Kurt Thometz

Maxims by the Pound

KT — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:46:26 +0000

From ABC of Reading. Ezra Pound.

Literature is language charged with meaning. Literature is news that STAYS news. If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. Your legislator can’t legislate for the public good, you commander can’t command, you populace (if you be a democratic country) can’t instruct its ‘representatives’, save by language. The fogged language of the swindling classes serves only a temporary purpose. Rome rose with the idiom of Caesar, Ovid, and Tacitus, she declined in a welter of rhetoric, the diplomat’s language to conceal thought, and so forth. The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts. It is very difficult to make people understand the impersonal indignation that a decay of writing can cause men who understand what it implies, and the end whereto it leads. It is almost impossible to express any degree of such indignation without being called ‘embittered’, or something of that sort. THE READER’S AMBITION may be mediocre, and the ambitions of no two readers will be identical. ‘Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.’ An epic is a poem including history. Phanopoeia : ‘the throwing of an image on the mind’s retina.’ Music rots when it gets too far from dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. One reads prose for the subject matter.

Incompetence will show in the use of too many words. The reader’s first and simplest test of an author will be to look for words that do not function; that contribute nothing to the meaning OR that distract from the MOST important factor of the meaning to factors of minor importance. One definition of beauty is : aptness to purpose. Whether it is a good definition or not, you can readily see that a good deal of BAD criticism has been written by men who assume that an author is trying to do what he is NOT trying to do.

An attempt to set down things as they are, to find the word that corresponds with the thing, the statement that portrays. and presents, instead of making a comment, however brilliant, or an epigram. Flaubert is the archetype. The Brothers Goncourt codified and theorized and preached Flaubert’s practice. Flaubert never stopped experimenting. Before he had finished he called his Salammbo ‘cette vieille toquade’, or old charade in fancy clothes.

THE FIRST PHASE of anyone’s writing always shows them doing something ‘like’ something they have heard or read. The majority of writers never pass that stage.

‘the value of old work is constantly affected by the value of the new.’ …The cinema supersedes a great deal of second-rate narrative, and a great deal of theatre. A film may make better use of 60 per cent of all narrative dramatic material. Each case can be decided on its own merits. In all cases one test will be, ‘could this material have been made more efficient in some other medium?’

‘L’historie morale contemporaine’, the history of contemporary moral disposition , the history of the estimation of values in contemporary behavior.

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully fostered by the inferiority complex of the public. …Before deciding whether a man is a fool or a good artist, it would be well to ask, not only: ‘is he excited unduly’, but: ‘does he see something we don’t?’ Is his curious behavior due to his feeling of oncoming earthquake, or smelling a forest fire which we do not yet feel or smell?

The authors and books I recommend in this introduction to the study of letters are to be considered AS measuring-rods and voltmeters. The books listed are books to have in mind, BEFORE you try to measure and evaluate other books. The are, most emphatically, NOT all the books worth reading. A great deal of what you read, you simply need not ‘bother about’. On the other hand, you needn’t fall into the silly snobbism that has ruined whole shoals of fancy writers, polite essayists, refined young gents, members of literary cenacles und so weiter.

The honest critic must be content to find a VERY LITTLE contemporary work worth serious attention; but he must also be ready to RECOGNIZE that little, and to demote work of the past when a new work surpasses it. The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully fostered by the inferiority complex of the public. Artists and poets undoubtedly get excited and ‘over-excited’ about things long before the general public. Before deiding whether a man is a fool or a good artist, it would be well to ask, not only: ‘is he excited unduly’, but: ‘does he see something we don’t?’ Is his curious behaviour due to his feeling an oncoming earthquake, or smelling a forest which we do not yet feel or smell?

From: How to Read

Introduction

People regard literature as something vastly more flabby and floating and complicated and indefinite than, let us say, mathematics. Its subject-matter, the human consciousness, is more complicated than are number and space.

The practice of literary composition in private has been permitted since “age immemorial,” like knitting, crocheting, etc. It occupies the practitioner, and, so long as he keeps it to himself, ne nuit pas aux autres, it does not transgress the definition of liberty which we find in the declaration of the Droits le l’Homme: Liberty is the right to do anything which harms not others. All of which is rather negative and unsatisfactory.

III

It appears to me quite tenable that the function of literature as a generated prize-worthy force is precisely that it does incite humanity to continue living; that it eases the mind of strain, and feeds it, I mean definitely as nutrition of impulse. This idea may worry lovers of order. Just as good literature does often worry them. They regard it as dangerous, chaotic, subversive. They try every idiotic and degrading wheeze to tame it down. They try to make a bog, a marasmus, a great putridity in place of a sane and active ebullience. And they do this from sheer simian and pig-like stupidity, and from their failure to understand the function of letters.

Misquoting Confucius, one might say: It does not matter whether the author desire the good of the race or acts merely from personal vanity. The thing is mechanical in action. In proportion as his work is exact, i.e., true to human consciousness and to the nature of man, as it is exact in formulation of desire, so is it durable and so is it “useful”; I mean it maintains the precision and clarity of thought, not merely for the benefit of a few dilettantes and “lovers of literature,” but maintains the health of thought outside literary circles and in non-literary existence, in general individual and communal life. Or “dans ce genre on n’etmeut que par la clarte.” One “moves” the reader only by clarity. In depicting the motions of the “human heart” the durability of the writing depends on the exactitude. It is the thing that is true and stays true that keeps fresh for the new reader.

Part 2.

In introducing a person to literature one would do well to have him examine works where language is efficiently used; to devise a system for getting directly and expeditiously at such works, despite the smokescreens erected by half-knowing and half-thinking critics. To get at them, despite the mass of dead matter that these people have heaped up and conserved round about them in the proportion: one barrel of sawdust to each half-bunch of grapes. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. … in the wake of the valid. You may say that for twenty-seven years I have thought consciously about this particular matter, and read or read at a great many books, and that with the subject never really out of my mind, I don’t yet know half there is to know about melopoeia. There are, on the other hand, a few books that I still keep on my desk, and a great number that I shall never open again. But the books that a man needs to know in order to “get his bearings,” in order to have a sound judgment of any bit of writing that may come before him, are very few. (It is a modern folly to suppose that vulgarity and cheapness have the merit of novelty; they have always existed, and are of no interest in themselves.) a “classic” movement, a movement that restrained without inventing. Anything that happens to mind in England has usually happened somewhere else first. Even the method of annihilating imbecility employed by Voltaire, Bayle, and Lorenzo Valla can be managed quite as well in rhymed couplets. The art of popular success lies simply in never putting more on any one page than the most ordinary reader can lick off it in his normally rapid, half-attentive skim-over. Henry James was the first person to add anything to the art of the nineteenth-century novel not already known to the French. All the developments in English verse since 1910 are due almost wholly to Americans. In fact, there iS no longer any reason to call it English verse, and there is no present reason to think of England at all. The French who know no English are as fragmentary as the Americans who know no French. One simply leaves half of one’s thought untouched in their company.

From The Letters of Ezra Pound

“If I had only read Confucius earlier I would not be in this mess.” Ezra Pound to Charles Olson, Howard Hall (for the Criminally Insane), St. Elizabeth’s, 1945 ‘Race prejudice is red herring. The tool of the man defeated intellectually and of the cheap politician.’ But the very characteristic next sentence is: ‘No one will deny that the jews have racial characteristics, better and worse ones.’ GOr-DDDAMMM mit!!! Get nimble. ‘As Mr Cohen said: “Vot I say iss, we got to svallow ‘em, vot I say iss, we got to svallow ‘e.” Or be boa-constricted.’ … there has been a perceptible decay in the imagination The means of communication breaks down, and that of course is what we are suffering now. We are enduring the drive to work on the subconscious without appealing to the reason. They repeat a trade name with the music a few times, and then repeat the music without it so that the music will give you the name. I think of the assault. We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers. There is the definite use of propaganda, forensic language, merely to conceal and mislead. … There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent. Another struggle has been the struggle to keep the value of a local and particular character, of a particular culture in this awful maelstrom, this awful avalanche toward uniformity. The whole fight is for the conservation of the individual soul. The enemy is the suppression of history; against us is the bewildering propaganda and brainwash, luxury and violence. It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer? ‘Quite apart from military operations, from the results of military operations, from the possible results of any military operations that may occur, the American people appear to have suffered crashing defeat, at the hands of the financiers.’

From Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization

“he tested accepted values and attempted to preserve the best … ‘He kept his curiosity alive, and sought to keep curiosity alive in others, in order to prevent people from becoming bogged down in cliché and superstition. He sought to maintain a constant flow of significant factual data, in order to prevent “brainwashing.”

‘Our revolutionary culture was critical and not monolingual. ‘the obstruction is a composit of sloth, feart and greed. ‘The befouling of terminology should be put an end to. It is a time for clear definition of terms. Immediately of economic terms, but ultimately of all terms. It is not a revolution of the word but a castigation of the word. ‘The total democracy bilge, by which I mean the clichés, the assumptions, the current cant about “the people” arose from sheer misunderstanding or perversion. Perversion of ideas by means and misuse of words.

The “economic “ history of the United States is, on one side, the history of enormous waste of natural resources, wast that took place because no immediate need for thrift was apparent and, in many cases, did not exist. “Free” craftsmanship in competition with the slave system. Usury however is a cancer, finance a disease. Polite society did not consider usury as Dante did, that is damned to the same circle of Hell as the sodomites, both acting against the potential abundance of nature.

it is idiotic to leave the pocket-book of the nation in the hads of private irresponsible individuals,. Perhaps foreign; it is idiotic to leave the nation’s sources of information in the hands of private irresponsible individuals, sometimes foreign. This ruin has its roots in greed for lucre, a greed which separates itself from all commonsense and every sense of proportion, and blindly creates its own undoing. Man has been reduced not even to a digestive tube, but to a money-recepticle that gradually is losing its own value. This cycle has lasted three centuries; from the arribval of the “Pilgrims” who sought freedom of worship, to the cult of lucre dominating today. This is an economic history. It is the history of a spiritual decadence. Part of this story is technical, monetary, financial. The aim of finance is to gain by the labor of others. In the last four decades, the aim of finance, in order that the gains of a small group be greater, has been the retention of all the profits of mechanical inventions and the lowering to a minimum of the workers’ rewards. And this was done in the open market through free enterprise. The American tragedy is a continuous history of waste, waste of natural abundance first, then waste of the new abundance offered by the machine, and then by machines no longer isolated but correlated and centuplicating the creative power of human labour. (centuplicating: 100 X, increased by 100 fold.)

‘As to POETRY// it just ain’t till it is lived / Best of it has to be knocked out of man; at the end of his tether / no matter what tether // The real thing is the LAST resource/’ Post-litteracure twee-try

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies… If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered… The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” Thomas Jefferson – The Debate over the Recharter of the Bank Bill (1809).

