August 26, 2009--Mid-Coast: At the Library

We’ve been here since the very beginning of July and Rona, with a touch of irony, says we may have to buy this place because we’ve bought and read so many books that there is no room for them back in New York City. “If nothing else than for the book shelves,” she says, “we probably should make an offer.”

But while doing all sorts of due diligence—things such as getting the septic system checked, having the roof and foundation inspected, and a water sample tested at the state capital in Augusta—Rona has been checking books out of the local library. I, on the other hand, since I have a fetish about reading books that I own and then shelving them close by, have continued to buy my books via the Internet and at nearby church and library book sales. Where nothing costs more than a dollar or two and sometimes you get lucky and find a first edition of locally-residing authors such as Richard Russo and Richard Ford.

I also must confess that since I am a bit more eager than Rona to make an offer for the cottage, as part of my strategy to bring her along, I have been buying up a storm of books. So many, in fact, have accumulated that there is no way our rented subcompact Hyundai Accent will be able to accommodate both our clothes and our books—one or the other will have to remain behind. Or be boxed up and shipped to New York by UPS. And there is in fact no spare bookshelf space back in Manhattan. We live there, after all, in 850 square feet and I have been buying and reading books at quiet a clip for more than 50 years. Thus we have a serious book-shelving and thus real estate problem.

And to tell the truth, another reason I am obsessed with buying books is that I have never been comfortable in libraries. My deepest memories of libraries are mostly unpleasant ones, being relentless shushed and otherwise disciplined by, forgive me, spinster librarians who seemed to have a serious problem with the surges of testosterone that animated me when I was a pre-book-buying adolescent. I even have a half-conscious memory of having been kicked out of the Utica Avenue branch of the Brooklyn Public Library because I laughed over-audibly while sitting on the floor while thumbing through a book of James Thurber cartoons. It took me decades to overcome this public humiliation and to allow myself to buy and read any book that might turn out to be laugh-out-loud funny.

And then later, to make matters worse, during pre-Google college and graduate school years, as a literature major, though I had no choice but to do all my research in libraries, from those early traumas, I conspired to do term papers that were so “original” (at least that was my claim) that they required more “creative” thought than arduous research. (Read—I sought to “research” things that did not require me to spend too much time in the stacks). Thankfully, for my purposes here I do not have to pull my master’s thesis or aborted dissertation out of dead storage as evidence, or to quote from either, to convince you that I am not making this up. I will spare us that experience.

Suffice it say that for my masters I wrote about William Blake’s obscurest and least commented-upon epic narrative poem, The Four Zoas; and for my doctorate, I worked on a New-Critical approach to the narrative structure of Beowulf. In the Old English, of course.

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum . . .

From a series of quick and very cursory visits to the Columbia library card catalogue I gleefully discovered that almost no one had taken this approach and thus it was an ideal topic for me on my own—which was the point—to ruminate and write about. On the other hand, to convince my dissertation committee to go along with this scheme, which is what it unabashedly and transparently was, was another matter altogether. Thus to this day there is no PhD appended to my name.

But this summer, during one of our (actually mainly my) rummagings, this one at the Tenant's Harbor Library Summer Book Sale, indulging me while I rummaged, Rona wandered around to take in the scene and occasionally to thumb through something that looked interesting. While I scooped up a copy of Richard Ford’s Wildlife (a fine first edition—for one dollar), as good fortune would have it, on a table off in a deserted and forlorn corner devoted to “Books of Maine and New England,” Rona found, for 50 cents, a book that would deeply affect her summer.

A book by the poet May Sarton’s series of eight, late-in-life journals, The House By the Sea. An account, Rona tells me, of how after leaving Nelson, New Hampshire, Sarton sought what she thought would be a totally different, more solitary life in York, Maine. Where she could mine and reflect upon the effect of relocation and relative isolation on her thinking and writing.

Should I say—a mini-version of just what we are contemplating? A partial relocation to a cottage by the sea. From, say, May through mid-October, getting out of town, so to speak, just when it begins to get cold, the days shorten, and the effects on us of relative isolation (which in our case, confessedly, must include breakfast every morning at the Bristol Diner) would yield more cabin fever than poetic inspiration. There is a limit to this kind of thing for the likes of us. Or should I say—me?

So after ingesting all of The House By the Sea in a a day or two, Rona was eager to read the next journal in the sequence, as well as the ones that preceded and followed it; and although I offered to order all remaining seven of them for her, she said that she preferred to take them out of the local library one by one. And when I attempted to say that I could have them all shipped here in two-to-three days and that she would then have copies of her own, and first editions at that, and therefore wouldn’t have to go to the library, she simply stared back at me and, without words, said—“This is my thing. Stay out of it.”

Which I of course did.

And she added, in words this time, “How often do I have to tell you that we’re drowning in books in the city?” That put an end to that, though very early the next morning, well before Rona was awake, for myself, via Abebooks, I sneaked off to the computer and ordered Richard Russo’s Straight Man (in the spirit of keeping up with Maine-based authors and to demonstrate that I am capable of reading books that cause me to laugh out loud, which in fact, after it arrived and I zipped through it, did) and a first edition of Pat Barker’s magnificent World War I novel, Resurrection. I had read it years ago but always coveted a first. We’d figure out, I convinced myself, where to find room for them. Maybe stacked up on our new coffee table, though I hate that kind of decoratey look. Or perhaps, I smiled slyly to myself, right here on some of the already existing shelves!

