A World Elsewhere Read Online Free

would not be the first idealist to learn the knack of squaring his conscience with a way of life that in his youth he thought could be reformed. There was an intricate set of necessarily imperfect rules that were followed the world over except by fools who, in the course of their foredoomed and lonely insurrections, were destroyed.
    His father was the first sealing skipper in the world to bring back one million seals from the hunt. Million . The word was everywhere in Newfoundland. The Board of Trade threw a dinner for Captain Abram Druken. One thousand flipper pies were served.
    “Million Abram” received the award of the Blue Ensign from the Governor. A gold medal from a prominent merchant. The OBE—the Order of the British Empire from Buckingham Palace. A “white-coat hat,” which his father called “the laurel wreath of sealers.”
    As a child, crouching down by his parents’ bed, Landish had reached underneath, taken hold of the small wooden trunk, and as gingerly as if it held explosives, eased it out.
    “The lock is just for decoration,” his father had said. He held the sides of the top of the chest with his fingers and slowly, ceremoniously, much as the Governor must have done at the official presentation, raised the lid.
    The first thing he noticed was the red velvet lining the inside of the chest, then the hat that was supposedly made from the very fur of the millionth seal. A baby seal. The purest white that he had ever seen.
    The first to bring home one million seals. Bring home . It made it sound as if the seals were dead when his father found them and all he did was bring them back.
    Every night, even if there was not so much as a breeze by day, the wind came up like something brought on by the darkness. It blew in through one side of the attic on Dark Marsh Road and out the other with a screeching whistle. Landish heard what he called the droning in the wires several streets away.
    He stood at the attic’s porthole, its only window, and looked out past the marsh, across the rooftops and chimneys of the city, to the Narrows. It was mid-October. He thought about the words “the fall.” No others would do for how things seemed, for the tantalizingtransformation that was taking place, the slow, sad fall of all things into winter. It seemed to him that “the fall” was shot through with the fall and in part made it what it was and caused him to feel about it as he did.
    Everything was falling, failing. Night was falling faster, the light fading faster from the fields. Time by day passed faster and by night seemed not to pass at all. He turned the attic lights on sooner, but not before something like a dusky silence filled the two rooms. It was as if some old regime of time was falling and a new regime was near.
    It had been this “feeling” of the fall that first made him want to write.
    He wrote more than he ever had at Princeton.
    It was so bad he wished that he could burn it twice.
    In his and Van’s final year at Princeton, more and more students began to vie for an invitation to the Lotus Land literary salons. Van was the gatekeeper. He chose not only outcasts, the previously unpopular, the “unaffiliates,” but also young men whose fathers were almost as rich as his, some of them deserters from the usual eating clubs, The Ivy as well as The Cottage and The Cap and Gown.
    Landish assigned more nicknames:
    There were three brothers who were known as Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger and Pliny the Tiny. There were the Duke of Unwellington, Le Marquis de Malarkey, the Duke of Buxomberg and Sorethumberland.
    Landish’s authority was sometimes challenged, most often by way of allusions to his having no “name.” He would pretend to take it in good humour. When he felt most wounded, he deferred the taking of revenge, storing up witticisms until he was able to give far worse than he’d got, so destroying his would-be rival that the fellow either dropped out of the Druken circle or hung on as a