The Mistake of Clearing Your Bookshelves

A book is a conversation, isn’t it? and yesterday I thought to clear off my bookshelves to restock them with fresher conversations. But a good book is one you want to read again, said Mark Twain, and I made the mistake of opening each book I pulled down to replace and now I have to read them all again and keep them. Except one.

After all, who can give up...

Self Portraits: Fictions by Frederic Tuten (with a cover by Roy Lichtenstein)

I had not opened this book in a long while and had forgotten how startling are Tuten’s stories. I like the physical structure of the narrative and their dreamy quality. The first story, “Voyagers,” opens the door to all the others because it tells of a writer's mind not always on the present planet. A story of those who dream and act on their dreams. I act on my own dream memory of the first time I read the story and sit down to re-read it in the bright sunlight streaming across bookshelf. I let Frederic Tuten tell me the story a second time and that hardly seems enough.

“Voyagers” is the price of admission to the book’s strange ordinary world. A story that makes Tuten’s story-telling career a triumph. A story that deserves vast prizes. I read it a third time, sitting in the brightest sunlight so I am sure to hear every word of its conversation.

Words that make me dream of an aboriginal priest on a stone pyramid staring at the Moon and wondering, wondering, wondering when the electric toaster will be invented and by whom and how a great empire of industry and invention must be raised up to do it. How can I find that tower to share a place on the pyramid’s peak beside the aboriginal man so we stare together at the Moon?

Grand as are all the other stories in Self Portraits, "Voyagers" is a perfection. Wish I could write like that.

I wonder, Where have I heard this voice before, or something similar? Brautigan! Yes, “Voyagers” shares Richard Brautigan’s dream:

Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

Like the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, Trout Fishing in America ought to be a seminal document of American culture. Especially the ejaculation scene. (Pardon the pun.)

I have read this book a hundred times (who hasn’t?) since I first heard Brautigan’s name in the 1960s. Heard that great story of his printing his home phone number on the album jacket of a reading of his poetry. Thinking people would see his number and phone him for a chat. But no one did. No one really believed he would publish his phone number that way.

I had never heard the album and lately I did. Brautigan recited in a whiny, sing-songy poetry voice that made it impossible for me to listen to the words I so much enjoy reading. I’ll keep Trout Fishing on my shelf because no library in America can be an American library without it.

But I will pull the thin tape out of the old cassette of his recital and toss it on the rubbish heap. Better that than remembering a voice so much poorer than his powerful words.

There, on the shelf too near Brautigan and Tuten, is a book I will not name because it was the first book I ever destroyed with malice:

A Book Unnamable by an author I won’t name

Looking back, I wonder that I was not shocked to destroy that book. It was, after all, the contents of a man’s synthesis and calculation, of his own strange ideas justifying Hitler, and he was free to speak his mind. But revulsion for his thinking was in me. Revulsion for his falsifications of history, his apology for a monster and his war. I was not much an historian when I bought the book and read it hoping for insight into the man who made a world war that murdered sixty million – probably 100 million – human beings, six million of them in the grinding horror of his concentration camps.

One true thing came from reading that book – a reminder that human beings can be savages. But “Voyagers” and Trout Fishing are antidote to savagery, horror and falsehood. Tuten and Brautigan are the bright, dreamy half of the human split personality. The half that will endure. Or so I hope. We on this pebble spinning through cosmic emptiness must live in hope and dream. What else can we do?

Night by Elie Wiesel

There, in a corner of my bookcase, is a book almost too white-hot to touch. The most terrible book I have ever read. The story of one of those concentration camps. After one reading, it will be years before I can take it down to read again, to hold it burning in my hands and read the fire once more. It is a story of such terrible power I feel compelled to ask, Can we human savages ever deserve the redemption we seek?

When I learned my daughter’s school would teach the book to her at age fourteen, I went in to protest. It takes a prepared spirit to read that book, I said, and no child can be ready for it. “But Anne Frank,” the headmistress said, “was just past fourteen when she was sent into the concentration camps.”

My daughter read the book. I could not talk to her about it. I could not say, even in a coward’s voice, that the price of knowing the truth about human selves can be too terrible to pay. That others have paid the price for us, and we must make our lives worth their sacrifice.

I keep that book shimmering in fire on my shelf and look for another conversation to relieve for a moment the unrelievable, and that’s...

Side Effects by Woody Allen

Here is another book that rebels against the encroachment of lies and terror. A lot of baggage to carry for a little paperback full of funny stories. I like best “The Kugelmass Episode” about a magic cabinet that sends Kugelmass off into the pages of a great novel to become Emma Bovary’s lover.

This is a story for voyagers and trout fishermen and far too good, even in my flaking paperback edition, not to keep. I’ll re-read it tonight in bed, beside my wife. Perhaps it will transport us into, oh, Pamplona for the running of the bulls with Jake and Brett and the wounded matador. Or to a steamboat on the Mississippi with the leadsman calling out “Mark twain!” Or maybe to meet a fellow named Rick and a woman named Ilsa in a town called Casablanca. Yes, maybe so…

Goodnight, sweet princes and princesses all. A good night and better reading.