by Linda Grant
It is more than 50 years since I began to build my library, from its earliest foundations in the elementary sentence construction of Enid Blyton. Now at least half of the thousands of books I have bought are gone. It is one of the worst things I have ever done. I hate myself. But not as much as I have come to hate the books.
Hate books! A thought crime at the very least. Only a philistine, a religious zealot, a Nazi, would hate books.
It is not the words I hate, not literature, but their physical manifestation as old, musty, dusty, yellowing, cracked objects, heavy to lug around. When I open the pages swarms of black ants dance on the paper. No-one told me. No-one said, ‘In the future, you will squint and screw up your face and try to decipher these words you once read so easily. Not because you are going blind, but because in the middle of your life your eyes have betrayed you. They are no longer fit for the purpose of reading.’
I have reading glasses, multiple pairs scattered all over the house. Prescription reading glasses as well as magnifiers for use with contact lenses. I can’t believe my eyesight was ever good enough to read print this tiny. There are closed books that are closed books to me until they are available on an ereader so I can enlarge the font size. Very little literature has been digitised. As new books come out, the main publishing houses usually bring out simultaneous editions, but the backlist, the in-copyright classics, remain to be uploaded. I cannot read Joseph Heller’s Something Happened because, according to his son Ted Heller, that title remains stuck in contract negotiations. The Frederica Potter novels, by A.S. Byatt, beginning with The Virgin in the Garden, which I would like to re-read, have not yet been made available as ebooks because of a transfer of agent representation.
When I look at my books I feel like Alice in the closing pages of Wonderland, when the cards all rise up and overwhelm her. I crave the small, tactile simplicity of my new Kindle Paperwhite in its purple leather cover, which is currently home to what would make up around three boxes of physical books, but whose screen’s digital imprint is flattened of all memory and association. It’s soulless and almost weightless.
On the other hand, the smug little ereader has not broken my spirit and my knees in the way that disposing of half my library has done, driving me to tears, rage and paracetamol.
***
Books Do Furnish a Room is the title of the tenth volume of Anthony Powell’s series A Dance to the Music of Time. I haven’t read it. I understand that it is set during the period of post-war austerity, when food was still rationed, and perhaps paper was too. Much of the grim, cold, shabby, partly-derelict country was crying out for basic products. In 1942, the government had introduced a scheme called the Utility Movement, state-sanctioned furniture items designed to make the most efficient use of scarce timber supplies. Influenced by Arts and Crafts, William Morris’ anti-industrial manifesto, the tables, chairs and beds were built with minimal decoration, spartan in their simplicity but using factory production to help a bombed-out wartime population.
Quality varied amongst the different manufacturers, but the constant was the lack of embellishment. As the fashion went at the time, everything was varnished brown. England was a brown place, without sun or central heating. Toad in the hole and suet pudding were substitutes for radiators. The first time I saw a picture of a stripped-pine kitchen floor in a Sunday colour supplement, I got a shock. I did not know that wood could be so pale. I thought it grew out of the ground a sticky, shiny, toffee colour.
When I was a student in the seventies, private landlords’ housing – a territory of damp, draughts, moth-nibbled carpets, mould and mouse-droppings – was a warehouse of unwanted Utility furniture. This era overlapped with the Habitat chain opening stores outside London, selling coloured cotton beanbags on which you lounged promiscuously instead of sitting bolt upright with an antimacassar behind your head, Scandinavian blond-wood coffee tables, and cutlery with no metal flourishes on the handles. We hated Utility furniture. What we hated most of all was its brownness. Its stubborn usefulness and scorn for ornamentation should have fitted in with the new aesthetic, but it didn’t. It was all ‘before I was born’ stuff. Those monochrome years of cold weather and tinned fish and powdered eggs.
I had a Union Jack wastepaper bin, primary-coloured and irreverent.
Sometimes Utility bookcases were provided. We asked for them to be removed. We kept our books in modern style, on shelves of planks raised on stacks of bricks. They were easily dismantled and taken from one unheated, mildew-ridden slum to another. The walls were decorated with posters attached by blobs of Blu-Tack, an adhesive substance that came in sheets of blue goo. The important fittings were the coffee mugs and the ashtrays, but books were the true furnishings. They were the soul of a room. They defined the identity of the person who lived there in a series of announcements: Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Charles Reich’s The Greening of America. Richard Neville’s Playpower. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Carlos Castañeda’s The Teachings of Don Juan.
All of these were required titles on the bookshelves of the counterculture, as defining as the shoulder-length hair, the tie-dyed t-shirt smelling of incense ash, and the bell-bottom jeans stained with drops of rank brown patchouli oil.
