by Sarah Vowell
It occurs to me now how preposterous it was that a girl who lived on a foldout couch in her married friends’ living room for a year was having a say in the decoration of swank Pacific Heights mansions. At the Arader Gallery, I hung gigantic Audubon pelicans and delicate little eighteenth-century prints of lilies and roses on the wall, wrote gushy letters to collectors about four-hundred-year-old maps of North America, and helped the sales staff try to peddle chromolithographs of the Grand Canyon to walk-ins. I boned up on natural history, discovering that the Carolina parakeet Audubon painted is now extinct, and that once upon a time there were buffalo in Poland. Some days I felt like a contestant in a cartography game show, as I rushed to research a map in three minutes if a salesperson had a live one. For shipping, I learned how to construct a cardboard box of any shape and size. I answered the phone. I fetched coffee. I made sure we didn’t run out of Bubble Wrap. At the end of the day, I would set the gallery’s alarm, put very loud grunge music on my Walkman, take the slow bus home, and pull another graduate school rejection letter out of the mailbox. Then my friends and I would drink some bottle of wine they learned about on their doomed Napa honeymoon until it was time for me to unfold my crummy foldout couch. They would be divorced by the end of the year, and it occurs to me now that having an interloper camped out on their sofa for thirteen lucky months could not have helped.
I was miserable, but I had been miserable before. All three years of junior high school spring to mind. But I had never had the privilege of unhappiness in Happy Valley. California is about the good life. So a bad life there seems so much worse than a bad life anywhere else. Quality is an obsession there— good food, good wine, good movies, music, weather, cars. Those sound like the right things to shoot for, but the never-ending quality quest is a lot of pressure when you’re uncertain and disorganized and, not least, broker than broke. Some afternoons a person just wants to rent Die Hard, close the curtains, and have Cheerios for lunch.
I remember how at home I felt, the first time I left. The gallery sent me east to learn from the master at Graham Arader’s Pennsylvania headquarters. Getting off the plane from San Francisco at the Philadelphia airport, I was taken aback. I realized I had been living under quarantine in some euthanized, J. Crew catalog parallel universe of healthy good looks. Because, in Philadelphia, I was pleasantly surprised to see old people, average people, even ugly people, ambling around in dumb T-shirts and home perms. And if that wasn’t relief enough, the weather was terrible and the coffee was dreck. The nice thing about Philadelphia is that no one has moved there to find the good life for over two hundred years. I went home to California feeling like the prettiest, most upbeat over-achiever in the world.
For as long as I can remember, one thing that has always lifted my spirits is research. (In San Francisco, that sentence is supposed to end on the words “sailing,” “gay sex,” or “driving down to Carmel for the weekend.”) I find looking things up consoling. And of all the collections I had to research in my job at the gallery, I became enamored of a period in European cartography in which California was depicted as an island. The gallery had quite a few of these maps, published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Paris, London, and Amsterdam. I hung them so I could see them from my desk. The idea of California as an island was a lie and a myth, but from where I was sitting, it seemed true enough. The gallery’s girl Friday, I was stranded on it. There might as well have been a little red arrow pointing at every one of those Californias next to the words “You Are Here.”
The consensus on what happened with the California-as-an-island maps was that Dutch pirates seized a Spanish boat containing an erroneous map or journal describing California as an island and in 1622 Dutch map publishers started to update their charts accordingly. Then the Londoner Henry Briggs jumped on the bandwagon in 1625. Though two of the great Dutch publishers, Jodocus Hondius and Willem Blaeu, refused to buy into the fad, the error was reprinted in many European maps well into the next century. California is an island, for example, on the map illustrating Daniel Defoe’s sequel to Robinson Crusoe in 1719. It was a Jesuit, Father Eusebio Kino, who set out to put an end to the rumor, which makes sense considering the missionaries were the biggest victims of the false information, dragging boats they didn’t need halfway to Cleveland. Kino made a map in 1701 confirming that California was attached to the mainland, and the mistake was fixed for good in 1747, when Ferdinand VI of Spain issued a royal decree proclaiming, “California is not an island.”
