A page from the kabbalistic text Pa’amon ve-Rimmon, printed in Amsterdam in 1708, showing the ten Sefirot. (photo credit 1.4)
The Canadian essayist Stan Persky once said to me that “for readers, there must be a million autobiographies”, since we seem to find, in book after book, the traces of our lives. “To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.”6 For me it was somewhat different. If books were autobiographies, they were so before the event, and I recognized later happenings from what I had read earlier in H.G. Wells, in Alice in Wonderland, in Edmondo De Amicis’s lacrimose Cuore, in the adventures of Bomba, the Jungle Boy. Sartre, in his memoirs, confessed to much the same experience. Comparing the flora and fauna discovered in the pages of the Encyclopédie Larousse with their counterparts in the Luxembourg Gardens, he found that “the apes in the zoo were less ape, the people in the Luxembourg Gardens were less people. Like Plato, I passed from knowledge to its subject. I found more reality in the idea than in the thing because it was given to me first and because it was given as a thing. It was in books that I encountered the universe: digested, classified, labelled, meditated, still formidable.”7
Reading gave me an excuse for privacy, or perhaps gave a sense to the privacy imposed on me, since throughout my childhood, after we returned to Argentina in 1955, I lived apart from the rest of my family, looked after by my nurse in a separate section of the house. Then my favourite reading-place was on the floor of my room, lying on my stomach, feet hooked under a chair. Afterwards, my bed late at night became the safest, most secluded place for reading in that nebulous region between being awake and being asleep. I don’t remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books. The psychologist James Hillman argues that those who have read stories or had stories read to them in childhood “are in better shape and have a better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced.… Coming early with life it is already a perspective on life.” For Hillman, these first readings become “something lived in and lived through, a way in which the soul finds itself in life.”8 To these readings, and for that reason, I’ve returned again and again, and return still.
Since my father was in the diplomatic service, we travelled a great deal; books gave me a permanent home, and one I could inhabit exactly as I felt like, at any time, no matter how strange the room in which I had to sleep or how unintelligible the voices outside my door. Many nights I would turn on my bedside lamp, while my nurse either worked away at her electric knitting-machine or slept snoring in the bed across from mine, and try both to reach the end of the book I was reading, and to delay the end as much as possible, going back a few pages, looking for a section I had enjoyed, checking details that I thought had escaped me.
I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwards. At the time, I was superbly selfish, and I identified completely with Stevenson’s lines:
This was the world and I was king;
For me the bees came by to sing,
For me the swallows flew.9
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge. Though I knew myself incapable of making up stories such as my favourite authors wrote, I felt that my opinions frequently coincided with theirs, and (to use Montaigne’s phrase) “I took to trailing far behind them, murmuring, ‘Hear, hear.’ ”10 Later I was able to dissociate myself from their fiction; but in my childhood and much of my adolescence, what the book told me, however fantastical, was true at the time of my reading, and as tangible as the stuff of which the book itself was made. Walter Benjamin described the same experience. “What my first books were to me — to remember this I should first have to forget all other knowledge of books. It is certain that all I know of them today rests on the readiness with which I then opened myself to books; but whereas now content, theme and subject-matter are extraneous to the book, earlier they were solely and entirely in it, being no more external or independent of it than are today the number of its pages or its paper. The world that revealed itself in the book and the book itself were never, at any price, to be divided. So with each book its content, too, its world, was palpably there, at hand. But equally, this content and this world transfigured every part of the book. They burned within it, blazed from it; located not merely in its binding or its pictures, they were enshrined in chapter headings and opening letters, paragraphs and columns. You did not read books through; you dwelt, abided between their lines and, reopening them after an interval, surprised yourself at the spot where you had halted.”11
Later, as an adolescent in my father’s largely unused library in Buenos Aires (he had instructed his secretary to furnish the library, and she had bought books by the yard and sent them to be bound to the height of the shelves, so that the titles at the page-tops were in many cases trimmed, and sometimes even the first lines were missing), I made another discovery. I had begun to look up, in the elephantine Espasa-Calpe Spanish encyclopedia, the entries that somehow or other I imagined related to sex: “Masturbation”, “Penis”, “Vagina”, “Syphilis”, “Prostitution”. I was always alone in the library, since my father used it only on the rare occasions when he had to meet someone at home rather than at his office. I was twelve or thirteen; I was curled up in one of the big armchairs, engrossed in an article on the devastating effects of gonorrhoea, when my father came in and settled himself at his desk. For a moment I was terrified that he would notice what it was I was reading, but then I realized that no one — not even my father, sitting barely a few steps away — could enter my reading-space, could make out what I was being lewdly told by the book I held in my hands, and that nothing except my own will could enable anyone else to know. The small miracle was a silent one, known only to myself. I finished the article on gonorrhoea more elated than shocked. Still later, in that same library, to complete my sexual education, I read Alberto Moravia’s The Conformist, Guy Des Cars’s The Impure, Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
There was privacy not only in my reading, but also in determining what I would read, in choosing my books in those long-vanished bookstores of Tel Aviv, of Cyprus, of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, of Paris, of Buenos Aires. Many times I chose books by their covers. There were moments that I remember even now: for instance, seeing the matte jackets of the Rainbow Classics (offered by the World Publishing Company of Cleveland, Ohio), and being delighted by the stamped bindings underneath, and coming away with Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates (which I never liked and never finished), Little Women and Huckleberry Finn. All these had May Lamberton Becker’s introductions, called “How This Book Came to Be Written”, and their gossip still seems to me one of the most exciting ways of talking about books. “So one cold morning in September, 1880, with a Scotch rain hammering at the windows, Stevenson drew close to the fire and began to write,” read Ms Becker’s introduction to Treasure Island. That rain and that fire accompanied me throughout the book.