Camilla Huey Trades on Her Work, Not Her Name

KT — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:31:47 +0000

By CHRISTOPHER PETKANAS. Published: April 11, 2012

THESE days, red-carpet cynosures name-check designers like they’re reading a Sears catalog. But one person remains uncited: Camilla Huey. In an era when the brow-threader of every actress is demanding her 15 minutes, Ms. Huey helps realize other designers’ visions (as well as her own) with her company House of Execution. Among Ms. Huey’s more-sensational creations was the black latex bodysuit, complete with nipple ring, that Janet Jackson scowled around in during her “Velvet Rope” period. And Seventh Avenue regularly relies on Ms. Huey when the stars need their hands held. She fit Cate Blanchett for a Donna Karan ad campaign and, for an ombre effect, painstakingly airbrushed the Zac Posen sequined ball skirt that Oprah Winfrey wore to the Oscars in 2011. Ms Huey has also dressed Aretha Franklin in collaboration with the stylist Kenny Bonavitacola, Katy Perry via Tommy Hilfiger and worked for Jennifer Lopez when she was Puffy’s girlfriend. Other clients include Adele, Anna Wintour, Shakira, Sarah Jessica Parker and Tina Brown. “I’m the ghostwriter, the hired gun,” said Ms. Huey (who will only say that she is a “woman of a certain age” the other day at House of Execution’s headquarters in New York’s garment district. “Even when there’s a designer involved I’m still designing, finding creative solutions.” Ms. Huey added that while Mr. Posen “has a very talented atelier, they’re not used to size 20.” Ms. Huey’s own secret weapon when corralling plus-size personalities like Adele, Aretha and Oprah, she said, is an old-fashioned pitilessly boned corset built-into the garment. A new patron of Ms. Huey’s, the young and willowy mezzo-soprano Rebecca Ringle, said in a message that “as a fashion-adoring tomboy from New Mexico,” she sought her own concept of concert attire that was “minimalist, modern and a little edgy, while still working in the classical arena. Camilla understood that.” For a birthday party hosted by Lucy Sykes, the former fashion director of Marie Claire, and her husband, the investment banker Euan Rellie, Ms. Huey confected a poetically moth-eaten bustier laced above a shredded tulle skirt, to be worn by Alexa Wilding, the neo-Stevie Nicks, as she popped out of a wooden cake. “Camilla and I began thinking about Isadora Duncan and Colette and the whole tradition of private performances,” Ms. Wilding said. “Camilla is a fashion historian. Wearing that costume was like traveling through time. It could have been found in a vault.” Ms. Huey grew up along the Mississippi, arriving in New York in 1984 after graduating from the Memphis Academy of Arts. Her first job was hand-painting kabuki masks on textiles for Sander Witlin, a dressmaker loved by Lady Bird Johnson and the Greenwich-and-Millbrook set. Ms. Huey remembered them as “women who, if there was an eighth of an inch difference from one side of a jacket to the other, they’d notice. I’m talking about things a normal person can’t see.” Ms. Huey became Mr. Witlin’s first hand (and Jackie O’s designated fitter) before eventually joining Izquierdo Studio, the theatrical crafts house. There she painted costumes for “Beauty and the Beast” and the scarf Annette Bening offers Katharine Hepburn in “Love Affair.” “I must have done 20 of them,” Ms. Huey said with a groan. “Just in case.” Itching to “begin making pretty things again,” she started House of Execution in 1995. Seven years later she married Kurt Thometz, a rare-book dealer who trades out of their 1891 brownstone in the Palladian shadow of the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights. (Down the hall from the bookshop is a charming self-contained one-bedroom garden apartment the couple rent by the night.) Mr. Thometz, who specializes in works on the Heights as well as in African and African-American literature, is also a private librarian, having imposed order on Diana Vreeland’s collection of works by her friends the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton and Truman Capote. Mr. Thometz has the last-word-but-one in the new documentary “Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel” (an animated version of Mrs. Vreeland has the last). He and Ms. Huey have long-term book and exhibition projects on the neighboring mansion’s former mistress, Eliza Jumel, the scandal-tinged 19th-century socialite. It’s not every designer who carries the measurements of both Jumel and Wendy Williams in her head. Ms. Huey has transformed Ms. Williams, the combative talk-show host, into Dolly Parton, Lucy Ricardo and a vintage Pan Am stewardess. “They’re not loose interpretations of a look,” Ms. Williams said. “Camilla wants it dead-on. For me, not so much, I’m loosey-goosey. But if a lapel is three inches wide, that’s what she insists on.” Ms. Williams is the exception: she knows Ms. Huey well enough to say hello on the street. But Ms. Huey dresses most celebrities at a fuzzy remove. There’s always such a posse around them, Ms. Huey said, “it’s not altogether clear to them who I am or where I’m from.” Photo: Lee Clower for The New York Times

On Collecting

KT — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 19:14:30 +0000

Style reveals the man. The building of a library is an act of style, an expression of what we are and a good measure of who we are. Collecting is an act of self-realization. One collects books and builds a library to create an intensified environment. It is a philosophical statement as this room is a reflection of our perception of the world. In well-appointed homes library space is precious and collections are highly prized reflections of the inhabitants interests, tastes, scope, and depth. In dicty sets Nancy Mitford’s writings are as de rigueur as chintz, Enid Bagnold’s autobiography still makes for after dinner conversation, and Proust, fraught with significance, read or unread, is an endless source of presumably refined speculation on society’s motivations and recreations. Mystics and radicals read reveries towards revelations. Others, who flatter themselves realists, won’t sully their shelves with poetry, fiction or belles lettres. Science, history and politics adorn their studies in chronologically categorized epochs. Their highly specialized selections of technological tomes vie for linear footage in the stacks with the reference essential to the practical intellectual. To attract a collector a book must appeal to the eye, the mind or the imagination. While it is an understatement to remind ourselves that a book is a visible act of communication and not just a thing, there is a need for truth that wants to know the origin of a thing in order to understand its nature. Books possess interiors much like the interiors of human beings. “The most profound enchantment for the collector,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.” There are those who consider books as objects: curios for the connoisseurs of bindings, investments when they belong to limited editions or are illustrated by fine artists. The fine bindings of the 17th and 18th century bring high prices more often for their jackets than to their content. Collectors of modern literature place a great deal of importance on the condition of the dust jacket, a sensibility alien to their counterparts in the first half of the 20^th century. To many collectors, first editions possess a vital signature that justifies the time and expense involved in tracking down the illusive rarity. They have a symbolic validity that later editions just don’t possess and possession is the distinction between the bibliophile and the bibliomaniac. Books’ appeal to the imagination are sometimes those which are interesting on account of their associations. The famous “Sentimental Library” Dr. Rosenback acquired from Harry B. Smith is an example of what I mean. It’s a great collection of conversation pieces: the Pickwick Dickens presented to his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, whose death postponed the publication of Part XV because of the author’s emotional collapse; the copy of Queen Mab Shelly gave to Mary Godwin inscribed, “You see, Mary, I have not forgotten you”; the copy of Shelly’s Adonais, bound in vellum, presented to Joseph Severn with one of Severn’s deathbed portraits of Keats pasted on the flyleaf. One needn’t be a bookseller or a scholar for books to become a passion. Reading is a powerful drug that occupies the minds of the most profound and the most superficial. The passion that excites and allows bibliophiles to distinguish themselves is collection. It encourages ambition and flights of fancy discouraged in a society in which the spirit of enterprise is limited to the marketplace and ideas are provided by the media. The library is a sanctuary immune from the anxieties of the office, the mediocrities of the media, the trials and tribulations of domesticity. Reading one book takes us out of range, away from the daily routine, away from petty, cloying, responsibilities. In a room full of books, insulated and absorbed, it becomes possible to sit quietly by oneself and want for nothing; the library itself becomes that finer world within the world all look for and few find. Image: Kurt Thometz cataloguing Mrs. Astor’s library, 1988, photographed for the New York Times piece: “Where to Find It: Taking the Chaos Out Of Home Libraries“.

From the Library of John Waters

KT — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 05:40:44 +0000

Reading as a Pleasant Deviation: A Guided Tour of John Waters Library

I was not a book fanatic until I was fifteen and discovered Genet and Burroughs and all these Grove Press books and thought, thank God, I’m not that abnormal. That opened up a whole new world to me. Those were my friends. Tennessee Williams was a huge influence on me. I thought, I don’t have to worry about all these creeps. There are other people more interesting.

It just made me get out of suburbia, go to downtown Baltimore and find what I liked quicker. Reading was a very positive influence on me. The boring books we had to read in school certainly discouraged me. I hated school. I’d get the other kids to do wild shit against the teachers. They finally just let me sit there and read whatever if I’d just shut up. So I would be reading 120 Days in Sodom — they didn’t know what that was — and they’d think, isn’t it cute, he’s reading a fat book.

I read the most devious books all through Catholic High and they let me, just so I’d shut up. I went to NYU for five minutes and got thrown out during the first drugs on campus bust in 1966. If I’d have quit school at sixteen I’d have made one more movie. I never liked school. I think it’s great for some people but I wanted to discover it all on my own. I didn’t want to hear what they wanted me to read. I’ve always had piles of what’s next to read.

My books are obsessively arranged in different rooms by different subjects. I play with them. Fifty years from now people will go crazy for the books I’ve collected. Not that I’m a book collector. No, I don’t buy things for what they’re worth. I just buy what interests me. Obscure stuff.

This wall is all fiction and literary bio. What I hate is when an author’s dead and I finally read his last book. This just happened with John Fante. I like to read him on the plane to Los Angeles. He really gets me in the mood. Now I’ve read his last one. That’s depressing.

Grace Metalis, of course, is one of my all time favorites. Primarily because she has the best author’s picture of all author’s pictures. You know, the woman who wrote Peyton Place. I finally got all of her books but I don’t have a cover for No Adam and Eve. She’s my favorite trash writer. There’s a great biography of her called Inside Peyton Place. This is a paperback original from some time ago called The Girl from Peyton Place. What happened to her is so good. As soon as she had fame she left her husband, took to martinis, became an alcoholic, bought Cadillacs, moved to the plaza Hotel in New York and committed suicide.

I have her next to Lillian Hellman. I like to make people turn over in their graves. This sounds really sexist and awful but in her book Maybe she says she has vaginal odors. That’s what Maybe is about. It’s so awful but I don’t feel bad saying this stuff because she started it. I don’t usually think about girls having vagina odors. When I read that I couldn’t believe my eyes. How could she say that? It’s not a thought that’s usually running through my head. In a literary biography or memoir that’s not something I ever wanted to know but now she’s got me wondering. I think Maybe ruined her whole career.

I think my very favorite novel in the whole world is Two Serious Ladies Possessed. I love reading about Jane Bowles. I love her and I love her life of misery. She fell in love with people that would be impossible, like a straight Arab woman that was real mean and abused her for twenty years. Of coarse, Firbank. And Baron Corvo is a must because of his evil Catholic ways. I loved all his gossip about priests and ecclesiastical mobsters. Reynolds Price I like. Kate Vaiden is his best. He was Anne Tyler’s teacher and she is a Baltimore writer.

Marguerite Duras has always been a favorite because she made pretension a life style. This book I can’t believe. It costs six dollars but it literally takes thirty seconds to read. Of coarse, Tennessee Williams, who takes up most of these two shelves. William Inge is one of my favorites because he was sort of a more pitiful Tennessee Williams. I love his obscure books like Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, which is a shocking novel. Really rude. In the end a spinster school teacher is getting fucked by a black student while her breasts are being singed on the radiator. There’s a really good biography of him called A Life of William Inge — catchy title — that I hardly saw anywhere.

Albee is another of my favorites and I’m really mad because lately his plays don’t even come out as books. The Man With Three Arms hasn’t come out. At least I can’t find it. James M. Cain I really like too. He died in Maryland. I write fan letters to anyone whose books I like. Why not? Mary McGarity Morris is my new favorite writer. Her kids go to school here at Hopkins so we talk. Have you read Vanished? Vanished is funny in a horrible way. Speilberg bought it for the movies, if you can imagine that.

I like odd Oscar Wilde books. I love this one: it’s a biography of his wife. What a wonderful life that must have been. David Plante I like a lot. Especially Difficult Women. Carson McCullers, of coarse. That biography of hers was really good. What a monstrous woman. Jean Rhys is another of my all time favorites. The thing I remember from her biography is that her own children would try to put up with her until they couldn’t stand it anymore and then they’d just pass out from her being awful. A mean drunk bitch but a great writer. Monsters.

John Cheever I liked except I like him less the more I found out about him. Those diaries! All that suffering. Falconer was my favorite. All of Genet. He got me through high school. I don’t know how I heard about him. Probably the Evergreen Review. They used to have those stickers you could write away for that said “Join the Underground”. I love this book called The Cinema of Jean Genet, especially as he only made one movie.

Do you know Violet Ledoc? She was in love with Genet, imagine that, and Mad in Pursuit is about their affair. Poor thing. Pasolini, of coarse. M.F.K. Fisher. Anyone who can write a cookbook with a chapter on how to boil water is A.O.K. with me. William Burroughs and his son, who I thought wrote good books — yet another one who got me through high school. This guy, Gombrowitz — I’ve never known how to pronounce his name — we read all of his books back in the sixties. This is the kind of book I was obsessed with twenty years ago but God knows if I could read it now.

