Phantoms on the Bookshelves (2 page)

James Salter

On September 1 1932, the Portuguese newspaper
O Século
carried an advertisement for the post of librarian-curator at the Condes de Castro Guimarães Museum, in Cascais, a little town on the coast about thirty kilometers from Lisbon. On September 16, the poet Fernando Pessoa sent the local authority a letter applying for the post. The six-page document was later reproduced in a book by Maria José de Lancastre,
Fernando Pessoa, uma fotobiografia (Fernando Pessoa: photographic documentation
), published in 1981 by Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda and the Centro de Estudios Pessoanos, which I bought for 500
escudos
in a bookshop in Coimbra in November 1983. It was the only copy they had. In the town's cafés in those days there was still a ledge under the table where you could put your hat, and I remember seeing a woman go past in the street with a sewing machine balanced on her head. The Portuguese text of the letter is reproduced in
Fernando Pessoa
in characters far too tiny for anyone without good Portuguese to decipher.

Pessoa, who was tired of translating commercial correspondence for import-export firms in Lisbon, on a wage that scarcely allowed him to survive and get (moderately) drunk every day, felt the urge to change his way of life and leave his flat at 16, Coelho da Rocha Street for a small town near Lisbon. In my copy
of the book, a few pages before the letter, there is a photograph of Pessoa drinking a glass of red wine in the shop owned by the wine merchant Abel Ferreira da Fonseca. Behind him you can see casks of Clairette, Abafado, Moscatel, Ginginha and so on. This was the snapshot which Pessoa sent in September 1929 to Ophelia Queiroz, the only romantic relationship he is known to have had. The dedication reads:
“Fernando Pessoa, em flagrante delitro”,
or “Fernando Pessoa
in flagrante
with a liter.” Sending the photograph had marked the renewal of a connection broken off nine years earlier, and which would end, permanently this time, six months later. At least, it ended materially. Ophelia never married, and she recounted that shortly before his death, Pessoa, on meeting his nephew Carlos, had asked him, “How is Ophelia?,” then, his eyes filled with tears, had grasped his hands and added: “Oh what a fine soul, a fine soul!”

There are two other editions of Maria José de Lancastre's album on my bookshelves. An Italian version (Adelphi, 1988) has been abridged—164 pages instead of 322!—and the letter appears only in a reduced form, just the first and last pages, making it even less legible than in the original book. On the other hand, it does show a photo of the museum in question, the neo-Gothic villa of Count Castro Guimarães. By contrast, the French version (translated by Pierre Léglise-Costa, published by Christian Bourgois in 1990) reproduces in their entirety the documents published in the original edition, and adds a translation of the letter of application. This document, which really ought to be quoted in full, is a heart
rending example of the frequent gaps that exist between the two worlds of the artist, the one in which he lives mentally—at the risk perhaps of losing himself—and the world he inhabits every day. Let us content ourselves here with the final paragraph:

The documents cited in paragraph 1 above, and enclosed herewith, are more than adequate evidence to convey the applicant's knowledge of English. As for his knowledge of French, the applicant is of the view that in the absence of truly valid documents (such as those he can produce for English) the best thing he can do is to attach an extract from the magazine
Contemporanea
no. 7, where on pp. 20 and 21 are published three songs which he wrote in French—
“Trois chansons mortes”
(Three dead songs). In the further particulars for the post, it states that the librarian-curator should be a person of “recognized competence and appropriateness.” The degree of competence and appropriateness implicit in the qualifications indicated as preferable in the paragraphs of the article will therefore be supported by documentary proof in the documents concerning each paragraph, [but] competence and appropriateness are not provable by document. They even include elements such as physical appearance and education, which are of themselves non-documentable.

Cascais September 16 1932

Fernando Nogueira Pessoa

The appointing committee, chaired by the mayor of Cascais, and no doubt baffled by this unaccustomed rhetoric, was not convinced; it prudently chose another candidate, whom Pessoa's biographers usually describe rather vaguely as “an obscure painter.”

