The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner (15 page)

The itinerant bookseller John Edwards turns up, with his adorable dog, in his big red transit van. He’s come from selling Wordsworth Classics and remainders to shops in Paris. In comparison, he sells little to me but doesn’t take umbrage at the paucity of my orders. After a cup of tea and chat, he sets off for Barcelona, anticipating a swim en route in the sea at Sète. It’s enough to bring on a strong dose of wanderlust.

It’s no contest; football wins over shop management. I’m on the road, albeit until England are knocked out. A friend, working as a translator for the England Supporters Club, has got me complimentary tickets for all of England’s World Cup matches. There are vast swathes of England shirts, bands playing the
Great Escape
theme tune and thousands of supporters milling about the stadiums without tickets; their dedication humbling. The games go by in a blur: a Scholes cracker in Marseille,
disappointment in Toulouse (no second-hand bookshops either), more hurt in Saint Etienne. Thousands make do with TVs in the French bars in order to witness Owen’s legendary goal before the inevitable let down. I return to Montpellier, deflated and once more shop bound.

There is, however, an escape route, one that biker Pete has helped to provide. Thanks to this maverick software designer, I am given an early introduction to the web’s book selling potential. Receiving the first order (for a 1938 Penguin
Gulliver’s Travels
illustrated throughout with wood-engravings by Theodore Naish) from my website was akin to an epiphany of sorts; I could trade without a retail premises in bricks and mortar.

The geography of the road was against us all along. Even friends have confessed that they can’t face climbing the hill into the city’s centre. And the promise of human traffic from the new tram stop proves illusory. With heavy hearts and an unacknowledged relief, we close the shop, placing a sign in the window: ‘Words failed me.’

For O-Level we studied
Lord of the Flies
whose author, William Golding, had taught our English teacher, and I used to wonder if Mr Whiteside was privy to the allegorical novel’s finer interpretations. Whenever the book comes up at auctions, as one did last year at the Dominic Winters Auction House near Cirencester, I do a double take. I was, though, and remain more appreciative of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, the other major work of literature that Mr Whiteside selected for study. Especially that revelatory passage when Huck rejects the
advice of his ‘conscience’, which continues to tell him that in helping Jim escape to freedom, he is stealing Miss Watson’s property. Telling himself ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell!’, Huck, listening to a deeper ‘conscience’, resolves to free Jim.

I am gazing at a first edition of this book, or rather a photograph of it in the pages of a Dominic Winter Catalogue for an auction in 2008. The book is bound in green cloth which bears a picture of Huck on the cover, standing in a field of corn, blocked in gold.
(1st American Edition, mixed issue, Charles L. Webster, New York, 1885, wood eng. frontis and numerous letterpress vigns., heliotype port. title-page with copyright notice on verso dated 1884, occn. creasing to corners, and pp. 163/4 with piece missing from upper outer blank corner, some light soiling, modern bookplate, orig. pictorial green cloth gilt, spine ends frayed with sl. loss, corners showing, 8vo)

I try to interpret what the book’s image in the catalogue means to me. It’s a false dichotomy; the book as a physical object and the story within. For they become intertwined. Mark Twain’s book, commonly recognised as one of the great American novels, inspired us to ‘play hookey’ and smoke cigars on the banks of the Thames. But more importantly it made us realise that stories are not the possession of any elite. When it came to respective social backgrounds, I was Tom to Eddy’s Huck. Eddy said recently himself that for his mother ‘scrawling a note to the milkman was breaking new literary ground’.

From the photograph in the catalogue you can clearly make out the novel’s title. Bundles of sticks, also blocked in gold, depict the first letters of Huckleberry Finn’s name, H and F. And the full title is
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade)
. Upon completion, the novel’s title closely paralleled its predecessor’s. Unlike
The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer
, Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
does not have the definite article as a part of its proper title. Essayist and critic Philip Young states that this absence represents the ‘never fulfilled anticipations’ of Huck’s adventures – while Tom’s adventures were completed by the end of his novel, Huck’s narrative ends with his stated intention to head West.

