Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (7 page)

This time around, the prescribed distaff virtues didn’t sound so awful. (In fact, I decided that if they were compulsory for men as well, the world would be a kinder and gentler place.) One night I compiled a brief O’Reilly list and asked George to rate me on a ten-point scale. Here’s how I stacked up:

Discretion	7
Discipline	5
Religious fervor	0
Power to soothe and charm	6
Truthfulness	10
Thrift	3
Avoidance of impure literature, engravings, paintings, and statuary	2
Kindness	10
Cheerfulness	6
Order in the Home	5
Abjuration of fashion	10
Self-control	9
Excellence in needlework	2

My scores wouldn’t have earned me a prize book from the Sisters of the Holy Cross, but I confess to a small, retrograde flush of pride at not having utterly flunked.

After the second reading, I started asking my mother and my aunt about the woman who had won it. I learned that Maude’s husband, Joseph Sharp, a wealthy young man who had studied the classics at Harvard, was superintendent of the coal mine in Sunnyside, Utah, a position that placed him at the top of the local social ladder. His beautiful wife was a renowned hostess until Joseph quit his job over a matter of principle. My mother remembers that there was an explosion in the mine, and the mine owners forbade him to open the doors to let the trapped miners escape, lest the oxygen spread the fire. My aunt remembers that there was a labor strike, and that the owners turned the miners’ families out of the company houses in midwinter, forcing them to live in holes they dug in the snow. Whatever the reason, Joseph and Maude moved without servants to a dairy ranch, where the winner of the trigonometry and elocution prizes scrubbed laundry on a washboard, killed mice by smashing them with a coal shovel, and rose before dawn to bake bread for a kitchenful of ranch hands wearing unwashed longjohns.

When their farmhouse burned to the ground, they lost all they owned except a few things, including Maude’s prize book, which she had given to their daughter. Unable to afford rebuilding, they hauled a four-room miner’s shack to the ranch on a horse-drawn wagon. It was unpainted and uninsulated. There were no pictures on the walls, no rugs on the floor, no gewgaws on the mantel, no mantel. Maude slept on a plain metal cot whose legs rested in cans filled with bedbug-deterrent turpentine.

In a subchapter called “How a Noble Husband Was Sustained by a Devoted Wife While Passing Through Financial Difficulties,” Father O’Reilly told the story of a rich man who suffered a reversal of fortune. His “proud little housewife” offered to sell some of their furniture, saying, “You shall see how easy it will be to me to part with thy treasures, provided I have a little home for you and our darlings.” The family, accompanied by their servants, cheerfully set themselves up again in a more modest house. “The carpets were plain, it is true, and the furniture was of the commonest kind; but chairs and sofas and ottomans had been covered with a chintz so pretty that no one stopped to inquire what was beneath the covering… . The little ones saw no change around them, save that the light of their mother’s smile was even more sunny than ever.”

Maude must have read this. Did she want to smash its author with a coal shovel for suggesting that reduced circumstances meant asking your servants to plump chintz-covered cushions insted of satin ones? (I would have. I didn’t really deserve that 9 in Self-control.) Or was she in some way consoled?

Father O’Reilly
, I think as I sit with my baby on one knee and a worn brown volume on the other,
you and I don’t exactly see eye to eye. But thanks for letting me get to know my great-grandmother
. And I tell him that someday I’ll ask my daughter what she sees reflected back when
she
looks into
The Mirror of True Womanhood
. She’ll have plenty to go on, since she’ll inherit her great-great-grandmother’s book the week her first child is born.

 W
O R D S  O N  A
 F
L Y L E A F
 

L
ong ago, when George and I were not yet lovers but seemed to be tottering in that general direction, we gave each other our first Christmas presents. Of course, they were books. Knowing that I liked bears, George gave me
The Biography of a Grizzly
, by Ernest Thompson Seton. Modestly sequestered on the third page was the following inscription:
To a new true friend
. No Talmudic scholar, no wartime cryptographer, no deconstructionist critic ever scrutinized a text more closely than I did those five words, hoping that if they were just construed with the right emphasis (“To a
new
true friend.” “To a new
true
friend.” “To a new true
friend
“), they would suddenly reveal themselves as a declaration of undying devotion.

Knowing that George liked fish, I gave him
Old Mr. Flood
, by Joseph Mitchell, a slim volume of stories about the Fulton Fish Market. The author had autographed the book himself in 1948, but did I leave well enough alone? Of course not. I wrote:
To George, with love from Anne
. Then I mistranscribed a quotation from Red Smith. And finally—on the principle that if you don’t know what to say, say everything—I added fifteen lines of my own reflections on the nature of intimacy. My cumulative verbiage, not to mention the patency of my sentiments, exceeded George’s by a factor of approximately twenty to one. It’s a miracle that the book, its recipient, and the new true friendship weren’t all crushed under the weight of the inscription.

Unfortunately—since George married me anyway and has retained his affection for both fish and Joseph Mitchell—rny words were preserved for good. Unlike the card that accompanies, say, a sweater, from which it is soon likely to part company, a book and its inscription are permanently wedded. This can be either a boon or a blot. As Seumas Stewart, the proprietor of an antiquarian bookshop in Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire, has observed, “Imagine how delightful it would be to own an edition of Thomson’s
The Seasons
with this authenticated inscription:
To my dear friend John Keats in admiration and gratitude, from P. B. Shelley, Florence, 1820
. Imagine, too, how depressing to have an otherwise fine first of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
with this ball-point inscription scrawled on the title page:
To Ada from Jess, with lots of love and candy floss, in memory of a happy holiday at Blackpool, 1968
.”

