But for all the enjoyment of acquiring the works of writers we wanted, it was the books by writers that we didn’t know we wanted that was the most fun.
“Thought you moight loike to try this,” said David, walking up to us one day at Berkshire Book Company with a book in his hand. It was The Chequer Board by Nevil Shute.
“Didn’t he write On the Beach?” On the Beach, a vision of the last days of human civilization in the wake of nuclear war, had been made into a powerful film starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner.
“Roight. That’s the one he’s most known for anywye. But he wrote lots of other things, too.”
We turned the book over in our hands. “Okay. How much?”
“No, no,” David said. “Just tyke it. I think you’ll enjoy it.”
The Chequer Board turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable, Somerset Maughamesque book about, of all things, a ne’er-do-well Englishman just after World War II with a soon-to-be-fatal head wound who spends his last months seeking out three acquaintances from the war. In the hands of a less talented storyteller, The Chequer Board might easily have been alternately grim and sappy, but instead it was alternately gentle and powerful, and ultimately uplifting. As soon as we finished it, we went out and bought On the Beach.
Sometimes a book got to us by force of repetition, like Midcentury by John Dos Passos. These days, Dos Passos is largely ignored, one of those writers whose name is instantly recognizable to a vastly greater number of people than who have actually read any of his work, a category that included both of us.
Dos Passos was one of the most innovative and preeminent of the Jazz Age novelists and a devastating social critic. In the late 1920s and 1930s no one in American literary circles enjoyed a greater reputation, not Hemingway, not Scott Fitzgerald, not Faulkner. In 1938, Jean-Paul Sartre said simply, “I regard Dos Passos as the greatest writer of our time.”
The contrasts with Ernest Hemingway, in particular, are striking. They were born three years and ten miles apart. Each volunteered as an ambulance driver during the First World War and each lived as an expatriate in Paris in the years that followed. They were close friends in Paris, seeing each other virtually every day. It was Dos Passos, already well known for stinging indictments of army life in his first two novels, One Man’s Initiation (1919) and Three Soldiers (1921), who first brought In Our Time to the attention of the publisher, Horace Liverwright, in 1925. (Three Soldiers, written largely from the point of view of a misfit private, caused a huge stir on publication and is eerily reminiscent of From Here to Eternity—or the other way around—which caused an equally big stir and made James Jones a celebrity a generation later.)
In the wake of the Spanish Civil War, Dos Passos and Hemingway ceased to speak and the split was mirrored in their literary fortunes. Hemingway became more and more celebrated, winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954, and Dos Passos, although he continued to regularly have his work published, drifted into a kind of literary netherworld, still respected for his early work but considered to have lost both his way and his energy.
It was only in 1961, ironically the year that Hemingway blew his brains out, that Dos Passos reclaimed some of his lost prestige with the publication of Midcentury, a book that he had worked on for ten years.
For Midcentury, Dos Passos resurrected the same narrative techniques as those used in his most famous works, Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy, which had been written decades earlier. He painted a kaleidoscopic portrait of American life by interweaving the stories of a number of major characters and adding “newsreels,” capsules of factual news of the period, biographies of real Americans representative of the times and what he called “Camera Eye,” stream-of-consciousness observations. This time, however, his major target was the corruption of the labor movement rather than the corruption of big business.
Midcentury was a huge commercial success, five printings before publication and four months on the New York Times best-seller list. As a result, a copy of Midcentury graced the shelves of virtually every used bookstore we visited. Finally, curiosity overwhelmed us and we bought one, a first edition for twelve-fifty.
Midcentury was so good that it made us want to rush out and buy everything we could by Dos Passos. But buying a paperback or taking a copy out of the library was cheating. We checked the “D”s every time we went into a used-book store but, other than a couple of minor works, we simply could not find decent editions of Dos Passos’s books.
“Have you ever read anything by Josephine Tey?” asked Esther, during another one of our visits.
“No.”
“Ooh, she’s quite wonderful,” said Esther. “A serious British literary figure, Martin Seymour-Smith, who wrote Who’s Who in Twentieth Century Literature, reviewed a mystery by Anne Perry recently in the New York Times Book Review and he wrote that Perry had modeled her work on Josephine Tey, this forgotten mystery writer of the fifties, and it was such a gratuitous, dismissive remark by someone who obviously didn’t read mysteries and didn’t know Josephine Tey’s work and the fact that she is a figure of some influence among British mystery writers that I always wanted to write a letter to the Times and say, far from being forgotten, Josephine Tey’s books have never been out of print and it was likely that her books were going to be read when those of the reviewer, as well as the reviewer himself, were long forgotten.” Esther was quite red in the face. “It just makes me mad,” she said, handing us Three by Tey, a 650-page book for ten dollars.
