“By all means, sir!” said the older scholar, and the others cried, “Hear, hear!”
“What I’m thinking of doing is an original entry.” There were more sounds of encouragement.
I was taken by the librarian into a smaller, adjoining room, seated at a desk, and given a sheaf of quality foolscap and an old-fashioned fountain pen of the kind I had not seen since childhood. Its point glided across the heavy, creamy-textured paper as a keen blade skims over black ice. What I wrote was as follows.
WREN, RUSSEL, born not so many years ago that he cannot still be called young, should be universally acknowledged as America’s foremost playwright in the last quarter of the twentieth century, but in reality he has been infamously neglected by the soi-disant major critics, who however have some slight justification in that as yet his work has never been produced.
When I returned to the roomful of scholars and presented the little paragraph to the man with white hair, he read it eagerly and then, with every sign of approval, gave it to the man next to him. When this second reading had been completed, the two nodded at each other.
“Superb!” said the older man. “We are delighted. But I must point out that it is, after all, a revision of an existing entry.”
“How can that be?”
He bent over the volume before him, flipped through the pages until he had arrived at the one he could use as evidence, and handed the book to me. “See for yourself.”
It was midway along the right-hand page, in the Ws, between Sir Christopher and a bird called the Wren-Tit:
WREN, RUSSEL, a shabby private detective in New York City who poses as a playwright to gain sexual favors from women and bluff his fellow man.
“So you see,” said the elderly scholar, “you have provided an obviously much needed revision.”
“I don’t suppose you could tell me who composed this entry,” I asked, tapping the book with an offended forefinger.
He looked around the table. “Anyone here?” But they all of them shook their heads in negation.
At length a skinny man with a prominent wen on his nose pursed his lips speculatively and said, “That wouldn’t have been Mr. McCoy?”
“Perhaps,” said the whitehaired man. “He’s done most of the American entries, for obvious reasons.”
“Good heavens,” I cried. “You people unwittingly took quite a chance. I assume you didn’t know that McCoy had AIDS.”
But my spite went for naught. They had never heard of the ailment despite the local prevalence of buggery.
The slight, dark librarian then conducted me to the third floor, where a battery of male typists made manuscripts of the revised entries for the encyclopedia.
My guide told me that these were regularly taken by himself to the royal printing house. He went now to a metal strongbox, painted bright red, on a table near the door, opened its hasp, and peered within.
“Filled. We might go there now, if you’d care to come along.”
Outside, I suggested we take the rickshaw, which was waiting at the curb, for the seat was wide enough to accept the slender man along with me, and the blond in the traces was certainly strong enough to pull the two of us. But my guide told me the printer was just along the street a few steps away.
The printer’s shop proved to be in an outbuilding, originally no doubt a stable, behind the house at the end of the street. A large hand-operated press, glistening disc cocked at the traditional angle, dominated the room, and sawdust covered the floor. A stocky man in an inky apron and a handmade paper hat was setting individual pieces of type in a composing stick: he did this with remarkable speed, plucking what he needed from a shallow horizontal box of pigeonholes.
“That’s nice to see,” I told my guide. “When I was a boy there was still a fellow in my town who did job printing on a hand-powered press when he was not occupied with Linotyping the weekly paper. By the way, do you have a newspaper in Saint Sebastian?”
“Broadsides,” said he, “when the occasions present themselves, but not on a regular schedule of any sort. Is it true that elsewhere in the world, newspapers are published every day and at the exact same time of day, whether or not there is anything of note to report?”
“And television and radio newscasts, as well,” said I, “relentlessly. And weekly magazines and papers, in addition, though of course by the time a week has passed, it would be unusual were nothing to have happened.”
He shrugged. “No doubt the problem is frequently addressed by invention.”
“That does happen at times, but if they’re caught at it there’s hell to pay.” I saw him frown, and added, “But perhaps the practice is routine in Saint Sebastian?”
“It surely would be, but we do not bother with news in the first place, you see.”
His smugness irked me. “But you do bother with an encyclopedia.”
“It cannot bother many if only one copy is available for reading, and of course we do what we can to keep quiet about the existence of a public library.”
The printer was now locking up a chase in which many sticks of type had been brought together to constitute a page. After the fashion of craftworkers everywhere, he found it easy to ignore laymen.
“Yes,” said I, “and I confess I cannot understand why, unless the idea is simply to keep the populace in a state of ignorance. In which case there would be no sense even to have something called a public library.”
“The idea, I should say, is rather to make it necessary to expend some personal effort in relieving one’s ignorance,” he told me. “Not to force-feed information to the reluctant.”
There might have been some sense in this had a genuine library been at the end of the obstacle hunt, or even one encyclopedia of substance and not such a farcical product as was being fabricated by the scholars of Saint Sebastian, but as a guest in the country I did not make these points aloud.
The printer finally turned. He winced at the sight of the red box. “That’s not filled again?”
The librarian cringed and said apologetically, “Well, that’s our job, isn’t it?”
