My library contains at least two documents of this type: Benjamin Constant’s Journal and Victor Hugo’s Carnets (Notebooks).
Benjamin Constant kept a journal during three periods of his life: from January 6 to April 10, 1803; from early 1804 until the end of 1807; and from May 1811 to September 1816. What is relevant here is the “abbreviated journal” from January 22, 1804 to 27 December, 1807. He explained this decision, which followed the death of his friend Madame Talma, the wife of the celebrated actor: “Madame Talma’s death had thrown me into such deep depression that from that time, my journal, in which I had noted all the details of her illness, and sometimes passed a severe judgment on her character, became intolerable to me. But not wanting to abandon it completely, I decided to write it in a very abbreviated form, mostly in numbers.”
The result for the reader—who was of course not supposed ever to see it—is rather astonishing: every day there are a few words and then some numbers from one to seventeen. For example the last few days of August 1804 are summed up as follows:
27: 4.2.2
28: 4.2
29: 4
30: 4.3
31: 4
That is an extreme example but not unique, so on October 1, 1804 we read: 4.3.2.3. More often words and numbers appear side by side: March 5, 1805: “Visit to Lacretelle. 4. Madame Dutertre 11. Letter from Minette 2.2.” Or another example, June 6, 1805: “Letter to Madame Dutertre, 2.12.4. but not much.” This is of course completely meaningless to us—as it was meant to be—but I doubt whether even experts on military decoding or even computer analysts could manage to interpret the events which Constant wanted to keep a note of, if it were not that he unintentionally helped us himself. Since he was afraid he might forget his own code, he wrote down the key to it at the end of the Journal. It goes like this:
1. signifies physical pleasure. 2. desire to break my eternal bond, so often considered. 3. return to this bond by memory or some momentary charm. 4. work. 5. discussion with my father. 6. feelings of affection for my father. 7. travel plans. 8. marriage plans. 9. fatigue. 10. touching memories and revival of love for Mme Lindsay. 11. hesitation over my intentions towards Mme Dutertre. 12. love for Mme Dutertre. 13. uncertainty about everything. 14. plan to settle in Dole to break with Biondetta. 15. plan to settle in Lausanne, for the same reason. 16. plans for overseas travel. 17. desire to be reconciled with certain enemies.
A rather disorienting list! It somewhat recalls Sei Shonagon’s list which contains among other headings: “Things that cause distress/Things that one has neglected the end of/Things that make one’s heart beat faster/Things that annoy one/ Things recalling a sweet memory from the past/ Things that are painful/ Things that fill you with anguish/ Things that appear upsetting/ Things that are incompatible/ Things that are distasteful to see/ Things that distract you when you are bored” and so on (The Pillow Book). In Constant’s case, all sorts of things are mixed up: emotions and plans, factual details and complex states of mind, simple elements and others which are more involved: “the desire to be reconciled with certain enemies”! But it does give some idea of the confusion of his feelings—see, for example, the entry for September 30, 1804: “Dined at Bosset. 3.2.3” and other days full of different emotions: “Write to Mme de Staël. 2.8.7.12.4. Went well. Spent the day alone. 1.”
More details would be informative not only about Benjamin Constant but about the human condition more generally. To be honest, number 1 is not the one that crops up most often, certainly less than 4, but it does appear fairly regularly, either without any context (so how did Constant know what he meant, if he read it a few years later?) or with some annotation suggesting a regular practice. So in 1804, on May 26, June 22, June 28, June 30, July 3, July 18, the famous 1 is preceded by “Went to Geneva,” which of course tells us nothing, but must have reminded him of the circumstances. Fortunately he took this secret to the grave.
Victor Hugo, in this domain as in so many others, had more baroque practices. He didn’t keep a journal but wrote entries in his private notebooks, which were a form of domestic and sexual accounting. The two were sometimes combined, since he sometimes paid the “ladies” who provided him with certain services: prostitutes during his stay in Brussels, servants or infrequent visitors in Jersey, or the actresses, would-be actresses and women in need who flocked round him when he made his glorious re-entry to Paris after the fall of the Second Empire. I don’t intend to go into either his love life or his sex life—they fairly quickly became separate compartments in his case. But his meticulous accounts covered several decades. Like Benjamin Constant, he used code or foreign languages, chiefly to evade the jealous curiosity of his lover, Juliette Drouet. A few examples among thousands of these jumbled notes, with decoding assistance from Henri Guillemin, Hugo et la sexualité (Hugo’s sexuality):
January: 27 Charlotte cloche [= “bell,” an allusion to ringing the bell in Scene One of his play L’Epée (The sword)].
