Heavy Books
A reflection on my love of books and my beginnings as a writer.
I love books. The feel of them, the weight of them, the smell of them. My earliest memory of books comes from library time in elementary school, kindergarten, first, second grade at Howe school in Schenectady, NY., walking single file down those daunting, high-ceilinged hallways to the ornate, swinging double doors of the library with its thick carpeting, its curving spaces, its stacks and stacks of books, all the different colored spines, the small squares of glued-on paper giving their call numbers, the checkout cards in the back, scribbled names alongside the “date-due” columns. The first books I recall checking out there and reading were the Dr. Doolittle series. They were fat, the font large, but not children’s-book large, and I think I probably checked them out as much for their physical stature as anything. I wanted to feel their heft as I carried them down the hallway back to our square, less inviting classroom, feel their weight in my hands, my lap as I read them, smell their musty-gluey, pungent-rich smells as their words delivered me to unanticipated places in those days long before the Internet or cell phones or anything really worth watching on television.
While I can now clearly see they often use racist tropes and an imperialist vision, back then those stories of the “good doctor” talking to his animal friends, described as a way of learning to observe the minutiae of animal gestures—subtle waves of tails, shaking of whiskers, a certain intonation of a cat cry or dog whine or frog croak—filled my schoolboy mind with utterly new ways to think about the world. When I got home, I’d look closely at my own dog and cat, trying to see if I could unravel the secret, hidden-to-most messages they conveyed.
H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man was also nice and beefy, and it too pushed me to envision a world of magical possibilities, and I let my imagination bring me to seeing myself as invisible too, wondering what I would do with that. Waiting in line at a bank with my parents, I imagined myself slipping away to the other side of the teller window, sneaking an unseen hand up into the cash drawer, lifting a stack of 100s away. But would they be seen, floating in the air? If I put them in my pocket, would they disappear? When I disappeared, would my clothes remain visible? So many questions—but most importantly, I was exercising my imagination, transporting myself beyond the normative reach of my experience toward something transcending experience.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was another book that grabbed hold of me just as I physically enjoyed holding onto it. This is one of the first books I remember reading obsessively, settling into my bed with it in the early morning of a weekend, not getting dressed, bringing it with me to the bathroom even, steadying it on the back of the toilet to keep on reading as I peed…. Reading through the darkening afternoon, on into evening, reading under the covers with a flashlight, waking with it spread across my chest, pages crumpled, to find my place and keep going….I did this with The Chronicles of Narnia as well, with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, all of the Dune books, Asimov’s robot stories, Foundation. Long before anything was asked of me by English teachers and professors in terms of searching for deeper meaning or placing a book in the context of literary history, I had fallen in love with books, the bigger the better.
So when my oldest brother placed boxes of his college books on a bookshelf he also brought home from college, a tall, dark-stained thing built quickly from pine planks and lathing that swayed if you leaned against it and seemed as if it might collapse under all that weight, I relished having a cache of big, weighty books residing in my very own home. These books went well beyond the works of Lofting, Verne, Wells…. I’d take them down off the shelf, hold them, some so very heavy, almost impossible to hold, The Complete Shakespeare, The Complete T.S. Eliot…. That smell, the thin-thin pages. I’d open to a random page and read. Eliot’s poems were particularly fascinating, even though I couldn’t begin to understand what was going on. The progression of mysterious words…. I remember reading “In the room the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo” reading through poems as long as I could hold onto some thread of what was being said, then giving up and moving onto another, and another, delighted finally to come to his cat poems but returning still to the longer, stranger, indecipherable ones. “April is the cruelest month” rang out. What a strange thing to say, to put down in words!
I took to carrying certain books around with me. I was in 7th, maybe 8th grade. I chose the biggest books on my brother’s shelf, the ones that were the least accessible. In my deeply self-aware puberty, I must have thought these would improve my image, somehow make my peers look upon me with something akin to how I looked upon books in general. I’m certain this habit had the exact opposite effect. I remember liking to carry Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow frequently with its big block blue lettering, the orange sunrise on the cover wrapping around to the back. I think that one still had a plastic covering over the regular book jacket. It may have had the square library call number along the spine (my brother having lifted it from his college library?)… I don’t remember ever having read a word of it, but I’m certain to have cracked it open, let my eyes wander across its pages, astounded that words in a language I spoke could be arranged in such an utterly new way. Or maybe it was always just the tangible presence of it I was most fond of after all.
