I had to move my books: what I found

No blogging for me last month. It’s been weeks of one thing and another kidnapping my schedule, and then painting the rooms downstairs, which required moving all the books out of the dining and living rooms so the painter could move the bookcases. I don’t live in a large house, so the books ended up spread in stacks on the steps of the staircase and over the floors in the bedrooms and hallway on the second floor. Also in odd places, such as on shelves next to laundry detergent and dog food. The rule was no lingering over the books: lift, carry, put them down.

I made no rules about returning the books to where they belong, so I’m lingering all I want. Time consuming, but terribly fun, especially because of the surprises.

Such as in the military classic Street Without Joy, where I found a letter from “Pauline” to her husband in Vietnam tucked behind the rear jacket flap and end paper. “Dearest one, dearest one,” it begins. It’s dated Thursday, November 4, 1965, typed, single spaced, a little more than one and a half pages.

I’m so mad! Have been waiting every night for Huntley-Brinkley to say something on TV about Revolutionary day and show a picture of you on TV — but they barely mentioned it on Monday. Have been expecting each night since, hoping the pictures of it were being processed and flown in, but I’ve given up. I’m crestfallen. Was so sure I would see you on TV. Darn it!

I purchased this book from an antiquarian bookseller fourteen years ago. What interested me was I had read somewhere that U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were known to read and then pass the book to others to read because author Bernard B. Fall nailed it, the “it” of what they themselves were seeing. Street Without Joy chronicles the French army’s strategic mistakes leading to their famous defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. My book is inscribed by Bernard B. Fall 11/5/64 to a Major Weber, and there’s also an ownership signature of Walt Gray, Major, USAF, April ’65, likely Pauline’s husband. I knew about the signatures, but I didn’t know about the letter hidden inside.

Some books I’ve lost track of how much I want to read them, not just collect them. These are first and early editions that fill a few bookcases in the downstairs. The five below are the ones (so far) that feel like the reading tipping point of now-or-never has arrived. The titles link to currently available editions.

First Love and Other Sorrows. This is Harold Brodkey’s debut, published in 1958, a collection of stories that first appeared in The New Yorker. They caused a ruckus of acclaim about Brodkey as “a master of narrative prose” in his chronicling of the educated and affluent middle class of the 1950s. The literary world breathlessly waited for Brodkey’s novel, following the success of this collection. It was a long time coming: The Runaway Soul was published in 1991. I found my copy of First Love and Other Sorrows at a rare books fair fifteen years ago, a first edition.

Pentimento. I’ve never forgotten the 1977 Academy Award-winning film Julia, how the story moved me in the small theater where I had no expectation of what it would be about. It’s the reason I’m compelled to read this book by the famous playwright Lillian Hellman. “Julia” is among the portraits within its pages, about a lifelong friendship that began in childhood. On the jacket flap, Hellman’s explains the transparency of aged painting, where you can see the original lines through the old paint. “That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.” Another first edition, which I purchased sixteen years ago. It’s subtitled on the interior pages as “A Book of Portraits.”

Paris Trout. This third novel by Pete Dexter, published in 1988, won the National Book Award in Fiction. Author William Styron commends Dexter on the jacket flap for his “brilliant understanding of the Deep South” and calls the book “a fine and engrossing work.” It’s about the murder of a fourteen-year-old Black girl by a respected white citizen named Paris Trout. The Washington Post called it “a psychological spellbinder that will take your breath away and probably interfere with your sleep.” I found my first edition copy of this novel, purchased fifteen years ago, browsing a used/rare bookstore. I bought it to read it, and yet here I am.

If I Die In a Combat Zone Box Me Up & Ship Me Home. This one sits in a bookcase with other Vietnam books, including Street Without Joy. It’s fiction that draws from author Tim O’Brien’s tour as a foot soldier in the war. The author’s bio on the jacket flap says O’Brien graduated summa cum laude from Macalester College where he was Phi Beta Kappa and president of the student body. He entered military service in 1968, discharged in 1970 with seven medals, including the Purple Heart. The Things They Carried is the novel he’s most widely known for. Perhaps also Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award in Fiction 1979. I’ve meant to read more O’Brien, ever since I reviewed The Things They Carried in 1990. My If I Die copy is the third printing, 1973, purchased twenty years ago

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. This is Richard Powers first novel (1985) in which three stories unfold and connect based on a photograph Powers saw in a museum, the photo that’s on the novel’s cover. My copy is the uncorrected bound galleys that I purchased not too long ago, 2019. The first page, a letter from the publisher, says the story begins “at perhaps [the century’s] last moment of innocence on May Day 1914 with three young men in Sunday clothes walking along a road in Germany.” Most may know Powers for his recently published Bewilderment and before that The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He has a new novel coming out September 24 titled Playground. His debut is another book I’ve been meaning to read, curious about Richard Powers’ first fiction.