Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (277 page)

“Murder,” he repeated. “That’s a word, Hodge. Means what you want it to mean. Wasn’t murder back during the war when Union soldiers was trying to keep the country from being split up. ’Tain’t murder today when somebody’s hung for rape or counterfeiting. Anyhow the Grand Army don’t go in for murder.”

I said nothing.

“Oh, accidents happen; wouldn’t deny it. Maybe they get a little rougher than they intend with Whig traitors or Confederate agents, but you can’t make bacon out of a live hog. Point is the Grand Army’s the only thing in the country that even tries to restore it to what it once was. What was fought for in the war.”

I don’t know whether it was the thought of Grandfather Backmaker or the unassuaged guilt for the miserable figure I had cut only three days back that made me ask, “And do they want to give the Negroes equality?”

He drew back sharply, shock showing clearly on his face. “Touch of the tar brush in you, boy? By—” He bent forward, looking at me searchingly. “No, I can see you ain’t. Just some notions you’ll outgrow. You just don’t understand. We might have won that war if it hadn’t been for the Abolitionists.”

Would we? I’d heard it said often enough; it would have been presumptuous to doubt it.

“The darkies are better off among their own,” he said; “they never should have been here in the first place; black and white can’t mix. Leave ideas like that alone, Hodge; there’s plenty and enough to be done. Chase the foreigners out, teach their flunkies a lesson, build the country up again.”

“Are you trying to get me to join the Grand Army?”

Pondible finished his beer. “Won’t answer that one, boy. Let’s say I just want to get you somewheres to sleep, three meals a day, and some of that education you’re so fired up about. Come along.”

IV.

TYSS

He took me to a bookseller’s and stationery store on Astor Place with a print shop in the basement, and the man to whom he introduced me was the owner, Roger Tyss. I spent almost six years there, and when I left neither the store nor its contents nor Tyss himself seemed to have changed or aged.

I know books were sold and others bought to take their places on the shelves or to be piled towerwise on the floor. I helped cart in many rolls of sulfide paper and bottles of printers’ ink, and delivered many bundles of damp pamphlets, broadsides, letterheads and envelopes. Inked ribbons for typewriting machines, pen points, ledgers and daybooks, rulers, paper clips, legal forms, and cubes of india rubber came and went. Yet the identical, invincible disorder, the synonymous dog-eared volumes, the indistinguishable stock, the unaltered cases of type seemed fixed for six years, all covered by the same film of dust which responded to vigorous sweeping only by rising into the air and immediately settling back on precisely the same spots.

Roger Tyss grew six years older, and I can only charge it to the heedless eye of youth that I saw no signs of that aging. Like Pondible and, as I learned, so many members of the Grand Army, he wore a beard. His was closely trimmed, wiry and grizzled. Above the beard and across his forehead were many fine lines which always held some of the grime of the store or printing press. You did not dwell long on either beard or wrinkles, however; what held you were his eyes: large, dark, fierce, and compassionate. You might have dismissed him at first glance as simply an undersized, stoop-shouldered, slovenly printer, had it not been for those eyes which seemed in perpetual conflict with his other features.

“Robbed and bludgeoned, ay?” he said with a curious disrespect for sequence after Pondible had explained me to him. “Dog eats dog, and the survivors survive. Backmaker, ay? Is that an American name?”

So far as I knew, I said, it was.

“Well, well; let’s not pry too deeply. So you want to learn. Why?”

“Why?” The question was too big for an answer, yet an answer of some kind was expected. “I guess because there’s nothing else so important.”

“Wrong,” he said triumphantly, “wrong and illusory. Since nothing is ultimately important there can be no degrees involved. Books are the waste product of the human mind.”

“Yet you deal in them,” I ventured.

“I’m alive and I shall die, too; this doesn’t mean I approve of either life or death. Well, if you are going to learn you are going to learn; there’s nothing I can do about it. As well here as another place.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Gratitude, Hodgins”—he never then nor later condescended to the familiar “Hodge” nor did I ever address or even think of him except as Mr. Tyss—“Gratitude, Hodgins, is an emotion disagreeable both to the giver and to the receiver. We do what we must; gratitude, pity, love, hate, all that cant, is superfluous.”

