The Bookman's Promise (3 page)

Round two to me, for brilliant footwork.

It was one o’clock when I left the judge’s house. All my annoyance with Archer’s arrogance had dissolved and I was glad I hadn’t retaliated at his stupid insult. I felt renewed, as if the pressing question in my life—what to do now?—had just been answered. Sometimes all it takes is the touch of a book, or the look on a woman’s face, to get a man’s heart going again.

I opened my eyes the next morning thinking of Erin and Burton together. Neither gave ground to the other; each grew in stature throughout the day.

I called her number. Got a machine. Her voice promised to call me back.

I let Burton simmer.

She called the next day and talked to my machine. “If this is a solicitation call, I gave at the office. But I’m a registered Democrat, I’ll talk to anybody.”

“Nice line,” I told her machine. “I liked it almost as much when Jim Cain used it in that story he wrote thirty years ago.”

“
Very
impressive,” she said to my machine later that day. “I wondered if you’d catch that Cain heist. My God, aren’t you ever home?”

“I’m home right now,” my machine said to hers. “Where are you?”

“I’m off to Wyoming, dear heart,” was her final attempt, hours later. “We’re heading into what looks like a long, long trial. The environment of the very planet is at stake and the partners need my young, fertile mind far more than you seem to. Good-bye forever, I guess.”

My machine said, with an incredulous air, “
Wyoming
has
environment?‘”

Then she was gone, a loss I hoped to hell was temporary. But Burton kept perking away like a stew in fine wine. On the morning of the fifth day I commenced strategic reconnaissance. In military terms this means a search over wide areas to gain information before making large-scale decisions. In bookscouting it’s exactly the same: I got on the phone. I ordered some reference books. I fished around for cheap Burton reading copies. Strategic reconnaissance indeed: it was the bookman’s madness, and I was hooked again.

Within a week I had read Fawn Brodie’s Burton biography and had skimmed through three of Burton’s greatest works. I began to read Burton slowly, in proper chronological order. I read Norman Penzer’s Burton bibliography from cover to cover and I started a detailed file of points and auction prices on Burton first editions.

To a bookman a good bibliography is far better than any “life” pieced together by even a diligent scholar like Brodie—the subject is revealed through his own books and not through the eyes of a third party. Burton had been unfortunate with his early biographers. Long before Brodie made him respectable in 1967, he had been presented as a scoundrel, and sometimes, because of his frankness in translating the sexual classics of the East, as a pornographer. He was luckier with his bibliographer. Penzer was a fierce Burton advocate. His 1923 bibliography contains superb scholarship on Burton’s books, and Penzer added pages of color on Burton’s character, unusual in such a work. Penzer considered Burton the greatest man of his century, but a tragic man who could not suffer fools and was damned for all but his greatest accomplishments. Knighted near the end of his life in an empty gesture, he was treated shabbily by his government. He lived in the wrong time, said Penzer: “His queen should have been Elizabeth rather than Victoria.”

Burton’s story is a grand one in the most sweeping tradition of the book world. He was a Renaissance man long before the term came into popular use: master of twenty-nine languages, perfecter of dialects, great explorer, student of anthropology, botanist, author of thirty books, and in his later years translator of the
Arabian Nights
in sixteen volumes, of
The Kama Sutra
, and other forbidden Oriental classics. He was an excellent swordsman, a man of great physical and mental strength. He would need it all for the hardships he would face in unknown deserts and jungles around the world. His knowledge of human nature was vast, his powers of observation both panoramic and exhaustive, his memory encyclopedic. Wherever he went, he saw and noted everything, so that he was able to produce, almost immediately after a whirlwind trip across the American desert to Utah and California in 1860, a dense, seven-hundred-page work describing the flora and fauna, the people, the customs, and the land, and follow this two years later with a book of advice to the prairie traveler. His observations on the American Indian, with a long description on the practice of scalping, are classic passages of travel writing. Penzer believed Burton stood with the greatest explorers of all times: compared with Burton, he said, Stanley traveled like a king. Burton’s expeditions into unknown Africa would read like myth except for the prodigious mass of detail he recorded about everything he saw there.

