Reading in Bed, Updated Edition

by Brian Doyle

  The New Book

  I have been traveling lately, and came back to my office this morning, and opened the mail tottering on my desk, and at the bottom, sturdily holding up the bills and complaints and insults, was a thick packet from a publisher. I open this and take out a gleaming new book. It is redolent and the slipcover is crisp and unwrinkled and the cover rings like true wood when I knuckle it. The weight of the paper inside is just right, so that the pages are substantive but not glossy, and they hold the engravings and maps well, and the pages turn easily, without me having to moisten a finger. The inside front cover précis of the book is refreshingly honest, telling me the bones of the story without overmuch ado. The bio note on the writer is admirably brief and does not feature a photograph of the author posing with his cat or in wrestling togs or in front of a cord of wood which he apparently cut with his bare hands. The blurbs are entertaining and do not claim that this book is way better than the Bible, which is narratively incoherent in the first half and a gnomic quest novel in the second part. There are no typographical errors that I can see on first glance. The cover makes sense, given the contents, and the designer did not try to be cool or hip or dashing, or splurge on pink and yellow. There is blessedly no subtitle. Perhaps best of all, the book ends at around 300 pages, which means that you could actually read it, rather than leave it on the shelf for 50 years and then leave it to your children for them to not read, as we do with Proust.

  How very tempting to sit down and begin to read it on the spot; but I wrote it, and remember it very well; I lived in it for two years, and wheedled and coddled and argued with the characters, and delighted and winced at their actions, and even now, a year after turning them over to the publisher, feel a sort of rough love for them. But now they have sailed away from my harbor, and into these lovely pages, between these deftly made covers, and all I can do is be proud of them as they go, and wish them well, and hope they will make many friends on their own. And then I prepare for another subtle literary joy: I slip the book in my bag to carry home, to show my lovely bride and our children the very first copy of my new book.

  Unpublished Snippets from an Interview with the Author His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

  Have you now, or have you in the past, tipped over a cow?

  I…don’t recall.

  What is your prime concern when dressing for the funeral of a leader in another religious tradition, i.e. Jewish?

  White socks or red. But then you really want to start thinking about car keys, pocket cash for the bar at the reception, and business cards.

  Have you ever just totally cruised through a day, pretending to look busy but really spending your time, say, wondering how the White Sox could possibly just steal a title like that?

  Well…you have off days, like anyone else. You have days when you just are not bringing your A game. I find, personally, that I perform best when I am feeling a little under the weather. I think it has to do with lowered expectations. I’m not revealing any secrets when I say that there’s a lot of pressure in the job. Celebrating Mass for a million people in a field is no walk in the park. Footwork is crucial, and the considered pause. And maybe most important of all is enunciation. Also wear bright colors. How in God’s name did the White Sox actually do that? You think about that too? I think about that every day. People who say they do not perceive miracles loose in this vale of tears are not following the White Sox.

  Hobbies, forms of relaxation?

  Kick-boxing. A couple or five ales here and there, but only in summer usually. I also have a thorough collection of Silver Surfer comics. I like Puccini records. Slasher movies. The Who, of course.

  If you were a vegetable, what vegetable would you be?

  Oh, eggplant. That’s an easy one.

  Best friend?

  My boy John Paul II was a dear friend — we used to kid about getting tattoos, but we never got around to it. He had a nasty sense of humor for a playwright. You know playwrights, all self-important and mysterious and all, but he didn’t have hardly any of the brooding artist thing going. Plus he was very hip to the fact that playwrights are like poets, no one actually reads their stuff and they don’t get paid. John Paul — Jack, I should say — used to say he went into the pope business just to get by. I miss the dude.

  What’s on your reading table, Your Holiness?

  Not Dan Brown, heh heh. But, seriously, there are some things you might expect — I like the thorny language of the King James Bible, even without Wisdom, as it were, and I try to stay up on world politics and religious currents. The most fun for me, reading-wise, are the personal projects I set myself — the complete works of Tiki Barber, for example. Also sometimes when I am feeling cocky and too sure of myself I inflict penance in the form of forced readings — the poetry of James Joyce, anything by Jerzy Kozinski, Saint Augustine. I mean, really, everyone bows and salaams when you say Augustine, but who really reads the guy? He’s impenetrable. I think maybe only his mom ever read everything he wrote. That’s how she got to be a saint, heh heh.

  Ever robbed a liquor store?

  Not recently, heh heh.

  Do you do your own laundry, Holy Father?

  No no — that’s why they invented the Curia.

  What’s the deal with you and small-bore firearms?

  Target pistols are why God invented cats.

  Favorite saint?

  Oh, Catherine of Siena, that’s easy. You remember she said when she spoke with God He didn’t like to be interrupted and she could hardly get a word in. Who knew the Creator was a monologue guy? That cracks me up.

  The whole division-among-Christian-sects thing, you want to speculate a little about that?

  Lovely weather these past weeks — hot during the day but crisp enough after sunset for a jacket, you know? Starting to be football weather.