James Purdy I really, really, really like. I have every one he ever wrote. There’s a new one out now that’s only available in England, Out With the Stars, and it’s in the style of his old really crazy ones. Even gay audiences don’t like him. He’s not exactly politically correct. What he is is over the top. I think my personal is The House of the Solitary Maggot but On Glory’s Coarse is up there. People are so horrible in this book. There’s so much gossip in this little town that while this woman’s hanging her wash out she hears evil things being said about her in the wind. One of the meanest things I’ve ever read is a scene where this daughter, who’s twelve years old, comes to her mother and says, what’s this? She’s having her period. And her mother says, I don’t know. I’ve never heard about this. I think you’re the only person this has ever happened to. So mean. I really like James Purdy. I think he’s great.

Gordon Lish is very literarilly incorrect. At least Spy magazine is always making fun of him. He does wear an ascot but I think his Peru is one of the best. And Fran Lebowitz. This is a first printing of Metropolitan Life. There weren’t very many of them. I just met Joan Didion. She has the best titles and her books are the most beautifully designed — not just the writing, they always look great. Julian Barnes’ Staring At the Sun is a favorite but you have to be in the mood.

Jim Thompson I love and this was a brilliant little series, Black Lizard, with all the original covers. They did a really good job. Pop. 1280 might be my favorite but they all start to run together after a while. Saul’s Book is my favorite hustler book. Capote, another monster. I believe every word of that biography. Mencken, another Baltimore writer. Delmore Schwartz never knew he wasn’t in Baltimore. Paul Bowles is over here, Jane is over there. I don’t put them together. Jane was a much better writer.

I must have read Willa Cather in high school when I was on LSD. I went right past her. Philip Hoar, who wrote the Stephen Tennent biography, tells me he goes to these Willa Cather groupie meetings and I just can’t picture what they must be like.

I like all these biographies of women on the edge. When I finished the Anne Sexton biography I read the Shirley Jackson biography and I just finished The Interior Castles of Jean Stafford. I really did love to read Gertrude Stein. I don’t know if I could read her today but I used to love to. Ellen Gilchrist I liked in the beginning but I can’t read her anymore. Joyce Carol Oates I cant read anymore but I loved Them. Here’s my Jackie Susanne collection. I’ve got all the biographies. This is the one where she has the affair with Ethel Merman. Imagine. What a sight!

More Grove Press. Hubert Selby Jr. I have all of him. I love The Room, and I love the one where the mother’s on speed watching television — Requiem for a Dream. I buy all of John Rechy even if I don’t read them. Nobody read Marilyn’s Daughter. Let’s just say I’m for John Rechy. James Baldwin was another one who got me through high school. Another Country, Giovanni’s Room, The Fire Next Time. I like this one, How I Became Hettie Jones: what it was like to be LeRoi Jones’ wife. I used to love LeRoi Jones when I was a kid. Particularly The Toilet. Denton Welsh is my all time favorite writer and this is his self portrait. I bought it from his biographer just after I read the diaries. I think he’s just, oh, the best.

Let’s go over to true crime. I think I have almost everything that’s come out in hardcover. I hate paperbacks, period. When I couldn’t afford hardcovers I stole them. This whole shelf is on the Manson family. Manson has a certain brilliance, a sort of genius. He hams it up so he doesn’t get put in with the general prison population.

I’m really working hard to get some of the original family out, the ones that have had no contact with him for eighteen years and who look back on it with complete horror. They’re totally rehabilitated. They’re yuppies now. A horrible thing happened to them when they were very young and joined the wrong commune. Here’s The Manson Family Sings the Songs of Charles Manson. It’s not bad.

This is all Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. I have quite a collection on that. The have great titles like Let’s Hold Hands and Die and Our Father Who Art In Hell. People send me crime ephemera sometimes and these were chipped from the People’s Temple.

This whole shelf is Patty Hearst. Here’s the Von Bulow affair but it really was a little too PBS for my taste. The MOVE people from Philadelphia, I’m obsessed by them too. My Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment in twenty volumes. Here’s another favorite, Mary Bell. She was sentenced to life when she was eleven years old. She killed when she was eight and nine, leaving notes saying “I kill because I like to.” A little warning sign when you have a child.

This is a case I’ve been obsessed by lately and unfortunately there are only two paperbacks about it: Hush Little Baby and Lullaby and Good Night. This girl convinced her entire family she was pregnant when she wasn’t so she followed a real pregnant woman into the maternity ward, took the woman’s car keys and the baby. She took it home and cut the baby up. She just used a pair of keys. I think it deserves better than two cheap paperbacks.

Here’s one of the best cases. The Indiana Torture Slayings and Kate Millett’s The Basement. That’s Gertrude Banisewski. She served twenty years for killing the foster children she took in for money. They let her out a couple of years ago. I have a portrait of her upstairs. And, of coarse, Alice Krimmins, the woman New York loved to hate! She used to hang out in steak houses. Shall we go upstairs?

The bedroom is all show business. Here are all the Russ Meyer books, everything, in French, German and English. Linda Lovelace’s books — both amazing but my favorite is Ordeal. Sonny Bono’s biography, Tiny Tim’s, Farrah’s World, The Mat Dillon Scrapbook and The Mat Dillon Quiz Book. The Making of The Other Side of Midnight, The Making of Heretic, The Making of Exorcist Two. These books were out for five minutes and they’re going to be worth something in twenty years.

Do you believe this is a book already: Elvis, My Dad. There were lots of books about Jane Mansfield. These are my Hollywood scandal books. The Big Love was one of Auden’s favorites. All of Hitchcock. All of Warhol. That paperback, The Velvet Underground, is the S&M book the band named themselves after. Kate Millett’s my favorite difficult feminist writer. Honey Bruce’s book, Lenny’s wife, they met in Baltimore. All the books on Billy Baldwin, the great Baltimore designer. And Diana Vreeland, talk about arch! “I hate spoons and I love forks.”

Here are all the Glenn Gould and Oscar Levant books. They belong together.

There’s a shelf here of all the books about me or the people I’ve worked with. Here’s a book with a chapter about when I was expelled from NYU. Richard Goldstein’s One in Seven: Drugs on Campus (New York: Walker and Co, 1966). “New York City: Pot on the Asphalt Campus”, that’s the chapter.

My film reference and criticism sections are in the television room. I really liked Renata Adler when she wrote for the New York Times. She would get so bored she’d write about how comfortable the seats were, the usher’s uniforms, and how clean the theater was that day. I really liked her.

This is my current table. This is what I just read. Why Buildings Fall Down. I thought that was an interesting subject. Each chapter is about a different building falling down. A life of Ricky Nelson. His brother, David, was in one of my movies. A new Marquis De Sade biography. This is my favorite new crime book. It’s about Lesbians that run this old age home. Whenever they’d kill somebody they’d ask their victims ‘How much do you love me?’ and the first one had to answer ‘Forever and one day’ and the second one had to answer ‘Forever and two days’. It’s called Forever and Five Days.

Bag of Toys is about Andrew Crispo. Ah! the Doris Duke biography. It’s so bad but I love it at the end when she takes up with the Hare Krishna girl. It’s shocking that Pee Wee Herman hid out with her. I love that she hides people from scandal. That Jean Stafford bio. Friendly picture on the cover, huh?

This painting is by a San Francisco artist named Bret Reictman, who’s having his first New York show this fall. Aren’t they lovely. They remind me of Snap, Crackle, Pop, Pinochio, and Alvin the Chipmunk all together. If you really look at the one in the center your IQ drops ten points.

My workroom is largely devoted to magazines. I subscribe to eighty a month. Shall we go over those? A bit much, don’t you think? There are books in here that don’t go anyplace else: Die, Nigger, Die, The Lonely Lady of San Clemente. I was in a bookstore once that had a section I loved called ‘Once Fashionable Subjects’ and that’s the way I think of this section. Let’s go upstairs to where my weirdest books are.

The guest room is arranged like this: terrorism, sex psychiatric problems, Nazis, religion, severe weather and pornography. It starts with terrorism and moves to the Nazis. The book on Lord Ha-ha, that’s my personal favorite. He was the Tokyo Rose of Germany. His wife was Lady Ha-ha. That’s the best name I’ve ever heard in my life.

Freud I love to read. And I have all of Dr. Money, a local doctor who handles complete lunatic problems. Reckless Orgasm; it’s about a person who’d strangle himself and jerk off. Which is what this book Auto-Erotic Fatalities is about. One of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. Tourette Syndrome books. This is all true sex. Dirty stories about sex with straight men by gay people. Ludicrous stories about one weird night after another. Actually insane, some of them. They’re good. Do you know that shop that used to be right next to A Different Light in New York? All vintage porno. It was amazing. I think that people as they get older try to go back to the first images they ever jerked off to. Prose pornography is going the way of the record album.

This is all the religious stuff: The Bad Popes, Lesbian Nuns, Holy Anorexia, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Sex in the Confessional and I love this one, How the Pope Became Infallible. Fire From Heaven is about spontaneous combustion, about how you’re walking down the street and explode from feeling so guilty. Another reason you’ve got to wear good shoes. All the pictures in this book are just of shoes and the ashes of people who just exploded.

Then there’s the nature porn, severe weather. I love weather! It’s just like porno and there are people that buy it like that. You can send away for tapes of tornados, hurricane’s, monsoon’s, earthquakes, heavy storms. Those Terrible Twisters, The Year of the Storm — look! It’s just endless pictures of hardcore weather.

These are guest books: The History of Tattoos, Rat Catching From Volcanic Eruptions, second edition, Pasolini, Prison Exposures, Female Film Stars of the Third Reich. Baltimore hair-dos: Mr Ray’s Magic Salon. On the cover he’s pulling not a rabbit out of a hat but a hair-do. This is a book a fan gave me. It’s an art book about Walter and Molly Keane, those people who did the big eye paintings, look — with the tissue papers! It’s Japanese!

There’s a nice little book on travel accidents. When I was a child I loved to go to junkyards and look at wrecked automobiles. My favorites were the one’s that had turned over a couple of times. When I saw this book in a junkstore I had to have it. It’s from exactly the year that I was obsessed. It brought back all those memories.

And that painting over there is by John Wayne Gacy. Beautiful isn’t it.

From the Library of Albert Murray

KT — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 04:19:15 +0000

That shelf is where my real stuff is. See it start with Joyce and come up to Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. That’s it. That’s the contemporary literature I read. Those people in those books up there on the shelves provide a solid base to enable us to get to it all.

There’s Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. I discovered this the year I finished college. I was on my own, I had plenty of time to read, and I could really get into it. The flow of the thing, the articulate way, the humor the guy had, and the learning really knocked me out. I said, this guy’s really a student.

And Auden, he’s got so much good poetry: “Part of us all hate life and some of us are completely against it” or “Everyman adopts to food the scientific attitude / When he wants to kiss his wife leads the politicians life / And so far as is known, he’s an artist when alone.” To me that was hip. That was the kind of hip guy I wanted to be.

That’s what books did. I knew all that other stuff. I knew the 920 Special with Coleman Hawkins, was listening to Basie and Lester Young Doggin’ Around, but Auden was the guy putting all that together: September 1st, 1939 (Another Time) “I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street / Uncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade: / Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth, / Obsessing our private lives; / The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night.”

And I could see him sitting on Third Avenue in a bar, sitting at the table with his cigarette and his book, got his drink in his hand. Edmund Wilson and his wife used to say about Auden, “He was just about the biggest slob we ever loved.” The guy was really awful but I was really taken with his poetry. That poetry could be made of that, you see? It was updating Eliot and Pound and those guys. He was effortlessly erudite.

All that poetic stuff, you can write prose that way now. Mann could do it. Hermann Broch could do it. Whew, that Jean S. Untermeyer translation of The Death of Virgil, it couldn’t have been better in German than it is. She put some kind of English in that. Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry, Pound, Eliot, and Yeats, this was where the big league stuff was. You can’t put Langston Hughes and those guys in that league.

Unfortunately, so many of these black studies people are trying to bootleg some third and fourth rate stuff out as being on the level. I wouldn’t want anybody to think that because they’d think I don’t know anything about poetry and I’m supposed to know as much about poetry as anybody else. And these guys don’t think they have to know it. They just brow beat everybody and say, you all prejudice.

Here is a book I read in high school: The New Negro. This was there in the 1920′s and waiting for me when I came of high school age in the 1930′s. So by summer of ’33, getting ready for the junior year of ’34, getting ready for the Juniors Oratorical Contest, where you had to write your essay and present it, show what you could do, I was looking up stuff to write mine and I called my essay The New Negro.

