Extra Innings (2 page)

For this reason, I remember, I once disliked the electric typewriter. It continued to hum ominously, insistently, even when invention failed me, and I could think of nothing to write.

Having the word ‘oxymoron' in my head, I thought this afternoon of the time, a few years ago, when I used to go to the Tuesday-morning liturgies at St. Alban's Church in Washington. Twelve or so of us would gather around the altar at seven-thirty. John Danforth was the celebrant, the Senator from Missouri who was ordained an Episcopal priest at the same time that he was graduated from Yale Law School.

One or another of the little congregation usually gave the homily. Once, when it was my turn, and for some reason I cannot now recall, I used the word ‘oxymoron.' At the breakfast-coffee gathering after the service John Danforth asked me what the word meant. I explained that it was two words used together that contradicted each other. An example? he asked. Thoughtlessly, I gave him the first one that came to mind: ‘government service.' As I recall, this was followed by a good deal of forced laughter from the little congregation, silence from the Reverend Mr. Danforth.

More reviews begin to come in. Months ago,
Publishers Weekly
, called the Bible of the book trade (sometimes Job, sometimes Revelations, perhaps Exodus?), gave the book a good notice in a short paragraph, and later followed the review with an interview. It was an honest, uncompromising account of my life and work by the historian of the Group Theatre, Wendy Smith. But still, like every other writer alive, I wait out other opinions in a state of acute anxiety. Like the first olive, one good one is never enough. Today there are two more.

Sybil and I are driving on Deer Isle to find Sven Olsen, known as Seven to the natives. We need his repair services for our ailing VCR. As we travel, I read my mail while she searches for his house. There is a letter from Gerry Howard. Two xeroxes drop out. In a state of pure panic I scan them, fast. One is a review to appear soon in the Sunday
New York Times
. It's by Noel Perrin, a New Englander whose book on living in the country,
First Person Rural
, I reviewed years ago. He appears to have liked my book, but he reproaches me for saying I hate travel, and then writing about three long trips I took in my seventieth year.

I find myself talking back to him. It is a matter of definition. To me, and (I believe) to Webster, travel is a progress. It means to go from one place to another, by whatever means. It is the
process
I hate: the proud airlines' contumely, worry about lost luggage and scarce taxis and inclement weather, bad meals and worse airline and train schedules, the race from one plane to its connection two concourses away carrying my luggage because I am afraid to check it for fear I will arrive at an appearance or a speech without the proper clothes, a book to read, or a toothbrush. All of that, I tell Perrin mentally.

Once I arrive, in Paris, in Yucatán, in Key West, in San Francisco, in Columbus, wherever, all is usually well. So I suffer through the unpleasantnesses in order to get there. Then, hours before I am to leave, I sink into a new fit of dread, in anticipation of the ordeal of getting home.

Perrin takes me to task for my ‘cranky old opinions.' The headline writer took a liking to that word and topped the review with ‘Be Cranky While You Can.' I am taken aback by the repetition of the word, having always, perhaps, I now see, mistakenly, thought of myself as reasonable and good-tempered about my preferences and dislikes. One learns, occasionally, from reviewers to see what one writes as others hear and read it. It is cautionary and useful. But then, if I hide this curmudgeonly inclination in me, I will fall under La Rochefoucauld's warning: ‘Our faults are generally more excusable than the means we take to disguise them.'

The other review, in the
Washington Post
, is curious. The reviewer is Anthony Thwaite, literary editor of the
Listener
and the
New Statesman
and now coeditor of
Encounter
. An accomplished Brit. I smile at this, thinking that Nina King, the scrupulous book editor of that paper, who is a longtime acquaintance, must have felt she could not rely on any reviewer in this country who might turn out to be a friend of mine, an enemy, a former student, or a sympathetic fellow writer.

Nervous about this English critic who has been given my offspring to judge, I study his qualifications before I examine the review itself. Then the review. Thwaite confesses that he has never heard of me, has never read ‘or even noticed' my novels, and, indeed, has heard of none of the persons who appear in the book. He confesses to being, like me, ‘in the later, if not last, stages of life,' and
then
, to my immense relief, admits that he likes me and what is better, my book. ‘Whew,' whistled Hal, ‘That was close,' as the boy heroes of my youthful reading used to say, stepping back from a precipice just in time.

