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The Would-Be Scholar of Eunuchs
‘Now Departing From Track 1’: Introduction to ‘Ten Past Noon’
Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty, published in 2020, is a hybrid nonfiction work about “war, racism, gender, time, mortality, free will, money, argument, information architecture, and why a writer might not finish a book.” The book description further explains:
In the Roaring Twenties, Edward Cumming might have become a railroad businessman, but he was more interested in literature. During the Depression, he tried to write a book about historical castrations. At thirty-nine, he died by suicide. What went wrong for him? A lack of focus? A problem of fate? The number forty? Or was his book haunted? In this train ride of an American biography, Tucker Lieberman tells the story of the would-be scholar of eunuchs.
Here, I share the book’s entire introduction.
For nearly eighty years, Eunuchry has endured in five dozen binders and boxes, housed in a building faced with limestone and sandstone. To better direct you, I can reveal that Eunuchry is in the Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, on the north end of Museum Mile. You make an appointment and, when you arrive, the guard makes a call to announce you. You take an elevator, then a staircase up. The Rare Book Reading Room has a high ceiling. Its shelves are made of dark wood, the contents protected by a grill and accessed by a ladder. The librarian has already retrieved your requested items and rolled them out on a cart. The cart is like a little train car with no motor.
The author of Eunuchry, Edward Dilworth Cumming, writing during the Great Depression, hoped to illuminate “a right understanding of the eunuch character.”
The first draft of Eunuchry is divided among nineteen loose-leaf binders, each identified as its own “volume.” Additional binders hold a second draft. A third draft manifests as a stack of one or two thousand sheets of paper — they aren’t numbered, and I chose not to count them — bound with brads. Numbered index cards were used to record quotations and bibliographical sources so the main text could be footnoted to the number of the card. The information on the cards was then compiled and…
