Robert Root

 

I own all of John McPhee's thirty books published between 1965 and 2018. It may be my longest reading relationship. When I discover a writer who seems to be on my wavelength, I look forward to spending time with him. It's a kind of solitary friendship. McPhee is an accessible writer; I'd taught some of his work to grad students in Michigan along with other essayists, memoirists, and literary journalists. McPhee was the most journalistic of them, reporting on the insights he gained from people in various fields as he gained them; his readers tended to learn with him.

 

My only autographed copy of a McPhee book, Uncommon Carriers, recounts his travels with, as the dust jacket tells us, "people who drive trucks, captain ships, pilot towboats, drive coal trains, and carry lobsters through the air: people who work in freight transportation." My wife and I lived in Colorado and frequented the Tattered Cover Book Store in downtown Denver when it was published in 2006 and McPhee came through on a book tour, giving me the chance to hear him read in person. I arrived early, bought my copy, and went to the nearly empty presentation room to start reading.

 

The first essay, "A Fleet of One," recounts McPhee's experiences accompanying the driver of a sixty-five-foot long chemical tanker across country from Georgia to Oregon. Opening with reflections on learning to drive a standard auto, he begins to see the highway as the driver of an eighteen-wheeler sees it. The change in perspective is revealing, especially in regard to what the drivers of four-wheelers don't appreciate about their relationship to eighteen-wheelers and what the drivers of eighteen-wheelers have to be constantly aware of in traffic shared with four-wheelers. After mentioning the first time his trucker used his air horn, he explains:

"In the three thousand one hundred and ninety miles I rode with him he used it four times. He gave a light muted blast to thank a woman who helped us make a turn in urban traffic close to one destination, and he used it twice in the Yakima Valley, flirting with a woman who was wearing a bikini. She passed us on I-82, and must have pulled over somewhere, because she passed us again on I-90. She waved both times the horn erupted. She was riding in a convertible and her top was down."

 

I reread the last sentence twice and chuckled to myself. Soon the event started, the audience now almost filling the room. McPhee was introduced, gave a quick overview of the book, then read the opening pages of "A Fleet of One." When he read the line "She was riding in a convertible and her top was down," the audience erupted in laughter. He smiled approvingly. At the end of his reading, among a swarm of listeners, I had him autograph the book, muttered something admiring, and headed home, expecting to read further in the collection that night.

 

On my way out of Denver I remembered how closely McPhee's reading of those early pages had echoed the pace, the shifts in stress and emphasis, the tone of my silent reading of them before his talk began. Almost nothing had varied. I had subconsciously read his prose in silence just as he had read it aloud. That is, we had both "heard" the words and sentences exactly the same way, the way McPhee intended them to sound if they were spoken aloud.

 

I might have been aware that McPhee tended to read his writing aloud to his wife before submitting it to The New Yorker, where he often published. In the title essay of his collection Draft #4, he explains how a piece of writing will take four or more drafts: the first ragged draft is there simply to open the door to discovery and further reflection; near the end of the second draft, he says, "the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show to other people, something that seems to be working and is not going to go away." He reads the second draft aloud, then he "remov[es] the tin horns and radio static that [he] heard" during the third reading, and largely copyedits the fourth draft by replacing certain words with better ones. The final draft gets the right words in the right order.

 

I took McPhee's advice about writing long ago. Writing short scripts for local public radio, I recognized how remote and academic my early ones sounded. Once I began reading them aloud as I edited and revised, I could hear myself sounding more conversational, less like a professor and more like a person. McPhee's Denver reading reconfirmed for me the wisdom of his multi-draft approach. This very post was considerably different in its first draft. As you read it you might be able to sense what it would sound like if you were reading it aloud. It won't sound like John McPhee, but, hopefully, it might sound like me.

 

 

Recently, going through books we were donating to our local library, I noticed some with dogeared pages, often more than one, and tried to straighten them. I habitually mark memorable passages that way instead of underlining them or scribbling marginal notes—which makes them unreadable for later readers –or stopping to copy them by hand and lose the expository thread. I reread Walden often, each time the same copy. Many pages have bent-back corners, at top or bottom, depending on where the passage is on the page. One reward of multiple readings of Walden is reminding myself what struck me in those passages; another is discovering unblemished pages with overlooked ideas I now need to dogear. Every page will likely have bent corners by the time I stop rereading the book.

 

If you skim my blog entries, you'll notice how a passage in a book, essay, article, newspaper column, or interview initiates my further reflections. I often type such passages into my laptop, in case I later want to compose a response or instigate a vaguely related meditation of my own. Writers have always done this kind of thing, collecting quotes in commonplace books, almost since the beginning of writing. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius kept one and later drew his published Meditations from it. Rare book archives house manuscript or print copies by such philosophers, scientists, poets, and politicians as Erasmus, da Vinci, Bacon, Milton, Newton, Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, Irving, Auden, and Woolf. The tradition continues to this day: on Facebook Dinty W. Moore, the founding editor of Brevity, posts an author's quote about writing almost daily: a digital commonplace site.

