CODA

Some Episodes in the History of My Reading

The Bed

My mother comes home from work tired. We sit in the kitchen with my grandmother, who has prepared a frugal meal, and by nine my mother is off to bed. We do not have a TV—it is 1945, and few do in my Bronx neighborhood—so I read a library book, a Jules Verne, maybe, or an abridged version of The Three Musketeers. The living room, with my wheezing grandmother sleeping fitfully behind the screen that separates us, my squeaky cot and the old, thin blankets, the winter coldness, all suddenly vanish. I’m ten and carried into the richest worlds of life and remain there as long as I’m reading my book. And I’m protected from harm after I turn off the light as long as the book remains in my hand.

The Raft

My mother gave me The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for my eleventh birthday. She had heard that they were what American boys read. I devoured the Twain books over and over again, finding myself in them—that is, my desired, adventurous, free self. Finding in Tom and Huck the friends I needed and wanted, models to keep me in the hope of escape from my cramped world in the Bronx. I was raised by Sicilians and I may as well have been living in Palermo, where there was no vast Mississippi and no wide raft to ride it, no open sky and no territory ahead, no America.

I lived not far from the mighty ripple of the Bronx River, and one afternoon I tied a small raft of planks I had plucked from a construction site close to the Botanical Garden—where the river ran through—then still on the wild side, with a deer or two hiding in the brush. I left my shoes and socks on the bank and pushed off and sank. I got stuck in the river’s soft, muddy bottom and barely worked my way out of the muck. I was coated in watery mud and crying with fear on the grassy bank. I wonder what story I told my mother when she saw me mud-caked and trembling. That was the early end of my exotic adventures. I consigned them to the safer regions of movies and books and, later, to putting them into my own fiction, in novels and stories located far from the Mississippi, far from America, and about artists, revolutionaries, and romantics, who, unlike me, burn and dare.

The Seduction

When I was young, I sought the more difficult books, the more difficult the better: I did not ever want to be led to where and what I had already known, to be guided in a language with words that seldom required a dictionary. At fifteen, I saw Caroline, an older woman, on whom I had a giant crush, sitting on a park bench and reading as if nothing else in the world mattered. I was ashamed of my lustful thoughts and expected her to have read them in my stare. She finally noticed me and called me over and asked if I liked to read.

“Of course,” I said, and nervously began to name a few books I loved.

“Those are good books. You’re my son’s friend, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am,” I said, not mentioning that we disliked each other, that he called me four eyes and a fruity bookworm.

“I have other books you may like,” she said, “so come by for coffee.” Her apartment jumped with books, shelves of them even in the kitchen, where we sat and drank coffee and where I burned for her. She lent me the novel she had been reading on the park bench, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. “Let me know what you think,” she said. I wanted to like it because she had. I wanted to like it because I wanted her to like me. But I couldn’t follow the story; I did not understand if there was a story, but there were passages of intense, mysterious beauty that made me tremble as I had on my first Holy Communion.

(That early reaction apart, I came, as I grew older, to understand how daring and rebellious Nightwood is. Barnes sidesteps the rules of normative—and predictable—fiction. The rules so beloved and enforced by the writing professors. Barnes tells and does not always show; she comments on her characters, even excoriating one; she shuns writing dialogue that supposedly replicates the way people speak—or are thought to speak; she abandons the so-called requisite arc of the narrative and for two chapters plunges into some of the most forceful prose poetry written on the mystery of love and whom we love. For her independence in life and in her art, she is my model.)

A year later, I broke my head trying to make sense of Joyce’s Ulysses, another book Caroline gave me, one she had a special passion for. Something extraordinary was going on there in that Irishman’s ocean of words, and I felt elevated, special, just trying to fathom it. But what remained in me was not only the novels she had led me to but the association of fiction with sexual longing, and with beauty and mystery.

Caroline loved Ulysses so much that she left her husband and children to live in Paris with a French scholar who had devoted his life to that one book. His passion for what she also loved was the magnet. Because of her, I’m drawn to any woman I see reading a book and curious to know what she is reading, snobbishly gauging her desirability by her taste.

