It is hardly surprising that reading should be experienced as a unique activity, and in my own case, there is always the euphoria of being able to put a reality behind the name of an author or the title of a book. (“I read without selecting, just to get in touch”—Walter Benjamin.) Until it has been read, a book is, at worst, a jumble of signs on the page, at best a vague, perhaps false image, arising from what one has heard about it. To pick up a book in your hands, and discover what it really contains is like conferring flesh and blood, in other words a density and thickness, that it will never lose again, to what was previously just a word. For example, to someone who has not read Knut Hamsun’s novel, Pan, that word will just be a set of three letters, usually denoting one of the divinities of nature. Once you have read the book, it will be forever linked to the scents and sounds of the forest behind the cabin in Nordland where Lieutenant Thomas Glahn lived with his dog Aesop, and where Edvarda, the daughter of the trader Mack, would sometimes come to find him; and to the two wild duck feathers which the lieutenant “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. Or, to change countries, what would someone who has not read them make of the names of Kafū Nagai (1879–1959), the melancholy and sarcastic poet of the venomous charms of La Sumida (The [river] Sumida), set in the red-light district of Tokyo, or Osamu Dazai (1909–1948), the tubercular and desperate author of Setting Sun and No Longer Human? Once they have been discovered, the works of these two writers will remain indelibly imprinted on the mind of the reader.
Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that’s exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours and hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time the box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique: one is filled with paintings, another with bundles of banknotes, a third with jewels or letters tied in ribbon, engravings, objects of no value at all, silverware, photos, gold sovereigns, dried flowers, files of paper, crystal glasses, or children’s toys—and so on. There is something intoxicating about opening a new one, finding its contents and feeling overjoyed that in a trice one is no longer in front of a set of boxes, but in the presence of the riches and the wretched banalities that make up human existence.
Just imagine a man who has all day, and if he feels like it, all night too. And the money to buy every book he wants. There are no limits. He is at the mercy of his passion. And what is it that passion most wants? If you will allow me an observation […] it wants to discover its own limit. But that’s no easy matter. Brauer was a conqueror, more than a traveller (Carlos Dominguez, The Paper House).
Yes, undoubtedly, the compulsive reader is a conqueror. And he considers the acres of print offered to him as fully equal to those conquered by Alexander, Genghis Khan, Tamburlaine or Napoleon—and at least as fascinating—and in any case calling for less futile devastation, cruelty and bloodshed.
The title of a book you have read (conquered?) has nothing in common with what it represented before. The book will now pursue its own life in your memory. Often, it will fall into oblivion. But it also happens that it develops of its own accord: the plot transforms itself, the ending has nothing to do with the one written by the author, its length can be radically altered. It was with surprise that I noticed, on picking up Silvio D’Arzo’s House of Others again, after many years, that it has only sixty-five pages, whereas in my memory it had acquired another hundred over time. And I would never have imagined that when I re-read Anna Karenina twenty years later, I would feel more touched by the lot of Alexey Alexandrovitch Karenin than I had been inflamed, on first reading, by the passionate feelings of the lovely Anna for Vronsky. Not to mention the books of which one wonders, second time round, how one could ever have liked them. I had this disagreeable sensation a few years ago, on taking up again a book by Paul Morand—either Ouvert la nuit (Open all Night) or L’Homme pressé (The man in a hurry) or Hécate et ses chiens (Hecate and Her Dogs)—I have now forgotten which. His lively style had enchanted me at the age of twenty, but now I felt oozing from his prose—still admittedly brilliant—a social disdain, a feeling of haughty superiority, a pompous self-satisfaction, which I found intolerable. So all that is left to me now of Morand is his Ode to Marcel Proust (“A shade/rising from the smoke of your fumigations/your face and voice consumed by your night watches/Céleste with her gentle rigor drenches me in the dark marinade of your chamber/ smelling of warm cork and the ashes in the grate”). Here he was speaking as a friendly witness—and the subject of the poem made Morand’s later anti-Semitism a paradoxical absurdity.
