The habit of collecting things undoubtedly goes back to the time when our ancestors spoke in grunts and wandered the plains of Africa gathering nuts and berries. In my youth, like most boys, I had several collections. Of course I collected stamps and baseball cards, but I also had more peculiar tastes. For awhile I collected bottle caps. I don’t know why, but they were pretty, were easy to find, and could be arranged by type, color, or by what had been in the bottle they had capped. In my teen years I collected jazz recordings—this was before there were quantities of reissues on the market and original Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong discs were prized finds. In my twenties, when I had young children, I collected as many greenback dollar bills as I could lay my hands on. Later, when the pressure had eased a little, I started collecting the books of my favorite authors—Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Wilson, to name a few. I gathered a complete set of first editions of S.J. Perelman, another favorite, including the rare ”Dawn Ginsberg’s Revenge.” I also have a fairly large collection of pitchers. I was drawn to this pursuit by a lot of pitchers which hung in the china closet of a rather grand house that belonged to my great aunts. I now have thirty or more pitchers, ranging in size from one that can contain a thimbleful of cherry brandy—a thimbleful of the stuff will do for most people—to one that will hold enough sangria to capsize a party of ten.
I also have quite a significant collection of neckties. This came about when I had an actual job back in the days when men routinely wore ties to work. Men of that time had many neckties, most of which they hated, but had to wear on those occasions when Aunt Silvia or Cousin Beth, who had donated the ties, might be present. I had ties with cats on them, ties with the stripes of some British regiment that had fled in terror during the battle of the Somme, a tie covered with pumpkins and squashes. Neckties are rarely required of me any more, but there they are in my closet, hoping forlornly to once more be paraded forth.
But collections of bottle caps and neckties are small potatoes compared with other gatherings I have heard of. In the golden days of the early twentieth century, Gertrude Stein and her pal Alice B. Toklas, collected artists and writers, among them Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Pablo Picasso, a collection of eminences that would do any salon proud. I recently have read about a man who collected penises, some of them long enough to serve as swords, or for the more peaceful, yardsticks. I can’t remember who or what these rather frightening appendages had adorned before being collected, but they must have been astonishing.
Then there are people who collect spouses. This seems to be primarily a male hobby; for whatever reasons, women seem less likely to make serial marriages. The champion, as I remember, was a wealthy playboy named Tommy Manville who well back in the twentieth century was married ten times. The famous jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw had, I think, five wives. He once said plaintively, “Why do I have to spend my time talking to an illiterate just because she has a great ass?” Freud—or Darwin or somebody—could have explained to Shaw that nature was far more interested in continuing the species than in amusing clarinetists. Another collection I came across some time back belonged to my son Andy when he was seven or eight. He came home one day with a fairly large rock. “What are you going to do with that?” I asked suspiciously.
“It’s my rock collection,” he said firmly.
“One isn’t a collection,” I responded.
“Why isn’t it?” he demanded. I hadn’t any good answer to that, and I still don’t.
In a time before the internet and email, it was usual for people to collect the letters they received. There was good reason for that. Travel was expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes dangerous—a sport for the well-to-do. Letters from friends and relations were important sources of information, not only about the travelers, but about the sights they had seen and the people they had met. Letters were carefully kept and read out loud to visitors. I once came across a lot of letters my father had written home during his stint in the army, his days working on cattle ranches, his adventure stowing away on a ship to get home. These letters helped me to know him better than I had living with him growing up. We had never really gotten along very well, and as a boy I had avoided him as much as possible. But from his letters I discovered that from his early teens he had been in rebellion against his unbending New England family. At sixteen he ran away from home and joined the army. In the end they captured him and pushed him into marriage. He always resented being a dutiful, bourgeois father, and his letters helped me understand why, at the age of seventy-five, he was living with a prostitute and spending his small pension in unseemly New York bars.
Letters also are quite useful for the collecting of ancestors, widely practiced in the United States, where ancestors are less common than in many other places, like England and France. (One of the greatest sources of tension between the English and the Irish a century ago was that the English forbid the Irish from having ancestors.) It is widely believed that everybody must have the same number of ancestors, but that isn’t always so, as for example in instances where the same ancestor comes into the line more than once, as is often the case in families which have lingered in the same area for several generations. A great many ancestor hunters are not aiming at filling out their genealogies, but are hoping to find proof that they are related to some notable, like Abraham Lincoln, the Duke of York, or Moses. One ancestor hunter I knew, my great-aunt Ruth Slater, who through much of my childhood spent a lot of time reading what her generation considered racy novels like “Sons and Lovers” and “South Wind.” She was aided in this work by ingesting cocaine dissolved in alcohol, a tonic often recommended for “women’s complaint,” a euphemism for menstrual cramps. My aunt Ruth, however, was imbibing her tonic long after she had to worry about menstrual cramps. Along with her tonic and literature, she dabbled in genealogy. It can be said in her favor that she was not looking just for ornaments to dangle from the family tree, but was as interested in the genealogies of local plumbers and carpenters, often discovering to her glee that they had more distinguished lines than many of the more prominent people in town.
However, most ancestor hunters are not so high-minded, but are chasing tinsel for the tree. My grandmother, Francis Collier, whom one of my cousins usually referred to as a “bitch on wheels,” was one of these. Once I said something about having to visit Washington for some journalist purpose or other. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “I was there when Mr. McKinley was president.” This seemed interesting, so I asked what Washington was like then. She replied, “My Cousin Will was in the government then. He was very well-thought of,” and on and on about Cousin Will, who as far as I could determine, was a non-entity who happened to live in D.C.
From all of this it has become clear to me that ancestors are useful only if they have a great deal of wealth. There is nothing, really, quite so charming as old money. Indeed money without “old” is pretty good; but contrary to what my grandmother Francis believed, “old” without money is worth nothing at all. You’d be better off collecting bottle caps.
That leaves me with one last class of objects that are often collected, and that is made up of people. It is sometimes difficult to see the advantages of collections of people, for they are awfully hard to dispense with when their value is exhausted, which is usually fairly quickly. However, it can be done. I will no longer attend the family reunions that Cousin Beth likes to put together. Cousin Beth believes that alcohol is the Devil’s bane, and nothing stronger than lemonade will be served. Nor will I go to my high school class reunion, which will be held in a gym redolent of the smell of sweaty boys and old sneakers, and will be an occasion of unparalleled tedium. In the end many of these people will stop speaking to me, and that, of course will suit all hands very well.
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