Lavender Whippets

David Hamilton

A magazine is a fragile adumbration of books in their becoming, which has everything to do with my fondness for them, my participation in them for years. And books, the technology of which has been continuously refined for over two millennia, evoke such a combination of intimacy and power that we may not abandon them so soon as we sometimes think. Thus the pleasures of a secondhand bookstore, or of the mostly unpeopled aisles of the library on the way to my carrel, along which, taking one path this time, another another, serendipity reminds me of something or leads me elsewhere. Downstairs, and out in the main hall on each floor, scholars cluster around numerous terminals, letting search engines direct their work. They sit hunched on high stools, staring into those screens, like great blue herons on one leg, in the shallows, looking for the flicker of nourishment. I do the same, when pressed, but the pleasure is greater when stumbling upon a book, the thing itself, like an old friend, or like a new acquaintance who may soon become more.

One idiosyncratic favorite of mine, one I know my way to in the stacks and like to wander back to now and again, is an Old English translation of a late Latin text known as Apollonius of Tyre. A book is an island of a sort, and this is a story of books and Mediterranean isles, quite the sort of thing to take along to my carrel with its northern view over a tarred roof, with pigeons working it, and a newish, undistinguished red brick building in the middle distance where not all that long ago there had been tennis courts. Apollonius is pretty light reading, considering the older stage of the language. As a romance, too, it makes connections with the Odyssey and becomes, through Gower, a source for Shakespeare’s Pericles.

Early in his adventures, roaming the Mediterranean, Pericles, that is Apollonius, is called upon to answer a riddle. The right answer would reveal the incestuous relation of a princess with her father and so secure the enmity of the king and father who puts the question to him. A wrong answer would merely mean Apollonius’s neck. Given this dilemma, Apollonius turns to his bocs for the answer, and I was surprised that he had carried some with him. One never thinks of Odysseus with a bag of books. Apollonius, however, has a little chest of them, and they provide the answer he requires. Then later, after successful flight followed by shipwreck, he meets a gentler, unsullied princess and becomes her tutor.

By teaching this second princess to read and write, Apollonius discovers that he is wooing her, as have other free floating men adept with their books. Since the Mediterranean of our story is hardly lacking in suitors, the girl’s father, a genial king, is soon cornered into approving a match. Thoughtfully, he asks his daughter to reveal her choice, which she cannot bring herself to speak. Being newly literate, however, she agrees to write her answer out and so declares herself for that shipwrecked but learned man above all others. Her written confession summons what may be the first blush in English literature when her father reads it aloud to Apollonius and his face reddens all over. Then the king saw that Apollonius “mid rosan rude waes eal oferbraeded”: his complexion (rude) was all overspread with rose. Nor does the king the father deny his princess-daughter her shipwrecked and apparently penniless tutor because he too has probably read enough tales by now to know the likelihood of such a man proving to be a prince.

As a literate man, Apollonius has powers, in love especially, that others do not. He turns to his boccist as a mountebank might to another kind of chest. Moreover, there is the implication that this chest, a small thing, confined and portable, something he can carry in flight over Mediterranean waters and preserve through shipwreck upon them, offers power over that which is much larger. It holds the key to the world.

It is this provocative relation of the small to the large that likely underlies the enduring charm of books. Pound’s enthusiasm for such a notion shows in his assertion that “with one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands,” as in his lifelong effort to place all his understanding between two covers, as perhaps also in his own Mediterranean affections and wanderings in love. Eliot could have been suggesting the rewards of sticking with Pound, or Proust, or with the collected novels of Jane Austen for that matter, when he suggested that studying one thing thoroughly leads to everything sooner or later. The old, new critical credo is akin to that, as it looks back to Blake, who found the world in a grain of sand.

Then there are The Books, those fountainheads of culture. For how long have we suspected that from quite small books, even tales or poems, we might tease understandings that run toward the Infinite, as Apollonius was able to discover, saving his life with books at one moment and finding his destiny through them soon after.

That desire to locate and carry away the key is as old as books themselves and more seductive than we usually pause to consider. We may be fueled by it every time we browse a bookstore, alerted by our anticipation of the book we have not yet discovered but that we half believe awaits us. While seeking a book for whatever weekend purpose, we may also carry a sublimated hope of finding the handbook for all things that we have always needed.

