Childish Loves (20 page)

‘I get these head-rushes,' he said. ‘Low blood pressure. It doesn't help that I slept not much last night. My son is teething. I said to my wife, at my age.'

‘So what did you think of Mrs Sullivan?'

‘I thought, it's wonderful the respect certain suspicious people feel for professional titles. I gave her my card and was in and out in fifteen minutes. Do you know how old she is?'

‘I can guess.'

‘Eighty-three, and still runs the place with some help from a cleaning woman. She told me all this herself in those fifteen minutes. Maybe suspicion is what keeps the brain alive. She also said, four or five different scholars have approached her about these papers. I liked the way she said scholar, as if it's one of the old professions, like priest or whore.'

‘And you believed her?'

‘I did not. She's trying to talk up the price.'

‘Is there anything to talk up?'

‘A few things, some of them more interesting to me than you. Peter had a first edition of Trelawny's
Recollections
, published by Edward Moxon in 1858. In fair condition; bookseller's notice tipped to front fly. Worth maybe a couple hundred dollars. Then there's Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Lady Byron Vindicated
. Another first edition, the English one – published by Sampson, Low, Son, and Marston. The binding's been repaired with brown paper, probably by him. It's not worth more than forty dollars, but Peter inscribed it and wrote the odd marginalia inside.' He began passing me books across the desk, and I took them from his soft hands and looked at them politely and afterwards couldn't think where to put them, so I put them on the floor by my chair. ‘This is rather nice – the third canto of
Childe Harold
. Sadly rebound; a third edition, but from 1819. And my favorite of the lot: the war cantos of
Don Juan
, published by John Hunt in 1823 after Byron's famous split from Murray. In good condition it would fetch as much as five hundred dollars, arid this is pretty fair.'

‘Anything else?'

‘Oh, just what you'd expect. Marchand's
Life
, in three volumes. Looks hardly touched. His
Portrait
, too, rather more dog-eared. The twelve-volume letters – actually, I think one or two are missing.
Byron and Greek Love
, by Louis Crompton.
My Dearest Augusta
, by Peter Gunn. Ethel Colburn Mayne's chatty little biography of Annabella. Grosskurth's silly book. A handsome deco edition of the poems, published by Bliss Sands & Co and originally priced at three and six.'

‘I mean novels, other poets.'

‘I haven't had a chance to go through everything yet. You mean, other than Byronalia. A few Penguin classics.
Cranford
, by Gaskell. A complete set of the
Waverley
novels, a show-piece edition, to look good on the shelf, but the bindings suggest he read them, too. Or somebody had.
The Heart of Mid-Lothian
is held together by rubber band.
Persuasion
and
Mansfield Park
. A dozen Jameses, from
The Aspern Papers
through to
The Wings of the Dove. David Copperfield. Moby Dick
– you know, the staple diet of a high-school English teacher. Many of these in the Norton school editions.
Twenty Years After
, by Dumas. Clough's
Amours de Voyage
. William Morris's
Defence of Guenevere
.'

‘And nothing more modern?'

‘It depends what you mean by modern,' Paul said, shifting boxes on his desk and putting his head in them. ‘He owned a well-thumbed copy of
Goodbye to All That
. Also,
The Bird of Dawning
by John Masefield. A few American things.
Goodbye, Columbus. The Adventures of Augie March
. Second or third editions, as if he read them in his youth. Nothing more recent than
A Girl in Winter
, by Larkin. No, I lie. I'm forgetting the O'Brian novels – you know, those sea-tales. A more or less complete set.'

By this point, there were books stacked like children's blocks on the desk and the empty chairs and on the floor.

‘Not a terribly large collection,' Paul said. ‘Just imagine them on the shelf – you wouldn't need but three or four. I would say, the collection of a book-lover who spent a great deal of his life moving between rented accommodations. A few favorite items mixed in with the necessaries. Did you ever see his place in New York?'

‘No. I didn't know him particularly well. Sometimes we went for walks in the neighborhood – around the school. I heard from my old boss that maybe he lived in Washington Heights. A lot of the teachers did, since it's affordable and commutable to Riverdale.'

‘His mailing address was somewhere in the one-eighties.'

‘But this is not what you were looking at when I came in.'

‘No.'

Paul stood up and moved delicately away from his desk, between the books.

‘Why don't you sit down,' he said and began clearing off more space. There were a couple boxes of papers on the floor and he straightened the pile he'd been looking at and returned it to one of them. ‘Excuse the mess. This is more or less how I live. I remember once going into the Strand bookstore with Peter, in New York. It was sunny when we went in and dark when we came out. For two or three hours we hardly said a word to each other, and didn't buy any books, either. A whole afternoon. Is this enough light for you? I'm used to reading in these little pockets of light.'

I edged around him, and we exchanged places. ‘So what am I looking at,' I said.

