“Well … I guess you are.”
“No, you know I am.”
“Even so, I don’t know what business of yours it is. You’ve been insisting I must tell the tale, your story. And you just conceded that all of us have our individual ways of doing, our idiosyncrasies. Everybody…”
“Idiosyncrasies. Right, governor. From the Latin for idiot. Sorry to interrupt you, But the buried origin of the word got to me.”
“Everybody has her or his own method. With whims and tics. A great German poet kept rotten apples under his desk while he wrote. Needed their smell to work.”
“Righto. That’s it. Whatever works. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not faulting your way. ’ ‘Tain’t easy,’ as the dummy used to say to the ventriloquist. On the radio, remember? As I’ve assured you, whatever’s necessary for this arrangement to work, strange as it might seem to you at first, will serve both our purposes in the long run. Not hinder, I swear. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“Don’t tempt me. But get to the point. You’re beating around the bush.”
“To the point, governor. When the matter first came up between us, you might remember, I had insisted you had to tell my story. Because you’d summoned me. After a song and dance of denial, you finally, if tacitly, agreed. Now mind you, the stipulation was that you tell. Not just write. Manu scriptum, from the Latin, of course, is not the only way to tell a story. Tell, so that I can take it in as you go. And we agreed that, sitting in this wonderfully comfortable chair while you did the telling, I’d be listening. Christ, governor, I’m not going to stand behind you, short or long as it takes, reading over your shoulder what’s running out of your pen. And my guess is your handwriting is every bit at bad as mine. Almost illegible. Hell, the last thing you care about as you push on is penmanship. All you care about is getting it down. So you, not somebody else, can make out the words later. Fair enough? I haven’t the least desire to read what you write, as you write it. Or ever. What I was summoned for was to hear you tell my story.
“Now look here, Fels, or whatever your real name might be, obviously you don’t know the least thing about…about giving birth, to use a pertinent metaphor, to a story. Why, what you’re asking is utterly impossible. Unheard of. Never…”
“Hold it, right there, governor. Not so fast with your absolutes. As an educated man, a literary fellow no less, you must know that before such a distinctively human activity as writing was, before the implements—computers, word processors, typewriters, pencils, pens, quills, chisels, paper, screens, papyrus, bark—existed as such, stories were chanted, sung, and told by bards, skalds, scops, gleeman, jongleurs, troubadours, prophets. Think of the early scriptures of all religions. The myths and epics—The Pentateuch, the prophets, The Mahabharata, Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, Beowulf. Matter of fact, there are some impressive precedents after quill, ink and paper came along. Eyes giving out in his late fifties, Milton dictated his three monumental poems to his daughters. As Flaubert, the perfectionist, wrought his beautifully crafted sentences, he belted them out. Closer to home and our time, fastidious Henry James, a master from who, or as you’d say whom, you can learn a lesson or two, chose to dictate his last three great novels, long and complex as they are. Not to mention such a diverse crew as Thomas Aquinas, Wordsworth, Stendhal, Wallace Stevens, and James Joyce, all of whom used their tongue as their pen. Rather than turn your nose up at such a practice, you should think of the company you’ll be in.”
“You’re a master of sleight of hand. Or to throw back at you, the organ you’re using to torment me, a wizard with an adder’s tongue.”
“Though it’s not meant to be, I take the epithet as a compliment. But what you’re confronting here, governor, isn’t a matter of choice. Just like the reason for your being the one to tell the story, delivering it aloud is a necessity.”
“Are you taking into account how much faster I can write a story I’m making up than I can tell it, groping for words as I’ll be to make certain they’re the ones I need. Rewriting, even crossing out and moving things around.”
“There you go. You’ve got the point of it, governor. Not the point of the pen but the tip of the tongue. You just can’t think a story. You also have to hear it. As for speed, you can set the rate and go at your own. It doesn’t want to be easy, telling a tale doesn’t. You don’t want to just let the words run out of your pen into ink on paper. You have to find them in your gut—a more polite word is heart—then breathe them out and hear them, pacing yourself to keep up with your invention and your writing it down. I won’t rush you, I promise. Okay? Now, no more pointless insistence and resistance, needing and pleading. ‘Harpier cries, “’Tis time, ’tis time.” Begin telling my story. Now.”
Before complying, I finish my second cup of coffee with deliberate slowness.
#
He’d come across the bookstall by the merest of chances. On his way to the Indonesian restaurant where occasionally he ate dinner, something made him saunter in. Skimming along a shelf, his eye was caught by black letters on the crimson…
#
“Stop! Hold it. Right there. Wrong, all wrong.”
He was sitting so far forward on the cushion of my easy chair that I thought he was about to topple over and land face-first on the floor. On the words stop and wrong he pounded the air with the clenched fist of his left hand.
“What can possibly be wrong? I’ve scarcely begun. Haven’t even finished the second sentence.”
“Exactly why I stopped you, governor. So you wouldn’t pursue the wrong road. What you’ve said is based on a mistaken premise.”
“Which is?”
