I think I’d have to say that I’m a very big fan of Simon Winchester and his books. I’ve mentioned before, but not very often, that most of my reading for a lengthy period of time, say for ten years, from 96 to 06, was non-ficiton. It was a variety of history and biography, a few years studying the Romans, along with who knows what, with writers like John Krakauer and Ross King and Sebastian Junger all in the mix. And out of those that come quickly to mind, all of them writing best-selling non-fiction, Winchester might be my favorite.

I had Winchester’s most recent book, about Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham and his famous history of science in China, on my desk today, hoping to write about it after I finished it last night. (NB: this was all last week sometime, actually, not that it matters.) I found myself introducing Wincester to a colleague, and pitching his books, some of which I have on a shelf in my office. I started with The Meaning of Everything, the story of the Oxford English Dictionary. it’s easy to confuse this with “Caught in the Web of Words, ” by K.M. Elisabeth Murray (1978), which is a biography of James Murray. I read that book years ago, and Meaning of Everything tells more or less the same story, without the biographical emphasis. Winchester is a scholar of scholarship, and that obscure corner is perhaps my favorite genre. But when you’re pitching books to the general populace, Meaning is bit of a tough sell. The next book at hand, The Map That Changed the World, is another great story, but it’s probably even more obscure. I found myself talking about how the big step before Darwin’s publication and an important inspiration for Origin of the Species was Charles Lyell’s work on geology in the 1830s, around the time of the voyage of the Beagle. Map tells the story of William Smith, who took Lyell’s thesis and created an astonishing map of the geology of the British Isles. As I’m explaining this, I’m talking about how the map showed how the landscape was millions of years old, refuting biblical time, well beyond the standard niceties of polite discussion. “I didn’t finish that one,” I say, thinking that I might go back and read the last 100 pages, like I did with the new book last night. Then I mention, as an aside, that Winchester wrote a book on Krakatoa–”you know, the big volcano explosion. I haven’t read that one.” Right now I want to, that one and more.

But I was saving the best for last: The Professor and the Madman. It’s about the same OED guy, Murray, from Caught in the Web and The Meaning of Everything. There were all sorts of random expert contributors to the OED, people working on words at home, sending in examples of usage, doing the grunt work. If you like Samuel Johnson and Boswell’s biography and the story of Johnson composing his dicitonary, reading about the OED is a supplemental feast. So Murray worked with different contributors, and in TP&TM Winchester tells of how he went to visit one of them, and found himself entering a hospital for the criminally insane. Do you want me to ruin the story for you, I asked, ’cause it’s crazy how good it is. No, no, I was told. but TP&TM is a masterful interweaving of the stories of two very different men. It’s amazing. It might be a movie. It was optioned years ago, but it’s one of those things that’s tough to put together.

All of that is preface to Needham and his story and Winchester’s most recent book. (A little research tells me that his next book will be about the Atlantic Ocean.) Winchester is back on familiar ground and telling the story of an incredible feat of scholarship. And if The Meaning of Everything, after the biographical work of Caught in the Web and TP&TM, is really about the dictionary, the OED itself, the new book is more about the scholar than the end product. Needham is a fantastic character and scholar, probably known well enough in his day and in Britain and Cambridge, but he’s certainly obscure enough for the common reader to be entertained by Winchester telling his amazing story. Needham was outstanding as a standard biochemist, the type of scientist who has a phenomenal mind and ability to gather and process information about all sorts of things, about everything, actually, and thus he’s in line with one aspect of Winchester’s previous studies, but it’s the unexpected turn that his takes that makes this a great story.

Needham’s long life crosses the broad span of the 20th century, and thus it has a very different set of values and consciousness and response to world affairs. It occurs to me, using an old habit for analyzing 19th century literature, that Winchester tells the story of a doubled or bifurcated self in TP&TM, that the Madman is something of a Dorian Gray/Jekyll & Hyde mirror image of the masterful Professor, expressing his buried drives and taboos. Needham is a semi-integrated 20th century personality, and he’s not afraid to get his freak on. Needham is the genius who breaks away from the prescribed path, who leaves behind scholarly seclusion and quietude to go out into the world. The heart of Winchester’s story tells how Needham became philosophically and morally comfortable with sex and practiced a relatively relentless pursuit of women. He and his wife, a fellow Cambridge scientist, developed a supportive and seemingly functional open marriage. These things are never simple, and Winchester seems to cover the pertinent details quite adequately and respectfully. The important part is that Needham has a restless, voracious spirit and intellect, and when he’s a young professional scientist and studying everything, he seems to be searching for a true passion. His affair with his graduate assistant and researcher, Lu Gwei-djen, provides the inspiration and the link. Spurred by his love and passion for a Chinese woman, who happens to be a scientist, Needham becomes obsessed with China, and the study of Chinese civilization and science proves to be a worthy subject for his capacious mind.

So the second difference is that China, rather than English literature or British science and scholarship, is Winchester’s true subject here. Perhaps he warmed up to it in his book on Krakatoa, and a look at his past works shows books about Hong Kong and Korea, and most importantly, a book about the Yangtse River. And it should be noted that of course his subject is British scholarship of China, of the way that one man heroically set about studying and interpreting Chinese civilization for Western academic consumption. But the topic here is still a global one no matter how you view it, and it’s rich and valuable and very well done. Needham’s story is fantastic in its own right as an adventure and a portrait of the 20th century, but there’s a larger, more important topic, a timely one coinciding with the Beijing Olympics and the rise of China as a great power. Winchester does a fine job with his own study of China and what it was like when Needham lived there, the way that it changed over the course of the 20th century just as Needham himself was studying its 5000 year history. It’s a wonderful and accessible introduction to Chinese culture and western interaction with it and a clear pathway to further studies and interest in China. Good topic, good book, well done.

I promised a long while ago to write about my own favorite, rather obscure teacher book. And I had written out this post before I put up the last one (Two Movies for Bloggers), but that one seemed a bit more timely. At any (very slow) rate, here are some thoughts on a book that I read a few years ago. Once again, lame, I know.

I don’t have a rule about not writing about books that I haven’t read recently, but maybe I should. I enjoyed reading John McPhee’s The Headmaster back in early August, and felt comfortable reviewing a sampler of teacher books that came to mind. A couple of quick recommendations to read Stoner came back, and I have to go get it and put it on the stack, which hasn’t been moving much these days. I started the last review with the idea that I would write about what I called my own favorite teacher book, but it became a longer consideration and I never made it to the intended topic. And then my blogging fell off once again, going back into sleep mode as it has been doing since the beginning of summer. There are reasons for all of this, which I may get into at some point, but for now I want to continue on with baby steps, and finish the short simple task that was most recently left undone.