Once, at Café de Flore in Paris, I saw an elegant woman, as Henry James would say, of a certain age, fixed on a book. She was at the same table over the following five days. Once, our eyes met and we smiled. I took the courage from that smile to approach her and ask in my most polite way, and in my halting French, what she was reading.

“Nightwood,” she said, showing me the cover. “And you?”

I held back my surprise and my wanting to tell her how I had first come across the book, but instead I replied, “The Third Policeman, by an Irish writer. I’m not sure it’s translated.”

“I have read it in English,” she said, adding, “I have wondered what you were reading all these days and wondered if you were a simpleton.”

She did not appear the next day or the days after, which I ascribed to my barging in on her privacy. But the headwaiter, Marcel, a man I had known for years and who was a friend of the novelist Lawrence Durrell, said, “She comes here every spring and early fall for seven days and sits with a book, speaks to no one, and waits for no one. She is not French and she is not English or American. She drinks calvados in Coca-Cola and smokes cigarettes in a holder. She leaves extravagant tips above the service compris, so we don’t care how long she sits, even when we are busy. We admire her comportment.” I imagined her in a world of books and art and intellectual elegance and wrote a novel about her called The Green Hour.

The Poisonous Book

A novel may just leave you where you were when you started it, and in that case, it was not worth your time, the dear hours of your life never returned. Sometimes, and in the best case, a novel leaves you with a shudder of recognition—about what you do not know: It has altered you and you do not understand how or why, but it has. That does not mean it has changed you to be kinder or not to cheat on your lover or on your income taxes. But it has changed you: However alone, you are not completely alone.

W. H. Auden said that poetry changes nothing but the nature of its saying. That may be true for poetry, but fiction’s power moves in mysterious ways. Some novels may elevate you; some may degrade. At eighteen, I encountered a “poisonous book,” like the novel given to Dorian Gray by the worldly, corrupt Lord Henry. That novel that turned Dorian into an aesthete who believed there were no rules to limit or govern his wish and pursuit of pleasure. I was in my freshman year at City College and doing poorly—because I arrogantly, rebelliously read everything but the required texts. The final exams would determine if I was going to be expelled, which, for me, meant the street. I started to study four days before the exams. I liked the danger of it, the immersion of life at the brink’s edge. Of course, I slept little and drank black coffee and smoked until my eyes popped; that was part of the ritual, but one that deranged me. The week before the exam, I had lit on The Fountainhead, sitting on a pile I had taken from the library. I had been warned against it by my fellow bohemian students: It was a fascist book, an apologia for social Darwinism, an all-around rotten business, with cardboard characters to boot.

It didn’t matter. I started reading it in the afternoon and through the night and morning of my first exam. I slept for two hours and went off to the subway and down to the college, took the exams, and failed both algebra and biology. I had a semester of academic suspension to mull over my megalomania- and fantasy-driven crimes.

What had happened? Midway in my reading of The Fountainhead, the idea grew that I was above exams and above study, towering above the college and above every demand made on me other than my own. And soon I was sure that I would not only pass the exams but that by my powers of concentration I would do brilliantly and win great praise. I was in the clouds of the grand Self. I was like the genius architect, Howard Roark, the superman of Ayn Rand’s novel, one of the exceptions for whom rules were meant to be ignored or, better, to be shattered. My fellow students and my professors were the gears that made the System work, that giant academic factory that turned out standard bolts, screws, and solid citizens. I had a higher mission: I was an artist. I was he, Howard Roark of the Bronx. I consoled myself with that idea for a few months after my suspension and while I was distributing mail from desk to desk in a large downtown catalogue company.

Another Book, Another Folly

I suppose I descend from the line of those characters deluded by literature. Don Quixote rides off to save chivalry and the world, modeling himself on an antiquated literature of knights and their codes and adventures; the married Emma Bovary ruins her life in the pursuit of the kind of love she swoons over in the sentimental romances of her day.

