Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  Beyond the Russian shelves, I found Japanese or Chinese titles. I couldn’t tell which. And Arabic. And German. French. Greek. More Oriental.

  English titles were in the rear. They were divided into American and British sections. Dickens, Cowper, and Shakespeare on one side; Holmes, Dreiser, and Steinbeck on the other.

  And almost immediately, the sense of apprehension that had hung over me from the beginning of this business sharpened. I didn’t know why. Certainly, the familiar names in a familiar setting should have eased my disquiet.

  I picked up Melville’s Agatha and flipped through the pages. They had the texture of fine rice paper, and the leather binding lent a sense of timelessness to the book. I thought about the cheap cardboard that Crossbow had provided for Independence Square. My God, this was the way to get published.

  Immediately beside it was The Complete Works of James McCorbin. Who the hell was James McCorbin? There were two novels and eight short stories. None of the titles was familiar, and the book contained no biographical information.

  In fact, most of the writers were people I’d never heard of. Kemerie Baxter. Wynn Gomez. Michael Kaspar. There was nothing unusual about that, of course. Library shelves are always filled with obscure authors. But the lush binding, and the obvious care expended on these books, changed the rules.

  I took down Hemingway’s Watch by Night. I stared a long time at the title. The prose was vintage Hemingway. The crisp, clear bullet sentences and the factual, journalistic style were unmistakable. Even the setting: Italy, 1944.

  Henry James was represented by Brandenberg. There was no sign of The Ambassadors, or The Portrait of a Lady, or Washington Square. In fact, there was neither Moby Dick, nor Billy Budd. Nor The Sun Also Rises nor A Farewell to Arms. Thoreau wasn’t represented at all. I saw no sign of Fenimore Cooper or Mark Twain. (What kind of library had no copy of Huck Finn?)

  I carried Watch by Night back to the desk where Coela was working. “This is not a Hemingway book,” I said, lobbing it onto the pile of papers in front of her. She winced. “The rest of them are bogus too. What the hell’s going on?”

  “I can understand that you might be a little confused, Mr. Wickham,” she said, a trifle nervously. “I’m never sure quite how to explain.”

  “Please try your best,” I said.

  She frowned. “I’m part of a cultural salvage group. We try to ensure that things of permanent value don’t, ah, get lost.”

  She pushed her chair back, and gazed steadily at me. Somewhere in back, a clock ticked ponderously. “The book you picked up when you first came in was—” she paused, “—mislaid almost two thousand years ago.”

  “The Tacitus?”

  “The Histories Five Through Twelve. We also have his Annals.”

  “Who are you?”

  She shook her head. “A kindred spirit,” she said.

  “Seriously.”

  “I’m being quite serious, Mr. Wickham. What you see around you is a treasure of incomparable value that, without our efforts, would no longer exist.”

  We stared at each other for a few moments. “Are you saying,” I asked, “that these are all lost masterpieces by people like Tacitus? That this”—I pointed at Watch by Night—“is a bona fide Hemingway?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  We faced one another across the desktop. “There’s a Melville back there too. And a Thomas Wolfe.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes were bright with pleasure. “All of them.”

  I took another long look around. Thousands of volumes filled the shelves, packed tight, reaching to the ceiling. Others were stacked on tables; a few were tossed almost haphazardly on chairs. Half a dozen stood between Trojan horse bookends on Coela’s desk.

  “It’s not possible,” I said, finding the air suddenly close and oppressive. “How? How could it happen?”

  “Quite easily,” she said. “Melville, as a case in point, became discouraged. He was a customs inspector at the time Agatha first came to our attention. I went all the way to London, specifically to allow him to examine my baggage on the way back. In 1875, that was no easy journey, I can assure you.” She waved off my objection. “Well, that’s an exaggeration, of course. I took advantage of the trip to conduct some business with Matthew Arnold and— Look, I’m name-dropping now. Forgive me. But think about having Melville go through your luggage.” Her laughter echoed through the room. “I was quite young. Too young to understand his work, really. But I’d read Moby Dick, and some of his poetry. If I’d known him then the way I do now, I don’t think I could have kept my feet.” She bit her lower lip and shook her head, and for a moment I thought she might indeed pass out.

  “And he gave you the manuscript? Simply because you asked for it?”

  “No. Because I knew it for what it was. And he understood why I wanted it.”

  “And why did you want it? You have buried it here.”

  She ignored the question.

  “You never asked about the library’s name.”

  “The John of—”

  “—Singletary—”

  “—Memorial. Okay. Who’s John of Singletary?”

  “That’s his portrait, facing the main entrance.” It was a large oil of an introspective monk. His hands were buried in dark brown robes, and he was flanked by a scroll and a crucifix. “He was perhaps the most brilliant sociologist who ever lived.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “That’s no surprise. His work was eventually ruled profane by his superiors, and either burned or stored away somewhere. We’ve never been sure. But we were able to obtain copies of most of it.” She was out of her seat now, standing with her back to the portrait. “What is significant is that he defined the state toward which he felt the human community should be advancing. He set the parameters and the goals for which the men and women whose works populate this library have been striving: the precise degree of balance between order and freedom; the extent of one’s obligation to external authority; the ethical and emotional relationships that should exist between human beings. And so on. Taken in all, he produced a schematic for civilized life, a set of instructions, if you will.”