I started my oratorical contest statement with this first paragraph: “In the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life of the American Negro and the three norns who have traditionally presided over the Negro problem have a changeling in their laps. The Sociologist, the Philanthropist, the Race-leader are not unaware of the New Negro, but they are at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be swathed in their formulae. For the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the professional observers is transforming what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary Negro life. Could such a metamorphosis have taken place as suddenly as it appeared to? The answer is no; not because the New Negro is not here, but because the Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man.”

I was reading this in ’33, ’34 and yet black studies has not gone back to pick up on this stuff. These guys spend all their time talking about social power, which is fine if you’ve been reduced to a statistic in the folklore of white supremacy or the fakelore of black pathology, but not if you’ve got a real mind. Not if you’re a real human being. Not if you are Stephen Daedalus. Not if you are Tristan. Not if you are Joseph. Not if you are Telemachus.

What they should be trying to find out is what is happening. They should be reading Constance Rourke’s Roots of American Culture. That’s a classic. You got a sense of definition of American culture. This and Kouwenhoven were two of my major touchstones in approaching a study of what an American context involves: Beer Can by the Highway and Made in America. These are fundamental attempts to define E Pluribus Unum.

The way pluralism works in a society, the strands don’t have to loose their identity in order to be interwoven with other things. But, you see, dumb-assed people grab ahold of a thing and they going and talking about something on the left side of the Zulu River where they can’t understand what anybody was saying. All this crap that they’re talking about now, all this superficial multi-culturalism and politically correct stuff, they’re just ripping off anything that will sell.

They should read Malraux. You want to know what the 20th Century’s like, it’s Malraux. He’s the one whose writing captures the central argument of freedom vs. totalitarianism. He says, “The only victory that’s possible for man is a victory against chaos.” Art is the bulwark against chaos. Write it down. I’ve always been one thousand times more interested in art than in politics. That’s what Malraux said.

When you start out with that then you’re as mature as Hemingway. See, all these people criticizing Hemingway, none of them are as mature as Hemingway. Eliot and these guys sound adolescent. They really miss it. Hemingway knew that you dominate chaos with style, the only victory the human consciousness can have over chaos or entropy is style.

See those Hemingway books. Look up there. Winner Take Nothing. Now that’s profound. If you miss this you end up being a fool, an idiot; you try to criticize him for the things that the newspaper articles criticism him for. That’s not where he lived. Here’s Hemingway, and this is consistent with the bullfighter and everything else, “Winner Take Nothing.” That’s it. “Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing. Neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory, nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself.” Like in Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity.”

That has nothing to do with macho. What they call macho is not macho anyway. See, macho is not for a guy who’s six feet two, macho is for a guy that’s five feet four, five. That’s what macho is. He could go out there and make a six foot guy look like a fool and he could take a bull that weighs a ton and make a goddamn fool out of the bull, that’s macho.

That’s what the Spanish mean by that. They don’t care how big you are. They will take you on because they got courage and they got a faith and skill in art. In other words, it’s not power but art. Everybody wants to say that Hemingway believed in power. Hemingway’s favorite hero was the bullfighter and the bullfighter wanted to wrestle with the bull, control the bull with style. If you don’t realize that the central thing in Hemingway is art, then you miss Hemingway. Chaos is the given. Improvisation is the way you can make your way through in a heroic way. Now that’s profound.

Contrast that with The Wasteland, with the assumption in The Wasteland that something went wrong and the Fisher King lost his potency. That the land reflects the malady of the ruler, so if the king is on evil times, if he’s impotent, then the streams don’t run, the trees don’t put out fruit. That implies that they once did and it was a golden age. Hemingway won’t give you that.

That’s what Murray calls the Hemingway epiphany; what Murray calls it is the sweat on the wine bottle. You remember when Jake and Bill go up to fish, when they go to the bullfights in Paloma, and they get up early in the morning, and they go up and fish these streams, and it’s icy cold in the streams, and they take a couple of bottles of white wine with them, and they put the wine in the stream, and they fish, and they clean the fish, and they go down and get that wine out, and there’s that sweat on the wine bottle, like the sweat on a wine glass when you got chilled wine, or the clouding up of the champagne. If you miss that, you miss life, Jack.

It’s like the point of orgasm: if you missed it, you missed it. So that’s what art is. You freeze that a little bit, that’s the biggest victory. That’s what Malraux calls a victory over chaos. That’s what Hemingway was talking about.

Reading’s the liberating device because it makes the world yours. It’s like Miss Metcalf says in my book The Spyglass Tree: windows on the world. You see, when you sit in the library you own it. How can you segregate a guy who’s coming to terms with the whole world? If your acceptance of the ancestral imperative is to qualify as a hero you got to regard jeopardy as an opportunity. You see a dragon, see, it separates the men from the boys. What you get from education, from reading, is you get seven league boots, a longer stride.

People who are really involved with books aren’t bookworms, they’re more thoroughly involved than bookworms, because they’re constantly applying practical significance to books. Literature as basic equipment for living, Kenneth Burke used to call it. Without that, without a sense of form, without a sense of purpose, without a sense of beginning, middle, and end, what we have is insanity.

We have chaos, which is insanity. Nothing means anything. Given the tendency, the wonderful tendency, to play, you get ritual, which is the reenactment of something practical; a ceremonial reenactment which is supervised by priests is religion. A playful reenactment supervised not by a priesthood but by referees and umpires is recreation. You see, the ultimate extension, elaboration, and refinement of that reenactment made possible by the play element is art.

It’s the playful element that makes for the elegance which adds up to art. The art keeps that idea alive when it’s not available to you physically. This fits in with the blues. You stomp the blues, that means you purify the society of those invisible menaces to happiness, or to form, or to equilibrium, but in the process of doing it you stomp so elegantly and with so much style it becomes a fertility ritual.

It’s not about oppression and money, it’s about stomping the blues away and having a good time. You don’t know at what point you cross that line but at some point everybody start shaking. There it becomes existential. They know all about that at the black social club.

Susanna Moore on the Book as Aphrodisiac

KT — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:55:10 +0000

My first acquaintance with Susanna just precedes the publication of her first novel, My Old Sweetheart, when we “met cute”. I was selling books at a carriage trade shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that several of her friends frequented; our bi-coastal movie clientele, it turned out, all knew her. She was beautiful, new to the neighborhood, on the rebound from a Hollywood marriage. Perfectly charming.

Susceptible as I am to appealing, long of limb, erudite literary brunettes, I made it my business to engage her in the charming cultural banter our merchandise lent itself to. We covered an enormous amount of ground in getting to know one another walking together through the stacks. We started clicking with Axel Munthe and I eventually sent her off with a stack of Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed, Chester Himes titles.

She left me with the proofs of My Old Sweetheart to read on my vacation. I was floored. This is not the place for why but it was one on those few and far between literary affairs where one’s experience and sensibility dovetails with another’s.

While our affair was chaste, it was largely due to prior commitments both of us had made, partially due to something in our chemistry being just off. This did not prevent us from the sort of salacious flirting that follows. She could overwhelm me.

She has a distinctively high girlish voice. She writes best when she writes the way she speaks. When I first heard it I was taken in. When I read it I was smitten. This is no simple trick and I have great admiration for those who do it well. It’s made it impossible for me to make a pass at her, though I admit temptations.

Once in the basement of Isaac Mendoza Books, once where Ann Street met Theater (Mehitable) Alley, she showed me a picture of herself from a back issue of Playboy. Wearing the perfect little black dress with opera gloves and posed with a cocktail, she was helping her formally attired companion choose from a buffet table. My fantasy girl.

Amongst Susanna’s charms is her candor. When this interview was conducted Susanna was experiencing the material that would become her most recent novel, In the Cut. She and her daughter Lulu had left the man they’d moved to New York to live with and with whom she’d make the movie Mesmerized.

They’d taken a good-sized duplex in the East 70s. I visited on a sunny weekday afternoon and prefacing this interview, ostensibly about reading, she told me about the detective she was seeing and the character she was basing on him.

I need preface this with a cautionary note: If you were, or you think you might be, offended by the sexually explicit scenes in In the Cut please read no further.

Susanna Moore: I read constantly. Unlike other people, who I admire, I can not read anywhere. I can’t read on the subway or in a doctor’s office, I can’t have music on, I certainly can’t be in a room where someone’s watching television.

I need a long stretch of time because I read for hours and hours and hours. It has to be very quiet. I’m preferably alone. Someone could be asleep in bed next to me, or reading on another chair. I can’t read in most situations. I couldn’t get into bed and turn out the light and fall asleep without reading.

It’s a kind of free space or buffer zone between the conscience and the unconscious. You are transported. It’s a kind of state, a kind of trance. You’ll be reading and you’ll stop and stretch and three hours have passed. Reading can be so ritualistic, so totemic, so specific an experience.

I reread. A friend of mine has a name for people like me. It’s that we’re dodo’s. Not in the sense of being stupid, but that we cling and hold fast to a world that has disappeared by a kind of social and biological Darwinism that says we’re meant to disappear, that we’re meant to progress and go on, and not to reread Tolstoy and Proust every year.

He finds me charming but a bit dodoist. I don’t do it out of nostalgia. I’m not one of those people who read Mapp and Lucia or belong to a reading group. I’ve been rereading Tolstoy and Turgenev.

John Dunne told me that I shouldn’t admit this but I spent a good part of last year rereading all of Faulkner. It was just blissful. I’ve picked up Faulkner at other times in my life and thought, fuck! How can I read this? It’s so mannered, so silly, so dated, so bad. I’m so compulsive that if I’m reading Faulkner I’ve got my map of Yoknapatawpha County, I’m reading architectural books on the old south, I’m looking at other secondary sources. I really steep myself in it. That’s heaven. When I was reading Turgenev I found this wonderful book of photographs of czarist Russia. It’s not just reading. It’s a way to be. A friend of mine calls this hedonistic of me. What did he mean by that?

Kurt Thometz: Your friend might be one of those people who looks upon reading as an unpunished vice and that this is over indulgence. Hedonism’s so unfashionable these days that I probably shouldn’t say this but I like to drink and read. Not in excess but I sometimes think sober reading has its limitations. Whiskey goes well with Ulysses and most of Faulkner. Wine and Proust. I like beer when I’m reading detective stories.

One must be quite careful with mixing intoxicants and to me reading is a kind of intoxicant. I used to think a little marijuana did wonders for one’s appreciation of Beckett’s novels. Read straight it seems to give the mistaken impression of being depressing and gloomy, some people dismiss him as boring. To me he’s one of the greatest comic writers of all time. Marijuana heightens sensitivity to the tragi/comic irony in Beckett, his repetitiveness has its full effect, the ambiguity’s enhanced, the chaos is articulate. They don’t have a plot that you have to remember. The plays I prefer without the artificial inspiration. Beckett’s exceptional this way. I can’t think of another writer this sort of intoxication enhances.

Susanna Moore: I had aunts who looked on reading like masturbation. It was self-indulgent and slightly dangerous to one. Giving too free a rein to the passions of the imagination. You read too much, they would say. Because of it’s excess. I’m so bad that if I’m reading a lot of nineteenth century novels I find, unconsciously, that I listen to a lot of nineteenth century music. I’m listening to Schumann and Schubert.

KT: I made a tape of everything that inspired Vinteuil’s Sonata: Franck’s Sonata in A Major, Faure’s Sonatas in G and D Minor and his Sicilienne, Saint-Saën’s Sonata No. 1 in D. My Proust tape.

SM: You did? I do exactly the same thing. Now I’m conscious of it and it makes me laugh. If I’m reading La Princesse de Clèves, or Les Liasons Dangereuses, I’m listening to eighteenth century music. I suppose some people would think of this as compulsive but it gives such pleasure doesn’t it?

My parents gave me a charge account at the Honolulu Bookstore that was downtown, a long arduous hot dusty trip from the country by bus. I lived two miles walk past where the bus line ended. It was quite an adventure. An entire summer day spent getting to the bus, riding the bus, getting to Honolulu required changing buses, and then the hours spent selecting those books, then the trip home at nightfall…it was a wonderful day.

If you’re a precocious reader as a child you run out of books. At least I ran out. If you grew up in a small town in the late nineteen-fifties in Hawaii you’d know what I mean about running out of things to read. I had gone through the children’s and the young adult sections of the Wayamaya Public Library by the time I was ten. I was given special permission to take out as many as twenty books at a time and that would last me two or three weeks.

