by Paul Monette
Various adults around us chuckled in sympathy, holding bags that looked even less commodious than ours. As we passed a rural fellow and his brood of squalling kids—a tableau right out of the dustbowl, worthy of Dorothea Lange—it was the father himself who looked to be holding back tears. Defeated by too much hope, a man who must’ve learned long ago that there was no free lunch. He caught my father’s eye, and they exchanged a moue of frustration. Next I heard my father ask, “How many you got?”
“’Bout three hundred,” came the reply, but then he had twice as many kids as we did, who probably drank their milk by the pailful.
“Here, take ours,” Dad declared, lifting the shopping bag out of my arms and handing it over. Just like that. And six months of hoarding stoppers—my sweepstakes project that came to nothing at last—vanished like the flush of youth.
I think I was angry with Dad at the time, giving the store away without even asking me, but that was sheer displacement. By the time we’d driven home in the wood-sided ’49 station wagon, I understood what a practical gesture he’d made—-not to mention generous. I recall he even apologized for the whole mess, as if he ought to have warned me all along that the best-laid plans fuck up. Then he bucked us both with a stop in Boxford for a Benson’s ice cream cone. Dairy was clearly the leitmotif of the evening, if not of my entire eighth year on the planet.
And how have I done since then? Depends. But I’ve never forgotten that 157: when I came up short of the grades at Yale to make Phi Beta Kappa; whenever I’ve had to settle for a niggling book advance; especially when my T-cells fell that far, only off by a point or two. There was a time when I wanted it written below the name and dates on my gravestone: 157. Let the deconstructionists figure that one out.
And doesn’t the lesson of that muggy August night still have its hooks in me? I’ve never bought a lottery ticket, even when the pot was soaring into the nine figures. When Winston and I were bound from Denver, passing the night in Vegas before the last push to L.A., I was constitutionally incapable of feeding the nickel slots. (Till he forced a roll of quarters on me and gave me my first lesson in the one-armed bandit—a lesson that never quite took.) Nothing is free. Bad luck being more to the point than good, why tempt fate by winning? Doubtless an old Puritan gene that taught me that even if I hit the jackpot—up to my knees in quarters, so to speak—I was likely to exit the Desert Inn right into the path of a bus or a drunken Eldorado.
Besides, it’s the atavism of the crowd at Glennie’s Dairy that’s stuck with me—oh, including my own—the craning hungry faces of the townsfolk, just this side of a riot if they should come up empty-handed. A naked trance of greed indeed; not so very different from the players in Shirley Jackson’s story, bound by a yearly madness that served to propitiate their darkest gods, only with stones instead of milk stoppers. “The Lottery” played for keeps, where blood kin snuff blood kin.
In my bookish adolescence I was a terrible snob when it came to things—imagining that the stuff of the mind was on a whole different level from the world of convertibles and power boats, snowmobiles and all the rest of that suburban loot which counted for glittering prizes. I read like a speedboat myself, never pausing to catch my breath between The End of one and the start of the next. I wasn’t especially discriminating, needing to fill up the empty hours when I wasn’t pining for boys to rut with. Reading as monkish distraction.
The hoarding came a bit later, giving up the library stacks in the face of the burgeoning paperback boom. (Half the queers I’ve ever met seem to have gotten it on in the stacks of their youth, or at least in the downstairs loo. Another string of missed chances in my book, too busy reading, holding my water till I got home.) I would even read while walking back and forth from town, not so much as looking both ways at the corners—thus the attendent screech of brakes that followed in my wake. But once I started buying paperbacks myself, I became a virtual Evelyn Wood in my absent-minded wanderings, possessed by the need to add yet another title to my bedroom shelves.
By the dozen and then by the hundredfold—watching the literary rows fill up as if my mind itself had found a physical form, and gratifyingly solid in a way that milk stoppers could never be. Reading for bulk, not content, like a power lifter mainlining steroids. The whole process abated in college, stuck as I was with groaning texts that took months to get through, and no real desire to add their doorstop heft to my personal collection. Besides, college was such a constant torment of romantic longing, pining worse than ever for those unattainable boys who looked right through me. The one extended time in my life when reading didn’t matter—indeed, when I could scarcely see the blur of words for all my hormonal madness.
