Public Library and Other Stories

The poet

So she’d taken the book and she’d thrown it across the room and when it hit the wall then fell to the floor with its pages open it nearly broke, which was one of the worst things you could do, maybe a worse thing even than saying a blasphemous curse, no, than saying a blasphemous curse in a church, or near a church, to break a book.

And she was a strong lass and she had a good throw on her, as good a throw as a boy any day, easily as good as thon holiday boy she’d shoved into the river. For he might be at school down south but that didn’t mean no folk knew Latin north of Edinburgh, did it, they had the Latin up here as well, not that he even knew what he claimed to anyway. Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit she’d said and he’d looked at her blank-like, the so-called boy scholar who’d never heard of Horace, who said pater and mater to rhyme with alligator, with the mater and the pater vacationing in Nairnshire, so taken with the area, and then he’d said the thing about highland girls and looked at her to let her know he’d a liking, the cheek of it. For he might have a father a famous surgeon but that meant nothing when you’d no need of a surgeon, aye, and no need of a father either, or a mother. And were all Edinburgh boys that feart to hang off the parapet of a bridge by their arms? He was too feart even to try, him and his sister afraid to climb even a tree, and a girl afraid of a tree was one thing, but a boy? Oh no, his clothes he said and his sister with her painted face and her talk of boyfriends, standing doing a dance, everybody’s doing it back at home, don’t you know it, Olive, really truly don’t you up here och dear me that’s too too, then she started doing it, a mad thing with her shoulders and her legs, right there in the long grass at the river, the midges jazzing up and down in a cloud above the sister’s head, and then the brother joined in, he knew the steps too, he shimmied up the riverbank away from the sister, took her own arm as if to make her do it too and then — Well, then he’d found himself in the river, and his good clothes too.

Then she’d run for home, blasphem-o blasphem-as blasphem-at, over and over under her breath to the sound of her own feet hitting the path past the ruined church, blasphem-amus, blasphem-atus, blasphem-ant, it wasn’t grammatical or real Latin like but it made a fine sound. She was laughing some, though she was shocked a bit at herself for doing it, in her head she could see the shock on the face of the boy from the cold of the water when he scrambled to his feet on the slippy stones, the water had darkened his good trews and his jacket too all up the side of himself he’d fallen on.

But it was when she was blasphemating up the High Street she saw the father of the man who was her father. He had his back to her, he was looking in the windows of the butcher’s. And when she got back to the house her Aunt was out and her mother she could hear shifting about upstairs like a piece of misery as usual, and something, a badness, had come over her right then and she’d hated them all (except her Aunt, she’d never hate her Aunt) and she’d gone to the shelf where the books were kept and she’d taken the first one off the shelf her hand had come to and she’d thrown it.

And the book had broken right open and that’s when she’d seen there was a music inside it, one nobody knew about, one you could never have guessed at, that was part of the way that the book had been made.

They were Fraser books. They’d sent them, the Frasers. There were books, and good new clothes too came to the house sometimes, and one day last month — it wasn’t a birthday, it was well past her birthday, but Aunt said it would be meant for her sixteenth — there was even a watch, Aunt said a real gold one and put it away upstairs in its velvet in its hard box still in the shop wrapping from Aberdeen, for they knew otherwise it’d end in the river or buried in sand on the beach, sand choking its dainty face and nobody finding it for who knows how many summers or winters, if ever.

St Agnes Eve! Ah, bitter chill it was. The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold. The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass. That was the poem Keats had written, about her birthdate, 20 January, four long months ago her birthday, and one thing certain, time meant something more than the face of a wee gold watch, aye they could send a watch fine, even one that’d obviously cost a fair bit, but if they saw her in the street they’d look right through her, her father too. Since she was a quite wee girl he’d been back and as close as Flemington right up the road, so close a bird would hardly notice it, hardly have to use its wings if it crossed the sky from here to there.

But he may as well still be in Australia with the sheep for all the difference his coming back made to his daughter, in fact she wished he were, so there’d be no danger of seeing him, no chance of him and his not-seeing her, in a street so close to home. She wished him thousands of miles away from here, truthfully she wished him on Algol, the bad most evil star in the sky, and her mother too, they could go and live there just the two of them and happily never exchange a word to each other for as long as they lived and nobody else would have to care. They could just go, the both, and take all their unsaying with them. For if a flower grew near them, even just the air that came from them would wither that flower.

But did that mean she would wither things too?

Did a badness pass from them to her?

Would it ruin the feel of the mouth of the hill pony on the palm of her hand when she went the hike by herself and gave it the apple she had for her lunch, the bluntness of the mouth, the breath of it, the whiskers round the mouth she could feel, the warm wet and the slaver on her hand that she wiped on her skirt and got into the trouble about?

And the nest shaped like a dome, something that the bird just made without needing to know, without reading in a book how to make, and made it so solid and hung it so firm in the thinnest of the branches over the river?

There was the word gorgeous, and there was the word north, and there was a sound that went between the words that she liked. Could you wither a word?