I would take books out of the library in cartons. I had to get special permission to stray, with approval of my choices, into the adult section of the library and when there was something that was considered too advanced I would lie and tell the librarian it was for my mother or my father. After going through everything in the library I would start again. Still the smell of library books gives me a sensation of pleasure and wellbeing, the smell of the glue and those green bindings.

I liked the idea of reading a book someone else had had in their hand, their stains on the pages, but I couldn’t stand reading a book that’d been underlined or notated. hat was distracting and intrusive. One’s thrilled to read a book a lover has read before one and underlined it because one’s looking for clues but otherwise it annoys me. Other peoples underlining is incoherent. Why would someone put a big exclamation mark in the margin? It doesn’t seem be in context. Sometimes they’re so incredibly obvious or meaningless. You can’t think why someone would underline the ands and the buts. It makes no sense. It has no meaning.

You read books earlier than you should because, one, you’re curious, two, you run out, and, three, books lead to other books. There are references to good books in good books, because they’re written by readers, that just take you on and on, a never ending wonderful kind of trail. But I did read many things too soon. It often wasn’t until the second or third reading I understood what was going on.

It wasn’t until the third time I read The Sun Also Rises, in my later teens, that I realized the word impotent – which I mispronounced phonetically – referred to sexual inadequacy as opposed to the inability of a man to get a taxi. I though it simply meant inadequate. I had no idea and missed quite an important part of the book. Like the anal intercourse in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Do you like D.H. Lawrence? It wasn’t until I read it the second time, in my naïveté, that I realized he’d fucked her in the ass.

A book that was a big part of my childhood and a big part of my idea of being a woman, and it would have been considered a kind of pornography that I wouldn’t have been allowed to read had I been discovered with it, was Ovid’s The Art of Love. This was so provocative to me, so seductive. I want to read it again because I’d be very curious as to whether or not it’s erotic to me now.

I remember it has things like, ‘If a woman is so blessed by the gods that her limbs are long and slender she should arrange herself on the couch so that her gown parts at the knee; if a woman is dark haired…; if a woman is fair haired…; if a woman is voluptuous…; if a woman is tall…’ To me this was a primer of pleasure. That was very influential. It’s interesting that the books that were remarkable to me as a child all had to do with sex.

KT: When I was twelve I was arrested for shoplifting a copy of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs from the Walgreens in the 7-High shopping center in Minnetonka, Minnesota. I’d spent the best part of the afternoon reading the book and had to have it. This is a perfect example of what my father calls, ‘Thinking with your dick’.

I think that’s one of the great reasons adolescence is the best times to read. There are so few people for children to talk about sex with, especially any deviation from the norm. Teenaged d.s.b., as we call ‘deadly semen build-up’ in my family, endeared me to pornography at an early age. Pornography, the good parts at least, bears rereading better than most “great literature.” A good pornographer can really touch his reader. Unfortunately, most of its written for idiots or psychopaths.

SM: A lot of sex in books is about so called perversion: rape, bondage, homosexuality, voyeurism. I suppose reading is voyeuristic. You know what was a great, great source of pleasure for me? The Frederick’s of Hollywood Catalogue.

KT: To me most literary novels just didn’t make the grade when it came to sex. Henry Miller, yes. I’d read everything by him when I was seventeen. D.H. Lawrence, I suppose. I read and reread the passage you’ve referred to in Lady Chatterley’s Lover but I largely dismissed it as too British. Very liberated for its time and place, I suppose, but by my standards dull.

I much preferred Henry Miller’s Sexus. Brooklyn, to me, is sexier than England but not as sexy as France. I’ve always preferred Runaway Teenage Tramp or Stick A Fat Pig to Fanny Hill or My Secret Life. Pornography led me to detective stories, as they too dealt with human passions. By comparison, most quality lit seemed so tame.

SM: So much is tame. Detective stories are very evocative and provocative. Very sexy, very flirtatious, very seductive to women. In detective stories you have aggressive women, you have villainesses and that’s sexy. The women aren’t passive. My favorite women are Eustacia Vye, in Hardy, in The Return of the Native, and Maggie Tolliver in The Mill on the Floss.

What’s so interesting in those books – I noticed this as a child and was quite disturbed by it – all the bad, willful, interesting, passionate, doomed heroines had dark hair, which made me feel great, since I have dark hair. What alarmed me a bit was that they all die. The blondes were the good girls, the rivals for the hero’s affections, and they all lived and got the guy. Whereas my character ended up at the bottom of the weir. Dead.

There was a lesson in that that I learned: there was a price to pay not only for being dark-haired but for being willful. I decided quite early on that being a price I was very happy to pay. Couldn’t wait to pay it.

I grew up at a time when grown-ups not only didn’t tell you anything of importance but they really didn’t talk to you at all. I had very formal relationships with my parents and adults. I had wonderful and passionate relationships with the people who worked for my family and they told me things they probably shouldn’t have told me.

They only knew their world and not the larger world outside that drew me on. I was very unlike my daughter Lulu, who just knows everything, who’s grown up with the tolerance of homosexuality, infidelity, bisexuality, eccentricity, single parents. She thinks nothing of it. She’s heard about it, talked about it, she’s able to be funny about it. She has her own very strict moral code, stricter than mine, that she abides by. I think its fine to go out with married men. She thinks its not fine.

KT: When I read your novel, My Old Sweetheart, I was possibly your ideal reader. I got it. I took it to heart. If the novel you wrote is a mirror readers can see you in, I was the reader through the looking glass. Our stories run parallel to each other. When I read your book, my childhood experiences became lucid to me. I don’t know that I read your book the way anybody else did. I probably have a very inexact memory of what actually happened in your book and couldn’t recount the plot. I read it like a poem.

SM: I wrote it like a poem the first time out. I don’t think it matters much. Have you ever heard five people explain the plot of a book? Nobody agrees. Maybe its not true that we’re immune to literature after the age of twenty. I still read to get knowledge. I tend, as an adult, to read very little new fiction and very little biography. Many grown-ups that you meet say that they only read biographies and histories. Ya, sure! I can’t read biographies.

Men make the statement about not reading fiction proudly, as though its an affirmation of their virility and their masculinity and their intelligence and that fiction’s girl stuff – fantasy. It’s so stupid. And I don’t think its just a few big heads but quite a few. Men find what most women read incomprehensible. It’s pretty incomprehensible to me, too. I don’t understand how women can read those romances. I guess its like soap operas but soap operas are funny. Those romances aren’t.

I don’t ever read to relax; beach books/airplane books. My idea of relaxation would be to reread all the Judge Dee novels. Ninth century China – I guess I am a dodo! – but it’s heaven. Or all of Raymond Chandler. I like Elmore Leonard and I like Charles Williford. He’s funny. I don’t like Jim Thompson. That to me is kitch. Those are for people who live in the Chateau Marmot and think that they’re hip. They’re comic books.

All the rattlesnake-in-the-pussy guys irritate me. Jim Harrison, Harry Crews, Larry McMurtry. Fredrick Exley – does he do it? Thomas McGuane’s a little bit but he’s too white to put snakes in pussies. They’re like city guys who just discovered their dicks while fly fishing – a phallic symbol – or hunting – another phallic symbol.

Then there are those academic novelists: Anita Brookner, Julian Barnes, A.N. Wilson, Byatt, Barbara Pym. Horrible. Talk about somebody who needs to be fucked in the ass! You want them to spend a week on Rikers Island before allowing them to write their next chapter.

At least Jean Rhys you always thought was getting fucked in the ass. She was a cunt. Mean, self-destructive, irresponsible, drunk. Never changed out of her nightgown; cigarette ashes on the cardigan sweater over the nylon nightgown. You can just see her, can’t you? The unmade bed and the empty bottles. But The Wide Sargasso Sea is a great book. A lot of people don’t like it.

KT: My friend Mai Mai Sze contends the butler in The Remains of the Day was Japanese.

SM: I don’t think she’s right but I wish she were because it makes it more interesting. I love Chester Himes but only the detective stories. I remember you giving me a handful of Nigerian market literature that I loved!

KT: Speedy Eric’s Mabel the Sweet Honey That Poured Away, “Her skin would make your blood flow in the wrong direction. She was so sweet and sexy, knew how to romance. Yet it ended at seventeen. And what an end? SO THRILLING.” C.N. Obioha’s Why Harlots Hate Married Men and Love Bachelors, written under the pseudonym, Money Hard, I will give to my son when he gets to be that age.

Nigerian literature, cooked or uncooked, is my passion. Amos Tutuola’s books, with the possible exception of his last, are all great. Cyprian Ekwensi’s vastly underrated. Jagua Nana is the best novel I’ve read about prostitution. I wish I could get my hands on more African pornography. They’re as cliché ridden as most porn but the clichés aren’t so worn. Bingu Matata of Kenya is the best I’ve found so far:

“She met a crazy jerk who couldn’t get his camouflaged artillery to stand up!! Well, with her good help, it found her vibrating lips open, a little lingering squirt but it never solidified like a fossilized bone!!! Funny how smart drunken mugs could be as big as Tetu bulls and still carry a thin weak thread between thighs.” “Cure boredom with sex,” is his motto.

SM: More butt fucking?

KT: They don’t really think of it the way we do. There’s very little homosexuality in sub-Sahara Africa and they’ve always used anal sex as an obvious way to prevent making babies.

SM: People that have always used it as a form of birth control don’t think of it the way others do. So interesting. So many people think its degrading to women and only pleasurable to men.

KT: Absolutely not! I’ve had several girlfriends who’ve loved anal sex.

SM: Why do they?

KT: I don’t know why they do. It’s one of those things you either enjoy or you don’t. One woman friend of mine had never before and it changed her life.

SM: Stop!!!

KT: It’d all been fairly Presbyterian for her up to then and afterwards she preferred it.

SM: Good for her! And she could cum and everything? It shows you that cuming’s all in the head. Don’t you think so? Someone told me about this girl who gave the best blow jobs of anyone because she came as she did it, so it was extremely exciting for the man. I don’t doubt it at all.

This morning there were some workmen here repairing the alarm system up in my bedroom while I took a call from —- —– down here. I hadn’t realized the answering machine was broadcasting everything I said and it was unbelievably disgusting stuff about some guy who, when he comes in a gir’s mouth, has the cum put back in his mouth. It was something I had not heard of before. Don’t you think that’s an act of repressed homosexuality? On onanism at it’s best or worst? Is it common?

KT: It’s hard to get reliable statistics.

SM: Would you turn the tape recorder off? I want to ask you something…

Postscript. 2012.

KT: In 1982, I read the galley of My Old Sweetheart, vacationing at Dr. Gerry Abbott’s remote fisherman’s farmhouse on Block Island with my girlfriend, Georgia Rae Gunn, and her best girlfriend, Deborah Turbeville. The scene, out of one of DT’s Jacobean photos, was conducive to Susanna’s drug-enhanced prose but my reading rendered a mirror on revelations my mother delivered, poolside in suburban Minneapolis, that had to do with the role narcotics played in my early youth.

Proofreading this 30 years later makes me feel my old self. At the time, I lived at 214 East 10^th Street, was a Greenwich Village book scout (see Johnny Depp in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate) and sold books at The Madison Avenue Bookshop, part-time. The shop was Upper East Side chic as were many of the women who shopped there.

It was there I met the celebs. As I liked to say, my clientele were boldface names in Women’s Wear Daily and The Wall Street Journal. Recovering aesthete inebriant of Harvard’s intellectual effete elite, black sheep, party-boy, Arthur Lehmann Loeb’s Madison Avenue Bookshop was a salon for the decision-makers you never voted for. The 10021 zip code then reputedly had more money in it than the rest of the United States put together and the Social Register’s geographic center was two blocks south.

The shop itself was between 69^th and 70^th, across the street from the Polo Lounge of the Westbury Hotel. Halston was on 68^th. Gene Hackman, as Popeye Doyle, can be seen shadowing Fernando Lamas in the vestibule of the bookshop in The French Connection and often at breakfast in the diner on Lexington and 70^th. I started there in 1975, after stints at the Strand and in the used-book stores on 4^th Ave. Uptown was something else. Downtown, the girls were one thing. Uptown, they were another.

