As both a reader and a book collector, I’m a big fan of college library book sales. Held annually or bi-annually at colleges and universities across the country, these sales convert library discards and unwanted donations into desperately needed funds. Uncluttered by the kinds of books that glut public library sales, the college library book sale paints an interesting picture of town-gown reading habits.

When I had the opportunity to attend The Friends of the Library Used Book Sale at the State University of New York in New Paltz, I tried to get there as early as possible, knowing that ambitious local booksellers and scouts would arrive when the door opened at 8:00 a.m. Not that I was necessarily looking for an overlooked first edition (although applying my esoteric knowledge about books and collecting for profit would be fun). Lest you think that the tables were filled with the fifth edition of the MLA Handbook, I will declare up front that I did find one such diamond in the rough — a first edition of Dwight Macdonald’s Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture in a Brodart-enclosed dust jacket (always a good sign). The book was not an ex-library copy — a red flag for collectors, but not readers — and because I had studied the book in graduate school, I knew not only its academic value, but also its scarcity on the market. I had purchased my own copy about ten years ago, settling for a yellowing, faded paperback, which still sits on my shelves. It’s not a find that will make me rich, but if I chose to sell it, I could buy five New York Times bestsellers in hardcover.

I found an uncanny number of books at this sale that I would have purchased had I not already owned a copy, such as Philip Slater’s The Pursuit of Loneliness, a classic of the American counterculture movement; or, David Denby’s 1997 tirade about preserving the Western canon, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World; or David Lodge’s superb satire, The British Museum is Falling Down. I should have bought that last one anyway, my copy is badly worn. A hardcover of Johnny Tremain, the story of a young silversmith apprentice in Revolutionary America, caught my eye, but again, I had one in similar condition at home. I read this book in seventh grade and recall it now as one of the books that made me like reading and learning about history.

When I noticed a copy of Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, I felt a pang of sadness and wondered whether this amazing work — one I relied on heavily in graduate school — cast off in such a way means that Jane Tompkins is no longer a staple in English and history departments. Surely that can’t be the case; it was just being passed along to a new generation of scholars, and some young English major will adopt it. It’s hard to believe that Tompkins published that book twenty-five years ago.

There are always some textbooks mingled into the college library book sale, and at this one, I also spotted a book of literary terms quite like the one I bought when I was in high school. The fiction struck me as exquisitely cerebral. The Well of Loneliness, a 1928 novel by Radclyffe Hall, was the subject of censorship and banning when it was first published in the U.S. Though critics felt it beautifully written, its lesbian content was impossible to overlook. This novel is found on the syllabi of women’s studies and sociology courses; I wrote a paper on it in a class on the history of propaganda. In more modern (but literary) fiction, A. S. Byatt’s Babel Tower, a novel set in bookish 1960s England, and Mark Helprin’s Freddy and Fredericka, a surreal critique of nobility, almost came home with me. (Both authors are highly enjoyable, thought provoking, and, admittedly demanding.) When I spied the fine dust jacket of Joyce Carol Oates’ You Must Remember This, I thought I might have another treasure in my hands. Alas, it turned out to be a book club edition (red flag!).

Dare I call these selections highbrow? Is this what the intellectual elite reads? What would Macdonald say — that academics are still valiantly resisting “masscult”? (It would help explain the dearth of Da Vinci Codes at this sale.) Would he categorize them as “high art” or, more likely, “midcult” — i.e., watered-down “high art”? Three of the novelists cited above were, at some point, Book-of-the-Month Club picks, of which Macdonald writes, “Midcult is the Book-of-the-Month-Club, which since 1926 has been supplying its members with reading matter of which the best that can be said is that it could be worse.” (Byatt’s most popular novel, Possession, was a BOMC selection. It also won the Man Booker Prize. Having read it, I’d be hard-pressed to call it lite literature.)

What did I end up buying at the SUNY sale, aside from old Macdonald? Only one other book: a Modern Library edition of The Collected Short Stories of Dorothy Parker. I enjoy the handy format of older ML editions, and this one retained its jacket in good condition, which is always a plus. This slim volume will fit nicely on the shelves I’ve devoted to Parker and the Algonquin Round Table. Modern Library, a publisher known throughout the twentieth century for its reprints of so-called classics, is often spotted at college library sales, as are some of the other classic reprinters; I recognized several World’s Classics at the New Paltz sale.

My husband found two books to take home that day — one, a professional monograph on voice and diction (his area of expertise) and the other a book called The Winter Beach by Charlton Ogburn Jr., a blend of memoir and natural history strikingly similar to the Henry Beston classic, The Outermost House, that he admires.

I brooded over what it says about me as a reader that my tastes are so easily reflected here on the tables outside a college library. But then, who cares what it says about me — what’s more significant is what it reinforces about campus reading. First and foremost, it says that physical books aren’t dead! The sale was packed — with students. Secondly, it manifests our common academic purpose in a liberal arts education — to read and think broadly and seriously in areas like sociology, history, and modern literature. Finally, it shows wide (concentric) participation in the stimulating circle of readership. Books at college library sales generally are not rare, collectible, or even particularly well cared for, but they are read, studied, assigned, highlighted, underlined, bought, sold, and loved (or hated) by students, professors, and college-town locals, and that is encouraging indeed.

Image credit: UofSLibrary/Flickr

1.

My grandfather died two weeks ago, in his bed, by the sea in Maine. Two days earlier, perhaps with a little help from his morphine, he looked out his bay window and said: “I am going to run across that water.”

I was reading Joan Didion’s Blue Nights at the time. On the aftermath of her daughter’s death, Didion writes: “‘Maintain momentum’ was the imperative that echoed … In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it.”

The passage struck me. I, too, felt the drive toward momentum. Not wanting to stop and think about my grandfather’s death, mostly not wanting to feel it, I was looking for things to do. From the Poetry Society of America events calendar, I read that a young artist, Jon Cotner, had set up an installation in the woods called Poem Forest. The name alone intrigued me.

Just days after Grandpa died — I should maintain momentum, I told myself.

It had only been three weeks since our last conversation. We’d talked by phone. I was walking my dog. Grandpa would have been sitting at that bay window, where he always sat, too arthritic to move, looking out on the ocean. “You’re looking good, Rosie!” he said. It was a joke — obviously, by phone he couldn’t see me. I laughed. This was our shtick. “You’re looking good, too, Grandpa. Nice haircut.” He was bald. My childhood nickname was Rainbow Rose. Most everything we said to each other was based off familiarity, old jokes.

“Where are you now?” he wanted to know. “I’m on Broadway, Gramps!” I said, trying to speak over the sounds of traffic. “Where, honey?” “I’m on Broadway!”

Just an ordinary exchange.

How could he be gone?

How could I answer this question? I continued reading about Poem Forest, a self-guided, twenty-minute, walk through the woods. It was unusual. Cotner placed 15 numbered signposts along Sweetgum Trail at The New York Botanical Garden. He also provided handouts at the beginning of the walk that included 15 numbered lines as excerpts from 15 different poems. At each signpost, a walker was to stop and read the line of poetry that coordinated with that post. What was most interesting to me was the idea that, by reading such lines in various parts of the woods, participants would be able to “see and sense more clearly, to inhabit the present more deeply, and to fill with enchantment.” So relayed the event description.

Soon, I was yo-yoing between doubt and hope. I didn’t really think Poem Forest would make me feel better, but I convinced myself it could. It was the word “enchantment” that really did it for me, a tug toward the spiritual, what I took to be the possibility of a panacea.

A past professor put me in touch with Jon, who, in his emails, was eager to discuss the work. He told me he had just published a different walking piece in The Believer; it had involved an eight-mile trek across Fire Island with his fiancée, Claire Hamilton. They created a slideshow of the journey — she took the pictures, and he wrote the captions. From the link he provided in one of his emails, I watched a slideshow that moved like a graphic short story, an art form I particularly fancied.

The duo had also collaborated on a slideshow for the BMW Guggenheim Lab. To get an idea of what this project is like, take the outline from The Believer piece and replace Fire Island with Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn.

Through our exchange, I also learned that Jon had co-authored a book with Andy Fitch called Ten Walks/Two Talks, consisting mainly of their conversations and resulting epiphanies as they engage with each other and New York City.

All of Jon’s projects advocated connecting to your surroundings. The more we emailed, the more excited I became. It seemed oddly providential that our paths be crossing now.

I told Jon I had walked El Camino de Santiago, The Way of Saint James, a pilgrimage through Spain, and I wanted to understand how his outlook on walking related to mine. I’d always moved to avoid unwanted emotions, as a distraction, I told him. When I walked El Camino I was frustrated and sad. I did not want to cope with my pain. I wanted to steamroll right through it.

This can’t work, of course. But, oh how tempting it is to try.

2.

The next Saturday, I was standing at the bottom of Sweetgum Trail, waiting to meet Jon Cotner before beginning my walk. I was early, and a volunteer said Jon was finishing up some last minute trail maintenance. I didn’t mind waiting — above me, the sky cloudless. The air — perfect for November — neither warm enough to elicit anxiety in one’s inner environmentalist nor cold enough to cut the skin.

Soon, Jon was running down the trail.

We introduced ourselves, shook hands. He was exactly as I expected, poised. He was tall and stood with perfect posture, and was focused and concerned that each signpost on the path was properly angled, positioned just right. He was also polite and warm, excited about Poem Forest. How it allowed walkers to participate with the art, by moving through it.

“I look at this piece,” he said referring to Poem Forest, “as a perception primer.”

What, I wondered, would I perceive?

3.

I began, aware that though I was in one of the most beautiful parks in New York City, I was still, in fact, in New York City. Teenagers bounced off each other as they passed me. I passed a leaf-rubbing table for toddlers. The numbered signposts were laminated, and the flashes of plastic seemed out of place against the old wooden guardrails covered in moss and lichen. I encountered a woman painting a watercolor alone; the designer dog sitting beneath her bench was wearing a zebra-print coat. I sucked in my breath, tried to corner my scattered thoughts. I already wanted to be elsewhere — in Maine, with my family, where soon I would be.

This walk is meditative; it works, I struggled to convince myself, if I remember to focus on my breath. The interruptions shouldn’t matter as much as my focus. I tried to see clearly.

Fire-orange and red leaves were hanging from gray flaking branches, and the dark brown leaves on the ground crushed beneath my boots.

Signpost number three: The nature of yesterday / Is not nature. / What has been, is nothing.

What should have been a dreamy line of poetry felt insensitive, even mean. Thinking of Grandpa, I took it personally.

The air tasted clean. A crisp autumn breeze. I walked, hoping, not really believing, that something amazing would happen, something enchanting. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it did?

The walk would have been lovely. There was nothing not beautiful about it. But that afternoon in the forest, I relearned an old lesson. There is no antidote to grief. There are only ways to cope.

My grief aside, I was still intrigued by what Poem Forest had to offer.

4.

I walked the trail again later that afternoon. This time with Jon. Part of the art, he said, is in the dialogue and in the thinking aloud.

I asked him something that was bothering me. Jon had called Poem Forest a perception primer. But what if there were things in this world you did not want to recognize?

Jon said he believed being here in the forest was greatly political. John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-In came to mind, the idea of advocating your beliefs by enacting them. Jon brought up Occupy Wall Street, his eyes refracting the colors of the leaves and the light that entered in glints: “Part of the trouble of our troubled times is a lack of perception.” Which could have been an academic response, a cop-out, except he immediately applied this philosophy to reality: “Did you notice, by the way, the [line of poetry] one stone is not like the other?” He motioned to the signpost by the river. “Did you notice the rocks around the riverbank?”

I hadn’t, but Jon pointed out the failed attempts to build a wall along the water’s edge. The rocks didn’t fit together, and the wall was eroding.

Then he said, “Isn’t it great to hear the rushing water? That it’s always making this sound?”

