botanizing

Books

A couple of weeks ago The New York Times had a review of Larry McMurtry’s new book, Books:  A Memoir.  The review was not especially strong, explaining that McMurtry’s narrative was disjointed and his stories were too often dropped before they were developed.  I immediately ordered the book despite the caveats raised by the Times.

Books:  A Memoir arrived quickly, and I read it yesterday.  The Times review as accurate; and as I read I wished that McMurtry had better developed his stories; yet, Books:  A Memoir was wonderful.

When I first opened Books I was amazed and a little intimidated by the list of books that McMurtry has published.  My response was the kind had by someone who can’t write books when faced with another who seems to have written so many with such ease and success.  But surely I read too much into a simple list.  Near the end of Books, Murtry talks about himself as a writer, describing writing as “neither a keen pleasure nor a hated chore.”  He calls it “simply my vocation.”   

I have read only two of McMurtry’s earlier books—All of My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers and The Last Picture Show.  The film of the latter is among my favorites, and I watch it every couple of years.  A copy of McMurtry’s Roads sits on my library shelves, and I look forward to reading it because my own interest in travelling American roads is only a little less strong than my interest in reading.  I have read regularly the reviews that McMurtry has published in the New York Review of Books, which are strikingly well informed, giving the impression of a writer who has exceptional facility with a broad body of knowledge.

Books is not about the vocation of writing books or the writing life, it is about what McMurtry calls “a powerful competitor” to writing:  book buying. Books is about having books—searching for, handling, accumulating, and then selling books.  It is about book collections and the book trade.

McMurtry says the “antiquarian book trade is an anecdotal culture.”  Books fits that culture as a succession of anecdotes.  His chapters are fragments of memories, barely shaped into stories.  Still, it holds the shape and stuff of a life about which McMurtry has cared—it has the joy of experience and the pleasure of various characters.  That experience and those characters provide a sociology of America and show our social structuring. 

Books reminded me of a used bookstore.  Its short chapters, one after another, were like the piles of books that crowd aisles.  It had valuable finds amid dross.  It was all a pleasure—one enjoys looking through the piles and scanning the books on the shelves, pulling out the interesting ones to see how they feel.

From its beginning, Books made my imagination hum.  I could read only a few sentences before my memories would overwhelm my concentration, and the words on the page would fuzz before the vivid images in my reveries.  McMurtry begins Books by telling us that his parents had not read him stories as a child, and he tells us where he discovers stories in the first books that he acquires.  And I was thinking about being read to as a child and thinking about my first books.  I was thinking about the consuming desire for books and the pleasure of reading.  I would read few paragraphs then put Books aside to reach for my pen.

*  *  *

Larry McMurtry, 2008. Books:  A Memoir.  Simon & Schuster, New York.

Dickinson’s Windows

South light of winters would have lain on Emily Dickinson’s small sleigh bed.  Her bed offered itself to both low south and late west light.  There were windows on each of those walls of her corner bedroom. Her small writing table stood angled between those two windows.  I have not thought about Dickinson and light.  They do not seem affiliated.  I have wondered about the values of her windows.  They were portals to spy on arrivals, allowing her moments to decide whether to remain hidden or to descend to conversation. Dickinson could ‘play’ from the windows, dropping sweets and surreptitious notes.

When I think about her windows, it is her mirror that comes to mind. A small mirror hung above her dresser, and I wonder whether she was too tightly framed by it.  I doubt a tiny mirror could have held Emily Dickinson’s ecstatic vision.  Seated at her writing table, however, she could have looked to the windows, eyes flitting to give a quick glance to south and west, to catch her own face in quarter profile in each window.  In her windows, Dickinson could have seen herself reflected against the outside world. She could see herself in the world without entering it, her face poised against leaves and the town, providing a cautiously distant perspective, a sense of self kept at reflective remove from wearying conflicts.

Below her mirror, Dickinson had hung pictures of George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  She could capture her face in the mirror, then look down to her mentors, and up again, holding the shapes of their strongly outlined faces against her own in the mirror.  Her hands could be on the chest below the mirror.  She could reach down to the bottom drawer, where she had collected her own poetry, miscellaneous sheets as well as sheaves bound by string.

