Reading in Bed, Updated Edition

by Brian Doyle

  But I return to the great pleasure of ceasing to read, or surrendering, or quitting, whatever you want to call that moment in bed or on the beach, on the bus or in the waiting room of the very slow dentist, when you say to, let us say, Scott Fitzgerald or Martin Amis or even Willa Cather, “Folks, enough and too much, life’s too short for you to be in my ear any more,” and you close the book with a feeling not of regret but of, in fact, joyous resolve; there is a little glint of pride that you have had the guts to say, even to a genius, nope.

  I know only two people who still obsessively finish every book they begin, and in both cases I suspect they are the sort of people who organize the socks and underwear in their drawers by color and manufacturer and country of origin, not that there’s anything wrong with that, lots of people are deeply neurotic, it’s what made this country great, but I believe most readers are like me, and we pick up books for all sorts of reasons, and hope to be grabbed, startled, snagged, riveted, knocked out, nailed, moved, amazed, absorbed, drawn irresistibly into a tale and a world and a tribe of characters who are completely and utterly real, within the first fifty pages or so, at most a hundred; but after that if you find your interest and energy flagging, and the page grows too heavy to turn, and the book sits dusty on the night-table, near the bottom of that stack we all have, and your attitude has quietly morphed into maybe I’ll finish that when I am moaning sick with the flu, then the end of that reading experience is nigh, and not even the looming pressure of the book club meeting, or the chance to wow a date, can force you back to it.

  It happens to us all, it happens every day, it has happened to me with every single Philip Roth novel I have ever briefly handled, and it just happened to me again recently when I picked up William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, and settled in with pleasure, because I was awed by his Confessions of Nat Turner, and deeply moved by his Darkness Visible, and impressed by his short stories, but after ten pages I slowed, and thirty was work, and by page fifty I found myself thinking I really should finish this… But the word should, as you know, is a death rattle, for we never do what we should do, which is the secret to a great deal of human joy and pain.

  In the American way I will conclude by celebrating independence, because the best thing about not finishing books you do not wish to read anymore is the way it frees you to read books you do want to read but have not read yet, and books you stumble across, and books that are pressed upon you by cousins and other charlatans, and books on other people’s night-stands, and books in the waiting rooms of very slow dentists, and books mentioned in the bibliographies of books you loved, and books lauded in book reviews, and books touted by Oprah, and books with shameless vulgar irresistible covers beaming at you from the windows of bookstores, and books you find in the basement that you were supposed to read in college but didn’t actually get around to then, and books newly translated into your first language, and books discovered after the untimely death of an author whose other books you admired, and books that your kids are supposed to read for school but leave carelessly around the house, which is a mistake on their part, for that is how one of my sons did not read Jack London’s White Fang but I did, which led me happily back to The Sea-Wolf, which led me for murky reasons to other writers who lived near oceans, which brought me ultimately to the saltiest of all American writers, the great testy genius Henry Louis Mencken, but even Mencken, great as he was, could not get me to keep reading his The American Language, which is said to be a total deathless classic but was so moaningly boring that after thirty pages I slammed it shut and grabbed a beer and a son and ran to the sea, the story from which all stories come.

  Tenant Lease Agreement (Addendum)

  Tenants and their guests are under no circumstances allowed to read William Burroughs out loud, or mime words or phrases written by same, or screen obscure arty films made from his work, or perform obscure arty skits based on his work, or brandish scissors and pretend to cut up pages of prose and rearrange them in obscurely arty ways like old Billy did while claiming them to be literature which they weren’t under any conceivable definition no matter what that brilliant marketer of self and cronies Allen Ginsberg shouted.

  If any tenant or his or her guest at any time should have the urge to claim that art in any way shape or form, or supposed art like things dunked in urine or buffalo chips scattered in seemingly artful arrangements, should be supported by any kind of public tax whatsoever, tenant and guest(s) will be subjected to the greatest hits of William Shatner for not less than one hour.

  Any tenant who says Richard Brautigan is a great writer without actually ever having read a murky page of Richard Brautigan will be escorted from the premises.

  Any tenant who has endured James Joyce’s deeply awful book of poetry, Chamber Music, and speaks honestly of it gets a free month’s rent.

  Any tenant who knows Henry David Thoreau’s real name at birth gets a free month’s rent.

  Any tenant who ever laughed at a Stewart Holbrook story, or has read a Stewart Holbrook story, or has even heard of the deathless and hilarious Stewart Holbrook, gets a free month’s rent.

  Any tenant who knows where Holbrook’s favorite Portland watering hole, the legendary Erickson’s Saloon, used to be, gets a free month’s rent.

  Any tenant who has ever shaken hands with Ursula K. Le Guin (for which you have to bend down, she’s the size of an egret), gets two free beers from the management.

  Any tenant who answers Philip Roth! when asked the finest American male novelist ever will be penalized one additional month’s rent.

  Any tenant who can within ten seconds name Saul Bellow’s birthplace gets a free month’s rent.

  Tenants and guests may not under any circumstances use, possess, conceal, cook, steam, shelve, play tennis with, bake, roast, sleep with, caress, sneeze on, pummel others with, eat, bathe with, or clean cats with, the collected works of Jerzy Kosinski.

