Posts by Robert Armitage

There was a time — in what has come to seem more and more a mythical past — when books were everywhere. Along the relatively short stretch of Fifth Avenue between the New York Public Library and Central Park were three magnificent bookstores: Doubleday, Brentano's, and the most architecturally stunning of them all, Scribner's. Around the corner on 47th Street was Gotham Book Mart ("Where wise men fish"). A few blocks west, on 57th Street, was the prodigiously well-stocked Coliseum Bookstore. All of these inhabited just one little chunk of midtown!

During my vacation from the library, between Christmas and New Year's Day, I learned a remarkable lesson. You can get along very well without NEWS. For a full week, I entered a blissfully news-free vacuum. No NPR; no relentless checking of Google News; no Sunday New York Times beyond Arts and Leisure and the Book Review. I didn't care if it was the twenty-first century or the fifteenth. Without that drumbeat of doom in my head all the time, I could focus on what was really important: family, friends, dining, museums, and music.

According to the Kinsey Report
Ev'ry average man you know

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. (The Catcher in the Rye)

Over the last few months, I have read all seven novels, many of the poems, and selected bits of juvenilia by the three Brontë sisters — as well as several biographies, odds and ends of literary criticism, and a fascinating volume about the Brontë legend, which over the years has sometimes overshadowed the facts of their lives.

I have spent a lifetime reading books and perhaps half a lifetime going to the opera. Each is a very real pleasure — neither can be done without — yet both offer different kinds of satisfaction. Words? Music? Which is more important? Fortunately, I am not in the position of having to choose. Books can sometimes lead to opera; opera can sometimes find its way back into books. Since the library specializes in both these worlds of artistic expression, it might be intriguing to look briefly at some of the places they intersect.

When a favorite author dies, we feel as if we have lost a good friend. When the author is the creator of a series whose characters we have lived with for many years, we feel as if we've lost a roomful of friends.

Novels don't need illustrations. An author should be able to conjure the appropriate word pictures without having to rely on the interpretations of some interfering third-party illustrator. Yet some books seem curiously mated to their illustrations. You have only to think of Dickens and Cruikshank, or Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel. To this short list I would add Charlotte and Emily Brontë and one of their latter-day illustrators, Fritz Eichenberg. As engrossing as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights might be — and they are about as engrossing as narratives can get — I have a hard time imagining them stripped of these dramatic wood 

[Today's guest blogger is brought to you courtesy of E. C. Comics Tales From the Crypt.]

Hello, kiddies!

Welcome to The New York Public Li-bury!

Heh-heh-heh!

Surprised to find me as your guest flogger? I suppose, if you looked hard enough, you'd find all sorts of things buried in the Library's hacks. "But can he write?" you ask. Well, I am good at de-composing!

The holiday season has by now been packed away on the top shelf of the closet until next year.

I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas... It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blasphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and anyone who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.

From: Dramatic Opinions and Essays: With an Apology, by Bernard Shaw

Shaw!

Scrooge!

The Grinch!

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.
                                 Hemingway, "In Another Country"

We embrace some authors and remain faithful to them for the rest of our lives; others are good for one mad fling but are then quickly forsaken — we move on and don’t look back.

"The hag Sedition was your mother, and Perversity begot you. Mischief was your midwife and Misrule your nurse, and Unreason brought you up at her feet — no other ancestry and rearing had you, you freakish homunculus, germinated outside of lawful procreation."  — Fellow playwright Henry Arthur Jones, on Bernard Shaw and his anti-war stance

“If I were a woman, I’d simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I got the vote... Women should have a revolution! They should shoot, kill, maim, destroy — until they are given the vote.”

Interview, George Bernard Shaw
The Tribune, March 12, 1906

"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."

— Jane Austen, Emma

A large percentage of my favorite authors (not to mention people) happen to be women. Whether this is a comment about the nature of imaginative writing or about my own nature I have yet to work out. Of course it is no surprise that men can be just as sensitive as women and that women can be just as bloodthirsty as men, but how exactly does this translate to the fictional universe? Are there certain gender-based qualities which color the writing of one sex as opposed to another? If you didn’t know in advance, would you be able to guess 

They say we no longer read for pleasure. They say we’re too busy with our tweets and texts, our iPads and iPhones and iPods, and our thousands of virtual Facebook friends even to consider picking up a book. They say that teachers are afraid to assign their students complete novels for fear they will never be read in entirety. They also say we are each and every day afflicted with such an enormous amount of undigested electronic information that we stand no chance of sorting out even the smallest part of it.

They say we have the attention span of newts.

Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or malexperienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards or weaklings; and our honour  false in all its points.  I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons...
                  
          Preface to Major Barbara

In my recent reading of Michael Holroyd’s biography, Bernard Shaw, I came upon a curious 

I get this crazy feeling. Every once in a while I get it. I get the feeling that this is the last time in history when the offbeats like me will have a chance to live free in the nooks and crannies of the huge and rigid structure of an increasingly codified society. Fifty years from now I would be hunted down in the street. They would drill little holes in my skull and make me sensible and reliable and adjusted.   [The Quick Red Fox, 1964]

(Click on winter scenes to enlarge)

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
—Christina Rossetti

As I write this, the temperature is about 60 degrees and winter would seem to be over—although I don’t want to jinx anything by being premature.

The best fiction provides its own social and cultural context.  Plots unfold and characters engage one another against a background more alive than would be possible even in the most detailed nonfiction study of a particular era.  This is the level akin to time travel, where we can step into the sights, sounds, moods, and attitudes of the past and measure that past against our own fleeting present moments.  Fact is one thing, experience another.