“I’m unpacking my library. Yes, I am.”
It’s something I’ve been looking forward to ever since my books went into storage in 1989. During that time, when I was on the move constantly, living in different countries, books, which are the only things I have ever cared to own (and which are, in a very real sense, my bread and butter), became a hindrance. Although I continued to write not just fiction but what might generously be called semi-learned articles, I had to do without them. Sometimes I called my parents and asked them to check a reference or quotation from the stack but it was easier, in the end, to cut down on references. Living abroad meant a move out of quotation marks.
There was also, I discovered, an impressive tradition of people doing without the books on which they depend. The most famous example is probably Erich Auerbach, whose magisterial study of “the representation of reality in Western literature,” Mimesis, was written in exile in Istanbul, where, he notes (what joy to go over to my shelves and check this reference!), “the libraries were not equipped for European studies.” Dispensing “with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recent investigations, and in some cases, with reliable critical editions of [his] texts,” Auerbach yet wondered if this deprivation were not a blessing in disguise: access to everything he needed might have prevented his ever reaching “the point of writing.” Auerbach was at least in one place; nomadic to the point of frenzy, D. H. Lawrence relied on whatever books friends posted to him. “Do you still have that book Early Greek Philosophers which I bought when I was last in London? If so, would you send it me, I want to do some work on the Apocalypse, and consult it,” runs a characteristic request to a much-put-upon friend in 1929. The next sentence is even more characteristic of Lawrence’s method of radically contingent research: “If you haven’t got it, no matter.” In authentically Lawrentian vein, John Berger once remarked that although he admired a certain writer’s intellect, there was always an off-putting sense that all this writer had to do to find something out was lift a book from the shelves.
Now I’m a shelf-lifter too! I’ve been assembling and arranging my books for days, compulsively, relentlessly, staying up till three in the morning: “Nothing highlights the fascination of unpacking more clearly than the difficulty of stopping this activity.” Now that I have most of my books together again I want them not simply in one place but in one room, with all the friendly adjacency—Bachelard, Barthes—and ironic intimacy—Amis’s The Information and Machado de Assis’s Epitaph of a Small Winner—decreed by unwavering alphabetical arrangement. This proves to be impossible: there are too many rogue volumes that are too tall for the vertical shelf space available, and that have to be consigned to a special oversize section. Since novels tend to be smaller than nonfiction books, this can be resolved by arranging by subject, but this generates its own problems: what do I do with Williams, Raymond? Lump everything together under W or subdivide between fiction, criticism, and politics? And what about Quasi Una Fantasia? Do I put it under music or, with the rest of Adorno’s output, under the vague classification philosophy/cultural theory (i.e., difficult books translated from the German)?
These problems are a source of unresolvable pleasure, but I am determined to keep to the principle of one room only. This means throwing out some books. Which ones? Nonfiction is always useful, but novels, the bulk of them are worthless! That’s why you end up keeping them, because they’re not even worth selling: no one wants them. Once one rejects the principle of completeness, in fact, the main feeling is of how few books you need. Over the last five years I rarely had more than twenty books with me wherever I lived, and although it generated a little inconvenience it didn’t cause any major problems. Now I’ve suddenly got thousands. Throw away three and, according to the same criteria by which they were excluded, you can get rid of another thirty or three hundred or three thousand. Peter Carey used to be one of my favorite authors; he is the author of what remains one of my favorite books of stories, The Fat Man in History, which I have in Faber’s original English edition. I didn’t rate Bliss, his first novel, and since I have it only in paperback, I put that in my “to be sold” box. As a piece of writing, the sprawling Illywhacker no longer means anything to me, but since it’s a signed first edition I want to hang on to it. And if I keep that then I’m somehow obliged to keep my hardback of the Booker-winning Oscar and Lucinda, even though that was the book that made me give up on Carey—and since I’m keeping that then I might as well hang on to the Picador Bliss for the sake of completeness. And so it goes on. I take them out of boxes, put them onto the shelves, take them down and put them into a box to be sold, and then haul them out and up again. Vox by Nicholson Baker: a paperback of a crummy book but you never know: it might, as they say, come in handy one day…
These are the marginal cases, but there are many books that I see again with unalloyed delight, like Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, whose essay “Unpacking My Library” (source of all unattributed quotations throughout this piece) I am at last able to consult. The nicest way to acquire books, suggests Benjamin, is to write them. I think not. The books I care least about in my collection are my own. In a sense they’re not in my collection (they are the only ones in which I haven’t written my name). They’re replaceable in a way that the others are not, because although I could get another identical But Beautiful I could never again get that copy of Russell Banks’s Affliction that I bought from Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue the day Fi had terrible cystitis. Or that copy of Something Happened I was carrying the night Nigel Raynsford and I got “our heads duffed in” (as we used to say) outside the Suffolk Arms during the summer holiday after A-levels. Or that copy of Herbert Lottman’s (out-of-print) biography of Camus, which is slightly buckled because it got drenched with spray one afternoon in Tipasa…
I keep hauling them out of boxes, and “what memories crowd upon” me as I do so, “memories of the cities in which I found so many things.” Not least because, for the last fifteen years, I have dutifully written on the flyleaf, in pencil, the date and place of either acquisition or reading, whichever is the more glamorous (hence Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace is inscribed “Algiers, Oct ’91” even though it was actually bought in Foyle’s, Charing Cross Road). These inscriptions mean that my books add up to a massively unwieldy diary. If my library were the only source to go on, you could get a fairly accurate idea not only of where I lived at any one time but also, to a degree, of my employment history. The gradual transition from paperback to hardback in the mid-1980s, for example, marks my progress from reader to critic (i.e., from buying books to getting them free). You would see from the period of greatest accumulation, 1987–89, that I almost certainly worked for a particular London publisher where books were there for the taking. Less concretely, it would also be possible to follow the contours of my intellectual development, or, more accurately, of my intellectual decline. The evidence of my library suggests, unequivocally, that the period of greatest advance (when I devoured Raymond Williams, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Barthes) took place in the three years after I left university—well over a decade ago.
Not that I care. I don’t even need an intellect, now that I’ve got all my books around me. Finding myself, at last, in the perfect situation for work, I don’t want to do any work. I can’t go for more than a few moments without sliding back my chair and gazing with massive self-love at my library. Needless to say, I have no impulse to read. Books are to be arranged and classified, shuffled around. At the very most I want to take a volume from the shelves, consult it, perhaps smell it, and replace it, carefully. Sometime in the future I may want to add a few incremental volumes but, for the moment, I just want to sit here, gazing at my life. For that’s what it is, this library; it’s not just the story of my life, it is my life. More exactly, it is, in a sense, my life over with. Assembling my books in one room is the fulfillment of a life’s ambition. There’s nothing else I want. Except to sit here, purring. “O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure!” exclaims Benjamin at the end of his essay. “Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well-being.… For a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”
Whatever may happen to me, even if I end up, as I almost certainly will, decrepit, impoverished, lonely, and celibate (you see, it was a good idea to hang on to that copy of Vox!) this library—that is, the part of my being of which it is the external manifestation—will grant me a kind of immunity. I think of people living on my street, couples with children, families, and I feel a kind of pity for them because they are not here, they are not me, in this lovely lamp-lit solitude, surrounded, at last, by the books I acquired over twenty years and from which I have been separated for the last six. At this moment, as far as I am concerned, the world could blow itself to bits and I wouldn’t mind. I probably wouldn’t even notice.
1995