Figuring out the substantial character and content of that amazement took a little longer. No one had told me, when we were introduced—a handshake at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia—that Mr. Seymour Adelman was (as a Rosenbach publication itself puts it) “a famous Philadelphia bookman.” What I saw was a tall gentleman, conventionally distinguished, but with one shoulder just a shade tipped down, as if this business of looking distinguished had happened in spite of himself, without his meaning it to; as if he worried that looking important would make him seem self-important. At that moment he had no smile; he wasn’t exactly at ease; it appeared he didn’t like being “introduced.” He was probably afraid that his credentials were about to be reeled off, and he would stand exposed for what he was: one of the most passionate bibliophiles on the American scene, a collector in whom the near evidence of a poet’s mind and hand inspired rapt and tremulous awe. There was no reasonable way, really, for Seymour to be introduced. He would have had to be defined, and that would have made him bashful.
Now if, at that early encounter, Seymour had been defined, this is what I would most likely have heard: “Please meet Mr. Adelman, in whom the acquisitive faculty is a lesser, though essential, aspect of the delectably inquisitive. Curiosity and rapture, infatuation and fascination—these are what motivate Mr. Adelman. If he has contrived to live in the presence of a marvelous thing—a letter, a document, a manuscript, a drawing, a broadside, a painting—it isn’t simply to own it, like some possessive tycoon, but to enter its intelligence, to dream himself into it. Please note that Mr. Adelman has dreamed himself into American and British history and painting and literature, and beyond—even into the boxing ring! Collecting is the domestication of beloved apparitions, so it’s no wonder that Mr. Adelman has chosen to set up housekeeping in the most sumptuous of all the palaces of the imagination. He doesn’t mean to stay there alone, though—the windows and doors are wide open, with Mr. Adelman waving like mad at the front gate, calling out ‘Come and see!’ to every fellow dreamer.”
But since no one said any of this, I had no idea of what lay ahead. I had never known a private collector, and thought of “bookmen,” when I thought of them at all, as pinched experts on the condition of old leather bindings. I had the low notion that bibliophilism belonged to the extrinsic, the superficial, the merely valuable—the farthest pole from true poets and their true lives.
Seymour contradicted all that. I followed him down into the hold of the Canaday Library of Bryn Mawr College, into his captain’s cabin—Room A-10. These were high seas! “Do you like A. E. Housman?” he asked: testing a potential member of the crew. I confessed to having been smitten at the age of sixteen. “Well, then,” said Seymour, and put into my hands an autographed transcript of “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough.” Housman at his purest, most lyrical, most crystal. And set down by the poet’s own pen. Seymour’s pride in this fabled cargo rocked the little room like a fresh wave—not the pride of ownership, but something else: a cheerful reverence, one might call it, a kind of patriotism for beauty and grace. Elation, perhaps, over the seamless continuity of art.
The next moment I was gazing down at still another Housman manuscript, also in Housman’s own hand:
Marinade of 4 Anchovy
2 Soy
3 Ketchup
A little treacle with vinegar
Draw out the gut, but do not split the fish
Bake in a closed vessel for 3 hours in a slow oven
It was a recipe for pickled herring. “I am happy indeed,” Seymour wrote me afterward, “that you recovered quickly from the encounter with Pickled Herring à la Housman. I might add that yours was a very mild case; most visitors to A-10, after even the merest glimpse of the recipe, collapse in a heap, gasping, and are routinely taken to Bryn Mawr Hospital.”
In return, I sent him a rhyme.
Loveliest of fish, the herring now
Is hung with vinegar above its brow,
it brazenly began. The “future home” of my letter, Seymour responded grandly, “is A-10, where I know it will be welcomed by its peers—my Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Tennyson letters.” And he emblazoned his signature with a flourish: “Now, hence, and forever.”
Now, hence, and forever. The loyal little “my” that preceded those noble names of English literature—for Seymour, it was “my” Keats, “my” Shelley, “my” Wordsworth, and all the rest, not because he had won these consummately precious world-treasures at hard auction, not because he had been victorious over other collectors (though the triumph of the chase ought not to be discounted), but because he had made a pact with genius. He offered his own life, a life of veneration and concentration and care—a dedicated curatorship; and genius, on its side, was simply to give him leave to warm his hands at its fires. A covenant both modest and glorious.
