A Passion for Books Read online

  So this is where we were: in Chaim’s living room, whiling away a winter’s afternoon, watching Planet of the Apes. Ordinarily I would have thought it impossible to convince Chaim to spend a few hours watching such a movie. If he could ask about a side dish, “Is this a vegetable for a writer like me?” then what would he say about Planet of the Apes ? But this was an afternoon to be waiting for a phone call. The book we had translated was published and received good reviews, but a few weeks ago we were told it was on the short list for the Pulitzer Prize. There followed the frenzied phone calls to people who are supposed to know about such things, and we kept hearing the same thing from many quarters: after disbelief that Chaim’s book was even being considered, it would be between his book and Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. There followed the weeks of endless conversations about what chance Chaim had, what chance any Yiddish writer had in America—of winning a Pulitzer, of selling well, of being recognized. Who but the people we met on our walks cared about the family life of a rabbi’s wife, of the politics of a European shtetl, of courtyard intrigues in the Jewish section of Vilna? I understood my role very well in these discussions. I was supposed to play the part of the consoler, the assurer, the advocate. Of course they would, Chaim, or at least the more cultivated readers would appreciate you. I honestly didn’t believe it then any more than I believe it now, but I’m a good soldier and I did my duty.

  On this day, we were told, the decision was going to be made. Someone was going to call us—from the publisher or from the committee, we didn’t know which. Continuing to work on the next translation was out of the question; even the usual pointless hand-wringing was too nerve-racking. When I saw in the paper that Planet of the Apes was playing on television that afternoon, I thought it would be the perfect release. This is what America liked, I said, and if he would watch it patiently, he would see that its plot lines were not so different from Chaim’s stories and that the setting was every bit as far removed from Main Street America as the alleyways behind the synagogues of Europe.

  But it was rough going. Explaining the twists of the plot of Planet of the Apes to Chaim—in Yiddish, and in terms he could relate to . . .

  “You see, the woman died because there was a leak in the capsule where she was in suspended animation . . . but they had to, because the space voyage was going to take so long . . . the gorilla (die malpe) thinks he’s as dumb as the humans on the planet because he can’t speak . . . that malpe is a scientist; that’s right, a scientist . . . They turned the other astronaut into a human as dumb as the ones on the planet; that’s what the scar on his head shows . . . No, that’s the malpe’s boyfriend . . . She knows he’s intelligent and can talk, but she’s afraid of . . . yes, that one, the doctor . . . No, that girl didn’t come with them on the spaceship; she’s one of the humans on the planet; Charlton Heston just likes her, that’s all . . . When the doll talks, that shows that people on this planet once talked; why else would they make dolls that talk? . . . No, that’s the real Statue of Liberty; they returned back to earth. Yes, they were going someplace else, but they wound up back on earth a few hundred years later . . . No, that’s the real Statue of Liberty . . . Right, the real one; so the war where everything was destroyed took place on earth, and that’s why Charlton Heston’s banging the water and yelling, ‘You did it, you really did it . . .’ ”

  That’s when Chaim accused the screenwriter of being a Communist.

  “A Communist!?” I said. “What makes you say he’s a Communist?”

  “Because he wants to show that that will be the end of the United States. Absolute, a Communist. And this is what Americans want?”

  “It’s very popular. I think they made two sequels. At least.”

  “Hear that?” he called out to the kitchen. “This is what they like.”

  That’s when the phone rang. It rang several times, and it seemed to me that neither Chaim nor his wife would answer it, and then it occurred to me that they thought I would answer it, that I should answer, as if somehow it was me who had gotten into this impossible situation. I ran into the study and answered the phone. When I returned to the living room, they were waiting and looked at me expectantly.

  “Well, the good news is we beat out Anne Tyler. The bad news is we were first runner-up. We didn’t win.”

  Chaim looked at his wife and smiled resignedly. Who can figure out these people? he seemed to shrug.

