I have been one of the few to extract a plausible living from a bookshop. When I was hired to work at Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Whitman had recently taken over running the place from her father, George. She wanted a permanent staff to confront the multitudes who flooded in on a daily basis, and she knew a good salary would keep people around. I was glad Sylvia was my boss. She was sweet and even tempered, while George was known to be irascible and unpredictable. Furthermore, everyone told me that George “didn’t like men.” (At one of his heralded Sunday breakfasts, he spied a single boy among the crowd of young female admirers and remarked, with narrowed eyes, “There’s a weed in my flower garden.”)

My shift lasted from 6 p.m. to midnight. Sylvia warned me that George often came down in the evening, after she’d gone home, to engage in sabotage. Father and daughter were embroiled in a simmering conflict over “improvements.”  Telephone, or cash register, or books organized by genre  – George was revolted by the idea. A few weeks earlier, under orders from the French authorities, the famously-treacherous staircase, described by Anaïs Nin as “unbelievable,” was taken down and replaced by a wider, sturdier, more conventional thing. Enraged, George attacked it with a hammer. The night of my first shift, I sat at the register, nervous that he would renew his assault.  What should I do if he appeared with that hammer again? But when he turned up midway through the evening, it was not the stairs he had in mind. A friend was coming from Atlantic City. We needed another bed! Ignoring the line of waiting customers, George ordered me to climb out onto the dilapidated roof (of the 16th-century building) to retrieve a piece of rotting plywood, skewered with nails. I obliged, of course. Later, he brought me gluey pancakes, which I clandestinely flushed down the toilet.

When readings were held outside the shop, George would sometimes throw chewed pieces of chicken out the fourth-story window. This was a snack for Colette, the shop dog. We all prayed the scraps would not fall on the author. George was thrillingly indifferent to appearances.  When Bill Clinton visited, he descended in his pajamas to inform the former president that he had “betrayed his principals,” by executing a mentally-disabled man during his tenure as governor of Arkansas.

George was epically and, at times, autocratically uninterested in anything convenient, orderly, or efficient. Cell phones? Computers? Kindles? No thanks. If we organized the books, he disorganized them. If we brought in the cleaners, he was livid. Cockroaches roamed and flourished. The wishing well was raided constantly by gypsies. George didn’t care; as long as people had books.

Over the course of 60 years, he gave shelter to almost 40,000 people, many of that desperate genre: the aspiring writer. When I worked at the shop, we would often find scraps of paper under the stairwell that revealed themselves to be thank you notes to George from people like Langston Hughes or Graham Greene or Jacqueline Onassis. And so I, and the many thousands of others who passed through, add our not-quite-as-illustrious thank you notes to theirs.

Photo courtesy of Harriet Lye.

My first reaction on hearing this morning about the death of Christopher Hitchens was not one of shock–obviously, we have all known for some time that this was coming–but one of despondency. What, I immediately thought, are we supposed to do now? Hitchens was, and still is, an indispensable person, a completely necessary man. You didn’t have to agree with him on everything in order to recognise this (he made it more or less impossible, in fact, for any one person to agree with him on everything). Like almost everyone I know, I thought he was very wrong on a number of major issues, but that didn’t stop me wanting to read him, and listen to him talk, and it didn’t stop me from admiring him greatly. The whole point of Hitchens–a major element of his necessity–was that when you disagreed with what he said, you really disagreed, and when you agreed, you wished you had said it yourself. Either way, it was necessary to hear his opinion; the matter in question, whatever it was, hadn’t been fully aired until Hitch had rolled up the sleeves of his off-white linen jacket and got stuck in.

