Stocking the shelves of the Invisible Library

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Earlier this summer, inspired by book-filled novels by Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, I hit upon the idea of using the Internet to start a catalog of books that exist only within other books--a Borgesian invisible library.

Now, through the inventiveness and industry of Ed Park--no mean begetter of imaginary books himself--the Invisible Library has a home! So far Ed and I have catalogued a mere handful of titles--leaning heavily on our old favorite, Anthony Powell--but the library is designed to be infinitely expandable, and we'll continually add more as we come across them.

Come by for a visit: whether you find your fancy piqued by Odo Stevens's wartime memoir Sad Majors or Fellowes Kraft's Joseph-Campbellesque mythic exploration Time's Body or Sebastian Knight's little-understood first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, we promise you'll leave empty-handed.

Nothing is different. Everything is different.

As regular readers of this blog know, I love biographies, especially of favorite writers. That's not because I feel a writer's work needs the context of his life in order to be fully understood but because, being interested in the writing, I'm interested in the talent that underlies it--and thus interested in the life and circumstances that created that talent. (In addition, I'm not ashamed to admit that I whole-heartedly love literary gossip.) And though I've often been surprised to find closer connections between a life and work than I expected--the charismatically malevolent characters in Iris Murdoch's novels, for example, can be mapped pretty closely to such figures in her own life (including the most malevolent of all, Elias Canetti)--I'm almost always able to keep the two separate when I return to the work, and thus I almost never regret learning more about a writer's background.

But I fear that I've found the exception. This week, as I blazed through the four novels collected in the Library of America's new Philip K. Dick volume, Four Novels of the 1960s (The Man in the High Castle (1962), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and Ubik (1969)), I found myself wishing I could return to the moment when I was sixteen and opened my father's copy of Dick's first published sci-fi novel, Time Out of Joint (1959). I knew nothing of Dick or the novel except that my father liked it and that it was strange (the paperback I read, however, sadly did not carry the tag line that the Lippincott first edition hardcover did, "A Novel of Menace").

Strange it definitely was, in a way wholly different from the sci-fi that I'd read up to that point, which consisted of Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and a scandalously large number of Star Trek novels. Those writers for the most part worked the "what if" that is a sci-fi writer's inspiration on a grand scale, at the level of universes. Time Out of Joint, on the other hand, opens at the level of the human, on what is recognizably our earth, with a simple moment of confusion: a man reaches for the light pull in his closet but is unable to find it, and after a time he realizes that there's no pull at all--the light is controlled by wall switch. A small mistake, but it gnaws at him, and soon he's finding other elements of his world to be ever-so-slightly askew.

It's a flawless opening, because it draws the reader in with an experience that is utterly familiar, even commonplace. We all know those moments, from deja vu to the momentary pixilated fog of waking from a deep sleep, where our world seems not quite right, like a gear has slipped and allowed us to glimpse, however briefly, the machinery quietly humming along in the background. As Joe Chip in Ubik says as he stands in his office,

I can't put my finger on it, but things are different.

But in our lives, things aren't really different, and we don't, of course, take those moments seriously; we know that they're caused by misfiring neurons or by our minds' inherent desire to discern patterns in the chaotic impressions that perpetually bombard it. We're confident that reality is as we see it, essentially, so we pour our coffee and move on.

Dick asks us, instead, to shed our usual blithe acceptance and instead confront those inexplicable moments on their own terms. Might these hiccups in reality that we accept as internal events, products of our own brains, instead be actual disjunctions, even signs or warnings? Might they be indications that all is not well? What if the reality we see right now isn't the reality that was there mere moments ago? (John Crowley rings a change on this theme in his Aegypt cycle.) What if our memories are not our own? Then, the ominous question that inevitably follows: who might be manipulating our perceptions, and to what end?

It's a captivating conceit--especially for the sixteen-year-old me, just discovering metaphysics--and it's one that turns up again and again in Dick's work. His variations on it are inventive and exciting, and he employs this slippage to produce effects ranging from comedy to suspense to full-throated horror (some moments in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are truly terrifying). For all the efforts of thinkers from Descartes on, we can't, after all, prove that we're right about reality, and a convincing explanation of what Oz the Great and Terrible might be up to behind all those painted canvas backdrops is thus always going to be compelling.

