I Murdered My Library (Kindle Single) (3 page)

Sometimes
the alcoves were lined with shelves but they didn’t hold any books – they were
for DVDs.

The
shelves pronounced taste, as my student bookshelves had pronounced a
counter-cultural identity, but taste in interior décor and dinner.

And I
knew this because when the estate agent came to look at my flat, he winced when
he saw all those books.

What
did he see?

Clutter.

Estate
agents do not think that books furnish a room – books make rooms look messy.
Books’ multi-coloured spines muddle and muddy the Farrow & Ball neutral
paint colours, the Ammonite and Hardwick White and Savage Ground. They
completely destroy the impact of the accent wall.

Books
are too personal as objects to be displayed, in case a potential buyer is put
off by your taste for Nietzsche or Marian Keyes. You would not display the contents
of your knicker and sock drawer, or your bathroom cabinet with its face creams
and cough remedies, so why put off potential buyers with your taste in
literature? For many cannot see past your books, I was advised. They cannot
imagine the room without them. Buyers want bland neutral décor so they can
impose their own taste on it. Or, if your taste coincides with theirs, they
want to buy into your sofa and your rug. House buyers want houses to look like
an interiors magazine. They are frankly hostile to the history of your whole
intellectual life arranged in thousands of volumes.

In
North America, there is a service available to home-sellers which has started
to arrive in Britain, though no-one I know has used it: staging. From one
staging website:

We
may suggest new accessories, lighting or furniture. From a stylish table
dressing to a feature mirror, some silk cushions or a throw – we think of every
detail. Transforming your property – maximising your profit. So if you're
looking to sell your home, but need a little help in presenting it for sale,
our dress to sell service is the simplest way to sell your property fast – and
for the best price.

I’ve
looked through the staged interiors and none of them contain any books. In the
past, books that weren’t real books, glued-together leather spines, were
introduced into houses by interior decorators to add a touch of class. Now
tables are set as if for the imminent arrival of dinner-party guests. But there
is no evidence of any reading going on.

In order
to market my flat, the books had to be pruned back. At the very least, they
would not be permitted to exceed the number of shelves available to house them.

So
the murder began.

***

First
I disposed of the multiple copies of my own books. Charity shops are not
interested in taking 30 copies of the same book, so I put myself about on Twitter,
and offered them to reading groups for the cost of postage and packing. There
was a very good take-up, and for two or three weeks I spent most days trundling
to the Post Office with an old-lady shopping trolley, packed with a box of 12 hardbacks
ready for dispatch to Glasgow or Nottingham or Cardiff. I made no demands of
the recipients; if they hated the book, they hated it, but I didn’t want to be
told. A cheque would arrive a few days later, and so the cupboards under the
eaves slowly emptied.

The
foreign editions found homes in the public library system where they were
accepted gratefully. Polish speakers in the London Borough of Haringey now have
a choice of books: by me, or by me.

Still,
stray copies of my own books turned up everywhere, concealing themselves behind
the now-softening Swiss ball or hiding behind a second-best printer. I threw
one box in the recycling bin. I’m going to hell, a hell in which eternity is a
Kindle with a dead battery.

The
methodology with which I embarked on my cull was very high-minded. I would
preserve those books of literary merit, the books I had not yet read but wanted
to, and the books given as gifts with an inscription on the flyleaf.

Judging
literary merit at the top of library steps is a beautiful and contemplative
activity. I see Catherine Deneuve, half-lit with the illumination from a
Parisian window on a Rive Gauche boulevard below cloudy pearly autumnal skies,
a few streets from Shakespeare & Co. She picks a book out from the shelf,
examines the spine.
Ah, Matthieu!
The much-older lover, a grizzled
intellectual with whom she spent a summer in Cadaques when she was 20. Fade and
dissolve to Charlotte Gainsbourg in 1967, in the kitchen cutting tomatoes,
while out on the terrace Daniel Auteuil is typing his masterpiece, which will
win the Prix Goncourt and later be filmed by Truffaut.

