by Roger Angell
The Botsford apartment occupies the upper floors of a handsome brownstone, which means that the elevator hall and the bookcase are part of the place, too. And what better spot to stash "Gardner's Library," as old friends think of it—a unique selection of volumes never to be taken down and opened, never to be discussed, reviewed, collated, or arranged? You can't tell a book by its cover, but in this case you can. Their owner and curator, the narrow and amiable Botsford, who is eighty-four, was once an editor at this magazine, with an office just inside the anteroom where inbound, not-yet-published books, destined to be sent along to reviewers or cast aside, accrued in teetery stacks. Running his eye week by week down the non-fiction titles, he became impressed by a sweep of unexpected subject matter and the acute seriousness of certain obscure authors—which, when combined, promised extremely low sales. He began to pluck out some of the unlikeliest volumes—"The Law and Your Dog," "Septic Tank Practices," "Successful Fund Raising Sermons"—and stashed them in a bookcase in his office, where, slowly gaining company during the sixties and seventies, they became a solace for him and his colleagues. When he retired, in 1982, writers and editors and artists found themselves mourning "The Handbook of Wrestling Drills," "Creative Insomnia," "What Can I Do with My Juicer?", and the rest, but not to worry: Gardner's Library went with him, carefully boxed up, and can still be visited by its exegetes.
"I don't believe there's as much of this kind of publishing anymore," Botsford said to a visitor. "The special special book, the book with an audience of three—I don't know where it's gone. " He went on to explain that two broad principles had governed selection of the treasure, which now numbers a hundred and six volumes. There were to be no joke titles—you had to be rigorous about this—and no work that didn't bear its title on the spine. "That's because no one will ever open any of the books," he said. "They are not for reading. Some people don't understand this."
The visitor pointed out that certain themes appeared to recur. Here was "The Personality of the Horse, "not far from "Breaking Your Horse's Bad Habits. " And would a geographer be drawn first to "The Passaic River" or to "Hamtramck Then and Now?" Might not a scholar wearying of "Refrigeration in America" be tempted to skip over to "Father of Air Conditioning"?
"Pure coincidence," Botsford said sternly. "And please don't move a book closer to any other book. These are arranged on the John Cage principle. Chance makes the music. Look here"—and he gestured toward "All About Guppies" and its neighbor "The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum."
The visitor, freed at last into art, made a random cast across "Haikus for Jews," "An Essay on Calcareous Manures," "Meet Calvin Coolidge," and, yes, "Who's Who in Saudi Arabia: 1978–79," nestled together on the right-hand side of the second shelf, and felt a twangling chord of happiness descend.
"It would be nice to find a few more," Botsford said, "but I have to rely mostly on friends. Tom Nagel, a professor of philosophy at N.Y.U., brought me this one not long ago." He pointed to a paperback by Kendall Crolius and Anne Montgomery, with its title prettily printed in red,: "Knitting with Dog Hair."
Knitting what—mittens? And with whose hair? Could time and love produce a Pekinese tea cozy? Saluki socks? A Lab lap robe? A guilty but familiar impulse crept over the visitor, and when his host departed briefly, summoned by the telephone, he sneaked down the book and began to read.
ii. Never Better
Every meeting with Botsford—down the hall; on a street corner, unexpectedly; at your doorway before dinner—began the same way, with your own "How are you, Gardner?" and his firm, upbeat "Never better!" You came to count on this and to laugh at it with other friends and colleagues of his—some of us even began to call him "Old Never Better"—and only with time did you sense how well the riposte served him, diverting attention from sadness or symptoms, encouraging the social or conversational pleasures just ahead, and also stepping off an elegant little distance away from intimacy. Botsford, who died in 2004 at the age of eighty-seven, was an editor with the magazine for almost forty years and a continuing presence around the place in the two decades after he stepped down. His long and famously happy marriage to the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm—it was the second for both—had its roots in their editor-writer attachment, begun when she was a young contributor of shopping columns, and maintained (through her nine books and ninety-odd reportorial and critical pieces) until the end. He relished her success and his own anonymity. Once at a splashy New York party, she introduced him to a well-known gossip columnist who had been seated at her table. "And what do you do?" the lady asked without much interest. "I'm a bowling instructor," Botsford said.
The instructor, in fact, had edited A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Flanner, Mollie Panter-Downes, Richard Rovere, Geoffrey Hellman, and dozens more of the vivid figures of the magazine's postwar journalistic flowering. Hired a couple of times as a young Talk of the Town reporter (the first time didn't take) by the magazine's founding editor, Harold Ross, and lured into editing by its second, William Shawn, he rose to an easy, semi-anonymous eminence: a number two man, had there been a masthead. He was also connected to the magazine through his stepfather, Raoul Fleischmann, The New Yorker's first publisher, and, one could say, through New York itself, where he grew up in the twenties and thirties as a rich East Side, privateschool kid, then a fabled charmer (he was a terrific dancer) and early devotée of the city's parties and pleasures.