My inscription, a specimen of the candy-floss school, did not improve
Old Mr. Flood
in the same way that, for example,
To Miss Elizabeth Barrett with the Respects of Edgar Allan Poe
improved
The Raven and Other Poems
, or
Hans Christian Andersen / From his friend and admirer Charles Dickens / London July 1847
improved
The Pickwick Papers
. In the bibliomane’s hierarchy, such holy relics of literary tangency eclipse all other factors: binding, edition, rarity, condition. “The meanest, most draggle-tailed, foxed, flead, dog’s-eared drab of a volume” (as the critic and bibliophile Holbrook Jackson once wrote) is instantly transfigured by an inscription with a sufficiently distinguished pedigree. Whose hands could fail to tremble while holding the well-worn copy of
Corinne
, by Madame de Staël, on whose flyleaf Byron wrote a 226-word mash note to the Marchesa Guiccioli that ends,
I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you. Think of me sometimes when the Alps and the ocean divide us
,—
but they never will, unless you wish it
. (Now
that’s
the sort of thing I wouldn’t have minded finding inside
The Biography of a Grizzly
.)

Even in the heat of passion, Byron remembered to observe proper inscription etiquette by writing on the flyleaf instead of the title page, which is traditionally reserved for a book’s author. I learned this only recently, after having defaced dozens of other writers’ title pages. I should have cracked the code years ago, since the Books by Friends and Relatives section of our own library contains a profusion of title-page inscriptions, all licitly deployed. My father inscribed
Famous Monster Tales
, an anthology to which he contributed a preface when I was a sullen fourteen-year-old,
For Anne, from that old monster, Daddy
. Mark Helprin, who likes to leave messages on his friends’ answering machines in spurious (but highly convincing) dialects, inscribed several of his books in imaginary languages. In
A Dove of the East
, he wrote
Skanaarela tan floss atcha atcha gamble to. Da bubo barta flay? Staarcroft
. I spent the better part of a decade trying in vain to figure out what that meant.

A distant rung down from the “presentation copy”—an inscribed book actually presented by the author as a gift—is the “inscription copy,” a book inscribed (sometimes, one suspects, with a gun to the author’s head) at the owner’s request. Before the advent of store-sponsored book sign-ings, most readers got a book inscribed by mailing it to the author and praying that it would make a round-trip. Yeats once asked Thomas Hardy how he handled these requests. Hardy led Yeats upstairs to a large room that was filled from floor to ceiling with books—thousands of them. “Yeats,” said Hardy, “these are the books that were sent to me for signature.”

The first edition of
On Forsyte ’Change
that I saw last month in a secondhand bookstore had obviously made a more fruitful circuit. On the title page, in small, formal handwriting—the work of an old-fashioned fountain pen—were the words
Inscribed for C. F. Sack cordially by John Galsworthy, Oct 6 1930
. Presumably, Galsworthy didn’t know C. F. Sack from Adam, and he didn’t pretend to. But what are we to make of
To Owen
—
Love + Kisses
—
Brooke Shields XX
(to quote from the title page of
On Your Own
, glimpsed in another bookstore)? I feel certain that Ms. Shields had no more intention of kissing Owen than Galsworthy had of kissing C. F. Sack—the fact that she signed her full name is a dead giveaway—but that was no deterrent. Her panting communication, written in black felt-tip pen, filled nearly half the page. (I can report, after a close study of the celebrity-autograph department of the Strand Bookstore in New York City, that the felt-tip pen has achieved near-total hegemony. Barbara Cartland writes in pink, Ivana Trump in purple, and Francine du Plessix Gray in green.)

My friend Mark O’Donnell, whom I consider the nonesuch of inscribers, would never stoop to such tactics. At a signing party for his collection
Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales
, he came up with something different for each postulant:
Dear Reader, I love you
(an ironic homage to the Shields genre);
No time to write
—
Life in dang
———; and, the most heartfelt of all,
Thank you for shopping retail
.

M
aggie Hivnor, the paperback editor of the University of Chicago Press, once told me that when she adds an out-of-print title to her list, she calls the author and asks for a pristine copy that can be photographically reproduced. “The author is usually a man,” she explained. “In a few weeks, a beautifully kept copy of his book arrives, a little dusty perhaps but otherwise absolutely perfect. And on the title page it invariably says
To Mother
.”

Now
that’s
a real inscription. The best thing about it is that until the editor’s call, the book that it ennobled reposed precisely where it should have: in a place of honor on Mother’s shelf. And there it shall return. How melancholy, by contrast, are the legions of inscribed copies one finds in any used-book rack, each a memorial to a betrayed friendship. Do the traitors believe that their faithlessness will remain secret? If so, they are sadly deluded. Hundreds of people will witness it, including, on occasion, the inscriber. Shaw once came across one of his books in a secondhand shop, inscribed
To
———
with esteem, George
Bernard Shaw
. He bought the book and returned it to ———, adding the line,
With renewed esteem, George
Bernard Shaw.