“Pardon this intrusion”

Well, that was a pleasant jaunt to the city.
 
I set forth the day before, so that I could visit with an old friend en route, my partner in many a cultural campaign (we’ve been known to watch a dozen Shakespeares over a weekend, or back in her city days, do three museums, a concert and two plays).  This time we dialed it back to a season of Upstart Crow and pizza.

Bless her, the CV arose at dawn, and got me to the 6:51 am from Old Saybrook.  I managed to execute a fairly complex journey (Shoreline East, Metro North, Times Square Shuttle, IRT) without ending up in the Bronx.  Alas, it left no time to stand and wonder at the heavens in Grand Central and think of Little, Big.

First stop, an impeccably green café up by Columbia, and some very pleasant conversation over brunch with the inestimable the_termagant.

Down Broadway to Columbus Circle, and a pleasant amble along the foot of Central Park.  It was (that afternoon, at any rate), a fine spring day.  The carriages were out—oh, scores of them—lined up along the curb:  smart equipages decked with garlands, coachmen and women in caped overcoats and top hats with panaches, horses in plumed harness, vying with the pigeons for their buckets of oats.

And so to the Grolier Club, quite elegant behind the scaffolding—New York is an eternal reconstruction—where I met with HWW:  an elegant figure, slightly fantastical, as if John Crowley had written him into a chapbook.  There were indeed glass cases, all round a gentleman-like study and its hallway, filled with—

O! Such treasures!  And my own chapbooks among them, like the least of the Pleiades.  What drew me first across the room was a Doves Press Hamlet (demurely included as “a ghost story”), open to “Who’s there?” with a leaf-green capital W, hand-illuminated . What wouldn’t I give to see The Tempest in that drowned and resurrected font?  That was in the (mostly) Gothic case, with such rarities as Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762), Burton’s full translation of The Arabian Nights (for Private Subscribers only), and the first American edition of Frankenstein, open to the monster’s first speech:  “Pardon this intrusion.”  Not perhaps what one expects from an eight-foot-tall congeries of corpses.
 
But my heavens, moving on:  a Kelmscott Morris, The Sundering Flood; a signed Lolly Willowes (be still, my beating heart); Peggy Guggenheim’s copy of the sole edition of Living Alone; a first of The King of Elfland’s Daughter (so beautiful); the collector’s very first Doc Savage, signed at seven, simply as “Wessells”; Blish, Disch, Dick; a Tiptree inscribed to David Hartwell; an autograph letter from Joanna Russ to Tom Disch; Clute, Delany, Crowley; Link, Clarke, Wendy Walker—oh, and everyone.

Really, you must buy the book, and read Wessells’ commentary.  He spoke, as he writes, with wit, scholarship worn lightly as a summer straw, and passion.  His audience was small, but rapt.  There was commentary on Kipling and Cyrano from one older gentleman, clearly a grey eminence.  As the gathering dispersed, Henry pointed out my books to him, calling Cry Murder! “the best book of 2013,” telling him of Ben’s scene among the bookstalls in Paul’s Churchyard, in Exit, Pursued by a Bear, and teasing him to guess what titles Ben would have bought in 1610.  The gentleman said, “Oh, but I must have this.  Where—?“   I’d brought copies of both chapbooks, just in case, so was able to present him with both, I hope gracefully.  My zenith was when the past president of the Grolier Club clasped my Ben novellas to his august bosom, crying out, "But this is thrilling!"

It doesn't come much better than that.

And yes, I have an inscribed copy of HWW’s book, which is marvellous.

I walked in rather a happy daze up 5th Avenue, along the park.

The Strand now has little stalls at the Plaza corner, with rather a Parisian air, like the bouquinistes along the Seine.  Of course one must browse:  I did, in Ben’s honor.  I came away with a book for the little Fox on chameleons who want to be the same colors together, and a book for myself on astronyms.

It was an early-closing day at the MMA, but I did fit in a good hour-and-a-half.  The Vermeers, of course, and Brueghel’s haymakers, and some old acquaintances among the quattrecento, cinquecento and the early Netherlandish.  I had a lovely conversation with a guard.  I said I was visiting old friends in her gallery, and she took me to her most beloved painting, a Gerard David virgin “with angels, one light, and one dark.”  She spoke feelingly of the sense of peace and protection it gave her.  I told how fortunate she was to watch over it, as it watched over her.

Along the way, I wandered into a little room where the Met keeps deeply desirable things:  a Dutch marquetry cabinet with a flight of blue-and-white jars atop; a green glass roemer (wine glass) with a map engraved, the world as bubble; a flower arrangement flickering with dragonflies, all in a mosaic of a hundred shades of mother-of-pearl.  And I thought, I want to see things:  jars, shards, chalices, intarsia.  Let’s just wander.  So I found myself on a balcony overlooking the hall of armor, and just kept taking turns.  I was rewarded with a tiny Renaissance closet, a trompe l’oeil library with books and instruments (musical and astrological) in inlaid woods:  an illusion with real sunlight.

Even as the guards were herding us out (fifteen minutes earlier than early closing), I lingered in the shop (they want you to leave with full bags), admiring Tiffany-inspired scarfs in silk and cashmere, brilliant regiments of Caran d’Ache colored pencils, and O my! wooden architectural models half my height, fantastical, skeletal, with domes and winding stairs.  Of course I don’t need one, but I do.

Mine was the last coat hanging.

On my way up, I’d cleverly noted that the bus stop out front said M4, Penn Station, so I caught that, all down 5th Avenue, in the daunt and dazzle of the lights.  When did they start having those LED screens, five stories high?  In the face of this terminal capitalism, I cowered; but had a moment of pure delight passing the NYPL lions, Patience and Fortitude, keepers of the world I want to live in.

In Penn, I found a reasonable deli, and had a cup of quite passable black tea, and a decent bagel and lox, toasted, with plenty of schmear.  The train, by a miracle, was exactly on time, I had two seats to myself, and it got into Boston early, just before the tempest started.

Nine