The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner Read online

  My French is improving but the result is a chipping away at illusions I’d naively held onto until recent weeks. People the world over wallow verbally in the mundane routine of everyday life and that the weather is chief among their preoccupations.

  Mornings drag by, after which I play exuberant games of football with ex-pats in the Jardin des Tuileries. Eddy plays too and it’s the only time we now spend together. Eddy has moved in with Sylvia and it’s weeks since I saw Delgado. I spend most evenings with a book for company. I am re-reading Edgar Allan Poe’s only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

  ‘Having barely escaped this danger, our attention was now directed to the dreadful imminency of another – that of absolute starvation for we found the whole bottom, from within two or three feet of the bends as far as the keel, together with the keel itself, thickly covered with large barnacles, which proved to be excellent and highly nutritious food.’

  I keep this book close to my bed as a talismanic object, hoping to use it to draw upon some of mankind’s innate resourcefulness. Pym’s salvation lay, unknown, just yards beneath his feet. Maybe mine is similarly within reach, requiring just a mere helping nudge of fate.

  Shakespeare, Avignon, 1994

  Author, former harpsichord maker, environmental activist, Wolfgang Zuckermann, now in his seventies, has recently opened a bookshop in Avignon. He’s named it Shakespeare in honour of Sylvia Beach’s original Shakespeare & Co. opened in Paris in 1919.

  Having opened our bookshops at roughly the same time, we like to compare experiences and even our respective takings. He kindly listens to my complaints over ‘les charges sociales’. Wolfgang has astutely set up his shop as an association to avoid such costs. I call it wisdom.

  Fulham Broadway, 1987

  ‘Just another Saturday. Chelsea v Arsenal 1–0. Everybody went to Chelsea on Saturday to continue the party, and it lasted for another fifteen minutes, until something – a Hayes miss, or a Caesar backpass, I can’t remember now – provoked the howls of frustration and irritation that you could have heard on any Saturday of the previous years.’ From Fever Pitch, A Fan’s Life by Nick Hornby.

  I went to this game but, being a Chelsea fan, experienced rather different emotions on the day. I wouldn’t have expected Nick Hornby to appreciate the fragile artistry of Pat Nevin or the surging runs of David Speedie. As home supporters, we are first to stream out from the ground. Outside I catch that smell of league football; the mingling odours of cigarettes, hotdogs and horse manure. The crowd is mostly good-natured, buoyed by unexpected victory, but there are still men who proceed down the Kings Road with an air of menace about them.

  I check out a nearby second-hand bookstall. The exhilaration of the game is beginning to fade, replaced by a warm glow of satisfaction, but my mind can’t focus in the search for books. Random stupid thoughts assail me; given his career as gunrunner, would Rimbaud have been an Arsenal fan? The Arsenal hordes will soon be let out. I don’t intend to loiter. There are old match progammes but I’ve never been really tempted by these. Like memories, they are somehow infinite and yet ephemeral.

  My loyalty to the club dates to junior school when teachers generally held less liberal and caring attitudes towards children from rough neighbourhoods.

  Eddy makes a resplendent entrance into the classroom, flouting school dress convention. The form teacher, Mrs Bremner, affectedly holds her mouth wide open as Eddy shuffles self-consciously past her, a striking blue figure amidst a room filling with its daily complement of grey jumpers. Eddy drops behind an ink-scrawled desk and into a chair also given the full graffiti treatment. But his swift movements fail to conceal the football kit. Aside from white socks and white stripes running down the sides of his shorts, Eddy is clad in cotton dyed blue in sporting allegiance. Mrs Bremner makes certain that her expression of shock has been universally perceived before she speaks.

  What I find distracting is the eerie inertness of Eddy’s head and his thick messy hair. From my angle his head is barely eclipsed by the silver strands on the head of his inquisitor. For a moment I have a ridiculous impression they are kissing. The threat of banishment is stridently issued in tones that belie Mrs Bremner’s short and rather peculiar stature. A huge pair of breasts induces a stoop in her posture, and her pupils, keen to pay testimony to their cruel wit, brand her as the ‘milk float’, a nickname that proves durable.

  Eddy looks unruffled. Maybe it’s shock. But from this moment I know that I’m a Chelsea boy too.

