WHERE I READ WHAT I READ
Once I spent a year in bed reading.
I have never been able to read on a beach. I have never been able to read on a park bench.
An illiterate traveler, I do not understand why the airlines stock all those magazines. Indeed, the only printed matter I can concentrate on in the sky are commands, the “No Smoking” and “Fasten Seatbelt” signs, “Return to Cabin.” “Occupied” and “Libre” on the lav doors like news from the front.
And nothing in waiting rooms, doctors’ or dentists’, the lawyer’s, the barber’s crushed leatherette, hairs stuck between the pages like bookmarks.
I cannot read in hospitals, I cannot read in cars. I can’t even bring myself to read in libraries. The idea of a reading or browsing room is, for me, no idea at all.
We read, I’ve told my classes, to die, not entirely certain what I mean but sure it has something to do with being alone, shutting the world out, doing books like beads, a mantra, the flu. Some perfect, hermetic concentration sealed as canned goods or pharmaceuticals. It is, I think, not so much a way of forgetting ourselves as of engaging the totality of our attentions, as racing-car drivers or mountain climbers engage them, as surgeons and chess masters do. It’s fine, precise, detailed work, the infinitely small motor managements of diamond cutters and safecrackers that we do in our heads. Ideally it is. Which is probably why we remember, even as we forget where we put our glasses and car keys, where we left our umbrella, if not the page number—if a book’s any good we never read the page number—then what side, the left or the right, a particular passage appears on, even its generalized location, top, middle, bottom. It’s why serious readers are as unlikely to forget an author’s name or the title of his book read years before as they are the names of their friends. For much the same reasons—absorption, absolutely paid attention—I can tell you the name of every movie house where I saw any movie and, because I’m self-centered, not only the year but the season, too, when anything out of the way ever happened to me. I can’t guess your age and weight but I can reel off my own cumulative, flickering stats, systolic and diastolic, shoe size and shirt collar, like some show-biz polymath of self, and recall not only the prevailing conditions, the weather I mean, but all the f-stop circumstances surrounding every book I’ve ever read. April in Paris, Autumn in New York, Moonlight in Vermont.
You remember this stuff yourself. It makes us real and stories our lives—anecdoting in our anecdotage. What, you’ve amnesia? You don’t recall where you were when Pearl Harbor was bombed, Kennedy killed, where you were standing for the heart attack?
I spent a year in bed, reading.
It was the ’58/’59 academic year. In April 1959 I was to take the “prelims,” the preliminary exams for my Ph.D. We called them prelims and, in a way, they were. I trained for them like some boxer in reverse. In bed, a month’s worth of library books behind my heaped pillows in the headboard, Stanley Elkin’s Five Foot Shelf, the perfect living arrangements for a graduate student. If a whaling vessel was Herman Melville’s Harvard and his Yale, then a Sealy Posturepedic was my Stillman’s Gym. Cookied and milked, sandwiched and Coked, I left the bed only for personal hygiene and to teach my MWF freshman rhetoric classes, and was back in it shortly after noon and, still snacked and still snug, remained there reading my books, getting up my centuries, my sixteenth and eighteenth, my two American, perfecting my timing, till, well, till it was time to go to bed. And weighed in a year later nine pounds heavier, overweight, Baugh, Brooke, Chew, Malone, and Sherburne my cut men, my trainers and seconds, in all the corners of my head, in perfect shape to go what I then thought was the distance.
It was a hell of a year. An idyll. I was twenty-eight, getting on toward twenty-nine. Sic ibid op cit, but it was swell. I.e. e.g., it was! A shower, a change of sheets, and Fanny Burney et al. beside me in the wilderness!
A few years earlier—this would have been late summer, the middle of September 1955, I would have been twenty-five—I was in the army—this would have been the U.S. Army, I would have been in basic training and on bivouac in Fort Carson’s Rocky Mountains.