“Which is, he doesn’t just happen on the book, the direction you’re taking. No, no. Not by a long shot. He’s been actively looking for it. To use a word you and I have worked our way toward understanding, the book has been summoning him. That’s why he’s been traveling from city to city, town to town in search of it in plausible places. Already he’s found twelve copies.”
“What then does he want with a thirteenth?”
“Although that seems to be a reasonable question, it’s out of place. As you go on, in the right direction, you’ll see why. Now forget the misconception you’ve begun with and start again.”
Warthog, I say to myself.
#
As he’d done many a time before, in city after city, town after town, he moved slowly along the cobblestone alley dividing the shelves, on one side of the outdoor bookstall, from the troughs, overflowing with books, on the other. The stall was attached to a bookstore.
This evening he was doing the top shelf, scanning methodically. Because he had to straighten to his full height—he was a short man—while keeping his left hand on the outer edge of the shelf for balance, and because he had to get a satisfying look at the spine of every book that was undersized and slim, his progress was slow. In light now growing dimmer by the minute, he was squinting. The summer afternoon had been quite warm and bright. But with the top floors of the apartment building, in which the bookstore was housed at street level, blocking the sun, he was gratified to have the falling temperature as a plausible explanation for wearing the raincoat. In no way was he concerned with appearance for appearance sake.
All at once his eye stopped . . .
#
“Sorry to break in on your thought. But you’ve been sitting there silently with your pen motionless, as though you’re considering writing on air, for nigh on five minutes. If we’re to finish by lunchtime, as we agreed was both possible and desirable, you need to start spitting out words and getting that pen moving across the lines of your legal pad. Word, words, words, governor. Start producing words again.”
“Can’t.”
“What? I thought you summoned me because you are a writer.”
“I am. But I’m stuck. It happens, you know. I got to ‘his eye’ and I didn’t know what
his eye.”
“You’re stuck, governor! Why you haven’t even got into the first act. All you’ve done is ramble your way into a prologue. Can it be because those long Latinate sentences of yours are impossible for you, let alone a listener or a reader, to follow. As a hermit manqué once advised, ‘Simplify, simplify, simplify!’”
“Sorry you don’t take to my style. But that’s the way it is. You didn’t have to answer my summons, as you call it, you know. Anyway, that’s not the reason I’m stuck.”
“What in God’s name has you stuck, then, governor?
“Some necessaries. I can’t go on without some necessaries.”
“Necessaries? You have a brain, a voice, a pen and paper, haven’t you? What necessaries?”
“For one, I have to know where I …I mean you…I mean the man in the story…let’s just say he is.”
“Why you know perfectly well where he is. You’ve got him in a bookstall. Exactly where he belongs.”
“Look…I mean, listen. If the story is going to be believed, there must be the illusion of reality. I have to provide convincing details and particulars. Density creates realism. What’s the architecture of the building the bookstall is attached to? Are there trees along the sidewalk? Are they plane trees, maples, oaks? Any shrubs in tubs? Flowers? What section of the city are we in? or is it a town, which makes a difference in the ambience. Is there litter? Are there trash baskets? Any odors? Buses? Traffic noise? How about pedestri…”
“Whoa there, Governor. Rein it in, rein it in. Your imagination’s got the bit between his teeth and is running away with you. None of that sort of horse…well, to use a polite term, hogwash, matters in this story. I know, I know. You consider it part of your craft. But keep in mind and fix your eye and ear on what this tale’s about. The book. It’s not a travelogue or a costume drama. What you have to make believable is the existence of the book. Nothing more.”
“Thanks. Thanks a hell of a lot. It’s a good thing you’re here, all right. Your support and advice are exceeded only by your presumption. But so be it. It’s your tale, asshole, to make an appropriate pun.”
“Don’t take it so hard, governor.”
“Well, I have to warn you. Given the circumscriptions and restraints you’re putting on me, the story won’t amount to much.”
“Whatever ‘amount to much’ means, I take responsibility for. As is only fair. After all, it’s my story.”
“You’re both a grateful and a generous…bastard.”
“Be that as it may, on with the tale.”
#
…on a book. In the gathering dusk he was unable to make out the faded letters on the spine of the dust jacket. Yet the size of the little volume sent his arm up, told his left hand to reach for it. Feeling himself on the verge of falling forward into the shelves, he threw back his head, counterbalancing, then turned it and looked over his right shoulder. No one in sight. When he swung his trunk and glanced to his left, he caught sight of a woman in a bright green dress. Back to him, head down, she was picking up a book from the trough on the other side of the alley. His quick impression was that she was tall.
When he returned to the shelf in front of him, he hooked his left forefinger…
#
“What are you stopping for now? When you were cantering along at a nice clip.”
“Take your hands out of the pockets of your raincoat.”
“What? For God’s sake, why?”
“Hold them out toward me. I want to see your fingers.”
“Oh no, you don’t. Sorry, governor. If we start down that road, well, it could be endless. Fact is, those descriptive details you’re convinced are necessary to make a story realistic and believable would put both of us to sleep with boredom, if not drive us to suicide. Also they keep you from getting on with the story, something it seems you’re having trouble doing.”
“But to go on I have to see the fingers grasping the book, the particular fingers.”
