The View From Her Chair

My mother put buttons in her lamps. Lots of buttons. She and my late father used to go to auctions. All the auctions. They bought a lot of what Dad called, “junk”: dishes and cutlery and furniture, collectibles, antiques, linens, ceramics, picture frames and… stuff. And, yes whenever she saw them, my mother bought buttons. Dad sold the things they bought to supplement his limited retirement income, first at yard sales, then from the building he put up to sell the stuff. They cleaned and polished and painted and made everything nice and then they sold what they’d cleaned.

Mother sold buttons, but she kept more than she sold. She’d seen a picture in a magazine or on tv of a clear glass lamp with buttons in it. It looked pretty. So she filled her lamps with buttons. 

What she did not see was that first the people making these pretty button-lamps put Styrofoam in the center and then scattered the buttons around the all but weightless middle. Not Mum. My mother filled her lamps with buttons. Hundreds of buttons — maybe thousands. Very pretty, but her lamps are heavy. Big lamps to start, then filled with buttons. I mean really heavy. Hard to lift heavy. I’ve carried good sized dogs and toddlers that weigh less than my mother’s lamps.

At some point someone pointed out her mistake. Too late obviously. The buttons were already in there. So many buttons. No point complaining now. Besides, might be quite valuable some day, all those buttons.

“Your inheritance,” she called them.

Actually she has used that joke a lot. She bought new chair a year ago. It’s a really nice chair. Just her size; like doll furniture. Little gray chair. Put a throw-pillow on it — with a brightly colored rooster on it, naturally. Loves chickens. Can’t have too many roosters. Rule of thumb. (On entering her house for the first time the boyfriend of her devoted hairdresser was once heard to remark, “Somebody really loves cocks!”) Now, I’ve sat on the new chair and it is perfectly comfortable other than how close it sits to the floor. Also the arms only come up to my hip not my elbow. I’m short and it’s still too low. Nobody sits in that chair. Like new. Just say you like it. It’s yours.

If you like something in her house — if you like anything in her house — if you admire a vase or a picture (or a button lamp) she says she’ll put your name on it. Be careful though, she may just make you take it. The Nurse’s Aide commented on the antique spoon collection. Went into a bag. Big bag. Went. Don’t protest. Let it happen. Mum’s ninety-two. Just do what she tells you. Take the spoons.

I know what I’m taking when she dies. I want her Tupperware saltine cracker box. It is perfect. Keeps the crackers crisp. She won’t let me have it yet. She likes saltines.  But she’s put my name in it. She goes — I get the Tupperware saltines cracker box, but not before. My inheritance.

Years ago a friend told me that as we die our things are drawn closer, as if by the gravity of the situation. What to do with that bureau -- which we none of us noticed an hour ago? Who will have my china? May we donate shoes? That chair’s like new. Take this. Counterintuitive isn’t it? True though. One would think the end is about letting things go but that is a function of living, or living well, in community, with love. Dying is about what we can reach, see from here, note, fix. Dying is a test of strength, it’s agitation; the body reflexively grasping to slow the inevitable losses. Dying is holding on.

More, when one is ill the scope of things narrows and it matters what is on the nightstand, when the one thing needed isn’t by the chair, that the lamp seems to move further away each day and that the switch isn’t where it should be. The scissors need to be — so. My glasses go — here.

From her chair my mother can see a fragment of leaf or a knot of lint on the carpet a yard away. Usually she notices these things again mid-stride while being helped back and forth between rooms. “What is that?” — dead-stop. This is how heels get stepped on. This is home healthcare bumper cars.

These things matter nonetheless. It matters that the flowers on the cup face forward when it’s put back on the sink, that she reads her newspaper with a bandanna spread across her bosom so as not to get ink on her blouse. It matters that her things are clean and where she expects them to be. There’s a tiny porcelain dish for her pills because she can see them in it and fish them out with her fingers. The pillows on the porch-swing need straightened. That is not where her slippers go, and the left shoe, it just stands to reason, should be to the left of the right one.

It may seem so, but honestly she is not being fussy. She used to be, you understand, fussy. Not now. Back in the day when she was working two jobs and cleaning other people’s houses and dorm rooms and looking after old people and raising her kids and other people’s kids as well, she was fussy about whatever she had the time and energy to fuss about. Hated dirt and disorder unsurprisingly as her days were spent cleaning other people’s messes. She fussed about our appearance and our manners and our intentions as every day she saw other people behaving thoughtlessly, being slovenly, making more work for women like her, more mess to clean up. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Didn’t see it at the time, possibly couldn’t have, being kids and therefore thoughtless, messy, greedy, selfish. See it now though.

And then everything slowed down considerably and her kids were grown and gone and eventually all of her old people died and then she was old and so was he and then he died and she was alone. “ Now I just clean to keep busy,” she told me at the time. It didn’t matter in the same way. Now it mattered because time needed to be made to keep moving. Muscle and bone mattered more than the specific use made of them. Just move. Get on with it. Go on. (Nearer the end and my mother sounds like Beckett suddenly.)

Asked her opinion of what’s to be done “after,” which is the word one uses rather than death, my mother says the most extraordinary thing. There are just the two of us and it is late, already dark for hours. We’ve watched a movie and made popcorn which was probably not a good idea for either of us. Maybe that’s a different night altogether. Nights smear across months and days fall into the same spaces that repeat like pill-cases — and who remembers before this was true? But then we are talking about death and hers specifically and what needs to happen then.

“Do what you have to. You’ll know. It’ll be hard,” she says. She knows whereof she speaks. “You’ll be fine.”

