'The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers'

The Houston Public Library held a book sale Saturday morning at a nearby middle school. I arrived without expectations and thus left without disappointment, untempted by a single title. Strictly bestsellers, textbooks and library rejects. While I was looking at the fiction carts, an Asian kid, about thirteen, was standing next to me. He was seriously examining a boxed edition of Katherine Mansfield’s stories, and I felt a moral obligation to steer him away from a decision I’m certain he would have lived to regret. I picked up a hardcover of Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer and suggested he read it instead of the Mansfield. My meddling didn’t seem to alarm him, and a man I judged to be his father looked on. After much perusing of both volumes, the boy reshelved the Mansfield, kept the Malamud and thanked me. His father smiled and nodded. I may have changed a life.

I ran into John Dillman, the owner of Kaboom Books, which is just a few blocks from the school. He noted that the sale was doubly depressing: there was little worth buying (he took home three volumes) and the library was gutting its collection yet again. I must have been feeling a lingering case of post-traumatic book disappointment because on Sunday I felt the urge to visit John’s bookstore, and my decision proved therapeutic. I found a copy of V.S. Pritchett’s first book, Marching Spain (1927), which I have never read. Next, the Akadine Press reprint of Evelyn Waugh’s Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson (1939), my favorite among his travel books (if it's not Labels, published in 1930, or Remote People, in 1931). And two titles by Rebecca West: A Train of Powder (1955) and a first edition of The Court and the Castle (1957). I’ve read the former, not the latter. West entered my pantheon years ago with Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941).

John and I had our usual rambling conversation. It started with one of his favorite novels, Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe (1940) -- he has the first edition of the English translation priced at $350 -- and shifted into Svevo, Lampedusa, Calvino, Levi and Elsa Morante. I asked if he was related to the actor Bradford Dillman, who died last January and turns out to have been his cousin. We moved on to Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and the latter’s work in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, followed by a discussion of the word “milquetoast” and, for some reason, the history of barbed wire and its use by the Italians during World War I.