Seymour liked to say that it was “the malignant influence of mathematics” that exiled him from the University of Pennsylvania after his sophomore year. More likely it was the beneficent promptings of immortality. It seems clear that Seymour had to be himself—a visionary seeker—no matter what: he went in a straight line from earliest youth. In 1924, still in his teens, he bought, for thirteen dollars, a letter by Charles Dickens, written in Philadelphia. He was attracted from the first by the halo of stubbornness that surrounds imaginative literature, the deep radiances only poets have the obstinacy to see all the way down into; and it was these flashes from the fiery hoop of eternity Seymour was secretly after. (Now, hence, and forever!)
He could sometimes cloak the sight of this blazing wheel behind the charming sleight-of-hand of the jokes and stories that teased his own ambition, but it was there all the same, and probably all the time. Here it is hidden in the catalogue note to Item 184 in the Adelman Collection:
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Typed letter signed, to
Seymour Adelman.
Roquebrune, France, 14 March 1939
In regard to this letter, mentioning Dunkirk, it can be stated, on the highest authority, that its recipient has not yet fully recovered from the joyous shock of receiving it. He had expected, at most, a note of acknowledgment signed by one of Churchill’s five secretaries.
This appears in the heart of much other Churchilliana, but what rushes up out of the surprise in Seymour’s voice—his voice unquestionably, as plain as a fingerprint—is the terrible heat of history: history as furnace and forge. Seymour was out to touch, even if only with the tip of his thumbnail, the heaving flames of that part of eternity which was his own time.
Yet he rarely left Philadelphia. “During the last eleven years,” he said in 1962, and again in 1974, “I have not been away from Philadelphia for twenty-four consecutive hours. And if my luck holds out, I look forward to another uninterrupted decade or two within the city limits.” The London he knew inside out was a map drawn in its gossamer particularity on the underside of his eyelids. (A map preserved, by the way, in Seymour’s most delightful essay, the celebrated “Changing Patterns in the Function of Travel Agencies.”) He could voyage to this handy London at will—“we’re going to see Shelley plain!”—and always find his favorite poets at home when he knocked. (He never actually admitted to it, but there is a hint or two in some of his paragraphs that he may have gone on these phantom journeys to London in the family car, with “my mother and sister on the lookout for scrimshaw and samplers, and my father on the lookout for reckless drivers,” right there over the Atlantic.)
Though there is no mistaking the inimitable apparatus of Seymour’s magnetism for anyone else’s, there is, anyhow, a second reason for a limitlessly recognizable and universal Seymour. It can be witnessed in an arresting painting by Seymour’s friend, Susan Macdowell Eakins, the widow of Thomas Eakins. An elegant young man in spectacles is reading in a beautifully carved chair. One long leg is crossed over the other. The head, too, is long, the hair richly thick. A nearby table holds books, a periodical, a splendi
d vase, an intricate little sculpture; also the young man’s stylish fedora and fringed scarf. On a wall behind, nearly lost in dimness, is a work by Thomas Eakins. A bright sheet has fallen beside the young man’s chair—a poster by Lovat Fraser, for a performance of The Beggar’s Opera at London’s Lyric Theatre. The young man has so far never been to London—it is 1932. The fingers of his right hand press dreamily into the pages of his book. If you stare long enough (not at the angelic mouth, but at the serious eyes), you can see the immortal Seymour just beginning a characteristic smile. The portrait is called, unsurprisingly, “The Bibliophile.” It is a singular representation of an American Muse: Seymour as the embodiment—the ingathering—of imagination, of heritage, of civilization and its arts.
SEYMOUR, A FAMOUS Philadelphia bookman, has finally left the city limits. He is in London at last—the true London, the London of the English poets. A hundred geniuses of the English tongue are streaming toward him. Dickens, Yeats, Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Max Beerbohm, Stevenson, Wilde, Hazlitt, Chatterton, Ralph Hodgson, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg—they are all hugely curious about the Adelman Collection. They want to look themselves up in the catalogue. Seymour, meanwhile, is taking tea with Keats. Tomorrow he will nibble herring with Housman. He is planning to treat FitzGerald—the FitzGerald of the Rubáiyát—to some vanilla ice cream, Seymour’s own favorite. Churchill has asked for an appointment. Wordsworth is waiting eagerly on the doormat. The incandescent ring of eternity fires the horizon, and Seymour is reaching out to collect it.
