Who are some of the other authors I long to write about? Well, on the landing in the attic sits a box of the Chicago bookman Vincent Starrett’s fiction and nonfiction, both waiting for my attention. I owe a Canadian publisher, improbably called the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, an introduction to Starrett’s Born in a Bookshop. I’ve somehow accumulated all of the novels of Elizabeth Taylor—the English writer, not the actress—as well as Nicola Beauman’s biography, and one day would like to read them. All I know is that Taylor is frequently likened to Barbara Pym, which is good enough recommendation for me. A couple of years back I enjoyed Sylvia Townsend Warner’s correspondence with her New Yorker editor, William Maxwell, and now I seem to own a dozen of her books and feel, quite sheepishly, that I should have started on Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot long ago.
Then there’s Gerald Kersh, a versatile novelist still known for Night and the City, but whose macabre short stories, such as “Men Without Bones” and “The Queen of Pig Island,” are horrifically unforgettable. I’ve found good copies of Fowlers End and several of his other works. A step down in literary quality, but a step up in one-time popularity is Dennis Wheatley. Wheatley’s thrillers featured aristocratic good guys in battle with Satanic forces, those forces generally seeking to use beautiful young women in Black Masses or other hideous rituals. His most famous book is The Devil Rides Out, closely followed by To the Devil—a Daughter. Great stuff, plus there’s a terrific biography of the man himself by Phil Baker.
Is that all? By no means. That wisest of all science fiction writers, Barry Malzberg, recently suggested that I return to the work of Walter Tevis, whose two most celebrated novels became even more celebrated movies: The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth. My friend the late Tom Disch once told me that Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit—about an abused girl who discovers a profound talent for chess—was the best book he’d ever read about what it must feel like to be a genius.
As you can tell, I do like to listen to my friends and follow their advice. Brian Taves, an authority on early film, P. G. Wodehouse, and Jules Verne, is also an expert on the adventure novels of Talbot Mundy. He generously gave me a few reprints, and I’ve now bought several more, most recently an old first of The Nine Unknown. One day I will sit down and read Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley, King of the Khyber Rifles, Jimgrim, and maybe even the massive Tros of Samothrace.
We’re not done yet, far from it. I own the four thrillers by Clayton Rawson about the magician-detective The Great Merlini, including Death from a Top Hat and The Footsteps on the Ceiling, as well as his two short novels about Dan Diavalo. I’m already a fan of the locked-room whodunits of Rawson’s friend John Dickson Carr. In fact, the impossible crime has long been my favorite subgenre of the mystery. Of course, it’s but the tiniest of steps from the seemingly impossible to the genuinely supernatural, so I am also fond of psychic detectives and keep meaning to reread, and write something about, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, The Ghost-Finder, Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence stories, Kate and Hesketh Prichard’s The Experiences of Flaxman Low, and at least one notable contemporary example, The Collected Connoisseur, by Mark Valentine and John Howard.
But looking further around the house, I notice all these books by Freya Stark and Lesley Blanch about travels and adventures in the Middle East. I’ve got half a bookcase devoted to classic accounts of famous murders and notable British and American trials, including F. Tennyson Jesse on Madeleine Smith, Edmund Pearson on Lizzie Borden, William Roughead on Oscar Slater and many others, as well as four or five books by Rayner Heppenstall on the famous criminals of France. Last year David Bellos—biographer and translator of Georges Perec—sent me a copy of his life of Romain Gary, after which I began to pick up the novels of this former husband of both Lesley Blanch and actress Jean Seberg. One of these days I aim to set down my thoughts about time-travel stories, so I own seven or eight collections of these. Having serendipitously found a box of Dornford Yates’s clubman adventures at a yard sale, I eagerly await the right holiday to enjoy Berry and Co., Jonah and Co., Perishable Goods, and perhaps a few others. Oh yes, and I’ve also promised myself to read more of the works of Shakespeare’s great contemporary Ben Jonson.