  “The human condition,” I said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “He did all this, and no one knows him.”

  “We know him, Mr. Wickham.” She paused. I found myself glancing from her to the solemn figure in the portrait. “You asked why we wanted Agatha. The answer is that it is lovely, that it is very powerful. We simply will not allow it to be lost.”

  “But who will ever get to see it here? You’re talking about a novel that, as far as anyone is concerned, doesn’t exist. I have a friend in North Carolina who’d give every nickel he owns to see this book. If it’s legitimate.”

  “We will make it available. In time. This library will eventually be yours.”

  A wave of exhilaration washed over me. “Thank you,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “That may have been misleading. I didn’t mean right now. And I didn’t mean you.”

  “When?”

  “When the human race fulfills the requirements of John of Singletary. When you have, in other words, achieved a true global community, all of this will be our gift to you.”

  A gust of wind rattled the windows.

  “That’s a considerable way off,” I said.

  “We must take the long view.”

  “Easy for you to say. We have a lot of problems. Some of this might be just what we need to get through.”

  “This was once yours, Mr. Wickham. Your people have not always recognized value. We are providing a second chance. I’d expect you to be grateful.”

  I turned away from her. “Most of this baffles me,” I said. “Who’s James McCorbin? You’ve got his Complete Works back there with Melville and the others. Who is he?”

  “A master of the short story. One of your contemporaries, but I’m afraid he writes in a style and with a complexity that will go unap
preciated during his lifetime.”

  “You’re telling me he’s too good to get published?” I was aghast.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Wickham, you live in an exceedingly commercial era. Your editors understand that they cannot sell champagne to beer drinkers. They buy what sells.”

  “And that’s also true of the others? Kemerie Baxter? Gomez? Parker?”

  “I’m afraid so. It’s quite common, in fact. Baxter is an essayist of the first order. Unlike the other two, he has been published, but by a small university press, in an edition that sank quickly out of sight. Gomez has written three exquisite novels, but has since given up, despite our encouragement. Parker is a poet. If you know anything about the markets for poetry, I need say no more.”

  We wandered together through the library. She pointed to lost works by Sophocles and Aeschylus, to missing epics of the Homeric cycle, to shelves full of Indian poetry and Roman drama. “On the upper level,” she said, raising her eyes to the ceiling, “are the songs and tales of artists whose native tongues had no written form. They have been translated into our own language. In most cases we were able to preserve their creators’ names.

  “And now I have a surprise.” We had reached the British section. She took down a book and handed it to me. William Shakespeare. “His Zenobia,” she said, her voice hushed. “Written at the height of his career.”

  I was silent for a time. “And why was it never performed?”

  “Because it’s a savage attack on Elizabeth. Even he might well have lost his head. We have a major epic by Virgil that was withheld for much the same reason. In fact, that’s why the Russian section is so large. They’ve been producing magnificent novels in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for years, but they’re far too prudent to offer them for publication.”

  There were two other Shakespearean plays. “Adam and Eve was heretical by the standards of the day,” Coela explained. “And here’s another that would have raised a few eyebrows.” She smiled.

  It was Nisus and Euryalus. The characters were out of the Aeneid. “Homosexual love,” she said.

  “But he wanted these withheld,” I objected. “There’s a difference between works that have been lost, and those a writer wishes to destroy. You published these against his will.”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Wickham. We never do that. To begin with, if Shakespeare had wanted these plays destroyed, he could have handled that detail quite easily. He desired only that they not be published in his lifetime. Everything you see here,” she included the entire library with a sweeping, feminine gesture, “was given to us voluntarily. We have very strict regulations on that score. And we do things strictly by the book.

  “In some cases, by the way, we perform an additional service. We are able, in a small way, to reassure those great artists who have not been properly recognized in their own lifetimes. I wish you could have seen Melville.”

  “You could be wrong, you know.”

  Her nostrils widened slightly. “About what?”

  “Maybe books that get lost deserve to be lost.”

  “Some do.” Her tone hardened. “None of those is here. We exercise full editorial judgment.”

  “We close at midnight,” she said, appearing suddenly behind me while I was absorbed in the Wells novel, Starflight. I could read the implication in her tone: Never to open again. Not in Fort Moxie. Not for you.

  I returned Wells and moved quickly along, pulling books from the shelves with a sense of urgency. I glanced through Mendinhal, an unfinished epic by Byron, dated 1824, the year of his death. I caught individually brilliant lines, and tried to commit some of them to memory, and proceeded on to Blake, to Fielding, to Chaucer! At a little after eleven, I came across four Conan Doyle stories: “The Adventure of the Grim Footman”; ”The Branmoor Club”; “The Jezail Bullet”; “The Sumatran Clipper.” My God, what would the Sherlockians of the world not give to have those?

