With only a few notable exceptions, I haven’t been very lucky with theatrical productions of Shakespeare. Of course, I’ve seen the Olivier and Branagh movies and some fine BBC productions, but film isn’t really theatre. In the theatre, especially here in New York, bad Shakespeare generally outweighs good Shakespeare. The problem with these productions, I find, usually stems from a distrust of Shakespeare’s language, either of the audience’s ability to understand it, or of the actors to speak it. I’ve seen the tragedy, Timon of Athens, played with irrelevant slapstick stage business fit for the Marx Brothers. I’ve seen a production of The Merchant of Venice, which contains subtle hints of homosexuality, embellish that subtext by dressing its characters in day-glo robes and platform shoes, like bit players in The Rocky Horror Show, and having them mince about in degradingly stereotypical fashion. I once even saw a Royal Shakespeare Company version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Titania, while speaking some of the most sensual love poetry ever, was lying on her back using her bare foot to massage Bottom intimately, driving him to eye-rolling ecstacy, as if the language weren’t already making enough of an erotic point. (Unfortunately, I did not see Ian McKellen or Patrick Stewart in their recent appearances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which I heard were wonderful; before I could muster myself to making the trip to Brooklyn, all tickets had disappeared.)

"I have wrought my simple plan / If I give one hour of joy / To the boy who’s half a man / Or the man who’s half a boy." (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, introducing The Lost World)

One of the most unnerving things about the Internet, I find, is the way it reveals the commonality of our human experience. No matter how unique I imagine myself, the online world usually demonstrates that someone else has been there, seen it, and done it all—if not before me, at least at roughly the same time. Back in July I wrote about an obscure young-adult novel, Danger: Dinosaurs! which had made a big impression on me during my formative years. I thought I was the only person alive who knew such a book even existed. To my surprise, two readers wrote back immediately, recalling a similar fascination with the very same book! Carl Eddy even went on to list as his childhood favorites many of the touchstones of my own youth: the movies King Kong and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the paintings of Charles R. Knight, and Turok, Son of Stone. My God, when was the last time I heard anyone mention Turok? What wouldn’t I give to have on hand again that beloved series of comic books from the mid-fifties about two Native Americans, Turok and Andar, who became trapped in a lost valley of prehistoric animals (which they called “honkers”) and spent episode after episode trying to find their way out? I could also go on about Gorgo, The Giant Behemoth, The Valley of Gwangi and the other dinosaur-related fantasies which colored my younger days. . .at least until I discovered that perfect television show, The Avengers, with John Steed and Emma Peel--especially Emma Peel, who gave this teenage boy something even more compelling to focus on than dinosaurs.

One day last year, as I was walking home from work, so wrapped up in my own furiously careening thoughts that I wasn’t paying much attention to anything but the general direction my feet were taking me, I found myself momentarily halted in the middle of a crowd alongside Gramercy Park. As I looked around, it dawned on me that the men in the crowd were all wearing fedoras, like 1950s Madison Avenue executives, most of the women wore long pleated skirts to the knee and some had gloves on, and at the same time I realized that all the cars parked on the street were vintage models I remembered from my childhood. This prompted an eerie moment of disorientation before I realized that I had stepped into the middle of a movie shoot, in this case Revolutionary Road, based on the novel by Richard Yates. I clearly remembered the story of Frank and April Wheeler, whose lives in 1955 suburban Connecticut become inexorably and tragically unglued, but was strangely distressed to learn that a book by an author who was always sort of a secret treasure of mine was being given the big-time Hollywood treatment. Soon, I imagined, I’d be spotting people on the subway holding movie tie-in paperbacks with photos of Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the cover. Yes, great books are meant to be shared--but the act of reading them is inherently a private one, the emotions they engender are deeply personal, and I confess to a smug satisfaction in keeping certain books to myself.

It isn’t even that Yates is so much of a secret any longer. At the time of his death in 1992 he was out of print, virtually forgotten, his name and books known only to a select and cultish group of readers and a few admiring fellow writers. Much of this neglect was due to the fact that these novels and stories are not comfortable reading. Yates knows who you are: your weaknesses and cruelties, the humiliations you receive and inflict, even the lies you tell yourself in order to get through your day. His fiction is fashioned without a hint of contrivance or fabrication, wherever absolute truthfulness will lead, no matter how painful.

From the start, my goal in this blog was simply to emphasize what I regard as highlights of the library’s collection, specifically in the realm of literature . . . but I’ve begun to wonder if there isn’t another unifying element, or, if you will, a hidden agenda. Whatever else I’m writing about, I always seem to end up trying to convey my profound love of books and reading. This has long been one of my defining characteristics, long before there was a blog (or even an internet). Nabokov, in Lectures on Literature, writes: “Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.” Reading for me has always involved that aesthetic tingle; it has become as essential as eating or breathing. It is, of course, the subterranean stream which led me to become a librarian in the first place instead of, say, a hedge-fund manager. It is probably also the genetic anomaly shared by most of us who work in libraries; if it had been detected at an early age, maybe we could have predicted where we all would end up.

