Excerpt:
I look back on my time as a used-bookstore clerk with mixed emotions. The pay (as has always been the case with bookstore jobs), was far from sufficient, and the hours long—yet the afternoons and evenings I spent in that bookstore were one long panoply of offbeat characters with whom I never tired of talking: hoarse-throated street musicians, poor independent scholars and morose writers of every stripe, a surprising number of highly literate janitors and other bookish workmen—even an ex-Hell’s Angel turned bibliophile—though it is the poets who most clearly stand out in my memory.
John Macoubrie
One of the most memorable was a small, stooped poet
named John Macoubrie who looked to be well into his fifties, though such were
the daily hardships of his life that he may well have been younger than he appeared.
He was decidedly of the genteel, high-culture school of Wilbur and Hecht, and
his knowledge of prosody was so much more extensive than my own that I decided
never to mention to him that I was a poet at all. He was known to all the
older established poets in Minneapolis and was well-respected. He would
come into the bookstore most nights after he got off his shift as a
dishwasher. He rode an old-fashioned ‘50s-era bicycle, even in winter, wearing
a thread-bare tweed jacket, coughing into his sleeve and perpetually hunched
against the cold. Word was that he had been married once or possibly twice,
suggesting a prior state of stability—but
was now in reduced circumstances, maintaining a bare subsistence in a tiny
rented room. On every visit to the bookstore he would purchase a book, but
never more than one, and never for more than a quarter or fifty
cents. This restricted him mostly to used copies of the old paperback
Laurel series of pocketbook poets. Frequently he would conclude his purchase
with some lines from that particular poet which he had by heart. On one
occasion, as he paid a quarter for the Laurel Edition of Longfellow, I
commented that it was heartening to see that there were still one or two
readers of Longfellow left in the world. He replied that Longfellow was
unjustly under-rated and, to prove his point, recited on the spot, from memory,
several stanzas from “The Jewish Cemetery.” The extent of poetry he could recite at will
in several languages—from Goethe to Valéry to Lowell—was something wonderful and,
in Dinkytown in those days, it was a gift that was widely admired.
James Naiden
James was brusque, did not suffer fools at all and was
merciless in dealing with writers’ inflated and easily-bruised egos, for which
he had no patience. His reviews, though generous at times, were unsparing and
in conversation, to your face, he could be downright insulting. I am sure he
was heartily disliked in many quarters. Of his past I could glean only
that he had been a smoke-jumper for a time in the Canadian Rockies, as well as
an actor, and had worked as a speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy. James was
the first true man-of-letters I had ever known, by which I mean one who supports
himself solely by his pen, by writing and editing, without resorting either to
teaching or hackwork. He lived frugally, drove a beat-up old station
wagon, and always appeared in the same worn coat.
As he had been a part of the Minneapolis
literary scene for many years, James had a large store of anecdotes about
Minnesota writers, minor and major, living and dead. He was skeptical of
celebrity and, with an incisive phrase or two, could cut an inflated reputation
down to size. I recall acerbic comments about Robert Bly on one or two
occasions, though Bly was a poet he had published.
I remember very well a story he told about
John Berryman. Once, many years before, Berryman had stopped by Naiden’s
apartment when James happened to be in the shower. As the door was
unlocked, Berryman let himself in, which he had done on many previous
occasions. As he relaxed on the couch, thumbing through a book, the front
door flew open and in stomped the landlord, huffing and shouting for Naiden and
demanding two months’ back rent. Berryman rose from the couch and blustered
back,
What does he owe?
— A hundred bucks!
Berryman pulled out two fifty-dollar bills, shoved the landlord out into the hallway and threw the bills after him. It all took place while James was in the shower. By the time he emerged the landlord was gone and the rent paid up. James vowed he would pay Berryman back as soon as he was able, but Berryman refused to accept his money.
Naiden could be a tough character. Once he returned to his parked car to find a tow-truck driver with his arm though a partially rolled-down window. The driver was from a local, universally-hated towing company with predatory methods, and he had failed to notice James’ German Shepherd in the back seat, which now had his jaws locked on the poor man’s forearm. James responded as though the driver were a thief breaking into his car, and refused to order the dog to release his grip until the police arrived, though the man was bleeding and clearly in pain. When the police finally showed up, James called off his dog. The driver threatened to sue, but James never heard from him or his company again. The police took no action.
Another side of James’s character is revealed by the following story. During one especially bitter winter, he chanced to form a friendship with a home-less Vietnam vet, a Lakota named Henry Walking Bear. James was concerned about his sleeping in the open on nights when the thermometer fell well below zero, and repeatedly tried to arrange for shelter for him. When such efforts failed, as they always did, James would invite Henry up to his apartment for a game of chess and a sandwich, just to get him out of the cold for a spell. One afternoon I found James in the café drinking coffee. As I sat at his table, he told me that Henry Walking Bear had been found frozen to death in an alley with a kitten, still alive, curled beneath his coat. In his pocket was a piece of paper with James’ name and address. James learned of Walking Bear’s death when the police contacted him and asked him to come down to the morgue to identify the body of a homeless Indian found frozen in an alley with a kitten under his coat.
