December 16, 2013
Monday

“Well, I suppose I may as well tell you what prompts me to do these things,” he said . . . .
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1821-1881
Russian author

A friend who read my post about ten of the books that have stayed with me marveled at my ability to remember when I had acquired each, except maybe the yearbook (because the date is right there on it, and I was on the staff that produced it), and the one that was a gift of the author. I told him that I can’t do this for every book that I have, that sometimes it’s just which half of what year. But for some, I can tell you the exact date, sometimes the time of day, and the circumstances that led to the acquisition.

On December 16, 1966, I bought the Signet Classics mass market paperback edition of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, a “new translation” by Andrew R. MacAndrew, published in 1962 and still in its first printing. It cost $.95. Pennsylvania imposed a 5% sales tax then, bringing the total to $1.00.

I was a college sophomore living with my parents. All of my basic needs were taken care of, including the use of a Texaco charge card to get me from school to home in the 1965 turquoise Corvair my parents had procured for this purpose. For “walking around money” I depended on a modest income stream from performing with the Harrisburg Symphony (special below union scale — $6 for a rehearsal, $10 for a performance, as I recall, thus about $45 for each concert) and from babysitting.

As I stood in the News Center West that December afternoon, just past 4:00, with dusk already gathering, I had exactly $1.00 to my name, until Christmas gifts came in or babysitting gigs paid off. Nevertheless, I opened my wallet and handed that lone bill over, and left with a 693-page novel that “is regarded the world over as the most shattering vision of nihilism in action to come out of Russia.” Just the thing to while away the late December evenings I would spend looking after the Lenker kids around the corner.while their parents attended many holiday events!

What motivated me that day, my finals completed and academic responsibilities fulfilled until mid-January? Had I nothing else to do, no other books to read? Was I taking a course in Russian literature in the second semester? You are probably way ahead of me here. I did it to get a young man’s attention.

I’ve written about him before, even used his real name, something I rarely do without permission. You can read the saga of who he was and how I came to know him at the appropriately titled “For Your Edification and Amusement.”  I bought that book because David Good, a 25-year-old Navy veteran who I thought was “the most worldly, most sophisticated, most mature individual I could ever hope to know” said it was the most compelling book he had ever read.

We had not yet had a date. We had German class together, and we’d chatted each other up, in the lounge area before and after class, sometimes at a back table in the library, in an alcove behind a set of protruding stacks. Although I was going out from time to time with one boy or another in my circle of friends, I had no exclusive arrangement, a fact I made clear that day when David Good asked me about my status. “Would it be okay if I called you over vacation?” he said. Thus did I find myself an hour later using my last dollar to buy a book to read in order to be able to talk intelligently about it to a handsome young man who had urged me to read it.

If you’ve read the piece I linked to above, you know that, indeed, David did call, and we spent the early months of the next semester going out from time to time. I still have the program from a concert we went to. My abiding love for Charles DeMuth’s The Figure 5 in Gold was born while holding David’s hand at the state museum in Harrisburg. And, of course, I still have my copy of The Possessed.

You might think that the epigraph I set for this piece, so cleverly apropos of the narrative that follows, is something I pulled up from my vast and detailed memory of the content of this book. And I wish I could say that it was. In truth, though, I can’t remember a single thing about the book, and I know only that it’s a “shattering vision of nihilism” because that’s what it says on the back cover.

The line I quoted is at the bottom of page 50. There is a lined 3×5 index card stuck in there, exactly the kind of card I used boxes of in those days. It is quite possible that the position of that index card marks the farthest point I read in this dense and dramatically complicated text.

It is a certainty that I will never read The Possessed in its entirety unless, some day, some writing mentor tells me I absolutely should. If that happens, I will have to acquire a trade paperback or a hardback copy, because I can no longer comfortably read the tiny print on the 7×4.5-inch pages. But the copy I bought with so much hope 47 years ago today, and which has traveled with me to six subsequent dwelling places, will stay with me as long as I possess books, as symbol, and remembrance.