Me, Reading: My Years at the Antioch Review

As a boy I would often walk to the Yonkers Public Library. The library was an imposing structure that sat high above Broadway in gothic splendor near Getty Square, at the opposite end of Broadway from where we lived in south Yonkers, not far from the Bronx. It was a long walk carrying ten books, the maximum number the librarian allowed me to check out on my card. Later, I learned to take the bus.

Looking out the window during these bus rides I could pick out familiar landmarks: the billboards we ducked behind to keep from getting clipped in the head during summer rock fights; the Chinese laundry; the small park off McLean Avenue with the statue of Lincoln, in whose shade I would sometimes rest on the long walk home; the movie theater where I first saw a picture by myself, a present from my mother on my tenth birthday. I felt grown-up riding the bus. I was alone, but not lonely. I had the books for company.

Sometimes I would riffle through the books on the bus, looking at the pictures or flipping to the back to see how many pages I would have to read to finish a book. Finishing was important to me. I never checked out less than ten books.

What was I reading at ten? Mostly adventure stories, I suppose. At this age, I was fonder of dogs than people. I loved Big Red, the indomitable Irish setter, his friend Danny, and their trapper life in the woods of Wintapi. Later there was Frank Merriwell, the college football star, and the Hardy Boys. We fancied ourselves boy detectives, my friends and I, as we glided through the woods above the park looking for clues. (Sometimes on these adventures, away from my friends for a moment, I stopped to gaze at the blasted rock cliff, lupine and snapdragons hanging from the walls like garlands. I would look up at the big stone house on the hill on Prospect Drive where I was born, and wonder how my family had come to move. The bare outline of the story, of course, was familiar to me, though I learned later that, as in most stories adults told, there were parts missing. After my grandfather, who owned the majestic house on the hill, moved unexpectedly to Miami, the house had been sold, and my parents and their three children had moved to a cramped apartment on Stanley Avenue, high above the Hudson River. It was not a happy place. My older brother died on the street outside that apartment one winter morning. Thinking about it now, maybe I was doing all that reading and sleuthing for a reason. Things didn't add up. (This is what I would discover later about life: things rarely did.) Later still, there would be Jack London, a name I had heard in school. I was big on dinosaurs—someone had taken me as a kid to the New York Museum of Natural History to see the theatrical Hall of Dinosaurs, T Rex and his pals posing in all their bony glory, and I was hooked. But there were also fat science books, as I recall. These went unread, left in a pile by my bed. Why did I take the trouble to cart them home from the library if I didn't read them? Beats me. They were there in the library for me to take, and I took them.

I was conscious of people watching me on the bus. I would count out my coins carefully and deposit them in the meter, or hand a dollar to the bus driver and wait patiently for a stoplight, where he could make change.

The books themselves I stacked one on top of another in a tall pile, the bigger books on the bottom. I held them against my hip as I walked, or out in front of me balanced on my belt buckle when my arms got tired, or when climbing the bus stairs or the stairs to my apartment. I always sat in the back of the bus. I carried my books past strangers, and sat on the side of the bus nearest the sidewalk. I never spoke to anyone. I preferred to observe out of the corner of my eye the passing scene, inside and outside the bus. My dream as a child was to become invisible. From my seat at the back of the bus, with no one behind me, I could see the adults but they could not see me. When the Chinese laundry came into view, and then the gray stone of Saint Denis Catholic Church, I would gather my books and get off the bus. It was my stop.

I shared my room in the apartment on Lawrence Street with my baby brother, Robert. Our mother had been pregnant when her eldest son was killed on Stanley Avenue, and in the remaining months of her pregnancy, from February to August, she had cried continuously. Bobby (we never called him Robert) has a middle name, Thomas; he was named for the older brother he never met. Two years later I would have another roommate, Douglas Arnold. The new baby for a time was cared for in my parents' bedroom; later he came to live with Bobby and me. Three boys, three beds, one room. There was a long hallway in the apartment where my father, a scratch golfer, would practice his chip shots with plastic balls. My sister Jeanne, the only girl in the family, had her own room. Pale violet in color and little larger than a closet, it was located just off the dining room and to the left of the entrance into the apartment. It was here that she practiced the mysteries of girlhood. She was an older sister. I was a little in awe of her. She had known my older brother; he had died just after I turned four. The week before his death he had carried home from the bake shop my birthday cake.

