(urth) Bibliomen part 1

[Marc Aramini]

*Bibliomen* is a light-hearted collection of twenty-two character sketches
of people associated with books in one way or another. Seaman (based on
Neil Gaiman) and Captain Roy C. Mirk, Ba, Ma., PhD. were added in 1995.
Many of the sketches begin in the past and go forward beyond their original
publication date of 1984. Many of the names also form puns and allusions
(which I may or may not catch – Gertrude S. “Spinning Jenny” Deplatta is
based on Gertrude Stein, Peter O. Henry more obviously the rather shocking
life of O. Henry). The commentary is here mixed with the individual
summaries and entries.

In his forward, Wolfe quotes Emily Dickinson’s infamous, “There is no
frigate like a book, to take us lands away.” He then says Emily met few of
her fellow sailors over the course of her cloistered life, readers and
bibliophiles Wolfe believes to be universally interesting, though some have
been detestable. He ends his forward with an injunction to get on with
things quickly from *The Tempest*: “Now belay all this. Heave on the plot
line and hoist our paper sail. In the immortal words of William
Shakespeare, ‘Fall to’t, yarely, or we run ourselves aground – bestir,
bestir!'”

The sea and sailing recurs as a motif throughout; no doubt this is because
of the opening simile, that of the book as a ship.

KIRK PATTERSON ARTHURS, Ph.D. (April 1 1960 - )

Born on April Fool’s day, Arthurs fakes through his academic career by
composing academic books about an obscure British writer, John Glaskin. (*Mask
and Coin: Grub Street in the 30s, Maze of Gray: John Glaskin Revisited, and
Sweet Sword, High Heart: Love and War in the Fiction of John Glaskin*).
When he gets a large inheritance in 1993, he retires from teaching and then
later publishes *Fiction in Fancy Dress: John Glaskin et al Exposed* in
which he reveals John Glaskin was entirely fictional. After a brief outcry,
his last book is forgotten. He claims his primary motivation in faking
Glaskin was to see if anyone would notice. He now lives in the South of
France, “reported to be at work on a book on deep-sea fishing,” returning
to the dominant maritime simile of *Bibliomen*. (The South of France will
appear in Xavier McRidy's entry and also possibly as the birth place of
“Adam Poor” in the Island of Sark.)

The text says that Glaskin was a contemporary of Alroy Kear, which
unscrambled reads Royal Rake (Edward VII’s nickname). Later, we get
Glaskin’s fake autobiography, and, indeed, he was born in 1899 and went to
London in 1911 – King Edward ruled from 1901-1910. (An autobiography
emphasizing his moral character was published on King Edward VII called *Edward
the Rake* by John Pearson in 1975, though whether this is at all related to
the character of John Glaskin is nebulous. The sensationalism in revising
or reevaluating history and character for academic trends might be under
attack , such as the dramatic hyper-sexualized slant on Edward VII's
character presented by Pearson in real life.)

The name Kirk means “Church”, Patterson can mean “son of Patrick”, which
implies patrician or noble. I suspect Arthurs is simply a pun on authors,
but it could imply “king” or “man” and “bear”. (St. Patrick’s Church?).
There are several Irish Catholic allusions throughout *Bibliomen* as well.

The obvious criticism of academia involves the artificiality of their
entire careers. Whether the things they write about are “real” or not is
conceptually irrelevant, and Dr. Arthurs ironically exposes himself as a
fraud.

HOPKINS DALHOUSIE

This entry reads as science fiction – the confession of Hopkins Dalhousie’s
killer, 00028956: his car. It begins, “Yes, I killed my owner … because I
loved him, because I could not bear to give him up. If you conclude that I
should be destroyed for that act, I cannot prevent you; but I ask you
whether many of you have not done worse, though you are free.” It
chronicles the success and failure of the writer Dalhousie and the gradual
loss of all his possessions. Dalhousie works fourteen to sixteen hours a
day, fruitlessly, and loses his wife and his house, pawning Proust for car
oil, gas, a meal, and some paper. Dalhousie speaks to his car of all the
things he has not yet done, and the car shows him all the roads it hasn’t
yet been on. Eventually they go into the hills overlooking the city to see
the lights, though the car has insufficient fuel to return. Dalhousie gets
out and walks near the drop; the car claims he heard his master’s voice
say, “You know what I want.” He runs Dalhousie off the cliff and lands on
top of him, knowing that he could continue to drive and get help, but
instead the car says “That I remained where I was for over an hour, until
he no longer cried out. That I have never backed away from my duty, and
that I did not do so then.”