I
sneezed. The shelves were filthy. I wobbled, looked down, got vertigo. How do
we assess André Gide’s reputation? By ‘we’ I don’t mean the French Academy.
Does anyone still read him? If no-one still reads him, what does that tell me
about literary merit? I went down the steps to the computer and looked him up.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Vatican placed his complete
oeuvre on the Index of Forbidden Books, alongside Samuel Richardson, Graham
Greene and the Dumas boys (father and son). He died in the year of my birth.
Strait
Is the Gate
was one of the Penguins I bought in my early teens. I have
absolutely no recollection of its subject matter (a love story set in the
Normandy countryside, according to Amazon). Literary merit established
conclusively; read, but not really read. Potential for re-reading. But not in
this edition. Potential for going to a bookshop and examining current print
size before considering a Kindle version. (But there is no Kindle edition.)

In
any case, that gets thrown to the floor and joins the other splayed volumes of
rejects.

After
a couple of hours, the process of deciding literary merit speeds up
considerably.

When
I was young, boys invited in for sex would examine your bookshelves. A
collection of novels by Arthur Hailey and Barbara Cartland would not
necessarily be enough to prevent them from ripping off their t-shirts and loon
pants and desert boots, but if you added to the sexual experience a credible
book collection, the move from one night stand to girlfriend was consolidated.
My books had to make up for my LPs. I did not have the definitive album by
Captain Beefheart, though I did have the bootleg Dylan
Basement Tapes
.

‘What’s
this? I didn’t know Tom Stoppard wrote a novel.’

‘But
of course – you mean you haven’t read it?’

Lord
Malquist and Mr Moon
was the literary equivalent of the
Wonderbra for intellectually pretentious students of the seventies.

I no
longer need to impress male visitors with the depth of my reading. So what is
the nature of this library? What function does it serve other than being a
filing system for books? What, to use the phrase beloved of cultural criticism,
does it say about me, and to whom is it addressing this message?

When
builders come in, or grocery delivery men, they often say, ‘Blimey, have you
read all these books?’

In
friends’ houses, I have stopped inspecting their bookshelves for evidence of
their literary taste because we have all read, more or less, the same books. My
curiosity is limited now to how they store and display them. The former
literary editor of a national newspaper told me the other day that most of his
books are in paid-for storage and have been for years. There is a strong part
of me which thinks that if you don’t have any access to your books, you might
as well not have them, as I believe that tidying things away where you can’t
see them means there is no point in having them at all. I believe in a desk
where everything is carefully composed into a filing system of paper, bills,
staplers, pens, reading glasses, polishing cloths for reading glasses,
dictionaries, thesaurus, earbud headphones, calculator and notebooks, strewn across
the surface.

I
made this point to him, but he argued that he had first editions of the Brit
Boys: Amis, Barnes, McEwan. I wonder if he thought they were his pension. A
Christmas email from an old friend in Vancouver spoke mournfully of a friend
whose husband is an antiquarian book dealer. The bottom had dropped right out
of that market, she reported, even for first editions.

My
sister (the one who truncated the eight years of my being an only child)
returned to London after nearly a decade in the USA. She decided not to ship
her books back from a rambling ‘heritage home’ in Chevy Chase to a flat in
Spitalfields so short of storage space that kitchen equipment has to be stored
in cupboards in the living room. As a two-Kindle, one-tablet household, she and
her husband feel no need to populate their precious and very limited shelves
with books they have read and will not read again. ‘Why do you actually
need
all these books?’ she asked me.

If
there is a need, it is not a functional one – it’s something else.

For
one thing, I would be ashamed of being a writer whose house had no books.

For
another, the books, as I have already said, are a
library
. In a library,
you do not read a book to the last page and dispose of it: you return, you
return.

