So intense was the competition for early entrance into this behemoth of Washington book sales that all sorts of trickery came to be practiced. Close to the opening hour, late arrivals would inch their way to the front, talking to friends along the way, arranging to arrive at the head of line as the doors opened. Others would exert extreme pressure at ten, so that the orderly one-by-one progress would be swelled by persons from the back, until pandemonium resulted—all in order to be the first at the poetry table, or the cookbooks.
Collectors believed that the worst-behaved and most pushy persons at the sale were dealers. Dealers thought that collectors of military books were unbelievably aggressive, and old-timers knew enough to stay away from Jacques Morgan, a local dealer who had the strength of ten in his hands and arms. He could insert himself into any small space near the book tables in order to sweep large numbers of books into his boxes.
All in all, the first twenty minutes of the sale were life-threatening. To the fleet-fingered, the rapid readers of book spines, and the effective elbowers belonged the spoils: valuable first editions, underpriced rare books, difficult-to-find volumes.
Two years ago (by this time I had stopped going to the opening day of the Vassar Sale for fear of losing life or limb in the initial melee) Sybil succumbed to torn carpeting and the pressure of the mob and was trampled, but not before a television camera had caught her fall and rise.
So her personal charge into the vast room containing thousands of used books is recorded for all time. Stories about her subsequent conduct are narrated, I am told, at the start of each year’s sale. In falling, she sprained her right wrist very badly. Not a whit deterred, she went onto the sale floor carrying her canvas bags and collected hundreds of dollars’ worth of ‘stock,’ as she calls it, to be shipped to the Sargentville store. She packed up cartons of the books she had bought, carried them to her van, then up to the apartment. Only then did she give in to the extreme pain and allow me to drive her to the emergency room of the Capitol Hill Hospital to have her severely sprained wrist treated.
It is of such stoic and ferocious stuff that used-book dealers are made.
The apartment has begun to look like a warehouse. It is piled and lined with packing cases marked for their destinations: ‘bookstore’ and ‘house upstairs’ and ‘kitchen.’ But we cannot figure out what will happen to them when they arrive. The Maine house is already overstocked with objects and furniture, the kitchen cabinets hardly close because plates, glasses, and cups obtrude from the shelves. I try to practice the ‘Good Riddance’ school of packing, but Sybil is faithful to her mode of saving, collection, and preservation. I say, ‘Let’s throw it out.’ She says, as she wraps, ‘You never know when we may need it.’
The rooms of the apartment grow smaller each day. We find ourselves living in the middle spaces, surrounded by brown carton walls. Still, there is a lot left, so we advertise in the Washington Post that we are moving and selling. We nail hand-printed signs to streetlight and telephone poles in the Seventh Street—Eastern Market area. From noon to five on market day, Saturday, people pour in. By the end of the day what we haven’t sold we give away, except for the larger pieces of furniture. Word spreads about them; by Monday they too are gone.
The phenomenon of ‘moving sales,’ ‘yard sales,’ ‘garage sales,’ and ‘tag sales’ did not exist, I believe, until the eighties. Before that time I remember sedate ‘estate sales,’ handled by professionals, and auctions. These were formal affairs, with no haggling or ‘offers’ permitted. The buyer felt somewhat intimidated by the process.
Flea markets date back to the early twenties and are probably the forerunners of yard sales et al. I never went to flea markets when I passed them ‘in the country’ (they were not city phenomena), thinking that only junk would be offered there: the name suggested small, cheap, insignificant objects to me. But now! It is impossible to drive out on state and country roads on weekends without encountering hand-lettered signs with arrows, directing us to the nearest yard sale. And it is nearly impossible for us to pass one in Maine without stopping.