There was an Astaire-like deftness and sense of style that went into the Botsford editings, which were applied swiftly with a fine-point mechanical pencil. His pleased expression and the fresh light that had entered your leaner and smarter paragraphs lifted you both, and you walked unhurriedly down the narrow avenue together and turned the corner to the next page. Often a writer—this writer, for one—couldn't quite remember what had disappeared from his text, or find where the scalpel had been slipped in. "Well, yes," Gardner would say, happy with the compliment. "A nice piece and let's enjoy it." Another long-term contributor, Mark Singer, recalls an early Talk piece of his that had grown miraculously stronger after a trip across Botsford's desk but had lost its significant, irreplaceable ending: "I went in ready to do battle, but he just gave me that smile and said, 'Too much is too much.' I try to keep that in mind."
Tall and bald, with a straight back, Botsford wore his beautiful tweeds inconspicuously. Modesty and courtesy came naturally to him, but he was stuffed with surprises. He graduated from Yale but didn't return for reunions or honors; he mistrusted Old Elis and smiled happily whenever the Yale football team took a licking in a big game. Bores and self-important types were "sashweights" in his lexicon. A lifelong liberal and Democrat, he gave Ronald Reagan's name its original "Reegan" pronunciation if it had to be spoken. Women he liked were called "dearie" and trusted male friends "Old Cock." He beamed at the approach of an icy martini or a lowdown joke—he was an appreciator above all—and conversations at the Botsfords' apartment or their deeply porched hilltop house in the Berkshires wound their way trustingly into the night. His laughter was world-class, a collapse into wheezings and gaspings and table poundings: nothing held back.
He was cool in both senses of the word. "He crackled," in the phrase of Alastair Reid. Another old pal, Charles McGrath, recalls a summer when he and his wife, young and short of cash, and with a new baby, were presented with the Botsford cabin, on a lake in Putnam County, for a couple of weeks at no charge. Maybe Gardner and Janet were renting my summer cottage in Maine just then—the time I returned to find a sheet of paper in my old Underwood upright, with the nicely spaced message "The Instrument of the Immortals. Write, Anatole, write—all France is waiting." Botsford or maybe Voltaire—there was no difference.
We thought we knew him, but then two years ago, well into his eighties, he produced a trim, unweepy memoir, A Life of Privilege, Mostly, which told us how much he had been keeping to himself. Who could have guessed that he was such a graceful and agile writer, for starters? He had been a rich kid, yes, but who knew about the five
live-in servants there at 151 East Seventy-fourth Street, or the runaway trip around the world that he and another playboy college friend had managed, just before the war put an end to such jaunts? He became an infantry officer in Europe after that, but who else would have kept quiet about his intelligence mission (he spoke perfect French) to make contact with a key member of the Resistance a day or two after his own landing at Omaha Beach, or his capture of a valuable collaborator spy? None of this inconspicuous gallantry is dwelt upon, any more than his two serious wounds, his Bronze Star and Croix de Guerre and five campaign stars, or the moment he found himself face down in the snow at the time of the deadly Battle of the Bulge, with an enormous tank of unknown provenance pausing above him in the darkness. The fun of it gets more space—an AWOL sojourn in Paris in the wild first week of Liberation, and later the appreciations of peacetime and his early days as the Sunday-night man at the magazine, closing the late Cinema and Theatre columns and the Letters from London and Paris. He grows up in the book, without regret, and it finishes with a meticulous sad accounting of the late tenure of William Shawn. What I go back to in my own copy of Gardner's book is a little gallery of photographs in the middle pages, where so many old friends of mine and his—Shawn, Joe Liebling, Maeve Brennan, Janet Flanner, Mollie Panter-Downes, and the eloquently calm Janet Malcolm, each a different kind of genius—regard me from the page but are now joined, and in my mind almost more clearly—by our man Gardner.
Here Below
ON a spring Sunday a couple of years ago Carol and I drove out to the Palisades Cemetery, which I hadn't visited in forty years. The place was harder to find than I'd expected, and we had to ask for help at the back door of one of a row of wooden houses that ends with an antique store on the corner of Route 9W. Redirected, we poked our way up a little private driveway and then through some tall shrubs to find the graveyard. It was a quiet, foggy morning, and once there I felt as if we'd walked into a green and gray room furnished with leaning stones. Many had surfaces thickened with lichen and decay, where inscriptions had become indistinct, with some words missing. It was like a half-heard conversation. There were rusty iron chains lying on the long grass here and there, and fenced-off small enclosures that you could reach only by opening a stiff little gate. Early lilacs were in bloom and there was intense spring birdsong all around us. (When you visit a cemetery the stage effects arrive without effort.) Some of the hundredodd stones dated back to the eighteenth century, but in among them I found some bygone friends of mine, including Bentz and Kitty Plagemann. There were long-ago Snedenses as well. Palisades is a village on top of the steep west bank of the Hudson, about twenty miles above New York City, and Snedens Landing lies off a narrow, twisting road that leads down to the river.