But my mind was still on the wall — and the probability that it would take me decades to work up to a perceptiveness as keen as Jon’s.

We continued talking and walking. Jon, with a mind like a library, quoted thinkers from Heraclitus to Frank O’Hara.

Regarding Poem Forest itself, the philosophy was quite simple. Jon said, “To some extent, this is an exercise in de-familiarization.”

Clearly, I was out of shape.

5.

After finishing our walk, we continued talking until it was time for me to catch the train back home (the dog would need walking). As Jon and I moved toward the elevated platform, we agreed that a lucid perception of your surroundings slows time. As opposed to how some people experience life, as Jon put it, “in a trance.”

I thought about Grandpa and — how quickly time goes. And then, I thought: I don’t want to live in a trance. I want to appreciate everything.

On the elevated platform, I tried to see it all: the train rattling closer, silver cars luminous in the sun. The air was getting cold. Inside the train: florescent light scattering rectangles along the glossy backs of plastic seats. There were people — everywhere. I felt crowded. My mind began to wander, already. Already? My head against the clammy seat, I was tempted: If I just close my eyes, maybe I will sleep. And if I sleep, I won’t have to think. And when I wake up, I will get off this train, and it will be as though no time has passed.

Except it will have.

So my eyes were open, and there I was, on a train that hadn’t even started moving.

Images: Claire Hamilton

Everyone knows that you are what you read. So to learn more about the protesters who have been occupying Wall Street for the past three weeks, it makes sense to find out what they’re reading. A little bit of everything, it turns out, which speaks volumes about this slippery, funky, and mushrooming movement.

Consider Daniel Norton. A library science student at the University of Maine, he was drawn to the protest site on lower Broadway on Thursday after reading an article in Library Journal calling for librarians to volunteer at the impromptu People’s Library at the northeast corner of Zuccotti Park, which most of the protesters now refer to as Liberty Park.

“What inspired me to come here was that article – and the fact that I’m one of the 99 percent,” Norton said on Friday as he sorted books in the dozen plastic bins that comprise the library’s collection. “I didn’t just want to camp out. I wanted to contribute something. What I’m trying to do now is create order because the premise of library science is the freedom of information and making it available to people. What I’m doing is in the spirit of what’s going on here.”

Donated by protesters and people sympathetic with their cause, the books are divided by category, including History & Resistance, Women’s Studies, Poetry, Government Change, and Fiction. The fiction collection ranges from Tom Clancy to James Joyce, with some J.G. Ballard, George Orwell, and Joseph Heller sprinkled in. Particularly popular are books about politics, history, and how to effect change in government. The books are loaned free, on an honor system. “The collection’s inspired by what’s taking place here,” Norton said. “We have a lot of people who are full of dissatisfaction with a government that doesn’t have their interests at heart.”

Steve Syrek, an English Ph.D. student at Rutgers University, responded when he heard that librarians were needed and protesters were hungry for copies of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Syrek bought nine copies and donated them to the People’s Library, along with two copies of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The books were quickly snapped up. Klein spoke to the encampment on Thursday night, telling the crowd something they were sure to agree with: that what’s plaguing America right now “is not a scarcity problem, it’s a distribution problem.” Michael Moore, who has a new memoir out, was also seen cozying up to television cameras and offering his support.

“Now that the protest has been going on for three weeks and it’s got some momentum, it started to interest me,” said Syrek, who lives in the Washington Heights neighborhood in northern Manhattan. He bristled at the criticism that the movement, which has now spread to dozens of American cities, doesn’t have a coherent message. “People want to know, ‘What’s your agenda?’” he said. “Well, the status quo doesn’t have an agenda. Everyone here, in the aggregate, are people who feel disenfranchised and powerless. It’s perfectly legitimate to be frustrated. I don’t have a solution. I’m not an anarchist. I’m here because I love books.”

Bosses, he seemed to be saying, are the people in suits who work in the cliff-like towers that surround the small park. The leaderless encampment has a free-flowing DIY feel, with some people giving impromptu speeches, some playing music, some reading books, some waving signs and shouting slogans at curious passersby and the small army of New York police officers who are running up a stiff overtime bill keeping an eye on – and sometimes arresting – Wall Street’s occupiers.

One sign read: TOO BIG TO FAIL IS TOO BIG TO ALLOW.

Another, carried by one of the volunteer librarians, was even more eloquent: YOU KNOW THINGS ARE MESSED UP WHEN LIBRARIANS START MARCHING.

Images courtesy the author

I met Anna seven years ago – we were both students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop – and while I knew Anna was Jewish, it wasn’t the first, or second, or even third thing I would’ve expected her to mention about her identity. Writer. Woman. From Gloucester, Mass. All those would have come first.

Her fiction, back then – and we had this in common – was scrubbed of any obviously Jewish characters or themes. The short story I remember most from workshop, which eventually became “What Is Alaska Like?” (One Story, April 2006), is about a chambermaid in Blue Lake Lodge, a roadside motel on Boston’s North Shore.

“There was no lake at Blue Lake,” Anna writes in the story. “The Lodge was a stucco motel on the Clam River, about an hour north of Boston. The stink came twice a day with low tide: mud and mussel shells and half-eaten crabs baking in the sun like the darkest casserole. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the smell, but these tourists from Ohio would stuff their faces into the sink like there was an answer in there. They wore visors that got in their way. ‘Sewage?’ they’d ask me. ‘Sulfur?’ ”

Her characters are Darlene and Jimmy and Ellen Crane. Even her rivers are treyf. It feels about as far from a depiction of Jewish experience as I can imagine.

Which is why, I’ll admit, I was surprised when I learned that Anna’s first novel, The Little Bride, released in September, is the story of Minna, a Jewish mail-order bride from Odessa, Ukraine, and her marriage to Max, a rigidly Orthodox Jew living on the “Sodokota” plains in the late 19th century. It’s about Am Olam, or “Eternal People,” a little-known historical movement that began in the 1800s, when immigrant Jews moved to the Western states and founded communal, agrarian colonies. Its most vivid scenes are Jewish, involving prayerbooks, teffilin, and kippot. The inscription is Hebrew: V’ka’asher ovadet ovadeti, “And if I perish, I perish.”

It’s a book that’s Jewish in its kishkes.

I sat down, recently, with Anna at a Park Slope, Brooklyn, coffee shop. We talked about her tenure a decade ago as National Public Radio’s Washington, D.C. bureau chief, when she spent 10 days in South Dakota producing a story about ranchers and the farm bill – an experience that would provide much of the scenic grist for her novel. (“I was totally blown away by the South Dakota landscape, especially the land near the Missouri River, the rolling hills – it feels like the motion is in the earth itself. And the air, how it just constantly seemed to be moving in one direction … very hot, gusting, dry air. I felt like I was in the middle of a continent.”) She recalled the afternoon she spent riding around with U.S. Senator Tom Daschle in his SUV. (“He’s just like he seems: short and friendly; speaks like a politician.”) We covered her approach to research.  (“I’m not, as a reader, interested in how many buttons a dress had in the 1970s compared to the 1920s – so I don’t care as a writer.”) But we returned, time and again, to thorny questions of Jewish identity.

“I’m still getting used to the idea of getting called a ‘Jewish Writer,’” Anna said. “What does that even mean?”

2. “My Hair Got Curly”
Anna Solomon was one of only a few Jews at my son’s bris in Iowa City. Most of my friends from Workshop who came weren’t Jewish. As it turned out, we couldn’t even find a moyle to perform the ritual circumcision. The closest one lived in Chicago, some three hours away, and couldn’t drive to our home on Shabbat, the day of the ceremony.

When I asked Anna what she remembers about that day, she recalls talking another writer through it. He had never been to a bris and was, to say the least, “very uncomfortable.”

Standing in my living room in Iowa City that day Anna was an insider.

Growing up in Gloucester, she in many ways was not.

As it happens, I spent many summer weeks in Gloucester as a kid. To me, Gloucester was the Wreck of the Hesperus, the Gorton’s fisherman, and the reef of Norman’s Woe. Ten Pound Island and the Yankee Clipper fishing fleet, offering half-day trips for cod, pollock, and cusk. Gloucester was the small restaurant on the approach to Bass Rocks that my grandfather called “Goo Foo” – the d’s had long ago fallen off the signboard, and no one ever thought to replace them. I knew it as a tourist, yes, but I also knew it before Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm brought George Clooney to town, making it a permanent stop on Hollywood’s on-location tour.

Anna, meanwhile, knew a very different place, a mix of working class and patrician New England, ethnically Irish Catholic, Italian Catholic, and Protestant. Her dad was an art dealer. Her mom, a teacher. Both had doctorates in education from Harvard University. Anna, a “white, privileged female,” should have fit right in.

Only, she didn’t.

She recalls sensing this as early as kindergarten, when her teacher often asked her to write her name on the board: Anna Solomon-Greenbaum. (She has since dropped “Greenbaum,” her father’s surname, to make it easier for readers.) “It was a very Jewish name to write on the board,” Anna told me. “I think at that point, I started to feel the difference.”

Anna’s family was active in the local conservative synagogue, Ahavath Achim. Her parents led Shabbat services. Her mom was the first female president of the synagogue. Anna went to Hebrew school and had a bat mitzvah. In high school, she played lacrosse, and began to stand out in more obvious, physical ways. “All the girls had straight, blondey, browny hair, and little noses,” she recalls. “My hair got curly.”

Things like sailing and skiing came naturally to other New Englanders. Anna’s family had to work at them.

“I was aware of myself being Jewish,” she said. “And it was important for me to fit in to a non-Jewish society.”

Anna’s early short stories, she told me, reflected this.

“The first short story I published in Shenandoah, ‘Proof We Exist,’ is about a 70-year-old WASP man living in Maine, with the last name Seed,” she says. “I was writing about the people I longed to be and not the person I was.

“I was so far from writing about myself,” she continued. “It took me a long time to do that. Even when I first started writing about young women, they were not Jewish. It took me a long time to open up to that aspect of my identity.”

“In my writing, I’ve gotten closer and closer to the things that really matter to me.”

3. Russian Dolls
The Little Bride is a beautiful book. In some ways, a writer’s book, with intricate, deeply moving language, powerful symbolism (one my favorite scenes depicts Minna, a new bride, literally blindfolded during her wedding reception), and vivid metaphor.

“New York is like being in the middle of a parade where everyone has been called home, all at once, in all different directions,” Anna writes.

And: “He was thin in the way of cellar insects, as if made to slip through cracks.”

“He was the sort of man that could locate praise in a bowl of teeth.”

There is a playful, riddle-like quality to the prose that, to me, evoked Russian dolls — “She dreamed the kind of dreams that seemed to be dreams of other dreams” and “He was like a boy actor playing a man actor playing a boy” and “He was like two men, the miner and the mined … and the mined man was two men, too, one stripped empty, the other filled back up with rage” — suggestive of the selves that we hide within ourselves.

More than once, I found myself nodding along in recognition. “So a decision was made. Or rather a decision was not not-made, and she came to Odessa by not not-coming.” Sure. That’s the same way a dozen years ago I moved to Washington, D.C.

Yet The Little Bride is also a sweeping historical novel about a Jewish woman’s journey: from the crowded streets of Odessa on the northwest shore of the Black Sea, Imperial Russia’s fourth largest city — where Jews faced four horrific pogroms in the 19th century — to the vast, harsh plains of South Dakota. The middle of a continent. Where Jews were largely unknown.

The narrative is in some ways reminiscent of biblical narrative. Minna leaves the land she knows and goes forth into the unknown, just like Abraham. She struggles to conceive, like Sarah. Max’s two sons, Jacob and Samuel, evoke Jacob (the angel wrestler) and Esau (the rough hunter), respectively, and, like the biblical Jacob, each prove capable of devastating betrayal.