There is a caveat: Thwaite reproves me for calling Edmund Gosse
Henry
Gosse, a scriptural error of mine, I'm sure, not caught by the copy editor or proofreader. I am horrified, but what can be done? I am somewhat mollified by hearing from someone that Thwaite's wife is the editor of Edmund Gosse's papers, so he, of course, would have noticed what perhaps only a few Americans will.
I
know Edmund Gosse's name is not Henry, having encountered the chap many times during my graduate-school grind in a course in nineteenth-century English poetry and criticism.

But then I am consoled. I look Gosse up in the index to
The Cambridge History of English Literature
, discover he is listed as
GOOSE, EDMUND
, and am much relieved that I was not responsible for
that
egregious error.

This morning, a Nicaraguan lady, Ligia, comes to clean house for us. She is an immigrant who taught school in her own country, and then left with her young son when her mother was murdered. I have trouble communicating with her, my Spanish being so rudimentary and her English almost nonexistent. But we get on well, with many smiles and much head-shaking. She has been given succor and sanctuary at St. Brendan's, the Episcopal church in Stonington, a fine little fishing village at the end of Deer Isle. Now she has her own apartment, which she supports by cleaning the Episcopal church in Blue Hill and the houses of some parishioners of both churches. One of them, a charming Southern lady, Mary Lyall Murray, stopped into Wayward Books (the store Sybil built and runs next door to our house) last spring and told her: ‘It's good to feel one is doing one's Christian duty and having one's house cleaned, all at the same time.'

This month is the anniversary of Margaret Schlauch's birthday. She was the professor at New York University who influenced me to change my major from philosophy to medieval literature, and then my friend. I continue to think of her. Even up here in these unscholarly climes, I have met persons who remember her, who were her students or readers of her work when they did their graduate work. Hers is the kind of immortality I believe in, a continued existence in the creative world of scholarship and learning, a ghostly presence who returns every time
The Gift of Tongues
, her most readable history of the development of Indo-European languages, and her other books are opened and studied. The word for such a return after death, in whatever form, I have recently learned, is ‘revenant.'

Sitting on the deck this morning, waiting for Sybil to bring the mail from the post office, which might contain more reviews, I read the last chapters of the Book of Job. After many long descriptions, in forty-two chapters, of the terrible trials God submits him to, there is a happy ending in one sentence of the epilogue: ‘So the Lord restored Job's fortunes and doubled all his possessions.' And then, at the last (in the
New English Bible
, issued in 1970): ‘Thereafter Job lived another hundred and forty years, he saw his sons and his grandsons to four generations, and died at a very great age.'

In its many translations into English, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, the Bible moves from poetry to matter-of-fact prose and rarely back to poetry again. But always it reflects the patriarchy of the society in which it is written. The poetry of my more familiar translation, ‘So Job died, being old and full of days,' is gone from the new, ‘revised' one, but there is still the interesting Hebraic insistence on the primacy of male offspring. Job had three most beautiful daughters who were left a share of the rich inheritance, but there is no mention of his living to see any granddaughters.

In reward for his fidelity to him, God doomed Job to live on and on (the verbiage here is mine). It is a lovely story, but nowhere is it said that Job suffered any of the usual infirmities of his gift of old age. If his possessions were doubled, perhaps also his age was, which would have made him 280 old. Arthritic? Deaf? Blind? Lame? Toothless? Senile? We do not know. Perhaps God, as an added gift to him, threw in immunity from all such indignities, in which case long time and extreme age would indeed be a gift. But if God did not think to do this, would it not be a further affliction for Job to be made to live on, so ‘full of days'?

Bill Henderson, the astute editor of the Pushcart Press who has built a summer cottage on Deer Isle with his own hands (‘How did you know how to go about it?' I asked him. ‘I read a book,' he said), writes this morning to tell me he likes the appearance of my new book. This pleases me. Ever since another publisher, David Godine, taught me that it is as expensive to produce an ugly book as a beautiful one, or perhaps it was that it is as cheap to make a beautiful book as an ugly one, I have been interested in the subject of book design.

