"Guy Ridley" or Used Book Stores -- Real and Imagined

The Book Exchange on Dundas West in Toronto is a cozy store in a neighborhood that's old by Toronto standards but still lively.  The shop is about 400 square feet with somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 books on its shelves.  I stop in there fairly often because Tom Colson, the owner, carries the literary fiction I like, plus genre fiction, a back wall filled with colorful children's books, and a good supply of history and current events and other topics of general interest.  I also like to talk with Tom, who has a fund of knowledge and interesting opinions.  Just last week the Toronto Star published a letter he wrote to them.

The Book Exchange is one of many stores in the city that deal in used books and publishers remainders, some well-established that do a good business.

Used bookstores have been one of the interesting corners of my life.  I've usually found one to visit whenever I've stayed in a place for a stretch of time.  I patronized a bookstore in the town I grew up in that had a used department.  I still have books on my shelves I bought there decades ago, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, for example, and several novels of Arnold Bennett. A faded plastic bookmark has been at page 364 of The Old Wives' Tale ever since I put it there before I graduated from high school in 1960.  I must read it all the way through one day. 

I also used to stop in at the Brattle Book Shop in Boston, a landmark in the city when I was a teenager. I once saw an autographed copy of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and asked Mr. Gloss, the owner, if he would reduce the price from $1.25 to $1.00 so that I could buy the book and also take the subway and bus home.  He agreed.  I read it and gave the book away to a college classmate who, like Sinclair Lewis, came from the Midwest.

Along with my studies, I visited two used bookshops in Hyde Park in Chicago, when I was a student there.  I remember the names of the owners and what they looked like, though I've forgotten whatever conversations we may have had.
 
All of this brings me to Guy Ridley, the main character in a novel I finished a while ago."Guy Ridley" He runs a second hand bookstore very near a large Midwestern university.  Despite his heartaches and disappointments, he is imaginative and creative, hopeful and not cynical till the end of his life, a great admirer of Don Quixote.

Here he is in chapter seven, just after arriving for work one morning.   

Guy surveyed his stock with a touch of self-satisfaction, for he’d brought in classics from almost every field of learning. He began his business career with an untested vision of wide horizons and pride in the profound ideas and great works of imagination that filled his shelves.. He liked to imagine colloquies among Aristotle, Einstein, Cervantes, and a dozen others. Fantasies enrich only a few, so he soon took on a hard-headed attitude to his trade. He added mysteries, romances, science fiction, most of which moved from his shelves quickly. Even so, inflation and rent increases concerned him.  Should he sell the business?
And in chapter twelve he takes another look at his shop. In the last sentence of this paragraph, he recalls two demons who pester him from time to time.

A quiet moment in Dulcinea’s the day after a mid-March snowstorm. As he checked his inventory, Guy pictured in a lightning mental swoop the long tradition of reading and knowledge. Unknown scholars preserved the fragments of Heraclitus. Socrates had a better fate. He talked to Plato, who had a writer’s itch. Then came Aristotle and the forgotten thousands who carried his flame around the Mediterranean. Wars after that, a difficult empire, centuries of obscurity until monks rescued the old learning, which has been at the center of western thought ever since. Teachers. From authors to publishers to salesmen to book-dealers to readers to used book stores. He stood at the end of a chain and helped to forge new links. Yet he’d heard people say that there was another chain, another tradition, the story of faith, but he heard withering blasts from Malassandro and Malspirita whenever he tried to get near it.

I found Ridley an interesting character to work with; his life has many shades of meaning.  At the same time, I know perfectly well that Tom and other bookdealers I've known have been competent business people who haven't had the quirks and challenges and temptations that beset my brainchild.  They've enjoyed their work (as people who run small businesses often do), contributed to their communities, and found much to satisfy them. May they continue to do well in the environment we live in that can be difficult for everyone.   

