The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

  Dozens of writers have acknowledged their debt to the Carnegie libraries. John Updike, describing his own experiences as a teenager at the Carnegie Library of Reading, Pennsylvania, spoke of his gratitude “for the freedom given me in those formative years when we, generally speaking, become lifelong readers or not.” He concluded, “A kind of heaven opened up for me there.”122 Eudora Welty traced back to the Carnegie Library of Jackson, Mississippi, the beginnings of her literary life. As Carnegie had stipulated, his donation was conditional on the community’s undertaking to guarantee the upkeep and smooth administration of the library; in Jackson, in 1918, the librarian in charge of these tasks was a certain Mrs. Calloway. Mrs. Calloway, Welty recalled, “ran the Library absolutely by herself, from the desk where she sat with her back to the books and facing the stairs, her dragon eye on the front door, where who knew what kind of person might come in from the public? silence in big black letters was on signs tacked up everywhere.” Mrs. Calloway made her own rules about books. “You could not take back a book to the Library on the same day you’d taken it out; it made no difference to her that you’d read every word in it and needed another to start. You could take out two books at a time and two books only; this applied as long as you were a child and also for the rest of your life.” But such arbitrary rules made no difference to Welty’s reading passion; what counted was that someone (she did not then know who this distant benefactor was) had set up a treasure trove for her personally (she believed), through which her “devouring wish to read” was instantly granted.123

  Andrew Carnegies bookplate.

  The sarcastic critic H.L. Mencken objected. “Go to the nearest Carnegie Library,” he instructed, “and examine its catalog of books. The chances are five to one that you will find the place full of literary bilge and as bare of good books as a Boston bookshop.”124 But for most writers, even if the stock of books is not formidable, to be able to enter a place where books are seemingly numberless and available for the asking is a joy in itself. “I knew this was bliss,” Welty wrote late in life, “knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.”

  Carnegie himself may have believed that the buildings he paid for would serve as proof of “my efforts to make the earth a little better than I found it.”125 Whatever his desire may have been, for hundreds of thousands of readers the Carnegie libraries became not the proof of any selfless or egotistical concern, or of a millionaire’s magnanimity, but the necessary intellectual stronghold at the heart of any literate society, a place where all citizens, provided they can read, are granted the basic right to make themselves “powerful against the Devil.”

  THE LIBRARY

  AS SHADOW

  But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.

  Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

  We dream of a library of literature created by everyone and belonging to no one, a library that is immortal and will mysteriously lend order to the universe, and yet we know that every orderly choice, every catalogued realm of the imagination, sets up a tyrannical hierarchy of exclusion. Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space and time, have not been included. Every library conjures up its own dark ghost; every ordering sets up, in its wake, a shadow library of absences. Of Aeschylus’s 90 plays only 7 have reached us; of the 80-odd dramas of Euripides, only 18 (if we include the Rhesus, of doubtful authenticity); of the 120 plays of Sophocles, a mere 7.

  If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be. Even within the strictest circumscriptions, any choice of books will be greater than its label, and an inquiring reader will find danger (salutary or reprehensible) in the safest, most invigilated places. Our mistake, perhaps, has been to look upon a library as an all-encompassing but neutral space. “The keepers,” wrote the American poet Archibald MacLeish during his posting as librarian of Congress, “whether they wish so or not, cannot be neutral.”126 Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.

  A book-burning in Warsaw, Indiana.

  This implicit censorship starts with the earliest Mesopotamian libraries we know of, from the beginning of the third millennium B.C.127 Unlike official archives, set up to preserve the daily transactions and ephemeral dealings of a particular group, these libraries collected works of a more general nature, such as the so-called royal inscriptions (commemorative tablets of stone or metal that retold important political events, akin to the broadsheets of seventeenth-century Europe or today’s current events best-sellers). In all probability these libraries were privately owned—personal spaces set up by lovers of the written word, who would often instruct the scribes to copy the owner’s name on the tablets as a mark of possession. Even libraries attached to a temple usually carried the name of a high priest or some other important personage responsible for the collection. So as to preserve the order established by a particular shelving or cataloguing method, certain library books carried a warning colophon intended to dissuade anyone wishing to tamper with the assigned category. A dictionary from the seventh century B.C. carries this prayer: “May Ishtar bless the reader who will not alter this tablet nor place it elsewhere in the library, and may She denounce in anger he who dares withdraw it from this building.”128 I have placed this warning on the wall of my own library to ward off borrowers in the night.

