Page from 1980

So this is the page of my reading record from around 1980. My arrows reflect the three books above as real big time keepers. I probably had been reading War & Peace for a while. I tend to read more than one book at a time. I was living in San Francisco and after my daughter was born in August of '79 we had settled into a small apartment just behind the St. Francis Hotel where I worked. I can recall reading it out in the rooftop patio area that some of the tenants had put together. It was windy up there most of the time but there could be good days.

I was working graveyard at the St. Francis and moonlighting as a Security Guard at a bookstore a couple of afternoons and later working at another hotel. Cynthia didn't go back to work after the baby was born. We had no money. I think that 1980 Christmas we found a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk and made that our Christmas fund. I got cardboard and wrapping paper and made us a Christmas tree. I can recall immediately after the baby was born, I'd walk the hill back home in the morning, and sit on the front stoop and smoke for a half hour before going up. It was overwhelming, but I got through it. We used to take long walks around the hills pushing the stroller. I'd make runs to Sears on my motortcycle for more diapers.

The book is very long and if you put it down for very long it's hard to remember who is who. It's mostly Pierre's story. (Henry Fonda in the early movie version) I had a hardback copy with a list of characters and their relationships. It was the Maude translation. I don't think I've read anything but the Maude translations of his books.

Tolstoy creates a world, populates it, makes it breathe, and will take you places you have never been and will make it visually part of your memory. This is a sweeping thing of a book. More of a history than a novel. Two or three months of devotion will take you there. Even the talk of ideas a bit later on didn't bog the progress. I took to skipping great sections of Hugo and Melville in their digressions of ideas, but not Tolstoy. As I am writing this, I'm thinking about Anna Karenina, Resurrection, Hadji Murad, Sevastopol, etc. All better novels. One should read it if one is doing Tolstoy. I have always considered him one of the top few. Flaubert belongs with him. I've finished all of Flaubert, still working on all of Tolstoy.

Working graveyard always gave me extra time to read. Having that luxury is great boon. Wikipedia says its really the 16th longest novel ever written. There no other ones of the long nature that I've completed. I only have managed the first two volumes of Proust's. Only the first book of The Tale of Genji, and only the first of the Story of the Stone.

A movie version to watch first might help with orientation.

This was our mayor then.

I can recall Cynthia beginning to critique my writing style then and we did comparisons of those authors I loved and my own work and I began to realize that certain principles had to be learned and applied. That was the beginning of the pursuit of the perfect paragraph and seamless prose. She always felt as if she was smarter than I was because she had finished her bachelor's degree. We decided later to move to Arizona so I could go back to school to get a degree in writing.

All through this period I was writing regularly on a long book about a drunk printer in New Orleans that went on and on and had just a little plot and a lot of where nothing really happened. I think I ended up with a 60,000 word first draft. Then I was going to rewrite into a Joycean structure like Ulysses except base it on the 12 labors of Hercules. I never rewrote it. I didn't know it at the time, but I needed to learn about dramatic tension- which Tolstoy has plenty of.

Oh and we had a cat, Herbie (Herbert Gold) that would sit on my desk in the evening when I wrote in long hand.

I'll get to Styron next time.On the same page, there's Langer & Pound- worth reading for understanding it all.