Dog-Eared

At age 16, I underwent the onomastic equivalent of a nose job: I legally changed my name. I had always hated “Lois,” a matronly moniker redolent of great aunts and baggy support hose. With the exception of Brenda Starr, it was also the worst possible name for a girl thinking of becoming a journalist.

Wanting an androgynous byline I chose “Leigh,” a variant spelling of my initials (L.E.E.) But Leigh was also a hat-tip to Leigh Hunt, the 19th century essayist, poet, convicted seditionist, and purported inspiration for the insidious Harold Skimpole of Bleak House. I liked Hunt for, among other things, his meditation on the authorial use of pronouns and the cynical essay “Rules for Newspaper Editors.” His verse is endearingly bad in the manner of Longfellow’s: “Abu Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)/Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.” It requires a brillo pad to scrub that out of your brain.

Hanff's Lesson: Why should you wander aimlessly around Barnes and Noble, picking out the books with the prettiest covers, if you can make the search more interesting?I owe my relationship with Hunt—not to mention my relationships with Lawrence Sterne, Samuel Pepys and other writers not on academia’s A-list—to Helene Hanff. An impoverished New York television writer with esoteric intellectual appetites, Hanff in 1949 began corresponding with the staff of a small London bookshop called Marks & Co. Over 20 years, their trans-Atlantic colloquy ranged over matters literary (the inadequacies of Richard Burton’s translation of Catallus), practical (instructions for the preparation of Yorkshire pudding) and personal (marriage, death, dental work). In 1973, Hanff published the letters in a book called 84, Charing Cross Road.

The book, a quest narrative in which a Jewish Galahad with catholic tastes zealously pursues obscure and out-of-print grails, influenced my life in several ways. As noted, Hanff indirectly suggested my name. More profoundly, she showed me the difference between merely reading, and living a reading life.

Before 84, Charing Cross Road I had consumed books the way most children do: browsing the shelves for intriguing titles or following the advice of friends and teachers. My school and local libraries were well stocked, and we lived near a large Brentano’s. Good books found me. It was their destiny. Hanff knew better.

Reviewers and fans of 84, Charing Cross Road invariably treat it as a love story: seven centuries of English literature stand in for the hunk. In 1987 the book was made into a movie, one of those BBC-yawners in which Anthony Hopkins is nominally roused from asexual torpor by a spunky, literate woman not impossibly more glamorous than most members of the audience. But while the Marks & Co. contingent has its charms, 84, Charing Cross Road is chiefly a character study of the author. Hanff emerges as loudly opinionated, personal boundary-less, acerbic, generous, funny. Reading the book at the emotionally inchoate age of 13, I imagined she was lonely. I wanted to know her. And budding egotist that I was, I wanted her to know me and to be enriched by our friendship.

84, Charing Cross Road is not about love but about longing: Hanff’s longing for the authors who gave her sustenance. “I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here….” she introduces herself in a letter dated October 1949. “I enclose a list of my most pressing problems.” And for Hanff these books—or rather the lack of them—were truly pressing problems, more so than such nuisances as intermittent joblessness and eviction.

Reading 84, Charing Cross Road for the first time, I compared Hanff’s tenacity to my own passivity. And I was shamed. Determined to stalk more exotic prey, I copied into a notebook every author and title mentioned in the letters and went in search. My parents’ bookshelves yielded Tristram Shandy and The Compleat Angler which I read, loving the Sterne, sort of liking the Walton. I also looked up used bookstores in my neighborhood and consulted the classifieds in my parents’ magazines for stores in other cities. I started writing letters.

Over the years I would hunt down more than a hundred titles, most of them gleaned from other authors. The more obscure the book and delayed the gratification the better. My nonpareil of elusion was Death’s Jest Book by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, a 19th century re-imagining of Renaissance revenge tragedies that was still on the list when I finally junked the notebook—by then a thing of threads and patches--in the late ’80s.

