Even in the heat of passion, Byron remembered to observe proper inscription etiquette by writing on the flyleaf instead of the title page, which is traditionally reserved for a book’s author. I learned this only recently, after having defaced dozens of other writers’ title pages. I should have cracked the code years ago, since the Books by Friends and Relatives section of our own library contains a profusion of title-page inscriptions, all licitly deployed. My father inscribed Famous Monster Tales, an anthology to which he contributed a preface when I was a sullen fourteen-year-old, For Anne, from that old monster, Daddy. Mark Helprin, who likes to leave messages on his friends’ answering machines in spurious (but highly convincing) dialects, inscribed several of his books in imaginary languages. In A Dove of the East, he wrote Skanaarela tan floss atcha atcha qumble ta. Da bubo barta flay? Staarcroft I spent the better part of a decade trying in vain to figure out what that meant.
A distant rung down from the “presentation copy”—an inscribed book actually presented by the author as a gift —is the “inscription copy,” a book inscribed (sometimes, one suspects, with a gun to the author’s head) at the owner’s request. Before the advent of store-sponsored book signings, most readers got a book inscribed by mailing it to the author and praying that it would make a round-trip. Yeats once asked Thomas Hardy how he handled these requests. Hardy led Yeats upstairs to a large room that was filled from floor to ceiling with books—thousands of them. “Yeats,” said Hardy, “these are the books that were sent to me for signature.”
The first edition of On Forsyte ’Change that I saw last month in a secondhand bookstore had obviously made a more fruitful circuit. On the title page, in small, formal handwriting—the work of an old-fashioned fountain pen —were the words Inscribed for C. F. Sack cordially by John Galsworthy, Oct 6 1930. Presumably, Galsworthy didn’t know C. F. Sack from Adam, and he didn’t pretend to. But what are we to make of To Owen—Love + Kisses—Brooke Shields XX (to quote from the title page of On Your Own, glimpsed in another bookstore)? I feel certain that Ms. Shields had no more intention of kissing Owen than Galsworthy had of kissing C. F. Sack—the fact that she signed her full name is a dead giveaway—but that was no deterrent. Her panting communication, written in black felt-tip pen, filled nearly half the page. (I can report, after a close study of the celebrity-autograph department of the Strand Bookstore in New York City, that the felt-tip pen has achieved near-total hegemony. Barbara Cartland writes in pink, Ivana Trump in purple, and Francine du Plessix Gray in green.)
My friend Mark O’Donnell, whom I consider the nonesuch of inscribers, would never stoop to such tactics. At a signing party for his collection Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales, he came up with something different for each postulant: Dear Reader, I love you (an ironic homage to the Shields genre); No time to write—Life in dang———— ; and, the most heartfelt of all, Thank you for shopping retail.
Maggie Hivnor, the paperback editor of the University of Chicago Press, once told me that when she adds an out-of-print title to her list, she calls the author and asks for a pristine copy that can be photographically reproduced. “The author is usually a man,” she explained. “In a few weeks, a beautifully kept copy of his book arrives, a little dusty perhaps but otherwise absolutely perfect. And on the title page it invariably says To Mother.”
Now that’s a real inscription. The best thing about it is that until the editor’s call, the book that it ennobled reposed precisely where it should have: in a place of honor on Mother’s shelf. And there it shall return. How melancholy, by contrast, are the legions of inscribed copies one finds in any used-book rack, each a memorial to a betrayed friendship. Do the traitors believe that their faithlessness will remain secret? If so, they are sadly deluded. Hundreds of people will witness it, including, on occasion, the inscriber. Shaw once came across one of his books in a secondhand shop, inscribed To———with esteem, George Bernard Shaw. He bought the book and returned it to ———, adding the line, With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.
I once saw a copy of Mayflower Madam inscribed by Sydney Biddle Barrows To Patrick—Richard has told me so much about you. Henry Miller could have written an entire novel about that inscription. It would take Turgenev to write a novel about the inscription I found in The Golden Book: The Story of Fine Books and Bookmaking. It read: To Father on his birthday, March 16, 1928. In the nature of a peace offering? Alan. After sixty-seven years, that heartbreaking question mark still hangs in the air. I only hope that The Golden Book found its way to a bookseller long after Father’s death. If not, Father, shame on you.
