CHAPTER EIGHT
Life Support
In 1971, Peter O’Toole made a film called Murphy’s War. In it he played the captain of a merchant ship who survives a Nazi torpedo attack off the coast of Venezuela and is rescued by a tetchy missionary nurse and an amiable French oil engineer. The engineer was played by the incomparable French character actor Philippe Noiret, who was only just coming into his own. Murphy’s War was directed by Peter Yates, who made several very fine films (Bullitt, The Dresser, Breaking Away) over the course of his long career. But Murphy’s War wasn’t one of them.
A few years ago, while riding a train from Paddington Station, immortalized by Agatha Christie in 4:50 from Paddington, to my in-laws’ home in Stroud, where Cider with Rosie author Laurie Lee could often be seen gadding about, I started paging through an English newspaper, when I happened upon an interview with Noiret. The interview was conducted on the set of Noiret’s latest film. I recall very little that was discussed in the piece, but toward the end of the conversation, Noiret said that if the reporter should bump into O’Toole on his travels, he would be greatly in his debt if he would pass along his best wishes to the actor. The reporter asked if the two were still close friends. Noiret said that while he had thoroughly enjoyed working with O’Toole and was a great admirer of his work, they had not seen each other in the many years since they made the film. But each time he was interviewed by an English journalist, he made a point of asking after his old comrade-in-arms, and each time O’Toole was interviewed by a French journalist, he did the same. There was a bond between the men that could not be sundered by time or distance.
I loved this story as much as any I have ever heard.
One Saturday evening in the early 1980s, I was riding a northbound New York City subway from Spring Street with my friend Clive Phillpot, the head librarian at the Museum of Modern Art. At the time I was working in a Soho art gallery, minding the store while the manager was off drumming up business that never fully materialized; my first day on the job was the morning after John Lennon died, a terrible day to be selling modern art. The gallery was managed by a woman whose father had starred in Zulu, Michael Caine’s first movie. Sally was very striking-looking, extremely manipulative, a fabulous dresser, and had quite a tart tongue. One day two rugged-looking men, neither of them art lovers, showed up and asked why Sally didn’t pay anyone to cart away her garbage. She said: I don’t have any garbage. And they said: Everybody has garbage. And she said: I don’t. And they said: Come on, lady. And she said: No, I will not come on. Whatever else I may or may not decide to do, I will not come on. So they went away. In all my life, I never met anyone like her. Some people give as good as they get, but she gave better.
I liked that job very much, even though we never sold anything. It was an exciting time to work in Soho, as the galleries and cafés and exotic boutiques were just opening up, replacing the foundries and sweatshops that had been there before, and there was an air of countercultural mischief in the air. It was post-Beatnik but pre-Slacker. Irony had not yet planted its flag. Soho was teeming with young people, many of them authentic eccentrics to whom one could award the very highest accolade: that one did not automatically despise them the second they opened their mouths. But within three years, corporate America would launch one of its trademark all-out blitzkriegs, and overnight the district would turn into a faux-bohemian hell, the Gotham equivalent of New Hope, Pennsylvania.
If memory serves me correctly, Clive and I were taking the subway up to my Murray Hill apartment to watch Jimmy Connors play John McEnroe in the Masters Tournament at Madison Square Garden. (We were completely blitzed that evening, so it is surprising that I remember anything.) Clive was in a jolly mood, having just returned from a book-buying expedition at the legendary Strand Bookstore, which prided itself on its 357,000 miles of used books. Clive has always been a far more eclectic reader than me—he has never read Don Quixote, War and Peace, or Sentimental Education—but he has read many other books that I have not. Most of them pertain to artists, often strange ones, like Ray Johnson, who once hired an airplane pilot to fly him over an avant-garde festival on Ward’s Island, onto which he then dropped several pounds of frankfurters. He subsequently tried to bill his gallery for the impromptu airlift, which he characterized as performance art. The gallery declined the request.
