Life Sentences (2 page)

Thoughts are assembled, worried like a cat with its mouse, armed against enemies, refined and refashioned, slid forth into the world like a christened ship. Perceptions, feelings, energies, and images are parts of the same verbal enterprise that creates, for instance, a poem. “For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”

To adorn nature with a new thing: that is the miracle that matters. Most prose flows into an ocean of undifferentiated words. To objectify through language a created consciousness, provide it with the treasured particularity we hope for for each human being—that is the cherished aim of the art.

What does make a sentence or a line of verse rise from the dead and walk again, run for a record, and even dance as dancers do when blessed? It is important for the reader to respond to these miracles with belief when they occur, because two or three inspired lines can turn a sonnet into a masterpiece, or make what might have been a rather slight little song into an arresting aria. It is equally crucial for the critic to be aware of those who merely mimic greatness through grandeur’s empty gestures, and not be taken in by inarticulate simplicity’s pretense to profundity, or answer to the trumpets that announce the coming of deep feeling as they might the queen. In addition, the critic should remain suspicious of imaginative sweeps more suitable to a broom, or a rhetoric that’s about to ride longhaired but bareback through the streets.

Matthew Arnold called genuine poetic moments “touchstones,” since it seemed to him they were exemplary instances of inspiration, and Paul Valéry, who liked to think artistry was an arm of intellect, confessed that some lines, images, or phrases appeared suddenly, inexplicably, from who knew what embarrassingly irrational depths, and between these glistening peaks were the dull unambitious gullies that the skills of the poet had to fill with intelligence and technique, as you might try to level a road. In short, between these rare and wonderful gifts from the gods, a chain gang’s labor.

Though the three greatest masters of English prose—Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne—came to their loose syntax and noble music by way of Latin, they were capable of some resounding Anglo-Saxon when those notes were needed, and it is among their sentences that the miracles I have been speaking of can be most frequently found. Emerson may have had passages from
Browne’s
Urn Burial
in mind when he wrote “Circles”—especially the one by Sir Thomas that begins:

I can repeat these clauses with the same appreciation I have for the greatest poetry: “our fathers find their graves in our short memories”; “grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years”; “old families last not three oaks.”

But the sons and daughters of such sentences—Virginia Woolf, for instance, Henry James—aspire always to, and often realize, such heights. From their eminence they urge even us, with our lesser talents, to make the climb, because, though we must halt at a ledge halfway, the view of the valley below is still sublime.

I live in a library.

When I was a youngster, eager to leave the nest although flightless as a dodo, I would imagine a magical new life for myself in New Zealand. Since I knew nothing about New Zealand except that it was at both ends of the earth and had rules against bringing bad habits into the country, my Zealand could be dreamed as I chose, made safe from all family connections and therefore without resident illness or anger, its days sweet, its nights serene. There, trees bore books instead of fruit, and one drank sodas tapped from gourds whose juices had been blessed by the native gods. I would sail there as a deckhand on a ship whose description came from Joseph Conrad and whose course was plotted by Robert Louis Stevenson. Getting away was cheaper by the book than by the ticket, and when you went by book you were always home in time for dinner.

Then, during the Second World War, I actually sailed the ocean blue. The sea was all that had been written of it. It was never blue; it was moody; there was a lot of it; and it was, every ship’s bell, more beautiful than the bells before. On calm days its surface was the skin of a sleeping creature. I would wash my skivvies by tying them to the end of a rope and letting the ship pull them through the water as though I was fishing for a bigger catch, perhaps a dress
suit. There they gathered salt while being thoroughly scoured, so that wearing them was no longer advisable. I decided to go without underwear, something I managed for a brief time, till a tell-all told all to my superiors, of whom there were many. Several years later, packed away in drawers at home, my skivvies still smelled of salt.

I was a passively disobedient officer, often confined to my quarters, where I read whatever readable books were aboard. This lot consisted of a handful of Hemingway and a pinch of Faulkner. Otherwise I played chess with another miscreant, who was never confined to quarters but was always there anyhow. Because of my exemplary incompetence I was promoted (such is the navy way) to top-secret officer. I was therefore entrusted with the combination to the ship’s walk-in safe, where books of codes and ciphers, printed on dissolvable paper and weighted with lead, dwelt in silent isolation except for the company they kept with the ship’s medicinal booze. To this secure space, the size of a bedroom at the Red Roof Inn, I regularly repaired, closed its heavy armored door, nipped a bit of brandy, and read the same Hemingway and Faulkner I had already repeatedly enjoyed, but with my ease uninterrupted and my attention undistracted—a lot like my dreamy New Zealand—until some tell-all told all to my superiors, of whom there were many. They immediately removed the brandy. I could still lock myself in and read or snooze. My superiors seemed content to miss me.

While in graduate school at Cornell, I spent hours in the university library, as PhD drudges are required to do. I had a carrel—a small nick in the wall of the stacks that held a mean metal chair and a bulb, a sheet of steel to write or rest a book on, a rack in front of my face for volumes taken from the shelves (but on one’s honor not to be removed from the building), and a jar of hard candy whose contents were dangerous when wet. To take notes, pencils-only was a rule I was willing to observe, since, unlike those of the navy, it made sense. The building resembled a ship in some ways and bore me off smoothly. Not only were the stacks made of metal, the floor was of steel mesh that let an already worn out light sink toward a
basement as distant as a bilge. Steps naturally rang a little unless you were in sneakers, but there were areas so removed from human interest (nutrition, for instance … it was a different era) that the only sounds you were likely to hear were those of the watchmen, who were apparently heavy men in boots. Nevertheless, sitting there day after day in dusky light, Eden’s image began to change. It had no location on a map, but was a destination determined by the Dewey decimal system.