In large part, of course, these are the dreams of youth, when we all embody a bit of princess or prince. Most children who become readers, not to mention writers, look back to a book or a small collection from childhood and youth that opened the world to them. For several years, The Handbook for Boys was my guide not just to outdoor life but, it seemed, to life itself. It was a paperback I could slip into my pocket or backpack. I had another handbook to the outdoors containing more knowledge that I consulted more, at home, but it was older, larger, hardbound, and unwieldy in the woods. As we mature, we disperse that concentrated, almost magical attention devoted to one book onto books more generally, a focus that eventually extends to a library or (now) the Internet. But the old dream of The Book of the Secret has staying power or there wouldn’t be the current flourishing genre of guides for everything. On a recent Jay Leno hour, a thirty-something interviewed on the street, one of several who couldn’t name Huck’s partner on the raft or the Great White Whale, smiled brightly and said, “But we only read self-help books.”

The figure of this attraction is a ratio: the larger the differential, the greater the power. The Handbook for Boys is a far better book than The Joy of Sex, precisely because it is handier to carry about and the ratio of the instrument to that which can be known through it, at least for boys not yet into their teens, is so much larger. It tells about knots and trees and stars.

The figure of the small against the large works equally as we weigh the slim volume of poems against, for example, an encyclopedia. So another of my paradigmatic favorites, that first lyric by Catullus, “To whom should I give this pretty little book . . . but to you, O Cornelius, who has done up the whole world in three learned volumes.” These paraphrased lines are from a dedicatory poem, calling upon the learned Cornelius Nepos, Catullus’s senior by ten years, to smile upon barely a hundred pages of poems. Of course it isn’t certain that Catullus is being complimentary. Describing Nepos as “Doctis,” and yoking that with “laboriosis,” could suggest that the great man’s learning lacked a little something when it came to style.

Nevertheless Nepos offers, however awkwardly, another paradigm we remember, this one signaled by Don Quixote, Moby- Dick, Dublin as Ithaca, or as the Mediterranean, or The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. One quick mention of books of that sort dissolves all taint of ponderous doctoral behavior: all things light and lithesome, though complete and encyclopedic.

The book must be a marvelous object to empower ideals as equal and opposite as these. Borges, that inveterate minimalist, remarked in Other Inquisitions that he saw no reason to spin out a story to hundreds of pages when four or five would do, and we laugh with him, for a moment, because we know that Cervantes and Melville will have it their way their share of the time.

Lifting a book by hand, we sense both measures at once. As it has become familiar, moreover, the mere form of the book implies the book, and so minimalism discovers one more reduction. Now we have wallpaper of book spines, making a room without books into a reading room of a sort; or the buckram volume that opens to a flask or to a revolver; or once on Mallorca, during a sabbatical year, I found a gallery that sold ceramic books that opened only to the mind, dreaming about what might lie in them. I resisted buying that ceramic book, though it was small and pretty and “freshly rubbed up with pumice” as Catullus described his own, because it was also a small brick. I denied myself the pleasure of its totemic charge because I had reached that point in my year away when I had begun to fear repacking.

I don’t hold with those who, fearing the demise of the book, argue that it will survive as a friendlier object than the computer. You can take it to the beach or to bed. Given a candle, you can read it when the lights go out. I take those to be incidental differences, soon to be overcome, and overcome already in science fiction and the movies. We already imagine Mr. Gates’s giving computers away, all over the planet, knowing full well how often we’ll repay him as we update our software. They’ll be small and pretty and smooth and, for a privileged few, say those who have pre-paid their next dozen upgrades, offered in buckram. We’ll be able to slip them into our backpacks or back pockets. I am tempted to predict there will be no essential difference between that computer to come and a book, that they will be better seen as variants of the same object.

In one way the computer expresses the essential mystery of the book better than any book yet has. Like my ceramic book, it is trim but weighty; then as you open it, you move from its finite presence to near infinite capacity. Most of what you can imagine will be found within, or through the computer. Of course I’m running ahead of events as they are, but isn’t that the promise we sense in them? It will be like holding a volume of Borges in your hand, and coming upon his story, “The Library of Babel,” in which every possible combination of words has already been written and shelved, but rather than reading his story, accessing the Library itself, vaster than that of Alexandria. The computer makes all but literal what we have heretofore taken as metaphoric, the Book of Creation, the World in a Book, the book as the Book of Everything, and it does so by putting on our desks, then in our hands, the twin images of the book we have juggled for centuries. In that development we lose nothing of the book’s essential nature. We may better argue that its nature has at last been realized. The small and trim little craft of the computer navigates surely on the oceanic medium of imagination and knowledge.

I’m not running ahead of events by much. According to an article by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times (4/8/ 98), researchers at MIT are already working on “‘The Last Book’ to Hold All the Others.” Their plan is to fashion a book, fully portable and bound in leather if you wish, with “hundreds of pages you can turn one at a time or riffle through.” Electronic ink (“eink”) will be set within its leaves. “E-ink consists of microscopic spheres, each about 40 microns in diameter, or about half the thickness of a piece of paper.” The head and tails of these tiny coins will be differentiated as black and white. They’ll be “applied by the millions to paper and then flipped over electronically to either their black sides or their white sides to produce what looks like a traditional printed page.”

