Beyond the Gates of Dream, page 10
I had scarcely been a month in Paris. The unexpected success (critical, that is, not monetary) of my first slim volume of verse had gone to my head. Man dragore, I called it, and its triumph would, I assumed, soon waft me to fame as a coming young poet. Still lacking of twenty, I fled the bourgeois, stifling atmosphere of America, hoping to find in the City of Light those ideal and paradisical regions in whose pure, stimulating atmosphere “perfect verse” could be composed, and among whose aloof, imperious and Olympian salons I would take my brilliant place. Ah—to be young, and a poet, and to live in Paris in those dim, dead days! It was Valhalla and El Dorado combined, that city where Proust drowsed and Heine starved. An industrious young Degas labored in every garret, and several wilted Rimbauds still ornamented the more picturesque gutters and scrawled Dieu est mortel on alley-walls with pastel chalks. Oh, dear God, but I was young …
I had spent a fatiguing day. Two editors I had bearded in their dens, in fear and trembling but sans result. The future of modern verse I had argued out with a bearded expatriate Russian who resembled an unkempt goat and rather smelled like one, and who vehemently persevered in holding the obstinant opinion, which seemed to me nonsensical, that the direction of verse lay in vers libre imitations of Pushkin.
I stopped on my way back to my flat, pausing at the little bistro for a cool glass and a warm bun. It was crowded with sightseers en route to or from the Cathedral, so I shared a corner table with an elderly gentleman of scholarly and even professorial appearance. He was neatly but cheaply dressed, slim and going gray over the temples; he wore an old suit of bottle-green corduroy, with a loose foulard at his throat, half-hidden behind a sharp little spike of a Napoleon III goatee. It is a universal custom that any two strangers forced to share a table ignore each other, and thus did we, save for a covert sidewise glance or two. He sat back, idly sipping a Pernod, watching the crowd. When next he reached for his glass I noticed his hands. They were stained with black oily grease: the hands of a mechanic. But, no, when I looked more closely, I saw that the grease was no mere oily lubricant but expensive graphite used to facilitate the workings of the most delicate gears. A watchmaker, perhaps? I decided not. Something about him savored of the basement inventor, while his long hair and the genteel decay of his accouterments suggested the artist.
His face was in shadow, but his profile, with the jutting small pointed beard and the patriarchal, hawk-beaked nose, inescapably reminded me of El Greco’s portrait of Cardinal Giambatiste in the Louvre.
My curiosity ebbed. My attention wandered. I sat back and drew out a copy of my book and leafed through it. I fear I was so enthralled with my newborn authorship that I carried Mandragore everywhere with me, and carelessly drew it out to read pointedly in public.
The garçon brought my drink and my companion finished his. Somehow or other, with the bustling, busy waiter as a pretext, the two of us struck up a conversation. I was proud to display what I fancied to be an exquisite command of aristocratic French; scorning as a lowly touriste the loutish American who speaks only English in Paris, I flaunted my linguistic accomplishments at every opportunity. He elicited from me my profession, seemed impressed at my status, and confessed his assumption that I was but another student. In our exchange, the stranger casually exercised a remarkable and unorthodox literary knowledge which excited my interest. I overrode his polite protest and bought him a Pernod—I was drinking Medoc, a good vintage, and priding myself on the taste of a born connoisseur. Our drinks came, and I listened as he began talking.
“As you may have noticed from the disreputable condition of my hands, young sir, I am a mechanical technician. In fact, if you will permit, something of an inventor in a modest way. I am fortunate enough to possess a few small patents, idly obtained in my industrious youth, and these fetch an income sufficient for my simple needs. So I can live as I please and continue my experiments as I wish.”
At this point I inquired as to his branch or specialty. He replied: “Alas, the proper term has yet to be coined! But for my own amusement, I have christened the area of my interests by the unlikely name of bibliochanics.