He was the embodiment of the public intellectual, a gifted and prolific writer who was also one of the most gifted and prolific talkers in the English-speaking world. Perhaps the saddest part of his slow dying was the moment, last April, when he lost his voice. His actual physical voice, perhaps even more than his writing, was the substance of his cultural presence. In an essay published in Vanity Fair shortly after this happened to him, he wrote of how an editor at The Guardian once gave him what he saw as an invaluable piece of advice–to “write more like the way you talk.” For most of us, this would be extraordinarily poor counsel, but for Hitchens it turned out to be very useful. Anyone who met him was inevitably struck by the sheer authority and eloquence of his speech, his ability to talk in perfectly formed sentences, with audible parentheses and semi-colons, and (seemingly but not actually) premeditated paragraphs.

I met him only once. It was June 16th, 2007–Bloomsday–and he was in Dublin to promote his book God is Not Great, which had just hit the top of the New York Times bestsellers list. Back then, I worked for a magazine called Mongrel which was run by a couple of friends of mine, and they called me and asked if I wanted to interview Hitchens. I have never in my life answered a question so vehemently in the affirmative. I went along to his hotel the following morning. Within seconds of his opening the door and sitting me down at a table in the small hotel room, he announced that he needed to use the toilet. Instead of closing the door to the en suite, however, he kept it wide open and talked loudly and authoritatively over the sound of his own micturition. He was enthusing about the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, who was due to pick him up after the interview and run him out to a party at the home of U2’s manager Paul McGuinness, and whom he claimed was one of the greatest conversationalists he knew, “maybe even better than Mr. Rushdie.” I remember thinking (and later writing) that it took a particularly potent kind of charisma to allow a person to engage in such concentrated namedropping, urinating all the while, and still manage to come across as charming. Hitchens had that kind of charisma. It’s still a source of stinging regret that, when he asked me what I wanted to drink, I opted timidly for a small bottle of white wine from the minibar rather than joining him in the Johnny Walker Black he’d ordered up from room service. It felt a little early in the day for the hard stuff, I think was my rationale. More fool me.

There is no question of anyone coming to occupy anything like the cultural position he created for himself. One of the surest signs of his greatness, for me, is the reaction I have to seeing people trying to bite his contrarian style. I feel sorry for them; it simply can’t be done. Only Hitchens could do what he did. Only Hitchens could write a book-length assault on the reputation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta–denouncing her as, amongst other things, a “lying, thieving Albanian dwarf”–and come out of it looking like the good guy. Only Hitchens would have the audacity, and the intractability, to appear on Fox News the day after the death of the televangelist Jerry Falwell and remark that “if you gave him an enema you could bury him in a matchbox.” We expected a spectacle, of course, and we usually got one, but he was much more than a contrarian exhibitionist. He was a superb writer, and a ferocious advocate of reason, intelligence and intellectual autonomy in a cultural marketplace that is often a rummage-sale of received ideas and half-considered positions. He was also, let’s not forget, an excellent literary critic. He was a sort of combination of John Lydon and Lionel Trilling, and he made that combination seem like a perfectly natural one. As frequently, as bluntly and as eloquently as he wrote about his illness, and as long as we have known that we would eventually lose him, his death still feels like an unexpected loss. It’s too early to measure the extent of it, but we’ll start taking that measurement soon enough; we’ll start as soon as we are compelled to ask, on the occasion of some catastrophic event or monumental political stupidity, “what would Hitchens say about that?”

Jonathan Swift–an Irishman and a cleric with whom this English atheist nonetheless shared some common ground–wrote his own epitaph, perhaps because he didn’t trust anyone else not to mess it up. It’s inscribed, in Latin, on a plaque near his burial site in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. W.B. Yeats translated it into English as follows:

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

It’s always a sign of a grim juncture when you’re reduced to quoting Yeats, but it seems particularly apt here. Christopher Hitchens has sailed into his rest. Imitate him if you dare.

(Image: Hitches? Hitchens! from allaboutgeorge’s photostream)

Public domain e-books are dear to me as a writer (where would I be without my fixes of Dreiser and other favorites?), and the man most responsible for them is now dead.

