Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (14 page)

Anne S.’s husband was unavailable for comment—he was on the phone with The Sharper Image, ordering her an Ultrasonic Wave Cleaner whose 42,000-wave-per-second piezo transducer will automatically bubble microdirt off her diamond bra—so I interviewed Anne F.’s husband instead. The question I posed was, “Why does your wife read mailorder catalogues?”

George looked me straight in the eye and said, “Because if something is addressed to you, it doesn’t occur to you that you could throw it out. You’re a bizarrely obedient person.” (This is true. It is hard for me to walk on a DONT WALK sign even if there are no cars for miles. However, while waiting, I get back at it by thinking, DON’T OMIT THE APOSTROPHE.) George confessed that when he knew I had a deadline, he had on occasion triaged half the mailbox—
my catalogues!
—directly into the trash can. I counter-confessed that I had decided to write this essay just so that whenever he caught me reading a catalogue, I could say I was doing research.

I
think I read catalogues for the same reason George stuffs himself with hors d’oeuvres at cocktail parties: they’re free. How can he justify going out for sushi when all those lukewarm pigs-in-blankets are there for the taking? Similarly, how can I justify a stroll to the newsstand to pick up
The New York Review of Books
when Alsto’s Handy Helpers is right there in my mailbox, offering, among other memorable lucubrations, 105 words in praise of the Ro-Si Rotating Composter? I also read catalogues in order to further my education. Had it not been for Design Toscano Historical Reproductions for Home and Garden, I might never have learned that the three parts of a sixteenth-century close helmet are the visor, the ventail, and the beaver. Finally, I value catalogues for the privileged, and sometimes aesthetically stimulating, glimpses they afford of worlds from which I would otherwise be barred. Who could read the Garrett Wade tool catalogue without thinking, “This is a poem”? Not I. In fact, here it is. The following syllabically impeccable haiku consists entirely of items you can order by calling (800) 221-2942:

Joiner’s mash, jack plane.
Splitting froe? Bastard cut rasp!
Craftsman dozuki

I hope you noted the Japanese touch in the final line, which refers, of course, to Item No. 49117.01, a saw whose blade “has a very smooth action with a very narrow kerf.” (I am currently composing a villanelle inspired by the word
kerf
.)

It would take an epic—to which I fear my abilities as a poet are unequal—to do justice to the tools purveyed by the Sempiternal Rose of mail order, the 1902 Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Its offerings included twenty-two different blacksmiths’ hammers, twelve watchmakers’ files, and seven cattle dehorners. Six hundred thousand people paid fifty cents apiece to read it, not a small sum if you consider that the same amount or less could have bought them one four-hook corset, two turkey calls, three solid-silver thimbles, four boxes of foot powder, or five false mustaches. The best thing about the Sears catalogue—a feature sadly missing from almost all its descendants—was the thirteen-page index. Who could read

Abdominal Belts…………	466
Accordions………….	205-206
Account Books…………..	261
Acme Gall Cure…………	412
Acme Harness Soap………	411
Adjustable Combs……….	498
Adzes……………..	515-516
Air Tight Stoves…………	827
Albatross Cloth………….	836
Albums, Celluloid and
Plush……………	269-270

and remain unmoved? And who could resist such blandishments as “LADIES, YOU CAN BE BEAUTIFUL. No matter who you are, what your disfigurements may be, you can make yourself as handsome as any lady in the land by the use of our FRENCH ARSENIC WAFERS”?

Note that the estimable copywriters of Sears, Roebuck & Co. said “You can be beautiful,” not “
Be
beautiful.” This is an important distinction. The tiny bit of wiggle room they left has since been lost, buried deep beneath the Catalogical Imperative:

• Cut tough toenails easily.

• Stop ugly fungus.

• Stop grinding your teeth at night.

• Stop bad breath in pets.

• Turn your home into a massage parlor.

• Enjoy bagels. Without a detour to the emergency room.

• Make 12 incredible-looking styles of paper shoes and then go for a walk.

• Serve up a deadly charge with the Swatter Electronic Insect Terminator.

• Shoot yucky green goo over 35 feet.

• Fill the plastic mold with peach flavored gelatin and a few hours later, out pops a flesh-toned left hand.

Even the ever-obedient Anne F. rebels. I won’t!

But such boorish commands (quoted verbatim from Healthy Living, The Sharper Image, and Brainstorms) tarnish only the low end of the catalogue-writing spectrum. At the top, although the second person prevails, the mood—as it was in the golden age of arsenic complexion wafers—is declarative rather than imperative. Q.v., from the J. Peterman catalogue: “Tonight your Lucia was the best in a generation.” “Someone may notice your resemblance to Ava Gardner.” “You still have your alto sax.”
How did they know
?

