May 2003
To: Margaux & Nora
With love from Collodi, Italy –
Home of Pinocchio.
With Love,
Aunt Kathy & Uncle Lynn

I can’t afford to collect signed first editions of the works of Twain or Dickens, but for several decades now I have collected books memorably inscribed by a gallery of nobodies. These books carry inscriptions not from their illustrious authors but from some previous purchaser. I’m talking about books that were given as gifts, from friend to friend, or parent to child, or husband to wife, and then somehow managed to end up on the shelves of a used-book store. I have a small but impressive collection of such works. Today, I added “Pinocchio” to that collection.
Many of my inscribed books I purchased with no intention of ever reading them. I bought them because something in their inscriptions spoke to me. I hate to see a lovingly inscribed book abandoned to the whims of commerce. By purchasing it for my collection, I feel that I have saved its inscription from complete oblivion.
It doesn’t pain me much to find a fifty-year-old book with a heartfelt inscription consigned to the shelves of a used-book store. People die, and it is only natural that their books should be sold off with the rest of their estate. I am saddened, however, when I open up a used book and find a tender inscription whose date is relatively recent. Some of these inscriptions are so endearing that only someone with a heart of lead could have traded it in at a used-book store. A case in point is the inscription I found in a hardcover edition of Margaret Atwood’s novel “Cat’s Eye”:

– April Elizabeth –

Did you know that when you read this
book in bed, that you are laying next to
the happiest man in the world.

Your husband,
Jim

“Cat’s Eye” was published in 1988. I found my copy (actually, April Elizabeth’s copy) in a used-book store in 1991. It seems unlikely that April Elizabeth could have died during that three-year span. Judging from Jim’s handwriting, April Elizabeth’s slightly hippie name, and the contemporary, feminist subject matter of the novel itself, I’d guess that April Elizabeth and Jim were a fairly young couple. So what could have induced a young wife to so quickly divest herself of a book so lovingly inscribed? For lack of any additional information, I am forced to fabricate an explanation. But nothing I can imagine portrays April Elizabeth in a favorable light. Judging from her taste in reading material (assuming, of course, that she even bothered to read “Cat’s Eye”) it would seem that she is at least mildly feminist and almost certainly more literate than her husband, who misuses a form of the verb “lay” and omits the question mark that should have ended his inscription. Did April Elizabeth outgrow Jim intellectually? Did she drop him in favor of a more literate lover? Did too much Margaret Atwood raise her feminist consciousness to the point where she could no longer endure her husband’s sentimental paternalism? I doubt that any plot thread of “Cat’s Eye” (which I’ve never read) can be as intriguing as the question of what caused April Elizabeth to trade in Jim’s lovingly inscribed gift.
At least when April Elizabeth traded in her gift she appears to have gotten a decent return for it. I bought the book for six dollars, which means that April Elizabeth probably got three dollars in cash for it. But what can be said for Tabitha Hart, who traded in a paperback copy of Irving Stone’s “The Greek Treasure” that bore two memorable inscriptions:

Darling Tabitha

Happy 14th
Birthday –
I love you always –
Big Kisses

Daddy
June 15, 1986

P.S. The Author
autographed this
book especially for
you!!

And sure enough, after Daddy’s inscription, we find, in a sloppier handwriting:

For Tabitha Hart

Have a fine read.

Cordially,
Irving Stone
May 1986

There are so many things wrong with this picture I scarcely know where to begin. I found “The Greek Treasure” on a shelf of bargain used books, where it was priced at fifty cents. That means that Tabitha probably got a quarter for it. For twenty-five cents she traded in a book lovingly inscribed by her father and cordially inscribed by the author. I know no more about Papa Hart and Tabitha than I do about April Elizabeth and Jim, but if I were to assemble a portrait of their lives from the one shard of evidence available to me, I would make the following conjectures. Papa Hart is probably divorced from Tabitha’s mother. When parents are married, their gifts to their children usually are given in both their names. Perhaps intellectual incompatibility had a hand in the Hart divorce, just as it appears to have played a role in April Elizabeth’s split from Jim. Tabitha was born in 1972, at which time the best known Tabitha in America was a character in the sitcom “Bewitched,” still widely syndicated on television in those days. Tabitha Hart’s mother probably named her daughter after the daughter of Elizabeth Montgomery’s character in “Bewitched.” Mr Hart probably regretted this. He appears to have been more intellectually inclined than his wife. The book he gave his daughter for her fourteenth birthday was a fictionalized account of the life of Sophia Vimpos, who, when she was just three years older than Tabitha, married 47-year-old Henry Schliemann (the famous “Schliemann of Troy”) and undertook with him the adventure of unearthing the ruins of the most legendary city in all of ancient Greece. No doubt Papa Hart was trying to inspire in Tabitha an interest in history, archeology, literature, and other scholarly pursuits (though, let us hope he was not trying to encourage her to run off with a man thirty years her senior while still a minor). Obviously the marriage of Papa Hart and his sitcom-addicted wife could never have worked out. Who knows what the final straw was? Perhaps he met April Elizabeth one day at a used-book store and they ran off together in pursuit of a more intellectually congenially union. It’s a fairly good bet, however, that Papa Hart was financially straitened in 1986. Had his bank account been at all healthy he probably would have purchased a hardbound edition of Stone’s book rather than the cheap supermarket paperback that he ended up giving her (could the cheapness of the edition have anything to do with the rather niggardly and perfunctory inscription from Stone?). But though he may have been poor, Papa Hart wasn’t without resources. He was farsighted enough to have sent the book off to Stone a month or two in advance of Tabitha’s birthday. And he was clever too. He found a way to increase the worth of the book (though obviously not its resale value) at a cost of just the dollar or two he probably spent on postage. In those pre-Internet days it probably took a bit of sleuthing to uncover Irving Stone’s address. So clearly Papa Hart wasn’t the kind of father who picks up a birthday present for his daughter on the way over to her house for a weekend visitation two weeks after her actual birthday. He was a smart and thoughtful man. His handwriting is elegant and confident, much smarter and neater than Jim’s (which is simple and spare) or even Irving Stone’s (which is sloppy). But Tabitha, alas, appears not to have appreciated her father’s resourcefulness. Otherwise she would never have sold off his gift for a mere quarter. She is now 38 years old. I picture her looking a bit like the grown up Lolita – a frumpy conventional housewife with a snot-nosed child or two always in tow. As I’ve said, this is mere conjecture on my part but, as Schliemann of Troy taught us, much can be gleaned from the mere shards of the past. Stone’s novel begins with an epigram from Sophocles that you might want to keep in mind if you’re thinking about trading in a book lovingly inscribed to you by your Grandmother Rose or your Uncle Ernie: “The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything. There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to life…”
In that spirit, let us now consider the case of a boy named Nathan. In the year 2000, while visiting Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, I came across this inscription in a used trade-paperback edition of Chaim Potok’s “My Name Is Asher Lev”:

To My Dearest Nathan:

May this book show
you the memories of your
past and the promises of
your future.

Your loving
Mother,
Judith

Monday June 16, 1997
~ A very special day ~

I doubt that Nathan’s bar mitzvah or high-school graduation took place on Monday, so it seems likely that the “very special day” his mother refers to is his birthday, probably his eighteenth. It also seems safe to assume that Judith, like Papa Hart, is a person of limited financial means. Her gift is a fairly humble one for an eighteenth birthday: a paperback book. But Nathan’s mother is obviously keenly interested in her Jewish heritage and has made an effort to pass on this interest to her son. I suspect that she has failed. A son who can sell off such a lovingly inscribed gift for a few bucks is not likely to ever find himself convicted of ancestor worship. Most likely Nathan is a greedy ingrate who will always be a source of disappointment to his mother. If I sound a bit harsh, it isn’t without reason. You see, shortly after I found the inscribed copy of “Asher Lev,” I came across this inscription in a mass-market paperback edition of James Hilton’s “Lost Horizon”:

Nathan:

Enjoy this
book while you
sail off to faraway
places. You’re a
good friend
and I’ll
miss
you!

YSFC
Trisha

A cynic might point out that I found this book in a Placerville, California, bookstore, nearly 600 miles from Powell’s, and thus it is unlikely to have belonged to the same Nathan as the “Asher Lev.” But both books appear to have been inscribed to a young man embarking on the first big adventure of his adulthood. I prefer to believe that both books came from the personal library of the same callous young man. Otherwise I am forced to confront the depressing possibility that the world is full of heartless Nathans. But perhaps I have been too hard on Nathan. Perhaps Nathan is a native of New York or New Jersey and, following his graduation from high school, he opted to spend a year or two traveling across country, pursuing some lost horizons of his own. Perhaps he thumbed rides with passing motorists or hopped aboard slow-moving freight trains, carrying only what could fit into his small backpack. Perhaps, before leaving home, he stuffed into his backpack the inscribed books he had received from his mother and his best girl Trisha. Things probably went well for a while. But then, somewhere out on the west coast, he must have run out of money. Perhaps he was robbed at knifepoint or fleeced by some slick conman. In a small town in northern California he was forced to sell Trish’s gift in order to raise a few bucks to buy food or a room for the night. Later on, in Portland, he was forced to do the same thing with his cherished copy of “My Name Is Asher Lev.” Perhaps he promised himself that he would someday return to these same used bookstores and retrieve his graduation presents, like the John Cusack character in the movie “Serendipity” who spends years searching every used-book store in New York for a copy of the novel in which the woman of his dreams inscribed her name and phone number.
I’m not sure which portrait of Nathan is the more likely: greedy jerk or luckless wanderer. I have very few clues to go by. Most intriguing is that “YSFC” at the end of Trisha’s inscription. I typed the letters YSFC into an internet search engine recently but all I found was the Yeardly Smith Fan Club, a group devoted to the work of the actress who gives voice to the TV character Lisa Simpson. Could that possibly be the YSFC that Trisha was referring to? Probably not. According to the online site urbandictionary.com, YSC stands for “You’re so crazy.” Thus, YSFC is probably the same message with a common four-letter intensifier thrown in for emphasis.
In my experience, it isn’t always prodigal sons like Nathan who are unable to appreciate the value of an inscribed book. Sometimes it is the parent who is the unappreciative one. I have a copy of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” inscribed with this message:

To Mom,

Happy Birthday!

