles, by Frank Gruber. Gruber was one of the 1930s Black Mask boys; his memoir The Pulp Jungle is fairly well known. Along with his hard-boiled fiction, though, he also produced a lighthearted series about Oliver Quade, a reference-book salesman who had memorized the encyclopedia and used his arcane knowledge to solve crimes. I’d read one or two of these Human Encyclopedia stories as a boy and loved them. Brass Knuckles collects them all and whatever I paid, it was cash well spent.
Soon I was buying books pretty readily, though I was still my mother’s son: a bargain-hunter. Then one day a catalogue arrived featuring a coveted title priced at the outrageous sum of $15. It was a first edition of Randall Jarrell’s A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. Back at college I had read to pieces my paperback of Jarrell’s famous collection Poetry and the Age. This was his second book of essays, one that had never been issued in softcover. Naturally, I had to have it, so I swallowed hard, sent Quill & Brush a check, and received back a small substantial package. When I finally made my way through multiple layers of padding and plastic wrap, I noticed that my new treasure’s dj was encased in some kind of protective cellophane or mylar. I soon learned that dust jackets, being fragile and susceptible to tears, needed their own jackets.
I read the Jarrell almost immediately—many of its pages lament the decline of reading—and the following weekend decided to visit Quill & Brush, then located in Olney, Maryland. Its genial owners, Allen and Pat Ahearn, told me how they had begun acquiring firsts back in their college days at the University of Maryland, eventually opening this shop. Allen worked at the Pentagon from Monday through Friday; Pat took care of their four kids; together they sold books on weekends, specializing in literary first editions. It was Allen who informed me that there were three important points to remember when buying a collectible book: condition, condition, condition.
Any wise collector who lives by that mantra will likely end up with a valuable library. But who can love and then be wise? Looking around this house, I seem to have opted for quantity over quality. Yet I should have known better, given that I eventually worked for Allen and Pat. When Quill & Brush moved to Bethesda, the Ahearns wanted to stay open at least one weekday evening, but who would mind the store? Why, who better than that nice young man with such a passion for books? So for six months, on Thursday from 6 till 9, I dusted the bookcases, filled a few back orders, occasionally even sold something. Naturally, I worked for trade-credit and wh
en traffic was slow, which it usually was, took to wandering among the shelves, pulling out titles, and slowly building up an understanding of “values.”
Thus, when one day in another bookstore I spotted a first of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, in a fine dust jacket and priced at $50, I didn’t hesitate to plunk down what was for me an ungodly sum. I knew the book was worth at least 10 times that. Today it would sell for several thousand dollars.
I know that because I just checked on AbeBooks. Since the rise of the Internet and sites like Abe and AddALL, book bargains are much harder to find, while titles once thought scarce have turned out to be fairly plentiful. Now, you can easily acquire almost anything with a keystroke, if you have the funds. But where’s the fun of that? Where’s the serendipity? The thrill of the hunt? As Terry Belanger, the retired head of Charlotteville’s Rare Book School, ruefully remarked: that’s not collecting, that’s shopping.
Well, yes and no. These days I tend to buy rather arcane books, usually older works of popular fiction from roughly 1870 to 1935. In the past I might have had to spend years searching for those titles in brick-and-mortar shops or hoped that someone would respond to my “Books Wanted” ad in AB Bookman’s Weekly. But in 2012 I can acquire what I need for various projects with relative ease and speed. Even Quill & Brush—relocated to the Ahearns’ home on Sugarloaf Mountain—now sells mainly online and through catalogues, only being open to the public by special arrangement. What’s more, most of their prices now start at $100. One thing never does change: the books you really covet always cost more than you want to pay for them. But, to borrow a phrase that women use of childbirth, the pain quickly vanishes when you finally hold that longed-for baby, or book, and know that it is yours forever.
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