These accomplishments alone should have made him a giant of British folklore, but he was also “one of the two or three most proficient linguists of whom we have authentic and genuine historical records.” He taught himself and was fluent in Arabic, Hindustani, Swahili, and Somali; he spoke Persian and Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek. Of course he knew Latin. Wherever he went he soaked up languages, often perfecting dialects in a few weeks.
And
, Penzer reminded, he was a master of ethnic disguise. That’s how he was able to go among natives as one of them, risking his life to breach the ancient holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Harar.

He wrote of his travels in the Congo, Zanzibar, Syria, Iceland, India, and Brazil. He wrote books on bayonets, swords, and falconry. He was one of those brilliant swashbuckling wizards who comes along rarely, who understands life and writes exactly what he sees without pandering to rules of propriety or knuckling under to religious tyranny. His kind does not have an easy life. He is resented and shunned by churches and genteel society; if he’s lucky, he may escape being burned at the stake. In Burton’s case, he was victimized after death by his pious, narrow-minded Roman Catholic wife. Lady Isabel torched his work, burning forty years of unpublished manuscripts, journals, and notes in her mindless determination to purify his image.

This is why I am not religious. If and when we do learn the true secret of the universe, some kind of religion will be there to hide it. To cover it up. To persecute and shred, to burn and destroy. They stay in business by keeping us in the Dark Ages.

Darkness is what they sell.

By the middle of the second week, I had a good grasp of Burton’s life and times; by the middle of the third, I knew what I wanted to do with my fifty grand. All I needed was to find the right copy of the right book.

I sent out feelers. Booksellers around the country began calling me with tips. By the middle of the fourth week, I had been touted to the Boston Book Galleries and an upcoming Burton that was rumored to be everything I wanted. I made plans to fly East.

How can I describe the joy of pulling down those sweetheart books for twenty-nine thousand and change? I knew I’d probably have to pay what the trade considered a premium. Dealers dropped out of the bidding early, and the contest winnowed down to two collectors and me. When it went past twenty I thought the hell with it, I wasn’t buying these books for resale, this was food for the soul and I didn’t care if I had to spend the whole fifty grand. The Seattle stash was found money, in my mind. People who gamble in casinos on Indian reservations sometimes call their winnings Indian money. They put it in a cookie jar and give themselves permission to lose it all again. But a book like the Burton set is never a gamble. I wasn’t about to throw my bankroll at a roulette table, but thinking of it as Indian money made me instantly more competitive and ultimately the high bidder. There was a time when it would have been unthinkable to spend so much on a single first edition. I laugh at those days.

I laughed a lot in the wake of Boston. I was amazed at how far my Burton story had been flung. It surpassed even Janeway’s Rule of Overkill, which goes like this: getting the media’s interest can be so much more difficult than keeping it. Reporters and editors are such pessimistic bastards—everyone wants a few inches of their space or a minute of their time, and they put up walls that are all but impregnable. Editors will send a grumbling reporter many miles to cover a man with a butterfly collection and ignore some shameful injustice that’s been growing in their own backyards forever. Out-of-town experts thrill them, but anyone who openly tries to lure them will get brushed off faster than a leper at a nudist colony. The key to the gate is your own indifference. Be shy enough and the media will swarm. At that point anything can happen.

I was indifferent, I was almost coy, and overnight I became the most prominent Richard Burton specialist in America. I didn’t claim to be the best or the brightest: I probably wasn’t the wisest, whitest, darkest, wittiest, and listen, this part’s hard to believe, I may not have even been the prettiest. The events that put me on the map were arbitrary and embarrassingly unjustified. A single piece in
The Boston Globe
, passionately written by a rabid Burton fan on his day off, led to my appearance on NPR, and to far greater exposure when a Boston wire-service bureau chief ordered a light rewrite and put that
Globe
piece in newspapers around the country. I didn’t kid myself—they were all using me as a modern hook for the story that really interested them, because Burton’s story had been history, not news, for more than a century. But this is how I got my fifteen minutes of fame: I was carried there on the broad shoulders of a man who died sixty years before I was born.

