When I bought Murdoch's The Bell at Givens, my favorite second-hand book store, I opened it up to find the price - $4.95. There was a pencilled name on the fly too--E. Cash. I didn't give it too much thought, just bought the book and left.
On turning to the first page, I was a little crestfallen to see so much pencilled underlining. E. Cash was a close reader. An underliner. He (I have him down as a He) had underlined character names (Dora Greenfield, Paul Greenfield) and sentences that had some significance to him ("She decided at last that the persecution of his presence was to be preferred to the persecution of his absence"). His boxy handwritting made rare comments ("good, good") and copied out definitions of words (animadvert, rebarbative...).
At first, I found them intrusive. But after a while, perhaps by chapter three, I found myself nodding in agreement as E. Cash and I pondered the significance of the same line or feeling grateful at his pencilled definition of an obscure word in the top margin. His isolation of some pertinent passages in an early chapter shed some light on a question I had without diluting my own exploration of the text.
Occasionally, I came across an exclamation or question mark in the margin and felt a little disappointed that Cash and I couldn't somehow discuss Murdoch's line ("Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself").
Cash was clear about his quest: to search for the book's theme. His notes indicate that he felt the theme was the need to see reality. I wanted to ask him whether it might be extended to include the perils (or illicit joy) of living in fantasy or at least untested reality.
It was almost as if Cash and I were reading together. It was like being a member of a book club without the noise, more a shared nodding or shaking of heads. I know that I'll look for E. Cash's name on flys. I hope we meet again.
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