by Ramona Koval
CHAPTER 15
Genius from the dust
On the shelf behind me as I write are two sets of children’s books—an eight-volume set of a 1930 edition of Cassell’s Book of Knowledge and a ten-volume 1947 edition of Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia, first published in 1909.
I haven’t read through them. Sometimes, books arrive in such a way as to be forever tainted with the stories they bring.
In my late twenties I got married again, for a short time, to another man whose knowledge and intellectual abilities impressed me. His talents included mathematics, translation from Italian (not his first language), a forensic memory of French films of the 1960s and a sweeping familiarity with political history.
At some stage he brought these children’s encylopaedias into my life. They had been important to him when he was growing up and acquiring his impressive range of interests. He liked multi-volume sets so much that on the first of his birthdays we spent together he asked for a volume of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. His ambition was to own the entire fifty-volume set of everything ever written by his political heroes.
The place to buy them was the International Book Shop, which you got to through a nondescript doorway and then up some stairs in Elizabeth Street in the middle of Melbourne. Here every kind of left-wing publication could be found.
For each of my presents to him I climbed these stairs. The International Book Shop never seemed to have the whole set at any one time, so I started with Volume 3. I thought we’d be together forever, and didn’t try to get Volume 1 or 2 before I branched out to Volume 10. I had endless time to buy the complete set.
My second ex-husband told me that when he was a university student he found a job as an orderly in a large psychiatric hospital. He got to know one particular patient, an old man, who said he wasn’t mad at all, but a gifted genius who had been writing a massive project, which he called ‘The Snowball Book of Knowledge’. It was a most important work.
The old man was distressed that his manuscript was still in his shack, somewhere in a forest near a remote country town. He told the student orderly its exact whereabouts, and, one weekend, the young man took off on his Vespa scooter armed with a hand-drawn map.
Now, as I write, I can see the mythic elements assembling themselves—a mad old man (an ancient mariner?), a secret book of knowledge, a young man on a quest—and I am shaking my head as I remember the rest of the story. The student arrives at a rundown shack, he parks the Vespa, his heart beats faster and he climbs in through a broken window.
He finds the room in which The Snowball Book of Knowledge is kept and discovers pages strewn around the floor, some of them wet with the rain that is blowing in through the broken window. Some pages have been nibbled by rats and other hungry creatures. I remember being so sad for the old man on hearing this, and so impressed with my ex-husband who went to rescue the book and the man’s reputation.
But when he read the old man’s pages he was terribly disappointed. The Snowball Book of Knowledge was simply a notebook in which the old man recorded all the things that he had ever heard about. Things that everyone who had been to school already knew. Five plus five is ten. The capital of Australia is Canberra.
I seem to remember that he didn’t take the pages back to the old gent because he didn’t want him to see how messed up his pages were. His life’s work. Maybe he told him he couldn’t find the hut.
What strikes me now is the disappointment of the young man. He really thought that he might have discovered a secret key to the meaning of life. I thought it was a romantic story with a wistful ending, but I could have saved myself a lot of wasted time and indeed some money if I had questioned my grip on reality.
As it is, I only bought five volumes of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. We parted long before he could amass the whole set. I imagine that his subsequent paramours have contributed in their own ways to the collection.
And I am left with Arthur Mee’s and Cassell’s sets of books, which he didn’t take with him—a silent reminder to be a little more discerning in my choice of men. In some ways they now add up to my own Snowball Book of Knowledge.
Alongside the children’s encyclopaedias on my shelves are several sets of books that I have only ever dipped into. These are my beautiful boxed sets of mysterious classics, and I have a fantasy that, if I live to be a very old woman, I will properly learn all the languages that fascinate me and I will read my boxed sets of the world’s classic literature.
Here is The Tale of Genji. It was written in eleventh-century Japan, almost exactly a thousand years ago, by a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court, a woman known to posterity as Murasaki Shikibu. Readers began to acknowledge the tale as a classic within a century of its writing, and it soon became an object of intense study. The story starts when a woman of lower rank in the court gives birth to a son called Genji. He is favoured by the emperor because he’s so beautiful, talented and likeable. He goes on to have many affairs, which allows Murasaki Shikibu to explore ideas of love, court politics, friendship, life and death—all the things that make a wonderful story.
In 2008 I interviewed Royall Tyler, a scholar of Japanese language and literature, a translator and, incidentally, an alpaca farmer in New South Wales. His translation of The Tale of Genji, all 1184 pages and 54 chapters, including 795 poems, took him almost ten years. How many years has it taken me not to read it, and how long will it take me when I do read it? The plot summary above is what Royall Tyler told me it was about, not something that I have discovered myself. Yet.