The Rarer the Better: The pursuit of obscure titles is a stimulating extracurricular activity for any good Jewish nerd. I eventually tracked down every one of the two-dozen or so volumes mentioned by Hanff, many of which bored me. That’s not surprising. She and I lack an obvious “People who bought this also bought” bond. Irreconcilably, Hanff disliked fiction (Jane Austen excepted) while I like fiction almost exclusively. Still, in memoirs and the amorphous belles lettres category I found her taste unerring. And even when the quarry proved disappointing, I never regretted the hunt.

Today, of course, the Internet has made such hunts obsolete. Searches are conducted in minutes not in years; the only constraints on immediate procurement are financial. Sure I appreciate the convenience. But always to own is never to yearn. It’s been years since I felt my heart skip upon discovering some rare-to-the-point-of-seeming-mythical volume among the miscellany of a second-hand bookstore, or packed in a crate of cellophane wrapped best-sellers at a library book sale (where I memorably brought to ground James Stephens’ Crock of Gold and Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels).

There are 17 copies of Death’s Jest Book available new and used on Amazon starting at $14.22. I bought one a few weeks ago. It’s a good book but, alas, no longer an end in itself.

This is a book column. So I’ll start with the book.

The Quincunx, by Charles Palliser, comprises 788 pages of dense type, black-and-white maps, and family trees. Its dust jacket is glossy black, the letters marbleized gold. The page edges are rough, as though sliced through with a paper knife. That was standard procedure in the 19th century. Here, it’s affectation: The Quincunx was published in 1989.

How They Did It In the 1800s: The QuincunxPublisher’s Weekly describes the story thus: “The protagonist, a young man naive enough to be blind to all clues about his own hidden history (and to the fact that his very existence is troubling to all manner of evildoers) narrates a story of uncommon beauty which not only brings readers face-to-face with dozens of piquantly drawn characters at all levels of 19th-century English society but re-creates with precision the tempestuous weather and gnarly landscape that has been a motif of the English novel since Wuthering Heights.”

It sounds awful. But who knows? Maybe it’s a good read. My friend Rebecca Alm was reading it in 1991, when she stayed with us in Boston. An editor for Swarthmore’s alumni magazine, Rebecca was in town to interview a Harvard professor who had just written a book about cross-dressing. I never saw her crack The Quincunx the entire visit. After she flew home to Philadelphia, I found it on a bedside table.

I met Rebecca in 1987, when we toiled together in the fact-checking department of TV Guide. At age 27 she looked the way I imagine Garrison Keillor’s Minnesotans do: broad of face and frame, placid of demeanor. You could imagine her in a dirndl and clogs churning butter, or sweeping the steps with a whisk broom. When she spoke she always sounded mildly exasperated, though she rarely was. Often I would come into the office with my sweater buttoned wrong (I get distracted), and Rebecca would cluck her tongue and fix me.

A fellow refugee from a graduate English program, Rebecca loved Sherlock Holmes and fat Victorian novels. We fought over how she could stomach Gallsworthy and prefer Our Mutual Friend to Bleak House. She had a perverse fondness for The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The Quincunx, I imagine, was right up her alley.

I talked science fiction with her husband, Brad Snyder. Rebecca and Brad had met at the University of Chicago; they married in 1986. When I first met them their life still had that new-marriage smell. If you talked to Rebecca without Brad present she would matter-of-factly report what he would say if he were there, and Brad would do the same. They loved the ways each other’s minds worked.

That year was a bad one for me, for all the usual reasons. I spent many evenings at their apartment, talking, watching TV, getting in the way while Rebecca tried to cook. Occasionally, when I was too depressed to go home, I spent the night. In the mornings Rebecca would pad around in her flannel robe and oversized slippers, serving strong coffee in ceramic cow mugs and making the day safe to go out in.

In 1989 I married and moved to Boston. But Rebecca and I still spoke often, wrote often. Sometimes she visited, by herself or with Brad. It was on a solo trip that Rebecca left The Quincunx at our house. I never bothered to mail it back.

In 1992, Rebecca and Brad had a daughter, Elizabeth. Her photograph is propped against my desk lamp. In the picture she is two years old, with uneven blond bangs and apple cheeks. She is wearing a Bert and Ernie t-shirt and clutching a stuffed brown dog that looks as though it has survived a lot of clutching. There is no word for the color of her eyes.

