Tender, Moveable Safety

I was waiting around campus a couple of weeks ago on a Friday afternoon. This was the first time I'd ever been on campus after all the classes were finished for the week, when the students, I imagine, are grouping (I realize how easy it to read that word as groping) in their dorms or apartments between the time of serious study and serious partying. The entire campus, it seemed to me, was like a ghost-town, and I wandered out of my home-away-from-home, the library, to walk the long straight path up to Friendly Avenue in order to cross it at rush hour and explore the used book store across from the college. The busy street seemed the antithesis of the deserted campus, and there was a feeling that I could either be crushed by the rush or buried by the solitude. I timed the lights correctly this time, I had almost been pummeled by a truck turning left the first time I crossed here, and made my way past the Deli and into the book store.

I was greeted by a traditional (that’s what traditional-aged college students are called here) student with a very friendly hello. Not sure whether she worked there or was just hanging out, I waited for a forthcoming “may I help you.” No such thing came forth. I realized soon that she was killing time talking to the young man behind the counter. I began to wander the stacks.

And there were plenty of stacks, all stuffed to the ceiling with books and categorized efficiently. The place smelled like my grandmothers house used to, the smell that old books take on after years sitting in a shelf waiting to be plucked, so their bindings can be loosened and they can receive some fresh air. I came in looking for something specifically, probably Tobias Wolff—this guy has become my personal obsession, just like when I finally “got” the Grateful Dead or Reggae, I spent the following year trying to obtain all I could from these “discoveries”—but I ended up going through the alphabetized fiction section backwards, searching for authors of interest or titles that sounded compelling. At the same time, I eavesdropped on the conversation between the student and the counter-man. It didn’t really feel like eavesdropping though because they weren’t speaking secretively or about anything that they seemed to want to conceal. In fact the counter-man seemed particularly proud to tell of his bass guitar, which was rare, or old, or both, I can’t remember. The young woman flipped through a book of photographs and made arbitrary comments, unrelated to the bass guitar. Both seemed quite likable.

I have the habit of checking publication information in notable books that look old. I like the idea of first editions, although I don’t know enough about old books to know what a good first edition is and what isn’t. I don’t really care about that. I like reading first editions, I’ve found lately, unless they were printed in the eighteenth century or something and are overly dusty, musty or stiff. This is going to sound incredibly snooty, but I really love to read a first edition Scribner’s. This revelation wasn’t necessarily the cause of my trip to the second-hand book store, but rather the result of it. Because I walked away with two first printings, both Scribner’s, and because I got both for very cheap (a very big bonus, but who knows, maybe you can’t give these books away in other places) I felt very virtuous and literary. When I approached the counter and handed my treasures over to be rung up, I looked for an expression of acknowledgement from the counter-man, but he kept a straight face as he accepted my credit-card.

The young woman was still flipping through a book of photographs of what looked like Olympic athletes vaulting over things and hurling heavy objects. One photo showed a girl contorted so unusually on a balance beam that for a moment there was a pause, and I blurted out “Is that Nadia…?” At the same time, the counter-man said “Mary Lou Retton.” He was right. Nadia was years earlier. I remembered her, they didn’t; they couldn’t.

As if to read my mind, the young-woman asked, “Do you remember this?” I feigned surprise and exaggeratedly exclaimed, “God no, way before my time.” She said “I remember.” She flipped a page and revealed a photograph of an athlete wearing a sombrero. I said “Now I remember the sombrero distinctly.” She laughed. I decided to out myself and said “I was seventeen then.” I was expecting surprise but she just turned the page to reveal a muscle-riddled man standing on his hands on a balance beam. “It doesn’t even look like those are his arms.” She said. “They really look like upside-down legs.” I remarked. They did in fact, and she concurred.

I walked out of the store with a first edition A Moveable Feast and Tender is the Night. I’ve read A Moveable Feast twice, once in Africa and again a year or two ago. I’ve never owned a copy though, and this addition is complete with dust jacket which shows a view, presumably, of the Left Bank, facing across the Seine. I’ve placed the book in the honored place above my desktop, next to Carlos Baker’s biography of Hemingway and For Whom the Bell Tolls. I recently read the short piece about how Gertrude Stein contrived the name “Lost Generation,” from a petrol station attendant who had been insulted by one young expatriate. That’s how I remember the story anyway. I could have the facts backwards.