I was speaking to him about his approach to translation so it was not important for me to read the whole work. But by the following summer I had time to read more of The Tale of Genji. I found that the earlier stories about concubines, stepmothers and secrets gave way to more complex and less interesting tales of court life. I was confused about the characters. Apart from Genji no one is called by their personal names. If they have no official title they are called, for example, the Lady of the House. If they change jobs, they change titles. Even if the naming is true to the social hierarchies of eleventh-century Japan the book demented me. I was defeated.
I look at the boxed set and admire the illustration on the cover of Genji as a grown man wearing wide trousers and a kimono lined in red. I like the red linen-bound volumes and the line drawings in the text. I think of Murasaki Shikibu, who was born in about 973. She was the daughter of a provincial governor of Japan, a middle level of the aristocracy which, in the capital Kyoto, supplied ladies-in-waiting to the greatest lords and ladies around the emperor. She was called to serve as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Shôshi. Nobody knows just when she began her story, or indeed when it was finished. People speculate that she died in 1013 but, again, the truth isn’t known.
And it wasn’t unusual by her time for a woman to write. The official written language at the court in Kyoto was Middle Chinese, even though the courtiers did not speak it. These men studied history, philosophy and religious texts and wrote poetry in Chinese. But the women wrote in Japanese, as different from modern Japanese as the English of Beowulf is from the language we speak. I wonder what happened to Murasaki. The book finishes in the middle of a sentence, and scholars speculate on whether she intended this, or left her story incomplete.
Next to The Tale of Genji sits a boxed volume of The Icelandic Sagas, abridged and introduced by Magnus Magnusson, with beautifully strange illustrations by Simon Noyes. I fell upon this when I decided that selfimprovement was in order once I started working on my first literary program, Books and Writing. The Icelandic Sagas are stories of the Norwegian Viking settlers who made their home in Iceland, of their land disputes and marriages and many deaths by axe. My friend and brilliant essayist Eliot Weinberger describes it as:
An enormous ‘human comedy’ of love, greed, rage, lust, marriages and property settlements, travels, revenge, funerals and festivals, meetings, abductions, prophetic dreams and strange coincidences, fi
sh and sheep. Nearly everyone in Iceland is descended from these people, and they know the stories, and the stories of what happened in the generations since.
One of my favourite of Weinberger’s essays is simply a list of dreams found in the sagas that begins:
Þorbjörg of Indriðastaðir dreamed that eighty wolves passed by with flames coming from their mouths, and among them was a white bear.
Glaumvör dreamed that a bloody sword was sticking out from her husband’s tunic, and that a river ran through the house, sweeping away all their things.
Hersteinn Blund-Ketillson dreamed he saw his father on fire.
It was wonderful to imagine that these might have been the real dreams of people a thousand years ago, which had made their way into these histories/sagas/stories, and I was hearing about them as if I were at breakfast with the characters the morning after.
The same summer I tackled Genji, I took my abridged Icelandic Sagas from my shelf. But, oh, how many pages you had to get through to reach each dream. Too many for me, and I was thankful for Eliot Weinberger who had done the spadework. You had to read through an awful lot of genealogical records—who was married to whom and whose daughters and sons they were—before you got to the stories. And some of the stories did seem to be about legal disputes, multigenerational feuds and the way they were solved. Many of them ended with an axe-hammer blow to the head. The charming Icelandic naming pattern which, to this day, insists on the use of traditional first names combined with the last name—using the mother or father’s first name plus ‘son’ or ‘dottir’—mean that many of the characters in the Sagas have the same name or one pretty similar. In Egil’s Saga there are characters called Thorvald, Thorunn, two Thorsteins, two Thorulfs, three Thorgeirs, and four Thoros. I have no patience.
My three-volume set of the Arabian Nights stands next to my Vikings. I read an abridged version as a child. I can still feel the tension in the story of Scheherazade, the woman who told tales to save her own life. The Arabian Nights first appeared in Europe, translated into French by Antoine Galland, in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717, and it was translated into English in 1708. It was woven out of tales told by the new bride Scheherazade to prevent her husband Shahryar the king from murdering her. He had been slaying virgins at a rate of knots ever since being cuckolded by a previous wife.
On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but she stops before it ends, forcing her husband to let her live another day so that she can continue. But the next night, although she completes the first story, she starts a new one, and leaves off so that she gets a second reprieve. This goes on for a thousand and one nights.
I knew that the Arabian Nights was an important book for my self-improvement plan. It had been astonishingly influential, and has inspired music, other stories, films and operas, as well as changing tastes in fashion and furniture—all that orientalism brought to the west. It had an enormous influence on the history of English literature, French literature and that of many other European countries, and ultimately it came back to have influence on Arabian literature via its influence on the magical realism of Latin-American writers who were then translated into Arabic.
Some of the best-known stories, including those of Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad, were not even part of the original manuscript. In his translation, Galland worked from a fourteenth-century Syrian text, and he added tales he’d collected in his own travels, including one he wrote down after a conversation with a Maronite Syrian who gave him the story of Aladdin. And he also changed the manuscript so that it had a stronger narrative line, omitting many of the poetic sections and adding details that accorded with eighteenth-century French taste.