When I went house-hunting in the autumn of 2013, I looked through or up at the windows of the neighbours. I wanted to see if they were the kind of people whose rooms housed books. When I detected built-in shelves on either side of an Edwardian marble fireplace, when I saw hardbacks and Penguins and a green wodge of Virago modern classics, I felt a sense of comfort and reassurance. I peered through the window of a house whose downstairs rooms had been knocked through to reveal a grand piano in front of French windows leading to a garden ornamented with Italianesque statuary. The entire left-hand flank of the sitting room was all books. And I thought, This is it, this is the only civilised way to live, in a high-ceilinged, well-proportioned room twinkily lit by a chandelier, a room which wears its books with ease and grace and space. I wanted the inhabitants of the house to be my friends. I trusted them without ever seeing their presence. The books wore the room and the room wore the books. (I wonder if they were the authors of the anonymous note signed ‘some concerned residents’ pushed through the door a week after I moved in. It complained about anti-social behaviour. The refuse wasn’t organised properly for collection. I was falsely accused of not understanding the principles of recycling.)
But that was a house that seemed to have been inhabited by the same people for many years. The home of a retired publisher or a professor of Anglo-Saxon or a Jungian psychoanalyst. When I went to look at flats whose current owners were of younger age, judging by the cot or little bed in the second bedroom, inside I rarely saw any evidence of books. Sometimes there was an item of asymmetrical Conran shelving designed to display a vase, a knick-knack, a framed photo, five or six TV tie-in recipe books and a few Waterstones three-for-the-price-of-two paperback bestsellers, the stickers still on them.
Sometimes the alcoves were lined with shelves but they didn’t hold any books – they were for DVDs.
The shelves pronounced taste, as my student bookshelves had pronounced a countercultural identity, but taste in interior décor and dinner.
And I knew this because when the estate agent came to look at my flat, he winced when he saw all those books.
What did he see?
Clutter.
Estate agents do not think that books furnish a room – books make rooms look messy. Books’ multi-coloured spines muddle and muddy the Farrow & Ball neutral paint colours, the Ammonite and Hardwick White and Savage Ground. They completely destroy the impact of the accent wall.
Books are too personal as objects to be displayed, in case a potential buyer is put off by your taste for Nietzsche or Marian Keyes. You would not display the contents of your knicker and sock drawer, or your bathroom cabinet with its face creams and cough remedies, so why put off potential buyers with your taste in literature? For many cannot see past your books, I wa
s advised. They cannot imagine the room without them. Buyers want bland neutral décor so they can impose their own taste on it. Or, if your taste coincides with theirs, they want to buy into your sofa and your rug. House buyers want houses to look like an interiors magazine. They are frankly hostile to the history of your whole intellectual life arranged in thousands of volumes.
In North America, there is a service available to home-sellers which has started to arrive in Britain, though no-one I know has used it: staging. From one staging website:
We may suggest new accessories, lighting or furniture. From a stylish table dressing to a feature mirror, some silk cushions or a throw – we think of every detail. Transforming your property – maximising your profit. So if you’re looking to sell your home, but need a little help in presenting it for sale, our dress to sell service is the simplest way to sell your property fast – and for the best price.
I’ve looked through the staged interiors and none of them contain any books. In the past, books that weren’t real books, glued-together leather spines, were introduced into houses by interior decorators to add a touch of class. Now tables are set as if for the imminent arrival of dinner-party guests. But there is no evidence of any reading going on.
In order to market my flat, the books had to be pruned back. At the very least, they would not be permitted to exceed the number of shelves available to house them.
So the murder began.
***
First I disposed of the multiple copies of my own books. Charity shops are not interested in taking 30 copies of the same book, so I put myself about on Twitter, and offered them to reading groups for the cost of postage and packing. There was a very good take-up, and for two or three weeks I spent most days trundling to the Post Office with an old-lady shopping trolley, packed with a box of 12 hardbacks ready for dispatch to Glasgow or Nottingham or Cardiff. I made no demands of the recipients; if they hated the book, they hated it, but I didn’t want to be told. A cheque would arrive a few days later, and so the cupboards under the eaves slowly emptied.
The foreign editions found homes in the public library system where they were accepted gratefully. Polish speakers in the London Borough of Haringey now have a choice of books: by me, or by me.
Still, stray copies of my own books turned up everywhere, concealing themselves behind the now-softening Swiss ball or hiding behind a second-best printer. I threw one box in the recycling bin. I’m going to hell, a hell in which eternity is a Kindle with a dead battery.
The methodology with which I embarked on my cull was very high-minded. I would preserve those books of literary merit, the books I had not yet read but wanted to, and the books given as gifts with an inscription on the flyleaf.
Judging literary merit at the top of library steps is a beautiful and contemplative activity. I see Catherine Deneuve, half-lit with the illumination from a Parisian window on a Rive Gauche boulevard below cloudy pearly autumnal skies, a few streets from Shakespeare & Co. She picks a book out from the shelf, examines the spine. Ah, Matthieu! The much-older lover, a grizzled intellectual with whom she spent a summer in Cadaques when she was 20. Fade and dissolve to Charlotte Gainsbourg in 1967, in the kitchen cutting tomatoes, while out on the terrace Daniel Auteuil is typing his masterpiece, which will win the Prix Goncourt and later be filmed by Truffaut.
