Door-to-Door No More

In some decades-off family-bonding moment, children now unborn will nod indulgently and exchange significant looks as Grandma natters on about a time when men and women came to her front door, in the flesh, uninvited, unannounced--no security clearance, no metal detector--just to sell stuff. Vacuum cleaners. Magazine subscriptions. Cosmetics. Encyclopedias.

Uh-huh, sure, Grandma. Whatever you say.

The last of the door-to-door Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen laid down his 32-volume burden in January. That was in England, where the doors are not as far apart as they are here, where the territory is dauntingly bigger and the highways temptingly broader and the last such salesman hung it up two years ago. The CD-Rom Britannica--as amazing to me as that marvel of the midway, the Lord’s Prayer written on a grain of rice, was to my grandsires--has all but replaced the five-foot, 50-pound shelf.

I own three sets of Encyclopedias Britannica. One I won in sixth grade for licking every other kid in the state at spelling. It weighed so much that the back of our green Chevy Impala sagged all the way home. Another I got just after the publisher cleaved the Britannica in twain, into Micropedia and Macropedia, which sounded unpleasantly like geopolitical names for South Pacific islands. The third is leather-bound, the fabled 11th edition, whose contributors included Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud--a moving-sale bargain, the best $100 I ever spent.

Over two centuries, entries were written at times by W. E. B. DuBois, Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, MacArthur and Macauley, Walter Scott and George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson and Leon Trotsky.

If this was going to be about encyclopedias, I would linger on the random-access pleasures of pulling down a volume to find one subject, then fluttering hither and yon among pages as thin as butterfly wings, distracted by other enticements, meandering from Gargantua to genomes, lost somewhere between ghee and Gobelin tapestries, the journey more alluring than the destination.

But this is about other men, the salesmen--wherever they are.

*

I tried to find the last Britannica house-call salesman to tread the depopulated sidewalks of Southern California, but I simply could not.

Maybe it’s better that way, that he remain mythic, a man bold enough to live on commission--and not by selling trifling eye-shadow-and-lipstick sets or quart bottles of floor cleaner but on the monumental sale of a huge and expensive product, as if he were going door-to-door to sell Chryslers. I don’t expect he died in his traces, for I imagine him to be both well-read and well-muscled, as his kind must have been since they sold the first Britannica in 1768, wearing Willy Loman’s “smile and a shoeshine,” though the shoes had buckles on them and the encyclopedia was a trifling three volumes.

Until the consolations and isolations of the mail-order catalog and the two-income family and the Internet, these men peopled the census of American life and literature: the Yankee peddler, the sharp operator, the traveling Babbitt, the footloose, unfettered man of enterprise. Willy Loman peddling his wares, Moses Pray shaking down widows with his gilt-edged Bibles, Elmer Gantry hawking farm implements and doling out farmer’s-daughter jokes as a bonus. You had to pay for their papers of pins or their lightning rods, but the gossip came free from the two-legged, one-man newspaper and dry-goods store who roamed prairie towns and countrysides that were starved for company and talk and a new face. They would not have welcomed the modern promise: “No salesman will call.”

Do we miss these men or not?

Nowadays, they peddle their goods, and their not-so-goods, by telephone. The sound of a doorbell, of a stranger’s knuckles on wood, has come to be the unsettling sound of true believers intent on sharing their faith . . . of scam artists with low-monthly-payment schemes for repaving or refinancing or repairing what may not need any of that . . . the sound of volunteers with police-sketch flyers conducting frantic searches for yet another Polly Klass.

*

One of my favorite bits of literary gossip--the kind of backstairs talk that ruminates on Shakespeare’s second-best bed and Byron’s overfond family ties--is the story that Samuel Taylor Coleridge never finished his epic fantasy poem “Kubla Khan” (“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan” and so forth) because he was interrupted by a salesman knocking at his cottage door.

Now, a man whose learning I respect tells me it was Coleridge’s landlady, not a salesman, who blew his opiate concentration. I am only set back, not shattered, by that information. The time will come when only drug dealers come knocking, and call girls and perhaps landladies, too, and somehow our ingenuity for isolation will find a way around even that. I don’t want to be interrupted grazing between “Thebes” and “thoracic surgery” and forget what I was looking for in the first place.