But I can’t say that I feel comfortable about it, as I have only a vague recollection of this book, my presumptive favorite, The Headmaster’s Papers by Richard A. Hawley. If I was a better reader and blogger I would reread it. But I remember reading it greedily at the time and being moved by it. It’s very sad. One of the important things I remember is the way that it is set in time, as it tells the story of a well-meaning headmaster who is trying to run a school during the tumultuous 60s. His wife gets sick with cancer and eventually dies, and he despairs as he watches his students get high and do drugs and reject conformity in the name of some vague sense of freedom. His expectations and standards are under constant attack. The heartbreaking part is that his own son has left, and he’s out wandering the world in the hippie manner of James Michener’s The Searchers (don’t hear much about Michener these days), if I recall that book correctly. Headmaster John Greeve tries to find and get information on his son, to tell him about his mother’s ilness and death, but his son has disappeared into the drug world of Spain and Morocco. Greeve realizes he will never know his son’s exact fate, but he has to give up and assume that he too is dead. Unable to function and hopeless, unable to perform his old job and manage this new generation of teenagers, this epistolary novel ends with a suicide note.

This book was a random choice at a bookstore years ago, but it had a couple of things going for it. It has an evocative cover, a dark shadow on a campus green, with a photo of a stately, classic school building inset in the middle. Below the title it says “Introduction by John Irving,” and this copy is the 2002 “Classic” edition, with Irving’s introduction and “an afterword by the Author.” It is a small press book, published by “Paul S. Eriksson, Publisher/Forest Dale, Vermont,” and the left corner of back cover shows Eriksson’s PO Box and zipcode. It looks like the book has gone through five different editions. On the copyright page it says that “grateful acknowledgment is made to John Irving for permission o use as an introduction his article about The Headmaster’s Papers for Lost Classics, an Anchor Books ttle edited by Michael Ondaatje and others in a gathering of pieces by well known writers discussing books they loved but felt had been underread, overlooked, or lost.” I cant say for sure, but the short Irving introduction might have been the deciding factor in making me notice the book, buy it, and read it, though it’s not as if I’m a huge Irving fan.

I often wish, and it seems to be an even stronger desire lately, that I had any discernable basic impulse to reread books. Instead I have a weird block and aversion against it, one I can’t really understand. It seems like work and extra difficulty, rather than pleasure. I know that before writing this I should start rereading this book and then I might actually have something interesting to say about it. I remember it as heartfelt and compelling and simple and devastating. I remember it as a singular perspective and portrait of a tumultuous time, a period that I went through as a young student myself. I like obscure, good, “lost classics” very much, and for now I think of this as my favorite teacher/school book. But I’ll try to reread it and get a better handle on the reasons and the details, and go get my copy of Stoner too.

Still so sporadic with the blogging! And as always with me, there’s getting around to writing, and then getting around to typing. Lame. So this is from weekend before last. Whatever. It’s something at least.

I’ve made a fairly concentrated effort, especially for me, to stay away from movie reviews on this blog, for all sorts of different reasons. But I saw a fascinating, somewhat obscure new documentary that I thought I might mention, and it occurred to me that I can set another recent film alongside it to cobble together a set of reflections. I moseyed about without getting any traction during blogger appreciation week, and this might be a late note to add to some of those discussions.

Let’s start with breezy, fun, and food. Julie/Julia is a hit movie, and it’s worth stating the obvious: amongst so many other things, it’s a film about blogging. It has yet another ridiculously amazing performance by Meryl Streep, who is defying the Hollywood gravity of age in ways that Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson must admire, and the fact that a woman is doing it is revolutionary. In this movie her first move is to get taller, and she evidently told her director, Nora Ephron, who was lucky here to get knocked on the head by the Meryl magic wand, forget about the voice and becoming a real, highly recognizable person, that’s easy (easy for her that is), but to do this role I’m going to become taller. And indeed, Meryl Streep is a robust 6 footer throughout the film, and it’s a key ingredient of the recipe. Genius is fun to watch. I saw the film with the family and we went out for French food the next night. And then I took my mother, who was a big Julia fan and Francophile back in the day, and very much a servantless cook. It was a classic outing with ma mere, but I’ll leave that aside. In the second viewing I was keeping an eye on the height thing, and it was an interesting pursuit. Of course we all know that a whole bunch of famous actors have below average stature and they play 6-footers all the time, so it’s pretty basic old school Hollywood technology. But it’s worth noting and adding to the mountainous pile of Meryl Streep accomplishments, many of them feminist and revolutionary in their own way.

The film is about female empowerment and the power of writing and food as art and as a vehicle for personal redemption and fulfillment. My mother couldn’t be Julia Child and she made her share of Boeuf Bourgonon, but she was more like April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road or Betty Draper in Mad Men, donig an occasional recipe for a dinner party while steadily sliding down the rabbit hole of TV dinners and smoking and drinking and depression. The film does a great job of bringing the dilemma of the time up to date and showing that the path of art and food and writing is more available than ever, and you don’t have to be an amazon and revolutionary feminist like Julia Child or Meryl Streep to put it to work. You can be an average neurotic New Yorker like Julie Powell, who is just a… blogger. I’ve heard a fair amount of disappointment about Amy Adams and that part of the film, but she’s making the shrewd, no-brainer move of being in as many Meryl Streep movies as possible, and she takes the hit (in this case a body blow, as there’s almost an audible sigh from the audience when Streep leaves and Adams enters) and is still standing.

Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, an update of Lubitsch’s Shop Around the Corner, introduced internet technology to the romantic comedy. It was set against the rise and fall of chain and independent bookstores, with a peaking pair of movie stars in Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. In a few decades this new film should serve as an interesting companion to that previous hit, showing the speedy advance of technology over a short period of time. Throw in the strange way that technology and communication worked as a basis for romantic comedy in Sleepless in Seattle, and add the spectacular failure of the virtually unwatchable meta-remake of Bewitched, and you realize that this Ephron chick, daughter of screenwriters and aiming to be the Elizabeth Bennett in a trio of sisters, might not be the most likeable and generous filmmaker and media persona, but she’s finding some extraordinary artistic satisfactions out of scratching the same itch.

These are just asides for the purposes of this blog, and I don’t want to lose the thread about the fact that Julie/Julia is a movie about blogging. I don’t know if this has happened to any other bloggers out there, and it may just be my own mix of book blogging and working in the film business, but I’ve met a couple of people who recently found out about my blog who interpreted it, without seeing or reading anything, through the version of Julie Powell’s blog in the movie. This is facinating, since Julie Powell’s blog is so project-oriented, and the movie is a fantasy of blogging wish-fulfillment. She’s a failed writer unable to publish her novel, left behind by her ambitious and mainstream business friends (including one “bad blogger,” a craven journalist), who reaches writer nirvana after the appearance of a NY Times article (charming, antiquated technology saves the day, Cinderella taken away in the horse-drawn coach), as her phone machine (more communications technology) fills up with agents and publishers begging to meet her, and the film ends with an arch crawl about how a movie has been made about her.

