An Interview with Claire Messud
LEAH PRICE: How far back does your collection stretch? When were the first books that you still own acquired? At what age did you start buying books? Which ones have you kept, and shed, as you moved?
CLAIRE MESSUD: Most of my earlier books are from high school or college—I’ve got lots of worthy tomes from university (Auerbach! Lacan! Jameson! Fish!), though I’ve passed on more than a few, by now, to more diligent academic readers than I. (I come from a family of book hoarders: at one point, when clearing my things rather belatedly out of my parents’ house, I separated out two boxes of university books to give away, only to discover much later that my mother had simply reshelved all those books into her own library.)
But I do have on the shelves some books of poetry that I was given as a child—two books of Australian Aboriginal myths, with beautiful illustrations; and an edition of a famous Australian poem by Banjo Patterson. I’ve also got the books I was given as prizes for coming first in class in my third- and fourth-grade classes at my girls’ school in Sydney, in 1974 and 1975: the first is Dolphins, Whales, and Other Sea Mammals, and the second is Reptiles and Amphibians. They’re both beautiful picture books, but I’ve barely looked at them in all these years.
At what phases of your existence has reading books—and owning books—been most important to you?
Owning books has been only intermittently of importance to me. At one time, collecting books that were my own, feeling I had my own intellectual and literary trajectory visible before me, seemed necessary and meaningful. But now, in midlife, I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it’s a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck. I love my books, and with all their dog-ears and underlinings they are irreplaceable; but I sometimes wish they’d just vanish. To be weighed down by things—books, furniture—seems somehow terrible to me. It’s important to be ready to move on. My father had a cousin who kept every thing, including his dishes, in packing cases. Each night at dinnertime, he’d take out the plates he needed and then wash them and put them back in the boxes. That way, he was always ready for the next move.
Could you say something about the books you selected for our top ten?
It’s funny, the books I chose for the list are like family. I feel as though they’ve been part of my psyche for as long as I can remember. Or else, as in the case of Bernhard, I can remember exactly when they joined the family: I was looking for Bernanos in the stacks of the American Library in Paris in the spring of 1999, when we spent a few months living and working there. Bernhard was next to Bernanos, and the spines of his books attracted me. I took a couple to my desk, and that was that. He was family.
Are your books interfiled with James Wood’s, or do you distinguish between books that entered your household via one or another of its members?
Some of our books are separate—poetry and literature, mostly—and some are combined—history, say, or travel books. Certainly we both know at once which books properly belong to one or the other of us, and by the same token, know which books are somehow shared. I can’t explain how we know this, but as far as I recall, we’ve never disagreed about a single volume.
Do you use an e-reader (Kindle, iPad, cell phone)?
I like best to read in bed, lying down, on my side, the way I read when I was a kid: I can’t imagine going to bed with a cell phone or an iPad.
What do you imagine your library looking like five, ten, twenty years from now? Do you think you’ll still own objects made of paper and glue? And—with apologies for a morbid question—do you ever think about what will happen to your library after your death?
These days, I think a lot about what will happen to my library after my death, not least because my father died recently and my mother is in poor health, and we are now trying to dismantle their extraordinary collection of books. Some will find good homes—the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard has taken my father’s Middle Eastern collection, which is fantastic—but others, I fear, will be harder to place. If only we can find new readers for them, wherever or however, then that’s a good thing.
But that’s not a reason not to have objects made of paper and glue. Doesn’t anybody but me ever imagine an apocalypse after which there is no electricity, no computers? Or even the simple and constant problem of the obsolescence of technology, that makes information hard to hold onto over time? The notion that we can do without knowledge on glue and paper—and that we wouldn’t want the many pleasures of objects made of glue and paper—is, to me, absurd. Anybody who thinks books are dispensable is someone entirely lacking in appreciation of sensual pleasure. I pity such a person.
Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina
Elizabeth Bishop The Complete Poems, 1927–1979
Arthur Schopenhauer Essays and Aphorisms
Thomas Bernhard Gathering Evidence
Fyodor Dostoyevsky Notes from Underground
Henry James The Portrait of a Lady
Gustave Flaubert The Letters, 1830–1857
Alice Munro Selected Stories
Marcel Proust Swann’s Way
Italo Svevo Zeno’s Conscience
LEAH PRICE: How far back does your collection stretch?
