He took me to a bookseller's and stationery store on Astor Place with a print shop in the basement, and the man to whom he introduced me was the owner, Roger Tyss. I spent almost six years there, and when I left neither the store nor its contents nor Tyss himself seemed to have changed or aged.
I know books were sold and others bought to take their places on the shelves or to be piled towerwise on the floor. I helped cart in many rolls of sulfide paper and bottles of printers' ink, and delivered many bundles of damp pamphlets, broadsides, letterheads and envelopes. Inked ribbons for typewriting machines, pen points, ledgers and daybooks, rulers, paper clips, legal forms, and cubes of india rubber came and went. Yet the identical, invincible disorder, the synonymous dog-eared volumes, the indistinguishable stock, the unaltered cases of type seemed fixed for six years, all covered by the same film of dust which responded to vigorous sweeping only by rising into the air and immediately settling back on precisely the same spots.
Roger Tyss grew six years older, and I can only charge it to the heedless eye of youth that I saw no signs of that aging. Like Pondible and, as I learned, so many members of the Grand Army, he wore a beard. His was closely trimmed, wiry and grizzled. Above the beard and across his forehead were many fine lines which always held some of the grime of the store or printing press. You did not dwell long on either beard or wrinkles, however; what held you were his eyes: large, dark, fierce, and compassionate. You might have dismissed him at first glance as simply an undersized, stoop-shouldered, slovenly printer, had it not been for those eyes which seemed in perpetual conflict with his other features.
“Robbed and bludgeoned, ay?” he said with a curious disrespect for sequence after Pondible had explained me to him. “Dog eats dog, and the survivors survive. Backmaker, ay? Is that an American name?”
So far as I knew, I said, it was.
“Well, well; let's not pry too deeply. So you want to learn. Why?”
“Why?” The question was too big for an answer, yet an answer of some kind was expected. “I guess because there's nothing else so important.”
“Wrong,” he said triumphantly, “wrong and illusory. Since nothing is ultimately important there can be no degrees involved. Books are the waste product of the human mind.”
“Yet you deal in them,” I ventured.
“I'm alive and I shall die, too; this doesn't mean I approve of either life or death. Well, if you are going to learn you are going to learn; there's nothing I can do about it. As well here as another place.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Gratitude, Hodgins"—he never then nor later condescended to the familiar “Hodge” nor did I ever address or even think of him except as Mr. Tyss—"Gratitude, Hodgins, is an emotion disagreeable both to the giver and to the receiver. We do what we must; gratitude, pity, love, hate, all that cant, is superfluous.”
I considered this statement reflectively.
“Look you,” he went on, “I'll feed you and lodge you, teach you to set type, and give you the run of the books. I'll pay you no money; you can steal from me if you must. You can learn as much here in four months as in a college in four years—if you persist in thinking it's learning you want—or you can learn nothing. I'll expect you to do the work I think needs doing; anytime you don't like it you're free to go.”
And so our agreement, if so simple and unilateral a statement can be called an agreement, was made within ten minutes after he met me for the first time. For six years the store was home and school, and Roger Tyss was employer, teacher, and father to me. He was never my friend. Rather he was my adversary. I respected him and the longer I knew him the deeper became my respect, but it was an ambivalent feeling and attached only to those qualities which he himself would have scorned. I detested his ideas, his philosophy, and many of his actions, and this detestation grew until I was no longer able to live near him. But I am getting ahead of my story.
Tyss knew books, not merely as a bookman knows them—binding, size, edition, value—but as a scholar. He seemed to have read enormously and on every conceivable subject, many of them quite useless in practical application. (I remember a long discourse on heraldry, filled with terms like “paley-bendy,” or “fusils conjoined in fess, gules” and “sable demi-lions.” He regarded such erudition, indeed any erudition, contemptuously. When I asked why he had bothered to pick it up, his retort was, “Why have you bothered to pick up calluses, Hodgins?")
As a printer he followed the same pattern; he was not concerned solely with setting up a neat page; he sometimes spent hours laying out some trivia, which could have interested only its author, until he struck a proof which satisfied him. He wrote much on his own account: poetry, essays, manifestos, composing directly from the font, running off a single proof which he read—always expressionlessly—and immediately destroyed before piing the type.
I slept on a mattress kept under one of the counters during the day; Tyss had a couch hardly more luxurious, downstairs by the flatbed press. Each morning before it was time to open he sent me across town on the horse cars to the Washington Market to buy six pounds of beef— twelve on Saturdays, for the market, unlike the bookstore, was closed Sundays. It was always the same cut, heart of ox or cow, dressed by the butcher in thin strips. After I had been with him long enough to tire of the fare, but not long enough to realize the obstinacy of his nature, I begged him to let me substitute pork or mutton, or at least some other part of the beef, like brains or tripe which were even cheaper. He always answered, “The heart, Hodgins. Purchase the heart; it is the vital food.”
While I was on my errand he would buy three loaves of yesterday's bread, still tolerably fresh; when I returned he took a long two-pronged fork, our only utensil, for the establishment was innocent of either cutlery or dishes, and spearing a strip of heart held it over the gas flame of a light standard until it was sooted and toasted rather than broiled. We tore the loaves with our fingers, and with a hunk of bread in one hand and a strip of heart in the other we each ate a pound of meat and half a loaf of bread for breakfast, dinner, and supper.
“Man is uniquely a savage eater of carrion,” he informed me, chewing vigorously. “What lion or tiger would relish another's ancient, putrefying kill? What vulture or hyena displays human ferocity? Too, we are cannibals at heart. We eat our gods; we have always eaten our gods.”
“Isn't that figurative, or poetic, Mr. Tyss? I mean, doesn't it refer to the grain of wheat which is 'killed' by the harvester and buried by the sower?”
“You think the gods were modeled on John Barleycorn and not John Barleycorn on them—to conceal their fate? I fear you have a higher opinion of mankind than is warranted, Hodgins.”
“I'm not sure I know what you mean by gods.”
“Embodiments or personifications of human aspirations. The good, the true, the beautiful—with winged feet or bull's body.”
“How about… oh, Chronos? Or Satan?”
He licked his fingers of the meat juices, obviously pleased. “Satan. An excellent example. Epitome of man's futile longing to upset and defy the divine plan—I use the word 'divine' derisively, Hodgins—; who does not admire and reverence Lucifer in his heart? Well, having made a god out of the devil we eat him daily in a twofold sense: by swallowing the myth of his enmity (a truer friend there never was), and by digesting his great precepts of pride and curiosity and strength. And you see for yourself how he finds interesting thoughts for idle minds to speculate on. Let's get to work.”
He expected me to work, but he was far from a hard or inconsiderate master. In 1938-44, when the country was being ground deeper into colonialism, there were few employers so lenient. I read much, generally when I pleased, and despite his jeers at learning in the abstract he encouraged me, even going to the length, if a particular book was not to be found in his considerable stock, of letting me get it from one of his competitors, to be written up against his account.