Banquet for Bibliophiles: The Finalists
Earlier this year we announced the winner of our Banquet for Bibliophiles creative writing competition. The winning entry, ‘Dining with Samuel Rogers’ by Martin Brayne has been published in our Summer 2021 issue (out now).
To coincide with the arrival of this Issue, we share below two more entries from the runners-up. ‘Bound Together’ by Jess Moody, and ‘Gertrude Stein Sends Her Apologies’ by Stephen Lycett, delighted our judging panel with their imagination and wit, and whilst they were pipped to the post by Martin Brayne, we felt they were worthy of a space on our website for our readers to enjoy.
Bound Together
JESS MOODY
The guests are getting twitchy, downing wine too fast to stave off hunger. Then, relief. They hear the puddle swish, taxi chug, door slam, the baritone grunts up the slippery steps. The pause before the knock. Listening, no doubt, to see if they dared start without him. A rush of wind and rain, and he’s in, though with much dripping and groaning. He comes in two volumes, so the diatribe is mostly between himself.
War and Peace [1955, Mockba] finally makes his mottled way into the dining room, and surprises them all by opening in French. In the corner, Accordion Crimes [1997, worn] flashes a crocodile-smile, echoes him with Creole drawl, ‘Eh bien, mon prince!’. Glasses are raised, seats shifted.
War’s late and clumsy settling, his dour weight of must and fate, serves to unsettle the previously content Flush [1933]. Dun coloured, he’s a good boy really yes he is, bearing his Hogarth Press stamp with a smug little wag. His barking is quietened by Vita’s slim Solitude [1938, £50]. She scratches his spine, calming his ruffling pages. Finally, thankfully, dinner is served.
She eye-rolls to her neighbour, as she slices her starter.
‘You know he’s only late to avoid the early small talk.’ A wrist-flick to indicate the Russian. ‘Twenty years on that National Trust shop shelf, now he’s positively allergic to mindless prattle about the weather.’
POEMS of Christina Rossetti [1891, marbled cover, to mother in all reverence and love] blinks up at her. POEMS is small and contained. Such thin leaves, such veiled engravings, but always, with her, the risk of sudden devastation. She takes a slow thoughtful sip of red wine, a drop ready for a fall.
The threat of stain heaves the heart of Scott, Illustrated [1881, slightly scuffed]. Across the table,
he struggles to sit still, frustrated with his steamed asparagus, its utter lack of gallantry. He bemoans what passes for quality sustenance in London these days. NW [2013, as new] humours him as long as she can, before a grateful return to worn-warm conversation with Earthsea [1986] and Kindred [2015 re-issue] on the worlds men can never hope to imagine.
The main course settles the Second-Hands into happy company. There is creak and shuffle, gasps and crinkled tissue. Sniggers at marginalia, footnote asides. Wuthering Heights [1970, exschool-library, last borrowed Marcella V, 1994] underlines her themes heavily for Crimes, whose smile splinters into shotgun laughter.
Desert is warm, fresh, sweet, moreish: all that can be plattered and plated. Vanity Fair [Unknown, used] eyes seconds with squat blue-thread certainty. Too full, Twelfth Night [1932] watches the window; hums hey ho to the wind and the rain. Trumpet [2011] picks up the tune, a duet of being both, other and more.
After coffees, digestifs. A final toast to the hostess, for again and again, bringing them to life, enriching them with each other’s conversation. A cheer, a cheer, and once more.
Then a crack.
Darkness.
And the horror of being unread. Flush whimpers. Heights wails. Scott chokes. War lowers his eyes.
But no, it is only a power outage. More and more common in the storms of these days.
And here is the hostess with the light; bringing candle-shimmer to gilt edges, calling the shadows of serifs to dance. Autumn [2016, Good] sits at the head of her table in russet sleeves. She reads their words, and the words before the words, between the words, and all the silence that speaks. She smooths down their corners like a goodnight kiss, a promise to return.
Autumn gestures out to the roaring night.
‘Never fear, my friends.’ She shrugs and smiles. ‘We will wait together for the dawn.’
Gertrude Stein Sends her Apologies
STEPHEN LYCETT
My darling Zelda,
Forget Westport, forget Antibes. This was the wildest, wildest party you ever saw. And you ain’t gonna believe this, honey: it was dry. Yep, you read that right. The party was dry. What’s more it was in a bookshop. Ever heard of Shakespeare and Co, Sylvia Beach’s place, Paris’s very own Parnassus? Well, that’s where it was.