In Judaism, memory is an obligation. Zachor. Remember that we were slaves in Egypt. Remember to keep Shabbat. Remember the Holocaust. In The Little Bride, memory sometimes feels fungible, not quite reliable. “Like any moment one waited for,” Anna writes, “Minna did not experience it so much as she saw herself experiencing it, so that as soon as it was over her memory of it was already made.”

There were times when twisting, circular sentences left me scratching my head, grappling for meaning. “Knowing the opposite of a thing,” Anna writes, “often seemed to Minna to be the same as knowing the thing itself.”

More often, the Lewis Carroll-like prose landed effortlessly, with a flash of insight: “They were never almost anywhere but the place they’d been a half hour ago.”

It’s a description of a ship crossing an ocean. But it could be almost anything. A person seeking a job. A couple having the same old fight.

A couple of yeshiva bochers, talking about the nature of God.

4. “It’s only a cross”
In The Little Bride, Anna tells the story of Jewish characters struggling to live Jewish lives, trying to understand what that means, and in that way, her writing is much closer to her experience. These are the characters she has been waiting for. Or, maybe, these are the characters that have been waiting for her.

“She learned to concentrate on not concentrating,” Anna writes of Minna, “to let her mind spread out, puddle-like, far enough from the body that the body was forgotten. Or at least silenced. A calm fell over her limbs. She wondered if this was prayer. If prayer was nothing more than a giving in, like sickness — if you weren’t required to believe, only to stop struggling.”

Reading this, it’s impossible for me to not hear echoes “Is My Toddler More Jewish than Me?”, a recent article Anna wrote for the Jewish parenting website Kveller.com, in which Anna writes about her conflicted relationship with Judaism, made more acute as her toddler, Sylvie, embraces Jewish ritual with the passion and joy of a zealot.

“Maybe we’re complicating what could be simple, if we stopped trying to figure it out,” Anna concluded in the blog post. “Maybe, instead of working so hard to protect Sylvie from our own experience, we should open ourselves to hers. We, after all, are the ones who sit or stand in synagogue now and have no clue where we are. We focus on the cantor being too operatic or the siddurs too outdated because we are new to the synagogues, yes, but also because we are scared of just being there, not as Sylvie’s parents – thinking, figuring – but as ourselves.”

Stop struggling.

There is a scene, toward the end of the novel: an accident has destroyed the family’s sod home, leaving it in ruins. Minna and Max are taken in by a German couple, Christians. Living in their home, Max feels assaulted by the cross hanging above the door.

“They expect us to look at this little man,” Max says, indignant.

“Motke,” Minna says, “it’s only a cross. … There is no little man.”

In Minna’s rejoinder, as in Minna’s name, I recognize Anna.

“Why am I Jewish?” Anna told me in Park Slope. “Why am I here and not in church? I don’t know that it matters if I come to religion as a Jew or a Catholic or anything else. I do it as a Jew because I am a Jew.”

This is, at its core, a novel about Jewish questions, Jewish experience.

But it is also, as with some of Anna’s early stories, more broadly about choice. Specifically, Minna’s choices. Whether to leave Odessa. Whether to stay with Max. Whether to return to him.

Thinking about this, I’m reminded of my favorite definition of theme, from Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. Theme, Burroway explains, is not what a novel is about, but, rather, what about what it’s about.

The Little Bride is a novel about choice. But what about choice?

“She had a choice,” Anna writes. “Which Minna used to think was the same as freedom.”

In fact, The Little Bride suggests, paradoxically, the opposite may be true. Max, who lives by a strict set of rules — God commands: what to eat, what to wear, how to act; there are few, if any existential questions — may just have more freedom than Minna.

By way of explaining, Anna posits the following scenario. Say you are teaching a creative writing workshop. You could tell your students: “Just write for 15 minutes. Something. Anything.” This, though, can be paralyzing. So instead, have them write for 15 minutes describing a barn from the point of view of a man whose has just learned his son has died – the classic John Gardner exercise.

“They suddenly have parameters,” Anna says. “They can just go.”

“You could love anyone, [Minna] thought, if you needed to,” Anna writes. “And in a curious way, not in spite of her need but because of it, because she was hungry and trapped, she felt safe.” Safe, in a moment when there are no decisions to make. Trapped, and therefore free.

To Anna:

“I am fascinated by people who join up — it could be Orthodox Judaism or the hard core punk scene — but they join in a very extreme, very intense, total way, and the idea is about following the rules. There’s a lot of liberty in that — a lot of comfort in it … I have a deep understanding of the appeal that kind of faith and fervor can hold.”

Here, Anna segues.

“In my early years as a writer,” she says, “I felt like I had to write. But some part of me wanted to stop. There was a real appeal for me to do something where the answers were provided … just to have a job or be in a community where it was clear what I was supposed to do. That would’ve been easier.”

“At its base, there’s this relationship to writing itself. Writing is so scary and unknown. When writing fiction, no one tells you what to do. There’s terror in having freedom.”

The Little Bride is, in this way, a novel about writing. Which brings me back, Russian doll-like, to the Anna I knew in the first place.

I’ve never had a place bore as deeply into my consciousness as Flannery O’Connor’s  home, Andalusia. It is a five-hundred acre dairy farm (now a museum) just outside of Milledgeville, Georgia. When I showed up there this summer, it was after a seven-year absence. I had been invited to the farm to read from my novel, A Good Hard Look, which features Flannery O’Connor as a character.

My first visit was in 2004. Flannery had just appeared in the novel; I kept telling myself that she might not stick around, that the crazy idea of dropping a Southern literary icon into my work was just a reckless phase I was going through.  On the off chance that Flannery wouldn’t leave, I traveled to Georgia to do research. I’m from New Jersey, and had spent very little time in the South; there was no way I could write about Flannery O’Connor without seeing where she lived. My instinct on that visit was to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open. I walked all over her farm, and the tired, yet lovely, town. I sought out no scholars or relatives; I didn’t introduce myself to anyone. I passed myself off, easily and truthfully, as just another fan making a pilgrimage to the great author’s home.

My visit lasted thirty-six hours, and then I spent the next seven years back in New York City writing and re-writing across Andalusia’s terrain. The white farmhouse, the enclosed porch, the rocking chairs, the arrogant peacocks, the water tower in the distance—this became my alternate universe, a reality often more real than the urban neighborhood I lived in. My dreams frequently took place at Andalusia. Flannery glared and stamped her metal crutches against the porch floorboards; the cries of peacocks rattled my windowpanes. My conversations with my husband covered the same ground; we ended up discussing Flannery as if she were someone we actually knew, and Andalusia as a place we were familiar with. When I finished the novel—thankfully and painfully and finally—the idea of seeing Andalusia again, in person, meant something completely different to me than it had the first time.

In 2004, I had been nervous and diffident; in 2011 I was nervous and reverent. The first time, Flannery had been a stranger; now she had somehow become one of the main figures in my life. She was the reason why A Good Hard Look had taken seven years to write—it had taken that long to do her justice. I’d struggled to make my fictional Flannery believable, to make sure she rang true. My great fear was that my novel would insult the writer, and the Southern town she’d lived in. Eventually, after much effort, I managed to convince myself that I hadn’t. But that conviction had occurred while alone with my book in my New York City apartment; the novel was now published, and I was in the South. My first event had taken place the night before in Atlanta. I had read to and answered questions from a hundred Flannery fans, and I’d been deeply relieved to find the crowd appreciative and enthusiastic. Tonight’s event was the real test, though. I was at Flannery’s home, in a somewhat removed part of the state; I would be meeting people who had known Flannery personally. Men and women who were not only Flannery’s fans, but her intimates. This was the group best able to judge whether my Flannery was, in fact, up to snuff.

I showed up at the farm with shaking hands. I wore a blue dress I had carefully selected for its 1960s style. I couldn’t stop smiling, and I feared that I would cry (though I am generally not a crier). I was also sweating. It was July, and the South was in the middle of a heat wave. It was one hundred and six degrees in Milledgeville, Georgia at sunset. The executive director of Andalusia, a nice man named Craig, met me on the lawn. I had a hard time listening to his words—the farmhouse was right behind him, and there were peacocks in a large pen to my left and my heart was beating hard in my chest—but he had two key pieces of news to impart. (1) The farmhouse, where I would be doing my reading, did NOT have air conditioning, and (2) Flannery’s ninety-two-year-old cousin, Louise Florencourt, who was the executrix of Flannery’s estate, would be in attendance. He wanted to make me aware of this, he explained, because Ms. Florencourt had been a Harvard-educated lawyer, and she was known to be confrontational, even a tad cantankerous, on the subject of Flannery. In fact, her love of debate had only been exacerbated by her encroaching senility. Anything, he indicated—with admirable delicacy and politeness—was possible from this woman.

“Oh,” I said, while wondering if it was possible for one’s ears to sweat. I could have sworn that my ears had begun to sweat.

“I’ll give you a few moments to gather yourself before the event begins,” Craig said, and then, again with great delicacy, he disappeared into the house.

I stood still, and tried to regulate the crazy pinball that was ricocheting around my chest. I didn’t feel discouraged—perhaps I should have—but I didn’t. Scared silly, yes, but not discouraged. I told myself that being at Andalusia was worth being yelled at by a tempestuous elderly woman. I stared at the white farmhouse, and tried to channel some of Flannery’s famous nerve. I knew the writer would have savored this kind of evening; she would have responded to any critic with a witty remark and a small, amused smile. I’m not Flannery O’Connor, though, and the house and grounds stared back at me blankly; no nerve was on offer.

My attention was caught by a sudden movement to my left. A rattling noise filled the air. The peacock stood in the center of his pen, shaking his long, thin tail. When the shaking concluded, he hurled his feathers upwards. This violent motion created, all at once, a sweeping display of moons and eyes and cerulean blues and bright greens. The fan was easily four feet across, and dazzling. The peacock pointed the display at me in silence, his head averted. Only when he thought I’d admired him long enough, did his sharp eyes deign to meet mine. In the hundred-degree heat, I was swept with chills. For one singular moment, I could feel Flannery’s presence. She stood beside me on the lawn, and together we stared down her wondrous, obnoxious birds.

Inside, the small dining room was filling with an audience that could exist nowhere else. In attendance were three distinct groups: relatives of Flannery, neighbors of Flannery and local scholars of Flannery. The median age was, if I had to hazard a guess, seventy. I was introduced by the head of the English Department from the Georgia State College in Milledgeville. The gentleman was a noted Flannery scholar and so I listened at first with interest, and then increasing confusion, to his talk. He was discussing my novel and Flannery’s role in the book, but it was difficult to put a finger on his actual thesis. He’s definitely not praising the novel… he’s hedging, maybe? Surely not condemning? Oh wait, that was a barb. I think it was a barb. I can’t be sure… it’s too hot in here to be sure. Oh wait, he’s done. What a weird note to end on…

From the podium, the ninety-two-year old cousin was easy to spot. She sat in a large armchair in the back corner of the room. A shiny wooden cane rested against her leg. She wore a white bun; she looked regal and imposing. She was—it became immediately clear—glaring at me. She glared the entire time I spoke: during my introduction, when I tried to explain how this girl from New Jersey came to write Flannery into a novel; during my reading, which I decided to cut short due to the extreme heat. (I could see beads of sweat on peoples’ foreheads, and did I mention the median age? I feared that someone might pass out; I could imagine an ambulance arriving, and the local headline blaring, “BOOK READING SO BORING THAT PEOPLE LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS”.) Nothing, however—not the temperature nor my nervous blathering nor the excerpt from my novel—had any impact on Louise Florencourt’s glare. Her gaze was so fixed she appeared not to blink.