I don't remember Bobby ever disturbing my reading in our small bedroom, though it's possible of course that he did. Perhaps I read to him, though I doubt it. Reading has always been a silent, solitary act for me. In those days I could well imagine that the writers I admired wrote only for me, an audience of one. This, despite the fact that the book I held in my hands were often old and worn, and the pale blue cards on the inside back covers held the dates that the books had been checked out by other readers. No matter. I had them now. I was peculiarly protective of these books. Often, I would ride the bus back up to the library at Getty Square in order to renew all ten of them for another two weeks.

Re-reading, Roland Barthes says, is a lost art, practiced only by the very old and the very young. Certainly this was true for a time in my family. My grandmother, who had come to live with us on Stanley Avenue after the death of her husband (it was the street of death, to me—I have never returned there), kept her ancient Italian bible on the night stand in her tiny room on Lawrence Street. Scraps of paper marked her favorite passages, mostly in the Psalms. Later in life—in the year that I lost my father, my teaching position, a home that I especially loved, and many of the illusions that had sustained my life to that point, and entered at last into something resembling adulthood, at the age of forty—I would turn to those same psalms for comfort and healing; they became my permanent address.

There was no air conditioning in the apartment. During the summer months the windows were wide open to the city below. We lived on the top floor of the three story building. On the ground floor was an upholstery shop owned by a Jew named Ira; my father had a second job—a third if you count his work as a caddy on Sundays—delivering slip covers for Ira throughout lower Westchester and the five boroughs of New York. I would accompany my father on these trips in our old Studebaker. Someone had stolen the back seat out of the car while it was parked outside on the street. We stacked the slip covers on the bare springs, and set out. I was amazed at my father's ability to navigate the city, which seemed to me, as a child, impossibly huge and sprawling, with wildly different neighborhoods. He would point out to me the various Midtown landmarks. I especially loved to look at the Flatiron building, which amused and delighted me. I got to know Tremont Avenue in the Bronx the way I knew my own street in Yonkers. Riding shotgun in the Studebaker, I would read the addresses that Ira had written out for the day's deliveries and try to imagine what adventures awaited us at each place. I loved the colorful place-names—Flatbush Avenue, Riverdale Drive, Brunkner Boulevard, Jamaica, Van Wyke, Bensonhurst, Coney Island, Mulberry Street, Murray Hill, Chelsea—and the graceful arches of the bridges at night, beaded with necklace-like lights—Throgs Neck, Whitestone, George Washington, Brooklyn, Triborough. Each time we passed it, headed home on the Major Deegan, I would lean out the window and wave at Yankee Stadium.

I helped install the slipcovers, cramming sofa cushions into place and zipping the clear plastic covers closed, sprinkling Corn Starch on them to take out the wrinkles. I enjoyed these Saturday excursions with my father; I had him all to myself. Sometimes I would get a dollar tip, which my father allowed me to keep. I would promptly spend my tip money on baseball cards, hoping for a Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris, but settling for an occasional Tom Tresh or Tony Kubek, and a pile of useless Washington Senators.

In front of our building was a street light. At night, with the door to my room open, I would lie in bed for hours, reading. Our building was on the corner of Lawrence Street and Saratoga Avenue. Across the street was Charlie's, the corner store where I would buy penny candy and baseball cards with my tip money. Each night at midnight the corner traffic light would automatically switch over to a steady flashing yellow. My room was bathed in this soft, cautionary color. At night when I couldn't sleep I would lie in bed and watch the light flash. I would think about what I had read, or think about my future, or think about nothing at all. Time seemed to stretch out between the pulses of light. The world, in my reading room, seemed impossibly lovely. Placing my hand on my bare chest, I could feel my heart beat in rhythm with the light. Outside on the street, cars were parked in a long silent line, their grills gleaming. On the dark walls of my bedroom I could make out the pulsating images of posters I had tacked up, my clothes hanging bodiless on a hook, the dull gleam of my school trumpet. And my library books, with their glossy dust covers, scattered on the bed and floor.


                                                        

It turned out that the man next to me was also a college professor. What's more, he told me, he was the editor of the Antioch Review. Like I said, I didn't know him from Adam, but I knew Antioch.