That’s our inheritance.

Who knows how long those buttons will stay in the lamp? Who will want that little chair? Won’t matter. Really never did except, however briefly to her and so to me, to us.

My house is full of books. These are my books. For years now, decades, the assumption has been that should my considerably older husband somehow outlive me (look at me — it could happen) he will ask one of my friends in the used books business to come out to the house with a truck and all the books will go. I’m fine with this. My books matter to me because they are my books. I have excellent taste. Some of my books are valuable of themselves but not many. A number are rare but none belong in a museum. I own books because I read books. I read my books. When I die my books will find other readers or they won’t. I won’t be here. I will not care. I did think my friends might be invited to browse my shelves and take a book in memory of me but now I write that and I blush. What a grim sort of wake that sounds! You know someone’s taking a Quixote they’ll never read because it looked pretty and it was getting late and oh, hell, just pick something. Shiver. No. Sell the lot.

And then my husband takes an unexpected sentimental turn in this our forty-first year together and says no, he would want to keep my books. He says that he would want to come and sit with them and remember me by them and I am more touched than I can possibly explain — but no, right?

And then I remember that I will not be here in this scenario. Exit, stage left pursued by bear. Gone. My books will cease to be my books the minute I cease to be. Then they will be his books and he can do with them exactly as he pleases.

All of the things, our things that are drawn up after us, the things we drag in our wake, what becomes the debris of our passing, matters now not then. This penknife matters to me because it is beautiful and practical and belonged to my late uncle and was given to me by my brother. The object is useful and pleasing but its only meaning comes from having been given away and remembered.

Is this all too obvious? Have I not said something useful even if I’ve said nothing original? 

The nature of my inheritance is such that most of it need never be stated at all. My inheritance, ours, is understood already or it’s wasted. It is in and of us, gifts from our mothers, memories of all those that raised us, made us, loved us, left us. Mustn’t waste it.

And in the meanwhile I buy more books and covet a Tupperware saltine cracker box, and wonder just how many buttons can be in all those big lamps. And now my sister in law Kris puts my mother’s slippers just so and cleans her glasses and puts them where they belong and turns the handle on the mug the right way as, unlike her youngest son, my mother is right handed.

“Do what you have to. You’ll know. It’ll be hard.” I will see to it. We will. We’ll be fine. Take this. Call it a gift. Our inheritance.

Where Did The Day

 Maybe they’re right. I mean, what do I know? Twenty years ago we managed to re-elect a man of such singular stupidity that by the next day it had become a trend for the not so stupid people to apologize online to the rest of the world. Remember that? Eventually there was even a website and a book. I didn’t pose for an apology photo myself. I still remember having watched John Kerry at the convention and knowing we were absolutely going to lose. The podium was less wooden. We were doomed. (Absolutely no point now in reminding anyone, but just for fun, throw your mind back to those good old days and also remember just what a filthy, mendacious, grotesque campaign the other side ran in that one. Doesn’t matter anymore, but just in case one might feel forgiving of ol’ George Jr. or nostalgic for the 2000s.)

How smug I must have felt the day after! I wasn’t happy obviously, but I’d done my duty and voted without enthusiasm for the better man — yet again — and when we inevitably lost I do not doubt I told someone “I told you so,” if not in so many words. 

Imagine my blushes thinking about that now. Arrogant prick. If you will, please consider this my apology for being that guy. Back then I still subscribed to that business of “election cycles” and pendulum swings and the inevitable survival of American democracy. It was easy. We didn’t know any better really, did we? Feels comparatively innocent but maybe I’m wrong and the slope, she was already slippery. I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. I mean I wasn’t exactly young then, but I will say I am SO much older today.

Anyway as I’ve said probably none of that matters now, history I mean. Also embarrassment, apologies, slippery slopes and pendulum swings and Steve Kornacki’s khakis, also politics, elections, democracy, the Truth, not sure what to do with any of that this morning other than ignore it all. Maybe that’s the lesson. Maybe that’s the way. Seems to work for them. 

So I’m not going to read the newspapers on my phone anymore. Just delete those apps. I’m never reading The Atlantic Magazine again, or Huff Post, or Apple News, etc. None of it. No television news either. No CNN, no MSNBC, no PBS News Hour, or Frontline. Nothing like that. I’m changing my car radio pre-selections to those “oldies” stations that just play that one Bruno Mars song every hour. Maybe a country station or two. No more NPR ever. Done.

And no more nonfiction generally unless it’s something safe and apolitical like murdered women — excuse me, “true crime.” All media. New rule. NO podcasts. 

I should just stop reading altogether. If I were to really commit to living like them I should abandon my books if not burn them but I think we all know I can’t do that. Maybe just read dead white men? There are a lot of’em and a number are among my favorites. Fiction anyway, that would seem to be the safest bet if I can’t give up reading entirely. Maybe stick to genre. I can’t even pretend to read Romance without glowing like a hot kiln — embarrassment, not passion, mind. It is all (ALL) just so bad! So maybe more murdered women. Maybe a western now and then. Dickens won’t work. Too much conscience. Maybe try the Bible again. Such a bad book though. And it’s not like most of those people even own one and the ones that do still read with highlighters! Like children! How mortifying.

I’m really not sure how any of this is going to work. I’ve frankly no idea how they do it, how they live as they do. How does one vote for an actual pile of shit, easily the worst man to ever occupy the office, the worst man to be elected twice, and then justify voting for him by saying breakfast cereal costs too much? Eggs? Gasoline?