Love,
Sarah & Mary
February 11, 2003

I found the book in 2004. Mom is obviously no sentimentalist.
Likewise, I found the following inscription in “The World of Herb Caen”: Dad – Here’s another look at your “breakfast buddy” of some 30 years. Thought you’d enjoy one more column from the “Master” – he’s a good one. Have a great birthday. We love you. The inscription is followed by the signatures of Dad’s four children.
I have a soft spot for books that appear to have been inscribed to a personal friend of the author’s and yet still somehow managed to end up in a used-book store’s bargain bin. Consider for instance the inscription I found on a cheap paperback copy of Max Byrd’s crime novel “Fusetime”:

For Ted and Toby

Wonderful friends
and supporters of the
life of crime – with the
promise that the next
one will be set in
Paris!
– All good
wishes –
Max

I bought the book for a dollar, which means that Ted and Toby probably got fifty cents for it — a quarter each! One can’t help but wonder just how wonderful and supportive these friends of Byrd’s really are.
And then there is the copy of Kendall Hailey’s “The Day I Became An Autodidact,” that a friend purchased in a used bookstore and gave me for my collection. Hailey inscribed the book:

For Mel and Bette,

Who knew me when (you lucky
devils) and who I hope will
always let me be part of their
lives.
With much, much love,
Kendall

It seems unlikely that Mel and Bette have always let Kendall be a part of their lives, seeing as how they didn’t even allow her book to remain a part of their library for very long. Kendall Hailey is the daughter of two successful Beverly Hills writers. Any friends of hers are likely to be wealthy Beverly Hills residents themselves, which only makes Mel and Bette look worse. They didn’t need the money!
Other favorites from my inscription collection include a copy of E.M. Forster’s novel “The Longest Journey,” which carries this sweet handwritten message:

Dearest Will

Here is one to start
your collection of
dreams, wisdom, and
reality. Good luck on
having time to read
it. Remember I’ll always
be there to travel “the
longest journey” w/you.

(heart) Carrie
XXOO

And here is a lovely inscription that I found in a copy of (of all things) “I Am A Memory Come Alive,” a collection of autobiographical writings by Franz Kafka:

For the first time in my life
I can look at you and
not feel any quirky…oh
forget it. You’re a great guy.

Happy Birthday (smiley face)
Love
Cissy

Experience has taught me that certain books are much more likely to be inscribed than others. If you want to build a collection of your own, start out in the classics section of a good used bookstore. Handsome editions of classic books, especially those that are part of a series like the Library of America or the Modern Library, are often inscribed as gifts. Shakespeare’s works are frequently inscribed, especially big omnibus editions of his complete plays. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “A Gift From The Sea” is one of the most frequently inscribed books I know of. Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet,” Paul Gallico’s “The Snow Goose,” and Richard Bach’s “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” are also on the Most Likely To Be Inscribed list. But none of these four last-mentioned books has ever yielded an inscription so memorable that I felt obliged to buy it.
Based on my unscientific and anecdotal approach to the subject, I’d say that women were far more likely than men to be both inscribers and inscribees. Woman-to-woman inscriptions are far more common than any other combination (father to child, husband to wife, mother to child, etc.). Classics of feminist literature, such as “The Golden Notebook” or “The Well of Loneliness,” seem to attract inscriptions the way other books attract dog-ears. Several years ago I bought a used copy of May Sarton’s “A Self-Portrait” that contained a woman-to-woman inscription I liked:

For Dar ~

A short introduction
to my favorite living author
who wrote “Gestalt at Sixty,” and
at 76 now says she celebrates
“The life that still lies ahead.”
Happy Birthday
Love,
Paula

I suppose “Dar” could be short for Darrel or Darrin, but I doubt it. It seems more likely that Dar stands for Darla or Darlene, and that she and Paula are (or were) domestic partners. So the fact that “A Self-Portrait” ended up in a used-book store makes the inscription all the more poignant. Every time I look at it I can’t help wondering: What ever happened to Dar and Paula?
Even rugged adventure tales often contain feminine inscriptions. A while ago I found a hardbound copy of Henri Charriere’s memoir “Papillon” with the following inscription:

To Ron,

A truly great book
for your bookshelf.

Love Mom
Xmas 1974

You’ve got to love a woman who would buy a convicted felon’s prison memoirs as a Christmas present for her son.
Used copies of artsy coffee table books are the heavyweight champs of the inscription world. I’d guess that roughly one out of five of these massive tomes carries some sort of handwritten sentiment on its title page. I once purchased a copy of “Renoir’s Nudes” because I liked the inscription: Merry Christmas Jessica! I hope you enjoy your babes! – Love Rilla. Okay, the inscription wasn’t the only reason I bought the book. Like Jessica, I like looking at naked babes. I just wish I knew someone who would give me a book filled with them for Christmas.
Recently I purchased a cheap used copy of a book called “High Endeavors” from a mail-order bookstore. The book is a joint biography of Miles and Beryl Smeeton, a thrill-seeking married couple who climbed mountains in the Himalayas, crisscrossed the world’s oceans in a sailboat, hiked through the jungles of Burma and Thailand, and trekked across the Andes on horseback. When I opened the cover, I discovered I’d gotten more than I’d bargained for. On the title page I found this inscription: Barrett – This book is out of print but I was able to get this copy through a friend. It reminds me of you. – Mom, Christmas 2002.
Someday, Barrett, you’re going to regret selling “High Endeavors.” When that happens, you are going to search high and low trying to find it. If your search eventually brings you to this online essay, feel free to contact me. I’ll be happy to return the book to you. But it’s going to cost you!

Known colloquially as “the mothball fleet,” the ships in Suisun Bay are part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet and are maintained by the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD), which also maintains reserve fleets in the Neches River, near Beaumont Texas, and at James River, Virginia. Environmentalists in the Bay Area have long been trying to get the fleet removed from the estuary. Over the several decades that the fleet has been anchored there, its ships have dropped more than twenty tons of toxic materials into the waters beneath them. Finally, a plan worked out by MARAD, various environmental groups, and the state’s water-quality regulators is set to gradually remove the fleet from Suisun Bay over the course of the next seven and a half years. The 25 most toxic polluters in the fleet are scheduled for removal by September 2012. The rest will be dispersed to their final destinations by September 2017. Julie was sad to read about the fleet’s coming demise. I, on the other hand, will not miss it.

Every time I see the mothball fleet I am reminded of Scapa Flow, a body of water in the North Sea near Scotland’s Orkney Islands where, at the end of World War I, the remainder of the German Navy’s battle fleet was interned while the Allied powers decided what to do with it. Under the terms of the Armistice, Germany’s so-called “High Seas Fleet” was ordered to sail to Scapa Flow and remain there until the Treaty of Versailles was finalized. By December 6, 1918, 74 German surface ships had been brought into Scapa Flow under the direction of German Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter. Months passed while the Allies, at the Paris Peace Conference, argued about the distribution of the ships. During that time, von Reuter devised a plan for scuttling the fleet should the Allies try to seize them without a formal peace treaty signed by the German government. On June 21, 1919, perhaps because he believed the Armistice had expired without a resolution of the fleet’s fate, von Reuter used flag signals to order his officers to commence scuttling the entire fleet. Portholes, water-tight doors, seacocks, and flood valves were opened. Interior water pipes were smashed. Slowly the German ships began to take on water. By the end of the day, 52 of the 74 captive ships had been sunk. More than 400,000 tons of warships that were consigned to the sea bottom that day, constituting the greatest one-day loss of shipping in history. Most of those sunken ships were raised and salvaged in the 1920s and 1930s. Seven of the sunken ships (three battleships and four cruisers) remain at the bottom of Scapa Flow to this day.

At the time of the great scuttling, the British warships in the area were out at sea practicing anti-torpedo maneuvers, which meant that the German Fleet in Scapa Flow was virtually unguarded until it was too late to undo the damage. When the British ships came racing back to the scene of von Reuter’s crime, they opened fire on a few of the remaining German ships in order to prevent them from being scuttled too. Nine Germans were killed in the gunfire, and they are regarded, unofficially, as the last casualties of World War I (officially, the last casualty of World War I was American soldier Henry Gunther, killed by German troops one minute before the Armistice went into effect). Reactions to the scuttling were mixed. Many people back in Germany considered von Reuter a hero for having prevented the fleet from falling into foreign ownership. The French and Italian governments were angered because they had each hoped to obtain a quarter of the fleet. Publicly the British were outraged, but privately many British officials were glad to see the fleet scuttled rather than end up in the hands of the Italian and French navies. In fact, some people have surmised that the British intentionally left the fleet unguarded on June 21 in order to encourage von Reuter to scuttle it. In any case, whenever I see the ghost fleet at Suisun Bay, I cannot help thinking about von Reuter’s ghost fleet, those 52 ships that he sent to the bottom of Scapa Flow so that they would not fall into foreign clutches. The American ships have a much nobler history than von Reuter’s ships did. But that only makes the fate of the American ships seem sadder. The German fleet vanished in a matter of hours as the result of a single audacious act of one-upmanship that to this day is still heatedly debated by historians. The more noble American ships are vanishing one rust chip at a time as a result of years of neglect.

Lately I have been engaged in an effort to see if various facts from history, science, and other disciplines can be usefully employed as metaphors for larger human truths. For several weeks now I have been meditating on the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow to see if it can be used to symbolize something bigger than itself. Sometimes we humans will destroy something we love in order to save it from an even worse fate. Anyone who has ever owned a pet has probably experienced what it feels like to order the destruction of a beloved companion in order to save the creature from protracted suffering and misery. On the other hand, we humans will also occasionally destroy something that is worthless to us just to prevent anyone else from deriving any enjoyment from it. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, the expression “dog in the manger” refers to “A mean-spirited person who will not use what is wanted by another, nor yet let the other have it to use.” The expression alludes to a fable in which a dog in a manger refuses to let an ox eat the hay in the feed rack even though the dog cannot eat it himself. In other words, a dog in the manger is a spoilsport. A horrific historical example of this behavior was Saddam Hussein’s decision to set Kuwait’s oil fields on fire when it became clear that he wasn’t going to be able to seize them for his own murderous regime.

So, which was Rear-Admiral von Reuter – a naval officer whose love for his fleet prevented him from turning it over to his conquerors, or a spoilsport who acted in petulance to prevent other countries from employing a fleet that Germany, under the Treaty of Versailles, would no longer be permitted to employ itself? Is there a third possibility? Could von Reuter be a symbol of the kind of derangement that inspires some men (and women) to murder their significant others rather than accept a breakup of the relationship? Occasionally we read in the newspapers a story about a gunman who goes to his estranged wife’s workplace and shoots her dead in order to keep her from leaving him. Were von Reuter’s actions at Scapa Flow, which resulted in the deaths of nine of his subordinates, a display of the same kind of homicidal fanaticism that fuels the rages of wife-murdering gunmen?