Reading from my novel was such a heady experience I forgot about Louise for a few minutes. The scene I had chosen was set at Andalusia, and showed the beginning of Flannery’s strange friendship with New York transplant Melvin Whiteson. The characters spoke on the porch that was only a few feet away from where I stood, and peacocks roamed the lawn that I could see out the window. It felt strange and almost miraculous to read my work in the home of one of the main characters—how many writers have that opportunity? When I finished, I took a deep breath before asking the audience if there were any questions. I was careful not to look anywhere near the lady in the back corner.

A man in the front raised his hand, announced that he had lived in Milledgeville his entire life and that I had made an error in the second chapter by suggesting that the town had no movie theatre in 1962. He nodded solemnly, to give his statement emphasis. “We’ve always had a movie theatre here.” I, of course, apologized.

Another elderly woman, also with cane, told me that I should have read her book while I was researching my own. She was Flannery’s neighbor, and she had written an entire chapter about the author. I said I was sorry I hadn’t come across it, and that I’d love to read it. The woman promptly handed me a bright yellow book and said, “My address is on the inside back cover—you can send a check for sixteen dollars to that address. That’s how much it costs.” I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

Craig, in the back of the room, shook his head ruefully. He told me later that he’d worried this lady was going to pull something like this; she was known to grab the microphone at public events in Milledgeville in order to push her self-published book on people.

Next, the history professor from the local college told me that he had figured out who, in Milledgeville, every character in the book was based on. I found this information—and the details he provided—both amusing and gratifying. The only characters I had based on anyone real were Flannery and her mother, so I chose to take this as some kind of compliment.

My final interlocutor was the youngest person in the room, a black-haired, clean-cut man of perhaps thirty. I’d been wondering what he was doing there; in a room full of characters, he didn’t fit. It turned out he had been sent down from Atlanta by his very wealthy, very Catholic boss to see if my book was worth optioning for a movie. His employer was slowly buying up Flannery’s short stories in order to put them on the screen; he saw this project as a kind of Catholic philanthropy, rather than a money-making venture. The young man looked me over, with what appeared to me to be skepticism, while we talked.

At some point, without my noticing, Louise Florencourt abandoned her glare and her corner seat. She left the farm without saying a word to me. Craig posited that it was because she hadn’t read my novel, so didn’t feel she had the necessary facts for an effective verbal attack. I was enormously relieved; if she had attacked me, the argument would have been one-sided. I would have let her have her say without interruption. Louise had, after all, grown up with Flannery; they were family. She felt an understandable ownership of the great writer, and the disapproval she had pointed in my direction made sense. I’d fictionally usurped someone she knew, and loved. If I’d written a bad biography of Flannery, Louise Florencourt could have—and probably would have—sued me. But a novel is not biography; it is mere make-believe, a piece of whimsy, an imaginative fugue, and therefore untouchable. I had pulled Flannery out through a trap door Louise didn’t have access too, and might even doubt existed. A novel must represent the ultimate frustration and insult to someone like Ms. Florencourt, who had made her living fighting facts with facts. I had not only taken her cousin away, I had taken her tools as well.

It was my turn to feel untouchable as I left that house for the second, and perhaps the last, time. The peacock was tucked in the shadows now, his tail matted down, his eyes looking away. The night was steamy, the crickets and birds clattered in the trees over my head. I had written onto this landscape the clatter of typewriter keys and the screams of fowl, the gunning of car engines and the spill of blood. I had written about a woman who lived here, and lived fiercely, in the face of certain death. I had lived here with her, with my pages and words, for many years. The truths I had tried to capture in my book, and the truths Flannery had nailed in hers, swirled around me in the noisy darkness.

The event was over and I was alone, but my hands continued to shake at my sides. I was smiling, too; I may have even laughed out loud. I found myself thinking that the night had been a great success. It had been weird and crazy and stressful, yes, but this was Flannery O’Connor’s house, and as such it was only proper that the weird and crazy should rise to the surface. The worst thing that could have happened was for the evening to be ordinary. “Ordinary” was an insult to Flannery O’Connor. “Ordinary” had no life in it, no electrical charge, and therefore had no place here.

Image courtesy the author

1.
During a recent visit to Cologne, I avoided the city’s most magnetic tourist attraction – you’ve seen one Gothic cathedral, you’ve seen them all – and instead I explored the city’s bookshops. Large and small, general and specialized, spacious and cramped, there seemed to be no end to the variety. But they all had one thing in common: they were thriving.

How do the Germans do it? When a huge, once-mighty book-selling chain like Borders is going down in flames across the Atlantic, how do the Germans manage to keep their book publishing industry so diverse, so robust, so stable? How do booksellers consistently turn a profit on everything from Goethe to Grass to Grisham? Is it because of careful planning? Dumb luck? Some mystical Teutonic gene? Or could it be a Kultur thing?

2.
Buchladen, a small shop on the north side of Cologne, is as good a place as any to begin searching for answers. It doesn’t look like much from the street – green awning, small display window – but as soon as you enter the shop you’re stunned by the quality and quantity, the variety and beauty of what’s on the shelves. At the front of the shop are new fiction and history books, in hardcover and paperback, by well-known German authors and numerous Americans in translation, including Philip Roth, Richard Price, Nicole Krauss, Paul Auster, and Richard Powers. In the paperback fiction section, 30 feet of floor-to-ceiling shelves, I found books by David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, Karin Slaughter, Don Winslow, and Elmore Leonard mixed in with German, French, Scottish, Irish, English, and Japanese authors. German readers have catholic tastes. They consume crime novels as hungrily as literary fiction, history, philosophy, erotica, and just about everything else.

One thing you will not find on the shelves at German bookshops, large or small, is that mainstay of big American bookstores – signs announcing steep discounts on current bestsellers. That’s because the cost of all new books in Germany is strictly regulated by something called the Buchpreisbindung, a uniform pricing policy that was adopted voluntarily by booksellers in 1888 and became national law in 2002. By forcing all stores and on-line vendors to sell new titles at the same price, the law is, obviously, a boon to small stores that can’t compete with the volume purchasing of the big chains and online giants like Amazon.de and Buch.de.

“The idea [of the Buchpreisbindung] was to eliminate price competition in order to promote the sale of little-known books,” says Simone Thelen, spokeswoman for the Mayersche chain, which was founded in the 19th century and now has 49 stores, mostly in the state of North Rhine Westphalia. “It makes it possible for publishers to publish a variety of books and authors, and it gives us the chance to promote young, unknown authors and books that are not blockbusters.”

This seemingly counter-intuitive strategy – protecting books by keeping them expensive – is actually in line with much of what goes on in Germany today. The country enjoys the healthiest economy in Europe, rising employment, a balanced budget, and an enviable trade surplus not in spite of, but because of, its well-paid workers and their vast network of social services, including universal (that is, mandatory) health care, plus at least four weeks of paid vacation and in some cases more than seven. It makes perfect sense to prosperous, book-loving Germans to pay a fair, strictly regulated price for new books because they believe that the health of the book industry – that is, of publishers, booksellers, and writers, from famous to unknown – is vital to the health of the whole society.

The idea of the government regulating the price of consumer goods is anathema to most Americans, who have bought into free-market gospel and the Walmart mantra that price is everything, and lower is always better than higher. It comes as no surprise, then, that many Americans are wailing about the coming cost of universal health care, our onerous tax rate (among the lowest in the industrialized world), and the need to trim the federal deficit by slashing government spending while preserving tax breaks for the rich. And yet, as the Borders debacle illustrates, allowing booksellers in America to set prices anywhere they choose is no guarantee that even the biggest fish will survive. Pity the vanishing small fry.

Marion Krefting, a sales clerk at Buchladen for the past 13 years, is, like most Germans, widely read, fluent in English, and addicted to foreign travel. Krefting happens to be in love with Australia, which she first visited in the late 1970s and has revisited many times since, most recently two years ago. In Australia she saw first-hand what happens when the government stops regulating the price of books and lets market forces do the job. “The first time I visited Australia, about 35 years ago, they had regulated pricing like we do,” she told me. “When I went back a few years later they had stopped it. What happened was that the bestsellers became cheaper, everything else became more expensive, and there was less variety.” And now the predictable kicker: “The little bookshops don’t exist anymore.”

Australia’s experience is not unique. After price regulation ended in England, the price of books rose by 8 percent; and when it ended in Sweden, one out of four bookstores went out of business. Always willing to go against the grain, the Swiss, who do not now have a book pricing law, are talking about instituting one.

Krefting, the daughter of a bookseller, is a fan of such writers as Tad Williams, Elizabeth George, and William Boyd. But her great love is children’s books, and she points with pride to her personal fief, the large, colorful section devoted to children’s books at the back of Buchladen. When a customer comes in and asks for an appropriate book for a 6-year-old girl, Krefting steers her to a book called Rita das Raubschaf. She gives the customer a concise synopsis of the plot – it’s about a sheep named Rita who gets bored chewing grass and runs off to become a pirate – along with her enthusiastic personal endorsement. The customer buys the book without hesitation. Such crisp professionalism is the norm in German bookstores because clerks are required to study for several years – literature, accounting, and the mechanics of the book business – then pass a standardized exam before they can become certified booksellers. In DIY, blue-sky, go-for-it America, such rigid standards are almost unthinkable. Which is not to say there are no knowledgeable booksellers in the U.S. There are many, of course. It’s just that Americans hope to find knowledgeable employees when they go to a bookstore, while Germans insist on it. To Krefting, the German way makes perfect sense. “This is not a job, it’s a profession I love,” she says. “The pay is not good, the hours are terrible, but I just love books.”

At a nearby shop called Agnes Buchhandlung, the display window contains copies, in German translation, of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, and Salman Rushdie’s Luka and the Fire of Life. The owner, Uli Ormanns, leaves no doubt about the importance of the Buchpreisbindung for small shops like his. “It’s absolutely critical to our survival,” he says. Another thing that helps, he adds, is the national network of book warehouses and its shipping system. “Of the one million books available in Germany, we can order 400,000 of them overnight, just like the big chain stores,” Ormanns says. “Other books, like textbooks, technical books, university presses – which are not a big part of our business – we can get in a week.” He then leads me to the corner of the shop devoted to books – in English – by American and British authors. Particularly popular with Agnes Buchhandlung’s customers are Stephenie Meyer, Philip Roth, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Franzen. “It’s a small part of our business,” Ormanns says, “but more and more customers are asking for American and English authors in English, usually after they’ve read the book in German.”

Catherine Brull, a native of Belgium who has worked in the shop for seven years, is getting ready to crack open her new copy of Super Sad True Love Story, which is priced at 19.95 euros, about $28, including tax. (The sales tax on books in Germany is 7 percent, compared with 19 percent for most consumer goods.) “The German people like the American way of writing,” Brull says. “Sometimes the German authors aren’t easy to read. They have a heavy heritage – Grass, Mann, Boll – and they’re always thinking about that.”

Discounted books are not unheard-of in Germany. When I walked into the venerable Buchhandlung Walther Koenig in the heart of Cologne, I was greeted by a large table festooned with high-quality art books reduced in price by as much as 75 percent. There are four ways sellers can make such sharp price cuts: if the book is used, if it’s damaged, if it was imported from a country without a Buchpreisbindung, or if the sales are so slow after 18 months that the publisher declares it a “remainder,” thus freeing stores to set their own price. The effect of the rule is that large chain stores tend to offer remaindered books at sharp discounts, which smaller stores rarely try to match. Similarly, there are no price rules on audio books, and therefore it’s almost impossible to find them at small shops. The prices of e-books, which currently account for less than 1 percent of all book sales in Germany, are regulated by the Buchpreisbindung.

3.
Which brings us, finally, inevitably, to the elephant in the middle of the bookshop. I’m talking of course about the differences in reading habits between Americans and Germans – or, to be a bit more broad, between Americans and most of the rest of the civilized world. Simply put, one of the major reasons Germany has a healthy book publishing industry, beyond its pricing law, is because Germans (like the English, the Irish, the Japanese, the French, and many other nationalities) tend to read more, and more seriously, than Americans. I can’t cite statistics to prove this, but after traveling much of the world I know in my bones that it’s true. I became convinced of it the day I boarded an airplane in Dusseldorf and sat next to a perfectly typical German hausfrau who spent the flight devouring Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, a novel that has defeated me every time I’ve tried to read it. I remember thinking: Germans are different.