Doesn’t matter. They did it again, and by a much wider margin and without a doubt this time. Done. And they seem genuinely happy. I don’t just mean the crazies in the red hats, the cultists standing in empty stadiums for three hours in the freezing rain waiting for their messiah who like all messiahs is inevitably late. Fuck them. Fuck all of them. That doesn’t change. No. I mean all the rest, the ones who don’t talk to reporters or pollsters, the ones who pretended to be “undecided” even up to the day. The ones who never went to a rally in their lives. Those are the ones I’m thinking about. That’s the lifestyle I’m after now.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe it’s better. How would I know? Instead of torturing ourselves with rationality and doubt, or for that matter with the true intent of The Gospels and the example of the Saints and so on, why not just ignore any and everything and everyone not, you know, me? Wait! Simpler even. Overthinking this because it’s pretty obvious that self awareness let alone self examination is not a part of what they do ever. See? It’s like I can’t let go even as I try seriously to let it all go.

Look. What I’m looking for is just a way personally to survive the next four hellish years — because who knows if even that rule will still apply? — and maybe not hate my country. They don’t. I doubt very much that they have any but the very vaguest notion of what this country is or was or was meant to be, but the point is that none of that matters to them. Get it? What matters is supposedly “biological men” in girls sports and unisex bathrooms and none of that actually matters to them either. It is really so much simpler than you can imagine. Of that I am finally convinced. Yes, it is a coalition of religious primitives, fascists, capitalists, racists, misogynists, and generic goons who control that party, but there will never be enough of them to win any national office. For that they need the people I’m determined to be like myself hereafter. Why not? Why not join the new majority?

No, I can no more say what they are than I can say who. That’s rather the point. They aren’t the enemy. We know the enemy. One can smell the enemy, see them everywhere. Eventually they will come looking for us. I don’t want to switch sides. I simply want to stop worrying about what’s going to happen now. That’s it. Hasn’t been doing me a bit of good anyway, bad actually for my heart. All I want is to learn to not look beyond the end of my nose except when I’m at the till. I can still be perfectly nice to strangers, have friends of a kind, go out or stay in just as I like. It seems one can have a family, like children, own pets. None of that seems to require even a thought beyond the immediate need, no sympathy beyond the people noted on a short form tax statement.

Defining anything by the negative is always a bad business. Yes, but what ARE you?! But what choice do we really have? They aren’t anyone in particular are they? The last time this happened I remember reading all sorts of statistical analysis and population studies and all that. This time I’ve read about disaffected X and indifferent Y and the loss of traditional coalition members Z. Not helpful. Women voted for the man (!) again. More men probably but doesn’t matter now anyway does it? How does that help? Who is that meant to help?

These people aren’t. That’s who they are. I know that rhetorically that is some lame shit, but here we are. They aren’t. They don’t read. Maybe they read something on their phones but nothing in paragraphs. They watch funny clips of people falling on the ice? Everybody does that though so that’s not probative. They don’t read newspapers or watch the news or read books with un-sunny covers. They evidently don’t do any of the things that have made me personally so well informed as to again be completely miserable this morning. To restate the obvious, they aren’t me or I ain’t them or we’re not better say because they are never going to read this. (“Too long” would be the nicest thing they’d say if they ever did which they never will.) 

What they do, what they did do again and in greater numbers this time, they voted. The argument Bill Clinton made over and over until even I believed him was that if we vote we win because our ideas are better but we just need to vote. So maybe yet again we didn’t. I won’t argue. In fact, I don’t really want to argue any of it anymore. Seems contrary to my whole resolution, argument. You’ll get none to speak of from them, let me tell you. Did you seen the person on the street interviews before the election? I don’t mean with the rally nuts. Those at least are entertaining in a sideshow way. “See a man pull a conspiracy out of his ass! Watch as a grandmother turns the air blue while mispronouncing the name of both the Vice President and the former Speaker of the House!” No, I’m talking local tv reporter, big clumsy mic, lady in a grocery store parking lot, rather shyly talking vaguely about inflation, a man in an old concert T-shirt complaining at a gas-pump. They don’t make arguments. They just state or more accurately misstate the obvious. That’s the ticket.

So let me just try to state the obvious then. Maybe they are right. Maybe don’t think this through. Maybe don’t try to reconcile this catastrophe to history or try to compensate for the staggering loss of all three branches of our government. Just… don’t. They clearly will not be thinking about consequences because they clearly could give a fuck so long as the price of eggs comes down and their gas bill comes down and maybe some “biological” boy who thinks he’s a girl gets kicked to death in a restroom — though honestly? That would just be sad but nothing really to do with anything anyway. I mean, these Trump voters, they’re not monsters you know, most of them. They’re just trying to get by like the rest of us, right? And besides, think about it. Think about that kid’s parents. Aren’t they really better off? I mean honestly, isn’t the kid come to that? So embarrassing. Don’t even like to think about it. 

Think about something else. Who has the time to think anyway? I WISH I could find the time to read! This is way too long. Have you seen the prices at the supermarket?! Somebody should do something. They’re all the same really though, aren’t they? They’re all crooks. No difference really. At least he tells it like it is! Can’t help but like him. At least he’s real, you know? And you don’t get to be that rich without doing something right! But don’t listen to me! What do I know?! Jeez Louise, look at the time. Where did the day do, am I right? 

Ooooowwww, I love this song!

“…there’s not a thing that I would change / ‘Cause your amazing / Just the way you are…”

Those people are so gifted, aren’t they? What is he anyway? He’s so little! Have you seen him dance?! They can all dance, I swear. Me I’ve got two left feet! 