  Tenants may use self-help books and Oprah Winfrey corporate materials in the potting shed only.

  All poetry must park in clearly marked spaces reserved for it. No exceptions. Poetry found parked in the spaces reserved for other literature will be ticketed.

  Fiction of all sorts, especially the nonfiction of James Frey, must park in the spaces reserved for the center of communal life.

  Tenants who are or have been editors of any periodical of any sort, including webzines and fanzines and mimeographed alumni bulletins from your late lamented grade school, get a free month’s rent.

  Tenants who have published haiku after the age of seventeen are penalized one month’s rent; tenants who have written it but not inflicted it on an unsuspecting world are encouraged by the management to keep on in that vein.

  Tenants who are or have been or wanted to be newspaper reporters, editors, circulation managers, printers, designers, cartoonists, subscription managers, delivery managers, advertising managers, advertising salespeople, account representatives, technical support staff, custodial staff, insurance representatives, publishers, and human resource and personnel staff, get a free month’s rent. Although whoever said, chirpily, a newspaper publisher, Grampy!, at age ten, in answer to your grandfather’s question, so, Herman, what is it you want to be when you grow up? No one, that’s who! Any tenant who did so is penalized one month’s rent, and has to park with the poetry.

  Banning the Ban on Books

  Library staffers at the Catholic university where I work recently opened the library’s “cage,” a small room on the second floor, and placed the books formerly within its confines onto the shelves of the rest of the library. The cage had for nearly a century contained books on the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books), the list of banned books that began with an Index of Forbidden Works promulgated by Gelasius in Rome in the year 496.

  While most of the books in the room made their way into the rest of the library, one riveted me especially: this was a slim volume titled Prohibited Books, which contained notes from the
late librarian to himself and his successors on “laws concerning prohibited books,” “recommendations for the University Library,” “clearly condemned books,” and “doubtful or borderline cases” (which were to be housed on reserve shelves, and reviewed annually by a four-professor library board).

  While the Christian habit of attempting to regulate the reading of the faithful goes back to the Ephesian converts of Saint Paul, who made bonfires of books they considered superstitious (books valued at “fifty thousand pieces of silver”), the Index was the most consistent and longest-lasting censorship effort in Western civilization, and even after its death it deserves to be remembered, if only to salute such diligent and well-intentioned folly.

  Folly it was. The final edition of the Index featured some 4,000 works, many of them deservedly obscure, but some of them among the greatest prose compositions in history: Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, the travel books of Laurence Sterne and Joseph Addison, John Milton’s State Papers, Daniel Defoe’s History of the Devil, Edward Gibbon’s immense and wonderful Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the complete works of Emile Zola, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume, among others. Some of these, like Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, were banned because of their irreverent portrayal of the Vatican City; others, like Montaigne’s essays — from which the modern essay genre takes its form and spirit — were banned because of their dangerous relativism and individualism.

  The Index did not begin in a purely condemnatory vein. Its first incarnation had three parts: a list of the authentic books of Scripture, a list of recommended readings, and a list of heretical and apocryphal books that the faithful were forbidden to study. The Index was a resounding success in its first millennium, since printing hadn’t been invented and keeping an eye on the few books in the world wasn’t difficult. Gutenberg’s neat idea threw the Church into a tizzy, though, and in 1467 Pope Innocent VIII decreed that all new books had to be reviewed by authorities before general issuance. Thus came into being a phrase familiar, perhaps, to many readers: Imprimatur, “it may be printed,” the permission granted by the local Catholic “ordinary,” or highest authority, usually a bishop.

  The Index, with many other aspects of ancient Catholicism, died at the hands of Catholicism’s revolutionary Second Vatican Council, and it cannot be said that it is mourned by many, even among the most conservative Christians. One may admire, at this remove, its paternal intent to protect readers from “immorality” (the very spirit, one suspects, that led to the construction and maintenance of the book-prisons like my university’s); but one may also cheerfully excoriate its restriction of freedom, its anti-intellectual stance and tone, its distrust of the sense and discriminatory powers of the faithful, and its employment of an enduring evil, censorship, as a tool to encourage faith, which is the search for love amid evil.

  A vibrant, dense, joyous faith of any stripe is one which punctures immorality and bad theology, not flees from it, or locks it away in cages. Evil is beaten not by retreat but by battle; and one of the most powerful tools readers and writers have against evils of all sort, including censorious religious monoliths, is their affection and respect for the word. Veritas vos liberabit, as the motto of my university has it — the truth shall set us free. So farewell, Index Librorum Prohibitorum. We are glad to see you gone, and pleased to see the cage doors flung open.

  The Newspaperness of Newspapers

  Hey, I read the papers, so I am well aware of the precipitous national decline in advertising pages, the plummeting numbers of subscribers, the slumps in circulations, the wailing and sobbing of executives as they kneel and worship the holy internet, burning incense before their glowing computer screens in hopes of attracting the 18-to-35 demographic, but the thoughts occur to me, as I am sure they have occurred to you, that (a) maybe newspapers are not dying but dieting, and will soon emerge from this arduous winnowing period healthier and happier, and (b) has anyone paused here along the groaning road to celebrate the sweet inky newspaperness of newspapers? Do we so take them for granted that we don’t see how cool and unique they are, in so many odd and graceful ways?