“And how do you read your books? And where?” Anywhere, and in any position. I am at any rate very far from the refinement of Guarino, of whom Anthony Grafton tells us that he “liked to read a text while out in a boat, his book on his knees. This way he could enjoy the pleasures of reading simultaneously with the sight of the fields and vineyards.” Seated, standing, walking—why not? But the ideal is to be lying down, as if the position allows the text to enter the body more easily. Reading has enabled me to shorten the longest journeys, not to notice the hours I have spent waiting in airports, and for two decades to put up with meetings as futile as they were interminable, but which I could not escape. There remain strongly fixed in my memory books so absorbing that they seemed to make time stand still: Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which I read in May 1968, since “the events” permitted me to devote myself to them full-time; War and Peace, which I finished in the back of a car between Paris and Marseille; Musil’s The Man without Qualities, which I read with wonder, while walking, one spring in the early 1970s, toward Caesar’s tower on the road between Les Pinchinats and Aix-en-Provence; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which I began one afternoon and to continue reading which I cut short a dinner-party invitation, finishing it in the early hours of the morning; Moby-Dick, some pages of which I re-read on the whaling island of Nantucket, where I noticed on several letter-boxes the surname Coffin, which figures in Melville’s novel. I am lucky enough to be able to read no matter how noisy it is around me, in crowds or even surrounded by conversations of no interest. I am capable of reading all day, and carrying on late into the night, and to find it restful after a busy day. Reading tires me out as little as it tires fish to swim or birds to fly. I sometimes have the impression that I have really only existed through reading, and I would hope to die, like Victor Segalen in the forest of Huelgoat, with a book in my hand.
I write on my books, in pencil, but also with felt pens or ball-points. In fact I find it impossible to read without something in my hand. This is no doubt a habit arising from years of correcting proofs: the book for me is more of a tool of the trade than an object to be respected. Like other people who have worked in publishing or printing, I can’t stop myself from correcting typos, grammatical errors or misprints in the books I am reading (and when I happen to know the publisher or the author, I feel obliged to send him or her the corrections to incorporate in any new edition, and I have appreciated the few people who have done the same for me). To write on a book helps my reading, but it also helps me to remember the book and to come back to it later. I can hold in mind for months the approximate visual image of the place in the book where the passage occurred that struck me: top or bottom of the page, left or right hand, beginning or end—or else I note at the end of the book the page numbers to which I will have to return.
The experience of living with thousands of books is not without its influence on the functioning of memory. My memory works best at being able to find quickly the book the information is in, rather than by loading itself with facts, dates and quotations which are sitting on my bookshelves. Of course that requires my memory, my bookshelves, and the order of the books on the shelves all to be in good working order. When I am away from my library,
I often feel as though I am handicapped, as if I had been amputated of some vital limb. It can go beyond needing a simple piece of information: sometimes it has more to do with the emotion or the idea—and its exact formulation—that one was trying to recollect. Years later, thanks to my marginal notes or the passages I underlined on the first reading, the content of the book comes back to mind in a few seconds. (“… On my old copy of The Critique of Pure Reason are inscribed my underlinings from thirty years ago; the pencil markings are from one decade, the ballpoint marking from another. They carry the memory of my relationship to the book”—Umberto Eco.) Or Alberto Manguel again:
I always write in my books. When I re-read them, most of the time I can’t imagine why I thought a certain passage worth underlining, or what I meant by some marginal comment. Yesterday I came across a copy of Victor Segalen’s René Leys, dated “Trieste 1978.” I don’t remember ever being in Trieste (A Reading Diary).
Charles Nodier devotes several pages to “bibliology” in his Hommes célèbres qui ont signé ou annoté leurs livres (Famous men who signed or annotated their books). He cites the case of a copy of the Essays given by Montaigne to Charron; several copies of The Imitation of Christ translated into verse by Corneille and offered to people as gifts; various works signed by Rousseau or Voltaire; and he claims himself to be the happy owner of an Aeschylus which once belonged to Racine, while his Euripides and Aristophanes came from the Royal Library.
The tens of thousands of books with their underlinings and marginalia, which have absorbed a large proportion of the money I have earned in my working life, are therefore now of no commercial value. That makes a kind of sense, since I have always considered them as a sort of mental and material extension of myself, destined to go out of existence when I do (symbolically that is, since to bury them, or even cremate them with me—an original approach and more elegant in any case than having oneself cremated or buried in the company of one’s family, arms, horses and servants—would pose considerable practical problems).
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WHERE DO THEY ALL COME FROM?
Reading a book by Cervantes, Flaubert, Schopenhauer, Melville, Whitman, Stevenson or Spinoza is an experience as powerful as travelling or falling in love.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
How did these books get into my library? By a combination of chance, systematic curiosity, and impulses generated by conversations or reading.