“It’s true that the tradition of reading is very deep-rooted in German culture,” says Michael Roesler-Graichen, an editor at the magazine put out by the Borsenverein, the national society of publishers and booksellers based in Frankfurt. “It’s not the whole population. The so-called higher literature, or belles lettres, is read by a small percentage. But it’s a very vital tradition.”

In 2007 an Association of American Publishers (AAP) survey revealed that one in four Americans did not read a single book – not one book – the previous year. Things seem to have improved since hitting that nowhere-to-go-but-up nadir. In 2009 the National Endowment for the Arts reported that the number of Americans reading literature (novels, short stories, poems, and plays) had increased for the first time since 1982. And this summer a joint survey by the AAP and the Book Industry Group revealed that American publishers’ net sales rose by 5.6 percent from 2008 to 2010, thanks to surging sales of e-books as well as juvenile and adult fiction. Much is now being made of the ascendancy of e-books and the boost they’re giving to the American book industry. I say hooray. But I’m inclined to wonder if this ramping-up of e-reader and e-book sales is an indicator that Americans are suddenly reading more. I suspect they’re merely downloading more. I hope I’m wrong. Time will tell.

None of this is to suggest that the German system of selling books could or should be transplanted wholesale to the United States. Nor is it to imply that all Germans are better-read and better-educated than all Americans. Roesler-Graichen, the editor, is happy to set the record straight on that score. “Whenever I visit America, people say, ‘Oh, you Germans are so well educated, you’re so well read,’” he says. Then, with a laugh, he adds, “I have to tell them it’s not true of all Germans.”

He’s right, of course. But there can be no denying that books occupy a special place in the life of Germany, the country that gave us the printed book. Thelen, the spokeswoman for the Mayersche chain, sums that place up nicely. “Books are not just a commodity here,” she says. “They have a cultural value that has to be saved.”

So in the end, yes, it’s a culture thing.

Image credit: chascarper/Flickr

As he stands in the front hall, Godfrey tells him that the house had originally been built in 1848. “This house?” asks Hinton, “built then, and stood up like this?”

“That’s because your family built it,” says his host.

Everyone relaxes, including the viewer, with sheer relief that someone has said something candid. These two men, who are connected by a long, ugly history, but who weren’t personally involved, and both seem very gentlemanly, have such a strange, limited space in which they can relate to each other. Engaging the history of the South would be too sober a task and, quite frankly, not their responsibility, but acting as if they’re just two guys meeting on a porch is too flippant. The resulting atmosphere is cordial but constricted.

This is how I felt for the entire three days I recently spent in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Just being there reminds you that, had you been born in a different time or place, there were people you would be expected to hate. Not everyone chooses to travel to the physical embodiment of racial and sectional conflict, but then I am a history fan. And, as I wrote in March, I’m in the process of reading a biography of each American president. Having recently arrived at the Civil War, I decided to celebrate, if such a word can be used, by visiting Gettysburg.

Along with everything else, Gettysburg is beautiful. The three-day battle spread itself for miles around the town, and because the battlefield is now a national park, Gettysburg is surrounded by woods and fields that have remained untouched except by monuments. As Kent Gramm writes in the opening of his book, Gettysburg, “It is the most beautiful place on earth. But death is everywhere — in every meadow, along every Virginia rail fence, all over those quiet, rocky hills at sunset.” My friend Kara, who traveled with me, and I spent our time learning and relearning the story of the battle. A topographically-based battle is remarkably easy to grasp, especially when the topography is preserved, and you are walking around on it.

There are two long, parallel ridges – Cemetery Ridge and Seminary Ridge – that extend southward from the edge of town and frame the second and third day’s fighting. Then there are the contested hills – Culp’s Hill, Oak Hill, Little Round Top, and Big Round Top – that provided more brief, concentrated action. The major events of the battle – Buford’s stand on the first day, the Wheatfield and the Little Round Top bayonet charge on the second day, Pickett’s Charge on the third day – cluster around these high grounds.

We spent the first day at the Gettysburg visitors’ center and museum, plus a visit to the room-sized diorama. The next day we went on the self-guided auto tour, for which you listen to a CD in your car that tells you what points to drive to and what to know about them (usually: the next stop is a spot where many brave men died), and walked in the National Cemetery in the evening. The third day I went on a horseback ride along the Confederate encampment lines with a Robert E. Lee impersonator. As Kara said, you can’t throw a rock in Gettysburg without learning a historical fact (did you know Union Major General Daniel Sickles shot and killed Philip Key – son of Francis Scott Key – for sleeping with his wife, and was one of the first people to be acquitted of murder via a plea of temporary insanity?). By the end of the trip we knew the narrative of the battle like the backs of our hands.

The town of Gettysburg is entirely dedicated to teaching you what happened there 148 years ago, but it avoids interpreting itself. The museum’s 15-minute orienting film introduced me to the Gettysburg gaze — a particular brand of narration (in this instance supplied by Morgan Freeman, impartial as the voice of god always is) that pervades the town, describing every skirmish as good vs. good. Good wins.

Michael Shaara’s Gettysburg novel The Killer Angels, which we listened to on our drive, is the champion of the Gettysburg gaze. Its film adaptation, Gettysburg, takes it even further. Scored like NBC scores the Olympics, the film features commanders in freshly dry cleaned uniforms who philosophize more than they command. One Union commander, marveling at General Lee’s success, says “It’s amazing what one honest man can do.” “One honest man,” his superior replies, “and a cause.”

This is freakishly off point. The Southern campaign for independence was not one honest man and a cause. It was the culmination of near a century of sectional conflict which, among others, The Missouri Compromise, The Wilmot Proviso, The Compromise of 1850, the repeal of The Missouri Compromise, popular sovereignty, and The Kansas-Nebraska Act all in turn failed to assuage, and finally escalated into a fury. Sure, it all started as Jeffersonian democracy versus Federalism, but those were hardly the rallying cries of the armies as they shot at each other.

The auto tour ends on the Union side of Pickett’s Charge, the foolhardy press of 12,000 Confederate soldiers towards the better-situated Union line, which decimated Lee’s troops, ended the three-day battle, and turned the tide of the war. You stand on Cemetery Ridge, looking at Seminary Ridge on the other side of town, and you try to imagine two armies watching each other across that distance, preparing to fight each other because the Constitution didn’t explicitly prohibit slavery. Your brain tries to fill in all the steps in between and obviously falters. In Gettysburg, Kent Gramm argues that the Civil War was fought for opposing abstract ideals — union and independence. As you stand on Cemetery Ridge, picturing 7,000 dead bodies scattered in the valley before you, it’s hard to comprehend that they got there because of opposing abstract ideals. So you stand with furrowed brow for a bit longer — that bizarre requisite time you spend standing silently at complicated historical locations, usually about two minutes — and go back to the car.

All our days ended this way. The stories and statistics would build up until it was impossible to grasp, so we’d go back to the hotel and collapse on the beds to read the AV Club and update our Facebook statuses. This is when the Gettysburg gaze comes in handy. Everything turned out fine, you tell yourself, everyone involved was brave and good and civil rights were just around the corner. (That sounds ridiculous, but one narration we heard drew a direct line from Gettysburg to Jackie Robinson.)

The closest encounter I had with partisanship during my visit was talking with the Robert E. Lee impersonator on a horseback tour of the battlefield. He bemoaned the fact that I was from Indiana, preferring to socialize with his fellow natives of “God’s country.” I told him, though, that my family had lived in North Carolina before settling in Indiana in the 1850s, and that the relatives who remained behind served for the South. He praised the brave deeds of the regiments from that state, to which I assured him he was welcome. Eager to use my outsized knowledge of 19th century politics, I chatted with him about George McClellan and John C. Calhoun, the presidential elections of 1852 and 1856, and the Mexican-American war (which he fought in, although he disagreed with policies of James K. Polk, who is a long distant cousin of mine, and this caused some tension). In all this he avowed Southern partiality, but in a passive, melancholy way.

The New York Times published an editorial in 1867 that read: “The contest touches everything, and leaves nothing as it found it. Great rights, great interests, great systems of habit and of thought disappear during its progress. It leaves us a different people in everything from what we were when it came upon us.” The greatest mercy of Gettysburg is that it releases you from culpability. It’s the American Mordor. Whatever the sins of the past, they were destroyed there in fire. Surely we continue to read about and visit Gettysburg to learn what happened, but just as much to confirm that it did.

Image credit: The stone wall on Cemetery Ridge, via the author

“The kitchen crew is the armpit of Bread Loaf, you know,” an assistant cook said to several of us who were working with him one morning in the kitchen on the campus where the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference is held. I can’t recall what led him to bring up the subject. Maybe he had heard the story about our two dishwashers who had crashed a gathering of women Conference members one evening. “Oh, we’re not writers!” the dishwashers gleefully responded to a question directed to them. “We’re on the kitchen crew!” Later, they raced back to the warren of rooms at the back of the Bread Loaf Inn where the female staff slept, gathered us together, and described how the authors seated around them had sat clutching their glasses of sherry or cups of tea, gaping soundlessly. The writers may have finally gone on to discuss something literary, but that part of the story would have been anti-climactic as far as we were concerned.

Whatever the cook’s reason for offering his armpit observation, it was pretty much lost on us. We would have had to have cared what someone else thought of us for the analogy to mean anything, and we didn’t. We were far too busy having a good time.

The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which meets at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf campus in Ripton, Vermont, will be starting a new session on August 10th. Over the past eighty-six years, thousands of aspiring writers have taken part in what many describe as the country’s premier writers’ gathering. Articles about Bread Loaf usually dwell on the intensity of the experience. Many applicants don’t make the cut in the first place. Those who do get to spend a chunk of their vacation time attending a full schedule of workshops, lectures, and readings while they compete for the attention of faculty members and pretend that they love having their best writing critiqued.

It sounded like a rough way to spend two weeks to those of us working in the Bread Loaf kitchen in the summers of 1973,’74, and ’75.

When describing their time at Bread Loaf, writers often dwell on the beauty of the site, so I guess some of them must get outside or maybe look out a window at least. However, by the time I finished my sophomore year at the University of Vermont and started my temp job as the Bread Loaf pastry girl, I was pretty jaded about the wonders of nature. I grew up in Vermont on what might kindly be referred to as a very small hill farm, and my school bus traveled rural mountain roads every day. For me the magic of the Bread Loaf campus wasn’t the view, but the way the landscape had been domesticated. The array of late nineteenth/early twentieth century buildings that dotted the enormous, carefully maintained meadow didn’t scream wilderness by a long shot. They were more like some very wealthy child’s discarded playhouses, and that’s how my friends on the kitchen crew and I treated them. During our free time, we explored every floor and wing of the Inn and all the dormitories, taking advantage of any opportunity to peer into the paneled or papered bedrooms and the bathrooms filled with primitive plumbing. The Library, the Theater, the Barn that held a lounge and a snack bar, and the pond at the back of the campus were all our territory.
We branched out to the Middlebury College Snow Bowl and the Green Mountain State Forest, both close enough so we could hike their ski trails and old roads between our breakfast, lunch, and dinner shifts. Sex and drugs were available for our more adventurous co-workers, but the rest of us had a little Peter Pan thing going on, one in which we ran wild over the Bread Loaf campus and beyond. The place seemed like the summer camps I’d only read about in books, but for grown-ups. Whenever we had enough, we would catch a ride with someone down to Middlebury for shopping and ice cream at Calvi’s during our afternoon breaks.

It was good to be us.