 

Decluttering created space on our bookshelves and, while moving different volumes off their customary shelves and onto others, I noticed dogeared pages and wondered what was in that book I wanted to recall. What follows here is (sort of) the start of a commonplace file, what Wikipedia claims works "as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts [. . .] found in other texts." Here are a few from books on my shelves:

 

"Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect those books and manuscripts and preserve them." (Susan Orlean, The Library Book, 309-310)

 

"The love of a comrade and the attention of the reader: these desires (which have no clear boundary between them) reach effortlessly across years and cities, then centuries and continents. No poet has spoken to the audiences of the future with such certainty that they are there, listening." (Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, 252)

 

"The essay poured out with such ease or rather tumbled out seemingly of its own accord. When this happens it means that the thoughts have long been gestating and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form out of sight. So much of the work of writing happens when you are seemingly not working, made by that part of yourself you may not know and do not control, and when the work shows up like that your job is to get out of its way." (Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence, 216)

 

"Throughout my life it's through attention that I've tried to tie myself to various places, through mindful recognition of my body's presence in the world of forms to memorize my own brief passage in this world. Now I try to imagine the pull of some other bond: mindless, selfless, a recombinant plein air melting in relentless solar wind. A scatter of atoms, unspecific and undifferentiated, into what happens next." (Elizabeth Dodd, Horizon's Lens: My Time on the Turning World, 123)

 

"Some feelings resist expression for years or decades. Some never submit. The sight of the peaks has long struck me as a kind of prayer I am supposed to know but cannot find the words to. They are the chorus of a hymn I want to sing but cannot finish: the mountains rise like, the mountains rise like . . . but what is it they rise like, to the sky?" (William deBuys, The Walk, 96)

 

Any one of these passages might start me pondering what it means to me, why I dogeared that page, what it meant to the author who composed it, how much we would agree about what it expresses. It might even foster a blog entry. Of course, any reader of this entry might wonder why these, among all my dogeared passages, are the ones I'm sharing as commonplace examples. You, reader, might blog about what you think is going on with me or blog about your own reaction to any or all of them or start checking dogeared pages of your own.

 

That's the way commonplace books work, fertilizing the mind by recording ideas in abundance and discovering what emerges over time. It's worked that way for writers of every kind throughout the history of writing.

 

 

Occasionally I'm astonished by what I find on Amazon. For example, I knew that my memoir, Happenstance, was published as an e-book but was surprised that other books, The Nonfictionist's Guide, Following Isabella (not the book about a sheep but the one about Colorado), and Postscripts, had also been published that way. (Note to self: read contracts before you sign them.)

 

A while back, these surprises made me check up on my older books. None had been converted into electronic format, but some offered pricing surprises. For example, E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist was available for $91.83 new, only $18.99 used, and was listed as by Robert L., Jr. Root and Robert L., Jr. Root. Difficulty figuring out what to do with a suffix like Jr. is one reason I stopped using my middle initial and suffix, but I can't guess why my name is there twice, as if I were truly identical twins. Recovering Ruth came up on the search first as merely an over- (but accurately) priced paperback; however, though the book only had one paperback edition, it's listed five more times, at somewhat staggering prices: $80.85 (three separate times), $71.37, and $134.75 (perhaps an inadvertently gold-plated copy). All these other listings are apparently for private dealers rather than Amazon's retail department, and they suggest that used book and/or private booksellers have no sense of proportion about pricing.

 

It gets worse. My second book, The Rhetorics of Popular Culture, now thirty-five years old, sells direct from Amazon for $107.95 ("Only 1 left in stock [more on the way]"—really?) and, from two other sellers, for $323.85 and $259.08. When the book was published it was overpriced for libraries so, when I taught from it, I advised students to photocopy the whole thing for around $11.00. Happily, my first book, Thomas Southerne, is only listed as used for $17.00 and the anthology Landscapes with Figures is sensibly priced at $23.95, but it starts getting wackier the longer I search the Amazon website. Working at Writing goes for $56.40; the first edition of Wordsmithery goes reasonably enough for $22.95 and $24, but the second edition, apparently a more wonderful book to judge by pricing, is variously priced, from a mere $57.52 through $132.95 used and $199.58 new to a spectacular $1,133.85 (used). (I have several new copies I'd sacrifice for half that price, with free shipping, in case anyone's tempted.) The first anthology that Mike Steinberg and I edited, Those Who Do Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching, is priced at one site at $4,999.00—that's nearly $19 a page. (I've also got a few of those in the garage; make me an offer.) All editions of The Fourth Genre were priced higher than we'd liked, as happens in the textbook market, yet the idea that the sixth edition runs $69.64 but Amazon will rent it for $53.75 is disturbing, and the offer of the fourth edition for $999.99 is ludicrous. In other entries the first edition goes for $290.21, the third for $115.56, and the fifth is priced at both $254.56 and $319.15. College bookstores who buy used copies at the end of each semester have much cheaper copies, a good many of them with no sign of ever having been used.

