The Art of Living

by John Gardner

  Sometimes lately, in the middle of the night, Queen Louisa would sit bolt upright in her bed. She would be atremble all over. He lay perfectly still, ready to spring to the defense, but there was nothing to defend her from. “We must have,” she said one drizzly, miserable dawn, “a royal ball. I must marry off my princes and princesses.”

  There followed a period of intense preparations; dressmakers came, and cooks and carpenters and pirates disguised as wine merchants, eyeing the silverware. The palace was transformed. King Gregor paced furiously back and forth, stroking his black beard, snatching at the arm of his friend King John. “We’ve forgotten something,” he cried out, “but what?” Trumpeter rushed with renewed intensity from the cemetery to the alleys of the village to the foul black wharf. All was well, all was well. On every lamppost and wall he left his warning.

  She’d grown pale as marble and quick to be exhausted. Nevertheless, all was well, it was obvious. King John and King Gregor met daily for war, and their armies came home bleeding—or King Gregor’s came home bleeding and King John’s army went—and there was dancing till midnight and poetry speaking and courtly love—and the Princess would shake her head and smile: “They’re all mad, you know, Trumpeter. Stark raving mad.” He would hold out his paw, and she would take it and solemnly make acquaintance.

  “She seems pale,” Queen Louisa said, pulling at her lip.

  “She needs to eat more beefsteak,” said King Gregor, and never moved his eyes from the map. “Ha!” he said suddenly. “He’ll creep up on us from here”—he jabbed down his finger on some lines on the map—“and little will he guess …”

  Since the palace was filled to overflowing with princes and princesses, none of them the pale one whom Trumpeter remembered, King Gregor and Queen Louisa held their royal ball. The orchestra played merrily, waltz after waltz, and by midnight all the merchants and the merchants’ servants had found themselves some princess, and each and every prince had found some daughter of a merchant who was exactly to his liking, and the peace and serenity of the kingdom were more wonderful than ever.

  When the ball was long over and everyone in bed, Queen Louisa sat bolt upright and said, “Trumpeter! What’s that?”

  It was nothing, he knew. If there were anything there, he’d have heard it or smelled it or felt it in his bones. But he dutifully rose, head turned to yawn, and mournfully went over to the window to look out. It was nothing: emptiness. Poor Trumpeter had no imagination.

  “Something must be done,” said Queen Louisa, “about the pirates and parrots, not to mention the cutpurses.” She leaped from the bed, her white legs bowed, presumably presuming she’d been changed into a toad, and stared past Trumpeter’s shoulder deep into the night. Absentmindedly, she stroked his head, and he moaned. “That’s it,” said Queen Louisa, as if it seemed to her he’d spoken. “We must show them we love them and think of them as equals. What can we do?” She began to pace, bowleggedly hurrying back and forth, wringing her fingers and biting her lip. Trumpeter sat, ears cocked, head tilted.

  A queer expression stretched Queen Louisa’s face. “Do we really need the royal treasury?” she said.

  Though the sentence was difficult, Trumpeter understood, and, hardly knowing what else to do, he covered his eyes with his right paw. Queen Louisa, however, was too excited to notice. “That’s it!” she cried. “We’ll invite the cutpurses, pirates and parrots to guard the royal treasure. They’ll steal it and never be miserable again!”

  A dog has no power. His only hope was that in the morning the Queen would have forgotten her plan.

  Morning came, and she had not. “Gregor,” she said, “I have a brilliant idea.”

  Trumpeter slunk off. He rushed to the cemetery, where no one ever went, and kept careful watch for an hour or so. But no one trespassed, not a rabbit stirred, so he hurried on, though it wasn’t yet dark, to peek through windows here and there in the village, but no one was in sight—the merchants and their servants were all away celebrating with their new royal wives—then he rushed, quick as lightning, to the foul black wharf. But it was empty as a rum bottle lying in the sand, and then, with a heavy heart, Trumpeter returned to the palace.

  “Dear God!” the King was yelling, though he was in on the plan, “the royal treasury has been depleted!”

  Trumpeter lay down.

  All was well; all was well.

