the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt nine)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

In any case, she was about to turn her hand to something everyone would declare a masterpiece among masterpieces, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Stints of writing back in Red Cloud; at the Jaffrey Inn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire; on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy; at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire; and of course in her alcove at the apartment on Bank Street brought the book rapidly into being. Never had she labored with more confidence and clarity of purpose. She nimbly thought her way back to nineteenth-century New Mexico; and this first historical novel pleased her sufficiently that she would write two more: Shadows on the Rock, which takes place in late-seventeenth-century Quebec, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, laid in antebellum Virginia. Feeling more and more out of phase with her time, Cather found in historical fiction a consoling refuge and fresh idiom. She would finish the Archbishop in the autumn of 1926 and see it through serialization in The Forum between January and June. Knopf’s handsome edition appeared in September.

Cather had for many years been noting down hints and suggestions for a novel about the Southwest, her adopted landscape. Then it came to her in a flash: It was to center on the nineteenth-century priests who came to New Mexico to restore a Catholicism degraded by priestly concubinage and other outrages to the faith. She took her cue from an obscurely published book by Father William Howlett, Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf, D.D. “At last,” writes Cather in her open letter on the Archbishop, printed in the Catholic magazine Commonweal, “I found out what I wanted to know about how the country and the people of New Mexico seemed to those first missionary priests from France. Without these letters in Father Howlett’s book to guide me, I would certainly never have dared to write my book.” Machebeuf becomes her Father Joseph Vaillant, vicar general of the diocese of New Mexico. Father Jean-Baptiste Lamy, who brought order to Santa Fe, becomes the book’s hero, Archbishop Jean Marie Latour. Richly embroidered with inset tales (in the tradition of Cervantes) and passionate evocations of the uncanny Southwestern landscape, the novel tells of the friendship between these two men, sons of the Auvergne and friends from childhood, devoted to the same professionalism, the same piety. And each the chief event in the other’s life. “To attempt to convey this hardihood of spirit” was her aim, as she says in the Commonweal letter. They are Archbishop and Vicar General, superior and subordinate. Yet the emotion of friendship makes equals of them—as friendship does. Educated Frenchmen, they would know Montaigne’s irreducible and unsurpassable characterization of the beauty of friendship: “Because it was he, because it was I.” Add to this that the two missionaries are probable saints and you have the formula for the book.

the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt eight)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

Installed at the Hotel du Quai Voltaire in the summer of 1920, just across the Seine from the Louvre, Willa was absorbing atmosphere for the next book. “Anybody would be a fool,” she wrote to Blanche Knopf, “to shut themselves up with their own ideas about the city, this rather particular city, swimming in light outside. I feel very comfortable for fifty francs a day—food and lodging, that is—which is not much if you consider exchange.” On July fourth she wrote to her Aunt Franc describing the parade of French war orphans carrying American flags and sporting the names of their sponsoring states. “After the parade I stopped a number of the children and greeted them and one little boy would point to himself and say ‘I am Michigan,’ and a little girl would say ‘I am Tex-ass.’ I like to think of them and thousands more in the remote parts of France, growing up with the feeling that that flag is their friend.”

A journey to one of those remoter parts was necessitated on Aunt Franc’s behalf. Willa went to inspect G.P.’s grave at Villiers-Tournelle, about fifteen miles from where he fell at Cantigny. The name on the cross read “Cacher” rather than “Cather.” She arranged for this to be corrected.

the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt seven)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

The realities of farm life—crop failures, debt, despair—are rarely offstage. At the center of the book Ántonia tells of something she has witnessed: a tramp who gives a friendly wave and flings himself headfirst into a threshing machine. As one of the hands reports, “by the time they got her stopped, he was all beat and cut to pieces. He was wedged in so tight it was a hard job to get him out, and the machine ain’t never worked right since.”