  “Who did win?” she asked.

  “That was also a surprise,” I said. “Someone I never heard of— and a book I never heard of. Something called The Color Purple by an Alice Walker.”

  There was a silence for a moment, and then all three of us seemed to be moved by the same idea at the same moment; Chaim said it aloud: “Get the car,” he instructed his wife, “and we’ll go down to Barnes and Noble and see this book.”

  Chaim and I were dropped off on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 18th Street while his wife parked in a lot down the street; we waited for her on the corner. There across the street was the main store, but I knew we weren’t going there; I don’t believe Chaim had ever set foot in that store—and perhaps never in any store that sold books at retail prices. We were denizens of the used-book stores, the “shenk,” he called them—Yiddish for tavern—because we were like drunkards whenever we went book hunting. And, my God, Chaim and I had spent many hours combing through used-book shops in Manhattan, in Boston, and even near Chaim’s summer home in the Adirondacks. We went every chance we could and spent many hours looking and searching. Chaim looked for sets—two volumes of Poe or seven of Balzac. I looked for books and authors I knew about, books I hadn’t gotten when I was taking a course, or perhaps a work by an author whose books I already had, only not everything that author had written—a work in philosophy or the volume of Stephen Jay Gould I was missing. Chaim would look at the books I collected (we would pick a place in the shop where we would place the books we had collected, to be culled from later, and I was in charge of making sure no one walked off with any of them, even though we wound up actually buying only a few of the books we squirreled away) with disgust. “How could you compare this fine three-volume set of the stories of de Maupassant with that garbage by Barbara Tuchman?” he would say. But you’ve got everything Barbara Tuchman ever wrote, I’d answer—in fact, some of her books you have several copies of ! Yes, well, I forget that I have them, he’d say sadly, so I buy extra copies. I had learned long ago not to bother pointing out that he had changed the subject.

  That’s one of the things that all bookaholics share, like a common symptom of a genetic disease. You come across a fine volume and you can’t remember if you have it, or maybe you have it with a different jacket, or maybe in paperback and here is this fine hardcover copy—or is your copy back at home also hardcover? It’s gotten so I can tell when I see that furrowed faraway gaze in the eyes of a customer in a used-book store, having come to a dead stop, that he is trying to conjure up his bookcases in his mind’s eye and remember whether or not he has the book he has found. This is part of the sweet agony that Chaim went through every time he set foot into a used-book shop—and it wasn’t getting any less agonizing. A few times when he had come across a book he wanted, but couldn’t recall if he had it, I remembered seeing a copy on his shelf and said so. Chaim was strangely unappreciative; he seemed to sneer at me. I couldn’t tell whether it was because I was depriving him of this agony I call sweet or he was simply angry at any indication that I was in some way inventorying (and how could I not be coveting?) his books. After that, I just kept my mouth shut.

  Chaim’s wife came down the street and we were ready to enter what we called “the shul”—the synagogue. The Barnes & Noble Sales Annex was, Chaim pointed out, something like an old-world synagogue at that. It had a men’s section and a women’s section—the men looking at the books about sports and airplanes (and sneaking surreptitious glances at the lingerie photography), and the women looking at fiction (and sneaking a peek at the firemen�
��s calendars). And there were the old characters who were always there because they didn’t seem to have anywhere else to go—perhaps sitting and reading an old book or a pointless obsolete textbook they had no reason to be looking at, except for the fact that it was so large and so cheap. And it had a shames—a sexton-like young man, a bit disheveled and distracted, who it turned out was the manager of the store. His name was Walter, and we were the bane of his existence, because Chaim could not buy a book without bargaining with the shopkeeper, and in this case, that unenviable role was Walter’s.

