William Saroyan, Rock Wagram,

My copy of William Saroyan's Rock Wagram (1952), has, in addition to a sweet musty smell, a dedication and a date in code on the flyleaf, and the price, 16/=, mostly erased, and then, maybe half a century later, £1.00, written in large sloppy pencil. The code looks mathematical, with a lot of dashes between symbols. You can sense an intimacy, a friendship, between two men, I'd think. Good to remember that the gift of a book communicates before you've read a word.

Not a great novel, but if you like William Saroyan's stories, spend time in his company, as well as in the company of the two men whose friendship was in code. As Proust said somewhere, all great literature is in code; or did he say all great literature is a foreign language, which is maybe the same thing? All ordinary literature also, all ordinary life.

Actually, when I pulled the Saroyan off the shelves, I meant to look at William Sansom, who was adjacent, reminded of something he wrote about moving a table out into a garden in order to write, and how I didn't need a table, just somewhere flat with a backrest and preferably sun. The William Sansom book, a Penguin with the price, second-hand, 3P, slathered across the front cover in black felt-tip, was also published in 1952.