Rebecca, Brad and Elizabeth died in a fire on the night of March 20, 1996. The cause was an overloaded electrical outlet. They were living in an apartment in Greenfield, WI. The next week they were going to move to a house—the first house they would have owned. According to the newspaper account, Rebecca’s body was found by the bedroom window. Brad was in Elizabeth’s room, by her bed. The emergency squad took Brad and Elizabeth to one hospital and Rebecca to another. I don’t know why they had to separate them, although they were dead by then so I guess it didn’t matter.

Good Company: Orwell and ParkerBrad’s mother called me after it happened. The next day I phoned the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and told the woman who handled back issues that I was trying to find an obituary of some friends who had died in a fire. The woman said, “Oh, do you mean the family?” For years I kept the issue on the top shelf of my closet, taking it down every few days to reread the story. One day the newspaper disappeared. I assume my husband removed it. Probably that was the right thing to do.

I shelved The Quincunx alphabetically with the rest of my books. It sits between George Orwell and Dorothy Parker—more scintillating company than it deserves. Those uncut pages are wicked dust-catchers, so it is always furred in gray.

Last October I e-mailed my friend Denise, who lives in San Francisco, to tell her I would be in town for a conference. Denise invited me to come along with her to a Day of the Dead party, an annual event in her social circle. She explained that the host—an artist—always erected an elaborate altar on which partygoers were encouraged to place a keepsake of someone they had lost. After the mole and margaritas everyone would gather round the altar, tell the stories behind their offerings, and pay tribute.

So there it was. I would bring The Quincunx with me and leave it in a stranger’s home on the other side of the country. It felt ordained.

At 4 a.m. on the day of my trip I laid the book in my carry-on bag and set off to make a 6 a.m. flight. It was still dark as I approached Logan, and several pylons were strewn around the entrance to the airport exit. I couldn’t figure out whether the road was in use or not, so I drove past and ended up in Charlestown. It took 40 minutes to get back to Logan (darkness, detours, zero sense of direction), and by the time I arrived it was very late.

I hefted the carry-on over my shoulder. It was heavy. The thought of bearing something so heavy from that parking space all the way to California overcame me. I took The Quincunx out of my bag and left it on the passenger seat.

When I got back it was waiting for me.

What is it about certain books that draw you back to not reading them again and again?

I have not read Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” six times. The first time I did not read it was in an undergraduate class on Romantic literature. I took the course in order to study Blake, whom I’ve adored since first encountering the phrase “dark Satanic mills” through Monty Python. I knew nothing about Wordsworth except that he “wandered lonely as a cloud” and “danced with daffodils,” which was pretty bad, but not automatically disqualifying.Danced with Daffodils: William Wordsworth

So I bought the Norton edition of “The Prelude,” with the cover illustration that looks like an unmade bed, and dutifully carried it to class. I still have the thing. Its flyleaves are dense with lecture notes — awful, cringe-inducing, undergraduate lecture notes: “W. in preface sets himself in opposition to the literary ancient regime. Shakes reader out of lethargy into new sense of wonder—indeed of divinity—in the everyday.” It’s possible I read as far as page 3, where I have scribbled “epic of secular transcendence” in the margin. At that point I think I came down with mono, or possibly just gave up.

The second time I did not read “The Prelude” was two years later, in a class for which I also did not read “Paradise Lost.” Fortunately, I was able to read enough about “Paradise Lost” to cobble together a credible thesis on Milton’s treatment of Satan, although most of that paper ended up being about Blake. In graduate school I took another Romanticism course, attracted again by Blake and newly seduced by Byron (“so do the dark in soul expire / or live like scorpion girt by fire” — I mean, come on!) I did not read “The Prelude” then, nor did I read it for a class on the role of theater in literature. In fairness to me, only Book Seventh was assigned for that one. (This is not a misprint. Chapters in The Prelude are titled “Book First,” “Book Second,” “Book Third” etc. Yet another reason to steer clear.)

Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: Seductive Lord ByronConcerned that I might be expected to teach, I eventually bailed on grad school and got a regular job. Reading was downgraded to a leisure pursuit, and since I had no leisure I read little. At one point, mentally bloated and blotchy after subsisting for months on a diet of horror and mystery anthologies, I determined to put my brain on a stern exercise regimen. Up from my basement bookshelves came three volumes: The Tale of Genji; The Decameron; and, of course, “The Prelude.” I can’t imagine I was serious. But by then “The Prelude” had become my anti-Everest: the monumental challenge whose mere existence compelled me to sit tight.

Assuming mortality pans out as described, I will die without having read most books. But I will have not read “The Prelude” in a more purposeful way than all the others. I guess I’m a book-tease: encouraging Wordsworth’s epic to hang out in the background of my life but unwilling to go all the way. Most of my reasons are superficial. “The Prelude” is long. It’s in blank verse. There’s not enough action. There’s too much nature. It seems really boring.

Or perhaps this repeated refusal to submit is all about me—a fitting interpretation, given the Romantics’ fascination with the self. We define our lives by the big things we accomplish; the big things we don’t accomplish have no such distinguishing effect. After all, there is nothing special about not rising to great challenges. The world is lousy with non-mountain-climbers, non-cancer-curers, non-great-American-novel-writers, non-I-lost-300-pounds-and-now-fit-into-my-high-school-cheerleader’s-uniform-ers. To dream such dreams yet fail to chase them is to be human. And is there anything more drearily generic than that?

By contrast, there’s something beautifully specific about the things we might just as well do but repeatedly and purposefully avoid. I had a friend with an enormous music collection who would never buy an album by the Beatles—a band he liked just fine—because he saw himself as a guy who didn’t own an album by the Beatles. Another friend refuses to shop at warehouse clubs for no better reason than that she refuses to shop at warehouse clubs. I have never watched “The Tonight Show.” If I walk into a room where it is playing I will walk right out to preserve my perfect record.

I briefly considered writing this column as a Moby Dick-like tale of haunted pursuit culminating in apocalyptic confrontation (I have, in fact, read Moby Dick. I’ve read the non-cetology chapters twice.) In that scenario, of course, “The Preludes” would be Ahab, and I the whale. I would read “The Prelude”—really, finally —and describe how I vanquished or was vanquished by it.

Thus passed my sixth flirtation with the text. At this point in my life, reading “The Prelude” might make me smarter. It would probably make me sleepier. It would certainly make me different. I will never read it.

A while back, I tried to e-mail a document containing the phrase “gimcrack-cum-geegaw,” but a prudish software filter wouldn’t let me. The gauntlet down, I fired off additional objectionables, and the only one that made it through was “quim.” I’m not surprised that that word tripped no alarms. Quim—which sounds vaguely nautical but in fact means female genitalia—has fallen out of fashion. Meanwhile, its more phonetically aggressive synonym, cunt, survives and thrives in music, movies, and on HBO. In matters of slang, it appears, lexical Darwinism favors the plosive.

I hadn’t thought of “quim” since I was 14. That year several books loomed large in my imagination. The one that taught me quim—and some other words swatted down by blocking software—was My Secret Life, a Victorian memoir (or not) by the ever-prolific Anonymous. The others were the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, by Dorothy L. Sayers. Sexier in their way than any bodice ripper, the Wimsey books were for me a psychic antioxidant, counteracting the damage done my tender id by Anonymous’s tale.

I first encountered My Secret Life at my friend Laura’s house. Her parents owned a copy, and after school we took turns reading it while the other watched TV. We never read together or aloud, recognizing that the mental life this book engendered must remain secret also. So we internalized the foulness, thus making it a little less real and preserving our relationship from its taint.

Published in 1902, My Secret Life is narrated by Walter, an agreeable gentleman who describes inventive sex in uninventive language for nearly 600 pages. In his wry introduction to the Signet Classic edition, James Kinkaid explains that the original ran to eleven volumes, an epic achievement of interest only to “scholars and the mentally tangled.” For 58 chapters Walter has at and at and at and at: men, women, and children arrayed in every imaginable social and physical position. The level of detail—with particular attention to the color, shape and thatchery of those aforementioned quims—is so excruciating it’s funny, but only briefly, and then it’s back to being excruciating.

