by John Crowley
Puritan divines had got the book suppressed, having missed Casaubon’s point, apparently, but a lot of copies had got out before then. The book could probably be got from specialists, might even turn up in shops. Kraft had more than one seventeenth-century book on his shelves, some more recondite than that one.
Where to start? Kraft’s system of classifying his books was unknown to Dewey and other pedants. And yet it was, must have been, a system.
Nothing more soothing and hopeful than summer light through open windows illuminating the spines of many books. Pierce did not suppose that there were all that many who felt so. Odd duck that he was, he could remember when he was ten, twelve, how on the cool mornings of hot summer days he would sit at breakfast in the bright air and think what a good day it was to read a book, take some notes.
Well look here. Very nearly the first case he approached, the first shelf along which he ran his hand. John Dee (1527-1608) by Charlotte Fell Smith, Constable and Company, 1909. Nice old buckram book, deckle-edged, letterpress. On its cover this was stamped:
Your stone, Madimi said. (Kraft’s Madimi had.) I mean your picture, your letter. Pierce lightly touched the lines. Powerless. Now.
Pierce opened to the index, and looked up Bruno. One brief reference. Paracelsus had been dead but forty years. Bruno was still alive, developing his theories of God as the great unity behind the world and humanity. Copernicus was not long dead, and his new theories of the solar system were gradually becoming accepted. Galileo was still a student at Pisa, his inventions as yet slumbering in his brain.
No more.
No meeting, then, or none in the records available in 1909, or this lady would have made much of it, it seemed to be that kind of book.
He leafed through the pages. Why had he wanted it to be true?
My my. Kraft had certainly gone through this book, and more than once; here were underlinings and brackets in several colors of ink, little wordless exclamation points beside choice bits, the whole thing marked up for repackaging, like the diagrammatic steer that butchers display. Was this an easy way to write a book, or not easy, this bricolage of facts and phrases, fixed with your own affections, given a bright coat of lifelike paint? Was it what he would have to do?
He put Miss Smith into his own bag, to study at leisure.
The thought occurred to him that Kraft’s shelves were in fact the uncondensed version of his already pretty large book; or that the book was an epitome of the shelves, as though they had brought forth the book simply by their arrangement, each book a chapter, or a sentence.
What’s that?
He had spotted a leather-bound folio on the next-to-top storey. To reach it he had to pull over a chair and mount it (as Kraft, he thought, must often have done); it was surprisingly light, though, and he levered it out and leapt not very featly to the floor with it.
Unreadable gold-stamped name on the spine. He took it to the window and opened it on a table there, where half-a-dozen African violets had died, thinking he knew what he would see.
Well for heaven’s sake.
Not the True & Faithful Relation; not Dee’s diary either. But it was a book he knew: a polyglot edition of an Italian sort-of novel, the very edition he had struggled with one summer in college, writing a paper.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francisco Colonna, 1594 though written almost a hundred years earlier in a Dominican monastery. In Italian with French and English translations in triple columns; big woodcuts, fine light paper that crackled with a familiar sound as he turned the leaves. Le Songe du Polifil. Poliphil’s Strife of Love in a Dreame.
Oh the cool still air of the rare book room of Noate’s library, the summer vehement outside … The summer before his senior year, working on an Honors Thesis they called it, for which he was actually paid money, though not enough to live on, he had washed dishes at a downtown hotel too, good Lord the things youth can put up with that age never could.
Part One, Chapter One, Poliphilo spends a bad night, tossing and turning: altogether uncomforted and sorrowful, by meanes of my untimelie and not prosperous love, plunged into a deepe poole of bitter sorrowes. Then, having spent some part of his wakefulness in the usual way of frustrated lovers, how well Pierce knew—my wandering senses being wearie to feede upon unsavoury and feigned pleasures, not directly and withoute deceite, uppon the rare divine object—toward dawn he falls asleep, and has this dream.
God he remembered: his first summer as a scholar; that splenetic dish machine. Possibility: how could a life, a time so constrained have seemed so full of it to Pierce, a banquet, not his yet but set for him as much as for any. Despite all of which, he had struggled to employ a disparaging irony against the fatuous extravagances of this book, as against his own inward parts: irony having at last been granted him, his newest weapon, sword and shield at once.
