by Anita Anand
The ruin of the great libraries of antiquity, almost total as it was, cannot help but make for sobering reflection. ‘Like the generations of leaves, the lives of men,’ mourned Homer in the Iliad. Ptolemy, in founding his great library, had been moved – in part, at least – by a dread that the same might be true of books. The scholars who staffed it believed themselves to be shoring up civilisation against the ever-present threat of ruin. Their agents confiscated manuscripts from unwary visitors; they cheated cities like Athens of their literary heirlooms; they scoured the book markets of the Mediterranean, sniffing out rare titles and definitive editions. Yet for all the immeasurable debt of gratitude we owe the librarians of Alexandria, it is as well to remember that the physical transmission of manuscripts from classical antiquity into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance owed nothing to libraries founded by any emperor or king. What has come down to us today derived instead from altogether more marginal institutions: the equivalent of run-down libraries, perhaps, in a financially-squeezed inner city borough. Pages stuffed into a vase; papyrus scraps buried beneath the crumbling of provincial walls; musty folios stored in a monastery’s vaults: these are what survived the obliteration of the ancient world’s imperial collections of books.
Borges, in his fable of the universal library, imagined some of the heresies to which its inhabitants were prone. Among these the most seductive was worship of a figure named the Book-Man. ‘On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book; this librarian is analogous to a god.’ Even in the Library of Babel, however, this was ultimately recognised to be an illusion. The perfect librarian, like the perfect library, does not exist. Today, more than ever before, the dream of possessing the ultimate in libraries, a collection which incorporates and renders accessible the complete sum of human knowledge, enthuses the mighty, the technologically proficient, the super-rich. A dazzling dream, to be sure – but one that runs the risk, perhaps, of blinding us to the value of altogether less glamorous libraries. Not every collection of books can embody the ambitions of an Ashurbanipal, a Ptolemy, a Google. A civilisation must be judged as well by the books it keeps in institutions far removed from the centres of power.
Its very survival, after all, may ultimately depend upon it.
A CORNER OF ST JAMES’S
SUSAN HILL
It is always the Michaelmas term. It is always early dark with lights shining out of a thousand London windows. It is always cold and the air always smells of smoke. It is always foggy. I am always nineteen or twenty. I am always wearing my King’s College royal blue and scarlet scarf. (Was mine the last generation to sport them? It was the first thing we bought on arriving, and in the Strand and down Surrey Street they knew when term had begun by the sighting of the first scarf, like the first swallow. Many things may be better there now, and I am not a sentimentalist about my university days, but it was a sad one when things went into reverse, and, instead of being an object of pride, the wide, warm, striped college scarf became one of ridicule.)
The old library in the Strand building at King’s was an excellent place but during term time the waiting list for essential books on the reading schedule was very long. They had three copies each of E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture and The Complete Essays of Hazlitt but there were thirty of us needing them both and even if I had had any money to buy books, there were precious few second-hand copies available to be bought – or not until the end of the year, when they were no longer needed.
Then one day, waiting to check a book in or out, I caught sight of a notice about the London Library, 14 St James’s Square, SW – of which I had never heard. Below a brief description of the Library, I read about a scholarship offered to full-time undergraduates. Get a scholarship and membership was free for the three years of one’s degree course.
It was October and dark early. It was foggy. It was cold. I wore my royal blue and scarlet scarf. And I walked into that historic Library for the very first time to pick up an application form, knowing, as I did so – I had read up about the Library – that I was walking in the footsteps of George Eliot and T.S. Eliot, Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens, Kipling and Carlyle, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Henry James and M.R. James … and, oh, everyone, everyone, heroes all, a roll call of great writers.
My application had to be sponsored by two existing London Library members and by my head of department at King’s, Professor Geoffrey Bullough.
I took the form and headed to the Cromwell Road and the home of two writers who had become my friends and patrons, C.P. Snow and his wife, Pamela Hansford Johnson. They signed my application form, Charles Snow wrote an accompanying letter of recommendation, and, a very short time later, I was walking back to 14 St James’s Square again for the first time as a London Library student Member.
I have never been a country member of the Library. The joy of it was going there several times a week during term, collecting the books I needed to study, using the quiet corners in which to work – college libraries are not good for concentration, there is too much activity.
I think I learned as much from browsing in the book stacks of the London Library as I have done anywhere in my reading life. There is something extraordinarily liberating and exciting about being let loose in such a place, allowed to wander, pick out this and that, read a bit here, a page there, take out the book, then wander to another bay in search of something related to it. It is the self-education among books that few people, now, are privileged to have. Virginia Woolf describes the benefits of it in her Diaries and Essays, though in spite of being a member of the London Library later in life, her early book education took place in her father’s library in their house in Hyde Park Gate, one of the great private libraries of that, or any other, day.
