Browsings

by Michael Dirda

  A Dreamer’s Tale

  For those of us with an inward turn of mind, which is another name for melancholy introspection, the beginning of a new year inevitably leads to thoughts about both the future and the past. My father would often intone on significant birthdays or anniversaries: “That which I did I ought not to have done, that which I did not do I ought to have done.” His pseudo-biblical lament unfortunately reduces the past to one long series of regrets, to the memory of foolish choices or rosy daydreams about what might have been.

  That way, I suspect, madness lies. Also, the ire of one’s spouse and children—What about us? they might rightly complain. Are we chopped liver or something? After all, people do make good choices, often very good ones. But in recollection we inevitably tend to think about those mysterious and alluring roads not taken. Could I have become a novelist or a poet? Did I miss my true destiny by not moving to New York or San Francisco? Might I have been happier as a small-town librarian or a plumber? Did I use my small talents in the best possible way?

  Such dreamy speculations are, happily, of no real consequence. They make us thoughtful for a moment; then we sigh and get on with the day’s work. To those who do what lies within them, according to nominalist theology, God will not deny grace.

  Like most people, at the beginning of a new year, I get revved up about what I want to accomplish in the coming 12 months. In 2013 I resolve to go to the gym every other day. I will lose 15 pounds and get back into what a friend used to call, when she was looking for a fresh boyfriend, “fighting trim.” I will write a short story and start a new book. I will travel more and see the world. I will fix up this dilapidated house, or sell it, and make a proper library for myself. I will . . . I resolve to . . . I must. . . .

  Some of these high-minded resolutions will almost certainly come to pass. [Note from 2015: With the possible exception of a short trip to England, I failed to accomplish any of them.] But what I really want to do, if I were to follow my bliss, as Joseph Campbell used to counsel us, is simultaneously modest and fanciful: to travel around North America in a van visiting second-hand bookstores. During my travels I’d also make occasional detours to spend a day or two with old friends, now too little seen—with my high school buddies who live in Houston and Missouri, my college chums in Maine and Chicago, my former book-collecting partner David Streitfeld, ensconced in the Bay Area, even some folks up in Toronto and British Columbia.

  Being a hero (and heroine) worshipper, I’d naturally take the time to genuflect at the final resting places of writers I admire. (Even now, two of my favorite photographs depict a reverent me at the tomb of Stendhal in Paris and the grave of Eudora Welty in Jackson, Mississippi.) Come lunchtime I would obviously eat in diners and always order pie for dessert, sometimes à la mode. During the evenings, sipping a local beer in some one-night cheap motel, I would examine the purchases of the day and fall asleep reading shabby, half-forgotten novels.

  Why would anyone want to do this? Mainly for the adventure, to recapture a little of the swagger and almost inexpressible sense of freedom that belong only to youth. It’s certainly not as though I need any more books. Just yesterday I was up in the attic creating neat stacks of those I would like to read Right Now. While admiring one such book tower, I suddenly flashed on the famous Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last,” in which Burgess Meredith, amid the ruins of a post-nuclear holocaust world, makes his own To Be Read pile—and then stumbles, breaking his glasses.

  What books would I read if I could simply read for my own sweet pleasure? Well, there are at least a dozen major classics of English fiction that I’ve never quite gotten round to yet. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, for example, and—hangs head in shame—Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. There are, alas, others comparably important. But, in truth, the books I most want to read are far stranger than these approved canonical high spots. What titles, you ask?

  First, two books by Cutcliffe Hyne: The Lost Continent, a classic novel about Atlantis, and The Adventures of Captain Kettle, tales of the criminous and fantastical that once rivaled those of Sherlock Holmes in popularity, just as Richard Marsh’s The Beetle—another book I look forward to—outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Then there’s the autobiographical Paul Kelver, by Jerome K. Jerome (author of the comic masterpiece, Three Men in a Boat), and Maurice Baring’s Daphne Adeane, about a strange portrait and the interconnection of ghosts and living people, and Robert Ames Bennet’s Thyra: A Romance of the Polar Pit, in which explorers encounter a Viking-like civilization living within the hollow earth, and Russell Thorndike’s The Slype, a hard-to-find mystery by the creator of Dr. Syn, aka The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. [Note from 2015: I’ve since enjoyed nearly all these books.]