There were the ladies-who-lunched and the ladies-who-wrote. Susanna was exemplary among her literary contemporaries, that included Fran Lebowitz, Jean Stein, Joan Juliet Buck, Andrea de Portago, Francesca Stanfill, Isabelle Eberstadt, Daphne Merkin, Annabel Davis-Goff. I read their galleys and discussed them with the neighbor girls I was seeing, Joel Grey’s daughter, Jennifer (then 22), who conveniently lived above the shop, and gallery girl Jennifer Brown, the double-jointed wit I was so wrong for I was right & visa versa.

There was an older generation of women, some literary, who influenced my reading with their recommendations. No one more so than Mrs. Vreeland but Lili Auchincloss, Mrs. Hilary Patricia Rinehart Barrett-Brown (the former Mrs. Harvey Breit), Louise Melhado, Josephine Hughes, Mai Mai Sze, Irene Sharaff, Francoise de la Renta, Mrs. Astor, Joan Didion, Shirley Hazzard, Rosemund Bernier, Barbara Tuchman, Courtney Sale Ross and (only ever on the phone) the infamous Dorothy Dean.

Collectively they seduced me into reading women, as I never much had before. I’d dozed reading through Jane Austin and the Brontes, surmising women being to marriage what men are to sports. Both were disappointing realizations and so were some of the above but O Suzanna! Someone to share my new found love of Jean Rhys, not so long before ‘rediscovered’ through new paperbacks of long out-of-print 1^st editions, I now knew well enough to buy. One night I took her to the Paradise Garage. We’d eat in French cafes on side streets all over town and intimately gossip about all the above. Oh, Calhoon, I’d say to myself, walking myself home, You livin’ large now!

There was a time… when one of the advantages of being well read was being a desired guest for cocktails, when Susanna was the new girl in town, when Fran was on the bestseller list. When Rhys, O’Connor, Welty, Gordon, McCullers, Gordon, Stein, Wharton and Willa Cather were the talk of the town. It was as pretentious as it all sounds, it was a remarkably literate world of becoming women for whom smarts were style. That world was on its last legs about the time I left the shop in 1992. I’d like to live long enough for the pendulum of Time to swing back to something like it was when I was still a young man.

Links:

New York Society Library The Sharaff/Sze Collection.

From the Library of Alan Pryce-Jones

KT — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:32:07 +0000

From my diary June 25, 1991

Mr. Pryce-Jones’s houses are on John Street in the heart of Old Newport. Three mid-Ninteenth Century saltboxes. His principle residence is at 46 where we found a note addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Thometz asking us to check in at #50. I hadn’t been prepared for a compound.

: The Alan Pryce-Jones houses, John St., Newport, R.I.

He came at us from behind to set us up in that house. Admirable house. I am here to configure the library, which is in astonishing disarray, but I can’t see the books for the too charming host and surroundings. Mr. Pryce-Jones’ flair for living is to me his most attractive of his very handsome features. I consider him one of the grand old boys of modern literature. His reputation is based partially on his reign as the memorable editor of the Literary Supplement of the London Times and partially as a terribly engaging conversationalist and partially as a marvelous ear. This is to by no means disparage his talent as a writer.

After we were allowed a civilized time to position ourselves and acclimatize, he gracefully bowed out to make an appearance at an esteemed elder’s annual remembrance, leaving us to bath and well stocked bar. Once the one year old was installed, I got some time to poke around. The third house on the property was the library proper.

There is a reference in Noel Annan’s book, Our Age, to Mr. Pryce-Jones’ education at Oxford. After rattling off his contemporaries and cohorts as the be-in-and-end-all of England’s effete elite in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, there’s the story of his being “sent down after two terms for gross idleness.” In his autobiography, The Bonus of Laughter, he admits to his early literary education contributing to pretension and flippancy, and writes it off – not without some reason – as just that. I have always considered it as an occupational hazard.

What struck me on first acquaintance with his books was the extraordinary collection of English poetry from the first half of this century. Most people don’t bother much about poetry anymore. As a critic as well as editor and practitioner, Mr. Pryce-Jones served a significant role in popularizing the verse of a generation as yet inadequately anthologized. The books to read are Martin Green’s Children of the Sun and Paul Fussell’s Abroad.

The English contribution to Modernism has become slightly obscured by the academic and popular perception of the period as hopelessly fey and contrary to the political interests of our time. While I myself have little good to say about the Imperialist slant to the history of the time as written from the British P.O.V., I find everything to recommend the literature.

Amongst the personally inscribed are books by Messers Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, Brian Howard and Henry Green. Of Harold Acton he comments, “I find it amusing that the Princess cultivates his company. In the none too distant past none of them wanted to know him.” His books from the Sitwell’s are very lovingly inscribed. One of the twelve proofs of Ulysses is in his possession as consequence of the gross underestimation of the book by his mentor, J.C. Spires, who wanted them burned and nothing less. An inefficient secretary saved them from that fate.

My family and I were Pryce-Jones’s guests for the week it took me to put his eight thousand volumes in agreeable order. You couldn’t find a better host. Days, he took my family to his cabana at Bailey’s Beach.

Nights we’d talk:

“When I was little one had fairly good training from one’s elders. I had two aunts who used to come very often and they loved reading out loud, so that one was read out loud to, which is stimulating when you’re quite small, and I learnt quite a lot by that. My father inherited a habit of his parents, from the eighteen-seventies I suppose, of Sunday readings; special things you read on Sundays you didn’t read during the week. Not improving necessarily, not religious things, but they were slightly superior to the weekday reading and that put one in touch with all sorts of things one wouldn’t see otherwise. It was pitched slightly higher. In my parents house that was quite something.

Very simple is Beatrix Potter. I learnt to read out of Beatrix Potter really, because my mother was someone who would read aloud to me and, sitting beside her looking at it, I got to relate the dots on the page to words finally. So that I discovered that I could read – -I was about five I should think — and they didn’t know that I could and that was exciting to me.

When the first war broke out in 1914 I was — what was I?…born 1908, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 — I was six. Actually, I could read the newspaper and they kept from me the news of the war until it started to upset me. My father was a professional soldier. I wasn’t the least upset, really, I merely thought of how extraordinary that on the rare occasions that I saw him, because he was away in France, he never spoke of the war. Why wasn’t he interested in the things that he was doing? why didn’t he ever talk about it? They thought that I couldn’t read and knew nothing. In fact, I was quite well up on what was happening.

Children’s books were better in the teens and twenties. Mrs Molesworth wrote wonderful stuff for children. One called Herr Baby, about a little boy in a German family. Frightfully good book. And The Cuckoo Clock, about a little girl who forms a friendship with a cuckoo in the cuckoo clock. I really think it was beautifully told. I keep all my children’s books together still. After David grew up he was never particularly interested so I took all of them back and give them to his children from time to time. The great-grandchildren will get them.

The poet Novalis meant a great deal to me when I was quite small, about ten or twelve. This arose because my grandmother had a German governess whom she adored and who was very nice to me. Somehow there was a works of Novalis in the house and she would translate them into English, because in those days I didn’t speak German. I suddenly became thrilled and I can’t tell you why. When I hear the name Novalis my ears prick up still. It meant to me the whole meaning of poetry, the whole meaning of existence practically, involved in this one incomprehensible book that I couldn’t read in its original language.

My life has been seldom altered by really good books. Reading Proust, not really. Reading War and Peace more. George Eliot altered my view of the world. When I discovered Middlemarch I was thrilled by it. I remember making it last a long time. I’m a tremendous fan of J.F. Powers. I’ve enjoyed his books as much as any I’ve ever read. There are a great many admirable writers, who I know to be good, that I have a great deal of trouble with. Dostoevski is one and Conrad is another. I have no trouble with Nostromo or The Secret Agent but I very often get stuck.

About twenty years ago, I thought it was ridiculous that I’d never read Ulysses and I thought I never would read it if I just went on leading the ordinary life one does. Not enough leisure. I promised myself I would take a cargo boat across the Atlantic and take Ulysses and nothing else.

I took this cargo boat from Boston to Southampton. It took about three weeks and I read Ulysses with delight. It’s one of the nicest trips I ever did. On this very comfortable boat — there was practically nobody on board at all — I had a cabin like a cathedral, played bad bridge with a Spanish purser in the evening, and I’d taken a case of vodka with me, because you aren’t allowed to buy liquor, and that endeared me to the Captain. I had a lovely time lying on a deck chair in the sun reading Ulysses. It was an absolute joy.

One has books that do mean something to one. There was an awfully good novel which, when I was at Eaton, somebody said you must read a book called The Nebuly Coat. It’s a frightfully good novel. Written by a man called J. Meade Falkner. Very interesting person he was: he was the head of Vickers, the armament makers, he was a great authority on ecclesiastical literature, he was a rich man, and he just wrote three books. He also wrote a number of poems that anticipate by fifty years all the poems by John Betjiman. You don’t know if you’re reading John Betjiman or Meade Falkner. It’s most extraordinary. They were privately printed in London by a bookshop.

One of his novels was called The Lost Stradivarius, one was about smugglers off of the Dorset coast, and the other one called The Nebuly Coat is about the collapse of a cathedral. It’s the most fascinating book, a sort of thriller. The story’s rather a good one to do with a complicated inheritance and The Nebuly Coat is the heraldic coat of arms on the cathedral window. There’s a rightful heir and an un-rightful heir. Eventually the villain is killed by the collapse of the cathedral, which is brought about by playing the organ too loudly. Sixty-four foot stops brought the cathedral down. It sounds ridiculous but it wasn’t at all.

At Oxford, we all read Chrome Yellow and just the other day I was reading its contemporary reviews and they were so impressed. Much more than they would be now. I reread it just lately and it’s a perfectly good book but some books evaporate and that has evaporated. That whole thing of the Bloomsbury mystique and everyone’s self-satisfaction with each other. It all seems rather vapid now. I remember thinking of Chrome Yellow as brilliant, as funny to a degree, as an illumination, but I don’t think really that it is.

Ford Madox Ford I’ve always had trouble with. I know one should think him wonderful but quite lately I tried again and sort of fagged after about twenty pages. The writer I’ve never got on with very well with is Anthony Powell, that enormous novel Dance to the Music of Time. It’s got some very good things in it. Ten splendid pages and then wasted rubbish. It’s rather difficult to read now. I think the military stuff’s good. Books Do Furnish a Room is a good title, starts out well and then it suddenly dies. Powell was a kindly old soul. He just published a book of his collected reviews, quite a stout book, about four hundred pages long, the reviews of thirty or forty years. One usually can’t reread contemporary reviews but they held up rather well.

Connolly was a great career man. In his day there was nobody more entertaining, nobody nicer, more welcoming, more charming to be with. One could have the most delightful time with him. When it wasn’t his day, nobody could be more fiendishly tiresome, exasperating, maddening, and self-pitying. A squalid man, like Auden. He was a great friend of Phillip Toynbee.

At one point the Toynbees as a couple and the Connolly’s as a couple lived under the same roof and it was a catastrophe. He would say, this really too much, I spend the whole of my days now on my knees trying to get the sick out of the floorboards where Phillip’s thrown up all over the floor again. Which didn’t surprise him. He thought it was the most natural thing to do.

The nicest thing about Evelyn Waugh is he was the most loyal friend. He had a number of people that nobody ever wanted as a friend. They were crooks and thieves and cheats and all the rest of it. In particular, a rather terrifying man called Ray Radcliffe, who was always in prison for things like buggery. He was not the sort of person you had round to your house.

Evelyn Waugh was wonderful to him: gave him money, supported him when he was down and out, gave him a home for weeks at a stretch, visited him in jail. He was an enormously loyal friend to the very few people he was loyal to. He was mostly horrible to people but when he wasn’t, he was beyond praise. It was always so unexpected to me. There was a drunk called Alfred Duggen who eventually wrote some very good historical novels, Evelyn was wonderful to him. Couldn’t have taken more trouble.

Graham Greene and I used to live in the same building. We both lived in the Orderly in London. He felt I was spying on him, not me especially but anyone in the building, and he was very troublesome. When you saw him coming you really had to hide behind a pillar in order that he wouldn’t think that you were there trying to get him.