But it was not only books I encountered in those somewhat perilous stacks and I daresay that it is the same now; for every eminent writer worth the name is a member, and a contemporary student might bump into Tom Stoppard or Antonia Fraser or David Hare and be star-struck.
One of the latter-day writers of the Golden Age style of detective story was Nicholas Blake – the pseudonym of the then Poet Laureate C. Day-Lewis. It was easier for writers to go about unrecognised in those days, when television was in its infancy and the papers did not back up everything with a visual image, but Cecil Day-Lewis could rarely have gone incognito because he had the most memorable of faces, lined and wrinkled like a map, as well as a rather large head. So when he stood aside for me to pass him in the narrow LL bookstacks I was hyperconscious of who he was.
Not, though, as conscious as I was of the small man with thinning hair and a melancholy moustache who dropped a book on my foot in the Elizabethan Poetry section some weeks later. There was a small flurry of exclamations and apology and demur as I bent down, painful foot notwithstanding, picked up the book and handed it back to the elderly gentleman – and found myself looking into the watery eyes of E.M. Forster. How to explain the impact of that moment? How to stand and smile and say nothing, when through my head ran the opening lines of Howards End, ‘One may as well begin with Helen’s letters’, alongside vivid images from the Marabar Caves of A Passage to India? How to take in that here, in a small space among old volumes and a moment when time stood still, was a man who had been an intimate friend of Virginia Woolf? He wore a tweed jacket. He wore, I think, spectacles that had slipped down his nose. He seemed slightly stooping and wholly unmemorable and I have remembered everything about him for nearly fifty years.
I went back to the hostel and took out Where Angels Fear to Tread, read some pages, read the author biography, and had that sense of unreality that comes only a few times in one’s life. The wonder of the encounter has never faded. Nor, indeed, has the wonder of bumping into T.S. Eliot on the front doorstep of a house in Highgate, though, strangely, I cannot now remember whose house, but there was a literary party
to which I had been invited by some kind patron of young writers. So there I stood, while Eliot rang the bell and gave me a rather owlish but kindly smile as we waited. Once the door was opened to us he was absorbed into the throng and I saw him no more – but I can certainly still hear the voice of someone saying, on seeing him, ‘Oh good, here’s Possum!’
IT TAKES A LIBRARY …
MICHAEL BROOKS
When you are researching a book these days, it’s tempting to rely on the internet. It’s certainly invaluable: a huge swathe of research literature is there at all our fingertips. But that’s when you know what you’re looking for. Every book I find via an internet search has something to say that I already know about. In a library, on the other hand, that book is only a starting point. That book is surrounded by books on a similar subject – books that I didn’t know about. You pick them up, flick through them, and find treasures – and wisdom – you would never otherwise have found.
Researching Free Radicals involved many trips to a university library that I regularly use. Those trips invariably resulted in a lot of ‘wasted’ time looking up and down the surrounding shelves, pulling out related books that looked interesting, and skimming through them.
There is so much in libraries that deserves an airing. There is little that can compare with the joy and value of discovering a book that you could only have come across by being in the same physical space. One example is Possible Worlds, a book J.B.S Haldane wrote in 1927.
Though I read it, Possible Worlds didn’t make it into Free Radicals. But Haldane did make it in there because he is famous for having experimented on himself for wartime science (self-experiment is one of the ‘anarchies’ of science that shed so much light on what really motivates scientists). Haldane and his father investigated the effects of exposure to chlorine and mustard gas. J.B.S pioneered the science of scuba diving and decompression sickness, his experiments inducing crushed vertebrae, panic attacks and perforated eardrums (through which he could blow smoke). He was truly courageous, and his science made a difference in wartime events. British commandos applied Haldane’s research to their diving routines, and the knowledge allowed them to defend and hold the crucial stronghold of Gibraltar when Hitler tried to take it.
Haldane was not alone in self-experimenting. ‘A good many biologists experiment on themselves,’ he wrote in Possible Worlds. Dying while trying to work out the mechanism behind communicable diseases is ‘the ideal way of dying’, Haldane says. It’s so admirable because scientists know that they are working with incomplete knowledge. ‘I have no doubt that the theories to which I entrusted my life were more or less incorrect,’ he says. Nonetheless, the working hypotheses were good enough to enable him to make reliable risk assessments.
My favourite chapter in the book is entitled ‘The Duty of Doubt’. It is an overview of the value of taking a sceptical stance on everything – science included: ‘science has owed its wonderful progress very largely to the habit of doubting all theories’, Haldane points out. Haldane strides across some great moments of science in which doubt played a central role, then expands his theme to encompass religion and politics.
