The author, who was once a janitor, hunkered down with his books in a “freighted elevator”
Mike Barnes. (Photograph by Liam Maloney)
To see the shambles that the wealthy commonly make of the core arts of living is good for more than schadenfreude: it can make you grateful for the little but ample you’ve got, and acquaint you with your real, as opposed to implanted, tastes and desires.
I received this kind of welcome reality check courtesy of a recent visit to “Libraries of the Rich and Famous” on the Book Riot website. It was fun to ogle the galleries and spiral staircases, the bespoke shelving and lighting and floor coverings; the Kubla-Khanish opulence of William Randolph Hearst’s library (which really was pleasure-domed, featuring, down its incredible length, ornate painted scenes covering the panels of its arched segmented ceiling); the bizarre SMERSH–Kelmscott amalgam concocted by Jay Walker, the founder of Walker Digital and Priceline.com, with its traditional wood-and-leather lower half giving way abruptly to a blue-lit upper region in which dangles an original Sputnik 1 satellite, models of NASA’s X-29 jet and Saturn V rocket, hanging above a priceless miscellany ranging from originals of the 1535 Coverdale Bible, Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia (and, yes, a Kelmscott Chaucer) to the Enigma code machine, an Edison kinetoscope and phonograph, an IBM processor circa 1960, and a Sumerian clay cone used to record surplus grain; the sheer colossality of the library of Harlan Crow, Texan real estate magnate, which, with its columns the size of ancient oaks, looks like a part (a large part) of the Library of Congress moved inside a private residence; Sting’s prim and coldly austere marble and wrought-iron alcove atop a staircase, with three absurdly pompous busts of composers surmounting one bookcase, inevitable glowering Beethoven in the middle (the whole matching wonderfully the homeowner’s faux and uninviting music)—it is immense fun to pore over the details of these ostentatious assemblages, a delight unimpaired by even the slightest tinge of envy, since none of them is a place where I could actually read or even be tempted to read. With lavish ingenuity, they repel the activity of reading as I’ve known it.
(The note to the Biltmore House library supplies a sort of meta-gloss on the idea of futilizing grandeur. Perpetrated by one of the Vanderbilts, the largest privately-owned home in the United States—at 135,000 square feet and 250 rooms—seems like an almost mathematical solution to a bizarre problem: How may a structure be designed that while conforming to the accepted meaning of the word “residence” is for all practical purposes unlivable?)
The few more shambolic or cosy entries—the retreats of Julia Childs, Woody Allen, Keith Richards, and Professor Richard A. Macksey (its intricate omnidirectional clutter like an autopsy of erudition)—are exceptions that prove the rule: still far too perfectly staged settings for the reading experience for me to think of cracking a paperback in.
MORE ESSAYS FROM MIKE BARNES:
And so, post-website, the question comes naturally: where have I read most happily?
So many, many places. Reading has been the most portable of pleasures. As a child, under tented bedclothes with a flashlight. Later, in canvas then nylon tents, the flashlight constant. In crooks of pines, in close cedar groves. In small, cave-like circles of rocks with leafy, sky-shot ceilings. As an adult, in waiting rooms—almost any kind is good. On-the-way places: buses, trains, planes. Coffee shops, cafeterias or diner-type eateries (not upscale cafes or restaurants, where inhospitable auras come between me and the page). A favourite chair in the kitchen or living room, preferably by a window, in every apartment I have occupied. In bed, of course, the stack on the floor beside ranging from picture books and sheer fluff to the most abstruse and impenetrable science and philosophy—offerings for any degree of alertness or insomnia.
The common denominators on this far-from-exhaustive list are obvious to me. Private places, or private-in-public. Humble. Unexceptional.
Unsanctified.
Walker Percy, in novels like The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming, talks about discovering—necessarily by accident, though a yearning quest makes the accident possible—of places that are “dispensed.” Places where one may actually look at or listen to another person or thing, whereas before even the simplest communion was obscured, encumbered by personal and social conventions, dissolved behind a haze of expectations. He imagines an art gallery where the masterpieces are invisible behind a screen of “ravening particles,” until an earthquake wrecks the building and there, amid the rubble, one might blow the dust off a painting lying askew and, for the first time, actually see it.
