Call me…. I have stood with Ishmael on the piers that surround the city, with the other Manhattoes, staring seaward, more times than I can count. I have voyaged with him to Nantucket and signed the articles, met Queequeg and seen Captain Ahab. I have looked seaward and yearned to spot the great white whale. But, yea, long about page 275 and facing 500 more, I abandon the adventure and leave Melville to sail alone.
I love Moby Dick for the language and the story. Still, it remains after decades part of an exclusive shelf: Books begun and begun again, ones that I would really like to finish but somehow never do. Books distinguished from those begun and discarded as soon as the brain reaches an understanding as to their true worth(lessness), those for which Dorothy Parker reserved this ignominious fate: “This is a book that should not be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” The latter category is vast, the former very select.
The books I am talking of are the “retries.” A retry is not the book the reader pick ups and continues reading after a 15-year interim, as in the case of, say, a history of the Spanish Inquisition or the fall of the Byzantine Empire. (Because, really, how many auto-da-fé cook-offs does one need to witness, how many early medieval emperors does one need to know?) The true retry calls upon the reader to go back to the beginning, the first page, the first “Call me Ishmael.”
The weekly pic: the smokehouse has a draw.
On the shelf of retries, just to the left of Moby Dick, sits A Confederacy of Dunces. It is a book I am contractually obligated by the Motherland to read to its end at least once before I die. To date, I have read, and reread, and reread, the forward by fellow Louisianan Walker Percy, the description of how he discovered the brilliance of John Kennedy Toole’s manuscript only after the mother of the writer, who had committed suicide, pressed it into Percy’s hands so many times he could no longer refuse it. Yet I have never ventured more than halfway through the actual story. I have, on at least a dozen occasions, stood alongside Ignatius J. Riley in front of the D. H. Holmes department store, where together we watch — he of the green hunting cap squashed on his fat head and I of the gray tweed flat cap —both of us judging the crowds for signs of bad taste. Inevitably, though, somewhere around page 185, Ignatius J. and I part company. The story is laid aside in a place where, fully intending on picking it back up later that day, the next, or the next week, I never do.
Eventually, I recognize the inevitable. I dust and then shelve Mr. Toole next to Messrs. Melville, Faulkner, Marquez, Gogol….
I’m making this confession publicly now not because I expect it to shame me into actually completing these works. But rather, there is the hope and dream that it gives more than a little insight into why I never quite finish weeding my row of turnips. Why I lay aside the hoe only to pick it up again a week later and start at the very, very familiar beginning.