With respect to blogging, and in writing about it now, the film makes me think about the infinite different ways in which blogging can be done and how it works. My shrink once said that blogging is a dream come true for writers, and I certainly can’t argue with that. In my own case it has unlocked a certain type of writing and reflection and has been an extraordinary gift. It has also given me all sorts of confidence about other types of writing, things that don’t appear on this blog, that take a lot of time and focus away from it in fact. And my own approach to blogging has its own project aspects, as I feel like I used it to write a short book (of sorts) on Richard Yates last year, one that I can go back to and keep working on, or I can get organized and keep going with Chekhov or who knows what, none of it purely intentional, with a type of organic intellectual growth that comes from blogging. I happen to like to write little essays on this blog, and for some of them to be connected to one another, but everybody does it their own way.

I’ve been thinking about blogging and writing and Julie/Julia but probably never would have mentioned any of this if I hadn’t seen Ondi Timoner’s amazing documentary about Josh Harris, We Live In Public. I don’t know if there’s any buzz about this film, which is getting a modest art house release, but I heard about it by listening to an interview with the filmmaker on NPR, on the “On the Media” show.

The film tells a truly amazing story and it’s quite disturbing. Josh Harris is a high-tech and internet pioneer, a staggeringly insightful genius, who got into the internet at the earliest possible moment, and saw not only how it would work but also had an understanding of its profound impact on our lives years and even decades before it happened. He very much received the inheritance of Any Warhol, multiplied exponentially through technology. The film is just awesome, unbelievable, a stunning record of watching our lives and the future unfold over the last 20 years. I’ll relate it to the concerns and proccupations of my own and this particular blog because Josh Harris is a product of my own generation and a similar upbringing, a child of April Wheeler or Betty Draper. We see on Mad Men every week how a depressed, aimless, narcissistic mother is detached from her children and is using television, an intensely powerful new technology, to raise her children. Josh Harris’ personality and profound, Warhol-like detachment was spawned watching hour after hour of television, with Gilligan’s Island playing a particularly strong role in his development. I’ll just say that I can relate. I’m sure he would be able to add the Jetsons and the Flintstones and The Beverly Hillbillies and countless other shows to the mix (in the new Coen Brothers’ movie, A Serious Man, it’s F Troop). As kids, television made us think about the future and stone age technology and unexpected wealth, leaving us to create our own powerful mythology. I remember being a kid and somehow knowing that there would be personal computers, a machine that would be a transparent vehicle for gathering information, following interests, and expressing my thoughts. It was just obvious, although it was impossible for me to see the details of how we would get there. This old hazy memory is perhaps one of the reasons why Revolutionary Road was so striking and shattering in its way, as its prescience about computers crystallizes certain ideas about the coming onslaught of technology. We all knew it somehow. It was a product of the war. And as a product of war and fascism there is a very dark side to it, one that preoccupies Josh Harris, that is explored in the film. The detachment of Josh Harris is deep and dark and desperate at times. I had my own fleeting insights and experiences, but I’m not that bright, and I’m an anti-techie in a lot of ways. Everything was clear to Josh Harris, just as it was to Yates and Warhol, and the evolution and impact of technology wasn’t an occasional glimpse to him; he lived it, and it’s all on film. He lived it in public.

And it’s just so striking to see this documentary and have a certain interest and investment in the internet and in blogging, writing about and participating in discussions about the NBA’s LA Clippers, for instance (as I do), or blogging about Yates and Chekhov and Hawthorne and counting the number of views on this site. Julie/Julia gives us a gauzy, classic Hollywood view of blogging making love and dreams come true. But go see We Live In Public if you want a better idea of what’s really going on and where this whole thing might be headed. We need to be very careful and thoughtful about how we use this powerful tool (and how it uses us), we need to raise our children well, and we must work hard every day to own our lives somehow, outside of our interaction with machines. I guess I’ll start with eating more French food.

Back to blogging. Lately I seem overly anxious about birthdays and anniversaries. It’s probably just being gunshy after making through the gauntlet of turning 50 (18,262) last November and then celebrating a 20th wedding anniversary on 9-9-09. It seems like it has been a stressful time, although I can’t say exactly why. But Samuel Johnson had his own 300th birthday last week, as he was born on 9-18-09, a bit of auspicious numerology there. That was 1709, of course, and there’s the old style calendar thing, but we’ll leave that be. I haven’t written at all here, for the obvious reason that it would show how nutty I am, about the way that I like to measure out life sometimes in days, rather than years. Years can be very crude and vague and bulky, while the accretion of days is fun to track in its details. And large chunks of days, other than the standard unit of 365, can be very suggestive. My experience and study shows that humans seem to mosey along towards maturity over the first 10,000 days of life (27 years, 2 months), and then the ripeness of adulthood is enjoyed for the next 10,000 days. A goodly span winds out in a final 10,000, twilight gathering slowly into darkness. So I don’t know that I had ever thought to celebrate a 300th birthday before, but these things are especially easy to caluculate–just don’t forget those leap years! So last Friday it had been 109,575 days since Samuel Johnson was born on his own 91809. The first thing that comes to mind is that 100,000 sailed right by at some point, back in 1983, and we missed it. 100,000 days turns out to be a long time, almost three centuries. A lot has happened since then.

And I believe that the day when Johnson was hitting 100k was right at the heart of the period of my most intense interest in him. I was in graduate school and had read an abridged version of Boswell a few years earlier. In an introductory graduate seminar I had worked on Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, his historical novel set in the 18th century. I chose the book at Virginia Woolf’s suggestion, as she wrote that it was Thackeray’s best work. I had been reading George Eliot and Dickens and Trollope, along with Woolf and Austen, and liked Vanity Fair when I had read it a couple of years earlier. In 1983 I was taking a graduate course in 18th century literature, and the focus of my general interests was making a slow turn from the novel to literary biography. Reading Thackeray’s Pendennis, The Newcomes, and The Virginians blew off a lot of the steam of my gusto for the Victorian novel, and I was ready to take a break. Along the way at some point I had discovered that Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, had been married to Thackeray’s daughter. It’s hard to say exactly why this set of connections seemed interesting to me. Perhaps it was the creation of a continuum between the Victorian and Modern novel. By looking at Leslie Stephen’s life and Woolf’s childhood, by studying the sources for To The Lighthouse and Mr. Ramsay, I hoped to gain a deeper sense of Virginia Woolf’s art. The fact that Stephen was a famous mountaineer seemed fascinating and exciting, a rare literary surprise, and it was very much in line with my own interest in the mountains. But it may be that the most important parts of Stephen’s resume for me were that he was a keen student of the 18th century, a pioneering intellectual historian, and a biographer. He was a follower and a fan of Dr. Johnson.