There was a large mirror over the fireplace in the Dickinson front parlour.  On my tour of the house there were several other people, including teenage girls who seemed to know Dickinson quite well.  When we were in the parlour, a lovely young woman, who was perhaps 16, asked the tour guide whether Dickinson had cared about her looks and how other people saw her. The guide could have told us about Dickinson’s tiny mirror, her reflective windows, and how she gazed at the pictures of Browning and Eliot, but these were not part of her answer for the young woman. After the guide’s answer, the young woman turned toward the parlour mirror.  She looked intently at her own face.  Here she was.  Her gaze was self-reflective, but the strong look connected to Emily, to questions of self and place in the world, and to wariness at the questions of the world’s gaze.  The young woman looked in the mirror as if looking through Emily’s windows to find the poet.

*   *   *
For RT, who shared her observations and put Emily Dickinson on our itinerary.

Henry Dies

I thought that Ralph Waldo Emerson would write about Henry Thoreau’s death.  I expected Emerson to make some note of his feelings or describe what he had done after hearing of Henry’s death, but there is no note of Thoreau’s death in Emerson’s journals.  Emerson and Henry had been wearyingly close.  Thoreau had lived in Emerson’s house for extended periods on at least two occasions.  For even longer, Thoreau had been a handy fixit-man and firewood cutter for Emerson. 

Emerson knew Thoreau’s death was coming.  In January 1862, Emerson wrote the header “Old Age” in his GL journal.  “As we live longer,” Emerson wrote, “it looks as if our company were picked out to die first, & we live on in a lessening minority.”  Emerson listed friends in England and Rome who had died.  Here, Emerson noted, Mary Howell Russell, a friend of his wife Lidian, had died, and he jotted also “I am ever threatened by the decays of Henry T.”

On the first of April 1862, when Thoreau lay immobile, dying, in bed, Emerson went to Walden Pond, where he walked across the ice.  The next day he wrote in his journal, “I walked across it again.  I fancied it was late in the season to do thus; but Mr. Thoreau told me, this afternoon, that he has known the ice to hold to the 18th April.”   Henry’s mind remains like the ice, but his body is melting. 

Emerson noted later that the ice remained unbroken on 18 April despite the warmth of the day, and Mr. Channing, he noted, had been on the ice the day before.

May 6, 1862, went without remark in Emerson’s journal.  It was later in the month that he wrote the header:
“Books bequeathed to me
by Henry D. Thoreau.”
The books were mostly Hindu religious myths and other writings on eastern art and philosophy.  Thoreau had introduced Emerson to Asian myths.

Through June and July, Emerson read Thoreau’s journals.  “Henry T. remains erect, calm, self-subsistent, before me, and I read him not only truly in his Journal, but he is not long out of mind when I walk, and, as today, row upon the pond.  He chose wisely no doubt for himself to be the bachelor of thought & nature that he was,—how near to the old monks in their ascetic religion.”

Emerson began to quote from and comment on Thoreau’s journal.  “He loved the sweet fragrance of Melilot,” Emerson recalled and then, in response to a description of Henry’s, “He is very sensible of the odor of waterlilies.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne was living in Concord when Henry died, and he also failed to mention the death in his journals.  Hawthorne had noted well the living Thoreau.  As Hawthorne planned his move to Concord, which had been encouraged by Emerson, Thoreau had planted a garden for Hawthorne and his new wife—Emerson had hired Henry to do the gardening.  Hawthorne would rent a house that had been in Emerson’s family, a house that Hawthorne would call the “Old Manse” in stories that would add to his fame.  Within days of Hawthorne’s arrival at the Old Manse, he tells us in his journal:

“Mr. Thoreau dined with us yesterday.  He is a singular character—a young man with much of the wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own.”

Only a few months later, in the spring, Thoreau told Hawthorne that he was leaving Concord—Henry had been living in Emerson’s house and Hawthorne noted that “Emerson appears to have suffered some inconveniency from his experience of Mr. Thoreau.”  Hawthorne wrote, “On my account, I should like to have him remain here; he being one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest-tree; and, with all this wild freedom, there is high and classic cultivation in him too.”

Ellery Channing began in the days after Henry’s death to write his biography.  On the day that Henry died, Channing went to the Alcotts’ home to tell them the news.  Like Channing, Bronson Alcott had been deeply affected by Henry, and, hearing of Henry’s death, Alcott walked to the Thoreau house to kiss the forehead of his beloved friend.