Vinton Cerf and colleagues gave us the Internet, with Al Gore cheering them on. But it was Michael Stern Hart of Project Gutenberg who popularized the Net as a book library. He died September 6 at age 64 at his home in Urbana, Illinois, after a long series of health woes, with more than 36,000 free Gutenberg books on the Web, in 60 languages, as his legacy. How to take this personally? I, too, have devoted years of my life to e-books, and coincidentally my middle name is the same as Michael’s last. He and I were born just weeks apart. In September 2008, I suffered a heart attack, and in the same month in 2011, he died of one.

Like many boomers, both of us distrusted Washington politicians. But Michael outdid me. He passionately opposed my vision of a well-stocked national digital library system, a priority to me as an ex-poverty beat reporter who had seen too many bookless homes but knew that cheapie color tablets would one day reach Kmart. Even William F. Buckley, Jr. could go for that one, in two “On the Right” columns, despite my port-side politics. But Michael’s fear of Washington knew no bounds.

Michael also loathed my advocacy of the ePub standard for the formats of digital books, now used by Apple, Sony, and Barnes & Noble (albeit often gummed up by proprietary copy protection).

As both a reader and editor-publisher of the TeleRead e-book site, I hated the Tower of eBabel that the industry had created before ePub. You don’t need Company X’s glasses to read paper books by author Y. Shouldn’t even commercial e-books be the same, regardless of Jeff Bezos’ proprietary tendencies? Michael somehow never understood.

But regardless of major differences about e-books and life in general–the man so often thrived on chaos, whether technical or organizational–how could I not respect Michael’s vision and idealism? Not to mention his tenacity. Michael’s very first digitization, on July 4, 1971, was of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Even with optical character recognition technology used today, it can be challenging for volunteers to produce accurate digital editions in ePub and other text-rather-than-image formats. Automation will take you only so far if you want a top-notch reproduction. Distributed Proofreaders, an allied group, originates many of the titles and is now Gutenberg’s main source of books.

Michael’s big gift to the cosmos wasn’t just the creation of the Gutenberg Web site and the accompanying communities of diligent volunteers. He also encouraged other sites to spread the books around–realizing that the best way to defend the public domain was to promote the popular use of it. Google may make the most money off the classics, and at the most lofty level, let’s hope that the Harvard-based Digital Public Library of American can succeed; just don’t forget the real Godfather of free E.

Certain academics and librarians have knocked the Godfather’s books for less than perfectly accurate reproductions of the originals. Scholars should care. But what about another kind of preservation? Michael helped keep the classics much more on the minds of the young than they would otherwise be.

The 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the ultimate anti-Michael, anti-library law or close to it, outraged many beneficiaries of his toil. Washington doled out 20 more years; that meant a writer’s life plus 70 and still more for corporately authored works. Even and especially as a writer, I agreed with Michael. Copyright exists to spur us on, and last I knew, F. Scott Fitzgerald was not churning out Great Gatsby sequels from St. Mary’s Cemetery. Some posthumous royalties for wives, sons, and daughters of writers for a reasonable time? Definitely, as I myself see it. But, to cite Michael’s wit from years ago, America does not need a “copyright gentry.” Without him around to popularize digital freebies, the Bonoized terms might have stretched even longer. Of course, if e-books hadn’t existed, not to mention Walt Disney’s profits to safeguard, maybe Congress would never have passed the so-called Mickey Mouse Protection Act in the first place. Ironically Michael’s free e-books helped put the medium on the radar of lawyers keen on monetizing as many bits and bytes as they could, schools and libraries be damned.

Alas, Michael was too wild as a potential lead plaintiff for Lawrence Lessig, a noted copyright lawyer, to use in lawsuit against the Bono Act (yes, named after the late entertainer), so another worthy purveyor of free books, Eric Eldred, substituted.

The fight reached the Supreme Court, but, sadly, they lost.

