by Floyd Skloot
What’s more, I still have room on the bottom shelf for a half dozen or so books. Maybe this time, if I buy it, I can get through A Tale of Two Cities, which I last deposited in the trash on a train in Italy.
6
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THE TOP SHELF
On Books I Need Beside Me
In 1972, while insisting that he was the wrong person to do so, the British poet Philip Larkin wrote a brief foreword for an Antiquarian Book Fair’s program. After all, he said, “I should never call myself a book lover, any more than a people lover: it all depends on what’s inside them.” He also denied being a book collector, or even knowing how many books he owned. But Larkin did allow that he was a compulsive reader, “and this has meant that books have crept in somehow.” So while he did not love or collect books he did need to have books. Many books, and always more books. “Only the other day,” he wrote, “I found myself eyeing a patch of wall in my flat and thinking I could get more shelves in there.”
More shelves! This is an attitude I can relate to, having crammed the tiny round house Beverly and I used to live in with so many straight-cornered bookshelves that I broke toes five times in fourteen years just trying to get into and out of my writing space. In our current, larger, and more rectilinear home, every room teems with bookshelves. The 137.5-square-foot bedroom where I write contains eight bookcases of varying shapes and sizes totaling 114 square feet of shelves. In our living room, the previous owner left a prodigious system of built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves that made me giddy when I first saw them.
Like Larkin, I’m not a book collector, though I’ll admit to having twenty-seven foreign and five American editions of my daughter’s best-selling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in a glass-fronted bookcase opposite my writing desk. While not an indiscriminate book lover, either, the percentages show that I clearly share Larkin’s need for books. And I can relate to his organizational approach. He had, he said, designated locations for specific types of books. Novels and detective stories were kept in his bedroom, “the higher forms of literature” and works about jazz were in his sitting room, titles “picked from a bad bunch on a station bookstall” and intended “to speed the parting guest” were in his hall. Shelved in the place of honor, “within reach of my working chair” and just to its left, Larkin kept books by twelve poets: “Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman, Frost and Owen.”
It’s a revealing and not too surprising list, providing a gateway into thinking about Larkin’s work. His to-hand poets are typically formal, traditional, plain spoken, direct, restrained, observant, often focused on disappointment or pain or loss. Excluding the flamboyant Whitman, the now-obscure nineteenth-century rural clergyman and dialect poet William Barnes (1801–86), and the even more obscure nineteenth-century politician and humorist Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–39), they’re poets you would expect Larkin to have admired, to have turned to for refreshment and example as he worked. They’re there, he says, “as exemplars.”
I understand the need to keep such work close. It comes not only from the desire to reread or study or gain inspiration, but—at least for me—also from a talismanic impulse. So I too have a group of essential poets within reach of my working chair and just to its left. Not only within reach, but within view, so I can see them at a glance there on the top shelf of a small desktop bookcase. There’s something more than admiration involved, something more intimate and emotionally urgent, a deeper connectedness.
My top shelf houses a never-changing core group of six poets: Frost, Eliot, Bishop, Stevens, Dylan Thomas, and Larkin himself. There’s also Thomas Kinsella, the Irish poet with whom I studied and have remained friends for forty-four years, represented by both his Collected Poems and a two-CD compilation of his recorded readings, so I can hear his voice again. And there are other poets who rotate on or off the shelf, space currently occupied by Roethke, Williams, Lowell, Sexton, and Kinsella’s Irish contemporary John Montague.
As I look over there now, and type the poets’ names, it is difficult to keep my hands from leaving the keyboard to take down the Thomas. In three weeks, Beverly and I are going to Wales so we can visit some of the places he wrote about, and it’d be lovely right now to reread “Fern Hill.” And wait, I want to check my recollection that Philip Larkin, long before admitting that he did fill his home with books, also wrote a poem in which he said that “books are a load of crap.”
Nothing about my life until the age of twenty suggests that I would be a person who loved and wrote poetry. Who required it. My father, a citywide track champion whose dreams of Olympic competition failed to materialize, graduated from high school in 1926 and worked most of the rest of his thirty-five years, fifteen hours a day, in his Red Hook chicken market. My mother, who dropped out of school after ninth grade—also in 1926—was an aspiring chanteuse whose brief career ended after a fifteen-minute radio show aired on WBNX in the Bronx. The Melody Girl of the Air then found temporary work painting mannequins for theatrical costume designers until marrying my father in 1938. Trapped together in a small apartment or in the upstairs rooms of a rented house, they were disappointed in the way their lives had turned out, furious with each other and with their two children, seen as daily reminders of all they’d lost. Their mutual rage seethed between eruptions and required steady monitoring.
I grew up in a home where books were living room decor, their cream-and-red cloth bindings neatly lined up on one shelf among the bric-a-brac and plastic plants. No one read them; no one was allowed to touch them lest the covers be dirtied or misaligned. There were Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola—names my mother loved to pronounce with elaborately elongated first syllables. I can’t recall my parents or brother reading a book. My father did read the newspaper when he got home at night, silent in his easy chair with a box of butterscotch cremes before him on the coffee table, and went to bed early so he’d be awake to open his market at dawn. I don’t recall ever being in a bookstore until I went to college.
