Beach Reads 2008: The Reviews

I note this week the danger of checking out books from a University library where dust jackets are removed. Where I'd reckoned, from all I knew about Doris Kearns Goodwin, impressionistically, that Wait Till Next Year is about attending games at Fenway, with her father, that never happened. It was only after she was a parent, herself, in Boston, that she took her kids to the ballpark.

What the book is about is something just as fine; the youngest daughter of a family who'd emigrated from Brooklyn to Long Island, desiring to please her father, upon his return home after a long commute, scores Dodgers games, played in the afternoon, broadcast by Red Barber on the radio, to replay the contest intimately after dinner for her dad. In the process, an historian and story teller is born.

The geography is familiar - after only a two-week infant residency in DC, in 1954, my family moved to Brooklyn, where we lived for almost ten years, before moving to Long Island for three more. Since the Dodgers had already left for California before I reached baseball awareness in 1961, and the Mets, founded shortly after, never caught my fancy (for a youngster, even Stengel-ese incompetence isn't necessarily charming, it's just embarassing), it's the Yankees of Mantle, Maris, Ford, Howard, Boyer, Kubek, Richardson, Pepitone, and Tresh, I carry, as Kearns holds Robinson, Snyder and Campanella in her heart.

Where I'd attribute the love of NY baseball to environment, I acknowledge an Anglophillia as genetic, maternally inherited, though reading The Brideshead Generation at the beach resulted in a deeper realization of something else.

Across from Persimmons Drive, where the rented beach house in the Outer Banks stands, lies the tiny Corolla Library which we frequented to check on emails. I'd told the wife, whenever I see her approaching the counter with a stack of books in her arms, it's quite sexy, and so, she didn't disappoint, filling a tote bag (at $15 a load, satchel included)! I, naturally, couldn't resist a contribution, and tossed a tome called The Sword and the Shield, by Christopher Andrew and Vasli Mitrokhin, onto the pile.

Unknowingly I'd purchased a complement to Brideshead, since Sword is the history of Soviet foreign ministry espionage and that story can't be told excluding the bio's of Philby, MacLean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross, the infamous Cambridge 5, who betrayed England for the USSR.

The Oxford-Brideshead Generation dismissed politics in lieu of art. The Cambridge crew committed treason, dedicated to a cause, that proved bankrupt. The arts and antics of the former, even when frivolous, outlasted the far more serious and deadly politics of the latter.

Indeed, although I didn't read so far at the beach into the Yeats biography, by Jeffares, to confirm whether Yeats' poetry was finally informed more by nationalism than Irish mysticism, at the point where I left off, the author writes, "he still wished for some system of philosophy which would include his belief that the legends, personalities and emotions handed down by poets and painters, philosophers and theologians were the nearest approach he knew to truth."

Reading, for me, is seasonal. Summer is for grand achievements in the arts while winter is for the historical reality, against which the hope, represented in the arts, is measured and overcome.

Upon return from the beach, the principles interweaved together magically at Wolf Trap, where for the first time, James Taylor performed. As he sang told tales and sang tunes like Sweet Baby James, the past 40 years of progressive politics were incoporated into a larger more enduring gentle presence which doesn't force any issue but quietly represents what it is we sought to be and how we live our lives.

Perhaps, after all he's gone through over the past four decades, publically and privately, James might not be adverse to Lewis Hyde's words, in the last of the 2008 beach reads, The Gift, "Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for their gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature."

For James, obviously, the gift is music. For me, the cultural legacies of a New York childhood, Eastern European-English genetics, and a life otherwise lived in the South, and Mid-Atlantic, make way for an inner garden not yet fully grown. That nutriments may be found in a life already existant as the political change desired, seems right; perhaps more can be explained through contemplation of the dolphins we watched at play in the ocean.