There is of course the subtext that Dalhousie had mortgaged his car and
wound up suffering and crying under his tire for an hour – perhaps the car
couldn’t stand to be sold, creating a motive.

Hopkins implies “son or Hob” or renowned fame, but Dalhousie is primarily a
place name. Both are names of prominent Universities.

This story criticizes the welfare system: “There was Government help enough
a million idlers; but not for Hopkins Dalhousie, who worked night and day
and had once paid a fortune in taxes.” Lurking in the background must be a
metaphor that possessions can come to own us, too, though Wolfe is never
that uninteresting and banal in his creation of these situations.

GERTRUDE S. “SPINNING JENNY” DEPLATTA (Aug 20, 1961 - )

This entry tells the story of Gertrude Susan Smith, who accepts a position
as a typist in 1981 at WHRL radio station and is asked to fill in for a
newscaster. In August of 1982, she subs for a DJ with a strained back.
“Despite the proverb, it is not greatness, but rather the opportunity for
it, that is thrust upon unprepared and indeed unconscious subjects.” She
was told to speak over the beginning and end of the songs to prevent
illegal taping, and advised that the back of albums might provide fruitful
material. Gertrude reads a mishmash of album material, pronouncing her
commentary “in a strained monotone and mingling it with non sequiturs
concerning ozone alerts, temperature inversions, the health of her cat
(named Jenny) and what would seem to have been album notes in a
never-identified foreign language she pronounced as though it were
English.”

The door was jammed by a fumbled record and it took 18 minutes for her to
be removed, consequently replaced by an organ recital taped at Wolf Trap (a
national park dedicated to the performing arts in Virginia). By the next
day, she has her own show and she becomes a national sensation, though
people think her name is Jenny. She starts calling her cat Trudy. Her
marriage to a pizza chef in November lasts only two days. A fan publishes a
book of her tapes. When a musical band makes a song of it and Spinning
Jenny attempts to speak over it in her usual style, it is “conjectured that
she suffered a form of verbal overload, but this cannot be confirmed; she
has refused psychiatric help.”

She is stricken mute and uses a daisy wheel typewriter to work on her book,
which she refuses to let anyone see, but insists will be done soon.

While her name is not truly Gertrude Stein, the nonsensical, kitchen sink
approach to art that garners attention is a unique and bizarre trademark of
Stein's composition style, and its sing song quality also lends it to the
metaphor of a spinning record topped with random nonsense. Stein's voice is
completely unique in literature. Deplatta assuming the name of her cat
seems to be the inversion of personality and voice Stein used in writing *The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas*.

Clearly, the story makes fun of Stein's style to some degree and combines
it with a rags to riches story in the musical world: random and meteoric
rise to success, a fast lifestyle with a rapidly dissolved marriage, and a
regression to practical insanity. In many ways Gertrude Deplatta comes to
resemble the narrator of Wolfe's “My Book” by the end, with her random and
meaningless technique for composition that actually drives her insane.
Deplatta can mean “made of silver” (even though there is only one T and the
husband Anthony is assuredly of Italian rather than Spanish descent –
perhaps “of the plate” would be a more appropriate translation in light of
her random fame as a disc jockey).

BERNARD A. FRENCH (September 9, 1933- August 19, 1985)

French is a publisher who wants to produce the largest coffee table book
ever. He gives another character, photographer Kopman Goldfleas, his final
assignment. When the giant books are delivered to French's office, his
secretary Barbara Ward hears a loud sound “but assumed he had struck an
author and did not investigate”. No trace of him was found until 1986 when
a bored janitor leafed through the book and found French pressed “between
the Afterword and the Index. He is reputed to have discolored the paper.”
The boxed book become his coffin, and his epitaph reads “A Page at the
Court of God”.