There was the orchard nobody went to. How could anything touch it? It was all blossom right now. There was the whole meadow full of flowers, wild ones, all the bright faces, out that window beyond this house only a couple of streets away. She sat low on the old nursing chair and the Fraser books sat on the shelf right next to her eye. Fraser. Olive. O LIVE. I LOVE. O VILE. EVIL O.

She reached and took out the first book. She didn’t even look at it, she threw the book. She just threw it.

And that’s how, when the spine fell off it and she picked it up to look at the bad damage she’d done, she saw — music.

Inside, behind the spine, the place where the pages were bound was lined with it, notes and staves all the way down the place where the name of the book had been. There’d been a music inside it all the years the book had been in the world. And that was a fair few years, for on one of its first pages was the date 1871. So that made it fifty-four years, near sixty, there’d been music nobody’d known about in the back of — she looked at the broken piece of spine — Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. And the paper with the notes on it looked like it might be a good bit older than the book whose spine it was hidden in, for there was a quality to the way the staves and notes were formed that didn’t look like these things looked nowadays.

That was an e, but she didn’t have the beginning of the stave so she didn’t know what key. C#, f, e, c#, b, b, f#, a. Then the piece of music ended where the paper had been cut to fit the spine. On the surviving bit of stave below: a, a, e, g, b, e, b.

She went to the space on the shelf that Ivanhoe had left empty. She put her finger to the top of the spine of the book next to the space, tipped the book out, watched it balance on its own weight then fall. She caught it in her hand. Waverley Novels. The Heart of Mid-Lothian. She ran her hand over the good spine. The paper of it felt like brushed leather. Maybe it was leather. It looked expensive. It looked like it would never break.

You could not tell whether there was music inside it just by looking at it.

The clean closed spines all along the Scott collection, book after book, quiet and waiting, lined three shelves. She shouldn’t even be in the front room. It was kept for the good. It wasn’t used.

(The boy’s face, surprised by the cold of the water. The dipper’s nest overhanging the river, disguised by leaves in summer, bare to the eye in winter. The carcasses hanging in the butcher’s window with the red and the white where the meat met the fat. The workings of the watch in its box in the dark.)

She looked at how well the stitching of the binding met the spine on the book in her hand. She gave it a tug with her fingers.

She went to the kitchen to get the gutting knife.

Olive Fraser, born 20 January 1909, Aberdeen. Died 9 December 1977, Aberdeen.

Brought up by her beloved aunt, Ann Maria Jeans, in Redburn, Queen Street, Nairn, on the Moray Firth coast in the Scottish Highlands. Estranged parents leave her there when they emigrate (separately) to Australia, and continue to do so after they come back (still estranged).

A force of energy and adventure, a headlong kind of a girl. That lassie lives in figures of speech. Blue-eyed blonde, so eye-catching that the newly instated Rector of the University of Aberdeen (which is where she goes in 1927 when she’s finished school, to study English), who happens to be driving past in his carriage from his own Instatement Ceremony, turns his head and cranes his neck to catch another glimpse of such a startlingly beautiful girl in the crowd.

A talker. A livewire. She was a beauty, but she gave the men a run for it. Hilariously funny. A poet. Circle of admiring undergraduates at her feet and her lines spilling out of her all Spenserian stanza. Annoying to young men in seminars: she niver thocht that up hersel, far did she get it fae? Beloved of landladies (and simultaneously disapproved of): that Miss Fraser! she keepit awfa ’ours. Bright, glowing like a lightbulb, ideas flickering like power surges. When trying to string fishing line on a rod and reel in her student lodgings, tangles herself up so badly that she has to toss a coin out of a window to a passing boy to get him to send a telegram to her friend Helena, a couple of years younger and a writer herself, enthralled by her exciting older poet friend: imprisoned in digs. Please rescue. Olive. Recalls, much later in life, this friend’s happy family house in Aberdeen, the welcoming shouts and the laughter, the merriness, the warmth. Recalls her friend’s mother’s singing, and the lucky stone with a hole in it that her friend’s mother gives her before her final exams.

Outstanding student. 1933: to Girton College in Cambridge on scholarship money, though a couple of years remain unaccounted for in between Aberdeen and Cambridge — poor health? poverty? mental exhaustion? Intermittently ill. Pale. Fatigued for no reason.

Five days of psychoanalysis in London: he simply took my mind to pieces and built it up again. I really feel as if I had been presented with a new heaven and a new earth, ten thousand cold showers on spring mornings and a Tinglow friction brush (mental).

Gains reputation as talented young poet. Wins Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse in 1935, only the second female student ever. Poem is called The Vikings. Senate unused to presenting anything to women: a kind of quasi academic dress had to be devised. Takes to calling herself Olave. Makes many new friends. Gets on many new people’s nerves: she was a pain in the neck. Strongly dislikes Cambridgeshire, too flat, too dank, too inland. Strongly dislikes Girton (remembers it ten years later, in a poem called On a Distant Prospect of Girton College, like this: Here does heavenly Plato snore, / A cypher, no more. / … / Here sits Dante in the dim / With Freud watching him. / … / Here does blessed Mozart seem / Alas, a sensual dream.). Girton, in turn, strongly dislikes her: she wasted the time of promising young scholars.