When a politician calmly goes back on a policy, ‘his enemies accuse him of broken pledges; his friends describe him as an inspired opportunist’, Haldane says. It is only a pre-scientific thought process in the electorate that create this dilemma for politicians, Haldane argues: if we were to allow politicians to use the scientific method, a politician could say, ‘I am inclined to think the tariff on imported glass should be raised. I am not sure this is a sound policy; however, I am going to try it. After two years, if I do not find its results satisfactory, I shall certainly press for its reduction or even removal.’
Imagine that! Perhaps this should be filed under Impossible Worlds. But in the current political climate, food for thought, nonetheless. And this from the era when Laurel and Hardy were just becoming popular, and the first Model A Fords were gracing the showrooms. Far be it from me to discourage people from reading new books, but I can’t help thinking there’s still an awful lot we can learn from the old ones.
THE MAGIC THRESHOLD
BALI RAI
I’ve always considered libraries to be magical and warm places, full of excitement and wonder. I remember being six years old, and walking into St Barnabas library in Leicester, staring in awe at the rows of shelves and the thousands of books. I don’t recall the first book I ever borrowed, but I do know that once I’d crossed what Barack Obama has rightly called a ‘magic threshold’, I was hooked. And I do mean hooked.
My father instigated my first visit. As the immigrant son of a Punjabi farmer, his exposure to books and education was sorely restricted. On moving to the UK, he found his life a struggle, working long hours at manual jobs that paid only basic wages. He wanted his children to better themselves, and my sister and I benefited from that desire. Even after my father fell ill, and could no longer take me himself, my love of libraries remained. In fact, it grew stronger, and it is the library and books that have made me the writer, and the person, that I am today.
Reading became a joy, particularly after I first encountered Roald Dahl. I had read great stories before discovering James and the Giant Peach – wonderful picture books and comics too – but that first Roald Dahl book sent my head into a spin. I remember marvelling at the world he’d re-imagined, and laughing at the slightly silly adult characters. I even argued with my friends at school about which fruits would make the best homes. The first ‘story’ I ever wrote was a word-for-word copy of small parts of the book, but with my name substituted for ‘James’. It drew a smile and a shake of the head from my teacher, who told me to write my own ideas instead. I was seven years old and I started to dream.
Roald Dahl was like God or a magician back then. He never seemed like a real, everyday person that I might meet in the street. I never imagined that I’d ever be like him, able to make a living from writing stories. I thought that writers had to be old and posh and white. Or dead and posh and white. Most times I read a book, the characters were white too. Actually becoming a writer, seeing as I was the British-born son of Indian parents, seemed as remote as becoming an astronaut.
So I continued to visit the library, to read and to dream. I read every fiction book I could find, and joined the protagonists in their adventures across the world. I learned new words and ideas and my imagination went into overdrive. I started to pick up non-fiction and newspapers too, encouraged by the librarians, and developed a life-long love for facts and world affairs. The more I read, the better I did at school, and the more sense every lesson began to make. I even began to challenge the things I was being taught, much to the amusement of my teachers. At home, I found myself interpreting the news for my increasingly sick father, and filling out the forms my mother couldn’t read or understand. By the time I turned eleven, I was reading well above my age.
That was when I discovered Sue Townsend. I say discovered but it was more like she exploded onto the scene. Her first book, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, was a revelation for me. Here was this ordinary, everyday woman, who lived in my home city and had written a best-selling story about the sort of pupil I could have been sitting next to in class. Every character was real, every street, every house. I didn’t realise it until a few years later, but I had found my role model.
Suddenly I was writing furiously about the world I saw around me. I had already grown out of children’s books, and the young adult novels I found in my school library weren’t anywhere near challenging enough. One or two books made me sit up – S.E Hinton’s The Outsiders, Douglas Adams’ brilliant Hitchhiker’s Guide series, and Bernard Ashley’s The Trouble with Donovan Croft come to mind – but on the whole I was uninterested, and not through any fault of the librarian. Realistic and challenging young adult novels that dealt with everyday issues seemed few and far between. Once again, it was public libraries that came to my aid. I began to borrow books from the adult section, from the class
ics to Stephen King and beyond. At first the library staff were suspicious of my borrowing, worried that I might be reading unsuitable material. Once I’d started talking to them about the books I’d read, however, they started recommending others. No genre remained off-limits, bar romance perhaps, and more importantly I began to read more challenging non-fiction too. Politics, science, anthropology, art: they named it, so I wanted to read about it.
Libraries have assisted each part of my development as a person, from childhood, through my teens and beyond university into adulthood. Too many of my peers from working-class families, with poorly educated parents, show that there’s a direct correlation between success and reading for pleasure. Maybe I was lucky. Perhaps I was pushed in the right direction. Whatever the reasons, I would not be the person I am today if it wasn’t for libraries.