The pun on “Page” will appear again in the story, and this is perhaps an
original story of a man killed by his oversize book - it is difficult to
determine if French is based on anyone in real life, though his aggressive
publishing strategies might resonate with Bernard Geis, who brought
sensationalism to the publishing world in recruiting celebrities to write
and in promoting unknowns like Jacqueline Susan. There seems to be no
relationship to Anatole France as far as I can tell. Indeed, Bernard
French, entombed in a book in the most memorable image from *Bibliomen*,
might be an entirely original creation, as are all the plot lines
concerning his giant book and his publishing company, Cobb, Neil, and Sons.

Bernard means “brave as a bear”, which gives it a vague etymological
relationship to the name Arthurs.

MARY BEATRICE SMOOT FRIARLY, SPV (April 12, 1925- )

Beatrice Smoot Friarly is born Easter Sunday by the effort of her mother
Martha to hold in the baby, but she was expecting a boy. Her mother raises
her “like nothing on earth.” At the age of 15 she appeara weeping to Father
John O'Murphy begging to be accepted as a postulant to a religious order.
“Muttering that it would at least get her out of her mother's house, Father
O'Murphy promsied to see what he could do.” A year later she joins the
Sisters of Perpetual Vigilance, “an order of nuns intent upon saving their
oil for the coming of the bridegroom.”

Taking the name Mary, she teaches Fourth Grade at Saint Apollos the
Persuasive (A real Catholic saint - despite the pagan name, mentioned in 1
Corinthians 3:16 as Paul's assistant). A mother gives her an eighty year
old cookbook and her collection begins. One night she hears a knocking at
her door, and she knows that the knocking will not wake her roommates,
Sisters Bruno and Evangellica. A short dark man says “Shalom” at the door,
and she replies in kind, at which point he steps across the threshold. He
says he has come in part as an answer to her prayers, to be visited by “the
least of Your messengers, Lord.” He asks if he can smoke and begins to do
so from his entire body, saying he has come because she has the greatest
cookbook collection in the world, and that he needs help. [She also notes
that he is Jewish from his circumcised state]. Sister Mary boasts that
thanks to her collection she knows how manna was baked, and which broth
simmered in the Cauldron of Cerridwen.

He whisks her to hell, where she finds herself looking eighteen and nude.
She comments that she didn't know hell was so crowded, to which the Devil
responds, “For people who don't like crowds, it's crowded. For people that
do, lonely.” They come across an expressionless man with red skin, who does
not respond to any of the Devil's punishments.

When the devil asks if he should try Sulfuric Acid on the red man, “As if
on cue, a dickens appeared. 'From Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Chairman
says so where is he?' the dickens announced. 'It's line seven. I should
tell him out to lunch?” [God is calling Lucifer here on phone line 7, and
his assistant is asking if he should say he is out to lunch – in this
“Jewish” stereotyped reality, God operates as a corporation or large
partnership firm].

The devil says he has to go (to take God's call) and leaves in a puff of
smoke, and Sister Mary tells the expressionless man, “He knows what I'm
going to do, you know. He knows exactly what I'm going to do. I find that
encouraging, exciting, and disturbing. The universe is not as we thought. …
Or perhaps this is not the universe at all … Just a corner of a bad dream.”
She grabs his hand despite his concern that it will burn her, and crosses
herself.

When she awakens, a tall and swarthy man appears in New Canaan “whom the
people have decided is a Micmac Indian.” He does neither work nor harm, and
whistles when he sees Sister Mary. On summer nights “when lightning flashes
in the west and black clouds gather over the Hoosac Hills, she joins
Man-on-Fire, the Micman Indian … and talks with him in tones too low to be
overheard.” She says she is preparing a volume of Indian recipes.

This one blends the classic horror idea of temptation of the devout with
cook books. Martha and Mary, the mother and daughter in this story, of
course echo the biblical story of the sisters found in the Gospel of Luke
in which Martha prepared food and Mary sat and listened to Jesus. Here,
Mary is preparing the recipes and collecting cook books without doing any
cooking. The devil here quotes Jesus from Luke 10 and calls him a “loose
liver” - someone who lives a rather dissolute life - when he says “I
watched Satan fall from the sky like lightning.” When the dickens (another
word for devil) appears in the most confusing part of the story, the
scripture referenced is either Exodus 3:6 or Acts 3:13. If it is the later
reference, this is where Jesus asserts that Jehovah is a God of the dead,
which would make sense in light of Man-on-Fire's presence in hell.