Above all, though, I’ve accumulated lots of popular fiction from the period between 1875 and 1930. I still occasionally mull over my proposed project for a massive study called “The Great Age of Storytelling.” So there are short story collections here by May Sinclair and Marjorie Bowen, lost-race novels such as Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent and Gilbert Collins’s The Starkenden Quest, the principal swashbucklers of Stanley Weyman. And so much more. Much, much more.
Sigh. Perhaps my Beloved Spouse is right. While there’s definitely method to my madness, it may well be madness nonetheless.
Oberlin
Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Oberlin College, my alma mater. During the National Book Festival weekend, held on DC’s Mall in late September, I spent much of the gala on Friday night with novelist Marilynne Robinson. One of the pieces in her most recent essay collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books, is actually entitled “Who Was Oberlin?” (The short answer: John Frederick Oberlin was a saintly, civic-minded preacher in 19th-century Alsace.) Turns out that Robinson is a great admirer of those small, theologically grounded colleges that sprung up during the early-to-mid-19th century, and were led, as in the case of Oberlin, by men such as Charles G. Finney, the most electrifying speaker of his time. Portraits show a man with piercing eyes that really do seem to bore into your soul. Because of the strong convictions of its founders, Oberlin College became our country’s first coeducational institution of higher learning and the first to admit both black and white students. The place was, of course, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. The social and political activism of Oberlin in the 1960s—my era—grew from more than 100-year-old roots.
On Saturday at the book festival I got to talking with Tony Horwitz, whose latest book is Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War. He reminded me that many, if not most, of the men who rode with John Brown had graduated from or had connections with my old school. I actually knew this from having reviewed, a decade or more ago, Nat Brandt’s provocatively titled The Town That Started the Civil War. Brandt’s book focuses not just on Oberlin as an abolitionist stronghold and a stop on the Underground Railroad, but also describes in detail the 1858 “Wellington Rescue,” a key event in the lead-up to the Civil War, in which a band of Oberlinians marched to an adjoining village to free an escaped slave from bounty hunters.
Oberlin, I once remarked, fosters two kinds of people: artists and activists. My middle son, Mike, who graduated from the college in 2009, occasionally still wears a beloved T-shirt that reads: “Oberlin: Where dirty, crunchy hippies go to frolic.” At the same time, few if any liberal-arts colleges produce more graduates who go on to earn PhDs than this small institution, located—as the jokes have it—either in an Ohio cornfield or “somewhere in the middle of nowhere.”
I can remember when I first became aware of the college, or, to be more exact, of its celebrated sister institution, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. One day at Admiral King High School, in Lorain, Ohio, the students were ordered into the auditorium for an assembly. As my buddies and I sat restlessly in our chairs, probably playing rock-paper-scissors to pass the time, the stage was suddenly invaded by these scruffy older kids in blue jeans and baggy sweatshirts. They looked like 20th-century versions of the ragtag street urchins Sherlock Holmes used to employ, except that they strode across the polished wood of the stage carrying violins and clarinets, lugging cellos and French horns. After some momentary confusion, the group sat down on folding chairs, placed some sheet music on metal stands, and, with a nod, began to play the most beautiful music I had ever heard.
Many, many years later I got to know the pianist Eugene Istomin and his wife, Martita (whose first marriage had been to the very elderly Pablo Casals)
. At a particularly ritzy dinner party I remember telling Eugene that what I loved about Oberlin was the easy availability of music, the way it was integrated into one’s daily life. Student recitals at Warner Concert Hall might start at 7 or 7:30, so one could drop by on the way to Carnegie Library, slump in a seat, and listen to a friend play a Beethoven piano sonata, then go on to study for a couple of hours. You didn’t need to buy a ticket (except for the special visiting artists series), and you could wear flip-flops and a raggedy sweatshirt if you wanted.
Eugene could see my point, but objected. The way to show one’s respect for musicians, he said, was to dress up. Slovenliness was a sign that the music wasn’t worth any effort. I could, in my turn, understand his argument, and these days I do put on a dark suit and tie when attending a concert. But, now, alas, the cost of tickets, the trouble of getting downtown and parking, and a dislike for going out at night combine to make those concerts few and far between. Instead I listen to CDs and old records. But at Oberlin I must have heard live music virtually every day. Even the pianos in dorm lounges were constantly in use, as show tunes and Gilbert and Sullivan rang through the hallways.