  Bangor, January 2010

  In one of the Sillitoe boxes, I might have discovered a story about a man with confused ambitions who must resist a tendency to fixate on limited editions (even his washing machine is a first edition Hotpoint). Amid tales of travel, written in the present tense because that is how he lives them, are chance meetings with verse and prose. He puzzles over the reliability of memory. Is it a present representation of the past? Or the actual past, laid down in neural pathways, resurfacing in the present? It would seem difficult to filter out all the fiction from the fact. Whatever memories are, writing about them is an attempt to impose if not an order then at least some sort of theme to a life lacking in clear direction. Amid a stream of consciousness, he recollects: The births of his children. The polished syntax of a Penguin rep. A knife point mugging in Barcelona. Finding B. S. Johnson’s Trawl in a box of Mills and Boon. Diarrhoea on a Corfu beach. Samuel Beckett’s miniature signature. The pallor on the face of a young waitress behind a fish and chips counter. Led Zep taking to the Knebworth stage. Hell’s Angels on a Devon beach. MacGowan mud pelting at Glastonbury. Watching Match of the Day in a post-operation painkiller high. Drinking tea with an Israeli soldier beside Bala lake. Finding reminder notes in a hymnbook that belonged to a church organist, recently deceased. A hashish bean soup in Corsica. Impromptu kick abouts.

  Life, at times, has an overwhelming intensity. The exhilaration may cause dizziness, and he self-prescribes autonomy to loaf about in imagined worlds, to deal in books and to dream. A buzz of expectation to banish the banal. Groping among the dirt and dust at the bottom of boxes, fingers eager to uncover rare, limited editions, he can lose himself ‘so that time and place and circumstances are annihilated in this sweet game, as in no other sport’. There is always the chance of a bargain, whether it be found in the shelves at Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road or from Pwllheli public library offloading old stock. He must learn, however, to abstain from snapping up books that were once bargains. The internet plays merry havoc with prices. The perennial fear of dealers, that the rare books will die out, is perhaps a more justified one these days. Charity shops have got savvy. Auctions generally are a better bet. Delving into a box bought at a recent sale, with the beetles and spiders scuttling away, he discovers two books that, being hidden beneath old newspapers, had escaped everybody’s attention. One book, with colour plates that illustrate beautifully the varieties of pheasants, will pay for a flight to Mumbai.

  And the other is a book with a passage in it that made a strong impression on him several decades ago, A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert. In it somewhere is an acceptance by Frederic Moreau, the novel’s protagonist, of life’s vicissitudes, a useful if rather bland philosophy. He rereads the novel but fails to locate the passage. Is it another figment of his imagination? Maybe it’s to be found in Madame Bovary, a more famous work of literature, perhaps, with memorable imagery.

  ‘Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.’

  He continues to hunt with delusions of grandeur; to stumble upon an ‘Et Tu Healy’, a broadsheet poem by James Joyce said to have been published when Joyce was nine years old. Or better still; a ‘Love’s Labors Won,’ a Shakespeare lost play achi
eving mythical status since 1953, when Solomon Pottesman discovered it in the 1603 booklist of the stationer Christopher Hunt, listed as printed in quarto: ‘Marchant Of Vennis, Taming Of A Shrew, Loves Labour Lost, Loves Labour Won.’

  The story ends before an aborted enquiry into the ethics of selling them, for as Percy Fitzgerald in the Book Fancier says: ‘the loyal heart would feel a twinge or scruple, as he carries off from the humble and ignorant dealer, for a shilling or two, a volume that may be worth ten or twelve pounds. No sophistry, he concludes, will veil the sharpness of transaction, in which profit is made of poverty and ignorance.’ This applies to capitalism itself but the realisation of it does not deter the story’s protagonist, now middle aged, from planning more journeys, exploratory missions to the East whereby en route he may even seek some Vedantic wisdom. Beside his bed is a well-thumbed copy of the Let’s Go Guide to India with the addresses of Delhi’s bookshops underlined. He continues to chase after it, still searching.

  About the Author

  Bill Rees lives between Bangor and Montpellier, and makes his self-proclaimed ‘precarious’ living by translating French football matches into English for a Dutch bookmaker, as well as selling the occasional book. As a graduate of Bangor University, Rees worked as a reporter for a local newspaper in London, before the lure of travel and bookselling led him to take a less conventional road.

  Copyright

  First published in 2008

  by Parthian

  The Old Surgery

  Napier Street

  Cardigan

  SA43 1ED

  www.parthianbooks.co.uk

  The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © Bill Rees 2011

  Cover design by www.theundercard.co.uk

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–908069–86–3

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