When I consider the discoveries I made long ago, the trigger might have been a mysterious title (Steppenwolf for instance—in French, the title is Le Loup des Steppes [Wolf of the steppes]—before I had any idea who Hermann Hesse was); or it might be the book’s jacket (Lolita in the 1971 paperback version, at a time when I had never heard of Nabokov, but was very taken by the illustration on the cover: a close-up of the nape of the neck of a girl with blond plaits, against an elegant green background). Or perhaps I might have seen the film before reading the book (Visconti’s The Leopard, from the book by Lampedusa; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, by John Huston, from the book by B. Traven; The Big Sleep, by Howard Hawks from Raymond Chandler’s original; The Lady with the Little Dog by Kheifetz from Chekhov’s story). It might be an anecdote—in one case, an article by Gilles Lapouge, which related how he had left a copy of Hamsun’s Pan on a park bench, only to find it again the following year, at a second-hand bouquiniste’s on the banks of the Seine. The article in question also had the bewitching attraction of evoking a “secret society” of admirers of Knut Hamsun. How could one resist the chance to join a secret society of readers!
My systematic acquisitions come firstly from habits I have acquired as an eternal autodidact. No, I don’t set out to read all the paperbacks there are in alphabetical order, though I do like to take a look at anything generally thought worthy of note. But it also comes from wanting to read everything by an author I have come across by chance. Or else by following a chain of affinities between different authors—for example, Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste led me to Tristram Shandy, Arthur Rimbaud sent me to Germain Nouveau. Leonardo Sciascia to Luigi Pirandello, and Pirandello to Giovanni Verga. Or perhaps a book by a single author has encouraged me to try and discover a whole body of literature. Let me take the example of Pan again (I still have Lapouge’s article in a cutting from Le Figaro littéraire from 1972—with on the back an article by Bernard Pivot entitled “134 French novelists, including ‘43 yearlings’ [first-timers],” predicting who would win the Prix Goncourt that year). That single book drew me first to read all the rest of Hamsun’s books that had been translated into French, which was not easy, since at the time most of them were out of print. I took years to find August, the last on my list, and that was in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the old one, in the rue de Richelieu, when the books I had ordered for work purposes were taking a long time to arrive. I will never forget the feeling that flooded through me as I at last held in my hands the book I had been chasing for years, when it arrived on a trolley in the great reading room, the Salle Labrouste. At last I was going to find out what had happened to the unpredictable Edvarda! Then I embarked on reading all the Scandinavian literature translated into French that I could lay hands on (Dagerman, Lagerkvist, Jonson, Martinson, Vesaas, Laxness, and many more) and I even wrote a very serious article on Hamsun’s novels Benoni and Rosa entitled “Une bague et un coeur que l’on brise” (A ring and a broken heart) in La Quinzaine Littéraire in 1980. But that wasn’t all. I note, while looking at my copy (P.-J. Oswald Editions), that Pan was number four in a French collection entitled “La source de la liberté” or “La solution intégrale” (the publisher of which announced that “this collection will publish great poets who chose to express themselves in prose”), and that at the time, I explored the whole collection and discovered the following numbers: (1) Haniel Long’s The Marvellous Adventure of Cabeza de Vaca followed by Malinche, prefaced by Henry Miller, with the subtitle Stories translated from American English by F. J. Temple; (2) Hermann Hesse, Demian, translated into French by Denise Riboni, and (3) Albert Cossery, Les Hommes oubliés de dieu (Men God Forgot).
So once again I found Hermann Hesse in my journey through books and, above all, discovered Cossery (this must have been the first time I came across his books, a detail I had forgotten). On checking, I find that the Cossery is still on the shelves, but not the Haniel Long, which I am nevertheless certain I have read (have I lost it, lent it imprudently, or shelved it wrongly?). Nor is the Hesse—on the other hand, I do have the 1974 Stock edition of this, in the same translation by Denise Riboni, only it has been “revised and completed by Bernadette Burn” and “prefaced by Marcel Schneider.” After that, I read everything I could find by Cossery: Les Fainéants dans la vallée fertile (The Lazy Ones); La Maison de la mort certaine (The House of Certain Death); Mendiants et Orgueilleux (If all Men were Beggars). I went to see whether I had shelved the Long under Miller, but no. However I did find Miller’s Time of the Assassins: a study of Rimbaud, which was number six in the collection. And this informed me that number five was Séraphita, which I then duly found shelved with the rest of my Balzac. And I was indeed to re-publish Balzac’s La Théorie de la démarche (Theory of walking) a few years later for Pandora editions in 1978. So starting from an article in Le Figaro, I have systematically read through Hamsun, explored Scandinavian literature, and acquired books from a particular collection, which in turn led me to other discoveries. I have only gone into so much detail over this example to indicate how infinite the ramifications of one’s reading can be. One has only to imagine hundreds of cases like this, to end up with thousands of books on the shelves.
