Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  I no longer needed a philosophy of life because I knew what I wanted: I wanted Olivia, and I took her aunt’s words to heart and took her out to dinner on her birthday. We went to a tapas bar on the near north side. Our shoulders touched as the Jeffrey Express bus jostled us along the Outer Drive.

  It was a Saturday night and the restaurant was crowded. We ate olives and anchovies and serrano ham and garlic and olive oil on boiled potatoes, while we waited to order, and we drank wine out of a porrón.

  “Remember the Orwell exhibit?” she said. “Orwell hated porrónes. He thought they looked like bed bottles, especially if you’re drinking white wine. As soon as he saw a porrón, he asked for a glass.” But she drank expertly, holding the porrón at arm’s length and letting the stream of wine arc into her open mouth, saying “Donde es Gregorio” while drinking. She didn’t even have to wipe her mouth after she set the porrón down.

  I picked up the porrón but my hand was trembling and I put it back down. “Do you remember what I wrote in the Keats book I gave you for Christmas, the Christmas you spent with us? Eighteen twenty. First edition.”

  “What is this, Gabe? I know what you wrote in it. You were such a Romantic, with a capital R.”

  Something clicked. “You don’t have it, do you?”

  “Gabe,” she said after waiting a beat. “I had a hard time in New Haven. I was miserable, all right? It wasn’t like Chicago. I didn’t fit in. Nobody wanted to direct my dissertation. They were too busy deconstructing everything to worry about the first generation of writers to write in a universe that didn’t have a built-in meaning. I had an affair with a professor—David—because I thought he might take on my dissertation, and he did, but he wanted me to deconstruct Wordsworth’s Prelude. He said it would be easy because the Prelude deconstructed itself. I fell in love with him, actually, and his wife found out and complained to the chair of the department and to the dean and to the president and she wrote a letter to the Yale Daily News begging faculty members not to fuck their students while their wives were at home making coq au vin or paella.”

  “You didn’t get kicked out?”

  “No, but David did… Well, not exactly. They told him he wouldn’t get tenure. He’d published one book—Deconstructing Keats’s Odes. I thought it was brilliant but they said that wasn’t enough. But that wasn’t the real reason. He landed at the University of Michigan, so that was okay, probably better. For him. But he left before I figured out how the Prelude deconstructed itself.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  “I didn’t love him at first. But after a while everything changed. I thought we’d belonged together from the beginning of time. I thought he was a force of Nature. That sort of thing. That was how it started. You know what Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne?”

  I shook my head. “I have no idea what Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, “but my thoughts flew out the window when I saw David coming down Chapel Street.”

  “Did he melt into your dream?”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know, Gabe. I don’t know anything.”

  “Did he know you were pregnant?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I told you, I don’t know anything. I was a different person then.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him?”

  “I didn’t want him to feel trapped.”

  “I see,” I said, though I didn’t see. “It’s all right,” I said. “Are you ready to order?”

  “Why don’t we just sit here,” she said, “and eat some more tapas and drink some more wine.”

  I understood then that she was going to wait for David to divorce his wife.

  I hardly slept that night. In the morning I walked over to the Abrams Funeral Home to see Delilah, who was on call on Sunday mornings. It was as if the world—the banks, the churches, the Quadrangle Club, Mandel Hall, the Regenstein Library, the coffee shop on the corner of Drexel, the hospitals—had been stripped of meaning. I turned south on Cottage Grove, thinking of an old song Grandpa Chaz used to sing: “She used to live out on Indiana Avenue, moved to Sixty-Third and Cottage Grove. Used to live out on Indiana Avenue, moved to Sixty-Third and Cottage Grove. She took all of my money, stole all of my clothes.” I needed to see Delilah. Delilah’s dad, Parker Abrams, had buried my grandmother, and he’d bury the rest of us. I, for one, was ready. I’d recently sold him a first edition of Carl van Bechtel’s Nigger Heaven. He was a longtime member of the Caxton Club. Dad had helped him put together a first-rate Langston Hughes collection.

  I sat down in a padded chair in the funeral home office and tried to bring my thoughts and emotions into a quiet place. Delilah shoved her way through a curtain and looked up from the book she had folded around her thumb.

  “How can I help you,” she said automatically. And then, “Gabe, what’s going on? Your dad okay?”

  “He’s okay. I just need a place to be quiet for a minute or two.”

  “You want to come in the back?”

  “I think I’ll just sit out here for a minute.”

  “What happened?”

  I told her. “She’s waiting for David to divorce his wife.”

  She nodded.

  “You knew? And you didn’t tell me?”

  “Not my place. When a woman like that falls in love with a man,” she said, “her whole world opens up like a flower, like she’s discovering a new world. You’ve got to understand that. It’s different for a man.”

  “What do you mean ‘a woman like that’?”

  “Soft on the outside; tough as old leather on the inside.” I had trouble taking this in. “Maybe this’ll shatter your illusions,” she said. “Help you out of old Plato’s cave. Like somebody watching TV so hard they can’t see the real world, and then stepping outside into a sunny afternoon.”