Louisa May Alcott, who had attached to Henry a young girl’s romantic fantasies, wrote about Thoreau’s death.  “On Tuesday at eight in the morning he asked to be lifted, tried to help do it but was too weak and lying down again passed quietly and painlessly out of the old world into the new,” Alcott wrote to Sophia Foord, who had also admired Henry.  Louisa Alcott was displeased that Emerson had disavowed Henry’s wish not to have a church service at his death.  “Emerson,” Louisa wrote, “ said his sorrow was so great he wanted all the world to mourn with him.”  She disliked the address that Emerson read at the funeral.  In Louisa’s mind, Henry might have belonged to her.  “It was a lovely day, clear, and calm, and springlike,” she wrote to Foord, “and as we all walked after Henry’s coffin with its pall of flowers, carried by six of his townsmen who had grown up with him, it seemed as if Nature wore her most benignant aspect to welcome her dutiful and loving son to his long sleep in her arms."

It was 6 May 1862 when Henry died.

*   *   *

Notes

“As we live longer . . .”  p. 165 in Allardt, L. and D. W. Hill (eds.), 1982.  The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume XV, 1860-1866.  Belknap Press, Cambridge.

“I walked across it again. . .”  p. 249.  ibid.

“Books bequeathed to me . . .” p. 252.  ibid.

“Henry T. remains erect, calm . . .” p. 261. ibid.

“He loved the sweet . . .”  and “He is very sensible . . .” p. 263.  ibid.

“Mr. Thoreau dined with us . . .” p. 105 in Arvin, N. (ed.), 1929.  The heart of Hawthorne’s Journals.  Barnes and Noble, Inc., New York.

“Emerson appears to have suffered . . .” p. 113, ibid.

“On my account . . .” p. 112-113, ibid.

The story of Channing telling Alcott of Henry’s death is from Saxton, M., 1995.  Louisa May Alcott:  A Modern Biography.  Noonday Press, New York.

“On Tuesday at eight . . .”  p. 247-248, ibid.

Acknowledgments

In a review in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Alan Hollinghurst begins by looking at acknowledgments, which he believes provide “slightly cryptic narratives of the writer’s heroic struggle.”  In the acknowledged, he finds boasts (‘see all of the important people I know’) as well as a record of debt.

Authors and the success of writing a book make me curious – as a consequence, I often turn first to the acknowledgments when I pick-up a new book.  There is often a different tone in the acknowledgments than in the book’s body – the difference is akin to that between our speaking voice and the voice we hear in our head.  The acknowledgment voice, like that voice in our head, rationalizes while also reeling-back through recall, sorting the names and events and their effects.

Some books lack acknowledgments.  Lionel Shriver’s recent The Post-Birthday World, for example, has none.  That absence fits well the deception of the novel. The parceling of names and events among paragraphs and categories in acknowledgments speaks of an author’s values and circumstances.  Does the absence of acknowledgments speak also of a certain muteness in the voice in the head?

The writer’s circle – those friends and colleagues who inspire and assist or simply join the writer for tea – are critical, I imagine, to the creative endeavor. The channels of ideas and energy that help to create books are fascinating, and I look for them in acknowledgments. 

There’s a will to connect in reading acknowledgments.  I want to know whether I know anyone acknowledged – a recognition that would give me at least a tenuous connection to the writer and his or her creative process.  Reading acknowledgments may also reflect my desire to be acknowledged – not only to have had some value in the creation of work as substantial as a book, but also to exist in that circle of writers, where creation and conversation and art and life mix (in my imagination at least).

Jacques Barzun’s A Stroll with William James, a book about James’s intellect, which I took from the library a few days ago, has the acknowledgments titled “A Personal Note.”  Barzun begins:  “This book is the record of an intellectual debt.”  As a record of debt, I’m intrigued that the entire Stoll could be read as acknowledgments.  But the body of the book is something other than a record, more than a memoirist acknowledgment of understanding and influence, it is Barzun recreating James’s ideas, and it’s appropriate, I suppose, that he acknowledged the source at the beginning.

*  *  *
Notes
Alan Hollinghurst’s review of Satyr Square:  A Year, a Life in Rome by Leonard Barkan is in the New York Review of Books (volume 54, number 10, June 14, 2007), and I have quoted from page 40.

Jacques Barzun’s A Stroll with William James was published in 1983 by Harper and Row, New York.  The quote is from page vii.

