The Way the World Works: Essays (10 page)

Shea decided to make the attempt and to record his
progress in this book. Each letter gets its own chapter. In Chapter A the volumes arrive, wrapped in the “regal and chitinous gloss” of their dust jackets. Shea sits near the window, his feet up on an ottoman, and begins to read. Difficulties ensue. He gets pulsing headaches and sees gray patches on the edges of his vision. His back bothers him. His neighbors make salt cod, and the odor is distracting. He’s tempted to look things up in his other dictionaries, comparing definitions, which slows his progress.

So he ventures out into the city, reading on park benches and in public libraries. No place is right. Finally he settles on a location in the basement of the Hunter College library, among books in French that don’t tempt him away from the task at hand. He drinks many thermosfuls of coffee. He gets eyeglasses and finds, much to his surprise, that they help him see better. His headaches continue.

And the lovely-ugly words, words that Shea didn’t know existed, leap up to his hand.
Acnestis
—the part of an animal’s back that the animal can’t reach to scratch. And
bespawl
—to splatter with saliva. In Chapter D, Shea encounters
deipnophobia
, the fear of dinner parties; Chapter K brings
kankedort
, an awkward situation.

Months in, Shea arrives—back aching, crabby, page-blind—at Chapter N. “Some days I feel as if I do not actually speak the English language,” he writes, his verbal cortex overflowing. “It is,” he observes, “like trying to remember all the trees one sees through the window of a train.” Once he stares for a while, amazed, at the word
glove
. “I find myself wondering why I’ve never seen this odd term that describes such a common article of clothing.”

By Chapter O there is evidence of further disintegration. Is he turning into, he wonders, one of the “Library People”—the
bag-toters and mutterers who spend all their time there? “Sometimes I get angry at the dictionary and let loose with a muffled yell.” At night he hears a deep, disembodied voice slowly intoning definitions.

But then, thank goodness, he breaks through into sunlight. In Chapter P he finds a rich harvest of words, including one,
petrichor
, that refers to the loamy smell that rises from the dry ground after a rain, and a nicely dense indivisible word,
prend
, that signifies a mended crack. He notes these down in his big ledger book. He attends a lexicographical congress in Chicago, where he is misunderstood by his colleagues, and returns to the Hunter library basement with renewed vigor. He tells his tolerant girlfriend about a rare P word and then wonders aloud if he is boring her. “The point at which I became bored has long since passed,” Alix replies.

Shea arrives at another bad patch partway through Chapter U, with the “un-” section—more than four hundred pages of words of self-evident meaning. “I am near catatonic,” he writes, “bored out of my mind.” But he doesn’t skip; he is lashed to the tiller, unthimbled and unthrashed.

Théophile Gautier read the dictionary to enrich and exoticize his poetry. Walter Pater read the dictionary to keep his prose pure and marmoreal—to learn what words to avoid. Shea has no interest in purity or poetry. His style is simple. He just wants to identify and savor, for their own sweet sakes, malocclusive Greek and Latin hybrids that are difficult to figure out how to pronounce. He is fond of polysyllabic near-homonyms—words like
incompetible
(outside the range of competency) and
repertitious
(found accidentally), which are quickly swallowed up in the sonic gravitation of familiar words. And a number of Shea’s finds
deserve prompt resurrection:
vicambulist
, for instance—a person who wanders city streets.

The effect of this book on me was to make me like Ammon Shea and, briefly, to hate English. What a choking, God-awful mash it is! Surely French is better. Then I recovered and saw its greatness afresh. The
OED
, Shea notes, is “a catalog of the foibles of the human condition.” Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own.