Not till I was rudely thrust into the real world after graduation did I resume my bookish accumulation. Presumably more discriminating, but ever more hyper to build a wall of intellectual bricks, the book-lined study of my particular closet. Haunting second-hand stores and bargain bins, and for the first time acquiring volume after volume that I would never find the leisure to read. Tomes that piled up on my desk and bedside table gathering dust, till the sheer Malthusian geometries of it all forced me to shelve them unread. What am I doing otherwise with the Holroyd two-volume bio of Lytton Strachey, a figure of not even marginal interest to me? Or the Belknap Press set of the Brownings’ letters, florid and not my style? But then Anthony Powell’s title has it exactly right: Books Do Furnish a Room.
I remember Roger beside me as I plumped the sixth volume of Mrs. Woolf’s letters on the counter at Book Soup; and not so many years later Volume Five of her diaries. On both occasions Roger murmured, slyly but not judgmental, “Do you think you’ll ever read it?”
The truth? No way. But by then the mere act of acquisition had taken on a life of its own—still trying to make up for the too-small book allowance left over from my prep school paycheck, not to mention an end run around that 157. These were more for reference than for reading, I told Roger, and more than that for providing a bracing view from my desk in the study. A harmless enough diversion, in any case, and hardly unique. Just being in a smart bookstore, redolent with the heady smell of print, a Dionysian pleasure going all the way back to Gutenberg. We all end up with too many books we wish we could absorb by a sort of osmosis, mind over matter.
In my case there was also the mind’s sub-basement where I did my screen work, with its INTs and EXTs and arbitrary divisions into Acts—as far from theater’s organic use of breaks as from the Acts of the Apostles. I would find myself staring idly at my wall of books across the room, my security blanket and shield, proof that my brain wasn’t slowly leaking out my ears. And round about ’83 deciding that brain death was imminent, I put myself on a schoolmarm’s regimen of self-improvement, making up for all the lacunae of my so-called education. From Robinson Crusoe to Lady Chatterley, from The Way of the World to Heartbreak House, a delicious couple of hours late every night to no purpose but my own.
Then Roger got sick. From that moment I ceased to concentrate except on him, leaving The Golden Bough dog-eared at page 221, as abrupt as the unfinished symphony of Schubert—
To this day the Sultan of Wadai must have no obvious bodily defect, and a king of Angoy cannot be crowned if he has a single blemish, such as a broken or filed tooth or the scar of an old wound.1
And never to be resumed, ending the era of self-improvement for good. It’s true that Roger and I passed the summer before his death reading Plato aloud, or I did anyway, since he couldn’t see. And yet from the sudden onset of his blindness I started jettisoning our books, like pulling out the stitches of some vast needlepoint tapestry—The Lady and the Unicorn, say, at the Cluny Abbey in Paris.
At first I put them in boxes, thinking I’d give them away. But no library wanted them, too expensive to catalogue and store, no matter how intellectually superior. The best I could do was offer them to jumble sales at churches, fodder for the bin-combers—twenty-five cents apiece as is, then finally reduced to a dime on the final day of
the fair. I began to play a ruthless game of triage, especially when it came to Roger’s cheap-bound classics from the French, so yellow and brittle with age that the pages crumbled to dust in the hand. None of that sweet perfume of ink and paper, but musty and final as ashes, like papyrus debris in the ruins of the Library at Alexandria.
And when he died, I only accelerated the process. All slim volumes of poems by the defiantly obscure. Any old textbook, kept against the day I might teach again. There was room for six hundred books on the shelves in the study and the living room alcove. But we were way over our limit, books piled teeteringly on top of the once alphabetical rows, a veritable chaos of books bulging from every cranny. I determined to throw one away for anything new that arrived. Not that I was buying much anymore, but the books came in from the publishers—galleys bound and pleading for endorsement, every book on dying of AIDS and just as many about beating it.
