When Vivien Jennings was a little girl, visiting her grandparents’ red-clay farm in the hills of Arkansas, she discovered a handsome, bronze-colored snake behind her grandfather’s barn. Always an adventurous kid, she picked it up and began to play with it, slipping the reptile in and out of an empty Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar. When she showed her grandparents her find, they were horrified. Vivien’s new playmate, it turned out, was a poisonous copperhead.
To me, the copperhead story reveals a lot about this well-known civil rights activist turned world-class bookseller. Vivien and Roger Doeren, her partner at Kansas City’s Rainy Day Books, recommend titles to 150 area book clubs. Rainy Day Books co-sponsors scores of events each year with local libraries, restaurants, and community service groups. Vivien or Roger attends every author function. “If writers honor us by coming, we want to be there for them,” she told me on the day after I saw the giant swallowtail in Nebraska.
After my reading, Vivien and Roger took me out for supper at the Bluebird Bistro, where they’d recently cohosted an event for a cookbook author. Over fresh rainbow trout and a garden salad grown in the lot across the street, the conversation turned to handheld electronic readers. Would they, I wondered, eventually replace books?
Roger grinned. “Has anyone ever asked you to sign one?”
“Books don’t need batteries,” Vivien said. “You can get sand on them. And”—she smiled, and for a moment I could see in her eyes that venturesome little girl, barefoot on a backcountry Ozark farm, with the deadly serpent in the Hellmann’s jar—“books work. One hundred percent of the time.”
Midnight in a motel in Kansas City. Paying dearly for that salad (try going six months without a fresh tomato) but not regretting it. Taking inventory: one (1) twenty-year-old Chevy Celebrity; two (2) author interviews slated for tomorrow in St. Louis (during a recent radio interview in Denver, the host had introduced me as Chris Bohjalian and asked what it had been like to go on Oprah); three (3) book events to do in the next two days; four (4) good novels on my bedside table; and five (5) imponderable questions that had just popped into my head:
1. Why isn’t man ever called the reading animal? After all, isn’t reading the one thing, in addition to causing mischief for its own sake, we can say, with assurance, that we do better than manatees, armadillos, and pangolins?
2. Why isn’t Jesus ever reported as reading anything? “It is written,” he loved to say. When did he do his reading? Why didn’t I think to ask him before he jumped ship back in Montana?
3. Why hasn’t Vivien Jennings (or another great independent bookseller) won the Nobel Peace Prize? Aren’t independent booksellers the last public guardians of our human rights and, along with librarians and teachers, the keepers of our cultural and literary traditions?
4. Why is it that, in a rundown motel on the outskirts of Kansas City, with the witching hour upon me and a fried gizzard, running to the can every six minutes, a large bottle of Kaopectate in hand, because I had the temerity to eat that tomato—why is it that I’m about as content as a touring writer can be? I can answer that. It’s because in the other hand, the one not grasping the Kaopectate, I’m holding Richard Russo’s novel Bridge of Sighs, and I can’t remember when I’ve met a more likable and compelling townful of folks in any book since Russo’s own Empire Falls.
5. Which reminded me. What was the name of that Depression-era con-man novel I read and loved and gave away thirty years ago and have been searching for, like the Holy Grail, ever since?
“The book is dead, long live the book,” I said aloud. “Goodnight moon. Goodnight man with the red balloo—”
That’s not funny, Harold. That’s just silly. Go to sleep.
Still hunting for that maddeningly elusive novel the next afternoon in the fiction section of the St. Louis County Library, where I’d be speaking that evening, I found myself remembering some of the high points of my personal history as a library habitué. I remembered exactly where I was sitting in the library of our small-town high school, the slant of light over the baseball field outside the window, even the time—it was 10:20 a.m. on the big, round Seth Thomas library clock—when I first read D. H. Lawrence’s great short story “The Rockinghorse Winner.” And the very chair at the very table in the reading room of Syracuse University’s now long-demolished old library where, on my second time through, I realized that Faulkner’s Light in August was a masterpiece. Not to mention the Saturday afternoon in the periodical alcove at the village library in Orleans when I picked up the latest Atlantic Monthly and suddenly it was an hour later and I’d read the entire long excerpt from James Dickey’s Deliverance without moving an inch. “Mr. Mosher, are you all right?” the librarian finally asked. And right here in this library in St. Louis a few years ago, I read the first few chapters of Undaunted Courage, standing like a sleeping horse or a catatonic writer in front of the new nonfiction display near the main desk. Reading.
Then there was the spring afternoon in 1965, during my first year as a teacher, when I harried my juniors into the school library to acquaint them with the Dewey Decimal System. With which, it must be said, Harold Who had only the slenderest acquaintance himself. We’d no more than started when, out of a little hedgerow of chokecherries bordering the deepest part of center field on the school baseball diamond, stepped a small deer. Up shot Little Prof’s hand. “Mr. Mosher, Mr. Mosher! Can I get my bow out of Dad’s car and shoot that deer?”
Now, I hereby invite any of my readers who have ever taught high school kids in a rural area to tell me what I should have said. Admittedly, what I probably should not have said—hunting season having ended months ago—was, “Sure, L.P. Just be careful to check your background. Don’t shoot any first-graders.”
Little Prof was already out of the room. Two minutes later, with the deer now grazing behind second base, I saw him sneaking around the corner of the school, bow in hand like Natty Bumpo, just as, dear Jesus, the library door opened and, stumbling into the room in all his red-faced glory came Prof himself, flush from a two-quart day and intent on conducting a teacher observation.
“Stand down, boys and girls, stand down. Continue as before,” bellowed the old educator, dropping into a chair, his clipboard and pen at the ready.
“So,” I said, trying to position myself between my semi-intoxicated employer and the window overlooking the ball field, “we will turn now to the 500’s and biography …”
“Mosher,” Prof said, craning his neck. “Is that my boy out there?”
“Out where, Prof?”
“Out in the school yard, you dumbbell. Stalking that Christly little skipper.”
I pretended to scan the ball diamond. “Oh, no, I don’t think—” By now Little P was within range. Arrow nocked, he raised the bow—and hurried his shot. The arrow flew harmlessly over the startled animal, which took three bounds and vanished into the hedgerow.
Prof shook his head. “Buck fever,” he said. “I just don’t know about that boy.”
And, forgetting all about evaluating me, he wandered out of the library and repaired to his office to commiserate with himself over a third quart.