  Most of the owners of these collections were of royal blood, and they kept their libraries stocked through the agency of buyers and looters. King Ashurbanipal, in order to supplement his already considerable library, was known to dispatch representatives throughout his vast kingdom to search for whatever volumes might be missing. He had no guiding principle defined by categories (later imposed on the collection); his was a haphazard hoarding of anything at hand.129 We have a letter in which Ashurbanipal, after listing the books he is seeking, insists that the task should be carried out without delay. “Find them and dispatch them to me. Nothing should detain them. And in the future, if you discover other tablets not herewith mentioned, inspect them and, if you consider them of interest for the library, collect them and send them on to me.”130 A similar all-inclusive impulse governed the composition of other Mesopotamian lists and catalogues. Commenting on the celebrated Code of Hammurabi, that compendium of laws from the eighteenth century B.C., the historian Jean Bottéro stressed the fact that it included in its enumerations “not only the common and commonly observable reality, but also the exceptional, the aberrant: in the end, everything possible.”131

  Though a library such as that of Ashurbanipal was the visible expression of earthly power, no single person, however royal, could hope to read through it all. To read every book and to digest all the information, the king recruited other eyes and other hands to scan the tablets and summarize their findings, so that in reading these digests he might be able to boast that he was familiar with the library’s entire contents. Scholars extracted the meat from the texts and then, “like pelicans,” regurgitated it for the benefit of others.

  Four centuries after Ashurbanipal, in the first half of the second century B.C., a couple of the principal librarians of Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium and his disciple Aristarchus of Samothrace, decided to assist their readers in a similar fashion. Not only did they select and gloss all manner of important works, but they also set out to compile a catalogue of authors who, in their opinion, surpassed all others in literary excellence.132 The qualifications of the two scholars were impeccable. Aristophanes had edited the works of Homer and Hesiod,133 and to his ed
ition of the latter he had added brief critical notes in which he listed other writers who had dealt with the same material; these notes, known as hypotheseis, were essentially annotated bibliographies that allowed readers a quick and exact overview of a certain subject. Aristarchus had also edited the works of Homer, with a rigour that was legendary, so that any exacting critic who followed him became known as an aristarchus. These lists of “best authors” (lists which, almost two thousand years later, the scholar David Ruhnken would call “canons”134) were copied out well into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and granted the included authors literary immortality, since their works were sought after and assiduously studied. On the other hand, authors not present in these lists were considered unworthy of attention and were allowed to fade into ashes and oblivion. This lengthy, never-compiled catalogue of neglected authors haunts us by its absence.

  A contemporary cartoon depicting a book-burning in Nazi Germany.

  The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order or space. In the library of my Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, we felt it behind the imposing wooden doors, in the welcoming gloom, and under the green-shaded lamps that reminded me vaguely of the lamps in sleeping-car compartments. Up the marble staircase, down the tiled floor, between the grey columns, the library seemed a parallel universe, both fearful and comforting, in which my own story had other adventures and other endings. Above all, absence (of the books deemed improper, dangerous, provocative) gaped in the dark holes that pierced the countless shelves of books towering up to the ceiling.

  And yet, many seemingly innocent titles deceived the librarian’s censorious eye. I remember, in the silence broken by whispered snatches of conversation, the pages at which certain books would spontaneously fall open: Lorca’s Romancero gitano at “The Unfaithful Bride,” La Celestina at the brothel scene, Cortázar’s Los Premios at the chapter in which a young boy is seduced by a wicked sailor. How these forbidden texts had found their way into our scrupulous library we never knew, and we wondered how long it would be before the librarian discovered that, under his very nose, generation after generation of corruptible students filled the absence on the shelves by selectively reading these scandalous books.

  Warning sign in the library at Le Presbytère.

  It may be, as Primo Levi suggests in his memoirs, that the unspoken purpose of librarians is to make sure that only those truly wishing access to books be allowed into the sanctum. For Levi, the library of Turin’s Chemical Institute in the 1930s was

  at that time, like Mecca, impenetrable to infidels and even hard to penetrate for such faithful as I. One had to think that the administration followed the wise principle according to which it is good to discourage the arts and sciences: only someone impelled by absolute necessity, or by an overwhelming passion, would willingly subject himself to the trials of abnegation that were demanded of him in order to consult the volumes. The library’s schedule was brief and irrational, the lighting dim, the file cards in disorder; in the winter, no heat; no chairs but uncomfortable and noisy metal stools; and finally, the librarian was an incompetent, insolent boor of exceeding ugliness, stationed at the threshold to terrify with his appearance and his howl those aspiring to enter.135