As a teenager, I admired Dick's inventiveness and his relentless attack on that concept, but as I grew older and learned more about Dick's life, it became tougher and tougher to enjoy. Dick, as seemingly every literature fan knows by now, was for much of his life a drug-addled paranoiac on the verge of mental breakdown; fueled by the legal pharmacological bonanza of the late '50s and early '60s (and the illegal one that flourished in his hometown of San Francisco in the latter decade), he was haunted by visions, deep-rooted fears, and an unshakable sense that, beneath the facade of everyday life, there really were answers and explanations.

In part because of the drugs and mental problems, Dick's was not a long life, and it seems not to have been a happy or particularly pleasant one, despite his accomplishments and his many friendships. And now I find it hard to totally banish that knowledge when I read his books. What I enjoyed before--the slithering visions of menace that penetrate The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the cryptic messages that drive the action in Ubik, or even the innocent dislocation that jars Time Out of Joint into motion--are irreversibly suffused with an extra-literary menace.

In a sense, whereas before, Dick and I were playing particularly inventive and fun "what-if" games together, games which we would lay aside at the closing of the book, restoring reality to its rightful place, this week when I read his novels, I couldn't ever quite escape the fear and worry Dick's characters were experiencing. How much of his own fear and worry was fueling the emotions of his characters? How much of these conceits that he would, I'm sure, overtly claim as invention did some part of his fragmented psyche actually believe--and have to live through? How much of the content of these novels is based in invention, and how much is based in actual suffering?

Maybe this is an inappropriate response--drawing one-to-one parallels is the job of the biographer, after all, not of the reader, and falling into that trap can greatly diminish a work. Maybe I'm being unfair to Dick; maybe, even as I praise his creativity, I'm insulting it by even suggesting that the air of paranoia and uncertainty he creates is anything but intentional and separate from his life. The alchemy of creativity is secret and strange in even the most ordinary-seeming writers, and direct attribution or explanation is liable to be wrong at least as often as it's right.

Intellectually, I know that for all my love of biography I'm a better reader when I can make that break, separating the biography and the work--and maybe in the future, in Dick's case, I will be able to. But this week, on this reading, his novels carried an air of pathos that, while leaving them no less arresting, rendered them something far different from entertainment or literature.

Happily ever after?, part one

I’ve never seen The Sopranos, but from the inescapable coverage of last weekend’s final episode I get a sense that the show ended, not with a big denouement in which loose ends were tied and story lines wrapped up, but instead with openness, ambiguity, and a sense that tomorrow would be another day for the characters, even if we wouldn’t be around to see it. [People who’ve actually seen the episode: am I right?]

It seems that a lot of viewers, maybe even most, didn’t like that. They felt cheated, felt that their seven years of devotion had earned them the right to expect some clarity and certainty—maybe even closure—which is understandable. All stories lead us to expect an ending, but lengthy sagas tend to raise those expectations even higher: by their very scope they seem to implicitly promise to draw out for us life's hidden patterns--to organize and explain what appears to us every day as life's messiness. Perhaps better than any other fiction, long-form works meld our desire to understand characters and our desire to know what happens next; in the best of them, the two impulses eventually become indistinguishable. To keep our attention on both points over time saga creators toss countless balls into the air, and our natural impulse is to expect to eventually see each one safely caught again. We've been given something so great and capacious throughout the story that, as an enthralling saga nears its end, we hope for--even demand--something even bigger and greater as a proper send-off.

Yet at the same time if there is any fictional genre that should resist the temptation to tie things up neatly, to explain, or to deliver an anticipated payoff, it's this one. What is a saga or serial narrative after all but an acknowledgment that life doesn't fit in convenient packages, and that to understand it we must study at it at length and over time? What is it but an acknowledgment that every story we start to tell, if we're honest about it, begins immediately to spiral--if not out of our control, then at least to the very limits of it? More characters must be introduced to help us understand those we've seen, but with each new character is introduced a new story, whose end points, to the extent that they can be defined, are not necessarily the same as those of any of the other stories we're following.

Within a truly expansive and open saga, all that holds these multiple tracks of story and character together is a shared sense of the unstoppable forward motion of time. Given all that, there's nothing more artificial to the form than a final act that wraps up the story, distributing rewards and meting out punishments. More in keeping with the sense of real life that many long-form narratives are trying to convey would be something like what it seems the creators of The Sopranos have done: a pan away rather than a closing curtain--an insinuation, at least, that these lives will go on even after the cameras are gone.

