Modern life

In the 1970s I belonged to the Minimum Cost Housing Group at McGill University in Montreal. Our research included third world slums, alternative technology, composting toilets, well, that was the seventies. We published and sold booklets—Stop the Five Gallon Flush was the most successful. Around 1978 I thought it would be a good idea to combine all the publications in a book—after all, this was the era of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Domebook. I didn’t have much success finding a trade publisher. I did get one positive response from Bill Strachan,

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In a spirited talk at Purdue University, the noted biographer Stacy Schiff was asked what advice she might give to aspiring writers. “Your only job is to make the reader turn the page,” was one of her answers. Pithy, and true. Years and years ago, before she became a famous biographer, Stacy was an assistant editor at Viking, my editor when I was writing Home. Later, when I was setting out to write a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted I too asked her for advice. “You need to learn everything about your subject,” she counseled,

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It is the third year of my life without Shirley. The period of intense grief has passed, but with it also the immediacy of her absence. I still talk to her, and I still occasionally get the feeling that she will knock on my door, like a character in a Hollywood paranormal movie. I would tell her about what she’s missed: the time the Schuylkill breached its banks and our building got flooded; my visit two summers ago to Northeast Harbor in Maine, where we once spent a happy week; my last book, my next book. In truth, there is not much to relate.

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I have different ways of remembering. I have framed an old sketch I came across that shows her in the first home we shared. “Shirley at the table with lots of things” I had written. “And Vitold” she’d added. I buy flowers; for the house, I say to myself, but really for her. I keep her favorite necklet on her night-table, sometimes I rotate it with bracelets and other pieces. Once in a rare while I spray her Sisley Eau de Soir—there is just a little left. What will I do when it runs out? We talk: Good morning I say.

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When I started writing I found myself dealing with subjects about which I was not knowledgable: medieval history, economics, social mores. My habit was to go to the university library, find a relevant book in the card catalog, then go to that section of the stacks where I could leaf through many related books—old and new—on the same subject. I concentrated on reputable university and trade publishers, at least to start with. When I found a book that struck me as particularly apposite, I could make use of the writer’s reference notes and bibliography to dig deeper. 

Of course the library had curated its collection,

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The Zhejiang University Press of Hangzhou has published Chinese translations of Home and Waiting for the Weekend. A reader of the latter will find a postcard with an image of Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte,” which is referred to in the book and was on the jacket of the Viking edition, back in 1991. Nice. Zhejiang has also published a translation of One Good Turn, which is a natural history of the screwdriver and the screw. It’s printed on black paper–a first for me–and has a screw post binding.

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