I sneezed. The shelves were filthy. I wobbled, looked down, got vertigo. How do we assess André Gide’s reputation? By ‘we’ I don’t mean the French Academy. Does anyone still read him? If no-one still reads him, what does that tell me about literary merit? I went down the steps to the computer and looked him up. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Vatican placed his complete oeuvre on the Index of Forbidden Books, alongside Samuel Richardson, Graham Greene and the Dumas boys (father and son). He died in the year of my birth. Strait Is the Gate was one of the Penguins I bought in my early teens. I have absolutely no recollection of its subject matter (a love story set in the Normandy countryside, according to Amazon). Literary merit established conclusively; read, but not really read. Potential for re-reading. But not in this edition. Potential for going to a bookshop and examining current print size before considering a Kindle version. (But there is no Kindle edition.)
In any case, that gets thrown to the floor and joins the other splayed volumes of rejects.
After a couple of hours, the process of deciding literary merit speeds up considerably.
When I was young, boys invited in for sex would examine your bookshelves. A collection of novels by Arthur Hailey and Barbara Cartland would not necessarily be enough to prevent them from ripping off their t-shirts and loon pants and desert boots, but if you added to the sexual experience a credible book collection, the move from one night stand to girlfriend was consolidated. My books had to make up for my LPs. I did not have the definitive album by Captain Beefheart, though I did have the bootleg Dylan Basement Tapes.
‘What’s this? I didn’t know Tom Stoppard wrote a novel.’
‘But of course – you mean you haven’t read it?’
Lord Malquist and Mr Moon was the literary equivalent of the Wonderbra for intellectually pretentious students of the seventies.
I no longer need to impress male visitors with the depth of my reading. So what is the nature of this library? What function does it serve other than being a filing system for books? What, to use the phrase beloved of cultural criticism, does it say about me, and to whom is it addressing this message?
When builders come in, or grocery delivery men, they often say, ‘Blimey, have you read all these books?’
In friends’ houses, I have stopped inspecting their bookshelves for evidence of their literary taste because we have all read, more or less, the same books. My curiosity is limited now to how they store and display them. The former literary editor of a national newspaper told me the other day that most of his books are in paid-for storage and have been for years. There is a strong part of me which thinks that if you don’t have any access to your books, you might as well not have them, as I believe that tidying things away where you can’t see them means there is no point in having them at all. I believe in a desk where everything is carefully composed into a filing system of paper, bills, staplers, pens, reading glasses, polishing cloths for reading glasses, dictionaries, thesaurus, earbud headphones, calculator and notebooks, strewn across the surface.
I made this point to him, but he argued that he had first editions of the Brit Boys: Amis, Barnes, McEwan. I wonder if he thought they were his pension. A Christmas email from an old friend in Vancouver spoke mournfully of a friend whose husband is an antiquarian book dealer. The bottom had dropped right out of that market, she reported, even for first editions.
My sister (the one who truncated the eight years of my being an only child) returned to London after nearly a decade in the USA. She decided not to ship her books back from a rambling ‘heritage home’ in Chevy Chase to a flat in Spitalfields so short of storage space that kitchen equipment has to be stored in cupboards in the living room. As a two-Kindle, one-tablet household, she and her husband feel no need to populate their precious and very limited shelves with books they have read and will not read again. ‘Why do you actually need all these books?’ she asked me.
If there is a need, it is not a functional one – it’s something else.
For one thing, I would be ashamed of being a writer whose house had no books.
For another, the books, as I have already said, are a library. In a library, you do not read a book to the last page and dispose of it: you return, you return.
I go back to Paris in the thirties, to Jean Rhys, the novelist of unmediated longing and yearning and rage and sexual desire, and the need for nice clothes, and the fear of what happens to women when they are old and lose their looks and become the woman alone upstairs, drinking alone, smoking alone, dying alone. Sentence after apparently unremarkable sentence pass until suddenly I feel myself hit in the solar plexus by the accumulated tension.
I look back and ask, How did you do that?
I return in memory and imagination, but I return by taking a book down from the shelf, and reading a few pages. That is a library. A full larder for the soul.
None of her novels are currently available as ebooks.
I kept Jean Rhys, I kept Anita Brookner, I kept Beryl Bainbridge. These books are personal not only as objects but also for the intense relationship I have with the text.
***
I want to say here that I am not hostile to new technology. Like my parents with their brand-new television purchased to watch mystical pomp and circumstance, I am an advocate of the modern. I had the internet when everyone was telling me it was just for nerds and Star Trek fans.
For a long time I had known that the day was coming when we would not only write on a screen but read on it too.
In the early years of this century, from the bath, I heard a BBC radio discussion about the idea of reading books on a screen of some sort. A scornful patrician voice said, ‘But you can’t take a computer to bed with you, d’you see?’, and the argument was, in her mind, permanently closed. Lying in the suds, I thought, But won’t they develop some kind of hand-held device?
My agent told me that the early ereader prototypes were stymied by the weight of the batteries. When the Sony ereader was introduced, the company sent one to a bibliophile friend who despised the very idea of it, and he gave it to me. I tried it, but the contrast between the print and the screen was so poor that it was impossible to read by lamplight in bed. And the technology was terribly clunky: you had to attach the thing to the computer via a cable and then transfer files and … I couldn’t see it catching on.
