by Brian Doyle
The same principle applies to books you might have missed at the ages you should have read them: Jack London’s Call of the Wild (which should be required reading at age 12), J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (age 15), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (age 19), John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday (which should be read back-to-back at 21 or 22, when readers are old enough to sense that love and pain and laughter are all cousins).
And the same is true of books you were supposed to read in high school or college but never actually did quite manage to read, or read hurriedly at best — or only skimmed, or read every third chapter, or just the beginning and end, or asked your roommate for a quick summary, or read the Cliff Notes — any of the million dodges of undergraduates under pressure. “I’ll read it later, when I have the time to really read it,” you promised yourself.
Now’s the time. It’s summer — vacations, longer days, looser schedules.
Read Herman Meville’s epic Moby-Dick, and savor the detail in it, the oceanic sweep of its ambition, the sly humor, Melville’s genius for portraying character under pressure.
Or Mark Twain’s best book, Life on the Mississippi, a funny, artless, open-hearted memoir of his young days as a riverboat pilot. You’ll find America in the heady days of its youth, recounted by its finest writer, with sharp-eyed humor and the cheerful affection of an older man for the young man he was.
Or Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina — you never actually read it, did you? It was the end of the semester, and you had all those papers due, and it was so thick, and, well, she couldn’t be 600 pages’ worth of interesting, right? Wrong — she’s as fascinating as any and all women, and you will learn a great deal about women’s hearts, and enjoy and suffer along the way, carried easily along by a master storyteller.
Or James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson — the best biography ever written. Or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, another exquisite sort-of-biography.
Or, by golly, James Joyce’s Ulysses — probably the all-time undisputed champion of books that are supposed to be great but no one actually reads. (Although Tolstoy’s War and Peace is up there.) News flash: Ulysses is great. It’s funny, sad, moving, piercing, one of the truest novels ever written, and you’ll recognize half the characters in it as people you see and hear every day, even though they are wandering around Dublin on a June day in 1904.
Or Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Stevenson’s Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde (far superior to its current incarnation as a musical, and a book that came to its author whole in a dream), E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat, George Orwell’s Animal Farm (chilling), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (more chilling), Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (most chilling).
Even locally, in the literature of the Pacific Northwest, there are many books that we were going to read but never actually opened — books that richly reward reading now, some of them classics that will be in print for centuries. Ursula Le Guin’s novel Left Hand of Darkness, for example, or her eerie novel set in a future Portland, The Lathe of Heaven. Barry Lopez’s inimitable Arctic Dreams, which won the National Book Award. Tom Robbins’ hilarious early novel Another Roadside Attraction. Stewart Holbrook’s entertaining and informative Holy Old Mackinaw, “a natural history of the American lumberjack.” Ken Kesey’s novels One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (everyone’s seen the excellent movie, but the book’s better) and Sometimes a Great Notion — the best novel ever written about Oregon, period. Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It — as beautiful and moving a short book as you will ever read, I promise, and again a ton better than the movie, which wasn’t half bad.
I cannot resist also advising cheerfully that we continue to avoid some books that we are supposed to have read — the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, for example, which are jaw-droppingly awful, or those of Nathaniel Hawthorne, or of Henry James, whose novels are brilliant and boring. But I hear the screams of many English teachers in the distance, and desist insulting the canon.
But I remain insistent about the startling joy of reading in summer, and I do not mean reading the self-help muck that occupies this week’s best-seller list. I mean books that have been selling for dozens or hundreds of years — books you know but never quite consumed, books you read three decades ago, books that are self-help books if what you want to feed is your head and heart. Read ‘em this summer. Think of it as a vacation from pop culture, which will lurch along desperately from fad to fad without you while you settle in for a weekend visit with Mister Twain or Ms. Le Guin.
I cannot prescribe all this literary medicine for the doldrums of summer without partaking of it myself — on my reading table this summer is Charlotte Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, which I never quite got to in college, and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, which I thought I detested but never actually read, I discover. (I hate that.) And looming like skyscrapers in the distance are six novels by a writer much discussed in recent years but never yet read by the undersigned, despite a lifetime of bookishness — Miss Jane Austen.
Next summer, maybe.
A Note on Finally Being Ready for Some Books, Thank Heavens
And another thing all readers know about reading but we hardly ever mention about reading is how sometimes you have to be ready for a book’s salt and swing, you have to be prepared lifewise for it to speak to you, and if you read it at the wrong time, too early or too late, the book just seems clogged and dense and self-indulgent and mannered and foolish, and you just don’t get it at all, and privately you conclude that all your friends who mooed with delight over it have lost their little tiny tadpole brains, but you can’t say that aloud, much, so when they ask anxiously what did you think? you have to lie and say you were about to start it when suddenly you found you only understood Basque, or were arrested for impersonating a cockatoo, or something like that. You know what I mean.
The easy categories of books like this are those you should read young, at certain set ages, like Treasure Island at age thirteen, and The Catcher in the Rye at fourteen, and The Lord of the Rings at fifteen, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at sixteen, and On the Road at nineteen, and those books you should read when you are older and have a deeper sense of pain and grace, like War and Peace and The Grapes of Wrath — both books that are elephantine and ponderous to the young, but poignant and powerful for people who have grappled with violence and lost sleep over joblessness and moneylessness.