‘It depends what you want. His mother threw everything in together, but I've been busy rearranging. The bigger box holds drafts of the novels. In order, long hand. Not illegible, but a little crabbed. Arrows and clauses added between the lines. Sometimes he used an erasable pen – you can still see the rubber-shavings on the page. Sometimes Tipp-Ex. On those marbled composition notebooks you buy for school; he dated the pages occasionally, in the margins, when he sat down to write. The other box has a few stories and shorter pieces; also, what seem to be letters.'

‘Letters people sent him?'

‘Not that I can see, though I haven't made an inventory yet. From what I can tell, it's drafts of the letters he wrote, which he maybe typed up later when he was satisfied with them, to be sent off.'

‘Who to? I didn't know he kept up correspondences.'

‘Just look at them. This is the first part of the business that made me feel this is none of my business. But why don't I leave you alone for a minute, in peace. And you can judge for yourself.'

Paul left and for the next two hours I had his office to myself, until he tapped on the door again and put his head round and suggested we get some lunch. But until then everything was quiet, apart from the faint industrial breathing of the air-vents. You could think of the building itself as a kind of animal, with the motor left running, even in sleep. This isn't work I'm very good at. I haven't the patience for archives, or the curiosity. It seems to me that the bulk of what's interesting about a writer lies in the published material; there's a kind of perversity involved in digging up from the manuscript pages the half-dozen first intentions he later thought better of. Of course, in Peter's case, nothing was published until I published it, and maybe what I disliked was the idea that the versions we worked with were only provisional. Paul had left out copies of
Imposture
and
A Quiet Adjustment
, for comparison. I planted my elbow in the light of the desk lamp and lifted a marbled notebook from the box under his desk.

Turning the cardboard cover gave me my first little thrill. Peter had written down in block letters the word IMPOSTURE, and underneath it, this line: ‘The opening and closing of Henry Colburn's large, red front door had produced in the course of the morning, as if by force of suction, a bright eddy of human traffic.' There was a date, written in red pen, which suggests it had been added later:
June 6th, 1983. Beaumont Hill
. The beginning of his summer holidays; Peter was forty. The school campus, on its fifty acres, would have been empty of everyone but a handful of janitors and administrators, and the odd live-in teacher with nowhere else to go. I thought of the desk in the room at Founders, which may or may not have been his desk, just as it might have been his room, pushed up against the bed so that if you were sitting down to write you could turn your head to look out the window. From that angle you'd likely see the back extension of the house. The paper he wrote on, frail to begin with and now curled slightly at the edges, had retained the Braille-like impressions of his pen – you could run your fingers over the lines and feel the words.

In my parents' house in Texas, in my old bedroom, there is still a box of legal pads that my father brought home for me to write on, and which are covered in poems and stories. Also, drafts of plays, few of them completed; ideas for poems and stories, and sometimes several versions of the same thing, written out fair or messy depending on the draft. Not a box exactly, but a seaman's chest, ribbed with wood and covered in pressed tin, which my father himself bought for me at an antique market and spent a month on, taking a piece of steel wool to the rust. My bedroom window overlooks the courtyard and sometimes I would sit on my bed and write while he was outside, not ten feet away, rubbing his hands raw against the rust. He had in mind already that I would keep my manuscripts in it, which I found flattering, as an indication of how seriously he took my schoolboy scribblings. It also suggested to me the idea that these are things to be preciously stored because no one will read them. The memory of that summer was very strong in me as I glanced through Peter's notebooks, and I felt again as I had not in years the atmospheric pressure of a writer's ambitions, ‘like ten feet of cold water' on top of your head. Such pent-up, concentrated loneliness.

There was another date at the end of another book (‘his arm stretched forth, his gesture expanding into an embrace.'), under which he had written the word
FINIS
and
December
29,
1985
– a week into his Christmas holidays, and a year and a half after he first put pen to page.

After an hour or so I shifted my attention to the second box. There were five or six folders of loose-leaf paper – not just paper, but receipts with something scrawled on them, paper napkins, train tickets, torn-out pages of books. Several containing nothing more than a single phrase or observation. For example:
Greater and greater happiness, which like a small tea stain in wash after wash becomes more general
. Or,
Softly as spiders, descends
. The folders were labeled by content (ADMIN, MISCELLANEOUS WRITING, NOTES, LETTERS, etc.) and had on them the branch and leaf insignia of Harvard College Library; they belonged clearly to Gerschon's efforts at ‘rearrangement.' I found a few stories and a few poems, as Paul had said, but I wanted to look at the letters, and this is the first one I came to:

I leafed through the rest of the folder. There wasn't a single private letter in it; all of them seemed to begin Dear Sir or Madam. I had the impression of one of those after-school tasks assigned for the punishment of misbehaving kids. Copy down a hundred times the following words. Sometimes he mentioned recently published novels that had made the best-seller lists and seemed to him to bear some resemblance to his own. Mostly potboilers, from what I could tell, with titles like
Mistral's Daughter
or
The Sands of Time
. Sometimes he mentioned the name of a parent or colleague who had recommended him to a particular editor or house, because he or it ‘would make a good fit for the kind of work I am doing, and I'm told it's important, right from the start of a career, to establish a relationship with a publisher sympathetic to your literary ambitions.' And so on.