Fame & Folly (35 page)

Figuring out the substantial character and content of that amazement took a little longer. No one had told me, when we were introduced—a handshake at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia—that Mr. Seymour Adelman was (as a Rosenbach publication itself puts it) “a famous Philadelphia bookman.” What
I saw was a tall gentleman, conventionally distinguished, but with one shoulder just a shade tipped down, as if this business of looking distinguished had happened in spite of himself, without his meaning it to; as if he worried that looking important would make him seem self-important. At that moment he had no smile; he wasn’t exactly at ease; it appeared he didn’t like being “introduced.” He was probably afraid that his credentials were about to be reeled off, and he would stand exposed for what he was: one of the most passionate bibliophiles on the American scene, a collector in whom the near evidence of a poet’s mind and hand inspired rapt and tremulous awe. There was no reasonable way, really, for Seymour to be introduced. He would have had to be defined, and that would have made him bashful.

Now if, at that early encounter, Seymour
had
been defined, this is what I would most likely have heard: “Please meet Mr. Adelman, in whom the acquisitive faculty is a lesser, though essential, aspect of the delectably inquisitive. Curiosity and rapture, infatuation and fascination—these are what motivate Mr. Adelman. If he has contrived to live in the presence of a marvelous thing—a letter, a document, a manuscript, a drawing, a broadside, a painting—it isn’t simply to
own
it, like some possessive tycoon, but to enter its intelligence, to dream himself into it. Please note that Mr. Adelman has dreamed himself into American and British history and painting and literature, and beyond—even into the boxing ring! Collecting is the domestication of beloved apparitions, so it’s no wonder that Mr. Adelman has chosen to set up housekeeping in the most sumptuous of all the palaces of the imagination. He doesn’t mean to stay there alone, though—the windows and doors are wide open, with Mr. Adelman waving like mad at the front gate, calling out ‘Come and see!’ to every fellow dreamer.”

But since no one said any of this, I had no idea of what lay ahead. I had never known a private collector, and thought of “bookmen,” when I thought of them at all, as pinched experts on the condition of old leather bindings. I had the low notion that bibliophilism belonged to the extrinsic, the superficial, the merely valuable—the farthest pole from true poets and their true lives.

Seymour contradicted all that. I followed him down into the
hold of the Canaday Library of Bryn Mawr College, into his captain’s cabin—Room A-10. These were high seas! “Do you like A. E. Housman?” he asked: testing a potential member of the crew. I confessed to having been smitten at the age of sixteen. “Well, then,” said Seymour, and put into my hands an autographed transcript of “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough.” Housman at his purest, most lyrical, most crystal. And set down by the poet’s own pen. Seymour’s pride in this fabled cargo rocked the little room like a fresh wave—not the pride of ownership, but something else: a cheerful reverence, one might call it, a kind of patriotism for beauty and grace. Elation, perhaps, over the seamless continuity of art.

The next moment I was gazing down at still another Housman manuscript, also in Housman’s own hand:

It was a recipe for pickled herring. “I am happy indeed,” Seymour wrote me afterward, “that you recovered quickly from the encounter with Pickled Herring à la Housman. I might add that yours was a very mild case; most visitors to A-10, after even the merest glimpse of the recipe, collapse in a heap, gasping, and are routinely taken to Bryn Mawr Hospital.”

In return, I sent him a rhyme.

it brazenly began. The “future home” of my letter, Seymour responded grandly, “is A-10, where I know it will be welcomed by its peers—my Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Tennyson letters.” And he emblazoned his signature with a flourish: “Now, hence, and forever.”

Now, hence, and forever. The loyal little “my” that preceded
those noble names of English literature—for Seymour, it was “my” Keats, “my” Shelley, “my” Wordsworth, and all the rest, not because he had won these consummately precious world-treasures at hard auction, not because he had been victorious over other collectors (though the triumph of the chase ought not to be discounted), but because he had made a pact with genius. He offered his own life, a life of veneration and concentration and care—a dedicated curatorship; and genius, on its side, was simply to give him leave to warm his hands at its fires. A covenant both modest and glorious.

Seymour liked to say that it was “the malignant influence of mathematics” that exiled him from the University of Pennsylvania after his sophomore year. More likely it was the beneficent promptings of immortality. It seems clear that Seymour had to be himself—a visionary seeker—no matter what: he went in a straight line from earliest youth. In 1924, still in his teens, he bought, for thirteen dollars, a letter by Charles Dickens, written in Philadelphia. He was attracted from the first by the halo of stubbornness that surrounds imaginative literature, the deep radiances only poets have the obstinacy to see all the way down into; and it was these flashes from the fiery hoop of eternity Seymour was secretly after. (Now, hence, and forever!)

He could sometimes cloak the sight of this blazing wheel behind the charming sleight-of-hand of the jokes and stories that teased his own ambition, but it was there all the same, and probably all the time. Here it is hidden in the catalogue note to Item 184 in the Adelman Collection:

In regard to this letter, mentioning Dunkirk, it can be stated, on the highest authority, that its recipient has not yet fully recovered from the joyous shock of receiving it. He had expected, at most, a note of acknowledgment signed by one of Churchill’s five secretaries.

This appears in the heart of much other Churchilliana, but what rushes up out of the surprise in Seymour’s voice—
his
voice unquestionably, as plain as a fingerprint—is the terrible heat of history: history as furnace and forge. Seymour was out to touch, even if only with the tip of his thumbnail, the heaving flames of that part of eternity which was his own time.