  She, this Princess whom only he remembered, had grown increasingly pale, increasingly quick to weary. He’d insisted on lying at the side of her high bright platformed bed, waiting, on the theory that sooner or later, inevitably, given the span of human time, the sun would rise and she’d abruptly sit bolt upright, and they would walk out again into the fields to pursue silly rabbits. Then, for reasons not discernible to him, five knights had come and had cajoled and coaxed him and had finally seized him with their iron gloves and had dragged him by a chain to the place behind the buttery. When they released him days later, the Princess was gone.

  “We’ve done it! We’ve done it!” Queen Louisa cried wildly, startling him awake. As far as Trumpeter’s eye could see there were people dancing.

  “Ah, peace!” cried King Gregor.

  “Ah, justice!” cried King John.

  There stood Vrokror the Terrible, looking shy as a maiden, holding Muriel’s hand; and Djubkin, Dobremish, Pretty Polly, and the rest were throwing rose petals over them, their faces bright with tears. Queen Louisa was laughing with a beautiful lilt, for the king of the pirates was offering her a treasure chest crammed to the gunnels with silver and gold, kissing her fingertips and squinting his eyes like a man who intended to steal it all back again; and King John and King Gregor were agreeing, all smiles, that both of them were certainly, in their own small ways, saints; and the parrots were crying, all, “Cracker! Pretty cracker!”

  The palace was full of light—beyond the windows, thick darkness. Nothing was wrong; nothing could go wrong. It was a balanced kingdom, the only kingdom in the world where art reigned supreme.

  Trumpeter crept from beneath the dark curtain of the tablecloth and glided to the door. He stood waiting. It was opened. He hurried away from the dancing and light, away from the joyful celebration of things that he knew to be quite proper, and when he reached the depths of the forest, he began to howl.

  THE LIBRARY

  HORROR

  I had been troubled for days—odd sounds, objects out of place, all the pitiful and mundane symptoms of a disordered mind, symptoms I know all too well, coming as I do from a family of lunatics, as everyone knows—when a few odd phrases in a book on aesthetics threw everything into sharp new perspective. I had been reading along in my usual fashion, simultaneously urgent and desultory, one hand pressed to my chest, a faint uneasiness in the back of my mind, a sort of floating anxiety like a shape moving furtively from window to window—never mind the reason (I had missed an opportunity to drop in on my father at the asylum outside the village, or, rather, I had thought of several reasons I could not possibly go, and then, not having gone, I had suddenly seen everything in a new light and had realized that my reasons were all trivial and absurd, I should certainly have gone; nor was that all, but never mind)—when suddenly I came upon these curious observations on “living form” in art.

  I no longer recall what I read, exactly, or even the general outline of the theory. There was some talk, I remember—very interesting at the time—about “virtual time and space” in music and painting, and something … you must forgive my haste … about “organic forms.” My wife—this much I remember distinctly—was working in the kitchen, banging the cooking utensils around, turning the water on and off with a violent suddenness I could only interpret as critical of my sitting in the livingroom, reading while she worked. All her acquaintances have maids, and she feels, she has told me, that a man as well off as I am could surely afford that small luxury. It wasn’t so bad when my father was still at liberty, dropping by every night or so and helping with her chores. But my father has been
put where he belongs—no fault of mine—so now she talks about having at least a maid. I’ve explained to her many times why a stranger in the house would be, to a man like myself, anything but a luxury. Even a stranger near the house is deeply upsetting to me, so that, inconvenient as it may be, I walk wherever I go (I seldom go out except for my rare official visits to the bank), since to own an automobile would inevitably involve me with a mechanic for the engine, a chauffeur, and heaven knows what else. But I am straying from my point.

  I had been hearing for several days and nights now strange noises from the library. (It took me some time to pinpoint the noises as coming from the library, but I must hurry past all that; my time, as you will see, is limited.) Now, at the sound of a particularly loud crash, I jumped up from my chair, closed the book of philosophy on my finger to keep my place, and moved carefully—I was wearing my slippers—to the library door. With my hand on the knob and my ear against the panel, my body bent over like an old man’s—like my father’s, for example—trying with all my might to make out what it was that was happening inside, I suddenly found myself—suddenly and surprisingly, as when a man wakes up in a different room from the one he went to sleep in—staring with ferocious concentration at the title on the book: The Problems of Art. It came to me with a jolt, such a jolt that I found my knees were trembling, that all this while, when I’d thought I’d been listening with all my wits, I’d been mulling over those ideas I’d just encountered, ideas I at that time recalled with the greatest exactitude.