When I was a young student in Prague I studied under Gouffé, then famous as ‘the Genius of the Machine.’ This was long before you were born, or even conceived, I am sure. I read widely and, I fear, indiscriminately in those student years. I recall an image, a metaphor, a paradox, call it what you will—something in one of the philosophers which so intrigued my mind and stimulated the curiosity of the young intellectual I then was, that it became a profound and motivating force on my future career. Perhaps you have already encountered the concept: it suggested that if you were to employ fifty million monkeys, scribbling aimlessly (this was long before the typewriter became popular, of course), they would eventually and in the fullness of time, reproduce the works of Montaigne, complete and letter-perfect, to the last dot of an i and crossing of a t.”
I nodded. I had somewhere encountered the same idea, or a paraphrase of it: in my day, the it had been “the complete works of Shakespeare,” but I let it pass without comment, curious as to where all this was leading—as, perhaps, are you.
He adjusted a monocle, sipped his drink, and continued:
“I was possessed by that paradox. The verb is precisely apt: it was as if an evil spirit had entered into me, and seized control of my person. The idea enchanted and fascinated me: I speculated endlessly over it. Later, in my courses of mathematics and symbolic logic at the University, I was literally electrified to discover that even so quaint and bizarre a concept was, after all, well within the bounds of the credible. For the total number of possible combinations of letters in any language is quite finite, I learned. Of course, at a liberal guess, it would take the fifty million monkeys about fifty thousand years to hit on Montaigne. But, still, it was possible.
“And so I became an experimental mechanical technician. And a highly successful one, if I may be so immodest as to admit the truth. During the years that followed, and they were busy ones and crowded with events, I remained under the power of that devilish and diabolical concept. At length, financially independent due to my facility for “tinkering,” I began playing with the idea at earnest. And, again, the verb is precise, for I toyed with the concept as an idle amusement, curious to see how best the notion might be translated into mechanical actuality. Such conceits were common in my time. Half the inventors of my acquaintance were eccentrics, with a perpetual-motion machine hidden away in the closet, or a fantastic and da Vincian aerofoil concealed in the attic. My hobby was a writing-machine.
“After some years of idle tinkering, I perceived of a means whereby the device might be made workable, and a leisurely hobby gave way to an absorbing period of mechanical design. What eventuated was not very unlike the modern typewriter, but perfected far beyond that crude device. It did not employ letters affixed to the ends of rods wherewith the platen could be struck, for such was too cumbersome and time-consuming a process. Instead, I devised wheels with raised letters set along the outer surfaces—wheels which revolved at random, creating a patternless meaninglessness—a chaos of pure Chance—numberless combinations of letters were thus printed and accumulated in a twinkling. Since I did not have fifty thousand years to spare on the project, my central and prime concern was to accelerate the accumulation of printed letter-combinations, so that the few years at my disposal should equal the vast number required. In endless experiments, I gradually refined my designs. My experiments devoured many years, and consumed my youth as well, but I worked on tirelessly. My writing-machine went through a hundred models, a hundred improvements, and its costs ate deeply into my small stipend. Luckily, I was able—purely as by-products to my main experiment—to patent several valuable modifications on the linotype and the typewriter, which provided the wherewithal to continue my work. Rather early in my attempts to increase the speed of the combinations, I eliminated actual letters as such, replacing them with spools of paper tape punched with a coded system of dots and dashes. Next, I invented a phonetic system composed of sounds, not letters at all—but I shall not bore you with a step-by-step account of the machine’s development. Eventually, my machine was ready to—begin.
“I called it Bibliac, from the Greek biblio “book,” and the admission that only a “maniac” would invent a device to simulate the random scrawlings of fifty million chimpanzees! My invention, by this stage, operated at amazing speed and compiled completely random combinations of letters, which I called wordforms. It ‘wrote’ at a speed impossible to achieve by hand. Its whirling wheels perforated code-combinations in spools of thick paper tape, simulating the actions of a typewriter, or many typewriters, but hundreds and even thousands of times faster than that antiquated device could duplicate. I had achieved ultimate speed by reducing both the size of the paper spools and the coded wheels, to the point where a single turn of a single wheel punctured hundreds of wordforms on the receptive tape, in endless variations.
“In short, I had the mechanical equivalent of fifty million monkeys. It filled half the upper floor of my house, and ran tirelessly, powered by a system of weights, balances, and springs.”
