When I was younger, though not so very much younger that I shouldn’t have known better, I found myself puzzling over the question: when are you exactly half your father’s age? Working it out longhand, through some trial and error, I discovered of course that it’s when you are the same age he was when you were born. It’s a fact of mathematical beauty that had escaped me until then, but here I rely on the Great Detective’s ignorance of our planetary system; or as my daughter once said in a skit: “My mind is very much taken over.”

This fact was brought back to me the other day when I was digging in my mother’s house and found a packet of letters, postcards, school drawings, mass cards, and assorted paper items on the floor in the back of a closet stuffed with clothes.

“What do you see?” Lord Carnarvon asks.
“Wonderful things!” Howard Carter responds.

Or something like that. In addition to a couple of dozen postcards and letters to my mother (and her children) from my grandmother at various stops on her many-visaed 1960 trip to Vienna and the Eastern Bloc to visit her family in Budapest, there were two letters from my father to my mother while he was at Georgetown and she was in Ohio with her sons trying to support all four of us. I was six at the time of the letters, my father thirty-six, or over twenty years younger than I am now.

I won’t divulge the contents of the letters, though they are commonplace. That (right, that) seems an invasion of some kind. But the tone of them was absolutely familiar from a far earlier part of my own life, and a bit sad. It’s a wonder anyone ever took me seriously when I was that way. Apparently more is granted to a father. They included a kind of apologetic yearning, both self-defacing and pleading, and a petulance that I suppose is entirely genetic. It will take some re-readings to absorb the letters, or, rather for them to slot themselves into the spectrum of emotions one carries away from childhood. I suppose the menacing edifice of Father does not expect bundles of letters from his youth to be ferreted out of dead peoples’ closets.

I was speaking to a friend the other day about this very thing. He told me he had dicovered a raft of letters from his father to his mother before they were married and agreed with his siblings to leave them unread. I can completely see that. These seemed more in the nature of reports from a distant city which, in small ways, they were. In the meantime, the ferreting and slotting goes on.

A week or so ago at a breakfast of writers, I found myself saying something that, on the face of it, sounded fairly harsh: “I never read a book suggested to me.” A startled (and maybe hurt) look from one my tablemates: “Really?” And I had to say: “Yes.” Now, setting aside the fact that “never” is probably too strong a word, we could go into this and such other personal oddities as, for instance, never quite finding time to open up any of the library books I’ve checked out before they are due or barely touching a book lent to me by another or, egad, the fine footwork involved in denying someone’s request for one of the books in my library. It’s not snobbery, I don’t think, so much as feeling that one’s reading life is a river and one is piloting a boat on it and night is falling and there’s a suspicious pool round your feet and one ought not make any unscheduled stops or take on extraneous ballast. Or something equally visual.

So it was a treat to catch this bit from Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms that pretty well sums up how I feel about the possession of books. I’ll let him have the last word.

The Librarian considered matters for a while. So . . . a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian’s opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be.

The time I ran away from home involved neither running nor actually being away from home. It wasn’t for very long, either.

I was mad at something big. Most likely a perceived slight or a less than perfect manifestation of motherly love. Whatever it was, I ran into the room I shared with my older brother, packed my suitcase, and stormed through the kitchen, past her bewilderment and my brother’s smirking, and right out of the house.

The door I chose to leave by was a heavy one made of metal. Slamming it made a final sound. With a perfect sense of that finality, I swung the iron door hard and left my old life forever.

Now, this door led from the back hallway off the kitchen and outside. You went down two cement steps to the level of the driveway, under the open sort of carport common in those days. Listening, I may or may not have heard words between my mother and brother inside the kitchen. I hardly cared. I was out and free of that place. Now what to do? It was a cloudy day, cold, I think. We lived then on a wide main uncrossable street near an intersection at the top of the hill. Walking — or fleeing — down the hill meant eventually having to hike back up. The other way would take me in front of our closest neighbors and what friends I had, so this was not the way. At the moment, my escape route seemed unclear. I decided to find a spot in the carport itself and wait for a plan to come to me.