Anyway.

Where did the day go?

A Caricature

 

Miss Hunty James poses for The Portrait of a Lady, honey.

A Caricature

 

The Flutter of Those Stainless Pinions

 By the time a word — any perfectly serviceable, common word like “gratitude” — ends up as calligraphy on scented candles and whitewashed barn slats, it is pretty much done. It’s like picking up a dull knife. Stale as old cake. It’s a shame. It’s a particular shame as it’s a particularly good word, gratitude. (I suppose that no one wants a candle called “shame,” though I rather like the idea as a hostess gift.) As it is, the word now makes one blush to see “gratitude” in the title of a serious book or even at the foot of a letter. All the Oprah of it has not so much dispersed since the 90s as it has soaked and spread into a generalized wet. Local morning show Barbies in minor markets punctuate cooking segments with it. It must be heard in mega church services nearly as often as “Lord” — a word otherwise so archaic as to be abandoned now everywhere but the upper house of Parliament and Bridgerton. It seems everyone is now so very grateful for everything — and to whom? — as to actually be indifferent to context. See? I’m grateful! It’s right there on my travel mug.

I blame Zen. More correctly, I blame all those little old monks and nuns and Tibetan by adoption students from Kansas or Brooklyn who turned us away from Ravi Shankar’s slappin’ sitar and convinced us to sit still. So much sitting still. Not their fault really, but when not suggesting detachment from all of our stuff, they did tend to ask everybody to just sit still and study a blade of grass. And not just study the blade of grass but to be grateful for, I don’t know, the green of it all? (Reminding me of another nearly ruined word when used now in any non-agricultural setting, “cultivate.”)

Pure speculation and probably not helpful because it doesn’t really matter how the word came to be code for sunshine and coffee and puppies and another day cancer-free. What matters more is that it is a necessary word still to understand specifically 19th Century novels, and particularly Henry James — not that he would recognize the word now that it’s been tattooed everywhere.

Not the first word to arise in The Portrait of a Lady. It’s a novel chuck full of good words, but this one didn’t occur to me until I was rereading my way through Isabel Archer’s beaus. So many eager suitors even before the girl comes into her luck, as it were. Every one a gentleman. Every one of them surprisingly responsive to the lady’s charms, including a pretty figure and face, but also a pretty quick wit, as well as character and more will than is usual in Victorian heroines generally. (James never stints on what we might now call “agency” when it comes to his women — even in the face of custom and the expectations of the day, even when they can’t quite do anything about it.) All of these men are attractive one way or another, all possess what James might call “points” to their advantage; money, position in society, refinement, even sensitivity after a distinctly masculine fashion. And yet each potential romance proved incredibly frustrating to read again as a very grown person.

What they all want from Isabel and don’t get is — you guessed it — gratitude. She’s engaging, responsive, kind. She says, “no.” Actually she says, “no, but thank you for asking,” but that is not enough. They are flummoxed because she didn’t say “yes.” They’re indignant moreover because she didn’t say, “YES! Thank you!” It finally occurred to me that all these men were waiting not for the acceptance but the requisite gratitude. I mean, how could she not?!

Kindness confuses. It’s expected. Demanded. But without consent, kindness might as well be a slap in their bewhiskered chops. These guys (a word, to my knowledge, James never used,) are all willing to wait — but only because they assume that “yes” is inevitable. When it doesn’t come, well, that’s just ungrateful. That’s just wrong. It’s stunning.

Not to spoil anything for the reader, but eventually the lady does consent to marry. Not a great choice, by the way, but what the author has rather slyly let us know well beforehand is that making the choice isn’t really where her Fate goes awry. Reading the novel this time, in my very late middle age, I’m pretty sure that for a woman when James was writing, marriage was Fate. The fact that his heroine here might escape it altogether is an anachronistic modern reading. James wrote more than a few unmarried women, but even at their best, this was if not tragic, then at least not devoutly to be wished. And money wasn’t enough to compensate. Spinsterhood was hard. (Widows might be luckier.) What’s wrong with Isabel Archer’s Fate is in the possessive. That this woman thinks it is hers is her mistake.

Though of course it isn’t because ultimately it is. The book famously ends without quite telling the reader what we want to hear. James did that more than once. One of his most modern habits. One of the reasons he’s never been more widely liked, and one of the reasons he’s still widely and closely read. Fate isn’t real. It’s not an actual thing. Maybe when the old Gods still had a dog in every fight and held beauty contests with tragic outcomes and the like, but James didn’t give a snap for classical mythology and he certainly wasn’t beholden to Arcadian plotting or ancient ideals. The only God in James is Henry, and his only religion is his art. Remember, Henry James is never not an American. Outside looking in (maybe through the keyhole.) I suspect that for him this means seeing through things as much as looking at them. Cathedrals are architecture. Gods are false. People are real, and really fascinating if you’re always other — and Henry is the definition of other — and he’s always looking really, really hard.

Among his most arduous tasks as a novelist was to make women real. There were already lots and lots and frankly wagon-loads of wonderful women in novels, and some of the best novels by then were written by women. He appreciated Austen. He loved George Eliot. He didn’t assume he had any special insight, only his art — and that was made from observation and composition. Those were his tools. So when he set to writing women specifically it was in part because he saw them. Think. Name another male novelist even today who spent more time in the company of and listening to women. Doesn’t mean he was by any stretch either a feminist or a sociologist. He was social. What he collected was conversation, confidences, appearances. I don’t know that it’s even fair to say that he liked women, not because he was gay, you understand. Lots of us do, though by no means all, sadly. Still men. He liked company, mixed company as they used to say. Often as not women were the better half of society as he understood it. He owed them his attention, and in his way, characters like Isabel Archer are an expression of — yes — his gratitude.