I was, as I’ve said, twenty-five, already five to seven years older than most of the rest of my fellows, a two-year RA, which you could do in those days, on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth of the month—you see? you see what total recall I have for my life, what attention I pay, my perfect pitch for the data and small beer of personal circumstances, my life like an open book, some limited edition, Reader, only I’ve read?—in strictly the best physical condition of my life—I would have been six feet tall, I would have dropped sixteen pounds from the 192 I was when I was inducted, I would have weighed 176 pounds—but still giving my comrades-in-arms those five to half dozen to seven years, still spotting them their youth, my own bookish, already middle-aged young manhood against their Detroit and even meaner streeted, late-prime-time kidhood, my own already declining, slug-a-bed sperm count against their blockbuster, highly motile, St. Vitus marathon dancing ones. (These were the mid-fifties high Rockies, recall. Colorado Springs seemed to me cowpoke, an army town. The Broadmoor Hotel was around then but, for my fatigue and khaki sensibilities, dislocated, anachronous, like some range Xanadu. I would have stared longingly at it from the bus.)
So there I was, shipshape, for me, but in heavy seas, force 10 winds (and the tops of the mountains indeed like waves, like the glaciers they’d been and some still were, displaced as stone like sinners in stories), worried about bivouac because the scuttlebutt had it how rough it all was, as years later I’d worry about those four centuries I was, as they put it in academe, responsible for, and as months later—this would have been December—I would arrange to have myself taken off orders to France only because I’d heard that you pulled two weeks of KP on the ship going over. In good shape but a nervous Nelly, I dreaded the nine-mile hike—this would have been on a Sunday—from the spot where they had to let you off the bus, where even a goddamn bus had to stop because it couldn’t go another foot. Wow, I thought bookishly. Whew. Jeez.
Which was when the sergeant came by asking for volunteers to set out—up?—to bivouac in a truck on Saturday. We’d have to help set up camp for the fellows. We would get Sunday off while the rest of the guys were chinning themselves up and down the Rocky Mountains. That was about it. I volunteered and packed a paperback copy of Thomas Mann’s novellas and short stories into my knapsack, saving it for my Sunday off.
Sergeant Turner—he didn’t give his first name—was an eleven-and-a-half-foot black man who either wore customized, armor-plated fatigues or had Permapress flesh with razor sharp military creases down the front of his thighs and shins. He wore a dark pistol on his hip but otherwise was the most unencumbered looking man I’d ever seen. Like a swimmer, say, only dressed. His crisp breast pockets were not only empty, they seemed never to have been unbuttoned. It was in his truck that we drove to the bivouac area, never mind what it said on the side and never mind either how he found it or how the marching Sunday teenagers would find us. Maybe it hadn’t been a bivouac area until Turner decided to park there. Maybe it hadn’t even been America.
We set up a mess tent. He told us to blow up our air mattresses and set up our pup tents. He told us to hang around. And all right, we thought, when Turner went off forgetting to tell us what else to do. He said, “I’m going to get dinner.” Maybe he knows a place, I thought. He came back, his pistol unfired, with three jackrabbits whose necks he had broken. (All of us thinking, What the hell, how bad can it be, maybe this is already it, maybe just eating Turner’s home cooking is what they meant by setting up camp, maybe just finding this place is. Thinking, anyway how could just half a dozen men set up camp for a regiment? We ain’t any developers, this is only 1955, there’s barely even shopping centers yet.)
When it was almost dark he told us to dig a hole and bury the ammunition. He gave us its dimensions like God giving them to Noah. He may have even spoken in cubits.
All we ha
d were our trenching tools, and we worked most of the night on it, till three or four in the morning, and it was quite a hole, a hole the size of a boy’s bedroom, and all that kept us going was the thought of that Sunday off, Turner periodically reminding us of our reward. “All right,” he said, before he went off to sleep at midnight, “you men already been through Saturday. You’re on your own time now. The quickest you get done the quickest you get to enjoy the rest of your Sunday.” When the tallest of us could stand in the hole without sticking up out of it, the hole was dug and we piled the cases of ammunition into it, covered it over with dirt, did our landscaping like responsible strip miners, and went off to pup tent.
I woke up at ten—this would have been AM—on perhaps the most beautiful day in the history of weather, the world at room temperature, the air so clear and fine one could see without glasses. I peed in the trees and washed my helmet liner in water from a stream so crisp and sweet it might have been the headwaters of water itself, its source I mean, its sheer perfect wholesome, untrammeled, unsullied, thoroughbred, sanitate, unadulterate, immaculate taps.