In other words those pages we will be miniature versions of cheering sections at the Rose Bowl with thousands of spectators holding up cards and flipping them to form slogans, or pictures of Trojans or Wolverines, but in black and white rather than maize and blue or maroon and yellow. A computer in the binding will control the pages through a network of fine wires. The reader will scroll through a list of titles, choose Ulysses for example, and “the computer will make the text appear on the book’s pages by flipping the appropriate spheres to their black or white sides.”

Before reading of this development, headed by Joseph Johnson, an assistant professor at MIT who has the backing of two business consortia, I had imagined a rather different computer, more like a pocket calculator, that would open to two facing screens onto which any number of books could be “dialed up” and scrolled through. I admit though to more pleasure at the thought of turning actual, rather than scrolling virtual pages. I’m sure before the “Last Book” is perfected, it will even learn to simulate letterpress printing—there is already a computer-driven press that will do as much—and we’ll be able to run our figures across a textured page that seems to hold the impressions of hot type.

Of course I wonder what I’ll do with all my oak shelves if one small computer in a single corner will enable me to dial up Alexandria. I’ve not yet been that much of a collector of video cassettes and CDs. And my browsing at secondhand stores, will it all prove beside the point? But who am I to set the standard of interior decoration and individual disposition toward books for the next generation? We’re more crowded all the time, and any tree that’s saved is a better tree for it.

I know I will miss looking around me as I read or write and seeing so many varying spines of books so long in my company, many of which come from secondhand stores, like Borders on the second floor of Williams Street in Ann Arbor, in the early 70s before the brothers became tycoons. “Thomas F. Borders, Louisville, August, 1968” stands in ink on the flyleaf of my hardback copy of Ellmann and Feidelson’s anthology, The Modern Age (Oxford, 1965), then added in pencil, “$3.” Another Borders’s book from those days is The Adventures of Ulysses, the tale summarized in prose and verse, but mostly told in photographs by Erich Lessing (NY, 1970, translated from a German edition of the year before). I used to tell my children the story, stringing together what I could remember and relying on those photographs as prompts, and to hold their attention. My shelves are full of such treasures, treasures to me anyway, and often with a story attached that the contents do not tell.

Once, for example, I ran across a slim volume of poems by one of the early poetry editors of The Iowa Review, inscribed to another, and the second poet had sold it. Or perhaps, playing Apollonius, he had passed it on to a girlfriend who sold it once he had left her shores. Or there is the first volume of poems (1951) by Radcliffe Squires, an old mentor of mine, published almost two decades before I knew him and long out of print by the time I did. I found the book in an Ann Arbor shop a few years after he died and bought it for $20. The original price had been $2.25. On the bottom right of the flyleaf, a small, neat hand writes, “John Ciardi—his book.” Ciardi, once the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, poetry editor and columnist for Saturday Review, a widely published, “contract poet” for the New Yorker, and translator of The Divine Comedy (in fluent, rhyming, iambic pentameter terza rima), was also the editor of this series, the Twayne Library of Modern Poetry. Then scrawled above his line, also in ink, are the words of my mentor, “This is perhaps Ciardi’s book—he had alot to do with it—nice remarks—dangerous [illegible] & all that—but what the hell I wrote it—I knocked it out—and shit I love it. Squires”

At office and home, my landscape of books is my most intimate landscape, at least so I often think, looking up now at Chaucer, at Squires in a later Abattoir Edition (Omaha) “with fifteen relief etchings by Keith Achepohl,” at The History of Saline County, Missouri (1881), at Muriel Foster’s Fishing Diary (Viking, 1980, printed in Italy), at five editions of Cavafy, two of them in Spanish, at Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton, Lewis & Clark, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop, and more. But perhaps we’re destined for smaller spaces, like Japanese hotels, in which case the “Last Book to Hold All Others” will seem a salvation. Though I fear they will prove more like cable companies, offering us magnitudes of near mindlessness in endless variation, but with literature as a kind of History Channel, at a higher rate. Then who knows what it will take for Bishop to be included in that, much less Radcliffe Squires?

He’s the one that got me into the magazine part of all this. I remember a hot summer day of 1969 and the christening of a friend’s baby daughter. It was mostly a circle of assistant professors and their families, most of us not yet thirty-something and new to Ann Arbor. But Squires and his wife were among us, as may have been a few other elders. In any case, we were all hot, the men in suits—the christening had been Episcopal—few of us had summer suits either. The living room of the small home forced us into a strained, hot circle. We had drinks in our hands, mint juleps as I remember: the family was southern as well as Episcopal. And our host turned to Squires and asked, with perfectly reasonable curiosity, “Do you have any children?” I remember a half-beat pause before he turned to his wife and said, “I don’t remember, do you, Eileen?”

