MARGINALIA AND OTHER CRIMES

Tara Bray Smith

 

 

 

I have misplaced my pen. Or I don’t reach to get it anymore. I don’t know why. I used to always read with a pen in my hand, as if the author and I were in a conversation. Ha! I wrote. Wow, Gosh, No! In Homer’s Odyssey I scribbled: “Being tall is important,” and “Doesn’t everyone just want to be safe and sound?” I “analyzed”: Fresh green breast = Daisy and Odysseus = The Middle Way. No one ever admonished me not to write in my books, so I never considered it wrong. Library books, my own books, the books of friends. (Let him who always returns his borrowed books cast the first stone.) Seeing the words issue from my hand, in a fine script, purple Pilot Precise Rolling Ball V5 Extra Fine, no dull black ballpoint for me, made me understand the books I was reading. So I wrote to learn. Or I wrote to be private. The book was my bower. I wandered off. Page 68 of Pride and Prejudice: a list of imaginary names for unborn children. Isabel, Minden, Ezekiel. Minden is the name of a town in Nebraska I passed once. Not the town, just the name, on a sign, next to a field. Isabel was a great-aunt. Did I not see how silly these names would seem to me in ten years? Ezekiel. How embarrassing. But who cares? I never minded the random scribblings of other readers; found them interesting, in fact. It is a truth universally acknowledged that people write the darnedest things in the margins of their books.

Someone told me a long time ago to put my pen to someone else’s paper. Who was it? Mrs. R——from high school, who sent her charges into rapture one day around the holidays, 1986, when instead of instructing us, she read Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” aloud in a reedy, great-aunt voice. Any teacher who favors reading aloud to sentence diagramming is my kind of teacher. And it was Mrs. R——’s notion that one needed to have a conversation with the author, with oneself, by writing.

Here’s Sylvie, in turquoise hi-liter, in D. H. Lawrence’s Complete Short Stories, Volume 2 (I found her at the Strand):

Dear Sasha

I’m writing today
this sort of short
letter, to tell you
that I hate you.
’cause you’re a
bitch. My big bitch.
You’re a goddammit,
a little twerp, ugly
a jerk, a mental
defective, a twit
a scatterbrain
a whore, a dike.

SyLvie

A goddammit! Exuberantly crass, of unclear sexual preference, SyLvie likes “The Odour of Chrysanthemums” through page ten or so, underlining here and there in a desultory hand. She favors dramatic words (so like her, Sylvie) and hot phrases: slunk, red coals, mumbled, rapturously. Then nothing.

Sylvie interrupts my reading, her intrusions thicken “Chrysanthemums’” delicate nose. But I like Sylvie. I like her guts. Hell, I like the fact that she reads at all! To analyze the morality of whether or not she should be there, in my book, seems beside the point. Certain bookworms eat books. Eat them, swear in them, spill things on them. There are still books in the Philadelphia Free Library’s children’s section that have bits of pages—corners, mostly, but also the occasional edge—missing because my friend Elizabeth ate them. Tore them off and popped them in her mouth. Most notably: The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew; Rose in Bloom, by Louisa May Alcott; and perhaps the Shoes books—Dancing Shoes, Ballet Shoes, Theater Shoes. Her favorites were the oldest books, because the pages were salty.

Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It’s how I feel after a good dinner. That’s why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mine and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, eat my way through every last slash and dot. That’s something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does a hydrant. (Though Web marginalia software is being developed, it is still not widely used. The closest the Web gets to true marginalia is the posting area of blogs, and even this is more composed than your typical “Huh?” written in the margin of a paperback. Unless you conceive that the entire Web is a kind of marginalia, written on the Ur-text of us. But back to my subject.)

There is this marking aspect—book as object—then there is something else. Reading as conversation, except all at once, with the reader given the benefit of someone’s completed thought sitting there in front of you, ready to be digested. And here, the meal metaphor again. Perhaps this is why books are so compelling. They leave room for us. They offer themselves to us, entire, to be taken at our whim. To lift our eyes from the page, to go to the bathroom without having to press pause, to put our book aside for years, and not miss a single scene.

Of course there are certain books one must not write in (I know that!). Library books, for example, though I have cheated. There is something so self-absorbed, downright priggish about “Marginalia and other crimes,” as the Cambridge University Libraries call the act of note taking, philosophizing, arguing, personal organizing, what-have-you in library books (www.lib.cam.ac.uk/marginalia). And yet I insert one query (I can’t stop myself): Isn’t self-absorption—and its opposite, complete mind-meld with another—what reading can be at its highest? And really, on the scale of things, is it so bad? In a Gutenberg Bible, yes. But in Wine for Dummies? Yes, of course, if the book’s not yours. Though I would have to include my own dirty doings under the heading “Case 4: Marginalia, single author many books,” or perhaps “Coloured marginalia,” or even the mysteriously titled “?,” I prefer the innocent carelessness of “Case 3: Damage by animals, small humans and birds.”

