PHANTOMS ON THE BOOKSHELVES
PHANTOMS ON THE BOOKSHELVES
JACQUES BONNET
Translated from the French by Siân Reynolds
With an Introduction by James Salter
An imprint of Quercus
New York • London
© 2008 by Jacques Bonnet
© 2010 by Siân Reynolds
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To Luiz Dantas
CONTENTS
Translator’s and editor’s note
Introduction
Author’s preface: Pessoa the Librarian
1. Tens of thousands of books
2. Bibliomania
3. Organizing the bookshelves
4. The practice of reading
5. Where do they all come from?
6. Reading pictures
7. Real people, fictional characters
8. The world within reach
9. Phantoms in the library
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
TRANSLATOR’S AND EDITOR’S NOTE
This is a book about books. It contains many titles in several languages. In the original, Jacques Bonnet lists details of the edition sitting on his bookshelves, which is usually in French: date, publisher, translator. The policy adopted for the translation is that, except for very well-known titles, such as War and Peace, the titles of books originally written in French (or other languages) are kept in the text, followed immediately either by the title, in italics, of the English translation, if there is one; or by a literal translation of the title, in roman type, if none exists. There is a full bibliography with dates and details at the end for readers who would like to follow up any titles: where possible the English edition is cited.
After owning books, almost the next best thing is talking about them.
CHARLES NODIER
INTRODUCTION
As Anthony Burgess once commented, there is no better reason for not reading a book than having it, but an exception should be made for this one, which appears at a time when books and literature as we have known them are undergoing a great and perhaps catastrophic change. A tide is coming in and the kingdom of books, with their white pages and endpapers, their promise of solitude and discovery, is in danger, after an existence of five hundred years, of being washed away. The physical possession of a book may become of little significance. Access to it will be what matters and when the book is closed, so to speak, it will disappear into the cyber. It will be like the genie—summonable but unreal. The private library of Jacques Bonnet, however, comprised of more than forty thousand volumes, is utterly real. Assembled according to his own interests, idiosyncratic, it came into being more or less incidentally over some four decades, through a love of reading and a disinclination to part with a book after it was acquired. Among other things, he might need it some day.
Under the pretense of writing about this library, its origins, contents and organization, he has written instead this often witty tribute to and perhaps requiem for a life built around reading that summons up all the magical and seductive power of books. You recognize, with a kind of terrible joy, all that you haven’t read and that you would like to read. Titles and names strike what can only be called chords of desire. In these pages, as at a fabulous party, you are introduced to writers who have not been translated into English, or barely. Hugues Rebell, Milan Fust, Anders Nygren, Kafū Nagai (1879–1959), the Japanese writer of the floating world about whom Edward Seidensticker wrote Kafu the Scribbler, or Osamu Dazai, “tubercular and desperate,” who attempted suicide three or four times, the last time successfully with his mistress. To these as well as to writers more famous, and to incredible characters: Count Serlon de Savigny and his beautiful fencing-champion mistress, Hauteclaire Stassin, who together murder the count’s wife and live happily ever after in Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Happiness in Crime, or Edvarda, the trader’s daughter in Knut Hamsun’s Pan, who sometimes came to the cabin where Lieutenant Thomas Glahn lived near the forest with his dog, Aesop.
Bonnet did not resist these books. They became, in a way, part of him, and he manages to bring up the question of what one has read, what one should read, what one remembers and, in a paradoxical way, what is the use of it. This last question can be dealt with more easily: Reading has the power not only to demolish time and span the ages, but also the capacity to make one feel more human—human meaning at one with humanity—and possibly less savage. Bonnet admits that he has not read all his books which, even at the rate of two or three a week, would take the better part of a century. Some he has read and forgotten, others he remembers, although not always perfectly—indelible, however, are “the two wild duck feathers which the lieutenant, Thomas Glahn, with the blazing eyes of a wild beast would receive two years later folded into a sheet of paper embossed with a coat of arms”—and a great number of books he has only glanced at or not read at all. As he describes it himself, books that he has acquired, that is, has bought rather than received because of his occupation as a writer and editor, can end up in one of three ways:
They may be read immediately, or pretty soon; they may be put off for reading later (and that could mean weeks, months and even years, if circumstances are particularly unfavourable, or the number of incoming books is too great—what I call my “to read” pile). Or they may go straight on to the shelf.
He goes on to say that even these books immediately shelved have, in a sense, been “read.” He knows what they are and where they are; they can be of use one day. He is able, of course, to read quickly since this has long been his work, but some books should not be read quickly. One often hears the expression “I couldn’t put it down,” but there are books that you have to put down. Books should be read at the speed they deserve, he properly notes. There are books that can be skimmed and fully grasped and others that only yield themselves, so to speak, on the second or even third reading.