Clive’s tastes ran toward political tracts—didactic, long-winded affairs like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a book I once owned but may have lost in a fire I started in order to avoid having to read it. He also fancied books like A Breath of Fresh Air, a moving account of impoverished peasant life written by the reformed communist and peasant emeritus F. C. Ball. I did not go in for this sort of material, even though I was, in the narrow technical sense of the word, an alumnus of the urban peasantry myself. That evening Clive was clutching a bag stuffed to the gills with purchases he had just made at the Strand. I remember that subway ride distinctly, because at one point a paper bag containing our two six-packs of Budweiser ripped apart and the cans began to roll all over the car. Each time we tried to retrieve them, the subway would lurch, and we would go flying, and the cans would roll just a tiny bit farther out of reach. Our fellow travelers on the subway found our maladroit salvage efforts riotously entertaining. Eventually, we threw in the towel and told everyone to go ahead and treat themselves to the King of Beers. Then we went back to discussing books.
One of the treasures he had acquired that day was Letters from Prison by Antonio Gramsci. I was not familiar with Gramsci at the time, but after inspecting the back cover, I learned that in the 1920s, with just the worst timing imaginable, he had founded the Italian Communist Party, which led to his being imprisoned by Mussolini. Luckless Italian Reds never did much for me, but Clive made such an animated pitch on behalf of this obscure collection of letters to family and friends, many of them deeply philosophical in nature, that I asked if I could borrow it. I took it home and set it down among other similarly provocative titles. I did not get to it that evening, nor the next evening, nor any evening after that. In fact, as I write these words, thirty-one years later, it continues to occupy the same space on the bookshelf that it has occupied since the night he gave it to me, right alongside José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, Patrick White’s Voss, J. P. Donleavy’s The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar S, Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Other Tales, Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte, and a few dozen other books I have never been able to part with, even though I have long suspected that I will never get around to reading them in this or any other lifetime.
Why I have never read them is a source of great mystery to me. With the exception of the impenetrable Finnegans Wake and La familia de Pascual Duarte, which is written in a language I have never learned, none of them is especially long, and with the exception of Voss, none of them seems like a book that conceivably could cause the human nervous system to stop functioning. But each time I pick up Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison and read on the back cover that “the book contains a useful index, as well as an informative and analytical biographical introduction, which sets into historical perspective the thoughts and life of this crucial Italian thinker,” I tell myself: No, not just yet; maybe I’ll read The Best of Roald Dahl for the ninth time instead.
In the years since Clive lent me the book, I have found time to read hundreds and hundreds of mysteries whose plots I have forgotten, as well as biographies of Wyatt Earp and Sonny Bono and Gina Lollobrigida and such worthy but nonessential curiosities as Paris Sewers and Sewermen, The Toothpick, The Olive, The Pencil, and The Ern Malley Affair, an absorbing account of a World War II–era literary hoax that set back the cause of Australian poetry an entire generation and possibly more. Yet in all those years I have never found time to read Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison.
I think I know why. Each time I look at that book, I hark back to that night on the subway, and the years roll away and Clive and I are young men again. A few years after that subterranean adventure, I gave up drinking forever. I do not miss getting loaded on a nightly basis, but I have no regrets about being blissfully wasted that evening. These days, when I spot a Budweiser can, I do not necessarily think of Clive or of that evening, but whenever I look at Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison standing at attention like a mournful sentinel, awaiting a relief column that he knows will never arrive, I can see those red, white, and blue beer cans merrily rolling away from us all the way down to the other end of the No. 6 train, and I can hear us laughing. So I will never part with the book, even though I will never read it. As long as my delight in reading Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison lies in the future, Clive and I will always be back there on the Lexington Avenue local.
I do not think you can have this sort of experience with a Kindle.
Twenty years ago, I bought a sweet little house on a hill high atop Tarrytown, New York, with a sumptuous view of the Hudson River. The property abutted a vast, empty field owned by the Rockefeller family, whose historic family compound—Kykuit—sat a few hundred yards down the road. Because I had grown up surrounded by cash-strapped deadbeats, the purchase was fraught with symbolism.
The house was a prim Colonial with a white picket fence, a second-story porch, and a good-sized backyard. It was really a bungalow with a chip on its shoulder, a glorified cottage that the previous owner had added on to in an inept and unsatisfying fashion to make it seem more muscular. It had a disaster-prone kitchen with a stupid, disruptive island planted right in the middle of it, an obsolete oven of an unconventional size that was impossible to replace without tearing the interior walls to pieces, and a family room with a year-round Iditarod frisson to it, sitting as it did directly behind a drafty garage. We lived in that house for nineteen years, never making much of an attempt to do anything about the drafts or the harebrained lighting or the comic-opera stove, because my wife would rather raise kids and tend to the needs of senior citizens and read Trollope than remodel a house, and I would rather raise kids, ignore senior citizens, and read Cervantes. At the time I bought it I was sure that I would live there forever.
