by Adrian D’Ambra
We were staying in New York for six nights. It was our first visit and we had exhausted ourselves on the art and the essentials such as Liberty and Ellis islands and the Brooklyn Bridge. On the morning of our final full day – a Saturday – we made our way from our mid-town hotel on West 31st Street to the Strand Book Store near Union Square. I grew up with the notions that bookshops were special places and that literature and the arts in general were the tools we used to make ourselves worthy of the Socratic proposition that the unexamined life is not worth living. Well, bookshops remain essential but they are also under siege from the online, digital onslaught. Especially the independents. When you walk into the welcoming shelter of a bookroom like The Twig in the Pearl district of San Antonio, Texas, or Fountain Bookstore on the Shockoe Slip in Richmond, Virginia, not only are you walking onto hallowed ground, you are entering a place of bravery, commitment and resistance. Their titles are always going to be more expensive than the identical editions online, their stock can never be as vast as the digital warehouses from which our online purchases are dispensed. These shops are meant to be shut, their owners bankrupt, either serving or receiving soup in the food lines of the post-industrial capitalist economy. But some of these people are hanging on. And we know why. Because sometimes you want to touch and feel both the actuality and the idea of the thing – the book, the author’s thoughts and deeds and words – simultaneously. To pick a book from amongst its companions on a shelf, to open it and wonder, to judge it by its cover and a glancing acquaintance with its contents; these remain essential elements in a reader’s experience of the world of books. These proprietors are survivors feeding the needs of readers and writers, the human need for the humanities in an increasingly dehumanised and technocratic world. And nowhere is this need captured more succinctly than in the Strand Book Store mantra which is repeated on posters, tee-shirts, badges and bags throughout the store: ‘If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!’ A necessary resistance, indeed, against hubris and narcissism, a defence against shallowness and disappointment.
It was our last morning in New York and Ellen wanted to buy us books. I was overwhelmed by the Strand’s four floors and concerned about the weight of our bags for the return flight to Melbourne. The shipping fees were also high, so I resolved to immerse myself in this place, to thoroughly enjoy the sensory overload of being surrounded by books for sale in a business devoted to the business of thinking and writing, publishing and reading, without choosing anything. Here were the writings of Thomas Jefferson whose Monticello we had recently visited in Charlottesville, Virginia, and whose memorial we had marvelled at in Washington DC. Here were James Baldwin’s novels and all the thus-far published volumes of Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Here were magisterial collections of the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and copies of virtually every title and author we have ever read or taught. And for the Australian browser, signed first editions by Peter Carey and David Malouf.
After nearly an hour, Ellen was disappointed that I had chosen nothing. I had been looking after almost all of our transactions during our five-week sojourn through these incredibly diverse United States and this was her opportunity to buy a gift for me. Instinctively, I sought out the literary non-fiction section in the basement, knowing exactly what I was looking for: a copy of Patti Smith’s M Train, a book I had looked at but not bought in Melbourne but which I knew would be the perfect companion to read while leaving New York, not knowing if, when or ever we will return.
M Train is all about memory, the intermingling of pleasure and pain occasioned by the experience of memory, regardless of whether or not the remembered experience was originally pleasurable or painful. And, from the point of view of someone in her mid-sixties M Train is also, inevitably, about loss. It is also extraordinarily honest. I don’t and can’t say this because I was there alongside her and can, therefore, measure the truthfulness of her account. I say it because – without ever appealing for the sympathy of her reader – you can feel her maladroitness in the world, the missteps that we all make for ourselves whether as children or as adults, making occasionally, apparently patently irrational adult decisions. Indeed, the most important decisions we make in the single short lifetime we have at our disposal are based far more on instinct and emotion, experience and desire, than they are on reason.
But the quality that stands out for me while reading Patti Smith’s M Train is loyalty and a kind of intellectual resilience. Smith personifies the constancy of the constant reader. Books – literary texts mostly – and their authors are constant points of reference in her experiences, dreams and memories. Like her, I see these books – literary fiction – as portals, ways into other worlds and other minds but, also, ways into oneself, into the great reservoir of one’s own interiority. Like her, I often feel a sense of dissatisfaction with myself as a reader because of my inexplicable failure to remember the surface details – plot especially – of so many of the literary texts I have read, no matter how deeply they have moved me. Why do so few readers admit to this? I think it actually reveals something very significant about the experience of literary fiction: that, through it, both the writer and the reader seek to go beyond storytelling and storyline, that these are merely the vehicles that take us somewhere else, somewhere beyond the reach of the social contract, the moral consensus, the political and economic status quo.
Despite these frustrations of an otherwise fine reader, though, I come back to Smith’s loyalty as a reader which has, I think, both moved and instructed me. In my youth and early adulthood, I loved many of the same books and authors that Smith loved at the same period of her life: Genet’s The Thief’s Journal and The Miracle of the Rose, Albert Camus, Wuthering Heights, Yukio Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Dawn tetralogy and Arthur Rimbaud for example. We have behaved similarly as readers. Smith, for example, took the opportunity of a trip to Tokyo to visit Mishima’s grave. I made sure that when I was in Egypt I went to the Cecil Hotel in Alexandria because of its associations with Lawrence Durrell and Justine. But, what Smith has done and what, I fear, I have not, is that she has kept her relationships with these texts open, she has kept the texts and the relationships alive for herself. Both of us own copies of what we have read and can name to a fault the ones we have lost, but whereas I tend to shelve, she clearly re-reads, dips in, returns to and annotates favourite passages, so as to keep these texts alive in her consciousness. Patti Smith has never abandoned her Romantic predisposition. Instead, she has allowed it to shape her life, demonstrating a courageous loyalty. For Smith, Honda’s journey through the reincarnations of his dead friend is living history, whereas for me it is dead history. Smith has kept the flames of her passion for literature not only lit but well-tended and for this we, her readers, must be thankful.
english literature teacher 