Clients always wanted to talk about the California maps. Maybe it was because we were in California or maybe it was because the maps were so mysterious or because everyone likes to point out how stupid people used to be. Or maybe they were dying to make one of the fourteen San Andreas Fault “not an island … yet!” jokes I heard every week.
Even though the salespeople and I would chat up the California maps with customers all the time, every day, I don’t recall that we ever sold a single one. Which makes sense considering that of Graham Arader’s five galleries around the country, we made the least money, and don’t think the boss didn’t notice. We were the worst map sales force of all time working for the greatest map salesman in history.
Arader was the kind of fascinating boss about whom employees gossip with a mix of adulation and dread—one of those go, go, go guys whose ambition you could admire while at the same time hoping you weren’t the one who answered the phone when he called. Under my breath I called him the Grahamarader, because I thought of him as an action-movie killing machine, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies.
It makes sense to me now that Graham’s life’s work involves the buying and selling of maps and natural histories from the Age of Discovery, when ambitious, even godlike men lit out to see and document and tame the flora and fauna of the New World. Graham’s beginnings in the early 19705 sound so American, so go-west-young-man. The guy was dealing maps out of his dorm room at Yale. His mother ruined his first big sale. Chagrined, he recalls, “What happened was, I’d been working the whole summer buying maps of Penobscot Bay for Thomas Watson, who was then the chairman and chief operating officer of IBM. He had never met me. I had met him by phone. I went ahead and found all these fabulous maps that showed Penobscot Bay. So at the end of the summer I’d amassed this really incredible collection. I was living with my parents at the time. I was twenty-three years old. And when Mr. Watson called, not knowing who he was or why he was calling, my mother said, ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to use the children’s phone/ Mr. Watson hung up and didn’t talk to me again for two years.”
My favorite legend about the Grahamarader, one printed in The New Yorker, so presumably it may even be true, is that Graham once desired a map owned by a friend. Graham begged the man for it. Graham told the man that he needed the map, that he loved this map so much he wanted to hang it over his bed, that it would be the first thing that he saw when he got up in the morning and the last thing he saw when he went to sleep at night, that he wanted to conceive his children under it. The friend was so touched he sold the map to the Grahamarader, who promptly called the friend the very next day bragging that he’d sold it, and for a tidy profit at that.
Map dealers, I came to learn, are not like that. As a group, they tend to be polite, bookish, and don’t inspire comparisons to Schwarzenegger or any other mythic pop figure. Graham is the map dealers’ Michael Milken, their Elvis Presley. In financial terms, he put antiquarian maps on the map. And he popularized them like no one ever had through sheer charisma. “The antiquarian map market before Graham Arader,” says Graham, “was a fairly sophisticated market. The people who collected had in-depth knowledge and understanding, I guess the effect that I had is that I brought map collecting to a lot more people who perhaps in the beginning were not as sophisticated. And the prices have gone up and I get blamed a lot.”
In other words, he functions as the messiah of the map biz, or its Antichrist, depending on your point of view. The entire industry can
be divided B.A., Before Arader, when many historical maps sold for a few hundred dollars, and A.A., after Arader, when the same maps began commanding tens of thousands of dollars.
One by-product of Graham’s excitement and salesmanship is hyperbole. He carries around a small but well-used toolbox of superlatives, which he hammers into everything, words like Fabulous! and Greatest! and his favorite, Best! I think he formed the hyperbole habit by saying things like “John James Audubon is simply the finest bird painter who ever lived!” Perusing his catalogs, one learns that the engravings based on the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer’s Travels in the Interior of North America are “the most detailed study of the Plains Indians ever produced”; that George Catlin’s Indian lithographs are “one of the finest portrayals of Plains Indian life ever created”; and that Currier and Ives were responsible for “the most popular and highly regarded lithographs of quintessentially American scenes ever produced.” Maybe Graham always talked like that. Somehow, I can picture a five-year-old Graham telling his mother, “Mom, these are absolutely the greatest oatmeal scotchies ever baked in North America!”
