Hardbound and down
What'd I do with my lottery loot? Go for cloth, not paperback. Titles that'd count?
I used to jest about this what-if. No need for a Maybach, or even a Merc. I’m no Jay Leno. MG? Ok. Maybe the Platonic Form idealized at the age of five, as I rode in the lilliputian back seat of the sportsy Karmann-Ghia. Or what The Saint drove, in my ca. 1966 Austin Powers-ish Matchbook toy car brochure, which I still keep safe, with its Lesney models. They had a cool 1899 Victorian Lipton’s Tea coach too. So old that they were still die-cast in England. Must’ve been a fun assembly line gjg. But I digress.
For me, financial stability would fund hardcover books. As I grow old with the hems of my sweatpants rolled, at least I resist Mr Prufrock's despondency. Perhaps dogged by an Irish Catholic rather than Anglo-Anglican indoctrination the same age I was swept away, if probably for all of ten minutes in the vicinity of smog-sultry Burbank. In layman's terms, I’ve the genes for arched eyebrow, sneer, scoff, and gallows humor.
But like T.S. Eliot, who not until high school would I identify as other than the author of (thankfully long-pre Andrew Lloyd Webber musical) “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” (I939, a year much in need of levity), even the starchiest among us may harbor a penchant for wit. I read a review on Goodreads of Philip Larkin's Complete Poems, where an American reader lamented why his conservatives lacked the sense of humor perfected by Tories. Well, P. S. O'Rourke, Tom Wolfe, Lionel (a she, and an aspirational Brit even though Carolina-bred) Shriver, Flannery O'Connor, J.F. Powers, Walker Percy pop up. Not sure where/ if cranky, askew latter-day David Mamet ranks.
Anyhow, let's start there. My very dear friend and mentor, for my sixtieth trip around the third stone from Jimi's sun, gifted me Larkin's Selected, and very well so by Martin Amis, Poems. I treasure that. And the selection which moved him to choose it was the same one that, with an upset stomach at 3:15 this morning, made me gasp/ swear with wonder. (No easy feat, akin to sparking me to laugh out loud at a scripted entertainment; the stupid cat and dog videos my wife forwarded might, admittedly, cause guffaws if babies were bowled over during the mayhem). “An Arundel Tomb”: take a few slow minutes to savor it….This photo enriches your mind’s eye impression.
I’d dutifully made it through the entire Complete Poems a few years ago. I took my library copy to the doctor's office in Burbank, where five-plus decades later a Leaf putted me rather than a bottlegreen once-made-in-GB sleek racer. The receptionist commented on how engrossed I was. The alternative was “Dr. Phil, or maybe Drew” blaring above me in the waiting room. Despite much of the contents compiling Larkin's juvenalia, scraps, rants, and rejects, Archie Burberry’s notes elucidated a massive amount of references and sources, which in tandem with Poet Laureate Andrew Motion’s fair-minded 2017 definitive biography, evaluate their now-cancelled, once-risque, subject, who should be known beyond his wry “1963” lines about s-e-x.
Shades of Elvis Costello’s “Angry Young Buddy Holly Man” LP This Year’s Model (1978)
Unlike my sagacious mentor, I neither compose nor consume verse. Well, a modicum of the latter, since it's difficult, or was in more rigorous regimens, to earn a doctorate in English Literature from a reputable research university without mastering the best of this genre. But I’ve always felt drama was my wobbliest leg to stand on, with poetry marginally sturdier. Yet as Mr Prufrock and yours truly fall in step with passing years, I’m reconsidering my predilections. There's something about a well-wrought verse when it comes to tackling the transcendent where sparer voices suit the subject more.
Back in our former house in Los Angeles, built for sunlight, bad for winter's lack, it’d get by my coddled SoCal standards, downright drafty. My fingers chilled, my nose and ears were icy to the touch. Every year’s end, I’d a primal, atavistic urge to delve into all matters Welsh. The look of its language, the sounds of Cymraeg, the first Celtic in situ spoken I’d ever heard, now forty-five years ago, and the austerity of lore and landscape have instinctually captivated me. I possess about the same percentage of (unreliable and randomly inherited, sure) Scots as Welsh, with a dollop of Cornish, but I’ve never cotttoned to roam about the heathers and moorlands beyond Hadrian's ruined Wall.
