Between Eternities

by Javier Marías

  Deep down, all readers, however unconsciously, share that same fetishistic urge. Who wouldn’t want to own a volume signed by Baudelaire or Dickens, Wilde or Cervantes, Voltaire or Faulkner? Each signed or dedicated copy is unique, quite different from all the other books in the same print run, which is why such copies sell for high prices and why real collectors do battle for them against mere accumulators of wealth (namely, American universities). What makes those signatures priceless – signatures that the authors doubtless dashed off distractedly or even reluctantly – is the fact that the writers are dead, which means that a new signature is now unobtainable. And that is only the first necrophiliac element in this increasingly strange business. The people who inhabit this underworld of old books (and, less blatantly, the world of books in general, not to mention the world of art) are always waiting, and waiting mostly for death. First, they wait for the titles to go out of print and become unavailable anywhere; then they wait to see which writers evolve, over time, into great figures, objects of worship or sad nobodies; then they wait for the deaths of the generations of buyers whose children, it is assumed, will not like the same writers as their parents and will thus put back into circulation books with which their progenitors would never willingly have parted; and, finally, they wait for the deaths of the authors themselves.

  There is, of course, no impatience, no ill feeling in this waiting. Second-hand booksellers tend to be very respectful of writers; indeed, their need to make money will find them torn between a secret longing for an author’s early demise (when first editions and signed copies will rise in value) and a genuine desire for their longevity, thus ensuring an increase (although not too great an increase) in the number of titles, editions and possibly dedicated copies – all food and drink to the bookseller. The latter will not be deceived by those wily authors who, in order to make money in that underworld while still alive and kicking, will sign anything that comes their way and sell off whatever manuscripts, drafts, letters, postcards and scraps of paper cross their desk on a daily basis. I remember an employee of Bertram Rota in London explaining to me why books signed by the obscure author John Gawsworth were of such little value: ‘Apart from the fact that he is such an obscure figure,’ he told me, ‘he was so poor at the end of his life that he would slap his signature on almost anything in an attempt to up the price of his books and his library.’ In that sense, booksellers are very particular: a book dedicated by Virginia Woolf to some unknown is not as valuable as a book dedicated to one of her colleagues, E. M. Forster, for example. The basic idea is that the book in question will have passed through two pairs of literary or famous hands, thus doubling its value. The underworld’s ideal object would be a book that various writers had passed from one to another and in which each left his or her signature. If such a thing existed, however, one would inevitably suspect that the now priceless book had perhaps been loathed by all of them, which is why they kept giving it away, passing it swiftly on to someone else.

  I should say that, even though I know this underworld well, I, too, like to own signed copies of books by my contemporaries (although not all of them). A lot of people despise the signing sessions held at book fairs and in large shops because they seem not only too easy, but also free and available to anyone. I, however, take them very seriously, knowing that, while most of the dedications will be destroyed either by time or by the buyer’s heirs, in a hundred years or so, someone will feel as excited to come across a signed copy of a book by Juan Benet or Eduardo Mendoza as we would if we owned a book signed by Valle-Inclán or Larra.

  One of the British booksellers who has, for some years now, been supplying me with interesting oddities is Ben Bass, although I have never actually met him, since his house-cum-bookshop is located in some out-of-the-way place in the countryside, near the River Avon. He has, apparently, deliberately chosen to have very few customers: he will not sell books to just anyone, but only to people who have been ‘recommended’ by a previous client or who, from the start, have come to him with ‘interesting requests’. We have exchanged numerous letters and spoken on the phone. His voice seems out of keeping with such punctiliousness, being hoarse and rather uneducated, more suited to a sailor than to a scholar, and there’s no bargaining with him either. If he asks for twenty pounds and I suggest paying eighteen, he’ll immediately increase the price to twenty-five, so confident is he of his sales and his clientele. Choosing one’s customers, unthinkable in any new business, is quite a frequent practice among second-hand booksellers. And one of the most painful things I have ever seen is the terrible doubt that gripped a certain lady bookseller who was also a collector – a combination doomed to tragedy. On the one hand, she wanted to sell as many books as possible, since that was how she made her living, but, on the other hand, she hoped, quite unreasonably, that no one would come into her shop or express an interest in any of her treasures, because she had such a choice selection of books that it pained her to let any of them go and thus ruin the whole collection. Her name was Veronica Watts, and she bore a striking resemblance to the actress Anne Bancroft and the writer Susan Sontag. She collected everything written by or about one of history’s greatest eccentrics, William Beckford, and would interrogate her customers about his life and works.