(2008)

Read at the Kennedy Library’s “Tribute to John Updike”

I
heard a little chirp come from my computer—it was like the beep of a hospital heart monitor except that there was only one of them. It was software telling me that an e-mail had arrived. And then, a second later, there appeared, fading in, a little ghostly rectangle down on the right-hand corner, which named the sender of the e-mail and gave its subject line. It was from a man I didn’t know very well but who sent me many e-mails, about his own dislikes and his health troubles and his political opinions. But the subject line, which appeared and then faded, caught my eye. It said something incomprehensible, that wasn’t in English but was in some horrible language of euphemism. It said: “Condolences on Updike’s Passing.” I thought, Passing? What does that mean? Are we talking about death, about the death of John Updike? He’s not dead, he’s very much in the middle
of things. He’s just had a book out, as always—as would always be true. But I checked and it said he’d been sick and apparently he had very politely, and without making any sort of public scene, without any forewarning to people outside his closest circle, died.

Sitting there at the desk I did what you do when you’ve lost your glasses or your wallet or some crucially important document that you need—a note to the principal—I felt around on the desktop of my mind for what I had of John Updike, what I could substitute for the livingness of the man. And I didn’t have anything that would serve, because the tremendous thing about him was that he was alive and writing and revising and reviewing some big wrongheaded biography and releasing another small piece of his own remembered past, perhaps slightly disguised and fictionalized—he was in the midst of being a writing person, as well of course as being a human being who has a wife and a former wife and children and editors and fans. That’s what I wanted from him, and that’s what I didn’t have: evidence of his ongoingness.

The computer started chirping again and there were editors who wanted me to write something about him immediately, a remembrance, an obituary, because a long time ago I published a book that was about him, sort of, and therefore I guess I was thought of as an expert on Updike, when I wasn’t, I was just a mourner like anyone else. So I said, No, I’m sorry, I’m just sad. That’s all I have to offer, just my own sadness.

What I think of now, though, is a time more than twenty years ago, when I saw him in the Boston Public Garden. It was a cold, overcast late afternoon, and there was a man walking toward me on the path. I knew who it was. It was the famous John Updike. We were over past the statue of
George Washington, in a part of the garden that has fewer trees, that’s always colder and windier than other parts—and I had to figure out what to do. He was wearing a tweedish jacket buttoned up and a scarf and a hat and he obviously had somewhere to go, as I didn’t, really. If I stopped and I said “Mr. Updike?” he would of course politely stop and we would have a brief conversation. I would maybe say that I liked his writing and that he’d signed one of his books for me once and that I’d sent him a fan letter once that I hadn’t put a return address on because I didn’t want to compel him to answer it and that in the letter I’d told him that my girlfriend, who had since become my fiancée, had dug out of a wicker basket of
New Yorker
s a story of his and given it to me to read and I’d read two-thirds of it and had decided, walking under the awning of a tuxedo shop in a moment of passing shade, that I wanted very much to write him and tell him about how happy it made me to
know
that he was out there working. But I couldn’t stop him on his path and tell him all that. He was on his way somewhere. So I decided instead that I would just nod. I would pack in everything I knew about him in my nod, all the memories I had of reading about packed dirt and thimbles and psoriasis and stuttering and Shillington, Pennsylvania, and the
Harvard Lampoon
and the drawing class at Oxford, and his little office upstairs in Ipswich—and the letters that he and Katharine White had exchanged when he was writing his early stories for
The New Yorker
that I’d seen behind glass in a display case at Bryn Mawr College—all that knowledge of him I would cram into one smiling, knowing nod. And that’s what I did. And he nodded back, a little uncertainly, I think. He wasn’t sure: Maybe he knew me?

And then later, in a letter, he said, Didn’t we meet once on Arlington Street? He remembered my nod.

What a memory on that man.

His very best book, I think, is his memoir, called
Self-Consciousness
. He was best when he was truest. And the most amazing thing about his truthfulness is its level of finish. Of polish. Because we all have thoughts. They’re slumped on the couch and they are not at their very best, in fact they aren’t completely shaven and they aren’t all that clean, necessarily. They’re living in the halfway house of what you have to say. What Updike does is he sends them an invitation—it’s tasteful, understated, but beautifully engraved. He says to his thoughts: the favor of your reply is requested—please accompany John Updike to the official writing of his next piece on whatever it is—on the car radio, on the monuments of the United States, on William Dean Howells, who, he said, “served his time too well”—please attend this essay. And then at the bottom it says, very quietly: black tie. Formal wear. That’s what you want from an essay, is you want these thoughts to have done their very best to at least rent their outfits and present themselves to the world in their best guises.

