I own a Rolodex that I inherited — took, really — from someone dear to me after his death, nearly a decade ago. It is black, plastic, hump-backed like a 1942 Plymouth coupe, and made by a firm called Zephyr American Corp. I don’t know how long ago it was manufactured, but it already has that lovely obsolescent look about it, strictly B.C. (Before Computers), as if it came from the age of adding and mimeograph machines. I must have used an address book before I acquired it, and now I use a computer to record all my e-mail addresses. I should probably toss it out, but find I cannot bring myself to do so. Even though barely a decade in my possession, it contains too much of my history.
I wish I could tell you that it is a power Rolodex — powerful in the sense of recording many of the great names of the past half century. Mine does have a few good names — mostly of writers, editors, and intellectuals, with one famous painter — but no really knock-out, this-one-will-get-your-attention-Howard names. The Rolodex of a man or woman who has lived any sort of public life ought to provide a preview, or coming attraction, for the rich index of his or her autobiography. Mine, I fear, disappoints. No cards for Cary Grant, Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, Sir Georg Solti, Picasso’s last wife, Paul Valery’s grandson, though it does have a card for one English lord (alas, a mere life peer), one United States senator, and one person who has had a sex-change operation.
In fact, my Rolodex has cards for a number of people whose names I do not myself recall: ephemeral sub-editors of the New York Times Book Review, men who install stereo equipment, a shop (long defunct) that sold juggling equipment. As a quondam teacher, I have too many students in this Rolodex. I’m not sure why I bothered to record their names and phone numbers, since no one is more difficult to reach by phone than students, that transient class which is also, in my view, easily the world’s most unreliable ethnic group.
This Rolodex reveals a man no longer in the flush or rush of youth. The names of several doctors are in it: cardiologists, rheumatologists, internists, dentists, but not yet (touch wood) any oncologist or shrink. (Physicians heal thyselves, is my motto, but, if you don’t mind, heal me first.) There are too many nice people whom I haven’t called in several years, a harsh reminder that I am not the most constant of friends, and a few with whom I have had what now begin to look like permanent fallings-out.
I have the former office phone number of a man with the perfectly appropriate name of Hope who used to work for the MacArthur Foundation. Whenever he left his name on my answering machine, it got my blood running. He has long since left the job, and hope of large windfalls, as well as of a number of other things, has run out for me.
What most impresses me, though, is the number of subtractions, through death, that a run through the cards of my Rolodex shows. Henry James somewhere says that, when one reaches 50, someone he knows dies every day. Not quite statistically true, at least in my case, though as a habitual reader of the New York Times obituary pages, I am regularly brought up short by how many people seem to be taking the ten-count that I have either known directly or know about through their connection with friends of mine.
In my own Rolodex, kept over less than ten years, seventeen cards ought to be withdrawn, or at least have black borders drawn around them, to mark the decease of old friends, strong acquaintances, family. I haven’t the heart to do either. Quite the reverse, I rather like to come upon these names, allowing memories of these people to wash over me. For some reason, my Rolodex often opens to the card on which is written the name Erich Heller, the continental literacy critic, who was hard of hearing and who used inevitably to answer, in his strong Teutonic accent, my phone calls by saying: “Denk you, denk you, very vell — und you?” when in fact I hadn’t asked him how he was but had merely announced my name.
One card in particular I cannot remove has the name of a young girl, written in green ink in her own small and elegant hand, a student of mathematics, brilliant and pretty, who turned up in her early twenties a manic-depressive and who, one night, unable to discern any charm in the world whatsoever, leaped from a ninth-story window to her death.
I have no plans ever to write an autobiography. My letters, though great in number, tend to be laconic and not very intimate. But I wonder if there mightn’t be a publisher out there wishing to bring out my unexpurgated Rolodex. Interested parties are invited to write to my agent, Mr. Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Inc., 136 E. 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
