'On the Dusty Shelves of Obscure Bookshops'

Those of us ever on the trail of The Book – that elusive Platonic Ideal, the title of which we may not even suspect – have visited bookshops like the one described by Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) in his essay “On the Doorstep of Valhalla”:  

 

“His shop was a curious illustration of Malthusian theory, for he sold books (if at all) arithmetically, but bought them geometrically. As far as I could tell, he also bought indiscriminately; he put his new purchases in flat cardboard boxes of the kind used for peaches and kiwi fruit, and piled them up dangerously between the shelves so that most of them became inaccessible, or accessible only at the risk of being crushed by a falling pile of such boxes.”

 

This recalls a bookshop I knew in a small, once prosperous industrial city in upstate New York. Located on a corner in a residential neighborhood, it appeared to have been a small grocery, with large show windows and a pressed-tin ceiling. The arrangement of books in the shop seemed to confirm Ramsey’s theory of randomness. The chaos was not complete. Given enough time and sufficient indifference to dust and cat fur, a patron could uncover treasure. I found a pocket-sized, two-volume edition of Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets published by Oxford University Press in 1929, with an introduction by Evelyn Waugh’s father, and an equally compact OUP edition of Gulliver’s Travels – all for six dollars. There were few shelves and no category labels or designated aisles. Most of the books and magazines were stacked on the plank floor or on tables and desks.

 

In the bookshop he visits in England, in an “industrial town, now denuded of its industry,” not unlike the town I remember, Daniels conducts an experiment: “Would I be able to tell whether the poetry of poets of whom I had never previously heard was any good?” The proposition is interesting. So much of our reading is preceded by marketing and critical judgment, whether formal or word-of-mouth, and guided by extra-literary considerations. How often have you chosen a book of poetry, or any volume, without preliminaries? A cold read is rare, and usually results in disappointment. Most poets are quickly forgotten, and rightly so: they can’t write.

 

For obvious reasons, I can’t recreate the controls Daniels sets up in his experiment, but I propose an alternative method. I will give you five anonymous excerpts from poems by American poets, most taken from my shelves. Cheat, if you must, and look them up online to identify their authors. But at least for your first reading, try to clear your mind of the usual props that support the texts we read. Ask yourself: based on two or fours lines, would I go on reading these poems? I acknowledge the unfairness of what I’m proposing, but stay naked, in a readerly sense:

 

1.)

 “I curse the libertine of verse

Whose meters lurch when they should tread.

What joy to leave that fool behind,

Wooden ears on a wooden head!”

 

2.)

“What was the wish of Icarus?

To fly, or to be seen to fly?

What was the wish of Eve? 

To know, or hope that, knowing, she could teach?”

 

3.)

“None of the beaten end up how we began.

A poem is a gesture toward home.”

 

4.)

“These are inverted horoscopes we cast,

It is ourselves we summon from the past.”

 

5.)

“. . . a house, nonetheless, a destination,

a house rising, imagine, word by word,

from words, one’s words (find the word for it, wordsman;

say, if you can, what the years were, one’s life).

 

Daniels concludes his essay open-mindedly: “A question remains that I am technically ill-equipped to answer. Is it true that undisturbed on the dusty shelves of obscure bookshops lie poems of some merit?”

 

[Daniels’ essay is collected in Good and Evil in the Garden of Art: Discrimination as the Guarantor of Civilization (Criterion Books, 2016).]

ADDENDUM, 10-3-20:

 1.) Henri Coulette: “The Wandering Scholar”

 2.)  Turner Cassity: “The Devil and Dedalus”

 3.)  Jericho Brown: “Duplex”

 4.)   Charles Gullans: “Research”

 5.)   Herbert Morris: “House of Words”