FOR ME, WORDS ON A PAGE give the world coherence. When the inhabitants of Macondo were afflicted with an amnesia-like sickness which came to them one day during their hundred years of solitude, they realized that their knowledge of the world was quickly disappearing and that they might forget what a cow was, what a tree was, what a house was. The antidote, they discovered, lay in words. To remember what their world meant to them, they wrote out labels and hung them from beasts and objects: “This is a tree,” “This is a house,” “This is a cow, and from it you get milk, which mixed with coffee gives you café con leche.” Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be.
“Believe to be”: therein lies the challenge. Pairing words with experience and experience with words, we, readers, sift through stories that echo or prepare us for an experience, or tell us of experiences that will never be ours (as we know all too well) except on the burning page. Accordingly, what we believe a book to be reshapes itself with every reading. Over the years, my experience, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library; my words and my world—except for a few constant landmarks—are never one and the same. Heraclitus’s bon mot about time applies equally well to my reading: “You never dip into the same book twice.”
What remains invariable is the pleasure of reading, of holding a book in my hands and suddenly feeling that peculiar sense of wonder, recognition, chill or warmth that for no discernible reason a certain string of words sometimes evokes. Reviewing books, translating books, editing anthologies are activities that have provided me some justification for this guilty pleasure (as if pleasure required justification!) and sometimes even allowed me to make a living. “It is a fine world and I wish I knew how to make £200 a year in it,” wrote the poet Edward Thomas to his friend Gordon Bottomley. Reviewing, translating and editing have sometimes allowed me to make those £200.
Henry James coined the phrase “the figure in the carpet” for the recurrent theme that runs through a writer’s work like a secret signature. In many of the pieces I have written (as reviews or memoirs or introductions) I think I can see that elusive figure: it has something to do with how this craft I love so much, the craft of reading, relates to the place in which I do it, to Thomas’s “fine world.” I believe there is an ethic of reading, a responsibility in how we read, a commitment that is both political and private in the act of turning the pages and following the lines. And I believe that sometimes, beyond the author’s intentions and beyond the reader’s hopes, a book can make us better and wiser.
Craig Stephenson, who for the past years has been the first reader of everything I’ve written, suggested the structure, order and selection for this book. He curbed my inclination to keep occasional pieces to which I was attached for sentimental reasons, and reminded me of others that I had forgotten, and spent far more time reflecting on the appropriateness of each piece than I myself, in my impatience, would have done. For this, and for more things than he would ever be willing to acknowledge, my loving thanks.
Many of the pieces here collected have appeared, over the years, in various shapes and guises, in a number of publications whose hospitality I wish to acknowledge.
“Jonah and the Whale” and “The Age of Revenge” were conceived as talks given at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where I was head of the Maclean-Hunter Arts Journalism Programme from 1991 to 1995; the latter piece appeared, slightly modified, in the Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm. “Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest” and “The Gates of Paradise” were the introductions to two anthologies, one of gay stories (edited with Craig Stephenson) and one of erotic short fiction. An earlier draft of “On Being Jewish” was published in the Times Literary Supplement of London, as were “The Death of Che Guevara,” “The Blind Photographer” and a shorter version of “St. Augustine’s Computer”; the latter was delivered as the TLS lecture in 1997. “Imagination to Power!” appeared as the afterword to my translation of Julio Cortázar’s Unreasonable Hours, and then was expanded to introduce a volume of his selected stories, published under the title Bestiary. Earlier versions of “Browsing in the Rag-and-Bone Shop” (under the title “Designer Porn”), “Waiting for an Echo” (under the title “Hard Words”) and “The Secret Sharer” appeared in Saturday Night magazine, Toronto. “Reading White for Black” (under the title “A Blind Eye and a Deaf Ear”) appeared both in Brick and in Index on Censorship. The latter also published an early version of “God’s Spies” as an answer to Vargas Llosa’s call for amnesty in Argentina. “Dragon Eggs and Phoenix Feathers” and “The Muse in the Museum” appeared in Art Monthly, Melbourne. “In Memoriam” was published by Heat magazine, Sydney. “The Irresolutions of Cynthia Ozick” combines several reviews of her work published in the New York Village Voice and the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Taking Chesterton at His Word” was written as an introduction to my selection of Chesterton essays for the Italian publishing company Adelphi and first published in the Frankfurter Rundschau. A section of “Borges in Love” appeared in The Australian’s Review of Books.
In spite of my views on editing declared in “The Secret Sharer,” most of these pieces have benefited greatly from the generous and intelligent readings of a number of devoted magazine and newspaper editors, too many to name but all of whom I humbly thank. If the craft of editing required a raison d’être, it would be, in my case, my friendship with Louise Dennys, whose passion for good writing, good stories and what Stevenson called the “ultimate decency of things” I have learned to treasure over the past many years. Any errors, solecisms, unshapeliness and blots are entirely my own.
And, as usual, my thanks to the unflagging team at Westwood Creative Artists, semper fidelis.
ALBERTO MANGUEL, Calgary, fall 1998