When I wasn’t reading or falling asleep over a page of Lovejoy’s
The Great Chain of Being
, I roamed. Up and down the metal steps. Up and down the metal aisles. I stalked like a hunter through a dim light deemed beneficial for any volume’s long interment, but barely feasible if you desired to read one, my fingers sometimes slipping along the edges of the books as a kid passing a fence might run a stick, my gaze on spines and their titles, a gaze full of wonderment that there were so many, as dead to me as those rows and rows of skulls in the catacombs were unless I removed one from their ranks, and opened it, and read the way Hamlet examined the skull of Yorick: Jean Henri Fabre’s
Book of Insects
or
The Worst Journey in the World
by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Who could resist an author whose name was Apsley Cherry-Garrard? I would check out the Henri Fabre for a son of my thesis director, Professor Max Black, since I had been asked to find worthwhile but entertaining texts for one of his boys. Unfortunately, the young man loved my selections and Professor Black prolonged my service. The Apsley Cherry-Garrard too, was a hit. Therein was one of the most harrowing accounts of Antarctic adventure ever penned, pages of cold and snow, pain and uncertainty, plus a stubborn unintended heroism that I would try to remember when I wrote
The Pedersen Kid
, a novella set in a snowdrift. Since I was a philosophy student I tried to make into a paradox the fact that
The Worst Journey
was really the best trip I’d ever taken.

The heavy-footed guys guarding the darkness didn’t like readers to stay the night. You could nod over John Locke all afternoon, they wouldn’t mind, but come ten o’clock they’d begin to sweep us out.
First they came scouting to see who was in their carrels. They would mark you by your light. Since our little nooks were as open as a supermarket, if they didn’t see you sitting there, they would turn off your lamp. Hiding at the right time by making yourself thin at the end of an aisle or fleeing to another level like an amused draft, we would wait to return only after closing.

Dodging the gestapo’s heavy tread became a game, but our abilities (and I was certainly not alone in this practice) were put to serious use each year when the library had its book sale. I knew succession, secession, recession, possession, concession, depression, and now I was to enjoy deaccession. A room on one of the lower levels would be set aside and furnished with several large library tables. Upon them rows of books, spines up, would be packed. The humanities filled more tabletops than the sciences did, which was not a surprise, because the scientists didn’t read; they tested. And reported their results in magazines that cost more than books. Rumors accused persons unknown of hiding overnight in the stacks in order to be first in line when the sale began the next morning. But that was not the worst these sneaks would sink to. They would actually take the books they wanted from one table (literature, philosophy, history) and hide them among economics or statistics, and one person I know was accused of taking volumes entirely away to another part of the building for the night, only bringing them back as if freshly chosen the following morning. Some tell-all told all once again.

The competition was fierce and friendship had no standing. Every book belonged to each of us, and often there were juicy prizes to be taken, since our teachers sometimes had the decency to die and their heirs, in ignorance or indifference, to dump the bulky part of the inheritance in the bins of the library. But these books would never reach the shelves. They’d be denied admittance (“we already have this edition of
The Maid of Orleans
”). A writer once said about editors that out of refusal comes redemption, in this case because the sale books would not have been disfigured by the library’s boastful black footprint (
PROPERTY OF THE CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
),
or pricked by the university’s embossed seal, or pasted with a withdrawal and return record, or embarrassed by a tattoo inked on their spines as if they were headed for the boxcars. We busy buyers said we were rescuing the books that we were eagerly pulling out of the pack from who knew what calamitous destiny. Not death. That was nothing. The bleakest fate was to be always available but never molested.

I have been to many library sales since, and can vouch for the fact that these duplicates are rarely examined, or their source respected, for out of them have fallen, as out of book-fair books, treasures that sometimes surpass even their pages: not just the debris readers normally leave behind to keep their place—paper clips, kitchen matches, rubber bands, foil, curls of hair, bookmarks, bills, sucker sticks, lists, letters of love, post cards, postage stamps, gum wrappers—but photographs and threatening notices, greenbacks, checks, and a draft of a telegram to be sent to the Allied High Commissioner asking him to expedite the transport of Werner Heisenberg out of Germany, which fluttered to my floor when I riffled one of Arthur Holly Compton’s books after purchasing it for fifty cents at a Washington University purge.

Collectors who do not care for books but only for their rarity prefer them in an unopened, pure, and virginal condition, but such volumes have had no life, and now even that one chance has been taken from them, so that, imprisoned by stifling plastic, priced to flatter the vanity of the parvenu who has made its purchase, it sits out of the light in a glass-enclosed humidor like wine too old to open, too expensive to enjoy.

Whereas Mister Tatters has his economic failure marked on his flyleaf, as a character in Dickens might, by virtue of the quality, wear, and soilage of his hat, cane, and coat. He has an enriched history: sold new in 1932 for $3.95, as used from the Gotham Book Mart in 1947 for two bucks, and marked down successively in pencil and then in crayon from seventy-five to fifty, from thirty-five cents to a quarter during the decades since—owned by at least two who signed
their names, one who added an address in Joliet—until it completed its journey to St. Louis, where it is picked from a barrow or a box at a garage sale or out of a bin in a Goodwill the way I found my copy of George Santayana’s
The Sense of Beauty
in 1982. It survived its adventures as admirably as Odysseus. I am rather free with my books and will let anyone who wants to kiss
The Sense of Beauty
’s cover in hopes for a bit of good luck in life, kiss its cover.

This is how I learned to live in the library, what routes to take to the bathrooms, what provisions to smuggle in by briefcase, how to cushion a hard seat, the skill to size up swiftly what is on the reshelver’s trolley or to find the books they put back out of place like a dime gone missing at the beach, how to mourn the loss of the card catalog, where it is easiest to read, where it is safe to sleep.