And this is how I got to be there. I hadn’t been in Paris a day when I ran into Hemingway. “Come and join me,” he said. “I’m on my way to a party. Party, what am I saying? A banquet, a feast.” What he didn’t say was that it was a literary feast, sans sex, sans booze, just lots of improving conversation. But what conversation! Just look at the roll call. In one corner Joyce was trying to talk Ford Madox Ford into lending him five thousand francs for an eye operation. “Don’t listen to him,” said Adrienne Monnier, who was Sylvia’s lover and owned the bookstore across the street. “He’ll have drunk it long before he gets to Switzerland.” Over by the fireplace Tristan Tzara was reciting a Dadaist poem to Man Ray, having first told him to punch him if anything he said made sense, and when Man Ray did so, Tzara punched him back, saying that he hadn’t been ready, that to produce complete nonsense he had to warm up first. Hemingway, who had been trying - unsuccessfully - to interest Jean Cocteau in bullfighting, brightened up at the prospect of a scrap and would have joined in had not Pound stepped between them. “Later, boys, later,” he said. “Business first, pleasure later.”
Sylvia rang a small hand bell and the meeting came to order. With her bobbed hair and sensible shoes, there was something schoolmistressy about her. Why she’d made it her life’s work to impose order on a class of unruly schoolboys, I could never make out.
“Okay, boys,” she said. “Let’s get to work. We know what we’re here for.”
“Do we indeed?” asked Joyce. “The Jesuits who taught me seemed to know why I was here, but I never really believed them. If someone could tell me, it would take a load off my mind.”
What they were there for was to discuss the launch of a new literary magazine - as if Paris didn’t have enough literary magazines! – and what they needed to launch it was a whiff of scandal.
“Apologies from Gertrude Stein,” she went on. “She says she’s sorry she can’t be here, but lends her support. I won’t read you the whole letter, but this will give you a flavour. ‘I can’t be with you because I’m with me and I can’t be there because I am here and there’s no there there anyway. Here is where I am and now is when I am. Then and there are elsewhere and you.’ But although she can’t be here herself, she sends us some brownies to make up. A new recipe of Alice Toklas, apparently. Don’t hold back, she says. Indulge, gorge. I would. I have. I feel a new woman.”
“Quel bonheur!” said Adrienne Monnier.
“Sublime!” said Man Ray.
“Why didn’t she come herself?” I asked Pound. “Why send a tray of cakes as a substitute?”
“Because she won’t be seen in the same room as Joyce. Professional jealousy. They can’t stand each other. Here, have a brownie. Better still, have two.”
Meanwhile Alice Toklas’s brownies kept going around and around, and the more they went around, the harder Sylvia found it to get everyone’s attention. Seeing that everyone ignored her, Hemingway took out a pistol and fired it into the ceiling. Pound, his hair and beard white with plaster dust, jumped up on to the table, upsetting the plate of brownies on to the floor. Everyone made a dive for them. “Well, anyone got anything for the first number? What about you, Jim?”
Joyce, who’d had more of Alice’s brownies than most, staggered to his feet and said: “Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor.”
“What the hell did she put in those brownies?” I asked Hemingway.
But Hemingway wasn’t listening.
“Would anyone like me to demonstrate how to use a matador’s cape?” he asked, jumping on to the table beside Pound.
Why he thought anyone would be interested in bull fighting, God knows. He was just a big kid who wanted to be the centre of attention. They all were. Meanwhile, Joyce had the bit between his teeth.
“Whisht and I’ll tell yer,” said Joyce. “Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Finnagain! Comeday morm and, O, you’re vine! Seday’s eve and ah, you’re vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you’re going to be fined again!”
For the first time in her life Sylvia had lost control. Joyce was talking gibberish and no-one could stop him; Man Ray and Tristan Tzara were fighting over cookies; Pound was pretending to be a bull and Hemingway was trying to stab him between the shoulder blades with Joyce’s walking cane.
And me? I suddenly felt old. I longed for the three-day binges we’d had at Westport and Antibes. What cocktails! What couplings! I just wanted to get safely drunk in a staid, old-fashioned kinda way. I slipped out of the shop unnoticed. Alice’s brownies were too much for me. I just wanted a drink.
Keep your pants warm for me, honey,
Scott