Sleeping Polifil dreams he wakes, finds himself in the usual flowery mead; stumbles in his dream into the usual dark wood, a pritty way entered, I could not tell how to get out of it. A long struggle, after which he escapes, hears seraphic voices, falls asleep again, dreams he wakes again, another flowery mead, this time with a titanic temple or shrine in the distance, toward which he makes his way.
Here was the illustration, a half-page woodcut. Pierce, a battlefield of conflicting feelings, put his hand lightly on it. Obelisk of Ægypt, flight of stairs, cube, pyramid, sphere.
He had been pointed to this book by his Senior Advisor, Frank Walker Barr, twinkle in his eye as though he knew just what trick he was playing. What Barr really thought of the book Pierce never discovered; what he liked about it himself at the time was its obdurate unlikeableness, all surface, no inside, as claustrophobic as a fancy tomb: for in those days he was drawn to the closed, the circular, the labyrinthine, maybe because he thought he knew better, could not himself be caught. Ha.
Poliphilus enters the temple, attempts to mount the steps, fails, retreats; enters the cubic base of the temple instead, reads inscriptions, interprets murals, all about love, all pertinent without being in the least illuminating. New things continually happen and manage to give the impression of perfect immobility. He finds an elephant statue on whose back is carried another obelisk, cut with what the artist imagined to be hieroglyphs; he enters the body of this beast, finds tombs or statues of a naked man and woman, reads inscriptions (Pierce struggling with the elliptical Latin, never sure he understood). It was like a Dream Sequence in the black-and-white art movies he went to then, accumulations of minatory images never repeated or endlessly repeated.
More woodcuts. Little Eros in his chariot pulled by naked girls, he lashes them with a bunch of switches, interesting. Love. No power on earth stronger. It was easy to lose track of whether a picture showed a scene that Poliphil dream-witnessed, or one he dream-perceived in a mural or read about in a tablet. At the book’s end he has found his beloved Polia, but then wakes to find her not there. Pierce had had only one critical insight into this hermetico-archæologico-crypto-romance that summer, and that was that though the hero falls asleep twice, he wakes only once. So at the end he’s still, apparently, asleep, an unusual ending among dream-books, one which Pierce in his paper had ironically maintained must have been intentional; he liked incompletion in those days too, limbos, imprisonments, the unexitable-from. Eventually, he remembered, he lost his notes and drafts at the movies one night, and never did hand in a paper.
“Polia” could mean “many,” couldn’t it. Poliphilos: the lover of many, or lover of the Many.
Here was an illustration of that. Pan, Hermes’ son, father of many-ness, Omniform or Pantomorph, shown surmounting a stele. Drawn clearly and hugely erect too, “ithyphallic,” wasn’t that the word; for this book was, also, a sort of delicate pornography. Nymphs around him bringing him fruits, flowers, produce; a garlanded bull; music, wine spilled, smoke of sacrifice. Bare Naked Land.
And here was winged Love, older now, a smiling boy, leading his mother in, winged too, he had not seen that before,
a winged Venus, unusual.
A ker, the word tumbled into his mouth, a word out of Frank Walker Barr’s course on the Greeks, maybe, or some old book he had had once, what book. KER, a dangerous and terrible winged being, smiling, merciless.
Pierce’s senses were suddenly alert, as though they had perceived something, some presence, there in the bright-dark room with him.
What is it?
He, or the room he stood in, had begun to fill with some numinous something. Or was it within? His heart opened to admit the passage of something out or in, something that seemed to him to be at once returning to him and coming toward him from ahead.
“What,” he said aloud, taut and all attention; and then “Yes,” he answered, or cried, as though jumping from a cliff, he didn’t care, all he knew was that something was nearby, in his grasp, offered him, and he would not have long in which to assent to it.
“Yes come back,” he said. Yes please come back please, listen I’m older now, I won’t waste it, I’ll use it in the context of life I will; this time I’ll be wise, just don’t die don’t go forever.