I acknowledge that I have been listed in the acknowledgments of at least one book.  I thank the author for recognizing my role.

I acknowledge also that a book I co-edited in 1996 does not have any acknowledgments.  I regret that omission and wish now to thank everyone that I then neglected.

Some Nights Ago

The sky still held a little blue.  A broad belt of retted cloud was suffused with saffron.  I drove up the Selway River to camp above a cobble bar of white stones.  To take my place here, I tossed the day’s New York Times in the fire ring and piled-on handfuls of fallen sticks.  The Times was reluctant to catch fire.   I grabbed dried grasses and handfuls of cottonwood leaves to place on the newspaper and humped the sticks over them all.  The grasses and leaves took a match and fire transferred to the Times.  The fire rose into the sticks.  The first moist smoke drifted down to the river and across the Selway.  As the flame steadied, I added logs from home to the fire.

I fixed tea from hot water in a thermos and sat in my canvas chair next to the fire.  The gibbous moon rose up river, and, in the dusk, milky Venus sat over the conifer-covered hills to the west. I began reading C. S. Giscombe’s Giscome Road, poems about travels in and the landscape of Canada.  Giscombe’s uneven, sometimes interrupted lines, following the length of fast steps, exerted breathing, or a steady gaze taken at a long rest, reminded me of Gary Snyder’s work. 

“The song’s a commotion rising in the current . . .” the volume's first poem begins.  The sound of the Selway rose.  A river finds its volume when the commotion of day dies away.   At the campfire, I read the poems aloud to myself, my frosty breath mixed with the fire smoke.  “ . . . the voice was always centerless talking that was leading up to song, was about to / be the horn that marked the edge of the water–”

I went to bed when I finished reading the volume of poems.  In the morning I was up at first light and drove three miles down river to the Wilderness Café, which wasn’t yet open.  I sat in the parking lot in my truck to wait, certain that it wouldn’t be too long.  The owner arrived about 6:15. He went inside but didn’t turn on the lights.  He turned on the television, a garish, shifting glare of yellow, red, and green behind the counter.  I waited.  Perhaps ten minutes later, another man arrived, and he opened the door of the restaurant.  The owner stepped outside with the man, and they smoked cigarettes while leaning against the building; each man stood with a knee bent to put a foot against the siding. 

My friends, writers and English professors, arrived at 6.30.  Cecil Giscombe, the poet, was with them.  We would all backpack up the Selway River.  After breakfast.  After a cup of tea.  We put on packs, then began the walk.

“[A]t the river-landing the field name verges on the day name: / at the river-landing’s the place where the river’s 'noble' in a description of it there—/ the river’s aimless self & the portage trail are something else, one goes / off into the trees”  the poet said.

*  *  *
Quotations from “Sound Carries” in Giscome Road by C. S. Giscombe (1998, Dalkey Archive Press)

Nietzsche's Umbrella

I first read Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1984.  I had picked-up a paperback copy in Iowa during a Christmas break when I was in graduate school, and I read the novella while I hunkered over the heating vent in my bedroom. Reading the novella that first time made me think about writing as a way of understanding beauty.  Of course, the book isn’t about beauty, it’s more about fear, especially of cages, and a will to live freely. 

I reread the novella yesterday, which was our warmest day of the declining winter.  I lay on my couch in the sun as I read.  The paperback has narrow margins, requiring considerable movement of my big hands as I read each page.

One of my favorite parts of the novella occurs after Holly’s older husband Doc has come to New York to fetch her back to Texas.  Holly, twice a runaway in Texas and a teenage bride to Doc, had escaped the cage of Doc’s love and domesticity for a more feral lifestyle.  Here’s Holly’s soliloquy to Mr. Bell, who owns a bar down the block from her apartment:

“Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,” Holly advised him.  “That was Doc’s mistake.  He was always lugging home wild things.  A hawk with a hurt wing.  One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg.  But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing:  the more you do the stronger they get.  Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods.  Or fly into a tree.  Then a taller tree.  Then the sky.  That’s how you’ll end up, Mr. Bell.  If you let yourself love a wild thing.  You’ll end up looking at the sky.”

Rereading Breakfast at Tiffany’s made me think of Nietzsche. Holly Golightly and Friedrich Nietzsche were much the same—both looking for a Dionysian world, both escapists at odds with social norms.