All of this is normal, and you have probably formed an image of a pallid bookworm, serious and solitary. Bonnet is not like this. He is, to the contrary, convivial, good-natured, even jaunty. He has spent his life as an editor, as a journalist for Le Monde and L’Express, and as an art historian writing a book on the life and paintings of Lorenzo Lotto. These are what might be called the visible occupations. At the same time, and much of the time, he has read. He has always read. He likes to read, as he says, “anywhere and in any position” although for him—and he is a voluptuary in this regard—the ideal is lying down or, as he elsewhere mentions, in the bath. I have never seen him reading although I remember that the one visit I made to his Paris apartment was like walking into La Hune; the walls were completely
covered with bookshelves and the shelves were filled with books. This was fifteen or twenty years ago, and I don’t know if there was then the full complement of books, nor do I know what forty thousand books would look like, but it was an apartment dedicated to them. I didn’t wonder at the time how they were arranged, and I did not consider what, after the joy of acquisition, must be an overwhelming reality for the owner of a large library; that it is almost impossible to move, both from the point of view of finding another place large enough as well as actually moving all the books, packing, transporting and reshelving them.
A private library of good size is an insolent form of riches, and the desire to have more books is difficult to rationalize, especially in view of the fact that you do not or cannot read them all but, as Bonnet makes clear, still you might. The bibliophile is, after all, like a sultan or khan who has countless wives already but another two or three are always irresistible. Reading is a pastime and can be regarded as such, but it can also be supremely important. Walter Benjamin expressed it off-handedly; he read, he said, “just to get in touch.” I take this to mean in touch with things otherwise impossible to embrace rather than merely stay abreast of, although a certain ambiguity is the mark of accomplished writers. Benjamin’s life ended tragically. He fled from the Nazis but was trapped, unable to cross into Spain, and he committed suicide, but that was the end only of his mortal life. He exists still with a kind of shy radiance and the continued interest and esteem of readers. He is dead like everyone else, except that he is not. You might say the same of a movie star except that it seems to me that stars are viewed years after with a kindly curiosity. They are antique and perhaps still charming. A writer does not age in the same way. He or she is not imprisoned in a performance.
Books, as Bonnet comments, are expensive to buy and worth very little if you try to sell them. The fate of a private library after the death of its owner is almost always to be scattered. There are exceptions, like the library assembled in Hamburg by Aby Warburg that was moved to London in 1933 to keep it out of the hands of the Nazis, and that became the heart of an institute for Renaissance studies. But even great libraries, those of schools and cities, have come to ruin, destroyed by fire, war, or decree: Alexandria’s famous library, Dresden’s in 1945, others. An emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi, you will learn, the builder of the Great Wall, also ordered the destruction of all books that did not concern themselves with medicine, agriculture or divination. There were a number of sages who preferred to die rather than destroy their libraries.
The love of books, the possession of them, can be thought of as an extension of one’s self or being, not separate from a love of life but rather as an extra dimension of it, and even of what comes after. “Paradise is a library,” as Borges said.
The writers of books are companions in one’s life and as such are often more interesting than other companions. Men on their way to execution are sometimes consoled by passages from the Bible, which is really a book written by great, if unknown writers. There are many writers and many of some magnitude, like the stars in the heavens, some visible and some not, but they shed glory, as Bonnet makes clear without the least attempt at persuasion.
James Salter
On September 1 1932, the Portuguese newspaper O Século carried an advertisement for the post of librarian-curator at the Condes de Castro Guimarães Museum, in Cascais, a little town on the coast about thirty kilometers from Lisbon. On September 16, the poet Fernando Pessoa sent the local authority a letter applying for the post. The six-page document was later reproduced in a book by Maria José de Lancastre, Fernando Pessoa, uma fotobiografia (Fernando Pessoa: photographic documentation), published in 1981 by Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda and the Centro de Estudios Pessoanos, which I bought for 500 escudos in a bookshop in Coimbra in November 1983. It was the only copy they had. In the town’s cafés in those days there was still a ledge under the table where you could put your hat, and I remember seeing a woman go past in the street with a sewing machine balanced on her head. The Portuguese text of the letter is reproduced in Fernando Pessoa in characters far too tiny for anyone without good Portuguese to decipher.
Pessoa, who was tired of translating commercial correspondence for import-export firms in Lisbon, on a wage that scarcely allowed him to survive and get (moderately) drunk every day, felt the urge to change his way of life and leave his flat at 16, Coelho da Rocha Street for a small town near Lisbon. In my copy of the book, a few pages before the letter, there is a photograph of Pessoa drinking a glass of red wine in the shop owned by the wine merchant Abel Ferreira da Fonseca. Behind him you can see casks of Clairette, Abafado, Moscatel, Ginginha and so on. This was the snapshot which Pessoa sent in September 1929 to Ophelia Queiroz, the only romantic relationship he is known to have had. The dedication reads: “Fernando Pessoa, em flagrante delitro”, or “Fernando Pessoa in flagrante with a liter.” Sending the photograph had marked the renewal of a connection broken off nine years earlier, and which would end, permanently this time, six months later. At least, it ended materially. Ophelia never married, and she recounted that shortly before his death, Pessoa, on meeting his nephew Carlos, had asked him, “How is Ophelia?,” then, his eyes filled with tears, had grasped his hands and added: “Oh what a fine soul, a fine soul!”
