Holding a Leg

Embarking on a train journey around the United States of America and bringing books from Little Free Libraries.

A week ago I clambered aboard a train car in Seattle and rode south to Oakland where I’m staying with two friends. Aside from some boxes of books and art in the basement of a friend in New Jersey, nearly everything I own is in four bags I brought on the ride from Washington through Oregon to Northern California, the first leg of a train trip around the U.S.A.

In those four bags are four paperbacks harvested from four Little Free Libraries: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Terrible Swift Sword by Bruce Catton, a collection of Kafka stories and Anna Karenin by Tolstoy. (I’ve always understood there to be an “a” at the end of “Karenina,” but that’s not what it says on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition.) The train ride from Seattle to the east side of the San Francisco Bay was meant to be an overnight ride but a great wildfire in Oregon made a key bridge impassable and necessitated a midnight transfer to a bus in southern Oregon and another transfer back to the same train in Sacramento in the early hours of the next day. Not conducive to reading. And anyway, part of the point of traveling by train is the scenery, which is hard to tear your eyes away from in the forests and mountain country of Oregon, which is all to say that this isn’t going to be a month for racking up titles on my reading list the way the last month was. In July I marauded through a litany of short books in rapid succession. Now I’m on the road with four hefty paperbacks containing what I understand to be dense, layered texts that reward study and attention.

In Oakland I got through the scholarly introduction to the first one. Good omen that Anna Karenina is mentioned in Tony Tanner’s 1972 introduction to this Penguin English Library edition of Pride and Prejudice, where he contrasts the tone of a scene in Tolstoy’s novel with Austen’s prose style. He writes that Tolstoy’s ball scene in Anna Karenina is “approaching something like a state of trance, each dancer almost drugged just by the presence and proximity of the other,” while Austen in Pride and Prejudice is happily unconcerned with “a whole range of physical experiences which can often change lives more forcibly than rational reflection.”

Elsewhere Tanner quotes John Locke and David Hume to reinforce his argument that Pride and Prejudice is, among many other things, about the inability of an individual to know anything to a certainty, that it is a story of one strong-willed and intelligent person’s journey towards realizing that these selfsame qualities may for the first time be not advantages but liabilities and that she must question not only her conclusions themselves but how she has arrived at them in the first place. (I know how she feels.) Tanner essentially argues that Pride and Prejudice, which was originally to be called First Impressions, is largely about - of all things - fallibilism. Can’t say I saw that coming, or that I wasn’t pleased and intrigued. It’s fun setting out to wander through a book and on a train without knowing precisely where either journey is taking me.

I must peruse bookshelves. This goes for bookstores, public and Little Free libraries and the sancta of friends, colleagues and enemies. (Next time an enemy invites you into his sanctum for any reason, steal a thorough look at his booshelf.) I like how books look lined up together. When I got here I beelined for the collection of my Oakland bibliophile pals and saw their copies of Chronicles Volume One by Bob Dylan and The Secret History by Donna Tartt, each recommended to me in 2016 by a different half of the couple and which I devoured in short order when I was staying with them in San Francisco during a similar period of transitory itinerancy. (I also saw the copy of To the White Sea by James Dickey that I gave to my friend some years back. The other day we walked to an Oakland book shop because he wanted to find a used copy of Dickey’s Deliverance, which I’ve told him is better than To the White Sea, better than most novels in general. He found one.) I pulled Dylan’s book down and, finding it on the first try, flipped to the part I like best where he discusses the difficulties in recording Oh Mercy in New Orleans with the record producer Daniel Lanois who was recommended to him by the singer Bono. Here’s why I loved this book, because of shit like this: writes Dylan of Bono, “He’s like that guy in the old movie, the one who beats up a rat with his bare hands and wrings a confession out of him. If Bono had come to America in the early part of the century he would have been a cop.” Dylan deposits all such statements at the reader’s feet with an incontrovertible air of authority and factuality, a master raconteur’s serene madness. Whatever portions of the opinions and recollections in the book are bullshit ends up feeling entirely beside the point because the guy is so confident and at ease as a writer of prose. My page-flipping homing mechanism eventually led me forward to Dylan’s alleged encounter with a strange shopkeeper supposedly named Sun Pie. Finally I went searching back towards the beginning of the book where he lays a foundation of influences, noteworthily citing Tolstoy among them.

Two paragraphs before that Dylan writes of Robert E. Lee, “it was on his word alone that America did not get into a guerrilla war that probably would have lasted ‘til this day.” The historian T. Harry Williams wrote that the only truly great generals of the American Civil War were Lee, Grant and Sherman. Williams was one of five authors who contributed essays on the topic of Why the North Won the Civil War from a book of that title edited by David Donald and originally published less than a century after the War’s conclusion. A paperback edition of Why the North Won the Civil War that I found in a Little Free Library was the last book I read in Seattle. Williams closes out his essay with reference to an utterance of Lincoln’s that stalks me through the pages of writings by various Civil War historiants and memoirists. Writes Williams, “When Grant explained his plan to the President, he remarked that even the smaller Federal forces not fighting would help the fighting by advancing and engaging the attention of the enemy.” Lincoln confirmed his understanding with a folksy description of how when some hunters might skin a deer, a guy who isn’t himself doing any skinning can hold down a leg. In 2016 not long before my friends got me onto Dylan’s and Tartt’s books I was reading the annotated memoirs of Sherman, where I first learned of how Lincoln’s secretary recorded the President’s response to Grant with the peculiarly haunting poetic abbreviation with which Williams closes out his 1960 essay on Civil War generalship. “Those not skinning can hold a leg,” Lincoln is said to have said.

I’ll be riding the rails into novel territory and holding the legs of whatever deer Austen and Tolstoy and Kafka and Catton are skinning. We’ll see where this leads.

Next: California to Chicago leg and first impressions of Pride and Prejudice. A round-up of recent movie watches.