Graham Arader sells history. He’s a passionate historian. He probably knows as much about the history of cartography as any academic on the planet. It’s what he does with all the information in his head that always astonished me. Graham’s inventory encompasses the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Think about those dates. Think about the story being told in European and American maps of that era. Dutch maps of South Africa. French maps of New France. It is not just one story but two—a great adventure of nation building and the promise of the New World, but also one of theft and warfare and genocide. Guess which one of those stories sells maps?
Watching him sell something is fun. It is exciting. It is patriotically inspiring. He showed me a map of America, cooing, “This … map … tells the story of Manifest Dessssssssssssstiny!” And I’m thinking, Yeah! Manifest Destiny! Wow! What a country! Then I catch myself, remembering, Oh yeah, Manifest Destiny. In fact, once, at the San Francisco gallery, a client walked in looking for Manifest Destiny memorabilia. I opened a drawer and pulled out a print copied from John Gast’s famous painting American Progress. In that picture, Columbia, the barely dressed mythological female representation of America, floats west over the prairie, stringing telegraph wire as a train, stagecoach, and various settlers also head to the Pacific beneath her. The man couldn’t have been more pleased, swooning over the little covered wagon, the little farmer plowing, the Brooklyn Bridge near the eastern edge, the quivering Indians looking over their shoulders in fear. He was smiling as I took his credit card, told me he was going to hang it over his breakfast table. Personally, I wouldn’t want to look at those shivering Indians as I munched my corn flakes. Why wake up to original sin? The only picture I can see from my breakfast table is a strategically placed snapshot of my baby nephew taking a nap with a puppy.
In his Manhattan gallery, I once watched Graham show a sixteenth-century book to one his favorite clients. The book was filled with beautiful engravings depicting the natives of the English colonies. “So this was the beginning,” Graham says. “This volume was from the voyage that John White took in 1585, and it was published in Frankfurt in 1590, and it really is the first image that Europeans had of the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws.” He turns a page, pointing. “That’s how they had smoked alligator and lizard. Here’s how they caught the deer. Look at that. That’s cool.”
And it is cool. It’s a lovely book. It is exciting to see the first image of the Cherokees. But the other voice in my head keeps saying, “Trail of Tears, Trail of Tears, Trail of Tears.” There’s something aesthetically pleasing about trading one engraving—an old map—for another—American money. What could be more perfect than someone paying for that book with all the Cherokees with a big fat roll of twenty-dollar bills, exchanging the graven images of Andrew Jackson, Mr. Trail of Tears himself, for the story of the tribe he sought to destroy?
The hardest part about working around all those ambiguous American artifacts was biting my tongue. I would be showing a client an early map of South Carolina, and he would be looking for his hometown or talking about color and out loud I would say, “Hmm, delightful,” but my brain would be droning, “Slave state.” I couldn’t believe someone would want to hang that on his wall, though now that I think about it, the man probably looks at that map all the time and the only thing it reminds him of is how he really should call his mom.
I could have filled a history book with things I couldn’t say to the buyers. I couldn’t tell the bird-watcher beaming at Audubon that Audubon had to shoot a lot of those birds to paint them. Or tell the couple admiring the Bodmer lithograph of the Mandan ceremonial dog dancer that the guy in the picture was probably dead soon after he posed because smallpox wiped out 90 percent of his tribe. Or tell the fellow spending all afternoon deciding whether or not to buy Catlin’s buffalo hunt picture for his office that in Catlin’s first letter about the natives he was drawing he wrote that the “means of their death and destruction have been introduced and visited upon them by acquisitive white men.” Can I wrap that up for you, sir?
