5
The chest of drawers on which the Gump bowl sits is a late
nineteenth-or early twentieth-century piece of mahogany or
dark cherry, about a foot and a half wide and three and a half feet high,
with six small drawers, inset fluted-column corners, and club feet.
It had belonged to Gordon Ray's parents in Indiana and was in his New
York apartment (25 Sutton Place South, five blocks from where I
live) at the time of his death on December 15, 1986, three months after his
seventy-first birthday. (It
served as the telephone stand
in the room where he sat to read books and to go over dealers' catalogues.)
Gordon was one of the great
twentieth-century book collectors and a leading scholar of Victorian
literature (author of the standard biography of Thackeray); and as president of the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 1963 to 1985, as well
as a ubiquitous member of boards of nonprofit institutions, he was a
respected force in the cultural world. He had a major impact on my life by
telephoning me on December 6, 1977, to offer me the vice presidency of the
Foundation. That moment is naturally one that I will not forget: I was
standing at the telephone in the front hall of my parents' house in Lebanon, Indiana. (I was
on leave from the University of Wisconsin, on a
fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was there
between trips.) I knew that I would ultimately accept his offer, though I
did not do so on the phone (nor did he expect me to). It was indicative of
Gordon's self-assurance and decisiveness that he would simply offer
me the job rather than ask me to come for an interview. He would not have
done so, of course, if we had not already known each other: I had met him at
the Grolier Club in the 1960s but did not know him well until I received a
Guggenheim Fellowship in the spring of 1969. From then on, I generally saw
him on my visits to New York.
Shortly after his phone call, I went (on December 20th) to New York to "interview" the Foundation (rather than the other
way round), and I accepted the position by phone on the 29th. When I was
back in New York for "Bibliography Week" in late
January, I had another conversation with Gordon to settle some of the
details and began searching for an apartment; Gordon's formal letter of
appointment was dated January 30th. The job began on the first of August
1978, and I never regretted my decision. Although I had not been unhappy in
Madison, I knew that Manhattan was where I wanted to be—and
especially when I had the opportunity to be there as part of an illustrious
institution that I admired. In addition, Gordon's presence at the Foundation
established it in my mind as a place with a scholarly atmosphere that I
would find appealing. Working with Gordon was
indeed a pleasure for me, as I knew it would be, since we had much in
common—such as a Midwestern background, a love of book collecting,
good restaurants, and scholarly bibliography (possibly in that descending
order), and an impatience (not to say anger) when confronted with pettiness.
To some, he appeared stern and austere, with his physical weight making him
seem even more formidable; but, bemused by human foibles, he possessed a
fine sense of humor and had a genius for social conversation, which was
always incisive and laced with literary allusions (for he seemingly never
forgot a detail from the many Victorian novels he had read). His combination
of geniality and assertiveness was on display at the many lunches and
dinners I had with him (not
to mention Foundation meetings,
theater evenings, and baseball games), and my memory of him in action
remains vivid and satisfying.
He named me his literary executor and the co-executor of his estate,
and that is how I came to have this chest of drawers—which now
contains, along with other things, part of my collection of his published
writings. (That collection includes "The Count's"
Adventures, the 1945 hardcover "offprint" from the first volume of
his edition of Thackeray's letters; the prospectus
for his 1947 facsimile edition of Thackeray's
The Rose and the Ring; an offprint of his 1953
article "The Bentley Papers" inscribed to John
Gordan; his annotated copy of his famous 1965 essay "The Changing
World of Rare Books," with sources of the quotations identified; and his
1968 Christmas card, printed at the Spiral Press, reproducing a Thackeray drawing with commentary.) The Pierpont
Morgan Library, his beneficiary, had no use for the furnishings of his
apartment, and I saw to it that his oriental rugs went to the Grolier Club,
where they still line the fifth-floor hallway. Another of the pieces
that came to me was a canterbury, now standing beside a chair near the
kitchen door, filled with the Times Literary
Supplement (which I have subscribed to for over fifty years and
cannot imagine being without) and the New York Review of Books (which I have read faithfully
since its inception in 1963, during the New York
printers' strike). (The four Hogarth prints that Gordon had given to me are hanging in my bedroom, not the living
room, but I mention them to illustrate the evocative significance of every
detail of physical objects: the labels on the backs show that the framing
was done by the H. Lieber Company of Indianapolis, perhaps during Gordon's undergraduate years at Indiana University; and his name with a Harvard address, 16
Conant Hall, shows that he took the prints with him to graduate school. The
Lieber firm is a name I know from my childhood, because our family often
went there for cameras and film, as well as framing.)
My debt to Gordon for his momentous telephone call
could not be adequately repaid. But I made an attempt to do so after his
death by writing an account of his life and by editing two volumes of his
writings: a gathering of his essays on book collecting, and his Lyell
Lectures on the Art Deco book in France. My
favorite passage in his work comes from the title essay of the former
volume, "Books as a Way of Life." I have quoted it in print several times
before, and here it is again:
book-educated people of the sort I
have been describing are rarely dogmatic. They tend instead to regard
the world from what George Eliot in Daniel Deronda
whimsically calls "a liberal-menagerie point of view." This state
of mind infuriates the fierce partisan, but it enlivens social
intercourse, and it holds out hope for the glorious day when mankind
will cure itself of the plague of politics. The "literature of power" is
above politics, having understanding as its aim rather than victory, and
the books that embody it are thus a potentially unifying force in a
divided world.
There is no better way than reading this paragraph to get a sense of what
Gordon was like.
