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The Room of Requirement (This American Life #664)

Ira Glass

Act Two, Book Fishing in America. OK, so our program today, of course, is about people who want libraries to satisfy some very deep, and sometimes, very idiosyncratic desires. And the people in this act, they wish for a library that can give them something that only ever existed inside the pages of a book. Sean Cole, tell us what happened.

Sean Cole

There's this book I've always really loved, a novel by Richard Brautigan. If you haven't heard of him, he was a really funny, almost surreal, hippyish writer in the '60s and '70s, probably best known for the book, Trout Fishing in America, a very short and deeply experimental piece of fiction, part travelogue, part fever dream. It's what made people cultish about Brautigan. A kid who went to my college legally changed his name to Trout Fishing In America.

But the novel I'm talking about is lesser known. It's called The Abortion, subtitle, An HistoricalRomance 1966. And it's not so much the story that gets me. It's the setting. It takes place in a library in San Francisco. But instead of coming to take books out of the library, people come to submit unpublished books they've written to the library, forever.

The books are there to stay. They can bring a book in anytime. The library never closes. And the librarian-- there is only one-- is always there to greet them. He lives at the library, and he's the narrator of the story.

This is from the first chapter. The librarian says, "We don't use the Dewey decimal classification or any index system to keep track of our books. We record their entrance into the library in the Library Contents Ledger, and then we give the book back to its author, who is free to place it anywhere he wants in the library, on whatever shelf catches his fancy.

It doesn't make any difference where a book is placed because nobody ever checks them out and nobody ever comes here to read them. This is not that kind of library. This is another kind of library."

The librarian is reflexively polite and effusive. He might say to someone, "I don't think we have a book like this in the entire library. This is a first." He puts people at ease. He says, "My clothes are not expensive but they are friendly and neat and my human presence is welcoming."

Eventually, a woman comes in with a book, and she's very beautiful. They fall in love. She gets pregnant, but they're not ready to have a child. So because this takes place in 1966, the two of them travel to Mexico to get an abortion, which is why the novel is called The Abortion. But just the spectacle of this library, it's hilarious, and heartbreaking, and democratic, and other-dimensional all at the same time.

Brautigan imagined a great anonymous wash of humanity marching through, with a lot on its mind. Kind of the Utopian ideal of the public square, except completely silent, all written down on rows and rows of unread books. The librarian says the main purpose of the library is, quote, "to gather pleasantly together the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing." And when you talk to other people who've read The Abortion, the conversation usually winds its way to this one chapter.

Todd Lockwood

"The 23?"

Sean Cole

"The 23." [LAUGHS]

Todd Lockwood

Yeah.

Sean Cole

This is Todd Lockwood, a photographer and music producer in Burlington, Vermont. I'll tell you why I got in touch with him in a minute. "The 23" is essentially a list of all 23 books that came into the library this one particular day, by little kids, old people. And the chapter's made up of just little descriptions of the 23 books that the librarian wrote down in his ledger.

There's one called It's the Queen of Darkness, Pal, a science fiction novel written by sewer worker. There's a book called Leather Clothes and the History of Man, which is somehow entirely made of leather. Not just the binding, but the pages. Richard Brautigan himself comes into the library with a book called Moose. And a doctor comes in looking, quote, "doctory and very nervous," with a book entitled The Need for Legalized Abortion.

I asked Todd what some of his favorites were, and he pointed to this one.

Todd Lockwood

Just the title alone is just wonderful. It's called Bacon Death by Marcia Patterson. "The author was a totally nondescript young woman except for the look of anguish on her face. She handed me this fantastically greasy book and fled the library in terror. The book actually looked like a pound of bacon. I was going to open it and see what it was about, but I changed my mind. I didn't know whether to fry the book or put it on the shelf.

Being a librarian here is sometimes a challenge."

Sean Cole

Todd first read The Abortion when it came out in the early '70s. A friend of his gave it to him with a little inscription that said, "This book will change your life."

Todd Lockwood

And that turned out to be more than prophetic.

Sean Cole

He ended up reading it about once a year for the next 15 years.

Todd Lockwood

And every time I'd read it, I'd get the same feeling from it. First thing I would say to myself is, when is somebody going to build this library? When is somebody going to do this? To eventually becoming, when am I going to do this?

Sean Cole

A real life library for unpublished books submitted by their authors. A home for anything anyone felt a burning need to express, or explain, or somehow get off their chests. Todd dreamed for years about one day creating a place like that. And there was clearly a desire for it.

