Escapes

Whether you’re lucky enough to be unfurling at the beach or enjoying the long, warm days at home, summer is an ideal time to escape into other peoples’ lives and adventures, an ideal time to read. We asked eight poets to share their memories of the books and writers who had consumed them in summers past. From Marcel Proust and Stephen King to Franz Wright and Jacqueline Susann, the answers may surprise. And they serve as a reminder that one never knows what will ignite one’s interest and imagination.

Jessica Greenbaum

In the summer before my sophomore year at college, I traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz, got unceremoniously kicked off for insubordination, waved goodbye to the love of my (so far) life there, and found myself back in my suburban childhood home on Long Island. My parents were on vacation. It was just myself, heartbreak, a part-time job at the DMV, and Quentin Bell’s biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf. I don’t remember another soul or even any sounds besides the pages turning. Immersed in her letters, her relationships, her singular person and struggle, I became subsumed by her life. I know I read her suicide note to Leonard with an attention created by suicide notes. But it really was her whole life with which I felt infused: her vision, her out-of-the-box thinking, and her tumult.

When I finished it, I went to the beach by myself—really by myself, because a hurricane was in progress. The waters were roiling under a green sky, and the lifeguard, my sole companion. We sat under an umbrella, smoked a joint and considered, between held breaths, what might happen to a person in the waves.

Matt Rasmussen

I’ll always associate the summer of 2004 with Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, by Franz Wright. I had just finished grad school at Emerson College in Boston and was both exhilarated and terrified by the future unrolling before me. I was trying to write poems about my brother’s suicide but was struggling. Wright’s book stares down death and even explores the desire to die, yet it never feels overly heavy or sentimental or gloomy. Its spontaneity, brevity, and dark humor make its weight more affecting. So many lines still ring in my head. For example:

How does one go
about dying?
Who on earth
is going to teach me—
The world
is filled with people
who have never died

Walking showed me how to say things plainly and how to say things I didn’t think I should say. I read that book several times that summer. It won the Pulitzer that year, and Wright was living in Massachusetts. I heard him read in Concord in October. It was the only time I ever saw or heard him. It’s difficult now to believe Franz Wright is not on this earth when he seemed so gigantic and real and close back then.

Tommye Blount

Georgie Denbrough’s doomed paper boat at the beginning of Stephen King’s It helped me get through the summer of 1994, in Detroit, Michigan. It was an old copy given to me by my father’s ex-girlfriend in 1992. For a while, the book just collected dust. I was too terrified to read it because the paperback was about a thousand pages, and when I was ten, I could barely make it through the first episode of the 1990 mini-series. I spent that night hiding in my father’s bed.

The summer of 1994 was when my father, then the last surviving parent, had his first heroin and alcohol relapse in about six years. I watched him slip out the door with television sets and game consoles only to return days later possessed and empty-handed.

This will sound cruel, I know, but it was comforting to disappear into the suffering in these other people’s lives, watch the violence these terrorized children endured from afar. I needed to be shocked out of my own horrific narrative, my loneliness. It wasn’t until I’d run out of daylight that I’d even remember there was no food, no electricity, no other soul around.

D.A. Powell

My parents used movie houses as cheap childcare. It made little difference what was playing; my folks weren't in the habit of censoring what we saw or read. The one movie I remember being forbidden to see was The Exorcist. Of course, everyone else’s parents in Linda, California, let them see it. Not mine. By the end of sixth grade, nearly everyone I knew had seen the damned film, and I was beginning to feel as though I’d missed a huge cultural phenomenon. I wasn’t a sheltered kid, so it made little sense to me that a horror film should be in any way off-limits. My brother and I watched horror movies all the time, and we were not monsters.

Walking home from the bus stop on the final day of school, I confessed to my neighbor Connie that I felt ignorant and unworldly. Connie was my age; our birthdays were two weeks apart. She was the first person to get me drunk—on sloe gin and coke—and she knew how to French kiss and how to French a cigarette. She wasn’t French, but she was infinitely more enlightened than I. Connie assured me that the book was always better than the movie, and later that evening, she stuck a copy of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist in the domed mailbox at the end of our driveway for me to retrieve. This may have been the first book I read that didn’t involve pictures, and I wasn’t sure I'd be able to make it through an adult-length novel with no illustrations to break up the monotony of printed text.

I read the book pretty much in one sitting, aside from an occasional trip to the dictionary to look up words such as surplice and Librium and semen. By the time I was done, it was 4 o’clock in the morning, and I was scared, scarred, and hooked on books. That summer, I read The Exorcist three more times, each time becoming more frightened and more intrigued. I also began to read other novels—some good, some trashy—and I found so many more words to look up before I entered seventh grade that fall.

Zackary Sholem Berger

August, 1995: Felled by heat stroke, I lay in the cool dark of my Madrid pension. “I can’t see anything,” said the landlady as she carried a jug of water in my general direction. “Cataracts.” Because I would be going to medical school, I tried to remember what I knew about them. All I could think of was gelato.

In my backpack was a fat, off-white paperback, Rafael Lapesa’s Historia de la lengua española (crammed with footnotes, maps, Arabic etymons, and dollops of Ladino), and Yonia Fain’s Nyu-Yorker adresn: Dertseylungen a Yiddish hardback improbably published in Oxford: stories of ambivalence in a literary world I would know only the wake of. I had my own notebook, filled with bad Yiddish poetry and worse English prose, the latter of which I intermittently sent on floppy disk to the befuddled editorial staff at the Forward newspaper, who hadn’t asked for any of it.