While I was wandering in the desert a year ago I was thinking about Nietzsche’s insanity and wondering how it was related to his isolation and self-transformation into a god. Holly Golightly was neither insane nor isolated, but she and Nietzsche were both self-transformers.  As I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I thought about Holly Golightly and Friedrich Nietzsche walking hand-in-hand, stopping in front of Tiffany’s—you can imagine Nietzsche standing behind her, hunched to look over her shoulder, his hands clasped behind his back, as she looks through her dark glasses through the store’s window.  Nietzsche would surely have been carrying his red umbrella.

Holly Golightly’s soliloquy reminded me of this haiku-like sentence from Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin:  “Rain or shine, Nietzsche never went out without a red umbrella to shield his afflicted eyes from the light.”

Nietzsche, with his sensitive eyes, and feral Holly refused the light of the sky.  Both Holly and Nietzsche go lightly beyond the constraints of social cages, lightly through the effects of their poses, but neither accepts light—Holly wears always dark glasses and Nietzsche has his umbrella.

I wonder about Nietzsche and Holly’s apprehensions.  I wonder whether escapable cages and tilting our umbrellas to shade our afflictions may be essential to achieve a kind of personal poetry.  I wonder also whether those acts of personal poetry, rather than either isolation or insanity, are the keys to understanding Nietzsche’s transformation to a god.

* * *
Notes:

The quotation from Lesley Chamberlain’s (1996, Picador) Nietzsche in Turin is from p. 130.

The quotation from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) is from p. 59 of the Signet reprint.

Botanizing the Nelsons

Aven Nelson’s childhood and mine were separated by little more than ten miles and 100 years.  Our childhood’s were played-out on the agricultural plains and in the wooded ravines where the acute angle made by the Mississippi and Des Moines rivers comes to a point in southeastern Iowa.  My ancestors had moved west from Ohio, settling in the vicinity of the Nelson’s farm, and later moved the ten miles to Farmington, where I was reared. Aven Nelson was born in 1859, and I in 1958.  We both became botanists interested in the plant diversity of the American West.

I’ve been thinking about Aven Nelson because of Frieda Knobloch’s book Botanical Companions.  While in the library last week to get a volume on the life and letters of a 19th century botanist, I noticed on the shelf the slim, black Botanical Companions.  I hadn’t seen it before, and it looked new.  What I found in Botanical Companions was wonderful.  Knobloch has explored many of the same ideas of botanical travel, collection, and memory through which I’ve been treading.  She explores these ideas in regard to Aven and Ruth Ashton Nelson.

The marriage of Ruth Ashton to Aven Nelson is one of Knobloch’s major themes.  They married in 1931, following the death of Aven Nelson’s first wife in 1929.  Ruth Ashton and Aven Nelson were married on her 35th birthday; Aven was 72.  The disparity in their ages is always a curiosity and Knobloch tries to explore it, although little material appears to remain that could inform us of their married life or even the botanical experiences they shared.  In the few photographs of the couple in Knobloch’s book, they are always apart, never touching, but they share broad smiles.

My first sense of Ruth Ashton Nelson was that she provided late in the 20th century a link to the frontier botany of the American West, in which Aven Nelson was an important player.  It was that link that was on my mind when I met Ruth.

The pasque flowers had recently turned to fruit in the spring of 1984.  Ruth Ashton Nelson was 88 and might have suffered a minor stroke the year before.  Through mutual acquaintances, I was invited to meet her at Skyland Ranch, her property in the hills above Estes Park, Colorado. Ruth wore a pale, weathered yellow sweater in the log house that was heated by a fire in a wood stove.  She moved well but with a slight stoop and lowered herself into a comfortable chair.  Her chair faced a broad window that framed a view of the peaks of the Front Range.  Those peaks—Powell, Otis, Hallet’s and Taylor—had fresh snow from earlier in the day, and they were shaded by low clouds. 

