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 Deirdre
Bair
It was summer, stinking hot in a small town and I was
fifteen and bored. The town librarian had been giving
me grief since I was eleven and in the sixth grade,
when she issued her first decree that I wasn't "old
enough" to check out what became the first of a
long line of books I had to fight to read. It was also
the first of many times when one or both of my parents
trudged down to the library to insist equally firmly
that she had no right to restrict my choices as I had
their permission to read whatever I wanted.
The summer of my fifteenth year was especially difficult
for this poor beleaguered woman. Her worst day came
when I insisted on checking out all of Proust, every
one of Thomas Wolfe's novels, and while I was at it,
Joyce's Ulysses as well. After all, I reasoned,
I had two weeks to keep these books and I was a fast
reader.
So I took them home, to the old iron glider under the
grape arbor, and I propped myself up on a bunch of pillows
and dug in with the same glee most people reserve for
hot fudge sundaes. I fanned the pages and decided to
read Look Homeward, Angel first because I like the way
all those words leapfrogged over each other on every
single page. Wow! The exuberant rush and gush of all
those words! The torrent was overwhelming, the words
blurred, I was losing the meaning. I knew I had to slow
the pace somehow before I would have to admit that the
librarian was probably right and perhaps I really wasn't
"old enough" to make sense of it.
And so I turned to Proust, finding relief within his
exquisitely nuanced precision and pacing. My love of
all things French was born with Proust, as I marveled
at his privileged people and their luminous lives. Who
were they really, I wondered, and was all of Paris like
this, and if so, how soon could I get there? For the
next two weeks, I cut back and forth between that unlikely
duo, Wolfe and Proust, sweating from July's heat and
the emotional impact of Brother Ben's death (best read
when one is fifteen), then cooling off with the soothingly
elegant rituals of Monsieur Swann and company.
It was an effort to penetrate the worlds of their words
and, needless to say, I renewed both authors for the
rest of the summer until my father, worried that I was
wearing out the pages and would have to buy new books
for the library, surprised me with my own personal copies.
I already had my own personal Ulysses, my father's
copy reluctantly given. To my unending embarrassment
in later years, he never tired of describing the look
of reverence on my face as I sat reading his cherished
book, and how he knew he had found its worthy heir.
In the years since that fifteenth summer, I've often
thought about how these three writers influenced me
in such very different ways. Wolfe (whom I did not reread)
inspired my family's joke, that I can't write "hello,
how are you" in less than 500 words ("shades
of Tom," is the key phrase they use to tell me
to cut like crazy in my early drafts). Some of the critics
have praised my biographies for the evocation of period,
place, character, and social class. "Thank you,
Marcel," I say silently in homage to Proust, happy
that he led me to the joy of living in France and writing
about its writers. And Joyce: what can I say in less
than one of Molly Bloom's impassioned soliloquies? Only
that I've never stopped reading Joyce, who led me to
Irish literature in general, who let me to Samuel Beckett
in particular, who led me to a happy lifetime of contemplating
the endless pleasure of the world of words and the satisfaction
of the writing life.
Sincerely,
Deirdre Bair
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