by John Dunning
“It’s like anything else, a lot of it’s slipshod and crummy. I don’t like the Mommie Dearest crap. But I guess I believe there’s a need for biographies of people like the Graysons, done by a writer who’s a real writer, if you know what I mean. No offense to you— what you do is indispensable, but…”
“But I’m not a writer and Trish is. You won’t get any argument from me on that point. The woman is just a sorceress when it comes to words. There’s a seductive quality to her writing that hooks you by the neck and just drags you through it. Just wait till you get started reading her book—you won’t be able to leave it alone. You’ll wake up in the night thinking about Darryl and Richard Grayson, their times and the lives they led. Trish is just brilliant when it comes to conveying emotions with images and words. She could’ve been a great fiction writer, done the world a favor and left the Graysons alone.”
“What about you? Did Aandahl interview you?”
“Several times. I had to overcome a good deal of reluctance to sit still for it. In the end, I’m no better than anyone else, which only proves my point all the more. I’m a ham, Mr. Hodges. I was fascinated with her subject, with the things she was finding out, and I was flattered that she considered me an indispensable source. There’s no getting around it, I did want to know what she was doing.”
“Did she quote you accurately?”
“I didn’t give her much choice. I insisted on reviewing her material—at least the parts where I was mentioned.”
“Did you find any errors when you read it?”
“No.”
I raised an eyebrow and cocked my head slightly.
“She had a tape recorder, sir, how can you misquote someone when you record every syllable and grunt? Look, I’m not saying she isn’t a good reporter —she may very well be the greatest newspaperwoman since Nellie Bly. And if she keeps digging at it, who knows what she might uncover? Maybe she’ll prove that Richard Grayson was in league with Lee Harvey Oswald and her work will go down in history. Pardon me in the meantime if I doubt it. We’re going around in circles—I have my opinion, Trish has hers, and I’m sure you have yours. Where do you want to start?”
I didn’t know. “It’s a little like jumping into a sea. All I know about the Graysons so far is what I got from that capsule biography in your book.“
He fidgeted. “I hated to do even that much. But the requirements of the book…the publisher demanded it, it was felt that readers would want at least the essentials of their lives. So I did it, but I kept it short—only what could be absolutely verified. It’s still the part of the book that I’m least proud of.”
“That doesn’t mean you didn’t know the lurid details.”
“I know all the lurid details. I’ve read everything that’s ever been published on the Graysons. I can touch the paper a Grayson book is printed on and tell you whether it’s the regular run or one of his variants. In a sense, every book he made was a variant. Did you know that?”
I shook my head no.
“It was one of his trademarks, one of his eccentricities. That’s what makes the man so endlessly interesting. Try to get a grip on him by looking at his work— you’ll end up in a rubber room talking to men in white coats. I can spend days with his books, and I’m talking about different copies of the same title, and I’ll find some little variation in every one of them. Every time I look! I’m supposed to be the Grayson expert, I’m supposed to know everything there is to know about these things, and I can still sit down with five copies of his Christmas Carol and find new things in every one of them. Sometimes they’re subtle little things in the inks or the spacing of words. Can you imagine such a thing in this day of mass production? —Grayson made every copy in some way unique. It was a trademark, like Alfred Hitchcock appearing somewhere in all his films. Only what Grayson did was far more difficult than anything Hitchcock ever dreamed of. Try to imagine it—the chore of produc-ing an exquisite book in a run of five hundred copies, and making many copies different from the others without messing anything up. It would drive a normal man nuts. He must’ve worked around the clock when he had a book coming out. The binding alone would’ve taken anyone else six months to a year, full-time. Grayson did it in a gush.”
“He had Rigby to help him.”
“But not until 1963.”
“Before that there was Richard.”
“Who was a pretty fair binder, as it turned out. I’m sure these people helped out, but I don’t think anything ever went out of that shop that Grayson himself didn’t do. This is partly where the mystique comes from. Grayson did things that to other printers look superhuman, and once he decided what he was going to do, he did it with a speed that defies belief. He’d fiddle and change things in the process: then, for reasons no one understands, he’d toss in a real variant. It’s as if he suddenly got a notion in the middle of the night, and he’d change the paper or the binding, for that one book only. If the book passed muster when he’d finished it, he’d go ahead and ship it. People on his subscription list were always thrilled when they discovered they had a variant—though it was sometimes years later that they found out.”
“Some of them probably never found out.”
“That’s an excellent assumption. You can bet there are still many Grayson books sitting on the shelves of people who have no idea what they’ve got.”
“The original owner dies, leaves them to his children…”
“Who don’t understand or care.”
“Is there any way of tracing these books?”
“Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me…and to one or two other people. You’d think it would be simple—Grayson must’ve kept a master list of his subscribers, but it’s never been found. Some of the books have come to light on their own. They’ll pop up in the damnedest places…last year I got a card from a woman in Mexico City. Her husband had been a subscriber. He had just died and she had all the books, still in their shipping boxes.”
“What did you do?”
“I flew down and bought them. On the first available plane. That’s one of the perks that comes with being an expert. Everything gets funneled your way.”
