Buddy's Book list: Henry Miller, Durrell, E.B. White

I've finished "The Custom of the Country", Edith Wharton's ode to female awfulness- in short a gripping tale of deceit based on amoral and remorseless greed. Undine Spragg keeps an eye on her rivals, though they hardly appear in the novel excpet as spurs to Undine's avarice. It ends as one of them, her country gal-pal Indiana Frusk becomes an Ambassadress, something the divorced Spragg can never achieve. "Mrs Spragg... yielded to the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity." & "Her incessant movements were not the result of shyness: she thought it the correct thing to be animated in society, and noise and restlessness were her only notion of vivacity." Edith Wharton Rules! I was outpaced by Masterpiece The-A-ter, and their Bleak House lapped mine, so I have laid it aside. City Room, Arthur Gelb's reminiscences of The New York Times, and Kay Boyle's turgid "Being Geniuses Together" have both been waiting patiently, half-read while I enjoyed Edith and Dickens. Both were picked up again at inopportune passages. Gelb has just emerged from red-baiting, and his drama critic years and all that is ahead seems to be labor disputes and the blackout. Boyle thought she had tuberculosis, and poor as dirt, accepted the hospitality of a couple, the male half of whom she gets pregnant by. He dies quickly, presumably to keep his production of ersatz Olde English verse to a minimum. She quotes too much of it, though too much is a debatable measure when giving us lines like: "Lyke a marygolde O the wynde has notte anye nose to mayke". Her autobiography is alternated with chapters of McAlmon's. The latter is eloquent, propulsive and fascinating. Here on Hemingway (who McAlmon published): "It's difficult to say who started the attitude in writing which one finds in "My Old Man".... It isn't so much a style or an approach as an emotional attitude: that of an older person who insists upon trying to think and write like a child." McAlmon was an assiduous drinking partner of Joyce's and somehow ended up piecing together the last fifty pages of Ulysses from the incoherent notes he was handed. (the first typist had destoyed the text as being obscene) He dragged Joyce home many nights and had him carried upstairs to the belligerant beetle-browed Nora. He also knew Wyndham Lewis well, Pound, and of course Hemingway. Interlarded with his tales are Boyle's maudlin, starry writings. The previous owner of this volume has a strange jabbing notational style. Sometimes she jabs her inkpen at the book when she is stirred by it, though often it appears to be just nervousness. Lee Hibbib was her name, and her marginalia is.. in total: Oh, Wow, Baby, Interesting, Class, Key, Am! and Ha! She prefers Boyle to McAlmon, with whom I have to say she shares certain qualities. Buddy has mauled the corner of the next book waiting, a biography of E.B. and Katherine White. It is only his second book. His first was the correspondence between Larry Durrell and Henry Miller. If I could only get him to take my current book and eat the Kay Boyle out of it.

At the auction

My dog, Mangelina Jolie

Will and I were taking the dregs of modernism, the unusable Herman Miller chair bases, the powdered box cushions, the warped and popped Rosewood veneers, the split fiberglass forms, curls of cracked bent plywood, busted Italian lamps to the dump in Fremont. They call it a "transfer station" I believe. All the refuse is thrown into the pit and this is pushed by a bulldozer into a deeper pit containing large dumptrucks which transfer it to another spot. The last time I was here, I was throwing hundreds of schoolhouse pull-down maps into the pit, like they were javelins. I had sold dozens, maybe a couple of hundred. It seemed that they supported the store. These were the leftovers. Places no one wanted. The dump is, of course infernal. The thirty-foot-deep pit glows red from the taillights of the trucks backed up to it.
Driving back, Will suggests we stop at the Humane Society. Just for a lark. We pull into its lot. There is no empty parking space. It is packed, on a weekday. People are bringing in dogs, or rescued cats. Most seem to be shopping for dogs, though I suspect one retiring lady is lingering near the wall of cats for a reason. The staff is harrassed but friendly. We see three adult pit bulls, all very sweet, a border collie who beckons calmly, and many and various excited yelpers. I say that we should come back when I am ready for a dog. So many of these are already spoken for, and so many people are there looking. It is heartening, but rather discomfiting to hear the emotions flow at each cage from each shopper. I discern a dim back room. In the first cage, almost too small to notice, there is a white puppy sitting next to a turd. He is almost all white, but there is a black patch over his eye. He is all unfocusable energy when I stop to talk to him.
His adoption, I see from the form, is pending. From my experience at garage sales I know that this means with enough effort, this puppy could be available again.
The receptionist calls the pending adopter. No--- His landlord says that insurance won't cover a tenant with a pit bull, and the puppy is supposedly a pit bull mix. When he was dropped off, the rescuers said they knew his mother was a pit bull. I look at the perfectly dogshaped infant. He is more of a Thurber dog than any other known breed. His snout seems more slender than a pit's, as do his shoulders, and his eyes are deep brown and very emotive. He does not have the stolid blunt Eastern European look of pits I have seen. He has a boxy head. Maybe he has some dalmatian. He is sort of like Peggy, the dalmatian I adopted in Little Rock, my faithful companion for roundabout four years, who rode in a truck from Arkansas to Seattle with me, and who died eleven years ago of old age complicated by euthanasia.
Unprepared to own a dog, nevertheless I find that I am determined. Some deep paternal instinct has been triggered. No force on earth could make me leave without him. I am handed the forms which might qualify me. It goes through. I get him and paying (140 dollars) the cashier asks what hisname will be. She named him Jason. Will asks "What's your favorite movie?". Then who is my favorite movie star and so on. Does Will think it suitable to name the dog Brad Pitt-Bull? How could one name a new being after a newsworthy person? I mean if I did love Brad Pitt immoderately enough to saddle the puppy with the name what would become of future developments? How could one trust that the actor wouldn't embarrass all the puppies named after him by something as peculiar as his recent embrace of everything his current bedmate endorses? What if I had been an Aniston partisan and had a dog that unfavorably reminded me that Mangelina Jolie was not the role model I had envisioned? When we come home and after short deliberation I name him Buddy.