The temptation was too great - on the day the trolley appeared outside Joe Bennett's local book shop he bought three second-hand books. Photo / Getty Images
The temptation was too great - on the day the trolley appeared outside Joe Bennett's local book shop he bought three second-hand books. Photo / Getty Images
A DOG'S LIFE
The local second-hand bookshop has acquired a wheeled trolley such as might once have moved books about a library. Fair enough. But what's not fair enough is that they wheel it out onto the pavement each day.
Books in a bookshop window are one thing. There's a barrier between youand them. To touch them, to turn their pages, you have to make the decision to step from your world into theirs. But a trolley on the pavement is already in your world. All you have to do is reach out. And the books are only five bucks each. What chance does a man have?
I don't need more books. I got rid of boxes of them just last spring by giving them away, as you've already guessed, to this same second-hand bookshop. Now there's a fair chance I'll inadvertently buy one of them back.
On the day the trolley appeared I bought three. The first was volume 1 of Malcolm Muggeridge's autobiography. I read volume 2 years ago. Muggeridge was a god-bothering bore on television but he wrote well.
Once, when returning to the UK by steamer after a year at an Indian university, Muggeridge found in his luggage a pile of exam scripts that he was supposed to have marked before leaving. So he sat in a deckchair at the stern of the boat and scrupulously marked them. And having carefully totted up the marks and written the total in a little circle on the front page, he tossed each script into the ocean.
The second book was a memoir by Robert Hughes, the art critic. I took it with me when I got the Covid vaccine. Sitting in Fendalton Pharmacy for 20 minutes after the jab I read his account of having a tick removed from his penis by a school matron. I snorted so much through my mask that the pharmacist asked if I was all right.
And then there was a book by Richard Halliburton. I'd never heard of him but inside the front cover were the words 'Inscribed for Sylvia', followed by the author's neat signature. This was a signed first edition published in 1929. It had to be worth a lot more than $5.
It wasn't. It turns out that this Halliburton was a prolific author and almost as prolific a signer. By profession, he was an adventurer. Off he went to have adventures, then wrote a book about them and gave illustrated lectures. He was world-famous. But to this modern reader he is hard to believe.
Book lovers at July's annual Zonta Great New Zealand Book Fair in Whangārei. Photo / Michael Cunningham
For example he describes climbing Popocatepetl with his father and a donkey. Popocatepetl is 18,000 feet high, some 4000 feet higher than Mount Cook. Camping overnight halfway up he inadvertently burns his boots, but he carries on through deep snow the next morning in their charred remains.
A couple of thousand feet short of the summit the boots give out entirely, whereupon his father undoes his own boots hands them to his son and wanders back down through the snow to base camp in his socks. Hard to swallow? Not for the public of his day. His books sold by the hundreds of thousands.
Halliburton, in that famous phrase of the obituarists, never married. He describes several implausible encounters with dusky senoritas but goes into far more plausible detail about Kit.
Kit is a young man who turns up out of the blue in chapter 4 and simply insists on joining Halliburton on one of his adventures, during which the pair of them do rather a lot more swimming naked than is perhaps usual. The whole episode is drenched with homoeroticism.
And sure enough, Wikipedia recounts that when Halliburton lived in Paris in the 1930s the French police became familiar with his habit of soliciting young men round the back of Gare St Lazare.
And here it's hard to resist a bit of home-grown psychoanalysis. There's a reckless suicidal quality to many of Halliburton's stunts, such as plunging 70 feet into a Mayan pool of sacrifice, almost dying on impact and then doing it again. Here was a man burdened with the love that dared not speak its name and he wasn't the first to court danger in consequence.
He died trying to sail an entirely unsuitable craft across the Pacific. His body was never found. The empty tomb they built for him says 'Lost at Sea'. I think that would have pleased him.
As would the fact that he finally washed up in the South Pacific flat on his back on the Trolley of Temptation.