Three by Tey consisted of three short mysteries: Miss Pym Disposes, The Franchise Affair, and Brat Farrar. All three were wonderful, The Franchise Affair in particular, which was an updated version of a famous real-life case in Britain. In 1753, a young girl, Elizabeth Canning, accused two women of kidnapping her, beating her, attempting to force her into prostitution and then, when that failed, keeping her prisoner and compelling her to work as a servant. But, while the stories were interesting, it was the style that made Josephine Tey so much fun. Everything was understated, laced with subtle wit, the absolute antithesis of the hard-boiled novel. In fact, in The Franchise Affair, the detective is a middle-aged, stodgy British country lawyer who lives with his spinster aunt and has digestive biscuits every day for tea.
Josephine Tey was born Elizabeth Mackintosh in Scotland in 1897. She never married and in her twenties moved to Loch Ness to care for her invalid father. She actually attained her greatest fame under another pseudonym, Gordon Daviot. Writing as Daviot she became a very successful dramatist, novelist, and historical biographer, whose plays were performed by, among others, John Geilgud. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, she thought little of detective fiction as a genre and wanted to be remembered for more substantial works, in her case, Gordon Daviot’s plays.
In this way, we came to know a number of other terrific writers, people like John Hersey, Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, and William Dean Howells and wonderful books like All the King’s Men, Andersonville, The Wall, Ashenden, and The Blackboard Jungle. It was easy to take a chance on a book for only five or ten dollars.
The only problem—and it was a small problem—was that, although used-book stores turn over their stock with remarkable frequency, that still did not mean that you could go to the same three or four places week after week and continually find new stuff.
CHAPTER 6
So, when birthday time rolled around the next year, there was no competition. We actually agreed on what we wanted to do—leave Emily overnight with the baby-sitter (a first), stay at an elegant hotel, eat pasta at one of those intimate little restaurants in the North End, and wander through historic Boston, checking out the used-book stores.
Negotiations began at once with the baby-sitter, Claire. We had originally hired Claire on the basis of extraordinary references from extremely reputable people. It was good that she had those references because the rest of her resume was somewhat nontraditional.
Claire was seventy-two years old and a great-grandmother. She cut and stack
ed her own wood, drove an ancient pickup truck, was very active during hunting season, had an enormous, extremely unfriendly German shepherd, and wore false teeth. When she came over, invariably dressed in her two-piece bubble-gum pink sweat suit, she would sometimes bring us pirated videotapes of her favorite movies, such as Dying Young and Sleeping with the Enemy.
At one point, Claire took in a mentally disabled World War II veteran as a border because the Department of Social Services paid her seven hundred dollars a month to “provide him with a noninstitutional environment.” The veteran (we never learned his name), apparently did little more than sit around the house, watch television, eat whatever Claire fed him, and go to sleep. He was amiable enough but almost never spoke. When he died a few months later (the cause being unclear), Claire noted sentimentally, “Good riddance to the bastard. I’ll miss the money, though.”
Of course, we weren’t blind to these eccentricities, but there were two factors in our continuing to employ Claire. First, she was, as the references had insisted, remarkable with small children and utterly trustworthy when it came to their care. Emily adored her. Secondly, she was absolutely always available, other residents of Lenox possibly not holding the same ecumenical view of her as ourselves.
“How much do you want to stay overnight?” we asked Claire, the next time we saw her.
We had had a long discussion about this. For obvious reasons, we wanted to err on the side of generosity. We assumed that she would ask for fifty or sixty dollars, to which we would gallantly reply: “Take seventy-five.”
Without blinking, Claire replied: “What about a hundred fifty?”
“A hundred fifty dollars?” we repeated. “For one night?”
“Well, you asked me,” she returned righteously.
The baby-sitting question thus deftly handled, we went to the Lenox library and photocopied the “Book Dealers—Used & Rare” page of the Boston Yellow Pages. There were thirty listings. We didn’t want to waste our time so we took the photocopy to David and Esther to ask their advice on who to visit.
“This one is good,” David said, pointing to a listing for a shop in a northwest suburb. “Quoite an extensive selection.” He also recommended a couple of stores in Cambridge. With one or two exceptions, he had dismissed most of the listings in Boston proper. “Very proicy,” he noted.
So, at about ten o’clock on a late August morning, already $150 in the hole, armed with our photocopy, a street map of the city and its environs, and two terrific head colds, we set off on the two-hour drive to Boston.
We had carefully plotted our route and the shop that David had recommended in the northwest suburb was the strategic first stop, then down through Cambridge and on to our hotel.
The suburb in question consisted of frame houses, pizza parlors, doughnut shops, Laundromats, and beauty parlors. We spotted the bookstore on a corner, pulled into a parking spot, put our two quarters in the meter ($150.50), and went in.
David was right. There certainly were a lot of books. Maybe thirty or forty thousand in all. Unfortunately, there was only space for about ten thousand. Management had solved this problem by building the shelves impossibly close together (even by used-book store standards) and doubling up the books on each shelf To know what was really on a shelf you had to pull out all the books in the front row in order to see the titles in the back.
On top of that, it was so dark and dusty that someone standing at the other end of the room appeared to be floating in a haze. But we’d just driven two hours to get here, it was our romantic birthday celebration, and, damn it, we were going to have fun.