In the past, in towns outside of Washington, Sybil would lure me to one that advertised books among other things for sale by saying: ‘Who knows, there may be a first edition of Huck there.’ Years ago, in a good bookstore in Santa Barbara, I bought a copy of Jean Toomer’s Cane that had belonged to Paul Robeson and had all the worn signs of having been carried everywhere for years by the great singer. We sold that unusual copy. But the promise of a first edition of that scarce-as-hen’s-teeth novel would drag me into garage sales for many years. Of course, we never found another Cane or a Huck, but we did come upon interesting books selling for very little that we could add to the bookstore stock.
I have heard that these sales, large and small, are now an important part of contemporary American economy. People buy what they need, it is true, but as often they are persuaded by the price to buy what they think they need or do not need but take a fancy to at the moment. Comes the time when there is no more room for what they have acquired at sales, they solve the difficulty by holding a yard sale of their own.
So it comes about that objects of use, near-use, and no use circulate, from one yard to the other, from a garage in Stonington to a barn in East Blue Hill. I like to imagine that, eventually, the first seller of the little sailboat mounted on the face of a clock which stands on an abalone shell will change hands for the fifth or sixth time, and at the end, will be presented as a fiftieth anniversary present to the original seller.
In this manner, old purchases will move from house to barn to yard to other house. There is the pleasant sense of making a profit from what one no longer wants. But I suspect the profit is delusory, because persons caught in the yard-sale circuit will use their profits to acquire more ‘things’ in the next season of sales. The pleasures of acquisition are fleeting, profits only temporary. But the yard-sale economy seems active and vital.
Sybil is already packing objects to send to Maine ‘for our yard sale up there.’ She assures me: ‘People in Maine will appreciate these things.’
The saga of the bicycle named the Queen Mary:
Stored for three years on the balcony of the apartment is Sybil’s old bike, vintage about 1939. When her older brother Joel came back from a student tour of England in that year he brought as a present to his ten-year-old sister a lovely three-speed Raleigh bike. For fifty years it has accompanied Sybil everywhere. But in her last years of city life she had rarely ridden it. This week, after much agonizing self-examination, she was able to entertain the thought that perhaps she might bring herself to sell it now.
At the apartment sale on Saturday a few people examined it with interest, but no one was willing to part with seventy-five dollars to buy it. On Monday Sybil and I walked it (one tire was flat) to a bicycle shop on Pennsylvania Avenue. We made a somber progress; she was desolate about offering it ‘to the trade.’ On the way we passed a panhandler who asked her if she was going to sell that fine bike. If so, he said, he would buy it ‘when I get paid at the end of the week.’
No, the fellow at the shop said, he had no use for it. But the former owner of the store, a man now in his eighties who is the world’s largest collector of bicycle drums, might be interested. Drums, or hubs, I learn from Isaac Wheeler, my grandson who works summers in a bicycle shop, are the axle-and-gear housings on old three-speed bikes. He was not able to tell me why anyone would collect them.
The shopkeeper tells us that so notable is Henry Mathis’s collection that he has left it to the Smithsonian Institution. Sybil dwells lovingly on her bike’s history as we all stand looking at the relic, pointing out that only the kickstand and the basket are not original. She explains that it is named the Queen Mary because one rides it sitting aloft in lordly fashion, high above everyone else on the road or street. ‘None of this abject crouching that they do on bikes these days,’ she says.
Next day she takes the Queen Mary to Maryland. The collector of drums (or hubs
) admires the bike, and buys it. So upset is she by her callous abandonment of an old, trusted friend that she forgets to ask if he is going to polish up the original, now-dull black paint and sell it, permitting the new owner to mount the shiny black antique and ride away down Branch Avenue, aloft and regal, or dismantle it for its parts. She is somewhat consoled by the thought that if the old collector does disassemble it, the drum will serve to immortalize the whole bike when it is displayed in a national museum. She thinks it would be like an historic transplant—taking a healthy part from it and preserving it in another place.
Sybil comes home, saddened. But I notice she puts her helmet, the old bike bell, and two sets of cables and locks on the pile marked ‘Pack.’