I remember, in a bookstore in Cyprus, where our ship had stopped for a few days, a windowful of Noddy stories with their shrill-coloured covers, and the pleasure of imagining building Noddy’s house with him from a box of building-blocks depicted on the page. (Later on, with no shame at all, I enjoyed Enid Blyton’s The Wishing Chair series, which I didn’t then know English librarians had branded “sexist and snobbish”.) In Buenos Aires I discovered the pasteboard Robin Hood series, with the portrait of each hero outlined in black against the flat yellow background, and read there the pirate adventures of Emilio Salgari — The Tigers of Malaysia — the novels of Jules Verne and Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I don’t remember ever reading blurbs to find out what the books were about; I don’t know if the books of my childhood h
ad any.
I think I read in at least two ways. First, by following, breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice the details, the quickening pace of reading sometimes hurtling the story beyond the last page — as when I read Rider Haggard, the Odyssey, Conan Doyle and the German author of Wild West stories, Karl May. Secondly, by careful exploration, scrutinizing the text to understand its ravelled meaning, finding pleasure merely in the sound of the words or in the clues which the words did not wish to reveal, or in what I suspected was hidden deep in the story itself, something too terrible or too marvellous to be looked at. This second kind of reading — which had something of the quality of reading detective stories — I discovered in Lewis Carroll, in Dante, in Kipling, in Borges. I also read according to what I thought a book was supposed to be (labelled by the author, by the publisher, by another reader). At twelve I read Chekhov’s The Hunt in a series of detective novels and, believing Chekhov to be a Russian thriller writer, then read “Lady with a Lapdog” as if it had been composed by a rival of Conan Doyle’s — and enjoyed it, even though I thought the mystery rather thin. In much the same way, Samuel Butler tells of a certain William Sefton Moorhouse who “imagined he was being converted to Christianity by reading Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which he had got by mistake for Butler’s Analogy, on the recommendation of a friend. But it puzzled him a good deal.”12 In a story published in the 1940s, Borges suggested that to read Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ as if it had been written by James Joyce “would be sufficient renewal for those tenuous spiritual exercises.”13
Spinoza, in his 1650 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (denounced by the Roman Catholic Church as a book “forged in hell by a renegade Jew and the devil”), had already observed: “It often happens that in different books we read histories in themselves similar, but which we judge very differently, according to the opinions we have formed of the authors. I remember once to have read in some book that a man named Orlando Furioso used to ride a kind of winged monster through the air, fly over any country he liked, kill unaided vast numbers of men and giants, and other such fancies which from the point of view of reason are obviously absurd. I read a very similar story, in Ovid, of Perseus, and also, in the books of Judges and Kings, of Samson, who alone and unarmed killed thousands of men, and of Elijah, who flew through the air and at last went up to heaven in a chariot of fire, with fiery horses. All these stories are obviously alike, but we judge them very differently. The first one sought to amuse, the second had a political object, the third a religious one.”14 I too, for the longest time, attributed purposes to the books I read, expecting, for instance, that Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress would preach to me because it was, I was told, a religious allegory — as if I were able to listen to what was taking place in the author’s mind at the moment of creation, and to gain proof that the author was indeed speaking the truth. Experience and a degree of common sense have not yet completely cured me of this superstitious vice.
Sometimes the books themselves were talismans: a certain two-volume set of Tristram Shandy, a Penguin edition of Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die, a tattered copy of Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice which I had bound (at the cost of a whole month’s allowance) at a shady bookseller’s. These I read with special care, and kept for special moments. Thomas à Kempis instructed his students to take “a book into thine hands as Simeon the Just took the Child Jesus into his arms to carry him and kiss him. And thou hast finished reading, close the book and give thanks for every word out of the mouth of God; because in the Lord’s field thou hast found a hidden treasure.”15 And Saint Benedict, writing at a time when books were comparatively rare and expensive, ordered his monks to hold “if possible” the books they read “in their left hands, wrapped in the sleeve of their tunics, and resting on their knees; their right hands shall be uncovered with which to grip and turn the pages.”16 My adolescent reading did not entail such deep veneration or such careful rituals, but it possessed a certain secret solemnity and importance that I will not now deny.