The day J.P. arrives in the Fadiman-Sadiman household, the world stops. No one is permitted to interrupt. The references to Henry James, Anna Akhmatova, and the Chogyal of Sikkim lull me into thinking I’m reading something worthwhile. The instructive excursi on Sir Francis Gallon’s hat (it had retractable shutters so his brain would not overheat) and the kind of shirts worn by polo-playing Persian princes in 1472 (open-necked) provide excellent fodder for dinner-party conversations. And who needs an atlas when you can master the spellings of Sylt, Krk, Sukhumi, Tetuán, Muhu, Bjugn, and Husøy just by reading your mail?

My analysis of J. Peterman’s appeal is that it is a Harlequin romance for the kind of people who vacation in Krk. For example (to quote from the blurb for an ankle-length crêpe-de-Chine floral dress with leg-o’-mutton sleeves):

He spends the morning repairing the deer fence. The next job is to start a compost pile. It’s getting warm. As he takes off his flannel shirt, he observes that you are no longer reclining in the bay window reading Proust.

This paragraph makes a number of assumptions, all exceedingly pleasant:

But I didn’t order the dress. My problem—and it has made Anne F., though a devoted reader of catalogues, a faithless patron—is that I never want the item, I want the associated fantasy. I don’t want the leg-o’-mutton sleeves, I want the country house, the window seat, and the Proust.

In fact, I threw out the entire Nordstrom catalogue except for the cover. Forget the clothes. After I get the country house, I want the goat.

 M
Y
A
N C E S T R A L
C
A S T L E S
 

W
hen I was four, I liked to build castles with my father’s pocket-sized, twenty-two-volume set of Trollope. My brother and I had a set of wooden blocks as well, but the Trollopes were superior: midnight blue, proportioned to fit a child’s hand, and, because they were so much thinner than they were tall, perfect, as cards are, for constructing gates and drawbridges. I own them now. Before I wrote these sentences, I took down three of the volumes from my shelves, and before you could say Sir Raffle Buffle,
The Last Chronicle of Barset
had become a lintel balanced precariously atop the twin posts of
Lady Anna
and
Doctor Thorne
.

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them. It’s a wonder to me that the young Diana Trilling, who had to wash her hands before she extracted a volume of Twain or Balzac from her parents’ glass-fronted bookcase, grew up to be a booklover. Our parents’ model was the playground; her parents’ model was the operating room. By buying his set of leatherbound classics en bloc from a door-to-door salesman, Trilling’s father committed the additional heresy, unimaginable to us, of believing that a library could be one-size-fits-all rather than bespoke. My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents’ tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closets. Their selves were on their shelves.

Our father’s library spanned the globe and three millennia, although it was particularly strong in English poetry and fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The only junk, relatively speaking, was science fiction; the only wholly extraliterary works were about wine and cheese. My favorite shelf held the books he had written himself. I liked seeing my own name up there—FADIMAN FADIMAN FADIMAN—especially around the age of five, since it was one of the first words I learned to spell. When my reading skills improved, I remember imagining that Erasmus must have looked like Ed Wynn because he had written something called
In Praise of Folly
. My brother remembers thinking (more accurately) that Kierkegaard must have been a terrifying fellow because he had written
The Sickness unto Death
and
Fear and Trembling
. And we both believed that our father, because his books did, somehow managed to incorporate both folly and terror, as well as every emotion in between.

Our mother’s library was narrower, focusing almost entirely on China and the Philippines. Paging through
A Primer in the Writing of Chinese Characters
(published in Shanghai!) and
I Was on Corregidor
(it mentioned
her
!) was thrilling, like discovering one was the illegitimate offspring of Mata Hari. But the excitement was not unalloyed. Our father, who often boasted that he had never actually done anything except think, was still the same person he had been when he started collecting books in the early 1920s. He and his library had never diverged. Our mother, on the other hand, had once led a life of action. And why had she stopped?
Because she had had children
. Her books, which seemed the property of a woman I had never met, defined the size of the sacrifice my brother and I had exacted.

Between them, our parents had about seven thousand books. Whenever we moved to a new house, a carpenter would build a quarter of a mile of shelves; whenever we left, the new owners would rip them out. Other people’s walls looked naked to me. Ours weren’t flat white backdrops for pictures. They were works of art themselves, floor-to-ceiling mosaics whose vividly pigmented tiles were all tall skinny rectangles, pleasant to the touch and even, if one liked the dusty fragrance of old paper, to the sniff. Vladimir Nabokov once recorded in his diary that at the age of eight, his son associated the letters of the alphabet with particular colors.
C
was yellow;
F
was tan;
M
was robin’s-egg blue. To this day, imprinted by the cloth-covered spines of the books that surrounded me thirty years ago, I feel certain that Sophocles is terra-cotta, Proust is dove gray, Conrad is cinnamon, Wilde is acid green, Poe is Prussian blue, Auden is indigo, and Roald Dahl is mauve.

There must be writers whose parents owned no books, and who were taken under the wing of a neighbor or teacher or librarian, but I have never met one. My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don’t read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children’s rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parents’ rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says PRIVATE—GROWNUPS KEEP OUT: a child sprawled on the bed, reading.