I just finished Christopher Hitchens’s magnificent new memoir, Hitch-22. I hated his last book, the one about God — or, as he would have it, god. Well, fair enough. I always thought the big-G god thing was an unfortunate bit of deck-stacking. But it was a truly ill-informed book, one written in bad faith (so to speak), one whose main use was to remind one of the utility of Cicero’s dictum that we must state our opponent’s position in the strongest possible terms. When writing about religion, Hitchens never misses a chance to ridicule, or to understand. But this new book…
Well, it should have been obvious that the best book he could write about now would be a memoir. As he tacked from political left to right over the past ten years or so (although he makes a good argument in the book that the shift was much longer coming), his persona, and his writing, have increasingly been self-centered. Even when unintentionally so: whether or not he chose to foreground himself, we the readers certainly began to read him as much for the Him as for the ideas.
So it is a treat, now, to have a book that gives the whole Bildung. And it’s just delectable, sassy fun to read about swinging London in the 1970s, when he was part of a set (he reluctantly uses the word) that included Martin Amis and James Fenton, and later Ian McEwan and many others. Their “Friday lunches” became the Algonquin on the Thames, full of wit and wordplay and political swordsmanship.
And those weren’t the only swords unsheathed. The man had sex with a lot of women — and, one is intrigued to learn, a lot of boys and men. Hitchens here makes a convincing and sympathetic case for the public-school incubation of the Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name as a rather beautiful thing, something one can develop a taste for. He is quite frank about his homosexual “relapses” that continued into his twenties, before he gynocentered himself for good.
My one complaint: that he never comes clean about his caddish end to his first marriage, and that he only briefly, economically confess what an absent father he has been, before moving on to more achievements and (wholly convincing) self-justifications about this, that, and the geopolitical other. He has suggested elsewhere that he doesn’t talk about his ugly disregard for his first wife and children because, well, it’s their story to tell, not his. I am not quite buying that. But one friend did make the very cogent case that his glaring omissions actually say something good about him: “Look,” she said to me, “he is open about sleeping with men, but obviously ashamed of the way he has treated those close to him. That actually shows he has a pretty good moral compass — he knows what is shameful and what isn’t.” That makes sense, I suppose. But I still wanted to watch him wear the hairshirt a bit more enthusiastically.
That said, this book is intelligent and humane, and it tells you more about Cypriot history than you thought you wanted to know. Hitch-22 reminded me why I love the author of The Missionary Position, his fervent slapping of Mother Teresa, and his book about the war crimes of Henry Kissinger. Hitchens takes no prisoners, not even himself.
Here at NHR, we try to lean more heavily on good books, but every once in a while a book is such a missed opportunity that it’s instructive to point out how. Hence my review of Daniel Menaker’s A Good Talk, posted this morning to the New Republic’s web site.
Menaker is a major publishing macher (is there any other kind?), having worked at the New Yorker, Random House, and HarperCollins. And his editor, Jonathan Karp, is quite savvy. So one wonders how the stone and the flint failed to ignite. Or something like that. Menaker had a hand in a recent slight disappointment, Judith Shulevitz’s book about the Sabbath, which I reviewed here. I don’t know if he was the final editor; he acquired it and then left Random House some time later.
Both books — and Shulevitz’s is by far the better book — seemed to need tougher editing. Having just gone through some tough editing for this forthcoming book, I know the process isn’t always fun. But it’s usually necessary, and it’s the writer who loses out when the editor gives him or her too much of a pass. (Heck, if I were editing Shulevitz, I would probably be too ginger: she is very smart, and she knows her stuff.)
Over the holiday, I read Michael Chabon’s new book, which has in it a very poignant essay about (among other things) oldies radio — how one day the songs you grew up with are now oldies, while meanwhile the the songs that used to be your oldies, like Elvis and doo-wop, are falling away from radio forever. In today’s radio culture, a song like Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” a baby-boomer favorite that had resonance for the generation of two after the boomers because of of the movie Stand by Me and, moreover, because it’s a great song, is now lumped together with all the way old crooner stuff, the Como and Sinatra, the Rosemary Clooney, which, while it has its own merits, is for the boomers and all the rest of us basically grandmom’s music. Even early Beatles don’t really make it onto FM radio much any more — if you remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, then you almost sixty or even older, which is to say a small percentage of the radio listening audience. And not a demographic advertisers care about (unless they are advertising prescription drugs).