For some reason (perhaps the sight of the helmet), I remember Queen Elizabeth I’s threat to an unruly courtier: ‘I will make you shorter by a head.’
The time for John Kidner’s moving men to arrive is approaching. Our living quarters have shrunk even further. We now have a couch, a chair, a demountable Ikea table, and about fifty cardboard cartons in the living room. The remains of a Mother’s Day bouquet, three tulips and a few carnations, sit in a bottle on the table. We are stripped down to basic needs. After all the years of overdecoration, it feels rather good.
I break the rhythm of compulsive packing and go to noon Mass at St. James. Mother Barbara Henry, ‘curate,’ as she is listed in the bulletin, is the celebrant, Iris Newsom, of the Library of Congress, is the server, I am the congregation. It is a quiet, decorous liturgy, during which the confusion and roil of the streets outside die away, and only the peace ‘that passeth all understanding’ seems to inhabit the beautiful church.
Afterwards we three meet in the nave, and realize we have all been aware of the same thing: how extraordinary it is that it is now possible for three women to come together to celebrate Mass, legally, in an Episcopal church. The institution itself proceeds into the modern world with the speed of a hippopotamus, as T. S. Eliot observed, but as Galileo insisted, in another context, ‘I pur si mu oue.’ Nevertheless, it does move.
We have dinner with a good friend who is HIV-positive and has been living with the specter of AIDS for years. His symptoms are not yet major, so few of his fellow workers, or even his family, I believe, are aware of the cloud that hangs over his life.
For some sufferers, this is the worst part of this plague: in order to be treated humanely they must hide the truth from the misinformed or pusillanimous persons around them. They must approach the darkness alone instead of in the company of friends and family. Only at the last, when it is too late, when extreme illness turns one in upon oneself, creating a hermitage of one’s pain, do the disapproving and the frightened ones come, carrying their fears for themselves in their faces, almost useless to the one who is dying.
We say goodbye to our friend and urge him to visit us this summer in Maine. He says he will come. But we doubt we will see him there. We feel honored to be among those he took into his confidence. We are his fellow travelers, even at a distance, moving with him for part of the way, into the dark wood. He has permitted us the journey with him toward the chasm.
The last three days of festivities before we leave. Each year the PEN/Faulkner Foundation awards prizes for the best American fiction of the year. This time I was one of the judges, so we are included in the ceremonies in Washington that surround the event. It is significant that we will leave the city, not from the humdrum daily life of the apartment, but from the luxurious hotel suite we have been assigned for the weekend.
On Friday evening, judges, winners, supporters, and literary friends meet at Lael and Ron Stegall’s house on East Capitol Street. A few years ago Sybil and I went there to buy books. Another time we acquired our prized library steps from their house sale, so we know the place well. We walk from the Capitol Hill Hotel, through the heavy-with-rain leaves of the huge trees on that lovely avenue. My feet in their unaccustomed party shoes hurt badly.
But I forget my discomfort in the presence of so many people I know. Faith Sale has come down from New York, fresh from the triumphs of two of her authors, Alice Hoffman and Lee Smith, and Harvey Simmons, whom I knew when he was an editor for the Eakins Press, and an old friend of the Stegalls, is here. Leslie Katz, owner of the press, published well-designed letterpress books, which Harvey always sent to me, to my great pleasure. Then Harvey disappeared from the publishing scene. Now he reappears (to me), having been for the last twenty years a Cisterian brother in New York. He tells me that the order’s prime source of income is the sale of fruit cakes at Christmas time. How large is the community? I ask. ‘Down to twenty brothers and five priests, from sixty,’ he says. He is a spry, bearded, almost elfin man with a cheerful mien, full of loving memories of ‘Mr. B.’ (Balanchine, of course) and his friendship with the great choreographer while he was working on books by and about him.
Elena Castedo, a South American novelist and now a board member of PEN/Faulkner, throws her arms around me and kisses me when we are introduced. I am startled, trying to decide why. She probably has heard I am a founding board member, but I am unused to such instant effusiveness.
