Winner Take Nothing: Finished After 42 Years

This is the copy of Winner Take Nothing I bought around 1969 and never read--somehow it survived while many better-loved possessions slipped away. Inside the back cover I wrote my name in trying-to-be-grown-up cursive, with my address and junior high school.

Back then, as I have said, I wanted to own books, especially books by authors whose names were famous and had a majestic sound. Shakespeare. Chaucer. Hemingway. Steinbeck. James Fenimore Cooper. Some fatalistic mood must have attracted me to this title and I seriously intended to read it.

But now the idea of trying to read it at age 12 is comical. I wouldn't have had any idea of what was going on in most of these stories, and not just because of all the French in them. For example, there's "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" in which a boy tries to castrate himself: at 12 I didn't know what castration was and the dictionary definition could not have enlightened me. Nor would the subtler events of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" meant much to me: I'd have read that the man was old, deaf, and alone with as little response as I'd also read, around the same time, that Allie Caulfield had died--would have seen them as random details to fill in the story and then wondered, coming to its end, why it didn't make much sense to me.

So I'm glad that in my ignorance I left Winner Take Nothing alone. Or I could be kind and say wasn't it very wise of my younger self to leave it alone, but save it on the shelf these many years, awaiting le jour convenable for understanding it better, and also, a little French?

Cooper's Deerslayer: finished after 43 years

In the farmhouse where my grandparents lived, there was an attic with a small book closet at one end. The only light was a naked light bulb protruding from a sloping gable; the only way to turn it on was to step into the darkness and grope blindly upward for the pull-string. My sister and I did not frequent it--there were many less scary places to play.

But around age 11 or 12, when I began wanting, badly, to own books, I visited the old book closet to see what treasure it might yield. It was still unnerving--the crowded orange-crate shelves tipped and crooked, dusty books slipping off them into more dust, and creepy unseen creatures, real or imagined, retreating as the light tinked on. But it was also rewarding. Right out in front was a green-backed set of novels-- the Leatherstocking Saga of James Fenimore Cooper, still standing in order: The Deerslayer. The Last of The Mohicans. The Pathfinder. The Pioneers. The Prairie. Very excited, I gathered them up and took them downstairs to ask Grandpa if I could have them.

I found him in his big blue chair by the lace-curtained front window and waited while he looked the books over, wiped a little dust off them, checked the title--"Hmmh!"--of each one. Perhaps he was thinking how little leisure time farming chores had left him for reading the books under his own roof, for they lived not only in the attic book room but in almost every room in the house. And then he said, "Take 'em home!"

And I'm sure he must have said something funny about them, too, and made me laugh, if only I could remember it, because that's what he did so often: he'd find us doing something unremarkable, like gazing up at the stars, (because they were so much brighter up north, in the country, in the cold) and he'd just casually pay out a remark-- "Well, don't let the night fall on you," --and then wander off and be manifestly thinking about something else while you were still cracking up at the crazy unexpectedness of him.

The Deerslayer had been tortured: mice had nibbled or scratched away a wedge of pages--you couldn't read a whole line of text until after the third chapter. My mother was not excited about having it in the house. But I wasn't so fastidious: it was a book! One of a matched set of books! By a famous author! They got the best spot on my own bookshelf, which by coincidence was also an orange crate, but painted and sturdy, and I have treasured them from that day to this.

Though I had to buy a new copy of Deerslayer when I finally decided to read it this year, both the stories and those particular books are precious to me. As I was reading, just a few hours ago, the very exciting ending of the story, I pictured my aunts, my uncles and my father, all departed now, reading it before me and telling me with that sly half-smile they all shared, "Yes, this is the good part."