I believe this was about the same time I volunteered to work as a library assistant. The librarian, Mr. Davenport, was a soft-spoken man who seemed to love being around books as much as I did. My job was to help him re-catalog all of the books in the library from Dewey Decimal to Library of Congress numbering. I would get to sit in his office and work on his IBM-selectric typewriter with its magical ball of raised letters (no clunky single-lettered levers to lift up and jam if you got going too fast), typing up a new card for every single book in the library, pulling old cards from the deep, narrow wooden drawers of the card catalog, replacing them with my newly typed ones. The work was tedious and required lots of focus—lining up your tabs correctly on the 3x5 cards, getting the cards aligned straight along the platen of the typewriter, going fast enough to bang out cards at a good clip without making typos, which would require me to hit the back-space/correct tab, though that often didn’t do a good enough job of lifting the ink from the thick cards, so I’d have to dab on the white-out, wait for it to dry, start over…. I became a good touch typist, though for years I had to work to not capitalize every word, my pinkies instinctively reaching for the caps keys, as if I were typing the title of a book.
Typing those cards even as I carried around my brother’s literature and philosophy and religion and history books, those wonderful, super-fat, super-thin-paged literature survey books where opening randomly might bring you to anything from Yeats to Chaucer, Dickinson to Pound, allowed me to see still further into the immensity of written expression—how many human beings throughout time, continuing on into the present, set word upon word down onto pages.
When I got to high school, I took advantage of an opportunity to volunteer for a nearby Skidmore College poet and professor, Joseph Bruchac. Professor Bruchac had acquired a large, private library of small, literary journals which he kept in his attic, and my job was to help him catalog and organize them, along with cataloging his own, Greenfield Review. I spent many hours in that attic, going through journals, typing up cards for each, listing the year, the number of the issue, stacking them in alphabetical order, but I spent an equal amount of time thumbing through those thin, often simply printed, understated publications. These were far different than the big, thick colorful hardcovers I first was enthralled to hold in my hands as very young boy, but I was equally enamored with them. The poems, especially, were often thrilling and lovely if beyond my comprehension. Professor Bruchac was a poet himself, I learned, a writer and a teacher and an editor. I learned about his poetry in the prison program where he did workshops with hardened criminals at Attica Correctional Facility, and he showed me some of their poems he was editing to include in an edition of his journal. They were stark, terrifying, raw, direct, different in so many ways than most of what I was reading in his journal collection, but both grabbed at me from the inside, took hold of me, shook me, and I felt the first urgings of wanting to write myself, to do whatever it was all these others had done and were doing.
This was around the time I fell for a girl who, of course, wrote poetry. She kept a big, fat journal of handwritten poems and was the first person I had met who seemed to possess something like what ran so deep in me. I don’t think I thought of any of this in these terms back then, still, I do know this is when I started writing my own stories and poems on a small “travel” typewriter that was her mother’s, I believe, back from her Smith College days. One of the clearest things I can remember from that time is the feel of pushing down hard on those emerald green keys and seeing words I had conjured appear on the page…completing something, the loud grinding noise of the platen when I pulled the paper clear, held it in my hands, saw my own words there, each letter etched into the page, still visible even in the places where the ink ribbon had let me down. I can still recall some lines from those first poems: “Wanton worm why saunter to the center of the walk?” one poem began, me so astounded by those repeating W sounds, that “saunter” and “center” are so much alike—forget that worms can’t really “saunter” given the absence of legs…. The feeling I got way back then is the self-same feeling I get now when I write, when I hit upon a good line, when I know in my heart something I’ve conjured from my brain and set down onto the page has some real value.
Alas, the writing life is a hard one, and for far too many years I did not write in nearly a focused enough way, did not feel that thrill, did not push myself hard enough in a disciplined enough way to forge my own pages of words gathering these finally into the greater-still weight of books, but as I pass the anniversary of my first year of fully devoting myself to constructing my own structures of words, I have found myself remembering that young boy who from the earliest of times loved books, at first just their tactile, visceral presence and later, steadily, the magic and mystery of all those words containing another kind of weight.
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I loved this one.