The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

  THE LIBRARY

  AS WORKSHOP

  I will lodge where I have a mind.

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Lay Morals

  There’s a notable difference, for me, between the large room in which I keep most of my books, and the smaller room in which I work. In the large room, the “library proper,” I choose the volumes I need or want, I sit and read and make notes, I consult my encyclopedias. But in my study, the chosen books are those that I consider more immediate, more necessary, more intimate. Battered copies of both the Pocket Oxford Dictionary and the two-volume Shorter Oxford, the faithful and stout Robert, my Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado from school, Roget’s Thesaurus in the 1962 version, before unholy hands revised and mangled it, Killy’s Literatur Lexicon, Graves’s Greek Myths in the Penguin edition…. These feel like extensions of myself, ready at arm’s length, always helpful, known of old. Many times I have had to work in rooms without these familiar volumes, and felt their absence as a kind of blindness or lack of voice.

  In my study I also require certain talismans that have washed onto my desk over the years, which I distractedly finger while I think of the next words to write. Renaissance scholars recommended keeping different objects in the study: musical and astronomical instruments to lend variety and harmony to the space, natural curiosities such as strangely shaped stones and coloured shells, and portraits of Saint Jerome, patron saint of readers. I follow their recommendation in part. Among the objects on my desk are a horse-shaped soapstone from Congonhas do Campo, a bone carved into a skull from Budapest, a pebble from the Sibyl’s Cave near Cumae. If my library chronicles my life story, my study holds my identity.

  The rooms in which writers (that subspecies of readers) surround themselves with the materials they need for their work acquire an animal quality, like that of a den or a nest, holding the shape of their bodies and offering a container to their thoughts. Here the writer can make his own bed among the books, be as monogamous or polygamous a reader as he wishes, choose an approved classic or an ignored newcomer, leave arguments unfinished, start on any page opened by chance, spend the night reading out loud so as to hear his own voice read back to him, in Virgil’s famous words, under “the friendly silence of the soundless moon.” The humanist teacher Battista Guarino, son of the celebrated humanist Guarino Veronese, insisted that readers should not peruse the page silently “or mumble under their breath, for it so often happens that someone who can’t hear himself will skip over numerous verses as though he were somewhere else. Reading out loud is of no small benefit to the understanding, since of course what sounds like a voice from outside makes our ears spur the mind sharply to attention.” According to Guarino, uttering the words even helps the reader’s digestion, because it “increases heat and thins the blood, cleans out all the veins and opens the arteries, and allows no unnecessary moisture to stand motionless in those vessels which take in and digest food.”190 Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.

  If the private space is the genus, then the study lodged inside that space is the species. During the Renaissance, ownership of a study was, for anyone who aspired to write, a sign of education and civilized taste. More than any other room in the house, a study was thought to possess a secret character of its own, which might persist long after that owner’s death.191 Composed of texts and talismans, icons and instruments of all sorts, a reader’s or writer’s study is something of a shrine, not to a deity but to an activity. The display of tools of the trade proclaims it a workshop; its order (or disorder) does not follow the requirements of an ordinary library, however private. The study is not a pared-down version of the larger structure—the library—which sometimes contains it. It has a different mission: it provides a practical space for self-reflection and conceit, for belief in the power of objects and reliance on the authority of a dictionary. The historian Jacob Burckhardt spoke of the Renaissance as “an awakening of individuality,”192 but surely individuality had been awakened many times before, in older readers’ studies, by men and women who created spaces in which their private selves could learn, grow, reflect and be reflected, in dialogue between the singular present and the endless generations past—spaces into which they withdrew from the bustle of social life. Sitting in the study of his seaside house in Antium, in the first century B.C., Cicero wrote to his intimate friend Atticus, “I amuse myself with books, of which I have a goodly store at Antium, or I count the waves—the weather is unsuitable for fishing mackerel.”193 Later he added, “Reading and writing bring me, not solace indeed, but distraction.”194 Distraction from the noise of the world. A place to think. In 1929, Virginia Woolf published her now famous lectures on “Women and Fiction” under the title A Room of One’s Own, and there she defined forever our need for a private space for reading and writing: “The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace.” And she added, “Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn.”195 As if it were night.

  The studios of celebrated writers are curious memorials. Rudyard Kipling’s studies in his house in Vermont, the Naulakha, and at Rottingdean, in which most of the books deal with travel or industrial crafts, bears witness to his interest in the exact technical phrase and word; in Erasmus’s room in Brussels, the light from the rhomboid windowpanes plays on volumes sent to him by those friends and colleagues for whom he liked to write; Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s closed, white, rectangular library in Neuchâtel has a simple bookshelf of neat modern bindings wrapping itself around the room, like one of the circular labyrinths he crafted in his novels; Victor Hugo’s cloth-lined and soft-carpeted mansion on the Place des Vosges in Paris seems haunted by manuscripts of his melodramatic stories and sketches of his ghostly landscapes; Arno Schmidt’s small, ugly rooms in Bargfeld bei Celle, in Lower Saxony, are lined with ramshackle shelves that held inglorious English titles (such as the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose texts Schmidt re-created in better German versions), and small boxes with snippets handwritten on bits of cardboard—miniature archives kept by Schmidt in thematic order, which he used to compose his masterpieces; thousands more studios and libraries around the world are preserved as memorials to their phantom owners, who might at any moment once again run an absent-minded hand over a familiar piece, sit in the customary chair, pick out a much-leafed book from among its fellows or open a volume to a certain page with cherished words. Deserted libraries hold the shades of the writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

  Rudyard Kipling in his study at his house in Vermont, the Naulakha.