"The Opinionists"

The Opinionists is a companion piece, at least in format, to The Hills of the Tigers that I wrote about in my previous post. The two are similar as well in that they both combine art and public life.

I wrote the first drafts of both many years ago. I hope I've got them after many revisions to a state where people will enjoy reading them.

The heart of The Opininonists is a theological controversy that took place in the mid-17th century and resembles one from the archives of Massachusetts history.  Surrounding this story, in alternating chapters, is an account of a movie company in the early 1950's making a film based on the controversy that galvanized the small colony.   

Here's a part of a scene in which the cast and crew of the film come together for the first time.

Vincent Adair assembled the best cast he could. I remember his speech to the company after we arrived in Stilton Fields. He rented a meeting room in the town hall with a high ceiling and tall windows on two sides through which we could see the bluish curves of distant dusky hills. Fans turned briskly overhead, creaking like crickets, for it was the beginning of summer. Vincent kept us waiting, fifteen minutes, half an hour, but we pardoned him when he came on stage and stood before us like a benevolent emperor about to dispense favors, an actor among actors.


“I suspect you’ve heard stories about my working methods.” Vincent didn’t need a microphone, for the range of his fabled voice could hold in thrall even the most restive gathering. “Some of the tales are true. I like to get my way. Be patient with me. We’re going to make one of the best pictures ever. Begin, please, by thinking of yourselves as a community in colonial America. You’ve known each other a long time. You’ve had many adventures together; you’ve accomplished a lot. You don’t know many people apart from each other. There are no cities near you to lose yourselves in. No highways. No electricity. You’re strict, but kind and loving; you know how to withstand hard knocks. None of you is rich, though some plan for riches. Your families, your community, and God Almighty are the biggest factors in your lives. You’re in awe of nature and the new land you live in, the vastness of which you can’t imagine. You dream about the future. You have a profound trust that life will go well for you. Now, a new element comes into this community...”

And now three paragraphs from the 17th century part in which the narrator sees the woman who is about to change the colony for good.

I stopped my work when the sun overtopped the tallest of the masts in the harbor and made two neat piles of papers I’d scattered over the table. I pushed back my chair and went to the window, stretched, and put my hands on my hips, looking, I’m sure, like a forest animal, weasel or fox, ambling out of his lair for a look at the puzzling, glorious world that surrounds him. Though we lived nearly a mile from the center of town, I could hear the new bell in the cupola atop the meeting house calling our delegates to the General Court. Two shopkeepers heading for King Street walked by on the lane below. I heard Ned Boland announcing the return home of Pastor Allerton and the death of the Protector – news that took me away from scholarly work I’ve kept up since my student days at Cambridge – to present events in Botolph and the conference downstairs in half an hour.

The melancholy cry of a seagull interrupted my expectant musing. I watched the homely bird as it perched on my window sill. When the gull flew off, calling out again, I looked down at Harbor Lane and saw, walking around the base of Berryman’s Hill, a solitary woman wearing a crimson cape and a black hood that half-hid her face. She walked rapidly, as if toward an urgent task of mercy. The gull called again in its skyward flight. Her pace slackened, she looked up. A smile brightened her face as she watched the bird’s graceful dips and turns. Her happiness delighted my furry fox self. I waved, she returned my greeting. Before long, our seagull flew off in the direction of the Mary and John, and Lydia Bowstreet went on her way.

I watched five black-cloaked men, a team of penguins, making their way toward me up the lane. I gathered papers I thought I’d need and went downstairs to join my Antarctic colleagues for the second day of our meeting.

One of the themes that interest me most as I worked  on The Opinionists was how people love freedom and in North America we can usually find find freedom in parts of our lives at least.

rfrenchnovelist.com

"The Hills of the Tigers"

During  many years of writing, I have found the arts both a refuge and an inspiration.  I threw away a pile of stories and plays a few decades ago, but the first writing I saved was the story of an enlisted man in the American army named Carl Norberg, serving in a village in a made-up Asian country called Kulon. He spends his spare time drawing pictures of Kulonese people and their country. 