There was on the wall against the house, a wide shelf of corregated green plastic mounted over a couple of sawhorses. Below this shelf was a mess of rakes, brooms, shovels, cartons, mountains of rags, and the old push lawn mower. With a little remodeling it would make a splendid shelter and cubby for a weary fugitive. I slipped behind the handle of the mower and folded myself into a small space between some cartons and waited. From my vantage I could see into the old ladies’ garden next door and to the place where in days to come Joey and his friend would do a fairly disgusting thing. But never mind that now.

I waited. No one came. Nothing happened. Time passed. Hmm. Should I have packed more deliberately, huffed loudly as I dragged my little red suitcase from under the bed, heaved clothes over my head, slammed dresser drawers? Should I go back in now, and announce more emphatically that, yes, in fact, I was leaving home, never to return?

As I rolled these thoughts over in my mind, the iron door opened, and my mother appeared. So. Finally. She had taken notice. I was silent, didn’t move. The way she leaned out, turning her head from side to side, reminded me of Auntie Em’s panicked search for Dorothy in the witch’s glass ball: her face wrinkled with concern and fear.

But apparently there was not enough concern and fear, for the door closed again, and there followed another few minutes of nothing.

My hideout was cramped and smelly. Wedged among the cartons — and being quiet about it — strained my back. Whatever I had packed in my suitcase, it wasn’t food, but that was all right. A life on the open road was tough. I’d steeled myself to the hardship of it. If I went hungry, if I slept in makeshift shelters, so be it.

But wait, my brother was out on the step now. He looked down the street. Not for himself, I knew. He didn’t care if I’d gone off somewhere. He was likely part of the reason I had stormed out in the first place. Besides, he’d have our room all to himself. He was merely acting as my mother’s emissary. He too was baffled by the cleverness of my hiding place and retreated back inside after a few minutes. Would they call the police now?

A third time the door opened, and both of them stood on the top step now, she behind him, leaning over his head. I don’t remember any words between then, but all at once, he slipped past her into the house, as if, little detective, a thought had occurred to him, and he needed to check something in our room. Drat! What clue had I left behind?

My mother said nothing during all of this. In fact, what was there to say? In collusion with my brother, she had done a terrible thing to me, and now I had vanished. This incident, this escape from home was more than just another of the simple unloved movements I made around the house. It was at once a triumph of revolt and an indictment of family. For me, it was new and dangerous. It was something that, if handled correctly, might get us all in a newspaper, with me as its undisputed hero.

Finally, it was something more immediate and less philosophical that brought me home again. I won’t say I waltzed back in the door, but with an aura of victory, full of the knowledge that my time on the road had brought them both weeping to their knees, though they neither wept nor knelt in my presence, I passed silently through the kitchen, suitcase in hand, and went straight to the bathroom.

A literacy conference last year included a panel of authors of children’s books. The panel was attended by teachers — classroom and reading — and a smattering of school librarians. When the authors spoke, they one by one showed their books to the audience, which included quite a few heads nodding seriously, as if they were actually being told some truths about literacy and not being shown goods to buy. Well, that was shocking. One expects more from an audience than to be so easily hawked to. Really now, teachers, librarians? “Buy my book” is an okay thing to say to you? And writers! Doesn’t your profession, your talent, your expertise give you a single insight on the problems of literacy in our schools unrelated to your wallet?

Once upon a time there was a person who viewed the neighbor-to-neighbor relationship as transactional: “I have invited you to dinner, now you should buy a bag of my home-made granola.” I suppose that somewhere along the way these particular authors had been instructed that a panel on literacy was a good huckstering opportunity. Did their publishers tell them that, or had their parents raised them to view others as potential customers?

Must remember to bring books and a calculator to the next funeral reception.