  Chaim would bargain with anyone about a book, even if he found it in a 50-cent bin in front of the Strand (though he never did that with anything else; in fact, I thought he was a generous tipper and particularly broad-handed when it came to money). At first I was always embarrassed by this, but he had gotten me involved in the process and I had to admit that it was part of the game. He’d argue for a discount, then not get it, and then he’d motion me to go to work: I’d tell the dealer that Chaim was a famous Yiddish writer who had fallen on hard times, that he was a scholar who needed the book for research, no matter what it was—while Chaim would stand stoic and hurt in the corner. It usually worked, but not with Walter, and there had been a few difficult moments over the past year when Walter was just a second or two away from calling the store guards from across the street to have us removed.

  We went into the store and saw Walter standing near the cash register. He winced when he saw us and averted his eyes, but I walked up to him, said hello, and asked him where I might find a particular book.

  “What book?” he asked.

  “We’re looking for a book by a writer named Alice Walker. The Color Purple.”

  “I think that’s a new book. You’ll have to get that across the street.”

  I stood there a moment and wondered how to proceed.

  “Across the street. You’ll have to get it—”

  “I know, I know. But the thing is that we can’t . . .”

  “What? I know, he’s a poor Yiddish writer . . .”

  “Look,” I said quietly, “Walter. We want to see this book because . . . my friend just found out he lost the Pulitzer Prize to this book, and we just wanted to take a look at—”

  “This book beat him out of the Pulitzer Prize?”

  I nodded.

  “Wait here.” With that Walter closed down the cash register, walked out of the store, and went directly across the street. I motioned to Chaim, who was standing at the far end of the store, that everything was under control. A few minutes later, Walter came back with three copies of The Color Purple and gave them to me.

  “How much is that?” I asked.

  I was ready to start haggling when he abruptly said, “No charge.” I shrugged and brought them to Chaim and his wife, who I had assumed was being forced to make this trip by Chaim, but it now seemed that she was every bit as eager as we were to see this book. We each retreated to a corner of the store and read.

  It took about two hours, and I’m not certain I’ve ever read a book with such inner turmoil before.

  When I had finished I turned to find Chaim and found them together in a corner of the store, with Chaim being told what was going on in the book. It was apparent that they had not gotten very far into it, but I could see Chaim was stilled by what he was hearing. He turned to me and asked, “What do you think?”

  “I hate to say it,” I said, “but I don’t think we have anything to be ashamed of.”

  “Pay for the books and let’s go.”

  “Already paid for.”

  The three of us left—I nodded to Walter, who seemed to be smiling at me as I walked by—and made our way to the parking lot and into the car.

  The trip back to the Bronx started in silence. I sat in the backseat, but I could feel the thoughts running through Chaim’s mind: Beaten again. Cheated again—or maybe not cheated, but certainly, at least, beaten. It was afternoon and the day was getting dark and cold as we crawled up the FDR Drive. Somewhere around 125th Street, Chaim turned toward me and asked, “So how much did that paskudnyak Walter charge you for those books?”

  I paused and then said, “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well, I told him why we wanted them . . .”

  “To read them there.”

  “Right, and that you had just been beaten out for the Pulitzer Prize by that book.”

  I don’t think I could have outraged Chaim if I had told him I was Stalin’s long-lost bastard child. He was livid and started cursing me in Polish. I tried to calm him down. “No, no, I didn’t say it in those words,” but the damage had been done.

  “Turn this car around! We’re going back and throwing these into his face!” And there were several moments in all the screaming that Chaim made a move to grab his wife’s arm or the wheel and the car swerved a bit, which caused more screaming.

  I guess I understood what I had done wrong—and maybe this was a subtle way of getting back at Chaim for all the times he had forced me into the uncomfortable position of bargaining for him. But he was livid and it looked as if it were going to be a long ride home and an even longer night when we got to the Bronx. Chaim was calling me every curse word in the book and breathlessly swearing I had ruined his life and made everything he had worked for like dirt (things I had heard many times from my mother when my forgetting to buy a container of milk on my way home had had similarly calamitous consequences). We were on the Major Deegan Expressway when, for some reason, I blurted out, “He was blacklisted!”

