Now, Read it Again

In the books I reread over and over, I always come back for the people, and often simply for their voices. I return to Ball Four just to hear Joe Schultz, manager of the hapless Seattle Pilots, tell his players to "pound that ol' Budweiser." Or to Peter Golenbock's Dynasty: The New York Yankees, 1949–1964, to hear the team's former third baseman Clete Boyer lamenting his eroded skills. "And it's a shame," he tells Golenbock. "Like old ballplayers—like myself. I should quit now. But s--t, I have to go back to Japan for the money. I hate to be embarrassed like that, to just hang on, hang on for the money." Or to Donald Honig's Baseball When the Grass Was Real, to hear the long-retired pitcher Wes Ferrell reminisce: "But I've still got those memories. I played against a lot of great stars. You name 'em. Ruth, Gehrig, Greenberg, Simmons, Foxx, Grove, DiMaggio, Cochrane, Feller. I saw them all. And they saw me. You bet they did." Honig's book also has a brilliantly told Ernest Hemingway anecdote, from Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Famer Billy Herman. When the team was training in Havana in the 1940s, Hemingway, who "took a lot of pride in all this manly stuff," invited some players to his house. Late in the evening he cajoled pitcher Hugh Casey into a "friendly" boxing match, sucker-punched him, kicked him "in the balls," then challenged him to a duel: " 'We'll use swords, pistols, whatever you want. You pick it.' And he's dead serious about it …c The next day Hemingway's wife brought him down to the ball park. You never saw a man so embarrassed, so ashamed. He apologized to everybody. 'Don't know what got into me,' he said. Well, I can tell you what got into him. About a quart."

I also reread Hemingway's own stories, to hear his characters' voices again—he's got an even better ear than Billy Herman. There's the narrator of "After the Storm," who's the first to come upon a sunken ocean liner, but can't get down there to loot it. "Well, the Greeks got it all. They must have come fast all right. They picked her clean. First there was the birds, then me, then the Greeks, and even the birds got more out of her than I did." And "the girl" in "Hills Like White Elephants," whose lover is pestering her to get an abortion. "Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?" (That's seven "please"s. Who says less is more?) But my favorite is the lumber-town prostitute in "The Light of the World," with her addled aria about a once famous prizefighter. "Did I know him? Did I know him? Did I love him? You ask me that? I knew him like you know nobody in the world and I loved him like you love God. He was the greatest, finest, whitest, most beautiful man that ever lived, Steve Ketchel, and his own father shot him down like a dog." In all of short fiction, she has only one serious rival for my affections: the spinster postmistress in Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." "Papa-Daddy woke up with this horrible yell and right there without moving an inch he tried to turn Uncle Rondo against me …c All the time he was just lying there swinging as pretty as you please and looping out his beard, and poor Uncle Rondo was pleading with him to slow down the hammock, it was making him as dizzy as a witch to watch it. But that's what Papa-Daddy likes about a hammock. So Uncle Rondo was too busy to get turned against me for the time being. He's mama's only brother and is a good case of a one-track mind. Ask anybody. A certified pharmacist." If you've got Talking Heads on your iPod, why would you want to hear this loony music only once in your life?

And it's not just the characters who've become my companions—it's also the writers themselves. Some of them, I feel, I would never have wanted to deal with in person, but on the page, they're some of my favorite people to hang out with. In Strong Opinions, a collection of interviews and letters to editors, the arch-mandarin Vladimir Nabokov sets me straight again and again about Conrad ("I cannot abide [his] souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés"), Freud ("Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts"), and "the corny Philistine fad of flaunting four-letter words." I never weary of his reply when asked about his "position in the world of letters": "Jolly good view from up here." And in The Sixties, the last of the posthumously published journals by Nabokov's friend (and sometime enemy) Edmund Wilson, I get to keep company with the august curmudgeon when he goes to see Yellow Submarine—"Amusing but almost two hours of animated cartoon is perhaps a little too much"—and a performance at a Paris music hall. "I… sat through the first act of a show that … consisted of American-type entertainment of the coarsest and most raucous kind: a jazz orchestra; everybody doing the twist; women torch singers, tremendously applauded, who … would sing with the microphone in the right hand, like a piece of garden hose." Still, huff as he did, even in his last years Wilson was always game to check out something new. Not—ahem—like some of us.

It might be that the shame attached to rereading has less to do with all the new books you feel you ought to be encountering than with what your choice of old books reveals. In my case, I can see a strong tendency toward nostalgia (for the New York Yankees of my childhood; for the sum-mer of 1973, when I watched the Watergate hearings on television) and toward Anglophilia—which appears to be my favored form of multiculturalism. I can't help but notice the glaring whiteness of all my most-reread authors; it might be righteous to pretend otherwise, but it is what it is: as John-son said, "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures." And for a heterosexual, I seem to have quite a taste for all-male subcultures (baseball, mountaineering), mostly male adventures (The Lord of the Rings, Moby-Dick, the Watergate saga), male solitaries (John-son, Philip Larkin, Father Brown), and male couples (Holmes and Watson, Jeeves and Bertie, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Mr. Pickwick and Sam, Frodo and his Sam). Then again, maybe having a taste for Hemingway says it all. I suppose I could go on to look at why I'm always rereading Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, or Tom Piazza's True Adventures With the King of Bluegrass, or Paul Fussell's Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, or certain stories by Cheever, Bruce Jay Friedman, Flannery O'Connor, James Thurber, and Ring Lardner. Not to mention Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, his eminently rereadable rereading of some of the all-time great rereads. The simple answer is that they give me joy. They fill me with the voices of people I know, thousands of them—many times the number in that old Dickens print—the real and the imagined, the living and the dead. Heaven may be like this eventually, but why wait around when it's right here, right now?

© 2009