At home I had twenty calls on my answering machine, including one from Miranda. Because of the Denver angle, both local papers had carried my AP story from Boston. Lee had seen it, and of course he wanted to see the books. Miranda invited me for “supper” that night, making the distinction that this was not “dinner,” it was family, and there would just be the three of us. It was a weeknight; we’d make it a short evening for the good of us all. Lee was in the middle of a complicated trial and I had lots of work to do. Even Miranda had an early date the next morning, at a neighborhood old-folks’ home where she worked as a volunteer.

We ate on their patio, laughing over my close call with Archer the last time I had seen them. “I was holding my breath,” Miranda said: “For a minute I thought you were going to take him apart before God and all of us.” She glanced at Lee and said, “Not that Cliff wouldn’t have been justified, sweetheart. I know the man’s your oldest friend, and it’s certainly not my habit to apologize for my guests. But that one’s a real bastard and I just don’t like him.”

Lee smiled in that easy way he had. “Hal’s had a hard life. That’s what you need to understand about him before you judge him too harshly.”

“Why is it
me
who’s got to understand
him
?. I like people I

already
understand.“

“Give him just a little break, Miranda. His family was against his writing career from the start and he had to struggle all through his life. His early books—all the ones that people are now calling modern classics—were rejected by everybody for years. He has suffered the tortures of the damned—the truly gifted man whose talent was ignored for decades, actually. If he’s bitter it’s because of the bestseller mentality and what he sees as the dumbing-down of our literature.”

“I know that but it’s such an old, tedious story. He’s hardly the first writer to feel unappreciated. How many talented people never do get recognized? You don’t see them whining about it, or causing a fuss when all someone wants to do is admire them. There’s just no excuse for boorish behavior. He should cut off his ear and enjoy some real pain.”

I asked for a truce. “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. Really, I barely noticed it.”

Abruptly, thankfully, Lee changed the subject. “Let’s look at your books,” he said, and we went back into the house. He studied the three volumes in awe, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “My God,” he said. “Where on earth did these come from?” Ultimately, I didn’t know: the auction house wasn’t required to disclose consignors’ names. Miranda wondered who Charles Warren had been, how someone who had received such a warm inscription could remain so unknown to Burton’s biographers. Finally Lee brought up his own volumes to compare. There was no comparison. Lee’s were near fine, more than good enough for most collectors of hundred-year-old books. Mine were a full cut above that: unblemished, stratospheric, factory-fresh. Placing the two sets side by side gave new meaning to the words
rare books
.

“I’d say you did well, even at thirty thousand,” he said. “In fact, if you want to sell them and make some instant money…”

“I’m going to hang on to these, Lee. They’re going into my retirement fund.”

That night I had a message from Erin on my machine. “I am going crazy on some planet called Rock Springs. Now I know what happens when all hope dies—rock springs eternal. My desperation simply cannot be described! It’s so bad that I’m actually calling
you
in some misguided hope for relief. Of course you’re not there, but I guess that
is
my relief.”

I left an answer on her home phone—“I warned you about Wyoming, kid”—and in the morning, when I turned mine on, she had already replied: “I beg your pardon, you certainly did
not
say I was being sent to
Mars
. It looks like we’ll wrap it up here in a couple of weeks, but that sounds like eternity on this end of it. I will need some very serious pampering when I get home.”

I thought about her a lot that day. We were having some fairly intimate bullshit for two people who had yet to touch, feel, probe, or say more than a few direct words to each other. At bedtime I launched a new attack on her hated answering machine. “Look, let’s make a date. You. Me. Not this gilhickey you make me talk to. Us, in the…you know…flesh. Didn’t mean that the way it sounded, it just popped out. Didn’t mean that either. I promise to be civilized. I swear. White sport coat. Pink carnation. Night of the thirtieth. Come by my bookstore if you get in early enough. Call me if you can’t make it.”

She didn’t call. But soon the crank calls began.