I do think that good Henry James is absolutely beyond praise but there’s some awfully dull Henry James around too. I think The Awkward Age is an absolutely marvelous book. It has the whole of Evelyn Waugh in it and is much better. It’s frightfully funny. I was amazed. The Spoils of Poynton is quite a good book. Of the early ones I like Roderick Hudson. Never got through Portrait of a Lady. I got stuck in the middle of that and it just sits there.

I rather enjoyed the Lewis book about all the James’. It didn’t tell you anything you didn’t know but I rather enjoyed it. All of Henry James’ books were sold in the 1950′s in Rye, locally, in a small bookshop. It was madness. I bought not very many, because a lot of the good ones had gone before I got on the scene, but I got about a dozen or so. Books annotated by him, which I am delighted to have… all sorts of unexpected books, including Georgian Poetry which was done by Eddie Marsh.

Sir Edward Marsh published four or five volumes of Georgian Poetry. I found among them a dedication copy to Henry James from his friend Eddie Marsh. Eddie Marsh was still alive and I rang him up and said, would you like the book back? Seems silly that you shouldn’t have it. He said, “Don’t speak about it. I’ve got more than enough books in the house.” I said, may I keep it? “Yes, of course, for God’s sake keep it, don’t bore me with it.”

Fran Lebowitz On Reading

KT — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:07:24 +0000

As told to Kurt Thometz.

I’m not a collector. I don’t care about things like that. I not a collector because I’m not that organized. I’m not grown-up enough to collect things, but I have acquired a stellar collection of odd books, weirdo books, books that don’t fit easily into categories.

I have a very small but choice collection of books about the Masons, the Odd Fellows and the Elks. I particularly like Odd Fellows books. They’re a little harder to find. The thing about the Odd Fellows is really curious. I was trying to figure out whether there still are Odd Fellows. You don’t hear about the Odd Fellow much any more. I looked them up in the telephone book here but I guess in New York you don’t need a separate listing for Odd Fellows.

I have a book called Take My Gun If You Dare, which is about the right to bear arms. That’s one of my miscellaneous, ludicrous books. Last month I was at Powell’s in Portland and picked up a great book called The ABC’s of Beekeeping. I don’t care anything about beekeeping, just liked the way the book looked, I liked the pictures.

So many things I have defy category. I have a book called The Gourmet Handbook of Cigars that tells you what cigars to have with what food, what cigars go with what brandy, what cigar goes with what you’re wearing, what size cigar compliments the size of your hand.

I keep everything I buy. Only occasionally do I buy a book by mistake. Someone recommends it to me and I buy it and it’s horrible. I don’t keep books that I don’t like. In my mind there are real books and not real books. Real books are books that I like and not real books are junk that other people recommend to me. I don’t believe it’s taste, I believe they’re wrong. People tell me they’re good and they’re not.

I collect Emily Post. I think I have everything of hers but I don’t keep up with the revised editions. I have a book called Manners for the Millions, which is a manual for immigrants to the United States. Emily Post may tell you how to properly address a Colonel, this tells you not to wipe your nose on your sleeve.

I’ve got my children’s textbooks, some really funny ones, and about five or six children’s encyclopedias. They’re not that hard to find either. You often find them where, say, A is missing.

I was once in Cleveland on a book tour and a bookshop there had just bought the library of a parochial grammar school and they were selling the books for ten cents a pound. There were these big meat scales. I went crazy. This was at the time my first book came out and I lived in this little apartment on West 4th Street that barely had a door, let alone a doorman, so I sent them to my agent and forgot to tell her. They sent them something less than book rate so that three years later I got a call from I.C.M. saying all these cartons of books had arrived for me. For about thirty dollars I bought eight thousand books.

I don’t really collect these books, I just buy them. Particularly one’s from the fifties, when I was a child, not valuable ones. It’s nostalgia for the last time I was prolific.

You know, Jews, when they drop a prayer book are supposed to kiss it. This is what they teach you when you’re very little. It seemed entirely reasonable to me that you would do that. When I was a child I would kiss any book I dropped. When I was a very little child after I’d read a book I really liked I’d kiss it. Love is really the word. I think Children’s books are a human emotional experience rather than an intellectual one. You have a human relationship with them. Children have emotional relationships with inanimate objects which it would be wise to carry on into adulthood. The way a child makes a person out of a doll, which I never did, I made people out of books.

When I was a child I read a lot of my mothers childhood books. Instead of having the consciousness of a child of the fifties I had the consciousness of a child of the thirties. There was a series of books about twins from different countries; not only different countries, there were The Cave Twins, The American Colonial Twins. The idea was to show children how children live in other places. There was no real story. Just to tell you about the customs. I like these books a lot. People must collect these because whenever I see them they’re selling for amazing prices.

You ask any woman what her favorite book was as a child, I think everyone would say A Secret Garden. For me it was Nancy Drew. That’s addicting. When I was about eight years old I had my eyes operated on and I was blind for two weeks. My mother sat by my hospital bed and read me a Nancy Drew book every day.

Of course, now they’re so out of time. Even in the ’50′s they had a sort of ’30′s flavor to them. I’ve read them since and they’re bizarre. She had a lesbian character, not that she ever said so, named George. She’s described as boyish, has short hair, and her best friend and cousin, whose name is Bess, is described as round, very feminine, plump.

In Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield writes about his sister who’s writing a mystery about a girl detective whose father was a tall attractive grey haired gentleman of twenty. Obviously, to any girl, it’s Carson Drew, who was the father of Nancy Drew. I also, when I was about eight or nine, wrote a mystery that owed quite a bit to Nancy Drew.

My mother was a big bookworm. Not a bibliophile. My mother got me into what has been for my entire life certainly what could be called my drug addiction: the reading of detective stories. I read five or six a week and must have eight billion of them. I used to give them away, or throw them away, but for the past seven or eight years I’ve kept them. When I get my house in Italy, which I have been expecting momentarily for the past fifteen years, I’ll have a whole room of these and people can have their choice of any of these eight billion.

So I don’t give them away anymore. I keep them. I’m the only person I know who reads mysteries like this who does not care who did it. I don’t read them for the mystery, I don’t read them for the game or the puzzle. I think of them more as an eating experience than as a reading experience. I suppose I read them for the atmosphere or the characters but I read them like a drug. I read them instead of taking heroin.

I like hard boiled detectives. I really don’t like the English. If I see the word Don and it’s not someone’s name, I’m out of there. Nero Wolfe is one of my favorites because I love to read about food. I also collect cookbooks. I don’t know how to cook but I know how to eat. I’m a glutton. John McDonald is another one of my great favorites. When my first book was published in paperback it was with Fawcett and I guess I told the publisher how much I liked him. I guess she told him because he wrote me a letter and told me how much he liked my book. I was thrilled. They made me an honorary member of the John McDonald Fan Club, with the badge, certificate, and everything. The Travis McGee’s are the best.

I liked Robert Parker before he became a social worker. Elmore Leonard. I even like his bad ones. I think Joseph Hansen’s the best living detective writer. The Dave Brandstetter series. The detective is a guy whose father owns something like Metropolitan Life Insurance, a zillionaire. The son is gay and he’s the detective. He’s a death claims investigator.

Hansen stopped writing them about five years ago but I still think he’s far and away the best. There was another series of gay detective stories that were quite good by a guy whose name I can’t remember. They were all named with a color, but a very particular color like slate. They were all like the colors that they list at fashion shows. He had another called Vermillion. There were three or four of them and then the guy just stopped writing and disappeared. I don’t know what happened to him. I never read spy books. Spy books are for boys.

I love trash. I like Jacqueline Susann and the early Harold Robbins. I love Jackie Collins. I once saw a presentation copy of one of her books in my agents office that was leather bound with leopard print endpapers and I begged for it. I begged for it and he wouldn’t give it to me. There aren’t many writers who do that kind of thing that are good at it but Jackie Collins is good at it.

I have a pornography collection. It’s not a huge one. The really good stuff is too expensive for me. I wrote some for a company called Midway Press. They would give these stapled pages that told you how to write one and what had to be in each book. They paid you five hundred dollars for a book and that’s it.

The first one I wrote myself and it was called House of Leather. I published it under the name of the headmaster who threw me out of prep school, Robert Paine Cook. Then I wrote two or three others with about five people. We would get stoned, we would talk, and somebody would type. There were so many people involved you’d end up getting like seventy-five dollars. It was really boring and it was really bad. My copies of these books are gone and I’m not looking for them. I have a finicky aversion to buying second hand pornography because I know where it’s been.

I would say that if I collect anything literary I collect O’Hara first editions, not that they’re that hard to find. Each printing was about eight billion. O’Hara is a really important American writer and a really overlooked one. There were two reasons he was never considered that way: one, he wrote so much, and, two, he was so popular, he made a lot of money.

Every single person I know who knew him, and there are quite a few, loathed him. He was probably such an unlikable person that nobody could judge him that way in his own era. My editor, for instance, knew him and we’re constantly battling, because he thinks I way overrate him and I say that’s because you knew him. So, he was a jerk. Except for pornographers, I think he’s the only writer who writes about sex in a way that it’s possible to read about it. I think John O’Hara’s the real Fitzgerald. O’Hara’s a cause to me. I have every single thing that he wrote.

About three years ago I found a book of his I never even knew about called Lovey Childs. It was obviously a short story that someone stupidly suggested he turn into a novel. It doesn’t really work but it’s interesting. I found it in a second hand store in Venice, California and I called Joe Fox, my editor, and I said do you know this book? He said there’s no such book. I said, I’m holding it in my hand, you published it — I don’t mean Joe himself but Random House — and you don’t know it? It’s a pretty scandalous book, a lesbian novel. It’s slight but it’s interesting.

I don’t know which is my favorite book of his. We had O’Hara books in the house. My mother must have liked him. He was so popular then. Everyone had a couple of copies of his books. I’ve owned a copy of Cape Cod Lighter since I was a child and only two years ago I found out what one was. I was at the house of an older man who teaches poetry at Harvard and he asked me to help him start a fire. He said, use that Cape Cod lighter, and I was thrilled. A Cape Cod lighter is a thing you light a fire with. I was just stunned. Initially, I’d never even thought what it meant. I don’t know what I thought.

I still have my copy of Howl, that little pamphlet published by City Lights. When I was twelve or thirteen I wanted to be a beatnik as if it were a profession. It kind of sticks with you. When my first book came out, and I was twenty-seven, I went to sign books at City Lights in San Francisco. The whole window was my book. I was so thrilled. Nothing could have made me happier than that. I felt incredibly accomplished.

City Lights, Grove Press, New Directions: publishing houses used to have a real sensibility to them. Each publishing house had its own character. Now they have none at all. To have one of those little publishing houses now you’d have to be a billionaire. Rich people used to dabble in that sort of thing. Now they don’t even bother. You used to have this sort of high quality rich person that was interested in that sort of thing and now you don’t. We have plenty of rich people, more that we need in fact. We have a big surplus of those people but they’re not interested in books or writers or writing.

I read contemporary novels but not with much pleasure. The last novel I liked was A Case of Curiosities, which surprised me because it’s a historical novel. Contempt would be the word that best defines my feelings for the historical novel. The outstanding example of middle-brow literature would be the historical novel.

I don’t know why I bought this. I don’t like historical novels for a number of reasons. First of all, they’re in the province of the third rate. People read them to learn things, as in James Michner. I think a real writer writes about his own life.

I reread Edith Wharton. I’m a big Henry James fan. A lot of people aren’t but I am. Flaubert. Proust. When I was a little girl, about twelve, my little sister gave me Swann’s Way as a birthday present. My sister was about eight. I’d never heard of it. I started to read it and I didn’t understand it at all. It was in English. I kept reading it and reading it and didn’t understand but I forced myself to read through the whole thing. Hadn’t a notion of what it was about. But without one second of comprehension I read it. I asked her why did she buy me this book and she said she chose it because it looked like the kind of books I liked. I don’t know what that meant.

When I was about seventeen I read it again with about ten percent comprehension. Then I read it in my twenties. I last read it when the Kilmartin edition came out. I didn’t know whether it’s a much better translation or whether I was just ready for it. I am not going to re-read both of these translations to make that distinction but it seemed to me much better. Now it’s being translated by Richard Howard and I’ll read that. His translation of Baudelaire was the first time it ever really made sense to me.

