The Books
Sometimes, late at night, when I’m browsing the thousand or more books on the shelves in my father’s study, I can hear them, the books, calling out to me. “Oh! Oh!” they say. “Pick me! Pick me!” And no matter what their personalities are inside, still there’s that moment of pride in them when I open them up, that little whisper of thanks. Even Finnegan’s Wake, which tries to act like it couldn’t care less if anyone reads it — as if by opening it I’m interrupting an important conversation among insiders (“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to … May I help you, lad? Are you sure you’re in the right room, little boy?”). But say what it will, when I slap it shut I can smell its musty sigh, feel its dejected binding sag.
Most of them are storytellers, young and old, and keep with their own kind. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare — the Norton and Riverside editions — lie on the bottom shelf and anchor the rest. Flannery O’Connor’s Collected Works sits comfortably (though with a slight air of superiority) beside The Collected Stories of Carson McCullers. The Iliad and The Odyssey press against each other, comparing page counts. The giant twins Norton Anthology of British Literature Vol. 1 and Norton Anthology of British Literature Vol. 2 laugh at all the other page counts, while directly below them a row of black Penguin Classics guffaws at them and mumbles, “Dilettantes.” To the Lighthouse, by an unfortunate but common twist of fate, is wedged between Ulysses and The Sun Also Rises, both of which flex the fibers of their pulp: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan,” says one; “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton,” says another. To the Lighthouse stares out the window of the study to the sea, projecting itself away from the whole brazen, testicular race of the English Language.
All the books, however, share some degree of distrust for the rogue gang in the high, far-right corner of the study — out of reach of children, though I am long since grown enough to reach them — whence come insults, screams, snorts, burps, farts, jokes about farts. The Minimalists and Postmodernists and Post-Hermeneutics: Naked Lunch, White Noise, Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme, Gravity’s Rainbow, Lost in the Funhouse. “You stiff turds!” they shout. “Fuck off! If we could pee we would pee on your dust jackets! Dickless fuck-balls! Ha, ha! Look at how we mix shit up! Fuck off!”
Shakespeare laughs knowingly and thinks, O youth. Moby Dick thinks, Aye, I know what ye mean, yet ye do scare me. Cathedral, waking from a drunken slumber, says, “Tell me what’s going on, would you please tell me, please?”
The Big Socially Conscious Nineteenth Century novels, however, harbor a deep fear for them. Anna Karenina (the Constance Burnett translation), Bleak House, The Scarlet Letter, among others. Gradually, by fractions of an inch, they try to move away from them. They point to the one that rules them all, the Oxford English Dictionary, which sits on a stand in the middle of the room, always open.
“Stop!” they plead. “Have respect for that, at least!”
But the gang replies, “Blah! Fuck off! But thanks for the words!”
Over on a table across from the shelves sit stacks of young books, magazines, literary journals, strewn about at random. They listen with interest to the bickering and await their places on the shelves. Some of them are distracted by Cien Años de Soledad, which sits in a corner by the window and from time to time says with confidence, though in a language most of them can’t understand, “You aren’t the only ones with a voice.”
