A round of memories.

“The binaries of the modern moment don’t suit a lot of lived experience,” said Samantha Power. The former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, was talking to Mitchell Kaplan, proprietor of Books and Books in Miami, on his podcast, The Literary Life. I earmarked Power’s formulation for my commonplace book as soon as I heard it, for it is a succinct, precise diagnosis of the disease that threatens the health of our body politic, to say nothing of the minds that inhabit it. But it’s what she said right afterward that has me kept me thinking about it for the past few weeks.

Power was speaking with Mitchell about her most recent book, a memoir called The Education of an Idealist, which traces her journey from early childhood in Ireland to adolescence in America, high school in Atlanta, college, and careers as war correspondent, activist, and diplomat. While her understanding of the mismatch between our penchant for binary modes of apprehension and the polymorphous realities that ever elude their grasp has clearly been shaped by her professional life, it was the way that, in conversation, she connected it to her childhood that spoke to me most tellingly.

The binaries of the modern moment don’t suit a lot of lived experience. Of course that’s true when you’re dealing with big policy debates, and what to do about ebola or climate change, and the incommensurables of debates in diplomacy or in government, but I’ve thought about it a lot in the context of the pub as well . . .

Why the pub? Because when she was a young girl her father would take her along with him to his favorite haunt and set her up in a special corner where she would read her books and generally entertain herself while he drank with his buddies. It’s a time she clearly treasures in memory, and she conveys it with a sense of warmth and remembered security that belies the evidence of what, as she herself puts it, is on the face of it “Exhibit A of how not to parent.” Things are complicated, she learned early in her education, and it’s a lesson the world would continue to teach her on larger and more historical stages as she grew up.

In any case, the child-in-pub scenes Power described were familiar, even friendly, to me. Although my mother never likes to hear me say it this way, I grew up in a bar, the one our family owned during my formative years, and that experience shaped, in many, mostly happy ways, the childhood from which—to employ a handy phrase gleaned from this week’s rereading of Albert Camus’s The First Man—I never recovered. I’ve been thinking about that time a lot lately, recalling it actively in conversation with my father during the restless nights we spend together now while we await, with hope beyond hope, my mother’s return home from her stint in a rehabilitation facility, where the hip she fractured in a fall, a few weeks short of her ninetieth birthday, is slowly mending, and she is gamely beginning to put one foot in front of another again. 

The bar is a good subject for us to talk about; the recollections engage us, and my questions about how he came to open it—the partner he ran it with, the physical layout of the place, the lunch menu (my mother cooked), the quantity of beer sold each month—animate his worry with effort and specificity (“every dish on the menu was a dollar”; “325 cases”). The customers who populated it—business people from Reader’s Digest and other local firms at lunch; electricians, plumbers, postmen, laborers from four to six; college students at night and on weekends; elderly card players on Saturday afternoons—were like a big stock company, who took the stage at their appointed hour and carried the show along. There were stars, too, of course, like the state trooper who was the best pistol shot in the nation, and who drank martinis until his ruddy complexion turned beet purple, and the friend for whom our home—an apartment down the street about a half-mile from the bar—was always open, and who sat at our kitchen table every Sunday morning to drink a glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream as a sort of benediction for the week ahead. 

Sometimes, early those Sunday mornings, my sister and I would come into the living room to find a strange young person or two asleep on the floor, my folks having ferried them home at closing time because they needed the support. One beneficiary of such largesse repaid it with a copy of Bringing It All Back Home, a just-released album by Bob Dylan, which was appreciated as a gesture, even if “Gates of Eden” sounded squeaky to ears accustomed to the buoyant swing of “I’ve Got the World on a String.” Others acknowledged gratitude to my parents’ general good will some years later, when they, from a perch at the bar of some local restaurant, would quietly pick up the check for a dinner I was having with a date, leaving the waiter to deliver the surprise; it was hard for me to explain. What I know now is this: at that bar of ours a large, loose family coalesced around a core of generosity big enough to overlook—and when needed embrace—all the frailties and foibles and failures that make lived experience more complicated than any simple scale of judgment can reflect. The bar was closed one day a year: December 25. When we finally moved from an apartment to a house, Christmas day would find 150 or more people traipsing through its front door from morning to night to share—and partake—of the spirits of the season. I’m not exaggerating: I’d sit on the stairs and count them all. 

