Recently, needing to buy a book for my son that I couldn’t wait to be delivered, I find myself moving through the RF field of The Strand on Columbus, passing tables and shelves topped with freestanding signs labeled with various imprimaturs—Best Sellers, Prize Winners, Staff Picks, Reader’s Favorites, Featured Titles, Blind Date With a Book—a little deeper in, past racks of greeting cards and bookmarks, the osmatic smell of mercantilism wafting off the candles on a shelf next to the puzzles, which disrupts my meditative mindset, and so I get to work scanning the signs above the shelves looking for True Crime, noting that nobody is standing anywhere near the back right corner under the four P’s—Philosophy, Plays, Poetry, Psychology—a sight that induces a nostalgia for the excitement I felt as an undergraduate English major going to the shelves labelled by course in the basement of the campus bookstore to collect the titles for that quarter’s classes, an anticipatory exuberance wafting over me for the sampling of western literature I would soon be tasting firsthand.
I have to remind myself this is not a museum and I need not be pacing so slowly—that, unless it is a rare item, a book is fungible, and anyone can lay down some currency and walk back past the RF pedestals, through the doors, and out into the larger world carrying a copy in a bag to be consumed later, in private. After I pull the last copy of Under The Banner of Heaven off the shelf, I move back to the Featured Titles table, where I noticed a stack of Anatole Broyard’s accounting of his entry into adulthood after WWII, Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, liking how Broyard’s title is appropriately laudatory and understated, as Kafka seems to be one of those writers who, since his posthumous debut into world culture, has never left but is continuously being rediscovered. It is compelling that the genius of Kafka, a German speaking Jew from Prague, who in 1924 at the age of forty died of tuberculosis (yes, the same dispositive ailment as Orwell’s), only comes into full view after the world-historical horror of the holocaust, during which his three sisters were murdered. Kafka’s tortured humility—his best friend Max Brod, whom he knew from his university days, published his three unfinished novels after his death, refusing his request to burn the manuscripts—augmented the poignantly absurd view of existential alienation he is famous for. (However, if you get around to reading a copy of Metamorphosis please don’t forget to look for the humor. It is pretty funny.)
I also like how the title locates me that precious mid-century interlude when a cultural hunger for Kafka’s dryly humorous absurdism was prelude to the unironic immediacy of abstract expressionism that marked the end of modernism, which is conventionally accounted for as an outgrowth of the sentiment that language and thought are insufficient to account for the madness the world had just experienced, back to when The Village was gritty and affordable, if you could find a squalid walkup in which to lay your head on the top half of a trundle bed, outside the drafty window a rusting fire escape, of course. Kafka Was The Rage—omitting the implied When making the words more direct, declarative, earnest—like how the kinetic vibe of Jackson Pollock compels us to feel a momentary soul-burst of what it is to be alive and human—like Jasper Jones’s unpretentious repurposing of common materials and objects, laying newsprint and strips of cloth dipped in pigmented wax on plywood to express his vision of an American flag, which we take in through our senses, a playful homage rather than something silly, like a visual Marxist pun on the techniques of production. Get all symbolist if you like, but you don’t have to. (He titled it Flag.)
Broyard affirms this earnest directness to the post war culture, when opening a secondhand bookstore in Greenwich Village after returning from war-ravaged Japan is like “sailing around the world”—and be careful what you will into being in a trauma-informed romantic state common among those who look at the world through the lens of literature. “Books enabled us to see ourselves as characters—yes, we were characters!” Broyard writes, accounting for the meta-conscious bounty available for those like him who are willing to put in the work to rigorously disassociate, “and this gave us a bit of control.” (30) What Broyard hadn’t realized is that his shop would attract the sort of individual who would “go into a bookshop when all other diversions had failed them. Those who had no friends, no pleasures…[who] came to read the handwriting on the wall, the bad news. They studied the shelves like people reading the names on a war memorial” (32). The “gaudy sadness” of literature so much easier to manage than these “heartaches” coming in “off the street” (33).
This endeavor was a digression on Broyard’s journey to the world of writing; he didn’t make it all the way over to the land of the novelist, finding instead a home in the fiction adjacent territories of the reviewer and the memoirist—but more to the point, to be a bookseller means you have to be a businessman, where your concerns are with the margins rather than the human condition—a temperamental difference that is made stark by a sharply contrasting fifteen-year-old memory, in which I step into a bookstore in Ardmore on a beautiful mid-May Saturday to find a thirty-something man perched up on a stool talking to an older gentleman, wasted thin, collapsed into a high-backed reclining chair, one bony leg crossed over the other. My presence interrupts their spending time. Can I help you find something? he says, clearly excited that a potential customer had breached the threshold. I tell him that I am going to browse his selection, and he holds up his palms and tilts his head to the side, pleasantly drawing down the sides of his lower lip. A proprietor’s practiced and sincere gesture. My steps creak the floorboards beneath the worn carpet as I move past the shelves, many book covers facing outward, taking up a delightfully audacious amount of space. I am pleased to see Updike’s Rabbit series, all four of them, shoulder to shoulder.