  I’ve read, and written about, Claude Houghton’s existential thriller I Am Jonathan Scrivener, but I’d like to look into his other novels, especially those with male names in the titles: This Was Ivor Trent, Julian Grant Loses His Way, Hudson Rejoins the Herd. Similarly, I’ve long meant to read more T. S. Stribling, not just his mystery stories about Dr. Poggioli, such as Clues of the Caribbees, but also his satirical novels, especially his semi-fantasy about academia, These Bars of Flesh. I’ve also got copies of several minor classics of supernatural fiction just waiting for their moment: Alexander Laing’s The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck, Hans Heinz Ewers’s Alraune, Frances Young’s Cold Harbor, and Leonard Cline’s The Dark Chamber (a favorite of H. P. Lovecraft).

  Then, too, I’ve been saving for the right holiday or vacation such oddball whodunits as Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon’s comic A Bullet in the Ballet and T. E. B. Clarke’s alternate history Murder at Buckingham Palace and Michael Fessier’s mix of fantasy, Grand Guignol, and mystery, Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind. Isn’t that an irresistible title? Given time, I’d certainly sample more of the work of Clemence Dane, starting with The Moon Is Feminine, and explore that of Phyllis Paul, beginning with the recently reissued A Cage for the Nightingale. And then there’s J. A. Mitchell’s The Last American, subtitled “A Fragment from the Journal of Khan-Li, Prince of Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy.” It was written in 1889.

  Not least are all the works I long to read but that are essentially unprocurable (in hardcover at least), except through interlibrary loan or to those who can afford to pay more than $500 for a single book. Frank Walford’s Twisted Clay, written in the 1930s, set in Australia, and immediately banned, is about a lesbian serial killer. Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night, published in 1937, envisions a horrific Nazi-controlled world, 500 years in the future. Then there’s R. C. Ashby’s He Arrived at Dusk and Eugene Lee Hamilton’s The Lord of the Dark Red Star and Mortimer Collins’s 1874 occult novel, Transmigration (which includes a section set on Mars), and Oliver Onions’s The Hand of Kornelius Voyt (by the author of the famous ghost story “The Beckoning Fair One”) and Frederick Irving Anderson’s two volumes about master criminals, The Adventures of the Infallible Godahl and The Notorious Sophie Lang. And many more. [Another note from 2015: Some of these have now been reprinted by specialty presses.]

  Given such alluring titles on my bookshelves or precariously arranged in stacks up in the attic, I really do need a long life, with good vision and intact mental faculties. Hope springs eternal! Of course, the id side of my reader’s brain tells me that I really should reread War and Peace and The Magic Mountain, or start on The Portrait of a Lady, rather than pick up that copy of The Messiah of the Cylinder, by Victor Rousseau, or Dr. Nikola’s Vendetta, by Guy Boothby. Sigh, truth is, I really do enjoy big, serious, life-changing Great Books of the Western World-style classics. But I also like weird, old stuff.

  With the possible exception of steampunk aficionados, many reasonable people must view my fascination with Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction—mysteries, fantasy, and adventure—as eccentric or merely antiquarian. Still, these books, despite some period prejudices, do offer good storytelling, moral clarity, and an escape from our meretricious times. Best of all, for m
e they also deliver something of the cozy pleasure I got when, as a boy, I first opened The Hound of the Baskervilles, or followed Tarzan into the forbidden city of Opar, or tagged along on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Besides, I’m also an invested member of The Baker Street Irregulars, which meets in a few days for its annual get-together in New York. To a serious Irregular it is always 1895—or at least it is for one long weekend in early January.