My model for ruin was Hemingway. Nothing he could do was wrong. Not a sentence was off. His style was contagious, and many in my generation caught the infection. I wrote shopping lists that read like his: “Buy a true bread. Be sure the leche is cold and its container true.” His stories were perfect. His life was perfect. Everything Hemingway wrote and did I wanted to write and do. But not exactly: I did not want to fish or hunt. At eighteen, I went out on a day boat that sailed from Sheepshead Bay and moored some miles into the ocean. Within an hour, I turned green and spent the excursion turning even greener belowdecks and pretending to show to the ship’s crew—as Hemingway would have me—grace under pressure. As for hunting, at nine, I shot my Red Ryder BB gun at a squirrel squatting in my uncle Umberto’s little Bronx garden and missed. I hit my uncle. My uncle was not hurt, but the shot unsettled him, wounded his trust in me. I never again wanted to shoot at any living or inanimate thing.

At nineteen, I went to the corrida in Mexico City because of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon; he had written about the drama of the running of the bulls, and I was sure I would find, as he had, metaphysical courage acted out in the sand. But when the matador’s sword plunged in and the bull fell and shuddered and died, I felt ill. I was still sure, however, that the feeling would pass because I would come to see the truth and beauty in the bull’s death and in the matador’s union with the animal he had just killed. Back in my little hotel, I saw only the felled bull in the blood-soaked sand and I had to drink a lot of tequila before I could finally go to sleep.

From among all of Hemingway’s stories, I was especially called to action by “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” moved by its cadences and glamorous darkness. I liked the idea of a café/bar as a place of sanctuary and that to drink there was a mode of communion with the nothing, the nada of the story and of life.

I had learned from Hemingway that it is the writer’s duty to drink. This was much easier than fishing or hunting or even sitting alone and, in total focus and purity of spirit, writing. Hemingway was not all to blame for this, but he had given me a noble mission, an obligation to the profession, which I, as an earnest young man, was eager to fulfill.

I was fresh from meeting Hemingway—crashing his home outside Havana—in early September of 1958. He talked about writing and its need for discipline, but he never mentioned the drinking part of the craft, which I assumed was part of the unspoken code that needed no mentioning.

That fall, as one of my experiments with the writer’s life and duties, I went to an Irish bar, one of the few then remaining in Harlem, on my way to a morning class at City College. A long, dark bar, a bowl of hard-boiled eggs, no TV, no radio, no music, just as Hemingway would have wanted it. Just me and the purity of the bar and the bartender dozing by the window to the street, and the early morning still fresh with hope. I looked at myself in the mirror and, quoting from Hemingway’s story, said sotto voce, “‘Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before the bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours.’” At nine, I ordered a double shot of rye with a beer chaser. Then another.

I left for class feeling pleasantly woozy and glowing with dignity, but then, halfway there, I turned back for another round at the bar to secure the dignity. I missed my classes that day, and the days following, when I renewed the experiments, but they, too, failed, like the raft that had sunk in the Bronx River.

It took me many years beyond my adolescence and adulthood to write my shopping list straight and to cease those and other such adventures in drinking.

A New Love

Years ago, a noted writer asked, “Who over the age of forty still reads novels?” I did, and always with the hope of finding the innocent joy and impress of my early reading. For a while, I took a vacation from fiction and turned mostly to biographies and memoirs and letters, to books on history and art. But enriching as they were, none had power over me or lived as deeply in my imagination.

A few years ago, I found for almost nothing all four volumes of André Gide’s Journals at a library book sale. I had wanted them forever, for the physical beauty of the books alone and because of their echo from my youth, when Gide was a demigod of literature and whose novel, radical for its time, The Counterfeiters I had loved. Gide’s reading was wide and profound, and I came to value and trust his taste, a trust that grew volume by volume, and I wanted to read the books he so much cared about. I admired and felt kinship with him because he was not afraid to dislike what the world claims it reveres. He demolishes, for example, King Lear: “The entire play from one end to another is absurd” (The Journals of André Gide, volume 4). It was reassuring to know that someone else on this planet felt as I had. His praise for Steinbeck’s masterpiece strike novel, In Dubious Battle, made me value his judgment even more.