In 1885 an English version was published by my old friend the British explorer and orientalist and translator of the Kama Sutra, Sir Richard Burton, in an erotic, private edition for subscribers.
Even as I open the books now, and read from the first ‘framing’ story, the pattern—of a story that is cut off when dawn breaks, so that the storyteller lives another day, and takes up the thread the next night—quickly begins to wear thin. Sometimes the stories are so ‘nested’, a story within a story within a story, that I close the book.
I also admit defeat with The Mabinogion (medieval Celtic tales), The Mahabharata (the Hindu classic), The Iliad and parts of The Odyssey. I am struck by the popularity of stories that become other stories and shape-changing, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and would be interested to read an essay on why we like them so much, rather than wade through the stories themselves.
I remember essayist and novelist Geoff Dyer’s words:
The strange thing about this is that at twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty.
My impulse to read the great works of literature comes from my romantic yearning to understand the wisdom of the ages. I wonder what I might have read if Ptolemy’s Royal Library of Alexandria had not been destroyed. I daydream about its papyrus scrolls which contained that world’s complete collection of knowledge.
I am not alone. The search for scraps of papyrus grew into a quest in Napoleon’s time for the great lost works of Greek literature. The first papyrus text ever to be published from findings at Faiyum in Egypt turned out to be a rather boring account of people who were digging out the irrigation ditches at the oasis there.
Then excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum in the mid-eighteenth century fired up the romantic imagination all over again. Scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum were identified, after they had been mistaken for lumps of charcoal by excavation workers, who used them to light the torches at the dig. That stopped when the lumps were found to contain traces of writing. But what did they say?
Wordsworth wanted to know. This is how he ends his poem ‘September 1819’:
O ye, who patiently explore
The wreck of Herculanean lore,
What rapture! could ye seize
Some Theban fragment, or unroll
One precious, tender-hearted scroll
Of pure Simonides.
That were, indeed, a genuine birth
Of poesy; a bursting forth
Of genius from the dust:
What Horace gloried to behold,
What Maro loved, shall we enfold?
Can haughty Time be just!
This wishful thinking chimes with images of the people of Herculaneum gathering their most precious books together in an attempt to flee to safety as Vesuvius erupts, and the ash and mud comes raining down on them.
The papyrologists, on the other hand, were faced with crumbling blackened rolls. These carbonised papyri are like a rolled-up newspapers after a fire. You can still identify the rolls, and painstakingly peel off the fragments and, if you’re lucky, the ancient Greek script might be present in maddening tiny pieces.
Till now, the only surviving fragments tell of a collection of Epicurian philosophical writings, mostly by Philodemus of Gadara, whose sentences are said to be rather tedious. Romantic bubble-bursters have even suggested the villa was being remodelled by a new owner at the time of the eruption, and the unremarkable papyri were all tossed in together in the renovation chaos.
But possibilities for romance still linger. Digital imaging spectroscopy has already helped read the black ink on the blackened papyrus of the scrolls, and hopes are that applications of CT scanning might even allow us to read the others without the need for damaging them further by unrolling them.
The idea of what a book might say can be even more powerful than its actual words. Two books sit, one upon the other, on a stand in the corner of my room. They are old books, hardbacks, but, like the papyri of Herculaneum, I don’t know what’s inside them. An artist friend gave them to me when she and her husband came for lunch one day. The books were from her recent exhibition about bees and temples. She h
ad put them in a beehive and they had become encased by wax. She was interested in death, poetry and metamorphosis, and was full of wonder at how the bees had transformed these books.
She had been having a series of bad headaches. She had just turned sixty, and was beautiful and a little delicate. That day she explained that as a child she had survived leukaemia. She had been given radiotherapy and was told that she probably wouldn’t ever be able to have children. In her thirties she had surprised everyone, including herself, by giving birth to twins. But she was haunted by her near misses, by the gifts of life, by the numinous world and by mortality.
I did not know her well but when I heard that she loved German literature I lent her my copies of Joseph Roth’s What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933, and My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard, which was a hysterical collection recounting the bad grace with which the ornery Austrian writer had received various accolades. I remember that day my friend was wearing a beautifully cut long dark coat that suited her well. I thought she would enjoy the books as I placed her gift of beeswaxed volumes on the stand.
A few weeks later we heard that she had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, and after some months she died. At her funeral service her coffin stood on a bier surrounded by beeswax candles that had been part of her exhibition.
The waxed books are here as I write. I wonder what they are about but I don’t want to disturb the wax that encloses them. They might be a message from the grave. They might not be. If they turned out to be geometry texts or military histories or manuals on irrigation ditches, might they lose the quality that makes them mysterious when I see them on the stand, reminding me of my friend, that lunch, her coat and the fleeting nature of life?