And, south or north, ’tis only
A choice of friends one knows,
And I shall ne’er be lonely
Asleep with these or those.
—A. E. Housman, “Hughley Steeple”
HELPING T. S. ELIOT WRITE BETTER (NOTES TOWARD A DEFINITIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY)
IT IS NOT yet generally known to the world of literary scholarship that an early version of T. S. Eliot’s celebrated poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” first appeared in The New Shoelace, an impoverished publication of uncertain circulation located on East Fifteenth Street. Eliot, then just out of Harvard, took the train down from Boston carrying a mottled manila envelope. He wore slip-on shoes with glossy toes. His long melancholy cheeks had the pallor associated in those days with experimental poets.
The New Shoelace was situated on the topmost floor of an antique factory building. Eliot ascended in the elevator with suppressed elation; his secret thought was that, for all he knew, the young Henry James, fastidiously fingering a book review for submission, might once have entered this very structure. The brick walls smelled of old sewing machine oil. The ropes of the elevator, visible through a hole in its ceiling, were frayed and slipped occasionally; the car moved languidly, groaning. On the seventh floor Eliot emerged. The deserted corridor, with its series of shut doors, was an intimidating perplexity. He passed three with frosted glass panels marked by signs: BIALY’S WORLDWIDE NEEDLES; WARSHOWER WOOL TRADING CORP.; and MEN. Then came the exit to the fire escape. The New Shoelace, Eliot reasoned, must be in the opposite direction. MONARCH BOX CO.; DIAMOND’S LIGHTING FIXTURES—ALL NEW DESIGNS; MAX’S THIS-PLANET-ONLY TRAVEL SERVICE; YANKELOWITZ’S ALL-COLOR BRAID AND TRIM; LADIES. And there, at the very end of the passage, tucked into a cul-de-sac, was the office of The New Shoelace. The manila envelope had begun to tremble in the young poet’s grip. Behind that printed title reigned Firkin Barmuenster, editor.
In those far-off days, The New Shoelace, though very poor, as its shabby furnishings readily attested, was nevertheless in possession of a significant reputation. Or, rather, it was Firkin Barmuenster who had the reputation. Eliot was understandably cowed. A typist in a fringed scarf sat huddled over a tall black machine, looking rather like a recently oppressed immigrant out of steerage, swatting the keys as if they were flies. Five feet from the typist’s cramped table loomed Firkin Barmuenster’s formidable desk, its surface hidden under heaps of butter-spotted manuscript, odoriferous paper bags, and porcelain-coated tin coffee mugs chipped at their rims. Firkin Barmuenster himself was nowhere to be seen.
The typist paused in her labors. “Help you?”
“I am here,” Eliot self-consciously announced, “to offer something for publication.”
“F.B. stepped out a minute.”
“May I wait?”
“Suit yourself. Take a chair.”
The only chair on the horizon, however, was Firkin Barmuenster’s own, stationed forbiddingly on the other side of the awe-inspiring desk. Eliot stood erect as a sentry, anticipating the footsteps that at last resounded from the distant terminus of the corridor. Firkin Barmuenster, Eliot thought, must be returning from the door marked MEN. Inside the manila envelope in Eliot’s fevered grasp, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” glowed with its incontrovertible promise. One day, Eliot felt sure, it would be one of the most famous poems on earth, studied by college freshmen and corporate executives on their way up. Only now there were these seemingly insurmountable obstacles: he, Tom Eliot, was painfully young, and even more painfully obscure; and Firkin Barmuenster was known to be ruthless in his impatience with bad writing. Eliot believed in his bones that “Prufrock” was not bad writing. He hoped that Firkin Barmuenster would be true to his distinction as a great editor, and would be willing to bring out Eliot’s proud effort in the pages of The New Shoelace. The very ink-fumes that rose up out of the magazine excited Eliot and made his heart fan more quickly than ever. Print!
“Well, well, what have we here?” Firkin Barmuenster inquired, settling himself behind the mounds that towered upward from the plateau of his desk, and reaching into one of the paper bags to extract a banana.
“I’ve written a poem,” Eliot said.
“We don’t mess with any of those,” Firkin Barmuenster growled. “We are a magazine of opinion.”