You can never get tired of a Hudson River view, but even the most poignant symbolism will eventually run its course if neighbors with a different set of symbols move in next door. Seven years after we bought the house, my son ran inside one day and reported that oddly clad men armed with surveying equipment were mucking about in the fields outside. We now learned that the property had been sold sotto voce to a cabal of developers who had plans to build two dozen McMansions directly in back of us. This meant that our days in the house were numbered. We were less upset about the hideous McMansions than about the hideous people who would live in them. A house, no matter how large and tasteless, can only be so ugly. With human beings, the possibilities are inexhaustible.
The first set of pre-fab châteaux malgré eux-mêmes quickly went up at the bottom of the hill, two hundred yards from our house, in the adjacent village of Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow, as noted, is full of venal Yuppies who would have let the developer build a full-scale replica of the Circus Maximus over their mothers’ graves if they thought it would broaden the tax base. Miraculously, the other half of the field—the part that was located in Tarrytown and that adjoined my house—remained empty, first because of the 2001 recession and then because of the even more severe recession that started in 2008 and never ended. Meanwhile, the village conducted a series of environmental-impact studies, staying the developer’s malignant hand. One day, to our great elation, the developer went belly-up. Throughout this interregnum, there was hope that if the town could delay construction long enough, Americans might come to their senses and stop allowing builders who took most of their design cues from William Tecumseh Sherman and Genghis Khan to tear down hundreds of trees and erect single-family grain silos in their place. But while some parts of the country did eventually turn against these cretinous edifices, Tarrytown is not the kind of town that voluntarily comes to its senses: It is always emphatically behind the curve, and there is no vulgarity it will not embrace.
Eventually the property fell into the clutches of the remorseless Toll Brothers, and ground for the McMansions was broken. As the field in back of my beloved, well-appointed Colonial began to vanish under the wrecking ball, I knew that the time had finally come to prepare the house for sale. Because our children were gone, this was a good time to downsize anyway, to get rid of some things we didn’t need. First I went through the LPs. Then I went through the CDs. And then it was time for the books.
This was excruciating. My books have been part of my life forever. They have been good soldiers, boon companions. Every book has survived numerous purges over the years; each book has repeatedly been called onto the carpet and asked to explain itself. I own no book that has not fought the good fight, taken on all comers, and earned the right to remain. If a book is there, it is there for a reason.
Or is it? Do I absolutely, positively have to hang on to my unread copy of Summon’s Christian Miscellany: An Amusingly Informative Collection of Unexpected Facts, Curiosities, and Trivia? Is there no way I could be persuaded to part with The Phillies Reader: A Rich Collection of Baseball Literature That Chronicles the Dramatic History of the Philadelphia Phillies or Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison? Is there a chance in hell that I will ever get around to reading Lust: Bisexual Erotica by Marilyn Jaye Lewis? What are the odds that my wife will again need to consult Understanding Pregnancy and Childbirth? What is a fallen-away Catholic like me doing with a copy of Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels? Why is Sideshow: The Howe Street Carnival still here? Finally, do I really need to hang on to such voluptuously vulgar items as Va Va Voom: Bombshells, Pin-ups, Sexpots and Glamour Girls?
Well, yes, in fact, I do. The first book was a gift from my oldest sister, the second a gift from my youngest sister; without that encyclopedic book about pregnancy, my wife might easily have given birth to simpletons. The book about Hasidic insurgents was written by a woman who played the lead in a low-budget movie I made in 1994; she survived the experience and went on to become a crusading journalist. Her book is a whole lot better than my movie. Adrian du Plessis, coauthor of Sideshow, a book about the notorious Vancouver Stock Exchange, helped me prepare a 1989 Forbes story that ultimately led to the exchange’s demise. It is, as it turns out, the only stock exchange that I have ever helped destroy. Castrated was written by Ralph Ginzburg, a celebrity jailbird who gave me my first writing job. While in his employ I met Marilyn Jaye Lewis, whose collection of bisexual erotica moves along at a spanking pace. I have read it once and might read it again.
