Hank Retrieves His Old Book and Reconsiders Writing

William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s recovery of his first book turns a forgotten volume into an unwelcome record of the life it helped set in motion—and, unexpectedly, a possible summons to write again. The book has passed from Finny to Dickie Pope, where it has become an object of office decoration; Devereaux slips it into his coat, then opens it in his office instead of putting it away. Against the distractions of his body, his memories, and academic business, the old pages bring his dormant authorship back into view.

The book and its history

The encounter begins with a book in pristine condition: its dust jacket and volume look almost untouched. The back-cover photograph shows a young Devereaux with an intense, severe expression. Looking at it, he wonders whether he had unconsciously borrowed the self-contained pose of his father, William Henry Devereaux, Sr. The clothes were intended to distinguish him from his tweed-clad scholar father, but the posture seems inherited. The photograph’s caption places Devereaux at home in Railton, Pennsylvania, while its expression suggests a man who could never be at home there.

On the title page, Devereaux finds an inscription in his own hand: “For Finny,” followed by “With affection and admiration. Good luck.” The good wishes return him to the year they both sought tenure and promotion to associate professor. Finny had spent six years at the Railton Campus without completing the dissertation begun at the University of Pennsylvania; his file held little beyond a letter from his dissertation director asking the committee not to give up on him. Devereaux, by contrast, had a published book and believed his promotion was nearly assured, despite having put himself forward after only a year in residence. The outcome reversed those expectations: Finny was promoted, while Devereaux was denied promotion.

The rejection enraged Devereaux. With Jacob Rose’s help, he put himself forward for full professor the following year. The committee approved the bid, but the victory fixed him more firmly at the university: tenure, rank, and salary left him too encumbered to be marketable elsewhere. The small book therefore belongs not merely to his past as a writer. Its publication helped determine where he and his family would live and what sort of institutional life he would inhabit.

From gift to office decoration

Devereaux remembers giving Finny the book as a sweet parting gesture because he assumed Finny would not be tenured. Now he is angry that Finny has sold it. The volume’s history strikes him as a decline in ownership: it passed from someone who apparently did not want it as a gift to someone who treats it as interior decoration. Devereaux compares its journey to Oliver Twist’s passage from one bad home to a worse one. The insult is sharpened by the contrast between the care visible in the pristine object and the disregard implied by its successive owners.

When Devereaux hears Dickie Pope speaking in the outer office, he puts the book in his coat pocket. Later, Dickie and Lou Steinmetz stand at the edge of the crowd outside; Dickie grins and points toward the darkening sky. In the men’s room, the recovered book becomes part of Devereaux’s uneasy inventory of himself: he sees his reflection repeated in the mirrors and remembers the volume in his pocket. Its physical presence joins the reflections in making his attention turn inward. The title he once gave away is now something he has taken back, although he has not yet decided what to do with it.

A life shaped by one book

Holding the volume brings back the scale of its consequences. Devereaux recalls that it did not make him famous, but its acceptance brought the family to Railton. Its advance helped pay for the early clearing of trees in Allegheny Wells and the purchase of the adjacent two lots. Devereaux has since refused to sell those lots, and that refusal helped feed the minor English department feuds that have served in place of more substantial conflict. The book’s reach thus extends from a literary decision to a home, a property dispute, and a recurring institutional antagonism.

The actual copy in his hands has had, in his view, an ignominious life, but the work itself once altered the course of its author’s family. That difference matters: the object can be neglected even as the book’s consequences endure. Devereaux’s anger at Finny is the only emotion he can identify while holding it, yet the remembered history makes the volume more than a grievance or a relic. It is tangible evidence of an earlier version of his life, one in which he completed and published a book and its success carried him into a new place.

Reading and the possibility of another book

Alone in the men’s room, Devereaux is fifty, sees his drawn face in the mirrors, and notices a low drone and tingling in his extremities. He wonders whether the brief temporal ellipses he has experienced in recent days signal illness. But he also remembers that similar disappearances occurred while he was writing his earlier book. Lily used to chide him for being physically present but emotionally absent during dinner conversations, and Karen later said she could tell when his attention had slipped into another world of fictional revision. The remembered pattern leaves open whether the sensation is bodily trouble or a sign that writing is again demanding his attention.

Devereaux is not confident that any new book would be worth following. He recognizes that bad books can call to writers as insistently as good ones, and he considers whether it might be better not to listen. Back in his office, he uses a small desk lamp rather than the overhead lights, hoping for a little peace. The drone grows louder, then abruptly disappears. He takes the old book from his pocket and, instead of shelving it, opens the first page and begins to read.

Rachel interrupts over the intercom to ask whether he is there. Devereaux’s inward division—between the writer absorbed in a book and the tenured professor with immediate responsibilities—finds a comic form in his uncertainty about which version of himself she means. He tells her, “I’m thinking about writing another book, Rachel,” and she responds with surprise and encouragement. The drone returns after he says it, swelling in his imagination into distant thunder, as if the storm Dickie had pointed out has arrived. But messages are waiting. Devereaux recognizes academic memos, voice messages, and other demands as a kind of cotton for the ears, capable of muffling the siren call of authorship. The scene ends not with a new manuscript begun, but with the possibility voiced and already pressed upon by the ordinary obligations that may drown it out.