As I've written about briefly already, a similar sense of frustration seems to have afflicted at least some readers of John Crowley's Aegypt sequence. They argue that after raising high expectations by suggesting in the early volumes that Pierce Moffett really might discover some long-lost occult wisdom with which to transform the world, in Endless Things Crowley essentially reneges on his promises. Instead of discovering secret wisdom, Pierce stops questing and settles down to live a quiet life as a husband and father, as close to content as he'll ever be. I've written already about why I think that ending, though unexpected, fits with Crowley's overall design and is the right one for the book--but even as I disagree with the disgruntled readers, I don't really blame them for wanting more. If a saga by its nature sets up grand expectations, then one in which the author hints broadly about hidden sources of secret wisdom would seem to promise even more of a payoff. By ending the story as he does, Crowley is essentially telling readers that Aegypt is, if they look closely, not the book they thought it was--it's a different (and, I would argue, deeper) one, offering not answers to mysteries but a reminder of why those mysteries, and the stories humans have invented to explain them, seem important in the first place. His frustration of our intentions is intentional (and, to be fair, reasonably well foreshadowed), but I could imagine it being deeply maddening nonetheless.

More tomorrow, including thoughts on how this applies to Anthony Powell and A Dance to the Music of Time (which, thanks to a suggestion from Ed (of The Dizzies), is where this all started).

John Crowley on the ideal reader

To cap my recent spate of blogging about John Crowley, I'm stealing something from Crowley's own blog. I steal with the best of intentions: Crowley posted the bit I'm stealing in a comment thread, and then he warned readers who haven't read Endless Things away from the thread, because some of the comments there reveal key details of the book's plot. Yet Crowley's comment--which was presumably written off the cuff, in response to what he rightly called a screed posted by a disappointed reader--deserves more attention than it's likely to get languishing in a comments section. Not that this blog is as widely read as Crowley's (Technorati, for example, puts a distance of about 1.5 million blogs between us), but I believe comments aren't indexed by Google, so lifting it to a searchable space may prove to be at least a small favor to Crowley's readers.

The reader who prompted Crowley's comment was deeply disappointed--even offended--by Endless Things, the resolving volume of the Aegypt tetralogy. He felt that Endless Things failed to deliver on the promises of the earlier volumes; Crowley's intentional shattering of some of the myths and patterns of the earlier volumes felt to him like a cop-out, even a betrayal. The reader's heartfelt question to Crowley was: what does an author owe his readers? Does he have to deliver on expectations? Does he have to make his purpose clear? Does he have to satisfy?

Crowley responded:

As to the general question of what I or any writer owes to readers, I would say that to the entirety or generality of them I owe nothing: the idea that I could aim to, say, please or satisfy anyone or everyone who (misled or misdirected) plunks down $25 for a book of mine is unintelligible to me: how could I even begin to think about that? The reader I aim to please, satisfy, move, mystify (pleasurably), delight and otherwise give good value to is not anyreader or everyreader but a sort of nonpersonal yet quite specific entity with whom I have been conducting a relationship or agon for years. You could call him or her or it my Ideal Reader. I know certain things about this personage: he (he is ungendered but needs some sort of pronoun) shares my particular sense of humor; he understands my cultural references and is alert to my distortions or play with them; he can pick up a few Latin tags; he cares little for politics (at least in fiction, where alone I know him), is generous even if orthodox in religion, does not divide the world into good and bad, or powerful and powerless, or stupid and smart; he enjoys playing complicated literary games with smart fair authors, and always supposes that what is asserted by the author is not always the case; enjoys (like Pierce) the sudden transvaluation of values called peripeteia, whether in jokes or tragedies; and oh many other things. I do not expect him to know my personal history; I do not expect him to have knowledge of my book before he has read it (as I do) or to grant me the leeway he would a friend or a sibling or a son, or give me credit for trying when I did not succeed in achieving. I am aware he may be smarter than I am, and see my faults more clearly than I do myself, which makes me cunning. Him I set out to please; will give my all to please; his pleasure is my own. I can't know, of course, if I do: I can only know whether to some extent I have pleased actual readers, or displeased, as in your case. To some extent some readers approximate my ideal, which delights and gratifies me; none matches it. They will all have to fend for themselves. No refunds.