  The philosopher wrote—this much I can still make out—of how in paintings, as in mirrors, we see “virtual space,” that is, space that seems as real as any other until the moment we try to enter it, at which time it proves an apparition. In the same way, reading novels, we move through virtual landscapes watching virtual human beings, people who speak and act as do real human beings until they vanish, or, rather, snap magically into words on a page. The implications, I hardly need tell you, are staggering!

  Perhaps, though time is short, I should try to dredge up one or two more details of the argument, to make the larger implications a little clearer. These “apparitions” that come to us in music or, say, fiction are not at all mere imitations, like the figures in a mirror. On the contrary, they are created expressions of life itself. They function in the same ways as do other living things; that is to say, they are pushed and pulled by the same laws that push and pull me or, for instance, my wife, Greer. I speak only, of course, of such works as we call successful, works that have “vitality” or “autonomous life.” It was of course this idea—this fact, I should have said, for so it seems to me—that made my knees tremble.

  Heaven knows what force it was that caused me to act. I myself was amazed, watching my hand as, with a will of its own, it closed more firmly on the large brass doorknob and turned it. Then, in the pocket of my jacket, the same hand closed around my gold-plated penknife and drew it toward the light. With my shoulder—hardly knowing what I was doing, abandoning my senses—I pushed open the huge old door and stepped in.

  The world is aclutter with mysteries, as everyone knows. The sane Newtonian universe has proved more illusory than your face in the mirror or the “solid” oak floor. We must somehow imagine, it seems, black holes and white holes, worm-holes through which Time makes astounding jumps, even some subatomic particle, I read, which is approximately the weight of an electron and two light-years broad! We’re stuck, if you believe our more outlandish physicists, with the real possibility of dying of asphyxiation because the oxygen has all piled up in a corner of the room where we happen not to be.

  We take these things for granted, or at any rate for probably true, and though we glance left then right before crossing a street, as if Newton’s universe were still in operation, or even Moses’ universe (“I know I have sinned, therefore it is likely that I’ll be hit by a car”), we know we have no choice but to make do with the universe we’re caught in. I could say more on this subject—I’m a voracious reader and, as you’ll see, no fool—but as I’ve said, my time is limited.

  My library—our library, for the house is in my wife’s name as well as my own—gives at first the impression of being nothing but books: books from floor to ceiling on all four walls, more books on the five free-standing stacks, three feet apart, which stretch from the east wall of the room to the west with only a four-foot-wide passageway tunneling through them, like a series of entrances to a crypt. These shelves too rise from floor to ceiling. One ducks one’s head, moving to the heart of the library; above the eighth shelf—the roof of the tunnel through the stacks—the shelves run straight across the room. One feels, in our library, buried in books, entombed. It is partly for this reason that I avoid the place.

  Yet the impression from the doorway that the room contains nothing but books is an illusion. Beyond the low passage through the free-standing stacks one sees—or, rather, I saw as I came in—that the heart of the library is flooded with moonlight, so that there must be large windows or (as happens to be the fact) French doors. Then one notices a glow in a part of that light, and one deduces (or knows) that in the heart of the library there is a fireplace where not long since there was a roaring fire. Every night around dusk I make a fire in the library fireplace. I never read there—the place makes me uneasy, all that gloomy weight of learning, ton upon ton of contradictory opinion, as if right to the center of things reality is moot—but the truth, I’m afraid, is that if I didn’t make a fire there my wife would complain that we need servants. For the same reason I work frantically in the garden, trim the hedges, pick up the droppings from our high enclosing walls of blue spruce…. But enough.

  There was not a sound now. I groped for the lightswitch to the right of the door and flicked it three times until finally, as if grudgingly, slightly arcing, it turned the lights on. The room was hardly lighter than before; in fact, it was only the quality of the light that changed. Cautiously, I moved my right slipper forward, then my left, soundlessly heading toward the hearth-lit center of the library. I opened the penknife as I went.