A popular poster of the 1970s featured a small mouse trapped in an open field as a ferocious hawk comes swooping in on him, talons first, for the kill. The mouse, with no place to run or hide, has opted not only to turn and face his doom but also to raise his middle finger to it. The caption read: THE LAST GREAT ACT OF DEFIANCE. Perhaps that was what von Reuter did at Scapa Flow, raised his middle finger to the devouring hawk of the Allied forces. Tom Robbins once said, “The man who jokes in the executioner’s face can be destroyed but never defeated.” Was von Reuter acting out some version of Robbins’ epigram when he destroyed his own fleet? Perhaps Scapa Flow, like the mouse’s middle finger, should be viewed as simply a straight-forward symbol of defiance in the face of certain vanquishment.

Lately, with home foreclosures on the rise, small acts of rebellion reminiscent of Scapa Flow are occurring all over the country. A small minority of homeowners, to express their anger at the banks that are attempting to foreclose on them, have taken to vandalizing their own homes prior to relinquishing them. These homeowners have removed wood flooring, windows, copper pipes, ceiling fans, and other fixtures from their homes in order to make it harder for the banks to recover their financial investments in these properties. If we associate the scuttlings at Scapa Flow with the vandalizing of these distressed homes, we make von Reuter’s actions a symbol not of noble defiance but of senseless violence born of powerlessness and a sense of futility.

A few weeks ago, Julie and I drove to Hillsborough, a little town south of San Francisco, and when we crossed the Carquinez Strait and saw the ghost fleet in Suisun Bay, I again found myself thinking about Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter. All the way home I asked myself what it was that von Reuter’s scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow symbolized. Isak Dinesen once wrote: “Nothing is mysterious until it symbolizes something.” I feel fairly certain that von Reuter’s actions in the Scapa Flow can be profitably viewed as a symbol of some general truth about humankind. But just what exactly that truth may be is still a mystery to me. Perhaps I shouldn’t be focusing so exclusively on von Reuter. Perhaps I should look for symbols in the larger picture. Maybe it is the British navy and its actions that can be most profitably mined for symbolic truths. There is a philosophy that says: The best way to make your problems go away is to simply ignore them. Perhaps the actions of the Royal Navy at Scapa Flow in 1919 are a metaphor for this philosophy. Overseeing the fleet at Scapa Flow was a huge nuisance for the British. Many of the German sailors were malnourished and in need of medical attention that the British couldn’t afford to provide at the time. The American government originally wanted the German fleet to be sent to a neutral country, either Norway or Spain, but both of those countries refused to accommodate the German ships. The British, being the leading European power of the era, more or less got stuck with the Germans because they had the only navy large enough to oversee the internment. At the end of World War I, Britain had more naval ships than any other European country, but the British government knew that giving Italy and France a quarter of the German fleet would diminish Britain’s proportional advantage over those two countries’ navies. The British didn’t like babysitting the German navy but neither were they eager to disperse it among rival European countries. Perhaps that is why on the morning of June 21, 1919, Royal Navy Vice Admiral Sir Sydney Fremantle took the majority of his battle squadron out to sea for anti-torpedo exercises. Did he have some inkling that the Germans might scuttle their fleet if the British gave them an opportunity to do so? There is no evidence to suggest this. But not only was Fremantle never punished for his questionable judgment, his career seemed to soar afterwards. He was made a full admiral in 1922, Commander-in-Chief of the naval base at Portsmouth in 1923, and was knighted a few years after that. Perhaps his lack of judgment at Scapa Flow was in fact a calculated act of provocation, intended to goad Reuter into solving a problem that had become increasingly troublesome for Britain. In that case, maybe the mass scuttling at Scapa Flow should be viewed as a metaphor for intentional neglect as a positive force in the solution of thorny problems. Perhaps the next time you have a difficult problem to deal with you should do what Vice Admiral Fremantle did at Scapa Flow: turn your back on it for a short while and see if it doesn’t go away on its own. It might work, but I don’t recommend it. When I ignore my problems, they never scuttle themselves. If anything, they seem to call up other problems from the briny depths of my own personal Scapa Flow, ghost ships that rise from the dead to add to the fleet of difficulties already troubling the waters.

In addition to rare books, the vendors at the event offered postcards, letters, and other ephemera for sale. Julie, who loves old ocean-liner lore, purchased, for five dollars, a letter written on the stationery of the R.M.S. Oceanic, a White Star passenger liner. The letter is dated August 12, 1913. At that time, the Oceanic was on its way from Europe to New York and was just one day away from its destination. The author of the letter is a woman, probably in her twenties, who affixed only her initials to the letter: BB. The letter was addressed to a friend of hers, but therein lies another bit of mystery. The envelope in which the letter was posted is addressed to Eugene [middle initial indecipherable, probably an M or an N but also possibly a W] Roland, whose address is “307 Commercial Bldg., Oakland, Calif., USA.” But the salutation on the letter is “Dear Pettie.” I don’t know if Eugene and Pettie are the same person.

BB begins her letter by noting “I’ll probably see ‘Sandy Hook’ at one-thirty tomorrow, but no telling when we will land and get through customs.” Sandy Hook is a large spit of land whose surrounding waters, for centuries, have served as an anchorage for ships entering Upper New York Harbor. The fact that BB knows that she’ll be delayed in Sandy Hook for a while suggests that this is not her first Atlantic crossing and that she is familiar with the details of arrival.

The letter continues: “You must excuse my [hand]writing, for we are just getting over a storm. Sunday afternoon a heavy wind came up, with rain. Yesterday it was worse, and this morning it was really very bad. Even the Captain’s report says ‘heavy winds & squally.’ The decks looked quite deserted and many who were sitting & lying were afraid to move for fear of the consequences. Yesterday somebody was sick right in front of my [deck]chair, so I ‘visited’ for a while! And to think that through it all I have felt perfectly dandy. I have decided that I really am a good sailor, and I’m so glad, for I love the sea. Watching the waves & feeling the wind – strong wind – is such good sport.”

What I like about that passage is that it provides a detail about ocean-liner travel that I never considered before. When she writes “even the Captain’s report says ‘heavy winds & squally’” BB lets us know that such reports are generally not to be trusted, that they tend to minimize danger. Nowadays most travelers are familiar with the way that airline pilots sooth their passengers by describing heavy turbulence as “a bit of weather.” BB’s letter is proof that old-time passenger liner captains were just as prone to euphemism as contemporary airline captains.

Although bad weather doesn’t bother BB much, many of the other passengers do. She writes, “there is the awfullest conglomeration of people aboard – there is a little of every kind represented. Fortunately for me, my room mates are the wife & niece of a minister and are returning from Zurich, so of course we were glad to know each other. Then there is a party of five from Minneapolis who were on the ‘Scotian.’ So we have rather kept to ourselves. It has been fun separating the sheep from the goats, and the goats are largely in the majority! You should see the sword-swallower who sits next to me at table. I generally look out the porthole in the opposite direction, but I can HEAR him just the same. Next trip over, I go on a one-class boat like the ‘Scotian,’ where you have the whole boat to roam over, and are apt to meet nicer people.”

Apparently “sword-swallower” was a slang term for a loud eater. The ‘Scotian” must be the S.S. Scotian, a 515-foot ocean liner that plied the seas between 1898 and 1927. It was probably the ship that BB voyaged to Europe aboard.

BB tells Pettie that she has “surely seen some rich things aboard here, with which I will amuse you someday.” Sadly, she doesn’t elaborate. She does, however, mention that “There have been some fast & furious love affairs, but none for yours truly. I have hardly spoken to a man except those in our crowd – none eligible – or men that they have introduced to me. I have been VERY, VERY good. One fellow, a Yale man, was quite interesting, and I had an entertaining afternoon [with him], but immediately thereafter he was taken sea-sick, and has only now come on deck, still looking yellow and decidedly uncommunicative – and tomorrow we land! One more dashed hope. I fear I have made no conquests on this trip – and why is it I have had absolutely no desire to do so? Why can’t I disremember somebody way, way out in California? Would you mind telling me? And why, moreover, am I trying to write on my lap, with the ship careening around, to that disrememberable person? And do you suppose there will be any mail for me when I get to New York?”

Aha! It appears clear that, at one time anyway, BB and Pettie were more than just pen pals. She makes it clear that the reason she has no desire for romantic conquests is because she hasn’t be able to get “somebody way, way out in California” off her mind. So where do she and Pettie stand now, in August of 1913? Are they still romantically involved? Are they engaged? Are they ‘just friends’? Alas, the letter doesn’t disclose this information. But the fact that she mentions her entertaining afternoon with the Yalie suggests to me that she considers herself officially unattached.

Having failed to make any romantic conquests, BB appears to have confined herself largely to her deckchair and her books. She writes, “The most exciting thing I have done these long days is to READ. In a day and a half I read the WHOLE of ‘Les Miserables’! I could hardly drag myself down to eat when I was in the most exciting part. It surely is a great book…Then I read ‘Trilby,’ and have just finished my life of Napoleon. You can see how deeply France and Paris affected me. And there’s a lot more I’m going to read before I forget this trip.”

At one point, BB feared that she might die before the voyage was over. She contracted a terrible sore throat that the ship’s doctor refused to take seriously. He “gave me some potash tablets to suck,” she writes. But her sore throat “kept getting worse all night, and I was scared stiff for fear I had caught something dangerous from some of these foreigners aboard. Got up in the morning, tried to swallow some coffee, but it hurt so [much] I absolutely couldn’t. So I went to my bunk, had a good cry to myself & then had them send for a doctor who was among the passengers. He looked down [my throat] almost to my stomach and assured me that I HADN’T diphtheria or anything but a congested throat. He chased me up some gargle & left me feeling much relieved mentally. Later on an osteopath offered his services & I gladly let him rub me. Among all of them, I got much better by night & now my throat is entirely well. I hope I don’t have another throat like that again, and so FAR AWAY from home & among strangers. NEXT TIME, I don’t go alone, either!”

BB concludes her letter with an epilogue of sorts written on August 13. She writes, “Everything is in commotion now, suitcases & trunks in the passages, & everybody running around trying to get ready to land. Speculation as to just when we will sight land is rife. All morning we have been seeing ships pass. The big sail boats are the prettiest. It’s good for you that you weren’t here last night, you would have gotten yours! Such a magnificent sunset I never saw before, and the moonlight on the water! Well, there’s nothing like it! And it didn’t go to waste as far as some of them were concerned. Oh, it was lovely.”

