The Bookman's Wake (19 page)

“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 what 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.

A simple question could tie us up for an hour. Huggins
was expansive: a gesturing, conjecturing, extrapolating
encyclopedia on the Graysons, and I didn’t know
enough to be able to decide what of all he was telling me
was relevant. Then I thought of the one thing that might
boot us up to another level—that scrap of charred
paper in my wallet.

“Could I ask you something…in
confidence?”

“Certainly.”

I took the paper out and put it on the counter between
us.

“What’s your opinion of that?”

He squinted at it, then got out his glasses. I heard him
take in his breath as if an old lover, still young and
beautiful, had just walked into the room. He looked up: our
eyes met over the tops of his glasses, and I could see that
my hunch was right. I had shaken him up.

“Where’d you get this?”