I REMEMBER THAT ON THE FIRST DAY I BEGAN setting up my library in France, I took out of its box a first edition of Kingsley’s Hypatia, a novel about the fourth-century philosopher and mathematician who was murdered by Christian fanatics. I remember opening the book and coming upon the description of the Library of Alexandria, a passage I had completely forgotten except for the words “rainless blue,” without recalling where they came from. This was the passage: “On the left of the garden stretched the lofty eastern front of the Museum itself, with its picture galleries, halls of statuary, dining-halls, and lecture-rooms; one huge wing containing that famous library, founded by the father of Philadelphus, which held in the time of Seneca, even after the destruction of a great part of it in Caesar’s siege, four hundred thousand manuscripts. There it towered up, the wonder of the world, its white roof bright against the rainless blue; and beyond it, among the ridges and pediments of noble buildings, a broad glimpse of the bright blue sea.”
How could Kingsley’s description have slipped my mind as I was trying to depict Alexandria and its library in a book I wrote a few years later? Why was my memory not more helpful when I was painfully trying to piece together an image, factual or imaginary, of what the ancient library might have been? My mind is capricious. Sometimes it can be charitable: in moments when I need a consoling or happy thought it throws at me, like coins to a beggar, the alms of an event that I had long forgotten, a face, a word from the past, a story read one sultry night between the sheets, a poem discovered in an anthology that my adolescent self believed no one had discovered before. But the generosity of my books is always there, as part of their makeup, and as I took them out of their boxes, having condemned them to silence for so long, they still were kind to me.
As I unpacked my books on the remote afternoon that restored Kingsley’s passage to me, the empty library started to fill with disembodied words and the ghosts of people I knew once, who had guided me through libraries vaster than that of Alexandria. The unpacking also conjured up images of my own younger self at different times: carefree, brave, ambitious, solitary, arrogant, all-knowing; disappointed, bewildered, somewhat afraid, alone and aware of my ignorance. Here were the magic talismans. Here was a paperback with selections from Tennyson in which at the age of twelve I first read “Tithonus,” underlining the words I didn’t understand before learning the poem by heart. Here was Lucretius’s De rerum natura full of penciled annotations from my Latin class. Here was a Spanish translation of Clausewitz’s On War that had belonged to my father, bound in green leather and trimmed of its first lines. Here was H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, which my friend Lenny Fagin gave me for my tenth birthday. Here was the edition of the Quixote edited by my beloved professor Isaias Lerner and published by the University Press of Buenos Aires, which was later shut down by the military authorities who forced Lerner into exile. Here was the copy of Kipling’s Stalky & Co. that Borges had read in his adolescence in Switzerland and which he gave to me as a parting gift when I left for Europe in 1969. Here was Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine, which had belonged to the Canadian businessman Timothy Eaton and whose pages had been cut only to page 93, with a bookmark from the Savoy Hotel in London—a book that symbolized for me my adopted country: the quintessential Quebecois novel written by a Frenchman, read halfway through by an Anglo-Canadian magnate in an aristocratic London hotel. Such encounters occurred many times during the happy months I spent among the piles of disinterred volumes.
Packing, on the contrary, is an exercise in oblivion. It is like playing a film backwards, consigning visible narratives and a methodical reality to the regions of the distant and unseen, a voluntary forgetting. It is also the reestablishment of another order, albeit secret. “Bonding” (as physicists call this process of new chemical formations) entails the clustering of unlikely items into groups and identities redefined through the new boundaries of a boxed cartography. If unpacking a library is a wild act of rebirth, packing it is a tidy entombment before the seemingly final judgment. Instead of the boisterous, endless columns of resurrected books about to be awarded a place according to private virtues and whimsical vices, their grouping is now established by a nameless common grave that transforms their world from the loud two dimensions of a shelf to the three dimensions of a carton.
The library in France was packed by several generous friends who descended like good spirits to help us overcome our reluctance. Lucie Pabel and Gottwalt Pankow arrived from Hamburg; Jillian Tomm and Ramón de Elía from Montreal and stayed at the house cataloguing the books, mapping their layout, wrapping them and placing them in cartons. They in turn summoned other friends, who came and helped for weeks at a time, until all the books were gone from the shelves and the library was transformed into a roomful of building blocks gathered in the midst of empty stacks. When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, crowds came to stare at the bare space with the four pegs that had held the painting, as if the absence carried meaning. Standing in my empty library I felt the weight of that absence to an almost unbearable degree.
