The Library at Night
Page 19
In one instance both the library space and the book titles were visible, yet the books represented were imaginary. At Gad’s Hill (the house he dreamed of as a child, which he managed to buy twelve years before his death in 1870), Charles Dickens assembled a copious library. A door in the wall was hidden behind a panel lined with several rows of false book spines. On these spines Dickens playfully inscribed the titles of apocryphal works of all sorts: Volumes I to XIX of Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep, Shelley’s Oysters, Modern Warfare by General Tom Thumb (a famous Victorian circus dwarf), a handbook by the notoriously henpecked Socrates on the subject of wedlock, and a ten-volume Catalogue of Statues to the Duke of Wellington.315
A wood-carving by Gwen Raverat depicting Sir Thomas Browne inspired by Death.
Colette, in one of the books of memoirs with which she delighted in scandalizing her readers in the thirties and forties, tells the story of imaginary catalogues compiled by her friend Paul Masson—a ex–colonial magistrate who worked at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and an eccentric who ended his life by standing on the edge of the Rhine, stuffing cotton wool soaked in ether up his nose and, after losing consciousness, drowning in barely a foot of water. According to Colette, Masson would visit her at her seaside villa and pull from his pockets a portable desktop, a fountain pen and a small pack of blank cards. “What are you doing?” she asked him one day. “I’m working,” he answered. “I’m working at my job. I’ve been appointed to the catalogue section of the Bibliothèque Nationale. I’m making an inventory of titles.” “Oh, can you do that from memory?” she marvelled. “From memory? What would be the merit? I’m doing better. I’ve realized that the Nationale is poor in Latin and Italian books from the fifteenth century,” he explained. “Until chance and erudition fill the gaps, I am listing the titles of extremely interesting works that should have been written…. At least these titles may save the prestige of the catalogue….” “But if the books don’t exist … ?” “Well,” Masson answered with a frivolous gesture, “I can’t be expected to do everything!”316
Charles Dickens in his library in Gad’s Hill.
Portrait of Paul Maison.
Libraries of imaginary books delight us because they allow us the pleasure of creation without the effort of research and writing. But they are also doubly disturbing—first because they cannot be collected, and secondly because they cannot be read. These promising treasures must remain closed to all readers. Every one of them can claim the title Kipling gives to the never-to-be-written tale of the young bank clerk Charlie Mears, “The Finest Story in the World.”317 And yet the hunt for such imaginary books, though necessarily fruitless, remains compelling. What devotee of horror stories has not dreamt of coming upon a copy of the Necronomicon,318 the demonic manual invented by H.P. Lovecraft in his dark Cthulhu saga? According to Lovecraft, the Al Azif (to give it its original title) was written by Abdul Alhazred c. 730 in Damascus. In 950 it was translated into Greek under the title Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas, but the sole copy was burnt by the Patriarch Michael in 1050. In 1228 Olaus translated the original (now lost) into Latin.319 A copy of the Latin work is supposedly kept in the library of Miskatonic University in Arkham, “one well known for certain forbidden manuscripts and books gradually accumulated over a period of centuries and begun in colonial times.” Other than the Necronomicon, these forbidden works include “the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermiis Mysteriis, the R’lyeh Text, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, the Dhol Chants, the Liber Ivoris, the Celaeno Fragments, and many other, similar texts, some of which exist only in fragmentary form, scattered over the globe.”320
Not all imaginary libraries contain imaginary books. The library that the barber and the priest condemn to the flames in the first part of Don Quixote; Mr. Casaubon’s scholarly library in George Eliot’s Middlemarch; Des Esseintes’s languorous library in Huysmans’ A rebours; the murderous monastic library in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose … all these are merely wishful. Given money enough and time, such dream libraries could find a solid reality. The library that Captain Nemo shows Professor Aronnax in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (with the exception of two books by Aronnax himself, of which only one is given a title, Les grands fonds sous-marins) is one that any wealthy French literary gentleman of the mid-nineteenth century might have acquired. “Here are,” says Captain Nemo, “the major works of the ancient and modern masters, that is to say, all the most beautiful creations of humanity in the realms of history, poetry, fiction and science, from Homer to Victor Hugo, from Xenophon to Michelet, from Rabelais to Madame Sand.”321 All real books.