The final slot on the list is occupied by Va Va Voom, which was given to me by a close friend who died too young. When I first began to visit Los Angeles in the late Eighties, Ed was the coeditor of Movieline, the only entertainment magazine in American history that did not serve an explicit pimping function for the film industry. On Saturday mornings Ed would materialize at poolside, nestle his gargantuan carcass into a chair, order preposterous quantities of food at my expense, and regale me with hilarious stories about insulting James Fox on the set of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, the 1965 film his father had produced.
“You don’t get the girl, and you don’t win the race,” he one day informed Fox. Ed could not have been more than thirteen at the time. “Does the phrase ‘Get me rewrite’ mean anything?” Fox had the precocious little punk banned from the set. At least that was the way Ed remembered it.
I had always assumed that Ed and I would go on like this forever, he phoning me in the middle of the night to say that he was driving down to San Diego to see The Three Faces of Eve for the nineteenth time, I phoning him from the upper deck of Notre Dame Stadium to tearfully share the elation I was experiencing in setting eyes upon Touchdown Jesus for the first time in my life. I thought that when we were old men we would take up our customary positions by the hotel pool and he would once again tell me the story about driving a stretch limo right onto the tarmac at LAX to rescue the shell-shocked stars of Heaven’s Gate after its catastrophic debut at the Toronto Film Festival, whisking them away to safe houses and rustic hideouts and France, where the press could not reach them. Meanwhile, I would see what he thought of my impression of John Malkovich as a geriatric Braveheart. But Ed died long before his time, succumbing to congestive heart failure at age forty-nine. Now my memories of him are forever entwined with a handful of absurd books like Va Va Voom and The Bare Facts Video Guide: Where to Find Your Favorite Actors & Actresses Nude on Videotape and Bad Movies We Love. In the end, I decided that the slapdash biographies of Steve McQueen and Gina Lollobrigida could go. But Va Va Voom was staying.
As purges go, this was not a good start, and things never really got any better. For some reason, over the course of my life, I had come into possession of three copies of Ethan Frome, a book I didn’t even like. So two copies could go. A third book that seemed eminently expendable was a beaten-up old French translation of Under the Volcano, the Malcolm Lowry masterpiece I had read thirty years earlier, but not in French. One night I was chatting with my college French teacher, with whom I had remained friendly for forty-three years, about my liquidation problem. He had been instrumental in getting me a scholarship to spend a year in France, the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me, the nicest thing anyone could ever do for anybody. Because of this I could never part with my battle-worn copy of L’art de la conversation, a drab, ugly, and not especially helpful grammar we used in my sophomore-year French-language class. I told Tom about my predicament vis-à-vis Lowry’s Au-dessous du volcan, trying to imagine a situation in which it would ever be useful.
“I still have my French translation of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics,” he said. “You never know.”
The problem is, there are no books in my collection that I cannot link with a particular time and place, because I always write my name and the date and place of the purchase on the inside flap of the book. Thus, in some sense, all my books are memorabilia. A few hundred books I have kept because they are classics that I constantly reread; another hundred or so were given to me by friends I hold in high regard. The rest remind me of something. That was the case with the French-language Under the Volcano; someone had left it behind in a pool hall in Lourdes, and I’d nabbed it. Had they left it behind in a bar in Lille, I might have been ready to part with it. I might never have picked it up in the first place. But Lourdes? Lourdes? Saint Bernadette would have clawed her way out of the grave, spit out a couple mouthfuls of dirt, and pursued me to the very end of the earth. A similar situation was obtained with Patrick White’s The Cockatoos, a short-story collection I spotted perched atop a trash can one day while I was walking down a Manhattan street with a friend I will never see again. I have always found White a handful; I started Voss in the summer of 1976 and am still working on it. Physically The Cockatoos was a ghastly aquamarine affair, and even though it is a bittersweet reminder of a friendship that is now dead, it is also a reminder of a friendship that was once very much alive. So it stays.
