The Widening Stain Read online

  THE WIDENING

  STAIN

  W. BOLINGBROKE

  JOHNSON

  Introduction by

  NICHOLAS A.

  BASBANES

  AMERICAN

  MYSTERY

  CLASSICS

  INTRODUCTION

  ACADEMICS AT venerable institutions of higher learning throughout the United States must have had great fun back in the 1940s wondering who, exactly, among their lofty ranks had taken pen to paper and written a delightfully irreverent biblio-mystery that took gentle aim at the foibles and passions of their profession, while ostensibly considering the untimely deaths of two scholars who had been working with rare books and manuscripts in the University Library.

  As a work of fiction, The Widening Stain was a one-off performance for the mysterious author drolly identified on the original dustjacket by the publisher Alfred A. Knopf as being one W. Bolingbroke Johnson, “a native of Rabbit Hash, Kentucky” and former librarian for the American Dairy Goat Association and Okmulgee Agricultural and Mechanical Institute—an unsophisticated rube from the hinterlands, in other words, whose previously published works (or “so he says”) included modest contributions to the Boot and Shoe Recorder and the American Musselman—none of which, of course, could have been further from the truth.

  In reality, W. Bolingbroke Johnson was the nom de plume of Morris Gilbert Bishop (1893-1973), a greatly admired educa tor and scholar whose reputation as a widely published biographer, historian, and authority on Romance Languages would be responsible for wooing Vladimir Nabokov to join the Cornell University faculty as a professor and lecturer of Russian Literature in 1948, and become his closest friend during his eleven years on the Ithaca, New York, campus.

  Bishop’s body of professional work was formidable—a “polymath in his field,” according to Alden Whitman’s three-column obituary in The New York Times—with fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Swedish among the feathers in his linguistic cap, along with an ability to “sight-read” Latin. His corpus embraced a broad spectrum, some four hundred published works over half-a-century, four dozen of them books he either wrote or edited, including respected biographies of Petrarch, Pascal, La Rouchefoucauld, Ronsard, Samuel de Champlain, Saint Francis of Assisi, and the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. To that was a two-volume Survey of French Literature that went through multiple printings, a critically-acclaimed history of the Middle Ages, translations into English of Molière’s dramatic works, and an institutional history of Cornell, where he spent sixty productive years as student, instructor, professor, official historian, and provost of the university, his time there interrupted only by a brief stint in advertising and military service in Europe during World War II.

  Quite apart from Bishop’s scholarship—which was unfailingly praised for its accessibility and clarity of expression—was a more whimsical side that found rich expression in light verse and casual prose, and a genius for composing limericks—the latter a skill that is brought to bear in The Widening Stain by one of the faculty members at the heart of the murder mys tery. From 1927—a year after receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell—to 1960, a span of thirty-three years, Bishop wrote, on average, fifteen poems and prose pieces a year for The New Yorker. Of his 1929 collection of verse, Paramount Poems, William J. Strunk Jr., author of the legendary Elements of Style, wondered if William Wordsworth was “ever more simple and direct than Bishop when he begins a lyrical ballad with the words, ‘The modern boys were bold and bad, / The modern girls were worse?’”

  Bishop’s attitude on the role poetry had to play in contemporary society is relevant to the laid-back tone and self-effacing approach he had employed in his mystery novel. “Our serious poets, writing deliberately for an elite and despising the average reader, have ruined poetry in the mind of the general intelligent public,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1954 collection, A Bowl of Bishop. It was the light versifiers, Bishop maintained, who were “helping to keep alive in the general mind a consciousness of poetic form and thought. They are holding poetry’s little forts amid the desert sands of the commonplace, awaiting the relief that shall come when the Poet arises, to fill our world with his overwhelming music.”