So in that early volume, I treasure among other things this dark turn on Yeats, “For Peter,” for he never mentioned a word of this later, nor did I ever ask:

Of the Lord’s many years most accursed
Is this dark year which is your first.
The music quarrels with the dying dancer;
The cancer patient with the patient cancer.

But you were born, my son, and I would offer
A crib of owl’s eye gold and a cover
Of edelweiss silk. Yet being poor
My very poverty must offer more:

I’ll feed you the vacuum of my days. . . .

And so I have a better reading of the kindly but disillusioned stance he normally took—suggesting that “it was never our duty to be immortal but to be implausible”; describing the marchers following Mailer and Lowell as “the helpless young”; “perfecting” the tourist’s role—“the century being the century it is”—with a youth in the Salamanca square who blackmails him into “freeing” a pet sparrow; rejecting “blood” as an image for cliffs of red stone, insisting on “The harder red, that stands when the soft is gone / Down trivial veins with the rain”; then imagining the emerging buds of violets, when Eileen brushed brown leaves from them in early spring, as the heads of “lavender whippets.”

When I knew him in Ann Arbor, he edited the Michigan Quarterly Review, and he invited me to help. I didn’t do much, only read small bunches of stories and poems he passed my way, passed on a few opinions, and entered into correspondence with a very few writers. I suppose I was not bad company for some afternoons in the office, and I had found much to care about in his poems. It is hard to resist a reader who thinks well of your work. Anyway, I’d already proved susceptible to magazines, as a stackwanderer in graduate school. I remember coming then upon the bright red cover of the North American Review, with reversed out white lettering, and being surprised to find it issuing from Mount Vernon, Iowa. “Iowa!” I exclaimed—the state one west of where I had been born and one north of where I had grown up, the state that would become my home. I’d been on the east coast for several years and was startled. But why not a North American Review out of Iowa? What location could be more appropriate?

Life is full of coincidence, if not irony. Serendipity I call it. When I moved to Iowa City, it was not to edit The Iowa Review. That came a few years later, after Tom Whitaker had gone on to Yale and found his relation to Iowa thinning. Forget that I had bought his house when I came and he left, and that I already had made his garden my own. Someone had to be found, and I had not even known of the problem until Kim Merker, of Windhover Press, and the Review's managing editor at the time, asked would I consider it. Then I learned that The Iowa Review had come about precisely because of the North American Review, edited by Robert Dana in those days, and to this day a neighbor and friend. There had been talk of bringing it from Mount Vernon to Iowa City but, the story goes, Paul Engle, then the Workshop’s guiding spirit, had said, “Yes, we need a magazine, but it shall be called The IOWA Review.” No doubt there’s more to it than that; nevertheless, both magazines still fly their colors and, with many others, diversify the landscape beyond what anyone would yet convert into “The Last Book to Hold All the Others.”

And I love them for it. I love the way literary magazines seem an inevitable outgrowth of a community—any community—as soon as it becomes a touch self-conscious. I love their expression of hope that we, accounted for in these pages, are up to something. I love the room within them for persons who don’t prove to be writers to show that they have had seasons of writerliness. I admire the way magazines, more than books, because on the front lines of this matter, affirm the degree to which writing remains part of our cultural deep structure—that people want to write, and need to write, and will write, no matter the forces that work against that.

Literary magazines, of course, work entirely against that magical, one volume, key-to-it-all paradigm from which I began spinning this essay. Magazines are always spilling on, becoming diffuse, going off on tangents. They are intensely local, recording no more than the best guesses of a few people working together at one time. In a way they are all one magazine, with myriad outlets, each with its small audience. The whole could be said to parody a franchise: These bagels are not all the same, though they tend to be round, have a hole in them, are nutritious to a point, and are rarely given to sugar.

Magazines sanctify nothing, empower no canon; they only loft their suggestions. I love them enough that my answer to the question that must be flitting along the fringe of any essay involving books and islands is that better than any book, better than the Bible or Shakespeare, would be a couple of crates of miscellaneous literary magazines. I could arrange them in stacks in the sand, browse them for suggestions, savor moments of serendipity, assemble my own Best of Anthology. I could discover what others had been imagining, much of which would seem strange to me. Rather than feeling in awe and that I was steadily being improved, I could feel enabled, now and then, to improve on them. If a few pencils came along with the magazines, and I had a penknife for their sharpening, I could add my contributions to their white spaces. And if no pencils, I’d still have my finger and the sand, in which someday, perhaps, I’d find my own lavender whippets.

From Conneticut Review Fall, 1999