And so I became interested in literary biography, and the connection from Woolf to Stephen to Thackeray reached back through Stephen’s father, Colonial Undersecretary James Stephen, to Macaulay and Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, right in striking distance of Boswell and Johnson himself. Not exactly on the same side of the street, mind you. I’ve mentioned before how I realized, eventually, that Leslie Stephen buried his revision and extension of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets in his own Dictionary, the DNB, a scholarly project every bit as ambitious as Johnson’s great Dictionary of the English Language. When I think of Johnson and his Tercentary, I find myself thinking of Stephen, and the way that he managed to develop a literary practice and art of his own that was based on Johnson, steeped in Johnson, which even had Johnson as one of its primary subjects, in essays, a short biography, and of course a biographical dictionary entry. Boswell created what Stephen routinely called “the greatest of books” out of Johnson’s life, but it’s hard to think anyone else besides Boswell who did more to honor, study, and analyze and use Johnson than Leslie Stephen. Macaulay wrote his famous essay, and there were editors and other biographers and exhaustive researchers, but Stephen took what Johnson did, and what he believed in, starting with his love for literature and writers, and he made his own life out of it. He steered his course by Johnson’s star. And isn’t it interesting that this acolyte and literary artist, who generally thought of himself as a harmless drudge who would quickly be forgotten, was the father of Virginia Woolf, that (along with her mother) he was her first and primary teacher, that she grew up in his library.

As I count my own days and remember those of others, I like to think of moments that are possible to imagine, back in time. Stephen was addicted to poetry when he entered adolescence, and later in life he did things like recite Milton’s “On the morning of Christ’s Nativity” to his family on Christmas mornings. So he must have been well aware of 91809. And I can picture Leslie Stephen in his writing chair, in his study, the room up at the top of the house in Hyde Park Gate, above the nursery where his children werer raised. That library contained, undoubtedly, shelf after shelf of books from and about the 18th century, and one can only imagine how much of it was devoted to Boswell and Johnson. Once you think of the room and the shelves and the books and the man, it’s easy enough to imagine his precociously literary daughter coming up to sit for a chat, and him telling her about Samuel Johnson.

This was going to be a post about my own favorite teacher book, but I got caught up in the introduction. So that one’s next, I hope.

I got two good quick comments from blog homies recommending Stoner, which I’ll get right away. I hadn’t heard of this book, and I’m very curious.

In the meantime I did a five-second thumbnail list of teacher books and school books, at least a few that I remember, just off the top of my head. They’re fairly obvious for the most part, and when I get this typed up I’ll check on wikipedia and elsewhere for more titles that I’m missing.

The two teacher books that jump to mind immediately are Goodbye Mr. Chips and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Probably some statement on the power of movies with regards to books there, fwiw, and that’s another list: teacher movies. I should also mention that I’m making a distinction between a teacher book and a professor book.

I liked Brodie when I read it a few years ago, and the movie does a good, if not great job of holding up, as I recall, but I’m not sure I finished either of them. Can’t really say at the moment–pretty vague on it all.

Chips I’ve seen a few times and would gladly watch again, and remember the book being quite satisfying when I read it. This is the title I’m most curious about, because of the passage of time–that’s the thing I’m interested in right now, time passing in the career of a teacher. Chips is charming and quaint, of course, and it makes a nice comparison to The Headmaster.

Like The Headmaster, in the “creative non-fiction” category, I have a copy of Tracy Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren on my shelves. Years ago I was a bystander in the process of trying to turn this book into a movie, but we never got very far on it. The book was very well done, a close account in what I’d call the “year in the life” category of teacher books. Considering these titles as a group, one important question seems to be how close the reader gets to the teacher, her concerns and challenges, along with how teaching and school fits into a larger view of daily life and character. Another topic is the role of students in that life and the narrative. The story of at least one student, as I recall, gives Kidder’s book its poignancy, while its focus is on the relatively selfless, unrecognized commitment of a simple, seemingly average teacher. Its close focus might have made it somewhat topical and it would be interesting now to see if it feels “early 90s,” but Kidder is a writer I like quite a bit, and his books are on the same shelf as John McPhee’s in my library.

Closely related to the teacher genre is the school genre. A Separate Peace is the king here, unless I’m mistaken. There have to be a zillion of them, but it’s a question of categories, perhaps of crossing over from YA lit to general literature. It seems odd somehow that I think of Separate Peace as a school book, while I put Catcher in the Rye in a different, literary teen angst category–they’re pretty close cousins, obviously. I didn’t read Separate Peace when I was a teenage, when I guess I was supposed to, but I read it a few years ago, more as a parent trying to find books for my kids to read, while trying to educate myself at the same time. The question is how it holds up, as it must have functioned very well back when I was “supposed” to read it in the 70s, though I can’t recover a sense of what its impact might have been. It’s a good enough book now, readable and intriguing if not great, with some power to it. It sits for mee on the same landscape as Lord of the Flies somehow–adolescent fiction that addresses morality in a relatively direct and accessible way. That’s all good enough, and I’ll mention that my son–the lab rat here–read Flies in school and Rye, which seems indispensible, as soon as he could get his hands on it, but Separate Peace can’t get past his anti-reading force field. In this context, however, I’m less interested in the hard nugget of moral complexity at the center of Separate Peace, and more concerned with its more leisurely portrait of a school and its students, its boys. That part seems well-done and well-paced, a strong work of foundational structure for the larger whole.

Tobias Wolff’s Old School wants, it seems, to work the same ground with more contemporary technique. It’s another good book–it made the shortlist of memorable titles, after all. If you’re looking at reading habits, this is a book that I bought within the first week or two of its appearance, and read right away, very quickly. I’ve been reading Wolff off and on all along, althoug I could do a much better job of being complete, and he’s a valued author not unlike McPhee and Kidder, the same generation more or less (could check the dates). All of these guys are heading to the finish line, with good careers and good books behind them. Not that everybody is dying, but the deaths of Updike and David Foster Wallace this year perhaps provide markers for an epoch–one that happens to be my own.

Old School lies somewhere in Wolff’s gray area between fiction and memoir, probably closer to fiction since he’s a short story writer, but I recall the book being somehow presented as a memoir, while at the same time, not one. It doesn’t matter much, but it’s interesting to compare McPhee writing about Boyden and Deerfield at the beginning of his career, with Wolff’s look back at his school days. I don’t know how to describe the contrast, but there’s something very different about the newer books (Old School, Among Schoolchildren) and the old (Headmaster, Separate Peace, Chips, and Brodie), something very simple about the changing times and culture and perspective I suppose.

The last book–and I’m curious where it falls in the above continuum–that I’ll mention in this post is one that I haven’t read, Richard Yates’ A Good School. I was going to do a post on it at the beginning of the summer, when this blog was slumbering and I was typing up my Boston journal and busy running around doing nothing. Two things happened, both of them involving my son. First, he’s aware of style stuff, being a teenager, that I find kind of interesting (being a parent), and I found myself tyring to gain a rudimentary grasp of the crossover between skinny-jeaned hipster chic and the “old school” world of Take Ivy, big time these days, essentially the abiding elements of prepster style. Not my standard stomping grounds, but bear with me. A few links led me to discover that our old pal Mr. Yates, known for being very Ivy in his simple wardrobe, and his school book are cited in no less an authority than The Preppy Handbook, which suddenly took on a new interest for me–it was ananethma to my own late-DFH, Dazed and Confused zhiv/non-style. When I started reading Yates, one of my friends mentioned that he had heard of him and had read A Good School, and now that makes sense.