  In Valladolid, readers of Don Quixote can stroll through the house occupied by Miguel de Cervantes from 1602 to 1605, the year in which the first part of the novel was published, and experience a voyeuristic thrill. The house has melodramatic associations: on the night of 27 June 1605, a certain Gaspar de Ezpeleta was walking home when, just outside this house, he was assaulted by a masked man and mortally wounded. Ezpeleta managed to cry out, bringing to his assistance a neighbour who in turn summoned Cervantes, and the two carried the dying man to the address of a well-known lady. The mayor of Valladolid, suspecting Cervantes (or one of his relatives) of being responsible for the attack, ordered that the writer and his family be imprisoned. They were released a few days later, after proving their innocence, but historians have long debated the question of Cervantes’s involvement in the murder. The house, though carefully restored, has necessarily been furnished with bits and pieces that never were in Cervantes’s possession. Only the study, on the second floor, contains a few objects that almost certainly belonged to him: not the “ebony and ivory” desk described in the will of his daughter, Isabel de Cervantes, but another, also mentioned in the document, “made of walnut, the largest one I poss
ess,” two paintings, one of Saint John and the other of the Virgin, a copper brazier, a chest for keeping papers and a single bookshelf holding some of the titles mentioned in his work. In this room he wrote several stories for his Exemplary Novels, and here he must have discussed with his friends the conception of his singular Quixote.196

  In one of the first chapters of Don Quixote, when the barber and the priest have decided to purge the knight’s library of the books that seem to have brought on his madness, the housekeeper insists that the room must first be sprinkled with holy water, “for there might be here one of those many wizards who inhabit these books, and he might cast a spell on us, to punish us for wanting to expel them from the world.”197 Like so many people who do not read, the housekeeper fears the power of the books she refuses to open. The same superstition holds true for most readers; the books we keep closest to hand are possessed by magic. The stories that unfold in the space of a writer’s study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections, of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.

  Sometimes the shade of the writer and that of his library mingle long before his death. For many years, until he left to die in Geneva in 1986, Borges lived in Buenos Aires among books he could no longer see, since blindness had overtaken him in his early fifties. His small apartment was on the sixth floor of an unobtrusive building in the centre of town, around the corner from the Plaza San Martín. The door was always opened by Fani, the maid, who would lead his frequent visitors into a small entrance hall where, in the gloom, stood Borges’s several walking sticks and canes, “patiently waiting,” as he liked to say, “to be taken out for a stroll.” Then, through a curtained doorway, one entered the living room, where the master would greet his guests with a weak, shy handshake. To the right, a table covered with a lace cloth and four straight-backed chairs furnished the dining room; to the left, under a window, stood a well-worn couch and two or three armchairs. Borges would sit on the couch and the visitor would be asked to take one of the armchairs facing him. His blind eyes would stare into a point in space as he spoke, his asthmatic voice echoing through the room full of the familiar things of his daily life: a small table on which he kept a silver mug and a mate that had belonged to his grandfather, a miniature writing desk dating from his mother’s first communion, two white bookshelves set in the wall holding encyclopedias, and two low bookcases of dark wood. On the wall hung a painting by his sister, Norah Borges, depicting the Annunciation, and an engraving by Piranesi showing mysterious circular ruins. A short corridor to the far left led to the bedrooms: his mother’s, full of old photographs, and his own, simple as a monk’s cell, with an iron bedstead, two bookcases and a single chair. On the wall of his bedroom hung a wooden plate with the coats of arms of the various cantons of Switzerland, and a copy of Dürer’s engraving Knight, Death and the Devil, which Borges had celebrated in two exquisite sonnets.

  Considering that Borges called the universe a book, and said that he imagined paradise “in the shape of a library,”198 his visitors expected a place copiously lined with books, shelves bursting at the seams, piles of print blocking the doorways and protruding from every crevice—a jungle of ink and paper. Instead, they’d discover this modest apartment where books occupied a discreet, orderly place. When the young Mario Vargas Llosa visited Borges sometime in the mid-fifties, he remarked on the spartan surroundings and asked why the master didn’t live in a more bookish, more luxurious home. Borges took great offence at this remark. “Maybe that’s how they do things in Lima,” he said to the indiscreet Peruvian, “but here in Buenos Aires we don’t like to show off.”