One day, after weeks of making these judgment calls, I decided to see just how many of my books came with a backstory. They all did. Books I bought in Chicago. Books I bought in Fort Lee. Books I bought in Providence. Books I bought in Paris. Admittedly, it was not always the literary quality of the book that accounted for its survival. I kept both Can You Drill a Hole Through Your Head and Survive? and Dante’s Divine Comedy because they were Christmas presents from my daughter. I kept Grim Legion: Edgar Allan Poe at West Point because a good friend asked me to review it and I found it highly original and surprisingly entertaining. I kept Andy Roddick Beat Me with a Frying Pan because I became friendly with the author, who asked if I would compile a humorous index for the book, in which I ridiculed him for losing a golf match to his grandmother. The score was not all that close. The book is now something of a collector’s item; farmed-out, freelance satirical indexes of this nature are rare.
Many books have remained in my collection for idiosyncratic or sentimental reasons. Graham Swift’s The Light of Day was a gift from an English friend who had worked as the author’s publicist. I didn’t much care for him, but I certainly liked her. And the book did contain one remarkable passage: “How does it happen? How do we choose? Someone enters our life, and we can’t live without them. But we lived without them before.”
Road to Purgatory was inscribed by Max Allan Collins, who riveted me for two hours in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Chicago one afternoon, filling me in on the sad, downward spiral of Eliot Ness’s life after he left the Windy City and moved on to The Mistake by the Lake. I read Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers on the roof of a West Hollywood hotel the first night I ever slept in Los Angeles, only pausing when the hotel manager came up to say that people on the lower floors were complaining about my loud, incessant laughter. So I handed him the book and said, “Okay, you try.” Girl with a Pearl Earring I bought at Heathrow Airport after appearing on a radio program with Tracy Chevalier; people who have been on radio or TV shows together form a bond that can never be ruptured, having pooled their resources and worked together to survive a potentially disastrous experience. James Crumley’s Dancing Bear and The Wrong Case I picked up in a Charlottesville bookstore where my son was briefly employed. Both books are here for the duration.
For similar reasons, I will never be able to part with Mister Blue, Op Oloop, Days of the Endless Corvette, Work Shirts for Madmen, So Long, See You Tomorrow, or even The Lamentations of Julius Marantz, all of them gifts from a friend who one day abruptly vanished from my life. Arnold Bennett’s mirthless The Grim Smile of the Five Towns, Jimmy Stewart: Bomber Pilot, and Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum’s majestic History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders were all books given to me by friends, ex-friends, colleagues, relatives, or my wife; Creative Insomnia, The Joys of Jargon, The Wizard of Lies, Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces, and Crazy U were all written by friends. These are all excellent books, but most people could have parted with them after a single reading. Not me. The same holds true for Oakley Hall’s Ambrose Bierce and the Trey of Pearls, which I purchased in south Jersey the last time I took my dying mother to her favorite casino, the Claridge. The last time I took her to Resorts International, I bought Shipwreck by Louis Begley. I recently read what I had written inside Shipwreck that day:
Joe Queenan
January 18, 2005
Atlantic City, of all places
And so, the two south Jersey acquisitions are staying.
It soon became apparent that Operation Winnow wasn’t going anywhere. The whole thing was a farce. One morning, perhaps halfway through my fruitless purge, I looked out the back window and saw that the first micro-colossus was going up at the end of the road. El momento de la verdad had finally arrived: The scum were moving in; soon it would be time for us to move out. But as usual I could not decide when we should go or what specific outrage would constitute the last straw. Should we stay one more year, just so we could say that we had spent a full two decades in the house? Why bother? Should we wait until the developers had finished building one of their Halicarnassus-scale eyesores right next to us? Should we wait until all twenty-four ersatz-Alhambras were built and then bail out, profiting from the halo effect, the situation in which people who cannot afford to purchase a house built for nouveaux riches parvenus instead buy a house right next door and then bask forever in its porcitectural penumbra? It was all a puzzle to me. Meanwhile, my wife, a practical sort, said that we should leave when we felt that it was time to leave. Well, thanks. That helped.