At any rate, I handed my son my unread (by me) copy of Good School, and he took it up to his room and read it that afternoon or evening, or both. He crushed it, or it crushed him, or (again) both. I had read the first couple of chapters before, and knew it was good and would be simple enough to read through, but I still haven’t done it. I’ll also mention that the poor kid read Revolutionary Road after Good School, though it took him a little bit longer. This literary parenting thing, it’s tricky. And I keep wondering: how tricky is it to teach?

Not sure how or when my blogging and reading went off the rails, and I’ll probably keep apologizing and explaining it in dribs and drabs until I can build some momentum back up. There was a funny coincidence, however, the other day, one that seems worthy of a comeback post.

I was buying some books at my local library store and grabbed a nice (cheap) newer edition of John McPhee’s second book, The Headmaster. It was the perfect short sidetrack read, and just as I was finishing it I saw a short post over at one of the basketball sites where I spend too much time, a post about McPhee’s first book, his profile of Bill Bradley.

http://myespn.go.com/blogs/truehoop/0-43-28/John-McPhee-on-Flashy-Play.html

It made me think about McPhee and want to consider his work in a broader sense.

I had read The Headmaster before, I think, many years ago, along with most of McPhee’s other early and middle works. In many ways he’s an ideal writer for my tastes, primarily in his subject matter but also his graceful, eminently readable style. I suppose it could be dismissed as standard New Yorker style, but what he accomplished in these books is much harder than it looks, and navigating through the 60s and 70s with any sort of clarity and pose was hard enough. I would definitely be interested to see a truly knowledgable, deeply considered treatment of McPhee’s work, and the 50-year mark since his first publication is approaching–it’s not for another 5 or 6 years, but still: that’s a long time, and he had written a lot of good books. So I’ll have to look around for some writing about McPhee.

I find it extremely interesting to look at these early books now, with some perspective, as a way of starting out as a writer. He’s writing non-fiction, of course, a sort of higher journalism that crosses over from magazine writing into essays and biography. I come back to the idea that it’s harder than it looks, and that starts with the choice of subject matter for a young writer, which is what McPhee obviously was when he wrote these books. Coming out of Princeton in the early 60s had its own substantial cachet, of course, and the conflicts of the era were just starting to emerge. There’s something about recognizing an incandescent character like Bill Bradley as a writing subject when he’s in your midst, and then the execution presents all sorts of challenges as well. Then, as a ball player like Bradley or any number of writers can tell you, there’s the difficulty of being a sophomore, which is an interesting enough topic to consider all on its own. That gets me to the book at hand, The Headmaster, and Frank Boyden as a choice of subject matter.

It probably just boils down to “write what you know.” But McPhee’s early works still seems to be a perfect primer for the writing of “creative non-fiction,” and one way to build a writing “practice,” as we yoga enthusiasts like to say, and career. He writes about his own college years and ethos through Bradley, and then goes back as a working writer, to write about his prep school. How many thousands of writers have written or tried to write about the same subjects in autobiographical fiction? By using objectivity and fact and retainng all of the benefit of character in Bradley and Boyden, McPhee creates a foundation out of his subjects, with his style an overlay of simplicity. You could do a lot worse than assiging these two books and more in a creative non-fiction course, or for a young person to read them as a way to think about what to write.

For me, the way that they mark a way to write about both sports and life at the same time is also quite interesting. I feels a great natural affinity with McPhee, having come to writing and literature somehow through sports. It seems odd and convoluted, but it’s probably a more common precess than one would think. It’s a turn on the Hemingway and Fitzgerald model. McPhee actually lays out cerain elements of the process in The Headmaster. In writing about Boyden and Deerfield he’s creating a prism for viewing a common American adolescence. Boyden emerges as an original proponent of the conjunction of sports and learning. McPhee creates a quaint potrait of Boyden arriving at the school in the Pioneer Valley horse-and-buggy simplicity of the turn of the century, building the school up organically from the most meagre materials, all filtered through his own personality, and performing in a role as a player on the Academy’s sports teams all the way into the 30s.

One of my interests as a mid-life blogger is to note the passage of time by decades that seem to flow past more swiftly somehow. McPhee, writing 45 years ago but well within memory, himself writes about a living relic, an extraordinary man in his 80s who had spent over 60 years building an important academic institution. In doing so he had shaped a region, a state, and generations in his own way. Boyden was clearly shaken deeply by the death of at least one student in World War 1, and there must have been many more sad outcomes over the course of the century. I used to think about my own grandparents as young adolescents during WW1, and remember asking my grandmothers what it was like then and in the 20s and then raising kids druing the Depression. McPhee writes a book about an old man who obviously played an important role in shaping his own life, and he studies the web of years and influence, the growth and continuing life of a school. And through Boyden and telling his story in a straightforward, clean fashion, McPhee is able to reach into history, going deep into the past with a graceful, unmannered grasp. His process is a lot like the way that Bill Bradley played basketball, and that’s probably not an accident. Maybe Bill Bradley taught John McPhee some important writing lessions, ones that we can all study and appreciate.

I’m studying and thinking about books about schools and teachers these days–I probably should be working on a list and breaking it all down. The Headmaster is a very good one, and it was a satisfying, easy read. More McPhee, please.

http://als-mla.org/HMGates.htm

I wrote this yesterday afternoon and then didn’t put up–sometimes it seems like I go out of the way to make sure people don’t come to this site. Now Obama has gone and called this “a teachable moment.” I didn’t reread or have the above excellent link to Gates’ Hubbell Award, which is all anyone needs to see. There must be all sorts of testimonials out there, but this is the one that shaped my thinking and response. Here’s what I wrote yesterday:

I was driving around at lunchtime today and listening to sports talk on the radio, the local power station that has recently become Fox Sports. It used to be a local show but now it is national, with Chris Myers and Steve Hartman. They can be a little conservative to begin with, and they’re on a Fox station, but I was surprised when they were standing up for the police in Cambridge and questioning Obama’s “stupidity” remark. It was all about respecting the police and daring to raise the idea that a cop might have made a rash move, and saying that if the President doesn’t know the facts of the case, then he shouldn’t have commented.

But the thing is, Obama knows one important “fact”: he knows Henry Louis Gates Jr. a lot better than the rest of us.

