Michael Chabon - Bookends

I NEVER READ INTRODUCTIONS, SAYS R OSE, THE YOUNGER OF my two daughters. She thinks it over for a second, frowns; the statement doesnt quite ring true. She emends it: Well, Ive read two, she says. One turns out to be Jack Kerouacs introduction to Robert Franks The Americans, required reading for a photography class: But it was fine because I like his style. The other is Sherman Alexies introduction to his own The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (a favorite book, and author, of Roses), because it felt like it would be rude not to.

I suspect that my daughters antipathy toward introductions (we did not discuss postscripts) is fairly common among avid readers. People who never bother to read what is more properly styled a foreword (in which one writer presents the work of another) or a preface (in which the writer herself, often retrospectively, reflects on her own work) are likely as numerous as people who dont bother with user manuals before launching the software application or powering up the widget.

You will not find me among either group; in the first instance out of hard experience but in the second out of love, pure love, from the time of my first encounter, circa 1979, with John Cheevers all-too-brief preface to his Stories, which contains the following passage, in which I now detect a premonitory stirring, two decades ahead of schedule, of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay:

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.

Certain forewordsSusan Sontags to The Barthes Reader, Walter Benjamins to Fables of Leskovand prefacesRaymond Chandlers to The Simple Art of Murder, Robert Townes to the published script of Chinatown, Elmore Leonards to his Complete Western Storieshave become beloved, even crucial texts for me, to be regularly re-readas are Nabokovs afterword to Lolita and Leigh Bracketts to her Best of collection.

Some forewords are transitive: acts of seduction that are at the same time documents of earlier seductions. I already had a serious literary crush on Susan Sontag when I saw her name on the cover of The Barthes Reader and plunged into her foreword, at which point I discovered that Sontag, in turn, had a serious literary crush on this droll-looking Frenchman in his ubiquitous cardigan; I emerged from her foreword with a crush of my own on the late M. Barthes. Other forewords are parasitical; like cuckoos eggs laid in crows nests they hatch and flourish at the expense of their hosts. The fables of Nikolai Leskov are fine, if you like that sort of thing, but I cant imagine life without The Storyteller, Benjamins preface to a German translation of that Russian classic. Benjamins diamantine epigrammatic style is on dazzling display throughout the piece but in no other writing of his does it do the work of heartbreak so powerfully as toward the end of the first section of The Storyteller, where Benjamin collapses all the industrialized brutality and disruption of the First World War into some fifty words:

A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

But Benjamins cuckoos egg also had a lasting, personal effect on me, far more acute than anything I got from the Fables it nominally served to introduce. I used to worry, sometimesin particular after I read Frank OConnors seminal meditation on the short story, The Lonely Voicethat unlike James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, A. E. Coppard, and the other writers Frank OConnor lionized in The Lonely Voice, I was not really from anywhere. My family had been on the move for three generations or more, on both sides, and by the age of twenty-five I had lived in more than a dozen different places. The distinction Benjamin draws, in his foreword to Leskov, between storytellers who stay put and accumulate stockpiles of local lore and those who travel the world collecting the material of the tales they bring home, went a long way to reassuring me that my rootlessness was not only a legitimate condition for writing but, potentially, a theme worth exploring in my work.

As for prefaces (and afterwords), these may be explanatory, apologetic, triumphal, tendentious, rueful, score-settling, spiteful, bibliographic, theoretical (as is the case with Chandlers), or gently embarrassed (as is the case with Cheevers) but the best of themlike Cheeversare also what I would call restorative. They unstopper the vial that contains, like some volatile oil, the fragrance of the time in which the prefaced work was engendered, conceived, or written, summoning for writer and reader alike a sensuous jolt of things past: Cheevers Goodman-haunted stationery stores; the motels and dusty mountainsides of Nabokovs midcentury transcontinental butterfly hunt; Townes ache for the smell of orange groves and all the lost Los Angeles that it encodes; and the Malibu, desolate and wild as Barsoom, of Leigh Bracketts girlhood.

There are many reasons a writer might agree to provide an introduction to her own or another writers book: affection, gratitude, regret, revenge, enthusiasm, a desire to evangelize or set the record straight. Ive done it for some of those reasons, and more. But the primary motivation for writing introductions has been the same as for everything I write: a hope of bringing pleasure to the readerto some reader, somewhere. In this hope my sole assurance has been the pleasure Ive taken as a reader, over the years, in the prefaces, forewords, and afterwordsthe intros and outroswritten by others. Im aware that this assurance may be far from sufficient for many readers, however, and I would encourage skippers of introductions to put this book down and seek pleasure elsewherebut what would be the point?