No one who reads My Ántonia forgets the tale of Russian Peter and Pavel, driven from town to town and finally out of Russia after saving themselves, the last of a wedding party, by throwing the bride to a pack of wolves that have swarmed the wedding sledges: “[ T] he groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and threw the girl after him. He said he never remembered exactly how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in the front seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it before—the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early prayers.”

Jim and Ántonia are haunted by the story, which they keep to themselves as a private treasure. Like all lasting tales it belongs to legend, to timelessness; and gives pleasure despite its savagery, as the most lasting stories do. “For Ántonia and me,” says Jim, “the story of the wedding party was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel’s secret to anyone, but guarded it jealously—as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party had been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.”

the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt six)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

On her return from Pittsburgh to New York she’d set to work moving from 82 Washington Place to a spacious new apartment Edith had found for them at 5 Bank Street—seven high-ceilinged rooms, one flight up, with two coal-burning fireplaces, a good kitchen, plenty of light, and views to the sycamore-lined street. Best of all was a little study off the living room, in which much of the work to come would be done. They’d moved in on New Year’s Day of 1912.

Cather was never a lover of New York. To Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant she wrote: “You cannot go a block in any direction without encountering a steam hammer and an iron drill. All the pavements are being repaired and all the sewer pipes are being changed. The place couldn’t be more smelly and noisy so we shall be in a pitiable state when it does get hot.” But 5 Bank Street offered an elegant haven. And they had hired a first-rate French housekeeper and cook, Josephine Bourda, as well as someone they referred to as their “colored maid” to do the housework. Willa went each morning to the Jefferson Market, two blocks away, to pick out the produce and viands for lunch and dinner.

the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt five)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

It was in the course of 1899 that she met her great love, Isabelle McClung, daughter of Samuel McClung, a wealthy and prominent Pittsburgh judge, who had presided ten years earlier at the trial of Alexander Berkman, would-be assassin of Henry Clay Frick and companion of fellow anarchist Emma Goldman. The meeting took place in the dressing room of actress Lizzie Collier and the attraction was immediate. Cultivated, well traveled, literate, winningly feminine, Isabelle was at once Willa’s other half. The McClungs’ spacious, sternly Scotch home at 1180 Murray Hill Avenue, at the crest of the street, its front porch banked with honeysuckle, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, was a second home to Willa, and within two years she’d moved in, writing in a converted sewing room at the top of the house recalling her attic room in Red Cloud and presaging Godfrey St. Peter’s sewing room study in The Professor’s House. There she worked for the remainder of her Pittsburgh years, evidently much loved by Judge McClung and his wife, Fannie; and often returned, after moving to New York, to write in the third-floor sewing room. Isabelle was a willing muse. Willa would declare, following Isabelle’s death in 1938, that all her novels and stories had been written for Isabelle.

the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt four)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

Her attempt in March 1896 to secure a teaching position in Lincoln came to naught. She marked more time back in Red Cloud. Then, three months later, lightning struck. She received an offer from James Axtell at Pittsburgh’s Home Monthly—a resolutely middlebrow magazine with nothing to offend against prevailing Presbyterian tastes—to join their staff as an associate editor and contributor. E. K. Brown describes the magazine thus: “There were departments devoted to floriculture, fashions, the nursery, Christian endeavor; articles on cycling for pleasure, Angora cats, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the care of children’s teeth.”

Still, this was one of those pivotal moments in a life, determining much of what was to come. Here at last, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela meet to form the Ohio, was a city: pulsing, gritty, prosperous, ambitious. The names to conjure with were Westinghouse, Frick, Mellon, and, above all, Carnegie. Stupendous wealth justified itself in the brick and mortar of libraries and concert halls. The musical and literary life was on a different scale from anything she’d dreamt of. As Red Cloud was too small after Lincoln, so Lincoln was suddenly too small in light of Pittsburgh.

the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt three)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