Maybe I’m overly inclined to read sex into everything, but it seems to me as if this passage contains references to various erotic goings on. BB must have witnessed at least a few couples making out on deck during this final, moonlit night of the voyage. Moreover, she seems to be telling Pettie that she herself was feeling so frisky she might have done serious harm to his person, his reputation, or perhaps both, if he had been aboard the ship the previous night (“It’s good for you that you weren’t here last night, you would have gotten yours!”).

She closes her letter by saying, “It’s pretty hard writing, so I’ll finish this now. It will go off on the mail lighter [a boat for removing cargo from large ships], and so will land before we do. Just think, before many hours I shall again be on the same, exactly the same, piece of earth that you are! Did you feel me when I landed? Good-bye, for now, Ever with Care, BB.”

It is unlikely that I will ever be able to identify the author of this letter. Such is the case with so many of the letters and travel diaries Julie and I own that were written aboard ocean liners. Julie always finds it frustrating when she cannot discover what happened to the writer after the voyage concluded. To achieve some sense of closure she always looks to the ocean liner itself. All of the great liners had definite conclusions – and many of them were tragic ones. Such is the case with the R.M.S. Oceanic. It was built, between 1897 and 1899, for the famous White Star Line, the company that owned the Titanic. It made its maiden voyage for White Star in September of 1899, at which time it was the longest passenger liner in the world, at 704 feet in length. She was built to accommodate 1,700 passengers and 350 crewmembers. In 1901, in heavy fog, she accidentally rammed another ship, the S.S. Kincora, and killed seven people. In 1905, according to the Wikipedia (where I gathered all of this information), she became the first White Star ship ever to suffer a mutiny, when 35 stokers led a rebellion to protest their harsh working conditions. In 1912, she was one of the ships that helped retrieve the dead bodies of the Titanic’s passengers and crew from the frigid North Atlantic. Almost exactly one year after BB’s voyage, on August 8 1914, the Oceanic was commissioned into the Royal Navy. Its naval stint lasted exactly a month. On September 8 1914, she crashed into a reef in the treacherous waters near Foula, the most remote and desolate of Scotland’s Shetland Islands. As a result of a navigational error, she was wrecked in calm seas, becoming the first Allied passenger ship to be lost in World War I. The ship’s crewmen were rescued by other ships in the area. The Oceanic itself remained stuck on the reef until the night of 29 September, when a ferocious storm struck the region. The residents of Foula Island awoke on the morning of September 30 to find that the Oceanic was gone. At some point in the night it had slipped from the reef and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. According to the Wikipedia, “The disaster was hushed up at the time, since it was felt that it would have been embarrassing to make public how a world-famous liner had run aground in friendly waters in good weather within a fortnight of beginning its service as a naval vessel. The revelation of such gross incompetence at this early stage of the war would have done nothing for national morale.”

I can only hope that BB’s life wasn’t as turbulent and tragic as the life of the ship that brought her back to America in 1913. On the back of the envelope in which her letter was sent is a handwritten notation indicating that it was received in Oakland on August 18, 1913, just five days after it was posted. How it ended up at a Sacramento rare book sale nearly a hundred years later is anyone’s guess. But I’m glad it did. Reading it gave me an opportunity to take a tour of a brief but fascinating moment in the life of a most undisrememberable person.

Quite naturally, the proprietor of the stall suggested that the shopper purchase the book and give it to her daughter. But the shopper suddenly seemed reluctant to do so. She set the book down. She picked it up again. She stood there and slowly flipped through its pages. Finally she set it down and walked away without it. There is a whole world of story possibilities in that non-purchase. Ernest Hemingway is reputed to have written a moving and mysterious short story in just six words: For Sale: Baby shoes – never worn. Whether or not the story was by Hemingway, I think it is a good one and I have meditated on it long and often. Why were the shoes never worn? Did the baby die? Was it ever even conceived? And who exactly is selling those enigmatic shoes? Those six words raise a multitude of questions. Likewise, the actions of the shopper at yesterday’s flea market raise a lot of intriguing questions. Why didn’t she buy the book? I doubt that money was an issue, because the price of the book was a mere fifty cents. Does the woman no longer speak to her daughter? Are there painful memories connected with her daughter’s early years that she would rather not revisit? Is she unhappily divorced from her daughter’s father? I cannot answer these questions. But if I had to guess, I’d say that the answer is a fairly simple one. The book, having triggered a memory, had done all it could possibly do for the woman. Once the memory returned, the woman had no further need for the book. If, however, the copy of “The Animal Dictionary” at yesterday’s flea-market had been the exact same copy that the shopper had read to her daughter roughly forty years ago, the outcome of the little encounter I witnessed probably would have been different. If the book contained an inscription or some other indisputable evidence that it was the actual “Animal Dictionary” that her daughter once held in her hands, I am certain the shopper would have purchased it, even if the price had been ten dollars. You can mass-produce a book but you cannot mass-produce a memory. In this instance, the memory is more important than the book. But if the shopper had somehow discovered her daughter’s old copy of “The Animal Dictionary,” the book and the memory would be one and the same, indivisible. A duplicate copy of some beloved old object from our early years can reawaken sleeping memories, but only the original object carries the talismanic power to put us into direct contact with our pasts. I have learned this from first-hand experience.

When I was thirteen years old, my parents gave me a portable radio that was round, blue, and roughly the size of a softball. This particular style of radio – known officially as the Panapet R-70 – was extremely popular in the 1970s and Panasonic produced millions of them. I grew very attached to my radio. The first time I ever heard Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” or the Eagles’ “One of These Nights,” I was listening to my R-70. From the age of 13 through the age of 18, I listened to the broadcasts of hundreds of sporting events on that radio – mostly Portland Trailblazer basketball games and Portland Buckaroo hockey games. And late at night, I would lie in bed and pick up the signals of radio stations in far-off cities such as Salt Lake and Denver and even, if the atmospheric conditions were just right, my future hometown of Sacramento. I loved that radio but, for some reason, I left it behind when I moved out of my parents’ house.

In the last few years vintage R-70s have become quite commonplace at antique shops and flea markets. The first time I came across one, at a yard sale, I gave Julie a long, rambling account of my love affair with my own R-70. Naturally, she suggested that I buy the yard-sale radio. But I refrained from doing so. The yard-sale radio was yellow. “I’ll wait till I find a blue one,” I told her. Every few months, at some antique shop or garage sale, we’d come across a vintage R-70, but always it was a white one or a red one or a green one or a yellow one, and so I would opt not to buy it. And then, one day, Julie found a blue R-70 at some seedy little thrift shop we were browsing in. It was a working model, in perfect condition, and priced at only five dollars. I had no excuse for not buying it. I picked it up and inspected it carefully. I loosened the screw that held the two halves together and glanced at the radio’s interior. I played with the tuning and volume knobs. And then, like the shopper at yesterday’s flea market, I set the object back down on the shelf and walked away from it. I had no desire to buy it. After all, it was just one of millions of copies of my own R-70. I had no special connection to that particular copy. And, unlike a copy of an old beloved book, the radio possessed no unique content that I couldn’t live without.

My own R-70 is a fetish object possessed of talismanic powers, and if my parents should happen to find it in some dark corner of their basement, I would be delighted to have it returned to me. But mere copies of my R-70 possess no such talismanic power. They are reminders of my past, but they are not relics of it. I already own my past. I don’t need to purchase cheap reproductions of it. But that doesn’t mean that a reproduction can’t serve a valuable purpose as an aide-memoire. Nearly every time I visit an antique sale, I come across something – a Franciscan-ware table setting, a stuffed Snoopy, a Hummel figurine – that is virtually identical to one that resided in the house I grew up in. Antique stores are the museums of ordinary human lives. Unlike the Smithsonian or the Louvre, they don’t house original cultural icons such as Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis or Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” Instead, they house the cheap old radios and battered picture books and cracked dinnerware that are the touchstones of ordinary people’s lives. I enjoy visiting museums. Viewing the contents of King Tut’s tomb at the de Young museum in San Francisco was an awe-inspiring experience for me. And when I saw Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, it literally brought tears to my eyes. Rarely do I have an awe-inspiring or tear-inducing experience in an antiques shop. What I experience there is nostalgia, for my own past and for the recent past in general – not the past as you find it in history books, which consists mainly of the extraordinary exploits of kings and conquerors, but the past of everyday human life as it has been lived by 99 percent of the people who ever walked the earth, people like me, and Julie, and the mother of the alligeegee girl. It is a past every bit as valuable as Cromwell’s or George Washington’s or King Tut’s. And its curators are those people, usually slightly odd and bookish, sometimes friendly but often curmudgeonly and almost always wearing outdated clothing styles, who own and operate your local antique shops.

Large national retail chains have infiltrated, co-opted, and in many cases cheapened nearly every aspect of American life. Food, clothes, books, electronics, hardware – sales of these items are nowadays dominated by massive national chain stores. But to my knowledge there is no such thing as a national antiques chain store. At least not yet. Like the wares they sell, antique stores are a holdover from an earlier and simpler time, a time when just about everything one purchased came from a store owned and operated by a member of one’s own community. Object lessons in how form follows function, the antique stores that house relics of our recent past are themselves one of the last remaining holdovers from that past. Someday corporate America will figure out how to sell antiques in big box stores located in busy shopping centers. But that prospect, like Hemingway’s baby shoes, is almost too sad to contemplate.

Yet one cannot imagine the people of Horstede were very much excited by it all: more likely they persuaded themselves, in the usual English way, that somebody high up was making a fuss about nothing and it would all turn out to be a false alarm. Easter was the biggest of all their annual feasts. That year it was on 16 April, and when they walked through the fields of spring to church that Sunday morning they had better and happier things to think about. Even now, in the second half of April, this part of England with all its blemishes is almost painfully beautiful. In the woods of Horstede the buds have subtly changed the outline of the oaks, the birches are covered with a gauze of green, the cuckoo has come with its stupid summery song, the dismal English winter is past and everything is coming to life, the birds and animals and crops, and the men and women too: Christ is risen. It is not a time to take much heed of warnings.

But on the night of the Tuesday after Easter, something happened far worse than warnings of kings or threats of human enemies, something that amazed and overawed the Horstede people and shattered their springtime peace of mind. A monstrous light appeared in the sky, silently moving with a trail of fire. People went out to gaze at it in fear, then in again to examine their consciences and ask each other what it could portend. All over England it was seen that night and seven nights after. The King saw it, with what feelings one cannot know; so did the [council of advisors known as the] witan, assembled with him for the Easter feast on Thorney Island. Monks, more learned than most, said it was a star called cometa, the hairy star. Modern astronomers say it was Halley’s comet. Whatever it was, everyone saw it as an omen of doom, a heavenly sign of wrath and fire on earth.