Nothing in Crowley's statement is particularly groundbreaking or revolutionary--in fact, a similar philosophy has probably driven writers since they shed their overt patrons a couple of centuries ago--though Crowley does seem to have taken the idea of an ideal reader seriously, investing him with the love of literature, history, and religion that Crowley himself clearly enjoys. The very act of imagining an ideal reader, then setting words free on a page despite knowing that one's actual reader will fall short of that ideal is a significant part of the drama of making art, nearly as significant as the realization that one's art itself will always be far from perfect.

Far more important than the specifics of Crowley's statement is its very existence. That Crowley fans are now able to keep these words in mind--to agree with or argue with--as we read his books in the future (and agree and argue with them), is such a happy accident of this still-new medium that it deserves to be celebrated. As has happened countless times before, a reader finished a book, frustrated, and had questions. But this time he was able to put those questions instantly in front of the author--and get a response. A reply like Crowley's, though certainly not something an author owes his readers, does seem like a wonderful repayment of the time a reader--however intemperate--has committed to his book.

Later in the thread Crowley actually posted a brief "key" of sorts to Endless Things, which is the real reason that someone who hasn't yet read the book should avoid the thread. But if you have, and you're curious about Crowley's thoughts about his own work and purposes, it's well worth checking out; I'm heartened to find that it jibes in large part with my own take (and that of Christopher R. Beha in Bookforum). Unless, that is, Borges was right in his story "August 25, 1983," and

Every writer sooner or later becomes his own least intelligent disciple.

In which case, Crowley's wrong and so are we, and you'll just have to read Endless Things and make up your own mind. Which is what you were going to do anyway, wasn't it?

Aegypt

About a hundred pages into John Crowley's Endless Things (2007), the final piece of his Aegypt tetralogy, I put it down. Seven years--an appropriate number for a series wrapped up in the idea of the mythically powerful--had passed since I'd read the first three parts, and I realized that if I was going to properly appreciate this novel, I would need to go back and reread the first three. The thought gave me pause. Though re-reading is something I enjoy, the decision to return to a book is always fraught; the countless unread novels--potential favorites all--press on me with particular force when I open a book for second time. And Aegypt in its entirety runs to more than 1,500 pages

Because work, travel, and family obligations have slowed my reading, it's taken me three weeks, but I've re-read it all, and it's been worth it. I've described the tetralogy a bit before, and if you want a more thorough explanation, this review from 2000 in the Boston Review does about as good a job of explaining Crowley's project as I can imagine. I've written before about what a surprisingly small role books and reading play in most fiction--relative, at least, to the role they play in my life and, I trust, those of most writers--and what struck me most in re-reading Aegypt was how utterly wrapped up in stories, and therefore books, the whole series is. Crowley presents his characters, led by his protagonist Pierce Moffett, as preternaturally aware of the way that we use stories to understand the world--and how those stories then shape, or even create, the world they describe. Old stories bleed into new, trace elements of discarded myths linger like junk DNA in our individual understandings of our everyday lives, and even the simple act of recognizing those inherited parameters and archetypes can influence our subsequent decisions.

Yet to feel yourself too strongly to be a character in a story, with feats to perform, prizes to win, and momentous decisions to make is also to be reminded constantly that the story could have gone differently, that a seemingly ordinary decision could be responsible for moving your story from the comedic or the heroic to the tragic. It can be paralyzing, and Crowley's protagonist, Pierce Moffett, spends most of the tetralogy suspended in that sort of uncertainty, wondering about what it is he is supposed to be doing and what sort of story he's supposed to be living. For three novels Pierce spins a variety of alternate theories of the history of the world, of the persistence of magic into our own age, and Crowley travels right along with him, showing us magic in many forms, most of them attempts to achieve power or deny inevitable loss--through wealth, sex, religion, pity, even parenthood. Crowley and Pierce step right up to the edge of promising us secret, forbidden knowledge, hinting that they have a key to understanding the hidden, occult history of the world--the sort of understanding (and, thus, power) that is tempting even to us rational skeptics.

The achievement of Endless Things is, without denying or damaging what has come before, to convince us that it was all just another story--and stories, after all, are the original, crucial magic, the only kind that we as a society can't do without. But, Crowley argues convincingly, on an individual level stories can be limiting, a distraction. We can live our lives wrapped up in books--thank goodness--but we have to remember, along the way, to actually live those lives. In Endless Things Pierce finally realizes that he must take Prospero's road and abjure his magic. The only real secret knowledge was the hope of a secret knowledge itself; realizing that, Pierce is finally willing to accept the uncertainties and finalities of existence and simply plunge into the business of living.