  Money

  While reading the papers this past Monday, I paused over two stories. One was a Washington Post review by Patrick Anderson—who specializes in writing about crime fiction—of a new thriller by Dick Wolf called The Intercept. In his opening paragraph Anderson mentioned all the millions Wolf had made from his TV shows, Law & Order in particular, and ended by observing that the writer owned a home in Montecito, California, “which is, as the saying goes, where God would live if he had the money.”

  The second story I lingered over was in The Wall Street Journal. According to reporter Jennifer Smith, prominent law firms are now letting go partners who don’t bring in enough business or bill enough hours. As one unidentified source said, quite plainly, “It isn’t enough to be a good lawyer. The job is to make money for the firm.”

  Apparently, these are tough times for that most universally despised of all professions. Some years back, and perhaps still, the Folger Shakespeare Library sold T-shirts emblazoned with the words: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” (That’s from Henry VI, Part Two, if you want to look it up.) Of course, nowadays lawyers enjoy lots of competition when it comes to being reviled. Consider, for instance, Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund operators, and overpaid CEOs (i.e., virtually all of them). Many of these are, of course, lawyers as well.

  Like most people, I am troubled by salary inequities. Long ago, when I took “Introduction to Economics,” my teacher, Robert Tufts, scribbled on one of my term papers (which had vigorously defended the radical views of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty), “Mr. Dirda, you actually write pretty well, but you don’t understand economics at all.” Perhaps so.

  Basically, I think that most people either make too much money or not enough money. The jobs that are essential and important pay too little, and those that are essentially managerial pay far too much. In a reasonable society, for instance, all elementary education would be public education and the highest-paid profession would logically be that of schoolteacher. The men and women to whom we entrust the formation of our children’s minds and characters would be deeply honored and appropriately rewarded. That teachers are not is largely because the rich send their kids to private schools. These should be prohibited. At that point, our politicians—one of the overpaid groups, in my view—would quickly ensure that public schools employed the best and brightest people that money could buy.

  But when was the last time you heard middle-class parents express the hope that their most gifted child, the one with the double 800s on his or her SATs, would find a job as a third-grade teacher? And why don’t parents wish this, rather than hope that little Chauncey or Rasheeda will grow up to become a corporate attorney or cardiac surgeon? Because of money and status. We still measure success by the Mercedes in the driveway and the size of the McMansion.

  The goal of a just society should be to provide satisfying work, with a living wage, to all its citizens. The jobs that are vitally important, truly dangerous or stressful, or inherently unattractive, should be the best compensated: teachers, coal-miners, emergency-room nurses, physicians and PAs, hospice workers, and, yes, trash collectors should all be extremely well paid. But work that deals mainly with intangibles, with the manipulation of words or numbers, should largely be its own reward. Corporate executives, who love to wheel and deal, ought to earn no more than poets, who love to play with language. In fact, I think that everyone employed by a business, whether a guy on the assembly line, a secretary, or the chief financial officer, should make exactly the same amount. Each does what he or she can do best for the success of the product or the company. A job should bring enough for a worker and family to live on, but after that, self-realization, the exercise of one’s gifts and talents, is what truly matters.

  Tolstoy once asked, How much land does a man need? The answer, you may recall, measured six feet by three: the size of a cemetery plot. How much money does a 21st-century American need? Not millions a year, not the kind of salaries we bestow on many in what is loosely called “business.” The rich soon come to think that they deserve to take home grotesque sums annually, that they are, in essence, being reasonably compensated, and that any attempt to tax them a tiny bit more is unjust and undemocratic. Yet why is this? A life is a life. Self-fulfillment, the expansive exercise of one’s abilities, should be, and usually is, what matters to most of us. The only reward that counts, in the end, is to be honored for one’s accomplishments, whether by colleagues, employees, or the nation.

  No doubt such thinking will be dubbed, or denounced, as socialistic or un-American. It’s certainly completely Utopian. But I am a child of both the working class and the 1960s. I don’t like gross monetary favoritism. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts. Of course, no one ever listens to me. But after the deplorable behavior of our legislative officials in dealing with the latest fiscal crisis, after the childish, know-nothing recalcitrance of the Tea Party, after the almost weekly corruption scandals among our moguls and financial “advisors,” after the outrageous golden parachutes allocated to inept executives, and, most of all, after the general and ongoing contempt demonstrated by the haves for the have-nots, it’s enough to make even a mild-mannered book reviewer depressed and ashamed of his country.