But then there are all sorts of books that you flip open here and there over the years and they just don’t grab you, you read a couple pages in the quiet redolent aisle of the library or bookstore and you don’t have the itch to turn to the third page, and you sigh and put it back on the shelf, but here and there over the years you pick it up again, idly, wondering, and then finally, one day, while waiting for your shoes to dry out, you stake out the good chair in the bookstore and flip it open and this time you get so absorbed you discover you are on page thirty by the time the owner’s laser glare registers, and you buy the thing, and read another forty pages on the bus some, and then another fifty pages after dinner, and you end up bringing it to work and reading it in the water closet, desperate to find out what happened to the daughter in Malta, or whatever.
This just happened, for me, with Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers, which I had tasted here and there over the years and never could eat — it seemed too studiously Jewish and New Yorkish and femaleish to me — until recently, when I started and finally grokked the heroine’s nutty courage against loneliness, and the wild creativity of the plot, and the way the story is crammed with detail and idea in same hilariously chaotic brilliant way as Saul Bellow’s great Humboldt’s Gift, say; another book in which the dense narrative deliberately reflects the intricate labyrinthine tendrilling of the seething human brain, not to mention the extraordinary jungle of the heart. And there was a subtle joy in diving into the novel, for me — a tiny hard-to-articulate ple
asure that the book and I had finally come to an understanding, so to speak, and would be cheerful companions now for a while, and even after the first flush of enjoyment we would always be happy acquaintances, in the same way you still rather like the people who used to live in your college dorm even though you only see their names and faces in passing every few years.
That happened to me with James Joyce’s Ulysses, too, which I read first like everybody else, looking for the lubricious parts, and then had to read again in college, dutifully slogging along marking subtle symbolic flourishes with a red pen, but then read a third time when I was Bloom’s age, 38, and the third time was the charm — I finally understood the sprawling salty genius of it, the shambling quiet courage of the anti-hero, the incredible capture of some hilarious broken brave seething humanity one day in one city, and even understood that some of it was less than fine — as the Irish novelist Roddy Doyle has said, the Nightttown section is muck, where was the man’s editor?
The point, I guess, is that for every book we keep picking up and hurriedly put back down again, convinced yet again that we will never begin to like Thomas Hardy or Ayn Rand, there is one that will finally snag your lapel and command your attention. For me the easiest way to find those books is to wander through the town library, trailing my fingers over the bright and sturdy spines, and acquiescing to accident — by chance I pull a Patrick O’Brian an inch clear of his companions, and glance at the first page, and finally, after many dry years, there is a whiff of salt and sea, and away we go…
A Note on Public Literature
Shuffling happily through a moist murmuring winter day recently I began to notice what we might call Public Literature, the stories and poems and essays and bromides and rants and shouts and gnomic tales published on buses and walls and signs and trains and telephone poles, and I have spent weeks now jotting notes on the songs they sing: the terse commands posted along highways and byways, for example, such declarative sentences, such blunt and inarguable instructions, yield and wrong way and merge; and the huge shouted poems rattling by me on the elephantine flanks of light-rail trains; and the epic photographic essays and sales pitches unfurled on billboards, with their grim gimlet-eyed sports teams and pints of ale thirty feet deep and immense work boots suitable for goliaths; and the wildly colorful jitterbug of graffiti (my all-time favorite, CHE WAS GHE!), and the bright repetitive chants of political signs, their patronymic insistence a sort of poem or prayer flag…
And then there is the taut literature of bumper stickers and the other ephemera people glue to their cars, sometimes so many stickers and decals and signs and symbols that you find yourself unconsciously tailgating so as to be able to read more thoroughly, or praying for a stoplight so you can try to make out what the driver or owner or thief might be saying thematically with truck-buttocks advertising politicians, opinions, rodeos, colleges, rock bands, radio stations, and the fact that someone in the family used to be on the honor roll in elementary school, although that particular sticker is mostly peeled off, perhaps from honoree embarrassment, or because the former honoree is now thirty years old and running a tiki bar in Bora Bora.
Consider the signs in and on and over stores, the signs in windows, posters, prints, broadsheets, the messages we print and scrawl for each other and pin up on the village green, in the many forms that arena takes; for all we laud and fear the electric village, we still talk to each other volubly in public, and while that conversational river is mostly commercial, there are also extraordinary moments of grace and pain, moments of quiet literature — the glowering most-wanted men in the post office, the plaintive request for help with a missing cat on the grocery billboard, the smiling faces of lost or kidnapped children on milk cartons, the often-hilarious but sometimes haunted tiny novels in the personals section of the newspaper, the terse epic literature of the police log, the entertaining soap opera of the minutes of the city council meeting — which used to be posted on the walls of city hall where I live, and I loved to stop by sometimes and read them, as I wandered home with armfuls of diapers, and try not to fall down laughing in the hallway at the published posturing and machination, because the floor there was really hard, and I hated to disturb the labor of harried clerks by laughing so hard I must have sounded like a man with a weasel in his pancreas.