Now, near the western fringe of bushes in the cemetery, Carol found one of the markers we were looking for: a tipping-forward silvery granite oblong, with the letters fading into invisibility. With effort—and a few impromptu rubbings done with a pencil and a scrap of notebook paper—we made out
ISAAC D. TALLMAN
ENGINEER
Was killed on the N.Y. & E. RR
While running the night express
ENGINE NO. 97
Caused by a rock laying on the track
April 11, 1855
Aged 30 years, 3 months
and 26 days
There were a couple of vanished lines, and then, near the bottom, in small italics:
No more to make the engine rattle
No more to sound the shrill whistle
Another eloquent marker nearby was a tall and faded pinkish-brown slab—perhaps it's brownstone—with a scalloped top and the pleasing old willow-tree-and-stone-urn drawing, barely visible here, that you find in this part of the country. Care and money had gone into its making, and pain, as well:
DANIEL POST
Who died July 22d, 1814
aged 52 years.
A pale consumption gave the fatal blow!
The stroke was certain, but the effect was slow,
With wafting pain death found me long opress'd
Pityed my sighs, & kindly brought me rest.
We looked about for another favorite of mine, but decades of acid rain had smudged away its name, leaving the decedent anonymous. The stone, as I recall, once presented the name and dates of a departed lady—perhaps another one of the local Posts—who had succumbed around the turn of the old century, with a closing "Who died of epilepsy* in her sixty-first year. " At first glance the asterisk looked decorative or accidental, but at the bottom of the stone it was repeated, in footnote fashion, and the medical slur corrected: * apoplexy.
A few weeks later Carol and I headed up to the Berkshires to visit friends and on the way decided to make a further swing to the north and pay a call at the Stockbridge, Massachusetts, cemetery. It's an impressive place, still almost the main event in town. We'd walked around here before, when one of my daughters was attending a nearby boarding school, and had come to know some family graves, including that of John Sergeant, a multi-great-grandfather of mine, on my mother's side, who had come to this area as a missionary to the Mahican Indians in 1728. He was the first settler of Stockbridge. I own a tall Queen Anne secretary of his, part of a striking four-piece set in gleaming cherry—he married money—now scattered among my closer relatives. He is said to have sat at the secretary while he wrote his weekly sermons in the language of the Stockbridge tribe.
It was the Fourth of July, a blazing-hot summer's day, and Carol and I and our fox terrier, Harry, were the only visitors. We kept losing our bearings among the rows and neighborhoods of graves and surrounding tall firs. The young dog, white against the green grass, cast eagerly about, keeping a steady pull on his leash and panting in the heat. There was a small house almost within the confines, with a back fence adjoining some of the oldest graves. A woman sitting in the yard asked us if Harry wouldn't like some water, and brought out a big metal cooking vessel, filled almost to the brim, which he lapped up noisily, with his forelegs in the pot. When she and Carol began talking she said, "When people asked why we lived right here, so close to the cemetery this way, my father always said, 'It's not who's outside who matters, it's who's in.'"
The John Sergeant gravestone—it's pronounced "Surgeant" in the family but "Sargent" locally—had once been elevated, lying flat on four legs like a pool table, but thanks to our informant we knew to look for it now at ground level. The raised stone had been tottering, she'd said, and had lately been repositioned:
HERE LYES
the body of the
Revd Mr.
John Sergeant who dy'd
the 27th Day of July AD 1749
In the 40th year of his Age
The monument has a long extolling verse below this, with a joke—a joke back then, at least—at the end:
Here's not a Sergeant's body or a Sergeant's MIND
I'll Seek him hence for all's alike
Deception here
I'll go to Heav'n, & I shall find my Sergeant there
There was a scattering of later Sergeants nearby—Sewall and Erastus and George—dating on into the nineteenth century, all of them recently cleaned to a startling and elegant white.
What we had come this distance to see once again, however, was not a family marker, and though I thought I knew its shape and location, not far from the roadside stone wall, it kept eluding me. Hot and out of patience, I said, "I give up—it's got to be around here somewhere," when my gaze went down again and there it was, bang at my feet, and almost exactly as remembered:
Erected to the Memory
of Solomon Glezen jr
who, made Prsoner by the
Insurgents, fell at the Battle
in Sheffield Feb 27th
1786, in the 26th year of
his age
Oh for a lodge in some vaft wilderness
Some boundless contiguity of Shade,
Where rumor of oppression & deceit,
Of unsuccessful
or successful War,
Might never reach us more.
All this was carved in a modest lowercase. I had written down the poem when I first found it, years ago, and its elegance and startlingly modern and apposite thought quickly imposed itself in my memory. The verse—this took a while to find—is from a much longer poem, "The Task," by William Cowper, a British poet long out of fashion. Somehow I'd convinced myself that Glezen was a British officer who'd died in captivity during the Revolution, but the date of his death didn't match up. That same night, I mentioned this puzzle to Gardner Botsford, the friend (along with his wife, Janet) we'd come to visit in South Egremont, and he instantly said, "It was Shays Rebellion that got him. There was a firefight in Sheffield, and a lot of local men and boys got killed." Daniel Shays led a brief and doomed uprising of local farmers, swiftly put down by the militia. The armed dissidents had been enraged by economic conditions imposed by the lawyers and merchants of coastal Massachusetts: an argument perhaps not quite sufficient to die for, as Glezen's little editorial reminds us.