The first time I read Madame Bovary I read it in the Penguin edition — which is a terrible translation — and I didn’t think it was that great. Then I read the Steegmuller translation and it was a really good book. I hesitate to say what writers I like best when I’ve read them in translation as I never feel like I’ve read them. I don’t speak another language so all the French writers, the Italian writers, the German writers, I don’t feel like I know them in a real way.

Having been through the experience of having my own books translated I know they can’t even come close. I worked with a Japanese translator on my second book. After spending a day with her I said, You know, you’re not even asking what the word for this is, you’re asking me what is the thought for this. It’s too distant. Too different.

There are certain great writers I don’t read with pleasure and Joyce is one of them. I read Ulysses when I was very young and I forced myself to read it, which is something I don’t do anymore and haven’t done for twenty years. I read for pleasure and if I’m not having fun I close the book.

Faulkner’s another one. I tried to read him when I was young, didn’t enjoy it, and never tried again. Southern writing doesn’t strike a cord in me. I like Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor but I don’t love them. The same goes for all those South American writers, except for Borges who I think is really interesting. I don’t love Marquez. People recommended him to me for years, I wouldn’t read him, and when I did I was right.

Hemingway I dislike. Hemingway, to me, is fraudulent. He may be too much of his time, which makes him not a great writer. It doesn’t matter when a great writer wrote. He changed writing but that doesn’t make him a great writer. You don’t think about the time when you read Flaubert or Shakespeare. He’s still read because people read him in school. I think that a writer that inspires you to fish instead of to write or read is not a great writer.

I love Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis. All the Lanny Budd books. I recently gave away my copy of Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, his biography of the man who started 20th Century Fox. He wrote some really weird books and published them himself.

Sinclair Lewis. Particularly Main Street. I thought that was a work of great genius. I think that particularly for a child it’s a great book. It’s a child’s idea of great literature. It’s a good introduction to real books. I think probably for an adult it’s a child’s idea of great literature as it doesn’t hold up.

As a child, reading Twain changed my life. After the age of twenty it is almost impossible that a book can change your life. That happens when you’re a child. Just like that City Lights thing, an important thing that happened to me when my first book came out was I got a letter from the Mark Twain Society saying I had been elected a Daughter of Mark Twain. I was extremely impressed by this.

Terry Southern is one of my heros. Blue Movie is really my favorite. He’s unknown to people younger than us. I speak at colleges all the time and whenever they ask me who is funny I say Terry Southern and get six-hundred blank stares.

With Thurber, you always laugh. I was thrown out of class — it must have been the third grade — because I was reading The Night the Bed Fell In behind my geography book and I was just hopeless with laughter. I couldn’t stop laughing even when my teacher was yelling at me. I was scared of my teachers as a child. It wasn’t like I was some belligerent student. I was just having a fit. I couldn’t stop laughing. They sent me to the principal’s office and as I walked down the hall, to my certain doom, I was convulsed with laughter. He is certainly, absolutely one of my favorite funny writers.

Dorothy Parker makes me laugh, always. Her book reviews. People really slight her because she was so dissolute, she hardly wrote, she was a drunk. I think if someone can write a book review of a popular novel published fifty years before you read the review, and you laugh every time you read it, that person is remarkably talented. Oscar Wilde. Firbank is so extremely precious, very funny and stylish, but Oscar Wilde is a genius. There’s quite a difference there.

Everything is disappointing to those who read a lot. There’s no question that at no time in my life have I ever thought that life was as good as reading. And I haven’t had a bad life. What’s unusual about me is that most people I know who read to the extent that I do aren’t as precarious as I am.

I am additionally a lounge lizard of tremendous proportion. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy, I do. But I would rather read than have any kind of real life, like working, or being responsible. Reading prepares you for other reading, and possibly for writing, but, I’m happy to say, it certainly has nothing to do with real life. All the things that I never did because I was reading, so what? If someone said to me, how did you spend your life? I’d have to say, lying on the sofa reading.

Adam Thometz & Fran Lebowitz

From the Library of Diana Vreeland

KT — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 05:20:10 +0000

Let’s suppose you were a total stranger – and a very good friend. That’s a good combination. What would you want to know about me? And how would you go about finding it out? To me the books I’ve read are the gateway. My life has been more influenced by books than by any other one thing.

-Diana Vreeland, D.V. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984)

The first house call I made to care for an ailing library, which came first to be something of a sideline, later an occupation, was more of a blind date than a job. Of the doyenne of American fashion, the enfant terrible of magazine editing whose every bon mot seemed to bare repeating, whose reputation inspired emulation by society girls, the veneration of artists, and adoring imitation by drag queens, I hadn’t expected great bibliophily.

“From the time I got married at eighteen until the time I went to work in 1937, twelve years – I read. And Reed [Vreeland] and I would read things together out loud, which was marvelous. That was the charm of it – when you’ve heard the word, it means so much more than if you’ve only seen it.”

Her library had surrendered to chaos through constant use and to put your hand to what you wanted – unless you could follow the Zen logic imposed by a pot-headed friend of her grandson – was difficult and ineffectual. Cataracts, which would eventually blind her to the written word, were making disorder too difficult to be practical. Christopher Hemphill, her co-author, was a friend and effected our introduction and my first job as a private librarian.

The apartment was Billy Baldwin’s famous interpretation of Mrs. Vreeland’s dictate to furnish her flat like “a garden in hell.” Scarlet fleurs du mal chintz covers everything in the living room, red wall to wall underfoot: a seascape of shells, Venetian blackamoors, a Sumu wrestler under glass, Warhol’s lithograph of Mrs. Vreeland as Napoleon, two Christian Berard portraits of her as a working editor, a Zuloaga scene of Easter Sunday in Saville, and a Dufy watercolor of a Venetian canal.

While she loved Venice she preferred Bahia, thought Salvador more beautiful, and the most charming picture she owned was a primitive portrait of a girl I loved. Where books weren’t, bibelots adorned every available surface: Scottish horn snuffboxes, a kennel of Staffordshire dogs from her late husband, porcelain leopards given her by Jean Schlumberger. Nothing priceless in itself but invaluable by association.

In my categorizing and arranging I was drawing a bibliographic portrait of Mrs. Vreeland and falling a little bit in love despite our fifty year difference in age. Her library possessed what Cecil Beaton characterized as her “most strict sense of chic and a poetical quality quite unexpected in the world of tough elegance in which she works.” This exacting sensibility distinguished her books as a collection, as opposed to a mere accumulation. Most of the books were by her contemporaries, coincidentally first editions, many gifts respectably inscribed by their authors. Condition didn’t interest her. The books were dog-eared, underlined, spines faded, jackets torn and well worn, not just read but reread.

The effete elite from past to present, rows of purple prose, stood their ranks on her shelves: Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, Ronald Firbank. Beaton’s works were inscribed, “To Reed and Diana…” Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, the friends of her formative years, dedicate their essays in aesthetics on her title pages. Augustus Johns’ books are situated close by his pencil portrait of her…a gift.

As special consultant to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, Mrs. Vreeland invented a new approach to presenting fashion and the inspiration of her shows dominated the styles of the 1980s more than the influence of any single designer. Here on the shelves of her library, the histories of Hapsburg Vienna, Imperial China, Tsarist Russia, Belle Epoque France, Raj India, Edwardian England, and Grand Illusion Hollywood represent her inquisitions into each era. The Letters of Madame Sevigne, The Memoirs of Duc de Saint-Simone, Walpole’s correspondance, the Goncourt brothers journals, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon — “I still keep it next to my bed. Meanderings of the mind, very charming. Little vignettes of wisdom and beauty”.

Three biographies of Maria of Rumania. A shelf of books on Edward’s abdication. Seven biographies of Diagilev, five of Nijinsky, four of Anna Pavlova, half a dozen on Leon Bakst’s designs for the Ballets-Russes. Misses Moberly and Jourdain’s Adventure, an account of two women of the twentieth century who step through a seam in time into the Trianon gardens of 1789 and there come upon figure after figure unaccountably arisen from that unfamiliar past.

All offered a clue to the modus operati that Mrs.Vreeland employed in mounting extravaganzas. History, in her mind, might be lived as fantastically as it can be grasped. “I think your imagination is your reality,” she’d say, “Only what you imagine is real. You love someone very much, but no one else sees her that way. But what’s the reality? Yours.”

The dining room is half walled with books – history, literature, and art – running the length of the room from floor to ceiling. Biography, photography and interior design are in the vestibule’s biblotheca. In the study are monographs on the great coutures: Poiret, Fortuny, Chanel, Schiaparelli, Dior, Balman, St. Laurant; treatise on fashion and rare books on costume. One of her favorites, reflecting a lifelong passion, is The Book of the Feet: A History of the Fashions of the Egyptians, Hebrews, Persians, Greeks and Romans, and the Prevailing Style Throughout Europe During the Middle Ages Down to the Present Period; also, Hints to the Last Makers, and Remedies for Corns, by J. Sparks Hull, Patent Elastic Boot Maker to Her Majesty the Queen, the Queen Dowager and the Queen of the Belgians. From the Second London Edition, with A History of Boots and Shoes in the United States, Biographical Sketches of Eminent Shoemakers and Crispin Anecdotes.

I spent nearly a week working on arranging the library, during which we became very good friends. After work she’d invite me to dinner and after dinner we’d sit up drinking Smirnoff’s neat with a twist and smoking Lucky Strikes. She’d sit in her little red child’s seat holding forth on the contemptible lack of quality in life today and the decadence of the modern novel — “The last novel I enjoyed was that one by Salinger” — or the sublime as effected by Henry James, George Eliot and Jane Austin, or the criticism she anticipated for the autobiography she and Chris were collaborating on: “Every word of it is real. How could I have made it up? I’m not all that imaginative, except in my mind.”

“Find me that bit in Polo’s Travels…marvelous,” she would drawl it out, “You know the passage..Elephants in all the regalia, walking six abreast through an ermine tent. Have you read that? Read it to me again. Ow, that’s turreiffirck,” she’d purr.

On Bibliophiles

KT — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:09:05 +0000

Reading, the unpunished vice, promises, as most vices do, a finer world within the world. Beyond the narrow realm of our senses is the greater reality retained in and contained by that cumbersome and collectable commodity, the book. While all book collectors consider themselves bibliophiles, most bibliophiles perceive collecting as the precious sport of a rarified few to whom a book’s physical stature dwarfs its state of mind. Such people, it is felt, have too much respect for books and not enough love. As George Antheil, the avant-garde composer once wrote, “People who are in love with one another do not really respect each other – they know too much about each other.” Bibliomanes occupy themselves not so much with literature as with books. They more entomb than enjoy their treasures and they judge books by their covers. Despite sharing the same object of affection with those of us who keep books, much as we keep old friends, their real interest lies not in the books content but in its context, its value as an antique, its singularity, its rarity. Despite their calculated eccentricities, they are generally bores. Book collecting can be a vice analogous to covetiveness. I wouldn’t say the acquisitive aspect of the habit is any worse than the universal urge to squirrel away, say, rusting automobiles, unrepaired appliances, salt and pepper shakers or any other nostalgic memento. It can also be an act of self-realization. There is an art to it. One collects books and builds a library to create an intensified environment, a reflection of our perception of the world. In collecting, the bibliophile balances the centrifugal force of serendipity with the centripetal force of methodical reading in seeking his intellectual thrills. He as often doesn’t know what he’s looking for until he’s found it as he doesn’t want what he’s looking for once it’s found. The charm of collecting books is you find out what you want to know. The book itself, once read, becomes more an accomplishment than a possession. To the bibliophile books solicit an emotional response analogous to religious faith and sexual attraction. To the bibliophiles herein assembled books are a practicality for the life of the mind. While the ballast of my career as a bookseller/librarian has been a voracious vice-like reading habit, the quixotic course of my dealing has taken me far afield of my own special interests. The vast majority of the people I’ve come to consider my friends are less the result of an active social life and more a part of what I think of as my auto-bibliography. People have lead me to books as often as books have lead me to books. Rather than a formal education, and this is often the case with booksellers, I have a succession of mentors – writers, scholars, librarians, fellow dealers, and customers – who have contributed to my literacy and whose thoughts books are much more informative than picturing their libraries. These interviews and portraits amount to less of the dialectic one who reads literary criticism is accustomed to and more of the personal experience, the aesthetic echo, of the appreciation of literature I am looking to share with fellow readers.