Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (19 page)

Okay. Such is my opinion. What concerns me now is the article in this morning’s paper and why I am of two minds about what I have read. The split seems to fall neatly between the terms “fiction” and “nonfiction.” For months now, I have been doing research for the novel I have finally just begun, part of which will concern itself with America in the early fifties. Consequently, I have read book after book about the Korean War, the Red Scare, the polio epidemic, the H-bomb, and so forth, but have also been watching documentary films, which can be very helpful. When, in today’s article, I came across the description of the “enhanced”
Nixonland
, I was intrigued. What an excellent idea, I thought, to combine written text and film in a history book. Such an excellent idea, in fact, that I can find no fault with it.

With the novels, however, I found myself resisting. The books mentioned are mass-market pop thrillers, but they are works of fiction for all that, and the notion of adding clips from a television series based on one of those books irks me. The question is why. Does it have something to do with the loss of belief in the imagination that I mentioned earlier? As if books are somehow too hard to absorb, and the story cannot be fully experienced until it is seen by the naked eye? But isn’t reading the art of seeing things for yourself, of conjuring up images in your own head? And isn’t the beauty of reading all about the
silence
that surrounds you as you plunge into the story, the sound of the author’s voice resonating inside you to the exclusion of all other sounds?

Perhaps I have turned into a stodgy old man. There are critical editions of classic novels that include excised passages, alternative endings, and even photographs. Why not film as well? I don’t know, but something in me is repelled by the notion of reading
Disgrace
, for example, and being able to click onto the film adaptation in midsentence on the second page of chapter 4. I am curious to know if you share this reaction or not.

Concerning “How Do You Pack a Stadium?” I feel equally confused. There is no question that one can now “see” a game better on television than in the stadium where the game is played. But, as the sixty-three-year-old fan says about going in person, “I just want the ambience, to watch the players and feel the crowd. I would much rather have the feel of the game brought into the home, not the other way around.” The thirty-two-year-old fan disagrees (not without justification), but I’m not sure that turning an actual experience into a video experience is the answer. Especially at such a cost. How not to be stunned by an expenditure of $100 million on “stadium technology,” not to speak of “personal seat licenses” going for as high as $20,000—just for the right to buy a ticket? It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the old days, but I distinctly remember going to Yankee Stadium with a couple of my friends in 1961 (we were fourteen) to see the Giants versus the Browns and paying fifty cents for a seat in the bleachers. As we have been saying all along, sport is big business now, a mega-industry, a leviathan, and most of the world seems more than happy to be swallowed by the whale.

As for South Africa and its role in the cold war, you are of course 100% right. Not that you need to hear that from me.

New York continues to broil—the hottest July on record. When I wrote to you the other week and announced that the temperature was 98, I was wrong. It was 106.

With fondest good thoughts,

Paul

August 18, 2010

Dear Paul,

I recently received an alumnus magazine from a university in South Africa. It included an article celebrating the opening of the new university library, with computer stations and study cubicles and seminar rooms and work spaces too many to count. I read the article, reread it to make sure. I was right. The word
book
did not occur once.

In designing the library the architects had no doubt called on the advice of librarians, librarians of the new generation who look down on books as old-fashioned, whose dream is of a paperless library.

What do such people have against books? Why don’t they share my vision of the library as acre upon acre of dimly lit stacks holding row upon row of tightly packed books stretching to infinity in every direction?

The argument against the Borgesian library is almost too tedious to rehearse—too tedious and too clinching, in an age in which economics has been elevated to queen of the sciences. It is that books take up too much space. There is no way of justifying the preservation of a physical object that occupies 20 cm by 15 cm by 3 cm of costly space, and may sit on a shelf for decades and centuries untouched, unread. If we drop our deceased loved ones into holes in the earth, or consign them to the flames, why should it be sacrilege to get rid of dead books?

Get rid of books, replace them with images of books, electronic images. Get rid of the dead, replace them with photographs.

I am dismayed at the prospect of the library of the future. I am sure that feeling is shared by many. But, aside from sentiment, what can justify such dismay? A hunger for the real in a world of shadows? Books are not real, not in any important sense. The very letters on the page are signs, images of sounds, which are images of ideas. The fact that what we call a book can be picked up in one’s hands, has a smell and a feel of its own, is an accident of its production with no relevance to what the book conveys.

When I was sixteen, having some money to spend, I bought ten or so books that were going to constitute the foundation of a personal library. They included
War and Peace
in the translation by Aylmer Maude, published by Oxford University Press, a bulky little book printed on thin India paper. (I bought
War and Peace
because
Time
magazine
said it was the greatest novel ever written.)

Aylmer Maude’s
War and Peace
, in its original maroon and cream wrapper, has accompanied me through half a century’s moves from continent to continent. I have a sentimental relation with it—not with Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
, that vast construct of words and ideas, but with the object that emerged from the printing house of Richard Clay and Sons in 1952 and was shipped from the warehouse of Oxford University Press somewhere in London to the press’s distribution agent in Cape Town and thence to Juta’s bookshop and to me.

This kind of relationship with an author—extremely tenuous and highly indirect, conducted through perhaps a dozen intermediaries—will be less and less possible in the future. Whether such relationships have any value seems to me an open question, as is the question of whether it is better to own a physical copy of a book than to have the power to download an image of its text.