***

Gratitude isn’t really the stuff of novels though, really more of a poetic theme: Stanley Kunitz in the garden, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry in the field, Jane Kenyon for Donald Hall, Donald Hall for Jane Kenyon and baseball and getting old. The getting older may be the key there. Thankfulness expands as the horizon narrows? The “To Whom?” question seems to trail off nearer the end and nearly every poet who gets to be old becomes a pantheist. (I used to explain late Mary Oliver to new readers as, “went to the mailbox this glorious morning” poems.)

Selling poetry is working at a fruit stand, if the reader will forgive the clumsy metaphor (not a poet, me.) There will always be a few people willing to try something exotic, something bitter or tart, but most people are looking for something ripe, something sweet. Not saccharine — though we have that in stock too (see Rupi Kaur.) 

“ The readiness is all” when it comes to emotion. Poetry gets right in there. “Gratitude — is not the mention/ Of a Tenderness / But its still appreciation / Out of plumb with speech.” See? Dickinson. 

Poetry is what’s wanted when I try to articulate this present moment, as I am at my mother’s house and I haven’t much time just now for novels.

I note that my mother has never been tall. Shorter now. She was plump most of my life. Now she’s as little and soft and vulnerable as a fawn. “I wish your Dad had lived to see me get small,” she tells me. He never did, but I can see it. Every day she seems smaller as I walk behind her as she can’t walk alone now. 

Every day she thanks me for this and that and every day I’m grateful to be here with her.

I’m grateful to be home and not home. I’m in the house I grew up in, doing my part as best I can to help care for the woman who raised me and I’m doing no better than one might expect. I’m not home with my husband in Seattle where I most want to be except here is where I want to be. (Henry James would not approve of the preceding sentences.) 

It’s hard to read in this house. Not a lot of down-time. Had to do my (virtual) monthly book club while I was here and that took some arranging, but it happened. I was grateful for all the help. Cousin Patty came and sat with Mum while I blathered away on my Zoom. My sister had to go back to Texas. First my sister-in-law then my brother got sick so it was a near run thing, getting those two hours to talk about Henry James.

“The debt immense of endless gratitude” as Milton called it, so perhaps that’s the measure of the thing. No matter how common the word now, there’s really no way to reduce the thing to less. 

So for Henry James and his Isabel and “the flutter of those stainless pinions,” for Dickinson and Milton and all the poets, for family and friends and the help of both, and of my fellow booksellers, and my employers for allowing me to be here, and most for the company of my mother nearer the end than the beginning, for being and not being home, I here express my gratitude.

Be Not Afraid, Brah

 “Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” — William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

In the NYT yesterday film critic A. O. Scott wrote with rather blithe skepticism about the Nobel Prize for Literature (and a little less so of Frances Ford Coppola’s new film Megalomania.) “What Good Is Great Literature?” That was the title. 

“Cry ‘havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war!” Right?

Fine. I read the piece end to end and it was not nearly so Philistine as the title suggests. (Do even critics and columnists get to write their own headlines? Even in the New York Times? I always wonder if there isn’t some editorial party whose only real job is goosing up titles. I’m sure it’s a gift, but it often feels like a waiter sticking those horrible birthday cake-sparklers into an otherwise perfectly palatable tiramisu.)

“What good is greatness?” he asks. “The concept has an old fashioned, even retrograde ring.” 

Take those separately, second sentence first, and he’s absolutely right. Conceptually that word “greatness” assumes not just that there must be far more not-so-great by comparison, but also ideas and principles to which the lot probably aspired and only the very few came within a country mile of — to use an old fashioned phrase from my rural youth. The idea of less good writing persists of course, else what’s a freshman essay course for? But just what makes an author not just good or even better but great has never been quite so democratically and hotly disputed as now. 

Good. That’s good trouble. I mean if you happen to be a Professor of English Literature it might not feel great to be alive right now and I genuinely sympathize, but even just within my lifetime there has been SO much work done to loosen the dead hand. SO much. And the results have been a very real boon to literature. We’ve never had such access to all the literature of the world. There are more great translators doing more great work today than ever before. There are more authors, living and dead whose work we can read today than I ever dreamed I’d see in even working in a bookstore.

So is Scott right to suggest that nobody needs a bunch of Swedish academics to hand out those fancy paperweights anymore? (Who still uses a paperweight?) He quite rightly points out that nowadays celebrity, even literary celebrity comes with rewards both financial and personal undreamt of by any writer in history save the occasional Dickens or Twain or Tolstoy — and he’s right to mention that all those old boys were exclusively, well, men. So who needs a Nobel?

And just this morning came the answer. Han Kang won. Scott is also at pains to make sure his readers appreciate that unlike a Pulitzer or a Booker or a National Book Award etc., the Nobel for Literature isn’t awarded for a book but rather for an author’s body of work. The latest recipient has that; a deep and widely respected — and translated — oeuvre. Not everybody gets an oeuvre. And very few writers in history even with one of those gets a Nobel Prize. Does that matter?

Not to disagree with A. O. Scott of the New York Times, but yeah it does. Maybe not to a writer invited to keep a “writer’s notebook” in the paper of record, but to Han Kang? I’m going to say, “yes.” To South Korea? And to folks who have never read her work? To the people like me who read and sell her work? You bet.