Like their brethren of solid wood and paper, not all imaginary libraries are composed only of books. Captain Nemo’s treasure trove is enriched by two further collections, one of paintings and one of “curiosities,” according to the custom of European scholars of his time. The duke’s wilderness library in As You Like It, made up of “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing,”322 requires no volumes of paper and ink. Pinocchio, in the nineteenth chapter of Collodi’s novel, tries to imagine what he might do if he had a hundred thousand coins and were a wealthy gentleman, and wishes for a beautiful palace with a library “crammed full with candied fruit, cakes, panettoni, almond biscuits and wafers stuffed with cream.”323
The distinction between libraries that have no material existence, and those with books and papers that we can hold in our hand, is sometimes strangely blurred. There exist real libraries with solid volumes that seem imaginary, because they are born from what Coleridge famously called the voluntary suspension of disbelief. Among them stands the Father Christmas Library in the Provincial Archives of Oulu, Northern Finland, whose other, more conventional holdings go back to the sixteenth century. Since 1950 the Finnish Post’s “Santa Claus Postal Service” has been in charge of replying to about six hundred thousand letters received yearly from more than one hundred and eighty countries. Until 1996 the letters were destroyed after being answered, but since 1998 an agreement between the Finnish Postal Services and the provincial authorities has allowed the Oulu Archives to select and preserve a number of the letters received every December, mainly, but not exclusively, from children. Oulu was chosen because, according to Finnish tradition, Father Christmas lives on Korvantunturi, or Ear Mountain, located in that district.324
Captain Nemo’s library, an illustration from the first edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Other libraries deserve to be imaginary for more whimsical reasons—such as the Doulos Evangelical Library, housed in the oldest-serving ocean liner, which tours the world with a cargo of half a million books and a staff of three hundred people; and the minuscule library of Geneytouse, in southwestern France, perhaps the smallest library in the world, lodged in a hut of nine square metres, without water, heating or electricity, founded by Etienne Dumont Saint-Priest, a local farmer passionate about literature and music, who had long dreamt of offering his village a place to read and exchange books.
But not all our libraries come from dreams; some belong to the realm of nightmares. In the spring of 1945, a group of American soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division discovered, hidden in a salt mine near Berchtesgaden, the remains of the library of Adolf Hitler, “haphazardly stashed in schnapps crates with the Reich Chancellery address on them.”325 Of the grotesque collection, only twelve hundred, bearing either the Führer’s bookplate or his name, were deemed worth preserving in the Library of Congress in Washington, on the third floor of the Jefferson Building. According to the journalist Timothy W. Ryback, these spoils of war have been curiously overlooked by historians of the Third Reich. Hitler’s original library has been estimated at sixteen thousand volumes, of which about seven thousand were on military history, over a thousand were essays on the arts, almost a thousand were works of popular fiction, several more were tracts of Christian spirituality an
d a few were pornographic stories. Only a handful of classic novels were included: Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Don Quixote, as well as most of the adventure stories by Hitler’s favourite author, Karl May. Among the volumes kept in the Library of Congress are a French vegetarian cookbook inscribed by its author, Maïa Charpentier, to Monsieur Hitler, végétarien, and a 1932 treatise on chemical warfare explaining the uses of prussic acid, later commercialized as Zyklon B. It is difficult to think of constructing, with any hideous accuracy, a portrait of this library’s owner. Let there be libraries that the imagination condemns simply because of the reputation of their reader.
Hitler’s personal bookplate.
We lend libraries the qualities of our hopes and nightmares; we believe we understand libraries conjured up from the shadows; we think of books that we feel should exist for our pleasure, and undertake the task of inventing them unconcerned about any threat of inaccuracy or foolishness, any terror of writer’s cramp or writer’s block, any constraints of time and space. The books dreamt up through the ages by raconteurs thus unencumbered compose a much vaster library than those resulting from the invention of the printing press—perhaps because the realm of imaginary books allows for the possibility of one book, as yet unwritten, that escapes all the blunders and imperfections to which we know we are condemned. In the dark, under my two trees, my friends and I have shamelessly added to the catalogues of Alexandria entire shelves full of perfect volumes that disappeared without trace by morning.
THE LIBRARY
AS IDENTITY
My library was dukedom enough.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
I keep a list of books that I feel are missing from my library and that I hope one day to buy, and another, more wishful than useful, of books I’d like to have but I don’t even know exist. In this second list are A Universal History of Ghosts, A Description of Life in the Libraries of Greece and Rome, a third Dorothy L. Sayers detective novel completed by Jill Paton Walsh, Chesterton on Shakespeare, a Summary of Averroës on Aristotle, a literary cookbook that draws its recipes from fictional descriptions of food, a translation of Calderón’s Life Is a Dream by Anne Michaels (whose style, I feel, would suit Calderón’s admirably), a History of Gossip, the True and Uncensored Memoirs of a Publishing Life by Louise Dennys, a well-researched, well-written biography of Borges, an account of what exactly happened during Cervantes’s captivity in Algiers, an as-yet-unpublished novel by Joseph Conrad, the diary of Kafka’s Milena.