Some people are fond of horses, others of wild animals; in my case, I have been possessed since childhood by a prodigious desire to buy and own books.

JULIAN THE APOSTATE

About fifteen years ago, the Paris publishing house I was working for published a novel by the great Italian writer and critic Giuseppe Pontiggia. Probably nobody else who could stammer out a few words of Italian was available that particular evening, so I was asked to “look after” him. We met for dinner in a restaurant (Russian as it happened) near the Vavin crossroads. We got on well, particularly since he and his wife Lucia spoke French much better than I did Italian. After the first few minutes of conversation, we realized we had something in common, which transformed the interest of the evening: we both owned a monstrous personal library of several tens of thousands of books—not one of those bibliophile libraries containing works so valuable that their owner never opens them for fear of damaging them, no, I'm talking about a working library, the kind where you don't hesitate to write on your books, or read them in the bath; a library that results
from keeping everything you have ever read—including paperbacks and perhaps several editions of the same title—as well as the ones you mean to read one day. A non-specialist library, or rather one specialized in so many areas that it becomes a general one. We spent the entire meal discussing both the enjoyment and the curse of our lot. Books are expensive to buy, but worth nothing if you try to sell them second-hand; they become impossibly dear once they are out of print; they are heavy to carry, gather dust, are vulnerable to damp and mice, and once you have acquired a certain number they make it impossible to move house; they need a workable retrieval system if you want to use them, and above all they take up room.

I once had a bathroom full of bookshelves, which made it impossible to take a shower, and meant running a bath with the window open because of the condensation; and I also kept them in my kitchen, which made it out of the question to use certain strong-smelling foodstuffs. As was the case for many of my colleagues, it was years before I could afford a living space equal to my book-collecting ambitions. Only the wall above my bed has always been spared from bookshelves, as the consequence of an ancient trauma. I learned, long ago, the circumstances of the death of the composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, sometimes described as the “Berlioz of the piano,” who was found on March 30, 1888 crushed to death by his own bookshelves. Every craft guild used to have its patron saint and martyr, so Alkan the elder, the virtuoso pianist whom Liszt admired, and who inherited Chopin's pupils
from him, must surely be the patron saint of demented book collectors. As in the Greek myths, there are several variants of his tragic end, and a different one suggests he was the victim of a heavy umbrella-stand, but since there is room for doubt, I prefer my version. I also possess in my record collection, in homage to this tutelary martyr to our gentle and inoffensive obsession, a classic R.C.A. vinyl of his Grande Sonate, “The Four Ages,” recorded in January 1979 by Pierre Reach.

That evening in Paris, Pontiggia and I had come face to face with another member of our clandestine confraternity, of necessity a limited one, given the conditions one has to fulfill, and we were able to tackle a number of serious questions of which ordinary mortals remain in complete ignorance. Why, for instance, does it so often happen that the out-of-print book you ordered the moment you received the bookseller's catalog turns out—already—to be unavailable after all? Or, how should you classify your books? By alphabetical order, by genre, by language, chronologically, or—why not?—according to an invisible web of affinities of the Warburg kind (more of this in
Chapter 3
), mysterious to everyone except the owner? Gilbert Lely, the poet and specialist on Sade, apparently always kept one hundred books on his shelves, not a single one more, and whenever he bought one book he jettisoned another. Georges Perec tells the story of one of his friends who decided, for some reason as surreal as it is incomprehensible, on the ideal number as 361, but could never decide how to count books that came in several volumes, or compendia like
the Pléiade editions, which contain several books in one.

We spent some happy moments, Pontiggia and I, comparing the reactions of occasional visitors to a sight they found astonishing. After the “oohs and ahs” there inevitably came the same questions: “How many have you got?” “Have you read them all?” “How do you find your way around them?”—and so on. For us, by contrast, it would be more of a surprise to go into someone's house and find no books at all, or find no more than a skeleton library belonging to a so-called colleague; or, alternatively, a beautifully arranged set of volumes, protected by glass-fronted bookcases, which you sense at once are entirely for show.