What does this all mean for me? Only that today, driving back from New York City with my 3-year-old fast asleep in the back seat, I flipped through the radio until it landed on the sublime “Super Freak,” the 1981 hit by Rick James.
I grooved through the last minute or two of that song, it faded out, and then I was hit with “Ventura Highway,” the 1972 bit of lite Americana by the band America.
Now, I love both “Super Freak” and “Ventura Highway,” truly. They are both catchy and lyrically memorable, and they both have the power to evoke a certain time in one’s life. Now, the times they evoke in my life never really happened, but rather seem as if they must have happened — but it’s a special kind of song that has the power to do that, too. BUT, and this is the point, they are two songs with nothing in common artistically, thematically, or culturally. They have been yoked together by some radio programmer out in ClearChannelLand only because they figure some guy in his forties (or maybe in his mid-thirties, but with an affinity for both music of his own time and the lite fare of his father’s time) will remember and enjoy them both.
In other words, if one thinks that a radio station ought to have a character, then this is a purely cynical programming move, putting “Super Freak” and “Ventura Highway” together. Which is another way of saying that nobody really expects radio stations to have a character any more. DJs don’t get to make playlists, and radio stations don’t serve meaningful communities of listeners.
To that latter point: there used to be a New Haven DJ named Vinnie Penn, who worked the morning show on WKCI (“KC-101”), a Top 40 station broadcasting out of Hamden, one town to the north of New Haven. Vinnie — who also had the honor of working with Glenn Beck when Beck was a crappy New Haven–based morning jock — wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but he was beloved by others. He could be crude and juvenile, to say the least, and at times could be quite smart. Anyway, what I liked about him was that he was a New Havener. His show was peppered with references to real New Haven hangouts, to what New Haven was like in his 1980s childhood, to stereotypes of surrounding towns in Connecticut, etc. In other words, he was our neighbor: Our Neighbor Vinnie.
After he resigned/was fired/was forced out, he was replaced by this dude with the fake name Mike Maze. (To be fair, Vinnie Penn was a shortened, so fake, name too. If I ever stalk the airwaves, it will be as Mark Oppenheimer, as in “Oppenheimer,” the song by the Old 97s.) From what I can tell, Maze isn’t the biggest moron on the air, but he is no New Havener, nor do his ClearChannelBosses seem to have any expectation that he be. His show could come from anywhere, and it seems to go nowhere. It has no grounding, except in the pop-culture reality-TV ether. For some reason, the idea behind a lot of morning shows now is to re-hash the TV of the night before.
I miss the way radio used to be. I came along way after the heyday of free-form. I never knew a time when DJs had any real power over what they played. But at least they weren’t playing “Ventura Highway” after “Super Freak.”
You may have noticed in this morning’s New York Times the article in which it’s asserted that men in their twenties and thirties are actually more dapperly dressed than our boomer parents. As one bit of evidence the author selected Prof. Samuel Rascoff of NYU Law School. Quoth he:
“The fashion gene skipped a generation,” said Samuel Rascoff, 36, a law professor at New York University who specializes in national security law and who, being a fastidious dresser, has given serious thought to the trend, which he sees reflected in his students.
“There’s a sense that this return to style, or to a consciousness of how you look, is an attempt by young men to recover a set of values that were at one point very much present in American society and then lost,” he said. “It strikes me as being of a piece with the way young people buy their coffee or their food: paying attention to authenticity or quality, and to whether something is organic or local. They stand for a rejection of the idea that all consumer goods are ephemeral and inevitably made in China and bought at Wal-Mart.”