Years ago, an editor suggested that the novella I wrote was incomplete, so after some thought, I had Norberg move to Botolph after he left the army, where he drives a cab and develops his work, so the story then becomes also about the contrast between urban civilian life and the military ways that influenced Carl.

Here's a paragraph in which he writes about his days in Kulon. 

It was my day off – a Wednesday or Thursday, I forget which – and the middle of the afternoon. The sun behind me cast a bright light over my shoulder onto a large sketch pad balanced on my knees. Unook, our houseboy, sat under a coconut palm a few feet away from me beside one of the motor pool drivers whom I had learned only the week before was his father. Despite the noise around us – laughter from the swimming pool, the voices of several sergeants talking irreverently about the events of the day, a radio that blared away in the echoing caverns of the supply room, the occasional sound of artillery fire from the training field a mile away – I was able to concentrate on what I was doing. The lines of experience in the older man’s face, Unook’s laughing, considerate eyes that didn’t show much strength, a few jagged curves to suggest the distant Hills of the Tigers, haunting, unreachable,¬ very likely dangerous – all fell smoothly onto the paper seemingly without any help from me. Although we knew little of each other, we felt at ease, like old friends. I was reminded – for some reason – of a quiet Sunday afternoon at home.

This is a few sentences about his time in Botolph.  Millicent is a gallery owner who has taken an interest in his work.

His storage room had a window that faced north. The sun shone brightly that morning and the light that illuminated dust-motes also allowed Millicent to his canvases. The colors were vivid, she thought, the designs harmonious, and the details true – all expressing movement, vitality, the flow of action, and nature’s changes. She liked that he’d gone out of his way to learn his subject matter and wrestle with his craft. He was more serious than she thought. 

“What happened to this village?” she asked. “I suppose it’s much different now.”
“It was bombed,” Norberg said without elaborating and showed her another sequence of paintings – of trucks, refugees, and dusty highways. “You’ll find some violence in my work. I can’t avoid it. War is a dreadful thing. I partly want to create an antidote – to celebrate the rhythms of everyday life – to heal, you see, myself and others. We aren’t kids, fond of wonder, who lack the power to fix bad situations. When things seem to be at their worst, some good is likely to break through. We need to be on the lookout for it.”

The story also concerns other members of the arts community in Botolph. Here's a paragraph that Carl's lady friend writes.  She sculpts birds in clay.

We walked across New Hope Common after lunch to the university gallery to see what the Nine had to say for themselves – mostly urban scenes that looked very different from Carl’s: two dozen pictures, each a fanciful image like ones our brains make before we fall asleep. Pam explained that the Nine liked to work with geometrical shapes and color relationships. They wanted to explore what our minds do with what our eyes see and they worked with the zeal of research scientists.  Their pictures were more precise than Carl’s, with careful attention to detail.  I guessed their work took a lot of patience; I liked some of the combinations they came up with.   Thinking of my birds, I wondered what I might take from the Nine to combine with Carl’s spirit and my own wish to work from love.

Click Here for "The Hills of the Tigers"

    
And a comment by one of Carl's detractors, after a gallery Norberg set up to show some of his pictures of Botolph burned in a fire.

Rodney Buffum made a public appearance about a new commercial development in South Cove near the site of the fire, about which the reporters kept asking him. “I don’t know anything about it; an agent handles my rentals. The wiring in the building was sound at the last inspection and I hired the best security outfit in the city. I resent allegations that I caused damage to my own property, even indirectly. The tenant must have contributed somehow.” Buffum didn’t stop there. “Norberg’s paintings are subversive. They damage the city’s reputation when we’re struggling for renewal. What will visitors say about a place that scorns itself?”

The novel is about how Carl endures and grows as an artist and as a man and communities that have shaped him and that he wishes to make better.

rfrenchnovelist.com