The radio guys are smart guys. Myers, formerly of ESPN, can be slick–he’s the new guy. Hartman is from my era, born the same year (Michael Jackson ‘58ers), likes most of the same teams, and he has a photographic memory about sports statistics and lots of other things. He stores an amazing amount of information, some of it cultural. He’s sharp enough that he would definitely be able to spit back the basic wikipedia info on Henry Louis Gates Jr. That being said, he wasn’t looking in that direction, and was turned around the other way. A lot of people, most of them know-nothings, want to debate the police issue. That’s relatively minor, and a typical sideshow. The point, and the moment, is about who Gates is, what he has accomplished and what he represents. They can’t be blamed for it, but it would nice if the Cambridge police knew who Henry Louis Gates Jr. is. In an Obama presidency, everybody should know Gates. And it looks now like everybody will. Not the best circumstances to get started, but sometimes things happen in strange ways.

I don’t know his story all that well, and I might be exaggerating, but as far as I can tell Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a national treasure. This is the “fact” that Obama knows, and it has a special meaning to him as President and the role he has to fill. Others would know the situation better, but I don’t think the place and importance of Gates is in doubt. I wanted to explain it to the radio guys in their terms, and after last weekend’s events I thought of golf. Gates is a revered senior with legendary status like Jack Nicklaus, as sharp and “competitive,” still at the top of his game, as Tom Watson, and in his day he was as revolutionary and transcendent as Tiger Woods.

He didn’t do it alone by any means, but he stands at the pinnacle of the post-King intellectual follow-up to the civil rights movement. He is the dean of African-American Studies, which had very humble beginnings in the 60s and 70s. His steady effort, insight, and leadership changed the way that American History and Literature is understood, defines itself, and is taught.

I had the standard vague sense of Gates as a “name” in African-American studies and literature, up until the beginning of this year. I can’t remember how I became interested in reading African-American Literature, but Obama’s campaign and victory was a part of it, and I had read James Baldwin and some other titles last year–I wrote a post about all this. Delving in, Gates started showing up regularly. I became aware of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, a worthy companion volume to the English and American Literature tomes. The primary editor is Gates. That’s all I really needed to know, but I also recently read an essay that he wrote after winning a major prize in American Literary Studies. And I read a piece he wrote about Anatole France. If you dip into African-American Studies, it quickly becomes obvious that he’s a major figure.

I’ve been trying to figure out who the equivalent person might be in a different scenario. It’s the general issue of a black man being arrested after letting himself into his own house, and I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with a corresponding white intellectual figure, and someone who would be so close to and important to the President and his world and his worldview. Jack Nicklaus is pretty famous, and you would think that a cop would know who he is, when he’s in his own home, but who has the intellectual status? Bob Woodward and even Walter Cronkite come to mind. You would expect a DC policeman to know who Bob Woodward is, and if he’s in his own home, figure out a way not to arrest him if became belligerent.

Gates stands as a living representative of the entire field of African-American Studies, although that’s a simplification. It is now a fully-vested discipline and history and literature, a major part of the larger whole. There really isn’t anybody who “represents” English or American Literature or History in quite the same way, or at least I can’t think of one. I’ll be working on it.

At some point over the weekend, perhaps when we were driving to Ipswich on Saturdary morning, I realized how close we were to Maine. I had just kind of forgotten about it. I had read Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs right before we went on our 07 College Tour, a key foundation point in my Literary Boston interests. On that trip we got up on Sunday morning and went to Salem, and then drove to Brunswick, where we went to my professor friend’s freshman seminar on Jane Austen on Monday morning at Bowdoin. The class was in a nice room with a fireplace in Massachusetts Hall, one of the original buildings, where Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Franklin Pierce took courses. My subsequent studies have shown that SO Jewett’s beloved father Theodore, the model for her heroine’s mentor and surrogate father Dr. Leslie in A Country Doctor, was part of this exceedingly famous Bowdoin crew. I remembered looking at the map as we drove from Salem to Brunswick and seeing that Jewett’s home and base, her father’s home in South Berwick, was not too far off the main track, but we had passed it by. So I found myself driving up there now, on a sunny Monday morning, feeling a little better drinking coffee and having a thin but ostensible purpose.

Everything was small and quaint, and South Berwick was little more than a tiny collection of buildings and cross streets. It was a beautiful day, a wonderful time of year, and if this wasn’t gracious living on the scale of the large houses out on Cape Ann, it seemed like a simple version of the good life, a cheat of course because the spring breeze, abundant greenery, and blue skies are so hard-earned. But what do I know, coming from California? The Jewett house stands at what seems to be the very center of the village, such as it is, filling the tine of a fork in the country road. The house opens to the public in the summer, starting in June, so I had missed it by a couple of days–now I would have to come back some other time, but I knew where it was. I got out and walked around. Hawthorne died on a May trip to New Hampshire with Franklin Pierce in 1864, a year before SO Jewett graduated from Berwick Academy. Theodore Jewett died in 1878 and James T. Fields died in 1881. So Jewett started living together with Annie Fields the next year, after they took a trip to Europe together that was very similar to the one that JT Fields had taken his young bride Annie on shortly after their marriage in 1854, and JTF and AAF moved into 142 Charles Street when they returned to Boston. SO Jewett moved into Charles Street after she and Annie returned from their 1882 European trip, and she and Annie would move out to the Manchester house for the summer. And every year, in the Fall I believe, Jewett would return to her home here in South Berwick, enjoying regular extended stays on her native ground. I felt like I had been neglecting the SO Jewett side of the story in recent months, and I made a note to get back into it. It was unfortunate the house was closed and turned the visit into a brief glance, but the trip is short from Boston, and now that I know the distance I’ll go back.

I went back through Essex and checked in with movie folks and then headed over to Salem. I guess I should analyze my reasons for not rushing back to the Historical Society and spending more time reading the Annie Fields diary. Somehow I felt as if I had accomplished my basic goal by getting into the building and getting access to the diary, sitting at the microfilm machine and briefly reading it. The microfilm factor was probably a bit of a turn off, but not having books or doing any extended prep were larger factors. I was a little dull and wondering why I was still hanging around. The success of the quick strike at the Historical Society on Friday morning had been a bit of a surprise, along with “covering” the diary so quickly, and I felt a bit guilty about carving out all of this extra time that I obviously didn’t need. But I wasn’t going to beat myself up too much, and it was only a day or two, and yet I was in a suitably dark mood as I wandered towards Salem, and the sun was gone and the clouds were coming in as well. I circled around and had a little trouble getting my bearings. I wasn’t sure how to approach Hawthorne’s stomping grounds. In my previous trip we had been to the wharf, which is the Maritime Center or whatever it’s called, and we had looked at the House of 7 Gables, but didn’t go in . If I had been in a more dynamic mood I might have gone over there and hoped for the best, but instead I set my sights on the Peabody-Essex Museum, which was reputed to be very solid. I made it to the National Park Visitor Center, took just a quick look inside, and then crossed the plaza to the museum, which is more central to Salem than I would have guessed–for some reason I thought it was on the outskirts of town, but in fact it serves as a nice centerpiece. It was closed, making me zero-for-two on the day so far. The building was quite impressive, however, and that made me want to return–and I still had another day to kill. Now I was loose on the streets of Salem for an hour or so. I wandered around, and headed into “the McIntire Historic District,” named after big time Federalist architect Samuel McIntire (1757-1811), but I wasn’t properly focused and just bumped around on the streets. At close to 5pm I returned to the NPS Visitor’s Center and looked at the books and pamphlets, one of them an architectural walking trail, developed by the NPS, of the area I had just been in, and I bought a small guide for $4.95 called “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Salem.” This energized me, as I started looking for the Peabody Sisters house, then the site of Hawthorne’s first house (now at the 7 Gables), and I began to get a sense of the original small town. Thinking about it now I’m reminded of poor walking shoes and my heel hurts, but I covered a fair amount of ground. Again, I would have a better idea of how to manage things if I went back, and I picked up the basics.