She condemns wholesale the music of Mendelssohn. Not for nothing did Will Owen Jones call her his “meat-ax girl.” Her judgments were extreme. Among actresses, Helena Modjeska was a divinity, Lillie Langtry couldn’t act at all. As for Lillian Russell, she “not only lacks the power to portray emotion of any kind; she has no sense of humor, she is utterly without enthusiasm, indifferent alike to her part and her audience, even to her own charms. She is a plastic figure . . . All these stories about her improvement in acting and singing are fairy tales.” Willa’s energetic pose is of the all-knowing connoisseur, her self-assurance and voluminous opinions a court of final appeal. In these brash columns she strives for a knowingness that has got in the way of knowledge, asserting a worldliness of which she’s uncertain. She is young and not immune to posing. That column on Wilde may be the worst thing she was ever guilty of. But near to it is the following boorish passage for a column in the Courier: “I have not much faith in women in fiction. They have a sort of sex consciousness that is abominable. They are so limited to one string and they lie so about that. There are so few, the ones who did anything worth while; there were the great Georges, George Eliot and George Sand, and they were anything but women, and there was Miss Brontë who kept her sentimentality under control, and there was Jane Austen who certainly had more common sense than any of them and was in some respects the greatest of them all. Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn or anything without wine, women and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.”

the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt two)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

The elder personalities of Red Cloud proved nearly as influential on her as family. There was, for example, the Englishman William Ducker, outwardly a failure, who clerked in his prosperous brother’s dry goods store and in the evenings read Virgil, Ovid, Homer, and Anacreon with Willa. She would arrive at the University of Nebraska with a solid grounding in classical languages. Ducker was an amateur scientist as well, with a laboratory fitted up at home. Willa assisted him at his experiments. He was her first encounter with a freethinker and set the pattern for her own intellectual outlook. Edith Lewis reports that one afternoon “she was accompanying him home, and he said to her ‘It’s just as if the lights were going out, Willie.’ After she left him a child came running to call her back. She found Mr. Ducker dead, a copy of the Iliad lying open on the floor beside him.”

the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt one)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

With that 1915 trip, the mold of her life was set. She was deep into middle age: forty-one. She had followed, as she calls it in “Old Mrs. Harris,” “the long road that leads to things unguessed at and unforeseeable.” She did not make of herself a myth, as had Whitman and Frost. Her life does not have the beautiful or dire shape of parable, like Emily Dickinson’s or Hart Crane’s (or Hemingway’s, for that matter). She was bedeviled by neither mental illness nor alcoholism nor any other occupational hazard. She grew to hate most of modernity, declaring in 1936 in a famous adage, that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” and that she belonged to the severed past. Perhaps not surprisingly, her later work reached back deeper and deeper into history, to the early French settlers of Quebec in Shadows on the Rock, to slaveholding Virginians in Sapphira and the Slave Girl. At the end of her life she was at work on a long story or perhaps a novel meant to take place in fourteenth-century Avignon.

How to dramatize the slow, steady fire she was? All scholars of Cather are indebted to Edith Lewis’s Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s Willa Cather: A Memoir, both from 1953. Also from 1953 is Edward Killoran Brown’s Willa Cather, the first biography. Two additional biographies on the shelf are noteworthy. There is, from 1987, Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress, a vast tabulation of the data. And there is Sharon O’Brien’s Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, from 1986, which covers only the first half of the life.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt nineteen)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

“How are you?” Joe asked him. “How is business?”

“A pointed question, as ever, from the mouths of you two. What can I tell you. Business is not good. In fact, it’s very, very bad. As if television was not problem enough. Now we have hordes of Baptist lunatics down in Alabama, or some goddamned place, making big piles of comic books and setting them on fire because they are an offense to Jesus or the U.S. flag. Setting them on fire! Can you believe it? What did we fight the war for, if when it’s over they’re going to be burning books in the streets of Alabama? Then this Dr. Fredric Stick-Up-His-Ass Wertham, with that book of his. Now we have the Senate committee coming to town … you heard about that?”

“I heard.”

“They served me,” Sammy said.