The function of regional, national, and international literacy prizes is pretty clear when it comes to getting readers and selling books. Stephen King doesn’t need a prize. Emily Henry doesn’t either. Dr. Chuck Tingle? He’s good. They’ve all achieved celebrity, money, even the kind of fame recognized on morning shows and even TikTok.

Back in the day the comedian Red Buttons used to do a regular routine, particularly at comedy roasts. It was about all the famous people who “never got a dinner,” as in, “Ponce de Leon who said when he discovered the Fountain of Youth said, ‘Where the hell are the paper cups?’ Never got a dinner!” Scott points out that the Nobel Committee, like all such organizations, has frequently missed their chance; as in Vladimir Nobokov never got a dinner! It happens. Graham Green, Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg never got a dinner (Nobel Prize.)

Doesn’t mean they didn’t deserve one, maybe even more than some of the people who did win. (Herta Muller? Bob bloody Dylan?! My list.) But this also doesn’t mean Han Kang won to spite Percival Everitt. My personal favorite for years to maybe win has been the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t thrilled when Annie Ernaux won!

What it did mean when Annie Ernaux won was that we got all her translated books into stock and displayed them in multiple copies with appropriate signage and sold more Annie Ernaux books than I’d have probably been able to hand-sell in my working lifetime. That’s what it means, why it matters. Hell, we even sold a fair number of Hurta Muller and Jon Fosse books when they won and I barely lifted a finger for those Laureates. 

So “What good is greatness?” He asks? Well, way down here where booksellers and librarians and serious and curious readers not interested in the latest Colleen Hoover pulp happen to be, greatness matters still. We want to know. We like prizes. We read reviews. We want to read the best books we can find. We want to discover Han Kang.

The one thing I can pretty much guarantee most of us won’t be doing? Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. 

The Very Mill of the Conventional

 "We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have." 

-- Henry James, The Middle Years 

"The house had a name and a history..."* 

Page four in the Penguin paperback of The Portrait of a Lady and there it is: the longest sentence in Henry James -- at least according to the internet. I asked. Did not know. The funny part? I'd reread that sentence just about a month ago and I never noticed. Flowed right by in a perfectly pleasant way, as did ultimately the first hundred pages, almost before I'd looked up. That long sentence did not at the time seem a specially notable example of James' style or volubility. Turns out it's both. The words "architectural" and "labyrinthine" were used to describe it, also "masterful" and "clumsy." Fair enough. How did it not register as such?

Maybe I'm just used to the old boy. I've been reading Henry James since I first picked up The Turn of the Screw as horror obsessed kid so -- maybe fifty years now? Imagine. Hadn't thought about that until this very moment, honestly. Not a long list, authors I read fifty years ago who I'm still reading now. Longer than most people maybe, but I'm really not that fan who reads through all of the Anne of Green Gables books once a year. Basically I've read Tolkien twice and the second time was because of the Peter Jackson movies. I enjoyed my time with both of those authors, Lucy Maude and John Ronald Reuel, but I'm not a devotee. I do however have my favorites, writers I regularly reread, and Henry J. is definitely on my list. In fact, he's my favorite novelist, probably my favorite writer.

A few months ago I wrote a Staff Recommendation for  The Golden Bowl, by Henry James:

"This is my favorite novel. I've read it seven times. Why? Because it is beautiful and thrilling and I still don't understand why. Basically nothing happens. There's an engagement and shopping for a wedding present. It's perfect."

Then something shocking happened. Never would have predicted it. In three months we've sold seven copies. Seven!!! I'm not being fatuous or snippy. That may be more copies of that book than I've sold in all my nearly forty years of bookselling combined. My very un-Jamesian reaction when I saw the sales-sheet? "Holy shit, Henry! We're a hit!"

Normally I don't tell strangers that The Golden Bowl is my favorite book. If asked I'll own it, but I wouldn't lead with that unless I intended to end the conversation. Ol' HJ tends to shut that kind of giddy exchange of bookish enthusiasms right down. Nobody's fault. He just does not come up in this context that often. 

"Ohmahgawd, I love that book too! What's your favorite book ever?!"

"The Golden Bowl, by Henry James."

"... "

Most people who ask, "what's your favorite book?" are hoping to hear something they recognize if not endorse. We most of us want our opinions reflected flatteringly back in the shining, bespectacled faces of our fellow bibliophiles, readers. Reading is a solitary pursuit and yet for lots of people, myself included, it is the beginning of community. We want to like what other people read. We want other readers to like what we like. We want to like one another. So there's an allowance made for some variation -- some -- and an eagerness to hear about books and authors heretofore unknown to us, but you tell me your favorite book is Atlas Shrugged -- or come to that The Golden Bowl -- you aren't really looking for conversation, let alone community, so much as a platform or a soapbox. 

One tries not to be that guy. One really do.

Recently we had our semi-annual Employee Shopping Day. Our discount goes up ten percent on nearly everything. Back in the day we would all hoard up books to be purchased at the better price, but now most titles aren't stocked in a depth that allows for squirrelling away copies for weeks at a time. Fewer books. Fewer booksellers. Smaller stacks. The fact is that I am now too old to be bothered waiting for an extra 10%. Why wait? I could die. So come the day, instead of a cart, I carried my three books straight to the register. My purchases that day? Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright, The Joyful Song of the Partridge, by Paulina Chiziane, and a very fancy, almost vulgar new hardcover of The Portrait of a Lady, (fancy fonts and shiny silver and pink filigree on maroon boards. Looks like the act curtain for a not entirely tasteful musical adaptation that will close faster than the premiere of Guy Domville.)** I'd read just enough of the first two novels to know I wanted to not just finish them but to own them. That last one? The Portrait of a Lady I needed like an extra thumb. Why on earth buy yet another copy of that novel? In addition to a volume in the Library of America James I've collected since that project was undertaken, I have somewhere a truly hideous academic hardcover of The New York edition of the same, and at least one ancient Oxford World Classic and or a Modern Library.