I could smell bacon frying from the mess tent. There were eggs. There were toast and jellies and dining-car coffees.
After breakfast I got my air mattress and retrieved Thomas Mann from my knapsack. I wandered off a few hundred feet, out of sight of the mess and pup tents, and entered a thin pine forest, pine needles on a forest floor exactly like the one where the earth moved for Maria and Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls—Professor Flanagan’s course; this would have been March 1954—and settled the air mattress against a tree at precisely the angle where my helmet would make a comfortable pillow for my head.
It moved for me, too. I had picked a spot at the very edge of the trees, with a view of the passes and mountains beneath me wide as beauty. It moved for me, too. I could have been the only man in the world. It moved and moved.
I opened my book and began to read “Mario the Magician.” It was, to then, the most wonderful story I’d ever read, the finest ever written. Or maybe it was the circumstances, maybe it was the day. Maybe it was the company. Didn’t I tell you we read to die, to be alone, to shut the world out? (But there it was, you say. There the world was, all before me, Colorado spread out like God’s best shot, all ripe Nature’s good old summertime. All right, maybe I did look up, sure I did, I looked up to take it in, but I am not by nature an eater of jackrabbit, not by nature a mountain man, not by nature, finally, by nature at all, and if I looked up to take it in—look, I was there for the view—it was as much Mann’s novella I was trying to absorb as the scene before me, trying to rhyme the novelist’s world with the world’s one. I was astounded by how beautifully men could write, stunned by how they could imagine worlds so much more beautiful, if not more comfortable, than even this one, which, steeped with style, was so much more suitable, too, than even that laid-back graduate-student-cum-teaching-assistant bed with its crumbs and learning.) This was the happiest day of my life.
Which is when the scratching started, fellow civil engineers scurrying about the brush and whispering, “The son of a bitch wants us back! He says we didn’t cover it with a tarpaulin.” “Did he dig the fucker up?” “No, man, he found the tarpaulin.” And another voice, this one official, or at least charged and calling with some increment of delegated authority, you know whose. I knew whose.
“Any guys still back in there start hauling ass! Sergeant Turner wants that hole dug up!”
“It’s Sunday, man. He give us Sunday off.”
“Tell him about it.”
Which is when I picked my book up in one hand, my air mattress in the other, stuffed my pot on my head, and started running, the air mattress held out stiffly behind me like a cavalry flag, in the one direction still available to me. Which was down.
Perhaps that day I invented hang-gliding, broken field, Rockies running, the encumbered downhill, downforest dash. I may have even invented the principle of civil-rights protests.
It wasn’t fear that gave me grace, it wasn’t even the senseless redundancy of digging up that goddamn Great Wall of Chinese Hole—Turner hadn’t said a word about any tarpaulin—it wasn’t even my outraged graduate scholar’s sense of justice. It wasn’t even gravity. It was simple invasion of privacy, a ruined read on the loveliest day in the world.
I didn’t stop to catch my breath, I could have run all the way to Kansas.
I hadn’t heard him call my name. I hadn’t heard him at all. What it was, I think, were those engaged attentions, my Rocky Mountain High, my dual glimpse of what man could do, what glaciers and erosion, still hanging on from my reading about Mario, still hanging on from looking up, only diffused now, spilling over into the viscerals and atavistics, frozen in my tracks as one of Turner’s jackrabbits. I turned, looked up.
“You’re AWOL,” he said in a normal voice three or four hundred feet above me, not even counting his own personal extra eleven-and-a-half feet. “You’re A. W. O. L.” he spelled it out for me, “and stealing a U.S. government property air mattress.”
I climbed Golgotha like a thief.
“Don’t you want to dig?”
“No, Sergeant.”
“All right,” he said gently. “Those other boys be doing the digging. You read that book you reading. When they be done you can guard it till you be relieved.”
This would have been just before one. They called me at two. (All they’d had to do was uncover the hole, spread the tarpaulin over the crates of ammo, and cover it up again. They’d have finished sooner but were a man short, they said.)
I was relieved at midnight.
