Let me take you back in time: the year is 1984, before the internet, before we could buy anything, anytime, from anywhere. On a hot, humid summer day in New York City, I was looking for a book. But first: back in the early ‘70s, I had read a book titled A Death in the Family by the gifted and poetic American writer James Agee. It had won the Pulitzer Prize, and for good reasons. It is the deeply moving story of the impact on a family of the death of the father, much of it from the young son’s point of view - and much of it from Agee’s own experience of losing his father as a boy.
Sometime later I read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee’s tribute to the desperately impoverished sharecropping families of the South during the Great Depression, illustrated with stark, haunting photographs by Walker Evans. I had never read anything so mysterious, so beautiful, before or since. I decided I wanted to read and have on my shelf everything Agee had written. And so began my quest.
In those days there were many small secondhand bookshops in New York, particularly in Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side. Whenever I was out for a walk in those neighbourhoods, I stopped in and went right to the beginning of the shelves, where the As were. Over time, I was successful in finding everything Agee had written: novels, short stories, letters, poems, film critiques, screenplays - everything, that is, except one short novel, The Morning Watch, the story of a boy’s quest for an epiphany on Easter Sunday. The book had been out of print for many years, and was simply impossible to find. And besides that, the used bookshops were beginning to disappear.
It was a hot, humid summer day in New York City, the kind of day when boundaries blur and anything can happen. I left my apartment on Charles Street in the Village and headed north up West Fourth. There he was. There he always was, the odd man with the dark, long hair, standing in front of his apartment building, leaning against the railing, wearing a raincoat no matter what the weather, or the season. I picked up my pace and walked past him - but not before hearing him mutter, “Books … books.”
I stopped and turned around. “Do you sell books?”
Wordlessly, he turned and walked around the railing and down the steps. I hesitated, but my quest overcame whatever misgivings I had following a stranger into a dark basement apartment. Light filtered in through the dirty windows, and my eyes adjusted. There were thousands of books there, not arranged horizontally on shelves, but in vertical stacks, floor to ceiling. Dozens of pillars of books.
“I’ve been looking for a book by James Agee called The Morning Watch. It’s been out of print for years. I wonder if you’ve ever heard of it.”
Still without a word, he walked over to a ladder in the corner of the room and carried it to one of the stacks. He slowly climbed the steps, then reached up and plucked a small book from the very top. He handed it down to me: The Morning Watch by James Agee. I stared at it, speechless. At last: “How much?”
“Two bucks.”
I pulled out two singles from my wallet and handed them over.
“Wanna bag?”
“No thanks.”
I turned and walked across the room, out the door and up the steps, back to the bright sidewalk - my book in my hand, and a story to tell.
This is an extract from Emissaries by Dean Rudoy