Having no formal training in typography, papermaking, binding, or design, I am usually designated ‘the sensitive amateur' when I am asked to judge the appearance of books for the American Association of University Presses, or ‘the literary critic' when I write reviews of handmade books for
Fine Print
. But my untutored views are firm enough to make me insist on having a hand in the design of my own books.

The first editor to listen to my complaints about a jacket design was Henry Robbins. I protested that the proposed drawing on the front misrepresented the persons in the text of
Chamber Music
. He laughed, and said that was not an uncommon state of affairs for jacket and copy. ‘Some jacket designers do not know too much about what goes on inside,' he said. ‘Their instructions are to make something that will sell the book.' Nonetheless, he ordered a change to a nonrepresentational jacket, and so
Chamber Music
appeared in a simple, unglossy ‘matte finish,' as it is called, almost puritanical in design.

Another editor, Bill Whitehead, allowed me to specify the type I liked and other small design elements of the body of the text. He listened patiently to my no doubt boring dissertation on how every element of a book—the body type, the design and type of the title page and half title, as well as spine and jacket—ought to be coordinated. If this was done, readers might have a better sense, although they might not be entirely aware of it, of the unity of the whole, the story suitably housed in its pages, jacket, covers.

As for this new book that Bill Henderson writes to me about: the publisher, designer, and editor conspired with me to make, to my mind, just such a satisfying volume. I wanted the right-hand margins to be unjustified, that is, unevenly set to resemble the jaggedness of handwriting in a journal. I like Bembo type for such casual writing. For the jacket I submitted the photograph of a sturdy little Model T Ford taken by a friend in a field not too far from where I live. I hoped the type around it, and the heads and subheads inside, might be in italic rather than roman, to approximate the slant of penmanship.

Then came a surprising, added bonus of goodwill and good bookmaking. Reading the galleys of
End Zone
, the publisher, Donald Lamm, discovered my distaste for the ugly design and tacky production of most contemporary trade books. So he authorized that the book be bound entirely in cloth instead of the usual two-thirds-paper-over-board.

I suppose I would be strung up and eviscerated by the Association of American Publishers if I asserted that writers ought to have a hand in the design of their books. It might be more prudent to suggest that writers spend some time studying the principles of book design, as well as the economics that govern such amenities, and then practice a vast amount of tact in offering suggestions about the kind of domicile they would like to see for their manuscript.

Looking through my good set of what we used to call ‘spyglasses,' from my study window, I spot the Cove's many birds. But the view the glasses provide is not always what I want to see. From a distance, and without the glasses, they appear to be a great patch of undifferentiated ducks, the brown female eider melded with the startling black-and-white males. Somehow the view makes me think of fiction, of how Henry James used almost no proper names for objects and places and yet, with the force exerted by his great tissue of words, he created particulars perhaps with the reader's unaware contributions. His unbounded generalities settle in the mind as graphic, detailed singularities.

On a drive toward Route 1 I pass the newly moved Episcopal church, now seated firmly on a hill, still gaunt-looking because the landscaping has not been done or the building painted, but impressive in its architectural aspiration. I think of its six-mile journey, cut into two pieces. Then the parts were put together, the chandeliers and windows and spire restored, and a historic place of worship was once again made whole.… Coming back toward Blue Hill, I slow down to see the empty field where the church, then serving a Methodist congregation, stood for so many years. The site is overgrown, with no sign remaining that it was a place where hardy Maine Protestants once made their arduous Sunday journey to worship.

Everywhere in this central coastal area of Maine
FOR SALE
signs appear along the roads, some of them the same signs that were here last year. Real estate, we are told, is being offered at low prices but very little of it is being purchased. Some older Mainers who wish to leave the winter cold for the year-round warmth of Florida are finding it hard to rid themselves of their (in many cases) ancestral property. Others, who tried to ride the recent crest of high prices, find that they have missed their chance for profit, and are held on their land and in their houses by the very real recession up here.