The Seducer

Mammoth Sale

It suddenly strikes me that I have not yet explained how Jonas Wergeland financed his travels, although I did mention at one point that he had Charles Darwin to thank for his visit to Timbuktu. A trip to the Far East, plus the cost of staying there for three weeks, is anything but cheap, not even if you happen to be travelling under the auspices of the Norwegian-Chinese League of Friendship.

As I said earlier, no one in Jonas’s family was much of a book reader, apart from his Aunt Laura, who kept her edition of Ibn Battuta’s travel journals, along with a pile of other recherché and rather suspect volumes, safely tucked away in a chest in the flat in Tøyen, like a treasure that had to be buried when one lived in the same building as the solid Einar Gerhardsen. At least, thanks to Aunt Laura, Rakel had the Arabian Nights printed indelibly on her memory. Jonas’s grandmother had been more of a one for pictures, and other than that he lived with a family blessed with gifts of a verbal nature. His grandfather had been a wonderful storyteller, and as we know his mother and father never stopped talking, to each other at any rate.

Then came those boxes of books which his mother had inherited from some distant Wergeland relative: books which she dutifully and neatly arranged on a couple of bookshelves bought specially for the purpose, after which they were rarely touched. For all that it mattered, the shelves might just as well have been filled with rows of cardboard dummies, the sort of thing you see at Ideal Home exhibitions.

By and large, in Jonas’s house books were used only to prop up the legs of the bed when the children were small and had a cough, to raise their heads: the worse the cough, the thicker the books. Jonas did wonder later whether this might have had an effect on him, whether those words had crawled up the bedposts, so to speak, and into his body. Or whether they had protected him, like the metal bowls filled with vinegar placed under bed legs in the tropics, in the old days at least, to keep the insects away. Maybe, Jonas thought, a book under the leg of the bed would also safeguard against bad dreams. On one occasion he did ask his mother which books she had used most, but she could not remember.

The books also came in handy when Jonas and Daniel had to press flowers for the endless herbariums at school, or when their mother was making brawn for Christmas and had to press the meat. Certain books also made the perfect forts and entrenchments when they were playing with their toy cowboys and Indians.

Apropos this last, I ought to mention that Daniel — who else but Daniel? — had got onto the track of another way in which books could be valuable. He had first become aware of this during a paper collection, the sort of thing organized once a year to raise funds for the school band, and an event that the children looked forward to with excitement, because you never knew what might be hidden away in those great piles of newspapers and other scrap paper, in the way of comics, for example, not to mention porno mags. The same old legend was forever circulating, about how one year somebody had found this really outrageous foreign porno mag, full of pictures of black guys hung like elephants and willing white women, outside Five-Times Nilsen’s doorway, although it might have been Jens Øvesen’s or rather Jesse Owens’s, he was just the kind of guy to have that sort of thing. So the boys fell on those piles of paper and rummaged frantically through every last one of them in the hope of at least unearthing some Katzenjammer Kids Christmas annuals or maybe a Donald Duck comic from the early fifties.

It was during just such a raid that Daniel happened upon a small cardboard box full of Red Indian adventure stories that must have belonged to one of the bigger boys who felt he had outgrown such childish things, several volumes of a series that was very popular at that time. Not, you understand, that Daniel himself was a reader, he stuck exclusively to comics and strip cartoons in all their guises, but he had gathered from his chums that a few of the volumes in this series were much sought-after, and one of these, Deerfoot Takes to the Hills was there in the box. So Daniel slipped it under his jersey and left the others where they were. Over the next few weeks, Jonas was surprised to see one little thing after another piling up on his brother’s side of their double-top desk: a pencil-sharpener shaped like a globe, a penknife with a mother-of-pearl handle, an elaborately constructed hair-band catapult for firing staples, two old volumes of Texas cartoons and so on, and Daniel had to admit that he had received these in ‘payment’ from the other boys in exchange for letting them borrow that rare copy of Deerfoot Takes to the Hills.