  Other second-hand booksellers treat their business as, well, a business. They are cold and imperturbable and probably never read anything. The only things they understand are paper, ink, editions, dates, print runs, covers, dedications and signatures, and they are experts in their field. They care about everything but the contents of a book. I visited such a bookseller once to sell him a couple of gems I had picked up for a song and which I imagined were quite valuable. The bookseller eyed the books sceptically at first. ‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘I know these, I’ve seen similar editions before’ (which are the most discouraging words a would-be seller can hear). ‘I’ll buy them though,’ he added, ‘because I’ve never seen this dust jacket with this particular advert on it. It’s the first time Beckett’s name appears in print; the other one is intriguing too because it still has the left flap, which most people cut off and keep whenever they manage to buy a copy.’ On that left flap was the photograph taken of Isak Dinesen disguised as a man when her novel The Angelic Avengers was first published under the male pseudonym of Pierre Andrézel. Needless to say, as soon as I left the shop, clutching my precious pound notes, I immediately regretted not having cut off that unusual left flap and, worse, having sold a wonderful, historic dust jacket that I will never ever find again.

  (1990)

  My Favourite Book

  Asking a writer to choose his favourite book is tempting him either to lie or to boast, since, if he’s really honest (not that there’s any reason why he should be, either then or on any other occasion), he would be sure to say that his favourite book is one that he himself has written. It isn’t the case, as the late, boastful Juan Rulfo said about his novel Pedro Páramo, that all writers write the book they would like to read, because otherwise there would be nothing worth reading, but it is true that an author’s own books are the ones he will have read most often and with most care, patience, interest, understanding and indulgence (sometimes as if his very life depended on it). They will also be the books – one presumes – that most satisfy him, and if they’re not, then he should refrain from publishing them. Writing is, in short, the most perfect and passionate way of reading, which is doubtless why adolescents, who usually have more time on their hands, often take the trouble to write out a poem they really love: copying out is not only a way of appropriating a text, of adopting and endorsing it, it’s also the best, most exact, most alert, most certain way of reading it. The Borges character Pierre Menard set out to write Don Quixote and, before he died, managed to complete two whole chapters and a fragment by his own means (that is, not by copying or transcribing it or even trying to live the same life Cervantes lived in order to find out if it was those experiences that had led him to write the book). His work, therefore, re
mained unfinished – a very painful and frustrating experience for any writer – even though, in his case, Menard could, had he so wished, have easily found out what the rest of his novel would have been like. Of course, being a writer rather than a mere reader, he did not.

  I, however, am fortunate enough to be able to reply to the question without indulging in lies or even in excessive vainglory because I translated Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (or The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman to give it its full title), and so, as well as reading it, I have also written it. It probably is and will be my best book, and I say ‘probably’ thinking of other translations I’ve done (The Mirror of the Sea by Conrad or the works of Sir Thomas Browne) or others I might one day consider undertaking (Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ or Faulkner’s The Wild Palms).

  Now, when I say that Tristram Shandy is my favourite book, I realize that this is precisely because I did translate it, because each and every one of its sentences, every word (even the blank and, indeed, the black pages it contains) not only passed before my attentive gaze, but through my painstaking intellect, my vigilant ear, my own tongue (by which I mean Spanish, not the moist thing in my mouth), and were finally reordered and set down on paper by my weary, hard-working fingers. Had I not translated Tristram Shandy, my favourite book might be Don Quixote or Madame Bovary or Heart of Darkness or Adolphe or the poetry of Baudelaire. However, I didn’t spend almost two years of my life with any of those books; nor did I submerge myself in them as I did in Tristram Shandy, however carefully I may have read them (and I did have to read Don Quixote in order to teach it, which is another of the most perfect ways of reading a book, but not the most exciting); none of them obliged me to write or edit or compose over a thousand sheets of paper, each one typed and retyped numerous times; none demanded that I find or invent more than a thousand notes; none of them, lastly, took over my prose, put me inside the author’s – the other’s – skin, so that I thought like him, spoke like him, said what he said in the way that he said it. Consequently, I can announce the title of my favourite book without resorting to lies. And yet, even though the truth does not impel me (as it would most writers) to choose one of my own novels, such absolute sincerity does not entirely exempt me from a charge of boastfulness.

  For I should, in all honesty, say that my favourite book is my Tristram Shandy, that is, Tristram Shandy in or according to my version, which is necessarily different from Sterne’s (although it’s also necessarily the same, which is one of the insoluble paradoxes of translation, of all translation, good or bad), just as the two chapters of Don Quixote that Pierre Menard managed to write must have been different from those by Cervantes even though they were exactly the same, word for word, and written in the same language. This doesn’t mean that I consider my version of Sterne’s novel to be superior to Sterne’s original – no, I mean something much simpler and less competitive: in my version, in Sterne-according-to-Marías, I know the reasoning behind the choice of each line and each word, whereas I don’t in Sterne-according-to-Sterne. And that is why I could still go on correcting my version, could keep working on it, improving it in accordance with my current criteria, aptitudes and understanding (the translation was, after all, published in 1978), something that I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to do with the English text, which, unlike the Spanish, does not in any way belong to me.