And yet I bought that tarted-up hardcover Portrait anyway. Started rereading it that same day. Forgot just how good it is. Took it with me to Pennsylvania on my annual trip back to see my elderly mother. Read just a little bit every night before bed. Before I'd even come back to Seattle I'd decided to make The Portrait of a Lady my next selection for Brad's Big Fat Book Club, my virtual monthly group chat. My selection, I'm pleased to say, was met with unexpected enthusiasm.  Good for us.

Truth is I'd never heretofore considered reading James in the Book Club. Unlike some of my other major enthusiasms like Dickens and Boswell, I hadn't much confidence in convincing even my friends to read Henry. I have been talked into a number of great books in my time and I have managed to persuade a number of otherwise perfectly indifferent and contented souls to read bits of Montaigne and Lamb and even the novels of Ivy Compton Burnett. So why should Henry J. be the one I couldn't sell for love or money?

The man has a reputation. It's mostly to do with those long sentences. In his autobiography G. K. Chesterton describes HJ's conversation as, "graceful groping." It's that, people's impatience at the idea of that. Henry James does many things exceedingly well and some, in my opinion, perfectly. He does not get on with it. For a lot of people that's a problem. 

If we are taught at all still to read English poetry, we hopefully learn first where and when to breath. Then emphasis, yes? (Verbs are good.) That's the trick of the whole business, isn't it? An actor's reading I admit but it has served me well. There are other ideas, other aesthetic considerations, but then I confess I've never really understood those even when they've been explained to me. Using words to do something other than mean what they're meant to has always seemed to me like having an elephant or a chimpanzee paint. I get that there's a novelty there, even some potential point to be made about... art? empathy? -- but ultimately it's like teaching a chicken to play the piano; not really the means to any end beyond that, is it?  

Prose literature is no different to me, at least in so far as to how I believe it's meant to work. What do Chaucer and Shakespeare and Joyce and Beckett -- hell, come to that add even a circus acrobat, in translation no less, like Laszlo Krasznahorkai to the merry band -- what do all great writers have in common? Read them aloud and see. Breath. Literature is as much breath as it is ideas or it isn't art, it's science and philosophy and polemic and agitprop, alphabet soup and graffiti. All but that last are legitimate uses of language I should think -- few things are as consistently banal, repetitive, and ugly as tagging -- but I personally need the sound of a recognizably human voice. Breath. A heart beat. Life. Sense.

Say what you will about the obscurity of James' vocabulary, the density of his language and his consistent modification and refinement of even the simplest declarations with all manner of dependent clauses, conditions, and contingencies, read his prose aloud and it breathes. Reading James, particularly late James like The Golden Bowl or for example his last unfinished memoir, The Middle Years, it would not be unreasonable to think, "Nobody talks like this. Nobody ever said these sentences aloud." But  you'd be wrong. James said them exactly this way. He dictated all his later books to a secretary -- with punctuation. This is then exactly how James talked, how he thought, the way his breath came. 

It is unlike the way we talk now, mostly. That's true. Increasingly we don't even want to talk if we can text. All to do with time, I should think. We seem to think there's less of it every day. Also? What we usually mean to convey isn't frankly very complicated. Kiss. Eggplant emoji. Shocked emoji. Laughing emoji. And ghost emoji. This isn't just something Henry James would not understand, it is the antithesis of everything he did and was and believed. Don't have to agree, but it is what makes reading him such a distinct pleasure; the time he takes, and the care is how he makes his meaning.

Also? He's funny. Honestly. People forget. Or they've never read The Portrait of a Lady.

But then there are the people who have read Henry James. Not always a good thing.

My generation had many great writers who were ruined for us by the indifferent teaching of usually their shortest novels. Length. Leave it to people answerable to lesson plans and semesters to reduce art to length. Poor Edith Wharton! Great writer. What did we read? The grim rural tragedy of Ethan Frome. George Elliot? The grim rural tragedy of Silas Marner. Charles Dickens? The grim urban tragedy of Hard Times. And our Henry? Did the man ever talk to children? The only examples we have, which may well be apocryphal, are all funny stories like Chesterton's again wherein James tries to give some urchins pennies to buy candy but then explains himself until they run away in confusion, much to his shock and disappointment. So, yeah, ask teenagers to read Henry James. Explain to most pimpled pubescents why The Turn of Screw is a masterpiece of ratcheting psychological horror or why Daisy Miller is a heartbreaking story of thwarted youth. Go on. Mention "thwarted youth." I'll wait.

It seems this sort of thing hardly happens anymore and I can't say that the world is any the worse for it. Those of us who love the great 19th Century novel tend to shake our shaggy gray heads sadly at the falling off of literacy and art. Rather our assignment now, shaking. The reality is that there have been at least two generations (three?) since my own who have come to maturity with a whole age-specific literature carefully calibrated to their every developmental requirement and they are every bit as indifferent to literature and art as were the majority of my contemporaries in my rural Pennsylvania high school, despite the theories of Education Majors and Library Scientists. (No one as endearingly confident in their evangelism, bless 'em, optimists all.) Bluntly readers read. Most don't. Most who do don't read Henry James. So what's worse really? Forced to read Silas Marner or never heard of Silas Marner? Same.