Which returns me to the point I made in writing a few weeks ago about Crowley's reading at KGB: for all its complexity, its heady ideas, layers of self-reference, and its interweaving of different times, places, and myths, Aegypt is about people, their decisions and their fates. That's what all good stories are about, after all, what keeps us reading, hoping to see these lives, so real, so similar in many ways to our own, set into a form that allows for understanding. Even if that understanding primarily consists of accepting that the complexity of life is beyond our ken, our desires will at least be gratified with an end to the story; the lives therein, messy as they may be, as messy even as our own, will be allowed the clarity and dignity that accrues to any ending. As Crowley says late in Endless Things:

Endings are hard. Everybody knows. It's probably because in our own beginningless endless Y-shaped lives things so rarely seem to end truly and properly--they end, but not with The End--that we love and need stories: rushing toward their sweet conclusions as though they rushed toward us, our eyes damp and breasts warm with guilty gratification, or grinning in delight and laughing at ourselves, and at them too, at the impossible endings; we read and we watch and we say in our hearts, This couldn't happen, and we also say, But here it is, happening.

Done, seen, read in New York

From The Zurau Aphorisms, by Franz Kafka (translated by Michael Hofmann, published in English in 2006)

It isn't necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy.

Ah, but only by disregarding Kafka's Thomas-a-Kempis-ean advice can you even think about going New York for a week on business.

And if you go to New York, you just might, on the first morning you're there, walk past a man on the street who looks, at a glance, like John Crowley--or at least like John Crowley looked twenty years ago when the photo was taken that decorates his novel Love and Sleep, which is tucked under your arm so you can read it at breakfast. Knowing that John Crowley is going to be in town a few days later for a reading, you might even think of saying to the man's receding back, quizzically, "John Crowley?" How often, after all, is he recognized on the street?

But the moment, most likely, would pass too quickly, the question remain unasked. Off to breakfast you'd go.

That, it turns out, is for the best, because at the reading you might realize that the man you saw was not John Crowley. He was too tall, and too young; his hair and beard were dark rather than gray. In fact, you might realize, he resembled not so much Crowley as the protagonist of Crowley's Aegypt tetralogy, Pierce Moffett, whom all these years you've associated, rightly or wrongly, with his creator. As a character, Pierce does give off a bit of the sense of idealization, of both his virtues and his faults, that often accompanies authorial stand-ins; but Crowley probably deserves more credit for his invention than that, and as you imagine the two together in this bar, the distance between them--and thus the value of Crowley's creation--seems to grow.

Which, in its way, only seems to make it more likely that the man you saw was the imaginary Pierce, wandering in search of the long-gone streets of late-70s New York, of old lovers and old buildings and old impressions long ago effaced by moneyed progress. He wouldn't have turned had you hailed him by the wrong name, but perhaps it would nonetheless have registered as a quiet ripple, a flash of inexplicable familiarity--even a shivery moment of deja vu.

From The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Richard Zenith, published in English in 2002)

Another life, of the city at nightfall. Another soul, of one who watches the night. I walk uncertainly and allegorically, unreally sentient. I'm like a story that someone told, and so well was it told that I took on just a hint of flesh at the beginning of one of the chapters of this novel that's the world: "At that moment a man could be seen walking slowly down So-and-so Street."

What do I have to do with life?

That's how your trip might have gone, had you been willing to ignore Kafka and Thomas a Kempis and set out in the first place. Some journeys are like that, after all: for example, having written earlier in the week about surprises left in library books, you unexpectedly get a chance to convince John Crowley to sign your Chicago Public Library copy of Love and Sleep. Now the title page will address the next patron to open it:

To all readers of Chicago Public--John Crowley.

Then one night you spend talking with a pair of friends who are thinking about going to Portugal in part because of Jose Saramago's book The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. The novel tells the story of Ricardo Reis, one of Fernando Pessoa's many obsessively maintained authorial identities, somehow surviving his creator's death and returning, confused, to 1936 Lisbon--which is all a bit odd because Pessoa happens to be the only author you chose to carry in your suitcase on this trip to leaven the 1,500 pages of John Crowley you're reading. Maybe that was Pierce Moffett you saw on the street after all.

