Life Sentences (3 page)

It would be a decade before I would encounter my first great library. By “great library” I mean a library whose holdings are so huge that no one quite knows what is in its basements; a library in which Vivaldi scores may lie hidden for a hundred years; a library of density as well as scope; a library that will turn no book away—trash or treasure—for a good library is miserly, proud of its relics as a church, permitting even a cheap novel to be useful to the study of the culture it came from; an institution, consequently, that won’t allow ephemera to ephemerate and is not ashamed of having the finest collection of bodice rippers in existence; a library that has sat safely in the same place and watched like a sage its contents age, consequently a library whose dust is the rust of time; a library that never closes on cold days and will allow the homeless to rest in its reading room; a library that will permit me to poke about in its innards as long and as often as I like; and finally a library that makes generous awards, and then lets me win one.

The University of Illinois library is such an institution and I spent a joyous year in it rescuing valuable first editions from the open stacks, and, tempted to slip away with them by personal greed and literary love but prevented by honesty’s cultural concerns and a love of literature, bringing them to the attention of the rare-book
people whom I knew would condemn them to purdah. But could a copy of
Tender Buttons
in the so-called Plain Edition be placed in public jeopardy? I knew Gertrude would not mind if a student puzzled over it, carrying it about in the same backpack as
Small Farm Management Practices
. But … was it safe even in my reverent hands because I had taken it home to exult with my wife about my prize and self-righteously complain of the staff’s carelessness, only to nearly spill—my God—Gallo (it was a different era) on a corner of its flimsy cover during dinner? I decided that it was better to have a cheap copy to work from (I was writing on Gertrude Stein at the time), and so I returned
Buttons
posthaste to the rare-book room, where I suspect it hasn’t been seen since.

I realize now that I began my life in the library as an enemy of the institution, having troublesome run-ins with the shushing hair-knotted sour-faced spinster at the checkout desk … (stereotypes are accurate more often than not, and profiling essential to the art of the novel, or where would Trollope and Thackeray and Dickens be without their caricatures, and how would Roger Tory Peterson sell his bird guides, because spotting a cowbird in my garden is like finding an Irishman in a pub? and none of the jokes about a priest, a rabbi, and an imam trying to explain the bitters in their pints to a Scot called David Hume, none of those jokes would be funny—and who would want to give up a good laugh?) … as I was saying … when I tried, as a high school kid, to take out James Joyce’s
Ulysses
and was told (a) I was too young, and (b) it was anyhow a dirty book, and (c) if I persisted in trying to obtain nasty books of this kind she would inform all my superiors, of which there were many.

While I was still in college, though now also a conscript for the navy, I was asked by my literature professor to write on
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, and received a note from him asking that I be permitted to withdraw such work from Special Requests (a holding cell, I supposed, for seditious books), but the whey-faced lady who guarded the guilty lot refused, contending that the work in question contained descriptions of unnatural acts. This response provoked an
eagerness for the project that I had not previously had, but it was no go. Acting on a hunch, I hunted up the library’s copies of
Canterbury Tales
, only to find (actually to my delight) that some of the Wife of Bath’s story had been razored out. I found similar damage had been done to copies of Boccaccio, Catullus, Petronius, and Aristophanes. There was no Henry Miller, but, had there been, his then scandalous texts would surely be doing jail time. I told all to her superiors, of which there were many. The whey-faced razor lady declared that it was her duty to protect the students from smut. I thought their own ignorance a sufficient safeguard. The navy moved me on to midshipman school, and I don’t know what happened to this particular guardian of public morals. They always look ill but live forever.

Now in my own home I am surrounded by nearly twenty thousand books, few of them rare, many unread, none of them neglected. They are there, as libraries always are, to help when needed, and who knows what writer I shall have to write on next, what subject will become suddenly essential, or what request arrive that requires the immediate assistance of books on … well … libraries, or the language of animals, or the pronunciation of Melanesian pidgin, since my essays tend to be assigned, not simply solicited, and because I am easily seduced by new themes. I can actually say a few things in Melanesian pidgin, none of them polite.