Sure enough, the comet had scarcely vanished when a strange fleet of ships was sighted off the Isle of Wight, and fierce foreign sailors came swarming ashore. But it was not the Duke of Normandy who led them, it was Harold’s brother Tostig.

Because language use is largely a matter of subjective taste, it is impossible to pen a passage of any length that cannot be picked apart by some disapproving reader. For me, however, the above three paragraphs are nearly perfect. The first of the three, with its lyrical references to gauzes of green and stupid summery songs, lulls us into the same sort of false security that the villagers of Horstede allowed themselves to fall into during the spring of 1066 despite the dire warnings they were hearing of a pending invasion. The second paragraph shatters that sense of security with the intrusion of a terror that starts out vague (“something happened”) and gradually grows sharper and scarier (“a star called cometa, the hairy star…an omen of doom, a heavenly sign of wrath and fire on earth.”). The third and shortest of the paragraphs delivers the strongest punch of all. After setting us up to assume that the Duke of Normandy and his army had arrived on the shores of England, Howarth knocks us off balance with the news that the invader portended by Halley’s comet is not William but Tostig Godwinson, King Harold’s mad brother.

Howarth’s book is a model of brevity, covering a complex subject in under 200 pages without ever coming across as hurried or cursory. I particularly like the way Howarth dispels sentimental myths and clichés. On chivalry, he writes: “Chivalry in later ages may have had some merits, but in the eleventh century it was a social disaster. It produced a superfluity of conceited illiterate young men who had no ideals except to ride and hunt and fight, whose only interest in life was violence and the glory they saw in it. They were no good at anything else, and despised any peaceful occupation. In national wars they could be called on to fight by their feudal obligations, much like the thanes in England. But just by existing, they created wars. When they had nothing to do they became mercenary soldiers who for pay and plunder, and for their own amusement, would form an army for anyone who wanted to start a private war. What was worse, perhaps, they were taught to look down on anyone who was not a knight, and they treated mere peasants or tradesmen with cruelty or disdain.”

Anyone who becomes misty-eyed at the sight of an imposing old English castle ought to read what Howarth says about them. A passage about the many things the common people of England despised about the Conquest concludes with this observation: “Perhaps most of all they resented the castles the Normans built all over England. There was no external enemy, and William was always strong enough to forbid the private wars that had been the plague of Normandy in the past: the only purpose of the castles was to protect the new landlords against their tenants and provide what England had never had before, a huge number of prisons. The grim stone keeps were a threat to every man and woman in every part of England, and stood as symbols of bondage.”

Howarth possessed a gift for formulating epigrams, and his book has many pithy observations about a variety of subjects:

Autocracy is always an oversimplification of the art of government.

Wounded pride is not a motive many people recognize in themselves, nor one they can use to win other people’s support.

Sheer lunacy of course was recognized in those days, but the subtle gradations of mental sickness were not. Yet people must have suffered from them then as they do now, and history can be distorted if one always insists on finding sane and rational reasons for the things they did.

I think it is usually presumptuous to say that generals of the past made blunders: one seldom knows the information and experience they acted on, or the stresses that impelled them.

I also like the way that Howarth frequently uses short, uncomplicated sentences and paragraphs to deliver big news and sweeping statements:

All the evidence suggests that Tostig was really out of his mind.

So one comes back to his [William’s] personal pride, which I think is the only credible cause of the Norman invasion.

Thus the final choice of the Hastings district can only have been made on the day the fleet set sail; and which of the harbors was sighted first was one of the chances of pilotage.

The Battle of Hastings was indeed a trifling thing in the downfall of a nation.

Howarth makes no attempt at objectivity in his book. His sympathies are always with the English and against the Norman invaders. Here are a few of his more subjective observations:

The Norman aristocracy and their neighbors were much more warlike people [than the English]. It was partly through necessity: with long land borders, no lord could survive unless he was able and willing to fight off other predatory lords. But it was also a matter of temperment: they loved fighting, while the English – or at least a significant number of them – had begun to discover the pleasure of having nobody to fight. England was unfortified, except for the walls or palisades round towns and important houses, which were designed to keep out robbers and animals rather than armies; but in Normandy every landlord or baron had his castle, designed to withstand a siege. And there was another important difference: the English had conceived the idea that every man, even the king, was subject to the law, but the Normans had not. The English were feeling their way, however dimly, towards a kind of democracy; the Normans towards efficient autocracy.

In 1066, when William was thirty-eight or thirty-nine, he had spent the whole of his life since childhood – probably every day of it – either in war or the sports that were training for war, or the warlike rule that was the prize of victory. He was probably illiterate, devoid of any intellectual or artistic interest, God-fearing, just when he was not angry, and absolutely intolerant. He was a more barbarous primitive man than either Edward or Harold, but he is not to be blamed: he came from a more barbarous primitive country.

Compare that last passage, describing the Duke of Normandy, with the following passage, describing King Harold of England:

Finally, in that night at York, he entirely revived the townsmen’s shattered morale, so that they followed him out in the morning not to confirm their surrender but to fight again. It was no mean feat of horsemanship: the Chronicle says he rode by night and day. It was marvelous as a feat of leadership – to infect a whole army with the same driving sense of urgency, to have the strength at the end of the march to inspire the men of York, and then to bring them all into battle without a pause. Here is proof, if proof is demanded, that Harold possessed the sympathy and loyalty of the English.

Unlike King Harold with his army of faithful followers, writes Howarth, William “did not have an army of loyal Norman lieges: two thirds of it were miscellaneous foreign mercenaries, hard to control and impossible to trust, who did not know or care about the justice of his cause but were only intent on booty.”

Howarth (echoing Churchill’s “History is written by the victors.”) frequently complains that most of the contemporaneous accounts of the Norman invasion were written by historians sympathetic to the conquerors. He accuses these historians of being biased towards William to the point of hero-worship. But as the above excerpts demonstrate, Howarth sometimes is guilty of a similar hero-worship towards King Harold. Even Harold’s disastrous performance at the Battle of Hastings, where he appears to have stood immobile and issued no orders while the men around him were being slaughtered, Howarth credits to Harold’s piousness rather than incompetence or cowardice. The book argues that when, shortly before the Battle of Hastings, he discovered that the Vatican had sanctioned William’s invasion, the devoutly Christian Harold became convinced that England’s defeat was a fait accompli and no amount of resistance could prevent it. Thus, according to Howarth, “the strangely passive battle [Harold] fought seems to fit a mood of fatalism, as if he scarcely fought for victory but simply awaited the expression of God’s judgment.”

Whenever he can, Howarth credits William’s success against the English to a nearly incredible string of lucky breaks:

Time and again in these thirty-two frantic days, one can see that if one event had chanced to happen one day later or one day earlier than it did – if anyone had hurried even more or paused a little longer – all the later events would have happened differently, and nothing whatever in the history of England since would have been the same.

Howarth is no respecter of sacred cows – at least not sacred Norman cows. He refers to the famous Bayeux Tapestry, an amazing, thousand-year-old, 230-foot-long piece of embroidery that depicts all the major chapters of the Norman Conquest, as a “strip-cartoon” written for Normandy’s “illiterate majority.”

It could be argued that Howarth’s favoritism towards Harold and the English is a fatal flaw in a book that is supposed to be a factual account of historical events. I didn’t always accept Howarth’s blatantly pro-English assertions, but I wasn’t particularly bothered by them either. I like the fact that the book has a point of view and that the author doesn’t even pretend to be a neutral observer. As well as an interesting overview of one of the seminal events in European history, the book is also one Englishman’s feisty and argumentative opinions about those events.

The Conquest was a singular event in world history, and Howarth excels at describing its many oddities. He notes, for instance, that the army King Harold led to slaughter at the Battle of Hastings was “the last army in history that was homogeneous: they were not divided into separate arms, cavalry, infantry, and artillery or archers. All of them were the same, except that some were better armed than others. Their weapons were battle-axes, swords and spears; javelins and smaller axes that were made to be thrown; and among the poorer men, stones tied to sticks which could be thrown a long way and probably did a lot of damage for such a simple device.”

From a distance, Howarth notes, the battle would have been an eerie sight:

Since gunpowder, deafening noise has been the essence of battle; it is hard to imagine now that the Battle of Hastings was comparatively silent, with only the evil thud of weapons, the sounds of the horses’ hoofs on the muddy ground, the snorts and neighs, the human cries of triumph or agony, and ordinary conversation…Nobody a mile away in the English countryside would have heard the battle at all.

Among the other oddities at the Battle of Hastings is the fact that it was the first time that Englishmen had ever met horsemen in battle. It was also the first time that the Normans had ever encountered battle-axes. Another curious fact related by Howarth is that archery played almost no role in England’s military in the eleventh century. Archery was employed mostly for sport in England. It was forbidden to teach the lower classes how to use a bow and arrow because the aristocrats feared the commoners might put these weapons to use in the poaching of game on private estates. Thus, in the Battle of Hastings, Norman archers were able to stand at a safe distance and rain arrows down upon the English army, but the English could not retaliate in kind, being armed only with sticks, stones, spears, and swords. This is one instance where England’s stratified class system worked against it. Fittingly, it was a Norman archer’s arrow that took King Harold out of the fray. He was blinded when an arrow pierced his eye. The injury wasn’t fatal, but what happened next was:

He stood or crouched or lay there, a blind man with the battle raging around him, waiting for the blow he knew must come. William and Eustace rode in on him: the others were Hugo of Ponthieu…and a knight with the honored name of Giffard. They hacked him to pieces. One of them stabbed him in the chest, another cut off his head, another disemboweled him, and the last cut off his leg at the thigh and carried it away…It was not a quick or merciful death: while Harold was blind, there was time for the thought to penetrate his pain that God had declared his judgment.

Howarth concludes his book with these observations:

Most conquerors deal harshly with the leading men of the countries they dominate and leave the simple people much as they were. But by giving away the land, William brought his conquest into the humblest cottage, and even the children were made to know they were born to a beaten race. Yet those children, or their children, won a victory in the end. They never became Norman; they remained most stubbornly English, absorbed the invaders and made of the mixture a new kind of Englishness.

Howarth doesn’t mention it but those conquered children also made a new kind of language out of a mixture of Old English and Norman French. It was a language that eventually evolved into our language. And David Howarth was a master of it.

