the literary life MY LIFE IN BOOKS
away, and I was on a sentimental
journey, looking for the ghosts of Doc
and Ed Ricketts. They still haunted
the place, although what passes for
progress has very nearly obliterated
them in the years since.
The thing about books, of course,
is that the stories they contain are not
ghosts but rather living things, which
is a comfort for both the reader and
the writer in me. There’s some small
chance that fifty years from now some-
one will happen across a dusty copy of
one of my own long-out-of-print books
in their grandfather’s library and will
read it on a whim. I’ll be a mere mem-
ory by then, and a fading memory at
that, but the characters in my books
will still be walking and talking, trying
to make their way in the sometimes
perilous world of the novel, which, all
those years ago, was my world, at least
as it existed in my imagination.
L
AU R ENCE Ster ne’s Tristram
Shandy rests on a set of
shelves built into my study
in what was once a window.
I read the book for the second time
in Ireland, sitting in front of a peat
fire while Viki and our two traveling
companions, Bill and Beth, were out
driving around the Irish countryside.
I stayed behind because I had eaten
some dubious ground beef the night
before, a bad idea from the point of
view of my stomach, but what might
be called a fortunate mistake. I can
still smell the peat fire in my memory,
and I fondly recall rereading particu-
larly good paragraphs, with nothing
to interrupt the solitude but my own
occasional laughter and the bleating
of goats cropping grass on the lawn.
There’s an old copy of The Return of
Sherlock Holmes in that same window
bookcase, published in 1905, one of the
very first books I borrowed from my
mother’s library. She was eager to aid
and abet my reading habit, and when
she saw that I was roaming the house
looking for likely books, she decided
to take my sister and me to the local
library every other Tuesday afternoon.
“Perhaps you’d like this book by Jules
Verne,” she said to me on the first trip,
and I came home with Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea, which turned
out to be a gateway book. It opened
my eyes and my mind to what a story
could do—what it could teach you,
where it could take you—and I was, as
they say, hooked.
Later in life I tried to return the
favor. When I was in college in the
late 1960s, my mother was bedrid-
den for a few weeks, and I supplied
her with books out of my own library.
She was particularly fond of Lawrence
Du r rell’s The Alexandria Quartet but
not at all fond of his novel The Black
Box, although she read it anyway. She
was reading through Agatha Christie
at the time, and so I gave her two or
three Raymond Chandler novels, but
she preferred the more cheerful streets
of golden-age detective mysteries to
the mean streets of Chandler’s mid-
century Los Angeles. I could recall
being quite happy when she’d given
me Ivanhoe to read all those years ear-
lier but not being half as happy with
Mrs. Astor’s Horse. I remember all the
books she gave me to read, whether I
understood them or not, and I remem-
ber those sunny spring days years later
when I’d get home from school and
knock on her door to get a report on
the day’s reading.
O
N THE east wall of my
study there are shelves
built between the studs,
and there sits the twenty-
volume set of Scottish author and an-
thropologist James George Frazer’s
The Golden Bough. I inherited the set
from my bookseller pal Roy Squires
after he died in 1988. Frazer’s inter-
pretation of the nature of myth is
another thing that has gone out of
fashion, but his books contain thou-
sands of strange entries of interest
to a certain sort of writer: “The Sky
Considered as a Heavenly Cow,” for
instance, or, more in keeping with my
own sensibilities,“The Sanctity of the
Threshold.”
Squires’s friends, including me,
divvied up a number of his books one
evening, a sort of impromptu wake
that included opening a bottle or two
of Laphroaig. Roy had stockpiled
a half dozen of the old clear-glass
bottles of the Scotch preceding the
infamous Laphroaig drought in the
1980s. It seems to me that the whis-
key was subtly diminished when it
reappeared in the world in its now-
familiar green-glass bottle, but it’s
equally likely that the world itself had
diminished with Roy’s death. I’ve still
got those books, though, and I think
of Roy every time I pull one down
from the shelf.
And now I’m nearly at the end of this
story, this short look at one writer’s life
in books. The long version, much like
my library itself, isn’t to be counte-
nanced, to use the old phrase. Open-
ing that Gasoline Edition of the Belloc
essays didn’t just kindle this medita-
tion of mine but sparked a greater
discovery: that virtually every book
I’ve kept close at hand conjures up a
story to accompany it.
Here’s one more for the road: Two
linear feet away from T he G ol d e n
Bough sits the thirteen-volume Work s
of John Ruskin, the Sidney Library
Edition, illustrated throughout and
published in a quarter-leather binding
in the late 1800s. Viki gave me the set
as a Christmas present sometime in
the 1980s, when I was keen on reading
all of Ruskin but ultimately failed to
do so. I opened him up a month ago,
however, and read a lecture in which
he lambastes the people of Edinburgh
for having too few Gothic windows
in their buildings. I’m fond of the
man’s arcane passions—the world
badly needs arcane passions, which
in today’s digital age some might
argue would include a library—and I
might tackle Ruskin again when I re-
tire. But perhaps even more than their
contents, I’m particularly fond of the
books themselves, and the memory
of the Christmas morning when I
found them wrapped in a bow under
the tree.
29 POETS & WRITERS^