So they are there to keep my curiosity awake and working, to inform me who the notable American writers were considered to be in 1894, when Henry C. Vedder published his book on that subject (I have just this moment pulled it at random from my shelves), and consequently to make the acquaintance of Charles Egbert Craddock and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, but also to learn that Henry James is “too clever by half” and his theory of fiction disgraceful because he dares to suppose that “a novel is good when it is well written” and “bad if it is ill written,” an opinion that suggests a deplorable indifference to the novel’s moral dimension. Oh, how badly I should fare at Mr. Vedder’s hands! Of course, Henry James did not, for a moment, ignore the novel’s moral dimension. I try to suppress a smile at these
confusions, and my indignation at this judgment, in order to enjoy John Quincy Adams’s definition of luncheon (quoted by Mr. Vedder) as “a reflection on breakfast and an insult to dinner.”

Before Mr. Vedder went back into the obscurities he came from, and so justly deserves, I managed to find out that the notable Egbert Craddock was a pseudonym for M. N. Murfree, and that the postbox from which his first story was mailed to the
Atlantic Monthly
was in St. Louis (as journalists do, we have gotten in our local reference). Reading on in the chapter devoted to him, I was informed that our mystery author is Mary Noailles Murfree, that she comes from “the best American stock” and was, when first seen by the
Atlantic
editors, a young slip of a thing. What her ultimate fate, and that best American stock was, you shan’t know, because I own the book and you don’t.

But book dipping is great fun, and not a day passes that I don’t blindly pick a prize and then read a page of it to be mystified, informed, surprised, delighted, and affronted.

When you live in a library you are constantly being solicited by good-looking texts to leave your present love for their different, more novel, pleasures. New volumes are always arriving, perhaps a present from a friendly press of a fine fresh translation from its sixteenth century French of Maurice Scève’s emblem sonnets, or Charles Rosen’s
Piano Notes
, which you ordered over the Internet, or a roughly used collection called
Songs My Mother Never Taught Me
that you picked up at an estate sale; or a book you’ve had since you were young, and forgotten, takes hold of your eye and then pulls open your memory to the days it saved from sadness, and its patient silence since.

My books are there to comfort me about the world, for only the wicked can be pleased by our present state of things, while the virtuous disagree about the reasons for our plight and threaten to fall to fighting over which of us is responsible for the misery of so many millions, and in that way steadily increasing the number of hypocrites, jackals, and rogues.

Among them, writers of books. No occupation can guarantee virtue the way hard labor makes muscle, and only sainthood requires it as a part of its practice. So the writers write, perhaps improving their texts from time to time, but only rarely themselves.

But the books … the books disagree quietly, as the minds of the many readers in the library may, without the least disturbance; and in that peace we can observe how beautiful, how clever, how characteristic, how significant, how comically absurd the ideas are, for here in the colorful rows that make bookcases seem to dance, the world exists as the human mind has received and conceived it, but transformed into a higher realm of being, where virtue is knowledge, as the Greeks claimed, where even knowledge of the worst must be valued as highly as any other, and where events as particular as any love affair, election, or battlefield are superceded by their descriptions—by accounts like Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s cold white journey across the cold white page—for these volumes are banks of knowledge, and are examples, carefully constructed, of our human kinds of consciousness, of awareness that is otherwise momentary, fragile, and often confused. Among the shelves, where the philosophers tent their troops, there is a war of words—a war of the one supportable kind—a war of thoughtfully chosen positions, perhaps with no problems solved, but no blood spilt; shelves where human triumph and its suffering are portrayed by writers who cared at least enough about their lives and this world to take a pen to paper. Thucydides knew it when he said, concerning the conflict that occurred on the Peloponnesus, in effect: this war is mine. History happens once.
Histories
happen repeatedly in reader after reader.

Every one of these books is a friend who will always say the same thing, but who will always seem to mean something new, or something old, or something borrowed, something blue. A remark that reminds me that I must go and see Queen Victoria. I’ve promised her a visit. She’s in the stacks that stand in my basement now. In Lytton Strachey’s biography. Still plump, a bit dowdy. Still queen.