(Nor was this the last time the army influenced my summer reading. The last time—this would have been August 1958—was a year after I’d been separated. I was in the Reserves. I’d been teaching summer school at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and couldn’t make it to Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, for the two-week training session with the rest of the outfit. They cut special orders for me, but, when I reported to McCoy, nobody, in effect, was home. Only a skeleton crew was on duty, the RAs permanently assigned there and a handful of civilians. The next cycle wasn’t due in for a week—they were coming, I think, from Kansas City—and they didn’t know what to do with me. They gave me a pass for the mess hall and my choice of a dozen two-story empty barracks buildings in which to stay. I was instantly alert, thirty-five months after I’d last seen Turner all senses still go—because I had the Francis Steegmuller translation of Madame Bovary in my suitcase, see—only thinking not “go” exactly, but “leave! get out!” Where, I asked carefully, should I report?
(Report?
(In the morning. In the morning, Sir! What were my duties? What covered hole in what ground would I be marching round and round, ready and by this time willing to kill the first son of a bitch who might take it into his head sometime to throw up over it, lie down on it, or just pick a daisy off it.
(Duties?
(Thinking: This isn’t any army, this is a nest of saboteurs, Reds probably or Canadian spies down from Lake Nipigon.
(But the fact of it was it was strictly don’t call us, we’ll call you, and I read all of Madame Bovary there, taking my time, stretching it out, moving from barracks to barracks and bed to bed to catch the light.)
On Labor Day weekend in 1953 I was asked by my summer employer, the Peacock Laundry and Dry Cleaners of North Clark Street, Chicago, Illinois, to accept as my last assignment for them the job of substitute watchman so that their real watchman could have the holiday off. I was to show up on Sunday evening and stay till they opened for business again the following Tuesday. They would give me twenty-five bucks, a half week’s pay, and no trips to the vault, that chemical climate like the start of the world, where I had to hold my breath for minutes and shove fur coats into storage with my eyes closed.
I had been taking Harrison Hayford’s Contemporary English, Irish, and American Lit. course at Northwestern University summer school, and though the course was ov
er now, there was still one novel that I hadn’t read—Joyce’s Ulysses. I remember what Professor Hayford had told us; not to be intimidated by the book but just to allow that bold, black serpentine “S” that winds down from the top of its left-hand first page to “tately, plump” at its bottom, to wash over us. For weeks now I had been showering in that giant “S” but could not get past the third page. This was the book I took with me to the Peacock Cleaners.
I don’t read sitting up and there was no place for a night watchman to lie down. In the back, though, were long tables, and I chose one of these, under a light like a fixture in a pool hall. There, in the dry cleaners, I took my last shower under the “S” and, pillowed on wet wash, began to read. I read for thirty-eight hours and finished the book and the course twenty minutes before the store opened up.
It wasn’t until afterward, after I left the store, that I smelled the smells, tasted them, the naphthas and benzines, the agents and solvents, Clark Street and Dublin suddenly all mixed together, coating my mouth like sore throat, swabbing my throat like pus, stinging my eyes like chemical warfare. I had a headache that would last days, an olfactory hyperesthesia that would actually return full blown when I visited Dublin sixteen years later. Hey, I was like Bloom in Nighttown, like Proust in the cookie jar, the disparate impressions of laundry and literature like things bonded in genes.
These have been, I see now, a few from the fifties. Strange—to me strange—occasions from a decade when I read more books than I’d ever read in my life, when, as a student and soldier, I was more intellectually engaged than I’d ever been before or since. More intellectually engaged, sadly, than I will ever be again. I began to teach and write in the sixties, have been at it since, and while I still read of course, I no longer catch up. Merely—at best—keep up. Which, as anyone knows, is not the same thing.
I would hope that some day someone will read one of my books with just a particle of that sense of occasion that I brought to Flaubert and to Mann and to all the rest. I haven’t said it here, am almost ashamed to own up, but once I opened books slowly, stately, plump imaginary orchestras going off in my head, like overtures, like music behind the opening credits in films, humming the title page, whistling the copyright, turning myself into producer and pit band, usher and audience, reclined, positioned as a dreamer, who could read in a barracks but not on a bench.
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