“You got subpoenaed?” Anapol stuck out his lip.

“I didn’t get subpoenaed.”

“An oversight,” Joe suggested.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt eighteen)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

“Jewish superheroes?”

“What, they’re all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.”

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt seventeen)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

Dr. Fredric Wertham, a child psychiatrist with unimpeachable credentials and a well-earned sense of outrage, had for several years been trying to persuade the parents and legislators of America that the minds of American children were being deeply damaged by the reading of comic books. With the recent publication of the admirable, encyclopedic, and mistaken Seduction of the Innocent, Dr. Wertham’s efforts had begun to bear real fruit; there had been calls for controls or outright bans, and in several southern and midwestern cities local governments had sponsored public comic book bonfires, onto which smiling mobs of American children with damaged minds had festively tossed their collections.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt sixteen)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

Joe struggled to make sense of what he had heard. The false tone of the program, the bad accent of the narrator, the obvious euphemisms, the unacknowledged truth underlying the blather about roses and violins—that all of these people had been torn from their homes and put in this place, against their will, because they were Jews—all these inclined him to a feeling of dread. The joy, spontaneous and unreasoning, that had come over him as he heard his little grandfather’s sweet voice for the first time in five years subsided quickly under the swelling unease that was inspired in him by the idea of the old man singing Schubert in a prison town for an audience of captives. There had been no date given for the program, and as the evening went on and he mulled it over, Joe became more and more convinced that the pasteboard cheeriness and vocational training masked some dreadful reality, a witch’s house made of candy and gingerbread to lure children and fatten them for the table.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt fifteen)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. What’s your favorite place ever? In the whole city, I mean.”

“My favorite place ever in the whole city?”

“Right.”

“Including the boroughs?”

“Don’t tell me it’s in Brooklyn. That’s awfully disappointing.”

“Not Brooklyn,” Sammy said. “Queens.”

“Worse still.”

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt fourteen)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

Among the magicians who haunted Louis Tannen’s Magic Shop was a group of amateurs known as the Warlocks, men with more or less literary careers who met twice a month at the bar of the Edison Hotel to baffle one another with drink, tall stories, and novel deceptions. The definition of “literary” had been stretched, in Joe’s case, to include work in the comic book line, and it was through his membership in the Warlocks, another of whom was the great Walter B. Gibson, biographer of Houdini and inventor of the Shadow, that Joe had come to know Orson Welles, a semiregular attendee of the Edison confabulations. Welles was also, as it turned out, a friend of Tracy Bacon, whose first work in New York had been with the Mercury Theatre, playing the role of Algernon in Welles’s radio production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Between Joe and Bacon, they had managed to get four tickets to the premiere of Welles’s first film.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt thirteen)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

Dinner was a fur muff, a dozen clothespins, and some old dish towels boiled up with carrots. The fact that the meal was served with a bottle of prepared horseradish enabled Sammy to conclude that it was intended to pass for braised short ribs of beef—flanken. Many of Ethel’s specialties arrived thus encoded by condiments. Tracy Bacon took three helpings. He cleaned his plate with a piece of challah. His cheeks were rosy with the intensity of his pleasure in the meal. It was either that or the horseradish.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt twelve)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

“I can’t allow this to happen to my country,” he said. “Things are bad enough already.”

Sammy and Joe were not caught unprepared. “She’s not showing anything any kid can’t see at Jones Beach” was the line that they had decided on. Sammy gave it.