So it surprised me to find this 1944 entry: “have just devoured one after another eight books by Simenon at the rate of one a day.” And then in 1948, the line “New plunge into Simenon; I have just read six in a row.” I had always thought of Simenon as a lightweight crime writer, but once I began reading his books, it was curtains for me. I thought, This is why I still read, because without novels like this, life is just breathing.

Sometimes after a serious Simenon binge, I feel sated, saturated, sick of myself, even, for being so addicted. My reward, as with drugs, is to receive less and less pleasure. I have been chasing the original high to no success, but like a true addict, I always relapse. I ask for little—a great opening, a dazzling seventy-five pages. I expect the letdown. But there is always another of his books to find the high.

Simenon wrote many novels, finishing them sometimes as quickly as in two or three weeks. You can feel the moment when he just had had enough. He speeds through the last third to get over with it and move on to write yet another. Classic seduction: charm, conquer, and flee. He jilts you, but it’s worth the ride and the disappointment. Better the inconstant but exciting lover than a faithful but predictable one.

No writer—not even Hemingway—opens his books with such economy and unadorned ease as Simenon does. No one draws you in as quickly on the first paragraph and holds you. No one creates or reveals a character in a phrase or line like he does. In a 1955 Paris Review interview, Simenon said that “an apple by Cézanne has weight. And it has juice, everything. With just three strokes. I tried to give to my words just the weight that a stroke of Cézanne’s gave to an apple.”

In the novel Madame Maigret’s Own Case, we see a woman turn down to the lowest flame a pot of stew she is cooking. She puts on her coat and hat and, before leaving, quickly checks herself in the mirror and “seeing that everything is all right, rushes out.” That little moment illuminates her pride, her vanity, her bourgeois correctness. Simenon makes no mention of her age, height, weight, no description of her hat, coat, shoes, her nose, her hair—all the ponderous, belabored detail that we are told is supposed to make a character vivid, real, and that we immediately forget. But in just a phrase, three strokes, voilà, Simenon’s character has volume and personality.

What Simenon does so simply and brilliantly for character he also does in his creation of atmosphere or the mood of his novels. In that same Paris Review interview, he said that his sense of atmosphere came from looking at Impressionist paintings when he was a young boy. I can’t imagine how he transposed the sunny dispositions of those paintings into the musty hallways and the half-lit, creaking, dingy tenements, the smells of cooking wafting through a window in summer, the yellowish fog over the Seine in the wet fall, the evocation of Paris at a time before Malraux had the grand buildings cleaned and their venerable patina washed down to the gutters and sewers. Simenon’s Paris lives before the tearing down of the ancient market at Les Halles, with its vans packed with produce and the little bistros serving onion soup at four in the morning. It almost makes you forget that Simenon is from Belgium or that Paris has changed. His atmospherics envelop his novels but never impede the velocity of the narrative. Velocity is the key.

When asked about Proust, Isaac Singer said, “Does he make you want to turn the page?” Of course Proust does, but to turn it slowly. I’m not suggesting that velocity is the foremost quality that matters in a novel, but the velocity of Simenon’s prose sweeps away all the dross, clutter, and manicured verisimilitude of much contemporary fiction. And Simenon pushes aside the idea of writing only “likable” and “relatable” protagonists, the expected staples of standard-issue fiction.

Dirty Snow (published in English in 1951) is set in a small, grisly town in an indeterminate place and time—but clearly during the Nazi occupation of France and Belgium. The master image is of blackened snow, stinking alleyways, dens of steam, smoke, drink, and menace, where a teenager, Frankie, spends his nights. His mother keeps a brothel of two or three girls in her small apartment, where he sleeps and sometimes shares his bed with them. The boy commits murder and robbery for no apparent reason, and tricks a young woman who loves him into sleeping with an older, slimy man. There are murderers in fiction whom one can feel for, who indicate they are a recognizable part of the human tribe—Camus’s Meursault, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov—but Frankie is not one of them. There is nothing redeemable about him, not a shred of decency or feeling or devilish charm that even the most tender-hearted social worker could detect with a microscope.