Fortunately, the very finest inscriptions, like the finest love letters, rarely pass out of a family. The most bravura performance I’ve seen—testimony that the art of the romantic inscription was not buried with Byron—graces the Oxford Classical Text of the complete works of Virgil, given to my friend Maud Gleason when she was reading litterae humaniores at Oxford. Maud says she would no sooner part with it than with her son’s first tooth. As she explained to me, “I had repaired to the King’s Arms, the pub closest to the Bodleian Library, with a fellow student, a dashing but bullheaded young Scotsman who proclaimed over coffee that Homer was vastly inferior to Virgil. As a Homeric partisan, I was much miffed, even though, as the conversation progressed, I had to confess that I had never actually read Virgil. ‘If you think Virgil’s so great,’ said I, the brash American, ‘why don’t you give me a copy?’ Soon thereafter a blue volume arrived on my doorstep, inscribed on the flyleaf with thirteen lines of Latin dactylic hexameter—Virgil’s preferred meter.” The inscription began Poscimur; atque aliquid quando tu, cara, requiris / Dabitur (I am entreated, and when you, dear, ask anything of me, it shall be given); continued with an apostrophe to Maud, whom the Scotsman declared that he admired, as all poets were wont to admire Virgil, quanto desiderat astra / Papilio volitans (as the fluttering butterfly longs for the stars); and ended with a pledge amoris amicitiaeque (of love and friendship).
“So what happened?” I asked Maud, who now teaches classics at Stanford.
“I never slept with the boy,” she said. “But I fell for Virgil, and I’ve slept with the book many times.”
The best inscription I’ve ever gotten—it may not be as dazzling as the Scotsman’s, but I wouldn’t trade—is on the title page of The Enigma of Suicide, by George Howe Colt. I’ve never slept with the book, but I’ve slept with the author many times. It reads (how far we have come, George, since our new true friendship!) To my beloved wife … . This is your book, too. As my life, too, is also yours.
YOU ARE THERE
On November 12, 1838, Thomas Babington Macaulay set out by horse-drawn coach from Florence to Rome. “My journey lay over the field of Thrasymenus,” he wrote in his journal, “and as soon as the sun rose, I read Livy’s description of the scene.”
The moment I read that sentence, I knew that Macaulay and I were peas in a pod. It is true that I had never reformed the Indian educational system, served in the House of Commons, or written a five-volume history of England, but those were paltry details. He would surely have agreed that we were alike where it really counted: we were both hard-core devotees of what I call You-Are-There Reading, the practice of reading books in the places they describe.
The discovery of our mutual passion was particularly gratifying because Macaulay was probably the greatest reader of all time. He started reading at the age of three, died at fifty-nine with an open book in front of him, and in between, as his nephew observed, read books “faster than other people skimmed them, and skimmed them as fast as any one else could turn the leaves.” He particularly liked to read while in transit. He read Bulwer-Lytton’s Alice while walking across the Pontine Marshes, Plato while rambling on the heath at Tunbridge Wells, and innumerable books while zigzagging rapidly, and apparently without collision, through the crowded streets of London. While sailing to India he read Homer, Virgil, Caesar, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Bacon, Cervantes, and all seventy vo
lumes of Voltaire. That’s a partial list. “What a blessing it is to love books as I love them,” he wrote to a friend, “to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”
When he read Livy at Thrasymenus—in Latin, of course—Macaulay achieved a kind of Double Word Score whose peculiar frisson will be instantly recognized by anyone who has ever read Wordsworth at Grasmere, Gibbon in Rome, or Thoreau at Walden. Thrasymenus, a lake in eastern Etruria, was the site of one of the worst disasters in Roman military history. In 217 B.C., Hannibal, riding the sole survivor of the thirty-eight elephants that had set out across the Alps the previous year, defeated the Roman legions, led by the consul Gaius Flaminius, in the second major battle of the Second Punic War. It was a classic ambush. While marching at dawn through a narrow defile with steep hills on one side and the lake on the other, the Romans were charged simultaneously from the front, the rear, and the left flank by torrents of Carthaginian infantrymen who had been concealed by a dense, low-lying fog. The Romans who weren’t hacked to pieces ended up in the lake, where many of them drowned under the weight of their armor. In three hours, 15,000 Romans died.