Out of all this, only one photograph I am aware of: a black-and-white snapshot of my father posing behind the bar, festooned with holiday decorations. What’s left are stories, and memories. Even the dates are hazy, but I can bookend them with two vivid recollections. When people ask me the iconic memory question, “Where were you when you learned JFK was shot?”—yes, I am dating myself—I can recall exactly. I was at the bar, having walked there from Saint Thomas Aquinas school; we’d had a half-day of classes because it was the day of the week on which the nuns devoted themselves to religious instruction of our public school contemporaries. When I opened door a pall was on the lunch time crowd, all eyes glued to the small television set above the juke box at the other end of the room. I sat absentmindedly on a stool at the point where the bar turned and made a corner for the cigarette machine. I tried to process what I was hearing. I was eight years old.

Fast-forward a little more than four years to the night of January 20, 1968, when I was in the bar with hundreds of others watching what would be called the college basketball “Game of the Century,” between two undefeated teams, the UCLA Bruins, led by Lew Alcindor (later to become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), and the University of Houston Cougars, led by Elvin Hayes. The game was televised from the Astrodome, and it is to what we now know as March Madness what the Iliad is to literature; or something like that. The game was close all the way, and I remember my disappointment at Houston’s two-point win; but I remember more vividly the scores of people swirling in the room, heads turned to a maybe slightly larger, but still small, television, while I stood opening one long-neck beer bottle after another on the opener screwed in under the bar, all night long. I’m guessing my father moved more than 325 cases that month. 

Six years later, the phone rang in my college dorm room. I was surprised to find Richard Murphy, the Irish poet with whom I was taking a creative writing course, on the other end. “Congratulations,” he said. “For what?” I asked. “That poem you dropped off; the one about the bar.” “Thank you,” I said, “it’s kind of you to call.” “It’s splendid,” he continued. “I hope you don’t mind, but I just read it over the air on the BBC. They asked me to do a half-hour of American poetry. I started with Walt Whitman, and I ended with you.” 

I didn’t know what could
be learned in the way men drank
and talked and smoked, my father
wouldn’t be quite so frank
with a little kid, I was
only supposed to learn
in school. He never thought
my mind would later turn
to the smoky scenes he set,
while I sat in some nook
in back and set my own,
eyes glued to another book.

I was speechless on my end of the phone, and Richard invited me to meet him, yes, in the student pub for a whiskey. I’m still tickled by that call: it remains the highlight of my intermittent writing life. But more important to me now is recalling the feeling of the days the poem inscribes, the same feeling Samantha Power evoked in talking of her time in her father’s wayward but welcome orbit. No binary weighing of good or bad can capture it, and even verse is hard-pressed to describe its enduring emotional radiance. What’s left of such childhood quandaries are not documents but memories, past time shaped into tales like those I’ll prompt my father to tell me again tonight when he can’t sleep, the ones I’ve heard on hundreds of occasions but am newly thirsty for as they threaten to fade away, stories that hang over our lives to constellate once lived experience that is as distant from the present moment as the stars.

Rhymes on my grandmother’s 100th birthday.

Time came with you on the immigrant ship
The wished-for century of luck and hope
You carried within you the length of the trip

A resilient, intricately coiled rope
Whose strength has served you for a hundred years.
Just like you, grandmother, to take the trope

We use to celebrate and offer cheers
And make it literally, day by day;
In my eyes that is how your life coheres

Across clever decades that swept away
Worlds your grandmother and grandfather knew.
No map-scaling chronicle can convey

The intimate history you labored through,
Placing hours like stones in time’s long dry wall
Never, by nature, either fast or true.

