"The barometer of his emotional nature was set up for a spell of riot."
The intriguing passage was on an unknown page, randomly fallen from a book, discovered as I compiled the paragraphs and pages of Randomary – my 366-passage list of book excerpts I compiled in 2008 and have recently revisited.
The way the loose book pages turned up is itself random – in the bottom of a paper bag. I recorded the lines (though, lamentably, did not keep the pages themselves) after finding them some 16 years ago.
In 2024 I retrieved my notes on the pages – the bag was from a used book sale, which just enhances the fragmentary nature of it. I used the Internet to investigate the key lines of two of the pages. A third seemed just to be a table of contents page – harder to discern its origin.
This case of finding loose pages, just pieces of a book, that seem to lack context but in fact are connected, is an examplar of what Randomary is about. These mystery pages were fragments outside of the tapestry of Randomary and, as happened many times in Randomary, the fragments had something in common. In this case: booze.
Was it simple chance that loose pages from three separate texts would remain behind in a book donation bag, and that all three would be fragments of stories of men ravaged by alcohol abuse?
Among the three, a phrase truly stood out, and I though, “what an intriguing opening to a book; set up for a spell of riot.”
Whatever its title, the unexpected passage carries an intriguing relevance to Randomary -- the hold that a selected passage can have on a reader, or at least on me.
Pages detached, and yet a "sense of familiarity, of recognition ..." echoes in the words of Benjamin Franklin, page 310 in Randomary. He wrote to Samuel Mather on the life-long impact of a book by Mather's father, Cotton, even though pages were missing from the book in question.
Franklin wrote, "It had been so little regarded by a former possessor that several leaves of it were torn out. But the remainder gave me such a turn of thinking as to have an influence on my conduct through life …"
I had brought home full of books from the annual Friends of the Library book sale. The empty bag was one of many offered in that library meeting room, and it happened to be the one I picked up for the $1-fill-a-bag sale. After discovering the loose pages, I checked to see if they had fallen from one of the books I had chosen; they did not. The pages had either been in the bag all along, or somehow came to be stuck to the back or insides of one of the books I bought. The book sale being a long tradition, with many paper bags stored, it is possible the page had years earlier come loose from some tome. The bag could have been held over from years ago. Who knows how long ago this spell of riot originated?
Orphaned passages found in a paper bag also form a mirror image of Randomary's premise, that of finding or choosing passages from known books. And with this "spell of riot" volume, without its context, achieves the same purpose but with an inverted sense of mystery.
It turned out the “spell of riot” line is from mid-point of “Counterparts,” a short story in “Dubliners” by James Joyce. The stories being varied and dense, I had not remembered the line despite having read each story a few years back during my short-story-a-day regimen.
It was interesting to discover that a second was from a book I had read and the other was evidently from “Under the Volcano” by Malcolm Lowry. "These words, on the printed page,” read the second line, “had the unsettling effect no doubt intended, but with a difference."
Both lines convey grades of disruption – a spell of riot and unsettling effect, and having re-read “Counterparts,” I see it again as a tale of a clerk, Farrington, in possession of a conflicted, fragmented, mind. The hinge of the story – indeed, what leads to Farrington’s unhinging – is that of two literal fragments, symbols, perhaps of Farrington’s spell of riot.
I am struck by how Joyce alternately refers to his protagonist as Farrington and “the man.” As if acknowledging the duplicate, actually split, character of this troubled person.
“He felt strong enough to clear out the whole office singlehanded. His body ached to do something, to rush out and revel in violence. All the indignities of his life enraged him.... Could he ask the cashier privately for an advance? No, the cashier was no good, no damn good: he wouldn't give an advance.... He knew where he would meet the boys: Leonard and O'Halloran and Nosey Flynn. The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.
“His imagination had so abstracted him that his name was called twice before he answered. Mr Alleyne and Miss Delacour were standing outside the counter and all the clerks had turn round in anticipation of something. The man got up from his desk. Mr Alleyne began a tirade of abuse, saying that two letters were missing.”
It is fragments – the two letters – that compel Farrington to his dreadful slide through a series of whisky houses and then, in an alcohol-craved state, home where he beats his son for not having his dinner on and letting the fire go out.
The third set of orphaned pages is from one of our best-known tales of an alcoholic: “The Lost Weekend,” by Charles Jackson.
I would set aside these fragments for a number of years before conducting a simple Internet search. What I had found was a random page from the book, and the table of contents reading 1. The Start; 2. The Wife; 3. The Joke; 4. The Dream; 5. The Mouse; 6. The End.
The shard from the book, in keeping with the Randomary sensibility, concerns a book: "At once he put the book aside; closed it, with his fingers still between the pages; dropped his arm over the edge of the chair and let it hang, the book somewhere near the floor. This in case he wanted to look at it again. But he did not need to. Already he knew the sentence by heart; he might have written it himself. Indeed it was with a sense of familiarity, of recognition, that his mind had first read through and accepted that sentence only a moment before; and now, as he relaxed his fingers' grip and dropped the book to the floor, he said aloud to himself: 'That's me all right.' The book hit the rug with a soft thump and the Scottie looked up from its basket. 'You heard me Me,' he called out. 'That's what I said!' He glared a the sleepy dog and added, loudly, burlesquing this fear and his delight: 'It's me they're talking about. Me!'
But there was another clue. Obverse of the contents, is the epigram, from Hamlet III. 1:
"And can you, by no drift of circumstance,
Get from him why he puts on this confusion,
Grating so harshly all his days of quiet,
With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?"
Turbulent and dangerous lunacy, burlesquing of fears. Spells of riot, drawn across three books – and Shakespeare the bonus.
Any epigram is itself a fragment – words drawn from an external source (context outside of context). I often wonder why some authors take their title from an epigram while others don't.
Perhaps some authors desire a transparent reference, while others want you to wonder all the more just what will be the relevance of the passage. The point of the passage is to set the stage for the book, to entice the reader toward discovering how the philosophical insight applies.
But the conundrum is you always want to know ahead of time — you want a clue, however elusive (or allusive) it might be. When the title is extracted from the passage, it's like going into a cold house that has only one light on. Yes, you'll need time to warm up and to adjust but at least you can find your way in, and perhaps see your way around.
By burlesquing fears or delights, a remainder can give a reader such a turn of thinking. — N.R.