The itinerant playwright
Another poet who came regularly into the bookstore (and
whose name I have long forgotten) was in his late twenties or early
thirties, I would guess. He was in most ways the complete opposite of
Macoubrie or White, being full of nervous, aggressive energy, brash, and
outspoken to the point of rudeness. When I was in a certain mood I found
him intolerable, but usually he was worth enduring, simply for his colorful,
ranting monologues. Like Macoubrie, he rode a bicycle, but it was an
expensive racing machine. He worked as a janitor by night and read and
wrote for most of each day. I have no idea if he had any formal
education. All he wrote were blank-verse plays, in a dense but vigorous
Elizabethan style, and what he showed to me seemed remarkably strong. He claimed to write every day, a hundred lines
or more, but what I saw of his work was always highly finished. He would
hang around the bookstore at odd hours and, whenever a literary-minded patron entered
the premises, especially if he looked as though he might be an academic, my
friend would thrust some pages under his nose and demand his opinion. He
was never quite so obnoxious that I had to shoo him out the door, and even at
first glance his writing was impressive, so I just sat back at such times and
watched the encounter with interest and amusement. It was surprising how
many of his professorial victims actually took five or ten minutes to read a
half-page or so, rather than sending him to the devil. His nervy,
off-the-cuff spiels disarmed and bemused them, and sparked their curiosity.
As he was my own age,
more or less, and we were both in similar economic straits with no professional
prospects, I showed him some of my sonnets. He was only mildly impressed,
and criticized my lack of prosodic rigor, but he approved my adherence to
antiquated forms and since, like me, he had received nothing from editors and
other poets over the years but admonitions to write in free verse, he accepted
me as a fellow-sufferer. He was a vagabond, he told me, and was ‘just travelling
through.’ I don’t remember where he had come from prior to stopping for
several months in Minneapolis, but the time came when he no longer dropped by
and I never heard from him again. Somewhere in the cavernous recesses of my old
house, among hundreds of boxes, I have a typed copy of one of his plays, but I
haven’t seen it in years.
Bert
And
then there was Bert, a great shambling inscrutable bear of a man, loaded down
with books, papers and God-knows-what-all overflowing from the oversized
satchel that was a permanent part of his attire. Yet for all his bear-like
attributes, Bert Brock was a master of invisibility. He could somehow slip
by you on the street or in a crowded hall as inconspicuously as a
cat. Settled into his chair behind the counter in the corner of the
bookstore, he was as quietly magisterial as one of those cloud-hidden mountains
on a Chinese scroll, existing always at an indeterminate distance, shrouded in
silence and mist to the point of disappearance. I could never decide what
Bert thought about anything. He was never vague or evasive—not in
the least—but invariably what he said was never what I was
anticipating. Now and then I would attempt to comprehend his taste in
literature. I would ask him about Dickens, for instance, and he would
bring up the long description of London fog at the opening of Bleak
House. He liked that, liked it very much indeed—but that was
the end of Dickens. Mention Housman and he would immediately quote ...the
cherry now / is hung with bloom along the bough. He liked that very
much as well, but the rest of Housman was of marginal interest. I decided
(without any real evidence), that Bert didn't read books like the rest of
us, but consulted them like oracles, landing on obscure random passages by
a mysterious process known only to himself. I came to believe that, for
Bert, a turned page was like an overturned tarot card, a glimpse into the
workings of the cosmos. But I had no idea, really.
Late hours, peculiar patrons
As
in any used bookstore, the later the hour the more peculiar the patrons, and
the Book House was open later than any bookstore in Minneapolis. One of the
most peculiar was one Emmett Smith, a rather dashing gentleman in sweptback
hair and sunglasses with the air of a 1920s film star who, incongruously, would
drive up in his early-‘50s pickup from somewhere miles to the south where he
raised goats on a small farm. I never inquired about his
education, but he spoke in elaborate, perfectly-formed sentences worthy of
Dickens or Trollope, though his figures of speech were closer to Donne in their
reliance on startling juxtapositions. He would reel out these extended
syntactical showpieces extemporaneously in a kind of tumbling drunken spiel: long
oratorial periods declaimed in a loud carnival voice with irreproachable
grammar, the entire effect rendered all the more surreal by his
subject-matter, which was primarily goat husbandry, the Bedouin and T.E. Lawrence,
interspersed with Persian proverbs in melodious Arabic—for he had sometime
earlier in his life spent years in the Middle East with the Peace Corps
and the experience had crazed him in some deep essential way.
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