  I hurried on with increasing desperation, as though I could somehow gather the contents into myself, and make them available to a waiting world: God and Country by Thomas Wolfe; fresh cartoons by James Thurber, recovered from beneath wallpaper in a vacation home he’d rented in Atlantic City in 1947; plays by Odets and O’Neill; short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Terry Carr. Here was More Dangerous Visions. And there Mary Shelley’s Morgan.

  As I whirled through the rice-paper pages, balancing the eerie moonlit lines of A. E. Housman with the calibrated shafts of Mencken, I envied them. Envied them all.

  And I was angry.

  “You have no right,” I said at last, when Coela came to stand by my side, indicating that my time was up.

  “No right to withhold all this?” There was a note of sympathy in her voice.

  “Not only that,” I said. “Who are you to set yourself up to make such judgments? To say what is great and what pedestrian?”

  To my surprise, she did not take offense. “I’ve asked myself that question many times. We do the best we can.” We were moving toward the door. “We have quite a lot of experience, you understand.”

  The lights dimmed. “Why are you really doing this? It’s not for us, is it?”

  “Not exclusively. What your species produces belongs to all.” Her smile broadened. “Surely you would not wish to keep your finest creations to yourselves?”

  “Your people have access to them now?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Back home everyone has access. As soon as a new book is cataloged here, it is made available to everybody.”

  “Except us.”

  “We will not do everything for you, Mr. Wickham.” She drew close, and I could almost feel her heartbeat.

  “Do you have any idea what it would mean to our people to recover all this?”

  “I’m sorry. For the moment, there’s really nothing I can do.”

  She opened the door for me, the one that led into the back bedroom. I stepped through it. She followed. “Use your flashlight,” she said.

  We walked through the long hallway and down the stairs to the living room. She had something to say to me, but seemed strangely reluctant to continue the conversation. And somewhere in the darkness of Will Potter’s place, between the magic doorway in the back of the upstairs closet, and the broken stone steps off the porch, I understood! And when we paused on the concrete beside the darkened post light, and turned to face each other, my pulse was pounding. “It’s no accident that this place became visible tonight, is it?”

  She said nothing.

  “Nor that only I saw it. I mean, there wouldn’t be a point to putting your universal library in Fort Moxie unless you wanted something. Right?”

  “I said this was the Fort Moxie branch. The central library is located on Saint Simons Island.” The brittleness of the last few moments melted without warning. “But no, you’re right, of course.”

  “You want Independence Square, don’t you? You want to put my book in there with Thomas Wolfe and Shakespeare and Homer. Right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. You’ve created a powerful psychological drama, Mr. Wickham. You’ve captured the microcosm of Fort Moxie and produced a portrait of small town America that has captured the imagination of the Board. And, I might add, of our membership. You will be interested, by the way, in knowing that one of your major characters caused the blackout tonight.”

  “Jack Gilbert,” I said. “How’d it happen?”

  “Can you guess?”

  “An argument with his wife, somehow or other.” Gilbert, who had a different name, of course, in Independence Square, had a long history of inept philandering.

  “Yes. Afterward, he took the pickup and ran it into the streetlight at Eleventh and Foster. Shorted out everything over an area of forty square blocks. It’s right out of the book.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But he’ll never know he’s in it. Nor will any of the other people you’ve immortalized. Only you know. And only you would ever know, were it not for us.” She stood facing me.
The snow had stopped, and the clouds had cleared away. The stars were hard and bright in her eyes. “We think it unlikely that you will be recognized in your own lifetime. We could be wrong. We were wrong about Faulkner.” Her lips crinkled into a smile. “But it is my honor to invite you to contribute your work to the library.”

  I froze. It was really happening. Emerson. Hemingway. Wickham. I loved it. And yet, there was something terribly wrong about it all. “Coela,” I asked. “Have you ever been refused?”

  “Yes,” she said cautiously. “Occasionally it happens. We couldn’t convince Cather of the value of Ogden’s Bequest. Charlotte and Emily Brontë both rejected us, to the world’s loss. And Tolstoy. Tolstoy had a wonderful novel from his youth which he considered, well, anti-Christian.”

  “And among the unknowns? Has anyone just walked away?”

  “No,” she said. “Never. In such a case, the consequences would be especially tragic.” Sensing where the conversation was leading, she’d begun to speak in a quicker tempo, at a slightly higher pitch. “A new genius, who would sink into the sea of history, as Byron says, ‘without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.’ Is that what you are considering?”

  “You have no right to keep all this to yourself.”

  She nodded. “I should remind you, Mr. Wickham, that without the intervention of the library, these works would not exist at all.”

  I stared past her shoulder, down the dark street.

  “Are you then,” she said at last, drawing the last word out, “refusing?”

  “This belongs to us,” I said. “It is ours. We’ve produced everything back there!”

  She looked solemnly at me. “I almost anticipated, feared, this kind of response. It may have been implicit in your book. Will you grant us permission to add Independence Square to the library?”

  Breathing was hard. “I must regretfully say no.”

  “I am sorry to hear it. I—You should understand that there will be no second offer.”

  I said nothing.

  “Then I fear we have no further business to transact.”

  At home, I carried the boxes back up to my living room. After all, if it’s that damned good, there has to be a market for it. Somewhere.