  These few bookcases, however, were Borges’s pride. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he once explained. “I like to pretend I’m not blind, and I covet books like a man who can see. I even covet new encyclopedias, and imagine I can follow the course of rivers in their maps and find wonderful things in the various entries.” He liked to tell how, as a child, he used to accompany his father to the National Library and, too timid to ask for a book, simply take one of the volumes of the Britannica from the open shelves and read whatever article opened itself to his eyes. Sometimes he would be lucky, as when he chose volume De–Dr and learned about the Druids, the Druzes and Dryden.199 He never abandoned this custom of trusting himself to the ordered chance of encyclopedias, and he spent many hours leafing through (and having read to him) the volumes of the Garzanti, the Brockhaus, the Britannica or the Espasa-Calpe. Then, if there was a particularly appealing tidbit of information, he would ask his reader to record it, with the page number, at the back of the revelatory volume.

  The two low bookcases in his living room held works by Stevenson, Chesterton, Henry James and Kipling, as well as J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, several scientific romances by H.G. Wells, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, various novels by Eça de Queiroz in yellowing cardboard bindings, books by nineteenth-century Argentine writers. Here too were Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; Vies Imaginaires, by Marcel Schwob; detective novels by John Dickson Carr, Milward Kennedy and Richard Hull; Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, Arnold Bennett’s Buried Alive; a small paperback edition of David Garnett’s Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo, with delicate woodblock illustrations; Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes; the several tomes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; various books on mathematics and philosophy, including titles by Swedenborg and Schopenhauer; and his beloved Wörterbuch der Philosophie, by Fritz Mauthner. Some of these books had accompanied Borges since his adolescent days; others, mostly the ones in English and German, carried labels from the Buenos Aires bookstores where they had been bought, all now vanished: Mitchell’s, Rodriguez, Pygmalion.

  The bookcases in the bedroom held volumes of poetry and one of the largest collections of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic literature in Latin America. Here Borges kept the books he needed to study what he called “the harsh and laborious words/ That, with lips now turned to dust,/ I mouthed in the days of Northumbria and Mercia/ Before becoming Haslam or Borges”:200 Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, an annotated version of The Battle of Maldon, Richard Meyer’s Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte. The other bookcase contained the poems of Enrique Banchs, of Heine, of San Juan de la Cruz, and many commentaries on Dante. Mysteriously absent from his bookshelves were Proust, Racine, Goethe’s Faust, Milton and the Greek tragedies (all of which he had, of course, read and mentioned in his writings).

  Absent too were his own books. He would proudly tell visitors who asked to see an early edition that he didn’t possess a single volume that carried (he would say) “that eminently forgettable” name. The truth is that he didn’t need them. Though he pretended not to remember, he could recite by heart poems learned many decades earlier, and correct and alter in his memory his own writings, usually to the stupefaction and delight of his listeners. Shortly after his death, his widow, Maria Kodama, donated the majority of his books to a foundation in Buenos Aires bearing his name, and from time to time certain volumes are shown in exhibitions organized in his honour. Lying open in glass cases, stripped of their surroundings, honoured but unread—less purveyors of words than funerary objects, expelled from their home after his death—books seem to suffer the fate of the spouses and servants of those ancient kings whose households followed their master to the grave.

  A study lends its owner, its privileged reader, what Seneca called euthymia, a Greek word which Seneca explained means “well-being of the soul,” and which he translated as “tranquillitas.”201 Every study ultimately aspires to euthymia. Euthymia, memory without distraction, the intimacy of a reading time—a secret period in the communal day—that is what we seek in a private reading space. According to Blake,

  There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find,

  Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious fi
nd

  This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found

  It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed.202

  Though we primarily seek euthymia in these private moments, we can sometimes discover it in the communal space of a public library. In Mameluke Cairo, in the fifteenth century, though there were indeed scholars who worked in their own private rooms, readers of lesser means were encouraged to visit the public libraries of schools and mosques. Here, books were made available to those who could not afford to buy them; here, they could copy out the desired works for their own use, whether to learn texts by heart or study them at leisure. The thirteenth-century scholar Ibn Jama’a, though recommending that students purchase books whenever possible, thought it most important that they be “carried in the heart” and not merely kept on a shelf. Copying out texts helped one commit them to memory, thereby building (he thought) a sort of parallel library to the one of ink and paper. “The student should always have with him an inkwell, so as to be able to write down useful things he hears,” Ibn Jama’a advised.203 It was understood that the written text supported the text learned by heart, since “what is only memorized flies away, what is written down remains” (an Islamic version of the Latin verba volant, scripta manent).204 According to Ibn Jama’a, the art of memory was akin to that of architecture, since by practising it a reader could build to his taste a private palace furnished with collected treasures, declaring ownership of the texts he had chosen in a deep and definitive way. To sharpen the skill of memorizing books, the use of honey, toothpicks and twenty-one raisins a day was recommended, while the consumption of coriander and eggplant was deemed deleterious. Ibn Jama’a also advised against “reading inscriptions on tombs, walking between camels haltered in a line, or flicking away lice,”205 all activities that affected the keenness of memory.