In The Abortion, Brautigan gives an address for his fictional library. 3150 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, California, 94115, which is the real life address of the Presidio branch of the San Francisco Public Library. So for a while, people were actually sending their unpublished manuscripts there and had to be informed, this is not that kind of library. This is a normal kind of library

Anyway, Todd kept putting off his dream, thinking, I'll put that library together someday. And then two things happened, the first one being very tragic.

Todd Lockwood

My sister died in a plane crash--

Sean Cole

Oh, my God.

Todd Lockwood

--in 1989. This was the United DC-10 that went down in Sioux City, Iowa. So losing a sibling is one of those things that really causes you to look at the things that you've done in your life and ask yourself, are these really the best things I can be doing right now? And so at any rate, about a month and a half or two months after the crash, I thought, you know what? I need to just get away from this constant sorrow here and take myself to the movies.

Sean Cole

And there was this movie that had come out earlier that year that Todd hadn't seen yet, a Kevin Costner vehicle about an Iowa farmer who plows up his corn to build a baseball diamond.

Man

(WHISPERING) If you build it, he will come.

[RUSTLING]

Todd Lockwood

So I went to see Field of Dreams, and about halfway into that film, it became really obvious to me that Brautigan's library is my baseball field. If I build it, people will come.

Sean Cole

It wasn't even before the movie was over that that struck you?

Todd Lockwood

Yeah. Yeah, as soon as that part of the film started to unfold, I was just astounded at the parallel. I was like, this is weird. I felt literally as if I'm supposed to be sitting here right now watching this. This is all part of a big plan.

Sean Cole

Which, if you remember, is exactly the way Kevin Costner's character felt in the movie.

Todd Lockwood

And I'm not a person that gets too caught up in the metaphysical aspects of life. But when I stepped outside the theater afterward, I just--

Ray Kinsella

I feel it as strongly as I've ever felt anything in my life.

Todd Lockwood

I'd never felt so sure about anything in my life.

Sean Cole

Todd immediately started calling around, putting a board of advisors together, appealing for funding. It took about half a year. And then finally--

Todd Lockwood

And around here on the side is our entrance.

Sean Cole

--the library opened its doors in Burlington, Vermont in 1990. This tape is from a BBC Radio story that aired a few years in. Todd led the producers past The Vermont Institute of Massage Therapy--

Todd Lockwood

And here we are.

Sean Cole

--to a modest wooden building, outfitted with comfy chairs and shelves for the books. A swinging placard out front said, in capital letters--

Todd Lockwood

The Brautigan Library.

Sean Cole

And underneath that, the words, "A Very Public Library."

[DOOR CLOSING]

Now it's one thing to adapt a piece of fiction into a movie. It's another thing to adapt a piece of fiction into a library. As soon as they started talking about how The Brautigan Library would work in real life, Todd and his advisors and volunteers realized that they were going to need to make some concessions, such as whereas in the novel, there's just one librarian, in real life, there were many. All volunteer, and none of them lived there. Certainly never impregnated anyone there, or not to Todd's knowledge.

And unlike in the novel, the books were almost exclusively submitted by mail. And the authors had to kick in a little money, $25 or so, to cover the cost of binding their manuscripts. And people actually came to read the books, from all over the country.

Todd Lockwood

I was sitting there one day, and a couple comes in the front door. And they announce, we're here! And I said, well, welcome. Where are you from? And this couple had flown from Houston for the weekend, specifically to hang out in The Brautigan Library for a couple of days.

Sean Cole

Stop it.

Todd Lockwood

And we had many of those.

Sean Cole

Probably because of the barrage of media stories about the library. New York Times,Wall Street Journal, a wire story that got picked up by hundreds of papers across the country. Everyone treated it as a quirky human interest story. The first and, at the time, only library for unpublished books, which started off as a piece of make-believe in a weirdo novel written 20 years beforehand.

There was a ledger the librarians used, but they didn't write down descriptions of the books that came in. Rather they wrote down descriptions of the people that came in. This is from that BBC story.

Woman

This is March 20, '93. "A man stopped by from Washington. 'Is this the library?' he asked. 'Yes,' I said. 'It's The Brautigan.' 'What's a Brautigan? Is it the city library?' I told him it was a home for unpublished manuscripts.

'Why?' he asked. 'So they can stay alive, and people can read them,' I said. He wasn't impressed. 'Where's the real library?' he wanted to know. 'Same street, three blocks up.' He left."

Sean Cole

A lot of people have asked that question-- why? And over the years, Todd has tended to give a pretty short and well-honed answer, almost like an artist statement. In fact, he used almost exactly the same words with the BBC producers in 1993, as he did with me in 2018.