You should see me on Cape Cod. I’ve been visiting every summer for about twenty years now and my routine is well-established. No sooner do we drive across the Bourne Bridge than the worry lines disappear and I shed ten years, almost as if the laws of time and gravity had been erased. By this point in the trip I’ve left my job so far behind it’s not so much in another state as on another planet. This is followed by a week or two of standing on the National Seashore staring out at the sweep and majesty of the Atlantic; floating like a big hairless seal in the bath-warm bay; and meandering through red maple swamps, around salt ponds, and across the tidal flats, where every quahog or razor clam shell must be picked up and examined. The chance sighting of a great blue heron, a cormorant, or even a piping plover is enough to set me rhapsodizing about Nature’s grand design. On Cape Cod, my only real concerns are which restaurant to go to for dinner and where my next ice cream is coming from.

Oh, and I also read.

I’m a more-or-less rational person. Anything with even a whiff of mysticism strikes me as a great yawn. And I believe dead is dead. Case closed. La commedia è finita.

Curiously, I’m also a fan of ghost stories. Contradictory? Maybe it’s that I’ve been working at New York Public Library for so long, I’ve come to feel like a ghost myself, haunting its marble corridors.

Not to split genre hairs, but I’m not so enamored of horror stories--or movies, for that matter--particularly not modern ones, whose main purpose seems to be to dispatch as many people (frequently teenage girls) as gruesomely as possible. If I wanted to be horrified, I’d read the newspaper. I much prefer the quiet suggestiveness of the classic ghost story, whether it takes a fusty antiquarian approach or a cool modern one--as long as it’s based on the notion that the most frightening possibility is what might be lurking in the shadows. The minute we find out that the shadows contain some drooling, rat-faced thing with tentacles is when the giggles start.
 
 
 
 

The weekend before last, I saw the Roundabout Theater production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, an adaptation by Christopher Hampton of the 1782 novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. The production was fascinating, the acting generally superior, and I’ve been smitten with Laura Linney since Tales of the City. . .but I’d forgotten since I first encountered it what a nasty story this is. Not that anything involving two bored French aristocrats who concoct sexual games in order to degrade and humiliate their victims could be anything but nasty. Still, at least in fiction, French aristocrats seem to make the best libertines. (Americans can sometimes be libertines, but they generally lack the requisite je ne sais quois. I’ve heard rumors that there are even libertine librarians, but I somehow doubt it.)

I was one of those kids who visited his neighborhood library in Brooklyn several times a week and always came away with an armload of books. It was a profound rite of passage when I graduated from a children’s card to an adult card and was allowed into the sanctum which contained Lady Chatterley’s Lover and other such mysterious things; until then, however, there was more than enough to beguile me in the children’s room. Since there was always plenty of time for everything back then, any book I really liked I borrowed and read repeatedly. One book in particular which seized me and set up subterranean forces in my personality that I haven’t shaken to this day was a young adult science-fiction novel called Danger: Dinosaurs! by Richard Marsten, about a group of time travelers stranded in the Jurassic era. Some children might have been traumatized by Bambi’s mother in the forest fire, but I had my first adult lesson in the fragility of life when one of the main characters of Danger: Dinosaurs! was trampled to death by a stampeding herd of brontosaurs. Interestingly enough, for someone who has trouble remembering what movie he saw last weekend, I can still visualize the exact corner of the children’s reading room and even the middle shelf where this book could be located.

Do you have similar books which helped (for better or worse) to define you?

I have mixed feelings about Charles Dickens. This is probably an embarrassing admission from someone who’s preparing a public presentation on the works of Dickens for the fall and winter, but the fact remains. I’ve read most of the major novels, some more than once, and while I always start them with lots of gusto and enthusiasm, I’m never sorry to see them end. Many years ago, in an over-flowing of Dickensian high spirits, I bought a set of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens from Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue (I know I date myself). It was a snowy afternoon and, since the carton was too heavy to carry back to the Upper West Side, my wife and I got a cab and hurried home to unpack our treasure. Handling the books and trying to arrange them on the shelf (alphabetically? chronologically? according to the colors of the dust jackets?) was exciting—a case of book-lust gratified--but the actual reading proved to be anti-climactic. When it comes to novels, what accounts for this transition from appreciation to dutifulness? I never feel that way about Jane Austen.

So what prompted me, you might ask, to choose Dickens as a subject?

Love might be a many-splendored thing. Sex and the City is another. Where the two intersect is the interesting moment in the new film where one of the women characters ends up in bed with one of the men (no names: no spoilers) and begins to read from a book of collected love letters. In a movie full of products like Prada, Louis Vuitton, Skyy vodka, and Mercedes Benz, it is this book that the musty old librarian’s attention focuses on. (I’m the guy sitting across from you on the bus who just has to know what book you’re reading.)