A passion for bookstores

The way most people browse, it's as if they've stepped into a temple or church. This is not riffling through the hangers on the clearance rack or tossing canned corn into the cart. No, this is browsing. It even sounds drowsy: to browse. Heart rates slow. Time disappears. Serious people turn into dreamers again.

Matthew Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

A passion for bookstores may not be universal in the sense of everyone, but perhaps it is in the sense of everywhere. That is the idea one gets from reading Browse: The World in Bookshops, edited by Henry Hitchings (2016).

Hitchings asked writers from around the world to reflect on their experiences in bookstores, and the results, most of them anyway, are fascinating, often inspiring.

British novelist Ian Sansom recalls working at Foyle's Bookshop in London as a young man and spending most of his working hours hiding from customers, and presumably his bosses, and reading.

"Literature was my homeland," writes Juan Gabriel Vasquez, whose other homeland is Colombia.

Kenyan Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor recalls visiting a Nairobi bookshop as a child. "We were in paradise," she writes, "because there was no (offending) school textbook in sight to destroy our illusions!"

"I would argue that under most circumstances the conversation of used book dealers or obsessive collectors is the best conversation in the world," says Michael Dirda, who writes about books for the Washington Post. In his essay he tells about using the hours before a predicted blizzard, while his wife is out of town, to search for treasures in a used bookstore.

Danish author Dorthe Nors tells of the thrill of seeing one's own book in a bookshop, although in her case the store manager, unimpressed, gets angry because Nors has moved her book to a more prominent position.

And so it goes, from Turkey to China to Ukraine to Italy and beyond. Some people may go to amusement parks for thrills. Others of us head for a bookshop.

Money buys watches, not happiness

Barry knew he was good at making and losing money and getting paid for both handsomely.

Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success

In Gary Shteyngart's deceptively good 2018 novel Lake Success, hedge fund manager Barry Cohen gets paid handsomely indeed even though he loses much more money for his clients than he makes. I say "deceptively good" because the novel turns out to be much better than you might think in the early going.

Gary, we find, is also good at both making and losing friends. He's an outgoing guy, which is why he attracts investors, but he proves to be too shallow and too needy to maintain relationships. His collection of expensive watches, "the implements of his true desire," is the only thing that really matters to him. And this includes his Indian-American wife Seema and their 3-year-old autistic son Shiva.

With his marriage in shambles and the feds closing in because of his Wall Streets dealing, Barry takes a few of his favorite watches and begins a cross-country bus trip to try to start his life over again. Mostly he hopes to reclaim his college girlfriend, now divorced and with a son of her own. He trashes his wedding ring, his cell phone and his credit cards, and because he is always trying to make a good impression on people he meets along the way, he is soon out of cash and turns to begging.

Gary thinks of his bus trip as significant, the beginning of Act 2 of his life, yet he returns pretty much the same man, just one with interesting stories to tell. He's still a lousy husband and father, good only at making money while losing other people's money. Soon he is left with only his beloved watches. Yet somehow Barry does change by the end, and the inspiration for that change comes from an unexpected quarter.

Shteyngart's novel, with the 2016 presidential campaign as a backdrop, delivers both tears and laughter to its readers, at least those who can get past the opening pages.

Tips for introverts

Susan Cain's Quiet helped introverts feel better about themselves, assuring them that they are perfectly normal (despite what many extroverts might think) and that they have much to offer the world (in many ways more than extroverts can offer). Jenn Granneman's The Secret Lives of Introverts aims to help introverts live their lives. It's more of a how-to book than an inspirational book.

Granneman does cover some of the same ground Cain covered, but mostly she is interested in how introverts, especially young introverts, can better cope with a world that often seems stacked against them. How does an introvert find a job? Make friends? Get a date? Break up with an unsuitable boyfriend or girlfriend? Get more alone time without appearing rude? All these things pose greater challenges for introverts than they do for extroverts.

Yet her book isn't just for introverts. She addresses extroverts as well, offering advice to help them better understand introverted friends, spouses, lovers, employees or whatever. Extroverts often fail to understand why anyone would rather stay home alone "doing nothing" than go to a party with friends or colleagues. "But for introverts," Granneman says, "'nothing' is really something." Those hours spent alone thinking, reading or listening to music help introverts make sense of the often noisy and confusing world in which they spent their day and prepare themselves to face a similar kind of world the next day.