Ezra Pound gets at the same thing differently:
I had over-prepared the event,
that much was ominous.
With middle-ageing care
I had laid out just the right books.
With reading, as with any romance, unless it is redeemed by extreme naïveté, over-preparation is deadly.
And so it came to me this morning, jogged by Book Riot and by a scene in the novel I’d just finished writing, that the paradigm of all my favourite reading places is a freight elevator stopped between floors.
It was 1980. I was working as a part-time janitor at the YMCA, steady on weekends and on-call during the week (though I was seldom called, and even more seldom answered). The bathrooms were the worst, and Saturday and Sunday mornings their nadir. Long-overflowed or simply ignored garbage cans. Liquor bottles, many smashed. Condoms, used. Urine and excrement, the latter often diarrheal, bewilderingly far from either urinal or toilet bowl. Some of my regular duties were so obviously impossible that they could be ignored without remorse, nor did anyone ever chide me for ignoring them. The cathedral-like windows in the main gymnasium, for instance, so grime-caked that staring up at them, into a nimbus of wan rays that forced their way through the crud’s minute cracks, the same lines always entered my head, from Carroll’s musing Walrus and Carpenter: “If seven maids with seven mops,/Swept it for half a year…?” No! Not seventy maids with seventy mops, plus scrapers and sponges and vats of Mr. Clean.
Wandering the vast, echoic, filthy place, I invented little games. Tying my rags into as close to a basketball shape as I could manage and taking shots from the free throw line and around the court. Curiously, I made more of them with my lopsided rag-ball than I ever had in gym class or as a bench-warmer in Midget basketball.
Like any loosely-supervised worker, I found places to hide.
At some point I discovered that the freight elevator could be stopped halfway between the ground floor and the basement, and that there was a lever that jammed it there, so that it was unsummonable by someone pushing the button from above or below. A 60-watt bulb glowed gamely overhead. That bulb I always carried a replacement for. And, of course, I always had my book, either in the back pocket of my baggy uniform pants, or, if the book was a little bigger, under the cleaning rags on my cart.
Céline. John Fante. Charles Bukowski. Knut Hamsun.
All the writers just-right for me then. And, now, the just-right place to read them in.
Just-right for reasons so clear to me now (not clear then probably, since they didn’t need to be) that I can set them down in a compact list:
My perfect reading room came back to me recently in an unexpected way. I’d thought about it from time to time over the years, always with a smile, but less and less with the attrition of distance. It was thirty-six years ago.
It came back to me by the transmigration of images that, for me, is one of the big joys of writing. The way the soul of another time—its people, its things, its places and situations, its tone-colour and feeling—can return in another context that is not overtly about them, set down by a scribe unaware that he has become one of those Star Trek screenwriters who make universes interpenetrate, bits of each poking into the other.
I had no notion of calling back my freight elevator when I wrote the scene in question in my novel The Adjustment League. I didn’t even realize it during multiple re-readings of the manuscript or during the editing or proofreading process. It just popped into my head this morning, during a withering heat wave they’re calling, for some reason, a “dome.”
Unsanctified. Unprepared. Dispensed.
Avoiding spoilers, in the scene the protagonist takes a special book into a special dark place and reads it by flashlight. Acutely desolate at that moment, he hopes, by this ritual, to reunite with a time and person he believes lost to him irretrievably.
I added the handful of lines only late in the writing. I didn’t ponder what I might be channelling in doing so. It just felt right. When I re-read it during the editing it made me think of reading in a tent or in bed as a kid, except the emotional tone of that, which was pure pleasurable absorption, didn’t match the dark high stakes of the novel’s passage.
When I recalled my freight elevator, the scene’s real origin clicked into place.
Morning after the blackest night. A tenuous, surprising dawn. Among its cool, pink scents, the acrid pong of a thief’s wild hope. This thief will conduct the raid of raids. Armed only with a cone of light, surrounded by utter dark, in a spirit of such mingled exaltation and despair it needs stolen privacy to flower, he will invade the past, he will journey outside time altogether, and reach, by means of daring and occult symbols, the single spot where the cherished lost was lost, and is now found, and found.