Antioch College was four miles down the road from the college where I taught, but it might as well have been four light years away, that's how different Antioch was from the place where I taught. Our school was the kind of place where you might encounter Jerry Falwell, a personal friend of our president, preaching about how God created Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve, or joking that the ACLU didn't like Christmas because “in that bunch you couldn't find a virgin or three wise men.” You get the idea. Sex was preached about on a regular basis in Chapel, which met every weekday at 10 a.m.—the basic idea was, “don't have any, or we'll kick you out.” Students were kept strictly segregated, men in one set of dorms, women in another. We didn't have any alumni that you might've heard of. By contrast, Antioch was a place where you might get up to use the bathroom in your co-ed residence hall to discover an orgy in progress, all genders welcome—where you might elect to join in, or go back to your room to complete an assignment, or maybe head over to Kelly Hall to hear Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould or U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand or Clifford Geertz, or another of Antioch's famous alums holding forth.

I had a few friends at Antioch on the faculty. On several occasions I had been invited to campus to speak. Often enough, it was Al Denman who invited me. (One night I was asked to speak on “The Death of God.” “God is dying every day,” I said, “in the streets of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under military occupation, in the segregated slums of South Africa, in the barrios of Central America where peasants still gather in churches to hear a word of liberation.” This was not what the Antioch folk had expected to hear.) Al taught philosophy at Antioch. He had come to Antioch in 1964 from Boston University, originally as “chaplain,” back when Antioch still had one, in the way that Yale had William Sloane Coffin as chaplain in the turbulent years of the Vietnam War. Al had experienced a crisis of faith many years before I met him, but still referred to himself as a “reverent skeptic,” in an Ingmar Bergman fashion. He was intrigued by my story, a displaced New Yorker of a liberal bent, working at a conservative Christian college in Ohio surrounded by corn fields, and teaching phenomenology and existentialism, Nietzsche, Marx, and Derrida, to students who listened appreciatively to Jerry Falwell. Talking to Al, I became sort of interested myself in how I was pulling this off.

Of course, I didn't last long at my college. I found myself unemployed after publishing a feminist anthology that included the writings of LGBT folk. But not before I joined the “staff” of the Antioch Review, at the invitation of the editor that I had met on that plane.

Back to the plane: what did we talk about? We talked about literature, of course, me and my new editor friend, and about Antioch. I don't recall telling him where I taught, though I surely must have. Instead, I discussed my favorite writers, writers I had discovered in the pages of The New Yorker and in the “little magazines” that kept the short story genre alive and vital. I was a fan of Donald Barthelme, and Frederick, two brothers whose stories in The New Yorker had thrilled and delighted me, different as they were—and I was especially fond of Ann Beattie, Ray Carver, William Trevor, and Alice Munro. We had a lively discussion about Ray and the guy who did the editing job on him at Esquire and Knopf, Gordon Lish, a.k.a. “Captain Fiction,” in a conversation that eerily resembled the current dustup. This was fifteen years ago, but even then I had concerns about the grieving widow and the cottage industry that was growing up around Ray (who after death had “published” as much or more as he had in life), not to mention concerns about Lish. My seat mate was friends with Gordon Lish, as it turned out, and had published Lish's new fiction in the Antioch Review. So, you see, we had a lot to talk about on the plane.

I had read the Antioch Review on occasion, had picked it up at the Epic Book Shop in Yellow Springs, leafing through its pages to see what fiction was offered, and who the poets were. But I didn't know that much about it. So, on the plane I asked a few questions about the Antioch Review, how it was faring these days, who he had lined up for the next issue, and the like. I remember him telling me something of the Review's history, how it had started in the dark days of the second world war, its founding editors, their vision for the new little magazine in the struggle against global fascism, and the way it had managed to endure despite a host of problems, not the least of which was Antioch itself, a place that seemed always to be in turmoil. I recall him saying how concerned he was about the essay form, which seemed to be vanishing. He was very proud of the Antioch Review's role in keeping the essay alive.

We talked our way from New York to Dayton, and when we landed we exchanged telephone numbers. Some time later, I found myself for the first time in the office of the Antioch Review.

The Review at that time was located on the second floor of the Antioch College library. I walked in, introduced myself to the managing editor, and looked around. On one wall were past issues of the Review, with its distinctive cover art by David Battle. On another wall were books that had come in from various publishers. The books were free for the taking, no questions asked, so long as you promised to write a review. (The Antioch Review continues its book review section today, long after many little magazines have abandoned it.) On yet another wall were hung pictures of famous and not so famous writers that had appeared in the pages of the Review over the years, and a small collection of the most god-awful opening sentences of rejected stories, culled from decades of submissions, some quite hilarious. Just to the right of this “wall of fame & shame” there was a table. On the table sat two plastic containers. In these containers, stood upright as soldiers, were hundreds of mailing envelopes of different hues. Each of the envelopes contained one short story submission. They were arranged chronologically, from the date they had been logged in by the managing editor or by Gabrielle, one of the student interns. This, of course, was the “slush pile”--unsolicited manuscripts that had come in from all over North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the English speaking world.