Predictably, I devised a book-related solution to the problem. I decided that I would not leave until I had finished reading every book in my house that I had not already read. This was a way of putting a time limit on things—say, two years. But I immediately sabotaged the operation by going back and rereading books like The End of the Affair and Beau Geste and The Plague and Persuasion, all of which I had read many times before. I then modified the original plan and decided that I would not sell my house until I had read every book that had made me happy while I was living in it. This, of course, would take years. Then I decided that I would read every one of the books that my children had left behind, including From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Polar Express and, yes, even Dune. This also would take years, none of them pleasant. I continued to devise these jury-rigged templates for implausible reading programs until even I had to admit that things were getting out of hand. When, I asked myself, was I finally going to get around to reading Jacques le fataliste? When would the moment be propitious to tackle H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History? Whom did I think I was kidding in suggesting that a moment in my life would arrive when I would be in the mood to read both volumes of Titian: His Life and Times, given that I only owned volume one, or Livingston’s River: A History of the Zambezi Expedition, 1858–1864? As I devised one fatuous schedule after another, it dawned on me that this was the role books had always played in my life, that I had always used them not only as a diversion and as a way of raising my spirits but as a way of putting off difficult decisions. Now, as ever, I was using books to avoid confronting reality.
Can an obsession with reading prove detrimental to one’s well-being? Yes, I think it can. Reading books has not always been a positive experience for me. It has encouraged me to develop a skewed, fun-house vision of the world. Devoting so many hours to reading is the reason I never tore up the revolting carpeting on the steps leading to the second floor in my house, or had the cracked wall in the dining room replastered, or replaced our lunkheaded stove, two of whose gas jets have not worked for years. An exquisite diptych languished on my office floor for four years; I could never free up fifteen minutes to hang it properly, because I was too busy reading Proust. The faucet in one of my sinks dripped nonstop for two years while I worked my way through Tacitus. Bills did not get paid, invoices did not get submitted, calls did not get returned because of my fixation on books. One day I realized that I had not had the picture window in my office washed for the past twelve years. Worse, I had not had the windows in my house washed since the first Clinton administration. All those years, I simply let the rain take care of things while I reread Proust. Sometimes Tolstoy. This was no way to run a railroad.
One day, fed up with not owning a high-definition television set or a Blu-ray player or a garage door you could actually open, I decided to get serious. For the next month I would not read a single page of a book. My only reading would consist of newspapers. I had tried this sort of thing once before, with middling results, but this time, for once in my life, I stuck to the program. Bookless but determined, I managed to buy a 3-D TV, set up the Blu-ray player, clean out the closets, hang the diptych, reorganize my compact discs, replace my blown speakers, purchase a laptop, buy a smartphone, install a new printer, get the three-year-old roll of film from my first and only trip to Rome developed, return seventy-five phone calls, and pay all my bills. I also spent time with my family. Then I went back to reading Proust. To this day, the windows, both home and office, remain immaculately unwashed.
Recently I read a mean-spirited review of a new book about video games. Its thesis was that video games were more exciting and rewarding than real life, so it was no surprise that young people preferred them to what most of us would refer to as “reality.” The reviewer thought this was horrible, as did I: What about sunsets and love affairs and long walks along the Schuylkill? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my own relationship with books mirrored the relationship so many young people have with video games. I started reading at a frenzied pace when I was a little kid living in a housing project under the thumb of a dipsomaniacal father who was literally robbing me and my sisters of our childhood. Clearly, I read to escape. But so did my sisters. And so did my father. Some of my favorite books—Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Tale of Two Cities, Around the World in Eighty Days, A Study in Scarlet—were his favorite books, too. He didn’t like being cold, hungry, and miserable any more than we did. If video games had been around at the time, he might have given them a shot, too.
The way I see it, a person develops early in life a pattern of behavior or a set of compensatory skills to deal with a particular problem, but then, long after the problem has been resolved, he does not automatically abandon or at least modify the behavior. Decades after my bitter housing project days were over, I continued to read feverishly, almost desperately, at all hours of the day and night, because reality—even my new, vastly improved reality—was never as sublime as the reality to be found in books. Thus, much like teenagers who get raked over the coals for the years they waste on video games, I could easily be taken to task for the ridiculous amounts of time I have devoted to reading when other, more pressing matters demanded my attention. Christianity took root because it offered the poor an uplifting alternative to life on this planet. Reading does the same. And once you are hooked—on books or religion—you are hooked. Throughout my life, I have let important projects wither on the vine because I was too busy reading. I refused to make any headway on my career until I was in my mid-thirties because I was too busy reading. I refused to cultivate the kinds of contacts that would be useful in my line of work because I was too busy reading. Well, that and the fact that the people were appalling. Yet the long and the short of it is: If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it the same way. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, is my attitude. In fact, even if it is broke, don’t fix it.