After the library was packed and the movers came and the boxes were shipped off to their storage place in Montreal, I would hear the books calling out to me in my sleep. “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; / Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. / I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
There can be no resignation for me in the act of packing a library. Climbing up and down the ladder to reach the books to be boxed, removing knick-knacks and pictures that stand like votive figures before them, taking each volume off the shelf, tucking it away in its paper shroud are melancholy, reflective gestures that have something of a long good-bye. The dismantled rows about to disappear, condemned to exist (if they still exist) in the untrustworthy domain of my memory, become phantom clues to a private conundrum. Unpacking the books, I was not much concerned with making sense of the memories or putting them into a coherent order. But packing them, I felt that I had to figure out, as in one of my detective stories, who was responsible for this dismembered corpse, what exactly brought on its death. In Kafka’s The Trial, after Josef K. is placed under arrest for a never-specified crime, his landlady tells him that his ordeal seems to her “like something scholarly which I don’t understand, but which one doesn’t have to understand either.” “Etwas Gelehrtes,” Kafka writes: something scholarly. This was what the inscrutable mechanics behind the loss of my library seemed to me.
But I needn’t dwell on how it came to pass. For reasons I don’t wish to recall because they belong to the realm of sordid bureaucracy, in the summer of 2015 we decided to leave France and the library we had built there. It was the absurd conclusion to a long and happy chapter and the start of another that, I hardly dared hope, would be equally happy and at least as long. After the inane circumstances that forced us to go, taking down the library felt like a counterbalancing act similar to that of Benjamin after his divorce. Packing the books was, as I said, a premature burial, and I now had to endure the consequent period of anger and mourning.
Here I should explain that I’m not a seeker of novelty and excitement. I take comfort not in adventures but in routine. I enjoy, especially now as I’m approaching seventy, the moments when I don’t have to reflect on everyday actions. I like to walk through a room with my eyes shut, knowing through habit where everything is. In my reading as in my life, I don’t care much for surprises. Even as a boy, I remember dreading the moment in a story when the hero’s happy days would be interrupted by an unexpected and terrible event. Though I knew from my other books that there would be a resolution, most often satisfying, I wanted to dwell on the brief first pages in which Dorothy lives peacefully with her aunt and uncle, and Alice has not yet started her fall down the rabbit hole. Because my childhood was largely nomadic, I liked to read about settled lives running their ordinary course. And yet, I was aware that without disruption there would be no adventure. Perhaps this idea was colored by the presumption that disruptions—misfortunes, injustices, calamities, suffering—are the necessary conditions for literary invention. “The gods weave misfortunes for men,” King Alcinous says in the Odyssey, “so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” I wanted the song but not the tapestry.
The notion that misery is at the root of the creative process has its origins in a fragment ascribed to Aristotle, or, rather, to Aristotle’s school. Throughout the centuries, this melancholic notion acquired both positive and negative connotations and was explored by relating it to somatic causes, psychic inclinations, and spiritual choices, or as a reaction to certain natural or cultural environments. The variety of such ascriptions is indicative of melancholia’s lasting attraction. From Aristotle on (and probably long before), philosophers, artists, psychologists, and theologians have attempted to find in the almost indefinable state of melancholia the source of the creative impulse, and even perhaps that of thought itself. Being melancholic, sad, depressed, unhappy (as popular belief has it) is good for an artist. Misery, they say, produces good art.
This belief implies two corollaries, more dangerous still. The first is that there is an existential state in which we are not miserable. Not satisfied with the story that once, in Eden, we were happy and now we have to earn our bread with the sweat of our brow, we are surrounded by ads that tell us that we can reach Eden again with the help of a platinum credit card and look as beautiful as the first Eve with the assistance of a fashion designer. The second implied belief is that art is somehow to blame for making us unhappy. The Controller in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World succinctly justifies the decision to eliminate art from human society: “That’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.”
Of course, leaving aside the fact that our emotions are wonderfully kaleidoscopic, it would be truer to say that it is in a happy state that artists work best. Schopenhauer’s existential despair and physical agony were only alleviated in the moment of writing, and whether he felt suddenly happy and wrote, or started to write and felt suddenly happy, no one will ever know. We can tell that Dante, in his gloomy exile, had moments of happiness when in the course of the poem he meets Casella on the beach of Purgatory or Brunetto Latini on the burning sands of Hell, and we can suppose that out of the memory of the blissful past came the poem, in spite of what Francesca has to say about remembered joys.