The writers we fed were just our excuse to be at Bread Loaf. The waiters and waitresses coming in and out of our kitchen three times a day were all Conference participants working off some of their tuition and fees. They cared about the literary guests who showed up in the dining room, but no one who really worked in the kitchen was impressed by writers. The professional cooks at the top of our hierarchy may have set the tone for the rest of us. They were permanent Middlebury College food service employees who would go back to the main campus to work in the fall. They knew way too much about the carryings on of academics to feel any awe of some more book people. The baker, my personal supervisor, remembered Robert Frost from back in the day when he’d been associated with Bread Loaf. She made it clear that he was no big deal. The year before I started in the kitchen, a science fiction writer on the faculty did all his laundry and then sun bathed nude on the lawn while he waited for it to go through the wash and dry cycles. This did not go over well with the long-term kitchen staff. I heard about it several times.
Many of the younger, temporary members of the kitchen crew were college students, some from prestigious private schools. Everyone was looking forward to a career, even if in many cases those careers were somewhat vaguely defined. We didn’t see ourselves as being that different from the average Writers’ Conference participants who were also looking forward to careers. We also weren’t much younger than some of them. Our ability to pass among the writers unnoticed made it possible for us to pick up odds and ends of information, and our sense of parity with them led us to feel qualified to comment upon what we heard. The man who had published an article in Playboy…Just one? The young woman who was so happy and hopeful because of the response she’d received to her writing from her assigned faculty member…That was nice, but did it mean any of that work would ever be published? When the rumor came back to the kitchen that a writer had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown, we felt badly, but, hey, writing isn’t an easy field to break into.

At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, even the kitchen crew knew that.

We younger members of the kitchen staff would probably have been more taken with the writers the years I was at Bread Loaf if they had been more like the naked guy I had heard so much about. The same year he had been at the Conference I was told that another writer had attended a dance in the Barn where his gyrations had been “obscenity in motion.” Stories like those led me to have expectations. The writers were very tame while I was there, though. Disappointingly so. I went to some kind of cocktail party once and hung around the fringes of a women-in-literature meeting. Everyone kept their clothes on. No one got up and danced.
I did see John Gardner from my bedroom window once, though. I knelt on my bed and watched him walk up a path toward the Inn’s back door. He was easy to recognize from his photographs because of his long, gray hair, and he was wearing a pullover shirt with full sleeves gathered at the wrists. There was a man who knew how to look like a writer.

I also went to hear Lore Segal speak in the Theater one evening. How that came about is a total mystery to me, because while she is a highly regarded novelist, short story writer, essayist, and teacher, I had never heard of her then. My only recollection of the event is that Segal had dark hair. What makes the incident notable to me is what happened years later. After I started publishing children’s fiction in the 1980s, I learned that Lore Segal is also a children’s writer. Was that what she was talking about that night? If I were listening to her speak now, I would probably be taking notes.

I appear to have been remarkably uninformed about contemporary writers when I was young, especially considering that I was an English major. But I’ve no doubt that that obliviousness contributed to my enjoyment of my time at Bread Loaf.

One day at dinner, the waiters and waitresses returned to the kitchen after their first foray into the dining room with news.

“Anne Sexton is here!”

“Anne Sexton is here!”

“Have you heard? Anne Sexton is here!”

They were truly thrilled, like kids who had caught a glimpse of Santa. It was fun to see how eager they were to pass on their information to someone, anyone they could get close to. While the meal was being served, the story came out. Maxine Kumin, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet I had never heard of, was at Bread Loaf that summer. Anne Sexton, also a Pulitzer Prize winner I knew nothing about, had come to visit her.

“And she’s going to do a reading. Tonight!”

That evening, while Anne Sexton was giving her reading to what I am sure was a standing room only crowd, my friends and I went swimming. We had a good time. I’m glad I didn’t miss it.

I’ve been to a few writers’ conferences, myself, over the years. Not many, though, because I don’t enjoy them very much. What I really prefer are salon-like gatherings that last maybe three hours or so. Coincidentally, that’s about how long my work shifts were in the Bread Loaf kitchen. My longest bout at a conference was a three-day event at which I served on the faculty. It was held in a woodsy, though somewhat flat for my tastes, venue in Rhode Island. I brought some walking shoes and a camera, expecting to get out on the trails at least once. I managed to sneak out for a little while during lunch on Saturday, but otherwise it was all presentations and panel discussions and critique groups all the time. It was like…work.

That’s writers for you.

For many years after I left Bread Loaf for good, I would have these frustrating dreams of returning to the Inn that dominates that campus. In them I was never looking for a second chance to hear Anne Sexton read. I was always trying to return to the back of the old building, to the kitchen with its network of high-ceilinged rooms — the pantry where I washed fruit for dessert, the bakery with its blackened bread and muffin pans, the narrow chamber with the long table where my friends and I ate our meals together.

The dreams suddenly stopped around the time I began to publish regularly. My dreams are almost always easy to interpret, but how do you work out the meaning of a dream’s absence? In this case, it was easy, too. The old subconscious recognized that the moment I signed that first book contract a door slammed shut. There would be no going back to the Bread Loaf I had known, because, unless they were carrying trays, writers were never allowed in the kitchen.

Image credit: Gail Gauthier (author)

We quickly discovered we had something in common: our aversion to Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

I was an insecure young professor of philosophy at a conservative evangelical college, with a troubled marriage and two kids. Cedarville College was four miles from Antioch, but  so distant ideologically from the famously radical Antioch that it might as well have been four light years.

I was prepared to dislike Patrick O’Connor intensely, based upon his association with a writer I considered odious. But he knocked me off balance with his first words. I later learned he was quite practiced at this.

We met in the quad during a cigarette break. Patrick O’Connor nursed a black coffee in a white ceramic mug he’d walked off with from the college cafeteria. I had a deep tan from mowing five acres of grass every week that summer, and lazing with my kids at the pool. A small man with a round face, he had a sly smile and a direct manner. We regarded each other from opposite ends of a picnic table.

Hey kid, have your good looks gotten in the way of you being taken seriously as a writer?

I deflected his question. Feeling misplaced in both a marriage and a job led to fantasies about women, art, and salvation that would later land me in world of trouble; I had already taken one of the women writers at the conference for a late night spin in my convertible, and had plans to see her that night. Somehow I had arrived at two non-original ideas:  that I needed to write fiction, not philosophy, and that my personal aesthetic should be, “I write to get the girl.” I was a hollowed out writing conference cliché, and I was sure Patrick O’Connor saw right through me.

Was I a frivolous person, impersonating a serious one? Talking to her favorite editor, I was certain that Ayn Rand did not see herself this way.

2.
On April 15, 2011, almost twenty years after my encounter with Patrick O’Connor, and almost 30 years after Ayn Rand’s death in 1982, Atlas Shrugged opened in theaters around the country. The movie is based on Rand’s bestselling dystopian novel of the same name, a literary vehicle expressing her trademark worldview: the morality of rational self-interest, or, Objectivism. The film was financed by a wealthy devotee of Ayn Rand’s work, and marketed aggressively to the Tea Party demographic by FreedomWorks, one of the prime movers in the Tea Party movement, which engaged in a massive campaign to encourage audience attendance, and to push the film into as many theaters as possible. The opening line of Atlas Shrugged — “Who is John Galt?” — has appeared on signs at Tea Party protests across America. Glenn Beck praises Atlas Shrugged regularly, and hosted a panel discussion dedicated to asking if Rand’s fiction is finally becoming reality. Once a shadowy cult presence in the margins of American life, Ayn Rand is now one of the central intellectual and cultural inspirations for the base of the Republican Party.

3.
A few days ago on Twitter someone tweeted, “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in philosophy: the search for a moral justification for selfishness.”

Ayn Rand’s books provided that moral justification for my evangelical Christian students. Atlas Shrugged, in particular. They were drawn to the fierce youthful idealism of The Fountainhead, which they found, quote, empowering. I found both novels to be insufferable. Rand was a third rate novelist of turgid prose who saw no reason to pen a sentence without making a speech.

Here is a sample sentence from Atlas Shrugged:

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call “free will” is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

As a stylist, she could be dreadful, her prose in service to her philosophy:

It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness — and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question.

A drop of rain pain in the shape of a question: “Who is John Galt.” That’s some raindrop.

4.
I don’t remember what I said to deflect Patrick O’Connor’s question — something short and inane. I was already deeply conflicted about my appearance, and felt frequently that my life was a fraud, a series of performances at home and at work. Teaching was a kind of performance art. Although I had chosen a substantive discipline, social and political philosophy, I often wondered whether this was to mask my insecurities. I felt myself to be frivolous and vain. Writing a book on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida had done nothing to dissuade me from this view, as Derrida himself was regarded as a lightweight, a “deconstructionist” more in vogue with language and literature departments than with “serious” philosophy departments in academe.

I steered the conversation to safer topics: Antioch, and Ayn Rand’s books. Antioch was a hotbed of student radicalism and curricular innovation. Two years later, four miles southeast, my “Christian” college would try to fire me for publishing a book on feminism, yet here I was in conversation with the editor of an indomitable woman from Russia, herself among the first women to be admitted to university after the Russian Revolution — an atheist and fierce critic of religion — who was nevertheless the guiding light of some of my evangelical Christian students.

The performative contradictions in that last sentence continue to astonish me.

5.
By the time I met Patrick O’Connor, I was itching for a fight about Ayn Rand. Two students were making my life hellish in class. Both were Econ students, promoting Rand as an apostle of free market capitalism and suspicious of my muddle-headed liberalism which harped about the growing chasm in Reagan’s America between the rich and the poor and the need for distributive justice. John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness? Forget it, Rawls was a wuss. Additionally, they were having difficulty with the concept of Jesus of Nazareth having compassion for the poor, like, say, Mother Teresa. Never mind that Jesus was a Jewish Mediterranean peasant, probably illiterate, with a biting critique of the rich and possessed of peasant humor — “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven” — my students weren’t buying it. It was not “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do) for these students, it was more like, “What would John Galt think.” I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about what John Galt thought. Holly and Mark were becoming royal pains and I wanted to kick Patrick O’Connor in the ass.

So when he told me that he was a Trotskyite, a Communist, and from the democratic wing of the Democratic party, I knew he was as misplaced with Rand as I was at my college.

I asked him directly: What was she like to work with? How had he managed to be that woman’s editor all those years?

Do you want to know why Ayn Rand’s books sell so well? he countered.

Well, yes.

Because she writes the best children’s literature in America, O’Connor said. The Fountainhead is practically a rite of passage for alienated youth. She writes these epic, Wagnerian things. Where the sex takes place on the very highest plane and it speaks to the kids’ highest aspirations, their youthful idealism. It’s all YA stuff.

In that case, I argued, people should grow out of her, like a phase, they should get over her ideas when they become adults.

This is America, he said. There aren’t many ideas. Ayn Rand had a few simple ones which she believed in fiercely and promoted relentlessly.

But surely you don’t agree with her philosophy? The whole Objectivism thing from Atlas Shrugged?

Of course not! But we never talked politics. I knew better.

I wanted to know just how well Ayn Rand sold, really.

She paid the bills. The lights, the gas, the heating bills, the Christmas bonuses. Here’s the thing you gotta know about publishing, kid. The publishing industry itself is basically left, but true publishers publish what they think will sell. There is very little publishing “from belief” and that’s the way it has always been. We’ll publish anything that we know will sell, and everyone — no matter what they may think of her personally — everyone, every one, admires her sales.

I asked about the “didactic nature” of her prose and he laughed.

Didactic, hell, it’s worse than that. She writes to convert!

I thought of my evangelical Christian students. They liked the idea of conversion. They’d like to convert all of godless Russia to Christianity. China, too. And of course, they wanted to “win America for Christ.” The irony of this: these good Christian kids admired an evangelical atheist who believed in conversion. My head swam.