From San Marco in Lamis you recall
The distant accident that led you here:
A church’s construction, its ceiling’s fall—

The story finally becoming clear
After I’d listened for the dozenth time;
Family inheritance is slow by ear.

The threat of punishment without a crime
Alarmed your father, who was forced to flee:
He had warned the pastor that sand and lime

Would need a few days to dry properly;
The pastor, insisting that God knew best
Intoned a novena despite the plea

That the plaster would never stand sound’s test.
Two faithful perished in the broken church;
Your father left home to escape arrest

Warned by the mayor of the pastor’s search,
With caribinieri, for an earthly blame.
A wife and family, left in the lurch,

Waited out wild fortune till it grew tame.
He made his way to Canada from France,
And on to America; then you came.

All drama settles into circumstance
Depositing silences in its wake
For the gods speak quickly in tongues of chance

Spinning new narratives to overtake
The foreseeable future’s universe.
Then—lucky? unlucky?—we’re forced to break

The past’s long sentences; the present’s terse,
Barking out an epigrammatic fate
Whatever long futures our fears rehearse.

On the ear of a child, seven or eight,
The present’s language made its blunt demands,
Rewording the world the senses relate,

Stripping your girlhood of the dreamed commands
A heart can issue to its native tongue;
Immigrant muses must have strong hands

For the soul’s faint poetry’s too far-flung
From the given body of the here-and-now,
On whose skeleton homesick hopes are hung.

To such formulations you’d never bow,
Your words have been tempered to harder steel
And tuned to what keynotes the years allow.

Through accented evenings, memories peal
To chase the dull hearing that troubles you;
Your voice rings from its weathered campanile

Tolling old stories, a spirited few,
For your spirit has nowhere else to go:
Your voice hoards the life that your limbs outgrew.

I sit and listen: you, fortissimo,
Deliver the opera years recast
In age’s lonely oratorio,

One long melody that your voice holds fast
And sings as if rattling off prayers by rote,
Raveling the aria of your past

Through joyful and sorrowful anecdote—
Familiar tales of rehearsed commotion
That trace the character which underwrote

A mother’s, a daughter’s, and a wife’s devotion
In decades of domestic mysteries;
Your tales are the relics of spent emotion,

Worn beads strung together in rosaries:
The time you deflected your father’s gun
From the sightline of anniversaries;

A laboring marriage at last begun
And then your nine children, alive with need.
Flour by hundred weight, coal by the ton,

You pile up numbers with an easy speed
Meant to impress me, as indeed it does.
How many more stories are there to feed

My grandchildish appetite for what was?
But of course you keep speaking for your own sake,
Cutting up my questions with a buzz

Of talk to cover the hours’ humming ache.
Legacies, finally, are left to words,
And age tells the truth its heart can’t break:

What life comes down to is a prayer in surds,
Blind faith professing our days are gods,
Though they scatter from us like skittish birds;

We lift a melody against time’s odds
Till it’s lost in the plainchant of the spheres
To which all memory finally nods.

Tonight, unsleeping, you will count your years
In darkness, awaiting dawn’s bulletin;
Then move to a window as new light clears

The space in thin air where our days begin.

The writer who made me want to write.

Upstairs in my parents’ house, in a room off what was, in our teenaged years, my sister’s bedroom, are the remains of the library I assembled through my first twenty-odd years. The rows of spines on the two walls covered with shelves are riddled with gaps, representing in absentia books and authors that traveled with me as I established my own households across the subsequent decades. I stood in the room last night, reviewing my early readerly enthusiasms and the flotsam and jetsam of seas of assigned reading. There were many mass-market paperbacks, among them John Barth’s Giles Goat Boy, Stanley Elkin’s Boswell, and Ishmael Reed’s The Free-Lance Pallbearers; several volumes by Jimmy Breslin and other more literary, less incisive journalists; a row of John McPhee’s modestly virtuosic forays into the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the cultivation of oranges, the building of bark canoes, and other assorted natural phenomena and human arts; a hardcover copy of Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry, which I’d always treasured, perhaps because I was its diligent student. In what seemed a separate chapel, there was an altar to the memory of the Beats, with Kerouac devoutly represented by an extensive array of candles, but Ginsberg and Corso and lesser lights still faintly flickering nearby. 