Neither Daniel nor Jonas ever read books, however, not even Deerfoot Takes to the Hills. Neither could his school readers or the novels which in due course had to be covered as part of the syllabus induce Jonas to see any value whatsoever in books. Given the choice, Jonas would have had the contents of all books related to him verbally in the most truncated version possible or, at worst, drawn. Books were bound up with Norwegian classes and dissertations: a necessary evil. And to crown it all, there were Gabriel’s lectures onboard his old lifeboat, the Norge, on the future of television, which had left Jonas convinced that books were as hopelessly obsolete as the dinosaurs, a relic of some long gone era.

So it was Nefertiti who first opened Jonas’s eyes to the riches lying hidden on the totally neglected bookshelves in the living room. Until then, Jonas had found those rows of books no more interesting than any grey rock-face. But Nefertiti had chipped away a little of the cliff and shown him — to stick to the metaphor of books as dinosaurs — that it harboured wonderful fossils: fossils which, even if they did belong to some obsolete race, could be very valuable, shedding light, as they did, on certain vital crossroads in the evolution of the Earth.

Or at least, to begin with Jonas had not seen what she was getting at. He thought it was the contents of the books that were valuable and, as I have mentioned more than once, he jotted down an extract from each of the twenty-odd books in his little red notebook. It was only after his momentous encounter with Christine A. in the well-stocked library of the Cathedral School — where she had not only ridden him to an understanding of transcendental functions but also shown him a book by Kepler that was worth a quarter of a million kroner — that he grasped the full significance of that tip from Nefertiti: that in fact they were also worth money, hard cash. The first thing he did when he returned home was to take a closer look at the books which Nefertiti had lined up on the bottom shelf, none of which had been touched since; only to discover that almost all of them dated from the nineteenth century, with a couple from the late seventeen-hundreds. Not only that, but when he noted down a couple of titles and looked them up in an encyclopaedia at school, he found that they were all first editions.

One day he picked a book at random, blew the dust off it, and instead of going to school he went to see Aunt Laura. On his way up to her flat he ran into Einar Gerhardsen on the stairway and bowed low to him as if he were some sort of headmaster to whom Jonas was apologizing for playing truant. Up in the flat, among the Persian rugs and the innumerable tools for shaping silver and gold into the most daring ornaments, he managed to persuade his aunt to put down her punches and accompany him to a second-hand bookshop; he wanted her, a grown-up, to make enquiries about the book, to save anyone getting the wrong idea.

Jonas had gone through the phone book, and the minute they swept through the door of Damm’s, the venerable antiquarian bookshop on Tollbugata, he knew he had made the right choice. They found themselves in a room lined from floor to ceiling with books, interspersed with a few old prints and maps and the odd globe dotted here and there. But it was the model of a sailing ship hanging from the ceiling that really gave Jonas the feeling of having landed in the offices of an agency specializing in boundary-transcending voyages to ancient, faraway realms. He took an instant liking also to the man who came to attend to them: a typically courteous, distinguished gentleman, with what Jonas described to himself as an aristocratic aura. Aunt Laura, in a big hat and with coal-black eyelids, played her part beautifully: a rather distrait eccentric lady who had inherited some books, she had brought one with her, would the gentleman be so kind as to take a look at it, was it worth anything at all?

Jonas would remember that moment all of his life, how the owner of the antiquarian bookshop took the book, a perfectly ordinary book as far as Jonas was concerned, with an olive-green leather spine, marbled side papers and green corners, a book that appeared little different from a chunk of grey granite from a drab rock-face, and the bookshop’s proprietor also took it into his hands as if it were a perfectly ordinary book, but when he looked at it more closely his face lit up. He opened it and tentatively ran his fingers over it, as if he had scraped the surface of a chunk of granite only to find that it was actually a gold nugget. He asked them most politely to step into an office, where he flicked through some catalogues, from book auctions, he explained, before telling Aunt Laura, with no ifs, buts or maybes, that this book, this insignificant-looking wodge of paper, 500 printed pages — as far as Jonas could see not all that different from Deerfoot Takes to the Hills — was worth something in the region of 50,000 kroner.

‘But why?’ asked Aunt Laura. Even she had been knocked for six by this news.

‘Because it is by Charles Darwin,’ the proprietor of the bookshop said, glancing at the title page. ‘Because it is a first edition of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. No more, no less. A milestone. One of the most significant treatises in the history of mankind.’

Jonas Wergeland never became a great one for books, but he loved second-hand bookshops. To him they were like the setting for a lottery, one in which he had hit the jackpot.

