The City of Dreaming Books

by Moers, Walter

  (I stared at him with brimming eyes.)

  Dancelot: ‘Yes, not counting the Orm, it might be described as the most precious thing any author can acquire in the course of his existence.’

  (He was really making a meal of this. In his place I would have tried to get the requisite information off my chest with all due speed. I leant towards him.)

  Dancelot: ‘I’m in possession of the most magnificent piece of writing in the whole of Zamonian literature.’

  (Oh dear, I thought. Either he’s becoming delirious, or he wants to leave me his dusty library and is referring to his first edition of Sir Ginel, that hoary old novel by Doylan Cone, an author he found so admirable and I so unreadable.)

  I: ‘What do you mean?’

  Dancelot: ‘Some time ago a young Zamonian writer from outside Lindworm Castle sent me a manuscript accompanied by the usual bashful blah-blah-blah: this was only a modest attempt, a hesitant step into the unknown, et cetera, and would I care to tell him what I thought of it - and many thanks in advance!

  ‘Well, I’ve made it my duty to read all such unsolicited manuscripts, and I can justly claim that reading them has cost me a not inconsiderable proportion of my life and a certain amount of nervous energy.’

  (He emitted an unhealthy-sounding cough.)

  Dancelot: ‘It wasn’t a long story - only a few pages or so. I was seated at the breakfast table, having finished reading the newspaper and poured myself another cup of coffee, so I tackled it at once. My good deed for the day, I thought. Why not get shot of it right away, over breakfast? Many years of experience had inured me to the usual literary hiccups of a young writer wrestling with problems of style and grammar, pangs of unrequited love and cosmic despair, so I sighed and began to read.’

  (Dancelot heaved a heart-rending sigh. I couldn’t tell whether it replicated his sigh on that occasion or heralded his imminent demise.)

  Dancelot: ‘When I picked up my coffee cup some three hours later, it was still brim-full and its contents were stone-cold. But it hadn’t taken me three hours to read the story; I had devoured it in less than five minutes. I must have spent the rest of the time in a kind of trance, sitting there motionless with the manuscript in my hand. Only a missile from a trebuchet could have dealt me a blow of comparable impact.’

  (I was briefly but unpleasantly reminded of the time when Dancelot had thought he was a cupboard full of dirty spectacles. But then, I must confess, an outrageous thought occurred to me. What went through my head the next moment, and I quote it verbatim, was: ‘I hope he doesn’t kick the bucket before he’s told me what was in the confounded manuscript!’

  No, I didn’t think: ‘I hope he doesn’t die!’ or ‘Please don’t die, authorial godfather!’ or anything of that kind. My thought was couched in the words cited above, and it still shames me, even today, that they included the phrase ‘kick the bucket’. Having gripped my wrist like a vice, Dancelot sat up and fixed me with staring eyes.)

  Dancelot: ‘The last words of a dying man on the point of imparting a sensational revelation - make a note of that literary device, it’s a guaranteed cliffhanger! No reader can resist it!’

  (Although Dancelot was dying, nothing seemed more important to him at that juncture than to teach me a cheap trick favoured by trashy romantic novelists. This was godfatherly devotion to duty of the most consummate and touching kind. I sobbed, overcome with emotion, whereupon Dancelot relaxed his grip and sank back against the pillows.)

  Dancelot: ‘The story wasn’t long, only ten handwritten pages, but I had never, never in my entire life, read anything even approaching its perfection.’

  (Dancelot had been an obsessive reader all his life, perhaps the most industrious bookworm in Lindworm Castle, so I was duly impressed by that statement. He was fanning my curiosity into a blaze.)

  I: ‘What was it about, Dancelot? Tell me!’

  Dancelot: ‘Listen, my boy, I don’t have time enough left to tell you the story. It’s tucked into my first edition of Sir Ginel, which I intend to leave you with the rest of my library.’

  (Just as I thought! My eyes filled with tears once more.)

  Dancelot: ‘I know you aren’t particularly fond of the book, but I suspect that you’ll grow into Doylan Cone some day. It’s a question of age. When you get a chance, dip into it again.’

  (I promised to do so, nodding valiantly.)

  Dancelot: ‘What I want to tell you is this: the story was so perfectly, flawlessly written that it wrought a drastic change in my life. I decided to give up writing, or largely so, because I knew I could never produce anything approaching its perfection. Had I never read that story, I should have continued to cling to my vague conception of great literature, which lies roughly in the Doylan Cone price range. I should never have discovered what perfect creative writing really looks like. As it was, I now held a sample of it in my hands. I resigned, yes, but I resigned gladly. I retired, not from laziness or fear or some other reprehensible motive, but in deference to true artistic aristocracy. I resolved to devote the rest of my life to the workmanlike aspects of writing and confine myself to subjects that are communicable. You already know what I mean: the cauliflower.’

  (A long silence ensued. I was just beginning to think he’d died when he went on.)

  Dancelot: ‘And then I made the biggest mistake of my life: I wrote the young genius a letter in which I advised him to take his manuscript to Bookholm and look for a publisher there.’

  (He heaved another big sigh.)