If I had £3000 to spare, I’d be tempted to invest in such a book. Not that it’s the pinnacle for Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) collectors.
*A blue cloth edition, which is more scarce than the green cloth edition, was issued in a smaller quantity. A three-quarter morocco leather edition was also issued. It is extremely scarce. There were only five hundred of the leather bound copies issued.

The bank is expressing its mounting frustration in the letters sent to my parents’ address.

Unwittingly, I have discovered that an overdrawn account cannot prevent the holder from cashing in travellers’ cheques, regardless of when they were issued. I have used the money to pay two months’ rent in advance. Delgado insisted.

This enigmatic Spaniard is sub-letting only the bedroom of a council flat on the seventh floor of a tower block near Belleville. The flat has little going for it except for a wonderful view of the Eiffel Tower. The sitting room is Delgado’s living quarters. Not that he lives here much. He’s out all day, returning only late at night to the flat before rising early to beat me out in the mornings. Despite making rare appearances, Delgado is obsessed by the flat’s appearance and isn’t
impressed when Eddy stays over. Empty beer cans and uncleaned ashtrays leave him foul tempered for days and I’m very much in his bad books after last Saturday night. The lock jammed in the toilet door with me on the wrong side. Luckily, Eddy was in the flat and the fire brigade could be called to rescue me. An axe produced a gaping hole in the door where the lock had once been and I was able to emerge with profuse gratitude. ‘
Merci millefois. Voulez vous une tasse du thé
.’ The firemen decline politely and wonder what the hell are two English lads doing in an HLM flat in the eastern suburbs of Paris. The captain made a cursory request for our IDs before leaving. Delgado still will not accept an apology or my explanation of what happened. He is, for once, spending Saturday morning in his room. So I take to the streets even though I’m not meeting up with Eddy and his girlfriend for several hours.

I wander along the Seine’s embankments, checking out the
bouquinists
. Anatole France knew of ‘no sweeter, gentler pleasure than to go a book hunting’ here. I have two travellers’ cheques left but these are for real emergencies. The overdraft does register on my conscience though, and so effectively prevents me from serious perusal. And I don’t need anything else to read. Phil has lent me a book written by Joris-Karl Huysmans called
A Rebours
which is translated into English as
Against Nature.

A wildly original
fin-de-siècle
novel,
Against Nature
follows its sole character, Des Esseintes, an aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. The book exhibits anxiety about preserving a sense of self in the face of cultural change. To combat this anxiety, the decadent hero of the novel embraces a melancholic identity. I
have developed a sneaking regard for Des Esseintes who is very much a book obsessive. ‘Des Esseintes was morbid devotee of the unique, and he was rich enough to print his favourite books in editions of one copy. He had Poe’s
Arthur Gordon Pym
thus specially printed for him on pure linen-laid paper, hand picked, bearing a sea-gull for water mark, and bound in sea-green morocco; his copy of the Diaboliques of Barbeyd’Aurvilly was specially printed for him on an authentic vellum blessed by the Church.’

I go in search of his creator and find rue Suger where he lived, and a confirmatory plaque:
Ici est né, le 5 février 1848, J.-K. HUYSMANS, Ecrivain français.

Later, he had a road in the sixth arrondissement in Paris named after him. My legs feel tired and I become aware of the time. From starting out hours in advance, I now risk turning up late. Eddy won’t mind but Sylvia might.

Eddy met Sylvia at the language school where they both now work. Sylvia started to teach English as a foreign language after an aborted career in marine biology. In Thailand, she’d worked on prawn farms but, overnight, the bottom fell out of that market when the Japanese Emperor Hirohito died; his people forsaking the crustaceans as a mark of respect.