“I wonder if Aandahl gets any of that.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. When you’ve published a book on something, people do tend to think you know what you’re talking about, whether you do or not. And they’ll call you when they think they’ve got something you’d buy for a price. Trish has a certain advantage in that her book will be read by many thousands more people; mine is so narrow and specialized. But I really doubt if she’d know the differences between the Benton standard issue and the Broder variant”—he grinned widely—“without consulting my book first.”
I didn’t say it, but it seemed to me that Huggins had been reading Aandahl at least as much as Aandahl had been reading Huggins. He caught my drift at once.
“I’ve read that goddamn book cover to cover ten times. That doesn’t count endless browsings. Sometimes I dip into it when I’m at loose ends. I’ve got two copies back there, one for the shelf and the other for the workroom. The working copy’s so marked up you can barely read it anymore. I argue with her in the margins, I rail at the liberties she takes. The book is bashed and battered where I threw it against the wall when I first read it. So, yes, I do know it well. I can quote passages from it the way some people quote Shakespeare. And if we’re going to be totally honest, I’ve got to tell you this: the goddamn thing can move me to tears in places. It has a brilliance that I…I don’t know how to describe it. At its best it rings so true that you just know …you find yourself pulling for Trish to be right. But her book is fatally flawed because there are many other places where you know she’s stretching it. I can tell the minute she starts that horseshit, sometimes right in the middle of a sentence. And in the end the whole book’s meaningless: it’s a fascinating piece of pop culture. Trish can talk to a million people, and even if they all slept with Grayson, they still won’t be able to tell her wh
at she really wants to know.”
“Which is what?”
“For starters, what drove the man, what made him do things, why he did them the way no one before or since has come close to doing, and where did the genius come from. I can’t remember who said this, but it’s got the stamp of truth all over it. James Joyce could spend a lifetime trying to teach his son to write, but the son could never write a page of Ulysses .”
“Grayson sounds like a pure romantic.”
“Trish seems to think they both were—that’s one of the many flaws in her book. Take the term romance strictly in its sexual context and you’ll see right away how silly her thinking is. Darryl Grayson couldn’t have been more his brother’s opposite in his relations with the opposite sex, even if encounters with women invariably ended up in the same place. In bed, I’m saying—they both had enormous sexual appetites. But women to Richard were just objects. Richard sometimes said that he had slept with more than twelve hundred women, Mr. Hodges, can you even begin to imagine such a thing? Trish Aandahl must’ve been in hog heaven when she uncovered that juicy little tidbit. But the point is this—Richard hated women; Darryl loved them. That’s the difference. Darryl Grayson never met a woman he couldn’t just love to death. And it didn’t matter what they looked like: he loved the homely ones the same as the beauties. I’ve known a few of Grayson’s ladies and they all say the same thing. He had a way of making them feel cherished, even when they knew he’d be with someone else tomorrow.”
“The most difficult kind of man there is, from a woman’s viewpoint.”
“Absolutely. Richard had the reputation of being the ladies’ man, because he conquered so many and they fell so fast. But it was Grayson who broke their hearts. His printshop fascinated them—they’d go in there and it was like stepping into a world they’d never dreamed of. Then they’d see what he was doing , and what he had done , with all those Grayson Press books lined up on a shelf above his matrix, and even a whore would know that something great had touched her life.”
“Did he ever show them work in progress?”
“All the time. Grayson was completely secure in himself. I don’t think the notion that anybody might steal his work ever crossed his mind. How could you steal it?—he created it all, from the alphabets to the designs. He took special delight in seeing the uninitiated light up at their first encounter with his art. In the last five years of his life, Darryl Grayson enjoyed his celebrity, as restricted as it was. He loved his uniqueness. He didn’t brag, but he’d spend hours talking to you, explaining the process, if you were interested.”
“Would you mind telling me a little about his process?”
“He was like great artists in every field, from literature to grand opera. Ninety percent of his time on a given project was spent in development, in planning, in trial and error. He created and threw away a lot of books. Sometimes he made a dozen copies, using various papers and inks, before he decided what was what. On the Christmas Carol , for example, he spent a year comparing the color reproductions on various papers. It wasn’t every day you got Thomas Hart Benton to illustrate one of your books, and it was damn well going to be perfect. And it was! What he finally chose was a fifty-year-old stock that he bought from a bank, which had taken over a publishing house and was disposing of the assets. The paper had been in a warehouse, sealed in boxes since 1905. It was very good stuff, intended for the fine-press books of that day but never used. It took the colors perfectly, the registers are just gorgeous.”
“What did he do with the dummy books?”
“Destroyed them. They were just for experimental purposes, and the last thing he wanted was for some flawed copy to turn up later, in the event of his unexpected death. Grayson was extremely aware of his place in publishing history. Rightly so, I might add. A hundred years from now his books will be as prized as anything you can name.”
“And he knew that.”