  Dancelot: ‘That was the end of our correspondence. I never heard from him again. He probably took my advice but had an accident or fell into the hands of highwaymen or Corn Demons on the way to Bookholm. I should have hurried to his side - I should have taken him and his work under my wing - but what did I do? I sent him off to Bookholm, that lions’ den, that haunt of skinflints and vultures who make money out of literature! I ask you, a city teeming with publishers! I might just as well have sent him into a forest full of werewolves with a bell round his neck!’

  (My godfather’s breath rattled in his throat as if he were gargling with blood.)

  Dancelot: ‘I hope that I have compensated in your case for all I did wrong in his. I know you have what it takes to become Zamonia’s greatest writer and acquire the Orm. Reading this story will help you to attain that goal.’

  (Dancelot still clung to the old belief in the Orm, a kind of mysterious force reputed to flow through many authors at moments of supreme inspiration. We young and enlightened writers used to laugh at this antiquated hocus-pocus, but respect for our authorial godfathers prompted us to refrain from making any cynical remarks about the Orm in their presence, though not when we were in the company of kindred spirits. I know hundreds of Orm jokes.)

  I: ‘I’ll read it, Dancelot.’

  Dancelot: ‘But don’t be alarmed! You’ll find it a terribly traumatic experience. It will dash all your hopes and tempt you to abandon a literary career. You may even consider doing away with yourself.’

  (Was he raving? No piece of writing on earth could possibly have that effect on me.)

  Dancelot: ‘But you must surmount that crisis. Go travelling! Roam the Zamonian countryside! Expand your horizons! Get to know the world! Sooner or later the trauma will transform itself into inspiration. You’ll sense a desire to pit yourself against that perfection and one day, if you don’t give up, you’ll match it. There’s something within you, my boy, that no one else in Earthworm Castle possesses.’

  (Earthworm Castle?! Why had his eyelids started to flicker like that?)

  Dancelot: ‘There’s one more thing you must bear in mind, my boy: it doesn’t matter how a story begins or ends.’

  I: ‘What does matter, then?’

  Dancelot: ‘What happens in between.’

  (He had never given vent to such platitudes during his lifetime. Was he losing his reason?)

  I: ‘I’ll make a note of that, Dancelot.’

  Dancelot: ‘Why is it so
cold in here?’

  (The room was sweltering because we had lit a big open fire for him in spite of the summer heat. The look he gave me conveyed that the Grim Reaper was already celebrating his triumph.)

  Dancelot: ‘So damnably cold . . . Could someone shut the cupboard door? And what’s that black dog doing in the corner? Why is it looking at me like that? Why is it wearing spectacles? Dirty spectacles?’

  (I looked, but the only living creature in the corner of the room was a small green spider lurking in its web beneath the ceiling. Dancelot drew a slow, stertorous breath and closed his eyes for ever.)

  The Manuscript

  It was several days before I investigated Dancelot’s parting words, I was far too busy making funeral arrangements and settling his estate. Being his authorial godchild, I had to compose a funeral ode, an anthemic poem of not less than a hundred alexandrines. This I read aloud at his cremation in the presence of all the inhabitants of Lindworm Castle. After that it was my privilege to scatter his ashes from the summit of the castle rock. For a moment, Dancelot’s remains hovered in the air like a wisp of grey smoke; then they dispersed into a fine mist that slowly subsided and finally disappeared altogether.

  I had inherited his cottage, together with his library and garden, so I decided to leave my parental home at last and move into it. This took several days, but I eventually set about incorporating my own books in Dancelot’s library. Sheets of manuscript came fluttering out of some of his volumes, having possibly been inserted between their pages to conceal them from prying eyes. They ranged from brief notes to rough outlines and whole poems. One of them read:For ever shut and made of wood,

  that’s what I am. My head’s no good

  now that it by a stone was struck.

  Old spectacles besmirched with muck

  repose within me by the score.

  I’m just a cupboard, nothing more.

  Oh dear, I was quite unaware that Dancelot had been trying to write during his spell of mental derangement. Although I briefly considered removing this piece of doggerel from his literary legacy, I thought better of it - after all, an author owes a duty to the truth. Good or bad, Dancelot’s efforts belonged to the reading public. Laboriously, I continued to sort through his books until I came to Doylan Cone’s Sir Ginel and recalled my authorial godfather’s mysterious statement on his deathbed: a sensational manuscript was concealed between its pages. Afire with curiosity, I opened the book.

  Sure enough, between the front cover and the title page was a folded sheaf of manuscript. Was this what my godfather had raved about so fervently? I removed the ten foxed, yellowish sheets and weighed them in my hand for a moment. Dancelot had not only whetted my curiosity but coupled his revelation with a warning. Reading the story might change my life just as it had changed his, he had predicted. Well, why not? I thirsted for change! I was still young, after all, having only just turned seventy-seven.

  The sun was shining outside. Inside the house I felt oppressed by the lingering presence of my late godfather: the smell of his countless pipes, the crumpled balls of paper on his desk, a half-written after-dinner speech, a half-empty teacup and, on the wall, an ancient portrait of him as a youngster with eyes like saucers.

