Available Surfaces II: The Gravitas of Paper [T.R. Hummer]

"Another damned, thick, square book.  Always
scribble, scribble, scribble!  Eh!  Mr Gibbon?" –William Henry, First Duke of
Gloucester

 

In the late spring of 2001, the boxes began arriving.
Buoyant gentlemen in brown uniforms brought them four afternoons in a row,
stacking them on the old wooden porch in the Church Hill neighborhood of
Richmond, Virginia, where I then lived, though I would not be living there for
long. Inside the house, other boxes were accruing, because we were
preparing to move.

In particular, I had just finished packing up all my books.
In the dining room, there was a virtual levee of boxes identical to the ones
that were arriving on the porch: one hundred (more or less) cartons bought at
the U-Haul store full of the tools of my vocation. It would have been easy, if
I’d had the corpse of an author on hand, to make a funeral cairn of books, to
contain the body of a poet entirely within a tomb of boxes marked Poetry in appropriately black Sharpie to
prevent confusion; likely I had enough Fiction
boxes to encompass a trio of novelists; and the Criticism could have stashed the cremains of a panel of
deconstructionists in a tidy mausoleum.

I was, in short, myself entombed inside my own collection of
books. And yet, on the front porch, more boxes were arriving. And, perverse as
it may appear, as I packed box after box with household goods, the incoming
boxes were unpacked, their contents scrutinized.

 

*

 

Writers are apt to be all too well acquainted with the
weight of paper. Those sheets that flutter so lightly in the wind when we don’t
want them to, that crumble so easily into balls under the force of our writerly
frustration, have a way of accruing into groupings—packets, bundles, parcels,
walls, mountains—of enormous density. I was told a story once that the library
at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale got around a cut in their book
acquisition budget by claiming—and in fact proving—that books are an efficient insulating
material. That slim volume of poems that almost levitates off your desk can,
when joined with sufficient others of its ilk, crush the child who tries to
climb a freestanding bookshelf. The cousins of those buoyant gentlemen and
-women of UPS–I mean professional movers—quickly lose their cheerfulness when
confronted by a personal library, especially one packed in cartons deemed by
the movers “too big,” i.e. too heavy. Weight has consequences. Mass accrues. A
spine, not to say a heart, can only bear so much. I could, as easily as that
clambering monkey-child alluded to above, be killed by my books. So could a
mover. So could a moving van.

That copy of Ulysses
you use for a doorstop is one thing, literally; multiply it by a few thousand
and you have my personal library; multiply it by millions and you have the
unsupportable weight of your university’s research facility. How much do the
books at the Library of Congress weigh? At some point we approach the density
of a dwarf star.

 

*

 

The old house where we lived in Richmond—built in 1885—had
the original oak flooring. As I piled my boxes of books in the downstairs
dining room, I imagined the effect of the weight. Was the floor sagging there?
(Who could tell? In that lovely old house, nothing was plumb, level, or
square.) Then again, maybe the trees from which the flooring came were
relatives of the trees from which the paper in the books were made: maybe there
was a reunion going on from which I was excluded.

All these things passed through my mind, but I was perhaps a
tad unhinged. I was not at a crossroad, but I was just beyond a myriad of them,
in the sense that a lot of complex decisions had recently been made and many
consequences were beginning to appear. That was the spring of my fiftieth
year, and yet, upstairs resting (as she should), my wife of two years was
pregnant, and we were about to set off to parts unknown, more or less, because
I had taken a new job. It was mid-April; on July 1 I would become the editor of
one of America’s best literary quarterlies, The
Georgia Review. I was doing almost all of the things that psychologists
list as the most stressful human activities, and I was doing them all at once.

The boxes that were arriving on my porch were, in fact,
arriving from Athens, Georgia. Their contents: the first 15 years of The Georgia Review. I was not yet in the
employ of The University of Georgia, but I was already beginning the work,
because I had taken on a task that needed all the time I could give it. I would
be editing the magazine, yes; but I had also agreed to take on a larger than
normal hunk of editorial work, suggested to me by the magazine’s staff: I would
spearhead the completion of a special anthology issue, Best Essays from The Georgia Review.

This task was, I began quickly to realize, Herculean in several
senses. The Georgia Review had been
chugging along since 1948, always publishing a hefty percentage of nonfiction
material. My predecessor, the late Stanley W. Lindberg, had, along with the
staff, done Best Poetry and Best Fiction issues of the Review ten years earlier; a Best Essays had always been part of the
plan, but it was never brought to completion. Exactly why this was the case I
have never been sure. Partly it was the consequence of a long illness that in
the end was fatal for Stan; partly it was the consequence of having many other
things to do. But it was also, I think, partly the more or less inchoate nature
of the task. Poetry and fiction have rather precise borders; nonfiction,
including the essay, rather less so. Stan had made notes about his plans for
the essay issue, including responses to his reading of the early issues, edited
(of course) by his own predecessors. Reading these, it seemed to me, with all
due respect, that Stan was dithering. And I could see why: the earliest issues
of The Georgia Review were
particularly Augean Stable-ish. The task was huge, the terrain very messy, and
the stakes high.

What were the stakes? I had the distinct impression that I
was being tested. The Georgia Review
is a proud old institution; one doesn’t just walk through the door to be the
editor without having to run the gantlet. I was being tested; indeed, I was
being hazed; and I was determined to pass with flying colors.

 

*

If writers know the weight of paper well, editors not only
know that weight, they are one with it. I was not walking into an editorship
without understanding what I was getting into; I had already been
editor-in-chief of Quarterly West, of
The Kenyon Review, of The New England Review, and poetry
editor of The Cimarron Review. I had
done, then, more or less equivalent jobs before, and understood that I would be
breathing, eating, and excreting paper. Day by day it would arrive and demand
attention; it would be carried about and handled; it would be read; decisions
would be made; most of it would be returned to its sender, but not without
having first thrown its weight around.