I became an “assistant fiction editor” at the Review, or what is commonly known as a “reader.” It was a simple job. Every week or so I would climb the stairs to the Review office, stuff as many manuscripts as I could fit into a cloth bag that I carried for this purpose, and carry the stories home with me, where I would read them. The following week I would return the rejected stories to the managing editor with a big circled R on the front of the mailing envelope. There was a lot of rejection. The Antioch Review received over 5,000 unsolicited short stories a year. Of these, we would publish about ten.

In preparation for my work as a reader, the editor encouraged me to call Nolan Miller. One of the early editors of the Antioch Review, Nolan retained the title of associate editor. I didn't know it at the time, and only read it after his death, but Nolan had once written a statement for the Review that detailed his view of what a “slush pile” reader should look for in a short story submission. This statement appears in its entirety in the Winter 2007 issue of the Review. Here is an excerpt:

What we're looking for is what is intriguing—difficult as it is to pin down just what that means. First of all, I think it's what I call “a voice.” The writer has a way of getting to the reader without getting in the way of his/her characters or story. The manner as well as the method is appealing, as interesting or appealing as a person is who attracts our attention when met for the first time. That is, some people are immediately likeable; we want to know them better, to enjoy their company more. They make us anticipate pleasure to come. An element of surprise hovers. We don't know what to expect (what's predictable) but we like expecting. This produces a state of suspense, not only in the possible outcome of the story but in the continuing “surprise” of the writing, the fresh imagery, the variations of the sentences which, like dance steps, “lead” us into patterns and rhythm we follow in time to persuasive and melodious music. In the best sense, good writing is very much like music—the music the writer makes and the reader hears, not too predominantly, but subtly effecting guidance.

Reading the next paragraph puts me in mind of countless afternoons spent at Nolan's side, in a kind of rolling tutorial, which I have written of elsewhere, as guest editor of a Mississippi Review issue dedicated to new fiction, and to Nolan Miller:

Too many of the stories we get are told rather than “made.” By this I mean that in the telling (too much expository writing, too much descriptive writing) we are too aware of the writer at work. Like a stagehand, setting the scene. Like a lecturer, instructing an audience. As a result, the reader is given no active role. No imaginative leap is made into the “surrounds” of the story. The reader does not find himself/herself at the center but is “outside” simply listening to the writer, simply looking at what the writer is looking at.

In good weather, I would read stories out by the pool. We had a lovely redwood house in those days, built by a Frank Lloyd Wright devotee in the Prairie style, and surrounded by ten wooded acres. In the pasture beside the pool, our four horses could be seen grazing. Our peacocks roosted in the tall trees beside the red pole barn. In fall and winter I would read in my office. The house featured a floor-to-ceiling glass window with a northern exposure; when I tired of reading, I would lift up my eyes and sometimes see a winter storm approaching. I kept a fire blazing in the fireplace through the winter months. The dog often sat at my feet.

Summer vacations, I would take two bags of stories with me to the beach at Montauk. Once, I had a friendly note from a writer whose story I had rejected, trying me again, and commenting about the sand that had somehow made its way from the beach into her return envelope. Another time, a rejected writer returned my toothbrush. Don't ask.

If I liked a story, I would read it all the way through to the end. Then I would read it again. If I still liked it, I would set it aside in the small “maybe” pile, and return to the big pile stacked up next to my reading chair. Later, maybe the next day, or the day after that, I would return to the “maybe” pile for stories that had stayed with me, whose characters I could imagine outside the story, who had kept me company at the beach or during a snowstorm. I would re-read these stories, scribbling notes on what was working especially well in the story, what I liked, and why I liked it. Often enough, a “maybe” story would wind up on the reject pile. This was the most difficult part of the work. I learned soon enough that it wasn't my job to try to fix the story (though I was sometimes sorely tempted). Instead, I would scrawl my name on the standard rejection note that the Review used, with the comment, “Try me again.” Most writers did. This is how I came to correspond (if I may use this term) with the aforementioned Sand and Toothbrush writers. A short story writer myself, I had a tiny collection of notes of this kind from Roger Angell at The New Yorker (minus the sand and toothbrush), including one typed on what appears to be an ancient typewriter, perhaps once belonging to E.B. White or (as I'd like to imagine), Roger's mother Katherine. Many years later, I learned that Angell had sent 21 of these notes (“Your writing shows promise, in the future please feel free to submit your work directly to me”) to Ann Beattie before accepting the 22nd story. We live in hope (both writers and editors).