  He was still omnipresent, and even the prospect of spending the night alone in the house unnerved me, so I resolved to find a quiet spot and read the manuscript in the open air. Sighing, I made myself a sandwich with some of Dancelot’s home-made strawberry jam and went outside.

  I will never, I’m sure, forget that day till I die. The sun had long passed its zenith, but it was still warm and most of the castle’s inhabitants were out and about. The pavement cafés were crowded and sun-loving dinosaurs were lounging on the castle walls, some playing cards, others engrossed in books or reading their latest effusions aloud. The laughter and singing that filled the air were typical of a late summer’s day in Lindworm Castle.

  It was far from easy to find a quiet spot, so I strolled on through the streets until I finally began to peruse the manuscript while walking.

  My first thought was that every word was in the right place. Well, there was nothing so special about that - every piece of writing makes the same initial impression.

  It’s only on closer inspection that one notices occasional solecisms: the misplacing of punctuation marks, the insidious spelling mistakes, the use of cock-eyed metaphors, the spurning of one word where two will do, and all the other blunders a writer can make. But that first page was different. Even without absorbing its contents, I gained the impression that it was a flawless work of art. It resembled the kind of painting or sculpture that tells you at a glance if it’s kitsch or a masterpiece. No handwritten page had ever had that effect on me even before I’d read it. This one looked as if it had been inscribed by a calligrapher. The characters, each of them a work of art in its own right, were choreographed across the page like an enchanting ballet. It was quite some time before I could tear myself away from this captivating general impression and at last begin to read.

  ‘Here, every word is really in the right place,’ I thought after reading the first page. ‘No, not just every word but every punctuation mark, every comma.’ Even the spaces between the words seemed to be of inalienable importance. And the text itself? I can divulge this much: it conveyed the thoughts of an author in a state of horror vacui, or fear of a blank page - an author paralysed by writer’s block and desperately wondering what sentence would best begin his story.

  Not a particularly original idea, I grant you. Many essays have been devoted to this classic, almost stereotypical bane of the author’s profession. I must know dozens, a few of them written by myself. They usually testify to the writer’s incompetence, not his greatness: he can’t think of anything, so he writes about his inability to think of anything. He’s like a trumpeter who has forgotten his music and toots away meaninglessly, merely because it’s his job.

  But this writer’s treatment of a hackneyed idea was so brilliant, so ingenious, so profound and, at the same time, so amusing that I found myself in a state of feverish exuberance after only a few paragraphs. I felt as if I were dancing to heavenly music with a lovely girl dinosaur in my arms, slightly tipsy after imbibing a glass or two of wine. My brain seemed to be rotating on its own axis. Ideas rained down on me like spark-trailing meteors that landed with a hiss on my cerebral cortex. Giggling, they permeated my brain and made me laugh, made me loudly endorse or contradict them. Never had any piece of writing evoked such a lively reaction from me.

  I must have made a thoroughly demented impression as I strutted up and down the street declaiming at the top of my voice, brandishing the letter, laughing hysterically now and then, or stamping my feet with enthusiasm. However, eccentric behaviour in public is the done thing in Lindworm Castle, so no one remonstrated with me. People may have thought that I was rehearsing for some play in which the protagonist had been smitten with insanity.

  I read on. The author’s way of writing was so absolutely right, so perfect, that tears sprang to my eyes - something that usually happens only when I’m listening to stirring music. There was an unearthly finality about its grandeur. Sobbing unrestrainedly, I continued to read through a veil of tears until a new idea of the writer’s tickled me so much that my tears abruptly ceased and I roared with laughter. I guffawed like a drunken idiot and pounded my thigh with my fist. By the Orm, how funny it was! I gasped for breath, quietened briefly with one paw clamped to my mouth - and, despite myself, burst out laughing again. As if under some strange compulsion, I repeated the words aloud several times, interrupted by recurrent paroxysms of hysterical laugher. Ha, ha, ha! That was the funniest sentence I’d ever read! An absolute scream, a joke to end all jokes! My eyes now filled with tears of mirth. The punchline was quite spontaneous - I could never have thought of anything as witty, not in my wildest dreams. By all the Zamonian Muses, how stunningly good it was! It was a while before the last great tidal wave of laughter subsided and I could read on, still
gasping and wheezing with mirth, still shaken by occasional titters. I had wept buckets and the tears continued to stream down my face. Two distant relations came towards me. They raised their hats with a lugubrious air, believing me overcome with grief for my late godfather. Just then I involuntarily emitted another bellow of mirth, and they walked off quickly pursued by my peals of hysterical laughter. At last I quietened sufficiently to be able to continue reading.

  The next page resembled a string of pearls, a series of associations so fresh, so relentlessly original and profound that I felt ashamed of the banality of every sentence I myself had written until then. They transfixed and illumined my brain like shafts of sunlight. I uttered a jubilant cry and clapped my paws several times, but I would sooner have underlined each sentence twice in red and written ‘Yes! Yes! Precisely!’ in the margin. I still remember kissing every word of every sentence that particularly pleased me.