Phantoms on the Bookshelves (7 page)

The experience of living with thousands of books is not without its influence on the functioning of memory. My memory works best at being able to find quickly the book the information is in, rather than by loading itself with facts, dates and quotations which are sitting on my bookshelves. Of course that requires my memory, my bookshelves, and the order of the books on the shelves all to be in good working order. When I am away from my library, I often feel as though I am handicapped, as if I had been amputated of some vital limb. It can go beyond needing a simple piece of information: sometimes it has more to do with the emotion or the idea—and its exact formulation—that one was trying to recollect. Years later, thanks to my marginal notes or the passages I underlined on the first reading, the content of the book comes back to mind in a few seconds. (“… On my old copy of
The Critique of Pure Reason
are inscribed my underlinings from thirty years ago; the pencil markings are from one decade, the ballpoint
marking from another. They carry the memory of my relationship to the book”—Umberto Eco.) Or Alberto Manguel again:

I always write in my books. When I re-read them, most of the time I can't imagine why I thought a certain passage worth underlining, or what I meant by some marginal comment. Yesterday I came across a copy of Victor Segalen's
René Leys
, dated “Trieste 1978.” I don't remember ever being in Trieste (
A Reading Diary
).

Charles Nodier devotes several pages to “bibliology” in his
Hommes célèbres qui ont signé ou annoté leurs livres
(Famous men who signed or annotated their books). He cites the case of a copy of the
Essays
given by Montaigne to Charron; several copies of
The Imitation of Christ
translated into verse by Corneille and offered to people as gifts; various works signed by Rousseau or Voltaire; and he claims himself to be the happy owner of an Aeschylus which once belonged to Racine, while his Euripides and Aristophanes came from the Royal Library.

The tens of thousands of books with their underlinings and marginalia, which have absorbed a large proportion of the money I have earned in my working life, are therefore now of no commercial value. That makes a kind of sense, since I have always considered them as a sort of mental and material extension of myself, destined to go out of existence when I do (symbolically that is, since to bury them, or even cremate them with me—an original
approach and more elegant in any case than having oneself cremated or buried in the company of one's family, arms, horses and servants—would pose considerable practical problems).

Reading a book by Cervantes, Flaubert, Schopenhauer, Melville, Whitman, Stevenson or Spinoza is an experience as powerful as travelling or falling in love.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

How did these books get into my library? By a combination of chance, systematic curiosity, and impulses generated by conversations or reading.

When I consider the discoveries I made long ago, the trigger might have been a mysterious title (
Steppenwolf
for instance—in French, the title is
Le Loup des Steppes
[Wolf of the steppes]—before I had any idea who Hermann Hesse was); or it might be the book's jacket (
Lolita
in the 1971 paperback version, at a time when I had never heard of Nabokov, but was very taken by the illustration on the cover: a close-up of the nape of the neck of a girl with blond plaits, against an elegant green background). Or perhaps I might have seen the film before reading the book (Visconti's
The Leopard
, from the book by Lampedusa;
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, by John Huston, from the book by B. Traven;
The Big Sleep
, by Howard Hawks from Raymond Chandler's original;
The Lady with the Little
Dog
by Kheifetz from Chekhov's story). It might be an anecdote—in one case, an article by Gilles Lapouge, which related how he had left a copy of Hamsun's
Pan
on a park bench, only to find it again the following year, at a second-hand
bouquiniste's
on the banks of the Seine. The article in question also had the bewitching attraction of evoking a “secret society” of admirers of Knut Hamsun. How could one resist the chance to join a secret society of readers!