Thinking back on my years at the Antioch Review, perhaps this is what I loved best of all—reading in hope. In hope of hearing a new voice that would thrill and astonish, or break my heart, or repair the world.

Things end. Just like stories. Relationships fail. I left the Antioch Review in 1995, after a terrible row with the editor I met on that plane. Worse, in recent days the world has learned that Antioch College itself may come to an end. From its founding in the mid nineteenth century, Antioch has had a precarious existence. Ironically, the demise of Antioch College is directly linked to the creation of its many offspring—satellite campuses around the country that collectively are known as Antioch University. (The “flagship” campus of Antioch University, with a new multi-million dollar building, is located in Yellow Springs, but not on the campus of Antioch College. Got that?) For those who love her, it comes as no surprise that a group of alumni and former board members worked heroically to save Antioch College. Recently, they succeeded in raising enough cash to open the place in the fall. Praise be.

The good news is that the Antioch Review goes on, as it is connected to Antioch University and not directly to the College. With a circulation of around 5,000, it continues to end each year in the red, and each year the University “makes the red ink go away.” Whether this can be called a “subsidy” is a matter of interpretation, as is most things Antiochian. Somehow, the Review goes on publishing.

Some years ago, I published a piece called “Mr. Seale Goes to Antioch” that explored the relationship between “the college” and “the university” in the context of a visit to Antioch by former Black Panther member Bobby Seale. Re-reading it a few days ago, I see again how impossible it is for me to think about the Antioch Review without also thinking about Antioch College. Already in that piece, written in 2002, I was lamenting the possibility of a world without Antioch College, and, I see now, without the Antioch Review. The existence of both, it seems to me, is essential to our culture. These “little magazines,” linked as they often are to indispensable institutions of higher learning in our nation, represent the best of what our American culture has been able to produce in the republic of letters. The loss of even one of them diminishes us greatly. Nevertheless, things end. “In the midst of life we are in death.”

The End. As a child I often saw those two words on the big screen at the movies or on the last page of the book in my hands. As a reader, I discovered the same slippage of time on the page as on the screen, thrown toward the same certain end. I have always been ambivalent about endings, particularly with stories that I especially loved. Reading as a child, and then later at the Antioch Review, the pages fell away as I traveled through a time that seemed to me, even as a child, to be so thick—the time of my reading, the time of the story, the time that expired tick by tick as I waited—for what I knew was coming, what could not be prevented, what I had been reading for, yet what I surely did not want. Our ambivalence toward endings of every kind is not merely literary, but existential; it reflects the certain knowledge of the final descent to our own end. It is dreadful, yet we accept it, embrace it if we can. Reading is a kind of preparation for death. This is widely known, though rarely acknowledged.

We cannot claw back fragments from the debris of time, to make some new beginning or to block the finality of our own end. All writing that is good writing does not trick us in this regard, or give us false hope. What remains is the love, the love that I have felt for writers, many of them encountered in the pages of the “little magazines” such as the Antioch Review, for the characters they brought into this world through these long years, against all odds; for the many gifts they have given me, and for opening in me the capacity for pure, oceanic feeling. For helping me to develop a capacity to give and to receive love, and for making me more nearly human. This is why I read: To feel that I am alive and that I am not alone.

Thinking back on my reading life I realize how stories written by people I did not know opened my mind and my heart to receive the beauty and goodness that this world has to offer. Worlds upon worlds, there for me.

What world is this? What kingdom? What shores of what world?

I am grateful.

The stories that I read were not perfect but they were my friends. I didn't ask for perfection, only company. Some I will go back and re-read, some never. I will remember characters in these stories that I have known, writers whose work I helped publish, remember also those who have lent me books and those to whom I have given books, those I wrote for and those who wrote for me, and they will remind me in some mysterious way of how it was with me, long ago, alone in my bed on Lawrence Street, under the flashing light. Me, reading.

There is not a single day that my heart cannot find them.