There is hardly a literary quarterly anywhere that has
office space as commodious as The Georgia
Review; and that space is crammed, every nook and cranny and available
surface of it, with paper. Some of it is more or less permanently installed on
bookshelves; much of it circulates like turgid blood in a peculiar alien
circulatory system. The editors are its custodians, and also its tenants. I
would come to live in the offices of The
Georgia Review, as I had other places, as a kind of symbiote,
simultaneously responsible for and dependent on a body of paper, and not a lean
fit body either: the body would be bloated, slow of metabolism, and gassy. This
is not a description of The Georgia
Review per se but of all such publications, maybe of all publications
period. A journal of the traditional kind is made of paper, and it eats paper:
too much paper enters it, and so—like an obese person living in a donut shop—it
grows.

 

*

 

In Virginia—it was a lovely spring; flowers of many kinds
were blooming, and the weather was luminous and perfect—I opened my boxes and
began to examine their contents.

I discovered a minor mass of apparently identical objects,
all the same shape and size, and all alas the same color, a species of khaki,
or, as you might say, something on the pale end of a spectrum of shit brown.
They arrived from an era in the history of literary magazines when publications
were visually Spartan, to put it nicely. It was as though editors—and not only
the editors of this publication, but virtually all editors of all similar
publications—made a virtue of ugliness, as if to say: this is serious business,
friends, like cod liver oil. To do them justice, color, in those days, was
expensive; and furthermore, these editors, virtually to a man (and they were
virtually all men) were, in the best sense, amateurs of publication. They dealt
with content, and put forward content as
content, rather the way a cereal company concerned entirely with matters of
nutritional virtue might put forward oatmeal as oatmeal, in a thoroughly unappetizing oatmeal colored box. This
was all well and good for the mission, and for the bottom line, but did not go
far toward making the children want to eat.

I ate it. I ate it all. I read every word of every
nonfiction piece (essays and otherwise, for there are distinctions to be made
here) ever published in The Georgia
Review. Beyond a certain point, the material was wonderful, and the choices
difficult only because they were to be made between better and best. From the
early years, however, there was not much nutrition in an acre of pine trees.
And, of necessity, I read chronologically, from start to finish, so that, there
in my dining room in Richmond, my meals were heavy, friends, and joyless:
pieces on peach farming in Georgia, and how the “Negro” might be “improved”
(for, yes, the Review began as
Agrarian and Fugitive outreach, and adopted a “genteel” segregationism grounded
in “The Briar Patch”).

Upstairs, my wife grew, as we say, heavy with child.
Downstairs, I grew heavy with paper. Furthermore, I became clogged with dust.
These issues were oddly new—most of them, like most issues of most literary
magazines everywhere, had never been opened—and at the same time old. They had
spent decades untouched by human hands but moldering in a Georgia storeroom,
and they harbored peculiar allergens, to which I proved susceptible. They
wicked all the moisture from the skin of my hands as I held them, and as I
sneezed, my skin cracked; I went through a small swimming pool full of hand
lotion.

Ah, friends, the act of reading is, for all we might say
about the readerly imagination, thoroughly physical, and editors are the
weightlifters of readers. There are joys in the profession, moments of electric
discovery, illumination; but there are perils too, hernias and ruptured discs
of readership, cracked hands and blurred vision, and susceptibility to whatever
dusty invisibles cling to the page and plan their insidious invasions.

I read my old issues, I made my notes, and when I was done,
I packed them all back in their boxes and piled them up with my other books.
When the time came, I saw them off in a moving van; they were going home, and I
was following, sucked along behind them by an irresistible if not altogether
appealing field of gravity.

 

*

 

There is something to be said for the internet. 

I have heard out the grouchy purists, those in love with
paper. I am even one of them; I love paper too. I love books, and would never
want to see them go away. I love literary magazines, broadsides, chapbooks,
pamphlets. I love beautiful type, thick rich pages, the marvels wrought by ink. By and large, by now I am largely made of paper. You are what you eat, and I have eaten my oatmeal. My loyalty here is real.

 But I also love the library inside my computer. I love the
brilliance of the screen, its pure luminosity. Light! I love lightness! It’s
not for nothing that I’m a poet: the lyric lifts, it floats, it flies.

Let there be beautiful books forever. Let them be read forever in
bathtubs, a place where computers should never go. But let there also be
digitization, let there be hard drives containing, almost weightlessly,
libraries dwarfing Alexandria. And let all ugly back issues of literary
magazines, bound in shit-colored cheap cover stock, be turned into electrons
that never make us sneeze.

Along with the excellent staff at The Georgia Review, I finished editing the special essay issue, and
a fine strong issue it is too, not because of me but because of the editorial
excellence of my predecessors there.

It is, however, an especially thick, weighty issue, and that
is mostly my doing. And in some future, a new editor-to-be will, at the Review’s two hundredth anniversary, have
to edit a mega-meta-Best-Of issue. I imagine the boxes arriving on his or her
futuristic porch. I imagine that unfortunate—attenuated into noodle-like
physical wimphood by another hundred and forty years of machine-aided human
evolution—struggling to lift them. I imagine his or her dining room floor—made
of polymer-uranium reinforced Styrofoam materials—collapsing under the weight,
the whole structure of the house imploding, the editor and all back issues
vanishing down a robotically engineered safety sinkhole put there precisely in
case of such an eventuality.

I will look down, or up, from whatever afterlife I then inhabit,
and I will say to myself: there is my legacy.