By the end of the evening, with the help of the vodka, we had dreamed up an association of owners of private libraries containing over twenty thousand books—exactly the number of Professor Ermanno Finzi-Contini's books in Giorgio Bassani's novel,
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
. The association would have the function of defending the interests of this little-known minority. Our association never saw the light of day, but from that evening on, we maintained a friendly complicity, which ended only with the premature death of my friend Giuseppe “Peppo” Pontiggia in June 2003.

But how does one get to be the owner of so many books? Individual answers would probably be of many kinds: family tradition (“May I be allowed to repeat that my father's library was the capital event in my life. The truth is that I have never left it”—Borges); prize-winning schooldays; a budding academic career;
or a mixture of all those elements. In my case, none of these apply. Instead it was a heartfelt desire to fulfill Borges's definition of a book collection, “Paradise is a library,” or Bachelard's, “Doesn't paradise consist of a huge library?”—although I prefer, with agnostic prudence, to turn these definitions inside out: the library is what brings us closest to paradise on earth.

Before that, came the discovery of reading—which penetrated, like a shaft of sunlight, through the gloomy atmosphere of a provincial childhood of the 1960s. One day, someone will write a book about the boredom of those years, when our fathers were rebuilding the French economy (and helping themselves, on the way) while their wives and children were still living in the nineteenth century. The so-called “thirty glorious years” (1945–75) weren't glorious for everyone. Yes, French women had the vote at last, but their legal status was still very largely defined by marriage; married women couldn't own a checkbook, for example. In the provincial petite bourgeoisie where I was brought up, women still looked after home and children, and depended on the head of the family for their housekeeping money. As for the children, they were, to put it briefly, daily confronted with the authority principle. To take just one example: in 1967 it was still forbidden to bring a daily newspaper—even serious ones like
Le Figaro, Combat
or
Le Monde
—into a French state
lycée
. Family discussions were rare, and one's parents' decisions were not over-burdened by rational considerations. The tedium of childhood could be fought only by two things: sport or reading. And reading was something like the
river flowing through the Garden of Eden, its four watercourses heading off toward the four horizons. Reading scorns distance, and could transport me instantly into the most faraway countries with the strangest customs. And it did the same for centuries of the past: I had only to open a book to be able to walk through seventeenth-century Paris, at the risk of having a chamber-pot emptied over my head, to defend the walls of Byzantium as they tottered before falling to the Ottomans, or to stroll through Pompeii the night before it was buried under a tidal wave of ash and lava. I noticed after a while that books were not only a salutary method of escape, they also contained tools that made it possible to decode the reality around me. The ambitious petit-bourgeois milieu of my youth wanted to consolidate its upward mobility, and in order to do so was prepared to support its children throughout their education. It was time to move out of trade and into the law, medicine, or finance. These were the real roots of May '68: the younger generation had become more intelligent, or at any rate better educated than its parents (not difficult) and was starting to ask unprecedented questions which, although by no means absurd, did not receive even the beginnings of an answer until the first cobblestones began to fly. Escape and knowledge: it all came from books. I have retained from that time an eternal gratitude, a sort of moral debt toward them, one I have still not finished paying. It was also a way of sliding off the family rails. Hence my ambition—as good as any other, after all—to turn my life to advantage by reading all the books in the world.

But why keep tens of thousands of books in one's private library? Why could paradise not consist simply of a few shelves? For some people, a single book is enough! For others, the libraries that already exist would suffice. But as Robert Musil explained, that doesn't suit everyone. (“I can't work in public libraries, because smoking is forbidden. That makes sense, doesn't it? But when I read at home, I don't smoke.”—
Diaries
)