I Murdered My Library (Kindle Single)

Copyright © 2014 by Linda Grant

I am moving
house. I am moving from the spacious flat I have lived in for 19 years, a
corner house very bright and full of windows, a place of flights of stairs and
landings and hallways, no room on the same level as another. A quirky flat that
no-one but me wanted to buy in 1994, but an awful lot of it, from the yellow
rose bush round the front door to the attic and eaves. There has always been
space for more books; you could tuck in a few shelves in all kinds of places. I
had them built when I moved here, by a carpenter called Crispin. It was his
last job in London before he moved to Somerset and faded from my sight. ‘These
aren’t going anywhere,’ he said, as he applied brackets to the wall that have
made the bookcases difficult to remove. Over the years I have had to paint
round them.

But
however many shelves Crispin built there were still never enough. The books in
alphabetical rows were overgrown by piles of new books, doubled in front. Books
multiplied, books swarmed, books, I sometimes dreamt, seemed to reproduce
themselves – they were a papery population explosion. When they had exhausted
the shelves, they started to take over the stairs; I had to vacuum round them.
You cannot have a taste for minimalist décor if you seriously read books.

Many
books are in my office; they are in a stand-off with technology as to which can
take up more space, and aggravate and inconvenience me more. Who hasn’t crawled
under the desk to disconnect a plug to attach some new gadget, and fused the
reading lamp?

 The
books line three sides of the room. A niche was left facing the window to accommodate
an armchair for the purposes of daydreaming, drinking tea and wishing I still
smoked cigarettes. Most of these
office
books are fiction, arranged
alphabetically by author, with a separate shelf for the Greek and Latin
classics: for Homer, Ovid, Aristophanes and Herodotus. Outside, up a flight of
stairs, the second landing houses mainly hardback biography (Dickens, George
Eliot, Eleanor Roosevelt, Coco Chanel). The third landing is the repository for
other non-fiction – top shelf the Holocaust, next shelf travel writing, bottom
shelf fashion monographs. The Vietnam war has its own section. In the bedroom,
a freestanding bookcase shelves current reading or to-be-reads. Lost books hide
under the bed, cohabiting with drifting dust balls, straying pens and old,
snotty tissues from colds and flu.

As
well as the treasures, there are books I did not particularly care for, but
kept anyway, or the books I bought but never read, or the books I started but
did not finish, and put away in case I wanted to come back to them. The review
copies, the books sent by hopeful publishers entreating a jacket quote, and the
non-fiction which I kept in the era before the internet, in case I ever needed
to look up biographical details about, say, Oscar Levant, or Augustus John, or
Vera Brittain. There are books that are evidence of past passions in which I no
longer feel much interest (travel writing comes into this category), and the
monumental-in-size coffee-table volumes on fashion. But I nonetheless have
shelved them all.

And I
have kept, because I didn’t know what else to do with them, dozens of copies of
my own books. Publishers generously – or maybe maliciously – send authors boxes
of each imprint: first the proof, then the hardback, then the paperback, and subsequently
each reprint of the paperback, each re-jacketing. The deal is part of the
contract. We are supposed to give them away to our friends and family, but I
suffer from English embarrassment. I can’t press my books into the hands of
others (still less follow up with, ‘So, what did you make of it?’). Boxes of
books (proof, hardback, paperback) cross the Atlantic from Scribner and Dutton
and Grove. Foreign language editions arrive from Italy, France, Germany, China
and Brazil. The husband of a famous novelist told me they kept hers under the
bed. Another writer said he buried his in the garden. From inky words, roses rise.
Some writers carry them round with them when they go to readings and literary
festivals, and flog them for cash, but I don’t have either the car or the
chutzpah. I have made use of my attic eaves for all these years, where books
hunched amongst the inflated Swiss ball and dumbbells (unused), the guest
futon, the suitcases and the packing case containing items I had not got round
to opening since I moved here in 1994.

No
books in the living room. Those walls are reserved for pictures, although it is
the site where the reading actually takes place.

For
many weeks before I left the building, I sorted them out. The decision about
what would stay and what would go, live or die, began with kindness, and ended
in rage and ruthlessness. I have a pair of library steps I bought in an antiques
shop in Cornwall and schlepped back to London, and I climbed them every
afternoon and scanned the shelves. What I saw, swelling with self-important
pride, was evidence of how I had constructed my own intellectual history through
reading. Here is Proust. Here is Jean Rhys. Here is Milton. Here isn’t Henry
James, because I have never been able to remember the beginning of his
sentences by the time I get to the end.

Here
is J.K Rowling, here is Jilly Cooper. This is a library which tells you
everything about its owner, which doesn’t conceal the shameful reads, the low
taste. Here are first editions, bought at abe.com, of my childhood favourites,
the
Sadlers Wells
ballet and riding books of Lorna Hill, which taught me
about ambitious, arty girls from Northumberland who went to London, became
prima ballerinas, married conductors and lived in smart flats in a St John’s
Wood mansion block with a service restaurant. The building actually exists; I’m
still waiting for the bestseller that would allow me to be able to afford to
live there amongst what I imagine to be tightly-upholstered sofas and hostess
trolleys.

Here
is my copy of the first paperback edition of Joyce’s
Ulysses
, the cover
almost disconnected from the spine, and inscribed with my name: ‘Linda Sharan
Grant, February 1969’. Here are my dictionaries, my thesaurus, and here,
occupying a whole shelf, are the complete works of Dickens, every book he wrote
including the overlooked (rightly so)
Barnaby Rudge
and those Christmas
stories that aren’t
A Christmas Carol
. I did my MA on Dickens and these
paperbacks are over-scribbled with notes and underlinings. The glory of the
library for me is how many of the books are in poor physical condition. They
are books that have been read and read intensely. They are knocked about and
shopworn. I would be ashamed of a book whose spine was not broken.