As the years go by of course, the field of discoveries shrinks, the continents are explored one after another, surveyed, mapped and sometimes even colonized, which does not prevent one from time to time discovering a lost tribe in a particularly inaccessible region—recently, I found the surprising and delicious The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, which shed light for me on some gaps in my knowle
dge of Turkish literature, despite my early appreciation of Nazim Hikmet.
And finally there are all the conversations. Those foreign friends who affectionately deliver to you the greatest authors in their own literature—which are not always the ones you would have guessed from the translations available—the books about which they speak to you with a tremor in their voice that inspires you to seek them out for yourself, the books they recommend to you as a special part of themselves, re-editions published by discerning readers. For example, the collection Fins de siècles (Ends of centuries), published by Hubert Juin in the series 10-18 in the 1970s and 1980s, led me to discover Marcel Schwob, Jean de Tinan, Octave Mirbeau, or Hugues Rebell. And what about the chance encounters? The Goncourts’ Journal, spotted on the bookshelves of Leonardo Sciascia in his modern flat in Palermo, and which, to my shame as a Frenchman, I had never read. Spoon River by Edgar Lee Masters, recommended to me by Louis Evrard during a dinner in the rue Lepic. William Kennedy’s Legs, recommended to me by Jim Salter when I asked him to name the American novel that he most regretted had not yet been translated into French. Another writer is John Cowper Powys, described enthusiastically by Max-Pol Fouchet, one evening on the French TV book program Lecture pour tous (Reading for all) or Apostrophes—I’ve forgotten which now. I could go on. Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel; Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros, Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony; Yuri Kazakov; Silvio d’Arzo’s Casa d’altri (The house of others); Petersburg by Andrey Bely; The Art of Describing by Svetlana Alpers; Story of My Wife by Milan Füst—and more. They are all linked to memories of people now dead, or with whom I have lost touch, and to whom I owe an immense debt. That’s the way books get around.
And I haven’t even started on bookshops. There has always been one in every town in which I have ever lived, some more memorable than others. (Oh yes! I remember Marie-Jeanne Apprin’s Librairie de Provence, in Aix-en-Provence in the 1970s; Brahic’s shop, also in Aix, at the top of the Cours Mirabeau; Madame Tchann’s bookstore on the boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris—later replaced by a shop selling golfing accessories, which quickly folded.) Bookshops with their daily deliveries, laid out on the “new books” table—sometimes their owners even opening the boxes before your very eyes—or with their treasures forgotten on the shelves. Christian Thorel found a copy of the out-of-print Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis in the tiny bookshop called Ombre blanche (White shadow) in its early days. Even more precious are the books recommended by a bookseller who is also a great reader, when he or she has a moment to escape the administrative preoccupations that take up most of their time. Bookstores often become informal meeting places, where at certain times of day you are almost sure to find someone to talk to. True bookshops—Tschann has now moved to another spot on the boulevard Montparnasse, or Le Livre in Tours (where they sell more books published by Clémence Hiver than by Grasset!)—have replaced the circulating libraries of the nineteenth century or the literary cafés, where it was a ritual to foregather in the late afternoon to meet people of similar interests. Or on a different tack, I remember José Corti in his bookshop on the rue Médicis in the early 1980s, getting cross because I asked him if he still had the two volumes of André Monglond’s Préromantisme français, (French pre-Romanticism) which had long been out of print. He calmed down, and we moved from confrontation to conversation. After checking, I find that I actually have Monglond’s book in my library, but I have now completely forgotten how it got there. I do know I paid a lot of money for it—400 francs—because I have another tic, which is to leave the prices in all the books I have bought second-hand. In this case it was on a thin piece of card with a notch in it, since it had been attached to the book’s jacket in the shop window.
Phantoms on the Bookshelves Page 5