Moreover, we didn’t want to prejudge anything. We were, after all, relative newcomers and it wouldn’t do to be dismissive. Also, although this was not our idea of an inviting place to browse, it apparently was other people’s. There were five or six other customers in the store. They were dressed uniformly in flannel shirts (it was ninety-two degrees outside), army-navy store jackets, and had a lot of hair, none of it combed. Each of them was puttering about, browsing in utter contentment, slowly and methodically working their way down a shelf inch by inch, looking through every single book the store had in that section. They looked like they had been at it for some time—days maybe. We got the feeling that our fellow patrons spent a good deal of their time indoors.
We started in the literature section. Although in theory, everything was laid out alphabetically, as in “Books Bruce & Sue Gventer,” the filing system was casual. Not only were “S”s often found under “G,” but hardcovers and paperbacks were intermixed. Many of the books were in appalling condition, sometimes missing front covers or, worse, entire pages. Still, trying to get into the spirit of the thing, we pored around and even got down on our hands and knees (no mean feat in that place) and, for five or ten minutes, pulled out one book after another to see if some treasure would be exposed in the back row. Not only was this search unfruitful, it kicked up a lot of extra dust that resulted in a good deal of sneezing.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” one of us finally rasped to the other, “I can’t breathe.”
“No. We’re here already. Let’s at least try to find one book.”
So, wiping our noses, we trudged up to the front desk. There was a woman sitting there who looked a perfect match for the patrons. “Do you have The Guns of August in hardcover?” we asked.
She thought for a moment. “Well, did you check History?” she said, but before we could answer she continued: “But it might be in War or maybe Political Science.” She popped out from behind the desk. “All of those are downstairs. Come on, I’ll show you.”
We started to say “No, thanks, that’s all right,” but she was already around the corner leading us, so we followed.
She went to a tiny, narrow space between two shelves that housed a staircase. The staircase was so steep that it was little more than a glorified ladder. “Watch your head,” she cautioned.
Two steps down, there was a concrete ledge that we had to bend forty-five degrees to get past. Across it was labeled WATCH YOUR HEAD.
Downstairs turned out to be the basement. This was an old building. Lots of pipes.
“Watch your head,” the woman said again.
The shelves were packed so close together and the aisles were so narrow that when the woman walked ten feet and took a left turn, she completely disappeared. We walked around trying to find her and got completely lost.
“Where are you?”
“Over here!” the woman’s voice rebounded.
We found her. She was standing in a corner surrounded by shelves. “History is here,” she said, pointing. “War is two aisles down and Political Science is in the other corner.”
Then, making no effort to see if The Guns of August was there, she took two steps, made a right turn, and disappeared again.
After a cursory glance over the shelves, it occurred to us that our time would be better spent trying to find our way out of the basement than looking through all those shelves (doubled, of course) for the Tuchman. We climbed back up the ladder.
“Couldn’t find it?” the woman said. “Come back another day. We’re always getting new stock.”
We slunk out of the store, got a soda at the first doughnut shop we came to, and broke into a package of Tylenol cold capsules.
We decided to skip Cambridge, go straight to the hotel, have lunch, and start over. We were staying at the Copley Plaza. In the spirit of the trip, we had chosen an older hotel, elegantly appointed, which prided itself on beautiful rooms and exemplary service.
We drove up to the Copley, then waited a few minutes outside while the valet parker unloaded a Mercedes that had pulled in behind us and ushered its occupants inside. When he returned, we left our car and walked unescorted to the front desk, our bags, we were assured, to follow.
“Reservation for Goldstone, please.”
The desk clerk checked the computer. “Ah, yes. A double room for one night at our special weekend rate.” He took out
a little rate card and, using an unopened ballpoint pen to point, continued, “The room will be two hundred twenty dollars plus city, state, and hotel occupancy tax.”
“Does that include parking?”
“No. I’m afraid not.”
“Breakfast?”
“No.”
“A newspaper?”
“You may purchase a newspaper in the lobby,” he answered coldly.
We must have gotten a special weekend room as well. During the week, it was probably a closet. If we opened the door to the television cabinet/chest of drawers, it blocked our way to the bathroom. There was a place, however, to plug in a portable computer or a fax machine. We debated as to whether or not to call Claire and check if everything was all right, but when we noticed that there was a two-dollar service charge to access an 800 number, we decided to be judicious with our telephone calls.
All right, we decided. So what? We had not come to Boston to hang around our hotel room. We freshened up (use of the bathroom was free), stowed our trusty Yellow Pages photocopy in a backpack, and went to have lunch.
One thing we missed in the Berkshires was the civilized lunch. Not that there isn’t good food in the Berkshires; it’s simply that lunch is considered a much more casual affair, jeans and sneakers in the summer, jeans and snow boots the other nine months of the year. As a result, we craved fashion as much as food. We ached to people-watch. So, a few days before we left, we had looked through the Zagat’s guide, which was available on our computer service and, based upon the following review, booked a reservation at Mamma Maria in the North End:
“Intimate” and “romantic,” this North End “upscale Italian” with “superb little rooms” is “expensive but nice for a special occasion.”
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