Don’t come as you are, Updike said, come in black tie, put on your best punctuational studs—and they, his ideas, obliged him, repeatedly. They said, Okay, RSVP, we will be there.

We had, I guess you could say, a correspondence over the years. He wrote Dear Nick and I wrote Dear John. I love his reserve. He didn’t really want to have a cup of coffee with me, in fact I think he’d much rather have written me a letter than have a cup of coffee—and who can blame him? But there was one thing I wanted to write him in a letter for years, and never did. One time I read one of his stories aloud to my daughter. She was then about thirteen. I read her a
story called “The City.” It’s about a man who is on a business trip—and he has a spot of indigestion that then turns out to be excruciatingly painful—and he goes to the hospital and it’s his appendix and the whole story is just the very simple but well-described account of his hospital stay in a city that he never ends up seeing. And as I was reading it to my daughter, I came to the moment in the story that I remembered from when I first read it. The man is lying in his hospital room in the middle of the night and he hears people moaning on either side of him and then there’s a sound of “tidy retching,” and then comes the sentence: “Carson was comforted by these evidences that at least he had penetrated into a circle of acknowledged ruin.” The word
ruin
there was so amazingly good and well placed—“acknowledged ruin.” And maybe it was that I gave it a special inflection as I read it aloud, but I don’t think so. My daughter said, “Oh,
that’s
good.” Right at that moment. She liked and she was excited by the very same phrase in the story that I’d been excited by. It seemed so reassuring to know that there is sometimes an absolute moment in a story that many people will independently discover and remember, even across generations, and that this may have been one of those moments. I wished I had told him that in a letter. And now I’ll never get to tell him that. So I tell it to you. With sorrow. Thank you.

(2009)

D
avid Remnick is fifty-two. He’s got all of his hair, which is black, and he’s got an office with quiet brown carpeting and a desk made of a slab of grainy black wood and a fat-rimmed yellow ceramic cup that holds his pens and his pair of scissors. He’s smart and quick to laugh, and if you sit in one of the square soft chairs in his office, he remembers things about your life that you barely remember. He likes baseball and
The Wire
and A. J. Liebling and spaghetti with squid ink sauce. You might feel jealous of him except that he works too hard and nobody else would want that kind of constant hellish weekly pressure. His wife, Esther Fein, is a writer, and he’s got three kids. He’s the fifth editor of
The New Yorker,
which may be the best magazine ever published.

I’ve met Remnick a few times, briefly. Once was at a party where he was chatting about boxing to the novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Another time was in 2001, at the National Magazine Awards. That year his magazine won four awards, including the award for general excellence. Remnick kept striding up to the podium as we applauded him, wearing an impeccable blue suit and David Mamet-style glasses,
and each time he found some new way to be abashed and thankful, as he was handed yet another copper-colored trophy designed by Alexander Calder, the mobile-maker. (It’s called an Ellie and it looks like several modernist boomerangs glued together.)

The awards are deserved, but they don’t convey how consistently good his magazine is. Remember, it’s a weekly. Every Monday it’s in the mail, or in the newsstand, or on a little flat screen, reassuring a million subscribers that things are still pretty much under control in the transatlantic world of letters. There are always at least a few funny cartoons, and one absorbing piece about something or another, and perhaps a brilliantly dismissive movie review by Anthony Lane, who sharpened his pencil at the
Independent
before Tina Brown, Remnick’s predecessor, lured him away. I confess I don’t read it all—few can—but let me just say it right now:
The New Yorker
is one of the three great contributions the United States has made to world civilization. The other two are, of course,
Some Like It Hot
and the iPhone. Maybe you have your own list. But it’s likely
The New Yorker
will be on it somewhere, because the magazine has been sharp and witty since the 1920s, angling unexpected adjectives in place with winning exactitude.