Force Field

Kathy Pories

When I was in college, each semester the Student Union would hold a giant used book sale during the first week of classes. Rows and rows of books were on sale at the kind of prices that college students appreciate—but you had to look through each one carefully. Textbooks often had nearly every sentence highlighted because somehow, highlighting felt like it might transfer the page directly to your brain. (I remember feeling like this might work as I tried to learn the steps of the Krebs cycle, or for that matter anything scientific, which never seemed to stick.) Of course, for the next person a book with highlighting was unusable, a wash of colors, the text itself nearly opaque.

But you could usually buy used novels, unless the previous reader was also fond of highlighters or had lots to say in the margins or possibly wrote everything that the professor said right onto the pages, or at least the gist of what they thought the professor said, i.e., in my copy of Equus: “horse = death.”  So you had to really inspect them, looking for clean, or cleanish, copies of Charles Dickens or William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf.

O Pioneers! had seemed pretty clean at first glance; there was some long division on page 179 at the end of a chapter where I guess the student got a little distracted, probably by bills, and then near the end of the book there were lots of underlines as Cather came to the point that the professor felt was the takeaway: “We come and go but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it —for a little while.” But otherwise, whole stretches were devoid of marks. I bought it.

It wasn’t until we were due to discuss Cather in class and I started reading when I discovered the writing on the title page. In cramped cursive, written hastily in pencil, the whole slanting upward, I found:

To Darrell,

Hope you get a lot of enjoyment out of this as I got writing

Willa Cather

It was like a portal had been opened between two freshmen boys. I imagined Darrell looking away for a minute, possibly bending over to find a pen in his backpack, as his friend quickly reached over and inscribed his edition. Darrell not seeing it all through class, or even the next class, not until he started reading the book just days before the final. The pleasure of the hidden joke between them, the time between when Darrell’s friend wrote it, and the time it took for Darrell to discover it. Every few years, I take it down off the shelf to make sure I’ve remembered it correctly, and it’s all still there, the slanting handwriting, the possible three l’s in Willa.

This is how it is for my favorite books on my shelves, the ones where I can still feel the presence of the reader. My parents have given me presents over the years meant to be treasured: a necklace with a single pearl and tiny diamond for my sixteenth birthday, handbags, dangly bracelets. Things chosen with care. But it’s in the pages of books that I feel my connection to them the strongest. One year when paring down his bookshelves, my father handed me a few of his old high school texts, asking if I wanted them. Hardbacks from the 1930s, they had the embossed covers we no longer see, as carefully rendered as a treasured novel: LATIN FOURTH YEAR, with a floral border as a frame. Later, paging through it, I found my young father in the margins, where he’d sketched the profiles of his teachers, practiced his cartooning, worked on the muscular structure of a torso, and then wrote on page after page ELLEN next to a heart struck with an arrow. He is there for me, bent over his textbook in class, hair falling forward over his eyes, thinking not at all about Latin but about his drawings, trying to crack the code of cartooning, mostly thinking of Ellen. In an old hardcover of Alice in Wonderland, I find in the opening endpapers in my mother’s friendly slanting grade-school teacher writing, “purchased by Kathy in 1968 at Cape Cod.” My mother, the documenter, so excited by my love of reading at a young age that she wrote it down right there. Here I was buying a book!

I have my Shakespeare paperbacks from high school, wonderful slim editions. The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV, Richard III, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew. And on the inside covers of each, in my loopy adolescent writing, the key themes I felt I should memorize before exams, as if they were like the Krebs cycle. Later, like all my friends, I copied these themes onto my thigh under my skirt for the exams. Those eventually washed off my skin, but the notes in the book remain and in them I see myself in ninth grade in Ms. Sokol’s class, who revealed to us that after she read The Taming of the Shrew she’d decided to divorce her husband. I loved her and I loved the plays and I loved my tiny editions, but in order to preserve the appearance of ennui with my friends, I pretended that I had to cheat to understand them until Mrs. Sokol pulled me aside and told me it wouldn’t serve me well to play dumb. I can’t not think of my huge affection for her every time I look at those paperbacks.

Not all relationships are good ones, to state the obvious. One day my husband (now ex) came home with a high school English textbook that he’d spotted at a gas station; he’d fished it out of the trash because it had been shot through, three times. (All these years later, it occurs to me that he was trying to tell me something.) The bullets penetrated the thick cardboard cover, which caved in around them, and then through nearly the many pages after that. The opening epigraph to the text is from Eudora Welty: “All serious daring comes from within,” and maybe the student honored that idea? I kept it. It felt like a record of a rocky relationship. Or two.

Books do remain. The physicality of them. The way we handle the ones that mean something to us. Years ago, when we were all discovering Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (the sentences so finely wrought), I worked at a restaurant with a girl so moved by it that she bought copies and wrapped them in foil for each of her favorite people. Each one a gift. Or the books missing from our shelves, never to be replaced or forgotten, like the time a house guest, after I told him how much I loved William Maxwell’s So Long See You Tomorrow and showed him my first edition, begged to borrow it and I never saw it again. I think about it every few months with a fresh sense of regret that I lent it out. It’s not that these works are lost, or that we can’t replace them or download them in mere seconds, faster than I can type this sentence; it’s that the copy you owned and held feels like something that talked directly to you, and you listened.