Back when William, the Duke of Normandy, sailed on his mission of conquest from what is now part of France to the coast of England, crossing the English Channel was a much trickier business than it is today. For one thing, it appears that sailors in the English Channel region were not yet familiar with the compass. To get from point A to point B they had to rely on stars, landmarks, and luck. There were hundreds of boats in Williams’s fleet but they were all following William’s lead boat. If William’s pilot had made a mistake, the entire fleet would have compounded the error. One of the most prominent harbors on the English side of the Channel was Beachy Head, located just a few miles from the village of Hastings, the site of the battle at which William and his men would eventually defeat the army of England’s King Harold. According to Howarth, William’s pilot, in guiding the fleet to Beachy Head, used “the ancient method of the Deliberate Error.” Because maps and sea charts were not entirely reliable in the days of the Conquest, trying to sail directly toward a particular far-off destination was unwise. The reason for this was simple: If you set sail for a specific landmark on the coast of England and, upon arrival at the coast, found the landmark nowhere in sight, you would have no sure way of knowing if you had missed the port by going too far to your right or too far to your left (sailors, of course, would have used geographical distinctions such as east and west rather than left or right). If, however, you set a course that was deliberately a bit to the right, say, of your goal, all you had to do was sail until you reached sight of the coast and then turn left and sail along the coastline until the port you were seeking came into sight. In the long run, sailors generally saved time by charting a course not directly towards their ultimate destination but to a spot somewhere east, west, north, or south of it, depending upon the predominant wind and water currents. In other words, they employed the ancient strategy of the “deliberate miss” (which is how various sailing websites, such as www.bananawind.us, refer to it) or the “deliberate error” (which is how Howarth refers to it).

Deliberate errors are not just a phenomenon of the nautical realm. Football teams, on rare occasions, will deliberately give up a touchdown to their opponents in order to get the ball back before time runs out. Slightly more frequently, basketball players will deliberately miss free throws for various reasons. If they are trailing their opponents on the scoreboard, they do this in the hope of rebounding the missed attempt at a one-point free throw and instead sinking a two- (or even three-) point field goal. If they are ahead on the scoreboard, they do it to keep the clock running and to force their opponents to waste time trying to rebound the ball and then bring it up court for a scoring opportunity. In short, there are any number of fields of endeavor where it occasionally makes sense to screw the pooch, to go deliberately astray of perfection. In politics, it happens quite frequently.

Most Americans, when they hear the term “Civil Rights Act,” probably automatically think it’s a reference to the famous Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landmark piece of federal legislation that had far-reaching effects on civic life in America. But seven years earlier, the less-well-known Civil Rights Act of 1957 acted as a sort of deliberate miss in the on-going struggle for equal treatment of the races. According to a January 22, 2010 article by Fred Kaplan in Slate Magazine, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 “is one of the most thoroughly forgotten pieces of social legislation in U.S. history, in part because it was watered down to nearly nothing – or so it seemed.” The bill was intended to usher in the kind of sweeping changes to American life that were later accomplished by the Civil Rights Act of 1964: an end to segregated housing, segregated schools, segregated restaurants and theaters and polling places, etc. But opposition by conservative politicians (culminating in a record 24-hour Senate filibuster by Strom Thurman), forced Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson to gut the bill of its most progressive provisions, leaving in tact only one real gain for civil rights supporters: the creation of a government commission charged with investigating accusations of racial discrimination in housing, schooling, and voting registration. The commission had no real authority to combat civil rights violations; it merely established a forum where complaints could be aired and investigated. The final bill was so watered down, says Kaplan, “that prominent civil rights activists, in and out of Congress, were outraged. Many of them argued that it would be better to kill the bill and start over with a new one.” Johnson, however, believed that a deliberate miss was better than no attempt at all, so he mustered the votes to pass the bill despite its obvious flaws. And two years later, when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released its nearly 700-page report detailing the many ways in which black citizens were being denied their rights in America, it fueled the social outrage that eventually gave birth to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 ended up being a deliberate miss that helped progressives in and out of Congress steer the ship of state toward their true goal: reformation of a system that had institutionalized racism in nearly all aspects of American life.

The writing life, more than most fields of endeavor, is fraught with deliberate misses. In order to write a good sentence, I generally have to write a bad one and then improve it. Before I can write a good poem, I have to produce a whole bunch of bad lines that will eventually be deleted. Nearly every story, novel, and essay I have ever written has concluded in a place far removed from the one I thought I was steering it towards. Sometimes, early in the process of writing a story or an essay, I will jot down what I think might eventually make a great final line for the piece. But usually, when I arrive at the end of a story or an essay and find myself actually able to employ that predetermined final line, it is an indication that the piece is far too predictable to be any good. The final line of this piece, for instance, was going to mention the fact that William the Conqueror’s invasion of England, which was aided by a deliberate nautical error, produced nightmarish results for most of the people who inhabited the island at the time of his arrival. But that final line, conceived in the early stages of this essay’s development, no longer seems appropriate in light of the essay’s generally favorable treatment of the deliberate-miss strategy. It would be like concluding a paean to the hamburger with a reference to E. coli. Likewise, I planned to include two additional examples of Congressional Acts that ended up serving as deliberate misses for much better pieces of legislation. But as the writing of this essay progressed, I realized that those examples would unbalance the essay, causing it to look more like a political diatribe than a general exploration of the ways that a particular nautical device can be adapted for use in other fields of endeavor.

Not everyone is fortunate enough to work in a field so forgiving of deliberate misses as the writing profession. My father, a CPA, can’t afford to be adjusting deliberate errors to a client’s tax returns as he and the client sit before an IRS auditor. Nobody would want a LASIK surgeon who employed a deliberate error surgical technique. And don’t even get me started on those who perform circumcisions.

I have lately been engaged in an exploration of the ways that various strategies and devices intended for use in only a single, highly-specialized discipline (mapmaking, film production, cast-iron cooking) can sometimes be helpful when applied metaphorically to other realms of human endeavor (marriage, for instance, or dealing with depression). But the strategy known as the deliberate miss is a necessary reminder of the limits of my project. To a writer, the use of some sort of deliberate-miss process of composition is pretty much unavoidable – unless, of course, you are brilliant enough to write every sentence perfectly on the first attempt, and I doubt that any writer has ever been that brilliant. But the examples of the CPA and the surgeon clearly demonstrate that not every task-specific troubleshooting device possesses general principles that can be helpfully applied to all realms of human endeavor. Moreover, even when you do find appropriate venues for the employment of the deliberate-miss strategy it is no guarantee that your final destination will be any more worth attaining than the one you deliberately missed. The essay I set out to write – about how William the Conqueror’s conquest of England is fraught with lessons that can be helpfully applied to a broad range of contemporary dilemmas – would not have been a masterpiece. More than likely it would have been full of labored metaphors and weak generalizations. But the essay I ended up writing – which focuses on only a single aspect of William’s conquest of England: the use of Deliberate Error in locating the landing site at Beachy Head – is, alas, no masterpiece either. The effectiveness of even the most brilliant tactic is limited by the skill of the tactician who employs it. William the Conqueror employed the tactic of Deliberate Error to conquer England and wound up founding one of the mightiest empires the world would ever know. In my hands, the tactic known as deliberate error usually produces only modest literary efforts such as this one. I suppose I should take solace in the fact that this essay, for all its faults, is unlikely to cause anyone harm, while William’s conquest of England, in the words of David Howarth, “laid waste thousands of square miles of England so completely that they were uninhabited, and uninhabitable, for a generation after he had gone…It is reckoned that…at least three hundred thousand English people, one in five of the native population, were killed in William’s ravages or starved by the seizure of their farm stock and their land.” For better or worse, no one has ever written an epitaph like that for a mere scribbler like me.

As it happens I began a streak of my own in the same year that the Brozinas’ streak began. Thirteen years ago today, on March 22, 1997, I began a regimen of daily workouts with a jump rope that has not yet been broken. Yesterday’s 35-minute workout brought my streak to 4,748 consecutive days during which I have managed to squeeze in time for jumping rope. Sometime this afternoon, my streak will enter its fourteenth year. Not sickness, nor foreign travel, nor even the unavailability of a jump rope has ever stayed this exercise freak from the sweaty completion of his appointed rounds. Once, when I found myself stuck in an out-of-town hotel overnight with no jump rope, I fashioned a makeshift rope from two telephone cords and went out to the parking lot to keep my streak alive. I have jumped rope at the base of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, at the base of the Swiss Alps in Interlaken, Switzerland, and at the perimeter of Saint Peter’s Square in The Vatican (it was late at night and I had to keep a pillar between myself and a patrol of Swiss Guards in order to avoid arrest).

When I opened up my newspaper yesterday I found it an odd coincidence that the Times had chosen to run a story about another freakish streak on the exact day when my own streak was due to complete its thirteenth year, especially since March 21 is a day of no apparent importance in the history of the Brozina streak. But, as it turned out, yesterday’s Times was full of stories in which I was able to find a personal connection. In a review of a new memoir by cartoonist Jules Feiffer, writer David Carr noted that Feiffer, in the early years of his struggle to establish himself as a cartoonist, often contributed his cartooning skills free of charge to various publishing outlets. Feiffer longed to be a famous cartoonist, like his heroes Saul Steinberg, William Steig, and Will Eisner. “His ticket to that rarified world,” writes Carr, “starting in 1956, was the comic strip in The [Village] Voice, then a nascent left-wing newspaper. It was another ‘job’ he was paid nothing for, but it was part of the plan: ‘The entire process – the getting famous thing – might take a year or two (certainly no longer). First I needed to establish a loyal readership, a fan base that would give me clout with publishers…This was my strategy. This was how it would happen. I had no doubts my luck had turned. Nothing could stop me now. And nothing did.” What interested me about this part of Feiffer’s life story was how closely his strategy as a cartoonist mirrored my own as a writer. I have never been fussy about getting paid for my work. Almost all of my published short stories and poems have appeared in magazines that pay their contributors absolutely nothing (except, perhaps, copies of the issue in which contributor’s work appears). I write a monthly column for an online magazine of language and linguistics for which I am paid precisely nothing. When the magazine included an essay of mine in an anthology last year, I was again paid precisely nothing. A local publisher is preparing to bring out a collection of my poems, for which I will not only be paid precisely nothing, I will also be underwriting the costs of publication. Even this blog, for which I have written roughly sixty entries this year – poems, personal essays, short stories – brings me absolutely nothing in the way of financial remuneration. Like Feiffer, I am willing to work for free just to get my name and my literary products out into the world and before the eyes of readers. But the results of this strategy have been far less successful for me than they were for Feiffer. He won an Academy Award for his work on a short film when he was 32, an Obie for his theater work when he was 40, and a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning when he was 57. I am 51 years old and still waiting for “the getting famous thing” to happen. I suspect the wait will go on for a long, long time. I am still giving away my work for free (this essay, for instance), and I have little to show for all that generosity.