I considered this statement reflectively.

“Look you,” he went on, “I’ll feed you and lodge you, teach you to set type, and give you the run of the books. I’ll pay you no money; you can steal from me if you must. You can learn as much here in four months as in a college in four years—if you persist in thinking it’s learning you want—or you can learn nothing. I’ll expect you to do the work I think needs doing; anytime you don’t like it you’re free to go.”

And so our agreement, if so simple and unilateral a statement can be called an agreement, was made within ten minutes after he met me for the first time. For six years the store was home and school, and Roger Tyss was employer, teacher, and father to me. He was never my friend. Rather he was my adversary. I respected him and the longer I knew him the deeper became my respect, but it was an ambivalent feeling and attached only to those qualities which he himself would have scorned. I detested his ideas, his philosophy, and many of his actions, and this detestation grew until I was no longer able to live near him. But I am getting ahead of my story.

Tyss knew books, not merely as a bookman knows them—binding, size, edition, value—but as a scholar. He seemed to have read enormously and on every conceivable subject, many of them quite useless in practical application. (I remember a long discourse on heraldry, filled with terms like “paley-bendy,” or “fusils conjoined in fess, gules” and “sable demi-lions.” He regarded such erudition, indeed any erudition, contemptuously. When I asked why he had bothered to pick it up, his retort was, “Why have you bothered to pick up calluses, Hodgins?”)

As a printer he followed the same pattern; he was not concerned solely with setting up a neat page; he sometimes spent hours laying out some trivia, which could have interested only its author, until he struck a proof which satisfied him. He wrote much on his own account: poetry, essays, manifestos, composing directly from the font, running off a single proof which he read—always expressionlessly—and immediately destroyed before piing the type.

I slept on a mattress kept under one of the counters during the day; Tyss had a couch hardly more luxurious, downstairs by the flatbed press. Each morning before it was time to open he sent me across town on the horse cars to the Washington Market to buy six pounds of beef— twelve on Saturdays, for the market, unlike the bookstore, was closed Sundays. It was always the same cut, heart of ox or cow, dressed by the butcher in thin strips. After I had been with him long enough to tire of the fare, but not long enough to realize the obstinacy of his nature, I begged him to let me substitute pork or mutton, or at least some other part of the beef, like brains or tripe which were even cheaper. He always answered, “The heart, Hodgins. Purchase the heart; it is the vital food. “

While I was on my errand he would buy three loaves of yesterday’s bread, still tolerably fresh; when I returned he took a long two-pronged fork, our only utensil, for the establishment was innocent of either cutlery or dishes, and spearing a strip of heart held it over the gas flame of a light standard until it was sooted and toasted rather than broiled. We tore the loaves with our fingers, and with a hunk of bread in one hand and a strip of heart in the other we each ate a pound of meat and half a loaf of bread for breakfast, dinner, and supper.

“Man is uniquely a savage eater of carrion,” he informed me, chewing vigorously. “What lion or tiger would relish another’s ancient, putrefying kill? What vulture or hyena displays human ferocity? Too, we are cannibals at heart. We eat our gods; we have always eaten our gods.”

“Isn’t that figurative, or poetic, Mr. Tyss? I mean, doesn’t it refer to the grain of wheat which is ‘killed’ by the harvester and buried by the sower?”

“You think the gods were modeled on John Barleycorn and not John Barleycorn on them—to conceal their fate? I fear you have a higher opinion of mankind than is warranted, Hodgins.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean by gods.”

“Embodiments or personifications of human aspirations. The good, the true, the beautiful—with winged feet or bull’s body.”

“How about…oh, Chronos? Or Satan?”

He licked his fingers of the meat juices, obviously pleased. “Satan. An excellent example. Epitome of man’s futile longing to upset and defy the divine plan—I use the word ‘divine’ derisively, Hodgins—; who does not admire and reverence Lucifer in his heart? Well, having made a god out of the devil we eat him daily in a twofold sense: by swallowing the myth of his enmity (a truer friend there never was), and by digesting his great precepts of pride and curiosity and strength. And you see for yourself how he finds interesting thoughts for idle minds to speculate on. Let’s get to work.”

