What I Learned About Literature From a Friend Who Just Died
I own too many books. Way too many books. They, along with those belonging to my wife, fill shelves that consume an entire wall in our study. In our guest room is another set of shelves lined with mostly my books. And on my dresser — it hurts to admit this — are two foot-and-a-half tall piles of recent acquisitions that I plan to read … someday.
I hang onto many of them for sentimental reasons. Among those, some of my most valued are the ones recommended to me by a guy who was easily the most voracious reader I’ve ever known — Desmond Toups, who died in an accident last month at 61. All accidents are by definition tragic, but his stands out in especially gruesome fashion: He suffered a heart attack while driving a Hyundai Elantra in an amateur road race, killing a bystander before crashing into a wall. It was a shock I’m still processing.
Desmond was a Mississippi native. But he spent much of his adult life hopping around the West — Colorado, New Mexico, Alaska, California, Washington. When we met, he was a copy editor at the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph; his roommate was a college friend of mine. After Des complained about the job (he was never shy about expressing his opinions), I suggested he apply to the Albuquerque Journal, where I was a reporter. This was in 1988, a time when newspapers were still decent places to work. He was quickly hired and just as quickly endeared himself to our colleagues for his sharp wit, his Southern-bred courtesy toward others, his skill in editing a variety of news and feature stories and — to smokers — his frequent availability for cigarette breaks.
We had a Sunday ritual. We would meet for breakfast burritos and finish the New York Times’ crossword together. Then we’d hit a bookstore — most often Page One, a sprawling behemoth of a place tucked into one of the many strip malls in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights and within walking distance of both of our apartments. In its heyday before the Internet, it sold out-of-town newspapers from all over the country, a sizeable assortment of new and used CDs, an equally impressive number of magazines and some computer equipment.
But Page One’s truly distinguishing feature was its book selection. Both of us dropped a not-inconsiderable share of our paychecks there. Desmond came from something of a literary family: His mother was a longtime columnist for the Biloxi Sun-Herald and the locally renowned author of books on birding. He deeply appreciated good writing, and loved introducing me to some of his favorite authors. He had a particular fondness for writers with prolific bodies of work who combined strong opinions with elegant prose. One of the first books he all but demanded I buy was Jan Morris’ “Journeys,” one of the best collections of travel essays ever assembled. Morris was a Brit, but an especially incisive observer of the U.S., among many other locales. She captured the varied inhabitants of Santa Fe, where I lived before moving south to Albuquerque:
“Santa Fe likes to call itself a tri-cultural community — Indian, Hispanic, Anglo — but it is really nothing so simple. It is a place of cross-currents, acculturizations, adoptions, blends, Indianized Hispanics, Anglicized Anglos, born-again Spaniards singing evangelical hymns, Polish-descended migrants from Cedar Rapids drinking sangria and eating tortillas, full-blooded Indian braves having their hair permed in unisex salons. You see that Indian woman passing by, the one with the glittering eyes and the turquoise rings? She is a nice Jewish lady from Illinois.”
Along similar lines, Desmond was an ardent admirer of M.F.K. Fisher, widely considered the foremost of food writers. I recall him praising her work more often than anyone else’s. He had me pick up “The Art of Eating,” a classic of the genre containing her essays on everything from snails to steaks. Like Morris, Fisher wrote with incredible perception and a certain dignity. I enjoy her observation about the fans of a shellfish of which I am also fond:
“There are three kinds of oyster-eaters: those loose-minded sports who will eat anything, hot, cold, thin, thick, dead or alive, as long as it is oyster; those who will eat them raw and only raw, and those who with equal severity will eat them cooked and in no way other. The first group may perhaps have the most fun, although there is a white fire about the others’ bigotry that can never warm the broad-minded.”
Perhaps the essayist with whom Desmond had the closest affinity, though, was Florence King. He loved “Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady,” her 1985 memoir of growing up in an eccentric family. King had a tart contrarian wit that Desmond adored, as well as a gift for turning a phrase:
“Our ancestors did arrive early in Virginia — 1672 — but they were not the kind of people Granny said they were, and they rose very little on the social scale in subsequent generations. I would not be at all surprised if I turned out to be a direct descendant of the Spotsylvania hatchet man who relieved Kunta Kinte (the slave in Alex Haley’s “Roots”) of his foot.”
Desmond’s taste in fiction was just as broad-ranging, with a nod toward idiosyncratic fantasy. Nearly a decade before “Wicked” became a hit musical, he beseeched me to read Gregory Maguire’s highly inventive chronicle of Oz. He also loved “The Roaches Have No King,” Daniel Evan Weiss’ downright bizarre 1990 novel about a colony of intelligent cockroaches seeking to carve out a better life for themselves by ruining the lives of the people whose apartment they occupy. Another favorite was William Brinkley’s “The Last Ship,” a 1988 tale of a guided missile destroyer that manages to survive a nuclear war before reaching an uncontaminated paradise island.
But the work of literature I associate most closely with Desmond is David James Duncan’s 1983 cult classic “The River Why.” I remember him saying he re-read it every year. I suspect he identified with Gus Orviston, the irreverent fly-fishing narrator who moves away from his parents (one of them an outdoors writer) to strike out for the rivers of Oregon determined to establish his independence. Though it starts as a fishing story, it becomes a comic search for meaning in life through love — not just of the West and of nature, but of actual human beings. Near the novel’s end, Gus makes an unusual comparison between love and the itching from poison oak:
“I don’t know where I caught it first. I suspect maybe I had it all my life but didn’t know it — maybe because of all that cool trout-water purling over it, lulling it, numbing it, hypnotizing me into not feeling it. I suspect maybe everybody is covered with it, but most everybody doesn’t know it for one reason or another. And I suspect that anybody who thinks they don’t have it and thinks they don’t want it had better be damned careful, because it can get you anytime, anyplace, anyhow, and you don’t even know you have it till you find yourself scratching, and the more you scratch the more it itches, and the more it itches the more you like it till you’re so infested with the stuff that you sit around writing crap like this when you could be out fishing!”
RIP, Des. Hope you’ve got plenty to read.
