Lapham Rising by Roger Rosenblatt Read Free Book Online

fusses elsewhere.
    So little by little, I got rid of them by dumping them on the threshold of the Quogue Free Library, which, after all, is committed to preserving that clamor. I began with the most expendable: the complete James Whitcomb Riley, the too-complete Galsworthy, and Proust, who long had been getting on my nerves. Then I reached to pluck the higher orders of the likes of Swift, Mann, Eliot (George and T. S. both), Ellison, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Yeats, Márquez, Cavafy, Conrad, Baldwin, Malamud, Nabokov. Marianne Moore adjusted her tricorner and came along peaceably, as did Austen and Kafka, who said he had seen it coming. Chaucer chuckled. Emily Dickinson said she needed a change of scene anyway. But Twain, surprisingly, threw a hissy fit, and Joyce, as one might have expected, blew a gasket. Hemingway told me to go fuck myself. Off they went nonetheless, until there was but onework left on the shelves, right side, third shelf from the bottom, leaning casually against the wall—a single humble yet confident, self-aware yet not self-involved, brief yet eternally expansive book. This one I could not bring myself to toss. It made no unseemly noise. It did not plead for its life. It did not preen or strut. It was, in fact, the English language’s supreme argument against noise, against pleading, preening, and strutting. See? Everything makes sense if you give it a chance.
    “And while we’re on the subject”—he never gives up—“what exactly is so great about Dr. Johnson? Everything you quote by him just sounds crabby to me, like someone else I know.”
    “Honor and principle, Mr. Tail. Honor and principle. Here’s a story for you. While Dr. Johnson was working on his dictionary, which took him years and years, the Earl of Chesterfield, his so-called patron, was supposed to give him money to live on. But Lord Chesterfield never gave him a cent, with the result that Johnson was often at the point of starvation. When the dictionary was finished, however, and it began to be acknowledged as the monumental work of the age, Lord Chesterfield suddenly wanted to get in on the act and offered Dr. Johnson his help. Dr. Johnson wrote him the following: ‘Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and when hehas reached the ground encumbers him with help?’ Brilliant, no?”
    He stares at me as though I were wearing a gorilla suit. “Do you realize you’ve told me that story a dozen times?”
    “Yes. Yes, I do.” I pat his head.
    He sniffs, then snorts. “And look at your bedroom, which has nothing in it but a box spring and a mattress. And the parlor, which has no furniture at all. And the living room, in which you never set foot, with its tattered sofa—”
    “It was you who scratched it to shreds, Mr. Tail.”
    “Sure, throw that in my face! I was just a puppy!” He shakes his fur into place. “Still, all of that would be excusable if you could not afford to live like a human being.”
    “Is that your standard?” I ask him. “Getting and spending? Yearning? You want a monument to yearning, like Lapham’s over there?”
    “But you’re rich!” he says.
    “I am not rich.”
    “You are! I’ve been in the Money Room.”
    He refers to a room in the house where I keep my fortune, whatever it amounts to, in stacks of cash bundled with paper bands. I refuse to use a bank not because I disapprove of banks but because I cannot abide talking about money, which is what they do in banks. My money comes from a couple ofbest-sellers I wrote many years ago. I have no idea how much of it there is, and I don’t care. This drives Hector up the wall.
    “Why don’t we ever spend some of that money?” He is working himself into a rabieslike lather.
    “On whom would I spend it?” I ask gaily.
    “Well, you’re going to lose it one day, mark my words.” He paces, agitated. “A Money Room! You’ll have a flood or a fire, and poof! All gone! You can take that