  There’s another circumstance to be added to all of this, one that apparently contradicts what I’ve just said and yet which is crucial to me in making my choice. The further beyond my grasp a book is, the greater my admiration. There are books I wouldn’t want to write and wouldn’t like to have written and which I nonetheless admire, precisely because, quite apart from not wanting to have written them, I feel I would have been incapable of doing so. Of all the books I’ve written or translated, and which I know, therefore, that in one sense or another I was capable of writing or translating, Tristram Shandy is the only book I would consider myself incapable of writing or translating now, even though I know that I did translate it. I mean if, say, just for the pleasure of reading a page or two, I open it at random and start to read (to re-read my own version), I find myself confronted by a task that now seems to me utterly impossible. I cannot conceive of how anyone could translate or have translated each and every page of this book into Spanish in an acceptable manner, and I can’t explain how the person I was did just that. I don’t believe the person I am now would be capable of the task. My favourite book, then, contains all the necessary qualities to be my favourite: it is, at once, the classic novel closest to Don Quixote and to the novel of my own age; thinking about it and occasionally dipping into it always bring me pleasure; and, finally, I admire it immensely because I see it as something beyond my grasp, even though I know that, as well as reading it (which, fortunately, I will always be able to do), there was a time when I re-wrote it.

  (1989)

  This Childish Task

  Most of my bookshelves are guarded, protected and defended by small tin soldiers from various armies and eras; one shelf is even under the protection of a civilian population, not made of tin this time, but of hard, high-quality German plastic. The soldiers are arranged in ranks and are all of the same size or pretty much in proportion, both those on foot and those on horse- or camel-back (there are a lot of colonial troops), whereas the civilians are a chaotic mixture, belonging to very different social spheres (there are even wild animals and racehorses galloping past train passengers laden down with luggage and past dancing couples), and some look like giants beside the smaller ones, while the latter look like Lilliputians beside the former. I suppose this isn’t entirely coincidental, although I tend to believe that it is. In civil society, everything is less orderly and more confused, discipline is minimal (if it isn’t, it means we’re living under a dictatorship, and having suffered under one of those for far too long I certainly don’t want another one, not even on my bookshelves), and so, in a way, all kinds of absurdities, inconsistencies and monstrosities are acceptable. In real armies, as in novels, this is impossible or, at the very least, inadvisable.

  I suppose that this liking of mine for diminutive worlds has two sides to it: one childish, one literary – although this perhaps amounts to the same thing. It clearly has its roots in part in my childhood. Children have an extraordinary capacity for noticing the very tiny, but more than that, for penetrating and inhabiting and breathing fictional life into it. I don’t know how it is nowadays, but boys’ fantasies always used to be either military or athletic in tone and found expression in disguises, toy soldiers and, if you were lucky, a toy fort that was repeatedly besieged by Indians; girls, I imagine, concentrated on, became absorbed by or wrapped up in the sheer tininess of doll’s houses (that was the norm, although there were always exceptions and reversals: bellicose girls and domesticated boys); for both, however, this was an initiation into fiction. By which I mean creative fiction, invented by them and full of all kinds of possibilities, a fiction in which they were obliged to invent the story, the adventure, the plot, however schematic or mimetic these might be; comics, films and books, on the other hand, represented fiction received or inherited, but which, in turn, served as models and stimuli for creation or re-creation. When you think about it, those games in which – by following certain rules or conventions, and trying always to keep within the bounds of plausibility – one decided the fates and vicissitudes of soldiers or dolls were probably a first decisive step towards writing fiction. Or, of course, filming it.

  The fact that my bookshelves are still crowded with tin soldiers is due in part, I think, to my refusal entirely to lose sight of the very modest origins of the novels I write. Hanging on to them as an adult, keeping them there before me in serried ranks, prepared and on guard, is, in a way, a reminder of the childish nature of what has been my principal occupation over many days and many years now, a salutary puncturing of the importance of that task (there’s nothing worse for a writer than to take himself too seriously and
to believe that what he’s doing is important or even significant), as well as an act of loyalty. I always keep in mind those lines by Robert Louis Stevenson in which, when he compares himself to his ancestors, who were builders of lighthouses, he cannot help but feel the insignificance of his chosen trade, and he begs for a little understanding: ‘Say not of me that weakly I declined/The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,/The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,/To play at home with paper like a child.’

  I try not only to remind myself that this really is all I do – namely, devote myself ‘to this childish task’, as Stevenson calls it in the same poem (‘But rather say: In the afternoon of time/A strenuous family dusted from its hands/The sand of granite, and beholding far/Along the sounding coast its pyramids/And tall memorials catch the dying sun,/Smiled well content, and to this childish task/Around the fire addressed its evening hours’) – I also like to have before me the probable origin of my chosen career, to have it there physically, corporeally, in that large army of silent, expectant, motionless figures who, nevertheless, like the characters in a novel when a novel is still in its very early stages of being written, seem as if they might start walking and talking and thus experiencing some possible story of which I was the sole witness and which, therefore, no one else can tell.