I asked Ruth about the early days of collecting in the Rocky Mountains, and she told me the already well known story of Aven Nelson’s appointment at the University of Wyoming and how he began to collect plants.  Ruth spoke only generally about the numerous trips she and Aven Nelson had made throughout the Rocky Mountains to collect.  As we talked, her eyes were still; her arms on the chair’s arms lay unmoved.  It was only when she began to talk about Alaska that her eyes seemed to focus, to shine more.  She and Aven were at Denali in 1936 to make a plant collection for the National Park Service.  The park superintendent drove them each day in his passenger car to collection sites until the car broke-down on the rough roads.  After that, Ruth and Aven took whatever service truck went out to get into the field to collect.  She smiled at the fond memory.  Ruth and Aven prepared a manuscript on the flora of the park and left it with the Park Service to publish, which they never did, Ruth recalled with frustration.  Although Ruth answered my questions, she seemed to have little interest in or energy for telling stories.  I wasn’t sure of her reticence but respected her short answers by not probing too deeply or for too long.

Ruth Ashton Nelson had died by the time that Frieda Knobloch began Botanical Companions, but Knobloch includes in the center of the book a set of letters to the late Ruth.  They are the letters of inquiry a scholar would send to an important informant.  The letters, I found, were the critical part of the book.  They present the dilemma of understanding—the sparseness of relicts, the absence of telling details, and the manner in which we project from ourselves to the things we want to understand.  Later in the book, Knobloch tells us that when she looks in the direction of Ruth Ashton Nelson, she recognizes “that I cannot look directly at her, a very complicated amalgam of her and me looks back.”  What Knobloch finds is a relationship, although certainly a one-sided affair, with the late Ruth. Knobloch suggests the point is to “understand some of the texture of relationship” through a sort of scholarly empathy enacted by creating her own personal narrative that interacts with the botanical experience and marriage of Aven and Ruth Nelson.

Frieda Knobloch tells us what she does as a scholar of the Nelsons.  It is the kind of narrative, informing us of how and why, that she would like to have had from the Nelsons.  When the facts of Ruth Ashton Nelson’s life and marriage become too tenuous for scholarship, Knobloch turns to a parallel story of her grandmother and mother. There is the sense that we reach for what is available when we can’t have what is wanted—if Ruth Nelson’s history is unavailable, then other histories will need to substitute.  What may be most tangible is the sense of the unknowable as well as will to handle the few relicts, to make new collections, and to tell a story.

Virginia Woolf on Emily Brontë

Virginia Woolf on Emily Brontë:  “It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.  Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers.  She could free life from its dependence on facts, with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.” 

From “‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’” in The Common Reader

*  *  *
The photograph was a breakfast view from my big back windows of the first sun on a tree's snowy upper branches.

Beginning Inheritance

I look annually to the Booker Prize, which is awarded in the U.K. to writers for novels, as a good source for book recommendations.  If the year’s winner doesn’t sound appealing, then the short list for the prize offers alternatives.  When I saw the announcement in The New York Times that Kiran Desai had received this year’s Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, my eyebrows raised.  The Times described the novel’s themes of immigration and estrangement, and I knew that I wanted to read it.  I wanted to read the novel because the immigration ‘debate’ in the U.S. has left me cold but wary of racism and xenophobia, and I thought that a novelist’s story might explore more intently the senses and consequences of immigration than American politicians, the public’s shrill ire, or news ‘analysis’ had managed. The Inheritance of Loss is set partly in India, and the country engages my imagination.  My friend BN emigrated from India as a child, and we have talked about her experience.  After I first read about The Inheritance of Loss, I e-mailed BN to ask whether she would read the book with me.

I went in search of a copy of The Inheritance of Loss.  First I went to the local independent bookstore, which is where I prefer to get books.  I like the store’s devotion to breadth of taste and ideas and the haphazard piles of books.  The store, however, didn’t have a copy of The Inheritance of Loss.  I tried next our campus bookstore, a place now managed by one of the national chain bookstores. The Inheritance of Loss wasn’t on the shelf in the literature section so I asked at the information counter whether they had a copy.  The worker, who happens to order the inventory for the store, had never heard of Desai (this was doubly strange to me because Kiran Desai’s mother is also a well known novelist, Anita Desai) or the Booker Prize.  I wondered at the implications of this lack of awareness for the state of the major research university where I work.   I ordered a copy of Desai’s book.

Several years ago I had picked-up Kiran Desai’s first novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard in London.  It was enough to make me want to read The Inheritance of Loss, but I hoped the new book would not use the magic realism of the first.