Jonas dragged his aunt out into the street and home to Tøyen, where he spent a long time sitting in silence among the rugs and all the copper on the walls, trying to take in what he had just learned; went on worrying at it for a whole week before allowing his aunt to sell the first edition of Darwin’s book to the antiquarian bookshop and put the money into a bank account in her name, an account to which she arranged that he would also have access — and which would remain their lifelong secret. Such a deal appealed to Jonas. A book-lover got Charles Darwin, and he got 50,000 kroner, plus a quotation, one which, aptly enough, he had found underlined in the ninth chapter, ‘On the Imperfection of the Geological Record’, and which he had come across again, encapsulated in the final chapter, also underlined, as if it really did all come down to a question of mountains and fossils — and time, as things increased steadily in value as the years went by. ‘The mind cannot grasp,’ Darwin had written, ‘the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.’

And so it came to pass, to employ an epic phrase befitting this episode, that even while still at high school, Jonas Wergeland never had to scrimp and save in order to travel. Although it was a while before he really began to eat into the account; to begin with he only went as far as Stockholm and Copenhagen. But eventually he had to sell more of the books that Nefertiti had picked out, leaving them, like a last will and testament, on the bookshelf; works such as Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion, with its almost illegible Gothic typeface, Charles Baudelaire’s Oeuvres Posthumes et Correspondances inédites — a book which impressed Jonas most for its endpapers, the leafs stuck to the inside of the boards, blue patterned in gold — and The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, two weighty quartos: all sold, of course, through the agency of his aunt, who had nothing against acting as middle-man and who gradually became better and better acquainted with the charming proprietor of Damm’s antiquarian bookshop, partly on account of his discerning selection of Oriental rugs, while he, for his part, was not a little curious about a woman as dramatically made-up as another Karen Blixen who happened to own such a unique book collection. Around the time that his family moved in to the new villa on the other side of Bergensveien, right under the granite rockface, Jonas sold the last of the books, among them Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, Journal de Eugène Delacroix, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty not without a twinge of regret for each of them, remembering as he did all the pleasure he had derived from those quotes about a people’s ‘spirit’, about realism being the opposite pole to art and about a state that could not accomplish great things with small men. All the same, the sale of those books ensured that once again his account showed an astonishingly healthy balance: what amounted, in fact, to a small fortune — for a young man, at least.

As for the world of antiquarian books with its staggering prices, Jonas saw it as being rather like a big-game hunt where the main attraction lay in the hides, in the irrational and sentimental values, rather than the words, the content. He thanked his lucky stars for the bookcase at home, which had sat there all those years, guarding its treasures in full view of everyone, but with no one being any the wiser. The books on the shelves were not unlike those mammoths that Nefertiti had told him about; mammoths that had fallen down the crevices in glaciers and were discovered again, thousands of years later, perfectly intact, frozen solid in the ice — for all one knew they, too, could have been in full view for ages and ages, encased in transparent ice; they, too, had a hide, a pelt which was worth a fortune because of its age.

Thus Jonas was able to exchange the hide bindings on the books for hard cash or trade them for another valuable commodity: travel. You could say that the books sprouted wings, or sails, and carried him off to foreign lands. So the spirit of Darwin had its effect even on Jonas Wergeland inasmuch as he was one of the very few people who were fortunate enough to discover the literal value of books, their potential for transcending boundaries.

Only a couple of other books ever commanded as high a price as the Darwin: Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, for example — an unbelievable 60,000 in nice crisp kroner — but many of them also contained dedications, obscure dedications which increased their value several-fold. Even though Jonas’s curiosity as to the previous owner of these books grew with the years, he did not balk at selling them; he looked upon them as a legacy of sorts from the previous century, a fund of wisdom no longer required; even those quotations which he had learned by heart he eyed with considerable scepticism, regarding them more as toys, conversation pieces, a bunch of strange fossils, than as genuinely valuable knowledge. Jonas was always baffled by people who were impressed by them, who took them to be a sign of intelligence. And for anyone who thinks it is impossible to sail through life on the strength of twenty-odd quotations memorized from some relatively learned works, then I would ask them to take a look around them, at all of those who do sail through life, who may even be the foremost leaders in our society and who do not carry a single quotation in their heads, not even from a bad book.