Not that I didn’t blurb my friends from time to time, especially the gay and lesbian ones, or rejoice at the fruits of their hard-won success. Rita Mae Brown remarks in her impish writer’s manual that John Milton didn’t go blind from any organic cause, but rather from reading unsolicited manuscripts. When I gave it up, it was partly that, and partly that I didn’t respond anymore to the reach of other writers’ imaginative cosmos. Nothing new to learn, not even that goosing twinge of envy that used to propel me through better books than mine. Whatever I needed to get through the night just wasn’t available between book covers.
Late in his life Edmund Wilson used to send a postcard by way of reply to various inquiries. It went something like this:
Edmund Wilson does not
( ) read unsolicited material
( ) give after-dinner speeches
( ) answer personal letters
( ) write introductions
( ) accept honorary degrees
He’d check the appropriate sentiment and be done with it. The sour grump of which notwithstanding, I understand he had no time for anything but his own work, and was usually reading his way through Balzac, Turgenev, the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the whole of Canadian literature. A man who couldn’t bear the quotidian.
It wasn’t that I had such high-toned literary tasks as Wilson’s, requiring all my time. Honestly, it was as simple as no longer opening books with a sense of anticipation, even wonder. I didn’t want to read anything over again—not even Forster, the angel on my writer’s shoulder. Or Iris Murdoch or Graham Greene or Flannery O’Connor, writers I’d read straight through, especially in those years when I preferred the feelings of fictive characters to life. Not even my own work spoke to me. No false modesty there, since nothing has stopped the near-erotic trailing of my finger along the spines of my shelf. But not to read.
Eternal regret: Forster was in residence at Kings College, Cambridge, in the summer of ’66 when I was there. I passed his windows and thought about sending a note, but was far too shy to follow through. A music scholar I met last year told me I should’ve come by for tea to Forster’s rooms, no invitation required, for he always delighted in new faces. A jolly time of wit and chortling laughter—the biographies never seemed to get it right about his irony—as long as you didn’t overpraise his work. J. R. Ackerley, the other queer English writer in the generation after Oscar Wilde, was often in attendance. And if some new face went into gush mode over Passage to India, Forster was quick to parry, “Oh, but Joe has a book about India too. You must read that.”2 Now there was a mortal occasion not to miss, better than reading any day.
Oh, of course I’ve kept a certain quantity of literary totems I’d never part with—anything from the ancient world, but then that stuffs practically immortal. The fragments of Pindar and Sappho, the bawdy and vivid lyrics of Catullus and the knife-edge quips of Martial. And despite my scatterbrained excuse to Roger back in the days of Mrs. Woolf—more for reference than for reading—that’s what I do with most of the books that remain. Following up on a line or two of poetry that I never quite committed to memory—or worse, had tried to improve on. Tracking down the moment in Jane Austen when Emma finally gets it through her head about Mr. Knightly. “If I loved you less,” he tells her in the garden, “I might be able to talk about it more.”
But even reading Sophocles, I start maundering in my head that I can’t experience it in the original. Oh well, no time to learn Greek now. Garry Wills tells a lovely story about being arrested at a demonstration and having in his pocket a Greek New Testament. He remarks to a fellow detainee—libertarian anarchist Karl Hess—that if he had to know just one language besides his own it would be Greek, because its literature was suffused with the language of all the founding genres of Western culture. I can picture him reading the letters of Paul in the holding pen.
Then several weeks later Wills was hauled in again from another demonstration, and Karl Hess struggled through the crowd to his side. “Let’s try to get in the same cell,” said Hess, “because I’ve been working on my Greek verbs.”
That is the sort of intangible I envy, not a matter of things per se, though of course requiring a text and a dictionary. Edmund Wilson experienced a frustration not unlike my own in his final decade—he who could read a dozen tongues, but couldn’t master the nuances of Mandarin Chinese and Hebrew, not enough to claim them as his.
Intangibles, which books are not, though the contents are. Both in the collecting and dismantling of my library, I’ve surely been too caught up in the “thingness” of books, when what has really fashioned me is the sum of a thousand narratives and stanzas, the revelations of a writer’s voice. Can’t take any of that to the grave with me either, but probably up to the very brink I will die with a quote on my lips. A whisper of profundity that, if I have the breath left, I will doubtless supply with a proper footnote.
