'The Pictures and the Books That Here Surround Me''

Some five years before his death from cancer, Clive James published the poem “Change of Domicile” in one of the lesser-known literary magazines – the British Medical Journal’s Supportive and Palliative Care, the September 2014 issue. Coincidentally, that’s the month my friend D.G. Myers died from cancer. The poem begins: 

“Installed in my last house, I face the thought

That fairly soon there will be one house more,

Lacking the pictures and the books that here

Surround me with abundant evidence

I spent a lifetime pampering my mind.”

 

Sensitive readers, of course, will be offended: how morbid. Others will be riled by even a hypothetical account of an afterlife. James’ poem reminds me of the parlor game my brother and I played in hospice, shortly before cancer killed him. One of the things I miss most about him is his sense of humor. All our lives we carried on as though anything can be funny and be made fun of. That doesn’t mean we broadcasted. Gentle souls are so easily distressed. Our premise, one pondered by Egypt’s pharaohs, was simple: assuming we survive after death, what do we bring? Another way of looking at it is to ask what we would miss if we didn’t bring it. We limited the choice to inanimate objects. I’ll skip the more salacious stuff. Ken’s immediate answer was music. He was a musician and once owned enough record albums to fill half a garage – Beethoven, Schoenberg, Johnny Cash, Louis Jordan, Leon Russell, you name it — all favorites.

 

Not surprisingly, I said books, my constant companions in this life. Among the assorted torments of Hell would be the strict absence of volumes. Or an infinity of books, all written by Joyce Carol Oates.

 

In a 1997 essay, “Nearing Ninety,” William Maxwell expressed his only regret associated with death: “[W]hen people are dead they don’t read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke.” The last book he read, in the final months of his life, was War and Peace. When he had read a third of the book his eyesight began to fail, and the novelist Annabel Davis-Goff read the remainder of Tolstoy’s novel to him aloud.  She recounts the experience in an essay collected in A William Maxwell Portrait (2004): 

 

“Reading War and Peace with Bill allowed me a rare and privileged view of how a great writer reads. I had, I suppose, known that anyone who writes above a certain level must read differently from most of us. Nabokov, in the introduction to his Lectures on Literature, asks what a reader needs in order to read a book properly. . . . His four correct answers: imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.”