  What prompted Bishop, in his mid-forties, to set a tongue-in-cheek murder mystery on a college campus much like his own—the fictional library he describes with painstaking detail is a dead-ringer for Uris Library at Cornell—he never said publicly. With the exception of a few confidantes, he pretty much kept the work-in-progress to himself during the ominous days of 1941, with world conflict looming on the horizon. “I am writing a mystery story,” he informed one friend that June, six months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “The mystery itself would not deceive an intelligent chimpanzee, but I think I can make it more obscure on second writing. The background may carry it. Most of it is laid in our University Library, a kind of Notre-Dame de Paris. I have written half the book in three weeks, so there will be no great loss if no one wants to publish it and, in the meantime, it serves as a most admirable retreat. Come to think of it, ‘The Corpse in the Ivory Tower’ wouldn’t be a bad title.”

  As things turned out, there was not one corpse lying amid a “widening stain” of blood in the Ivory Tower, but two, the first victim an instructor in the Romance Languages Department named Lucie Coindreau, a “black-eyed, black-haired Frenchwoman in her early thirties,” good-looking “in the smoldering southern incipient-hairy way,” with an accent, according to some of her countrymen, that “took on a flavor of garlic” when she got excited. Lucie’s death one night after a cocktail reception in the home of the university president is thought at first to have been nothing more than a horrible accident during an after-hours visit to the rare books wing of the library, a head-first fall from an upper gallery where the young scholar was believed to have been retrieving a difficult-to-reach volume—a high-heel, possibly, getting stuck in her long evening gown triggering the fatal plunge.

  Not everyone is convinced, however, least of all Gilda Gorham, a summa cum laude graduate of the university whose day job is Chief Cataloguer of the library—“the brain of the Library’s sluggish body”—unmarried, also in her thirties, with an alert and inquisitive mind.* “She was bright and pleasant,” everyone agreed, “and knew what people were talking about,” qualities that earned her invitations to all the faculty parties.

  The obvious suspect, in Gilda’s view, is Angelo Casti, a tenure-tracked assistant professor like Lucie vying for promotion to associate professor, with whom she had at one time been romantically involved. The previous spring, Gilda is told, the two had “spent a lot of time in the Phonetics Laboratory, prolonging their research late into the night, and it is suspected that the time was not devoted exclusively to recording each other’s vowels and consonants.”

  Casti’s “pseudo science” scholarship, as some call it, involves studying the pronunciation of the vowel sounds in the combinations of “uff” and “ugg,” according to the medievalist Professor Hyett. “He has determined, I believe, that the average subject pronounces the ‘uh’ of ‘uff’ in 169 thousandths of a second, while they take 176 thousandths of a second to pronounce the ‘uh’ of ‘ugg,’” raising an eminently logical question: “But what good does that do?” Professor Hyett explains: “We seek pure learning, knowledge for its own sake. That knowledge may well be of some practical use to someone some time, but we don’t care whether it is or not. We just seek the fact. It’s the essential difference between pure and applied science. Wouldn’t you rather be pure than applied?”

  That the first death was most assuredly not an accident becomes evident with the discovery, in an inner sanctum known as the “locked press” where the rarest books an
d manuscripts are stored, of Professor Hyett, strangled where he sat before a reading desk, and a twelfth-century manuscript of rhymed verse in Latin gone missing. How does it all fit? Who among Gilda’s list of suspects could be responsible? It gives nothing away to say that the epiphany for her comes during a concert she attends with Francis Parry, composer of the clever limericks that enliven the pages of this smart and witty book. At novel’s end, there is the hint of romance in Gilda’s future, which leaves the reader to wonder if there may have been some thought to her becoming a continuing character—a female amateur detective, perhaps a research librarian who solves crimes in her spare time.

  Appearing in print during the early days of World War II, The Widening Stain proved to be something of a distraction for an anxious nation, going back to press several more times, appearing in English and French editions, generating a degree of curiosity as to the actual identity of the author, which Bishop never confirmed publicly. “We do not know who W. Bolingbroke Johnson is,” a reviewer for The New York Times wrote, “but he writes a good story with an academic atmosphere that is not so rarefied as we have been led to believe it should be in university circles.” The closest Bishop came to outright acknowledgement is to be found in a limerick he composed and inserted in a volume of the novel, now housed in the Cornell University Library:

  A cabin in northern Wisconsin

  Is what I would be for the nonce in,

  To be rid of the pain

  of The Widening Stain

  and W. Bolingbroke Johnson.