Older volumes—the letters of Henry Adams, dutiful secondhand assemblages of Dostoevsky, Henry James, Conrad (including The Rescue: it’s been there for five decades now, still, alas, unread), curiosities of Melville’s career overshadowed by the whale—added flavor to the stock. My mother and I spent many wonderful afternoons back then frequenting library book sales, and no remotely intriguing volume eluded my grasp; consequently, the collection I surveyed resembled an old stamp album, each book an emblem of a voyage envisioned, many of which I never took, the whole room exuding the air of a old volume of brittle-edged, yellowing pages. 

The section of shelf I lingered over longest contained about two dozen books by William Saroyan, the American author of Armenian descent—a pedigree he referenced regularly in his work, and which provided a good deal of the material for his stories and reminiscences, especially in the early years of his career—whose heyday ran from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, a period in which he was astonishingly prolific, publishing volume upon volume of stories, plays, and novels. His most famous works—the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Time of Your Life (with characteristically endearing and perverse bravado, Saroyan refused the award), the autobiographical story collection My Name Is Aram, and the novel The Human Comedy, the latter two, with their seemingly effortless evocation of the fledgling emotions of children, works perfectly pitched for young readers—date from this decade of prodigious (albeit sometimes uneven) inspiration, which found him for a short time mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway and Steinbeck. But several other titles from this period were also at hand as I went through my collection one by one: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), which brought his first fame; Inhale and Exhale (1936); Three Times Three (1936); Little Children (1937); The Trouble With Tigers (1938); Love Here Is My Hat (1938); My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939); Peace, It’s Wonderful (1939); Razzle-Dazzle (1942).

His meteoric rise began with The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, a story collection which opens with a tale called “Seventy Thousand Assyrians.” Actually, it’s more a narrative than a tale, recounting the author’s observation of national mood and human nature as he goes to a haircutting school in San Francisco for a bargain haircut. I don’t think it was the first prose of Saroyan’s I read—I’d place a big bet I began with the autobiographical stories of childhood gathered in My Name is Aram, or his novel of growing up in California during World War II, The Human Comedy—but I got to it pretty soon, and the insouciant swagger of its first paragraph captures the quality that made me eager to read all of his work I could:

I hadn’t had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work. You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party. We barbarians from Asia Minor are hairy people: when we need a haircut, we need a haircut. It was so bad, I had outgrown my only hat. (I am writing a serious story, perhaps one of the most serious I shall ever write. That is why I am being flippant. Readers of Sherwood Anderson will begin to understand what I am saying after a while; they will know that my laughter is rather sad.) I was a young man in need of a haircut, so I went down to Third Street (San Francisco), to the Barber College, for a fifteen-cent haircut.

“Seventy Thousand Assyrians” is about a writer at work—about being a writer in the world, engaged in a process of translating people and pleasures and passions, small events and big ideas, into prose for the sheer exuberance of expression.

I want you to know that I am deeply interested in what people remember. A young writer goes out to places and talks to people. He tries to find out what they remember. I am not using great material for a short story. Nothing is going to happen in this work. I am not fabricating a fancy plot. I am not creating memorable characters. I am not using a slick style of writing. I am not building up a fine atmosphere. I have no desire to sell this story or any story to The Saturday Evening Post or to Cosmopolitan or to Harper’s. I am not trying to compete with the great writers of short stories, men like Sinclair Lewis and Joseph Hergesheimer and Zane Grey, men who really know how to write, how to make up stories that will sell.

By making so much of his writing about its own performance, by animating it with the brio and intoxication that fuels the imagination, by not looking back to second guess himself but rushing headlong into the next story or drama, Saroyan filled my adolescent soul with a sense of possible vocation that has haunted me ever since.