Elsewhere in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review was a write-up of a new book by David Shenk called “The Genius In All of Us” in which I also saw reflections of myself. In his book, Shenk argues that the main difference between ordinary mortals (me, for instance) and geniuses like Dickens and Beethoven isn’t a huge disparity in talent but merely a difference in our respective abilities to tap into our inherent talent. In her review of Shenk’s book, critic Annie Murphy Paul writes, “We’ve traditionally regarded superior talent as a rare and mysterious gift bequeathed to a lucky few. In fact, Shenk writes, science is revealing it to be the product of highly concentrated effort.” Shenk notes that Ted Williams, Michael Jordan, Mozart, and Beethoven all worked relentlessly to achieve mastery in their chosen fields of endeavor. And Shenk argues that it was that hard work more than any innate talent that led to their outsized professional achievements. Shenk urges his readers, according to Paul, “to think of talent not as a thing but as a process; not as something we have, but as something we do.” There is an old joke about a visitor to New York who asks a bystander, “Excuse me, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The bystander’s response is, “Practice, practice, practice.” That joke, according to Paul, sums up the gist of Shenk’s argument: “Whatever you wish to do well, Shenk writes, you must do over and over again, in a manner involving, as [psychologist Anders] Ericsson put it, ‘repeated attempts to reach beyond one’s current level,’ which results in ‘frequent failures.’ This is known as ‘deliberate practice,’ and over time it can actually produce changes in the brain, making new heights of achievement possible.” What struck me about this theory of deliberate practice is that I and most of the other serious writers I know personally have been employing it all our lives, and though we have certainly nailed the “frequent failures” part of the theory, we are all still waiting for the “new heights of achievement” aspect to begin kicking in.

If, by themselves, hard work and a refusal to quit, could produce geniuses, then I and my writing pals Tony of Texas, Darrell of Oregon, and Bill of Sacramento would all have attained nearly Shakespearean literary powers by now. Bill is in his early sixties. Darrell and I are in our early fifties, and Tony isn’t far behind us. To the best of my knowledge, each of us has written at least 100,000 words a year since we were in our early twenties. That’s a minimum of a million words a decade for every decade of our adult lives. Between us, that adds up to about 13,000,000 words. Our output has been truly Olympian. Bill’s poems resemble Emily Dickinson’s and his fiction resembles Ernest Hemingway’s, but he has produced far more poems than Dickinson and at least as much fiction as Hemingway. Darrell has written roughly a dozen novels, hundreds of short stories, thousands of poems (in both English and Portuguese), and a handful of plays. What’s more he is a musician who has written several operas (both words and music; and one of them in Portuguese), and hundreds of songs in the folk and rock genres. He has also set poems by the likes of Fernando Pessoa and William Butler Yeats to music and performed them in coffee houses and elsewhere in his hometown of Ashland, Oregon. Tony also has written approximately twelve novels as well as dozens of stories and hundreds of poems. He has written teleplays, screenplays, and book review, and he also once wrote and directed his own independent film. I’ve completed a handful of novels, hundreds of stories and poems, and written countless feature stories for newspapers and magazines. I currently write a monthly column for both Inside The City and the online magazine The Vocabula Review. As mentioned above, I’ve written about sixty essays for this blog just since the beginning of the year. Those blog entries alone probably add up to more than 100,000 words. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems that my estimate of the combined output of words produced by Tony, Darrell, Bill, and me over the course of our careers may actually be way too low. It’s possible that between the four of us we have produced something like 20,000,000 words of literary output over the last three or four decades. And yet, truth be told, none of us has come close to producing a masterpiece. All four of us have evinced a devotion to our craft to rival even that of a Dickens or Balzac. Clearly, hard work and a refusal to quit aren’t enough to guarantee a writer a successful literary career. I think it is safe to say that none of us – Tony, Darrell, Bill, or me – considers himself a huge success as a writer yet. And at our ages (late forties to early sixties) the chances of a attaining a long and celebrated literary career become slimmer and slimmer with each passing day. And yet, despite the odds against us, we all keep writing. I think we do this for two reasons. We do it in the hope that someday we will prove David Shenk’s theory correct and all that hard work will result in some sort of masterpiece, be it a great poem or story or novel or essay. But we also do it for one of the primary motivating factors that kept Jim and Kristen Brozina reading to each other every night for nearly nine years, which is also one of my motivations for jumping rope every day for thirteen straight years: We are all on a streak. Each of us has produced 100,000 words a year or more for the last 30 years or so. Every impressive streak creates its own momentum, perpetuating its own freakish streak-hood. A truly long streak of regular positive accomplishment – be it consecutive days of sobriety, days without an absence from school or work, or years without producing fewer than 100,000 words of literary output – is something to be proud of, and certainly not something to terminate frivolously. I can’t speak for Tony or Darrell or Bill, but I certainly don’t intend to let minor setbacks like a complete lack of acknowledgement or monetary reward prevent me from keeping my literary streak alive for at least another two or three decades.

Yesterday, when I finished my jump-rope workout, I walked into the living room and told Julie, “Well, that’s thirteen years under my belt, and I still don’t have a figure like Matthew McConaughey’s.”

“Cheer up,” she said. “You look a lot better than you did when it was all hanging over your belt.”

Roughly the same thing can be said about the literary work produced by Tony, Darrell, Bill, and me: It may not be perfect, but it looks a hell of a lot better than it did twenty million words ago.

As I see it, every successful partnership needs a Big Picture Guy and a Small Details Guy. I aspire to be the Big Picture Guy. I want to spend an hour or two every morning racking my imagination for an idea that can be transformed, with a lot of hard work, into a great short story, novel, essay, screenplay, or poem. Then I want to hand off this idea to my collaborator – let’s call her Amy – and tell her, “Here you go. Bring me back a completed manuscript as soon as possible.” At that point, I envision myself going off to play tennis while Amy holes up in a small room somewhere and doesn’t reemerge until she has produced some sort of literary masterpiece upon which we can affix both of our names. Who couldn’t use an Amy like that?

Stephen King frequently writes stories about writers who are driven to madness by the isolation and solitude of their profession. The films The Shining, The Dark Half, Secret Window, and 1408 all more or less fit that description, and they are all based on King’s work. But what does Stephen King know about isolation and solitude? Sure, his work – like nearly every other writer’s work – is born in solitude, but it never stays in isolation for long. My work, on the other hand, spends pretty much its entire life in isolation. I’m the one who should be writing about homicidal authors. If I had a literary collaborator, I might not be any more successful than I am now, but at least I’d have a companion in failure.

Because I don’t have a real collaborator, I have decided to create a fictional one. The late Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko created a fictional companion named Slats Grobnik, with whom he frequently collaborated on columns. Royko spent so much time with Grobnik that their conversations were eventually collected in a book. With all due respect to Royko, if I were going to spend a lot of time collaborating with a fictional character it wouldn’t be a Chicago lowlife named Slats Grobnik. If you’re going to create a fictional collaborator, why not make her young and charming and cute and witty? And since I’ve already named her Amy, why not give her an uncanny resemblance to Amy Adams, one of my favorite actresses? I’m not talking about the fairy-tale Amy of Enchanted or the pathetic hick of Junebug. I envision my partner as a combination of the super-efficient workaholic Amy played in Charlie Wilson’s War and the compulsive writer she played in Julie & Julia. That’s exactly the kind of collaborator a Big Picture Guy like me needs.

Around this time last year, it appeared that I might soon have a real life collaborator. In the summer of 2007 I wrote an essay about my marriage that the New York Times published in its Modern Love column. A year ago I began seeing trailers for a film called It’s Complicated in which Meryl Streep portrays a sixtyish woman whose first husband (played by Alec Baldwin) still wants her back, even though they have been divorced for many years and even though she is now involved with a new man (played by Steve Martin). That, in essence, was the gist of the personal essay I wrote for Modern Love. It appeared that writer/director Nancy Meyers had used my life story as the basis for her new movie. I was the Big Picture Guy who had come up with the general premise and she was the Small Details Guy who had fleshed it into a completed manuscript with a lot of commercial potential. I bided my time through most of last year, waiting for the film’s Christmas Day release. I was certain that the movie’s plot would be an obvious rip-off of my own story. If that turned out to be true, I would hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit against Nancy Meyers. I wouldn’t ask for financial compensation, just a promise on her part to collaborate with me on another joint project, one for which I would share both the credit and the compensation.

A few months before Christmas I picked up an issue of Creative Screenwriting magazine that contained an interview with Meyers. In it, I learned that “After finishing her 2006 film, The Holiday, Meyers decided to take a year off. ‘I didn’t have an idea in my head,’ she says.” But at some point “a new character began slowly evolving in the back of her mind, and a few different story ideas to develop as well. By early 2008 she was actively working on a new script and honing in on the story.” Hmm, I thought, there wasn’t an idea in her head at the end of 2006 but by early 2008 she was working on a script that apparently bears a strong resemblance to an essay I published in mid-2007. Curious. I was certain that this was all the evidence I would need to legally force Nancy Meyers to become my Small Details Guy (or Gal, as the case may be).

Last Christmas Day, my wife and I sat in a movie theater and watched the film that I hoped would give birth to the lawsuit that would result in my becoming the writing partner of one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood. Sadly, the movie ruined all my hopes. Even if Meyers script had been inspired by my essay, she took the material off in a direction that was entirely original and bore no strong resemblance at all to my life. Our collaborative relationship was over before it ever began. I was right back where I had started: writing alone.