Not everyone loves the public domain. Gutenberg’s giveaways have unnerved even some writers without multi-million-dollar estates awaiting their families. Imagine having to compete against dead geniuses whose brilliance the masses can download at no cost. But as an author, I’m better off for Michael’s digitization work. I can more easily draw inspiration from Dreiser’s compassion and realism, visit and revisit the Dickens classics I missed in school, or instantly look up a quote from The Education of Henry Adams.

To teach or write literature, you must read it first, and not just modern books; and Michael vastly simplified the process.

Even some publishers may have come out ahead, since lively classics like Jules Verne’s can encourage readers to go on to modern novels and actually shell out cash. Goodwill and advertising and other commercial possibilities are hardly the only reason why Google, Amazon, Apple, and others carry free public domain writings on their Web sites.

Beyond the world of e-publishing, imagine what Michael’s thousands of free e-books mean to, say, community college students without the cultural and intellectual advantages he enjoyed growing up.

Michael’s own parents were professors at the University of Illinois, his father a Shakespearean scholar, his mother a mathematician. Alice Woodby survives her son, as does his brother, Bennett. The Hart family reared Michael to be unconventional and skeptical, which jibed with his love of a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

Of course, on e-book standards, I thought Michael was endlessly unreasonable in the traditional sense. He most of all venerated the plain old ASCII text format, which really isn’t a book standard at all, given the need of publishers for little amenities such as italics and bold rendered in good form without fuss. I joined a brave and prescient techie named Jon Noring in pushing a consumer-friendly format called OpenReader, the existence of which prodded the main industry trade group to create and promote ePub, which in the end was fine by me since I cared more about a standard format than about the OpenReader organization. Michael at least tacitly encouraged a wacky troll to go after us standards advocates. At times like those, Planet Earth would have been better off with Gutenberg’s leader as a quiescent son of Dale Carnegie.

Physically, Michael was a short, stout, bearded man fond of showmanship; in at least one photo he wore a top hat, perhaps in part to flaunt his love of the supposedly obsolete, not just to “pull books out of the hat.” That wasn’t the only eccentricity. I never visited his house in Urbana; but a mutual friend did as one of Gutenberg’s thousands of volunteers, and in an online chat she recalled it was “bursting at the seams with books and computer gadgetry. He had to shower in the basement. No decent bathroom.” Michael cared less about such trifles than about tidy e-files for Project Gutenberg (and about amassing the paper books he so often gave away). Remember, this guy sprinkled sugar on his pizza.

Michael could be just as quirky in composing his emails. As remembered by his friend Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, which built on Gutenberg’s work, Michael would manually insert extra spaces between words in correspondence to justify them so they lined up evenly to the right. Michael saw word-wrap as a wicked destroyer of “my phraseology.”

What a mix of the backwards and forward looking! As a novel, Michael would have been a brilliant, sprawling classic from the 19th century–offensive to the order-minded but still a “must read” for the discerning.

The good news is that Shavian unreasonableness notwithstanding, Michael was realistic about his health and–to use his own words, quoted in Brewster’s blog–planned a “graceful exit.” Gregory Newby, a computer scientist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the same visionary who included a 1990s incarnation of my national digital library proposal in an MIT Press/ASIS information science collection, is Gutenberg’s chief executive. He has devoted thousands of hours of his life to running Gutenberg day to day. And the format wars? Well, I hope they’re winding down at least somewhat. Nowadays you can download thousands of Gutenberg books not just in plain ASCII and in other formats but also in the one of my dreams–nonDRMed ePub.

Many thanks, Michael and Greg, for that and much more regardless of the detours along the way. I hope that Gutenberg lasts at least as long as the most durable of the classics it has digitized.

Image credit: Marcello

One of the first stores I visited was Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., where I was greeted warmly by the owners, an effusive woman named Carla Cohen and her more reserved partner, Barbara Meade.  Only later did I learn that Meade thought she worked like a cat (“unobtrusively”) while Cohen worked more like a dog (“joyfully”).  They readily agreed to let me park my Buick right on the sidewalk in front of the store.  Cohen and Meade understood that it pays to advertise, especially when the advertising is free and sports a two-tone paintjob and a glittering “Dagmar” front bumper.  The reading was a success for all of us.