Here is Prof. Rascoff:
Now, it so happens that I knew Sam Rascoff when he was a wee law student (not that I was a law student—I was not), and he did have a way with clothes. But unless his style sense has taken a major leap forward, he is at best the fourth-best-dressed man I know. In ascending order, I nominate these men as better dressed still:
3. George Raine, my old college classmate, now an associate at Ropes & Gray, the Boston law firm. George puts the white shoe in “white shoe.” Consider:
2. Prof. Willard Spiegelman, the editor of Southwest Review and a teacher of English literature at Southern Methodist University. So well dressed that he appeared in a fashion spread in the New York Times Magazine. Consider:
1. D. Graham Burnett. This guy is a sartorial legend. He teaches the history of science at Princeton. I have only met him twice, but sweet Jesus does he have threads. In fact, he may violate the old principle (which I have heard attributed to Diana Vreeland, late of Vogue, and generally late) that if you dress elegantly they notice the person, not the clothes. (Or was it Coco Chanel?) He dresses so well I can’t for the life of me remember his face. These pictures don’t quite capture the texture of the fabric, the warp and woof, the weave, the whoo-whoo of his how-de-do. And one of the pictures is weirdly gay (Burnett is a married man). But they will have to suffice:
While I am at it, may I say how much that second Burnett photo, the rent-boy pose, reminds me of the author photo the late Yale historian John Boswell used?
Reading today’s cover story in The New York Times Magazine, by Elizabeth Weil about her couples therapy with husband Daniel Duane, was for me a bit like reading a second novel by an author whose first book I loved: I want to read it—indeed, there is no chance I am not going to read it—and I hope it turns out well, but the whole situation is fraught because I will be devastated if it turns out badly.
The things is, I really love Daniel Duane’s writing. Let me put it this way: I am from Springfield, Massachusettes, land-locked and cold, and yet he made me enjoy reading about surfing. In fact, it would be a uncomfortably accurate to say I have a man-crush—OK, let’s call it a crush—on Duane. He climbs mountains, he surfs, he cooks, he makes a living as a freelance writer, he re-built his own house, his house is in the Bay Area. What’s not to love?
But could my love survive his wife’s article?
The answer turns out to be yes, my love survives. But it is weakened, and will probably never return to full ardor. To judge from her article, he is a loving husband and father, but he is a serial obsessive of the kind I can’t abide in person for more than about ten minutes. He mastered climbing—then surfing—then carpentry—then cooking! (What am I missing?) To know his passions through his writings is endearing; to know them through his wife’s long-suffering observation is to make me realize how unlikely it is that he and I could be friends. Partly this is because of the inferiority complex all of us ineffectual, lazy non-starters have when in the presence of real doers; partly this is because of the moral valuation I find myself placing (perhaps unfairly) on anyone who would rather cook really well than order pizza and have more time to play with his kids. (Don’t believe me? Read the article.)
I am not sure how to sort this all out. The issue of Daniel Duane is way too close to my face for me to see it clearly. I love his writing, envy his career, sometimes envy his life, don’t envy his wife … you get the idea.
Does this all bore you? Well, at least his books won’t. Read them.
1999, to be exact. On Saturday, the New Haven Review took over Lyric Hall, the antiques and restoration house on Whalley Avenue. Owner John Cavaliere has retrofitted the old vaudeville space in the back, and so what choice did we have but to throw a party to celebrate issue #5?
First, we ate and drank for an hour. The mango champagne punch was swell. Then the 75 or so guests retired to the theater, where NHR editor Brian Slattery (violin, guitar, piano), Craig Edwards (violin, guitar), and Joe DeJarnette (upright bass) played backup music as local notables (“locables”) read stories by their favorite authors. (Thanks to Laurel Silton for taking the pictures.)
Actor Bruce Altman read from Philip Roth’s Indignation and The Breast.
And then we drank again. And we ate more. Arlene Ghent catered, with pastries by Manjares. Have you had their brownies? I ask you—have you had their brownies?
We raised some money in pledges—low four figures, since you asked—but that wasn’t the point. The point was seeing people, meeting people. Tom Gogola was there. New Haven native Darius James, late of New York Press, was there. Katharine and Nicholas Fox Weber were there. My mom was there. Pang-Mei Chang was there, seeing John Cavaliere for the first time since high school. Bruce Tulgan and Debby Applegate were there. Betty Lockhart was there.