What about Rand’s reputation for being “difficult?”

I did everything she said.

What’s everything? (I had three books in the pipeline. Naively, and un-Rand-like, I said yes to everything Macmillan and Prentice Hall told me.)

Ayn Rand wanted approval of copy, advertising, art, you name it, O’Connor said. Publishers almost never give in to these kinds of demands, but we did. Because of her sales. I told the bosses, look, it’s her bat and ball.

6.
You can get schooled at Twitter if you have the right friends. The other day someone tweeted that Facebook is the people you went to school with, and Twitter the people you wish you went to school with.

So. the other day, Maud Newton tweeted: “Irony of Atlas Shrugged, movie about great people laid low by mediocre jealous people, is that it is wholly mediocre.”

It’s been years since I spoke with Patrick O’Connor. And I’ve had time to think about Rand, about her legacy, about the way she never really went out of fashion among what John Scalzi calls the “nerd revenge porn” crowd. And I agree with O’Connor that Rand wrote children’s literature. The problem is that a lot of these people have grown up, put on colorful colonial uniforms, and are trying to shrink the nation’s budget to the size where it can be dragged into the bathroom and drowned in the bathtub. A libertarian whose ideas are as wacky as Rand’s (who in fact is named Rand) is now a United States senator in Kentucky. Former Fed Chairman and economist Alan Greenspan is a devotee of Ayn Rand. And a guy whom no one had heard of until recently, congressman Paul Ryan, (R-WI) Chairman of the House Budget Committee, has been making the GOP case for massive budget cuts that will hurt the poorest and most vulnerable among us, using principles derived from Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” of Objectivism, and requiring his staff to read her work.

Paul Ryan proposes a budget plan would cap non-security discretionary spending at $360 billion for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 and freezing it for five years. That’s equal to 2006 spending levels. Over the next decade that means cuts to education, job training, and social services of 25 percent below levels needed to maintain current services. These reductions come on top of the $38.5 billion already cut from this year’s budget.

Two-thirds of the long term budget cuts that Ryan proposes are directed at middle class and low-income people, as well as the poorest of the poor at home and abroad. At the same time, he proposes tax cuts up to 30 percent for the nation’s wealthiest corporations.

Paul Ryan and his followers have solidified the connection between Ayn Rand, the Tea Party, and the Grand Old Party, with nary an outcry from the “religious right,” Karl Rove’s “base” that put George W. Bush in power. No one that I am aware of in the religious right has called attention to the words of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah in the Bible:

Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make victims — laws that make misery for the poor, that rob my destitute people of dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children. What will you have to say on Judgment Day, when Doomsday arrives out of the blue? Who will you get to help you? What good will your money do you?

Isaiah 10:1-3, The Message translation

In lecture tours around America, Ayn Rand defended “the virtue of selfishness.” She had a long term love affair with Nathaniel Brandon, a young psychologist, who later established the Nathaniel Brandon Institute to promote Rand’s philosophy. Though it was reported that she did so with her husband’s full knowledge, it is generally acknowledged that Frank O’Connor (no relation to Patrick) found the experience to be “difficult.”

I don’t know if Patrick O’Connor got himself laid in Yellow Springs, Ohio. But the affair with the writer I met at that Antioch conference created deep pain in my family, and in hers, and led to the breakup of both marriages. In time, I came to understand the wisdom of that saying, “All love affairs are special cases, and yet at the same time each is the same case” — but in my case, it was too late.

I understand the selfishness part of Objectivism. It’s the virtue part that causes me difficulty.

7.
On the day that Atlas Shrugged opened in theatres, someone tweeted, “Republicanism is crumbling of its own avarice, lust for power, excesses, and hypocrisy. It could not be otherwise when their entire “philosophy” is based upon the works of a sociopath.”

Patrick O’Connor did not think that Ayn Rand was a sociopath—to him she was just a loveable little old Jewish lady from Leningrad– although apparently his bosses at New American Library thought otherwise.

“She can’t be Jewish, she’s a fascist!” he reported them saying.

O’Connor challenged their hypocrisy: You’ve been living off this woman for years. She’s been paying all your bills.

The philosopher Jurgen Habermas spoke often of the “legitimation crisis” that plagues late capitalism, as core communication functions in society become disabled or “colonized” by money and power. I’ve often wondered whether Patrick O’Connor believed that publishers decrying Ayn Rand as a fascist while enjoying the benefits of her labor should undergo a legitimation crisis or shut up.

Here are Ayn Rand’s own words, in Atlas Shrugged.

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become tools of other men. Blood, whips, guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other.

8.
My encounter with Patrick O’Connor went to the heart of my struggles in those days: Was I a serious person? Was I really a pretty boy, flighty, without substance? Or someone serious enough to write, to take myself seriously as a writer? Ayn Rand took herself seriously and produced dreck—really dangerous stuff. She was a true believer. I no longer knew what I believed. I was carried away by the next breeze, toward the next woman, self absorbed and a wisp of the wind—but she stood as firmly planted as an oak. Rand was like Reagan: wrong but strong. She has endured, despite turgid prose and half baked ideas that were laughed out of the academy by people like me.

The year before I met Patrick O’Connor, Mary Gaitskill published a novel called Two Girls, Fat and Thin, which featured a thinly disguised Rand character, Anna Granite, and her philosophy of “Definitism.” Like the character Justine in her novel, Gaitskill had actually interviewed followers of Ayn Rand. I asked Mary Gaitskill: what is it about Ayn Rand, and why is she still here? What inspired her to write about Ayn Rand? Gaitskill wrote back:

I was inspired in part by realizing how important Ayn Rand’s ideas still were, and how deep they got into the American psyche.  I thought then (and I’ve been proved right) that she was much more influential than she was given credit for.  I didn’t have to be that smart to conclude this, I knew that Alan Greenspan had been an early devotee, and that William Buckley had taken her very seriously and that Atlas Shrugged was (according to one poll) one of the five top best-sellers in the history of the world, up there with the Bible.  I found this astonishing. Still do.

Gaitskill went on to say:

Rand appears to be so crazy, and yet she really does speak for an aspect of America, really for an aspect of human experience.  She treats big ideas in a way the common person can understand them; that is one legitimate reason for her popularity.  Something I noticed about the followers, the “cultists” that I met–they tended to be nice people yearning for bigger meaning in their lives. Most of them were not especially selfish.  It’s worth noting that most of them were also NOT people who knew Rand or were part of the early group.  Those people, the few I met, struck me as both crazy and unpleasant.   But the lower-level followers, no.  They were in their own way idealists.

9.
Patrick O’Connor believed that Ayn Rand sold because she knew who she was, she knew what she wanted, and because she spoke to people’s common dreams– the dreams of well meaning, idealistic people who want something more. I wasn’t dreaming of anything that day at Antioch, except maybe Rilke’s earnest childlike plea: Change your life. I knew that I needed to change my life, but didn’t know how. I couldn’t guide anyone reliably, anywhere, except in circles.

Saul Alinsky used to say, when you don’t know where you are going, any road will do.

Meanwhile, The Economist has reported several sharp spikes in sales of Atlas Shrugged since 2007. According to the Ayn Rand Institute, sales of the novel hit an all-time annual record that year, then reached a new record in 2008. USA Today reports that Atlas Shrugged made its debut on the USA Today Best Selling Books List on January 22, 2009, two days after President Obama’s inauguration. On April 20, Atlas Shrugged, first published in 1957, hit number 65 on the list, propelled by the new movie. Released in 299 theatres, the movie made $1.7 million in its first week.

As Patrick O’Connor insisted to me in 1992, she sells.

Do you remember this joke that was circulating in the 1980s: While deconstructionists were taking over English departments, Republicans were taking over the country.

I never found that joke to be funny.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Dublin is a fairly small city. While I was working on my thesis in Trinity College, it wasn’t unusual for me to leave the library to go for a sandwich somewhere and to pass Banville on the street. It happened more than once that I would be having lunch and he would enter the restaurant and sit down a couple of tables away, or walk past the window with his fedora, his large and quaintly flamboyant scarf, and his mysterious canvas carrier bag. (Containing what? Groceries? Surely not. Books, most likely, but then why would Banville be carrying around books? Where would he be taking them, and to whom?) When this happened, I would usually nod casually and discretely in his direction and say to my lunch companion something like “there goes the boss man,” or “there’s the gaffer now.” It amused me, for some reason, to think of myself as a low-level functionary, labouring away obscurely for years, scrutinizing texts and producing a complex 100,000 word response unlikely to be read by more than a tiny handful of specialists, as though this were a service for which I had been engaged by an eminent and enigmatic novelist.

I had also convinced myself that it amused me to be utterly unknown to Banville, and yet to be spending my working days doing nothing but thinking about his novels. But I’m not sure it really did amuse me. I think it felt a little indecorous; even, perhaps, a little shameful. I sometimes joked about feeling a bit like a stalker, but I wasn’t always entirely sure that I was joking.

It wouldn’t have felt so strange to be writing a thesis about the work of Bellow or Dickinson or Joyce or Woolf, because these are no longer men and women, as such, but historical figures, Great Writers, bodies of work to be read and thought about and, if you’re so inclined, interpreted. Even, as we say in the lit-crit racket, “working on” a living writer like, say, Toni Morrison or Don DeLillo would not carry with it this faint but indelible stain of unseemliness, because these people are remote, semi-legendary figures, securely encased in their reputations and, more importantly, their foreignness. Even if I lived in Manhattan and were writing a thesis on Thomas Pynchon, I would be unlikely to find myself standing behind him in the queue for the ATM (and even if I did, it is highly unlikely that I would realize it).

But while I was working on him, Banville was everywhere. My period of postgraduate research coincided with his ascension to a level of fame and visibility he hadn’t previously inhabited (not long before I started writing my thesis, he won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sea). He was giving readings from as-yet-unpublished novels across the square from the library where I was writing about his published ones. He was curating exhibitions of eighteenth century etchings in galleries on the other side of town. He was getting into public squabbles with crime novelists for writing a highly successful series of mysteries under a pseudonym and bragging about how easy he found it (Banville has always seemed to enjoy mixing it up). At one point, presumably undergoing a particularly severe bout of inter-project restiveness, he was even embroiled in a weirdly out-of-character controversy over vivisection at the School of Medicine at Trinity. The spat became a minor news story, culminating in J.M. Coetzee’s weighing in on his behalf in the letters pages of The Irish Times, and involved his taking part in a small but vocal protest by animal rights campaigners outside the college, which I had to pass one day on my way to the library. Surely Richard Ellmann never had to pass Joyce on a picket line; surely Boswell was never called a scab by Dr. Johnson? (Nobody called me a scab, I should clarify—and neither am I seriously comparing myself to Boswell or Ellmann, or Banville to Johnson or Joyce—but the image is an amusing one, so I’ll let it stand).

For four years, the question I was inevitably asked by anyone who happened to express an interest in what I was doing with my life was this one: “Have you met Banville yet?” It’s a question I got slicker at answering the more I was asked it, until it became a sort of automated response. It was always some minor variation on the following basic template: “No,” I would say, “I haven’t. In fact, I’ve sort of been avoiding him. I’ve been in the same room as him quite a few times, at readings and that kind of thing. I’ve passed him on the street Christ knows how many times—Dublin is a small town, after all—but I’ve never felt inclined to speak to him, to introduce myself. To be honest, I don’t think it would do me or my work any good. I don’t think a critic should have too close a relationship with the writer he’s writing about, or better still any relationship at all. Why would Banville’s opinion of my opinion about his work have any bearing on those opinions, when you think about it? It’s not about what he thinks of me, it’s about what I think of him. Interviewing him would just compromise the integrity of my work.”