Later, meeting another friend in a bookstore during a thunderstorm, not only do you discover that a new volume of Pessoa's poetry has just been published, but you talk her into leaving the shop with a copy of The Book of Disquiet under her arm--and at the counter you discover The Zurau Aphorisms, which you happen to open to this:

All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach, an ostensible pinning down of an ostensible object.

Which, to be honest, sounds like as close to a method as you've got for your blog. Thus coincidence and doubling, despite your not being on the lookout for them, pervade the trip--probably because you're secretly, perpetually on the lookout for them. After all, WWBD? What would Borges do?

I'm sure there are blogs out there that would benefit from a methodical approach, but this one, I think, will continue to attempt to make a virtue of ostensible pinnings down, of falling into error.

It really was a splendid trip.

John Crowley at KGB

One thing that literary critics and scholars generally agree on is that reading for character is one of the most naive forms of reading. It's how we begin reading, after all: we learn about the prince and princess, learn that some cruel magic is keeping them apart, and we read on (or pester our parents to read on) to find out if they will find each other, and happiness. As we get older and read more, our interests widen. We start to take note of style, metaphor, theme. We look at novels for what they tell us about the society in which they were written. The truly adventurous wander off into the weeds of experiment, where reading for character may not even be possible.

Despite all that, for most of us non-scholars, character is still what binds us to novels, drawing us back and convincing us to give over such large portions of our lives to imagined realities. From Tolstoy to chick lit, we see in created characters our own lives, our own friends, refracted, adapted, made over, made strange--and we learn about how life is lived outside of our own subjectivity. We surrender to a new reality, suffer through characters' vicissitudes and agonize over their decisions. And when we close the book, the best of them stay with us, expanding our world of acquaintance, shifting ever-so-slightly the way in which we see the universe.

All this was brought home to me with particular force Wednesday night at KGB Bar in New York. I was there, alone, to see John Crowley read from the long-awaited final volume of his Aegypt tetralogy, which he began all the way back in 1987. Aegypt is complicated, multi-layered, hard to describe, centered around a couple of years in the lives of a group of aging hippies and new agers living out the '70s in a small town in the hills of New England--but it also wanders into late-1950s Appalachia and Renaissance Europe, explores alchemy and magic, cults and werewolves, and tells the stories of Elizabethan mage John Dee and Renaissance scholar Giordano Bruno. Crowley employs all these disparate elements to answer such seemingly simple--even childish--posers as, "Why is the universe the way it is, and not some other way?" and "What if the past was different at one point from what it is now?" and, most poignant, "Why could the past not be different from what it is? Why can I only do, and never undo?" Ringing changes on these questions with a master's skill, Crowley has created what is essentially a single 1,500-page novel of ideas, fantastic and surprising and compelling.

I've not yet read the final book, Endless Things, choosing instead to re-read (and reacquaint myself with) the earlier volumes, which have reminded me that for all the architecture of ideas underlying the books, the heart of Crowley's story remains the characters he has created. Damaged and tentative, and uncertain about what they want in life, they still somehow retain a hope that they will someday come to understand the manifold workings of the heart. The ideas, fantasy, and history are anchored and made palpable by Crowley's realistic--and generous--depiction of his characters; concern for them is what drives our appreciation of the whole.

At KGB, Crowley demonstrated that he knows that. As he took the podium in that dark, red-walled bar, a thunderstorm washing down Manhattan outside, he announced that he would be reading about a wedding--and all of us in the audience smiled, for we had been waiting for this wedding, hoping it would happen despite obstacles, and now we rejoiced in the event as if these characters were our friends, taking pride in the choice they'd made and glad that we'd seen them to this point.

Were we responding like naive readers, taking these characters as if they were real people, their happiness as real happiness? Possibly. But in that setting, in that crowd, the scene was magical, the wedding the result of paths and turns and switchbacks, dropped strands and lucky breaks, the way real weddings can sometimes be--and the joy was undoubtedly, entirely real.

Crowley, in front of all of us, worked the magic for which he'd been laying the groundwork for twenty years: for one brief moment, his imaginary community drew all of us strangers together, and the power of fiction was made manifest. There's not much more an artist can hope for than that.