You were there. And if you weren’t, you should have been.
I almost didn’t read the new book by the great journalist Tracy Kidder, and I’m not proud of either of the reasons why.
First, I didn’t like the title. Tracy Kidder has had some memorably evocative titles (Among Schoolchildren, an allusion to a Yeats poem, whether he knew it or not; Home Town; and one of the best titles ever, The Soul of a New Machine, which among other virtues always reminds me of the Police album Ghost in the Machine). But he now has two terrible titles to his name. First, there was Mountains Beyond Mountains, a portrait of the saint on earth Paul Farmer. And now comes Strength in What Remains, about Farmer’s also quite saintly Burundian colleague Deogratias Niyizonkiza. There’s something about good people that, for Kidder, makes for bad, treacly titles.
I also didn’t want to read a book about genocide. Having skipped Philip Gourevitch’s book about the Rwandan genocide, avoided David Rieff’s writings on genocide and intervention, and missed every book about death and destruction in Iraq (except Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s, which I correctly suspected would be fun to read because it’s all about what incompetent boobs the Bush administration were), I thought I might as well keep up my streak: no books that threaten to convince me that mankind is irredeemably evil and God, if he exists, doesn’t care.
But I read a review of Kidder’s new book on the day in August that my annual birthday gift from my in-laws, an Amazon gift certificate, arrived in my e-mail inbox. So I bought it. And in the last week I have finally read it.
And it’s warm, and humane, and at times funny. There’s no shortage of intense misery, described all too well. Of the frequent flashback scenes that take us from Deogratias’s more comfortable life in the United States back to the hell he endured less than ten years ago in his native Burundi, where as a Tutsi he was hunted by Hutu génocidaires, the most haunting involves an orphaned infant whom Deogratias could not save. I won’t tell you any more than that—partly because I don’t want to give away too much, partly because I just don’t want to re-live it in the typing.
For me, the book’s most unusual achievement is to show us a big American city, New York, through the eyes of a penniless refugee. Before Deogratias was taken in by generous Americans, before he enrolled at Columbia, before his graduate work at Harvard and then Dartmouth, he was delivering groceries for below minimum wage and sleeping in Central Park, hoping to one day figure out that subway system. No matter how impressive the accomplishments that bracket this period—surviving, on foot, and evading his would-be killers; becoming an educated American and building a hospital back in Burundi, a hospital which opened in 2007—it’s Deogratias’s early days as a nameless, faceless, dark black man in a city where he knew nobody that I will always remember best.
About a year ago, I wrote a review of The Bishop’s Daughter, Honor Moore’s memoir of her father, the late Episcopal bishop of New York, Paul Moore. The review never ran, but the recent release of that book in paperback prompted me to return to the review, and I still think it contains some points worth making. So here it is; read on:
In the strongest sense, literature has no ethnicity, of course. Beloved is not African American, even if its author is; Studs Lonergan is not Irish-American, even if its author is. Art, that’s what they are. But for the sake of shorthand, and to describe our acquired tastes, we do use ethnic language for literature (and so Portnoy’s Complaint is obviously Jewish, to take a familiar example). By those arbitrary standards, The Bishop’s Daughter, Honor Moore’s memoir of her father, the late Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, is a distinguished contribution to the very small genre we might call WASP confessional. Other writers have delivered the juicy, clam-baked goods, dishing on the sex and drugs and general dissolution hidden behind the brownstone walls, but the most notable of these works have usually been fictional, if just barely: from Edith Wharton to John Cheever, from Evan Connell to Louis Auchincloss, all can be told if no real names are used. In The Bishop’s Daughter, Moore quite plainly has decided that the old rules aren’t just old—they’re dead.
The book is thus instructive as an example of how meaningless ethnic literary categories are becoming, if they ever mattered all. Having decided there’s nothing to be said for her tribe’s traditional discretion, Moore can thus yank her bisexual father, who died in 2003, quite rudely from the posthumous closet and write of her mother’s descent into mental illness, of her own abortion, of lesbian affairs, and of straight affairs too numerous to keep straight. Much of the book’s compelling scent is the strong whiff of transgression. It’s the odor of dirty sex coming off those sheets of paper. Who writes like this about her dead father’s sodomite tendencies? Who besmirches the church this way? Certainly not a Radcliffe alumna descended of a founder of Bankers Trust! Thank God few of her father’s St. Paul’s classmates are alive to see this. Moores just don’t do this.
