The Museum of Literary Souls

CHAPTER TWELVE

The next morning, once he had washed and breakfasted, Mr. Berger returned to Caxton Library. He brought with him some fresh pastries that he had bought in the local bakery in order to replenish Mr. Gedeon’s supplies, and a book of Russian poetry in translation of which he was unusually fond but which he now desired to present to Anna. Making sure that he was not being observed, he took the laneway that led to the library and knocked on the glass. He was briefly fearful that Mr. Gedeon might have spirited away the contents of the premises — books, characters, and all — overnight, fearful that the discovery by Mr. Berger of the library’s true nature might bring some trouble upon them all, but the old gentleman opened the door to Mr. Berger’s knock on the glass and seemed very pleased to see him return.

“Will you take some tea?” asked Mr. Gedeon, and Mr. Berger agreed, even though he had already had tea at breakfast and was anxious to return to Anna. Still, he had questions for Mr. Gedeon, particularly pertaining to Anna.

“Why does she do it?” he asked as he and Mr. Gedeon shared an apple scone between them.

“Do what?” said Mr. Gedeon. “Oh, you mean throw herself under trains.”

He picked a crumb from his waistcoat and put it on his plate.

“First of all, I should say that she doesn’t make a habit of it,” said Mr. Gedeon. “In all the years that I’ve been here, she’s done it no more than a dozen times. Admittedly, the incidents have been growing more frequent, and I have spoken to her about them in an effort to find some way to help, but she doesn’t seem to know herself why she feels compelled to relive her final moments in the book. We have other characters that return to their fates — just about all of our Thomas Hardy characters appear obsessed by them — but she’s the only one who reenacts her end. I can only give you my thoughts on the matter, and I’d say this: she’s the titular character, and her life is so tragic, her fate so awful, that it could be that both are imprinted upon the reader and her in a particularly deep and resonant way. It’s in the quality of the writing. It’s in the book. Books have power. You must understand that now. It’s why we keep all of these first editions so carefully. The fate of characters is set forever in those volumes. There’s a link between those editions and the characters that arrived here with them.”

He shifted in his chair and pursed his lips.

“I’ll share something with you, Mr. Berger, something that I’ve never shared with anyone before,” he said. “Some years ago we had a leak in the roof. It wasn’t a big one, but they don’t need to be big, do they? A little water dripping for hours and hours can do a great deal of damage, and it wasn’t until I got back from the picture house in Moreham that I saw what had happened. You see, before I left I’d set aside our manuscript copies of Alice in Wonderland and Moby Dick.”

“Moby Dick?” said Mr. Berger. “I wasn’t aware that there were any extant manuscripts of Moby Dick.”

“It’s an unusual one, I’ll admit,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Somehow it’s all tied up with confusion between the American and British first editions. The American edition, by Harper & Brothers, was set from the manuscript, and the British edition, by Bentley’s, was in turn set from the American proofs, but there are some six hundred differences in wording between the two editions. But in 1851, while Melville was working on the British edition based on proofs that he himself had paid to be set and plated before an American publisher had signed an agreement, he was also still writing some of the later parts of the book, and in addition he took the opportunity to rewrite sections that had already been set for America. So which is the edition that the library should store? The American, based on the original manuscript, or the British, based not on the manuscript but on a subsequent rewrite? The decision made by the Trust was to acquire the British edition and, just to be on the safe side, the manuscript. When Captain Ahab arrived at the library, both editions arrived with him.”

“And the manuscript of Alice in Wonderland? I understood that to be in the collection of the British Museum.”

“Some sleight of hand there, I believe,” said Mr. Gedeon. “You may recall that the Reverend Dodgson gave the original ninety-page manuscript to Alice Liddell, but she was forced to sell it in order to pay death duties following her husband’s death in 1928. Sotheby’s sold it on her behalf, suggesting a reserve of four thousand pounds. It went, of course, for almost four times that amount, to an American bidder. At that point the Trust stepped in, and a similar manuscript copy was substituted and sent to the United States.”

“So the British Museum now holds a fake?”

“Not a fake but a later copy made by Dodgson’s hand at the Trust’s instigation. In those days the Trust was always thinking ahead, and I’ve tried to keep up that tradition. I’ve always got an eye out for a book or character that may be taking off.

“So the Trust was very keen to have Dodgson’s original Alice. So many iconic characters, you see, and then there were the illustrations too. It’s an extremely powerful manuscript.

“But all of this is beside the point. Both of the manuscripts needed a bit of attention — just a careful clean to remove any dust or other media with a little polyester film. Well, I almost cried when I returned to the library. Some of the water from the ceiling had fallen on the manuscripts — just drops, nothing more, but enough to send some of the ink from Moby Dick onto a page of the Alice manuscript.”

“And what happened?” asked Mr. Berger.

“For one day, in all extant copies of Alice in Wonderland, there was a whale at the Mad Hatter’s tea party,” said Mr. Gedeon solemnly.

“What? I don’t remember that.”

“Nobody does; nobody but I. I worked all day to clean the relevant section and gradually removed all traces of Melville’s ink. Alice in Wonderland went back to the way it was before, but for that day every copy of the book, and all critical commentaries on it, noted the presence of a white whale at the tea party.”

“Good grief! So the books can be changed?”

“Only the copies contained in the library’s collection, and they in turn affect all others. This is not just a library, Mr. Berger; it’s the ur-library. It has to do with the rarity of the books in its collection and their links to the characters. That’s why we’re so careful with them. We have to be. No book is really a fixed object. Every reader reads a book differently, and each book works in a different way on each reader. But the books here are special. They’re the books from which all later copies came. I tell you, Mr. Berger, not a day goes by in this place that doesn’t bring me one surprise or another, and that’s the truth.”

But Mr. Berger was no longer listening. He was thinking again of Anna and the awfulness of those final moments as the train approached, of her fear and her pain, and how she seemed doomed to repeat them because of the power of the book to which she had given her name.

But the contents of the books were not fixed. They were open not just to differing interpretations but to actual change.

Fates could be altered.