An unexpected postscript on libraries

Soon after I finished yesterday's post about libraries, I by chance came across two pieces of writing that seemed, together, to demand that I write a brief postscript. First, moments after I finished yesterday's post, I read the following in John Crowley's Aegypt:

Like many monkish libraries, San Domenico's was a midden of a thousand years' writing; no one knew all that the monastery contained, or what had become of all that the monks had copied, bought, written, commented on, given away, and collected over the centuries. The old librarian, Fra' Benedetto, had a long catalogue in his head, which he could remember because he had composed it in rhyme, but there were books that weren't in this catalogue because they didn't rhyme. There was a Memory Palace in which all the categories of books and all the subdivisions of those categories had places, but it had long ago filled up and been shuttered and abandoned. There was a written catalogue too, into which every book was entered as it was acquired, and if you happened to know when a book was acquired, you might find it there. Unless, that is, it had been bound with another, or several others; for usually only the incipit of the first would be put into the catalogue. The others were lost.

So within the library which Fra' Benedetto and the prior and the abbot knew about there had grown up another library, a library which those who read in it did not catalogue, and did not want catalogued.

The idea of a secret library within a library returned later in the evening when I showed some friends the following handwritten note that I had found in a copy of Gore Vidal's Lincoln (1984) that I had checked out from the Chicago Public Library's Bezazian Branch:

Lew Welch

Step out onto the Planet
Draw a circle 100 ft round

Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands,
and, maybe
nobody's ever really seen.

How many can you find?

The Internet quickly revealed that Lew Welch was a beat and this one of his poems. But my initial search led me into some confusion, landing me on a site that, had, it seemed, the poem I was looking for. According to this site, it was called "Stepping Out," and it was ever-so-slightly different from the one in the book:

Step out onto the planet.

Draw a circle as big as you can throw a stone.

Inside that circle are
300 things that nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody's ever really seen.

How many can you find?

Pick one,
and protect it.

How, I thought, could someone who had taken the trouble to write this poem down and leave it in a book have left off the closing injunction, which the whole poem builds towards? And had they gone out and heaved a stone, discovering that they could throw it a hundred feet? Stacey quickly added the last two lines to the handwritten poem, her purple ink and distinct handwriting making them stand out even more than the poet intended.

But this morning as I was harvesting links for this post, I discovered that I had made a mistake: the longer poem is not a Lew Welch poem but a very close reworking by someone identified as tamo and noted as "After Lew Welch's 'Inside the Circle.'" The library's anonymous note-writer was correct in his transcription, and now, by combining Lew Welch's original and tamo's adaptation, we've created an ever-so-slightly different third poem.

I think this writing and rewriting, this doubling and mistaken identity, this anonymous communication would entertain John Crowley, would resonate with his fascination with the transmission of knowledge--passed through unknown hands and from mind to mind, altered by that sharing--down through the centuries. So I'll fold this note, tuck it in the pages of Aegypt, and return it to the library, helping the poem along in its travels and sowing further confusion for the next unsuspecting reader.

On libraries

From Jorge Luis Borges's "The Library of Babel" (1941)

The Universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below--one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides; the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first--identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer form this mirror that the library is not infinite--if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication. I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite. . . . Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, compasionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the Library is endless.

Busy today, so all I've got for you is a couple of bits I've come across lately about libraries. Borges's infinite library that is the universe seems a good lead into a bit from John Crowley's Aegypt (1987), on the role of distant libraries in forging in the main character, Pierce, a lifelong obsession with mythical, mystical, shadowy pasts:

Such was the family Pierce was to make his way in; in their isolation they were like some antique family of gentry, in the specialness of their circumstances like foreigners living within a pale. It was only the Oliphant children who were taught by the priest's sister; only the Oliphants (as far as Pierce knew) who every month received from the state library in far-off, blue grass-green Lexington, a box of books. . . . Every month the read books were packed up and shipped back, and on receipt another box would be sent, more or less filling the vague requests on the Oliphants' list (Mother West-wind, more horse stories, "something about masonry," anything of Trollope's) and picked up at the post office, and opened in excitement and disappointment mixed, Christmas every month. Pierce remembering his confusion and contempt before this bizarre system--bizarre to a child who had had the vast, the virtually illimitable reaches of the Brooklyn Public to wander in, his father went every two weeks and Pierce had always gone with him and could have any book he pointed at--Pierce remembering those battered library boxes wondered if it had been they, those librarians or whoever they were who had filled them, who by sending him some book full of antiquated notions and quaint orthography had first suggested to him the existence of that shadow country, that far old country that was sort of Egypt but not Egypt, no, not Egypt at all, a country with a different history, whose name was spelled too with a small but crucial difference: it was not Egypt but Aegypt.