“Oh, yes. Oooooh, yes, my friend, no doubt of that at all. Grayson gave the impression of being a humble man, and in some ways he was. But don’t let anyone tell you that he ever sold his art short, or that he wasn’t acutely aware of his own importance.”
A thought crossed my mind and I shivered slightly. Huggins asked if I was cold and I said no, I was just thinking of Grayson’s dummy books. “Imagine turning one of those up. What do you suppose it would bring if a thing like that just turned up suddenly at auction?”
He rolled his eyes.
“What if a whole set survived?”
He was too much a gentleman to say it, but the look he gave me said it well. You’ve been out in the rain too long, mister, it’s starting to make your brain soggy .
“So what about The Raven ?” I said.
He gave a laugh and rolled his eyes, a vision of Looney Tunes.
“You did know he was working on it—that much is in your book.”
“Obviously he died before the project was finished.”
“Do you know how long he’d been working on it when he died?”
“In a sense you could say he’d been working on it since 1949. That’s where it started, you know, that obsession with Poe. It began in Grayson’s nagging dissatisfaction with his first Raven . Personally, I love the book. I’ll show it to you when we’re through here, you can see for yourself. It’s simple and lean, but what’s wrong with that? It was done on a shoestring budget, that’s all. It wasn’t the lack of money that kept The Raven from being a great Grayson—Grayson would never let money stand in his way. If the money wasn’t there to commission an artist like Benton, he’d get someone else to do the art. That someone might be a total unknown, but he’d be good, you could bet on it, and the book would still be a Grayson. The trouble with The Raven was with Grayson himself. He was just too young, he didn’t know enough yet. His alphabet was wrong: he was trying for an effect he couldn’t yet achieve—letters that combined the modern and the Gothic in a way that had never been done, that would draw out Poe in the context of his time and still keep him relevant to a modern reader. It was too ambitious for a boy, even a genius, not yet out of his twenties. His vowels in particular were too modern for the rest of it—the A’s and the O’s , but even the bowls of the D’s and B’s too sleek-looking to give him the effect that the other letters were working for.”
“Damn, it sounds complicated.”
“You can’t begin to imagine. At Grayson’s level it can’t even be adequately explained to a layman. But look, let’s try. You have twenty-six letters. Your goal is to have them mesh perfectly, each with the others in every possible sequence, and in absolute harmony. So you tinker around with your E . At last it seems perfect, it looks great, until you discover— after the goddamn book has been bound and shipped—that when you put it between an uppercase L and a lowercase n , as in the name Lenore , it looks just like dogshit. You can’t do this mathematically and you can’t do it with computers: you just have to slug it out in the trenches and hope you don’t overlook some silly thing that makes your work look to all the other printers in the world like it was done by a kid in kindergarten. Sure, the average guy won’t know the difference—even a collector or a bookman like yourself wouldn’t know. Any of you would look at the Grayson dummies and think they were perfect. But a printer like Frederic Goudy could tell right away, because he was also a master designer. Goudy was dead by then, but Bruce Rogers was asked about Grayson and he said what Goudy probably would’ve said—‘This is very good, but it was done by a young man who will get nothing but better.’ The remark got into print and Grayson read it. Rogers meant it as a compliment, but it stung him, and the book always haunted him. He wouldn’t discuss it, and he went through a time when he considered denying that he’d ever done it. Good sense prevailed and he soon got off that silly kick. Grayson in the end was like most great artists, he could never reach his idea of perfection, and he was always too hard on himself. He didn’t understand that the charm of his Raven lay in the very flaws that always tormented him. They show the
budding genius at work. The flaws illuminate the brilliance of the other parts, and they do what none of Grayson’s other works can begin to do. They show him as human after all. Especially the mistake.”
“What mistake?”
“There was a spelling error in the poem ‘Annabel Lee.’ He never forgave himself for that.”
“What did he do?”
“He spelled the word sepulchre wrong—with an re in one place, and an er in the other.”
“That’s an easy mistake to make.”
“Of course it is. But gods don’t make mistakes.”
“Actually, I think you can spell it both ways.”
“It had to be spelled the way Poe spelled it. To’ve messed that up was to a man like Grayson the height of incompetence. But it proves what old-time printers all knew—there’s no such thing as a perfect book.”
“Damn. Then what did he do?”
“After the denial stage, he went through another silly time—he decided to round up all the surviving copies and destroy them. Trish has this wonderful scene in her book, and who knows, maybe it even happened that way. Grayson had retrieved five copies and was about to set them on fire in the dump behind his house. But he couldn’t do it—thank God he couldn’t light that fire. I think it was then, that night, when he decided he’d do another Raven someday, in the distant future, when he had the money and the skills to do it right. He saw his career enclosed by those two Ravens , like definitive parenthetical statements.”
Huggins let a long, dramatic moment pass. Then he said, “Isn’t it too bad he never got a chance to do that second one?”
The clock ticked and the question hung in the air. A long silence fell over the room. I knew we were thinking the same thing, but Huggins would never admit it. Once or twice he looked to be on the verge of something: then he’d look away and hold his peace. I still had a million questions and the sinking hunch that even then it would come to nothing.