So thank the household gods for the pocket-sized paperback, where you can write whatever you want to. Those little wafers of pleasure, issued by the gazillions starting in the 1920s and 1930s, reaching their modest zenith in the 1960s, when television was still in swaddling clothes. Illustrated by Edward Gorey, Milton Glaser, Andy Warhol, now a dollar a dozen. Worth so little they are put in basement laundry rooms for the taking, which is how I got What Maisie Knew and Deliverance and Lord Jim and Patti Page’s Once upon a Dream, in which “Lovely Patti shares her intimate secrets of popularity, diet, beauty, love and marriage.” These books are extra. They accumulate on stoops, their pages humid and curled, FREE hovering above them like a plea. They are what poor men sell on the Avenue of the Americas and are humbly beautiful like all good, free things: sun, air, water, grass, stars, love. They are to be written in, bent, thrown into bags. They should function as stories and diaries and confessionals. (Inside SyLvie’s Lawrence: “Jesus had a twin. He knew nothing about him.”) They should accumulate all manner of stains: coffee, dirt, newsprint, ink, water, pigeon droppings, food. Sand and pressed leaves should fall from their pages.

Sing to me of Signet Classics. Penguins and Puffins and Peregrines and Plumes. Bantams (“Read more” in the back always tempting me to send ten cents in) and Meridians and Fawcett Crests and Doubleday Anchors. Vintage and its worried little sun, Pockets, Popular Library Fictions, Mentor Editions, Pyramids, and Heinemann’s African Writers Series, Founding Editor Chinua Achebe. Sing to me of Comp IV, Am. Lit., Freshman Comp., Brit. Lit., Edith Hamilton’s Mythology , A Separate Peace, the purple cover of the Color Purple. Sing USED SAVES (George Washington Bookstore Textbooks), $4.95 reduced to a buck, down to a quarter, finally nothing. Sing to me of muted spines in red, yellow, green, taupe, manila, manila, manila. Sing of that blunt little typeface Times Roman, and those otherwise unloved nineteenth-century portraits that would not have lives unless put on the covers of Oxford Classics. Sing to me of dog-ears,

✻
!
?
]
Yes!

Doodles and grocery lists and phone numbers I do not recognize anymore, and boys I once loved. “Woman as object,” “Man v. Nature,” “Wow!,” “Gosh!,” “SELFISH BITCH,” “No!!,” “Careless people,” “Blah blah,” and the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. Esteemed eds. Alvin Kernan, E. M. Butler, J. P. Hardy, L. J. Swingle—where are thee now?

Those lists. Those lists that made me feel inadequate. READ THESE OTHER VINTAGE TITLES. I was twenty-four. I put check-marks next to every book I had read and there were only one or two on each page. Lolita, Dubliners, Light in August, Ragtime.

And yet I did not write in all of them, and even now will not as often pick up a pen. Why did I not write in the margins of One Hundred Years of Solitude? Or Where I’m Calling From? Or Père Goriot? (Michele Peter’s copy has only one mark. On page 82, Madame de Beauséant’s speech against love: “I’ve read very extensively in the book of society, but there were apparently still a few pages I didn’t know. Now I know them all.”) Ed Quaintance’s copy of the 1957 New Directions paperback edition of Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse, has a black-and-white Buddha on its cover. A mean boy with blue eyes gave the book to me in high school. I thought it meant he liked me. He did not. There are a few dog-ears. They trot out after a few dozen pages.

I didn’t write in these books because there was no pen around, most likely. But then, there are writers that speak to us more or less directly. The Greeks, for example: “No one wants to speak the truth,” I announce to a blameless Herald in Agamemnon. But poor Ibsen, whom I quite like, nothing, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, nothing. James’s The Bostonians is empty, so is Romeo and Juliet.

Yet Franny and Zooey has its requisite haphazard black ballpoint underlining:

He wasn’t Epictetus.

“—you don’t just despise what they represent—you despise them.”

Do we grow out of responding to our books like this? Or do our books become more imposing as we age, less like friends, more like mountains to climb? I read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace without a pen; though I loved it so much I had to hold my breath and look up several times while I was reading it. Yet not once did I get out a pen. It was just in my bag, at my feet. All I had to do was reach over.

Billy Collins, from “Marginalia,” on reading Catcher in the Rye:

—I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil—
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet—
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Competitors to the written word have matured. Television is not so stupid anymore, is it? And I hardly watch it. I don’t have one. Not because I detest it; in fact, I love television too much, the way it fills in the spaces. It’s brighter, and in some sense, easier, all the while becoming more complex, more interactive. TiVo as fire hydrant. My untidy stacks of Doubleday Anchors and Mentor Editions have a hard time competing, no matter who illustrated them.

Still I wanted to read today. It’s August. The weather this summer has been fine. I have a new-old paperback—Coetzee’s Foe, Penguin (“—is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing-place of memories?”). It has been lent to me. Its previous owner did not like it much; or at least, I imagine so, as it has not been written in. But even here you can see Mr. Coetzee gathering steam. “Bright future!” I would write in the margins.

And here is where the book, and especially my humble cheap-or-free book, is still best. It is not tethered by electric cords or determined by central programming or mediated by actors or accessible by remote or trapped in a rectangle of glass. It is not too fancy or rare to be brought to the riverside. It is a tangible, physical thing, something to be held, a perfect, common thing that can be spilled on and tossed into a bag and even lost and Oh no, I’ll have to get another one. Pardon the egg salad stains, but I am in love.

I will bring a pen. I will lie in the grass. I will look at the river occasionally, and then I will look back at the words on the page.