Todd Lockwood

The beauty of it is that it doesn't make sense.

For me, one of the beauties of this whole thing was that it didn't make any sense.

Sean Cole

It was illogical.

Todd Lockwood

Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Cole

Just like in Field of Dreams, where he says, I have done something completely illogical.

Todd Lockwood

Right. Right. Oh, yeah.

Ray Kinsetta

I have just created something totally illogical.

Annie Kinsetta

That's what I like about it.

Sean Cole

It's what I liked about Todd's library, and it's what I'd always loved about the library in the novel, the fictional one. It wasn't just illogical. It was impossible. And I loved sitting with the librarian in that impossible place, surrounded by books that only he and the people who wrote them knew about.

So for someone to transform an imaginary magical place I loved into an actual location I could maybe visit one day, it was like finding out there was a real life chocolate factory, like the one Charlie visited, or a wardrobe that opened up unto a forest with talking animals in it.

But there was something else, something stranger, that The Brautigan Library had in common with Field of Dreams. The story goes like this. In 1991, about a year after the library opened, the Bumbershoot Arts Festival in Seattle asked Todd if he wanted to set up a mini version of the library at the festival, an exhibit. So Todd, his wife, and about 100 of the books they'd amassed up to that point got on a plane, flew out there, and set up shop in this indoor event space.

Todd Lockwood

And so first day at the exhibit, I'm showing people around. And this gentleman walks up to me, and puts out his hand, and says, Hi, I'm Bill Kinsella, the author of Shoeless Joe, the book Field of Dreams was based on.

Sean Cole

No way. No way.

Todd Lockwood

And I was just dumbfounded. I said, you have no idea how wildly fantastic it is that you are here right now. I said, if you hadn't have written that, I might never have stepped up to the plate and really done this.

Sean Cole

You just said, "stepped up to the plate."

Todd Lockwood

Oh. [LAUGHS]

Sean Cole

It just so happened that Bill Kinsella, or WP Kinsella is what it says on his book jackets, was a featured speaker at Bumbershoot that year.

Todd Lockwood

And he said, well. He said, I've got one for you. Were it not for Richard Brautigan, I would never have written that book.

Sean Cole

No way.

Todd Lockwood

In fact, he said I would never have gotten into being a fiction writer, were it not for Richard Brautigan.

Sean Cole

This is the part of the story that when I tell it to people, their eyes get really wide. The part where one twin in a fairy tale figures out why she's been wearing half a locket around her neck the entire time. Todd hadn't known it, but no other writer had as much of an impact on Kinsella's life and career as Richard Brautigan.

In 1985, Kinsella published a book of weird, vignettey short stories that he called his Brautigans. He dedicated the collection to Richard Brautigan, including, in the dedication, a fan letter he'd written to Brautigan, in which he said, quote, "I have just written a novel about a man who drives from Iowa to New Hampshire, kidnaps JD Salinger, and takes him to a baseball game at Fenway Park. He was talking about Shoeless Joe. That was part of the plot.

Sean Cole

And so you're both kind of shocked. I'm imagining two shocked men.

Todd Lockwood

Yeah, right. [LAUGHING] I was like, perhaps someway or other, Brautigan himself is playing some sort of role in all this. That we're like marionettes, and he's up there just with a great big smile on his face, just having a blast, messing with the real world.

Sean Cole

Or haunting it somehow, like he was saying, playfully, better not forget me. I wanted to talk with Bill Kinsella for this story, but he died in 2016 on September 16, the same day Richard Brautigan had died in 1984. Both of them chose that day to end their lives. Kinsella was terminally ill and opted for doctor-assisted suicide, which is legal now in Canada, where he's from. Brautigan shot himself with a revolver.

The Brautigan Library chugged along in its original location for about six years. But as Todd once wrote in an issue of the library newsletter, reality can be so clankingly real at times. By 1996, fewer and fewer manuscripts were coming in. Money was tight. Here and there, Todd had to make ends meet with funds from his own bank account.

And finally, the entire Brautigan Library was moved to a room in the Fletcher Free Library, the regular public library down the road in Burlington. It stopped accepting new books but people could still come and read the ones that existed. 10 years went by, and then the Fletcher Library decided it needed the space for other things. So all The Brautigan Library books, more than 300 of them, found themselves shrink wrapped on a wooden pallet in Todd Lockwood's basement.

And this is the moment in the library's history when I first heard about it. I've been wanting to tell this story and see the books for myself for about 10 years. But way back when Todd and I started talking about this, he said he needed to wait, that he was in negotiations with a couple of academic libraries that might be interested, couldn't do an interview until something was finalized, et cetera and so on. Certainly the books weren't available to look at. I said I'd keep checking in, but I didn't.