  —NICHOLAS A. BASBANES

  * Editor’s Note: According to Bishop’s granddaughter, Margaretta Jolly, the Gorham character seems to be modelled on his wife, the artist Alison Mason Kingsbury, whom he met while she was painting the mural in Cornell’s Willard Straight Hall.

  THE WIDENING STAIN

  Chapter I

  IN THE women’s rest room of the University Library, Miss Gilda Gorham, Chief Cataloguer, looked at her face. It would do, she thought. Not the sort of face to launch a thousand ships, unless you wanted to bounce it off the bow like a champagne bottle. But not exactly revolting, either. Showing a certain wear and tear to the acute observer, she decided; not so juicy as it was once. The lips pursed too tightly, in the habit of disapproval. She wiggled her lips briskly. Pity she had to do so much disapproving, in the way of business. Well, everyone couldn’t be beautiful, and probably a good thing. What was that pretty bit from the Bab Ballads:

  Skin-deep, and valued at a pin,

  Is beauty such as Venus owns—

  Her beauty is beneath her skin,

  And lies in layers on her bones.

  That wasn’t her trouble, anyway. She was rather on the thin-spinsterish side. That is, if she was actually a spinster. When does one become a spinster, exactly? Thirty-two? Thirty-three? Alarming thought!

  Miss Gorham walked into the catalogue room, and took her seat at the high desk as the Library clock boomed nine unhappy strokes. Only three of the girls were present at the great circular desk with the reference works on an enormous revolving wheel in the center. The Library admitted nothing low like a time-clock, and trusted to the staff’s sense of duty, with the result that the staff was likely to arrive from five to fifteen minutes late. When Miss Gorham had pointed out this fact to Dr. Sandys, the new Librarian, Dr. Sandys had replied that the moral sense of the staff was the best time-clock; it would keep them at work after five o’clock, until their duties should be done. But in fact most of the staff left ten minutes early, and took an hour and a half off for lunch.

  As the girls entered, Miss Gorham greeted them, combining a smile, a frown, and a glance at the clock. You couldn’t really blame them for sneaking a few minutes. They were nice girls, and fearfully underpaid. The Library paid its minor employees on about the same scale as the five-and-ten, and got away with it because it is so respectable and elevating to work among great books. Miss Gorham cast an eye at the shelf on which the books paused on their way from Accessions to Classification. Eyak Indians of the Copper River Delta; Variations and Diseases of the Teeth of Animals; Colloquial Japanese; Anglican Humanitarianism in Colonial New York; Rural Waste Disposal. So inspiring to work with the great productions of scholarship. Yeah.

  “Oh, Miss Gorham, just a moment, please. . . .”

  It was Dr. William Sandys, the Librarian, large and imposing, with an educator’s goatee and a somewhat conscious air of executive decision.

  “Miss Gorham, there is just a little question of routine procedure. About that Latin miracle-play manuscript in the safe, you know—”

  “Manuscript B 58.”

  “Yes. Well, Mr. Casti of the Romance Language Department wants to take it out in order to make some investigations with it in his Phonetics Laboratory. Now, is that in accord with your custom?”

  “Absolutely not. No manuscript may leave the Library building. And anyway B 58 is one of our most precious possessions. It is unique and unpublished, and some of the illuminations are very remarkable, the ones showing the staging of thirteenth-century plays. Mr. Wilmerding paid twelve thousand dollars for it in 1885, and probably it would bring ten times that today.”

  “Ah, just as I thought. But Mr. Casti seemed to think—”

  “He has a microfilm of it. What more does he want?”

  “I see. Quite so. I simply wanted to make sure about your procedure. I don’t want to make any egregious errors at the start. I want to know the ropes, as the boys say. You see?”

  “Oh yes, of course, Dr. Sandys.”

  “Well—huh—I guess that’s all, Miss Gorham.”

  Miss Gorham, watching him go, commented inwardly that the Librarian had made himself an imposing façade, but from the rear he was less convincing.

