Sample text for A certain somewhere : writers on the places they remember / edited by Robert Wilson.
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Paradise Regained
Thomas Mallon
Flannery O'Connor once complained of "being sawed in two without ether" when her mother insisted on straightening up the room in which she lived her literary life. Repainting was even worse: "It was like the earthquake in Chile," the novelist wrote in 1960. "It will never be done again while I live."
Those who live large parts of their imaginative lives in the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library made similar moans during a sixteen-month displacement (July 1997 to November 1998) while the vast octogenarian room was shut for a $15 million renovation. The whole institution only managed to function by an unthinkable series of dispersals and improvisations. The reference librarians moved down to the first floor; the Xeroxers, to the south staircase in Astor Hall. It was a kind of anxiety dream, like being told someone had decided to rearrange the paintings in the Frick, the only other New York space that ever seemed unalterable.
For a year and a half one waited through long delays in unfamiliar rooms for the books one absolutely had to have, all the while wondering just what the renovators were doing up there on the third floor and whether, when it was over, despite everything they'd promised, you and your fellow refugees might be returning to some horrible new Penn Station for the printed word.
For thirty years, no matter where school or work or travel has taken me, the New York Public Library has been a biblio-Gibraltar, standing through every change in my own fortunes and New York City's. At sixteen, suffering through my first summer job in an office down at Thirty-seventh Street, I would escape each day, four blocks north, to the library's stone steps to eat my lunch. Without enough time to go inside, I would have my sandwich and watch the pedestrians on Fifth Avenue and dream about putting them all into a book that would achieve eternal life in the building behind me?an even grander possibility than having someone read it.
A decade later, in the power-failure summer of 1977, as the city sat in fiscal receivership and lurched into its years of arson and four-digit murder rates, I went as a graduate student to read the personal papers of Georgian poets in the pin-drop silence of the library's Berg Collection. The room that housed it was a good deal more spruce looking than the rest of the building, whose griminess and fatigue, inside and out, made it difficult to believe the library's prospects were any brighter than New York's.
A misapprehension, to be sure. In the twenty years since, the library's slow, steady revival has been the chief harbinger of New York's own recovery. When, in 1981, Vartan Gregorian picked up his new broom (and, in the other hand, a vacuum for philanthropic dollars), the NYPL's patrons got used to seeing stretches of marble coming suddenly clean, old murals being rendered visible, exhibition rooms sporting new paint and gold leaf. Eventually, to the building's immediate west, Bryant Park, filled for years with muggers and syringes, became something more like the Boboli Gardens, sitting atop the library's vast new warren of underground stacks.
The reading room, at the summit of all this rejuvenation, remained more or less untouched. Reassured by everything else going on, I and most other patrons thought that was fine. The plaster ceiling might be flaking and one might occasionally notice glue traps trying to hide themselves from readers and mice, but nothing could seriously detract from the room's gravity-defying grandeur. Look, God, no columns! To receive your requested book, as ever, the only bona fides you had to present was the desire to see it.
By the mid-1980s, possessed of a contract for my work in progress, I was entitled to a key to the Wertheim Study, a ceilingless module squared off by some bookshelves in the reading room's southeast corner. But I never applied for the privilege. The writers in there struck me as aristocrats who'd built themselves a dull little private chapel when right outside it they could have all of Chartres.
The reading room eventually showed up on the pages of some books I researched there. One reviewer of my study of plagiarism took me to task for interrupting a narrative of literary detection to marvel about the place and its procedures. I was describing my search for the Victorian volumes in which I hoped to find one plagiarist's smoking gun:
One waits for the slips to travel through the pneumatic tubes to the stacks, and then, just minutes later, the pink number matching one's ticket lights up on the board in South Hall, and there, at the counter, are the books: a miracle of ingenuity and municipal munificence, more satisfying than the autoprogrammed cassette that records itself and keeps, like a warm dinner, in the VCR.
The reviewer was right: The wonder of the reading room had got the better of me, and I didn't get back to my story until a whole paragraph had gone by.
Years ago, after being shooshed by a librarian, Holly Golightly (or, at least, Audrey Hepburn) pronounced the reading room not half as nice as Tiffany's, and urged George Peppard to vamoose with her lest the place disrupt their romantic day of exploring New York. To me, though, the room?whose pink-numbered deliveries could be everything you hoped for or terrible disappointments?was as romantic as any place in the city. In my novel Aurora 7, it becomes the place where the sex-starved Father Tommy Shanahan declares love to the art history student for whom he's fallen a little earlier in the day. I have him rush up the library steps with some lilies that he's swiped from the altar of St. Agnes's on Forty-third Street. Racing past the guard and into the reading room, he finds the young woman at one of the tables, contemplating a book of Renaissance paintings. He hands her the flowers, which drip water onto the nose of Titian's Woman at the Mirror.