“Speak for yourself,” the printer growled. Then he stared at me and asked rudely, “Who’s this one?”
“I’m from New York,” I said, choosing from amongst my various identifications (nationality, profession, religious preference, etc.) the one I supposed would make the quickest impression on a national of a tiny foreign country.
But I immediately lost the advantage.
He demanded, “Where’s that?”
“New York? Why, in America. You’ve heard of America.”
“Don’t be insolent,” said the printer. “What’s new about it? Where’s Old York?”
“England. But the Old isn’t nearly as well known as the New.”
“I don’t like new things of any kind,” said he. “They’re never really reliable, no matter what you say. Would you consider this new place as more reliable than the old one?”
“Certainly not. But is that a reasonable criterion?”
The printer cleared his throat angrily. “Name a better one! If you go about irresponsibly naming things ‘New,’ then you should expect to defend the practice sooner or later. You say New York is well known. For what?”
For no good reason I was altogether on the defensive, and when my back is to the wall, like most people I resort to dollars and cents. “Money! I understand you don’t use any in Saint Sebastian, but please believe me when I say that elsewhere it makes the world go round, with the exception of totalitarian-collectivist lands, where brute force, realized or implied, would seem to be the catalyst.”
The printer resituated the paper hat on his head. “Do you have a lot of money?”
“As it happens I have very little.”
“Why, when you live in its capital?”
“Aha,” said I. “That is a somewhat rude but not irrelevant question. I always expect to be given some in the future. A play written by me might have a great success, making me a rich
man overnight.”
He thought about this for a moment. “And life as a rich man would be to your liking?”
“I assure you it would, not because I yearn for possessions. Indeed, I might even own fewer things than I do now—or did before my home was destroyed. Incidentally, that was done by extremists from Saint Sebastian, so not everyone here thinks this country is a paradise.” Going on the offensive made me feel better.
He simply ignored my later point and focused on the earlier. “What would being rich do for you?”
I welcomed the opportunity to sort out my feelings on that subject. “Services! One could hire people to take clothes to the cleaner’s and to wait until the machines were free at the Laundromat.... Just a moment: if you were rich enough, you could wear clothes until they were soiled and then simply throw them away and send your flunky to the shops for more. Having one’s own chauffeur-driven limousine would be basic, but what of getting from your apartment to the car? Such a routine journey can be fraught with discomfort and even danger in New York. With money one could hire a team of bravos to carry one to the curb! These same men, preferably conspicuously fearsome-looking plug-uglies, would accompany one everywhere and forestall, by their appearance alone, most of the abuse which is a quotidian feature of life in the city: the vicious responses of cabdrivers to imaginary encroachments; the thrusting shoulders of sidewalk thugs; the threats of those who find you, if unarmed and harmless, the principal author of their social disenfranchisement; and even the fishwifery of well-upholstered matrons who cannot forgive you for falling victim to their umbrella-tips. In restaurants such bullyboys could command the attention of the same blind-and-deaf waiter who is hired specially by one eatery after another, whichever you choose to dine at that day, to serve cool steak and warm ice cream, to bring Bulgarian claret and charge you for Mouton, and to replace a greasy fork with one which displays dried marinara sauce.”
The printer was staring at me with a raised eyebrow.
“Mind you,” I went on, “there are free radio psychiatrists, and museum food has got more elaborate in recent years, and at certain gathering places notables are sometimes to be glimpsed, trading gossip and/or punches, and one who’s fascinated by fresh-made pasta and picketing against gentrification need never be lonely.”
The printer shook his head. “It’s obvious you suffer from an exaggerated case of envy. You lust for what you cannot have, and envy has vitiated such force as you might originally have had. My advice to you is to settle in Saint Sebastian and learn and practice a craft: printing, if you like. I can always use an extra apprentice. Or carpentry, shoemaking, masonry, cooking or baking, distilling schnapps, brewing beer. There’s plenty to do, none of it characterized by the hateful competitive strife typical of, by your account, your home principality.”
I passed up the opportunity to quote the legendary bon mot of the circus employee who gave elephant-enemas, “And leave show business?” I simply told him I’d think about it, thanked him, and left.
On his own exit the librarian, who I now decided greatly resembled the author of In der Strafkolonie, had plucked, from a pile near the door, a copy of a one-sheet newspaper.
I asked him, “Is that a broadside?”
“Yes, indeed,” said he, presenting it to me.
It bore a headline of modest size: “The Case Against Training Birds to Speak.” I read it aloud, and asked, “Is that a current problem here?”
“At least one person thinks so,” said my companion, “else he would not have written this.”
“The subject is characteristic of the broadsides?”
“I’d say so. Natural history is a favorite topic. There was one last week that considered what might happen if mice were as large as pigs.”
I lowered the paper. “Have you ever heard of a long story entitled Die Verwandlung?”
“No.”