Joe said, “Just like at Jones Beach.” He had never been to Jones Beach.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt eleven)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

At this very moment, Joe’s attention was diverted by the sound of someone, somewhere in the drawing room, talking in German. He turned and searched among the faces and the blare of conversation until he found the lips that were moving in time to the elegant Teutonic syllables he was hearing. They were fleshy, sensual lips, in a severe way, downturned at the corners in a somehow intelligent frown, a frown of keen judgment and bitter good sense. The frowner was a trim, fit man in a black turtleneck sweater and corduroy trousers, rather chinless but with a high forehead and a large, dignified German nose. His hair was fine and fair, and his bright black eyes held a puckish gleam that belied the grave frown. There was great enthusiasm in the eyes, pleasure in the subject of his discourse. He was talking, as far as Joe could tell, about the Negro dance team the Nicholas Brothers.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt ten)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

The party thrown for Salvador Dalí that last Friday of the New York World’s Fair got considerably more play. It rated twenty lines in Leonard Lyons’s column, a mention in Ed Sullivan’s, and an unsigned squib by E. J. Kahn in “Talk of the Town” the following week. It was also described in one of Auden’s letters to Isherwood in L.A., and figured in the published memoirs of at least two mainstays of the Greenwich Village art scene. The guests of honor, the satrap of Surrealism and his Russian wife, Gala, were in New York to close The Dream of Venus, an attraction, conceived and designed by Dalí, that had been among the wonders of the Fair’s Amusement Area. Their host, a wealthy New Yorker named Longman Harkoo, was the proprietor of Les Organes du Facteur, a Surrealist art gallery and bookshop on Bleecker Street, inspired by the dreaming postman of Hauterives. Harkoo, who had sold more of Dalí’s work than any other dealer in the world, and who was a sponsor of The Dream of Venus, had met George Deasey in school, at Collegiate, where the future Underminister of Agitprop for the Unconscious was two years ahead of the future Balzac of the Pulps; they had renewed their acquaintance in the late twenties, when Hearst had posted Deasey to Mexico City. “Those Olmec heads,” Deasey said in the cab on the way downtown. He had insisted on their taking a cab. “That was all he wanted to talk about. He tried to buy one. In fact, I once heard that he did buy it, and he’s hidden it in the basement of his house.”

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt nine)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

Inevitably, he went back to Yorkville. There was a konditorei called Haussman’s across the street from the headquarters of the AAL, and from a table by the window Joe had a good view of the door to the building’s lobby and of the window. He ordered a slice of the house’s excellent Sacher torte and a cup of coffee that was unusually drinkable for New York, and waited. Another slice and two cups later there was still no sign of any Aryan-American at work. He paid his tab and crossed the street. The building’s directory, as he had already observed, listed an optometrist, an accountant, a publisher, and the AAL, but none of these concerns appeared to have any patients, clients, or employees. The building—it was called the Kuhn Building—was a graveyard. When he climbed the stairs to the second floor, the door to the AAL offices was locked. Gray daylight through the frosted glass of the door suggested that there were no lamps turned on inside. Joe tried the knob. Then he got down on one knee to examine the lock. It was a Chubb, old and solid, but if he’d had his tools, it would have presented no problem. Unfortunately, his picks and wrench were in a drawer beside his bed down at Palooka Studios. He felt around in his pockets and found a mechanical pencil whose metal pocket clip, attached to the shaft with a two-pronged collar, would serve well enough, suitably deformed, as a tension wrench. But there was still the matter of a pick. He went back downstairs and walked around the block until he found a child’s bicycle chained to a window grate on East Eighty-eighth Street. It looked like a new bike, sugary red, its chrome parts bright as mirrors and its tires glossy and stubbled. He waited for a moment to make sure that no one was coming. Then he grasped the shiny handlebars and, with savage jabs of the heel of his shoe at the bike’s front wheel, managed to spring loose a spoke. He wiggled it free of the wheel rim and then ran back to the corner of Eighty-seventh and York. Using an iron railing as a crimping form and the sidewalk itself as a rough file, he was able to fashion a serviceable pick from the thin strong wire of the spoke.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt eight)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

At a certain point about halfway through the crossing, he was taunted by a hopeful apparition. The mad spires of Ellis Island and the graceful tower of the New Jersey Central terminus came into conjunction, merging to form a kind of crooked red crown. It was, for a moment, as if Prague herself were floating there, right off the docks of Jersey City, in a shimmer of autumn haze, not even two miles away.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt seven)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

“You know I have no patience with nonsense,” said the Northeast’s leading wholesaler of chattering windup mandibles. He put the pages aside. “I don’t like it. I don’t get it.”

