What the Palisades Fire Took, and What it Left
ayear ago, I can remember exactly where I was standing when I was considering a familiar but newly significant question in the aisles of Santa Monica’s Angel City Books & Records. I was holding a slender, charmingly illustrated volume from 1938 called Carmen: The Story of Bizet’s Opera. Should I buy it or leave it behind?
I had weighed that exact yes-or-no question untold thousands of times across my 60-some years of book collecting. This time was different. Weeks earlier, excepting a few hastily grabbed items, my entire collection of something like 4,000 volumes, acquired one by one over all those decades, had turned to smoke and ash in the Palisades fire. The question before me was not just about this particular book, but about whether it made sense, in my late 70s, to begin collecting all over again.
I’d owned so many books in so many collecting areas that no one but me knew the extent of what I’d had, and even I’d forget the specifics from time to time. My film-book collection, no surprise given my nearly 30-year stint as a Los Angeles Times film critic, covered an entire wall. But I also had shelves upon shelves of hard-boiled crime fiction, including an impeccably jacketed first edition of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. I had many shelves more of Yiddish literature in translation, with an emphasis on Isaac Bashevis Singer, who’d personally signed a copy of his Nobel Prize speech to me.
There were also hundreds of Grosset & Dunlap’s Photoplay editions, books about the history of Montana (my wife’s home state), and the many volumes I’d bought while researching my joint biography of MGM titans Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. Then there were the one-off books I’d gotten because they had spoken to me. A first edition of George Eliot’s philo-Semitic Daniel Deronda; a colorful jacketed first of Zane Grey’s Rogue River Feud, bought to celebrate a family boat trip; a book on avian diseases by Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz.” All of it gone, suddenly, overnight. Book blogs mourned my loss, a distinction that was both affirming and heartrending.
[Read: The house where 28,000 records burned]
My books had almost defined me, providing comfort and order in a chaotic world. Almost a year on, I find myself fantasizing that my collection still exists in another dimension, like a book heaven, intact but eternally out of reach.
Perhaps the fire had been a sign, the universe trying to teach me about the impermanence of objects and the futility of collecting. Maybe the virtuous minimalists who mocked possessions were right. I’d read stories of people using the fire as an opportunity to start over. One couple we knew found in their loss a chance to live in central Paris—where, Notre Dame notwithstanding, the potential for a catastrophic fire was close to nil.
My wife and I were planning to stay in West Los Angeles, which made the prospect of collecting again feel like rebuilding a house in a floodplain. I was also a lot older than my late friend Ricky Jay had been when, at 45, he began a new collection of magic-related memorabilia after he lost an earlier one. Regardless of how much time I had, I knew I would never be able to replace the many one-of-a-kind items I had so lovingly amassed, such as a gorgeous Soviet first of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry in a custom clamshell case.
All of this and more went through my head in that should-I-or-shouldn’t-I moment in the Santa Monica bookstore.
The book in question was not particularly rare or noteworthy, but something about it appealed to me. Finally, I listened to my emotions: I wanted it, I could afford it, so I went ahead and bought it. I’d deal with those larger questions later.
But I didn’t ponder; I didn’t reckon; I simply kept buying. On a long-planned trip to New Zealand a couple of months later, I skipped trekking and camping and took in the country’s exemplary used-book stores instead. I found a Bashevis Singer book that had started its journey in a Singapore bookstore, or so the imprint on its elaborate plastic dust jacket claimed. I replaced some of my incinerated Anthony Trollopes with an Everyman’s Library set of his beloved Chronicles of Barsetshire—though the cost of shipping these six volumes home made the frugal Wellington dealer blanch.
One of my oldest friends, an artist in Greece who collects inexpensive paperbacks with vivid covers, parted with “the prize” of his own collection—a beautiful Penguin edition of Cain’s Serenade—to help me along with mine. He wrote that he hoped that the book would serve as “a kind of ‘talisman’” for me, “carrying with it all the best into the future.” A friend in Los Angeles returned the copy of Babel’s Benia Krik: A Film-Novel that I had given him years earlier. Dealers I knew offered discounts, subsidies, even books for free. In December, a box of books arrived unexpectedly from our legendary Montana landscaper and tree specialist, who’d heard about our loss and wanted to “help build back” our library.
These touching gestures reminded me that books were restorative, bringers of joy as well as knowledge. They recalled a talk I once gave to book collectors at UCLA, in which I invoked the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, the restoration of a shattered world. Though book collecting is often a solitary activity, I came to see that gathering so many voices and far-flung volumes into a unified collection is “a way to heal the world one book at a time.”
Gifts from friends and colleagues also forced more practical considerations about what I actually wanted for this new collection, and where I would put it. Among the first pieces of furniture we got for our new rental home were sizable bookcases. Yet they are still modest compared with what I was used to, and I didn’t want to fill them up too quickly. My previous collecting goals had been encyclopedic, but this “the more the merrier” aesthetic would now be impractical, for reasons of both space and time.
Casting about for inspiration about a sustaining collecting path, I remembered an impulse purchase made just after returning from New Zealand: The Miniature Library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, a book that describes everything you ever wanted to know about the nearly 600 miniature books, none taller than a few centimeters in the renowned dollhouse created in the 1920s for the wife of King George V. This tiny library, which had gardening books, the complete works of Shakespeare, and some 200 handwritten volumes by the likes of Thomas Hardy and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was not meant to be comprehensive. It was meant to “reflect the literary landscape of the time.”
Though no one is handwriting any books for me, tiny or otherwise, this dollhouse library helped me see how to proceed. My new collection would be spare and potent, a miniature version of my former enormity.
[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]
I turned to stalwart websites such as Bookfinder to locate works that had been particularly painful to lose, including Abraham Joshua Heschel’s magisterial The Sabbath and Alfred Kazin’s memory piece A Walker in the City. I replaced old friends and made new ones. My miniature Montana collection, which fits snugly on a single shelf, mixes beloved classics such as The Last Best Place anthology with newfound gems, including Copper Camp: Lusty Story of the Richest Hill on Earth, a colorful 1943 history of the booming mining town of Butte.
If a shelf becomes too tight, I feel more comfortable culling now than I ever had been before the fire. There turned out to be something satisfying about the discipline involved in creating a personally meaningful collection within these constraints.
The damage of loss, of course, is not so easily overcome. Whenever I see a photograph in a newspaper or magazine of someone else’s still-intact library, I wince and have to turn the page, and it will be that way for a while. But when I enter my office and experience my new collection, admiring the trimness and focus of what I’ve done, I feel something like the calm I felt before.
The fire did not release me to become someone else. It did not liberate me from my past so that I could try on a new kind of life. Instead, it helped me see what it is about my life and myself that I very much want to keep, regardless of the circumstances. And it turns out that managing to stay myself amid the chaos of the past year was more of an accomplishment than I’d realized. Maybe not miraculous, but something of value nevertheless.