  “We don’t have a TV,” I said.

  “I forgot,” she said.

  The phone rang. Delilah answered, asked for information, repeated the address and the phone number as she was writing them down. “Someone will be there in a little while.”

  I picked up a pamphlet on grief and looked at the pictures.

  “Mrs. Jackson,” Delilah said, “you’re going to have to call your doctor, or the coroner, or I can do that for you. And then I want you just to sit quietly for a little while. You don’t have to do anything. I know it’s hard, but I just want you to sit quietly for the next half hour.” I thought for a minute she was talking to me. “Yes,” she went on. “In the same room. It’s okay… Go right ahead… Is somebody with you?… I see. Then my brother and another man will be on their way, but we can’t bring him to the home till he’s officially pronounced dead.”

  Suddenly I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t anything at all.

  She hung up and turned to me. “Somebody just stepped out of the cave.”

  “I see you’ve got a new sign,” I said. “A new motto.”

  “‘Any man’s death diminishes me’—John Donne.”

  “Remind me,” I said. “What was the old one?”

  “‘Experience the difference,’” she said. “My grandfather came up with that. Never felt quite right to Daddy.”

  “Big difference,” I said. “Big difference. You’re alive and then you’re dead. Hard to compare the two experiences, unless you’re like Lazarus.”

  “Hard to know. Lazarus didn’t sound too happy when he came back.”

  “Well, he was all bound up. Must have been uncomfortable.”

  “Grandpop was thinking of the quality of service we provided. He couldn’t see it any other way. You want me to give you something to read, take your mind off your troubles?”

  “Something to read?”

  “
Something to help you make it through the rest of the day. If the phone rings, don’t answer it. I’ll pick up in the back.”

  She shoved the curtain aside and disappeared. While she was gone, I started to read the pamphlet on grief. There was nothing to disagree with, but nothing that went beyond the obvious.

  Delilah came back in with a book. I didn’t bother to look at it. “You’re going to have to let go of that woman. She’s going to do what she wants to do, not what you want her to do. You’ve got to accept that. You get to work on the new catalog and you’ll be okay. Those Cardinal Newman books are not going to catalog themselves.”

  I put the book under my arm and walked home and told Dad what had happened. “I’m going to lie down and read,” I said.

  That night Dad made a salad and cooked a couple of hamburgers. We sat in the living room and read. The book Delilah had given me was an ARC (advance reading copy) of a detective novel by Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress. The protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is a work in progress—an out-of-work day laborer on his way to becoming a hard-boiled detective. The woman he’s hired to find—a white woman, Monet—turns out to be a light-skinned black woman whose real name is Ruby.

  We turned in early. I told Dad I wanted to get an early start on cataloging the Cardinal Newman books in the morning. They were still in boxes in our cataloging room. But I stayed up and read for a long time.

  It had been a long time since I’d been pulled so hard into a story. I read it the way I used to read as a child, totally absorbed. By the time Easy got things sorted out—killing a couple of people and blackmailing Ruby along the way—it was past midnight.

  If Punch had still been alive, I’d have reached over the edge of the bed and scratched the top of his head, but Punch had died a long time ago.

  Delilah was right. Descriptive bibliography may not seem like a lot of fun to most people, but it was exactly what I needed to do. I needed to pay close attention to something that was right in front of me. I needed to look at it the way an artist looks at a leaf or a flower or a human face. A lot hinges on descriptions. This is where a book dealer shows his stuff. The main thing, as Grandpa Chaz liked to say—and if he had a philosophy of life, this was it—is to give the book a life, make it accessible, cherished, wanted. Who owned it? When was it bought and sold? Who did the restoration? Who’s ex libris is glued to the upper pastedown? Why is this book important? And like any intimate physical experience, it can be healing. You touch the body of the book: the raised bands on the spine, the smooth leather stretched over the boards, the fore edge, the endpapers, the headbands, the hinges. You hold it to your nose and smell it, you sleep with the book, so to speak. You pay close attention to every physical detail: to rubbed edges; to worm holes (tunnels created by the larvae of various kinds of beetle that may cut out letters, such as the death watch beetle or the common furniture beetle); to hinges that have been reinforced; to foxing (fox-colored spots caused by sunlight); to the sewing; to the quality of the leather—Grandpa Chaz claimed that he could feel the difference between goat skin and calf, though scientists say you can’t really tell without DNA testing; you pay attention to the quality of the original binding or subsequent rebindings; to marginalia; to issue points, like the misprint in the “Wicked Bible”; to indications of provenance, like a coat of arms stamped in the compartments on the spine or library marks; to a printer’s device stamped on the boards, to woodcuts, maps, illustrations (making sure all are accounted for); to owner’s marks and inscriptions; to small tears; to ink holes and water stains; to the end bands, to library stamps, such as the stamp for the Vatican secret archives. To deaccession stamps too, of course. We worked in silence except for occasional eruptions from Grandpa Chaz, who was working on an eighteenth-century French cookbook and kept reading bits of the recipes aloud.