He expected me to work, but he was far from a hard or inconsiderate master. In 1938–44, when the country was being ground deeper into colonialism, there were few employers so lenient. I read much, generally when I pleased, and despite his jeers at learning in the abstract he encouraged me, even going to the length, if a particular book was not to be found in his considerable stock, of letting me get it from one of his competitors, to be written up against his account.

Nor was he scrupulous about the time I took on his errands. I continued to ramble and sightsee the city much as though I had nothing else to do. And if, from time to time, I discovered there were girls in New York who didn’t look too unkindly on a tall youth even though he still carried some of the rustic air of Wappinger Falls, he never questioned why the walk of half a mile took me a couple of hours.

True, he kept to his original promise never to pay me wages, but he often handed me coins for pocket money, evidently satisfied I wasn’t stealing, and he replaced my makeshift wardrobe with worn but decent clothing.

He had not exaggerated the possibilities of the books surrounding me. His brief warning, “—you can learn nothing,” was lost on me. I suppose a different temperament might have become surfeited with paper and print; I can only say I wasn’t. I nibbled, tasted, gobbled books. After the store was shut I hooked a student lamp to the nearest gas jet by means of a long tube, and lying on my pallet with a dozen volumes handy, I read till I was no longer able to keep my eyes open or understand the words. Often I woke in the morning to find the light still burning and my fingers holding the pages open.

I think one of the first books to influence me strongly was the monumental
Causes of American Decline and Decay
by the always popular expatriate historian, Henry Adams. I was particularly impressed by the famous passage in which he reproves the “stay-at-home” Bostonian essayists, William and Henry James, for their quixotic sacrifice and espousal of a long-lost cause. History, said Sir Henry, who had renounced his United States citizenship and been knighted by William V, history is never directed or diverted by well-intentioned individuals; it is the product of forces with geographical, not moral roots.

Possibly the learned expatriate was right, but my instinctive sympathies lay with the Jameses, in spite of the fact that I had not found their books enjoyable. This was due at least partly to the fact that the small editions were badly printed and marred, at least so foreign critics claimed, by an excessive use of Yankee colloquialisms, consciously employed to demonstrate patriotism and disdain of imported elegance. For some reason, obscure to me then, I did not mention Adams to Tyss, though I usually turned to him with each of my fresh discoveries. When he came upon me with an open book he would glance at the running title over my shoulder and begin talking, either of the particular work or of its topic. What he had to say gave me an insight I might otherwise have missed, and turned me to other writers, other aspects. He respected no authority simply because it was acclaimed or established; he prodded me to examine every statement, every hypothesis no matter how commonly accepted.

Early in my employment I was attracted to a large framed parchment he kept hanging, slightly askew and highly attractive to dust, over his type case. It was simply but beautifully printed in 16 point Baskerville; I knew without being told that he had set it himself:

The Body of Benjamin Franklin

Printer

Like the Cover of an Old Book Stripped of Its Lettering and Gilding

Lies Here Food for Worms.

But the Work Shall Not Be Lost For It Will, as He Believed,

Come Forth Again In a New and Better Edition Revised & Corrected

By The Author.

When he caught me admiring it Tyss laughed. “Felicitous, isn’t it, Hodgins? But a lie, a perverse and probably hypocritical lie. There is no author; the book of life is simply a mess of pied type, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There is no plan, no synopsis to be filled in with pious hopes or sanctimonious actions. There is nothing but a vast emptiness in the universe.”

“The other day you told me we admired the devil for rebelling against a plan.”

He grinned. “So you expect consistency instead of truth from me, Hodgins. There is no plan, authored by a mind; it is this no-plan against which Lucifer fought. But there is a plan, too, a mindless plan, which accounts for all our acts.”

I had been reading an obscure Irish theologian, a Protestant curate of some forsaken parish, so ill-esteemed he had been forced to publish his sermons himself, named George B. Shaw, and I had been impressed by his forceful style. I quoted him to Tyss, perhaps as much to preen myself as to counter his argument.