Granneman manages a blog called Introvert, Dear (introvert dear.com) that she mentions frequently in her book. Recent posts on the blog from a variety of introverted writers have titles like "I Kept to Myself at a Birthday Party, and Enjoyed It," "How to Stay Married to an Extrovert When You're an Introvert" and "5 Reasons You Should Hire an Introvert." If you are not interested in reading the book, try the blog. It's got similar advice but in smaller doses.

Unexpected greatness

There was something almost biblical about Chester A. Arthur. He reminds me of men like Moses, David or the apostles of Jesus, ordinary men whose early lives gave no clue they would ever stand out in their own generation, let alone be remembered by generations to follow.

Arthur was hardly a nothing, but he settled early for wealth over worthwhile achievement, Scott S. Greenberger tells us in his fine 2017 biography The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur. A pastor's son, he became a New York City lawyer and served briefly as a brigadier general in the Civil War, in which capacity he excelled at acquisition and organization of supplies.  These skills caught the attention of Roscoe Conkling, the U.S. senator who ran New York's political machine. Soon Arthur was Conkling's righthand man in running the spoils system that handed out jobs to the party faithful, regardless of ability. To describe Arthur as a political hack might have been generous.

Conkling expected to be the Republican candidate for president in 1880, and Arthur went to the convention in support of his boss. He was still wearing his Conkling button when James Garfield, the surprise nominee, agreed to accept Arthur as his running mate in hopes of winning New York's electoral votes. The strategy worked, but nobody, least of all Arthur, expected he would ever occupy the White House. The new vice president spent more time in New York assisting Conkling than in Washington assisting Garfield. Then an assassin's bullet (and inept doctors) changed history.

Power corrupts, but not always. Sometimes power actually builds character. Consider Moses. Or consider Chester Arthur. In his brief presidency, he stood up to Conkling, championed civil service reforms to end the spoils system, took steps to build the U.S. Navy into a world power, became an advocate for civil rights and pushed for more protection for Yellowstone.

Greenberger gives much of the credit for this transformation to an invalid woman named Julia Sand, who wrote Arthur a series of at least 23 letters encouraging him and sometimes chastising him. Often he did precisely what she urged him to do. Arthur once paid a surprise visit to her home and had a long chat with Julia and her family. She wished for more, and sometimes her correspondence reads almost like love letters. The president read her letters, and kept them even when he had most of his papers destroyed at the end of his presidency, but his heart belonged to his late wife. And besides, before he left the White House he knew he was dying.

Chester Arthur is not remembered as one of the greatest U.S. presidents, and in fact he is hardly remembered at all. But Greenberger's book reminds us that even minor presidents may have a little bit of greatness within them.

The feminization of names

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Beverly, Dana, Evelyn, Gail, Leslie, Meredith, Robin and Shirley were all primarily names for men.

Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought

Dana Andrews

To continue the discussion of "naming the baby" begun a week ago, let us briefly consider the feminization of boy names. As Steven Pinker points out in his book, the trend of parents giving masculine names to girls has been going on for a long time, since way before the beginning of the feminist movement.

Some parents want a boy and so give their daughters the boy names they had already picked out. Other parents choose masculine names in the belief such a name will give their daughter more confidence or independence or whatever. Many girl names are feminized versions of boy names. Charles becomes Charlene, then either can become Charley. Gerald becomes Geraldine, then either can become Gerry. Samuel becomes Samantha, then either can become Sammy. Robert becomes Roberta, then either can become Bobby.

Terry Moore

My parents named me Terry, not Terrance but just Terry. It was a common name for boys born in the 1940s. The popular comic strip Terry and the Pirates began in 1934. I knew other boys in school with that name. Two members of Monty Python, my contemporaries, were named Terry. One of the characters in American Graffiti, a movie about the class of 1962 (my class), is named Terry. Yet, perhaps because of actress Terry Moore, that name quickly evolved into a name for girls, much to the disgust of my father. Today few baby boys are called Terry.

Rarely do names move in the other direction, from girls to boys. Despite the Johnny Cash song, there are no boys named Sue. (Today there aren't even many girls named Sue.)