The small town I grew up in had an old Carnegie library, but its offerings were necessarily limited, and we, too, relied on similarly vague requests sent off to larger libraries in other towns and cities. Now I'm spoiled, living half a block from a branch of the Chicago Public Library and also having access to a major research library. Almost anything I want is available--though sometimes just barely. When I decided earlier this week that I couldn't really approach Endless Things (2007), the final volume of John Crowley's Aegypt tetralogy, without revisiting the first three, which are out of print, I was surprised to find that the Chicago Public Library system only has three copies of each--and one was checked out, presumably in the hands of a Crowley fan who, having the same idea I had, was quicker on the draw. Maybe the uniform paperback editions that Overlook is bringing out in the autumn will inspire the library to increase its holdings.

As regular readers know, I'm at heart more of a book buyer than book borrower, but I still make fairly regular use of the local library. It's particularly good for a summer Saturday afternoon when nothing on my shelves seems right; I can head out to the library confident that within ten minutes I can be back in my chair with a good mystery novel or two. People have of course been using libraries in that way--to pick up a quick bit of pleasurable reading--since they were invented. John Brewer describes a couple of early libraries in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997):

The largest circulating libraries were more than adjuncts to a bookselling business. In the capitals of the three kingdoms, in the large provincial towns and in resorts such as Bath and Margate, circulating libraries offered comfortable, spacious surroundings in which customers could gossip, flirt, browse, examine newspapers and reviews, and choose from a selection of every kind of book. The late eighteenth-century engraving of the library at Margate, sold jointly by its proprietor and engraver, conveys the ambience library proprietors wanted: one of leisure and display as well as learning.



The biggest libraries published catalogues: John Bell's famous London Library contained more than 8,000 volumes; Sibbald's in Edinburgh offered its patrons a choice of 6,000 titles in 1786; and Ann Ireland's Leicester Library, though not as large a Barber's in Newcastle, nevertheless housed 2,500 books. These libraries were not only repositories of fiction. The number of novels and romances was never as great as those of history, travel, and geography; indeed for every "frivolous" volume there were two of more serious reading matter. But these figures refer to books on the shelf: no records survive to reveal the pattern of borrowing in a major circulating library. It may well have been that the sober histories and detailed travellers' tales never received a second glance as readers hurried to the shelves of multi-volumed novels and well-thumbed romances. Isaac Cruikshank's The Circulating Library certainly takes this view.



The shelves for novels, tales and romances are empty--all the books are out--but the sections for history, sermons, voyages and travels are full, attesting to their unpopularity.

That was before libraries had learned to stock multiple copies of the most popular trashy books: the Chicago Public Library has, according to their online catalog, 26 copies of The Da Vinci Code (2004), about half of which are available right now for checkout.

It seems unlikely that any trashy books marred the shelves of the library John Stow describes here in his A Survey of London (1598):

Joceline of Furness writeth, that Thean, the first Archbishop of London, in the reign of Lucius, built the said church by the aid of Ciran, chief butler to King Lucius; and also that Eluanus, the second archbishop, built a library to the same adjoining, and converted many of the Druids, learned men in the pagan law.

Just think of the splendid confusion a time traveler could create by stealing on of Chicago Public's extra copies of The Da Vinci Code and slipping it into the stacks of Eluanus's library. By the time the historical ripples reached the present, Dan Brown's faux-scholarly mishmash might actually have created the sort of secret societies it purports to uncover--though I suppose even Druids might find his characters and sentences a bit wooden.

But people do enjoy fluff and trash, and I'm not one to deny anyone pleasure from books, of whatever kind. I think D. J. Enright, in Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1987), gets at least part of it right:

A love of literature, Virginia Woolf wrote, is often roused and initially nourished, not by good books but by bad ones. "It will be an ill day when all the reading is done in libraries and none of it in tubes." And vice versa, too.

Interplay, too, is out of print, and obscure enough as to be missing from most library collections. But a commonplace book, being a bedside and armchair companion, is best owned rather than borrowed anyway--and there an Enright fan is in luck: searchable used bookstore inventories have made it readily available to anyone anywhere.

And, as John Crowley clearly understands, there are few things more inherently exciting to a reader than getting a box of books in the mail.