When I looked up Livy’s description of the battle—it’s in book XXII of his history of Rome, which he wrote about two hundred years after Flaminius’s defeat—I anticipated dry fare. Well. By the fifth page I was on the edge of my seat; by the tenth my heart rate had palpably accelerated. And that was reading in my living room. I had forgotten how incredibly gory, stirring, and intimate combat was before the invention of firearms, when in order to kill your enemy you had to be close enough to stab him with your sword or pierce him with your javelin. “The fog was so thick that ears were of more use than eyes,” wrote Livy,
and the groans of the wounded, the sound of blows on body or armour and the mingled shouts and screams of assailants and assailed made [the Romans] turn and gaze, now this way and now that … . When it became apparent that their only hope of safety lay in their right arms and their swords, then every man became his own commander and urged himself to action … . And such was the frenzy of their eagerness and so absorbed were they in fighting, that an earthquake, violent enough to overthrow large portions of many of the towns of Italy, turn swift streams from their courses, carry the sea up into rivers, and bring down mountains with great landslides, was not even felt by any of the combatants.
Two thousand and fifty-five years later, Macaulay wrote, “I was exactly in the situation of the consul, Flaminius—completely hid in the morning fog … . So that I can truly say that I have seen precisely what the Roman army saw on that day.” He had arrived at Thrasymenus not only at the same hour as the original battle but in the same weather! When his coach reached the hilltop, above the fog, he, like Hannibal, had a clear view of the scene. “I then understood the immense advantage which Hannibal derived from keeping his divisions on the heights, where he could see them all, and where they could all see each other, while the Romans were stumbling and groping, without the possibility of concert, through the thick haze below.” Haec est nobilis ad Trasumennum pugna. Such was the famous battle of Thrasymenus. Such was Macaulay’s conversation with the dead.
What makes You-Are-There Reading so much more thrilling to us buffs than You-Are-Somewhere-Else Reading? I think it’s because the mind’s eye isn’t literal enough for us. We want to walk into the pages, the way Woody Allen’s Professor Kugelmass walked into Madame Bovary, triggering a flurry of scholarly confusion about the bald New Yorker in a leisure suit who had suddenly appeared on page 100. Failing that, the nearest we can come to Macaulay’s living “amidst the unreal” is to walk into a book’s physical setting. The closer we get, the better. For example, reading Steinbeck in Monterey won’t do; we must read him on Cannery Row. Even that backdrop falls short of perfection, for Cannery Row has changed more in a half century than Thrasymenus had in two millennia, and the details on the page no longer match the details before our eyes. The consummate You-Are-There experience requires us, like Macaulay, to see exactly what the author described, so that all we need do to cross the eidetic threshold is squint a little.
I’ve never equaled the sensory verisimilitude of my friend Adam, who once read the ninth book of the Odyssey, in Greek, in what is believed to be the Cyclops’s cave, a Sicilian grotto Homerically redolent of sheep turds. But I have read Yeats in Sligo, Isak Dinesen in Kenya, and John Muir in the Sierras. By far my finest You-Are-There hour, however, was spent reading the journals of John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who led the first expedition down the Colorado River, while I was camped at Granite Rapids in the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
In one crucial aspect, I bested Macaulay. Alone on his grand tour, he had no one with whom to share the rapture of Thrasymenus except the shade of Livy. In the Grand Canyon, I had George. It was our first vacation together, and it was full of revelations: that George was afraid of mice; that I never went backpacking without my baby pillow; that we both loved skinny-dipping in water so cold it gave us headaches.