It was not there with him anymore. Whatever it was. He realized he had been standing unmoving for a long time, trembling like a bowstring.
What had been offered him? Had something? There had been a sort of picture in his heart or mind: a woman was in it, maybe, and and. Possibility somehow. A transforming power shown him at his heart’s root; something he recognized at the same moment he knew how long he had been without it.
“Love,” he said.
He closed the stone-dead dream-book, and mounted the chair again to put it back into its place. Then he got down. The light had altered in the smelly old room. He could think of nothing vividly, nothing but lunch.
It was in his bag, the stained and ragged bookbag in which he had lugged books for years, as a woodcutter might lug his fagots. In a paper sack (as they called those in Kentucky), under the borrowed book on Dee and the curled and cup-ringed pages of his proposal, the proposal that his agent Julie Rosengarten had used in selling him to Cockerel Books.
He took out the book and the lunch, went out of the library (a moment’s doubt again in the hall, no one would believe he could possibly be confused here, left? right?) and out the kitchen door into the garden; sat on a stone bench there to read and eat.
He felt a return of it as he sat there, the power that had visited him, borne in the breeze that passed over his sweat-damp shirt and his hair: not so strong as before, but strong enough that he could tell for sure that it was coming and not going.
He sat stock still, sandwich in his hands, trying to make its face appear, hear its name.
Just please don’t hurt me, he pleaded with whatever it was, not knowing that it could or would, and yet afraid.
SIX
On that Midsummer afternoon, Boney Rasmussen also sat looking out into the day, in the study of his own house, “Arcady,” a brownish pile of Shingle Style whimsy and not the only house in the Faraway Hills to bear a name. On the desk behind him (he had turned his swivel chair to look out at the lawns and the oaks, under which he could now descry a small crowd of sheep taking their ease) was a messy pile of papers, and these were Fellowes Kraft’s also: letters which Kraft had sent over the years to Boney. Some were formal typewritten replies, self-effacing and cagy, to Boney’s first expressions of interest in his work, and to the Foundation’s early and tentative offers of help. Others from later years were fuller and franker; Boney and Sandy Kraft (everyone who knew him at all well called him Sandy, his right name too much a mouthful) had become, Boney thought, fast friends at last.
Boney considered each of these letters in turn; picked it up, read the date, read the letter, and after a little thought either dropped it to the floor or filed it in order in the growing pile on his lap. The latest ones were the ones he considered the most closely, questioning through his blue-tinted glasses each sheet of airmail flimsy that trembled in his shaky grasp.
A letter from 1967, from New York apparently, about Kraft’s final trip to Europe, for which the Rasmussen Foundation had paid:
“Mon Empereur,” it began, Kraft’s little joke. “I am off at dawn. Really. The ship sails at first light, after we spend a night rocking in harbor—some small problem to which they have not made us privy. Boney I know what a dreadful expense this is compared to cheap and popular air travel. I know it and I will make it up to you. What do you want me to bring back? Ah yes I see. But is that something we go abroad to fabled realms to seek? What we most want is, or ought to be, lying out in plain sight, isn’t it; found finally in no exotic place or jeweled cabinet but right in your own backyard. Of course it is. And yet, and yet. It would be fun, Boney, wouldn’t it, to find at last and finally one treasure that was not in your heart but in the world; something you could pick up in your own two unworthy hands, a splendor meant for you alone.”
These two sheets Boney filed in the pile in his lap by their date, and took up the next. This was not the first time he had tried to read all the letters together; nor was the arrangement by date the only one he had tried. He felt sometimes, when ordering them, as he did in games of solitaire, when the cards begin turning up one after another and moving off well, and it seems certain you must go out this time, when you hit a bind, the last ace hidden under the last red queen and the last black king, hidden, hidden.
The next was from Vienna, weeks later.