 

Compared to ads for rare books in The New York Times Book Review, these prices may seem like chump change, but as author/editor of the ones above they seem bizarre. Does anyone ever pay those prices? They seem symptomatic of a certain aspect of the online marketplace for books: a casual disregard for either reader or author. Not long ago, needing a newer edition of Walden, I found a host of them available for cheap as e-books. Almost none were scholarly editions or products of established trade or small press publishers; instead, they were mostly versions scanned and uploaded by people hoping to sell public domain books in the e-publishing market. All kinds of out-of-print classics and not-so-classics are subjected to this approach. Like Jane Austen or Dante? Find an uncopyrighted nineteenth century edition or translation, scan it into your computer, and start your own e-Collection of Jane Austen's works or your own Divine e-Comedy. You never have to have read a word of either author or ever have written a word about them to sell them online. Plagiarism runs rampant. Thanks to the Internet you can rip people off online without ever getting out of your pajamas.

 

I've self-published electronic and print-on-demand versions of two manuscripts with a very limited audience—for her descendants, my grandmother Betsy Root's 1937 newspaper column in How to Develop Your Personality; for anyone who remembers hearing them, my decades-old series of radio scripts in Limited sight Distance —and I appreciate the availability of these resources, which have removed part of the taint self-publishing had under the label "vanity publishing." As someone who can no longer shop at Border's and can seldom find an older book at a Barnes & Noble or ever-more remote independent booksellers, I appreciate the availability of books online. But I'd feel more comfortable each time I do these things if I didn't feel I was implicating myself in something at best sloppy and shady, something at worst crass and corrupt.

 

 

Lately—well, the last year or so—I've been involved in a project which intends to foster the editing and publishing of book-length manuscripts by relatively long-established nonfictionists. My book Lineage and Steven Harvey's Folly Beach served as the first test cases. In the coming year and perhaps later years the two of us and the poet-essayist Kathryn Winograd expect to apply what we've learned from our experiment to manuscripts by three more writers, in hopes of their books emerging in the near future. At base we're trying to give support and encouragement to people like us who, even though they find it challenging to place their recent writing with the kind of trade or university presses that published their work in the past, still keep writing personal essays and memoirs. As we're well aware, we're not the only ones this happens to.

 

As if I needed confirmation of that, I recently read an essay posted online in Kenyon Review titled "On Not Giving Up," by Laura Maylene Walter. She tells us of her decision years ago to "keep writing even if I never publish again." Writing, she says, "can be a breeding ground for loneliness, self-doubt, and self-loathing; it's rife with rejection; it's tough on both the spine and the heart; and there's pitifully little money in it, and often just as little respect." She adds, "It's not easy to stay the course through the years and decades, especially if you feel you don't have much to show for it." Later she explains her recurring struggles with "how frustrating the writing was," claiming that over the years she was "racking up hundreds—probably thousands—of rejections." In spite of that she kept writing.

 

It will come as no surprise that, despite Walter's account of her bouts with frustration and self-doubt, her refusal to simply quit writing resonates with me and, I'm certain, with most writers unable to break the habit. Something there is in writers that can't resist a blank page, that needs to scribble ideas upon it. My wife and I have been decluttering our dwelling lately and I continue to unearth ancient artifacts of my own writing life, a vast assortment of manuscripts and typescripts and printouts and publications of all kinds—columns and reviews, articles and essays, plays and poems and songs and scripts—and an overwhelming volume of handwritten journal entries dating back many decades. I'm also only too aware of how many project logs and reflective posts (which I often refer to as "whining journal entries") and the like take up bytes and kilobytes and megabytes on my succession of laptops, flashdrives, CDs, and floppy disks, not to mention various "clouds" somewhere.

 

Much of it—maybe even most of it—is overwhelming evidence of an obsession with expression. I even keep a Blog Log, to report to myself what I've been doing or have done or may possibly do to generate another entry. When I'm not specifically working on something I'll write about that in a file—the Notes entry I tend to compose every other Friday now always ends with this quote from me: "Avoiding work by writing about all the work I have to do is a standard device of mine that seems to be working." To my mind, it counts as writing. What got me into writing was not a desire to publish but a need to clarify my thinking by wrestling with the words I use to express it. It's generated a lot of sentences over the years.

 

In her essay on not giving up, Laura Maylene Walter reports that, though she finally has a debut novel, Body of Stars, coming out (and apparently an agent, since it went to auction), "that doesn't mean it's smooth sailing." She adds that "what we're all living through now—a global pandemic, a renewed and overdue call for justice for Black lives, continued political upheaval, climate change, and beyond—can make the pursuit of the writing life seem frivolous." I recently heard a writer friend express reluctance about posting something light, something lyrical, something intimate on her own blog or Facebook page, nervous about being thought to be indifferent to the terrible times we live in, as if she didn't feel the anxiety and anger and outrage that so many of us feel overwhelmed by. But I know she does feel it all, as I do, as do most of the people whose Facebook posts I "like." That doesn't mean that any of us need to entirely abandon everything else that matters to us, ignore the things that grow out of who we are. As Walters observes, "we keep going, and we continue trying to make something meaningful with our words."

 

Wherever my future writing takes me—and wherever my future editing might help other writers take their writing—I'll hope that the words end up being necessary, being honest, being meaningful. I'll hope that we won't give up.