In 1960, the literary critic Leslie Fiedler delivered a eulogy for the ghost story in his classic study “Love and Death in the American Novel.” “An obsolescent subgenre,” he declared, with conspicuous relish; a “naïve” little form, as outmoded as its cheap effects, the table-tapping and flickering candlelight. Ghost stories belong to — brace yourself for maximum Fiedlerian venom — “middlebrow craftsmen,” who will peddle them to a rapidly dwindling audience and into an extinction that can’t come soon enough.
Not since Herman Melville’s publishers argued for less whale and more maidens in “Moby-Dick” (“young, perhaps voluptuous,” they dared to dream) has a literary judgment been so impressively off the mark.
I was bundled up in my sleeping bag shivering while the tent rattled loudly in the wind. I had already twisted toilet paper into earplugs and placed every extra article of clothing underneath me. But to no avail. Our campsite was on a glacier 11,000 feet high. We were waiting for midnight to begin our push for the summit.
Disappointment Cleaver, a massive rock buttress protruding out of Rainier’s eastern face like a crooked nose, looked down at our camp condescendingly. Earlier that day, I had watched the hundred climbers who attempted the summit come down. Their heads were bowed in defeat. Some said that the Cleaver was “too steep,” some “too dangerous,” and some, with shell-shocked faces, said: “The wind was blowing us off the mountain.” Half of my group had attempted Rainier a year before, only to turn around at The Cleaver.
At midnight, we put on our windbreakers, helmets, headlamps, and crampons. We began moving up the glacier roped together, unable to see much beyond our next step. Once we got to The Cleaver, I clipped onto fixed ropes to traverse a path no more than two feet wide, with a vertical drop below. I looked down. Even with my lamp turned on to its highest setting, I could see nothing but darkness.
I have carried this memory around with me all my life, but never looked at it very hard. What gave this disappointment its status over other childhood sorrows? Why did they fade to nothing, while this one became a vivid memory? Children are conformists. Was being given petals from the “wrong” flower so afflicting because it set me apart from the other children, making me seem different? Or was there something more to the memory than that? Something primitive, symbolic, essential. Are roses better than peonies? When I recoiled from the peony petals, had I stumbled on some knowledge of the natural world not otherwise available to a child of five?
Today, the Louvre possesses one of the world’s largest collections of frames, with around six thousand in use and another three thousand in storage. This year, all of them are being inventoried for the first time, under the direction of Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, a curator in the Department of Paintings. She and her team recently put together an exhibition, “Regards sur les Cadres” (“Looking at Frames”), which ends next month. The idea is “to interrogate the complex role of the frame,” Chastel-Rousseau said the other day. “The frame must valorize the painting. With a successful frame, you don’t see the frame. But if a frame is too weak, or not up to the level of the painting, it seems improperly hung.”
Until very recently there was a large foreign-language bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. called Schoenhof’s. Before it closed in 2017 it had been there for over 150 years. When I was in college—before I admitted to myself that I was basically cognitively incapable of learning any actual foreign language—I sometimes shopped there. I don’t remember much about which books I bought at Schoenhof’s, apart from a more or less obligatory undergraduate infatuation with the works of Gerard de Nerval (“Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie…”). But I do remember the bookmark they gave you when you bought something. It had the store logo in the foreground, and in the background, doodled there by some journeyman graphic designer, was a map, presumably intended to evoke the foreign-ness of Schoenhof’s books.
It wasn’t a map of anywhere in particular, and really it was just a fragment of a map, but I still remember some of its topographical details: smooth gray rolling hills, with a crooked little blue river wiggling its way down and out on to some nameless plains. I was weirdly fond of this mysterious cartoon land, and when I was out of sorts over something, a bad grade or some romantic reversal, which was pretty often, I would sometimes think about the Land Behind the Schoenhof’s Logo, and how when I eventually went to live there I wouldn’t have these kinds of problems anymore.
I cannot tell you how affecting I found this: Tóibín’s open-hearted interpretation of the letters almost as much as the notes themselves. Desire goes on and on and on, and never believe anyone who tells you otherwise.