That was, in any case, one way to read the message of several anguished letters that Honor Moore’s siblings wrote to The New Yorker after the magazine published an excerpt from The Bishop’s Daughter in March 2008. But what they actually spoke of was common, not aristocratic, decency. “With moving elegiac sentiments, my sister Honor Moore has outed my recently deceased father, Bishop Paul Moore, against his clearly and often stated will,” Paul Moore III wrote. “Many of her siblings were astonished when she decided to do so. Our family resembles many others in that we presume a natural confidentiality as we share our struggles in life.” Osborn Elliott, the former editor of Newsweek and a neighbor of Paul Moore’s in Stonington, Conn., added his two, acerbic cents: “Writing about what she learned growing up as a daughter of Bishop Paul Moore, Jr.—and later about his secret life—Honor Moore seems to have forgotten the Fifth Commandment: Honor thy father and thy mother.”
I for the most part agree with Honor’s younger siblings and with Mr. Elliott: it’s a bad thing to write a book like this. Not because it libels the dead, who in this case is quite guilty and therefore not libeled in any case. And not because it violates class protocol. Rather, there has to be a very good reason to to go against the wishes of those friends and other family who would rather not see their beloved exhumed for the purpose of Amazon rankings. And Moore’s defense, straight from the canons of romanticism, does not cut it: “I came to understand that my own sexual development was inextricably tied up with my father’s complicated erotic life, and…I thought that story important for me to understand. [B]ecause I was a writer, understanding meant telling.” “So you have to write this for your integrity?” Moore is asked. “Yes,” Moore answers.
Nonsense, I answer. And I say that as a writer, one with the same good notices and poor sales as Honor Moore. Our integrity cannot require us to hang Daddy’s dirty laundry in public, nor to ignore the feelings of our siblings. (As another eldest sibling in a large family, I am particularly galled by Moore’s sororal irresponsibility.)
Meanwhile, however, the book is very good. The language is lovely, showing Bishop Moore vividly in all the stations of his cross: as the prep school boy slowly coming to Jesus, the worker priest serving the poor yet conflicted about his own family’s wealth (and about his lust for men), the sad, widowed father of nine children, the nationally famous left-wing bishop of New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, and the elder pastor, outed to his family and hoping for some portion of their compassion. And not only is the book beautifully written—a published poet, Moore will surely be remembered for this exercise in prose—and anthropologically interesting, taking us inside that world where possessions are rarely bought but always had, where every friend and lover has a summer home, and where practically the only Jew to be seen is “Arnold Weinstein,” a Portnoy-figure who honors the much younger Honor by making love on her “in daring, experimental ways.” The book is also theologically profound, making a powerful case that Paul Moore’s progressive episcopate depended on his homosexual urges. He was an enlightened clergyman because, not in spite of, what he believed was his sin-darkened heart.
In his daughter’s telling, Paul Moore appears to have been that rare creature, a genuine male bisexual. As a bachelor Paul Moore had courted more than one woman, and Honor, using her parents’ letters, reconstructs for us the winding road that led to Jenny McKean’s triumph over the competition. Then, beginning at least in seminary, already married, Paul Moore was having gay relationships. He continued having gay sex throughout his marriage. But when he and Jenny separated in 1970, probably because she knew about his affairs, they agreed to see other people…and soon, Honor later discovered, he was “dating no fewer than five women.” After Jenny’s death from cancer in 1973, a grieving Moore connected with at least one old female love but soon was re-married to a new love, Brenda Eagle. He seems truly, if inexplicably, besotted with his second wife, a falling-down drunk who wastes none of her small capacity for kindness on her stepchildren; but the marriage does not, at least, seem like a cynical arrangement meant to maintain a public persona. Meanwhile, Moore keeps his long-term male lover, abandons him when Brenda finds out, then goes back to him after Brenda’s death. He also goes back to women, taking at least one lover shortly before his death. (He told me about her when I interviewed him in 2002.) Long after he was out of the public eye, when he had no reputation to uphold, and when his children all knew about his gay past and present, he continued to love and make love to both men and women.
