Implications of an Incinerator 'D
By STRIX
rOR sawdust, as for poetry, there is a limited market. More of both are produced than can be sold. But here the analogy between them ends. Sawdust is waste, the inevitable by-product of converting a noble tree into lacklustre planks. Poetry, roughly speaking, is the opposite. It is not a by-product; it is not inevitable; and its tradi- tional purpose might be summed up as converting planks back into trees.
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My capacity for producing poetry is nil, my annual output of sawdust enormous. Most wood- land-owners possess some kind of sawmill; I have never met one who possesses the right kind. We almost all started from' scratch, with a primitive apparatus which at unregarded moments turned out fencing stakes for the estate or firewood for the house. Mine, until the end of the last war, was powered by a huge steam traction engine, manageable only by its mahout, an elderly pen- sioner; it stood in a vast, dilapidated shed, open to the elements on three sides. Since then, in a series of inconsequent stages, a half-baked modernisation has been put in hand. The shed has been enlarged and rebuilt, this time with walls which keep the wind out but make it impossible to see, without appearing inquisitive, whether anybody inside is actually doing any work. The two largest saws—the younger is forty years old—are driven, uneconomically, by ancient tractors; a third, smaller one works by electricity; a fourth does not work at all, I forget why.
I am thus left, like many another land-owner, with a small, obsolete, inefficient industrial plant. Were I an industrialist, and if the sawmill could be kept working flat out all the year round, it might despite its imperfections show a handsome profit, since the raw material it uses costs me nothing except the overheads of bringing it in from the woods. But the woodmen have many other more important tasks, for sawing can hardly be described as a branch of silviculture; and when they are planting or cleaning or felling or lining out seedlings in the nursery the sawmill stands idle.
Even so, however, we shall sell over £2,000 worth of sawn timber this year, mostly chocks, lids and coverboards for the coalmines made out of unsaleable beech thinnings. With my primitive saws the wastage in terms of sawdust is 10 per cent. The mill produces roughly .1,000 cubic feet of sawn timber in a month, so you might suppose that I was left with only 100 cubic feet of sawdust to dispose of. In this you would be wrong. Sawdust is many times bulkier than wood, and what I am left with after sawing 1,000 cubic feet of timber is, as nearly as I can calculate, 700 cubic feet of sawdust, or enough to fill a room ten feet long, ten feet broad and seven feet high.
We get rid of an occasional sack to a nearby fruit-farmer, but the whole place would have been buried under sawdust long ago were it not that an old brick-kiln stands near the sawmill in the estate yard. Here, with the help of a wheelbarrow and by a process which would reduce any time- and-motion expert to hysterical despair, we burn the stuff. Heaven knows what else we burn as well, for some of the villagers pay clandestine visits to the kiln after dark, and once grisly suspicions crossed my mind when I saw pram tracks leading up to the edge of the burning though unfiery furnace but not, apparently, coming away again.
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To a literary man the possession of his own, personal incinerator opens possibilities which at first seem bright. When one of his books is trans- lated into a foreign language he normally receives at least one and often as many as six copies of the new edition. He peruses it with a baffled com- placency.
'Og tot inglanderskin schribblipholk,' the blurb says, 'Prix e, par fillom sagasticom fitddicibotn, clamchowdit duo manx phrilliposh, glarb ac dungsproodi. Burstnit en 1907, egg vom skeedlit iz Oxphordu . . .' This sounds all right, though he cannot help wondering slightly about 'phrilliposh.' Its off-white pages uncut, the book, which has an indefinable air of being made of processed birch-bark, goes into the shelf on which his-Works are arranged. The five spare copies of Gliv og Todlkippz are left to find their own level in what, were his house a ship, would correspond to the bilge.
As time goes by these aimless symbols of his literary prowess in Ruritania and elsewhere accumulate. After the last war, when a succession of Germans, Poles, Danes and Spaniards did fleeting tours of duty in my kitchen, some of the translations were taken down from the shelves and may actually have been read as well as sprinkled with gravy. But there still remained, dotted about the place, deposits of redundant copies, and soon after the brick-kiln was relumed I cast into it three copies of Seiklus Brasiilias, which thirty years ago took (for all I know) the literary world of Bucharest by storm, and with them no fewer than three dozen copies of a more recent pocket edition of the same work in German.
But that, although I am not a prolific writer, still leaves me with a shelf full of tawdry-looking volumes in French, German, Dutch, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Rumanian, in more than half of which I could not, if I tried, read a single sentence. They are of no possible use to me; the right place for them is the kiln, but somehow they do not go there. I am puzzled by my reluctance to consign them to the flames.
It is not as if they were prominently displayed, ground-bait for the visitor's curiosity; nobody ever sees them except me. It is not that their format is elegant or even bizarre. What I suppose has happened is that they have got themselves taken on the strength of my litres et penates. They are at once trophies and curios. They are like Nanny's china ornament with 'A Present from Weymouth' on it, like the bunches of heather tied on to cars bound south from Scotland, like the obscure decoration conferred by some third-rate Power upon a former military attaché at its capi- tal. They are, if not positively vulgar, valueless; yet I cannot quite bring myself to jettison them.
I wonder what the Giants of Literature do about a problem which must, for them, attain almost sawdust-like dimensions? Are there on the Cote d'Azur great catacombs where the translated works of Mr. Maugham are stored in tier upon tier of shelves? Does the Inland Revenue allow Mr. Priestley to charge against his taxes the rent of a warehouse in Bradford? And what on earth will happen to these polyglot collections when their owners die? What, if it comes to that, will happen to GIN og Todlkippz and the rest of my humbler but equally useless hoard?
The only sensible answer is that these birch- bark books will be destroyed. I still don't quite know what restrains me from taking them up to the brick-kiln after luncheon.
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