His Father’s Fellow Travelers

This is written at a dining room table, an island in a sea of packing-cases, cartons and drifts of wrapping paper and sealing tape. A mover has been struggling to unstick the top half of a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Five hundred books and 18 years had sunk it into the bottom half on which it rests. Time and letters; each with its own accumulating weight and subsidence.

I am here to help my father move from north to south, and from a large apartment to a small one. A great many things have stuck to him in his 86 years, even if they are only a fraction of what has fallen away. A major winnowing went on these past few days. Riding boots, a massive inlaid Victorian desk, six pairs of flannel long johns, a set of white tie and tails, a plastic dog kennel with a Snoopy doll on top--the older you get, the jokier the presents--and so on.

From earliest childhood, I thought of my father as a man of many books and many clothes. Both were chosen with passion, set out with care, and treated with ceremony. I picture a whole closet full of dark suits--he was an American lawyer working abroad--and one light-gray plaid. I never was sure of the significance of the plaid, but when he wore it, the day’s prospect seemed lighter. There was a vivid houndstooth-check sports coat, worn exclusively on weekends; and though it was worn with a necktie and a shirt with French cuffs, it declared a holiday for all of us: a trip to the country, or movies, or dinner out.

As for the books, they occupied entire walls and half-walls. There were all kinds: classical and modern literature, books on law and economics, poetry, essays, current fiction. They had a serious and substantial look, those editions of the ‘20s and ‘30s: cloth-bound, often wearing their jackets. There was a scattering of leather, as well; re-bound copies of paper-bound French and Spanish books; and later, when he began sending off to London and Oxford for catalogues, old atlases and travel memoirs.

This was not as stiff as it may sound. Well, the clothes were, maybe, but the books weren’t. Except for a short child’s difficulty in getting to the higher shelves, there was no question that every book was there for whoever wanted to read it.

Instead of handing us what he thought we might read, my father would tactfully edge a dozen books an inch or so out of the shelf, so we could make our choices unobserved. When I was 14, he extruded James Joyce’s “Ulysses”; he was not sure how much sense it would make to me, he explained later, but hoped that the sheer splurge and vigor of the language would be encouraging to a schoolboy on a low-cholesterol diet of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.

Sic transit Allied Van Lines. Moving from country to country and later, in the United States, from New York to Michigan to Washington D.C., the books followed loyally even as the clothes--because of retirement and because he began to pay greater attention to younger people and changing ways--lightened and simplified. Open-necked shirts, a zipper jacket, finally even a tam-o-shanter, made their appearance. While somewhere in a Detroit slum or on the Bolivian Altiplano, those dark suits are walking around, still providing ceremony, and of an essentially similar kind.

This time, though, things were going to be different. They had to be. Florida construction is big on swimming pools but small on uninterrupted wall space. You can’t hang bookshelves on a picture window any more than you can hang pictures. Clearly, those 1,500 books had to be radically thinned out.

We talked about it by phone over the past two months. My father’s vision was streamlined, crystalline. “I love ‘Bleak House’ (1905 edition, half-leather) but am I going to read it again?” “ ‘Don Quijote’ (Spanish edition, 1790, folio) is one of the funniest and most delightful books I know, but it is just silly to think that I’ll get back to it.” And of course, alongside these old companions there were the hangers-on. Paperbacks bought a dozen years ago in airports and looking like other members of our speeded-up society, infinitely older than, say, the “Don Quijote.” Junk. No question at all of taking them south. He would carry, in fact, only the essentials. His dictionaries. A set of Shakespeare. Two big poetry anthologies. “Toi Et Moi” by the French poet Geraldy--obscure today, certainly, but back in 1925, he and my mother each had a copy. Stripped down, figuratively winged, he would arrive in Gainesville. (Not Coral Gables; you want a university and a library.)

As for the rest, an auctioneer would come for the few genuinely valuable specimens. The second-hand bookstore might be persuaded to acquire the others in bulk or, failing that, the Salvation Army, or some church preparing a bazaar. He would make the arrangements. And of course, his children could pick out anything they wanted.

His children, all of them pressed for space, did; a carton or a half carton apiece. The auctioneer took 20 books. And when I arrived over the weekend, prepared for a scene of near-booklessness, 45 packed book cartons stood solidly on the floor.

He hadn’t really had time to make the selection, he told me. The Salvation Army was busy. The University of Florida library would doubtless want quite a few of the books. Perhaps a compact selection of novels and memoirs might be nice to keep, after all. Certainly, you could dispose of unwanted books in Florida just as well as in Washington. There would be no problem putting the cartons in the spare bedroom; if necessary, the beds could go on top of them.

On moving day, the foreman tactfully informed us that the extra weight would increase the charges by some $1,000. “You know, you just have to figure that a move will always cost you more than you planned for,” my father, a veteran of everything but getting rid of his books, told me philosophically.

Out of curiosity, I looked through an unsealed carton. A paperback of Joyce Cary’s “The Horse’s Mouth.” Six volumes of Shelley, circa 1900, faded pink with faded gold stamp. A thin volume of Civil War chants, with all their Northern jubilee-and-hurrah-ing and their Southern defiance (Maryland’s patriotic gore was there, and so were the marvelously unregenerate lines: “I hate the nasty eagle/With all his brag and fuss”). First editions of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s later poetry. An illustrated edition of poems by Blaise Cendrars translated by John Dos Passos, who prefaces them with an angry denunciation of “literary philosophers regularly favorable to fascism, pederasty and the snobmysticism of dying religion” (Eliot? Stevens? Yeats?) who have superseded the vigorous literary Bohemia of the ‘20s. It’s not that you can’t discard books. It’s that they can’t discard you.