“And did it produce Montaigne?” I asked. My tone must have been light, for the Gentleman in Green fixed me with a serious, even a stern, glance of reproof.
“No, it did not. For many months, in fact, Bibliac produced endless and undiluted gibberish—at the rate of seventeen million ‘words’ a day, however.”
“But surely you did not actually read—?”
“No. I had devised a Monitor that spot-scanned the tapes in random samplings, and was keyed to register any significant combination of phonemes—anything that suggested a logical or meaningful pattern. After two full years of this, during which my inexhaustible Bibliac continued to operate virtually without pause or rest, such a meaningful combination was noted! The Monitor reported that the wordforms were beginning to take on a semblance of coherent construction. I translated the coded tapes into recognizable letters, but could make no sense out of the wordforms at all. However, the pattern persisted. It was utter Babel, yet familiar constructions were irregularly repeated. It was undeniable that Bibliac had evolved a vocabulary of sorts: phonemic combinations—meaningless ‘words’—were used over and over. Well, one cannot devote a sizeable portion of one’s life to a project and give up without a struggle. In despair of making any sense out of Bibliac’s productions, I transcribed the first portions into the Roman alphabet and determined to secure the advice of an old friend from the University, who had made his home in Paris in his later years, even as had I. He identified the text without delay—why had I never thought to consult a linguist!
“ ‘Why, of course,’ Markoy said when I showed him my transcription. ‘You have here an early portion of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, the ancient Babylonish epic. In the original Sumerian, too. It is, as you may be aware, widely considered the most ancient known work in any literature …”
*
“FROM THAT point on,” continued the Gentleman in Green, “I dwelt in Paradise, tasting such delights as only he can savor, who sees his dream of a lifetime coming true before his eyes. Bibliac wrote on, producing the complete text of the Sumerian, the Akkadian, and the Babylonian literatures, the oldest known to man … and I was forced to realize that I had never thought about the logical implications inherent in the paradox of the fifty million monkeys … of course the hairy typists would not produce Montaigne out of a blue sky … naturally, they would have to work up to him, by duplicating the full literary tradition!
“Rapt in fascination, I tended my whirling, racketting machine, tending its needs with the finest lubricants money could purchase, poring enthralled over each day’s literary productions. Ere long, Bibliac had progressed through the late Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Hittites, the ancient Egyptians, and was well into Homer. From that point on, of course, the results were predictable.”
I gaped at him. “Can it be … you mean?”
My Gentleman in Green nodded with a faint smile. “The logical implications of the paradox … don’t you see what the fifty million monkeys represent? Not a nonsense-symbol, but an historical reality. For there existed a living equivalent of the fifty million monkeys, the human race itself, whose literature began with that Sumerian epic and worked slowly upwards to the era of Montaigne!”
I stared at him, staggered, wondering whether he were mad or merely entertaining me with a fanciful and amusing fable—but completely caught up in the fascination of his tale. He continued:
“I watched as Bibliac reproduced the entire literature of the Greeks (including the fourteen lost comedies of Aristotle which perished in the flames that consumed the Alexandrian Library, the long-vanished Marsyas of Homer, the books of the Cyclic poets, otherwise extant but in scattered fragments). By winter, Bibliac had gotten as far as the Romans. Before Christmas, the lost literature of the Carthaginians was regained—I kept it piled on a work-bench near the window, and amused myself with calculating what the professors of the Sorbonne would pay to have it in their hands!—and by spring we had entered into the Dark Ages: we would arrive at the Renaissance before Easter, which seemed most appropriate. I was watching the complete vindication of my life’s work—the fulfillment of my dream!”
I ordered our glasses refilled, and as the long gray shadows of afternoon mingled with the plum-purple of evening, he talked on. He and Bibliac had worked through the dreary literary productions of the Reformation, he recalled, and thus into modernity. I lost the thread of his remarks for a bit—I must confess that I was secretly wondering if his amazing machine had reproduced the text of my Mandragore. But this I did not dare ask … I have often wondered about it, since.