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt six)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

Monday dawned as the most beautiful morning in the history of New York City. The sky was as blue as the ribbon on a prize-winning lamb. Atop the Chrysler Building, the streamlined gargoyles gleamed like a horn section. Many of the island’s 6,011 apple trees were heavy with fruit. There was an agrarian tinge of apples and horse dung in the air. Sammy whistled “Frenesi” all the way across town and into the lobby of the Kramler Building. As he whistled, he entertained a fantasy in which he featured, some scant years hence, as the owner of Clay Publications, Inc., putting out fifty titles a month, pulp to highbrow, with a staff of two hundred and three floors in Rockefeller Center. He bought Ethel and Bubbie a house out on Long Island, way out in the sticks, with a vegetable garden. He hired a nurse for Bubbie, someone to bathe her and sit with her and mash her pills up in a banana. Someone to give his mother a break. The nurse was a stocky, clean-cut fellow named Steve. He played football on Saturdays with his brothers and their friends. He wore a leather helmet and a sweatshirt that said ARMY. On Saturdays, Sammy left his polished granite and chromium office and took the train out to visit them, feasting in his private dining car on turtle meat, the most abominated and unclean of all, which the Mighty Molecule had once sampled in Richmond and never to his dying day forgotten. Sammy hung his hat on the wall of the charming, sunny Long Island cottage, kissed his mother and grandmother, and invited Steve to play hearts and have a cigar. Yes, on this last beautiful morning of his life as Sammy Klayman, he was feeling dangerously optimistic.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt five)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

“Who was that?” Sammy said, stroking his cheek where she had brushed against him with her perfume and her alpaca scarf. “I think she might have been beautiful.”

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt four)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

The free and careless use of obscenity, like the cigars, the lyrical rage, the fondness for explosive gestures, the bad grammar, and the habit of referring to himself in the third person were wonderful to Sammy; until that summer of 1935, he had possessed few memories or distinct impressions of his father. And any of the above qualities (among several others his father possessed) would, Sammy thought, have given his mother reason enough to banish the Molecule from their home for a dozen years. It was only with the greatest reluctance and the direct intervention of Rabbi Baitz that she had agreed to let the man back in the house. And yet Sammy understood, from the moment of his father’s reappearance, that only dire necessity could ever have induced the Genius of Physical Culture to return to his wife and child. For the last dozen years he had wandered, “free as a goddamn bird in the bush,” among the mysterious northern towns of the Wertz circuit, from Augusta, Maine, to Vancouver, British Columbia. An almost pathological antsiness, combined with the air of wistful longing that filled the Molecule’s simian face, petite and intelligent, when he spoke of his time on the road, made it clear to his son that as soon as the opportunity presented itself, he would be on his way again.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt three)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

In 1939 the American comic book, like the beavers and cockroaches of prehistory, was larger and, in its cumbersome way, more splendid than its modern descendant. It aspired to the dimensions of a slick magazine and to the thickness of a pulp, offering sixty-four pages of gaudy bulk (including the cover) for its ideal price of one thin dime. While the quality of its interior illustrations was generally execrable at best, its covers pretended to some of the skill and design of the slick, and to the brio of the pulp magazine. The comic book cover, in those early days, was a poster advertising a dream-movie, with a running time of two seconds, that flickered to life in the mind and unreeled in splendor just before one opened to the stapled packet of coarse paper inside and the lights came up. The covers were often hand-painted, rather than merely inked and colored, by men with solid reputations in the business, journeyman illustrators who could pull off accurate lab girls in chains and languid, detailed jungle jaguars and muscularly correct male bodies whose feet seemed really to carry their weight. Held in the hand, hefted, those early numbers of Wonder and Detective, with their chromatic crew of pirates, Hindu poisoners, and snap-brim avengers, their abundant typography at once stylish and crude, seem even today to promise adventure of a light but thoroughly nourishing variety. All too often, however, the scene depicted on the label bore no relation to the thin soup of material contained within. Inside the covers—whence today there wafts an inevitable flea-market smell of rot and nostalgia—the comic book of 1939 was, artistically and morphologically, in a far more primitive state. As with all mongrel art forms and pidgin languages, there was, in the beginning, a necessary, highly fertile period of genetic and grammatical confusion. Men who had been reading newspaper comic strips and pulp magazines for most of their lives, many of them young and inexperienced with the pencil, the ink brush, and the cruel time constraints of piecework, struggled to see beyond the strict spatial requirements of the newspaper strip, on the one hand, and the sheer overheated wordiness of the pulp on the other.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt two)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