April: 28 Mlle C. Rosiers, piernas [=legs]
May: 3 B.C.R. [= Baisé Catherine Rosiers = sex with Catherine Rosiers]
July: 22 3 francs [French equivalent of] f.w.f.m.i.b.n. (“for waiting for me in bedroom, naked”)]
March: 13 Catherine. sub clara nuda lucerna [naked under lamplight]
[undated]: Emile [for Emilie] Taffart, rue du cirque, 21, 6e,
osc [osculum = kiss, in Latin] 4 fr 50
September: 8 Marie. Saints [= seins =breasts]
September: 10 Misma. Pecho. Todo. [“Same, breast, everything”]
February: 17 Marietta: Garter [in English in the original]
February: 20 Mme Robert [Zélia] b.d.b. [= besa de boca = kiss on the lips]
November: 24 E. G. Esta manana. Todo [Elisa Grapillot. This morning. Everything]
As well as this mish-mash of abbreviations, borrowings from Spanish, English and Latin, and puns, Victor Hugo also played word games with women’s names, no doubt amusing himself: Estherhazy (Esther); Natte-à-lit (Nathalie); Eblouissement = “dazzling,” contains the name Louise; Alphonse Inn (= Alphon-sine); “Annales de Schaerbeck” (Anna); “Question delicate: rhinoceros” (Catherine) and so on. And a certain number of cabbalistic signs (crosses, wavy lines, circles, underlinings and dashes, a sort of capital T on its side) probably meant something too, but they are still awaiting the literary equivalent of the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone.
I don’t mean to belittle Hugo by referring to this sort of accounting, just to express my astonishment at how important it evidently was to him. As Guillemin tells us, Victor Hugo expressly ordered all his manuscripts to be deposited in the French National Library, “even fragments of poetry or a single line; any text which is written in my hand.” In other words, so that we, his posterity, can find them and read them: “When I am no longer there, people will see what I was like”—a strange sentence.
Stendhal, in spite of appearances, does not really go in for this kind of bookkeeping. True, in his journal he does refer, among many other things, to his love affairs and sexual adventures, and does occasionally use English or Italian to do so. But it is a more literary kind of reference. So of his affair with Angela Pietragrua, he wrote on September 21, 1811, “Yesterday, I received a half-favor,” and a little later, “On September 21 at [in English] 11:30, I won this victory so long desired.” But he cannot refrain from immediately reflecting on the event. “Nothing is missing from my happiness, except what would be happiness for an idiot—that it is not a victory. It seems to me that perfectly pure pleasure can only be the result of intimacy. The first time [in English] it is a victory; ‘in the three suivantes’ [in franglais = the next three times] one attains intimacy. Then comes perfect happiness, if she is a woman of intelligence, and character, whom one loves.” Two years later, in Monza, he wrote, “I see from my braces that it was on September 21 at 11:30 in the morning.” Stendhal’s bookkeeping is much more feeling than a simple sexual tally, and a man who writes on his braces the date and hour of his amorous “victory
” can’t be all bad.
Victor Hugo was sure enough of himself to be able to leave behind a record of his less attractive features. Henri Beyle (a.k.a. Stendhal), who adopted over a hundred pseudonyms in his life, writes somewhere in Memoirs of an Egotist: “I found I had every possible fault; I would have preferred to be someone else.” How are we to distinguish between the real and the fictional in his “Henry Brulard,” who is presented to us by the author as his double—but which one?