Honor Moore is very sensitive to the nuances of her father’s complicated sexuality, and she never tries to fix his erotic life to any theoretical matrix (his sexuality is never “on a continuum,” for example). She lets the facts speak for themselves, and saves her interpretation for the relationship between those sexual facts and his ministry. First, Honor notes, the overriding desire in Paul Moore’s life was not sexual but pastoral. He wanted to serve God in a very specific way: not as a theologian or church educator or deacon or choir director, but as an Episcopal priest of the traditional parish kind. That meant, in his estimation, having a wife, not just or even mainly for appearance’s sake, but rather because he would need a helpmeet in serving God. “Eventually,” Honor writes, “he found himself in love with my mother, his misgivings about her and his other desires subordinate to his quest for a partner in the life he was becoming more and more determined to pursue, a life in the church.” Attracted to both men and women, he chose to settle down with a woman, and as a young bride that woman helped him feed the poor and shelter the destitute in their parsonage in Jersey City; their joint ministry became a model in the church for engaged social action.
Honor seems to believe that the will does have some sway over the libido. Not only does her father choose women, but after a rocky time with men she loves only women for a long time, then returns to men. In this view, it is plausible that the bishop chose his double life in part because of the kinship it would give him with the suffering. Moore’s first great causes were justice for the Negro and for the poor man, and he was as far as can be from either. He did, however, have his own burden—homosexual love—and it’s one that gave him a sense of otherness, of what it was to be the Invisible Man.
“As my father lived his sexuality with men, it certainly was ‘something else,’” Honor writes, “something that moved beneath the surface of the life he lived with his wives, with his children, with parishioners and colleagues; something that moved between the interstices of language in the charged realm of desire, of imagination, of relationship with the unseen, informing his theology and compassion.” What’s more, if he “had disclosed that existence to his wives and children, he would have had to give up one life or the other….” This is not the time-worn drama of the tragic closet-case. Rather, Honor is arguing that her father’s refusal to choose between two worlds, even in old age, when gay rights were a fact of the world, and even at great cost to honest relations with his family, was the crucible in which his special Christian charity was forged.
That’s not to say that Paul always saw his bisexuality as a blessing. He was a man of his time, ashamed of his same-sex attraction, and he could be blunt about what he saw as a terrible failure. He did not valorize gay love as some sort of manly, Platonic ideal; to the contrary, he saw it as inferior to what a man shared with a woman. “It was an addiction,” he once told Honor. By contrast, “I loved your mother, and I love Brenda.” And at a time, the late 1960s, when other preachers, like the philandering William Sloane Coffin, were preaching a “situation ethics” that might allow for extramarital sex, Moore was slow to give up the belief that “all sexual activity outside marriage was per se sinful,” as he wrote in his memoir.
But of course that unflagging sense of rectitude contributed to Moore’s suffering, and therefore may have made him an even finer pastor. In 1969, Jim Stoll, the first openly gay Unitarian minister, once compared the plight of homosexuals to the plight of blacks in America. “[T]here are many different groups of ‘Niggers’ in this country,” he wrote. “Mexican Americans, poor people, women, and yes, homosexuals.” Moore would never have preached in such off-color language, but he would have been in intuitive agreement with Stoll. “But what of the suffering?” Honor writes. “It was my father’s sacrifice and his gift. It was, as he had once told Andrew Verver”—his longtime lover—“what kept his ministry alive, what made his faith necessary.”
What made his faith necessary. The late twentieth century was not a good time for liberal religion, and certainly not for mainline Protestantism. The old establishment churches, the Congregationalists and the Episcopalians, hemorrhaged membership. People like Paul Moore were losing faith all around him; Honor is quite typical in having rejected the church of her patrician ancestors, the church of her dad. But Paul Moore remained a believer; his faith did not waver. Was it being bisexual that made his faith not only possible but necessary? Without it, would he have been just a rich old white man with a sentimental side and a soft sport for high-church ritual? Did the poor and benighted whom he served have his “addiction” to thank—for his willingness to lead them into the light, for his table where he fed them?