“And now that Bibliac is silent,” I interjected, “you must be ready to publish an account of your experiment in whatever scholarly journals devote their pages to the mechanistic science. You should reap a well-deserved harvest of fame—”
His reply was a quick glance of startled resentment.
“ ‘Silent’?” he repeated blankly. “But it is not—the work goes on!”
“How can it go on, when it has already reached …”
“Already we are well past the literature of the 21st Century,” he stated. “Bibliac is printing the unwritten works of the future!”
The stunning shock his words created must have been visibly traced on my features, for he leaned forward, tapping the tabletop with a lean forefinger for emphasis.
“Listen to me, young man! I have perused the works of genius that shall not be penned till long after you and I are dust. I have pondered the poems which will astonish the world in the age of your grandchildren. That gigantic novel, Those Who Err, whose author, Willard Paxton, will die before completing it, even as did the great Cervantes, leaving unfinished his masterpiece, the Quixote, to which Paxton’s novel will often be compared! And I have read the Arthuriad of Gwyn Rhys Jones—a Welshman and the greatest epic poet since Milton. And I have explored the intricate music of the cyclic-dramas of Von Bremen, and the rich dream-imagery of Taliesin in Limbo, for which the English King Charles IV will knight Edward Quinsey Marlinson. I alone of all men in the world, recall the subtle cadences of the opening couplet of Tierney’s great mock-romance, Baghdad—
Sindbad am I, sailor of Ocean,
Sailor of all of the Orient Seas
… ah yes, my fine young poet, you who do not even believe that I am telling the truth … at his hour, Bibliac is well more than a century ahead of us all, puzzling its way through the odd and cryptic works that will bejewel the distant future … don’t you see, you young fool … Bibliac will run forever, tireless as any giant machine, filling its endless paper spools with the triumphs of literature from the thirtieth, the fortieth and even the fiftieth centuries … to the last syllable of recorded time!”
*
YOU ARE looking at me, young man, with very much the same sort of expression I must have worn, when the Gentleman in Green uttered those astounding words to me, decades ago. I have no doubt he was irritated by my vapid stare, my idiotic comments, my not-very-well-concealed air of ironic tolerance of what may, after all, have been the utterances of a madman, and not a mechanical genius whose subtle invention had riffled through the library-shelves of unborn Tomorrow.
What? Oh yes: what happened next. There is very little left to tell. He sprang up from the table in a spurt of anger—darted into the street—and was struck down by a bicyclist. His brow collided with the curbstone, splattering it with crimson … ah, I do not like to recall it, even now!
Hmm? Dead? Perhaps—I never knew. The crowd gathered swiftly, like human vultures drawn to the bright evidence of mortality. The gendarmes … the ambulance … I was shaken to the core of my spirit, and hesitated—a fatal hesitation—then he was gone, taken away to some unknown morgue or hospital, and my one and only chance to investigate the truth of his astounding claims, gone with him. You see, his name—his address—I never knew. Whether he lived or died—forever unknown to me.
But his memory has tortured me ever since. Was he just a clever cadger-of-drinks, who repaid the generous with a fine-spun romance? Was he just a cafe hanger-on, seeking the ear of the well-pursed, gullible tourist? Was he insane—deluded—a dreamer—an eccentric would-be inventor, seeking funds to finance some wild invention that would never see the light of day?
Or was he what he said, and all of his story sober truth?
Perhaps my first theory is the soundest of all. Surely, you, a journalist, must have listened to many surprising revelations over a free glass of liquor? I recall a grizzled Irishman for whom I once purchased a mug of good beer at McSorley’s in New York; he confided hoarsely to me, in words breathed in a redolence of fermented malt, that he had sold his immortal soul to Asmodeus for eternal youth … but unfortunately had neglected to realize that eternal poverty went with the gift, since no conceivable amount of funds could support a man never to die! And then there was the bogus Italian count I met on the Riviera—twenty years ago, as I recall—who sponged a full week off a wealthy, occult-minded dowager, on the strength of his claim to be a genuine werewolf … he left our mutual host before the full moon, and I have always rather regretted missing the test of his tale.