So naturally I was saddened to learn that Carla Cohen died on Monday at the age of 74 from a rare form of bile duct cancer.

But I was also heartened to learn that Politics and Prose, which Cohen and Meade opened in 1984, has become a cultural institution in our nation’s capital and that crowds routinely line up down the block to attend readings by the likes of Bill Clinton, J.K. Rowling and Tom Wolfe.  The secret of the store’s success has been that the owners loved books and weren’t afraid to have opinions or share them with their customers.  And the customers responded to that passion.

When news of Cohen’s cancer diagnosis got out last summer, she and Meade put the store up for sale.  They received about 50 offers and narrowed them down to half a dozen.  While some book lovers in Washington are anxious, it appears likely the popular store will live on.

Other independent bookstores I visited during those long-ago selling trips have not fared as well.  Books First in Richmond, for one, is gone.  Many others have succumbed to chain stores, on-line retailing and the sad fact that serious readers of serious writing, always a tiny minority in America, are beginning to look like an endangered species.  Yet some of the stores I visited are not only surviving, but thriving.  In addition to Politics and Prose there are The Regulator in Durham, N.C., Prince Books in Norfolk and Burke’s Books in Memphis.  Patrick Brown recently wrote an enlightening essay in these pages about other independents that are beating the odds.

Almost always there are passionate book lovers like Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade involved in those successful stores.  When Matt Drudge asked to give a talk at Politics and Prose, Cohen turned him down, saying he wasn’t a journalist, he was a “rumormonger.”

Thanks for doing that.  And thanks for letting me park my Buick in front of your store, Carla Cohen.  You will be missed.

At 16, my impending adulthood terrified me, and I worried often about my ability to do the ordinary things that an independent person must do to get by. I was convinced that facing the logistics of life—finding a place to live, paying the bills, going to the dentist—would deplete any happiness I might find. The bureaucracy and tedium of high school left me outraged, and like many young people who came of age during the Bush administration, I had a pretty grim view of humanity’s future.

I found hope and comfort in American Splendor, even as the comics actually confirmed some of my worst fears about the adult world. Harvey’s autobiographical protagonist faces all the challenges I worried about, and he doesn’t always respond to them with the calm maturity I hoped I would someday develop. Most of the stories in American Splendor take place at the hospital where Harvey worked for most of his life as a file clerk, or on the streets and stoops of his run-down Cleveland neighborhood. They chronicle his strained relationships with loved ones, his bouts with cancer and depression, and his frustration at practically everything.

American Splendor reassured me despite all this gloom. A lot of the comics recount run-ins with a cast of eccentrics; some strangers, some co-workers and friends. I think one of these vignettes, an encounter with a guy named Crazy Ed, inspired Pekar to start writing comics in the first place. I spent a lot of my life at the time wandering around the city and riding buses, so I had plenty of conversations with strangers myself, and I often enjoyed talking to them more than anything else I did. Pekar recognized that these interactions are not just funny anecdotes: they can sustain one’s spirits and make it easier to persevere. Getting through the day was hard, he affirmed, but it was worth it. Not for any great philosophical reason, but because ordinary life is filled with strange occurrences that are not to be missed. American Splendor helped me imagine a future I could handle, and I considered Harvey Pekar an ally on my path to adult stability.

When I saw a P.O. box listed in a back issue of American Splendor, I decided to write him a letter to thank him. I told him that his comic books reassured me that things would turn out okay, and that I loved the Mr. Boats stories (a series of comic strips about an elderly co-worker given to making grandiose statements in elevators). I didn’t really expect a response; my brother had made similar overtures to R. Crumb and never heard anything back. A few weeks later, though, my mom called me at work to tell me that I had gotten a letter from Harvey Pekar. Luckily, I worked in a bookstore, so I could brag about it without having to explain who he was.