Rona’s telling me not to order the rest of May Sarton’s journals meant, inevitably, that we would have to make repeated trips to the library. Hopefully, I thought, perhaps through familiarity I might somehow recover from over my bibliotechaphobia.

Rona’s first foray was to look for Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, the first of the eight. She was directed toward the two rows of stacks where the works of Maine authors were located. Non-Fiction, where she headed; and Fiction where I decided to hide, thinking that while attempting not to too visibly cringe and thus reveal the psychic residue of my painful times in Brooklyn and at Columbia I might get some ideas about which Richard Ford and Richard Russo books to order to fill in the gaps in my reading and collecting mania. And perhaps I would discover some Maine writers with whom I was not familiar. Though since I am trying to pass for at least half a Mainer, there was a limit to what I was willing to do. I’d rather be run out of Lincoln County than be caught toting Portland’s Stephen King’s Children of the Corn.

“I see you have it,” a moment later I heard Rona say out loud to herself from the other aisle. “Just the one I’m looking for. How nice.” I was tempted to shush her before the librarian did.

But, just as audibly, I heard that librarian say, “Now isn’t that nice to hear. I wasn’t sure it was in. There’s someone else from the area who has read everything by May Sarton and I thought she might have checked it out.”

What is going on here, I wondered, as I peeked around the end of the shelves to make sure I wasn’t imagining things—a librarian in the library speaking in such a normal tone of voice? No shushing?

Rona, with a broad smile, emerged from the stacks and walked over to the desk. I could see from were I was hiding that she was clutching the Journal of a Solitude, Sarton’s first published journal and another volume, which I assumed either followed it in the series or came before the one she had bought the week before.

She promptly, louder than I would have, plopped both books down onto the desk and, noting that it was a very small library, asked, “Is it all right to check out two books at a time?”

“Of course, dear,” the clearly jolly librarian responded, “for anyone who loves May Sarton as much as I do, there are no rules about how many books you can have.”

“So, you like Sarton too? I just ‘discovered’ her. I bought House By the Sea last week and couldn’t wait to get here to see if you had others.”

“Why, we should have all of them. She has quite a following here and I made sure we acquired all of them! I saw to that. Let me see what you have here,” she let her reading glasses slide down from where they had been nesting in her hair. “Both of these are wonderful. Read them slowly as there is so much to take in and think about.”

“The first one, I mean the first one that I read was so meaningful to me that it is even making me think that this would be a good place to live. Now that we have the time.” She gestured toward me, I had by then fully crept out from between the stacks, to indicate who the we was. "I hope to read all of them.”

“Well then, you will be inspired. Some might ay that she did some of her best work when she had physical burdens to endure.”

“Oh, I can’t wait. I plan to be back to check out others of her books.”

“And we have a lot of them. Be sure, of course to look at some of her novels, I’d be happy to suggest which ones you might like since there are so many of them, not quite of the quality of her poetry, which you must, if you haven’t, read. Again, there’s quite a lot of that. So you have your work cut out for you! You may just have to come back. Even next summer! They will be waiting for you.” She bathed Rona in a glowing smile.

“I hope we might,” Rona said, “We have been talking about that.” She nodded in my direction. By then, still stunned by all of this gregariousness, I was however beginning to realize that times had changed since the last time I was in a library. Or at least one in a small town.

“Is there a way for me to join?” Rona then asked. “As perhaps a summer member? So I can check out books.”

The librarian, whose name I could see from her name tag was Mrs. Moore, frowned. This was a much more familiar look to me. “To tell you the truth that though you can, I wouldn’t recommend it.” Ah, I thought, here we go. Deep in my DNA I knew about how exclusive and off-putting these places can be. “It used to be that summer people for five dollars could become members. And that five dollars would be refunded at the end of the summer if you didn’t have any books outstanding. But then the trustees,” she lowered her voice and leaned across the desk toward Rona—and I stepped slowly closer since I am hard of hearing—this I too wanted to hear: how things in libraries really work, “the trustees, who are otherwise wonderful people, last year changed all of that. I think, to be truthful with you, to make sure the summer people contributed something to the library, they changed our policy and now everyone, no matter how long you are in residence, has to pay ten dollars a year to become a member and none of it, mind you, is to be refunded.”

“Well. I’m willing to . . .”

“I assume you are dear. But to me this is not a good policy. That’s why I am telling you about it. And besides, if you were to join I’d have to get all sorts of information from you and put it into that.” Did I sense a familiar librarian sneer as she gestured toward the computer screen?

“So?” Rona said, letting that hang in the air.

“Here’s what I suggest,” Mrs. Moore whispered, “While you’re here, why don’t you just use my number. It’s 434. And I’ll be sure to let the other women know that this is all right. Then you won’t have a problem.”

“That’s wonderful of you, but I don’t want to cause any difficulties. Could I at least make a contribution to the library fund? I assume there’s a way to do that.”

“Yes there is and that would be very nice,” though she waved that offer away as if it were a black fly buzzing about. “Yes, that would be nice, but hardly necessary.”

“But why are you . . .?”

“Because I am interested in doing whatever we can to encourage people to read more. Charging gets in the way.”

* * *

The next morning, again before dawn, in anticipation of our anniversary in October and as a gesture toward acquiring a bookshelf of May Sarton book as a gift for Rona, I ordered first editions of all eight of her journals.

And when we returned to the library a few days later so that Rona could check out At Seventy and After the Stroke, in the Maine Fiction section I found a copy of Russo’s first novel, Mohawk; and since I haven’t as yet been able to locate a first edition and thus haven’t read it, with her generous permission, using Mrs. Moore’s 434 membership number, I checked it out.