Graham Arader’s America is a prettier picture than mine. And he believes in it. That is why, as he would say, he is the best, the finest, the most successful antiquarian map dealer in the history of the world. His is an easier picture to sell. But it’s also a lovelier, less sarcastic one to buy. I want to buy it. I like the telegraph and the railroad and the Brooklyn Bridge. Graham’s map of America has an elementary school quality that I admire. How many times have I wished to go back there, to live once more in the country I thought I lived in as I stood on the stage of the second-grade Thanksgiving pageant, singing “This Land Is Your Land” in a cardboard turkey suit?
I think the reason I wasn’t cut out to be a good map seller or a good Californian had something to do with the fact that I dressed up as Wednesday Addams for Halloween that year. The Addams Family and The Munsters, shows where roses were grown for their thorns and pretty blondes were pitied as monsters, were on TV every afternoon after school when I was a little kid. Throw in three Pentecostal church services a week where they preached that the Antichrist would be a sunny, smooth, all-American charmer, and you have the makings of an insular worldview. Namely, a sneaking suspicion that there’s always a dark side of nice.
When I called Graham those years ago to tell him I was quitting my job and leaving California to go to Chicago to study art history, he told me what a dumb idea that was and how I would learn a lot more about art by selling it. At the time, I laughed. But I can see now what he meant. There’s something educational about trying to see the good in things, holding some old picture in your hands and telling another person why it’s significant and excellent, special.
Dear Dead Congressman
A rosy letter about voting written the day before an election day now infamous for poorly designed butterfly ballots, disenfranchisement of black voters, nationwide malfunction of voting machines, incompetent network TV coverage, and a snippy Hillary Clinton campaign worker insulting me as I walked into my polling place to vote for her candidate:
November 6, 2000
Dear Congressman Synar,
I’ve never written to a dead man before. But there’s something I always meant to tell you, and I’m not going to let a little fatal cancer stop me. You probably won’t remember me. My mother used to do your mother’s hair in Muskogee in the sixties. My parents still have one of her paintings, by the way, a brownish still life with flowers. When you were running for the House that first time, in 1978, I handed out some pamphlets for you at my town ‘s rodeo. I’m from Braggs. I was eight. I live in New York City now, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been to a rodeo in Oklahoma (or anywhere else). At the Braggs rodeo, you shook my hand and gave me the “Synar for Congress” button off your own lapel—which I still have—and told me it was the last one off the printing presses. You’d think Elvis was handing me h
is sweaty scarf or something, I was so excited. I realize now how young you were. You were twenty-seven then, younger than I am now.
There’s this letter you sent me right after your election. I’ve kept it with me all these years. It’s written on House of Representatives letterhead marked “Mike Synar, Member-Elect, 2nd District, Oklahoma.” It reads:
Sarah—
Thank you so much for your help during our campaign. Don’t forget that when you become eighteen you should get registered to vote. Get involved in government and our government will be better.
Thank you again Sarah
Best Wishes,
Mike Synar
Lord knows, you probably mailed hundreds of these notes during your sixteen years in the House. It’s even possible an aide wrote it, but in my heart of hearts I believe it came from your own pen. I must have pulled it out of the envelope and reread it a thousand times, dreaming. Someday, I thought.
How I pined to vote. In 1985, the movie The Breakfast Club came out. In my teen world, it was a really big deal. Every kid who saw it was supposed to identify with one of the stereotype characters—the rebel, the weird girl, the jock, the nerd, the princess. I identified with Anthony Michael Hall’s nerd, Brian. (Though I was only about nine months away from turning into black-clad, antisocial Ally Sheedy.) There was this one scene, my favorite, in which Ally Sheedy has just stolen Anthony Michael Hall’s wallet. Jock Emilio Estevez is looking at the nerd Hall’x phony driver’s license, pointing out that it says the nerd, who looks like he’s twelve, is sixty-eight years old. Clearly, the kid’s no barfly, so the jock’s suspicious.