. . . didn’t want to be buried all the way down in Virginia with his father. A wounded and decorated veteran of the Normandy campaign, he was seventy-eight when a stroke sent him tumbling down the stairs toward the front door. His son later wiped blood from the carpet where his old white head had struck the floor, but he apparently kept this fact from his mother.

According to the brochure literature, burial at Arlington for a veteran includes a place for the spouse, but their visit there did not at all make obvious where one might be put. The stones were awfully close.

After his elder brother died, and sometime after the shock of all of that lessened, his mother decided that he was dearer to her in some ways than her husband (though this may be an oversimplification, entered into the record to quicken the telling), that Virginia was so far, and that her life was here, so she’d rather lie beside him; him, who also happened to drop dead, although the distance was not so great, perhaps as short as from the bed to the floor. There was also some carpet work to be done there but not by him: between the removal of the body and the brother’s coming two days before Christmas, the landlord snipped away a square yard’s worth of rug.

In September when she was found, her now-only son, the one we’re talking about, called the same fine and happy fellow who had carved the first monument and asked him to make a second in the same style. Notwithstanding the three years that had passed, the carver remembered, and a price and schedule was fixed. So that much was set. Later, he (the living brother) learned that the monument maker would match the stones (side by side plots had been arranged courtesy of the cemetery manager) by rubbing the existing one and carving the new one in a like manner.

“Rubbing?” the son asked the cemetery manager. “Isn’t there a ‘style’ for markers? Like, the first was a Number 3 stone; I’ll have another of those . . . ?”

The manager laughed and laughed, a sound that had the oddest effect in the quiet graveyard where they waited for the priest, and something was said about the carver being “old school.” It may have been the brother who came up with this phrase. More laughter. It was September, a pleasant morning, and a Friday.

There was much more to tell, more details to report and notes to be made, but he couldn’t do it just then, so the fabric of the tale remains a bit thin. A bit. His last name.

Even a creature that is weak, ugly, cowardly, smelly and in no way justifiable still wants to stay alive and be happy after its own fashion. I could not invert the existing scale of values, or turn myself into a success, but I could accept my failure and make the best of it. I could resign myself to being what I was, and then endeavour to survive on those terms.

— George Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys . . .

. . . is all about the devil you know. In thinking about the Christmas season, I’m reminded of the Cleveland years. The eastern side of Cliffview Road near the corner of Weston was a sequence of nearly identical tract houses built in the late forties for homecoming veterans and their new families. Our neighbors to the left were the Downings, a couple with two daughters: Holly, the oldest, who often babysat for my brother and I, and Regan, my age. While Regan sometimes joined the boys in neighborhood play, the Abbotts and Downings never consorted as families. There was, however, an identity among the four of them, a gravitational pull toward center that I envied. It was so unlike the vague desperation at home.

I suspect one of the reasons we didn’t mix socially was that Mr. Downing was the complete opposite of my father who, as unsocial as he was, ruled our event calendar. Or, rather, Mr. D was the opposite of my father in every way but one: they were both loners who had nothing in common with the rest of the world. Now that I think of it, they both also generated fear in their children. Then there was the veneer of superiority they both carried around with them. Okay, maybe they were two hateful peas in a pod. Like Mr. Downing, my father was quiet and sinister, a red-faced ball of anger and resentment with a violent streak. There were rages from room to room. Silences. Biting language. Not to mention the time he . . . but I see I’m going off track here and should go more deeply into this some other time.

What I wanted to tell you was that on Saturdays after mowing the lawn, Mr. Downing relaxed by putting jazz records on the hi-fi. Then he would turn the speakers out to the patio and play an assortment of pot- and pan lids with a set of wire drum brushes. Drum brushes. As if he was in a smoky downtown club and everyone was hep. Only he was playing his wife’s kitchenware, it was a patio on Cliffview Road, and it was only us kids. For such a cool cat, he was darkly fierce about this activity; it was not only his damn right, but something he was compelled to do. We were under strict instructions not to disturb him while he was playing. I know, right? Ruin his solo or something.