That said, I now accept that I must stop using my books as a delaying mechanism and sell a house I expected to die in. Otherwise, I will find myself ten years down the line despising the neighbors who live right next door in Babylonian splendor, with their seven-car garage and cathedral windows and swimming pool the size of Latvia, while I myself remain paralyzed into inactivity because I have not yet finished Middlemarch. Accordingly, I have decided to pack up our belongings, sell our house, and move somewhere else where I can install lots and lots of bookcases and blow off the next twenty years of my life getting caught up on my reading. Everyone has to grow up sometime, the old saying goes. It’s the single worst thing about life on this planet.
• • • • • •
There are many sad and beautiful stories about books. After being banished to a backwater on the edge of the Black Sea, Ovid wrote a eulogy in honor of his nemesis Augustus Caesar in the language of the barbarians that inhabited the region. Both the eulogy and the language have disappeared. Homer wrote a comic epic that has vanished without a trace. Fifteen hundred of Lope de Vega’s plays are no longer with us. Almost all of Aeschylus’s work went up in flames when cultural pyromaniacs burned down the library of Alexandria in A.D. 640. Aeschylus, it turns out, wrote eighty plays. The Egyptians had the only copy of his complete works; it was out on loan from the Greeks. Only seven plays have survived.
Electronic books will ensure that these tragedies—described in Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books, a personal favorite that someone has filched from my personal library—never reoccur. That’s wonderful, but I’d still rather have the books. For me and for all those like me, books are sacred vessels. Postcards and photos and concert programs and theater tickets and train schedules are souvenirs; books are connective tissue. Books possess alchemical powers, imbued with the ability to turn ennui into ecstasy, a drab, predictable life behind the Iron Curtain into something stealthily euphoric. Or so book lovers believe. The tangible reality of books defines us, in the same way the handwritten scrolls of the Middle Ages defined the monks who concealed them from barbarians. We believe that the objects themselves have magical powers.
People who prefer e-books may find this baffling or silly. They think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel. I recently read an article in which a noted scientific writer argued that the physical copy of a book was not important, that it was nothing more than a fetish. He said that books were “like the coffin at a funeral.” Despite such comments, I am not all that worried about the future of books. If books survived the Huns, the Vandals, the Nazis, and the Moors, they can surely survive noted scientific writers. Some people will continue to read and treasure books; some won’t. One friend says that in the future “books will be beautifully produced, with thick paper, and ribbons, and proper bindings.” People who treasure books will expect them to look like treasures. And so they will have ribbons. Another says: “People still paint a century and a half after the invention of the photograph, but the relationship of painting to life is different. I suspect a similar journey for the book.” A third says: “Books will survive. Books are in our DNA.” “Paper is still a great technology,” says a fourth. And a fifth says, wistfully, that books will survive “as a niche, a bit like taking a carriage ride in Central Park. But more than that.”
One can only hope.
The reading life I have described has been thrilling for me, but I am willing to concede that people like me are as mad as hatters. Perhaps madder. We have invented a way of dealing with the world that works for us, but it will not work for everyone. The presence of books in my hands, my home, my pockets, my life will never cease to be essential to my happiness. I will never own an e-reader. I have no use for them. A dimly remembered girlfriend’s handwriting will never take me by surprise in a Nook. A faded ticket to the Eiffel Tower will never fall out of a Kindle. I am a Luddite, and proud of it.
I was once told a story about a man who fell in love with a woman who lived far, far away. They rarely saw each other, but they regularly sent each other gifts. She would send him books; he would send her music. She did not select the books haphazardly; each one of them meant something. Often written by obscure writers, they were nothing like the books he would have chosen himself, but almost without exception they were poignant and inspiring. The books, mostly novels, introduced him to a world he had never known. There were books by Japanese writers, Belgian writers, Argentine writers, Vietnamese writers. They were exotic, strange, wonderful. During their friendship she sent him forty-seven books, all told, all but one of which he read. When the books arrived, he would take his time with them, not wanting to rush things. When he was done, he would place the books on a shelf and look at them and caress them several times a day, because every time he touched one of the books, he felt her presence in the room. The books were the chronicle of their love affair. They were prima facie evidence that two people once loved each other enormously.
