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Reading, for all of us, is fettered only by obvious restrictions. You can’t own all that you want or need to read. There are, then, two kinds of books – yours, and the contents of libraries. There is the actual, personal library, your own shelves, which mark out reading inclinations, decade by decade, and the virtual library in the head – the floating assemblage of fragments and images and impressions and information half-remembered that forms the climate of the mind, the distillation of reading experiences that makes each of us what we are.
Let’s look first at the actual library – the real, tangible books. My two thousand plus, which is nothing very much in personal library terms and requires no cataloging system beyond crude subject allocations: fiction in the kitchen, poetry in the television room, some history upstairs, other history down. Alberto Manguel, in his lovely book The Library at Night, says: “Every library is autobiographical . . . our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and what we have been . . . What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not merely the choice of titles themselves, but the mesh of associations implied in the choice.” His own library sounds awesome: many thousands of books in a converted barn somewhere in France, the amazing accretion that is the fruit of his tastes, his eclectic reading, his generous interest, his voracious curiosity. And his book is a homage to the very concept of the library.
My granddaughter Rachel, at the age of ten, was made library monitor for her form at school. She had all the proper librarian instincts; under her aegis, the form-room books were arranged by subject matter, and, within that, in alphabetical order. She was away ill for a week and came back to find that some interfering ignoramus had reshelved everything in height order; Rachel was outraged, quite rightly.
Had she known of it, she would have no doubt attempted an embryonic Dewey system. So would I – had I the time and the energy and rather more books than I have. When I was first raiding the public library system, I didn’t know what those cryptic numbers on the spines meant, and was entranced when at last enlightened – the elegant simplicity of the Decimal Classification system whereby the field of human knowledge is divided, and then subdivided – theoretically ad infinitum. Dewey is under fire these days, it seems, but I still like the elegance.
Alberto Manguel does not use Dewey, it would seem; his library has “no authoritarian catalogue” and the title of his book – The Library at Night – is intended to evoke that random, disordered quality that he feels so crucial to a library, that power to make connections, create echoes, cross cultures. A majestic collection such as his would do precisely that; it has the discipline of groupings, in some form, and further groupings within these, but its essential feature is that it is a private not a public library. The shelving system of a public library must be apparent to all users; a private library is sui generis – it has been assembled in response to the pursuits of a particular mind, a particular reading life, and is colored by all the associations and connections of that particular reading narrative. It is not trying to be comprehensive; it is relishing selection. It is about time and space; it tells you where this person has been, in every sense. Manguel records his pleasure, when unpacking his books and starting to arrange them in their French barn, at the coded references he found among the pages: the tram ticket reminding him of Buenos Aires, the paper napkin from the Café de Flore, the name and phone number scribbled on a flyleaf.
Exactly so. For any of us, with our humbler collections, the books have this archival aspect; they are themselves, but they also speak for us, for this owner, for you, for me. My books spill train tickets, invoices, pages of notes, the occasional underlining or swipe with the highlighter (though I don’t approve of defacing books). A little copy of Silas Marner in a slipcase has my name in childish handwriting – Penelope Low – and a year, 1945. And there too is the printed sticker of the bookseller: Librairie Cité du Livre, 2 rue Fouad, Alexandrie. So I acquired it at the age of twelve, in wartime Alexandria. And it has followed me from there, and then.
Perhaps my most treasured shelves are those with the old blue Pelicans, over fifty paperbacks, including some seminal titles: F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition, Margaret Mead’s Growing Up in New Guinea, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, Richard Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship. And John Bowlby’s Child Care and the Growth of Love, which had us young mothers of the midcentury in a fever of guilt if we handed our young children over to someone else for longer than an hour or so lest we risked raising a social psychopath – even the father was considered an inadequate stand-in. Pelicans were the thinking person’s library – for 3 shillings and 6 pence you opened the mind a little further. And Penguin had of course their own flamboyant Dewey system – the splendid color-coding: orange for fiction, green for crime, dark blue for biography, cherry red for travel.
I don’t have enough old Penguins. The Pelicans have survived, but the rest have mostly disappeared – read until in bits, perhaps, or left on beaches or in trains or loaned and not returned. And long gone are the days when a paperback meant a Penguin, pure and simple, let alone when a paperback publisher could confidently market a product with no image at all on the cover – just the title and the author’s name, emphatically lettered. Beautiful.
Biography and autobiography and memoir are alphabetical by subject, for me, and I rather relish the strange juxtapositions – Edith Sitwell and Wole Soyinka, Kipling and Werner Heisenberg. Like a game of Consequences: He Said To Her . . . And The Consequence Was . . . This is Manguel’s library at night – the library of thoughts and voices and associations. I was once taken on a tour of the stack at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, where the long shelves of that great literary archive reach away into shadowy distances, each run of boxes labeled – Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf – and one imagined it when the archivists were gone, a silent colloquy of all those voices.