History in fiction

What Edward Rutherfurd did in one fat novel — tell the history of New York City through fiction (New York, 2009) — Beverly Swerling did in four fat novels. Her death in 2018 prevented her from continuing that history into the 20th century, assuming that was ever her intent.

Following City of Dreams, City of Glory and City of God, her 2011 novel City of Promise covers the period from the end of the Civil War to the mid-1880s, or the time when the Brooklyn Bridge was under construction. This was the Gilded Age, when those who made fortunes in business thanks to the war enhanced those fortunes, when immigrants flooded into the city and when, to accommodate the growing population and growing business, developers started building up as well as out.

The story centers on one of these businessmen, Joshua Turner, who came out of the war with a wooden leg that in no way slowed his ambition. His bright idea is to build multi-story apartment buildings for the middle class. His even brighter idea is to marry Mollie Brannigan, a sharp-as-a-tack Irish woman who, because she is over 20 (and still a virgin despite growing up in her aunt's brothel), has resigned herself to spinsterhood. She meets Joshua while working at Macy's.

Yet this is also the period when the Boss Tweed political machine is in power and when criminal gangs are exercising power of their own. Then there is a rival businessman who made life miserable for Joshua when he was a Confederate prisoner of war and is now willing to do anything, including kidnapping or killing Mollie, to claim Joshua's success as his own.

Those in Joshua's corner include a resourceful dwarf who knows how to make steel, Mollie's aunt  whose business has provided her with many valuable contacts in the business world, and a pawnbroker who seems to know everything going on in New York but whose true loyalty remains in doubt until the end.

Swerling makes New York history an important part of her story while at the same time keeping it in the background, so readers may not even realize they are learning anything.

Living in a bookstore

A bookshop can be a magnet for mavericks and nomads. A community hub, a haven, a platform for cultural ideas. A centre of dissent and radicalism.

Henry Hitchings, Browse: The World in Bookshops

Henry Hitchings was talking specifically about Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookstore in San Francisco when he wrote those words, but he just as easily could have been thinking of Shakespeare and Company, the famous English-language bookstore in Paris within sight of Notre Dame Cathedral. Shakespeare and Company and its long-time owner George Whitman are the subjects of Jeremy Mercer's fascinating 2005 memoir Time Was Soft There.

Mercer was a crime reporter for a Canadian newspaper, and at times in trouble with police himself, when he made the mistake of revealing a source, who then threatened revenge. Mercer fled to Paris with little money and no prospects. Like so many young people in Paris under similar circumstances, Mercer found his way to Shakespeare and Company. For decades Whitman, a devoted socialist, had operated the bookstore as a free boardinghouse for "mavericks and nomads," with preference given to aspiring writers. Over the years some 40,000 people had spent nights in the bookstore, some for years at a time, sleeping wherever they could find room.

Whitman, an American, liked to tell people he was the son of Walt Whitman, which was true but it wasn't THAT Walt Whitman. He was in his mid-80s when Mercer was his guest, but still not nearly old enough to be the poet's son. Despite his socialist ideals, Whitman enforced a class system in his shop, allowing those he judged to be the best writers to use actual bedrooms on the upper floors, while others, like Mercer, had to look for space on the floor. Whitman also favored new guests over those he was starting to get tired of and attractive women over everybody else. Even at 86 he was still falling desperately in love with young women.

Whitman, Mercer tells us, was also a petty thief, stealing from his own guests. His favorite reading in his own bookstore were the diaries he stole from women who stayed with him. Mercer describes Whitman wrestling with a priest over a book being sold cheaply at a book sale. He wanted the book to resale in his shop. The priest presumably wanted to read it.

For all Whitman's faults, Mercer came to admire him and to want to help him protect the future of the store, which was being sought by developers because of its prime location. Mercer was able to track down Whitman's daughter, his only child and the product of his brief marriage to one of the women he fell in love with in his store. Today, following Whitman's death in 2011, Sylvia Whitman operates the store.

Mercer's title refers to prison slang. For prisoners there is hard time and then there is soft time. At Shakespeare and Company, he says, time was soft.

I visited Shakespeare and Company when I was last in Paris two summers ago. How I wish I had read Mercer's book first.