  Ever play football, Your Holiness?

  Played linebacker for two years in school but then the other guys kept growing and I stopped right about here, which is decent size for a pope but not for a guy anchoring a defense. You need a guy in the middle with some serious attitude and a chest like a refrigerator.

  Were you dating anyone at that time?

  Not seriously, no.

  Your meeting with Hans Kung was widely reported in the Catholic press — would you care to share some of the conversation?

  Well, Hans played some football also, mostly tight end — he had the height, you know, and those big hands. We talked some ball, had a couple of beers. Hans is alright — for a theologian, heh heh.

  Last thoughts you want to share with the readers?

  Be not afraid. My boy Jack nailed that one good.

  Józef Korzeniowski: a Note

  Some years ago my lovely bride and I had the incredible luck to house-sit a vast old house by the sea. This was one cool house for any number of reasons; it was rent-free for us for ten months, as the owner and her family only came back in summer; it had a coterie of maintenance men assigned to it and paid ahead of time by the owner, so my job was to sit on the porch and smoke cigars; it was ringed by a small wood in which there were pheasants and night-herons; it was flanked on one side by a genius artist and on the other by a lovely old church; and it had the greatest personal library I had ever seen, thousands of books, among which I discovered complete sets of three writers: Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad.

  This posed an immediate problem. None of the three were parsimonious with their works; all of them had their glowing virtues, and one had been a partner in saving civilization from slavery; but even I, then in the full flush of youthful arrogance, knew that I could not read all of all of them in ten months, or even all of two of them. I would have to choose one, I told my lovely bride; but which one?

  Sensibly she asked why I had to choose one to read in toto when I could read some of all, or even graze freely among all the books in the house, but I was and am a man, and therefore willing and able to set off on vast silly projects, so I did.

>   First I decided to test each man by reading the first chapters of three of their books. Churchill showed early promise, but then I dipped into A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, possibly the most boring book in the history of the English-speaking peoples, and stopped cold. Dickens had me through Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities, but then I ran into Bleak House, and froze. With trepidation I turned to Conrad, fearing that my lovely bride was right and all I could do those ten months was read the greatest hits of the house… but no! Youth, Typhoon, Lord Jim, The Shadow Line, The Nigger of the Narcissus, all superb! and then, deliberately, with my heart in my mouth, I read The Secret Agent and Nostromo, hoping that he would be as good on land as he was at sea, and he was! And then, blessedly, delightedly, every night in my little study lined with the works of the historian Page Smith, who had lived and worked in the house, I read most of the astonishing outpouring of stories and novels and novellas and essays Joseph Conrad published between 1895 and his death in 1924, including his lovely collection of personal essays The Mirror of the Sea.

  We had to leave that house at the end of June, as the gracious owner and her clan returned for high summer by the sea, and there is much I miss about it even now — the croak of pheasants in thickets, the plethora of bedrooms (fifteen!) for awed houseguests, the cheerful burly pastor next door, the friendly repairmen with whom I shared cigars, the lovely loneliness of life in a free mansion with my paramour when we were young; but also I miss the patent joy of spending almost a year with one extraordinary writer, who never once disappointed me, even over the course of some thirty books. Offhand I can think of only Graham Greene and Georges Simenon and maybe John Steinbeck for that sort of quality over a long shelf of books; how rare it is to be very good and very productive; and how rarely today do we stop and salute and celebrate Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in what is today the seething Ukraine, who unquestionably is one of the finest writers in the history of the English-speaking peoples — all due respect to Sir Winston.

  “…These the Visions of Eternity…”

  There are, and have been, many fine poets of nature, and William Blake (1757-1827) wasn’t one of them. This wonderful English poet, painter, and printer spent 69 of his 72 years in gritty and grimy London, where he was more apt to write of chimney-sweeps than chimney swifts, although he did walk regularly in Hampstead Heath, often remarking its verdure; and the London of Blake’s day was much smaller in scope, so a long walk from his house (he lived, variously, on Green Street, Broad Street, Poland Street, South Molton Street, and in the Strand) would take him quickly into the countryside. Still, Blake was hardly a poet of field and forest — except in the three years that he and his wife Catherine left London.

  In 1800 matters conspired to bring the Blakes to Felpham, near Chichester on the south coast. The journey was arduous (they left at dawn, changed chaises six times, carried with them 16 heavy boxes and portfolios, and arrived just before midnight), yet “all was Chearfulness & Good Humour on the Road,” and that night they tucked in at their thatched cottage with joy.

  The cottage was two minutes from the ocean, and Blake was immediately overwhelmed by a riot of animate and vegetative life on a scale he had never seen: clematis, elms, thyme, larks. He was also entranced by the sea, another creature he had never seen; in its “shifting lights” he saw spirits and the luminous “majestic shadows” of great poets and prophets. All in all, “the sweet air & the voices of winds, trees & birds, & the odours of the happy ground, makes [Felpham] a dwelling for immortals,” he wrote a friend. “Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more Spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their forms more distinctly seen; & my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses.”