It’s now been five years since Algonquin gave up their office in Chapel Hill. The majority of our group now resides in the Hachette office in New York; those of us in North Carolina work from home. For years, we’d been located all around Chapel Hill, first in Louis Rubin’s backyard, then on Franklin Street, then (when I joined) a creaky two-story house on Weaver Street, and finally on the outskirts of Chapel Hill in an office park. As the spaces grew, so did our collection of books. When you exited the elevator you entered into a large space filled with shelves of new releases. Down the hall in the editorial area was our collection of first editions, chronicling the full history of Algonquin, kept (mostly) in chronological order until someone borrowed a book and it disappeared for a while. In our offices, editors kept galleys and finished copies of each book they’d worked on. There were books in the production department, books piled in the art department, stacks of books for mailings in the marketing and publicity offices, boxes of books arrived every week. And each year, there were more. There were so many that when it came time to vacate, it took us two months to take them all away. Gabe Bump came by and, as strongest man on the planet, hoisted a massive box of them, the kind of box an appliance arrives in, as if it were a box of tissues (it still felt unreal to watch) and drove them to a local prison. I took all the ones I’d edited home with me; it felt like a betrayal to let them go, even though our house is tiny. Now in every room save the kitchen and bathrooms, in addition to the large built-in bookshelf, we have small bookshelves everywhere you turn to hold them all. In Durham, there is a used bookstore called Books Do Furnish a Room, and I get it. It’s a bit crowded with books in our small house, but when I look at their spines, I remember my conversations with each author, whether good or heated, I remember how the jacket was loved or hated. There is undeniably a power that emanates from a physical book; why else would so many people be determined to ban them from libraries or schools or burn them?

Since the invention of the printing press, the creation of the physical book has evolved to make its production faster and cheaper, the weight of the paper becoming ever lighter, but it’s worth noting that even as it has evolved, there is a continued effort to make the book look as if it were created in the same way. Printed books are made from giant sheets that run through the printing press, each side carrying the images of eight pages. Then the sheet, called a signature, is folded up and cut on three sides. The signatures were once stitched directly into the spine, and in older hardcovers you can discern the stitching because the thread was often color-coordinated with the hard cover of the book itself. These days, stitching has given way to glueing, which is of course cheaper, but some publishers still create the illusion of stitching by running a color where the pages meet the spine, a way of respecting the creation of each book as a singular process, even if it’s a simulacrum of how a book was once made.

There was a period of time when I watched home makeover shows, and I confess that still, whenever I’m in a waiting room, I’m glued to the TV. You get to see dark old houses converted into wide open white spaces, everything cleaned up, memory erased. In the kitchen, white cabinets, white or marble counters. In the bedrooms, there is a sense of serenity, maybe soft blues on the walls. There is an enviable entertainment room with a big screen. The camera pans the rooms in delight, everything brightly lit, nearly neon, the HD screen of the waiting room making you feel as if you’ve entered the clean new space right along with the couple. It hit me one day what was missing from any of these rooms: books of all sizes and colors and conditions. And of course that makes sense; how could they bring in books to a home makeover, how could one feel as if they’re starting over in this virgin space?

But it’s also what gives me that feeling of emptiness. The physical presence of a weighty book in my lap has always been a source of comfort, not quite equal to having a cat but close. I’m not the only person who remembers reading a book at the dinner table, cradling it in my lap; it was one of the first relationships I had that was truly mine. When things were tense in my family, I could create a force field with me and my book anywhere: in a corner, in my bed even though my sister and I shared a room, in the backyard, even just on the stairs. I would fold down pages or lay it flat open when I stopped; I could do whatever I wanted with it, as it was wholly mine, my attachment to certain ones mysterious even to myself, like Cheaper by the Dozen.

I have my favorite books, ones that have shown me how to understand people and love and hate and see social systems in a fresh way and that have moved me so profoundly—Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed—but there are so many, depending on the day or the year, or the season, the moment that that book spoke to me and let me be totally in their worlds instead. A physical book to me is like someone I’ve just met. I hastily judge it by its cover, sometimes critical of how it looks, deciding that the jacket looks too sad or silly or forbidding or intellectual. And then I get to know it, I read the first words. I read them again. I carry it around the house, I place my bookmark, I look down the spine and measure how far I’ve read just as I’ve always done. And after reading, I want to go back to the beginning to make sure I was listening as carefully as I should have been.

Over thirty years ago, my friend Sue, who often recommends books to me (The End of the Affair, The Good Soldier, see others listed above), framed for me an old WPA poster, an image of a boy in a chair with a book open on his lap. The pages glow with a yellow light that reaches his face, also bathed in yellow. He looks down, his face totally captured by the book. Created for Book Week, the caption reads:

After All—there is nothing like A GOOD BOOK!

That glow of yellow light: it’s like heat, the words warming him, speaking directly to him, the book, it’s his alone.