I had a few Hardy Boys volumes and Classics Illustrated comics, but was at best a haphazard and very occasional reader who seldom turned to books. My imaginative world was focused on playing with baseball cards or conducting two- or three-hour sessions of dice-baseball games during which I filled a notebook with extensive records of each player’s performances. In this place of emotional chaos I tried to surround myself with order, with structure. Or I tried to be gone. I was active, playing ball in all seasons and in any league I could find, joining a youth group at the synagogue or a service organization at school, finding reasons to be at home as rarely as possible. When I was old enough, I got after-school and weekend jobs, busing tables, filing brochures at a travel agency, working as a butcher’s apprentice, selling produce in a supermarket, cooking hamburgers at a beachfront snack bar, parking cars at beach clubs, mowing lawns.
Most of the books I remember reading as an adolescent had some connection with sports: The Long Season and Pennant Race, major league pitcher Jim Brosnan’s memoirs of the 1959 and 1961 baseball seasons; Joe Garagiola’s 1960 reminiscence, Baseball Is a Funny Game; Jimmy Breslin’s 1963 account of the hapless New York Mets and their first season in existence the year before, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?; biographies of Jackie Robinson or Mickey Mantle and sappy Young Adult baseball novels by John R. Tunis or Joe Archibald with the word Kid in their titles; Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 novella, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. I used the library, which was located near the town’s railroad station on the way home from school, as a place where I could justifiably spend some time and delay my arrival home. I tended to take out the same books over and over.
I have no memory of reading poetry or being affected by hearing it until an afternoon in the spring of 1962, a few months after my father had died. I was nearing fifteen, a ninth-grader, when my English teacher read aloud A. E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young,” about the early death of
a champion runner (“The time you won your town the race / We chaired you through the marketplace”). As she asked questions afterward, I remember feeling thunderstruck, silenced, unable to move a muscle. Normally, I’d have found a way to tell about my father’s exploits as an athlete, a runner like the young man suddenly dead in the poem. When class ended I couldn’t get out of my seat. It felt as though Housman had reached someplace so far inside me that I hadn’t known until then it was there. Nor had I known or had words to express quite what I thought or felt about my father’s death, other than shock at its suddenness and finality, fear over what would happen to us without him, and anger at him for leaving me with my mother. But Housman seemed to know, specifically and personally, how harrowing it had been to see my father in his coffin, the terror of his eyelids sealed against me, “eyes the shady night has shut.” He knew I couldn’t forget the moment when the coffin was lowered, when I had to throw dirt on the coffin, heard it strike the wood above my father’s face, and imagined him in there where “earth has stopped the ears.” For all his speed in life, like the athlete in the poem my father was suddenly “Townsman of a stiller town.” The contrast of swiftness and stillness, which I hadn’t thought about before, seemed unbearable. But it also gave me a way to think about what I couldn’t forget.
I was hardly the first adolescent to be bowled over by Housman’s mix of romanticism, yearning, and loss, undone by the solemn tetrameters and heavy rhymes. But I did feel, right then in Mrs. Beckman’s English class, as though Housman’s poem were somehow mine, had spoken to and for me, had presented the eulogy I hadn’t be able to say for my father. I’ve heard the poem spoken several more times since 1962—by Jim McKay, the great sportscaster, after Israeli athletes were murdered by terrorists during the 1972 Munich Olympics; by Meryl Streep, as Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen in the film Out of Africa, after the death of her lover, Denys Finch Hatton—and it still triggers the same intense reaction, as though the particular sense of loss and shock were a dormant virus in my body being reactivated by exposure to Housman’s words.
Despite—or perhaps because of—its impact, “To an Athlete Dying Young” didn’t immediately alter my reading habits. Beyond what was required in school, poetry still had no place in my life. Why choose to read stuff that had such power to hurt? I did read a novel that was not about sports, John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, since my aunt gave me a copy for my seventeenth birthday.
After graduating from high school, my primary motives for going to college were to get away from home and avoid being drafted. I had no sense of what I wanted to do or study or be. Maybe I would be a physical therapist or a chef, professions for which I had no more qualifications or calling than for any other. Maybe I could become an actor, since I had portrayed A-Rab in West Side Story during summer camp when I was fifteen. I did hope to play baseball for whatever college I went to.
It was the baseball fantasy that led me where I needed to go, because the only way I had a remote chance of playing college baseball was by attending a small, academically oriented school. With that in mind, and considering my mother’s edict that I had to stay within 250 miles of home, and a transcript showing my best subjects were the nonsciences, my high school guidance counselor suggested that I apply to a pair of liberal arts schools whose admissions officers she’d recently spoken to: Colgate University and Franklin and Marshall College. I visited Colgate, in upstate New York, on a day when the temperature was twenty-six below zero. So I chose Franklin and Marshall, an all-male college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which I hadn’t seen in person until the September afternoon when I moved into the dormitory. The decision that altered my life was based on nothing more substantial than who had been in contact with a guidance counselor I’d never known before entering her office, and the harsh weather in Hamilton, New York, on a winter day in early 1965.