As for the act of writing itself, the tools of the trade have changed utterly in my lifetime. In grammar school I went through six years of the Rinehart method of penmanship, copying out pages of individual letters till we were deemed ready to essay a full sentence. In third grade we graduated from pencils to inkwells. Individual wells in the right-hand corner of each child’s desk, and a black wood pen like a mini-conductor’s baton, with a changeable nib at one end.
Learning the body English of dipping and then transferring ink to paper demanded rock-hard concentration. Woe to the kid who blurred his letters by applying too much ink. Of course we also had squares of blotting paper, but they were meant to be used sparingly, for words that didn’t dry fast enough. We weren’t, after all, in the business of making Ror-schachs. Miss Alice Stack in the fourth grade, who came round every Friday with her thin-lipped watering can of ink to give us refills, actually made it a practice to check our blotters, factoring an excess of blot into our penmanship grade at report card time.
I still prefer today to write in longhand, though thankfully in the blotless age of the ballpoint and the Flair. In ’83 I managed to make the transition to word processor (hateful phrase, like verbal Velveeta), kicking and screaming the whole way. My pre-Columbian computer is a vintage IBM, whose upgrading and updating I’ve avoided from the first, dashing the hopes of salesmen who long to bring me up to snuff. “But it’s so slow,” they tell me. “You could be into your file in two seconds.” But I rather like the chugging and throat-clearing of the IBM, like an engine turning over on a frosty morning. And anyway, I don’t want to go fast.
Thus have I eschewed both fax machine and laptop, even as they proliferate all around me. Absolutely everyone who knew I was at sea for several weeks last summer, hearing that I’d managed to finish two of these essays shipboard, remarked in chorus: “What did you use, a laptop?”
“No,” I replied, “a pen.” And in the face of their various states of shock, I added helpfully, “You know. By hand.”
Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn’t propose to send me something in a flash: “Here, I’ll just fax it to you.” After informing them that I haven’t bought into that technology as yet (but as if its
arrival is imminent; not wanting to imply that my house is lit by whale-oil lamps), I wait out the loss of words of my up-to-the-minute callers. “You could send it overnight mail,” I suggest, in case they think their only other option is Pony Express. “All right,” they reply, conceding defeat, but clearly aghast that they might have to wait in line at the local P.O.
So I am something of a throwback, no doubt about it. But I’ve also come to feel it as an acute pain in the region of the heart that writing by hand will be the hardest thing to surrender at the end. A few years ago in the British Museum, I remember poring over the “fair copy” of Jane Eyre, the final presentation draft submitted to the publisher. The hand was clear and unvarying, not a word crossed out or misspelled—a sure A+ in Miss Alice Stack’s gradebook. And this was the standard back then: the patient copying out of near three hundred pages, with a rhythm of such repose that you couldn’t fail to see what a physical act of pleasure it was, making that fair copy.
Or consider Francis Parkman, brilliant historian of the French and Indian Wars, whose own ill-health plummeted even further after his exploration and site research for The Oregon Trail. So debilitated was he after 1850, suffering from that he could often compose no more than six lines a day. Eventually he employed a metal grill that he would lay down over his manuscript as a sort of template, writing between the thin metal bars. Virtually blind for decades, he nevertheless produced some nine volumes of history, most of it still peerless a hundred years later.
a complete exhaustion and derangement of his nervous system, a mental condition prohibiting concentration, and an extreme weakness of the eyes,3
But then patience was once the order of the day, and the physical act of writing was close to the operational definition of being a writer at all. Jane Austen wrote at a tiny desk in the parlor, and whenever someone entered the room she would swiftly slip the manuscript under the blotter or in the drawer. Not shy, not threatened, but ever alert to her social duties and somehow thriving on interruption, since the bustle and gossip and coming-and-going were her great subject after all. I assume it took her no more than a couple of seconds to pick up where she left off—quick as any modern software.
