The Vinyl Café Notebooks

by Stuart McLean

  Unless, of course, it is a book by Patrick O’Brian, who wrote the Aubrey/Maturin series, which The New York Times called the best historical novels ever written. Patrick O’Brian is exempt, that’s fair, even though I’ve never read him before. Although I have started the first book, several times, and I didn’t much like it, but I might start it again, and I might like those books this time. And if I do, I might finish the first four that I already own, and in case I do and want to read the next fifteen, I am allowed to buy them. So clearly I’m not including Patrick O’Brian.

  And I’m allowed to buy a book if it’s a book that I’ve already read and it’s somewhere in the boxes in the basement and I want to reread it. I think you would agree it would be easier on everyone if I bought another copy rather than go into the basement and look for it. You can imagine what that would be like.

  And it also doesn’t count if the book is in the basement, or I think it’s there, and I don’t want to exactly read it but want it around so I can do any of the following things:

  • consult it

  • look at it

  • have it on my shelf because it makes me feel better to have it there than to worry about it in the basement

  • sell it to a second-hand bookstore

  • lend it to a friend.

  If it falls under any of those “special” circumstances or any other circumstances that I can’t think of right now but might qualify as “special” at a later date, then I’m allowed to buy that book, even if I already own it and it’s in the basement somewhere.

  And I’m allowed to buy a book if I know it’s a book that I might not necessarily read but need to have on my shelf because having it there might be helpful in some way that is hard to describe but has something to do with the phenomenon where you learn things just by being near them, like how you can learn a language by listening to tapes while you sleep—you go to sleep with the tape playing and you wake up and can speak the foreign language (as long as you’re still able to speak your own language, because I don’t want to wake up speaking Urdu if it means I have lost the ability to speak English).

  And I’m allowed to buy books on subjects like losing weight, or meditation or any number of practical things like killing squirrels who ransack your garden or building a sauna in the woods. Those books are exempt. And I hardly think I have to list all the exempt categories because they are pretty obvious.

  And I’m allowed to buy books if it’s a book that more than one person says I should read, like say five people mention it. Okay, maybe five is a lot. Make it three people. And they don’t necessarily have to tell me to read the book, but if they mention it in some way, even if they aren’t speaking to me, then that should count. Like if I overhear them talking about the book at a dinner party. Or, say, see them reading the book on an airplane.

  In the case of a book that has had a movie made about it, or won a major award, or appeared on a bestseller list, then less than three but more than one person.

  And I’m allowed to buy a book if it was written by E.B. White or W.O. Mitchell or Margaret Wise Brown, even though I own everything by E.B. White already, but not in every edition, and there might be editions that are better than the ones I own, or even not as good, which might be good to have as backups, so everything by E.B. White is okay and isn’t covered by this.

  And if they discover something new by Shakespeare whose first name is strangely escaping me right now, or decide one way or another about Double Falsehood, even though I haven’t read anything by Shakespeare since school, and even then I only read Macbeth and for the rest of them read the Coles notes or not even, if they discover a new Shakespeare, that is exempt because it might be the best one, and I wouldn’t have to hear that from three people; in this case, one would do.

  And first editions don’t count.

  Especially if it is by Shakespeare, but anyone else too.

  I think that covers it.

  3 June 2007

  THE THOMAS FISHER

  RARE BOOK LIBRARY

  P.J. Carefoote is a librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. P.J. called to tell me he had a book he wanted to show me.

  The Fisher Library is the largest rare book library in Canada. The collection includes clay tablets from 2000 B.C., papyrus scripts from the time of Christ and velum books from the Middle Ages.

  It is housed in the odd-looking tower at the south end of the Robarts Library. From the outside, the Fisher appears to be stuck onto the end of the Robarts, like a figurehead on the prow of a Viking ship, albeit a concrete one. Inside, however, it’s something else all together.

  Walking into the Fisher is like entering a medieval cathedral. The light is dim and filtered, and the room (there is just one large room, a stunning six-storey atrium ringed by booklined balconies) is, quite simply, breathtaking.

  Umberto Eco spent time at the University of Toronto when he was working on his medieval mystery The Name of the Rose. Many believe the tower in his fictional fourteenthcentury monastery owes much to the time Eco spent at the Fisher.

  If it’s a cathedral, however, it isn’t a cathedral to the glory of God. It’s a cathedral to literature and to the glory of man’s struggle in the world of ideas. As you stand at the bottom of the atrium, in light so dim it could almost be candlelight, and look up at the thousands of leather-bound books, it is aweinspiring to think that the library holds the collected sum total of human thought. It is, more than books, a collection of the ideas that men and women have considered worth preserving over the centuries.

  Very little lasts for a century. Not many of our buildings last that long. But most of the books in the Fisher have been carefully preserved for centuries upon centuries.

  I stood in the atrium, lost in the beauty of the place, when I realized P.J. was smiling at me.

  “A lot of people do that,” he said.

  Then he said, “Come on.” He took me upstairs onto the first balcony and pulled a huge volume off the shelf.

  He held it out. A leather-bound volume that looked like an encyclopedia.