  Well, no point making high drama of it. Suddenly, there in front of me—leaping out so quickly from behind the third bookshelf that I hardly knew at first where he’d come from—stood a man with an axe. He was a small man, no more than four feet tall. Why this should be I have no idea, but small he was, a perfectly formed midget with terrified, rolling, somewhat slanted eyes, more terrified of me than I had time to be of him, a ferocious little Russian—a student, I imagined—crazily muttering to himself. Dim as the room was I saw everything with dreadful clarity, like a man about to die. His eyes were sunken, his lips wildly trembled, his coat came almost to his ankles. On the blunt side of the axe there was blood and what might have been gray hair. I tried to speak, but it was as if all the air had gone out of me. My knees banged crazily together. He drew back the axe, blunt side forward, to strike me, but that very instant a young woman in English Victorian dress appeared behind him and cried out, “Lord in heaven! Have you gone loopy?” He turned his head, or, rather, threw it around, to look at her, and his axe waggled downward a little. She too was a midget, though now it was less obvious; something was beginning to happen to my sense of the scale of things. The books on the shelves had grown larger, and the people the same. He looked at the girl with a terrified fixity, as if—in the word’s profoundest sense—he’d never seen anyone like her.

  With a part of my mind I was so afraid of the little man I could think nothing at all, but with another part, or so it seems to me now, I sensed what he was thinking. Raskolnikov—for of course it was he—had never seen an English schoolgirl and had no way of knowing she was, so to speak, an “outlaw” English schoolgirl; but he knew, it seemed to me, that she was somehow an outlaw, as he was, theoretically; and what had shocked him so badly that he had lowered his axe was philosophical: this girl in dark ringlets, with the slightly puffy eye-sacs, the petulant mouth, the stance he could not judge as obscene or unobscene, not knowing
her culture, but knew to be somehow or another defiant and by the standards of her own time and place almost certainly unacceptable, this girl was, like him, a moral outcast, but outcast from a morality so different from his own world’s as to cast the idea of “universal human nature” into the trash-heap of ancient pseudodoxia. As he dropped the axe and crazily stared at her, she paid attention. He was astonished by this and reached for the axe again but merely touched it with the tips of his fingers then changed his mind and let it lie. It seems pointless to analyze, but it comes to this: his standards of good and evil—the standards by which he defended and condemned himself—were so different from hers, or her society’s, that he abandoned all sense and followed her, like a sexually aroused animal, into the dimness beyond the fourth shelf.

  I can hardly bear to tell you the trivia that followed. It seemed to me at the time astonishing, even wonderfully interesting, but on reflection I see that it was neither. I could recreate my state of mind for you perhaps, by trickery and rhetoric, but I refuse to descend to such foolishness. Suffice it to say that I saw Ahab, split by lightning from head to toe, who argued with Boswell’s Dr. Johnson, boringly—sometimes threatening to hit Dr. Johnson “a good one, right smack in thy face,” to the latter’s dismay, of course—about immanence and transcendence; saw Scrooge and Bunyan’s Pilgrim, who sounded to my ears remarkably alike; talked with Jane Austen’s Emma, who was not at all as pretty as I’d imagined her to be and seemed oddly bigoted on almost everything we touched … etc.

  I will leap to the heart of the matter, which is this: when I had been in my library for several hours, arguing with these dreams or apparitions or realities, my wife came to me dressed in her nightgown—she is generally said to be quite beautiful—and said, “Winfred, are you coming to bed?” I knew this was a threat and a proposal. “Soon,” I said, twisting my head around to look at her, “I’m not quite finished.” She stood waiting. By now the beauty of her breasts and flanks, well defined under the nightgown, had become, I thought, slightly comic. If one sits looking long enough at mere actuality it becomes, well, obvious. She pivoted away, swinging her rear end in a way that an actress might call cliché, and disappeared through the low-slung entrances or, in this case, exits. From the door she called back, “Remember, tomorrow is visitors’ day at the asylum. I know you’re busy, of course….”