JAMES WOOD: I have books from my teenage years, complete with clumsy and naïve annotations. But the naïveté tells a story, which is a love affair: the margins of the old books are filled with exclamations like “wonderful!” and “fantastic!” (or the odd admonitory “this doesn’t work”), as I worked out what I liked and why, over the years, and what I didn’t like and why. I started buying books as a child—the whole English culture of “book tokens” and school prizes (whose money you could only spend on a book) was helpful in that regard. Then I had a period of lifting books from shops, because I didn’t have the money but had to have the books. Informal research has shown that I was not alone in this vice. I gave it up in my late teens, less out of remorse—I am ashamed to say—than out of fear of being caught (and perhaps due to increasing prosperity).
Could you say something about the books you selected for our top ten? Which are the ones you would grab first if a fire broke out?
For my top ten books I confined myself to fiction written (or published, in the case of the Chekhov translations) in the twentieth century; not because these are necessarily the best, but because (as Virginia Woolf once wrote) one feels differently, more tenderly, more possessively, towards and about contemporary literature—it belongs to us in a way that Cervantes doesn’t. I suppose that what is notable about the list—notable not about my taste but about fiction in general—is that it is marked by a tendency towards the comic, or towards the tragic-comic: this is obviously true of Chekhov, Henry Green, Naipaul, Bellow, the wonderful Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, and of Joseph Roth. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (which could do with a bit more comedy, actually!) is one I reread every year, with ever greater admiration and love.
In my library, the books that mean most to me are the ones that made a decisive impact on my development, the ones I can remember reading in a certain time and place, with joy and discovery. The affection one has for these books has, in my case, nothing to do with the quality of the books as objects. Often, they are the cheapest, and most beaten-up paperbacks: the old Penguin editions of Nietzsche, for instance; Benjamin’s One-Way Street; the ugly old Penguin editions (with hideous cover art) of Bellow’s novels; that absurdly expensive, half-read book of literary theory from MIT Press, whose first pages made such an impression … I like the idea of a library being not materially imperishable, but on the contrary, materially replaceable. I tend to write all over my books, drop them in the bath, stuff them into pockets, and so on. So if there were a fire, I wouldn’t bother taking any of the paperbacks, happy in the knowledge that I could get them all again, in newer and probably better editions.
The bookshelf, literally: what are your shelves made of? How did you acquire them?
They are newish—made last year by a carpenter, and the first custom-made, fitted shelves we have ever owned. Most of my books are not in these shelves but upstairs, on the cheapest trestle shelves (the ones made of three shelves per unit, whose gates swing out, and which generally sell for about fifty dollars each). These new, fitted shelves, which I like very much, and which make me feel quite grown-up, are the “show-shelves.”
What books are not on the shelves you allowed us to photograph?
I have a separate bookcase for “unread books I want to read sometime soon.” Of course, it’s enormous and dispiriting.
Do you lend your books to friends?
There is a simple rule: practice a kind of generous selfishness. Give a book to a friend, but don’t lend it, because you will never get it back.
Do you mark up your books?
I deface nearly all my books, with both annotations in ink, and lots of dog-earing. I also regularly write to-do lists in the endpapers, or telephone numbers, or names of people I must e-mail. These latter often prove more interesting than any of my literary comments: years later, I stare at them, trying to work out who these people were.
What do you imagine your library looking like five, ten, twenty years from now? Do you think you’ll still own objects made of paper and glue? And (with apologies for a morbid question) do you ever think about what will happen to your library after your death?
I think my library will look much the same in twenty years. I would happily get rid of my books before I die, so that my children don’t have to throw them out themselves (which they assuredly will do). A few years before his death, Frank Kermode was moving house and had some boxes of his most precious books out on the street, ready for the movers. Alas, the garbage men came by and mistakenly took them away, and compacted them. In a stroke, he lost all his first editions and most prized dedication copies; he was left with only his cheapest paperbacks, and his collection of literary theory. There’s a parable lurking there.
W. G. Sebald Austerlitz
Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop
V. S. Naipaul A House for Mr. Biswas
Henry Green Loving
Cesare Pavese The Moon and the Bonfire
Joseph Roth The Radetzky March
Saul Bellow Seize the Day
Anton Chekhov Stories
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse
Bohumil Hrabal Too Loud a Solitude