  “The first folio,” he said.

  Published in 1623. The first printed collection of William Shakespeare’s plays. It was put together by two of his fellow actors six years after his death. There are about one hundred copies left in the world. It was sold for a pound when it was printed and is worth about $6 million today.

  “I have seen men cry when I have handed them this,” said P.J. “This is where the art of the English language began. If this did not exist ...” P.J. shook his head. “Who knows?” he said.

  He took the huge volume and began to flip through it.

  “This one is called The Rosebud Edition,” he said.

  He flipped to page 395, the middle of the tragedy of Cymbeline. Someone had once used the book to press a rose. The oil from the flower had stained this page, leaving behind the perfect imprint of a rose.

  “One of the lovely things about these books,” said P.J., “is when you find something like this. A sign of everyday usage.”

  He put the book back and plucked another from farther down the shelf. “This is the Wicked Bible,” he said. “There are only eleven of these in the world.”

  Having the right to print bibles in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was a licence to print money. Robert Barker’s family had held the rights to print English bibles since the Elizabethan period. Rival printer Bonham Norton was jealous of the Barkers and their lucrative position. One night in 1631, he had one of his “printer’s devils” sneak into Barker’s print shop to mess with the type. The apprentice removed the word not from one of the commandments. When the bible was printed it read “thou shalt commit adultery.”

  It was a huge scandal. Barker was fined, and Norton, sadly, I would have to say (me being a man who has perpetrated worse jokes), had to reimburse Barker his fine.

  P.J. took the bible and put it back on the shelf. He had more he wanted to show me.
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  “This is why you’re here,” he said.

  He was holding out a leather-bound volume about the size of a large theatre program. The ninth edition of Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

  “Not a particularly interesting printing in itself,” said P.J. “But it is, nevertheless, one of the most interesting books in Canada. Because this copy once belonged to General James Wolfe.”

  He handed it to me.

  Then he said, “We know Wolfe had this with him in Quebec. And from certain accounts, we believe that he was reading from it the night before the battle of the Plains of Abraham.”

  I was barely paying attention. I was holding in my hands the very book that James Wolfe had once held.

  P.J. smiled. “That’s not the most interesting thing,” he said. “The most interesting thing is that he wrote in it.”

  I opened the book carefully. It was inscribed. From KL ... Neptune at sea.

  The Neptune was the warship Wolfe sailed on. KL was Katherine Lowther, his fiancée.

  I had never considered that General James Wolfe might have had a girlfriend.

  I began to flip through the book. A few pages in, I stopped. Wolfe had underlined the word weary. And again, drowsy.

  I was looking for the poem’s most famous line.

  “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

  Each word was underlined individually.

  It is said that the night before the battle, as he floated down the river, Wolfe quoted that line and said he would rather have written it than take Quebec.

  There are four notes in the margins of the book, all in Wolfe’s neat and precise hand.

  P.J. said, “Most people don’t like it when you write in books. I encourage it.”

  He shrugged. “A clean copy is beautiful, but it is more beautiful to know what another reader was thinking while he was moving ahead of you.

  “When you write in a book, it is like leaving your testimony for other readers. People who will never know you but will know your thoughts.”

  He nodded at the book I was holding. “Little notes like that are a reminder that these books belonged to someone else before they came here.”

  I handed Wolfe’s book back to P.J.

  As he walked me to the door, he said, “We are always looking for the sacredness beyond humanity.”

  Then he said, “I would posit that there is something sacred about these books. There are books here that have been censored and banned. There are books that are not here because they didn’t survive.”

  The library is not just a testimony to the books. It is a testimony to the people who wanted them preserved. Looking after them is a sacred trust.

  P.J. waved his arm around. “People wanted all this saved. These books meant something to them. They are witnesses to those who went before us. They have existed for hundreds of years. This is a holy place.”

  A secular kind of holy, perhaps. And yet the farther back you go, the more tangled it becomes, the harder to unknot the one from the other. Monks and nuns were once, quite literally, the keepers of knowledge: copying manuscripts and protecting them from harm. Now it is up to the librarians and those of us who support them in their sacred work.

  5 October 2008

  W.O. MITCHELL

  My first job at the CBC was as a researcher on the national call-in show Cross Country Checkup. The first week I worked there, we did a show—prophetically, it turned out—on the death of the Eaton’s catalogue. What, we asked Canadians, did the Eaton’s catalogue mean to you? As hard as that is to imagine today, it meant a lot to many people. One of those people was the much-loved prairie writer W.O. Mitchell. Cross Country Checkup always has a few callers like Mitchell up their sleeve, standing by during the show to prime the pump. It was my job that week to call Bill Mitchell and book him.

  I couldn’t believe my luck. It was my first day on the job and I got to call W.O. Mitchell at home. That was the first time I spoke to his wife, Merna. You always spoke to Merna when you phoned the Mitchells, regardless of whether she got on the line, because when you spoke to Bill, it was always a three-way conversation, Bill holding the receiver and Merna orbiting around it.

