The Haunted Bookshop

by Christopher Morley

  Chapter IX

  Again the Narrative is Retarded

  Roger had spent a quiet evening in the bookshop. Sitting at his deskunder a fog of tobacco, he had honestly intended to do some writing onthe twelfth chapter of his great work on bookselling. This chapter wasto be an (alas, entirely conjectural) "Address Delivered by aBookseller on Being Conferred the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Lettersby a Leading University," and it presented so many alluringpossibilities that Roger's mind always wandered from the paper intoentranced visions of his imagined scene. He loved to build up in fancythe flattering details of that fine ceremony when bookselling would atlast be properly recognized as one of the learned professions. Hecould see the great auditorium, filled with cultivated people: menwith Emersonian profiles, ladies whispering behind their flutteringprogrammes. He could see the academic beadle, proctor, dean (orwhatever he is, Roger was a little doubtful) pronouncing the augustwords of presentation--

  A man who, in season and out of season, forgetting private gain forpublic weal, has laboured with Promethean and sacrificial ardour toinstil the love of reasonable letters into countless thousands; towhom, and to whose colleagues, amid the perishable caducity of humanaffairs, is largely due the pullulation of literary taste; in honouringwhom we seek to honour the noble and self-effacing profession of whichhe is so representative a member----

  Then he could see the modest bookseller, somewhat clammy in hisextremities and lost within his academic robe and hood, nervouslyfidgeting his mortar-board, haled forward by ushers, and totteringrubescent before the chancellor, provost, president (or whoever itmight be) who hands out the diploma. Then (in Roger's vision) he couldsee the garlanded bibliopole turning to the expectant audience, givinghis trailing gown a deft rearward kick as the ladies do on the stage,and uttering, without hesitation or embarrassment, with dueinterpolation of graceful pleasantry, that learned and unlaboureddiscourse on the delights of bookishness that he had often dreamed of.Then he could see the ensuing reception: the distinguished savantscrowding round; the plates of macaroons, the cups of untasted tea; theladies twittering, "Now there's something I want to ask you--why arethere so many statues to generals, admirals, parsons, doctors,statesmen, scientists, artists, and authors, but no statues tobooksellers?"

  Contemplation of this glittering scene always lured Roger intofantastic dreams. Ever since he had travelled country roads, someyears before, selling books from a van drawn by a fat white horse, hehad nourished a secret hope of some day founding a Parnassus on WheelsCorporation which would own a fleet of these vans and send them outinto the rural byways where bookstores are unknown. He loved toimagine a great map of New York State, with the daily location of eachtravelling Parnassus marked by a coloured pin. He dreamed of himself,sitting in some vast central warehouse of second-hand books, poringover his map like a military chief of staff and forwarding cases ofliterary ammunition to various bases where his vans would re-stock.His idea was that his travelling salesmen could be recruited largelyfrom college professors, parsons, and newspaper men, who were weary oftheir thankless tasks, and would welcome an opportunity to get out onthe road. One of his hopes was that he might interest Mr. Chapman inthis superb scheme, and he had a vision of the day when the shares ofthe Parnassus on Wheels Corporation would pay a handsome dividend andbe much sought after by serious investors.

  These thoughts turned his mind toward his brother-in-law Andrew McGill,the author of several engaging books on the joys of country living, whodwells at the Sabine Farm in the green elbow of a Connecticut valley.The original Parnassus, a quaint old blue wagon in which Roger hadlived and journeyed and sold books over several thousand miles ofcountry roads in the days before his marriage, was now housed inAndrew's barn. Peg, his fat white horse, had lodging there also. Itoccurred to Roger that he owed Andrew a letter, and putting aside hisnotes for the bookseller's collegiate oration, he began to write:

  THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP 163 Gissing Street, Brooklyn, November 30, 1918.

  MY DEAR ANDREW:

  It is scandalous not to have thanked you sooner for the annual cask ofcider, which has given us even more than the customary pleasure. Thishas been an autumn when I have been hard put to it to keep up with myown thoughts, and I've written no letters at all. Like everyone else Iam thinking constantly of this new peace that has marvellously comeupon us. I trust we may have statesmen who will be able to turn it tothe benefit of humanity. I wish there could be an international peaceconference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my ownconviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in nosmall measure on them and on the librarians. I wonder what a Germanbookseller is like?

  I've been reading The Education of Henry Adams and wish he might havelived long enough to give us his thoughts on the War. I fear it wouldhave bowled him over. He thought that this is not a world "thatsensitive and timid natures can regard without a shudder." What wouldhe have said of the four-year shambles we have watched with sickenedhearts?

  You remember my favourite poem--old George Herbert's ChurchPorch--where he says--

  By all means use sometimes to be alone; Salute thyself; see what thy soul doth wear; Dare to look in thy chest, for 'tis thine own, And tumble up and down what thou find'st there--

  Well, I've been tumbling my thoughts up and down a good deal.Melancholy, I suppose, is the curse of the thinking classes; but Iconfess my soul wears a great uneasiness these days! The sudden andamazing turnover in human affairs, dramatic beyond anything in history,already seems to be taken as a matter of course. My great fear is thathumanity will forget the atrocious sufferings of the war, which havenever been told. I am hoping and praying that men like Philip Gibbsmay tell us what they really saw.