  Chaim turned toward me and said, “Who?”

  “The writer of Planet of the Apes. He had to write it under a pseudonym because he was blacklisted.”

  Chaim exploded in laughter; it was as if all the energy of his explosion of anger was now erupting in a volcano of mirth. He was bouncing around on the front seat so violently that his wife was having even more difficulty driving than when he was physically attacking her a few minutes earlier. “What did I tell you? Of course he’s a Communist! And he tells me he isn’t a Communist . . .”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t a Communist. I just said . . .”

  But Chaim was laughing that exaggerated laugh in which each “ha!” comes out as a projectile that offers a glancing blow against the head.

  We returned to Chaim’s apartment. I sat in the living room; Chaim’s wife puttered in the kitchen, sullen and disappointed; and Chaim was in his study on the phone. He spent the rest of the night there, taking one call after another. I don’t know if people were calling him (to console him, perhaps, or to rub it in) or if he was calling them, but I could hear him talking into the phone at the top of his lungs, cursing me for telling Walter about why we wanted copies of The Color Purple, and for taking them from him at no charge, and poking fun at me for trying to fool him into thinking the writer of Planet of the Apes was not a Communist. A few times I sauntered to the door of the study and looked in, and if he was talking about Planet of the Apes, he’d smile at me knowingly, triumphantly. And if he wasn’t, I would just go back to the living room and not look in.

  It was hard for me not to hear just about everything Chaim was saying, and I don’t remember him saying anything to any of those callers the entire night about not winning the Pulitzer Prize.

  Bibliolexicon

  Bibliobibule One who reads too much

  Biblioclast One who tears pages from or otherwise destroys books

  Bibliodemon A book fiend or demon

  Bibliognoste One who is knowledgeable about editions, colophons, printers, and all the minutiae of books

  Bibliographe One who describes books

  Biblioklept One who steals books

  Bibliolater One who worships books

  Bibliolestes A book robber or plunderer

  Bibliomancer One who practices divination by books

  Bibliomane One who accumulates books indiscriminately

  Bibliomaniac A book lover gone mad

  Bibliophage On
e who eats or devours books

  Bibliophile One who loves books

  Bibliophobe One who fears books

  Bibliopole One who sells books

  Biblioriptos One who throws books around

  Bibliosopher One who gains wisdom from books

  Bibliotaphe One who buries or hides books

  What Is the Matter with the Bookshop?

  BY A. EDWARD NEWTON

  It is virtually impossible to walk into any used-book shop in the Mid-Atlantic states and not encounter one of A. Edward Newton’s collections of essays about books—and even some books from Newton’s own vast library. One could almost throw darts at the title pages of Newton’s books and be assured of hitting a memorable piece. Here are two of the editors’ favorites—from A Magnificent Farce (1921) and The Greatest Book in the World (1925), respectively—with a cartoon and a list sandwiched in between.

  Some time ago my friend Mr. William Harris Arnold told me that he had written a paper on the welfare of the bookstore. When it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, I read it attentively, and I disagree with his conclusions. As it seems to me that the subject is one in which all who read should be interested, I should like to present my views for what they may be worth.

  Mr. Arnold’s remedy for the situation, admittedly difficult, in which the retail booksellers find themselves is to have publishers grant to booksellers “the option of taking books by outright purchase or on memorandum”—that is to say, on sale, and subject to return. I remember once, years ago, hearing the late Andrew Carnegie say to a body of businessmen that, if he were in a business in which it was impossible for him to tell, at least approximately, how much money he had made or lost in a given month, he would get out of that business. He said that the next best thing to making money was to know that you were not making it—and apply the remedy. Now, if a publisher should establish in any large way the custom of disposing of his publications “on sale,” as the phrase is, I should like to know when, if ever, he could go before his creditors, represented by authors, printers, paper-makers, and binders, and declare himself solvent and worthy of their further confidence.