And so, just before Christmas, with such a long-standing mental stake in the place, I didn't exactly bound up to the reopened reading room. I approached nervously, pausing at the entrance to notice, straight off, that the two old phone booths (real ones, with seats), behind which lines of impatient callers always formed, were gone. Turning left into South Hall?one of the room's two great halves, split by the book-claim station and its dumbwaiters?I now expected a fusillade of novelty that I was sure to scorn.
My first sensation was of an unfamiliar brightness. New lights shone on the ceiling and bookcases; old blackout paint had been scraped from some of the windows; and all 1,620 bulbs in the eighteen chandeliers appeared?as never before?to be working. The bronze table lamps, all shined up after eighty-seven years, seemed lit from without as well as within.
But all this new illumination soon revealed a space that looked remarkably the same. The little, rarely used lecterns at the edge of some tables were still there, and the tables themselves, gleaming now like their lamps, had been inset with new electrical outlets in the most unobtrusive way imaginable. One would swear the brass-rimmed connections had been there all along, and merely polished up like everything else.
There was, I thought, a different sound. One had heard keystrokes in here for years, but now they made a sort of white-noise waterfall. Sure enough, the computer terminals holding various reference databases have claimed more than a quarter of the tables on South Hall's left side, and new signs urge please watch your wallets, purses, laptops, and other personal belongings. And yet there are more seats than there used to be for the unlaptopped and logged off, because the old Wertheim Study has been dismantled and moved down to the second floor.
The great reading room can once more stretch out to its natural length. It's the same in North Hall. The microfilm readers have been permanently banished to another precinct of the library, and the big, featherbedded Xeroxing department has been shrunk into the book-retrieval station between the two halls. (There's also, just in time for the millennium, a spot for self-service copying.) Even with the addition of some handsome information booths, the general feeling is what one gets in the newly restored Grand Central?everything has been cleared of clutter and opened up. Walking along the same old polished terra-cotta tiles, one reaches the edges and ends of the place rather than a lot of blind alleys. At the far-northeast end, I even discover an emergency exit I've never seen before. The two halls have achieved a new sort of parity, since books can henceforth be claimed in both of them?even-numbered call slips in South, odd-numbered in North. The lighted digits announcing the books' arrival now run like a headline ribbon in Times Square.
Pacing the perimeter of both halls, I see all the familiar stretches of books?the green Harvard Classics and the red Who's Whos?standing up as though nothing had ever happened. And the inveterates, those readers who've been here day after day for years and years?the dapper, squinting man who looks like a drawing of Voltaire; the fellow with the port-wine mark on his forehead?are all sitting as though nothing had ever happened, as if the sixteen off-limits months had been no more than a sixteen-minute wait for their latest call number to flash. After a while, for all the keystroking, the place even begins to sound the same: When a book is dropped, it still echoes with a great, solemn thud.
Up above, the ceiling ornaments have been repaired and regilded, and the three James Wall Finn paintings, too far gone for restoration, have been replaced by entirely new productions: Yohannes Aynalem's powder-blue skies filled with great pink clouds, three painted rosy dawns over what is now the Rose Main Reading Room, named for the four children of Frederick Phineas Rose and Sandra Priest Rose, donors of the $15 million with which all the work was carried out.
The same quotation from Milton remains inscribed above the great room's doorway:
A Good Booke Is The Precious Life-Blood Of a Master Spirit, Imbalm'd and Treasur'd Up on Purpose To a Life Beyond Life.
Passing back under these lines and going back down the steps, I'm aware of my relief, but I begin to recall something Miltonic that's missing, that's been gone, in fact, for years from its wall space above the next-to-last landing on the north staircase: that enormous painting of the blind poet dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters. Where did it ever go?* Even now I can remember the young women looking at Milton with such expectancy, awaiting the words they were about to receive?feeling what I've always felt climbing those stairs.
1999
*I've since learned that the painting, done in 1877 by Mihály Munkácsy, now hangs in the library's Edna Barnes Salomon Room, on the third floor.
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: United States Description and travel Anecdotes, Voyages and travels Anecdotes, Authors Travel United States Anecdotes, Authors Travel Anecdotes, Travelers' writings