This last phrase I always delivered in an ironic, jocular staccato, as though acknowledging the pretentiousness of such a notion, as though highlighting the absurdity of the idea of my work having anything like integrity (I have this highly irritating habit of being dismissive of my own endeavours, and then immediately feeling as though I’ve slighted myself unforgivably). Like a lot of things we say to people, I suppose I both believed this and disbelieved it at the same time. Ambivalence was always the dominant affect of my thesis-writing years.

Behind the jokes about stalking Banville lay a real discomfort with the fact that I was spending so much time thinking about him and writing about him—or thinking about his fiction, at least, which may or may not amount to the same thing. He is, I think, a fascinating novelist, and among the more important presences in contemporary literature, and so it makes perfect sense for there to be a considered academic response to his work (there’s loads of it, by the way, which, given his stature and his prolificacy and the finely-textured allusiveness of his writing, isn’t surprising). It also makes sense that I, as a scholar in the early stages of my career, should choose Banville as the subject of my apprentice work, because I am provoked and perplexed by it in intellectually productive ways and, even now, after all the time I’ve spent with it, still derive real pleasure from reading it. He is, I think, a great writer, and may even turn out to be a Great Writer. But he is also just a guy, and this is something that his physical proximity to me—the fact that I kept passing him on the street—made very difficult to ignore. I often asked myself what it might feel like to know that, somewhere in your city, a person with whom you are entirely unacquainted is spending his days writing a psychoanalytic examination of your life’s work. I was eking out an existence for myself—you couldn’t quite call it a living—through government-funded scholarships that were contingent upon the value to society, however hypothetical, of my interpretation of Banville’s fiction. I did occasionally have an unpleasant image of myself as a parasite living off a large animal who was innocent of my unobtrusively, harmlessly blood-sucking presence. You can have a certain image of yourself and then reject it, but you’ve still had that image: it has come from somewhere. I would have been a lot less uncomfortable had I been working on someone who was dead. (The morticianary insinuations of that sentence were not intended, but they are discomfitingly apt. It is only now, in fact—as in right this second—that I finally fully get Banville’s biographer-as-embalmer joke in The Newton Letter.)

Strangely, when I did finally end up sitting down and having a conversation with him just a couple of months ago, his first reaction to my telling him that I had written my thesis on his work was to apologize for not being dead. I laughed, but made no comment on the spooky perceptiveness of his joke.

“You must absolutely despise me,” he said. I told him—truthfully—that I had somehow managed not to. What I didn’t tell him was that he had often, indirectly at least, given me occasion to despise myself. The awkward ambivalence of my psychological relationship with him, though, was not something I thought it wise to bring up over mini salmon vol-au-vents and room temperature white wine. I had not planned the meeting; in fact, I had had no idea that it would be happening until a couple of hours beforehand. I had received an email from my former Ph.D. supervisor, who had himself just received an email requesting, as a matter of extreme urgency, that someone—anyone—volunteer themselves to conduct a public interview with Banville that evening in a lecture hall in University College Dublin. He was due to receive an honorary lifetime membership of the university’s Law Society that evening, and whoever had initially been scheduled to handle the interview aspect of the proceedings had to cancel at the last minute, and they were now desperately looking for someone who could pull it off at short notice. I wasn’t sure that I was necessarily their guy but, deliberately denying myself any time to think about it, I rang the number anyway, and two hours later I was sitting in the UCD staff bar with the boss man, making small talk. (Against all reasonable expectations, Banville is really very good at small talk.)

While acknowledging that he would be unlikely to conceive of it in the same way, I had always imagined our eventual meeting would be a kind of lower-intensity literary version of that café sit-down scene in Michael Mann’s Heat, in which Pacino and De Niro appear on screen together for the first time. (In moments of greater clarity I understood that, at best, it would be an episode of Inside The Actor’s Studio, with me as a less polished and fulsome James Lipton). The way it panned out, though, not even I could fool myself into sensing any kind of frisson of tension or significance. Banville appeared not to have any particular interest in the topic of my thesis—or at least if he did, he managed not to betray it by asking me any questions on the matter. I was both slightly disappointed and slightly relieved by this. The thesis was entitled “Narcissism in the Fiction of John Banville”, and so there was always the slight but non-negligible possibility that he might understand the whole project to be a long-winded and tortuous accusation of self-obsession and vanity on his part. Even if he didn’t take it personally, there was a chance—far less slight and non-negligible—that he would consider the whole approach facile or wrong-headed or obtuse or in some other way completely beside the point. I had absolute confidence in my work, but—as paradoxical as this might sound (and probably is)—less than absolute confidence in my ability to maintain that confidence in the face of any degree of criticism or dismissal from of its subject. Now that I think about it, it’s likely that Banville had similar reasons for not asking me about it.

Apropos the issue of my spending (give or take) four years reading, thinking about and writing about his writing, he mentioned having interviewed Salman Rushdie for the New York Review of Books in about 1993, at the very height of the fatwa. He spent two full days transcribing their taped conversations. By the time he had finished, he said, he was consumed by an intense hatred of both Rushdie and himself. So he could, he assured me, imagine how I must feel about him after four years.

I chuckled drily and, I hoped, urbanely. It struck me that having a conversation with the man amounted to having Banville on tap. All I had to do was make a comment or ask a question and, as though I’d popped a coin in a vending machine, it would provoke an emanation from the same source that produced The Book of Evidence, Doctor Copernicus and Shroud. I felt an unaccountable, giddy compulsion to start pointing to things and people and demanding that he describe them. How would you characterize the taste of these vol-au-vents, Mr Banville?; or See that elderly man over there at the bar? Let’s have an adjective for him; or What would you say if I asked you to describe this wine? This was, after all, someone who has described the taste of gin more frequently and more variously and more vividly than probably any other novelist in history—gin, with its “silver-sweet fumes” (Eclipse), and its “cold and insidious and subtly discomposing” taste with “the faintest tinct of paraffin-blue in its depths” (The Infinities).

At this point the undergraduate from the university’s Law Society who had introduced us—and who seemed to be the main organizer of the event—had excused himself to go and check on the turnout in the lecture hall. Banville had just finished his own wine and was wondering aloud, presumably rhetorically, whether he might get away with swiping the untouched glass the Law Society guy had left behind. I gave him my blessing, though he seemed not to require it.

A large grey-bearded man with a German accent sidled up to our table and shook hands with Banville. He congratulated him on what he called his “apotheosis”—presumably he meant the lifetime membership of the Law Society—and handed over a pile of about five or six first editions and foreign translations, which Banville dutifully signed. (The man offered him a biro, but he declined, withdrawing from an inner pocket of his jacket a gracefully gold-trimmed Mont Blanc. This glamorous implement now unsheathed, the mere idea of Banville ever writing with anything else was instantly relegated to the category of the preposterous.) I thought how strange it was that the man had used this word, “apotheosis,” so enduringly associated as it was, for me, with Banville’s writing. I had, in fact, written something in my thesis about his repeated use of it.^[1] I wondered, briefly, whether the man could be making some kind of sly allusion here, but then checked this flight of obsessive fancy, realizing how unlikely it was that he would be as wonkishly preoccupied as I was with Banville’s fondness for a particular word, and what it might mean in the context of his work as a whole.

The conversation turned again, somehow, to the topic of death, specifically that of Banville’s death. We spoke briefly of the difficulties future biographers and scholars would come up against now that no one, not even novelists, wrote letters any more. He pointed out that emails were probably more useful from a future scholarship point of view, given that they were all automatically archived and organized and searchable, to which I countered that that was all well and good if you had the password. He conceded that this was a fair point, and suggested that if I played my cards right he might think to pass on his login details to me before he died. I said that I would be honored. The idea of Banville having anything as vulgar as login details, however, seemed as strangely implausible as Nabokov owning a pickup truck—he is that kind of writer. Did he use instant messaging, I wondered? (It was an odd thought, but it was not inconceivable. A few years ago, I interviewed the philosopher Peter Singer for a magazine, and he still occasionally pops up on Google Chat, an occurrence which gives rise to all kinds of inane impulses.) I speculated idly on whether Banville’s password might be something like “@pose0s1s” or, maybe, “banvillenobel2016.” Was he a Gmail man, I wondered? Probably not. Outlook Express, if anything.

The interview was less of an ordeal than I had imagined it might be. On our way down to the lecture theatre I had told him that I had agreed to it only a couple of hours previously, that I was as a consequence grossly underprepared and that he would therefore have to do a lot of the heavy lifting himself, and he had patted my arm lightly and said, “Oh, don’t worry about that, I’m a raddled old whore at this stage.” My questions seemed to me to shift from the bafflingly gnomic to the recklessly long-winded without ever occupying any intervening sweet spot of coherence and concision but, true to his word, he responded to them with an eloquence that, retrospectively, made those questions appear shrewd. Afterwards, there was a flurry of book-signings and hand-shakings, through which I stood awkwardly off to one side. There was some kind of official photograph that needed to be taken, and I allowed myself to be hustled into the shot, and then that was pretty much it for the evening.

As we walked toward the exit, Banville asked me whether I needed a lift home. I had not anticipated this; had I foreseen it as a possibility, I might well have taken the bus there instead of driving. I told him that I had my car—I think I may even, moronically, have produced my keys and held them aloft, as though some kind of proof of my having driven might be required—but almost immediately regretted doing so. It would, I thought, have been worth the trouble of getting the bus back the following morning to collect my car, had it meant getting a lift home with Banville. I found myself wishing, suddenly, to know what kind of car he drove and, above all, what kind of driver he was. Would he handle his car like he did his prose, with supreme confidence and restraint, changing lanes with suave precision, overtaking with brisk wit and style? Or would he be ill at ease behind the wheel, as I imagined his protagonists would be, constantly wrong-footed by the stubborn actuality of traffic lights and lane-mergers, the boorish incursions of other motorists? I remembered a bit in Martin Amis’s The Information about the comparative driving skills of poets and novelists. The (almost certainly spurious) jist was that Novelists are generally decent drivers, while poets don’t drive, or at least shouldn’t: “Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems.” And then I remembered Banville’s tendency to make grandiose-sounding claims in interviews about his aspirations of forging some sort of formal synthesis of poetry and the novel. Would he drive, I wondered, like a poet or a novelist? Would I gain some oblique insight into his mind, into his philosophical stance toward the world, by observing him negotiate the M50 and the Red Cow roundabout (that black comedy of infrastructural errors in which thousands of Dubliners play a daily role)? What would we chat about? How would he respond to questions as to fuel consumption, reliability, general performance? What radio stations, if any, would be preset on his car stereo? Would he have a SatNav, or one of those hands-free Bluetooth earpiece setups for his phone? I would now probably never know the answers to these questions. But perhaps that’s not such a terrible thing.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I successfully convinced a publisher that my thesis was worth the time and money it would cost them to publish. So I’ll be spending a further few months on Banville-related activities, hacking and thrashing the thing into a book-like shape; and then, if I’m lucky, my first monograph will afford me some sort of reputation as an academic, as, specifically, a Banville scholar. And these would all be great things, things that might—I permit myself to hope—even lead to that greatest of great things, an actual full-time job. In the meantime, I’ll just have to get over my discomfort with what seems to me to be the rank presumption of regarding oneself as an “expert” on the work of someone who is still living and writing and (who knows?) possibly using a hands-free Bluetooth earpiece while driving.

Eventually, I’ll have to come up with another topic on which to position myself as an expert. In my cockier moments, I sometimes fancy my chances with Nabokov. I would, of course, imagine him being utterly dismissive of whatever reading of his work I might decide to argue for. But that wouldn’t matter very much, because he is safely, unapproachably dead, and therefore reassuringly unlikely to sit down at the next table in a café, or offer me a lift home. I think it would be an easier relationship.

Back | 1. In a section dealing with the novel Shroud, I find that I wrote the following: “‘Apotheosis’, in its associations with ideas of self-perfection and deification, is a key term in Banville’s later work. The narcissistic content of the word as he tends to use it is connected to the notion of the self as a work of art.”