When Paul Moore told his eldest daughter, “It’s come out that I’ve had gay affairs,” he followed up quickly that “it is not public, and…you are NOT going to write a short story about it.” Honor was disoriented, and one of her first thoughts was, “Doesn’t he know I don’t write fiction?” She sure doesn’t. This is an exercise in confessional, the kind her father knew only in a liturgical context. We cannot know how her father would have felt about this fine exercise in non-fiction, and we can only wonder if her siblings will ever forgive her. But for those interested in what makes even some flawed men great, what makes them give their lives over to an ideal that leads them to serve others, this book offers a fresh, provocative answer.
I was in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, and I went into Bridge Street Books, located nowhere near Bridge Street, from what I could tell. It was on Pennsylvania Ave., off M Street, the main thoroughfare of Georgetown. The proprietor, who sat to the left, immediately upon the entrance, sitting between a two-sided counter, a wall of books, and the front window facing the street, was not particularly friendly (that seems to be a species of booksellers, deeply in love with books but not much for customers—it seems a unique form of vocational torture). When I asked him what was upstairs, for I had noticed a staircase, he said, “More books.” When I asked him what particular sections were kept upstairs, he impatiently ran off a list for me (“fiction, psychology, sports” — something like that), but clearly wasn’t keen to do it. I had hoped he might enjoy telling me about the vast selection in his store; he clearly hoped I’d have the decency to leave him be and go look for myself.
When I did go look, I discovered that his was one of the best-curated selections of any bookstore I’d ever seen. Put another way: he’s a splendid buyer. There were a dozen books I’d seen reviewed over the past six months but had never seen in a store; there were even more books, including some by famous or prestigious authors, that I had not seen reviewed, but which he had ordered from publishers’ catalogues. He (or his buyer) quite simply had a terrific eye. The store was very, very well stocked, with reasonable quantity but unmatched quality.
It wasn’t just that he had good taste, but also variegated and eccentric taste. This clearly was not a scholarly bookstore, although there were many fine books from scholarly presses. Nor did it suffer from the book-clubby quality of so many independent bookstores, the proprietors of which seem to buy books, primarily “literary fiction,” with the predictable tastes of local book-clubbers in mind. (This tic results in shelf after shelf of Barbara Kingsolver.) And he was not a snob: there was no shortage of beach reads or what in Washington might be called Metro reads.
I ended up buying from his Architecture section a book I had never seen before, even as my current interests mean that I always look in a store’s Architecture section. It’s called Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness, and it’s by an Australian critic named Elizabeth Farrelly. I’m nearly done with the book now, and while in some ways it is familiar—her impatience with suburban sprawl will be familiar to readers of Philip Langdon, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Bill McKibben, David Owen, and many others—she has a deeply philosophical bent; her references range from Milan Kundera (on kitsch) to Richard Sennett (on the modern tension between our interior and exterior selves) to Aristotle, happiness psychologist Martin Seligman, and weirdo supremo Alvin Toffler. She misspells Nietzsche, but we all do sometimes; less forgivable is her misspelling of Lemony Snicket. The book is spellbinding, and I am grateful that I went browsing in a store that had it.
In other news, my friend Jonathan now has a Kindle; he is the first of my friends whose literary flame has been Kindled. He loves it, so far. From the public domain he has downloaded Hume and Freud; from the private domain, Gladwell and Michael Lewis. Jonathan said it even came with a little beach tent to keep sand out. Party on, my dear friend, party on.
Today, my Yahoo home page informed me of the news that Farah Fawcett “passes away.” No thank you— she DIED. Euphemisms be gone. What next: “Farah Fawcett goes to Jesus”? Or, in weird John Edward (the psychic) New-Age-speak, “Farah Fawcett passes”? It’s sad, people, very sad. I miss her. But that’s no excuse for tawdry euphemism. She died.