We can imagine the books we’d like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles—a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that, in a similar fashion, the identity of a society, or a national identity, can be mirrored by a library, by an assembly of titles that, practically and symbolically, serves as our collective definition.
It was probably Petrarch who first imagined that a public library should be funded by the state.326 In 1326, after the death of his father, he abandoned his legal studies and entered the Church as a means of pursuing a career in literature, which eventually culminated in his being crowned poet laureate on the Campidoglio in Rome in 1341. During the following years he divided his time between Italy and the south of France, writing and collecting books, and acquiring an unparalleled scholarly reputation. In 1353, tired of the squabbles at the papal court at Avignon, Petrarch settled for a time in Milan, then in Padua and finally in Venice. Here he was welcomed by the chancellor of the republic, who in 1362 obtained for him a palazzo on the Riva degli Schiavoni in return for the bequest of his by now celebrated library.327 Petrarch agreed on condition that his books be “perfectly preserved … in some fire- and rain-proof location to be assigned for this purpose.” Though he modestly stated that his books were neither numerous nor very valuable, he expressed the hope that “this glorious city will add other books at public expense, and that also private individuals … will follow the example. … In this fashion it might easily be possible to establish a large and famous library, equal to those of antiquity.”328 His wish was granted several times over. Instead of one national library, Italy boasts eight, two of which (those in Florence and in Rome) act jointly as the central library of the nation.
In Britain, the notion of a national library was late in developing. After the dispersal of the libraries following the dissolution of the monasteries ordered by Henry viii, in 1556 the mathematician and astrologer John Dee, himself the owner of a remarkable collection of books, suggested to Henry’s daughter Queen Mary the establishment of a national library that might collect the manuscripts and books “of ancient writers.” The proposal was ignored, though repeated during the following reign of Elizabeth I by the Society of Antiquaries. A third plan was presented to her successor, James i, who showed himself agreeable to the idea but died before it could be put into practice. His son, Charles i, had no interest in the matter, despite the fact that royal librarians were routinely appointed during his reign to look after the haphazard royal collections, though with little inclination or success.
Then in 1694, during the reign of William iii, the classical scholar Richard Bentley was appointed to the post of keeper of the royal books. Shocked by the sorry state of the library, Bentley published, three years later, A proposal for building a Royal Library and establishing it by Act of Parliament, in which he suggested that a new edifice should be erected in St. James’s Park for the specific purpose of housing books, and that it should receive an annual grant from Parliament. Though his urging received no answer, Bentley’s devotion to the nation’s books never ceased. In 1731, when a fire broke out one night in the Cotton Collection (which contained, in addition to the already mentioned Lindisfarne Gospels, two of the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus of the mid-fourth century and the Codex Alexandrinus of the early fifth century), the royal librarian was seen running out into the street “in wig and night-dress, with the Codex Alexandrinus under his arm.”329
As a result of Bentley’s proposal, in 1739 Parliament acquired the magnificent books and objects left by Sir Hans Sloane on his death, and later, in 1753, Montagu House in Bloomsbury, to store them. The house had been designed by an architect from Marseilles in the so-called French style, after the first Montagu House had burnt down in 1686, only a few years after its construction, and possessed many rooms suitable for the display of Sloane’s treasures, as well as several acres of fine gardens for visitors to stroll in.330 A few years later, George II donated his royal book collection to the library—which was by then called the British Museum. On 15 January 1759, the British Library at the Museum opened its impressive doors. At the king’s request, the contents were made available to the general public. “Tho’ chiefly designed for the use of learned and studious men, both native and foreigners, in their researches into several parts of knowledge, yet being a national establishment … the advantages accruing from it should be rendered as general as possible.” During its early years, however, the librarians’ main task was not to compile catalogues and seek new titles, but to guide visitors around the museum’s collections.331
Portrait of Sir Antonio Panizzi.
The hero of the British Library saga is the Italian-born Antonio Panizzi, mentioned previously with regard to the shape of the Reading Room. Threatened with arrest in Italy for being a member of the secret carbonari, who opposed Napoleonic rule, the twenty-five-year-old revolutionary had fled to the safety of England. After a brief period as a teacher of Italian, he was named assistant librarian at the British Museum in 1831. A year later he became a British citizen, changing his name to Anthony.
Like his compatriot Petrarch, Panizzi felt that it was the state’s responsibility to fund a national library for the bene
fit of everyone. “I want,” he said in a report dated 14 July, 1836, “a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry, as the richest man in the Kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that Government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.”332 In 1856 Panizzi ascended to the post of principal librarian, and through his keen intellectual gifts and his administrative abilities he transformed the institution into one of the world’s greatest cultural centres.333