Today I’m introducing them to an oasis of peace in this busy city, intending to drag them around the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. Statues, tombstones and crypts dominate the landscape but also lend a romantic atmosphere to the cobbled avenues that run amid trees on the uneven ground. Ostentatiousness abounds but there remains something affecting in these funeral monuments, many of which are in an advanced state of dilapidation. Eddy and Sylvia, upon arriving, both agree. Below is what Flaubert thought:

Famous people are buried here including Musset, Chopin, Molière, Modigliani, Balzac, Colette, Oscar Wilde, Delacroix, Balzac and Jim Morrison in whom Sylvia, being a Doors fan, has expressed interest. A local florist sells us a leaflet that is unashamedly a map of the famous dead with co-ordinates of where to find their tombs, e.g.
Edith Piaf Chanteuse 97 e Div n-4.

Some visitors to the cemetery are ticking off the names like seasoned gravestone hunters. Simone Signoret’s grave is conspicuously festooned with flowers. We seek out Oscar Wilde’s tomb; a sphinx-inspired angel sculpted by Jacob Epstein. On one side of the memorial are tributes to Wilde’s art and achievements. Cited is Oxford’s esteemed Classics prize and his epitaph is a quote from
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
:

The monument is covered with lipstick kisses. Would Wildean gifts of lyricism be imparted to the kisser like the legend of the Blarney Stone? Kiss the stone of eloquence and you’ll never again be lost for words.

Sylvia is impatient to get going. Arrows chalked on gravestones point the way to the Morrison mourners. A German youth is drinking beer while listening to
The River
on his cassette player. A stout Australian woman is translating the lyrics of the same song for the benefit of a French schoolboy. A group of hippie girls with long, unkempt hair sit around a Primus stove boiling water to make tea. There are a few punks and the denim jacket brigade is also represented. A man sporting a hat of green feathers obscures Morrison’s actual grave, it being of modest proportions. He moves and we can then read: JAMES DOUGLAS MORRISON 1943–1977
KATA
(Greek with a multitude of interpretations (To the divine spirit within himself, He caused his own demons, True to his own spirit).

In front of the grave are three joints; cannabis deemed more appropriate than a bouquet of flowers. We loiter, not knowing quite what is expected of us. Some people stoop to partake in a ceremonial toke before quickly extinguishing the joint or passing it on with an embarrassed air. Death has failed to grant Jim Morrison the anonymity he was said to have craved; an escape from idolatry. Eddy is disconcerted to see that most tombstones within a ten metre radius of Jim Morrison’s are covered in graffiti, much of it being The Doors’ lyrics. Sylvia and I also question this spray can adulation. In
making their shrine to Jim Morrison, the mourners have desecrated the tombs of others.

After several weeks of unemployment, I became maniacally jealous of other people engaged in ordinary and seemingly mundane activities. Couriers, roadside labourers, just about anyone having a job upon which to focus. I look forward with exaggerated relish to dish-washing in Montparnasse. The night before I’m due to start, I cash a travellers’ cheque in spite of Eddy’s protestations.

He and I are both in drunken awe of La Notre Dame which, viewed from Le Pont Tourbelle, appears to me as a huge, deformed heart, the exterior of the apse bursting out with arteries. Earlier in the evening we attended a book signing in the Village Voice bookshop. We went along to listen to Don DeLillo’s pre-signing spiel about
Mao II
which is his tenth novel. His intellectual earnestness made an impression on us. But now all we can recall is the sentence: ‘The future belongs to crowds.’ After the talk we crawled into and out of various Irish pubs, finishing up in The Oscar Wilde. In the years to come, will Parisians be drinking in The Seamus Heaney? The alcohol makes Eddy maudlin. He is a little fed up with the teaching. I empathise, remembering Madrid when I sometimes felt like an impostor, asking colleagues what a gerund was. My experiences weren’t like anything out of
The Education Of Hyman Kaplan
. ‘I’ve got to get out before we started on the past perfect continuous,’ declares Eddy.