The doubt and dismay I express here is not unrelated to the doubt and dismay you express in your most recent letter about the ways in which sport is being reshaped (repackaged) for television. There still happens to be a confluence of interest between what the media want from the game and what the fans who actually attend games want—the fans want what they are so naive as to call the real thing, not a moving image of it, while the media abhor empty stadiums because an empty stadium spells death for the spectacle—but that doesn’t mean the business interests that own sports really care about fans except as consumers. If they can find a way of filling seats with holographic images, my guess is they will do so.

Your dismay and my dismay: the shared dismay of two aging gents at the way the world is going. How does one escape the entirely risible fate of turning into Gramps, the old codger who, when he embarks on one of his “Back in my time” discourses, makes the children roll their eyes in silent despair? The world is going to hell in a handbasket, said my father, and his father before him, and so on back to Adam. If the world has really been going to hell all these years, shouldn’t it have arrived there by now? When I look around, what I see doesn’t seem like hell to me.

But what is the alternative to griping? Clamping one’s lips shut and bearing the affronts?

Yours ever,

John

Nantucket

August 21, 2010

Dear Gramps,

I have always wondered how the world, which is very large, can fit into something as small as a handbasket. To deepen my confusion, I’m not even sure I know what a handbasket is. Aren’t all baskets in fact
hand
baskets, and if they are, isn’t the prefix
hand
wholly unnecessary? We should probably say: “The world is going to hell in a basket,” although that sounds even worse, doesn’t it? What should contain the world as we watch it descend into hell? A locomotive? An automobile? A cardboard envelope? Or perhaps something so small that it can’t even be seen. A single atom?

The truth is, griping can be fun, and as rapidly aging gentlemen, seasoned observers of the human comedy, wise gray heads who have seen it all and are surprised by nothing, I feel it is our duty to gripe and scold, to attack the hypocrisies, injustices, and stupidities of the world we live in. Let the young roll their eyes when we speak. Let the not so young ignore what we say. We must carry on with utmost vigilance, scorned prophets crying into the wilderness—for just because we know we are fighting a losing battle, that doesn’t mean we should abandon the fight.

Yours in friendship,

Paul

September 4, 2010

Dear Paul,

Dorothy and I leave for France this week. We’ll be meeting old cycling friends in Montpellier and going on a bike tour, hoping that it is not too late in the year for pleasant weather. I’ll have intermittent e-mail access but no fax access.

I looked up going to hell in a handbasket in a dictionary of idioms. It gave “going to hell in a handcart” as a variant but didn’t explain what a handbasket was. All baskets aren’t handbaskets. There is such a thing as a bushel basket. And now for the interesting bit. Each market town in medieval France had its own bushel basket, and therefore its own opinion of what constituted a bushel of wheat. You would talk of an Orléans bushel and a Lyons bushel. For grain dealers it was maddening. One of the arguments for enforcing a single authority over the whole country was to standardize weights and measures. Presumably the same held, mutatis mutandis, for other countries. More than that memory will not deliver up. No idea of dates.

Warmest wishes,

John

September 6, 2010

Dear John,

I envy your trip to Montpellier—and admire your courage in climbing aboard yet another plane for yet another ultradistance flight. The weather at this time of year should be perfect. The intense dry heat of the summer gone, the chill of winter still a long way off.

Why don’t you write me a letter about it when you return? The pleasures and hardships of cycling. We have written so much about watching sports, it might be helpful to have an account of one of us actually doing something.

Apropos: last week a friend of mine sent me a short book published by an American sports writer in 1955,
A Day in the Bleachers
, which recounts a single baseball game in scrupulous detail, the first game of the 1954 World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians at the now vanished Polo Grounds, which happened to be the game in which Willie Mays made his historic catch. A charming and entertaining book, which I thoroughly enjoyed. One of the complaints of the writer: too many people were coming to the stadium with transistor radios and listening to the play-by-play account as the actual game was unfolding before their eyes. He felt disgusted by the introduction of technology into what he felt should be a pure and unmediated human experience. Fifty-six years ago, and yet almost identical to the objections voiced about the jumbo TVs in stadiums today.

Thank you so much for your comments on bushel baskets. We have such things in America, of course, which are usually small enough to be lifted by one person, but the baskets used for storing grain in ancient times, yes, they must have been fairly enormous. The only slang dictionary I have (the British one compiled by Eric Partridge) has much to say about the word basket
*
:

1. In the 18th century, basket! was a cry directed, in cock-pits, at persons unable, or unwilling, to pay their debts. Such persons were suspended in a basket over the cock-pits. (Looking up cock-pits, I find: 1. A Dissenters’ meeting-house. 2. The Treasury, the Privy Council.)

2. Basketed: left out in the cold, misunderstood, nonplussed.

3. Polite term for “bastard.” “That basket So-and-so . . .”

4. Disrespectful term for an elderly woman. “Silly old basket . . .”

5. Go to the basket: to be imprisoned.

6. Basket-making: sexual intercourse.

7. “Grin like a basket of chips”: to grin broadly.

8. Basket of oranges: a pretty woman—derived from Australian miners’ slang for the discovery of gold nuggets in the gold fields.

9. Basket-scrambler: One who lives on charity.

And then, of course, there is the American term “basket case”—which both of us are all too familiar with.

Have a wonderful trip—and write when you return.

With love to you and Dorothy,

Paul

October 21, 2010

Dear Paul,

Dorothy and I are back from France, and I am halfway through the purgatory of readjusting to Australian time. I snatch at sleep whenever it offers itself, day or night, but for the most part I wander around the house feeling like death.

The cycling tour was a great success. The weather was perfect, the five-member party got along famously, and the landscape was unfailingly interesting. I’m talking about the Cévennes—I am not sure whether you know the region.