BOOKS OF THE DAY
Book Market (Graham Greene) Philosopher's Holiday (C. E. M. Joad) World Economy in Transition (Honor Croome A Critique of Russian Statistics (Ian Bowen) Two Great Englishmen (A. L. Rowse) ... • • • ... ..
PAGE
• 58 59 59 6o 62
Australian Journey (Helen Simpson) The English Miss (Sally Graves) .. The Island of Zeus (William Plomer) Fiction (Forrest Reid)
PAGE ... 64 .. 64
... 66 ... 68
BOOK MARKET
By GRAHAM GREENE
A SUNK railway track and a gin distillery flank the gritty street. There is something Victorian about the whole place—an air of ugly commercial endeavour mixed with odd idealisms and philanthropies. It isn't only the jumble of unattractive titles on the dusty spines, the huge weight of morality at sixpence a time : even the setting has an earnestness. . . . The public- houses are like a lesson in temperance.
It isn't all books by any means in the book market: a dumb man presides over the first stall given up to paintbrushes and dividers ; we pass wireless parts, rubber heels, odd stony collections of nuts and bolts, gramophone records, cycle tyres, spectacles (hospital prescriptions made up on the spot under the shadow of the gin distillery), a case of broken (I was going to say moth-eaten) butterflies—privet-hawks and orange-tips and red admirals losing their antennae and powder, shabby like second-hand clothes. One stall doesn't display its wares at all: only labels advertising Smell Bombs, Itching Powder, Cigarette Bangs—Victorian, too, the painful physical humour, reminding us of Cruickshank on the poor and Gilbert on old age.
And then at last the books. It is a mistake to look for bar- gains here, or even to hope to find any books you really want— unless you happen to want Thackeray, Froude or Macaulay on the cheap. Those authors are ubiquitous. No, the book market is the place for picking up odd useless information. Here, for instance, is Dibdin's Purification of Sewage and Water, published by the Sanitary Publishing Company, next to Spiritual Counsel for District Visitors, Submarine Cables and Chicago Police Problems, published—it seems broad- minded—by the Chicago University Press. Of course, there are lots of folios called Views of the Lakes . . . or of Italy, Switzerland, the Tyrol, as the case may be ; and one can buy, in pale blue paper parts, Bessemer on Working Blast Fur- naces. Doll Caudel in Paris seems to be part of a series and looks a little coarse.
Somebody had left a book open on a stall, and I read with some amazement : " George Moore nad a great idea of duty. ' If I have one thing,' he says in his diary, it is an imperative sense of duty.' He was always possessed with the full sense of doing his duty.' He wished to do it; and he prayed to God to help him do it. But what duty? " What, indeed? Of course, one remembers the scene in Salve, when Moore said a prayer with Mr. Mahaffy and was presented with a prayer book, but this emphasis on duty seemed a little odd until I found the title-page and the author—Samuel Smiles, LL.D. This George Moore was not a writer, but a wholesale merchant and a philanthropist, and here, perhaps, is the real delight of the book market—nowhere else would one be likely to find the life of a Victorian draper. And it is rewarding. Smiles deserved his popularity ; there is a bold impressionist vitality about his style ; he roughs in very well the atmosphere of commercial travelling : the astute offer of a favourite snuff, the calculated jest, the encounters in hotel rooms—the Union Hotel, Birmingham, and the Star at Man- chester, the seedy atmosphere of benevolence—what he calls " Mr. Moore's labours of love ": the hospital for incurables, the penny bank, the London Porters' Benevolent Association, the Kensington Auxiliary Bible Society, the Pure Literature Society (Mr. Moore's favourite book, unlike his namesake's, was The- Memoirs and Remains of Dr. M'Cheyne). His oddest philanthropy perhaps was " in marrying people who were not, but who ought to have been, married "—or else his attempt to introduce copies of the Bible into the best Paris hotels. But Dr. Smiles had more than vigour ; he had a macabre if ungrammatical imagination, as when he describes the end of the first Mrs. Moore. "Her remains were con- veyed to Cumberland. On arrival at Carlisle, Mr. Moore slept in the Station Hotel. It seemed strange to him, that while in his comfortable bed, his dead wife should be laying cold in the railway truck outside, within sight of the hotel windows."
Macabre—but not quite so macabre as this other book which has lost half its title-page, but seems to be called The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death. Published in 1746, and illustrated with some grim little copperplates, it contains " a great Variety of amusing and well-attested Instances of Per- sons who have return'd to Life in their Coffins, in their Graves, under the Hands of the Surgeons, and after they had remain'd apparently dead for a considerable Time in the Water." A scholarly little work, which throws some doubt upon the story that Duns Scotus " bit his own Hands in his Grave," it carries in the musty pages some of the atmosphere of an M. R. James story—there is an anecdote from Basingstoke too horrible to set down here which might have pleased the author of 0 Whistle and I'll Come to You. I was pleased to find a few more details of Ann Green, who was executed at Oxford in r65o and was revived by her friends—about whose resurrection, it may be remembered, Anthony Wood wrote some rather bad verses—and before laying the book back beside the battered brown tin trunk which carried the sales- man's stock, I noted this recipe for reviving the apparently dead: " We ought to irritate his Nostrils by introducing into them the Juice of Onions, Garlick, and Horse-radish, or the feather'd End of a Quill, or the Point of a Pencil: stimulate•his Organs of Touch with Whips and Nettles; and if possible shock his Ears by hideous Shrieks and excessive Noises."
Poor human body which must be clung to at all costs. There is very little light relief in the book market—an old copy of Three Men on a Bummel, that boisterous work, all sobs and horseplay, and a promising folio out of my reach called simply The Imperial Russian Dinner Service. The smell of mortality, morality, and thrown-out books go together —and the smell of the antiquated Metropolitan Line. Here is another moralist. In Posthuma Christiana (1712, price 6d.) William Crouch, the Quaker, laments the Restoration—" The Roaring, Swearing, Drinking, Revelling, Debauchery, and Extravagancy of that Time I cannot forget," and a few lines, as I turned the pages, caught the imagination as Blind Pew once did at the Benbow Inn. He is quoting an account of the Quakers, thirty-seven men and eighteen women, who were banished to Jamaica. "The Ship was called The Black Eagle, and lay at anchor in Bugby's Hole, the Master's name was Fudge, by some called Lying Fudge." They lay in the Thames seven weeks, and half of them died and were buried in the marshes below Gravesend. " Twenty-seven survived, and remained on board the Ship ; and there was one other Person of whom no certain Account could be given." .
That is the kind of unexpected mystery left on one's hands by a morning in the book market. A storm was coming up behind the gin distillery, and the man with the Itching Powder was picking up his labels—trade isn't good these days fox his kind of bomb. It was time to emerge again out of the macabre past into the atrocious present.
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