While there is a Hoosac Hill in New Hampshire, there is a rather famous
reputedly haunted tunnel in the Hoosac Mountain Range in Massachusetts
(Sister Mary is born in New Canaan Massachusetts) called “The Bloody Pit”
in which 193 workers were killed and at least one foreman strangled to
death. Many of the deaths involved the use of nitroglycerin and other
explosives in its construction.

Since her name is Sister Mary and her mother is Martha, of the Magdalene
family, I feel perhaps there is a faint reference to Sister Magdalena of
the Cross, who ascribed most of her powers to the intercession of demons
rather than angelic forces before repenting. This story is more innocuous –
but it does show how the demons work with God, almost under his
supervision.

Mary can mean “bitter”, “rebellion”, or even a “wished for child.” Beatrice
means “voyager”, Smoot is a name for someone who could afford rich foods or
sold fat or lard. It seems that her last name implies “like a Friar”. These
seem to relate to the story.

Who is Man-on-Fire? Is he related to the historical explosive deaths in the
Hoosac Tunnel? While the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration are a real order,
the Sisters of Perpetual Vigilance seem to be fictional.

SIR GABRIEL (503 -February 2, 1987)

Born at Carcassone,, Sir Gabriel grows up to serve Kng Arthur and lived a
heroic life before Arthur's defeat and death at Camlan. He wandered
aimlessly until he picked up a book in a ruined castle near Gastonbury, and
became so absorbed that he forgot all about his life and entered a
“nepenthean” state until a sour faced woman touched him on the shoulder.
She tells him he is her husband, Harry Appledorf. His golden aura
disappears and he finds himself living in a small apartment in St. Louis.
He knows that he was once Sir Gabriel, “and now and again he returns to the
book he found himself holding at the time his wife tapped his shoulder. It
was this one.” He dies as Harry Appledorf.

Certainly here is an inversion of* Don Quixote* – a knight picks up a book
in Glastonberry and becomes Harry Appledorf. While this plays with the
ability of a book to serve as a kind of wish fulfillment, it has been
inverted – in the midst of despair Sir Gabriel escapes to an ordinary life
far removed from the world of King Arthur. Which is real doesn't truly
matter, as the artificiality and metatextual nature of *Bibliomen *is
directly invoked.

Harry means “ruler” and Appledorf probably means “cottage or village of
apples” or something close to it. Gabriel means “strong man of God.”

Usually, the character of low mimesis dreams of having some power and
grasping towards a reality where mythic or high mimesis is possible – here,
the character of mythic proportions in his depression transforms into an
ordinary, hen-pecked man.

JOHN GLASKIN (1899- )

Here we receive the fictional biography of the writer John Glaskin. He was
born at Saltburn-by-the-Sea in the North Riding in 1899. He moved to London
and published in *The Boys Own Weekly, The Yellow Book* (which would have
been out of print after 1897) and *New Witness* (which was edited by GK
Chesterton).

He is friends with Virginia and Leonard Woolf until a year after her
suicide, “when Leonard offered to 'dig up a girl for him, too.” [Virginia
Woolf was cremated, as was Leonard, and their ashes buried under an elm
tree – shades of *Peace*?]

Shaw hated him as a “regular Don Juan” [referencing the third act of *Man
and Superman*, often called “Don Juan in Hell”, where the Devil and Don
Juan have a philosophical debate]. The story states Gissing treasured him
for counseling him not to marry, but it is unclear if this refers to George
Gissing (who died in 1903 and had turbulent relationships with women) or
his son (who did not seem to have marital problems– though both were
writers.) In the chronology of* Bibliomen* it must be the son, but there
are several indications that dates are being tampered with in *Bibliomen*
as jokes by Gold (such as *The Yellow Book* being out of print by the time
Glaskin went to London). The textual jokes that Glaskin was always trying
to match H.G. Wells up with girls is of course unnecessary: in real life
Wells seemed to have many affairs with his wife's consent in a fairly
non-traditional lifestyle.

