Long Sonata of the Dead

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Book: Long Sonata of the Dead Read Free
Author: Andrew Taylor
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priceless knack of seeming to be interested in a person. The takeaway stretched among the three of us. Adam and Mary got very stoned and I sulked.
    Next week Mary and I officially broke up. It was one lunchtime in the pub. She did her best to do it tactfully. But all the time she was being kind to me, she was glowing with excitement about Adam like a halloween pumpkin with a candle inside.
    As she was going, she said, “Don’t take it personally, Tony, will you? I’m always looking for something, you see, and I never quite find it. Maybe one day I’ll come round full circle. Or maybe I’ll find it. Whatever it is I’m looking for.”
    I didn’t know which disturbed me more: the knowledge that Adam was having an affair and that his marriage to Mary was breaking down; or the growing suspicion that he would take Youlgreave away from me, probably without even knowing what he was doing.
    I knew perfectly well that Francis Youlgreave wasn’t “mine” to lose in the first place. He was just a long-dead clergyman with eccentric habits, who had written a few minor poems that sometimes turned up in anthologies. Even I accepted that most of his poetry wasn’t up to much. If half the stories were true, he had taken too much brandy and opium to do anything very well.
    For all that, Youlgreave was an interesting person, always striving for something out of his reach. He was also interesting in the wider context of literary history. He was not quite a Victorian, not quite a modern, but something poised uneasily between the two.
    We were about to reach the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of his birth. Publishers love anniversaries, and I had pitched the idea of a short biography of Youlgreave with a selection of his better poems to an editor I’d worked for in the past. To my surprise she liked the proposal and eventually commissioned it. The advance was modest. Still, it was a proper book and for a decent publisher.
    I knew there wasn’t a great deal of material available on Youlgreave. It was rather odd, actually, how little had survived—I suspected that his family had purged his papers after his death. But when talking to the editor I made a big point of his friendships with people like Oscar Wilde and Aleister Crowley, and also his influence on the modernists who came after him. There were people who claimed to see elements of Youlgreave’s work in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland , which wasn’t as fanciful as it might seem.
    Besides, what we did know about him was intriguing. The second son of a baronet, he had published a volume called Last Poems while he was still at Oxford. He was ordained and spent the 1890s as a vicar in London. He was made a Canon of Rosington—some people said that his family pulled strings in order to get him away from the temptations of the capital—but had retired early owing to ill-health.
    Youlgreave was only in his early forties when he died. I had seen reports of the inquest. He was living at his brother’s house. He fell out of a high window. They said it was an accident. But no one really knew what had happened, and they probably never would.
    I had one advantage that I made the most of with my editor. Youlgreave had been a member of the London Library for most of his adult life. After his death, his family presented a number of his books to the library.
    One of them was his own copy of The Voice of Angels. Youlgreave’s last collection of poems, published in 1903, was called The Tongues of Angels. Voice was a privately-printed variant of Tongues that included an extra poem, “The Children of Heracles.” The poem, which has strong elements of cannibalism, was unpleasant even by today’s standards; presumably Youlgreave’s publisher refused to include it in Tongues.
    I suspected that the cataloguer hadn’t realized how rare this book was. It was not in the British Library or the Bodleian or Cambridge University Library. As far as I knew, the London Library’s edition was the only

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