Phantoms on the Bookshelves (11 page)

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?

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 music 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 Kis
č
—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.

So anyway, on the shelves behind my desk there are plenty of standard dictionaries, but also a few which are somewhat extravagant. Their titles are not without a certain fantastical poetry: the
Dictionnaire des onomatopées
(Onomatopoeic dictionary) by Pierre Enckell and Pierre Rézeau; the
Dictionnaire des langues imaginaires
(Dictionary of imaginary languages) by Paolo Albani and Berlinghiero Buonarroti;
Les Sept Merveilles—les expressions chiffrées, jamais deux sans trois, les neuf muses, faire la une
(The seven wonders, expressions of number: never two without three, the nine muses, to make the front page—“page one” in French) by Jean-Claude Bologne;
⁴
Les Fous littéraires
(Literary Madmen) by André Blavier;
Le Dictionnaire du monde rural
(Dictionary of the rural world) by Marcel Lachiver;
Le Rose
by Annie Mollard-Desfour (part of the sequence of dictionaries of words and expressions using colors published by CNRS Editions);
L'Etonnante Histoire des noms des mammifères
(The amazing story of the names of mammals) by Henriette Walter and Pierre Avenas; the more prosaic
Dictionnaire du français régional du Berry-Bourbonnais
(Dictionary of French spoken in the Berry-Bourbonnais regions) by Pierrette Dubuisson and Marcel Bonnin; not forgetting the
Dictionnaire des saints imaginaires
et facétieux
(Dictionary of imaginary and facetious Saints) by Jacques E. Merceron. And I have the very recent
Dictionnaire de la pluie
(Dictionary of rain), by Patrick Boman. A dictionary is not just a useful instrument: it can often be an original way of approaching a subject, casting light on it in a special way. The
Dictionnaire Hitchcock
(ed. Laurent Bourdon, Larousse, 2007) is quite distinct from all the monographs on Alfred Hitchcock, as well as from Donald Spoto's biography. And the
Dictionnaire Marcel Proust
, edited by Annick Bouillaguet and Brian G. Rogers (Honoré Champion, 2004), was a useful addition to a bibliography which is admittedly already vast. In any case, since all dictionaries are by definition incomplete or contain errors, one tends to accumulate them in order to compare one with another. I have several dictionaries from the nineteenth century in my library: Vapereau's
Dictionnaire des littératures
, Bouillet's
Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie
; Dezobry and Bachelet's
Dictionnaire de biographie, d'histoire, de géographie, des antiquités et des institutions
, but not the
Grand Larousse
. Since our idea of fame or notoriety has changed, one can find in these works names of people or subjects which have disappeared from more recent dictionaries, and they are also notable for a more personal and idiosyncratic tone. I have a second edition of the
Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture
(Dictionary of conversation and reading) which describes itself as follows: “A reasoned inventory of the most indispensable notions for all, by an association of scholars and men of letters under the editorship of M. W. Duckett, second edition entirely revised, corrected and augmented
by thousands of the most up-to-date entries. Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, Fils et Cie, Printers to the Institut de France, rue Jacob, 56. MDCCCLXXIII.” It is indeed a dictionary, as it says, but instead of contenting itself with brief definitions, it does not hesitate to plunge into long perorations. Guided by the magic of alphabetical chance, we find five entries starting on page 136 of the first volume as follows:
Adule
(marbles of): Adule (Adulis), ancient port then in Ethiopia, now in Eritrea (followed by about fifteen lines); then
Adulte
(Adult) about twenty lines;
Adultération
gets only four lines but
Adultère
(Adultery) gets four entire columns, while
Adustion
which comes next is dispatched in two lines (“a term in surgery: cauterizing or burning”). My series is, alas, incomplete, and ends at Volume XV with
Saxons/Saxonnes
(m. and f. “Germanic peoples”). What a pity—it irresistibly brings to mind a character in Jules Renard's
L'Ecornifleur
(The scrounger) who, in exchange for a dinner to which he invites himself every night, provides interesting conversation. It gradually dawns on you as the story goes on that the subjects he introduces to the conversation, day after day, are in alphabetical order. (I have just found a recent edition of Renard's little novel and, on reading it, am flabbergasted to find that, no, there is no trace of the alphabetical nature of the “hero's” culture! Did I confuse this one with some other literary figure who did the same, or did the adapter of the television version, which I saw in the days of black and white, take liberties with the original text? Jacques Duby played the scrounger. Did the film and the novel get mixed up in my memory? Who knows?)