“Have you ever read I Promessi Sposi, the Thesmophoriazusae, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Ghalib’s ghazals, or, for a change of pace, the frothy entertainments of the late Thorne Smith: The Night Life of the Gods, perhaps, or Topper Takes a Trip?”
“Never.”
“I suspected as much. It is no doubt desirable in Saint Sebastian for a librarian to be—forgive my candor, which is intended to be scientific, not abusive—to be, in a word, ill read.”
“I’m quite illiterate,” said he, with a smile I should have called proud. He nodded at the paper in my hand. “I can’t read a word of that.”
“Uh-huh. And it doesn’t strike you as strange to have such employment as you do?”
“Not at all. You see, I am therefore utterly unbiased. One book is as good as another to me.”
“You don’t really have many books at the library, do you?”
“Not now.”
“At one time there were more than the Encyclopaedia Sebastiana?”
“A good many,” said the librarian. “I gave them all away.”
The rickshaw man was waiting at the curb. His head was down and he seemed to be dozing as a horse might in the same situation.
“To whom did you present them?”
“I gave one to each person, but sometimes, when I was told that several constituted a set, I gave those that belonged together to the same person, relying on his honesty, for of course I was unable to identify the titles except by ear.”
“Extraordinary,” I said. “And may I ask why you disposed of the collection of the public library of Saint Sebastian?”
“It seemed to make little sense to keep all the books with me, who could not read, when they might each find a good home with someone who would make use of them.”
“Yes, but people generally do not reread the same volume constantly unless it’s a religious scripture and they are fanatically devout,” I told him. “Most readers go from one book to the next.”
He was shaking his head. “Not in this country.”
“Come now, you don’t mean to say a Sebastiani reader remains with the same book?”
“With all respect,” said the librarian, “if your practice is otherwise. But my literate countrymen believe that, going from one book to another, the reader can never get more than the most superficial sense of what the author has taken the pains to write.”
I was not insensitive to the point being made, having myself in my pedagogical days taught a survey-of-world-lit. course at State, in which in the space of barely eight months the students were obliged to pretend they had read the major works of some twenty centuries (I confess their instructor had to fake a few himself). “There is much to be said for that argument if the books concerned are masterpieces,” I noted. “But every volume in the library? Would you not have had some titles of negligible value: the mendacious memoirs of film stars, the apologias of ex-statesmen, once famous muckrakings made pointless by time, first-aid manuals for personality disorders now out of fashion, and the kind of narratives our forebears found risqué but which nowadays would anesthetize with ennui a novice nun?”
“Sebastiani readers do not make such distinctions,” said the librarian. “If a book is printed and bound, it’s good enough for them.”
It occurred to me to ask, “Would the books concerned have been the work of Sebastiani authors?”
“Indeed they would,” said he.
“Might it be possible for me to meet one or more of your writers? There are some extant?”
“Certainly. The pink house just there is their quarters.” He indicated the building next to the library.
“When you say ‘quarters,’ do you mean they live there in a kind of colony?”
“Of course. That is the law.”
“When you say ‘law,’ do you mean that they are obliged to live there?”
“Not unless they want to practice that profession,” said the librarian. “No man can be forced to become a writer, but if he does become one, he must live here and not amongst the populace.”
“What is the purpose of that law? F
or whose benefit was it enacted? The public’s or the writer’s?”
“Both, I should think,” the little librarian said. “Thus neither is polluted by the other.”
“I’m not sure what that means. By ‘polluted,’ do you mean—”
“I’m sure it’s a fancy way of saying ‘bored,’ don’t you know,” said he. “But here we are.” We had reached the doorstep of the two-story building in pink stucco. “The authors will be having their... let me see, which meal will it be? Breakfast, Postbreakfast, Lunch, ah yes, this would be Postlunch without a doubt. I’m sure you will be most welcome in the dining room.”
5
WE ENTERED THE PINK house and went upstairs to a dining room that occupied most of the second floor. Its central feature was a large round table, at which about dozen men, one or two young, one or two old, but most of them in middle age, sat silently drinking what would seem from its color, and the shape of the glasses, to be sherry.
“Gentlemen,” said my sponsor, “you have a visitor from New York. I know you’ll want to make him welcome.”
One of the writers, a flabby-cheeked individual with the melancholy eyes of a hound, gestured with his forefinger. “There’s a place there, next to Spang.”
I assumed it was Spang, a sallow, longlipped man, who moved so that I might slide into the chair beside him. But when I said, “How do you do, Mr. Spang. I’m Russel Wren,” he replied, in a high-tenor voice, “Oh, I’m not Spang. I’m Hinkle.”
“Since when are you not Spang?” asked the sad-eyed man who had first spoken to me.
“I’ve never been Spang. He’s deceased.”
“If that’s so, then why have you never mentioned it before?”
“There’s never been an occasion to do so,” said Hinkle. “You’ve never called me Spang before.”
“But I’ve always thought you were Spang. Can’t you get that through your thick head? Simply because I’ve never had to use your name before doesn’t mean that I was not certain what it was.”