And the banners trailing behind small sputtering airplanes in summertime, and the smoke stories airplanes write in the air sometimes, the roman type becoming italic with the wind; and the blinking neon lights on which sometimes a letter or two winks out and you are left with a brilliant sudden poem where there had been only information before; or the bedsheet banners and cardboard statements people hang from highway bridges sometimes, the sweetest being birthday greetings, and, once, on a shimmering summer morning, a marriage proposal, to which about every other car that passed under it honked happily yes! yes!
And the post-it notes we leave for each other and for our unmemorious selves, so often poignant little poems, like milk / cheese / cookies / love / mom; and the finger-painted words and pictograms on steamed bathroom mirrors and car windows; and the words fingered onto truck-walls slathered with a month of dust; and posted memos and rules and regulations and rosters; and the poem of the all-time track records in the history of the school mounted by the gymnasium; and the fluttering poem of the league championship flags riffling by the skylight; and the alphabetic parade marching around four walls of the kindergarten, pausing only to allow the door to open and the fresh minds to wander in…
Posters and prints, letters and lectures, speeches and song lyrics, newspaper clippings and magazine covers, maps and charts and graphs and diagrams, famous and infamous quotes, ticket stubs and funeral notices, and best of all the scrawled glorious heartfelt notes and letters and early headlong essays of children — all these things are public literature, are they not? Each a story, each soaked with meaning and emotion, each something that when you touch it or notice it afresh or are asked to explain it, out pours a tale very often exactly the shape of your heart…
Why Portland, Oregon, Is the Coolest Literary City in the West
I have worshipped the holy air where Erickson’s Workingman’s Club used to burble and roar, on Burnside Street between Second and Third avenues, because it was in that echoing wooden emporium, in that that legendary saloon with its vast planked floors punctured by many thousands of hobnails, that the second-greatest Portland writer of them all, the glorious Stewart Holbrook, once held court, chaffing and razzing, teasing and grinning, listening and lecturing, until he ceased to imbibe because visions of snakes and bats were granted unto him, though there were technically no snakes and bats in his immediate personal area, so he desisted from the water of life and its many devious ands wondrous cousins, and retired posthaste, but not before mulling and then milling a thousand stories from the dense air of Erickson’s, which is why every time I shuffle past where it used to be I stop and make obeisance, for which I once got stared at by a suspicious cop, who told me to scurry along, which I did.
I have shaken the enormous horny hand of the late astounding Ken Kesey on Morrison Street. I have shaken the deft calm hand of the genius Barry Lopez on Davis Street. I have shaken the tiny prolific hand of the polymath Ursula Le Guin on Fifteenth Avenue near where she has lived for many years. I have shaken the hand of tall quiet gentle John Daniel on Princeton Avenue where he lived for many years. I have shaken the brave papery hand of the late Alvin Josephy on Salmon Street, and that was a hand that once belonged to the United States Marine Corps and clenched a rifle in the heat and blood and rage and fear and courage and chaos and fury of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, a fact of which I was very much aware at the time, despite the kind eye and amused seamed face of that most interesting Oregon writer, whose hand was as warm and friendly as he was.
I have walked the streets in northeast Portland where Beverly Cleary was a girl, and you cannot tell me that there was ever a finer writer in the history of Portland than Beverly Cleary, because no
t only do her many books sing and laugh and ramble and burst with real people and excellent dogs and joy and tears and the dense emotional thickets of childhood, but they have been read by millions of children, which is a remarkable thing to say, and I might argue, if we in a good pub with excellent ale and no hurry, that waking the hearts and brains and litry hungers of children is the very best thing any writer can do, which is another reason why Robert Louis Stevenson is the best writer in the history of the English language, because who among us who were raised in the ocean of that ancient tongue has not been lulled to peaceful slumber, and lulled his or her children to ditto, by the thin grinning Scot’s glorious Child’s Garden of Verses?
I rest my case.
But I am wandering away from my city. I have wandered the shaggy rumpled streets of Saint Johns, with that loveliest of bridges leaping above me as I wondered which lanes and alleys once held the young Gary Snyder in their stony embrace. I have ambled southeast Portland where the lean leathery smiling Robin Cody lives. I have wandered past The Oregonian building on Broadway where Ben Hur Lampman hatched his inimitable small lyrical essays and the deadpan storycatcher Steve Duin does so today. I have shuffled past the spot in Washington Park where John Reed grew up. I have rambled along Vista Avenue thinking I was swimming through the air where once the polymath Charles Erskine Scott Wood wandered and pondered.
And I have read and heard and seen and laughed with and been startled by and awakened by and moved by Monica Drake and Karen Karbo and Kim Stafford and Sallie Tisdale and Molly Gloss and Diana Abu-Jaber and Charles D’Ambrosio and Whitney Otto and James Hall and Brian Booth and Gus Van Sant and Walt Curtis and Barbara La Morticella and Joanne Mulcahy and Ana Callan about a hundred more Portland writers I cannot remember at the moment because I am a man inundated by children and thus rimrocked by laundry and riddled by dishes to be done.
