Woes of the True Policeman

4

Two Arcimboldi Novels Read in Three Days

The Librarian (Gallimard, 1966, 185 pages)

The protagonist’s name is Jean Marchand. He’s young, from a good family, and wants to be a writer. He has a manuscript, The Librarian, on which he’s been working for a long time. A publishing house, recognizable as Gallimard, hires him as a reader. Overnight, Marchand finds himself buried in hundreds of unpublished novels. First he decides to set his book aside for a while. Then he decides to give up his literary aspirations (the practice of writing, if not his passion for it) to devote himself to the careers of other writers. He sees himself as a doctor at a leper colony in India, a monk pledged to a higher cause.

He reads manuscripts, has long discussions with writers, gives them advice, calls them on the phone, inquires after their health, lends them money. Soon there’s a group of about ten whom he can consider his own, whose novels he’s been involved with. Some-a few-find publishers. Parties are thrown and plans made. The rest come imperceptibly to swell the ranks of a collection of unpublished manuscripts guarded jealously by Marchand. Among these manuscripts by others is his own novel, The Librarian, unfinished and perfectly typed, neatly bound, a beauty among grubby, smudged, crumpled, dirty originals; a lady cat among tomcats. Marchand dreams that in one magical and endless night the rejected manuscripts make love every way possible with his abandoned manuscript: they sodomize it, rape it orally and genitally, come in its hair, on its body, in its ears, in its armpits, etc., but when morning comes his manuscript hasn’t been fertilized. It’s sterile. In that sterility, Marchand believes, lies its uniqueness, its magnetism. He also dreams that he’s the leader of a gang that scavenges metal from mines and that the mountain they must plunder by the light of the moon is hollow, empty. His prestige at the publishing house grows, as it must. He has recommended the publication of a young writer who is the hit of the season. Marchand knows that for every writer he allows to breathe, there are five who endure with him (with the best Marchand, the most improbable) the airlessness and darkness of their labyrinthine works.

Eventually, one of his writers kills himself. Another turns to journalism. Another, of independent means, writes a second and a third novel that only Marchand will read and praise. Another is published by a small regional press. Another becomes an encyclopedia salesman. By this point Marchand has abandoned any scruples, any hesitation: not only does he maintain steady relationships with the writers but in more than one case he has become acquainted with their families (dear M. Marchand), their girlfriends and wives, their generous grandmothers, their best friends. In his imagination, his manuscript lives on in the novels that he stores at his house: the character of The Librarian enters the lives of the other characters-the characters from the other books-just as he works his way into the lives of the writers. Of the first ten, only one takes the tempestuous world of publishing by storm (and even so, Marchand controls him to the point of making him write stories that only he will read, rewrite novels whose discarded fragments only he will possess); as the years go by, the others find new interests, stop writing, readapt themselves, grow up. But the flow of new manuscripts is unceasing: Marchand takes on another ten writers, then another ten, and so on until his library is filled with manuscripts-strange ones, bad ones sometimes; surprising ones, delightful ones, dark ones sometimes-that he personally takes care to see are rejected by publishers. There comes a moment when Marchand reads only unpublished works: the novel gives brief plot summaries of about forty.

Marchand has dreams: a great fire in his building, described by Arcimboldi with the precision of an architect and a firefighter; the appearance of a thundering Messiah who publishes all the filched manuscripts and condemns him to burn in hell, the Librarian’s greatest fear; the hatching of a generation of novelists who are as quick as lightning and whom he’ll coddle and lead, step by step, into his library of rejected writers. The novel ends abruptly. Marchand dies of a heart attack. Present at his burial, along with the employees of the publishing house, are many former writers. A moving truck transports his collection of manuscripts to a warehouse. Arcimboldi describes the warehouse in great detail.

Racine (Gallimard, 1979, 140 pages)