Read Online Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman - Free Book Online Page A

with two sets of revisions.
    In a voice that could barely be heard above the roar of the Whitewater, George read of spinning in whirlpools, bashing against rocks, capsizing in waterfalls, losing food and oars and guns and barometers and blankets and an entire boat. In the worst stretches, including the rapids at our feet, Powell couldn’t turn right, couldn’t turn left, couldn’t slow down, couldn’t get out, couldn’t do anything but hold on to a leather strap he had fastened to the gunwale and ride his leaky dory like a bucking bronco. Years later, when I read Livy, I was struck by how much Powell’s adrenaline-soaked confusion resembled that of the soldiers trapped in the defile at Thrasymenus. Caroming through Granite Rapids, no one would have noticed an earthquake either.
    “It is especially cold in the rain to-night,” read George. “The little canvas we have is rotten and useless; the rubber
ponchos
with which we started from Green River City have all been lost; more than half the party are without hats, not one of us has an entire suit of clothes, and we have not a blanket apiece… . We sit up all night on the rocks, shivering.” That was the night of August 17, 1869. Powell and his men had just run Granite Rapids. As the sun set beneath the South Rim, George and I snuggled in polypropylene and Gore-Tex. “For us, only the illusion of peril and discovery,” I wrote. “For Powell, the real thing.”
    T hat’s the catch: it’s always the illusion, never the real thing. Or so I thought until last year. George and I have two children now, and our adventures are closer to home. When our daughter was four, she took her copy of
Eloise
to tea at the Plaza Hotel. Macaulay never fought at Thrasymenus. I never ran the Colorado River. Rut Susannah has
actually
hidden behind the red velvet curtains in the Grand Ballroom, slomped down the hallway on the fifteenth floor, and gotten dizzy in the revolving door with theon it. When we got to the Palm Court, Susannah opened her book to page 40. Her eyes skittered back and forth between the plate of Gugelhopfen on the triple-tiered table in the picture and the plate of Gugelhopfen on the triple-tiered table in front of her. She didn’t say a word. I knew what she was thinking. She was there.

 T H E  H I S ‘ E R  P R O B L E M  
    W hen I was nineteen, William Shawn interviewed me for a summer job at
The New Yorker
. To grasp the full import of what follows, you should know that I considered
The New Yorker
a cathedral and Mr. Shawn a figure so godlike that I expected a faint nimbus to emanate from his ruddy head. During the course of our conversation, he asked me what other magazines I hoped to write for.
    “Um,
Esquire
, the
Saturday Review
, and—”
    I wanted to say “
Ms
.,” but my lips had already butted against the
M
—too late for a politic retreat—when I realized I had no idea how to pronounce it. Lest you conclude that I had been raised in Ulan Bator, I might remind you that in 1973, when I met Mr. Shawn,
Ms
. magazine had been published for scarcely a year, and most people, including me, had never heard the word
Ms
. used as a term of address. (Mr. Shawn had called me Miss Fadiman.
He
was so venerated by his writers that “Mister” had virtually become part of his name.) Its pronunciation, reflexive now, was not as obvious as you might think. After all,
Mr
. is not pronounced “Mir,” and
Mrs
. is not pronounced “Mirz.” Was it “Mzzzzz”? “Miz”? “Muz”?
    In that apocalyptic split second, I somehow alighted on “Em Ess,” which I knew to be the correct pronunciation of
ms
., or manuscript.
    Mr. Shawn didn’t blink. He gave no indication that I had said anything untoward. In fact, he calmly proceeded to discuss the new feminist magazine—its history, its merits, its demerits, the opportunities it might offer a young writer like myself—for four or five minutes
without ever mentioning its name
.
    Since that time, whenever I have