I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language things they already know. I am merely making a record, so if I wander around a little, it is because I am in no hurry and because I do not know the rules. 

The urgency of utterance, the liberty of creativity, made Saroyan’s early work crackle like fireworks; sometimes it was breathtaking, sometimes just a fizzling without definition, but it was always colorful, and it made the promise of a writing life seem like a dream one could make come true. There have been periods across the years when I was close enough to realizing it—with a small pile of pages as evidence—that I am glad I chased it, however intermittently. 

As for Saroyan himself, after his initial explosion across the literary and theatrical sky he more or less faded away as a force to be reckoned with, although his ability to charm readers was never entirely lost. The best books of his later years—Letters from 74 rue Taitbout (1969); Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon (1973); Obituaries (1979)—are memoirs about the process of memory, and delightfully desultory. They were on that shelf in my parents’ house, too, until I took them home with me today. His familiar voice on the page, recollecting, with diffidence, happy accidents and squandered chances, putting together sentences to shape his presence in the past and his passing interest in the present, helps me remember myself as I found it in the pages of his early writing, when he wrote like a boy waving at the world in confident expectation of a glad response, until the day—when was it exactly?—it stopped waving back.

Late at night with my mother’s favorite books.

I sit in my parents’ living room in the wee small hours of the morning. It’s dark except for the illumination provided by the large television that is my father’s constant companion as he dozes and wakes in his reclining lift chair, ruminating, I can only suppose, on his 91 years as pain and discomfort circulate through his increasingly frail mortal coil. He is keeping vigil for my mother, his wife of nearly 70 years, as he waits and hopes for her to come home from rehab, where she is recovering, first falteringly and now with some hopeful momentum, from a fractured hip. 

To my right, and behind me, are bookshelves built, before I was born, by my mother’s father. My dad not being a reader, the books that fill them are entirely hers, and as I sit in quiet companionship with him, I trace along the spines a map of her interests and attentions, interests and attentions foreign to the world of her Italian immigrant father whose carpentry still holds them. I remember him as a silent presence handing me scraps of wood to nail together intently as he toiled more productively in his workshop. He spoke very little in Italian and less in English, smoked Parliament cigarettes, never tired of lamb chops, watched the Huntley-Brinkley Report each evening on NBC, and wanted his death notice to appear in The New York Times. While his wife, my grandmother, took secret delight in reading celebrity biographies (as I learned once I entered the bookselling business and could supply her with same at a steady clip), neither of my mom’s parents would have cherished the books I look at now: a shelf of volumes by Dutch-American historian Hendrik Willem van Loon—most notably the ambitiously subtitled Van Loon’s Lives: Being a true and faithful account of a number of highly interesting meetings with certain historical personages, from Confucius and Plato to Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, about whom we had always felt a great deal of curiosity and who came to us as dinner guests in a bygone year—beautifully produced and illustrated, the kind of volumes a reader can fall into; a complete set of the diaries of Frances Partridge, the last survivor of the legendary Bloomsbury Group, who began to publish them—in which her elegantly composed accounts of her current days are colored with reminiscences culled from her long life in the company of authors, artists, and other fascinating figures—when she entered her seventies; Ann Cornelisen’s Torregreca and Women of the Shadows, about life, death, and miracles in a southern Italian village; the indelible if arguably accurate autobiographical narratives of Lillian Hellman; memoirs, diaries, and letters of Christopher Isherwood and May Sarton; books by and about Dorothy Day, the American political activist, pacifist, and co-founder of The Catholic Worker newspaper and movement, who has lately been put forth for canonization by the church, although she herself would bridle at that idea: “Don’t call me a saint,” Day once wrote, “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” At the end of one shelf, dilapidated by my mother’s six readings of it, is Robert A. Caro’s massive The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York in its original hardcover edition, which, many years after its release, I got the author to sign for her when I interviewed him (he was thrilled that the book was so palpably well-read).