  You will not agree with me on what I am about to say, for I know you asa stubborn Republican; but I thank fortune that Wilson is going to thePeace Conference. I've been mulling over one of my favourite books--itlies beside me as I write--Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, edited byCarlyle, with what Carlyle amusingly calls "Elucidations." (Carlyle isnot very good at "elucidating" anything!) I have heard somewhere orother that this is one of Wilson's favourite books, and indeed, thereis much of the Cromwell in him. With what a grim, covenanting zeal hetook up the sword when at last it was forced into his hand! And I havebeen thinking that what he will say to the Peace Conference will smackstrongly of what old Oliver used to say to Parliament in 1657 and1658--"If we will have Peace without a worm in it, lay we foundationsof Justice and Righteousness." What makes Wilson so irritating to theunthoughtful is that he operates exclusively upon reason, not uponpassion. He contradicts Kipling's famous lines, which apply to mostmen--

  Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

  In this instance, I think, Reason is going to win. I feel the wholecurrent of the world setting in that direction.

  It's quaint to think of old Woodrow, a kind of Cromwell-Wordsworth,going over to do his bit among the diplomatic shell-craters. What I'mwaiting for is the day when he'll get back into private life and writea book about it. There's a job, if you like, for a man who mightreasonably be supposed to be pretty tired in body and soul! When thatbook comes out I'll spend the rest of my life in selling it. I asknothing better! Speaking of Wordsworth, I've often wondered whetherWoodrow hasn't got some poems concealed somewhere among his papers!I've always imagined that he may have written poems on the sly. And bythe way, you needn't make fun of me for being so devoted to GeorgeHerbert. Do you realize that two of the most familiar quotations inour language come from his pen, viz.:

  Wouldst thou both eat thy cake, and have it?

  and

  Dare to be true: nothing can need a ly; A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby.

  Forgive this tedious sermon! My mind has been so tumbled up and downthis autumn that I am in a queer s
tate of mingled melancholy andexaltation. You know how much I live in and for books. Well, I have acurious feeling, a kind of premonition that there are great bookscoming out of this welter of human hopes and anguishes, perhaps A bookin which the tempest-shaken soul of the race will speak out as it neverhas before. The Bible, you know, is rather a disappointment: it hasnever done for humanity what it should have done. I wonder why? WaltWhitman is going to do a great deal, but he is not quite what I mean.There is something coming--I don't know just what! I thank God I am abookseller, trafficking in the dreams and beauties and curiosities ofhumanity rather than some mere huckster of merchandise. But howhelpless we all are when we try to tell what goes on within us! Ifound this in one of Lafcadio Hearn's letters the other day--I markedthe passage for you

  Baudelaire has a touching poem about an albatross, which you wouldlike--describing the poet's soul superb in its own free azure--buthelpless, insulted, ugly, clumsy when striving to walk on commonearth--or rather, on a deck, where sailors torment it with tobaccopipes, etc.

  You can imagine what evenings I have here among my shelves, now thelong dark nights are come! Of course until ten o'clock, when I shut upshop, I am constantly interrupted--as I have been during this letter,once to sell a copy of Helen's Babies and once to sell The Ballad ofReading Gaol, so you can see how varied are my clients' tastes! Butlater on, after we have had our evening cocoa and Helen has gone tobed, I prowl about the place, dipping into this and that, fuddlingmyself with speculation. How clear and bright the stream of the mindflows in those late hours, after all the sediment and floating trash ofthe day has drained off! Sometimes I seem to coast the very shore ofBeauty or Truth, and hear the surf breaking on those shining sands.Then some offshore wind of weariness or prejudice bears me away again.Have you ever come across Andreyev's Confessions of a Little Man DuringGreat Days? One of the honest books of the War. The Little Man endshis confession thus--

  My anger has left me, my sadness returned, and once more the tearsflow. Whom can I curse, whom can I judge, when we are all alikeunfortunate? Suffering is universal; hands are outstretched to eachother, and when they touch . . . the great solution will come. Myheart is aglow, and I stretch out my hand and cry, "Come, let us joinhands! I love you, I love you!"

  And of course, as soon as one puts one's self in that frame of mindsomeone comes along and picks your pocket. . . . I suppose we mustteach ourselves to be too proud to mind having our pockets picked!

  Did it ever occur to you that the world is really governed by BOOKS?The course of this country in the War, for instance, has been largelydetermined by the books Wilson has read since he first began to think!If we could have a list of the principal books he has read since theWar began, how interesting it would be.