“They certainly did have some nice things, the Hapsburgs. There was at one time or another in the Hofburg the seamless cloak rent or rather not rent by the soldiers who diced beneath the Cross; and the Spear with which Longinus pierced the side of Christ, and which like the more famous Cup has haunted German legend ever since. And—hardly least—the one single physical relic of Jesus Christ himself which we can be certain was left on earth when He ascended into Heaven. What do you suppose it is? Yes! His little foreskin, amputated by the moyel St. Simeon Senex, who promptly passed away, having lived a hugely long life just to do this deed. And where did it go then? Well, like the Grail itself, it comes and goes; is sought for; is seen in visions; is rumored to be inside this or that fabulous gem-encrusted reliquary. A little literature springs up around it, little compared to the Grail literature. The mystic nun Hildegarde of Bingen not only saw but tasted it in a vision; it was placed like a Host in her mouth (His Body, after all) and she said it tasted sweet like honey. I am not inventing this. Actually antiquaries say that the penis of Napoleon used to turn up now and then at auction houses, a blackened rind, labeled “a tendon” or some such thing but of course everybody knew. But which would you rather get hold of, mon Empereur? I mean: There is no question, is there?”
This, after a long moment of thought (Boney’s thoughts seemed lately to arrive in his consciousness a long time after they started out, like elderly drivers driving ever more cautiously; nothing for it but to wait), he dropped to the pile at his feet.
The next was also from Vienna, from the same trip in ’67 probably, though the first sheet was lost that bore the date:
“… or an agate bowl, once in the possession of Ferdinand I, that was also supposed to be the Holy Grail. Interested? I am contemptuous, but of course there is no trouble at all in checking it out. Ferdinand was a phenomenal collector; one of his agents brought back from Constantinople the first tulips and lilacs ever seen in Europe. So says my guidebook. So it is out to the Hofburg today to see what we can see. Just let me throw on an overcoat, autumn is frigid in the Danube valley, and swallow a coffee mit schlag. The hunt is up.”
The hunt was his game, of course, a game which had not seemed so cruel then as it did now: that the Rasmussen Foundation had sent him off to the European capitals to discover or to recognize for them the priceless and the eternal, and get possession of it somehow. They had used to laugh together, he and Sandy, about what might be found in the attics of the old empires, dusty, wrongly labeled by obtuse curators, and yet still living, still potent. A game. Boney remembered (just the
n remembered, old stored memories spilling, as they often did nowadays) how once, in the shabby science exhibit of his old high school, a snail shell, glued onto a card on which its Latin name was written, had one spring day, after a year or more of appearing quite dead, put out a foot, tugged itself free, and gone off across the glass of its case, leaving a starslime trail behind. Boney had seen it.
“Well it was there,” Kraft had written next day, April 1, the letter arising next in Boney’s pile. “Large and luxe and unattractive. I quote the book: ‘Case V—Basin of Oriental Agate with the handles, fashioned out of what is asserted to be the largest single piece of this semiprecious stone; 75 cm in diameter; alleged that the word Christus is visible in the texture of the stone,’ not to me. It came to the Hapsburgs as part of the dowry of Maria of Burgundy, who married Maximilian I in 1470, along with the silver baptismal utensils in Case VI and the unicorn’s horn in Case VII, just a narwhal’s tusk according to this wet-blanket guidebook.
“Of course it might have lost something of its numinous lustre over the centuries (the cup, Case V, I mean). It might have appeared much different two hundred or eight hundred years ago. I wonder if we don’t have all this backwards, and that once the world worked differently from the way it works now, and what was then a powerful engine is now junk—like a Model T left out in the rain for half a century.
“But maybe, probably, this just isn’t it. They probably never really had it; or it was with the stuff that Gustavus Adolphus took away with him to Sweden, and it lost its charm amid the snows and Lutherans. Or maybe they did have it and still have it only no one knows where; maybe they forgot long ago and then had only the certainty that once it really had been in their possession. I can imagine them, Duke upon Emperor, rummaging through the kabinetten, searching among the cups, the bezoars, the jeweled lizard’s skulls, the mercury barometers, automata, magic swords, reliquaries, the petrified wood, dragon’s teeth, saint’s bones, perpetual motion machines, vials of Jordan water, the forty-carat emerald hollowed out for a poison ring, the mummified mermaid, the lac lunæ, the ten thousand clocks all chiming differently. Like Fibber McGee’s closet. Got to be in here somewhere.”