Alone on a beach of almost Caribbean whiteness, walled in by cliffs of black schist and pink granite, George and I had washed each other’s hair in the Colorado River and then settled ourselves next to the churning rapids with The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. “G. reads from Powell,” I wrote by candlelight in my journal that night, “holding the book on his bare legs. Amazing to hear of Powell’s equipment and food and how hard it was for him to run the rapids, with the rapids right in front of us!!” There was an engraving of Granite Rapids in the book. Nothing had changed.
“We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown,” read George. “Our boats, tied to a common stake, chafe each other as they are tossed by the fretful river … . We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not.” We had no idea at the time that these are among the most famous sentences in expedition literature. We thought we had discovered them. I am grateful for our innocence, just as I am grateful that I didn’t know then that Powell’s journals were hashed together from the skimpy notes he scrawled on strips of brown paper during the expedition, overlaid with impressions from a second trip two years later, further overlaid with two sets of revisions.
In a voice that could barely be heard above the roar of the whitewater, George read of spinning in whirlpools, bashing against rocks, capsizing in waterfalls, losing food and oars and guns and barometers and blankets and an entire boat. In the worst stretches, including the rapids at our feet, Powell couldn’t turn right, couldn’t turn left, couldn’t slow down, couldn’t get out, couldn’t do anything but hold on to a leather strap he had fastened to the gunwale and ride his leaky dory like a bucking bronco. Years later, when I read Livy, I was struck by how much Powell’s adrenaline-soaked confusion resembled that of the soldiers trapped in the defile at Thrasymenus. Caroming through Granite Rapids, no one would have noticed an earthquake either.
“It is especially cold in the rain to-night,” read George. “The little canvas we have is rotten and useless; the rubber ponchos with which we started from Green River City have all been lost; more than half the party are without hats, not one of us has an entire suit of clothes, and we have not a blanket apiece … . We sit up all night on the rocks, shivering.” That was the night of August 17, 1869. Powell and his men had just run Granite Rapids. As the sun set beneath the South Rim, George and I snuggled in polypropylene and Gore-Tex. “For us, only the illusion of peril and discovery,” I wrote. “For Powell, the real thing.”
That’s the catch: it’s always the illusion, never the real thing. Or so I thought until last year. George and I have two children now, and our adventures are closer to home. When our daughter was four, she took her copy of Eloise to tea at the Plaza Hotel. Macaulay never fought at Thrasymenus. I never ran the Colorado River. But Susannah has actually hidden behind the red velvet curtains in the Gra
nd Ballroom, slomped down the hallway on the fifteenth floor, and gotten dizzy in the revolving door with the on it. When we got to the Palm Court, Susannah opened her book to page 40. Her eyes skittered back and forth between the plate of Gugelhopfen on the triple-tiered table in the picture and the plate of Gugelhopfen on the triple-tiered table in front of her. She didn’t say a word. I knew what she was thinking. She was there.
THE HIS’ER PROBLEM
When I was nineteen, William Shawn interviewed me for a summer job at The New Yorker. To grasp the full import of what follows, you should know that I considered The New Yorker a cathedral and Mr. Shawn a figure so godlike that I expected a faint nimbus to emanate from his ruddy head. During the course of our conversation, he asked me what other magazines I hoped to write for.
“Um, Esquire, the Saturday Review, and—”
I wanted to say “Ms.,” but my lips had already butted against the M—too late for a politic retreat—when I realized I had no idea how to pronounce it. Lest you conclude that I had been raised in Ulan Bator, I might remind you that in 1973, when I met Mr. Shawn, Ms. magazine had been published for scarcely a year, and most people, including me, had never heard the word Ms. used as a term of address. (Mr. Shawn had called me Miss Fadiman. He was so venerated by his writers that “Mister” had virtually become part of his name.) Its pronunciation, reflexive now, was not as obvious as you might think. After all, Mr. is not pronounced “Mir,” and Mrs. is not pronounced “Mirz.” Was it “Mzzzzz”? “Miz”? “Muz”?
In that apocalyptic split second, I somehow alighted on “Em Ess,” which I knew to be the correct pronunciation of ms., or manuscript.