  Book Projects

  Last week I made my annual pilgrimage to New York for the 2013 birthday weekend of The Baker Street Irregulars. The BSI, as many of this column’s readers probably know, is the 80-year-old literary and dining society devoted to honoring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Yes, a few people do dress up in Victorian garb or sport deerstalkers, but mainly the BSI meets for talks, presentations, and what churches call “fellowship.” In effect, this means three days of eating and drinking, followed by more drinking.

  There is, technically speaking, a good deal of planned programming. I attended the Lunch of Steele—honoring Sherlockian illustrator Frederic Dorr Steele—held at The Players in Gramercy Park, a bibulous Special Meeting at The Coffee House Club (of which BSI founder Christopher Morley was a member), the Gillette Lunch at Moran’s Seafood Restaurant (a double homage, as William Gillette played the Great Detective on stage for 40 years and the name Moran recalls that of Professor Moriarty’s chief assassin, Colonel Sebastian Moran), the black-tie BSI banquet at the Yale Club, a late-night champagne party hosted by Otto Penzler of The Mysterious Bookshop, a private cocktail party on Central Park West on Saturday afternoon, and, finally, a gathering of the Pondicherry Lodgers for Indian food later that same evening, succeeded by nightcaps even later before the fireplace at the Harvard Club.

  Of course, those with real stamina could also attend several additional lunches, dinners, and alcoholic get-togethers. But, alas, I’m not the man I once was. During the few hours my dance card wasn’t penciled in, I sped woozily away—via subway—to visit the Strand Bookstore, the Housing Works Bookstore, James Cummins Bookseller, and The Grolier Club. I naturally acquired a few items in the Sherlockian dealers’ room as well, including two T-shirts, Robert Veld’s immensely informative The Strand Magazine and Sherlock Holmes, Nicholas Utechin’s diverting “Occasionally to Embellish”: Some Writings on Sherlock Holmes, and the latest magisterial production of the BSI itself: The Wrong Passage: A Facsimile of the Original Manuscript of “The Golden Pince-Nez,” with Annotations and Commentary, edited by Robert Katz and Andrew Solberg. Needless to say, it was a heavy suitcase
that your “Browsings” columnist rolled down 6th Avenue when he boarded the nine A.M. Bolt Bus for the trip back to Washington.

  While the BSI blowout is always fun, especially for those who have trained for it or possess, by genetic gift, the capacity for drink of 1930s newspapermen, I was constantly being asked a question that bothered me. It’s one that any writer, journalist, or scholar will recognize: “What are you working on now?” This actually means: What is your latest book project?

  While I explained, with the becoming modesty for which I am widely celebrated, that I was writing every day and contributing regularly to a half dozen newspapers and periodicals, such journalism, no matter how exigent or ambitious, doesn’t really seem to count. People want to know about books. On Conan Doyle came out in 2011, and it’s now 2013—shouldn’t I be finishing up something new?

  Well, yes, I should. Or at least starting on it. But what?

  I’ve never found it easy to come up with publishing projects. Three of my books—Readings, Bound to Please, and Classics for Pleasure—are essentially collections of my columns and reviews. In some instances, the pieces have been amplified or reworked so that they read like essays. An Open Book is a memoir, focused on how comics, adventure stories, and classics shaped my early life. Book by Book is a little compendium of quotations drawn from my commonplace book, i.e., from the bound volume into which I’ve been copying favorite passages from my reading for the past 40 years; B3—as I sometimes call it—is organized by subject and supplemented by mini-essays and book lists. On Conan Doyle chronicles, from an autobiographical viewpoint, my lifelong involvement with the novels, stories, essays, and memoirs of A. Conan Doyle, starting with my discovery, in 5th grade, of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It’s only 200 pages long, part of a Princeton series called “Writers on Writing.”