I go
back to Paris in the thirties, to Jean Rhys, the novelist of unmediated longing
and yearning and rage and sexual desire, and the need for nice clothes, and the
fear of what happens to women when they are old and lose their looks and become
the woman alone upstairs, drinking alone, smoking alone, dying alone. Sentence
after apparently unremarkable sentence pass until suddenly I feel myself hit in
the solar plexus by the accumulated tension. I look back and ask,
How did
you
do
that
?

I
return in memory and imagination, but I return by taking a book down from the
shelf, and reading a few pages. That is a library. A full larder for the soul.

None
of her novels are currently available as ebooks.

I
kept Jean Rhys, I kept Anita Brookner, I kept Beryl Bainbridge. These books are
personal not only as objects but also for the intense relationship I have with
the text.

***

I want to say
here that I am not hostile to new technology. Like my parents with their brand-new
television purchased to watch mystical pomp and circumstance, I am an advocate
of the modern. I had the internet when everyone was telling me it was just for
nerds and Star Trek fans.

For a
long time I had known that the day was coming when we would not only write on a
screen but read on it too.

In
the early years of this century, from the bath, I heard a BBC radio discussion
about the idea of reading books on a screen of some sort. A scornful patrician
voice said, ‘But you
can’t
take a computer to bed with you, d’you see?’,
and the argument was, in her mind, permanently closed. Lying in the suds, I
thought,
But won’t they develop some kind of hand-held device
?

My
agent told me that the early ereader prototypes were stymied by the weight of
the batteries. When the Sony ereader was introduced, the company sent one to a
bibliophile friend who despised the very idea of it, and he gave it to me. I
tried it, but the contrast between the print and the screen was so poor that it
was impossible to read by lamplight in bed. And the technology was terribly
clunky: you had to attach the thing to the computer via a cable and then
transfer files and . . . I couldn’t see it catching on.

In
the autumn of 2010, the owner of a bed-and-breakfast I stayed in for one night
showed me her Kindle. It weighed almost nothing in the hand. The contrast was
considerably better than the Sony. I bought one. I was the first person I knew
to own a Kindle, as my parents were the first family they knew to own a TV. We
are Modernists. We like the idea of the future.

When
I said, ‘I’ve bought a Kindle’, everyone retorted, ‘Ah, but it’s not a book’,
fact,
end of
. A book is a tactile object. It smells of paper. It has a defined
typeface you cannot alter. It has a cover. So, no, I replied. It is not a book
and particularly not in the sense that you do not have to spend all day lugging
around in your handbag, for example, the 900 pages of Vasily Grossman’s
Life
and Fate
.

The
first book I read on my Kindle was Damon Galgut’s Booker-shortlisted
In a
Strange Room
. When I, or Galgut, write a novel, we do not type it into a
bound book with cover and frontispiece. We used to write on typewriters – now
we write on screens. A few writers still compose longhand, but I don’t know any;
mostly we’re staring at the empty space of Word for Mac or that convoluted
writers’ software, Scrivener. So when we are writing, as I’m doing now, a
screen is the medium, and what matters is not paper or the cover or the binding
or the smell of ink, but the words. The ‘real’ book that I write is 12-point
Arial at 150 per cent zoom, with the page set in draft view so that it fills
the screen. Double spaced, margins justified.

I
think many writers are notoriously conservative and superstitious about their
work methods, with rituals and incantations and other rubbish we won’t mention,
apart, obviously, from the enormous amount of time spent staring out of the
window. I can’t write in Times New Roman because it looks as though it’s
already printed. This comes from starting to write in the Palaeolithic era, on
an Olivetti portable typewriter with finger-darkening ribbon-changing, a bottle
of Tippex for corrections and carbon paper to make copies. I must use a font
that is provisional, resembles typing and so is susceptible to savage editing,
then printing out and scribbling and printing out and scribbling until you are
sick of the sight of the thing and can’t believe anyone else would want to read
it, by which time your editor is sending armed men to retrieve the MS from you by
force.