I started The Inheritance of Loss on Sunday morning with my second cup of tea and my legs propped amid the piles of books on the coffee table.  The first paragraph called-up an image of the Himalayan peak Kanchenjunga, and my thoughts went back to Frank Smythe’s The Kanchenjunga Adventure.  Smythe has seemed to me to be among the gentlest writers in the genre of Himalayan climbing adventures.  I folded The Inheritance of Loss over my thigh while I drank tea and thought about Smythe’s writing, botanizing, and photographs.  At the end of page 10, I laid the book spine-up on the couch—the words Sikkim, Darjeeling, and Kalimpong sent me to the library for the big, hardbound atlas.  I knew we were in northern India, in tea country, but I wanted a better geographic sense.  I wanted to triangulate Nepal, Bhutan, and Kalimpong to place my imagination.  My fingers began to trace the rivers that flow from the Himalaya, and I started to think about an airplane, trains, and buses.  Another four pages, and black cobras distracted me.  Nagas, I thought—beings that were part human and part snake.  I again picked up the atlas.  Nagaland—the home of the Nagas—lay east of the story in The Inheritance of Loss, but I was thinking beyond geography to the roles of snakes in Indian stories and to BN, who had once offered one of her names to a woman who, recently divorced, was looking for a new family name and to whom the experience of snakes appealed.

The Inheritance of Loss was going to be slow, but the reading was joyful.  The description was rich.  Paragraphs and pages kept launching my imagination in different directions.  I would put the book in my lap, loll my head on the couch’s back, and follow the trajectories of thought.  It was wonderful.

Eric Newby

I read today in the New York Times of the death of Eric Newby and recalled one of my most enjoyable weekends.  That memory dates from 1991 when I lived in Duluth, Minnesota.  It was Halloween, a Thursday, and the first snow of the season had begun that afternoon.  When I left my office at 9:00 that evening about four inches of snow lay on the ground.  The next morning the telephone rang at 6:30—it was an undergraduate who worked in my lab.  She had called to say that classes had been canceled so she wouldn’t be at work.  Why, I wondered with drowsy frustration, couldn’t she have waited until at least 7:00 to call instead of getting me out of bed?  The radio reported that nine inches of snow had fallen and a foot was expected by the end of the day.  DJs on the radio interviewed a newspaper boy about the problems he’d had delivering papers that morning.  Despite the closure of campus for the day, I walked down the hill to work—when I left that evening after dark, the snow was shin deep except in the drifts where it covered my thighs. It snowed still when I went to bed.

The next morning I found four feet of snow drifted against the sliding doors to my deck.  A high ridge ran down the middle of the driveway.  Cars were snow hills.  A larch, still with ochre leaves, had become a white bottle-brush.  I watched the falling snow through the bay window of my living room, watched through the day from my warm couch, while I read Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.  Newby was a buyer of women’s fashions, and the book began in London at the showing of the 1956 Spring Collection in a blizzard.  He bagged the job for the idea of climbing a 25,000 feet high peak in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush.  Newby had not climbed mountains so he went to Wales for a weekend of training before departing for Asia.  Eric Newby must have loved pathos for he built his story upon layer after layer of ill-preparation and beleaguered failure, but he told it with adventure and well-stated, if subtle, humor.  I laughed out loud through the day, page after page.  It was beautiful travel writing.  I read the book in one sitting, taking breaks only to fix tea and to watch the snow fall.  It remains one of the most wonderful, vivid days in my memory.

When I finished the book at the end of the afternoon, the radio reported the snow depth was at 36 inches and the wind chill at -20º.  Hard, gusting wind through the day had drifted the snow to five feet deep in my driveway.  I went out in the evening in the intense cold to begin shoveling.  I could hear the scrape of other shovels and the groan of snow plows. The cloudy sky was brightly lit by street lights that reflected from the snow.  It was a glowing night.  The snow had stopped.  I thought about Eric Newby stopped at an ice fall at an elevation of 18,000 feet in the Hindu Kush.  Lacking experience with ice, Newby took from his pack a book on technical climbing and followed its instructions on chopping steps—“there was nothing else to do,” Newby wrote—“It was far harder work than I had imagined . . .”

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The radio this evening forecast that we would have our first snow flurries tonight on the hills and valleys of eastern Washington. I’d like to reread Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Perhaps tonight’s snow will be deeper and longer than expected.  It’s a short walk to my wood pile, and a day before the fireplace with tea and the great pleasure of Newby’s story-telling would be welcome.