We were under strict instructions not to disturb his lawn, either. If anyone started across it after a winter snowfall, he’d tear open the front door like a mad little demon and shriek, “Get off my snow!”

Snow. That’s why I’ve remembered all of this. We’ve just had a pretty good snowfall here in Connecticut. My family and I invite you to walk all over it. Merry Christmas!

. . . I wore as a young man in a foreign city was not making eye contact. Because, I suppose, I had the sort of eyes that impressed others as belonging to a lost soul (I have tried to change this, with middling results), meeting someone’s glance could lead to uncomfortable contretemps, like that time in Cambridge when a stray look around the cafe called forth an eerie guy from the shadows.

But I digress. The point is that there used to be in the seventies a bookshop in London with a life-size wax manikin of Freud standing in its front room. My recollection is that the shop specialized in poetry and was out a bit from the center of town. Although I found a handful of Heaney paperbacks I’d been looking for, I had a question. Not making eye contact, I sidled up to the gentleman standing next to the register. “Do you have such-and-such a volume by Ted Hughes?” No answer. I glanced up.

Like the girl from Ipanema, the bearded man looked straight ahead not at me. It took a few seconds, the longest few seconds I can remember, while a sequence of fright and confusion and embarrassment bounced across my brain. Feeling I’d been the seventies version of “punked,” I looked around to see the reaction. No eye contact? Good. I paid a real person and left the shop.

. . . Anne Sexton’s letters is that, even as she types a blue streak to her correspondents, spiraling up and down about her flaming inner life —

“ . . . sometimes I am a little crazy (withdrawn for a time and then flashing into a manic excitement, wild words, wild talking) . . . and yet not quite as crazy as all that . . . ”

— she thinks in poetry. Here is a fragment of a letter from 1962, word for word, ellipses and all, but unprosed:

At night the dump was lovely,
burning in gray and scarlet fires out over the water.

I remember most the rain, the rain, the rain.
It was sept, october, november and december and
it rained. I had never seen
Christmas lights up over the streets in the rain . . .

I drove out to the coast in five days . . .
stopping seldom except once
at Reno where I won about 50 bucks . . .
it was a wild ride.

I love the mountains and those huge trees, the redwoods.

. . . let’s mark a birthday. James Agee was born a hundred years ago today in Knoxville and died forty-five years later in a New York City cab, by which time he had written two novels, a couple of stories, scripts, lots of journalism, poetry, and that thing that still can’t quite be categorized, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, early on in which he writes:

While we were wondering whether to force a window, a young negro couple came past up the road. Without appearing to look either longer or less long, or with more or less interest, than a white man might care for, and without altering their pace, they made thorough observation of us, of the car, and of the tripod and camera.

The chaos doesn’t really seem to abate, or the noise to soften, or the dripping mess of stuff I dragged downstairs to organize itself, even in these dark mornings at the table, but it was Agee who best showed me exactly what you could do with words.

Laurence Bergreen’s 1984 biography is pretty good. Robert Fitzgerald’s memoir is intimate and moving. There is apparently a new biography being written by Dwight Garner (I forget where I noticed that), and we could use it. It would be splendid if Blake Bailey did Agee but you can’t have everything you want.

After wondering, when he heard of his death, why they were not better friends, John Cheever wrote in his journal:

I think, niggardly perhaps, that there may have been some imbalance between the relationship of Agee’s work to the people who appreciated it and the relationship of this work to everybody else’s work. I am sad to think that he is dead.

Am not sure this is entirely clear to me, but maybe Cheever is trying to get at that troubling sense that Agee was not as directed a novelist as he might have been, and that the “writer’s writer” aspect Agee’s work gets a bit tangled when you introduce the reading and buying public. Maybe he’s saying that while you might have loved the work, it’s ultimate importance may not have been as deep as, say, Cheever’s own. Cheever, of course, waffled between exaltation and denigration of his talent and self, and reputations waffle too, so let’s not choose. Besides, this was before A Death in the Family was published.

So, fine . . . Happy Birthday, Jim.