  Here's something I'm just copying out to put up on my bulletin boardfor my customers to ponder. It was written by Charles Sorley, a youngEnglishman who was killed in France in 1915. He was only twenty yearsold--

  TO GERMANY

  You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed, And no man claimed the conquest of your land. But gropers both through fields of thought confined We stumble and we do not understand. You only saw your future bigly planned, And we, the tapering paths of our own mind, And in each other's dearest ways we stand, And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

  When it is peace, then we may view again With new-won eyes each other's truer form And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain, When it is peace. But until peace, the storm The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

  Isn't that noble? You see what I am dumbly groping for--some way ofthinking about the War that will make it seem (to future ages) apurification for humanity rather than a mere blackness of stinkingcinders and tortured flesh and men shot to ribbons in marshes of bloodand sewage. Out of such unspeakable desolation men MUST rise to somenew conception of national neighbourhood. I hear so much apprehensionthat Germany won't be punished sufficiently for her crime. But how canany punishment be devised or imposed for such a huge panorama ofsorrow? I think she has already punished herself horribly, and willcontinue to do so. My prayer is that what we have gone through willstartle the world into some new realization of the sanctity oflife--all life, animal as well as human. Don't you find that a visitto a zoo can humble and astound you with all that amazing and grotesquevariety of living energy?

  What is it that we find in every form of life? Desire of somesort--some unexplained motive power that impels even the smallestinsect on its queer travels. You must have watched some infinitesimalred spider on a fence rail, bustling along--why and whither? Whoknows? And when you come to man, what a chaos of hungers and impulseskeep thrusting him through his cycle of quaint tasks! And in everyhuman heart you find some sorrow, some frustration, some lurking pang.I often think of Lafcadio Hearn's story of his Japanese cook. Hearnwas talking of the Japanese habit of not showing their emotions ontheir faces. His cook was a smiling, healthy, agreeable-looking youngfellow whose face was always cheerful. Then one day, by chance, Hearnhappened to look through a hole in the wall and saw his cook alone.His face was not the same face. It was thin and drawn and showedstrange lines worn by old hardships or sufferings. Hearn thought tohimself, "He will look just like that when he is dead." He went intothe kitchen to see him, and instantly the cook was all changed, youngand happy again. Never again did Hearn see that face of trouble; buthe knew the man wore it when he was alone.

  Don't you think there is a kind of parable there for the race as awhole? Have you ever met a man without wondering what shining sorrowshe hides from the world, what contrast between vision andaccomplishment torments him? Behind every smiling mask is there notsome cryptic grimace of pain? Henry Adams puts it tersely. He saysthe human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknownand unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mentalchaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its ownill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature'scompulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only ininstruments and averages. After sixty years or so of growingastonishment the mind wakes to find itself looking blankly into thevoid of death. And, as Adams says, that it should profess itselfpleased by this performance is all that the highest rules of goodbreeding can ask. That the mind should actually be satisfied wouldprove that it exists only as idiocy!

  I hope that you will write to tell me along what curves your mind ismoving. For my own part I feel that we are on the verge of amazingthings. Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers.They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the humanrace. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousandsof books unread that would have given me noble and unblemishedhappiness. I will tell you a secret. I have never read King Lear, andhave purposely refrained from doing so. If I were ever very ill Iwould only need to say to myself "You can't die yet, you haven't readLear." That would bring me round, I know it would.

  You see, books are the answer to all our perplexities! Henry Adamsgrinds his teeth at his inability to understand the universe. The besthe can do is to suggest a "law of acceleration," which seems to meanthat Nature is hustling man along at an ever-increasing rate so that hewill either solve all her problems or else die of fever in the effort.But Adams' candid portrait of a mind grappling helplessly with itsriddles is so triumphantly delightful that one forgets the futility ofthe struggle in the accuracy of the picture. Man is unconquerablebecause he can make even his helplessness so entertaining. His mottoseems to be "Even though He slay me, yet will I make fun of Him!"

  Yes, books are man's supreme triumph, for they gather up and transmitall other triumphs. As Walter de la Mare writes, "Howuncomprehendingly must an angel from heaven smile on a poor humansitting engrossed in a romance: angled upon his hams, motionless in hischair, spectacles on nose, his two feet as close together as the flukesof a merman's
tail, only his strange eyes stirring in his time-wornface."

  Well, I've been scribbling away all this time and haven't given you anynews whatever. Helen came back the other day from a visit to Bostonwhere she enjoyed herself greatly. To-night she has gone out to themovies with a young protegee of ours, Miss Titania Chapman, an engagingdamsel whom we have taken in as an apprentice bookseller. It's aquaint idea, done at the request of her father, Mr. Chapman, theproprietor of Chapman's Daintybits which you see advertised everywhere.He is a great booklover, and is very eager to have the zeal transmittedto his daughter. So you can imagine my glee to have a neophyte of myown to preach books at! Also it will enable me to get away from theshop a little more. I had a telephone call from Philadelphia thisafternoon asking me to go over there on Monday evening to make anestimate of the value of a private collection that is to be sold. Iwas rather flattered because I can't imagine how they got hold of myname.

  Forgive this long, incoherent scrawl. How did you like Erewhon? It'spretty near closing time and I must say grace over the day's accounts.

  Yours ever, ROGER MIFFLIN.