  Like Levi’s unwelcoming library, and like the far less forbidding one of my school, every library, including those under strictest surveillance, contains secretly rebellious texts that escape the librarian’s eye. As a prisoner in a Russian camp near the polar circle doing what he called “my own time in the North,”136 Joseph Brodsky read W.H. Auden’s poems, and they strengthened his resolve to defy his jailers and survive for the sake of a glimpsed-at freedom. Haroldo Conti, tortured in the cells of the Argentinian military of the 1970s, found solace in the novels of Dickens, which his jailer had allowed him to keep.137 For the writer Varlam Chalamov, sent by Stalin to work in the gold mines of Kolyma because of his “counter-revolutionary activities,” the prison library was itself a gold mine that “for incomprehensible reasons, had escaped the innumerable inspections and ‘purges’ systematically inflicted upon all of Russia’s libraries.” On its miserable shelves Chalamov found unexpected treasures such as Bulgakov’s writings and the poems of Mayakovski. “It was,” he said, “as if the authorities had wished to offer the prisoners a consolation for the long road ahead, for the Calvary awaiting them. As if they thought: ‘Why censor the reading of those condemned?’”138

  Sometimes, those who take upon themselves the task of guarding the entrance to the library’s stacks find danger where others see none. During the hunt for “subversive elements” under the military regimes in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile in the 1970s, anyone in possession of a “suspicious” book could be arrested and detained without charge. “Suspicious” were the poems of Neruda and Nâzim Hikmet (they were communists), the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (they were Russian) and any book with a dangerous word in its title, such as Stendhal’s The Red and the Black or the sixteenth-century Japanese classic Comrade Loves of the Samurai. In fear of sudden police raids, many people burnt their libraries by lighting bonfires in their toilets, and plumbers became suddenly perplexed by an epidemic of broken toilet bowls (the heat of burning paper causes the porcelain to crack). “He has children who saw him burn his books” is how the novelist Germán García defines the generation that was killed, tortured or forced into exile.139

  Those in power can ban books for peculiar motives. General Pinochet famously excluded Don Quixote from the libraries of Chile because he read in that novel an argument for civil disobedience, and the Japanese minister of Culture, several years ago, objected to Pinocchio because it showed unflattering pictures of handicapped people in the figures of the cat who pretends to be blind and the fox who pretends to be lame. In March 2003 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who was to become Pope Benedict xvi) argued that the Harry Potter books “deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.”140 Other idiosyncratic reasons have been given for banning all manner of books, from The Wizard of Oz (a hotbed of pagan beliefs) to The Catcher in the Rye (a dangerous adolescent role model). In the words of William Blake,

  Both read the Bible day and night,

  But thou read’st black where I read white.141

  As I’ve said, any library, by its very existence, conjures up its forbidden or forgotten double: an invisible but formidable library of the books that, for conventional reasons of quality, subject matter or even volume, have been deemed unfit for survival under this specific roof.

  At the end of the sixteenth century, the stern Jesuit Jacob Gretser published a defence of censorship under the explicit title Of the Laws and Customs Concerning the Banning, Expurgation and Destruction of Heretical and Noxious Books. Gretser’s erudition led him to be appointed advisor to the Catholic Church when the Index of Forbidden Books was being compiled in Madrid in 1612; he employed that same erudition to support the argument (evident to many) that censorship of books is common to all peoples in all times. Gretser’s infamous genealogy begins with the pagans who burned Cicero’s treatise On the Nature of the Gods (for being too inclined to monotheism, according to an old, unproven story), and leads up to the book-burnings of the followers of Luther and Calvin.142 Had Gretser been able to look into the future, he could have added to his list the “degenerate” books condemned to the pyre by the Nazis, the works of the “bourgeois” writers proscribed by Stalin, the publications of the “Communist scribblers” exiled by Senator McCarthy, the books destroyed by the Taliban, by Fidel Castro, by the government of North Korea, by the officials of Canada Customs. Gretser’s book is in fact the unacknowledged history of those colossal libraries that whisper from the gaps on the bookshelves.143

  Earlier, I mentioned the legend that accused Amr ibn al-As of ordering Caliph Omar I to set fire to the books in Alexandria. Omar’s apocryphal response deserves to be quoted here because it echoes the curious logic of every book-burner then and now. He is said to have acquiesced by
saying, “If the contents of these books agree with the Holy Book, then they are redundant. If they disagree, then they are undesirable. In either case, they should be consigned to the flames.”144 Omar was addressing—somewhat stridently, it is true—the essential fluidity of literature. Because of it, no library is what it is set up to be, and a library’s fate is often decided not by those who created it for its merits but by those who wish to destroy it for its supposed faults.

  This is true of the native literature of the Americas, of which hardly anything has reached us. In Mexico and Central America, particularly, the great libraries and archives of the pre-Columbian peoples were systematically destroyed by the Europeans, both to deprive them of an identity and to convert them to the religion of Christ. The Australian poet A.D. Hope tells the story of how the Spanish conquistadores set fire to the books of the Maya:

  Diego de Landa, archbishop of Yucatán

  —The curse of God upon his pious soul—

  Placed all their Devil’s picture books under ban