'Shaping Tombs in Words'

At Kaboom Books a man about my age was standing in front of the “S” shelves in fiction. I routinely stop there hoping to find hardback copies of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novels to replace my disintegrating paperbacks. On a nearby step-ladder I noticed a stack of such Singer titles – Satan in Goray, The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin – the first of his books I read as a teenager, even before his short stories. I hesitate to bother people who appear to be serious readers but I butted in anyway and asked if he was reading Singer. He was, and was I familiar with his work? I am, and I paraphrased Joseph Epstein: Singer is the one writer from the latter-half of the twentieth century we might still be reading a century from now. “What about Solzhenitsyn?” he asked. I conceded his point and realized I was in the presence of a true reader, that splendid endangered species. 

We chatted a little longer, I suggested Vasily Grossman and my companion said Life and Fate was on his to-be-read pile at home.  I remembered a poem I had read just the day before in Catharine Savage Brosman’s latest collection, Arm in Arm: Poems (Mercer University Press, 2022). In 2008, Brosman remarried her first husband, Patric [sic]  Savage, who died here in Houston in 2017 at age eighty-eight. Her poem, a sort of elegy for him and his books, is titled “Pat Curating His Library,” which begins:

“It started with Tom Sawyer, from a generous aunt,

of foreign birth but knowing all the better

what the use of books might be for this bright boy,

determined, eager.”

 

Many of us read Twain early. It seemed like a patriotic act, expected and yet enjoyed. Brosman describes the “clusters” of books in her husband’s library, including many volumes by and about Twain. She writes: “All that / made a cluster, never separated in Pat’s moves, / until the move of death and scattering of many books / —ashes of the mind.” In a note to the poem, Brosman tells us:

 

“After my husband’s death, I sold, as he had asked me to  do, the condo where we lived—too large for me, as he knew—and most  of its contents, and returned to a smaller one we owned. Hence the necessary dispersal of thousands of his books.”

 

Brosman’s devotion to her husband, along with her practicality, is touching, though she impresses me as being stoical by nature. The reader inevitably asks: What will happen to my books, so carefully selected and organized across a lifetime – curated? We knew as they accumulated that the collective autobiography they represent (at least to us) might be dispersed among appreciative readers -- or pulped. What once seemed permanent (a naïve trick of the mind) will likely be lost. I am not the Bodleian. Brosman concludes her poem with “I am bereft,” and goes on:

 

“. . . of curator, you see, of one who cared tremendously—

for books, for me—but would have sacrificed

the whole collection for my sake. Now,

I return the favor as I can, bestowing on him

fresh creations—full of his own Irish spirit, often.

I select a gorgeous book of his, leaf through,

and find the makings of new poems and the reason

I should make them, writing, shaping tombs in words.”