But the book I take up to peruse tonight in the television’s glow is the one I know to be her favorite, A Mass for the Dead by William Gibson—not the visionary science fiction novelist of the same name, famous for Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition among other works, but the American playwright most celebrated for his play about Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker. Through my mother’s advocacy, A Mass for the Dead became my favorite, too, so much so that, back in the days of A Common Reader, I rescued it from out-of-printness (to which fate, alas, it has been confined once more). In fact, my desire to make it available again was a primary impetus in the decision to launch our own publishing program in 1996, and I was pleased beyond measure when Gibson’s family chronicle, originally published in 1968, became our first Common Reader Edition.

In this eloquent volume, Gibson relates, with affection, anguish, wonder, and extraordinary sympathy, the story of his father and mother: their families and their courtship, their determined yet unspectacular search for economic security and domestic comfort in and around New York City in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, their dedicated parenthood. It is the story as well of the author’s growth from boy to man, from happy child to disaffected youth to father and—as his parents reached the end of their lives—once again blessed and blessing son.

Beginning with a meditation on a missal he finds among his late mother’s effects, Gibson shapes his chronicle to the image of a requiem mass, interspersing his continuous narrative with passages of evocative, powerful, prayerful contemplation as well as bursts of knotty poetry. In doing so, he fashions a language lofty enough to honor the generosity of life’s generations, yet supple enough to capture all the commonplaces—of parents and children, affection and argument, birth and death—that those generations inhabit. The fruit of his effort is a book that has haunted my imagination with the force of life itself in the four decades since I first read it, a book whose rendering of experience so gracefully shaped what I knew, or intuited, about existence that my sense of self, family, and world would be unrecognizable to me— and no doubt impoverished—without it.

My mother, I know, feels as strongly about the book; she badgered me to read it for years before I—being young and lost in those nether reaches of poetic ambition which keep one at a distance from family, a distance which Gibson so tellingly describes—finally deigned to do so. I’ve returned to his pages many times since that first reading, most tellingly in the new light cast by the two girls who ushered me into fatherhood, and each reading has made me appreciate all the more profoundly my mother’s love for this work, leaving me astonished anew at how extraordinary, how genuine and true, are its sentiments.

Tonight’s no different: flipping through the pages of A Mass for the Dead,I am brought up short by shocks of recognition as Gibson portrays his family’s passage through the weatherings of time. Brooding on my father’s fitful form, praying for my mother’s recovery in a lonely room fifteen miles away, I am brought near tears by passages like this:

Of that tissue I was born, saw what I saw, the betrayals and the gifts, take nothing on hearsay, and know the lives of my father and my mother, laboring to survive in self-respect; all that I see is true, and insufficient. History is another book, and its last page may be ashes. Yet the first page I read was the avowal of growth in eyes which, over me and my sister in cribs, made our survival their credo until from beyond the grave my mother said, “I loved you both dearly.” Of that tissue, predicting murder or mercy, life or extinction, and al­lowed one belief, half tonguetied, what dare I say?
I believe in my parents. I believe in my parents, therefore, in myself, therefore, in my children. I believe in my parents, and in life everlasting.

A reflection from A Month of Sundays.

Tall trees surround our house, spaced across the hilly lawn like stately privacies. Their sleek, strong trunks reach beyond the roof before they ramify into clusters of branch and leaf—earthbound, rooted clouds that nonetheless depend upon the sky. To sit beneath them and look up, as I did lazily yesterday afternoon, is to observe a natural ordering of color (the gray-brown bark, the green foliage, the blue desire of the sky) and element (wood, leaf, light) that delights both soul and sense.

Contemplating these trees always makes me think of the paintings of Paul Cézanne, because, some years ago, looking at his canvasses in a magnificent retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, taught me something about how to pay attention to them, and other things as well. Rocks and trees, apples and onions, mountains and houses—the subjects of the artist’s vision hung on the gallery walls like objects discovering perception in the very substance of their color, shape, and materiality. The world was revealed in a riot of looking, and one walked watchfully, as if through a building site in which apprehension itself was under construction.