  She glowered at one of the girls who was snickering into the telephone. Obviously a personal call, and obviously too long a one. She made a note to speak to Miss Loring. Badinage was all very well, but not on University time.

  Professor Belknap of History, tall, dour, and sour, was making his way toward her desk. He was carrying an old discolored vellum-bound volume under his arm. All the girls looked at Professor Belknap; two put their heads together and made what were apparently cute remarks. Professor Belknap looked at none of them; he walked in an oblivious cloud of scholarship. He wore his invariable suit of steel gray; a great golden Phi Beta Kappa key hung on his stomach from a gold watch-chain. “The scholar’s crucifix!” murmured Miss Gorham, rather pleased with the conceit.

  “Good morning, Miss Gorham.” Professor Belknap was not one to waste time in frivolities. “Miss Gorham, you know that manuscript, the Filius Getronis of Hilarius?”

  “B 58.”

  “Yes. You know that I am planning to publish it, with the co-operation of Mr. Hyett of the Classics Department and Mr. Parry of Dramatics? Well, I am not sure if you have heard that Mr. Casti of Romance Languages is interested in it from a linguistic point of view. He thinks that he may find in it influences of the presumably Angevin dialect of the author. Some of those involuntary influences, you know, of the linguistic habit of the vernacular on the written Latin. Mr. Casti has asked to examine the manuscript in his laboratory. He thought that I might persuade you to persuade Dr. Sandys to let him take it out. I consented to convey his request to you.”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Belknap. You know as well as I do that in principle no manuscripts may leave the Library building. Of course, if you are all agreed that a laboratory examination is necessary, it might be arranged.”

  “I should hardly go so far. I myself thought the request a strange one, and curiously devious. But Mr. Casti asked me to speak to you. He seemed to think that I might exert an influence which he lacks.” He smiled. One could almost see his will hauling at rusty muscles, lifting the mouth’s corners.

  He laid the vellum-bound volume on Miss Gorham’s desk.

  “And by the way,” he said, “here is something for the Library.”

  “Why!” gasped Miss Gorham.
“It’s the Hammer of Witches! The Malleus Maleficarum! And the edition of 1489! That must be the first edition, isn’t it?”

  Professor Belknap’s smile was warmed with real delight. “Yes. It is a shameful thing that the Library has no copy of this epoch-making book. When I saw this offered in Thorp’s catalogue, I tried to get the Library Council to buy it. The Council refused, with characteristic stupidity. But I felt that we had to have it. The great classic on the detection of witches and the methods of torture to extort confessions!”

  “This is wonderful of you, Mr. Belknap! Dr. Sandys will write you a letter of thanks.”

  “No, no, no! None of that nonsense. It’s just a book that the Library needed. Well—”

  He glanced about, evidently looking for an excuse for escaping from gratitude. Conveniently, he perceived Professor Parry of the Department of Dramatics heading toward Miss Gorham’s desk.

  “Good morning, Parry. I yield my place to you.”

  He bowed formally to Miss Gorham. The smile dimmed on his face. He turned, clasped his hands behind his back, and stalked away, his eyes fastened on the ground. One of the girls at the catalogue desk said something that made two others snort and strangle with laughter. Miss Gorham rapped on her desk with a pencil. Those girls, acting as if they were working in a model bakery on visitors’ day!

  Professor Parry, tall, blond, handsome, and forty, whose greatest grief was his thinning hair, watched the Professor of Medieval History out of the room. He turned to Miss Gorham with the irresistible boyish smile which had captured the audiences of innumerable college plays and of Faculty Dramatic Club performances.

  “Good old Belknap!” he said. “Buried up to the neck in scholarship!”

  “And why not, indeed? Scholarship is his business.”

  “No reason why not. It just amused me to watch him. All the girls were staring at him, and he was staring at the floor. Pretended he didn’t know they were looking, but he knew, he knew. He makes me think of one of the saints I ran across in this medieval work we’re doing. Saint Ambrose of Milan I think it was. He never raised his eyes from the ground for fear he would be polluted by seeing a woman. The result was he was run over by a chariot or something. And when he came to he was in bed in the hospital of a nunnery. A frightful shock.”