27
CHAZ AND I have lived for twenty years in a commodious Chicago town house. This house is not empty. Chaz and I have added, I dunno, maybe three or four thousand books, untold numbers of movies and albums, lots of art, rows of photographs, rooms full of comfortable furniture, a Buddha from Thailand, exercise equipment, carved elephants from India, African chairs and statues, and who knows what else. Of course I cannot do without a single one of these possessions, including more or else every book I have owned since I was seven, starting with Huckleberry Finn. I still have all the Penrod books, and every time I look at them, I’m reminded of Tarkington’s inventory of the contents of Penrod’s pants pockets. After reading it a third time, as a boy, I jammed my pockets with a pocketknife, a Yo-Yo, marbles, a compass, a stapler, an oddly shaped rock, a hardball, a ball of rubber bands, and three jawbreakers. These, in an ostensible search for a nickel, I emptied out on the counter of Harry Rusk’s grocery, so that Harry Rusk could see that I was a Real Boy.
My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs, and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven’t read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may need to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill’s history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, forty-seven novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. That 1957 best seller by James Gould Cozzens was eviscerated in a famous essay by Dwight Macdonald, who read through that year’s list of fiction best sellers and surfaced with a scowl. I remember reading the novel late into the night when I was fourteen, stirring restlessly with the desire to be possessed by love.
I cannot throw out these books. Some are enchanted because I have personally turned all their pages and read every word. They’re shrines to my past hours. Perhaps half were new when they came to my life, but most were used, and I remember where I found every one. The set of Kipling at the Book Nook on Green Street in Champaign. The scandalous The English Governess in a shady bookstore on the Left Bank in 1965 (two dollars, today ninety-one). The Shaw plays from Cranford’s on Long Street in Cape Town, where Irving Freeman claimed he had half a million books. Like an alcoholic trying to walk past a bar, you should see me trying to walk past a used bookstore. Other books I can’t throw away because, well, they’re books, and you can’t throw away a book. Not even a cookbook from which we have prepared only a single recipe, for it is a meal preserved, in printed form. The very sight of Quick and Easy Chinese Cooking by Kenneth H. C. Lo quickens my pulse. Its pages are stained by broth, sherry, soy sauce, and chicken fat, and so thoroughly did I master it that I once sought out Ken Lo’s Memories of China on Ebury Street in London and laid eyes on the great man himself, dining alone in a little room near the entrance. A book like that, you’re not gonna throw away.
I can’t throw out anything. I possibly don’t require half the shirts I have ever owned. But look at this faded chamois cloth shirt from L. L. Bean, purchased through the mail in about 1973 from a two-inch ad in the back of the New Yorker: The longer you wear it, the more it feels like chamois! I’ve been wearing it a long, long time. I can’t say it feels like chamois, but I want to work on it some more. I also need this tea mug from Keats House in Hampstead, even though its handle is broken off. I need it to hold these ball-point pens I had printed with the words No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough. They were one hundred for thirty-nine dollars, I think. The ink has dried up over the years, but I still need them in order to provide a purpose for the mug.
And here are my thick reference books. Not only the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but the small tiny-type edition of the complete OED, which came with its own magnifying glass. And Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion, a hardbound London A to Z from 1975, and two dozen books on the occult, including the I Ching and The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, who was a flywheel but surely wrote one of the best of Edwardian autobiographies (Crowley explained that he invented modern British mountain climbing in the Himalayas after his predecessors “had themselves carried up by Sherpas”). In idle hours I like to leaf through my well-worn leather-bound 1970 edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which offers entries not to be found elsewhere:
· Giotto’s O. The old story goes that the Pope, wishing to employ artists from all over Italy, sent a messenger to collect specimen of their work. When the man approached Giotto (c. 1267–1337), the artist paused for a moment from the picture he was working on and with his brush drew a perfect circle on a piece of paper. In surprise the man returned to the Pope, who, appreciating the perfection of Giotto’s artistry and skill by his unerring circle, employed Giotto forthwith.
· October Club. In the reign of Queen Anne, a group of High Tory MPs who met at tavern near Parliament to drink October Ale and abuse the Whigs.
Now here is the Penguin paperback of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, the story of his agonizing trek through the darkness of the Antarctic winter to investigate the eggs of the penguin. The book is as long as the walk. I may not read it a second time. Do I require two later editions? Of course I do. You just never know. And both the second and third editions of the Columbia Encyclopedia? You bet.
Chaz gave me this facsimile of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Will I ever read it? Not with that spelling and typography. But I will always treasure it. I look at it and wonder at the genius of the man. Do I need, for that matter, all of my other editions of Shakespeare? The little blue volumes of the Yale Shakespeare, and the editions by Oxford, the Easton Press, and the Folio Society? Handsome books, finely made. But I read only my battered and underlined old Riverside Shakespeare from college, because it was edited by G. Blakemore Evans, and he was my professor, you see.
My possessions are getting away from me. We have an agreement. My office is my office. Chaz has her own book-filled office and takes care that the rest of the house is clean and orderly. My office has a glass door with this gilt lettering:
The Ebert Company, Ltd.
Fine Film Criticism since 1967
I have not been able to get into the storage closet of my office for four years. What? You expect me to throw out my first Tandy 100? And there’s a forty-year run of Sight and Sound in there somewhere. I have a book named Rodinsky’s Room, by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, about a mysterious London cabalistic scholar named David Rodinsky who in 1969 disappeared from his attic above a synagogue on Princelet Street in the East End. His flat was strangely left undisturbed for years, and when it was opened all was exactly as he left it—his books, papers, possessions, even a pot of porridge on the stove.
That’s what I should do. Just turn the key and walk away, and move into 150 square feet. Get me a little electric coil to boil the coffee water. Just my Shakespeare, some Henry James, and of course Willa Cather, Colette, and Simenon. Two hundred books, tops. But no, there wouldn’t be room for Chaz, and I would miss her terribly. That I could never abide.