Our age, said Emerson, is retrospective. Certainly, Oberlin has been on my mind lately, but not just because of Robinson and Horwitz. A week ago there arrived in the mail a gigantic photographic album titled Oberlin, which offers a pictorial homage to my old school. Daguerreotypes and digital photos share many oversized pages. Some of the scenes pictured I remember all too well: the silent vigils in Tappan Square during the Vietnam War, the protesters surrounding the car of a military recruiter. Most make me ache to be 19 again: Here are entire classes lounging under the trees on a spring afternoon, distinguished guest lecturers on the stage at Finney Chapel, painted messages adorning the big rocks across from the old Co-Op Bookstore, the lighted shop front of Gibson’s Bakery, blankets of snow covering the streets of the city and campus, the neon sign of the Apollo movie theater, rows and rows of Steinway pianos in the conservatory, the façade of Allen Memorial Art Museum (designed by Cass Gilbert, with a modern addition by Robert Venturi), Claes Oldenburg’s giant three-way plug, pretty girls carrying bookbags, the farmland outside the city limits.
It’s an excellent photo album, even if—Obies are nothing if not critical—it could have been better. I would have liked more text, more pictures of teachers, more testimonials from notable alumni, though there is an excellent tribute from screenwriter William Goldman. I’ve just finished reading a biography of Thornton Wilder, which reminded me that the future author of Our Town attended Oberlin for two years and that his best friend there was Robert Maynard Hutchins, later the almost legendary president of the University of Chicago. Wilder said that in an education that embraced many schools and universities, including Yale and Princeton, he had had one truly great teacher: Oberlin’s Professor of English Charles Wager.
You probably haven’t heard of Wager, unless you are connected to the college in some way. Recently, I did pick up the two volumes of his casual essays, largely drawn from the Oberlin alumni magazine and collected under the title To Whom It May Concern. In my undergraduate days I wrote chunks of my honors thesis—on the poetry of William Empson—in the Wager Seminar Room of Carnegie Library. Still Wager’s influence on me was quite profound, in the indirect but typical way of academia: I took a class on 17th-century metaphysical poetry from his protegé, the quietly formidable Andrew Bongiorno. He, too, like so many Oberlin teachers before and since, poured his energies into teaching, rather than swanning about as a “public intellectual.”
Readers familiar with my memoir An Open Book know that Oberlin College dramatically changed my life. For a decade after I graduated, hardly a day went by when I didn’t imagine that I would eventually return there to teach, live in one of those big Victorian houses on Morgan Street, become, in fact, a professor just like Bongiorno and Wager. I have fallen short of that dream. Still, if I were ever, like Emily in Our Town, permitted to relive one day of my checkered past, I would choose a beautiful October afternoon in Oberlin, when all the world was young.
Jacques Barzun—and Others
Last week, the distinguished cultural historian, teacher, and man of letters Jacques Barzun died at the age of 104. For a while there, it seemed that Barzun—rhymes approximately with “parson”—might go on forever, adding to our knowledge of the past, assailing the decline of standards, both exemplifying and fighting for cultured, civilized values. Certainly up through his 90s, he remained active as a scholar and writer, even producing a surprise best seller, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, in 2000, when he was 92.
This past year Michael Murray brought out Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind, tracking his subject’s astonishing life from a French boyhood in which Barzun played marbles with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire through a brilliant career at Columbia University, first as an undergraduate, then as a teacher, and finally as the university’s provost. Murray relates a particularly delightful story about young Professor Barzun. In one of his first history classes, Barzun recalled, there “was a beautifully dressed man of about forty, with very black hair and a signet ring with a diamond and a tie pin; he was done up to the nines. At the end of the first semester, he came to me and said: ‘I am a Turk, and I want to express my gratitude because in your dealing with the Turkish question you have been perfectly fair. This means so much. I want to tell you that if ever at any time someone stands in your way or has done you harm, here is my card, just call me, and he will be taken care of.’”