One of my best friends, Stein, was on the road for a short business trip and we were trying to meet up in Boston. Stein had a Spanish place he liked to go to–he travels a lot for business–and wanted to meet out by Fenway. I made better time than I expected getting into Boston, and I was ahead of schedule and heading out on Beacon St. when I saw the Crossroads Pub, my Richard Yates destination. I parked and went inside, then came out and called Stein to tell him to meet me there.

I ordered an ale and went to sit at one of the raised tables and started to catch up in this book. I know that Yates had a regular spot, where he would sit and drink and eat a little bit and get hammered, and I could guess where it might have been. I wrote an outline of my activities on the trip, the one I’ve been using in putting together this narrative, and then did a brief journal entry. My mood was suitably dark. The day’s transition from Jewett to hawthorne to Yates was working on me, and now I was in the zone, writing, in the perfect venue for an extended evening’s consideration and analysis of mid-life crisis, fueled by alcohol consumption. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the dark spirit of Yates was clearly with me. It was as if one shade had passed me along to the next, starting with the pleasnt SO Jewett morning. The muddled, curious Coverdale-style afternoon ended with the drive up Beacon St., and as I crossed Mass Ave Hawthorne passed me over to Yates. And now Yates was watching from his spot as Stein walked in and we began our conversation, catching up on our desperate and empty lives, covering the latest news in Stein’s epic mid-life struggle. We started drinking.

We start by making the short drive up to Ipswich, just to get a look at it and guage the distance. Ipswich is Updikeville, and I haven’t done any recent Updike reading or research, but I have a strong personal sense of his presence as we move through the little town and stop for coffee. Updike of course just died at the beginning of the year, and it’s funny to think if my experience here would have been different if he was still alive, how I might have been wondering if he was about to pop in for a bagel just like the one I was having.

We doubled back through Essex and headed out to Gloucester. The weather had been bad for the past two days, cloudy with rain, but now it was gorgeous out and the bright sunshine made all the difference. This is beautiful country, and our scenic drive was now extremely scenic. We covered the west side of Gloucester, then went back down to the center of town and spotted the Crow’s Nest bar from Perfect Storm, then made our second stop of the day at the Rocky Neck Artist’s Colony, getting out, walking around, and enjoying the sunshine. From there we looped out to East Gloucester, where all the big houses are. We kind of stumbled on this, not knowing exactly where it all was, but my scenic drive technique basically consists of putting myself into position to make this kind of discovery–or not. We saw the ocean view inns and motels, which all looked pretty good, and we drove past the beach. From there we headed to Rockport. It was great and we could have happily spent the afternoon there walking around, but we wanted to keep moving and didn’t get out of the car.

I expected we would turn back. But when I was reading the Annie Fields diary the day before, she had mentioned that she and JT were going to their house on Pigeon Cove–I had to assume this was a house they had before building their house in Manchester. When we were finished going through Rockport I saw a sign that said “Pigeon Cove–Two Miles,” so of course I had to keep going, wondering all the while about how different this must have been as a summer spot 150+ years ago. Only I somehow missed Pigeon Cove and soon enough we had definitely gone further than two miles. We were cruising slowly along the winding coast road, enjoying the views and not checking the map, and soon enough we had rounded the Cape and were going through Lanesville, Annisquam and Riverdale, driving the whole of route 127, and we were back at Grant Circle and Gloucester. Combined with the brief ride up to Ipswich, it seemed as if we had put a pretty high score up on the board for the morning scenic drive portion of the program.

And now it was time for the afternoon museum portion. We drove into Boston, which I had down to a science by now, and my scouting/refresher course on Friday morning was helpful as we went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. This famous “small” museum isn’t exactly a secret, and it had been on my list for my two previous trips, but I hadn’t made it there yet. I knew it would be great, and wasn’t disappointed. In mentioning the museum to people I say that it’s like the Frick (and I could add the Huntington here in Pasadena, I suppose), a rich art collector’s mansion turned into a museum. A lot of people seem to know the Frick (“Oh, I love the Frick,” I keep hearing), perhaps because of its Manhattan Museum Row location, its manageable size and the quality of its artwork. The Gardner isn’t as measured and accessible as the Frick, and it’s a bit dark and brooding and heavy in the Renaissance Palazzo manner that informs its aesthetic, but it’s still spectacular. And when we were there the early summer sunshine was poring down into the beautiful couryard and side garden and it was gorgeous. I appreciate a structure centered around a perfect ancient Roman mosaic more than I might have in the past.

Iszy was in heaven. Her studies took a strong art history bent in the freshman year she just completed. It’s funny to think how she likes the museum even more than I do and has a better idea of what’s going on, since my own knowledge of art is a result of lots of museum going but no formal coursework. The Gardner is like a house (sort of, in a palazzo kind of way), everything the way that ISG left it, and nothing is labeled. This is probably good and it’s different, and it makes me realize how dependent I am on the little cards that say who, what, where, etc. There’s a system with room guides, but it takes some getting used to, and throws me off my game a little bit. That’s probably a good thing, I know. I’m voracious and I move quickly through museums, doing a volume business in a first pass through a larger museum, and in smaller ones, like the Gardner, I often go through twice, lingering on the second round, taking my time as others catch up. But Iszy moves pretty quickly too. We’re efficient.

We head to Copley Square and eat, and she’s telling me about Trinity Church and H.H. Richardson and McKim, Mead and White. I had gone through MMWs impressive Boston Public Library on a previous visit, and I had heard Trinity Church mentioned but didn’t understand the fuss, and now Iszy clues me in. The sun is out and it’s five o’clock and people are everywhere, appreciating the great weather. The library and church are closed, but Iszy snaps a couple of photos with her phone.

Then we’re on the road, well-fed, and I’ve remembered something else I wanted to do: we drive out to take a look at Wellesley College.