My systematic acquisitions come firstly from habits I have acquired as an eternal autodidact. No, I don't set out to read all the paperbacks there are in alphabetical order, though I do like to take a look at anything generally thought worthy of note. But it also comes from wanting to read everything by an author I have come across by chance. Or else by following a chain of affinities between different authors—for example, Diderot's
Jacques le Fataliste
led me to
Tristram Shandy
, Arthur Rimbaud sent me to Germain Nouveau. Leonardo Sciascia to Luigi Pirandello, and Pirandello to Giovanni Verga. Or perhaps a book by a single author has encouraged me to try and discover a whole body of literature. Let me take the example of
Pan
again (I still have Lapouge's article in a cutting from
Le Figaro littéraire
from 1972—with on the back an article by Bernard Pivot entitled “134 French novelists, including ‘43 yearlings' [first-timers],” predicting who would win the Prix Goncourt that year). That single book drew me first to read all the rest of Hamsun's books that had been translated into French, which was not easy, since at the time most of them were out of print. I took years to find
August
, the last on my list, and that was in the Bibliothèque
Nationale, the old one, in the rue de Richelieu, when the books I had ordered for work purposes were taking a long time to arrive. I will never forget the feeling that flooded through me as I at last held in my hands the book I had been chasing for years, when it arrived on a trolley in the great reading room, the Salle Labrouste. At last I was going to find out what had happened to the unpredictable Edvarda! Then I embarked on reading all the Scandinavian literature translated into French that I could lay hands on (Dagerman, Lagerkvist, Jonson, Martinson, Vesaas, Laxness, and many more) and I even wrote a very serious article on Hamsun's novels
Benoni
and
Rosa
entitled “Une bague et un coeur que l'on brise” (A ring and a broken heart) in
La Quinzaine Littéraire
in 1980. But that wasn't all. I note, while looking at my copy (P.-J. Oswald Editions), that
Pan
was number four in a French collection entitled “La source de la liberté” or “La solution intégrale” (the publisher of which announced that “this collection will publish great poets who chose to express themselves in prose”), and that at the time, I explored the whole collection and discovered the following numbers: (1) Haniel Long's
The Marvellous Adventure of Cabeza de Vaca
followed by
Malinche
, prefaced by Henry Miller, with the subtitle
Stories translated from American English by F. J. Temple
; (2) Hermann Hesse,
Demian
, translated into French by Denise Riboni, and (3) Albert Cossery,
Les Hommes oubliés de dieu
(
Men God Forgot
).

So once again I found Hermann Hesse in my journey through books and, above all, discovered Cossery (this must have been the first time I came across his books, a detail I had forgotten). On
checking, I find that the Cossery is still on the shelves, but not the Haniel Long, which I am nevertheless certain I have read (have I lost it, lent it imprudently, or shelved it wrongly?). Nor is the Hesse—on the other hand, I do have the 1974 Stock edition of this, in the same translation by Denise Riboni, only it has been “revised and completed by Bernadette Burn” and “prefaced by Marcel Schneider.” After that, I read everything I could find by Cossery:
Les Fainéants dans la vallée fertile
(
The Lazy Ones
);
La Maison de la mort certaine
(
The House of Certain Death
);
Mendiants et Orgueilleux
(
If all Men were Beggars
). I went to see whether I had shelved the Long under Miller, but no. However I did find Miller's
Time of the Assassins: a study of Rimbaud
, which was number six in the collection. And this informed me that number five was
Séraphita
, which I then duly found shelved with the rest of my Balzac. And I was indeed to re-publish Balzac's
La Théorie de la démarche
(Theory of walking) a few years later for Pandora editions in 1978. So starting from an article in
Le Figaro
, I have systematically read through Hamsun, explored Scandinavian literature, and acquired books from a particular collection, which in turn led me to other discoveries. I have only gone into so much detail over this example to indicate how infinite the ramifications of one's reading can be. One has only to imagine hundreds of cases like this, to end up with thousands of books on the shelves.

As the years go by of course, the field of discoveries shrinks, the continents are explored one after another, surveyed, mapped and sometimes even colonized, which does not prevent one from
time to time discovering a lost tribe in a particularly inaccessible region—recently, I found the surprising and delicious
The Time Regulation Institute
by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, which shed light for me on some gaps in my knowledge of Turkish literature, despite my early appreciation of Nazim Hikmet.

