The Purchase of Scotch

Purchasing Scotch

      by Doodoo Right Dougie Lanyards

Poe ushered in a new era in literature. No one had done the horror thing before with any persistence. Frankenstein may have been a model for him. A woman wrote that. Not too likely that a woman would make a life of writing horror. It must have been Byron who wrote it. Or, as I am about to asseverate, a male acquaintance of his.

          A decade ago, round about, in England for a visit to my wife's people, I ordered a bottle of scotch and sat down in a library to read. I got tired of Poe, and then tired of Dickens, Crabbe, and Boroughs successively. What might I do that would be of more interest. I went up to the sixth floor by lift and walked about in the stacks. I came, eventually, to a dark corner where light drained in from a distant bulb. I sat down on the floor itself, dusty, unattended, hardly ever visited by the feet of visitors. With the help of my electric torch, a small pencil type that I keep with me at all times, I scanned the titles before me. The library in this remote corner of nowhere bore a silence not unlike that of a dungeon or crypt. I pulled my bottle from my pocket, set it down on the floor beside me, and thought how cozy this moment was. A Christmas carol filtered through the dust and distance. "Oh holy night, the stars are brightly shining." I drank, and shone my light over the titles of books not seen or held for many, many a decade. I pulled out one or two and thumbed through them. Belleville, the Marquee. Torture in the Dungeon of the Castille. "Vous a vous la Trois frer te ma votre," I read, uncomprehending. And next, Samuel Taylor. Come For to See, 1893. And after a while, the scotch warming my insides, this: Frankenstein, by Percy B Shelley. 

           "What?" I thought to myself. This cannot be! The authorage is incorrect. I opened the book, read the text, noticed how immediately variations appeared from the Mary Shelley text so well known to me, and became absolutely riveted. This was not the book that I had heretofore known as Frankenstein. Surely, this must be an imposter. Someone had deliberately attached the poet's name to the text that, for all the world knew, Mary had written, though, often thought, with the help of her husband. I felt suddenly a tingling sensation along my arm. This is an affect I experience when something is not as it should be, when something big and very strange is in the making. I put my bottle away, I picked up the book, and I gave it to the attendant to ask from the databanks when the last date of its withdrawal had been. He checked. A frown crossed his brow. He finally spoke and said that it had never been borrowed by anyone before. He looked surprised as he handed the slim volume back to me, shaking his head as if to clear it, and then went back to his work.

        I did not sign out the book, but went back in the direction from which I had come. My intention was already clear to me. If, in fact, this was an unknown version of the text, signed by the poet, then it would turn an entire literary history on its side. Courses would never again place great emphasis on the superb fact that in the mid-1800s a woman wrote the first great novel and as a result today women have a fine place in the annals of literature. I did not mind at all having women in the center of literary tradition, but not if they did not deserve to be there. Nevertheless, all this was only a niggle in my mind. I knew that a good reason existed for my spiriting this text out of here so that I could gain the reputation accruing to it and its discovery. I took the lift up to the sixth floor, returned to my remote corner of the building, looked about me for a window that I might pry open and, sure enough, found one casement that lifted after some effort. Below me a meadow, and a parking lot to the right. I could see my small red truck where I had parked it. I knew the general location and would be able to find it again. I searched about me until I found a paper bag and loaded it with pages from some old volumes that I thought no one would ever wish to see again. I threw the bag out and watched it fall. The book landed rather roughly in a bush. I closed the window and left the library. I found the text and recovered it. It was not damaged, to my great relief. I drove away. I now am a tenured professor at the University of Wallingsford, near the home of Shakespeare. I teach the odd course at Oxford. My reputation has been built on the fact that not Mary Shelley but her husband Percy wrote the famous novel with which we are all so familiar. This life suits me. I meet with students once or twice a month and they usually work at subjects related to this business of literary tradition.