Hemingway likes Glaskin, “believing he had thrown their fight.” In Africa,
Glaskin lurks in a leopard skin on Mt. Kilimanjaro and Hemingway fires on
him. His best known books are *Sixpence for Buns*, *Brideshead*, and *You
Can't Go Home at All.*

“Having gained literary immortality, Glaskin can never die. He presently
lives in Kent under the name of Saunders, where he keeps bees and vice
versa.” [Edward Saunders, an English entomologist, wrote, among other
books, *Wild Bees, Wasps and Ants and Other Stinging Insects*, though he
died in 1910.]

The magazines Glaskin supposedly published in were ridiculously diverse – a
boy's magazine, a conservative religious one, and an avant-garde one
reputed to be fairly amoral. His biography is sensationally eclectic and
obviously fabricated, and this entry pokes fun at the sensationalist
biography of the famous.

Why is Glaskin equated with Saunders?

KOPMAN GOLDFLEAS ( May 1, 1940 – January 7, 1987)

Kopman Goldfleas works as a retail clerk in a camera store before becoming
a self-trained photographer. After 1967, he supported himself with
free-lance photography. In 1980, Bernard A. French commissioned him to
photograph Michelangelo's *Aphrodite Preparing to Seduce Paris* in San
Benito, Italy. He finds that the village priest had painted over it in
white because it was obscene.

Goldfleas says he needs to take a photo as proof, but takes three days to
shoot. When he returns, he locks himself in his darkroom to develop the
photographs because “he believed Michelangelo's painting could be “brought
up” by optical methods, much as palimpsestic writing is made to appear on
the parchment from which it has been removed.” Eventually he stops eating
the vitamins and Necco wafers his family shoves under the door, and his son
finds him dead. His son Claude believes he fell for the image of Aphrodite
and would not leave her or surrender the image to his publisher. Claude
destroyed the negatives, feeling that Aphrodite was “overdeveloped.”

Besides dealing with photography as an obsessive art, we see the
subjectivity of taste: obscene and worthy of suppression to one, ideal and
worthy of obsession to a second, and too voluptuous to the final observer–
three different reactions to one image. The painting is fictional, though
it harkens back to some of Gold's talk of the Venus de Milo in *Peace, *and
just as he posits an apple in hand, Aphrodite is here seducing Paris for
the gift of an apple of discord.

Kopman is a name for a clever person, “head man”. Claude means “lame”.

PETER O. HENRY (January 22, 1965 – November 2, 1987)

His mother tells stories of how at four years old Peter was entertaining
crowds of older children. Some of his crayon efforts “are at least good
enough to earn the condemnation of most college writing workshops.”

He left school at fourteen and worked for a time at an automobile
dealership, writing “Two Cigarettes” and “A Black Goy”. He was arrested for
burglary in 1981 and maintained his innocence, jailed for three years. He
moved to New Jersey where he composed his stories on the word processor at
the public library. Working in textiles, he lost all four fingers of his
right hand in 1986 and drew workman's compensation. His only published work
was “Dustywings” in *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction* before
being admitted to a hospital for pneumonia, of which he died. One of his
stories supposedly served as the basis for Lothar Schmidt's opera “The
Short Nosed Doll.” (Lothar Schmid was a famous chess player in real life
who was reputed to own the largest collection of books on chess in the
world – he was the arbiter between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972).

This entry ties together some of the biographical facts from the life of O.
Henry, though some sound like the stories of Jesus as a child amazing the
wise men at the temple and his peers. The author O. Henry was at one point
accused of embezzlement by a bank at which he worked and was eventually
arrested. He fled to New Orleans and then Honduras by changing trains right
before his trial. He served only three years (just as Peter O. Henry did).

While Peter O. Henry has to type at the library, I am unsure which author
this references – Bradbury famously wrote many of his most enduring works
on just such a public typewriter.

Here we have the exploration of the artist only recognized long after his
death. Of course the name Peter means “rock or stone”.
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