In the South there was always a Bible you could memorize chapters from. Don't anyone around me make fun of Louis Untermeyer and his big blue TREASURY OF POETRY. You could memorize passages from Shakespeare plays without ever having seen a copy of those plays. After a school fire there were boxes of books one could paw through and I found a 1990 Henry Holt MACBETH than had been signed Jan. 21, 1913 by Lottie Ray Adams in Tecumseh, Oklahoma. A play that short, you could pretty much memorize. By 1952 I had a Pocket Book (a genuine Pocket Book) Four Great Tragedies, and under a locust tree around cow patties memorized some of KING LEAR. (In 2020, before surgery, I did floor exercises to Anthony Hopkins.) In 1953 I got my one-volume Shakespeare in New Orleans along with the first photograph of me and Andrew Jackson. When Canty and Deroder (not quite the right name) showed up one afternoon on their go-cart at Singer, Louisiana there was the folded up cot at the South end of the office but on the working part of the great pigeon-holed desk were what Canty hailed as the Bible and Shakespeare, the only alien books in the place. And on 1 January 1956, released from a sanatorium, I had the one-volume Shakespeare to get me through the next five months. OTHELLO? 7 times up through 25 May, and (a miracle) Paul Robeson's LPs 3 times late in May. One year later, with peneuno-peritoneum I did enact Cassio in the Richmond Community Theater and have a photograph to prove it. How could anyone ever be bored? Back as night telegrapher on the KCS in Port Arthur, I started off taking only 10 units, thinking more might be too hard for a tubercular released on the unsuspecting world. With money coming in, I got Helen Derbyshire's 2 versions of THE PRELUDE and line by line read the earlier version, line by line. What a treasure she gave, Helen Derbyshire. I owned her book until a few weeks ago but it is no longer on the shelf where it had lived. And in late 1957 I could read LIGHT IN AUGUST imagining that the author was home over in Mississippi, and re-read MOBY-DICK absolutely astounded again that a young American had written it. Well, no movies then (except the black and white version of Olivier's RICHARD THE THIRD, which took over the black and white television for a day), but Robeson's LPs were long-sustaining. (I finally got to see Uta Hagen, his great co-star, in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? in NYC at a matinee. Was it early in 1963? One frugal young fellow and a hoard of blue haired ladies were released onto an unprepared street, bewildered and explosive. Not bored. Never bored.