Every spring, as the season drew near, my father would speak more frequently of the days when he had played minor-league baseball in the Northern League, and especially of the disgraced Black Sox and other barnstormers he had batted against, but most particularly of the pitcher Chick Hafey, a legendary figure, according to his account, as well as others named Moose and Sly and Bull. He had known some of the great ones, and he still remembered the diamonds of Fargo and Grand Forks, and how the grass so softly reflected the summer sunlight it would seem to stain a lowered palm. He could recall the higher numbers of the grandstand seats, how bats would sound and how cheering echoed from the outfield walls. He knew, he said, the specific break of the great lefties’ sliders, balls so often spit upon they sank like torpedoed ships.

They were the pride of his life, those encounters, and he had a cap he could still pull down over his encircled eyes, and did pull down when we went to Indians games, even though the players Cleveland had performing for them had no aura, nor the sparkle to make him wink in wonder at their play. From under its bill he would holler at the pen: “Bagby, you bastard, you’re throwing with your nose.” Jim Bagby pitched for Boston and had a nose as broken as his curve. The cap stood for my father’s professional past, and although others
might swear from the stands, their obscenities were empty, my father claimed, while his were full of observation and advice. The subtlety of this distinction was beyond my years. On the field, when a player bobbled a ball, my father would cup his hands and shout: “Spit in your mitt, Yawkey, spit in your mitt.”

Boston was, for him, the big enemy. I don’t know why. I hated the Yankees. Their lineup was called the Murderers’ Row because of the way they killed my team. Anyway, the Red Sox were owned by some beantowner whose name sounded like Yawkey when yelled, hence the content of that catcall. My father described himself as a yipper—a player given to constant taunts and chatter. Even when, in our backyard, he would toss a baseball high in the air in hopes I would catch it, he would murmur as I ran around under it, “Hey hey hey go get hey go hey go get …” It did not help my concentration.

My father also had a book of scraps from those times when he won medals in the dash, medals in the broad jump, and trophies in boxing and basketball. Old photos of him in his blouse and baggies were pasted alongside accounts of his prowess with fist and hoop which he’d clipped from local papers. These provincial rags had names like the
Larimore Pioneer
, or the
Devils’ Lake News
—names I found as strange and otherworldly as Nap’s name, and Chick’s. He entered the pros on the brink of the Depression and would make more in a few months playing pickup or bandit ball in the Northern League than he would in two years teaching high school in Ohio.

We listened to ticker re-creations together—always the Indians, always blowing a lead. You could hear the click of the wireless sometimes as the announcer turned the tape’s dry and sullen information—F8—into a long drive which Earl Averill pulled down against the wall after a mighty run. Later, I would realize that those radio matches were more interesting than games seen on TV or from a poor seat in some vast modern stadium, because they were conveyed in symbols, created in words, and served to the field of the imagination.

The cap was the cap of the St. Louis Browns, and it was my father’s
repeated story that he had been a Brownie—a utility infielder, for one catastrophic season—but with the Browns what other kinds of seasons were there? After settling his cap and carefully leafing through his newsprint past, my father would take his glove from a cardboard box. It looked like something run over on the road: flat, thin, torn, stiff, a dark disagreeable brown. “No padding, look,” he’d say. “The bums these days try to catch balls with a pillow.” You could no longer put your hand into it, the leather was so stiff and stuck together, so brittle and torn. “A good glove was supposed to be loose and flexible in those days so you could get your whole hand around the ball when you caught it.” He would demonstrate by making a fist already crabbed by arthritis. “Then we’d put a little chew in our cheek and now and then spit in the glove so the ball would stick there like it’d fallen in a bog.” That was why the glove was so stiff, stained from his youthful saliva. “Pitchers didn’t mind if the ball came out of your mitt as damp as peed pants. Pock,” he’d say. “When you caught a tall foul. Pock.”