“Nonsense. Fingers are fingers. All you need is something that can grasp. Prehensile.”
“But these are not fingers generically. They’re somebody’s fingers and therefore are distinctive.”
“Whose fingers are they then, may I ask?”
“Why yours, of course.”
“Oh ho. How can you be so sure?”
“Didn’t you persuade me that you were summoned by me to tell your story?”
“Just because it’s my story, governor, you can’t assume the fingers about to pull the book from the shelf by its spine are mine. Or that I’m the man in the bookstall. Seems to me he’s a character in a story that happens to be mine.”
“You’re splitting hairs. Maybe trying to worm out of it is a more fitting phrase.”
“Now, now, governor. Those are right nasty remarks. Though we may have our differences, let’s stay focused on story-telling and forswear character assassination.”
“Even granting you the point on which you’re weaseling, trying to have it both ways, still and all the fingers that are acting in the story I’m telling, if not unique, do belong to a recognizable category of fingers. Are they stubby, as if they’ve been chopped off? long and slender, like a concert pianist’s? hairy? smooth? knobby and gnarled with swollen joints, that is, arthritic?”
“Doesn’t matter in the least. Story’s not about what fingers look like. It’s about what fingers do. You want to embroider. What you need to do is get on with plain-stitching.”
“I hereby place on record my disagreement and reluctance to proceed as you stipulate. Yours is not the proper way to compose a story—yours, mine of anybody else’s.”
“Wrong-minded as you are, your objection has been noted. Now enough of your childish grumbling. On with the story.”
#
…inside the top of the binding. Just in case the woman in the green dress should be eyeing him, he hummed a tuneless ti ti ti dum, as if to himself. So tightly packed on the shelf were the books that the slim little volume didn’t want to come out. Wiggling it from between its closest neighbors, he heard his humming turn to a grunt, which he feared might be audible in the canyon the two tall surrounding buildings made of the alley. All at once the book tumbled free, with suchforce it fell, smashing his no….
#
“Cut! as they say, or used to, in film-making. Don’t finish that word.”
“What in heaven is the matter now? I was just getting into gear.”
“The matter is, and it’s no small one, you’re starting to tell a story you’re inventing. It may be your story, but it’s not mine.”
“Haven’t I got the book in hand, so to speak? Literally, as well as figuratively. At this very instant it’s tumbling …”
“You’ve got the book off the shelf, governor, and that’s all well and good. But the point is, how?”
“How what?
“How you’re coloring it.”
“Honestly, I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about, what your objection is. How does my coloring the telling, as you call it, make it my story, instead of yours?”
“I’ll tell you how, Goddamnit. My story is not slapstick. With the ‘he’ humming to himself and grunting as he’s about to smacked on the schnozzola by a book he’s trying to remove. The man in the story is not a buffoon. And my story is not slapstick. I’m a serious man, governor, and this is a serious story.”
“Oh my God! I try to provide a little humor. To lighten up what strikes me as a rather dull tale. And you explode with anger. And, while I’m being candid, I must say you’re not only touchy and waspish. You’re also an ungrateful fellow. After all I’ve done to oblige . . .”
“Wait just a minute, if you please. Aren’t you forgetting something? Though tacitly and reluctantly, you did agree.”
“Agree to what?”
“Agree that you had no choice. When you’ve been appointed to tell my story,
you can’t claim grace or your part. So put it in reverse, governor and, proceeding with a touch of humility and a tone of high seriousness, to use the self-descriptive phrase of a solemn nineteenth- century poet and essayist, give my story the dignity it asks for.”
#
Wiggling the book, he wrenched it free. While clutching it in his left hand, again he checked behind him. The woman in the green dress was holding the oversize volume open, presumably reading. Quick as a reflex he slipped the little book into the left-hand pocket of his raincoat.
#
“Mind if I interrupt again?”
“What in the name of Christ is it now? I’ve got through only four new sentences. If you keep sticking in your big nose, how in hell am I supposed to finish the story by lunchtime?”
“Figured it would help your morale, governor. Which I worry might begin to flag. It commonly does at about this point.”
“In case you didn’t happen to notice, I was getting on with it.”
“Though I wouldn’t exactly call it highballing, you were moving, I grant you that.”
“Then why make me slam on the brake?”
“To congratulate you, provide en-courage-ment. Courage is what’s needed now. Slipping the book into the pocket of the raincoat ‘quick as a reflex’—that’s not too bad, not bad at all.”
“Well, well, well. At last I’ve done something you approve of. Are you aware this is the first time you’ve expressed an iota…”
“Iota—ninth letter and the smallest in the Greek alphabet, in case you didn’t know.”
“…of satisfaction with my craftsmanship. All you’ve done to this point is chastise me and complain. And, I might add, try to impress me with your learning. Pretty shallow, I’d be willing to bet.”
“Now that’s ad hominem. From the Latin. But the fact of it is you’re misreading, or I should say, mishearing me, governor. Only trying to keep you on the straight and narrow, the road every story has to hold to, as Mr. Bunyan knew, if it’s to arrive at its destination and ring true. Fact is, you’re doing quite well, now.”