As a child’s first pornography, My Secret Life is rough trade. There is rape and pedophilia and all manner of “buggery,” an excellent word that I choose to define broadly as sodomy-plus. Not surprisingly, it left me with the most soiled and sordid idea of all things sexual. Still, I read the book fanatically long after Laura had grown bored and gone on to better things. To me this was not just Walter’s secret life; it was the secret life of all adults. In those pages lay a deeper truth than I would ever hear from my parents —hyper-educated New York Jews with a self-proclaimed healthy attitude toward sex, whose clinical marvels they would gladly, horribly have shared upon request. This was the worst. I knew the worst. I both thrilled at and hated knowing it.

And so I watched romantic movies and read romantic novels and listened to romantic songs. But I found none of it erotic because I knew that it would end squalidly. Even Jane Eyre—my favorite “hot” book of years past—became suffused with the smell of chamber pots. Encountering boys I once liked, I just wanted to pile more and more clothes on them and, ideally, shove them into a closet.

In the end it was Sayers who banished the (rutting) toad from my imaginary garden. Her Wimsey mysteries are traditional English cozies featuring an aristocrat detective who quotes handily from the western canon when not lapsing into Wodehouse-ian twaddle. In Strong Posion (1930) Wimsey meets Harriet Vane, an equally cerebral mystery novelist awaiting execution for the murder of her lover. Wimsey solves the case and saves Harriet’s life, creating an onerous debt that prevents her from accepting his endearingly sincere and self-deprecating marriage proposals through two more books. (They wed at last in Busman’s Honeymoon.)

So what made the Wimsey-Vane relationship so erotic? (I am not alone in finding it so, by the way. Two women I know confess to getting all heavy breath-y over the pairing during their formative years. I’m sure there are more of you out there.) The extended intellectual foreplay had a lot to do with it, of course. Sayers successfully sustained sexual tension over more than 1,000 pages, leaving readers who loved the pair no choice but to imagine them into bed. And while neither character is unusually attractive, they are both smart. No, not smart—Oxford smart. “Not faint Canaries, but ambrosial,” Peter murmurs when the two at last get down to it. And we know the sex is great because Harriet doesn’t get around to sourcing the quotation for ten whole days.

But what is sexiest about these books is the way complex people—he so chivalric, she so dark, both so wounded—think and talk about intimacy. They approach the subject with delicate, yet joyous, anticipation and a kind of cautious indirection, as though afraid to stare into the sun.

Peter, walking home after his first interview with Harriet in her cell, allows himself one small stroke tucked discreetly into a full imaging of their life together: “…she’s got a sense of humor too—brains—one wouldn’t be dull—one would wake up, and there’d be a whole day for jolly things to happen in—and then one would come home and go to bed—that would be jolly too—and while she was writing I could go out and mess around, so we shouldn’t either of us be dull….” Sayers keeps these two mostly on a plane of such high thought and feeling that when, on occasion, they do acknowledge their physicality it is more arousing for being a surprise.

Peter: “You don’t particularly care about children?”

Harriet: “Not children, in the lump. But I think it’s just possible that some day I might come to want….”

Peter: “Your own?”

Harriet: “No, yours.”

“ ‘Oh,’ he had said, unexpectedly disconcerted.”

So much yearning, so much humility, so many quotations from John Donne. And yes, it’s a great love story, but it wasn’t love that made me lightheaded. Sex, in Sayers, was simultaneously hot and elliptical: ideally provoking to the imaginations of smart, scared teenaged girls.

W H A T N E X T

Do Something: What are you favorite textual versions of Skinemax? Tell us below in the Comments section.
Go Somewhere: Join the Dorothy L. Sayers Society.
Read Something: Got $400 to toss around and keep your vapors going? Buy the Lord Peter Wimsey Companion.