Barzun then added, “I have strewn the byways with my victims.”
Barzun’s best-known books include Berlioz and the Romantic Century, Teacher in America, A Stroll with William James, and Simple and Direct, a guide to writing. But I’ve always thought that A Catalogue of Crime, written with his lifelong friend Wendell Hertig Taylor, could be his most lasting masterpiece. I keep it by my bedside, along with a handful of similarly wide-ranging and often idiosyncratic reference books, such as E. F. Bleiler’s Guide to Supernatural Fiction and Martin Seymour-Smith’s New Guide to Modern World Literature. All these volumes are dog-eared and marked up, with loosened bindings; booksellers sometimes facetiously describe their condition as “much loved.”
My own copy of A Catalogue of Crime is certainly “much loved,” even though I disagree with many of the book’s harsh judgments on modern crime fiction. Barzun and Taylor definitely champion classic whodunits, especially those written with wit, panache, and, above all, cleverness. The Catalogue lists more than 5,000 novel-length mysteries, collections of detective stories, true-crime books, and assorted volumes celebrating the delights of detection. Every entry is annotated, and a succinct critical judgment given. For instance, John Dickson Carr’s historical reconstruction The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey is summed up as “a classic in the best sense—i.e., rereadable indefinitely.” The brief account of Murder Plain and Fanciful, edited by James Sandoe, opens: “This virtually perfect anthology seems never to have been reprinted, which is a disgrace as well as a deprivation to the reading public.” The brief description of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison reads as follows in its entirety: “JB puts this highest among the masterpieces. It has the strongest possible element of suspense—curiosity and the feeling one shares with Wimsey for Harriet Vane. The clues, the enigma, the free-love question, and the order of telling could not be improved upon. As for the somber opening, with the judge’s comments on how to make an omelet, it is sheer genius.”
I sometimes like to imagine Barzun spending the first decade of the 21st century reading and rereading his favorite authors, in particular, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rex Stout, and Agatha Christie. He once wrote that Archie Goodwin, the legman for Stout’s fat detective Nero Wolfe, was a modern avatar of Huck Finn and one of the most memorable characters in American literature. As a teacher, Barzun taught any number of distinguished writers, from science fiction giant Robert Silverberg to the cultural essayist Arthur Krystal and the
award-winning musicologist Jack Sullivan. He was also, of course, a great supporter of, and contributor to, The American Scholar. Alas, I never knew him, except through his books.
But I have been lucky enough to meet two other great centenarians of scholarship: M. H. Abrams and Daniel Aaron. Abrams taught at Cornell, where, in another life, I earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature. He retired a year after I got there, so I only knew him very casually and wasn’t able to take any of his classes. His masterpiece, The Mirror and the Lamp, tracks the shift from classicism to romanticism in English poetry. From all reports he remains vigorous, this fall even bringing out a new collection of occasional pieces, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays. Daniel Aaron, of Harvard, is one of our most revered Americanists, author of the classic study Writers on the Left, editor of Edmund Wilson’s letters, co-founder of the Library of America, and famous for riding his bicycle all around Cambridge well into his 90s.
When I first began to work as an editor at The Washington Post Book World back in the late 1970s, it was my habit to ask quite elderly writers and scholars to review for me. My secret reason for this was simply to connect, however briefly, through letter, telephone call, or handshake, with these eminent men and women, but also with the great writers who had been their friends and associates. Favorite authors like Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, W. H. Auden, and Evelyn Waugh were already dead, but I could reach out to their friends, including Malcolm Cowley, Peter Quennell, Eleanor Clark, Rex Warner, Stephen Spender, Sir Harold Acton, Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Douglas Bush, and many others. Once a retired Boston University professor reviewed two books about T. E. Lawrence, with whom he had done brass rubbings while they were both undergraduates at Oxford. Warren Ault wrote the review at age 102.
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