8
THE WORLD WITHIN REACH
Like all the men in the Library, I travelled in my youth: I went on pilgrimages looking for a single book, or perhaps for the catalogue of catalogues.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
One episode of The Twilight Zone, the famous American sci-fi television serial of the 1960s, broadcast in France as La Quatrième Dimension (The fourth dimension), tells the story of a bank clerk who can never find time to indulge in his favorite activity: reading. At home, his wife makes a scene if he picks up a book, and at work, reading behind the counter would get him into trouble. One day, after he has taken refuge in the strongroom with a book, there is a huge explosion—an atom bomb presumably—which destroys his town, leaving him the sole survivor. After hours of despair, he recovers the will to live when he finds that the local library has remained intact. He enthusiastically draws up a program of books to read in the coming days, weeks and months, and just when everything seems to be going well, he drops his spectacles on the floor, where their thick lenses shatter into fragments. The episode was called “Time enough at last” and one could read it as a metaphor for bibliomania: the man who fights melancholy and depression through reading, who reaches a point when he has as many books as he wants—and then drops dead.
The library protects us from external enemies, filters the noise of the world, tempers the cold winds around us—but also gives us the feeling of being all-powerful. For the library makes our puny human capabilities fade into insignificance: it concentrates time and space. It contains on its shelves all the strata of the past. The centuries that have gone before us are there. (“[Writing is] great, very great, in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space”—Abraham Lincoln.) The past haunts libraries, not only in documents bearing witness to past ages, but through scholarly works, literary reconstructions and images of all kinds. But my library is also a concentrate of space. Every region on earth is represented there somewhere, the continents with all their landscapes, their climates and their ways of life. Even imaginary countries like Swift’s Lilliput, Musil’s Cacania, Buzatti’s Desert of the Tartars, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Or places little known to humans but explored by authors—Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Dante’s Inferno, or Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages to the Moon and the Sun. I can be transported there in an instant, change my mind immediately, or even find myself in two places at once. All this has something divine about it—which is perhaps why when we talk about libraries, we so easily think in religious terms. Borges parodied Nicholas of Cusa: “The library is a sphere, of which the true center is some kind of hexagon, and the surface of which is inaccessible.” Umberto Eco uttered this strange pronouncement: “If God existed, he would be a library.” And surely that must refer to the way it enables us to overcome time and space.
And here—since my intention is not to write about the authors who matter most deeply to me—I will not be talking about what it means to be living in daily contact with them. (“With few books, but learned ones/I live in conversation with the dead/And I listen to the deceased with my eyes”—Francisco de Quevedo.) For beyond books themselves, there is everything they have to tell us about the human condition. Pointing out that the past allows us to put our own present into salutary perspective is something of a truism, yet surprisingly many people seem not to know it. To cite just one example, which touches me nearly, if you delve into history, you see how individuals come into and out of focus as fashions change: J. S. Bach was forgotten for a century until he was rediscovered thanks to Mendelssohn; Shakespeare was unknown in France until Voltaire and above all the romantics; Georges de la Tour had vanished from memory for two hundred years—and the same was even true of Vermeer! Jean Cocteau relates in his Journal that when Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Les Enfants terribles came out in 1950, the soundtrack contained a keyboard piece by Vivaldi, but he could not find a single recording of The Four Seasons in any Paris record shop. To take some recent examples, it is easy nowadays to express a liking for Impressionism, Cubism or abstract painting, since our age has assimilated what was once new and shocking. But who is to say whether in 1880 I would have preferred Manet and Renoir to Bouguereau and Cabanel? More seriously, would I have been a pro-Dreyfusard when it really mattered, or opposed to the Munich agreement in time to make a difference? People more intelligent than I came down on the wrong side. Lucien Febvre writes somewhere that anachronism is the mortal sin of historians, but it is also a common failing among ordinary people, and one has to be aware of it and try to fight it.
But to return to the library. Once it has been established, it tends to become an unavoidable transit zone for reality, a sort of vortex that sucks in everything that happens to us. That catalog you want to find a place for on the shelf becomes an integral part of the visit to the exhibition or museum, as does the documentation about a town and its monuments discovered in the depths of Portugal, Italy or France. What bliss it is, after a day in a city you have always meant to visit, as you sit in your hotel room at the end of the afternoon, looking through the books, postcards and brochures destined to find their way to your bookshelves, all giving you the comforting feeling that you are taking home some tangible elements of what has already become the past! It gives you the impression of safeguarding some fragments of lost time, whereas everything else, the emotions and sensation of the journey, will be fleeting memories.
