ALAN LELCHUK
597
Arrowsmith, Adam Bede, R. U.R.,
he shook his head.
"Dismal. No wonder you kids grow up illiterate. With little interest in
reading. What do you want to be, do you have any idea?"
I didn't dare mention writing at that point, so I cited my other chief
pursuit. "An explorer."
He narrowed his gray eyes, revealing his high pallid forehead and
giving me a kind of inquisitor's look. He reflected, and took out a small note–
book.
"Here, see if you can get hold ofa life of Rimbaud. It might interest
you. And I'm also writing down a novel, for you, if you feel like reading it."
He nodded with authority, and left.
After he departed, George approached me, and asked if I knew who
the fellow was.
"What do you mean?"
He laughed. "He's a famous literary critic. Barrett is his name. He
must like you, he hardly ever talks to anyone here. Just picks up his books
and leaves."
I explained how he was just chastising me for my ignorance. "Barrett,
huh? What's he written?"
George gave me a few of his titles, and I managed to find one in stock:
Kipling's Legacy.
It
looked simple enough to read, but I had
QO
idea of all the
books he was talking about inside. Charles Edmund Barrett. I liked that
name, so formal, so long. Anyway, I began to hunt around for one of the
Rimbaud titles he had recommended. Instead I found first the novel he had
suggested,
Look Homeward, Angel
by Wolfe. And immediately, that after–
noon, sitting on my cushioned bench in a remote corner, away from the
stairway or door, I began reading that weighty tome, beneath the bare sev–
enty-five watt lightbulb.
To my surprise, I was immediately taken by the character Eugene
Gant, and captivated by the whipping, headlong prose of the author. I read
almost forty pages in that first sitting, interrupted three times by buzzer calls,
and managed to take the book home with me, sticking with it on the subway.
Jostled this way and that on my torn cane seat, I couldn't stop reading it, de–
spite the tightly-packed pages and poor light. And for the next week or so, I
was hooked that way, poring through the book everywhere, at work, on the
subway, at home, Even at school, in English class, while they discussed
Ivanhoe,
I followed Gant.
And when I finished it, I felt heady with excitement, and searched in
earnest for that life of Rimbaud, as well as being on the lookout for another
novelofthatWo~e.
Just around that time, while my informal reading education had begun,