The biblical story of the Tower of Babel has an apparently malevolent Deity creating a confusion of languages in order to foil attempts at the unity of mankind, the term Babel thus becoming a synonym for linguistic chaos. A library is indeed a Tower of Babel – multilingual, multicultural. Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian as well as a writer, a dual commitment which presumably accounts for that enigmatic story “The Library of Babel” in which he proposes a library that is composed of infinite hexagonal galleries, in which each book is of uniform format – four hundred and ten pages – and among which librarians wander in interminable pursuit of some final truth, the book that will explain all books, many of whom have strangled one another, succumbed to disease, or committed suicide. It sounds more like life as lived than the ambience of the British Library, the Library of Congress or the Bibliothèque Nationale and indeed the story can be read as some sort of fable or allegory with the library as the universe: “unlimited and cyclical.” But the image is a powerful one: the multiplicity of a library, the cacophony of voices, its impenetrability, unless you can read the codes. When I worked in the Round Reading Room at the British Museum, before the British Library moved to St. Pancras, I used to have a fantasy – a short story that I never wrote – in which humanity has disappeared, all systems are down, forever, and members of an alien race pad into the Reading Room, taking down the catalog with their long green fingers, crack teams of scholars who have been set to work to penetrate the mysteries of this inexplicable archive, in which, now, all material is of equal significance: the Lindisfarne Gospels and Beekeeping for Beginners, the Koran and the Guinness Book of Records, Hamlet and Asterix. A great library is anything and everything. It is not for its current custodians to judge what the future will find to be of importance, and it is this eclecticism that gives it the mystique, that is the wonder of it. A private collection is another matter entirely: you or I have accumulated what we feel to be of significance to us, the books speak for what we have responded to or wanted to know about or got interested in and may include many acquisitions th
at have sneaked in for no good reason, like – in my case – that fat hardback Collected Works of Jane Bowles, whose work I do not care for, and plenty of other titles toward which I am indifferent but that I might need to check out at some point.
There has been plenty of checking out in the service of these pages. That is the other function of a private library – reference. Today we have the Internet, and very wonderful it is, and I am getting better at Googling, but an atavistic urge still has me reaching for the Shorter Oxford, or Chambers, or Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, or The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, those reliable companions over the decades.
My first engagement with a great library was as a student. A vague memory of induction to the Bodleian is that it involved making some kind of ritual declaration in Latin – presumably that you wouldn’t steal or abuse the books – and of the inimitable smell of Duke Humfrey’s Library, the rich aroma of old book – very old book, in that case. I doubt if I ever went into it again. The Radcliffe Camera was the place for history undergraduates; you got to know it all too well, homing in on favorite desks, from which you could look around and see who else was there, the hunt along the shelves for the book you needed and the frustration when you found it was already taken, which meant a search for the reader and a negotiation about how long he or she would be wanting it. One man always achieved the book I was after before I could get to it by dint of arriving at the library the moment it opened, which I never managed to do. Years later I came across him again, by which time he was the distinguished historian Theodore Zeldin; it was somehow gratifying to know that he had put the books to better use than I had – one forgave that pre-emptive early rising.
In 1993 I was invited to serve on the Board of the British Library, and did so for six years, only too glad to give up some time and energy to an institution from which I had had so much. And what can be more important than the national archive? Here is the record of pretty much everything that has been thought, and said, and done over the centuries, not just in these islands but the world over – the Library thinks multicultural, it reaches out in space as well as time. As a reader, I was awed by the sense of that vasty deep from which you could conjure up not spirits, but the precise work you had noted in the catalog, the sense of infinity of choice but also of order imposed, the idea of an immeasurable resource, a grand ideal, made available to individual inquiry. As a Board member, I was immersed, involved, sometimes baffled, occasionally panic-stricken.
Membership of the Board was quite a commitment: ten meetings a year of three hours or so, each meeting served by a batch of papers that certainly took me half a day or more to read. Some ancillary commitments. Board membership carried a modest salary; you had been appointed by the secretary of state. In my day there were, I think, twelve members, who included the three senior executives of the Library. Eleven suits, and me; for three years I was the only woman on the Board. The sole advantage of that, from my point of view, was that my isolation made it virtually impossible for the chairman to avoid my eye if I wished to say something: discrimination, that would have been.
I enjoyed those Board years – learning corporate speak, a language new to me, watching the St.Pancras building rise from the rubble of its construction site, for this was the point at which the Library was about to leave its old home in the British Museum. We had conducted tours, wearing hard hats, being briefed about the problems with wiring and shelving. It was a dismaying process at times; you thought you had signed up for involvement with the running of a great library, instead we found ourselves presiding over the travails of one of the most elaborate and complex construction processes this country has known. There was plenty of white water – boardroom confrontations between our project manager and that of the Department of Arts and Libraries, responsible for the construction, angry letters flying from the Library to the Department. I listened to civil service speak, also new to me. But at last the new Library was there. I remember a triumphant completion tour: the acreage of shelving, the marvels of the book delivery system, the light-flooded reading-rooms. The safety measures: the sprinkler system, the steel doors that would close in the event of fire. One of these was demonstrated – the imposing shutter that inched slowly and remorselessly down. And I remember that Matthew Farrer, a fellow Board member, looked at me and we both said “Gagool!” – being of the generation that read King Solomon’s Mines. A neat instance of cultural community, and nicely appropriate to the Library.