I wanted to live among books. When I was sixteen, in 1964, I found a job, after school, at Pygmalion, one of the three Anglo-German bookstores of Buenos Aires. The owner was Lily Lebach, a German Jew who had fled the Nazis and settled in Buenos Aires in the late 1930s, and who set me the daily task of dusting each and every one of the books in the store — a method by which she thought (quite rightly) I would quickly get to know the stock and its location on the shelves. Unfortunately, many of the books tempted me beyond cleanliness; they wanted to be held and opened and inspected, and sometimes even that was not enough. A few times I stole a tempting book; I took it home with me, stashed away in my coat pocket, because I not only had to read it; I had to have it, to call it mine. The novelist Jamaica Kincaid, confessing to the similar crime of stealing books from her childhood library in Antigua, explained that her intention was not to steal; it was “just that once I had read a book I couldn’t bear to part with it.”17 I too soon discovered that one doesn’t simply read Crime and Punishment or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. One reads a certain edition, a specific copy, recognizable by the roughness or smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover. The epistemological rule for reading, established in the second century, that the most recent text replaces the previous one, since it is supposed to contain it, has rarely been true in my case. In the early Middle Ages, scribes would supposedly “correct” errors they might perceive in the text they were copying, thereby producing a “better” text; for me, however, the edition in which I read a book for the first time became the editio princeps, with which all others must be compared. Printing has given us the illusion that all readers of Don Quixote are reading the same book. For me, even today, it is as if the invention of printing had never taken place, and each copy of a book remains as singular as the phoenix.
And yet, the truth is that particular books lend certain characteristics to particular readers. Implicit in the possession of a book is the history of the book’s previous readings — that is to say, every new reader is affected by what he or she imagines the book to have been in previous hands. My second-hand copy of Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself, which I bought in Buenos Aires, carries a handwritten poem on the flyleaf, dated the day of Kipling’s death. The impromptu poet who owned this copy, was he an ardent imperialist? A lover of Kipling’s prose who saw the artist through the jingoist patina? My imagined predecessor affects my reading because I find myself in dialogue with him, arguing this or that point. A book brings its own history to the reader.
Miss Lebach must have known that her employees pilfered books, but I suspect that, as long as she felt we did not exceed certain unspoken limits, she would allow the crime. Once or twice she saw me engrossed in a new arrival, and merely told me to get on with my work and to keep the book and read it at home, on my own time. Marvellous books came my way at her store: Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf, Salinger’s Nine Stories, Broch’s The Death of Virgil, Herbert Read’s The Green Child, Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, the poems of Rilke, of Dylan Thomas, of Emily Dickinson, of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Egyptian love lyrics translated by Ezra Pound, the epic of Gilgamesh.
One afternoon, Jorge Luis Borges came to the bookstore accompanied by his eighty-eight-year-old mother. He was famous, but I had read only a few of his poems and stories and I did not feel overwhelmed by his literature. He was almost completely blind and yet he refused to carry a cane, and he would pass a hand over the shelves as if his fingers could see the titles. He was looking for books to help him study Anglo-Saxon, which had become his latest passion, and we had ordered for him Skeat’s dictionary and an annotated version of Battle of Maldon. Borges’s mother grew impatient; “Oh Georgie,” she said. “I don’t know why you waste your time with Anglo-Saxon, instead of studying something useful like Latin or Greek!” In t
he end, he turned and asked me for several books. I found a few and made note of the others and then, as he was about to leave, he asked me if I was busy in the evenings because he needed (he said this very apologetically) someone to read to him, since his mother now tired very easily. I said I would.
Over the next two years I read to Borges, as did many other fortunate and casual acquaintances, either in the evenings or, if school allowed it, in the mornings. The ritual was always very much the same. Ignoring the elevator, I would climb the stairs to his apartment (stairs similar to the ones Borges had once climbed carrying a newly acquired copy of The Arabian Nights; he failed to notice an open window and received a bad cut which turned septic, leading him to delirium and to the belief that he was going mad); I would ring the bell; I would be led by the maid through a curtained entrance into the small sitting-room where Borges would come and meet me, soft hand outstretched. There were no preliminaries; he would sit expectantly on the couch while I took my place in an armchair, and in a slightly asthmatic voice he would suggest that night’s reading. “Shall we choose Kipling tonight? Eh?” And of course he didn’t really expect an answer.
A History of Reading Page 2