Madrid was tolerable at night, when I would watch other people go clubbing. Yitzhak Rabin was killed in November; shortly afterward, I made my way to Eastern Europe. “You know some Russian,” observed a conductor at Brest (which I would later know as Brisk), emptying my backpack to find a paperback siddur borrowed from a Wisconsin summer camp. “Are you CIA?”

Deborah Landau

I’d often tried to read In Search of Lost Time but had always stalled in the dense, haunting opening passage, the language so rich and evocative that I kept reading and re-reading, savoring each word, not wanting to miss a thing. The best way to read Proust is quickly, advised a friend; trust Proust.

I was working in Paris that summer and with her encouragement set out again, reading an hour every morning on a café terrace with my crème. I made it through Swann’s Way like that and, in the summers that followed, continued this meditative ritual volume by volume, reading in a different café, depending on where I was living, the weather, my mood. The names of those cafés still feel so much a part of the experience of reading—Café des Phares, Café de Flore, Café Beaubourg, Café Charlot, Café Pinson, Café de la Nouvelle Mairie—a moment in time spent with the perfect book.

Solitary reading is luxurious, especially in summer, and solitude in cities is my favorite kind. In Paris, you can look up from your book and see Proust mirrored in the street life, the architecture, the people walking by. Nothing makes you wiser or sadder than reading Proust, John Ashbery has said—his words are so often still relevant, necessary, illuminating, true. One morning toward the end of summer, for example, after everyone I knew had left the city and I sat reading at the same café at which I’d met friends the night before, half-expecting them to appear again, I reached the final page of Swann’s Way and came upon this:

“The reality I had known no longer existed. That Mme. Swann did not arrive exactly the same at the same moment was enough to make the Avenue different. The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.”

Six summers, six volumes of Proust. This summer, I hope to finish volume seven.

David Trinidad

July, 1967: I was about to turn 14, and I was enthralled with movies and movie stars. In those days, the best place to find stuff about contemporary stars was at the local drugstore in Chatsworth, California, where I grew up. A magazine stand full of movie magazines stood next to a rack of paperback books. That was my lifeline to the world. One day, I noticed a novel in the bookrack—Valley of the Dolls. A white cover with pills on it. The jacket copy informed me that dolls equaled pills and that the novel was a sensational bestseller about three actresses in show business. Here was the inside scoop on Hollywood and lots of sex and drugs. I started reading. I became obsessed.

I was taking an English class in summer school. The teacher asked us to pick a book to do a report on. I innocently said I wanted to do Valley of the Dolls. “I’m not familiar with that book,” she said. “I’ll have to get back to you.” The next class, she said, “No. Absolutely not.” She obviously had found out that the book was full of pill taking and lesbian sex. She recommended that I read Oliver Twist. I liked Dickens, but as soon as I was done with him, I went back to Valley of the Dolls. I think I read it two or three times that summer.

I’d never read a book in that way—get to the end and start all over again. My mother found my copy of Valley of the Dolls and took it away because it was too racy. She ended up reading it herself. Of course, I bought another copy at the drugstore and read it in secret.

Jacqueline Susann, the author, was an expert at dialogue and able to evoke vivid scenes with very little description. I love her sentences; they’re very clean and efficient. There are moments I consider poetic, especially when she describes taking dolls. And wise: Susann knew a lot about the difficulty of aging, the pitfalls of ambition and fame. Many consider her book, which at one point outsold the Bible, trash. Nonetheless, it has had a lasting influence on my own writing and how I see the world.

Erika Meitner

In 1983—the summer I was eight—my grandmother took me to Israel. We went to visit her sister Anja because my grandfather had just died, and everyone thought the trip might cheer her up. We stayed with Anja and her husband, Monyak, in their apartment at the bottom of Mount Carmel in Haifa for a month, and my grandmother and I slept together on a foldout sofa in their living room. Neither Anja nor Monyak spoke English, and I didn’t speak Hebrew or Yiddish, so we communicated by facial expressions and pointing.

We rode out the hot August afternoons inside; my grandmother would nap in an easy chair, and I would lie on my stomach on the living room rug and read, my elbows turning red from pressing them into the beige shag. I had brought as many cheap paperbacks as I could jam into my suitcase, all Moby Books Illustrated Classic Editions: Oliver Twist, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and The Pauper, David Copperfield, The Swiss Family Robinson—mostly stories of boys who had overcome adversity.

Nights, my grandmother and Anja sat silently in the kitchen in housecoats and slippers, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea with milk. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d join them. Anja would gesture to ask if I wanted food—cold knaidlach, tea biscuits, an orange. Even if I said no, she’d set a plate in front of me. Those long nights at the table learning to read their softening faces, the fine lines around their mouths when they spoke. Which was rarely. I learned to read what they weren’t discussing: the war, the camps, their dead, the numbers tattooed on their forearms.

I finished my books quickly, on the floor indoors as the midday sun blazed outside. And though I remember studying those inky illustrated scenes of the classics intently, I’m still transfixed by what their faces—my grandmother’s and her sister’s—never told me, most of all.