That's why R.S. Thomas' Collected Poems would rest on my Golden Ticket short shelf. His irascible nature—as exemplified in one of the two excellent biographies by respectively Byron Rogers and by Jason Wintle--lingers in the anecdote how a visitor to this crusty cleric’s vicarage revealed the interior temperature around 35 degrees, as he didn't want to waste money on electricity, despite the entreaties of his wife with the patience of Chaucer’s Griselda. But this same flintiness sharpened his eye for the evanescent beauty amidst the brutally registered poverty of his neighbors, and less frequently his Church of Wales congregants among those non-conforming Dissenters.
As he aged, like Larkin, he ached. The librarian in postwar Belfast and then Red brick university in provincial Hull. Bereft of belief, but a forebear to Richard Dawkins or Terry Eagleton, Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Alain Badiou, Jordan Peterson or Candace Owens, Jenny Holland or Russell Brand, Giorgio Agamben or Paul Kingsnorth, Douglas Murray or Tom Holland, Sohran Ahmari or Andrew Sullivan, (the Irish critic) John Waters or Milo Yiannopoulis in our digital marketplaces and unsafe spaces. A cabal you may revile or reject. Savvy refugees whether lauded or mocked from postmodern anomie, who lament what's been lost as what's been gained talkin' bout our g-g-g-generations realizes. {Here’s since I wrote this an in-depth debate between Dawkins and Hirsi Ali I recommend.} Larkin faced this void with admirable bravery. Thomas grew to peer into the abyss, too. AKA the Machine, McMurphy's Combine from Ken Kesey's prescient 1963 “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.” Even we curmudgeons deserve a respite, in our vulnerable gripes and existential fears. As in a 2013 Welsh-language collection of testimonies tellingly titled “Cofio RS: Cleniach yn Gymraeg” is rendered “Remembering RS: Kinder in Welsh.” None of us merit caricature, in reality. Well, apart from those satirists, some believers, as listed a few paragraphs up above.
Larkin and Thomas, English and Welsh. Two poets whose works surpass 500 pages. Necessitating sturdy bindings. That'd go for the recent Cambridge Centenary edition with annotations of James Joyce's Ulysses, my favorite novel. Bless her pre-tachocardial dear heart, my wife tucked that among the coffee pods, for godssake an espresso maker, lots of Trader Joe’s mozzarella, Cascade detergent pods—as dishwashers are unknown in a Global South nation where “help” waits for hire.
I also hauled down to Ecuador, hard to believe seven weeks ago under sunnier skies and confident spirits, a lovely mid-century one-volume edition of Rebecca West’s 1941 massive masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. One icon for what Wikipedia defines as “false sacrifice,” one for an “enigmatic image” from a Serbian folk song.
The past twenty-plus years, its I100 pages were a bulging green spine Penguin Modern Classic paperback, and I feared its width would crack its binding. It could've been an even weightier contender, but it predated the reprint’s Christopher Hitchens' typically in-depth, astute, self-assured preface commissioned during that unfortunate business in post-Tito Balkan bastions. But I could find that online. I’d studied it at least twice. West, alongside my dead-tree Premier League first team of world-class literary champions, needed sturdy support. That copy along with thousands of my books went off by the half-a-truckload, supposedly to boost a charity for animal rescue. And I needed to get past a third through. Similar to John Dos Passos' episodic USA trilogy (and like “Vanity Fair” can’t be imagined without William Thackeray’s sketches, JDP demands Reginald Marsh's Ashcan School cartoons: this the tenth book I’d theoretically add. (Yet I already own the handsome but unfortunately image-less Library of America version). West can be picked up, flown with, then kept ready packed until another long winding road. USA and BLGF testify to an era when, as the guide at the Ozark Folk Museum in Farmdale, Arkansas, said as a casual aside as we perused shelves in a restored farmhouse full of once-well-loved volumes from the zenith of our last troubled, war-torn, depressive, bold, brutal, informed, ignorant, earnest, blinkered, jingoistic, rhetorically rich century, “people used to read books.”
Accompanying Everyman hardbound Orwell's Essays, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Richard Latham’s nicely named The Shorter Pepys excerpts from the diary’s multivolume life’s work (although a hair dryer had to set it straight after a leaky shampoo bottle inevitabily snuggled too close), La Biblia Latinamericana to goad me to benefit from its bilingual presentation of a somewhat familiar text, as man cannot learn by Duolingo alone, and a fat Oxford Spanish Dictionary, I think that'll do, big.
Because sometimes, you gotta get off this screen we're stuck on and get into a long conversation with literature worthy of more than a skim or scan. Tell me your picks…