Bad headaches. Grey skin. Nosebleeds. Concentration lapses. Unexplained illness. Fatigue.

Drifts from job to job. Back north to help on farm. Trains polo-ponies in Oxfordshire. Assistant to archaeologist in Bedford. Wartime: applies to cypher dept in Royal Navy WRNS in Greenwich. Posted to Liverpool, junior officer on watch, witnesses blitzing of maternity hospital near Liverpool docks. Went out of her mind … thought the enemy were after her, trying to get in touch with her. 1945: Poultry worker. 1946: Bodleian librarian (gets the sack, leaves under a cloud). Solderer. Assistant nurse. Cleric. Shop girl (Fortnum’s, among others). 1949: living in Stockwell Street, Greenwich (now demolished), then Royal Hill, Greenwich. Made most of the furniture myself, being employed by a firm that had its own sawmill and was very generous in a thoughtful kind way to its employees and even to people who lived around. The death of the mother. The death of her aunt. The death of her dog, Quip, an Irish terrier. Drawn to Roman Catholicism; poetry becomes devotional. Poverty. One new outfit in the last twelve years.

1956 in London: onset of severe mental illness. I was walking along and I just blacked out and when I came to, I found myself up a tree. Diagnosed with schizophrenia. Hospitalized. I cannot write any literature. It is as though I had lost a limb. Medication: chlorpromazine. Like she’s been hammered down in a box and dropped below the Bermuda Deep. Unrecognizable, changed from the gallant, yellow-haired, rosy-cheeked girl. Grossly overweight, disfigured. Medication brings on painful sensitivity to sunlight. Puffy eyes. Skin grey, leathery. Stuffs enough hospital teddy bears (paltry sum per bear) nearly to ruin her hands. Buys herself ticket north.

1960s: moves from house to uneasy house, renting in Inverness, Capital of the Highlands, sixteen miles from Nairn. Hospitalized again. Seen in grounds of Craig Dunain, Inverness mental hospital, wandering about holding beaten-up typewriter. Moves back to Aberdeen, this time to Cornhill Hospital. Percipient woman doctor thinks schizophrenia might be misdiagnosis and medicates for hypothyroidism, myxoedema. As if by disenchantment herself again.

Sunlight. Three wonderful years of good health.

Cancer. Two operations. Dies in December 1977. Penniless at time of death. Friends gather in snow for funeral that never takes place: bad weather, mishap, misinformation, accident.

Winner, over the years, of twenty-two literary prizes and two gold medals. Very little work published. When I send a poem to a publisher with ‘Royal Mental Hospital’ at the top …

I have forgotten how to be / A bird upon a dawn-lit tree, / A happy bird that has no care / Beyond the leaf, the golden air. / I have forgotten moon and sun, / And songs concluded and undone, / And hope and ruth and all things save / The broken wit, the waiting grave.

*

In her gold medal-winning early poem, The Vikings, the dead are simultaneously ancient and young, younger than death and life. The poem’s narrator asks them how it’s possible that they’re so very beautiful:

O we are loved among the living still,

We are forgiven among the dead. We plough

In the old narrows of the spirit. We

Have woven our wealth into your mystery.

Here are three of her poems, the first from 1943, the second circa 1954, the third 1971.

THE PILGRIM

I have no heart to give thee, for I

Am only groundmists and a thing of wind,

And the stone echoes under bridges and the kind

Lights of high farms, the weary watchdog’s cry.

I have no desire for thy dreams, for my own

Are no dreams, but realities which are

The blind man’s sight, the sick man’s heavenly star

Fire of the homeless, to no other known.

THE POET (III)

Go to bed, my soul,

When the light is done.

Sleep from enemies

Blanketed in bone.

Let thy blood grow cold

As a mouldering stone

On a martyr’s tomb,

Known to God alone.

On the stair of truth

Down and up are one.

Bless the cobbled street

When the light is gone.

When the light is past

When the flower is shown

Let the poet be

Common earth and stone.

THE UNWANTED CHILD

I was the wrong music

The wrong guest for you

When I came through the tundras

And thro’ the dew.

Summon’d, tho’ unwanted,

Hated, tho’ true

I came by golden mountains

To dwell with you.

I took strange Algol with me

And Betelgeuse, but you

Wanted a purse of gold

And interest to accrue.

You could have had them all,

The dust, the glories too,

But I was the wrong music

And why I never knew.

The story about her finding the music in the spines of the books is made up by me.

But that 1871 edition of Scott, like many books over the centuries, bound with recycled old paper stock, really is lined and pasted with staved manuscript at the back of the pages, at least, the ones I’ve got on my desk are. And she really could, as a girl, hang from the parapet of a Nairn bridge by her arms, and pretty much everything else here can be found and is sourced in the collections of her poems which her good friend from her university years in Aberdeen and Cambridge, the Medieval and Renaissance academic Helena Mennie Shire, edited after Olive Fraser’s death, The Pure Account (Aberdeen University Press, 1981) and The Wrong Music (Canongate, 1989).

Think of the Waverley collection on the shelves, the full twenty-five novels, their spines sliced back and open and the music inside them visible.