Americanitis

IV

in an overpriced Capitol Hill bar, we had agreed to meet at five o'clock to laugh about the foibles of our respective subjects and their apparently equally obsessive bookkeeping/hoarding. It was my first day in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress and I was utterly overwhelmed. Having completed all the necessary pre-registration forms online weeks beforehand, after retrieving my Reader Identification Card, I made my way to the Performing Arts Reading Room, only to find that there was some kind of altercation going on inside. I could see through the great glass panes of the door a couple of policemen speaking to a wearied man who remained seated but was gesticulating wildly with one arm while his other rested proprietorially over a vinyl record. Nevertheless, I started to enter on the basis that I had been directed to this location at registration and, in any case, was curious to see what all the fuss was about. But I had only opened the door about halfway when a librarian inside quickly stopped me and motioned me back into the hall with her, where, giving no indication of what was happening inside, she told me that she was familiar with my request and that several boxes for me had been taken down the hall to the Manuscript Reading Room around the corner from where we were standing, and that she hoped this wouldn't be too inconvenient. But before I could respond, she turned back into the room. I stood for a moment, still watching. It seemed like whatever excitement there had been had tapered off and a stalemate was emerging that seemed to wear thin for every person involved. And as the door swung behind her I was given a glimpse into this disturbance, though it didn't make much sense to me.

Sir, I will tell you, again, for the final time: you cannot take the Goldberg Variations home with you.

But the humming! he shouted. With the software on my computer, I can remove his godawful humming!

In the next room I was ushered quickly to a table where a trolley was waiting for me. Actually confronting the number of boxes I had requested was staggering, and it was far fewer than the number that would be available to me throughout my time there. As I gazed upon them in all their beige and unhelpful cardboard glory, my head began to swim, and what had started as a nice excuse to go abroad suddenly appeared a Herculean, if not Sisyphean, endeavour that I would surely never find the strength to rise to. I felt very foolish for thinking that I would get much done in six weeks, and I wondered if anyone from the university would notice if the trip they were part-funding didn't result in the linchpin to my thesis it had been planned for. With only my battered copy of Mingus's book sporadically underlined and scribbled on during the plane rides over, a pencil I had bought in a gift shop and that neat yellow lined paper you only saw on American legal dramas, I wondered what the hell I was going to do.

Then, on a table not far from me, I saw her. I hesitated. She was clearly engrossed in her task. But she had mounds of material at her table too. And I was very attracted to her. I won't lie about that. It had only been three, maybe four days - I was also jet-lagged - since I had left home, but already I was craving some socialisation. My new flatmate never seemed to leave his room, or was never there to begin with - I couldn't be sure of which because his door remained closed regardless, and he never made a sound; only occasionally dirty dishes would present themselves in the sink - and I didn't know anyone in the city. So I'll admit right now that I knew exactly what I was doing when I walked over to her, leant down next to her, and asked her, quietly, How do you start?

She looked at me, laughed, and then stifled herself. What do you mean?

How do you start? I repeated, indicating the trolley next to my chair. I have no idea what I'm doing.

You're a researcher?

PhD student, I said.

First year writing the thesis?

The third.

Oh, that year is the worst. But it doesn't matter where you start. You just have to start somewhere. Who've you got over there?

Charles Mingus - the jazz player. His memoir draft is literally over a thousand pages long. It's outrageous. You?

Philip Roth. This is just what he lets you see, and it's still almost three hundred boxes.

What an arsehole. Who keeps all this keich?

I know.

Listen, I'm going to take your advice and get started, but do you want meet at the end of the day and compare notes? Who knows, Mingus and Roth could be more alike than they seem.

She agreed and wrote down the name of a place she said was nearby and told me that she typically didn't leave the library until the close of each day.

I hadn't taken my laptop with me (stupid) and only had the burner phone I bought near the airport to use while I was in the US. But when I looked up around closing time she was engaged in a conversation with a librarian that seemed to be distinguishing between the boxes she was finished with and the ones she would need the next day. I didn't want to interrupt, or seem like I was hanging around waiting for her, so I sorted myself out in the Performing Arts Reading Room - no, I'm not finished with anything yet, unfortunately - and made my way outside with zero indication of where I should go. I remember it was crisp and bright and I was becoming a little giddy. (Desiring simply could not compare with feeling desired!) I walked around aimlessly, hoping that I'd just run into the place, but in the end the assistance of a rowdy crew of men my age, all wearing tailored but slightly ruffled suits, was required.

In particular, she told me, she was interested in Roth's treatment of women in his texts, and especially the letters he had written to them, but, officially, she was focusing on the ambiguous fictionality of his narratives. Our drinks were in hand and we'd found a table outside on the brick-lined pavement. Laughing ruefully, she told me that one of his correspondents, a well-known English author who wrote only subtle, nearly sexless novels about lonely women, he would savage later with an artist friend, as they faxed each other sketches of her in various compromising positions. Only her side of their dialogue was in the archives, so it goes, but she had heard all about it from Roth's official biographer, with whom she was sporadically in touch. Now that she was able to read the woman's cordial and effusive letters to him first-hand, she felt devastated on her behalf.

He actually called me once, she said. I had already received provisional copyright permission from his agent - an assistant of his agent, anyway - for my Newark article, and even when that notice came through it felt like I had received a direct transmission from Jehovah Himself. But I guess Roth was made aware of my project and he had decided to dig deeper into what I was doing. So he calls me up. Random number from Connecticut. I didn't think anything of it, obviously. (I don't know if it's the same in Scotland, but we get these tedious scam calls all the time here in the US that come from numbers similar to yours so you think it's someone you'll know.) Anyway, I say, Hello? And this surprisingly soft, almost tender, voice goes, It's Philip Roth. And I'm like, OK. How are you, Mr Roth? And he just starts laying into me. Says he's never heard of me; the proposal I wrote doesn't make any sense; I shouldn't believe what I read in the accounts of his jaded ex-lovers; how he's already discussed 'the woman thing' at length, etc. - some real senex iratus-type stuff. You know, just circular, obsessive nonsense about himself. Eventually, he pauses for breath, so I'm like, Wait a minute: do you want to hear my side of this or did you just call me up to yell at me? Clearly, it was then that he realised that he was talking to a young woman, because his tone changes completely and he says, Well, I just don't think you're getting the full picture here. I can tell you're at the start of your career. Why don't you come up and visit me, blah blah blah, I'll cook you dinner and I'll show you why you're wrong to pursue this. I didn't go, of course. It has nothing to do with him! Everything I need is right over there. So I politely declined and tried to explain: I'm a serious scholar; I'm not writing anything gossipy; and he'll never hear anything more of this anyway because, like he said, no one has heard of me and probably never will. Except him, I guess! He didn't seem convinced, but the permission has remained intact ever since - thank God - so here I still am. No idea how he got my number.

I can't imagine what a phone call from Mingus would have been like, I replied. I don't believe half of what he says happened to him. I'm approaching it allegorically, out of necessity more than anything else.

You probably don't remember, she said after a pause, but Bret Easton Ellis had this website up back when he was promoting Lunar Park. You know, that horror/faux-memoir thing he did. On one side of the screen were the biographical details of the 'real' Bret and on the other side it had the novel's 'Bret'.

She was flattering me to suggest that this was something I had once known but since forgotten. I'd read a few books by Ellis, it was true, but I wouldn't have thought to do a search of him on the Internet that long ago, I don't think. But I enjoyed Lunar Park a lot and remembered it...