“Jason Tyler,” I said. “He has a bookshop on College Street.”
“I know Tyler,” he said. “What do you want to know about him?”
“Whatever you know. Is he shady? Squeaky clean? An expert in any field? Most of all, what kind of person is he? His, whatdoyoucallit, character?”
“I haven’t cultivated his acquaintance. I don’t like him, his stock isn’t very interesting, and it doesn’t change much.”
“You know anything about his personal life?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you like him?”
“No good reason, just an immediate instinctive antipathy. If I knew him I might like him, but I don’t want to know him. And don’t ask me why.” He made a face to keep the remark airy.
“But you don’t know of anything dishonest, disreputable?”
“No, I told you. Now if you’d ask me about his predecessor in that store I could tell you a story.”
“Tell me anyway. How long has Tyler been the owner?”
“Two years, maybe. A bit less. Not long, anyway. I used to go in all the time when James Curry owned it. I haven’t been in twice since it changed hands. The last time a woman in there asked me if she could help me. I said I was just browsing. She asked me for what, maybe she could point me in the right direction. I never went back.”
“Why?”
“A salesperson coming on strong in an antiquarian bookshop, even one as tatty as Tyler’s?”
“Well, it is a shop,” I reminded him.
“So it is.” He gave up on me as one of the people who could not differentiate between a bookshop and a used car lot, and went back to his reading. I said, “So tell me about James Curry.”
Tensor searched the air for the name. “Huh?”
“The story about the predecessor.”
He laid his book aside and prepared to get rid of me. “Here’s a story, then. Once upon a time someone left a valuable manuscript with Curry to evaluate, and Curry lost it. He said it was stolen, along with some other odds and ends, but it never turned up in the trade. I think that the owner of the manuscript threatened to assault him. But the manuscript was never recovered.”
“What was it a manuscript of?”
“One of the moderns.”
By “moderns” Tensor means anybody after Beaumont and Fletcher. “Which one?”
“The one who worked for the newspaper.”
“Christ. Hemingway?”
“Hemingway. Yes, that sounds like it.” Tensor gave a small smile to show he was teasing, but I know he doesn’t think much of Hemingway. He was shrinking him by affecting to have barely heard the name.
I said, “There’s a story about Hemingway and the Toronto Star, isn’t there?”
“You see? You already know it. Is that it, then?” He picked up his book.
“Was the theft news at the time? When was this? What was it the manuscript of?”
Tensor said, “Some poems, I think. Did he write poetry? He did, didn’t he? Awful doggerel.” He grinned to show he was only playing about, then leaned forward, the body language of engagement and seriousness. “I think it must have been news or I wouldn’t have heard of it. I don’t read newspapers, and I don’t remember Curry saying anything. I probably heard it on one of those three-minute Arts programs the CBC puts on before the real news. When was it? About twenty years ago, not long after I joined the department, because I didn’t know Curry well enough for him to have chatted to me about it. As I remember, the manuscript wasn’t the beginning of a book but a collection of drafts of stories that Hemingway had saved, knowing he would be famous one day, the way writers these days save up their drafts in the hope of one day persuading a library to buy them.”
“That’s your story about Curry?” I asked after waiting for more.
“What kind of story are you after? I’ll tell you another one, a human interest story. Curry never answered the phone.”
“Why did he bother to have a phone at all if he didn’t answer it?”
“So that his address could be listed in the phone book, the Yellow Pages. And to be able to call out to get Swiss Chalet to deliver. And some of the messages were important; they just weren’t urgent.”
“But what if they were urgent. Some must have been.”
“Try keeping a diary. How many life-or-death messages do you get? People adjusted to him. They gave him a day to answer his machine. Very occasionally, a friend would want to let him know that a book he was interested was available if he were quick, then they used a courier. Curry said couriers were today’s version of the telegrams the Bloomsbury crowd used to invite each other to tea with.”
This wasn’t fascinating, but it had given me a chance to think. “Do you think there really was a Hemingway manuscript?”
“Papers; not manuscript, papers. Oh, yes.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I think they were stolen. Not by Curry, I should say. For an antiquarian bookseller, Curry was very honest.” He looked at his watch. “And that’s all I know about Mr. Hemingway’s papers. Perhaps you should talk to David.”
“He told me the story once.”
“Make him do it again.”
chapter ten
The story of Hemingway’s stay in Toronto is part of the city’s folklore. Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star for a few months before he went to Paris and became the paper’s European correspondent. He discovered that his stint as a reporter had given him his style, and sat down to write “Up in Michigan”.
At one time all Canadian undergraduates registered in English knew the story of Hemingway’s residency in Toronto, and graduate students from Saskatchewan still sometimes pay a visit to the Selby Hotel on Sherbourne Street to raise a glass in the tavern of the hotel where he stayed, and students doing an M.A. in American literature also visit the other places where he slept—on Bathurst Street and Lyndhurst Avenue—if only to avoid being tripped up on their oral.
Somehow I missed hearing the story in graduate school, but as soon as I arrived at Hambleton College it was told to me by David Wintergreen, a specialist in American Literature. Actually, David is now drifting sideways out of American literature into poetry (his own)—something that often happens to senior academics a few years before they retire. In David’s case, he is also drifting backwards into a kind of literary criticism which the periodicals he submits articles to will not take seriously, believing he is not serious. I think he is.
David’s thesis is that much literary writing is affected by technical problems that the writer has to get around. Searching for the meaning of a text in the author’s life, in his or her society, in myth and archetypes, in psychology, is all very well, but before you decide any question of meaning you need to be sure that you have understood the possible reasons why a text is thus and not thus.
David was put on to this by reflecting on his own practices when writing, in the days when he had abandoned research and was looking about for something to do in the three or four days a week left from his teaching schedule, before he took up verse. Back then, before word processors, the skill and energy