And then this past summer, I started thinking about the library again. So I looked it up, and the library had finally found a new home in Vancouver, Washington, about 3,000 miles away from where it was born.

John Barber

Watch your head here, low ceiling.

Sean Cole

And it had a new librarian, John Barber, a professor at one of the universities in town. He led me down into the basement of the Clark County Historical Museum.

John Barber

And here it is, The Brautigan Library.

Sean Cole

Wow.

John Barber

These are all the manuscripts.

Sean Cole

Oh, my gosh.

Come to find, the manuscripts have been housed in this building since 2010, and John Barber was instrumental in making that happen. If there's such a thing as a Brautigan scholar, it's him. He may know more about Richard Brautigan than anyone else alive. He was a student of Brautigan's and hung out with him.

So naturally, he was a big supporter of the library from early on. And when the library shut down, he was sad to think of all the books being mothballed in Todd's basement. Until finally, he just got inspired and organized to have them all moved to this place. And he's taken on the mantle of the librarian.

John Barber

Also, I should say, Richard Brautigan once told me that he would haunt me.

Sean Cole

Wait, he said, I will haunt you?

John Barber

Yes.

Sean Cole

This was in 1982, two years before Brautigan killed himself. Brautigan's friend, Nikki Arai, had just died of complications from cancer.

John Barber

And I said, you have your memories of her. You could write about those memories. You're a writer. That's what you do. And he said, I don't write for therapy, and actually got really upset with me. Then he said, but then again-- and he turned and walked away. And he came back after a few minutes with a little slip of paper, on which he had written, "Where you are now, I will join you soon."

Sean Cole

After dinner and another bottle of whiskey, they went out to the yard and burned the note in a kind of ritual to send those words to Brautigan's friend.

John Barber

And I went home that night-- slowly because of all the whiskey-- and wrote about that experience. And I showed it to him, and he said, if you ever show this to anybody before I'm dead, I will haunt you. And I did. And he does.

Sean Cole

After all, John, for all intents and purposes, now inhabits a physical manifestation of an idea Brautigan had in his head. And what's a little startling when you meet John is that he is the librarian from the novel. Like he's just like him. His clothes are not expensive but friendly and neat, and his human presence welcoming.

John Barber

Yes, we look an awful lot alike. Tall, mustache, glasses.

Sean Cole

He's reflexively polite and effusive. I had all three meals with him the day we spent together. And each time, he said to the server, in all earnestness, "Thank you for your hospitality." Same as when the museum's director let us in early before it opened.

John Barber

Thanks so much for accommodating us.

Man

Of course.

John Barber

Thanks.

Sean Cole

It's much smaller than I imagined somehow.

John Barber

Well, there's that, certainly. There's 300-plus manuscripts that are associated with the library. So we might actually say that it's small but mighty. Because each of these 300-plus manuscripts that we're standing in the middle of has dreams, and aspirations, memories, and hopes for the future associated with it.

Sean Cole

In fact, it's just two long sets of bookshelves at one end of the museum's research library. And all of the books have the same plain black, brown, gray, or blue bindings. The host of that BBC piece said they looked like body bags for whatever was inside of them. I really wonder how many of them were ever read cover to cover.

I wanted to see if being in the library gave me the same feeling I had as when I read TheAbortion. And I have to say more and more, it really did feel like I had climbed into the pages of that novel, with its messy expanse of humanity marching through. Some of the books were silly. Others were mournfully nostalgic. Still others were deadly serious.

Sean Cole

Enjoy the War, Peace will be Terrible.

Which is about the lives of two teen girls in World War II Vienna. Others promoted radical ideas.

Sean Cole

Three Essays Advocating the Abolishing of Money.

Almost 50 poetry collections. I opened up one called I'd Be Your Roadkill, Baby. The poetry reading.

Sean Cole

"He greased me with his words--" oh! OK, I can't say that on the radio.

Instead of using Dewey Decimal, the books are organized according to what they call the Mayonnaise System. It's a Brautigan in-joke. He ended Trout Fishing in America with the word "mayonnaise." And it goes by category. So there's adventure, family, future, humor, love, meaning of life, poetry, natural world, social political cultural, spirituality, street life, war and peace, and my favorite, all the rest.

Sean Cole

[LAUGHS]

John Barber

There's always the miscellaneous drawer, right? Where something is just too offbeat to fit in.

Sean Cole

And instead of the summaries being in a big library contents ledger, there's a summary printed out on the first page of each book. Of course, almost all of the books are offbeat. Like this is the summary of a novel called Did She Leave Me Any Money?