Philip Larkin has a poem, “None of the books have time,” in which he describes these two emotional states, one melancholic, empathetic to suffering, the other ego-centered, blissfully oblivious to the pain of the world. The myth that the artist needs suffering to create tells the story the wrong way round. Suffering, no doubt, is the human lot, and poems describe that suffering. However, the song comes afterwards, not in the writhing of misery but in the recollection of that misery and the respite from it provided by the writing.
A century ago, Thomas Carlyle described the writer in these words: “He, with his copy-rights and his copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living.” More than likely, as we all know, they would not.
So there he or she sits, at a small table, staring at a blank wall or at a wall covered with bits and pieces, cards and photos and cartoons and memorable sayings, like the wall of a prison cell from which there’s no escape. On the table, the tools of the trade. They used to be pen and paper, or a rickety typewriter, but of course now it’s the word processor, whose screen, until just a few years ago, gave off an eerie green glow like kryptonite, draining this superman, or superwoman, of strength. What else is on the table? A collection of totemic figures that are supposed to bring luck and ward off the evil spirits of distraction, of sloth, of procrastination—magical objects to guard against the curse of the icy blank spaces. An empty cup of tea or coffee. A stack of unpaid bills. Where did this pathetic image of the writer come from?
In Greece and Rome there were, on occasion, writers who appeared lonely and penurious, like the cynic Diogenes in his barrel or the poet Ovid exiled to the slums of Toomis. But they were specific cases, miserable because of specific circumstances, because they chose to live with none of the modern comforts, like Diogenes, or because they were punished for speaking the truth, like Ovid.
Perhaps it was in the Middle Ages that the image of the poor scribe came into being: fingers gnarled with cold, cramped in his high chair, bent over his parchment, eyes straining to catch the feeble light. Wherever this image might have sprung from, the fact is that it stuck. The writer in the corner, the writer far from the madding crowd. And of course, the writer poor. Virtuous poverty, a notion that early Christians shared with the Greek Stoics, is of the essence. In the popular imagination, poverty and the suffering of the flesh allowed communion with the Holy Spirit or the muse.
It is useless to counter that hundreds and thousands of writers don’t conform to these lugubrious criteria. There are the writers of the road, like the Provençal poets or Jack Kerouac. There are the gregarious writers, like André Malraux or F. Scott Fitzgerald. There are the writers rolling in money (admittedly fewer than in the previous categories), like Somerset Maugham or Nora Roberts. But the image has been seeded and it has taken deep roots in the mind of the people: the writer is someone lonely, grumpy, and poor. The question is, Why is this image so appealing?
Like so many literary creations that begin as strokes of genius and end up as tiresome clichés (Macbeth complaining about the sound and the fury, Don Quixote tilting at windmills) the image of the garret-bound writer was a mere literary creation, born, no doubt, to describe a certain writer at a certain moment, in a long-lost novel or poem. Only later did it become frozen into the commonplace that riddles us today. Writers may snigger or chuckle at this image, but the public (that vast imaginary creation) looks upon it as the truth and feels allowed to make a number of assumptions. For instance, that writers are misanthropic, that writers are creative only in the most uncomfortable conditions, that writers enjoy squalor. And, most important, that poverty is somehow part of a writer’s essence. The fact that a book was written “in a bed in a garret” or that it was “begun, continued, and ended, under a long course of physic, and a great want of money,” as Jonathan Swift declared in his preface to A Tale of a Tub, does not say much about the excellence of the book itself.
There are writers who themselves become convinced of the truth of this image and accept the role of the poor outsider without question. There is something masochistically gratifying in struggling through life for the sake of one’s art, something that appeals to the Puritan dictum of suffering for the sake of glory. (The Greeks saw art and commerce as incompatible: none of the nine Muses have commercial dealings, and monetary transactions in Olympus are left in the hands of Hermes the Trickster—god of exchanges and thieves—who is the messenger of the other divinities. Like Victorian gentlemen and ladies, the Greek gods won’t debase themselves by dealing directly with tradesmen.)
Being sick, being downcast, being poor doesn’t suit the creative genius; it only suits the idea that the rich patron likes to have of the artist to justify tightfistedness. There is an anecdote about the film mogul Sam Goldwyn trying to buy the rights of one of Shaw’s plays. Goldwyn being Goldwyn kept haggling about the price, and in the end Shaw declined to sell. Goldwyn couldn’t understand why. “The trouble is, Mr. Goldwyn,” Shaw said, “that you are interested only in art—and I am interested only in money.”