Michel Melot points out in La bibliothèque multimédia contemporaine (The contemporary multimedia library) that “The library has always been connected to a set of practices for acquiring knowledge, not only to the book. In Alexandria it was part of a greater whole, the Museum.” Yes, libraries do accept other things: periodicals, engravings, posters, pamphlets and so on. Melot was talking about public libraries, of course, but things are much the same in private libraries, allowing for the different scale of resources (an individual can’t have a copyright library!) and for the more limited obligations (I don’t have to be at anyone’s service but my own). So I don’t keep many newspapers, for instance, but I do keep a lot of cuttings. Articles have two possible destinations, either being placed inside a book where they have their logical place, and will therefore be easy to remember, or in a big box of “articles to keep,” in which, as a rule, I can never find what I’m looking for. I have even gone so far as to buy a book, because it had a connection with an article I wanted to slip inside it and be sure of finding again, if need be.
As well as all this, I have music and film sections, like a modern multi-media library. The desire to have anything that is really worthwhile within arm’s reach is not confined to books. It is in any case hard to separate cinema and literature, music and reading. C.D.s and D.V.D.s have the advantage of taking up less room than books and above all it is easy to shelve them because they have a standard format. Films are a problem though: where will I ever find the time to see the ones which—in spite of all my self-denying ordinances—find their way into my home? Luckily, they are very easy to classify (alphabetical order of title, with occasional boxed sets by director integrated into the order, and a few rare exceptions, such as boxed sets on themes). My C.D.s are arranged by genre, and then by alphabetical order of composer or performer, the difficulty there being that some discs are a mixture—a performer playing works by several composers—and I sometimes hesitate over the category of music. Where do I put traditional or folk music? Should gospel and blues go in with jazz? Should I keep classical and contemporary musi
c separate? And I see that a sort of bookish deformation has absurdly pushed me to put tango, flamenco and salsa all in one place, and fado and bossa nova somewhere else. And then there is the occasional nasty surprise when the sleeve is empty or fails to contain the right disc.
But the library is governed by a wider economy, to do with one’s relation to the outside world. To play its part properly, the library must be left behind from time to time, so that one can miss it and then gratefully rediscover it. From a distance, it becomes idealized, and helps one to bear the discomfort of traveling. It is waiting for us at home and is already being enriched with the things we are bringing back with us.
Like public libraries, my bookshelves hold a number of reference works. Putting it briefly, these are mainly books that help me to use other books: dictionaries of my own language, of foreign languages, dictionaries of literature, history, religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, mathematics, physics, astronomy, and so on. Some of them I consult every day, but most of them have been opened only once, the day I bought them. Their presence is reassuring however—and you never know! Two years ago, I suddenly needed, while doing a tricky translation, to look up something in the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the one that comes with a magnifying glass on account of the very small print—and although it is described as “compact,” it has taken up a lot of room for the last thirty years. It is true that the Essai de grammaire slovène (Essay on Slovenian grammar) by Claude Vicenot is unlikely ever to be of the slightest use to me. But this is a souvenir from several visits to Ljubljana, and I would feel I was blotting out my past if I got rid of it. (I still have a photo, taken with Nicole Zand, in Lipiza in 1987 or 1988, by Eugen Bavcar, a Slovenian photographer—who is blind.) Another unusual scene remains in my mind from this trip: with a group of writers of various nationalities, we were at Gorizia, at an agricultural show, and in a vast marquee where beer and slivovitz were flowing freely. Carried away by the atmosphere, the Hungarian writer Peter Esterházy and the Yugoslav Danilo Kisč—who died shortly afterward of throat cancer—got up and started waltzing together among the tables crowded with local peasants raising their glasses. And I see that next to it in the shelf is a French-Corsican dictionary (compiled by “I Culioli”: Jean Dominique, Antoine Louis, Gabriel Xavier and Vannina Sandra), which I had completely forgotten about, but once I opened it I found it hard to put down. So, for instance, I came across the French word “gluant” (= sticky) for which the Corsican is “adj.: lumacosu, vischjosu, mustosu, appiccicarinu (of a person who clings on to one).” Without really understanding the etymology, I love the fascinating thought of being able to describe someone who will not let me go as “appiccicarinu”: the meaning of the word seems to go perfectly with its pronunciation.
Phantoms on the Bookshelves Page 8