Cézanne’s trees (“Large Pine and Red Earth,” for instance, shown here) in particular entranced my mind’s eye, and enhanced my moments of gazing reverie when I returned to the vistas around my house. To study Cézanne, I discovered then, is to reeducate our eyes to both the weight and wonder of the world, to refresh our vision—“as if,” the novelist William Maxwell put it in another context, “seeing were an art and the end that everything is working toward.”

On Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

“Yes, and this is how you are a citizen,” we read as we approach the end of this book about race, identity, language, and memory: “Come on. Let it go. Move on.” The phrases echo others sounded on earlier pages in their urging that the consciousness at work—the “you” being addressed—evade engagement with racial hostility, disregard insults and slights, swallow pride in the face of prejudice ignorant or intentional: “Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.”

Winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry (in a sign of the book’s multivalent singularity, it was also a finalist in the Criticism category), Claudia Rankine’s remarkable book is about being a citizen in an uncivil union, a relationship that renders one’s figure in the world alternatively ominous and invisible. Innovative in both structure and substance, Citizen unfolds at the start in succinct and carefully composed paragraphs that evoke the discourtesies, aggressions, dismissals—call it the realities—that are inherent in both the private and the public lives of people of color in a society shaped by white priorities. The persistent “you” implicates the reader in the poet’s recognitions, while Rankine’s intimate voice, as if talking to itself, struggles to find meaning in a recurring daze of provocations. The litany of incidents Rankine recites begins in an elementary school classroom and continues into adulthood and professional life, when, for instance, a colleague complains, “his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.” She distills the anguish of these recollected moments with keen awareness:

As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache- producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.

In a brilliant résumé of the career of tennis champion Serena Williams, Rankine contemplates the athlete’s rare but powerful reactions to flagrant discrimination on the court:

. . . it is difficult not to think that if Serena lost context by abandoning all rules of civility, it could be because her body, trapped in a racial imaginary, trapped in disbelief—code for being black in America—is being governed not by the tennis match she is participating in but by a collapsed relationship that had promised to play by the rules.

Something like a gallery, Citizen is unconventional in form as well as force: Photographic images and paintings are juxtaposed with text, and a section of the volume presents scripts for “situation videos.” Created with John Lucas, these are collage-like constructions of quotations and meditations on injustice, discrimination, and violence as reflected in specific instances, including Hurricane Katrina, the killings of Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson, the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of British authorities, and the policy of stop-and-frisk adopted by urban police forces.

Given such deadly serious subject matter, the book’s subtitle—An American Lyric—might seem ironic, yet it holds the key to Rankine’s most telling achievement: The composed space of reflection and repose that is the domain of lyric poetry provides a magnifying frame for everything Citizen examines, as the book’s initial paragraph suggests: “When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. . . . [The moon’s] dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor.” Exactly because Rankine is a lyric poet of such extraordinary gifts, she cannot comply with the forgetfulness her citizenship demands: “Come on. Let it go. Move on.” In the pages of Citizen, she holds fast to what she’s seen, brings close what others have felt and suffered, and breathes language into the deadened air of grief, forcing herself—and her readers—to scrutinize the pain that racism provokes, and to stand still and ponder its cumulative injury and sorrow.

Excerpted from the book, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die by James Mustich. Copyright © 2018 by James Mustich. Published by Workman Publishing.

A reflection from A Month of Sundays.

The assumptions that anchor our days, those habits of heart and mind we rely on to palliate the tyranny of the actual, are invisible allies—or are they as often enemies?—in our never-quite-settled war with the world.

Suggestions for therapeutic reading.

In his taut, eloquent introduction to The Journals of John Cheever, the author’s son Ben recalls that his father “used to say that a fine piece of prose could not only cure a depression, it could clear up a sinus headache.” Such allusion to the medicinal benefits of good writing made me think of a passage in Christopher Morley’s 1919 novel, The Haunted Bookshop, the second of two delightful adventures that feature bookseller Roger Mifflin as protagonist. In the passage in question, Mifflin offers insight into the therapeutic application of his professional skills via a placard posted on a bulletin board among a collection of “clippings, announcements, circulars, and little notices written on cards in a small neat script.”

