The Lives of Books

I have been thinking for a while that it would be interesting to do a blog entry on The Book Pile--the always teetering tower of books that come under the categories of “current reading” or “current browsing” or “current intending.” Right now that stack would include Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury, Kenneth Silverman’s Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, Van Wyck Brooks’s The Flowering of New England, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Chogyam Trungpa’s Meditiation in Action, Thomas Hardy’s Selected Poems, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Steven Meyer’s Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, Thoreau’s Walden, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Caleb Crain’s American Sympathy, J. Allan Hobson’s The Dream Drugstore, and Borges’s Ficciones. That’s just the downstairs stack (in the vicinity of my armchair), so it doesn’t include any of the other books piled on the desk in the third-floor study or waiting in the “transitional” bookcase on the second floor or perhaps lingering in what we might delicately call “the smallest room in the house” (I got that one from Ted Enslin). Anyway, a pile like this, with its mix of discernible patterns and odd juxtapositions, does give you a certain lively slice of (reading) life feel, but it would be even better to somehow graph the flow of books that pass under one’s eyes from one day or week or month to the next. Or perhaps one could make a time-lapse film, like the ones that condense the slow bloom of a flower into a sudden dramatic unfolding. A film of book-flow wouldn’t have the same sort of denouement—unless perhaps one happened to capture the book that changed one’s life for good and all—but it would still be kind of cool to see the fluid run of titles registering the little shifts and sideways tugs and athletic leaps of one’s ever-refocusing attention.

One book that isn’t on the list above, but only because I brought it upstairs with me when I came up to write this, is The Langston Hughes Reader, which includes samples of Hughes’s fiction, poetry, drama, autobiography, and song lyrics (it also tosses in a “pageant” and some articles and speeches as well). A couple of nights ago, shortly before nodding off, I picked the book up just to dip in, and turned to the following passage, which launches Hughes’s first volume of autobiography, The Big Sea:

"Melodramatic maybe, it seems to me now. But then it was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart when I threw the books into the water. I leaned over the rail of the S.S. Malone and threw the books as far as I could out into the sea—all the books I had had at Columbia, and all the books I had lately bought to read.
The books had gone down into the moving water in the dark off Sandy Hook. then I straightened up, turned my face to the wind, and took a deep breath. I was a seaman going to sea for the first time—a seaman on a big merchant ship. And I felt that nothing would ever happen to me again that I didn’t want to happen. I felt grown, a man inside out and out. Twenty-one.

I was twenty-one.

Four bells sounded. As I stood there whiffs of salt spray blew in my face. The afterdeck was deserted. The big hatches were covered with canvas. The booms were all tied up to the masts, and the winches silent. It was dark. The old freighter, smelling of crude oil and garbage, engines pounding, rolled through the pitch-black night. I looked down on deck and noticed that one of my books had fallen into the scupper. The last book. I picked it up and threw it far over the rail into the water below, that was too black to see. The wind caught the book and ruffled its pages quickly, then let it fall into the rolling darkness. I think it was a book by H.L. Mencken.

You see, books had been happening to me. Now the books were cast off somewhere in the churn of spray and night behind the propeller. I was glad they were gone."

A gripping scene, no doubt, but how appalling to begin the story of one’s life with such a despicable act of bibliocide! And yet, I think I know a little of how he must have felt. Perhaps one day I will date a new epoch in my life not from the reading of a book, as Thoreau suggests, but from the discarding of one, or all. Sometimes I remind myself of the sort of soul Thoreau describes near the start of Walden, “well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot!” I don’t have a hundred acres or a barn, but if I did have a barn it would surely be full of books.

And yet books do give much pleasure to such as me. When I opened the Hughes Reader and began to flip through, looking for a place to begin, I found two small artifacts tucked in its pages: the first a receipt for the purchase of the book, and the second a pale gold bookmark printed in black with the image of an owl wearing a pointed cap, a quill pen grasped in its talons, apparently preparing to write something in a large tome. Above the owl is the name Heartwood Used and Rare Books, a favorite old stamping ground during those long years of graduate study at the University of Virginia. Below the image appears the bookstore’s address on Elliewood Avenue. I got a sort of thrill reading both the name of the bookstore and the name of the street, both of which strike me as evocative and even musical (“Heartwood” a thumping trochee; “Elliewood” a lilting dactyl). Gazing on this bookmark and looking at the April 1997 date on the receipt, I realized that I must have purchased the Reader after Suzanne and I had already moved away from C-ville to work our first post-grad school jobs, at the College of Charleston. In fact, I was probably on a return trip to defend my newly finished (and now dusty) dissertation on the “Objectivist” poets. So Hughes’s book was dragged or pushed around by me across five states—Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Connecticut--for a period of ten years, unread, only to be finally “ready” (see how “read” lurks in that word?!) on the shelf at the right moment. That’s a lot of dragging and pushing, but still, I’m glad I never gave it the heave-ho.