Standing near by is this year’s first-prize winner, Don DeLillo. He too looks startled. I move over to talk to him. He does not throw his arms around me. In fact, he is leaning against the wall and looks cornered when I approach. I congratulate him, he thanks me for my choice of Mao II. Then he points to a large abstract painting on the wall, full of colors that whirl, a mass of chaotic figures. ‘There’s the first chapter,’ he says, unsmiling.
His novel is a searing account of the futility and irrelevance of writing fiction. Bill Grey, its hero, is a Thomas Pynchon—like writer who has published two books that have attained cult status. He becomes hermitic, wanting only to work without the intrusion of the world, while outside, having made of him a mythic figure as important as his work, the world waits eagerly for another book (in this he resembles Harold Brodkey). Years pass without its appearance (J. D. Salinger?). He has been writing and rewriting it in his cell, surrounded by walls of files of everything he has ever written.
The absurdity of mass culture (‘The future belongs to crowds’), the fatuous world of the book and the writer, the media that feed on it, are DeLillo’s subjects. When a photographer breaks into his seclusion she tells him she loves writers but is afraid she cannot speak their private language. Bill Grey says:
The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I’ve grown a second self in this room. It’s the self-important fool that keeps the writer going. I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation. The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself. If the pain is real, why do I inflate it? Maybe this is the only pleasure I’m allowed.
And later:
I’ll tell you what I don’t exaggerate. The doubt. Every minute of every day. It’s what I smell in my bed. Loss of faith. That’s what this is all about.
Yes.
Sybil has read the book, and liked it well enough. But she claims it is a writer’s book, and that it is significant that the three judges are all novelists themselves. She is probably right. For it is a well-known maxim (Le Rochefoucauld? Montaigne? Twain?) that we most admire in others what we know to be true of ourselves.
Next morning Richard Wiley, fellow judge and novelist, Allan Gurganus, runner-up for the prize and my longtime friend, and Sybil and I have breakfast at Sherrill’s, the Hill’s oldest eatery, where the waitresses are all over fifty. One is so frail and old she has to hold on to the counter when she comes around to serve. They all have the surly dispositions of the waiters at the forties Broadway restaurant called Lindy’s, another place where longevity bestowed upon the help all the privileges of incivility. The food at Sherrill’s is plentiful, cheap, and rather poor. Hill dwellers are so used to the historic place they prefer it to glitzy newer restaurants with pretty young waitresses and good
food.
We ate and talked for two hours, of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where I taught after Richard and Allan were classmates there, and of other PEN/Faulkner events we had all attended. Allan told a story about the last gala, which took place during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. The honored writers were asked to talk about their heroes. Two famous black writers confined their remarks to black movie actors who never got the fame they deserved, and jazz. Allan decided to talk about the matter on everyone’s mind. His hero was Anita Hill.
The audience gasped. Afterwards, an official of the affair asked him, reprovingly, if he knew that Senator John Danforth’s daughter was on the Gala Committee. Others, like Hodding Carter and Susan Stamberg, congratulated him. Apprised of this, the official informed Allan that his was ‘the best talk.’
After breakfast, Richard and Allan go off to see a demonstration on the Mall in support of aid to the cities. For the last time, we go to the apartment to empty it of trash. We strip it of everything, down to the penny that had dropped behind the bed. We turn off the refrigerator, leave the keys on the counter, and shut the door. We are gone, leaving for the last time our home away from home, I with relief, Sybil with reluctance.
Saturday’s Washington Post has a sad story about Lowen’s, a toy store on Wisconsin Avenue that is closing after almost fifty years in business. One employee has worked there for thirty-seven years. In the shadow of Toys R Us, the world’s largest toy store, as it calls itself, the small, beloved Lowen’s could not survive the competition, the rent rises, the recession. Small, it would seem, is both beautiful—and fatal.
Extra Innings Page 21