The technologies of today were relatively new, back then, but the Library was at the cutting edge. Turning the Pages became available, that enthralling process whereby you can wipe a finger across a screen and leaf your way through a virtual Luttrell Psalter or Sherborne Missal. The then director of information technology gave a presentation on current innovations, and was asked by someone what he thought the most significant information development so far. Without hesitation he replied: “The book – user-friendly, portable, requires no infrastructure, relatively non-degradable.”
Since then, the e-book. I don’t care to read on an e-reader myself, though I would under certain circumstances – when traveling, or if in the hospital – and I get bored by the exclusive defense of either paper or screen. Future readers will require both, I assume, but I can’t imagine that many would wish to own a personal library that consisted of the Kindle on the coffee table, rather than some shelves of books, with all their eloquence about where we have been and who we are.
There is a devastating poem by Tony Harrison about his mother’s death, about love and grief, about the distance between him and his father:
Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between’s
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.
I can hardly bear to read that poem; it is so sad, and so true. Books can have a divisive power. They can estrange – but can also unite, of course. Great courtship material, books – that discovery of a shared enthusiasm, the exchange of gifts. We read to bond, to oblige, to discover how someone else reads. And read to persuade, to agree or disagree. Why weren’t book groups around when I was a child-tethered young mother in Swansea in the 1960s? Why didn’t we think of starting one up? They are a marvelous concept, combining a social and intellectual function: you spend time with like-minded others. You read something you might not otherwise have read and are provoked to defend, or criticize.
Cultural community is shared reading, the references and images that you and I both know. Books are the mind’s ballast, for so many of us – the cargo that makes us what we are, a freight that is ephemeral and indelible, half-forgotten but leaving an imprint. They are nutrition, too. My old-age fear is not being able to read – the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think, and to write.
Six Things
My house has many things, too, besides those books – the accretions of a lifetime. Not many of them are valuable; some of them are eloquent. People’s possessions speak of them: they are resonant and betraying and reflective. When house-hunting, I used to find myself paying more attention to the furnishings than to the house one was supposed to be inspecting. They spoke of the people who lived here.
So in this last section I have picked out six of the things that articulate something of who I am. This is to plagiarize myself, in a way – I used a similar device in A House Unlocked, making objects in my grandmother’s house speak for a time, for the century. But self-plagiarization seems to me permissible. And, at this late point in life, I have seen these objects in the house imbued with new significance – I have seen how they reflect interests, and concerns, how they chart where I’ve been, and how I’ve been.
I imagine them in an estate sale, or an auction room, mute, anonymous, though perhaps each might be pic
ked up, considered, thought to have some intrinsic merit – or not. The bronze cat would be a snip – someone would bag that. The Jerusalem Bible might appeal, and the sampler. The leaping fish sherd and the ammonites and the duck kettle-holders are probably in a box of assorted junk, unwanted.
But before that happens let me give them each their story – theirs and mine. A sort of material memoir.
The duck kettle-holders from Maine
These are, strictly speaking, American folk art. They are a pair of circular kettle-holders, about nine inches in diameter, each with a duck worked in colored wools on sacking. They were sent me by my friend Betty, many years ago, as an addition to our collection of emblematic ducks which had accrued – inevitably – when we lived in Oxfordshire at the seventeenth-century farmhouse called Duck End. Decoy ducks, gift shop ducks, small oriental papier-mâché ducks.
These particular ducks had been made by an old lady living at some rather remote spot in Maine; she made such things for sale at local fairs and was working nicely in the American folk art tradition. The ducks are closely woven in wool, simple, stylized, and with their markings picked out in different colors. Betty breeds border collies and is a renowned sheepdog handler and demonstrator at sheepdog trials. She was on a trip to one such trial up in Maine, had rather lost her way and was in desperate need of water for her dogs. She stopped off at the old lady’s house to ask for water and directions. The old lady invited her into her kitchen, filled a can, and Betty spotted the ducks and exclaimed. It was apparent that this was by way of a (very small) business, and she asked if she could buy them. The old lady demurred: trouble was, she needed something for the craft fair next week, she was right out of burlap so couldn’t make some more, and if she let these go she would have nothing to show. Okay, said Betty, what if I drive to a store, get you some burlap – then could I have them? That would be fine, it seemed. So Betty sought the nearest store (some way away), achieved a yard of sacking, and the ducks were hers. And, in due course, mine.