Writers in the Rain in an Unreal City

About the latest Brooklyn Book Festival, my friend Liz Eames made a good point: “Everyone was a writer but no one was a reader.”

For sure, it seemed my friend Gregory Tague and I, sitting at the St.Francis College table, trying to sell our books, me the one I wrote, Greg the ones he edited through his newly minted publishing company, Editions Bibliotekas, had to justify why it was we were sitting there and not- in the eyes of all those writers and wannabe writers passing by us or passing us by- they who were sitting there instead.

In other words, “Who are you?” they seemed to say. “Are you nobody too?”



The “big” writers, Rushdie, Ashberry, Auster, were performing indoors on this wet and windy afternoon, safe and warm and at a reasonable distance from the occasional paranoids or schizophrenics who examined and cross examined us, tested our minds and our patience, told us wild stories of a twisted imagination as if giving themselves up as living fodder or material for our own future stories.

It began with the Russian woman and her giant suitcase on wheels who asked if she could leave it with us beneath our canopy, out of the rain. At first I said no, but when she began to look at my book, to read the reviews on the back cover, to skim through the table of contents, to ask if I had been interviewed on C-Span, I finally relented and let her put her bags in a dry corner behind us.

It was only much later after she kept coming back, hovering around us, spouting invectives about a corrupt government (ours) that had thrown her and husband out of their apartment that I realized she would probably not be buying my book. By then it was too late. She already felt at home (perhaps for today this was her home) comfortable with us and began showing Greg her own writings from an orange composition notebook.

It rained pretty steadily all day and people waited on a long line to get tickets to see and hear the “real” writers indoors- inside Borough Hall or the St. Francis College auditorium.

I thought of T.S. Eliot’s Unreal City . . . "under the brown fog of a winter dawn/ A crowd flowed over London (or Brooklyn? Manhattan?) bridge, so many . . ."

Had death undone the “unreal writer,” the writers who flowed to us in the rain, the forgotten, the unknown, the desperate writers who all had something to say, something they wanted us to hear but we could not, would not listen to.



At times, as we sat alone beneath the canopy in the pouring rain, a lone and mysterious suitcase on wheels still standing behind us, our cards and fliers blowing away, to be crushed and soiled beneath the wet shoes of the multitude rushing to hear the “real” writers, those anointed by the priests of literary taste, what is good and not good, those who appoint and designate others for greatness.

As for us, our books were getting wet and we needed to push them even further back on the table. People, interested only in getting out of the rain stood in front of our table, oblivious that we were even selling books.

One man was interested we were selling books, but more interested in why we were selling our books and why Greg was bothering to publish books and finally, an hour later, after he moved on from Greg and over to me, why I bothered writing in the first place.

I kind of expected him next to ask why people even bother reading and finally, why they even bother breathing.

With his rather silly white and wet floppy hat, and just the slightest Mephistophelean grin, he seemed like a messenger from the hell of my unconscious.

“Well,” I told him, “as writers and publishers we want to both contribute to and share in the human experience . . .” and that’s when I saw that devilish grin start to get wider and suddenly I knew that that was exactly what he wanted to hear and if I actually continued talking that way, he’d eat me alive, devour me whole, but more importantly, perhaps, never leave our table.

So I said, “But the truth is of course I have a big ego like most writers and don’t let them tell you anything different and I want people to like me and recognize me and love what I’m saying and buy my books and . . .”

Then I saw it, saw how the muscles and nerves in his jaws and that thing, even that ineffable thing behind his eyes began to relax. “I appreciate your honesty,” he said. I asked three other writers the same question over there and they just gave me a lot of bull about . . . but you were honest with me. I appreciate that.”

And then he left.

He just walked away.

“Look,” I said to Greg. “He’s gone.”

“How did you manage that?” he asked.

“I think he appreciated my honesty.”

But was I being honest? Did I really mean what I said, or was I just bitter about my own situation that day? After all, hundreds of people came out in the rain to look at books, even to buy books, to listen to writers, to ask them questions, to think of themselves, maybe, just maybe, not only as writers or wanna be writers but readers too and that maybe this Book Festival is a great thing because maybe it is a great thing to, yes, to share in one of the great common human experiences left to us, which is books (whether we write them or read them) the idea of books, the feel of books (I did not see a single Kindle or Nook or iPad) and though I was careful not to say it too loud, I think I left that day, though soaked and still forgotten--believing in the wonder of books.