At Franklin and Marshall, in another instance of serendipity, I was hired to be the reader for a blind professor, Dr. Robert Russell, who happened to be the chairman of the English Department. This assignment kept me around department activity, allowed friendships to develop with faculty members, made me feel involved with literature. It also began turning me into a serious reader as I tape-recorded novels, stories, and most often poems, including all the selections of Victorian era writers from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, a task that might have destroyed poetry for me forever but instead felt like some kind of grand initiation. To do the job properly required more than just a quick, flat recital that thumped along the metrical track. I needed a deeper engagement with the words and lines, an immersion in the poem’s voice, its form’s inner workings. I remember the skin-prickling excitement I felt, closed off in Russell’s storage room with his reel-to-reel tape recorder and the massive textbook open before me, as I read Robert Browning’s twelve-line poem of desire, “Meeting at Night.” It might have been published in 1845 but it felt utterly NOW, the voice urgent and immediate and believable as the speaker brought his boat to land, leaped out on shore, and ran to the farmhouse where his beloved waited: “A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch / And blue spurt of a lighted match, / And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears, / Than the two hearts beating each to each.”
This was astounding to me, more honest and open than Housman, real, emotional, barely-but-surely under control, and I loved it. I looked forward to coming to work, began putting in extra hours, took more and more English courses as electives, attended plays put on by the college’s Green Room Theatre. Over the summers and on my own initiative I read Melville, Lawrence, Conrad—writers I’d been introduced to in classes. At the start of my junior year, I was officially an English major, Russell was my academic advisor, I’d auditioned for and been cast as Pompey in the Green Room’s production of Measure for Measure, and I was no longer thinking about being a baseball player. Which was fortunate, because, near the close of a thoroughly mediocre freshman season, I’d sustained a shoulder injury that ended my playing days.
When I was asked by my family what I intended to do with a degree in English, the best answer I could offer was “get another one.” I assumed I would complete an M.A. and Ph.D. and go on to teach, like the professors I’d come to admire and with whom I’d spent so much time. It was not that I particularly wanted to teach, or do research on a writer or specialize in an era—none of which I ended up doing. I just knew I’d become a person who loved to read, to think and talk about writing, and especially to speak written words—poems, prose, parts in plays—out loud. This act, this transference of words on a page to speech with the full engagement of my body and mind, satisfied something I didn’t fully understand about myself.
In the spring of 1969, as my final undergraduate semester began, I took a poetry writing class taught by Sanford Pinsker. He’d been hired the year before, after completing his doctorate at the University of Washington, where he’d gone in part to study with Theodore Roethke. But Roethke had died a month before Pinsker arrived in Seattle. So he ended up working with Roethke’s colleague David Wagoner, hearing Roethke stories, and benefiting from fresh memories of Roethke’s ideas about conveying emotional depth and immediacy, about rhythm and energy, formal tension over control of powerful feeling. He began reading the Confessional poets emerging in the mid-1960s—Berryman, Lowell, Sexton, Snodgrass—and I remember borrowing his copy of M. L. Rosenthal’s 1967 study, The New Poets, and avidly reading its chapter on them. Near the book’s end, I discovered excerpts from the work of someone I’d never heard of, Thomas Kinsella, who would soon come to mean so much to me.
Pinsker wrote poems and published them in magazines, but was also establishing himself as a critic of contemporary fiction, particularly Jewish fiction. This was his first writing class as a teacher, and my only writing class as a student. Pinsker was twenty-seven, fresh from being saturated in exactly the sort of poetry I most needed to know about, as enthusiastic about conveying a love and commitment to poetry as about teaching craft. It was th
e perfect moment for me to receive such instruction.
Although there were formal writing assignments or exercises, the class’s emphasis was on close reading of poems from an anthology. Not only do I remember the book, I still have my copy, barely held together with old Scotch tape, pages highlighted and littered with notes. The binding is cracked in several places so that it lies flat when opened to Roethke’s “The Lost Son,” beside which I’ve exclaimed over and over, in green ink, the word “sounds!, sounds!”; or W. D. Snodgrass’s “Heart’s Needle, vi,” where I’ve underlined and bracketed and starred the poet’s comment “I shall have to investigate the objects and events of my personal life”; or Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” where I’ve blurted that “contemplation is the only means to salvation”; or Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” where I’ve repeated in the margins—IN ALL CAPS—that poetry “survives in the valley of its saying.”
Reading Modern Poetry: A Critical Anthology, edited by Paul Engle and Warren Carrier, was a 1955 publication revised in 1968, the year before I bought it. Containing a generous selection of modern and contemporary poems arranged by increasing difficulty of reading, it also incorporated thorough analyses or commentaries—many written by the poets themselves—on several poems. It seemed as though these commentaries were addressed directly to me, as when Allen Tate wrote of the poet being in “a world that allows him but little certainty” or when Paul Engle said a poem could “become the live sound of a man talking intensely.”