The wrinkled, beat-up envelope from Cleveland contained a short note, in which Harvey thanked me for my letter and said I could give him a call if I wanted to talk some more. He had free long distance, and he didn’t have time to write long missives. I couldn’t believe that an accomplished writer wanted to talk to me, although I knew from references in the comic books that he had become friends with fans before.

I was extremely nervous the first time I called. His wife picked up the phone, and I stumbled through an awkward explanation of who I was. Once Harvey got on the phone I relaxed a little bit and we talked for a while. His voice was strained and raspy, due to a problem with his vocal chords that was charted in a series of comic strips. I felt bad about keeping him on the phone because it sounded so painful. Our first conversation was friendly but short. We mostly talked about comics we liked; he was very enthusiastic about young comic book writers like Keith Knight, and gratified by the medium’s newfound popularity. He was surprised that I found anything uplifting in American Splendor, since his work was often derided as too curmudgeonly. We agreed to talk again soon and he got off the phone to go to bed.

We had longer phone conversations over the next year. Harvey was warm and funny in conversation, but he also sounded worn out and subdued. In his comics, he portrayed himself bursting with energy and anger and enthusiasm. I knew this was an exaggeration of his personality, but I think the time I knew him was especially hard for him. It was a bad time for me too, and having someone to commiserate with helped. I was so grateful that he was interested in my problems that I felt presumptuous trying to help with his; I was just a kid and I didn’t have much perspective.

I remember one very serious conversation about living with chronic depression. He was amused that I expected him to have some words of wisdom on the topic, since he had struggled with these problems his whole life without overcoming them. Nonetheless, he did give me some advice that was both pragmatic and frightening, and I’ve tried to follow it ever since. I think Harvey didn’t even consider it good advice; it was just the only thing that worked. He told me that you have to force yourself to do whatever needs to be done to get through the day, no matter how you feel, and at some point later you’ll be glad you did.

We talked about lighter stuff too, mostly books and art. Harvey also told me to read as much as I could about everything I was interested in, and to keep educating myself whether I was in school or not. He believed in reading to satisfy curiosity and gain expertise, not just for pleasure, a philosophy in keeping with his pragmatic, unromantic approach to writing (another thing he encouraged me to do regularly). And, as any reader of American Splendor would expect, we spent a lot of time complaining.

We met in person twice, at comic book conventions in San Francisco and Portland, but I enjoyed talking on the phone more. The conventions were busy and crowded, and I was even shyer in person. When I introduced myself for the first time, I was flustered and asked if the convention gave him any free food. Recognizing a fellow cheapskate, he responded enthusiastically and gave me a handful of energy bars.

I was very sorry to hear about Harvey’s death last week. I’m sure our conversations meant more to me than they did to him, but I hope they cheered him up. Our acquaintance demonstrated one of the things I had loved about American Splendor: the importance of connections to strangers. The fan letter I wrote on a whim led to a brief but valuable friendship. Those talks helped me grow up. I took his advice and forced myself through the rest of high school. I’ve settled into the adult life I was so afraid of, and most of the things I dreaded turned out to be pretty easy. I wish I could thank him, and ask him for advice again, this time on figuring out what to do with my freedom.

Emilie is the reason why I get a little impatient with people who insist that you need to know someone, or have some sort of inside connection, in order to get your book published. Some years ago, when I thought I had a good draft of my first novel, I started querying agents. Emilie was the thirteenth or fourteenth agent I contacted; she pulled my letter and sample chapters out of the slush pile, requested the full manuscript, and then, well, sent me a rejection letter. But her rejection was long, regretful, and filled with thoughtful editorial comments, all of which seemed sound to me. There was no guarantee of future representation if I took her suggestions, but I thought that in the worst-case scenario I’d at least have a better book, so I spent six months revising my novel and sent it back to her. She very graciously agreed to read it again, and this time she took me on.