I have to say that the episode of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s road trip is one of my favorite pieces of writing. If you forget the tragedy of Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and read the piece as comedy, with Hemingway as the suffering road-nurse and Fitzgerald as the Norma Desmondesque prima-donna, all in Hemingway’s clipped, hard-boiled style, it is classic buddy-stuff. One usually doesn’t expect to laugh out loud while reading Hemingway, but this instance has provoked in me a moment of putting the book down and bowing my head up and down like an Inca at the alter. I like to speculate that Hunter S. Thompson was inspired by this piece when writing the legendary road sequences in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. There are many similarities.

I turned to Tender is the Night and finished it two or three days ago. It has been a long time since I’ve felt such escapism in reading a book. The themes are dismal: alcoholism, infidelity, disintegrating marriages, suicide, mental illness, incest; did I miss any? It sounds terrible, I know, but the world that these characters move in is so gilded and the time period so distant and dreamlike (between the wars), that it felt like knowing the Europe my grandparents knew—my grandfather was a British diplomat.

The main character, with the name worthy of a porn star, Dick Diver, (sorry I had to go there), gradually comes unglued through his marriage to a patient—he is a psychiatrist—by at once feeling trapped by her need for him and his longing to conduct an affair with a young American movie star. Like most Fitzgerald, no one really gets what they want because no one really knows what they want. But all of the characters seemed likable (I use that word too much I know, maybe in the hope that likeability will come back in fashion), probably for their ability to try to provide what others want of them. Modern fiction, in my plebian opinion, does little of that, where the conflict comes from one selfish person bumping up against the next. So, if there is a tragedy where a faulty but likeable character meets his end I feel moved, but if a faulty, annoying character meets his end, say like in The Corrections, I say “finally!”

It is really hard to explain the difference I felt reading this novel from any other I’ve read. First of all, the chapters were prefaced with a simple ink print showing a scene from the chapter: a couple resting on a terrace, or a two-man sailboat tacking in high winds. The jacket did not come with the book, and I carefully used a book mark to keep my place. The book mark has the irritating image of the cartoon character Ziggy on it, and as I was reading, the squat Charlie Brown derived hapless loser distracted me, and I would have to turn the book mark around, where I keep it in the back pages. I truly believe that there is something different about reading first additions. Maybe a better connection to the author, with the idea that the author was still alive when the book was manufactured. I don’t know, but the easy movement of Fitzgerald’s characters from the Riviera to Zurich and Geneva, from Paris to Rome combined with the loosened but otherwise undamaged binding, the comfortable weight of the book and the faint smell of upstairs guest bedrooms in old houses that emanated from the pages did, I must admit, enchant me. Tender is the Night may not be my favorite novel, but reading it might have been my most sublime reading experience.

I am now reading Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. I’m having trouble with it, though I’m only about seventy-five pages in. I’m not becoming attached to the characters (which is an infuriating criteria of mine which ruins many a perfectly good classic for me). The party scene early in the book, where the superior professor gets one-upped by the narrator’s wife’s ability to read Homer in Greek left me, God forgive me, feeling sorry for the superior professor and his wife. It could be that I’ve succumbed to what Stegner believes is envy over the Morgan’s and the Lang’s brilliance and vitality. It also could be that as Stegner describes the precipice-like wasp-nest of academia ladder-climbing, I realize that if I get into that world one day, with such a late start, it could kill me.

So why will I keep reading Crossing to Safety? Because I bought it, for one. Also for Stegner’s transformative descriptive powers which seem to catch emotions that can only be relayed by a master. Here’s an example:

"In its details, that dinner party was not greatly different from hundreds we
have enjoyed since. We drank, largely and with a recklessness born of
inexperience. We ate, and well, but who remembers what? Chicken Kiev,
saltimbocca, escalope de veau, whatever it was, it was the expression of a
civilized cuisine, as far above our usual fare as manna is above a baked potato."

So yes, after transcribing that passage I feel the need to end this post, this long meandering, unlearned baked potato of a post. With the help of some great authors, possibly I can get off the ground, like those fuzzy black and white images you see from time to time of ill-fortuned flying inventions that thwack and jolt but get little lift. But I’ll keep trying, to invent the one machine that can lift me upward, toward manna.