“I realize that,” Eliot said, “but I’ve noticed those spaces you sometimes leave at the bottom of your articles of opinion, and I thought that might be a good place to stick in a poem, since you’re not using that space for anything else anyhow. Besides,” Eliot argued in conciliatory fashion, “my poem also expresses an opinion.”
“Really? What on?”
“If you wouldn’t mind taking half a second to look at it—”
“Young man,” Firkin Barmuenster barked rapidly, “let me tell you the kind of operation we run here. In the first place, these are modern times. We’re talking 1911, not 1896. What we care about here are up-to-date issues. Politics. Human behavior. Who rules the world, and how. No wan and sickly verses, you follow?”
“I believe, sir,” Eliot responded with grave courtesy, “that I own an entirely new Voice.”
“Voice?”
“Experimental, you might call it. Nobody else has yet written this way. My work represents a revolt from the optimism and cheerfulness of the last century. Dub it wan and sickly if you will—it is, if you don’t mind my blowing my own horn”—but here he lowered his eyes, to prove to Firkin Barmuenster that he was aware of how painfully young, and painfully obscure, he was—“an implicit declaration that poetry must not only be found through suffering, but can find its own material only in suffering. I insist,” he added even more shyly, “that the poem should be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness. To see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.”
“I like what you say about the waste of all that white space,” Firkin Barmuenster replied, growing all at once thoughtful. “All right, let’s have a look. What do you call your jingle?”
“ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ ”
“Well, that won’t do. Sit down, will you? I can’t stand people standing, didn’t my girl tell you that?”
Eliot looked about once again for a chair. To his relief, he spied a high stool just under the single grimy window, which gave out onto a bleak airshaft. A stack of back issues of The New Shoelace was piled on it. As he gingerly removed them, placing them with distaste on the sooty sill, the cover of the
topmost magazine greeted Eliot’s eye with its tedious headline: MONARCHY VS. ANARCHY—EUROPE’S POLITICAL DILEMMA. This gave poor Tom Eliot a pang. Perhaps, he reflected fleetingly, he had brought his beloved “Prufrock” to the wrong crossroads of human aspiration? How painfully young and obscure he felt! Still, a novice must begin somewhere. Print! He was certain that a great man like Firkin Barmuenster (who had by then finished his banana) would sense unusual new talent.
“Now, Prudecock, show me your emanation,” Firkin Barmuenster demanded, when Eliot had dragged the stool over to the appropriate spot in front of the editor’s redoubtable desk.
“Prufrock, sir. But I’m Eliot.” Eliot’s hands continued to shake as he drew the sheets of “Prufrock” from the mottled manila envelope.
“Any relation to that female George?” Firkin Barmuenster free-associated companionably, so loudly that the fringed typist turned from her clatter to stare at her employer for a single guarded moment.
“It’s Tom,” Eliot said; inwardly he burned with the ignominy of being so painfully obscure.
“I like that. I appreciate a plain name. We’re in favor of clarity here. We’re straightforward. Our credo is that every sentence is either right or wrong, exactly the same as a sum. You follow me on this, George?”
“Well,” Eliot began, not daring to correct this last slip of the tongue (Freud was not yet in his heyday, and it was too soon for the dark significance of such an error to have become public knowledge), “actually it is my belief that a sentence is, if I may take the liberty of repeating myself, a kind of Voice, with its own suspense, its secret inner queries, its chancy idiosyncrasies and soliloquies. Without such a necessary view, one might eunuchize, one might render neuter—”
But Firkin Barmuenster was already buried in the sheets of “Prufrock.” Eliot watched the steady rise and fall of his smirk as he read on and on. For the first time, young Tom Eliot noticed Barmuenster’s style of dress. A small trim man lacking a mustache but favored with oversized buff teeth and grizzled hair the color of ash, Barmuenster wore a checkered suit of beige and brown, its thin red pinstripe running horizontally across the beige boxes only; his socks were a romantic shade of robin’s egg blue, and his shoes, newly and flawlessly heeled, were maroon with white wing-tips. He looked more like a professional golfer down on his luck than a literary man of acknowledged stature. Which, Eliot mused, was more representative of Barmuenster’s intellectual configuration—his sartorial preferences or the greasy paper bags under his elbows? It was impossible to decide.
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