I came down to the Curtis Brown offices on Astor Place to meet her. It was a heady occasion—the initial “I can’t believe I actually have an agent!” shock hadn’t worn off yet. I was early, so I loitered for a while in a bookstore near the office, running my hand over the spines of books, trying to imagine what it would be like to see my name on the shelf. I went up to the offices to meet her, and was struck by her warmth.

Emilie took me to lunch at the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill, a few blocks away. She’d hurt her back a few months earlier, and the recovery was proving difficult; she was stooped over and moved slowly. She was too vain, she said, to consider using a cane.

I doubt the décor of Knickerbocker has changed significantly since it opened in 1977. (I was surprised, in fact, to discover that it opened that late—it looks like it hasn’t changed since the 1940s.) It’s all dark wood paneling and leather and round banquettes, a dizzying assortment of bottles atop the grand piano. I’d never been there before and it was like slipping back into a lost world, a time when publishing deals were made in a cloud of cigar smoke over multiple martinis. I half expected to see Norman Mailer dining out with his agent at the next table.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked, when we sat down. She was of an era when a business lunch typically involved cocktails. I declined and ordered my usual mint tea. I wanted to ask how long she’d been agenting, but given her obviously advanced age it seemed somehow vaguely impolite, as if I were indirectly asking how old she was. I asked her, instead, how she became an agent.

“Well,” she said, “it was back in the early days of television, and…”

Curtis Brown was her first job out of college, and she stayed there for the next sixty-two years. From our first meeting, I decided that Emilie is what I aspire to: when I’m in my eighties I want to be that passionate, that interested, that warm, with a mind as sharp as hers.

2.
Some weeks ago Emilie called to tell me that at long last she’d decided to retire. The good news, she said, was that a colleague of hers was interested in representing me. I told her that of course I’d known this day would come, but that I would miss working with her terribly.

“I think it was email that finally pushed me over the edge,” she said. She used email gamely enough, but she disliked the informality of the medium; emails from strangers that began with “Hello Emilie” bothered her immensely. She was deeply annoyed when she sent people emails and they didn’t write back.

I came back to the offices on Astor Place a few weeks ago to meet my new agent. I arrived early to visit with Emilie, and for a quiet half-hour we sat in her office together. Her office was a wonderful place, large and filled with books. I’ll confess that seeing my first novel displayed prominently next to David Lodge’s work always gave me a thrill. Her computer seemed an unwelcome imposition on a second desk, behind her real desk, which was massive and piled eight inches high with correspondence and manuscripts.

Emilie was so much a part of Curtis Brown that it was almost impossible to conceive of her being outside it, no longer coming into this office every day. I asked what she planned to do after retirement. She said she thought it would take her about a year to clean the stacks of manuscripts out of the closets in her apartment, and then she was going to read for pleasure. She thought she might like to do some writing. We talked about books for a while—she’d just read and loved The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. We spoke about her career.

“You were my first champion,” I told her. I told her how much I appreciated everything she’d done for me, the faith she’d always had in my work.

She smiled and began reminiscing about other firsts: a piece of Joyce Maynard’s that she placed in The New York Times when Maynard was eighteen (“An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life”), a John Knowles story that eventually became the climactic scene in A Separate Peace. She asked if I was working on a new novel and I told her that I was.

“Oh, this is why I’ve delayed retirement for so long,” she said. “I always want to see what everyone’s going to do next.”

I told her that I’d send her the manuscript as soon as it was done. She seemed happy at this prospect. “Okay,” she said, but she was gone five weeks later.