Most of my parents' and grandparents' generations read shit too, if they read at all. Harlequin romance and Don Pendleton, and before them Elinor Glyn and Owen Wister, and so on back through the annals of popular fiction, Philistinism, and the predictable disapproval of the rising generations by the passing. 

Even Henry James had a pretty dim view of his chances as a popular artist. 

"You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all--not even yourself.”

He knew.

Which is not to say that he isn't fun. He is. Never more so perhaps than in the book I've picked for the Club this time. Why I picked it, remember? I'd forgotten myself how well this one starts even as our heroine is orphaned! The charms and attraction of Isabel Archer are far more obvious than any to be found in The Golden Bowl's Maggie Verver & Co. Isabel is one of literature's most appealing heroines, not least because her story is not altogether a happy one. Fresh and sharp and surprisingly determined to dictate her own terms with life to whatever extent she can, the Lady in James' Portrait is endearing in a way many of his major characters tend to be. She's young. She's intelligent. She's curious. The world is as it were all before her. Unlike so many of her contemporary fictional heroines, she's neither insipid nor dull nor moony with romance and sex. The people she meets are interesting if not always altogether what they seem, and isn't that always better for us too? When we involve ourselves then with Isabel Archer (somehow always both names in my head) we aren't simply interested in her, we want for her all she rather inchoately wants for herself. Her pleasures and fortune we share. Her disappointment hurts us too. She is real. She breathes.

“You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.”

Interesting to me that when I quote from this novel I seem to be quoting mostly older characters rather than our young leading lady. She says pithy things. People do, particularly in Henry James. But then very grown persons and very small children tend to the quotable more, don't you find? (Won't meet many toddlers in a Henry James novel and that is just as well. Their general level of conversation is not reliable.) Isabel thinks very well and says well what she means to, but really it is the author who speaks to us most directly. This is what makes Henry, so modern in so many ways from his psychology to his contempt for conventional romance, perhaps the last great practitioner of the novelist's direct address. Later very clever writers like Proust and Gunter Grass would find interesting ways 'round that by then quite dated convention, but Henry tells as much or more than he shows. He is therefore in direct line back to all the Victorians, to Fielding and Richardson, and on.

That is the joy of the thing, that Henry James has much to say. He has characters to say much of it and very well indeed. That is one of the conventions of his fiction. Even the least articulate character speaks to us in a characteristic rather than an eccentric or exaggerated way (see Dickens) because every character is of a class and a time to do so. Leisured people need not be particularly bright, or educated, but the writer who uses them has in them all the time in the world to put them into the society of others equally unoccupied by anything other than emotion and afternoon tea. We know that as a critic Henry James was the admirer of all sorts of writers who did not write about rich American bankers, art collectors, lords and ladies, country houses and rented villas in Italy. James chose to write about the people he chose to live among largely so that he might write the way he did -- and eat well at other people's tables more nights than not. He liked these people and the society of these people for the same reason he wrote about them: they talked and said or did not say what they meant but nearly always intentionally. What a thrilling departure that must have been from the bluestockings and New England Mandarins among whom he was raised. Those people meant every fucking word. Delicacy, irony, suggestion, nuance -- none of those are really American, are they? (Henry was from a family of great talkers and writers himself, come to that, but it's worth noting that his father and his brother and even his beloved if distinctly neurasthenic sister were all talkers at people. Henry listened more than he talked and wrote more than he generally did either. For all the spoofing of his talk and his style, no one ever suggested that the man was a bore. He might be boring occasionally, and trying in his syntax bless him, but his manners were perfect.)

“Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was.”

And in the balance and mordancy of that sentence is nearly all of Henry James, for our purposes anyway. I intend for the Book Club that we should have a ball. It's right there to be had in nearly every lovely long paragraph of The Portrait of a Lady, in every witty rejoinder, eventually every wicked deed, every mystery.

There are of course all sorts of interesting things to discuss in the fiction of Henry James and in his biography and times. We may well. I find him strangely irresistible, this rather virginal, obviously queer bachelor, scribbling away, then dictating some of the most complicated sentences in English prose. I like his barely disguised prurience and his hatred of vulgarity and cruelty and cant. I enjoy that he meant to reform no one and correct nothing but literature itself. I appreciate his preoccupation with the private thoughts of the passionately reserved English and their often bumptious but ever so slightly better intended American cousins.

That "mill of convention" by the way? He never tried to stop it. He was fascinated by the works. He never suggested it ought to be stopped turning. He watched, as he watched everything, with great sympathy and curiosity but with no thought to improve it's motion or question it's necessity. His intentions were, in their way, pure, as probably was his person. 

And really, no one ever made more books or better art from intentions than did dear Henry James. That is really where every book starts. What is the intention? What were her intentions? His? And no one ever had a sharper eye for the distance between “... the high brutality of good intentions ...” and the actual. That's where the man lived. Glad of the chance to spend some time there with le Maitre, and to bring friends. He loved company. Though I'm sure he would be shocked by our language and want of tact. 

And by how few buttons we all seem to require now. I'm quite sure he'd notice the brevity of our buttons.

*Here's the whole thing:

"The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night’s hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell’s wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodelled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain: bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he knew all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances—which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork—were of the right measure."

** Guy Domville was James' 1895 theatrical flop. The author was jeered and booed. The show did not run.