Life intervened, and the romance faded. They lived too far away from each other, emotional fatigue set in, they had other commitments, the flame had gone out. They sometimes spoke on the phone but both hated it, because the things they said on the phone were the idle, mechanical chitchat of friends, while the things they said when they were together were spoken in the secret language of lovers. One day the woman wrote and said that she did not wish to see him anymore, that their love affair was over. She would not call him; she would never let the word “goodbye” pass through her lips, because “goodbye” is the worst word in the English language. She vanished from his life. He would never see her again. She would never send him any more books.
He was angry and disappointed, and his heart was broken. He felt betrayed. He took all of the books she had given him and stuffed them into boxes and hid them in the basement. For a moment he came close to giving them away, perhaps even destroying them. But he relented. That would have been inconceivable.
Time passed. He never heard from the woman again, but his anger slowly subsided. It was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. He had read that somewhere in a book. One day he went down to the basement and carried the boxes upstairs and put all the books back on the shelf. He arranged them in the exact order in which he had received them over the years of the love affair. And then he began rereading them in the order in which they had come into his possession. He reread the book about the samurai and the book about the doomed ship. He reread the book about the chess players and the book about the angel of mercy and the book about the tormented explorer and the book about silkworms. He loved these books now as he had loved them then. He would read and reread these books until the day he died. He knew that he would never see the woman again, but the books would keep her in his heart forever.
Only the very last book she sent to him, a novel about a man pursuing a mysterious and elusive woman, he would never finish reading. He had started this book just before the romance ended and was not more than ten pages from the end when the fateful missive arrived. He closed the book that day and would leave it closed forever. For until he had read the final page of the very last book the love of his life had sent him, she would never cease to be the love of his life. As long as he did not finish this book, there would always be one more gift awaiting him. It would arrive like a gift from the future. It would arrive like a gift from the past.
This story does not work on a Kindle.
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Jacqueline Calvet, mother of one of my oldest and closest friends, spent the last six years of her life in a Berlin apartment with her daughter and her German son-in-law. She was sickly and frail and the only thing that still excited her was the occasional visit to the public library. In those last six years, as her heart gradually failed her, Jacqueline read two thousand books. Two thousand. She was literally using books as a form of life support. She was reading for her life.
My father was cut from a similar cloth. My father and I were not close, but we shared a passion for books. The day he was buried, I visited his tiny apartment one last time. All of his possessions could fit into three plastic trash bags, a metaphor for his monastic lifestyle. He did not own much, and he did not leave much behind. When I entered his apartment, I noticed that he had no food in the refrigerator, no artwork hanging on the walls, a tape player that worked only when it felt like it, and no television. But there were books all over the place. There were books about holy men and books about cowboys and books about the Romans and a book about the Hound of the Baskervilles. There were lots of books about the day somebody died: Abraham Lincoln, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Wild Bill Hickok, Jesus Christ. As his life wound down, as death closed in, he had shed all the trifles that one does not need in this world. There was nothing on television that could possibly mean anything to him at this point. There was nothing he could hang on the walls that would make any difference now—not a photograph, not a painting, not even a crucifix. But his books still mattered to him, just as they had mattered when he was young and full of hope, before alcohol got its hooks into him. His books still held out the hope of doing a far, far better thing than he had ever done, of going to a far, far better rest than any he had ever known. His books allowed him to cling to dreams that would never materialize. Books had not enabled him to succeed. But they had mitigated the pain of failure.
Reading is the way mankind delays the inevitable. Reading is the way we shake our fist at the sky. As long as we have these epic, improbable reading projects arrayed before us, we cannot breathe our last: Tell the Angel of Death to come back later; I haven’t quite finished Villette. This is, I believe, the greatest gift that books give to mankind. Every life, even the best ones, ends in sadness. People we adore pass on; voices we love to hear are stilled forever. Books hold out hope that things may end otherwise. Jane will marry Rochester. Eliza will foil Simon. Valjean will outlast Javert. Pip will wed Estella. The wicked will be overthrown, and the righteous shall prosper. As long as there are beautiful books waiting for us out there, there is still a chance that we can turn the ship around and find a safe harbor. There is still hope, in the words of Faulkner, that we shall not only survive; we shall prevail. There is still hope that we shall all live happily ever after.
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