  Although furiously busy with the printing and engraving projects by which he made his living (one of which was a set of 12 engravings for a friend’s poem called Ballads founded on Anecdotes Relating to Animals), he set to work on an epic poem called Milton. In this work, named for the great blind English poet who wrote Paradise Lost, we find, unexpectedly, a nature poet of remarkable perception. Milton is a curious and difficult poem, often impenetrable, and all that most readers know of it is the famous stanza with which it opens (“And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green …”), a small stand-alone poem which, later set to music as a hymn, serves today as an English national anthem. But Milton is the book in which a great burst of nature poetry erupted from this most urban of poets, and the selections on these pages are drawn primarily from that extraordinary work.

  For William, most his time in the country was utter joy. He was refreshed as an artist, as he wrote to his dear friend Thomas Butts: “One thing of real consequence I have accomplish’d by coming into the country, which is to me consolation enough: namely, I have recollected all my scatter’d thoughts on Art & resumed my primitive & original ways of Execution in both painting & engraving, which in the confusion of London I had very much lost & obliterated from my mind.”

  He regained his ordinarily sharp ear for poetic dictation from the heavens: “I have composed an immense number of verses on One Grand Theme, Similar to Homer’s Iliad or Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Persons & Machinery intirely new to the Inhabitants of Earth… I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without Premeditation & even against my Will; the Time it has taken in writing was thus render’d Non Existent, & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life, all produc’d without Labour or Study. I mention this to show you what I think the Grand Reason of my being brought down here.”

  He even was an interested observer of a fairy funeral, as he explained years later to a startled woman who happened to sit by him at a social function. “I was walking alone in my garden, there was great stillness among the branches and flowers and more than common sweetness in the air; I heard a low and pleasant sound, and I knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of the size and colour of green and gray grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared. It was a fairy funeral.”

  But the Blakes’ stint in the country, which had begun with such promise and Chearfulness, ended poorly. Catherine was ill most of the time, Blake himself was tried for sedition (he tossed an insolent soldier out of his garden, and the embarrassed soldier accused him of threatening to kill King George; Blake was found innocent, but the trial terrified him), and the Felpham friend who had arranged for their country visit (the minor poet William Hayley) turned out to be a well-intentioned but bothersome meddler. So the Blakes hied themselves back to London, where they lived out their days; but from their years in the Sussex country we have some of the most beautiful nature poetry in the English language. “Amen, Hallelujah!” as Blake says in Milton.

  On Not Saying Yes to the Irrepressible Terence O’Donnell One Night Years Ago When He Said Hey Let’s Get a Beer

  Which probably I should have done, even though at the time my kids were little and my weary wife had been chasing and wrangling and hosing them down all day long and I was already in overtime, as it were, having done a literary event with Terry at the Multnomah County Central Library, during which event he sailed off on a long hilarious story about how he used to run naked through the woods near his cabin in Long Beach, Washington, for medicinal purposes, as he said, because he was convinced that salt air and epic ferns were restorative when applied directly to the skin at high speed; this was before he got crippled and couldn’t run anymore, although he claimed to like being crippled, all things considered, because it gave him an excuse for a knobby cane, which he loved to brandish, and as he said himself what American Irish writer with any sense of decency would miss the chance to brandish a knobby stick at dogs and cabbies?, which he did, wit
h glee.

  After the event at the Multnomah County Central Library, Terence and I were laughing on the steps, and I said this has been a kick, but I better get home, what with all wrangling and hosing duties, and he asked if he could hitch a ride to his apartment on the South Park Blocks, and I said sure, because how often do you get a chance to give a ride to a genius raconteur who has lived in rural Iran for fifteen years and wrote a masterpiece about that, not to mention various other excellent books about Oregon? So we drove the few blocks, Terence telling me tales one after another, and then we sat in the car outside his apartment building for a while, Terence telling me tales one after another, and after about forty riveting stories, Terence said hey let’s get a beer, we are deep into the sea of stories now, and I hesitated, and he said I’ll even buy the beer, and that almost tipped the moment, free beer being such savory bait, but then I had a vision of my weary wife hosing off the twins on the lawn with the garden hose, and I said nah, I better get home, thanks anyways.

  Terence, being a gentleman, said he understood, and he bundled himself out of the car, brandishing his stick, and hobbled into his apartment building, and I drove home, and even now, fifteen years after that night, I think I did the right thing, because your first allegiance, when you are married with small squirming children, is to help out with wrangling and hosing; yet I still wonder what tales Terence might have told over those beers. He was a masterful tale-teller in every way, utterly alert to theatrical gesture and pregnant pause, liable to humor at any moment, vastly traveled, armed with a superb memory, and as well-read a man as I have ever met; and for all his courtliness and gentlemanly ways, he was absorbed by every manner and corner of human life, every shade of social status, every shimmer of emotion and desire. He was one of the greatest storytellers Oregon ever hatched and housed, and he died nine years ago, and I am afraid he is being forgotten, and that is a shame.