When I’m on the road I like to get out and about early and find a coffee place, which helps to get things going. I was on LA time I guess and slept a little late, until almost 8, when I knew I had to check on the parking meter situation. So I was walking up and down Charles Street, finding coffee and considering the associations that I had developed with this locale since the time of my last visit. In “The Dante Club,” for instance, OW Holmes Sr. lives on Charles St., and a few scenes take place in his house, but it’s never mentioned that JT Fields lives down the block–did Holmes live on Charles St. too? We had done a pretty good job of covering Beacon Hill and a lot of the history of Downtown Boston on our previous visit (Freedom Trail, etc.), and that’s when my appreciation for the Charles St. location, right off the Common, had begun, before I knew anything about the famous home and salon of Annie Fields. After a while, coffee and croissant consumed, I confirmed that 142 Charles Street is now the garage where I had expensively parked my car on my previous visit. I was more thrifty this time, and my bill as I checked out of the John Jeffries House was remarkably cheap too.

I wasn’t sure about my next move, and this was when I first wished that I had planned out my literary pilgrimage activities more carefully. I didn’t have the hours for the Mass. Historical Society and thought it opened at 10 (it opened at 9), and I gravitated in its general direction, reacquainting myself with the basic city geography in the process. Just as I didn’t feel like a legitimate filmmaker or member of the production when I had visited the set the afternoon before, today I didn’t feel like a legitimate scholar as I went to look at the Annie Fields papers. But all you really need is a drivers license or photo id, and I knew exactly what I was looking for, so I didn’t have much cause for concern. The Historical Society was a tad formal, as it should be, but I calmly followed procedures and received my orientation, then got some help from my friendly guide. The diaries are on microfilm, and you don’t get to actually look at the real thing, though I had a sense that if I showed up regularly for a few days and became buddies with the Historical Society kids–everybody was young and friendly, but the tightness of the ship suggest that there are plenty of grown ups behind closed doors–that they’d pull it out and show it to me. The Annie Fields papers take up three reels of microfilm, which is something that I knew already, from going online. So if, say, some one wanted to publish that diary, in conjunction with the Historical Society of course, one would only have to copy those reels to begin preparing the text, and the reels could easily be turned into a PDF. Let’s just say that the whole thing could easily be more accessible, if anyone cared, especially since they take the romance out of looking at the papers themselves.

One thing quickly becomes apparent as you crack the diary: the “63 volumes” is a bit of a cheat. It’s more like “63 blue books” or thin little Moleskines. You’d think that AAF would have opted for a fancier venue for her thoughts. It’s another reason why it would be good to get a look at the actual diary, to be able to see what kind of stack the papers make, but it can’t be more than a couple of volumes of Pepys. (I should probably note that I know very little or nothing about Pepys–Royal Navy guy, right?–or Evelyn or any other diarists. Who are the bigwigs in the diary game? In the literary diary game? I guess Boswell’s journals count.) The entries that I looked at weren’t especially lengthy, and they were anywhere from a couple of paragraphs to three or four pages. The diary has a title: Journal of Literary events and glimpses of interesting people. I spent about an hour reading through bits here and there, mostly fascinated by the length of the chapter-like “volumes” and the amount of time they covered, usually a couple of months. My goal on this first quick visit was just to get in and try to take a general glance, and I had set aside two days at the beginning of next week if I wanted to hunker down and really read through it. I realized that my preparation could have been much better, and I regretted not bringing with me on the trip Rita Gollin’s 2002 book, an exhaustive study of AAF that I’ve checked out two different times from the library and have been reading in fits and starts.

It was raining outside and I was worrying about the parking meter–when I originally went in I didn’t know if I would be there for five minutes or five hours. The morning was getting on. In the microfilm reading room with me there was a “real” scholar, looking at another diary. I eavesdropped to try to discover his topic. He hit a snag and asked for help reading the handwriting (“how good are you at reading 18th century handwriting?” “um, probably pretty mediocre, since I’ve never done it?”). I took a shot, to no avail, and then a Historical Society tyro stepped in and figured it out in seconds. It was, I believe, Thomas Pickering’s diary he was reading–some Pickering–and he told me he was writing a book on Washington. He asked about my research, but he hadn’t heard of AAF, and I explained the diary in a speedy flourish by saying that Emerson had just stopped by, “Hawthorne shocked us by his invalid appearance,” “Who should join us in a wood-land walk this morning but Mr. Franklin Pierce formerly President of these United States”–that sort of thing. The scholar went back to work, and I rolled up the microfilm reel to leave. As I signed out I saw that he was Ron Chernow–yep, a real scholar.

It was around noon now and I thought I would fit in a couple of bookstore stops before going back out to the set. I had googled Boston bookstores before I left, but didn’t make a list–of course not. I remembered the general location of Brattle Bros. Books on West St., and saw Commonwealth Books close by, so I thought I would check those out. Every good bookstore is different, while bad ones are generally the same, and I have a standard routine for making a snap judgement on overall store quality, before settling in and poring over the shelves. I look to see sets of collected works, which are generally close by the counter, unless there’s a rare book room or it’s a very high end store. Then I mosey around looking for scholarly books on literature and other topics in search of something that I just have to have and can’t possibly resist, before working my way to seeing cheaper, trade paperback editions that I might actually purchase. I was on an extremely tight budget on this trip, so I went in with my anti-book buying force fields fully engaged. A book was going to have to be very special to break through my defenses, but the common practice is that if one book busts through then four or five very often follow. Both bookstores were excellent. My supposition is that Boston, with Harvard, MIT, and literally a zillion colleges and universities and the whole American/New England intellectual tradition thing, should be a bookstore Mecca, and these two stores provided a good start. Commonwealth had all sorts of good, well-priced books and I remember four stately volumes of G. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Boswell’s Johnson, books that I’ve long coveted, for $100. The complete idition is 6 volumes, I believe, but the text is complete in the first four if I remember correctly. And downstairs I saw “The Letters of Celia Thaxter,” by her friends AF & __”–an Annie Fields book, for $25. The force field held steady.

And Brattle Bros. was a solid step up from the very solid effort by Commonwealth. This is a pretty dreamy bookstore, comprehensive, scholarly, accessible. Any lover of books and personal libraries could do some real damage here. It has a rare book room up on the third floor, reminding of Moe’s Books in Berkeley. It’s a little smaller than Moes’s and not an emporium like The Strand, or what I imagine Powells must be like. There are interesting sets galore, of all different kinds and prices, lots and lots of Emerson and Hawthorne and some beautiful Throeau and all sorts of stuff. I was moving quickly, scanning at top speed and checking prices and worrying about the stupid parking meter again, half a mile away in the rain. The force field was weakening, as I was happy to be in this just slightly untidy (pretty good for a bookstore), dynamic intellectual sanctuary, but I managed to bail out.

I stepped outside and stumbled on what was perhaps the best literary pilgrimage moment of my trip, completely by chance. On the house next to Brattle Bros. there is a plaque, marking it as the site of Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore. A paragraph gave a good brief description of the store as a crucial locus of the trancendental movement–I wish I had written down the quote. I suddenly felt like I was on hallowed ground, at the site of the center of things, and it’s interesting to reflect on how the spot is just a short walk across the Common from Charles St., where I had started my day. I jogged through the drizzling rain back to my car, plunging forward, but it seemed like I had gotten lucky, and was off to a good start on my literary activities.