In Dirty Snow, there is no lovable Maigret, Simenon’s famous detective, no welcoming cafés and domestic comforts, no Paris of quaint streets and interesting criminals. This town of dirty snow and gray cold is not even a hell crowded with tortured sinners. Here there is crime for which there is punishment, but there is no justice. Simenon’s town lives outside of sin, of good and bad, and, like most life, has no boundaries but power. This is the grimmest novel I have ever read. And perhaps the most moral in its truth.

All my life I wanted to be near books, to have them close to me, by me when I eat, beside me in bed, and on the little shelf I built next to the toilet—a trick I learned from Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life. As a boy, I hated parting with books from the library and was always fined for late returns. In my teens, I haunted the now vanished Book Row on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan and could find the most important, beautiful books in the world for pennies. I did not need fancy bindings and hand-tooled covers; in any case, they do not enrich the literature they harbor. I would carry my newfound treasures in a brown paper shopping bag on the subway, all the way to the upper Bronx, and imagine them piled up alongside my cot and in an already packed unpainted pine and brick bookcase. I read on the subway, on the bus, on lunch and coffee breaks from work after I dropped out of high school. I read when I got home and when my mother went to bed with one of her romances, usually a novel of pirates and the women they seized as booty and for ransom but whom they ended up loving instead. I read three or four books at a time, going from one to another like a hungry man in a hurry. I wanted to have friends but had few, and none had a passion for reading. I wanted to have a girlfriend and go steady, as that was the height of sophistication for teenagers in the early fifties. I had a girlfriend, but she was always busy. Busy with others.

No one was as sure, as steady, as magical, as mysterious, as sexy, as comforting, as life-giving as anything or anyone I found in the novels I took home. All my life there were disasters in the street, sadness on the subway, heartbreak and betrayals in and out of bed; the world was a disaster, but once I walked into my apartment and saw about me my books on their shelves, I was, I am, safe and maybe even brave.

Among my books I still have some I bought or that were given to me when I was fifteen or sixteen. On those, I made a little drawing of my profile on the fly-leaf, and wrote the date of purchase and in careful print the words “Pelham Parkway, the Bronx.” One was The Magic Mountain; another, Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky. These and the others from the past I took wherever I moved or stored them for my return. As long as they were with me, I had a history, one more vivid and palpable than a photograph could give me. The books brought with them the damp smells of my Bronx apartment and the spring breezes in the Botanical Garden, where I had read them, the cigarette burns where the ashes fell, the coffee stains on the pages where they were read on the kitchen table, the echoes of the operas broadcast on radio WQXR directly from the Metropolitan every Saturday afternoon. I took The Sheltering Sky for Bowles to sign when we were teaching together in Tangier in 1981. The book had traveled a long way from the fifties. Bowles asked, “Did someone pound this with a baseball bat?”

Suppose there is an afterlife and there are no books there, just waves of words with nothing to hold, no pages to turn, no aroma of paper and ink and dust. Even though there is an eternity of time to read, it would not be the same without the physical entity, the book and its earthly cycle from birth to decay, the once sunny, expectant pages moldering into dust along with the owner. I thought of the history of the burials of the great and the ordinary, and the goods taken by the dead for their future life, whole households of pots and pans and furniture for some, spears and axes for others. I want my books with me, the treasures I have loved and amassed along the way.

No simple coffin will do. I need a mausoleum, like that of the robber baron Jay Gould’s mansion-size white pile facing Melville’s headstone, up in Woodlawn Cemetery, the last subway stop in the Bronx. Mine would have floor-to-ceiling bookcases, carpeted floors, three or four comfortable leather club chairs, and reading lamps with rose silk shades beside them, and a skylight high above my marble sarcophagus. This is a library that I do not and never shall have in life but that I enjoy imagining will be built after my death. Open to the public—for free, of course—twenty-four hours a day, until the end of eternity.