Sean Cole

It says, "A philosophical comedy about men, money, motivation, winning strategies, architecture, nudism, trucking, corporate assassinations, heart attacks, sexual politics, hometown parades, spiritual warriors, and the dredging of Willapa Bay."

This is something a bunch of the books have in common. It's like their authors are gushing forth with everything they've been wanting to talk about their whole lives. And with a lot of them, there's this sense of, this is important. I alone have the answer. Just like with a lot of the books in Brautigan's novel. For instance, there's the most prolific contributor to The Brautigan Library, Albert E. Helzner.

He's got 19 books here, three under an assumed name. And they're mostly comprised of his own personal scientific theories and observations. Titles like A Revolutionary Way of Looking atthe Earth as a Planet, or, more to the point, The World is Wrong. The only way I can think to describe it-- and I do so admiringly-- it's like PhD-level stoner thinking. Everything and everyone in the Helzner-verse is interconnected and impactful.

In his book, October 6, 1990, Helzner said that every year on October 6, he'd go to the maternity ward of a hospital, look at a newborn baby through the glass, and ask himself, how did this birth come about? What is the long-range effect? And what is the significance of any birth? Addressing the baby he went to see in 1990, he says he wants to tell her what transpired on the day before she was born.

"I spent the whole day thinking about you," he writes. "On that day, the moon was shining on my town of Marblehead, Massachusetts. It was a bright full moon sitting in a clear sky. My wife and I drove to Seaside 5 Corners for a bite to eat. We saw the moon as we drove along. We saw the old buildings. You'll see the same moon and the same old buildings when you grow up."

Albert Helzner died in June 2016, but his books are still at the library. God knows where that baby is now.

I asked John if there were any books in particular that he wanted to show me. And he was really enthusiastic about this one that he thought gave a sense of what the library was there for. It's called--

John Barber

Autobiography about a Nobody. And it's written by Etherley Murray of Pittman, New Jersey. And she may have said, oh look, here's a library that accepts manuscripts, regardless of subject matter.

Sean Cole

Right, exactly.

John Barber

I'm a nobody. They'll be interested.

Sean Cole

It's mainly the story of her growing up during the Depression in Altoona, Pennsylvania, eating onion sandwiches and, quote, "wearing coats that belonged to women who had just departed this life." Except it was in the humor section, intentionally so. There's a cartoon horse in a red union suit on the title page, tears cascading from behind its blinders.

John Barber

She says, in the notes that came along with the submission, that she had submitted it to 40 publishers, who, although they liked the story, did not publish manuscripts of nobodies.

Sean Cole

In Brautigan's novel, a guy in his 50s walks into the library with a book he wrote when he was 17. "'This book has set the world's record for rejections,' he says. 'It has been rejected 459 times, and now I am an old man.'"

Todd Lockwood

You know, there'd be a sense of completion, for one thing.

Sean Cole

This is Todd Lockwood again, the founder of the library.

Todd Lockwood

And we heard this from numerous writers that sent us works. After their book had been in the collection for a while, we'd hear back from them, hear back from writers who would say, wow, this really is a weight off. I just feel like the project is done finally. Even though it technically was finished, it's the fact that it's sitting on a shelf in a public place, where someone that that person doesn't know will cross paths with that book, and take it off the shelf, and perhaps read it. That sort of completes the circle, and I can get on to the next thing.

Sean Cole

It's funny to think about, but in some ways, The Brautigan Library is more like the library in the novel now than it ever has been. The books are housed in a building that looks more like the Presidio branch. They aren't often read by anyone. And it has one librarian, who actually is available at all hours of the day and night to accept new books, but only digitized ones, PDFs submitted online.

But the more I think about it, it's not about how perfectly or imperfectly Todd or John turned a fictional place into a real one. That's not the point. It's that Richard Brautigan in his novel predicted with perfect accuracy what would happen if you did create a library like this. That being there would give you a feeling like you're walking down the street and noticing that everyone has a book they've made tucked under one arm, a jumbled woolly individual transcription of how the world feels to that person.

It's the feeling of being able to read everyone's mind for a moment and being startled by their unedited thoughts because they're nothing like yours, but they're just as weird. It's like the librarian says in chapter two of the novel, "There just simply had to be a library like this."

Ira Glass

Sean Cole, who's one of the producers of our program. Coming up, a woman who went to the library every day for a while as a child suddenly realizes one day as an adult that the way she was remembering it was not right at all. That's in a minute. From Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

#thisamericanlife #podcast #library

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