As I cycle back toward the front, the man on the stool seems to preempt the conversation, as if to opportunistically take the occasion to leave, or perhaps to allow the old man to focus on the interaction he loved so much—through the operation of his charm turning an off-the-street browser into a paying customer. Bye uncle, he says, slipping off the stool and walking decisively toward the back exit, leaving just the two of us. I begin: I noticed your bookshop from across the street. Not too many of these small ones around anymore. There is another one in Wayne, he says. That guy started about the same time I opened this one. We are the only two left. Then without bidding, frank details about his illness, pancreatic cancer, trip off his tongue, as though he were complaining about a flare up of arthritis. Last August, he says, they told him two months to two years. It is now late May. Some quick optimistic math puts the current estimate at fourteen months. Even after the days I get chemo, I don’t want to go home, so I come here if I can. This morning I went to synagogue, and now I’m in my store. A little religion, a little work, he says, putting out his left hand, then his right, his lower lip again pulling down at the edges.
His eyes light up when I tell him I teach high school English. You should order your books through me, he says. I work with a couple local teachers, like you. They come to me with their needs and we work something out. True to his purpose, even while dying by the minute the thrill of the deal jazzes him. I should have left it at this, but I couldn’t help myself but respond by telling him I just self-published my first novel—a tone-deaf act of self-promotion subconsciously motivated by the desperate notion that some happenstance prophet would open the gates to the monetized world. He copes with the awkward turn by leaning back into memory. I have had a number of people come through and ask if they could stock my store with their book. It happens. A few local writers, he continues, even have held events here. Some worked out really well. They had wine. People came. And others not very well. They completely stopped my foot traffic. He pauses and with great effort puts his hands loosely behind his head. I still made my day, he says. A salesman’s expression. The survival of this store all these years was not an act of fate. He willed it to happen.
He recovers. What is your book about, he asks and then listens as I tell him about the main character, Sam, about the scandal of a teacher having an affair with a student that establishes the driving tension within the plot. He considers this, and says, It sounds interesting. How does it end? Sam is shocked out of his malaise by his friend’s scandal, I say. He implodes his life, moves out to California. Remakes himself into an emotionally more viable version. Finds love. It ends happy! he says. Yes, a happy ending. He punches a fist up in the air, to just above his head before his arm runs out of strength. He then tells me about a local writer, his writer, he says, who will not dress! He dresses just like you, he says, but all the time. He wills himself up out of the chair and comes from behind the counter. All this guy’s done since college is write his books. I ask how he supports himself. There is money there, in the family. He moves his hands in small reciprocal circles in front of his chest, as if an old wizard conjuring a spell. I follow him to a shelf where he picks up a book with a handwritten ‘local author’ tag sticking out the top. This is his second with this character. I haven’t read it, but the first was good. He hands it to me, saying, He simply refuses to dress.
Standing on the sidewalk outside the propped open door, I feel a discomfiture caused by having brought my ego needs in with me across the threshold, tuning an organic moment into something synthetic and, generating the type of pseudo participatory experience you get from art displays like Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, an installation on the second floor of the MOMA consisting of hanging balls of stuffed animals and brightly colored sculptures fixed to the walls emitting intermittent bursts of pine scented mist—the critical conceit is that they are deliberately stitched together such that their faces are concealed in order to prevent an emotional reaction, which undercuts the shifting of expectation that comments on the wasteful haste of consumer culture, the olfactory goof a nod to how disgusting it is to buy used stuffed animals at a garage sale. There is nothing necessarily remarkable in this aesthetic contradiction, this reversal. The installation succeeds in proving the obvious fact that these objects are disposable kitsch.
In this vein, sort of knowing what I was doing, I decide to return to The Strand and participate in the Blind Date marketing ruse, which turns on the ploy of wrapping books in paper that features a suggestive scrutable phrase indicating something of what it is about, and I choose one with the words all is not well at the farmer’s market printed in letters that look like they’re composed with sticks. Hoping for a sardonic memoir about rival vegetable vendors, I get an unpalatable horror mystery, sweetly savory, like chili infused with cinnamon, which I force myself to choke down. Afterwards—recalling that disappointed look the checkout employee gave me: here you go spontaneous book consumer—I feel a vague sense of self-hatred that lingers. Has reading a book ever been such a post-ironic gesture? This contrivance proved a bookstore is much better experienced simply as a place you go to browse the shelves and potentially buy something to read.
I am happy that back then I did buy the local author’s book, despite fearing it would be terrible (and it was), and not only to honor the owner’s optimism, his embodiment of the value of work, how he sustained himself for decades in the narrow margins between viability and oblivion—but because of the memory of the last time in my life I have my credit card run over by one of those portable imprinting devices. Wump, wump. I place three fingertips on the paper to hold it in place, feeling the grittiness of the carbon dust as I sign my name. He fluidly tears off the smudgy yellow copy and drops it and the book in a plastic bag that day’s newspaper came in. He continued to make his days there for a few more months.
Trevor Payne is the author of THE MECHANICALS, a modern-day love comedy tracking the journey of a young couple, Jackie and Norman, who are brought together by an unplanned pregnancy, the imperative of family allowing them to survive their wild and unsettled twenties and their functionally alternative thirties, ultimately leading them to a deeper understanding of what they have come to mean to each other. The event that catalyzes this outcome is the death of Guy Roche, the world champion MMA fighter Norman becomes friends with through his work as a feature writer for a men’s magazine, Voyeur. Through helping Guy’s family decide what to do with his estate, Norman and Jackie become closer to Guy’s widow, Natasha, a former adult film star who models for them her intuitive understanding about how to exist in the messiness of the universe.
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