Yet he rarely left Philadelphia. “During the last eleven years,” he said in 1962, and again in 1974, “I have not been away from Philadelphia for twenty-four consecutive hours. And if my luck holds out, I look forward to another uninterrupted decade or two within the city limits.” The London he knew inside out was a map drawn in its gossamer particularity on the underside of his eyelids. (A map preserved, by the way, in Seymour’s most delightful essay, the celebrated “Changing Patterns in the Function of Travel Agencies.”) He could voyage to this handy London at will—“we’re going to see Shelley plain!”—and always find his favorite poets at home when he knocked. (He never actually admitted to it, but there is a hint or two in some of his paragraphs that he may have gone on these phantom journeys to London in the family car, with “my mother and sister on the lookout for scrimshaw and samplers, and my father on the lookout for reckless drivers,” right there over the Atlantic.)

Though there is no mistaking the inimitable apparatus of Seymour’s magnetism for anyone else’s, there is, anyhow, a second reason for a limitlessly recognizable and universal Seymour. It can be witnessed in an arresting painting by Seymour’s friend, Susan Macdowell Eakins, the widow of Thomas Eakins. An elegant young man in spectacles is reading in a beautifully carved chair. One long leg is crossed over the other. The head, too, is long, the hair richly thick. A nearby table holds books, a periodical, a splendid vase, an intricate little sculpture; also the young man’s stylish fedora and fringed scarf. On a wall behind, nearly lost in dimness, is a work by Thomas Eakins. A bright sheet has fallen beside the young man’s chair—a poster by Lovat Fraser, for a performance of
The Beggar’s Opera
at London’s Lyric Theatre. The young man has so far never been to London—it is 1932. The fingers of his right hand press dreamily into the pages of his book. If you stare long
enough (not at the angelic mouth, but at the serious eyes), you can see the immortal Seymour just beginning a characteristic smile. The portrait is called, unsurprisingly, “The Bibliophile.” It is a singular representation of an American Muse: Seymour as the embodiment—the ingathering—of imagination, of heritage, of civilization and its arts.

S
EYMOUR, A FAMOUS
Philadelphia bookman, has finally left the city limits. He is in London at last—the true London, the London of the English poets. A hundred geniuses of the English tongue are streaming toward him. Dickens, Yeats, Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Max Beerbohm, Stevenson, Wilde, Hazlitt, Chatterton, Ralph Hodgson, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg—they are all hugely curious about the Adelman Collection. They want to look themselves up in the catalogue. Seymour, meanwhile, is taking tea with Keats. Tomorrow he will nibble herring with Housman. He is planning to treat FitzGerald—the FitzGerald of the
Rubáiyát
—to some vanilla ice cream, Seymour’s own favorite. Churchill has asked for an appointment. Wordsworth is waiting eagerly on the doormat. The incandescent ring of eternity fires the horizon, and Seymour is reaching out to collect it.

HELPING T. S. ELIOT WRITE BETTER (NOTES TOWARD A DEFINITIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY)
 

I
T IS NOT
yet generally known to the world of literary scholarship that an early version of T. S. Eliot’s celebrated poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” first appeared in
The New Shoelace
, an impoverished publication of uncertain circulation located on East Fifteenth Street. Eliot, then just out of Harvard, took the train down from Boston carrying a mottled manila envelope. He wore slip-on shoes with glossy toes. His long melancholy cheeks had the pallor associated in those days with experimental poets.

The New Shoelace
was situated on the topmost floor of an antique factory building. Eliot ascended in the elevator with suppressed elation; his secret thought was that, for all he knew, the young Henry James, fastidiously fingering a book review for submission, might once have entered this very structure. The brick walls smelled of old sewing machine oil. The ropes of the elevator, visible through a hole in its ceiling, were frayed and slipped occasionally; the car moved languidly, groaning. On the seventh floor Eliot emerged. The deserted corridor, with its series of shut doors, was an intimidating perplexity. He passed three with frosted glass
panels marked by signs:
BIALY’S WORLDWIDE NEEDLES; WARSHOWER WOOL TRADING CORP
.; and
MEN
. Then came the exit to the fire escape.
The New Shoelace
, Eliot reasoned, must be in the opposite direction.
MONARCH BOX CO.; DIAMOND’S LIGHTING FIXTURES—ALL NEW DESIGNS; MAX’S THIS-PLANET-ONLY TRAVEL SERVICE; YANKELOWITZ’S ALL-COLOR BRAID AND TRIM; LADIES
. And there, at the very end of the passage, tucked into a cul-de-sac, was the office of
The New Shoelace
. The manila envelope had begun to tremble in the young poet’s grip. Behind that printed title reigned Firkin Barmuenster, editor.

In those far-off days,
The New Shoelace
, though very poor, as its shabby furnishings readily attested, was nevertheless in possession of a significant reputation. Or, rather, it was Firkin Barmuenster who had the reputation. Eliot was understandably cowed. A typist in a fringed scarf sat huddled over a tall black machine, looking rather like a recently oppressed immigrant out of steerage, swatting the keys as if they were flies. Five feet from the typist’s cramped table loomed Firkin Barmuenster’s formidable desk, its surface hidden under heaps of butter-spotted manuscript, odoriferous paper bags, and porcelain-coated tin coffee mugs chipped at their rims. Firkin Barmuenster himself was nowhere to be seen.