  Such as the way they open like wings or arms, and patiently give us stories, without the nagging and wheedling of television, the drone and yowp of radio, the cold glow of the computer. Or the way they cheerfully fold themselves into squares and rectangles and let us read them any old way any old where. Or the way they are friendly and useful and immediate and neighborly with grocery coupons and police logs and shipping calendars and theater listings and smiling profiles of cops and nurses and fifth-grade teachers and small boys who rescue ducklings from storm drains. Or the way they offer themselves with silent grace as kindling and fishwrap and in-a-pinch giftwrap for birthday presents you forgot to get whatsoever. Or the way they get divvied up on Sunday morning to various members of the family according to interest and obsession, the food section going to the father who fancies himself a chef, the sports section to the small boy addicted to agate type, the comics to a second boy, the news to the intelligent and curious mother, the business section to the grandfather who for some reason checks the price of silver and gold every morning and claims to have a serious interest in how much grain is exported weekly from Oregon to countries under constellations unknown. Or the sheer generosity of information and opinion in the paper, some hundred large pages a day of used cars, used dogs, processed political guff, polished editorial prose, furious and hilarious letters to the editor, crossword puzzles, adoptable children, cartoon strips like Mary Worth that have been running since the dawn of recorded time, stock prices, bond markets, bicycles for sale, fulminations and recriminations, lies from the Legislature, photographs from around the world, used tires, maps and graphs, the misadventures of celebrities, scientific discovery, battalion reunions, funeral arrangements, and what time the Blazers are on — among much else.

  Consider for a moment that newspapers are organic and recyclable, do not require electricity, are portable, are redolent, can be read by children, foster literacy, foment community, are useful for lining windows and cedar chests, can be used for school projects having to do with volcanic action in the Cascade Range, are sometimes carried by proud dogs, can be used effectively against wasps, can be thoroughly consumed in twenty minutes (forty on Sunday), and are filled with voices from every class and shape and stripe and color and age and sort of human being, and then maybe you will wonder, as I do, if we take their technology and utility for granted. Beautifully designed to fit human life, delivered magically before dawn to your door, costing something like a penny a page, is there any other medium so thoroughly informative, so unassuming, so much a part of communal life that we don’t stop to salute it as much as we should? In the same way that we take cops and teachers for granted, and nurses and mothers, and plumbing and blackberries, and literacy and ballots, and marriage and ministers, I think we mostly ignore the sweet wild gift right under our noses — literally, in the case of newspapers, which spread out beneath our hungry eyes every day like countries we have never even imagined. So this morning, maybe right now, take a moment and contemplate the flutter of ideas in your fingers. A curious and lovely gift, yes?

  On the Pleasures of Reading the Port Calendar in the Newspaper

  First there is the song of the names of the ships, the Vishnu and the Liubliana, the Kali and the Kenny, the Pyxis and the Pharos, the Chinook Maiden and the Eternal Athena and the Star Harmonia… Then there are the blunt terse working boats, the barges and tugs and grain vessels, the latter filled to the brim with Oregon wheat for Japanese tables, hard red winter wheat, dark northern spring wheat, western white wheat… Then there are the destinations and originations of ships, Mozambique and Nanjing, Indonesia and Iwakuni, Aarhus and New South Wales, and how many of us have the same irresistible boyish urge to keep an atlas within reach, and flip to Indonesia, and get lost for a moment among the wet and redolent islands of the archipelago, the
smell of teak and bouganville drifting faintly over the breakfast table, before an exasperated teenaged someone snarls for the ketchup a third time?

  And the poem of the headings themselves, vessels in port, vessels due, to depart… To Depart! In the dim smoky mist of an Oregon morning, with endless rafts of fir trees poking through the fog across the river, the faint shouting of orders and commands, the letting-go of hawsers and cables, the basso groan of the vast ship leaning into the river, the thrum and hum and thunder of the engines as big as cottages in the nether reaches below, the whirl and whine of instruments and machines, the hammering of men’s feet on decks, the startle of a heron veering off the bow, the mewling of gulls circling the stern, the faint shiver and surge of a ship headed to sea…

  The boy inside the man dreaming at the breakfast table (“dad? the ketchup? hello? dad?”) nods for a moment, and the man snicks grimly back into place, and ponders serious adult ideas like shipping tonnage, and oil spills, and tanker hulls, and dockyard unions, and sea pirates, and military repair contracts, and port authorities, and homeland security, and dirty bombs, and carp with eleven eyes, and how it came to pass that ships the size of Luxembourg can get so far up the Columbia and Willamette rivers, but then he reads the words Chembulk Barcelona, from Qingdao, China, Berth Five, and all semblance of maturity dissolves like mist over the river, and once again there is a boy at the table dreaming of islands and languages and masts and mid-ocean waves the size of schoolbuses and birds of every color that ever was.