RX

If your mind needs phosphorus, try Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith.

If your mind needs a whiff of strong air, blue and cleansing, from hilltops and primrose valleys, try The Story of My Heart, by Richard Jefferies.

If your mind needs a tonic of iron and wine, and a thorough rough-and-tumbling, try Samuel Butler’s Notebooks or The Man Who Was Thursday, by Chesterton.

If you need “all manner of Irish,” and a relapse into irresponsible freakishness, try The Demi-Gods, by James Stephens. It is a better book than one deserves or expects.

It’s a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.

Such faith in the power of books is, despite the very real diversion delivered by the novel’s capering plot, the animating spirit of The Haunted Bookshop. “I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!” says Mifflin at one point, as he sets about writing a prescription. 

Those of us who are inveterate readers, of course, have well-stocked shelves of elixirs, stimulants, palliatives, and consolations, and trust that there’s a book for every mood.  I had fun with this idea in the 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die Page-A-Day Calendar for 2020 in a feature called “Books for Every Mood.” Below, I’ve posted some examples, including a couple of previews from the 2021 edition of the calendar (which, by the way, goes on sale in August).

❦

❦

❦

❦

❦

❦

❦

❦

Calendar blocks excerpted from 2020 and 2021 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die Page-A-Day Calendars by James Mustich. Copyright James Mustich. Published by Workman Publishing.

A reflection from A Month of Sundays.

It can come as a shock to recognize that the straight-and-narrow is more oblique than one imagined, and that the suspension of disbelief, in religion as well as drama, can be far more cunning in the long run than rationality might be able to measure. As Pascal said, the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.

On the essays of James Baldwin.

Evidence and Eloquence

On the essays of James Baldwin.

It can be a little too easy to pin labels on James Baldwin: black, gay, expatriate, aesthete. But every label sells him short, diminishing the singularity of his work. That he wrote specifically of his time and place—America in the middle of the twentieth century—and engaged its most dangerous themes—race, Civil Rights, the persisting degradations of history—does not limit the reach of his sentences into the past and the future: They are, and will remain, acute inquiries into the moral and political quandaries of our being, regardless of the age in which they’re read. While the books are indeed indelible documents of their era, they ponder questions of inheritance, race, and social justice with a sense of perplexity and purpose that resonates far beyond their contemporary context, and that makes them especially timely today.

His essays especially are provocative exercises for the reader. The volumes that first gathered them—Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street—made his reputation as a refulgent if often recalcitrant prophet of the Civil Rights era, landing him on the cover of Time magazine and keeping him in the public eye. In every paragraph, Baldwin’s language reaches forward and back in time with a tragic sense of continuity and consequence. His deep well of evolving private memory enriches his—and our—perspective on current events. His writing is as challenging as it is rewarding exactly because his probing of complex realities realizes that their complexity emanates from contradictions at their cores. Truths, he’d learned, were never singular, and seldom in agreement; yet he remained unrelenting in his pursuit of them. This commitment to capturing the contradictions of lived experience imbued his explorations with an equivocal ferocity that revealed both the naïveté and the arrogance of others’ certainties. If America, as he wrote in Notes of a Native Son, is a “country devoted to the death of the paradox,” Baldwin realized that such devotion was a kind of suicide.

Baldwin’s essays move with restlessness and agility and, now as then, they offer his readers not solace but a kind of education in sorrow, teaching us that morality is far more fatal, and perhaps more unforgiving, than our sentimental narratives of reconciliation and redemption allow us to believe. And more personal as well: Baldwin knew that the subject of race in America was also the story of him in America, and his essays make of his insights and bewilderments a tortured light. As he writes in No Name in the Street, “the moral of the story (and the hope of the world) lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.”

❦

Excerpted from the book, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die by James Mustich. Copyright © 2018 by James Mustich. Published by Workman Publishing.