  Bill agreed to do a bit for Checkup and, in the course of our conversation, invited me to attend the premiere of his play Back to Beulah, which was opening a few weeks later at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

  “You should come,” he said.

  Well, of course, I did. Are you kidding? I had an invitation from Bill Mitchell himself, who, I imagined, would welcome me like a ... friend? Colleague? Who knows what I imagined. I bought a ticket and flew to Toronto from Montreal as if I had been summoned to Buckingham Palace by the Queen herself. I didn’t understand that Bill hadn’t expected me to follow up on the invitation and had forgotten it the moment he offered.

  Bill was capable of that sort of thing, out of generosity, not malice. Pierre Berton was once invited to dinner at the Mitchells’ and arrived a little late. Pierre met Bob Needham sitting glumly on the Mitchells’ front porch.

  “I think the fire is out,” said Needham. The Mitchell kids had set the house on fire. But Merna and Bill were nowhere to be seen.

  “Bill is out looking for Merna,” said Bob.

  Several hours earlier Bill had driven Merna ... well, that was the problem. He had driven her somewhere, and he had promised to pick her up and return her home so she could cook dinner for Pierre Berton and Bob Needham. The problem was Bill couldn’t remember where it was he had dropped her and, thus, where it was he should pick her up. He thought it was possible he had taken her to the doctor. But it could have been the dentist. So while his house was burning cheerfully, Bill was driving around the city, with his head out the car window, bawling his wife’s name, while Merna, who was standing in front of the medical building where she was supposed to be standing, tried to convince the police she wasn’t a hooker. Meanwhile, Berton, who was still waiting on the front porch, watched while an unfamiliar woman with a suitcase burst out of the house.

  “I can’t stay here any longer,” she announced on her way past him. It was Merna’s mother.

  I now know these sorts of moments to be the common stuff of Bill’s life, but I didn’t know that the weekend I appeared in Toronto, expecting to attend the opening of his play as his special guest. And I was shaken to get there and learn not only was there no ticket waiting for me at the box office, but the people in the box office had no idea I was coming. The theatre, of course, was sold out.

  The box office staff took pity on me and put a bridge chair in an aisle. I saw the play, but I never saw Bill, and I left feeling a little special and a lot stood up.

  Almost a decade passed before I met Bill again. The next time our paths crossed, I had moved to Toronto and was working at the old CBC Radio building on Jarvis Street. It was a late autumn afternoon when I came out of the building and saw him standing alone in the parking lot looking lost. Mostly in your life you don’t do what I did next. Mostly you don’t do those things you want to do with people you admire, or are attracted to, or love, which pretty much describes the way I felt about Bill. Mostly you think these things, but you let them go. That afternoon I didn’t. Instead of walking away, and wondering about him, I walked up to W.O. Mitchell and introduced myself.

  “We spoke years ago,” I said. And then I heard myself inviting him home for dinner. “I have ball tickets,” I said. “You could come to dinner and after we could go to the ball game.”

  I didn’t know he was a big ball fan. I didn’t know I was making an offer he couldn’t refuse. He lit up. But first we had to go to his hotel room to fetch a jacket and dump his briefcase.

  He had a room directly across the street at the old Hampton Court Motel. When I prepared to step out onto Jarvis Street in the middle of the block, Bill shyly pulled me back. He pointed south to the corner of Carlton, where there was a traffic light.

  “I promised Merna I would cross at the corner,” he said.
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  That he would both make, and then keep, that promise speaks of the relationship he and Merna shared.

  At dinner he held my young son in his lap. At the ball game he kept saying, “I wish Merna was here. She would like this so much.”

  That night was the beginning of our friendship. For the next twenty years we got together whenever our orbits collided.

  Once, in Winnipeg, when we were both on a book tour, I was ushered into a radio station for an interview to find him sitting in the lobby, having already done his. He wasn’t actually sitting; he had dropped onto a sofa in exhaustion and had slid so deeply into it he was almost horizontal. I had to step over his legs to get by him. It was another autumn afternoon, this time rainy, and windy, and cold. He was only wearing a thin beige trench coat. There was snuff sprinkled over the coat as if someone had seasoned him with cinnamon.

  He is too old and too thinly dressed for this, I thought.

  “Stuart,” he said, opening one eye. “Is that you?”

  I smiled.

  “They’re passing me around the country like a goddamn baton,” he said. “Do you want to have dinner?”

  He was reading that day, at lunchtime, to the Canadian Club. At his invitation, I once again watched him perform, this time from the back of the room. He had attracted a crowd of maybe five hundred enthusiastic fans, and faced with their enthusiasm, he came wonderfully alive. I attracted about fifty to my afternoon signing. At dinner I told him I was jealous.

  Another time I took my two boys to a now defunct Toronto bookstore where he was signing copies of Roses Are Difficult Here. I wanted them to meet him. I wanted them to understand he was someone I thought was important. We stood in line, and appearing like that out of the blue, I wasn’t sure he would recognize me. He did. He snatched the book out of my hand and explained in a voice everyone in the bookstore could hear that he had fought with his editor, my friend Doug Gibson, over a passage.