And finally there are all the conversations. Those foreign friends who affectionately deliver to you the greatest authors in their own literature—which are not always the ones you would have guessed from the translations available—the books about which they speak to you with a tremor in their voice that inspires you to seek them out for yourself, the books they recommend to you as a special part of themselves, re-editions published by discerning readers. For example, the collection
Fins de siècles
(Ends of centuries), published by Hubert Juin in the series 10-18 in the 1970s and 1980s, led me to discover Marcel Schwob, Jean de Tinan, Octave Mirbeau, or Hugues Rebell. And what about the chance encounters? The Goncourts'
Journal
, spotted on the bookshelves of Leonardo Sciascia in his modern flat in Palermo, and which, to my shame as a Frenchman, I had never read.
Spoon River
by Edgar Lee Masters, recommended to me by Louis Evrard during a dinner in the rue Lepic. William Kennedy's
Legs
, recommended to me by Jim Salter when I asked him to name the American novel that he most regretted had not yet been translated into French. Another writer is John Cowper Powys, described enthusiastically by Max-Pol Fouchet, one evening on the French TV book program
Lecture pour tous
(Reading for all) or
Apostrophes
—
I've forgotten which now. I could go on. Don Marquis's
Archy and Mehitabel
; Anders Nygren's
Agape and Eros
, Mario Praz's
The Romantic Agony
; Yuri Kazakov; Silvio d'Arzo's
Casa d'altri
(The house of others);
Petersburg
by Andrey Bely;
The Art of Describing
by Svetlana Alpers;
Story of My Wife
by Milan Füst—and more. They are all linked to memories of people now dead, or with whom I have lost touch, and to whom I owe an immense debt. That's the way books get around.

And I haven't even started on bookshops. There has always been one in every town in which I have ever lived, some more memorable than others. (Oh yes! I remember Marie-Jeanne Apprin's Librairie de Provence, in Aix-en-Provence in the 1970s; Brahic's shop, also in Aix, at the top of the Cours Mirabeau; Madame Tchann's bookstore on the boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris—later replaced by a shop selling golfing accessories, which quickly folded.) Bookshops with their daily deliveries, laid out on the “new books” table—sometimes their owners even opening the boxes before your very eyes—or with their treasures forgotten on the shelves. Christian Thorel found a copy of the out-of-print
Dom Casmurro
by Machado de Assis in the tiny bookshop called
Ombre blanche
(White shadow) in its early days. Even more precious are the books recommended by a bookseller who is also a great reader, when he or she has a moment to escape the administrative preoccupations that take up most of their time. Bookstores often become informal meeting places, where at certain times of day you are almost sure to find someone to talk to. True bookshops—
Tschann has now moved to another spot on the boulevard Montparnasse, or Le Livre in Tours (where they sell more books published by Clémence Hiver than by Grasset!)—have replaced the circulating libraries of the nineteenth century or the literary cafés, where it was a ritual to foregather in the late afternoon to meet people of similar interests. Or on a different tack, I remember José Corti in his bookshop on the rue Médicis in the early 1980s, getting cross because I asked him if he still had the two volumes of André Monglond's
Préromantisme français
, (French pre-Romanticism) which had long been out of print. He calmed down, and we moved from confrontation to conversation. After checking, I find that I actually have Monglond's book in my library, but I have now completely forgotten how it got there. I do know I paid a lot of money for it—400 francs—because I have another tic, which is to leave the prices in all the books I have bought second-hand. In this case it was on a thin piece of card with a notch in it, since it had been attached to the book's jacket in the shop window.

Reviewers and writers are another source of ideas. Would I have found my way to reading Joubert, Broch or Musil without reading Maurice Blanchot's
Le Livre à venir
(
The Book to Come
)? How would I ever have got to Ammianus Marcellinus, or reread Grégoire de Tours without Auerbach's
Mimesis
(my copy is in the Gallimard collection, Tel, dated 1977)? Would I ever have gone back to Rousseau without Jean Starobinski's
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l'obstacle
(
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: transparency and obstruction
)? And among the many critics who have helped
me to understand Proust better (Deleuze, Revel, Beckett, Poulet and more) there is the precious stylistic approach of Leo Spitzer (
Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics
). These critics—and some others—were not satisfied simply to analyze the books, but went on to shed new light on them for readers already familiar with their contents, while at the same time persuading new readers to seek them out. As did some authors, such as Claude Simon, who used to speak so luminously of Proust, or Julien Gracq, whose
Lettrines
and
En lisant, en écrivant
(Reading, writing) conveyed the impression of having a friendly conversation, of remarkable interest, with someone who had read the same books as oneself.