There are two other editions of Maria José de Lancastre’s album on my bookshelves. An Italian version (Adelphi, 1988) has been abridged—164 pages instead of 322!—and the letter appears only in a reduced form, just the first and last pages, making it even less legible than in the original book. On the other hand, it does show a photo of the museum in question, the neo-Gothic villa of Count Castro Guimarães. By contrast, the French version (translated by Pierre Léglise-Costa, published by Christian Bourgois in 1990) reproduces in their entirety the documents published in the original edition, and adds a translation of the letter of application. This document, which really ought to be quoted in full, is a heart rending example of the frequent gaps that exist between the two worlds of the artist, the one in which he lives mentally—at the risk perhaps of losing himself—and the world he inhabits every day. Let us content ourselves here with the final paragraph:
The documents cited in paragraph 1 above, and enclosed herewith, are more than adequate evidence to convey the applicant’s knowledge of English. As for his knowledge of French, the applicant is of the view that in the absence of truly valid documents (such as those he can produce for English) the best thing he can do is to attach an extract from the magazine Contemporanea no. 7, where on pp. 20 and 21 are published three songs which he wrote in French—“Trois chansons mortes” (Three dead songs). In the further particulars for the post, it states that the librarian-curator should be a person of “recognized competence and appropriateness.” The degree of competence and appropriateness implicit in the qualifications indicated as preferable in the paragraphs of the article will therefore be supported by documentary proof in the documents concerning each paragraph, [but] competence and appropriateness are not provable by document. They even include elements such as physical appearance and education, which are of themselves non-documentable.
Cascais September 16 1932
Fernando Nogueira Pessoa
The appointing committee, chaired by the mayor of Cascais, and no doubt baffled by this unaccustomed rhetoric, was not convinced; it prudently chose another candidate, whom Pessoa’s biographers usually describe rather vaguely as “an obscure painter.”
1
TENS OF THOUSANDS OF BOOKS
Some people are fond of horses, others of wild animals; in my case, I have been possessed since childhood by a prodigious desire to buy and own books.
JULIAN THE APOSTATE
About fifteen years ago, the Paris publishing house I was working for published a novel by the great Italian writer and critic Giuseppe Pontiggia. Probably nobody else who could stammer out a few words of Italian was available that particular evening, so I was asked to “look after” him. We met for d
inner in a restaurant (Russian as it happened) near the Vavin crossroads. We got on well, particularly since he and his wife Lucia spoke French much better than I did Italian. After the first few minutes of conversation, we realized we had something in common, which transformed the interest of the evening: we both owned a monstrous personal library of several tens of thousands of books—not one of those bibliophile libraries containing works so valuable that their owner never opens them for fear of damaging them, no, I’m talking about a working library, the kind where you don’t hesitate to write on your books, or read them in the bath; a library that results from keeping everything you have ever read—including paperbacks and perhaps several editions of the same title—as well as the ones you mean to read one day. A non-specialist library, or rather one specialized in so many areas that it becomes a general one. We spent the entire meal discussing both the enjoyment and the curse of our lot. Books are expensive to buy, but worth nothing if you try to sell them second-hand; they become impossibly dear once they are out of print; they are heavy to carry, gather dust, are vulnerable to damp and mice, and once you have acquired a certain number they make it impossible to move house; they need a workable retrieval system if you want to use them, and above all they take up room.
I once had a bathroom full of bookshelves, which made it impossible to take a shower, and meant running a bath with the window open because of the condensation; and I also kept them in my kitchen, which made it out of the question to use certain strong-smelling foodstuffs. As was the case for many of my colleagues, it was years before I could afford a living space equal to my book-collecting ambitions. Only the wall above my bed has always been spared from bookshelves, as the consequence of an ancient trauma. I learned, long ago, the circumstances of the death of the composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, sometimes described as the “Berlioz of the piano,” who was found on March 30, 1888 crushed to death by his own bookshelves. Every craft guild used to have its patron saint and martyr, so Alkan the elder, the virtuoso pianist whom Liszt admired, and who inherited Chopin’s pupils from him, must surely be the patron saint of demented book collectors. As in the Greek myths, there are several variants of his tragic end, and a different one suggests he was the victim of a heavy umbrella-stand, but since there is room for doubt, I prefer my version. I also possess in my record collection, in homage to this tutelary martyr to our gentle and inoffensive obsession, a classic R.C.A. vinyl of his Grande Sonate, “The Four Ages,” recorded in January 1979 by Pierre Reach.
Phantoms on the Bookshelves Page 1