In all his life, Thomas Kavalier had never been up so early. He had never seen the streets of Prague so empty, the housefronts so sunken in gloom, like a row of lanterns with the wicks snuffed. The corners he knew, the shops, the carved lions on a balustrade he passed daily on his way to school, looked strange and momentous. Light spread in a feeble vapor from the streetlamps, and the corners were flooded in shadow. He kept imagining that he would turn around and see their father chasing after them in his dressing gown and slippers. Josef walked quickly, and Thomas had to hurry to keep up with him. Cold air burned his cheeks. They stopped several times, for reasons that were never clear to Thomas, to lurk in a doorway, or shelter behind the swelling fender of a parked Skoda. They passed the open side door of a bakery, and Thomas was briefly overwhelmed by whiteness: a tiled white wall, a pale man dressed all in white, a cloud of flour roiling over a shining white mountain of dough. To Thomas’s astonishment, there were all manner of people about at this hour, tradesmen, cabdrivers, two drunken men singing, even a woman crossing the Charles Bridge in a long black coat, smoking and muttering to herself. And policemen. They were obliged to sneak past two en route to Kampa. Thomas was a contentedly law-abiding child, with fond feelings toward policemen. He was also afraid of them. His notion of prisons and jails had been keenly influenced by reading Dumas, and he had not the slightest doubt that little boys would, without compunction, be interred in them.

He began to be sorry to have come along. He wished he had never come up with the idea of having Josef prove his mettle to the members of the Hofzinser Club. It was not that he doubted his brother’s ability. This never would have occurred to him. He was just afraid: of the night, the shadows, and the darkness, of policemen, his father’s temper, spiders, robbers, drunks, ladies in overcoats, and especially, this morning, of the river, darker than anything else in Prague.

the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt one)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

Thomas Masaryk Kavalier was an animated gnome of a boy with a thick black thatch of hair. When he was a very young boy, the musical chromosome of his mother’s family had made itself plain in him. At three, he regaled dinner guests with long, stormy arias, sung in a complicated gibberish Italian. During a family holiday at Lugano, when he was eight, he was discovered to have picked up enough actual Italian from his perusal of favorite libretti to be able to converse with hotel waiters. Constantly called upon to perform in his brother’s productions, pose for his sketches, and vouch for his lies, he had developed a theatrical flair. In a ruled notebook, he had recently written the first lines of the libretto for an opera, Houdini, set in fabulous Chicago. He was hampered in this project by the fact that he had never seen an escape artist perform. In his imagination, Houdini’s deeds were far grander than anything even the former Mr. Erich Weiss himself could have conceived: leaps in suits of armor from flaming airplanes over Africa, and escapes from hollow balls launched into sharks’ dens by undersea cannons. The sudden entrance of Josef, at breakfast that morning, into territory once actually occupied by the great Houdini, marked a great day in Thomas’s childhood.

After their parents had left—the mother for her office on Narodny; the father to catch a train for Brno, where he had been called in to consult on the mayor’s giantess daughter—Thomas would not leave Josef alone about Houdini and his cheeks.