  In the middle of March—we had cataloged over two hundred books—I picked up The Anatomy of Melancholy, which I had set aside.

  THE

  ANATOMY OF

  MELANCHOLY

  What it is, with all the kinds,

  symptoms, prognostics & Several cures of it.

  To three Partitions, with their several

  Sections, numbers & subsections.

  Philosophically, Medically,

  Historically opened & cut up.

  BY

  Democritus Junior

  [i.e. Robert Burton]

  The Anatomy was an old friend. We were glad to see each other—old friends bumping into each other in a crowded subway car—and reminisce about Dudley Sanderson’s class in seventeenth-century literature, on the third flood of Wieboldt Hall.

  First published in 1621, over twenty years before Harvey’s Anatomical Exercises Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood, Burton’s Anatomy looked back to the old world of the four humors—the four bodily fluids that were thought to shape our psyches, our temperaments, our personality types: blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm—corresponding to sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic. At the same time, it looked forward. It was one of the first works to consider the problem of mental illness in any depth. (In those days, Love was still regarded, as it had been in the Middle Ages, as a medical illness.) As I was collating the first “book,” I paused at Part 3, Sect. 3, Memb. 1. Subs. 1. “Love Melancholy,” to see if I could recognize myself. If Olivia was phlegmatic—cool, calm, composed, thoughtful—I was melancholic—serious, introverted, contentious but susceptible to depression. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe not. If love melancholy was the foundation of chivalry (“heroic melancholy”) and a source of poetic inspiration, it could also be a devastating illness (ferinus insanus amor in men, furor uterinus in women) that required medical treatment. Burton likens it to the plague, to a torture so severe that “in a word, the Spanish inquisition is not comparable to it.” Hmmm.

  What can be done?

  The cure for love melancholy, of course, is marriage, a cure that brings its own set of challenges. Books are not quite as reliable, but they can help:

  And if I were not a King, I would be an Vniuer ity man; And if it were ſo that I muſt be a Priſoner, if I might haue my wiſh, I would deſsire to haue no other Priſon then that Library, and to be chained together with ſo many good Authors.

  The library that Burton refers to here is the Bodleian. I was thinking of the room I was in right at that moment, between Oscar, who was still collating the plates in the Diderot, and Grandpa Chaz, who’d finished collating the cookbook and had moved on to something else.

  Would I be content to stay here, to be a prisoner in this room, surrounded by these books and by my bibliographic tools? I started to answer in the affirmative, but then I thought again of Plato’s cave. I had the sensation of stepping out of one cave only to find myself in another, a cave where bibliographers gather and speak to each other in their own special code. You wouldn’t be able to make a lot of sense of it, so I’ll mention only the fact that the copy I had in front of me once belonged to John Overton, whose papers are in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Overton paid six shillings for his copy in 1638. In the same year he paid seven shillings for a Shakespeare First Folio, nine shillings for a pair of stockings for his wife, and seven pounds for “a seven-year old dapple gray ambling nag.”

  VII. HEATWAVE

  (1995)

  Burton was my close companion for the next four years, sitting near me on the shelf next to my desk at the shop, traveling with me to book fairs. Dad wanted me to sell it, but I turned down several good offers, couldn’t let it go. I read it as Dr. Johnson read it: because it was therapeutic—a response to widespread suffering, what we call depression today. I read it because it was the first book to take psychosomatic disorders seriously. I read it because it was a bridge to an older world. You don’t have to believe in the four humors—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—to see their value as metaphors. I read it for the same reason th
at Burton wrote it: because it spoke to my condition—love melancholy. I thought that it spoke to Olivia’s condition too, but while she was waiting for David to divorce his wife, I was waiting for Kafka’s axe to break up the frozen sea inside us. Things continued to happen, of course. The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was murdered and left in a hallway outside his office; the Italian translator was stabbed in Milan. The man who’d placed the pipe bomb in the shop was identified, but he decamped to Iran before he could be arrested. David’s fill-in position at the University of Michigan turned into a tenure-track job. Dad and I continued to exhibit at all the major book fairs—New York, Boston, California—and we unloaded a lot of the Cardinal Newman books for very good prices. In 1994, we celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the store with a new exhibit every month—books published in 1934—starting in January with an exhibit of detective novels that ranged from Murder on the Orient Express ($999) to The Clue of the Broken Locket (Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, #11) ($400).

  By this time Delilah had become our store manager, and Olivia had persuaded Dad to lay out $4,000 for a computer for the store so she could enter all our children’s books in a database.

  I was still waiting for Kafka’s axe to fall when Mayor Daley declared 1995 the “Year of the Book in Chicago.” I thought I would try to make something happen, chip away at the ice. I persuaded Olivia to go with me to the kick-off event—a black-tie dinner at the Newberry Library sponsored by the Caxton Club. Aunt Fern bought her a new dress for the occasion—one that “follows her curves without clinging to them”—and Olivia looked very elegant as we browsed through the display cases in the Fellows’ Lounge on the second floor.