Lately, however, I’ve begun to wonder if I gave up on my partnership with Nancy Meyers a bit too hastily. In the last few weeks I have seen several movies that bear only a slight resemblance to their acknowledged source material. Writer-director Richard Kelly’s film The Box is based upon a 1970 short story called “Button, Button” by master fantasist Richard Matheson. Both the film and the short story begin with the same basic set-up: A man calling himself Mr. Steward delivers a package to the home of Arthur and Norma Lewis, a married couple, and tells them, “Press the button on top of the box and two things will happen: somewhere in the world a person you don’t know will die – and you will receive a million dollars [in the short story the sum is $50,000].” But whereas Kelly’s film spends a great deal of time developing the characters of Arthur (a NASA engineer who hopes to become an astronaut; a man approaching middle age and haunted by the fear that he is a failure) and Norma (a teacher of Literature at an elite private prep school; a beautiful woman with a secret disfigurement), establishing a sense of place (late 1970s professional-class East-Coast America) and the moral quandary they find themselves in, Matheson’s story employs complete ciphers as characters, places them in a totally nondescript setting, and uses the plot not to explore moral questions but to set up a punch line (Norma eventually presses the button only to learn that Arthur was killed at exactly that moment. When she telephones Steward and protests, “You said I wouldn’t know the one that died,” he responds with the story’s final line, “My dear lady, do you really think you knew your husband?”). The characters in Kelly’s film have a strong incentive for wanting to press the button: Norma has lost her job, they are anticipating some steep medical expenses, and their son is enrolled in an expensive prep school that they can no longer afford. The characters in Matheson’s story have no apparent financial needs. Norma wants to spend the $50,000 on travel and a vacation home.

Another film that apparently bears only a vague resemblance to its source is Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air, which was based on a novel of the same name by Walter Kirn. I haven’t read the novel but, according to some of the less flattering reader reviews of the book at Amazon.com, it pales in comparison with the Reitman film. Amazon’s naysayers point out that some of the best things about the movie are missing from the book. These apparently include the characters Natalie Keener and Alex Goran, both of whom are essential to the film. At the beginning of the film, Natalie (brilliantly portrayed by Anna Kendrick) is a soulless yuppie whose only goal is to make the process of terminating working people easier (for the employer, that is) and less personal (she wants to do it via long-range computer encounters). Her growth from corporate cretin to sadder-but-wiser-woman-of-conscience (though a bit farfetched) was the highlight of the film for me. Likewise, the plot development that reveals the seamy side of Alex Goran, an apparently unattached jetsetter played by Vera Farmiga, provides the film’s strongest narrative jolt. And in one of the film’s best comic conceits, George Clooney (playing corporate hatchet-man Ryan Bingham) is required to photograph a cardboard cutout of his younger sister and her fiancé in a variety of different locales in order to provide them with a virtual honeymoon. Just the sight of super-cool Ryan Bingham having to pack the ridiculous-looking cutout into his otherwise perfectly ordered suitcase is priceless. But according to the Amazonian naysayers, none of these things – Natalie, Alex, or the cutout – is in the book.

I suppose it could be argued, then, that my Modern Love essay bears at least as much resemblance to the film It’s Complicated as Matheson’s “Button, Button” bears to the film The Box or as Kirn’s Up In The Air does to Reitman’s Up In The Air. And if the point were argued well enough, it might even inspire Universal Pictures to retroactively buy the rights to my story in order to forestall a lawsuit.

Which brings us back to Amy. For our first project together I have scribbled down this 2000-word outline of an essay about my ruined dream of a partnership with Nancy Meyers. Now, Amy, it is your turn. I want you to take this undercooked idea and transform it into a brilliant 10,000-word essay that I can sell to the New Yorker or The Atlantic, something that will dazzle readers coast to coast, portray me as the victim of a heinous act of intellectual-property theft, and maybe even generate a payoff check from Universal. Are you ready, Amy?

Amy? Where are you, hon? Amy…

My wife says that a variation of this rule applies to decorating, as well. She insists that no array of accessories – figurines, vases, framed photos, etc – should ever add up to an even number. She prefers to display accessories in groups of either three or five. But even seven or nine is preferable to two or four.

Recently I have been composing essays in which I examine some odd fact from the realm of science or art or sport or history and try to find a way to use it as a metaphor for a larger human truth. One of the odd facts that I planned to write about is the rule of three. For many weeks now I have had a Post-It Note attached to my computer monitor which reads “Rule of Three – Life Lessons?” Over the past month or so I have scribbled several pages of notes on the subject. But when I finally sat down and tried to write the proposed essay, what emerged from my imagination was something totally different. I wrote a piece that could be described by any number of literary terms – short story, fairy tale, poem, fable – but by no stretch of the imagination could it be called an essay. Oh, well. If my muse wishes to bring me a poem rather than an essay, who am I to argue?

THE GIRL WHO SNIFFED MAGAZINES

She had all these little habits that annoyed.
She sprayed saliva when she laughed and then employed
Her sleeve as a handkerchief and wiped
Her mouth and chin with it. She favored
Black bras beneath white sleeveless tops
So that her shoulders often looked zebra-striped.
She liked garish lipsticks that were flavored
Like peppermint candy or lemon drops,
Soda pop, bubblegum, and butterscotch,
Which she’d constantly suck from her bottom lip.
At supermarket checkout lines she’d flip
Through fashion magazines and open the flaps
That concealed perfume samples and then dab
Some scent on her cheek or wrist. Sometimes she’d touch
Even more intimate parts of herself –
Her neck, or the spot just above her heart –
Before resealing each little tab
And returning the magazine to the shelf.
“You can’t do that,” her boyfriend would say of this lapse
In checkout-line etiquette on her part.
“Of course I can,” she’d assert. “They’re free samples.”
“But that magazine isn’t your possession!
What you did just now with those flaps tramples
The rights of the eventual purchaser.”
(He was a scholar, an academic,
And tended to sound a bit pedantic.)
But his logic never got through to her.
At night, back at home, she would casually shed
Her zebra stripes before climbing in bed,
Where he’d kiss her neck and smell Obsession,
And then her cheek and inhale Enchantment.
In a sensitive spot behind one ear,
While fluttering his tongue to titillate her,
He just might detect a whiff of Desir.
And once when he pressed his lips to her wrist it
Emitted the lovely forbidden scent
Of Paradise as he tenderly kissed it
At the place where the beat of her pulse could be seen.
He tasted paradise too, but later
In another part of the magazine.

The boyfriend was writing a scholarly tome,
The Rule of Three: An Exploration
Of Tripartite Elements in Fairy Tales.
From the number of chairs in the Three Bears’ home
To the number of wishes the conjuration
Of a genie brings, to the times someone wails
“Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!”
In The Three Little Pigs of nursery rhyme,
Tripartite elements are featured in
Most of the classic tales of Pierrot,
P.C. Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe,
Madame d’Aulnoy and The Brother’s Grimm.
And the way that these writers, time after time,
Employed such things as billy-goats gruff,
Blind mice and wishes always in threes
Struck the boyfriend as rather wonderful stuff
For a collection of scholarly analyses.
But as he began giving birth to this work
His love life seemed hell-bent on smothering him,
He found his young lover’s every quirk
Grew each day less endearing and more annoying,
Her voice a distraction, her purloined scents cloying
Until, after a year of co-habitation,
He opted to sever their romantic bond,
Deciding his need for publication
Outweighed her smile and her hair so blond
And silky smooth, her lovely turquoise eyes,
And all the rest: her breasts, her jests, her sighs.
Perhaps later on, when the book was completed
He’d go out and find a more suitable mate,
A woman more equal to his new stature
As an expert on fabulous literature.
But the future is murky, it’s tricky to read it.
He went seven long years without one second date.

And then, one day, in a checkout line
At a supermarket, he saw her again.
Beside her, half imp and half angel divine,
Was a small, perfect replica of herself,
Her daughter, no doubt. He gazed at her then
This long-ago lover, more unicorn
Than zebra now, so lovely in fact that he wasn’t sure
That this radiant vision was actually her,
The girl whose absence had left him forlorn
For seven long years, till she reached towards a shelf
And picked up a copy of Harper’s Bazaar
Or some other high-fashion magazine
And opened up one of the perfume flaps.
Breathless he stood and looked on from afar
As she tested the scent of some perfume or other
(Enchantment, Obsession, or Desir, perhaps?).
Then she lowered the issue and held it between
Herself and her child. The child took a sniff
And then nodded her head with a smile as if
To say that she liked it. At which point her mother
With tenderness touched the flap to the girl’s
Soft cheek and, with a few delicate swirls,
Transferred the purloined perfume to her skin.
The man watched transfixed as mother and daughter
Repeated this ritual another two times,
The peeling of paper, the sniffing, the swirling,
All of which sent his memory whirling
Back to the days when he’d scold if he caught her
Pilfering scents from a Vogue or an Elle.
He longed to approach her now and to tell
Of the prize which only last year was awarded
His book from the Center For The Scholarly Study
Of Fables, and Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes,
But even to himself this triumph sounded
Paltry and small and pathetic. No more did
He deem his book worthy of the sacrifice
He’d paid for completing it: hurting somebody
Who’d never been anything other than kind
And caring to him. He suddenly found it
Unbearable to ponder the terrible price
He had paid for his puny success, and he left
The store and his cart full of groceries behind,
Feeling quite wretched, a failure, bereft.
A few minutes later, after she’d gone,
He sidled back up to the magazine shelf
And purchased the copy of Vogue she had held
While she and her daughter had stood there and smelled
The samples of perfume inside — whereupon
He felt sordid and slightly ashamed of himself.

Back home he page-flipped through the Vogue to discover
Exactly which perfume his long-ago lover
Had held to her nose and then pressed to her cheek.
For although she had dabbed three scents on her child,
To herself she’d applied only one of the three.
He opened the first flap; the aroma was meek.
He opened the second and found it too wild.
The third one was perfect, seductive but shy,
In a way that recalled her own youthful esprit.
He stretched himself out on the couch and nearby
Laid the magazine open to the page with her scent.
In a while he lowered his eyelids and went
To sleep with her perfume flap under his nose,
And a prayer on his lips that, when he arose,
He would find that the last seven years were a dream
That had vanished like water in a sizzle of steam
When you drizzle it down upon coals that are hot,
That he and his lover had never been parted,
And that her impish young child was his imp too.
But his praying, it turned out, was purely for naught.
He awoke, looked around, and was broken-hearted
To find nothing there but the naked nymph who
Stood affixed to the base of his book prize, a fairy
Whose wings cast their shadows on the coffee table
Where a molehill of cigarette butts in a dish
Symbolized the ruins of his fervent wish
To undo the past. And in the room’s dim
Tobacco-scented and uncertain light
(a hazy mixture of yellow and gray)
She looked so delicate, so soft and airy,
A trembling fear enveloped him
That any moment now she might prove able
To rise from her pedestal and flutter away
And leave him alone in the void of the night
With the big bad wolf Memory skulking through town
And making her way towards the poor scholar’s door
Where she’ll huff and she’ll puff and she’ll let out a roar
And bring the whole edifice tumbling down.