All sudden deaths are a little shocking. It seems impossible that I’ll never see her again. In the last letter she ever sent me—she never sent an email when a letter would do—she expressed her regret that she wouldn’t be in Martha’s Vineyard when I read at a bookstore there in June. But she would be there later in the summer, she said, and she suggested that if my husband and I were to return to the Vineyard, perhaps we might like to visit with her and her husband. It’s startling to think that she won’t be there. It’s startling to think that the next time I see the orange Curtis Brown letterhead on an envelope in my mailbox, it won’t be from her. The last email I received from her was only two weeks ago.

There’s great comfort, of course, in knowing that she spent almost the entirety of her long life doing work that she was truly passionate about. I know this is the best we can hope for: a long life engaged in a pursuit that brings us joy and fulfillment, a quick death at the end. There’s a school of thought that a peaceful death at the end of a long and fulfilling life isn’t a tragedy, and I put some stock in this.

But she really was magnificent, and I don’t use that word lightly. I always thought of her as an emissary from a bygone world, among the last of her kind. I feel as if a light’s gone out, and there won’t be another like her.

I too was reading Salinger last weekend, for a second time. I first read Catcher in the Rye in high school, and followed it with Franny and Zooey, appropriately, in college. I never experienced the Salinger epiphany that so many do, but I was compelled to continue reading his work. Holden Caulfield voiced his angst and frustration with far more insight and intelligence than any teenager I knew, and I admired his courage to escape. But he also left me somewhat estranged.

My desire to identify with Holden–and who doesn’t read Catcher in the Rye to identify with Holden?–underscored our vast differences as much as it made him a companion or guide. Literary liberation and rebellion for me, rather, took the form of Nora leaving in A Doll’s House and Margaret Atwood’s female leads. By the time I read Catcher in the Rye, its colloquialisms seemed “phony,”  to sling Holden’s favorite insult. His lingo had long ago ceded to other teenage argot. This alone I could have forgiven.

But Holden also embodied adolescent maleness so completely that he left no room for a frustrated girl of a commensurate age. To be fair, he left little room for anyone else. His alienation was the point. The female characters were colored by Holden’s conflicted desire. They were either vulnerable (like and Jane and Phoebe), a source of ambivalent attraction (Sally and the hotel prostitute), or playthings (the Pencey mother on the train and “stupid girls” who dance well). I doubt it’s a coincidence that most of the tributes to Salinger have been penned by men.

Holden’s hang-ups with shoddy suitcases also came between us. Of the ones owned by his former roommate, Dick Slagle, Holden said, “it’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs–if yours are really good ones and theirs aren’t. You think if they’re intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humor, that they don’t give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do.” Perhaps it’s because I wondered how my suitcases would measure up that his complaints about privilege, phonies, boarding schools, and New York apartments seemed distant and intangible. Rereading now, though, his insights about class and wealth, and the divisions they create, strike me as more truthful than I then cared to admit.

In spite of his faults, I admired Holden for his audacity to pick up and leave and to always speak his mind. He could be clever, insolent, and charming, simultaneously. He knew he had a precious window of time on the cusp of adulthood, where he could shirk responsibility and leave, say with Sally, until the money ran out. And he was was still young enough to believe that everything would work out in the end.

It occurs to me that I’m judging Holden more like an old friend than a character in a novel. This is perhaps the largest compliment I can pay him, and Salinger, too. Holden himself said that what he most wanted from a book was the sense that “when you’re all done reading it, you wish that the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” Salinger, more than most authors, gave his readers that feeling. He implored not only Holden but every weary, cynical teenager reading his novel with Mr. Antolini’s admonition: “you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then start going there. But immediately.” He echoes this in Franny and Zooey, too, when Zooey tells Franny,“if you don’t at least know by this time that if you’re an actress you’re supposed to act, then what’s the use of talking?”

Salinger may have secluded himself for the second half of his life and escaped society in a way Holden only yearned to. But his voice has and will continue, in his death, to resonate through his fiction. He gently nudges his readers at times, and at others he grabs them by their lapels in an attempt to rouse them, to tell them they must decide what kind of skull you want when they’re dead. Get to it, he’s saying, don’t waste time.