Here
are books that were birthday presents, with inscriptions in the front from dear
friends; some of those friends are no longer living, and some names I can’t
even decipher (or I have forgotten who they were) – but they have tried to form
a bond with me through the medium of a book. Here is a copy of the first
paperback edition of Tom Stoppard’s only novel,
Lord Malquist and Mr Moon
,
published in 1966, which nobody but me has ever heard of. Sir Edmund Spenser’s
Faerie
Queene
, the cover drizzled with spilt candlewax, an accident which took
place at university in 1974. An American first edition of
Bleak House
bought
for me at the end of the seventies as a breaking-up present by a man – an
apology for going back to his wife.

First
editions of the forgotten American poet and short-story writer Delmore
Schwartz, some of which you can
only
buy in first editions, for they
were never reprinted. A Hogarth Press fifth edition of Virginia Woolf’s
The
Years
, still with its maroon and acid-yellow dustjacket designed by Vanessa
Bell. I bought it (and a number of other books) with an £8 book token, a prize
for winning a poetry competition. Many a long year lost, though, is the
paperback of
The Waves
which Leonard Woolf signed and sent to me after I
wrote to Virginia Woolf, unaware that she was no longer alive. It arrived in
the post on my 17th birthday.

There
may not have been a better time in history for a teenager to begin to build a
library than the sixties, the heyday of the cheap paperback, and of the
expanding paperback imprints: Fontana and Abacus are words which have as rich a
meaning to me as the cathedrals of Chartres or St Paul’s. If you ask me who I
am at 16, 17, I am a girl who reads. Not only reads, but reads widely. If,
young man, my parents were to permit you to enter my bedroom, which they won’t,
you will see what I have read, how extensively, and with what ambition.

***

In the middle of
my move I was watching a documentary called
The Flat
. A family was
clearing out the Tel Aviv apartment of a 97-year-old woman who had recently
died, a home in which she had lived for 70 years since arriving there from
Germany in the thirties. The walls of the flat were lined with books published
in her native language. Her grandson called in an antiquarian book dealer. He
took the volumes down off the shelf and hurled them with force to the floor.
‘No-one reads Balzac,’ he said. ‘No-one reads Shakespeare, nobody wants Goethe.
Know how many books they throw away in Germany?’

The
books were unwanted and unsalable. The film-maker spared us the horror of their
fate. Where did they go? Into the rubbish? Burned? Pulped? Holy of holies, the
printed book – and not even mass-market paperbacks. The leather-bound classic
on the pyre of the obsolete.

Who destroys
books? Cities, churches, dictators and fanatics. Their fingers itch to build a
pyre and strike the match. On 10 May 1933, students gathered in Berlin to dance
around a bonfire of 25,000 volumes of ‘un-German’ books. They burned, amongst
many others, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, James
Joyce and H.G. Wells. They destroyed them because the contents were too
dangerous. Now, in an apartment on the Mediterranean, the same authors were
being dumped because no-one wanted to read them. They are the detritus not just
of the digital revolution but also of disposable living and small houses.

And I too have
committed murder
in my library. I have killed my books.

The
little girl who lay in bed, a circle of illumination on the sheets from her
toadstool nightlight, afraid to go to sleep because her Struwwelpeter picture
book lay next to her in the dark confinement of the ottoman with her toys,
frightened of the scissor man who cuts off the thumbs of children who suck them
– that small person, who even before she could read understood the power of a
book, has just liquidated half her own.

This
isn’t me
. I am the adult outcome of the shy, awkward, only child, who instead of running
around outside in the garden, or clambering on dangerous arrangements of slide
and swing in the playground, or slapping bats against balls, or skipping down a
muddy lane, preferred above all else, as I still do, to stayed indoors and
read. Only children are no good socially. (A sister came along after eight
years, but by then the habits of solitude were set in the bone.) I found in
books my friends and my fantasy lands, and never looked to fiction for social
realism, or expected books to tell me about the life I led in suburban Liverpool,
with immigrant parents who muttered in an obscure tongue, and in the kitchen
made sure to find a use for every part of the chicken.

I was
enraptured by what disgruntled readers now refer to as matters ‘not relevant to
my personal experience’. By girls who wanted to become ballerinas and show
jumpers – though I was clumsy on my feet, and terrified of horses’ steaming
flanks and iron hooves. Edwardian children who walked up the Cromwell Road in
London, and imaginary creatures who lived in the sand. I was overly-familiar
with chairs that flew, with wardrobes that led to snowy woods, and holes in the
ground with hobbits in them. In books was life! The great life!

I was
the girl whose face fell when she saw a wrapped present in the shape of a box,
perhaps a jigsaw puzzle. Worst of all, that preparation for the future slave-house
of motherhood, a doll. I only wanted book tokens or books themselves – but
better a book token. The worst present is the book you don’t want to read.

My
parents weren’t great readers. They liked the American and the racy. Damon Runyon
for my father, Harold Robbins for my mother. Both left school without
qualifications and made their way in the world through hairdressing. They
bought a TV in 1953 to watch the Coronation, the first real spectacle of the
dawning television age. The set came as a walnut cabinet the size of a sideboard,
inset with a blurry black-and-white postage-stamp screen, through which the
Woodentops, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, Andy Pandy, and Ragtag and Bobtail
peered out onto our floral carpets and line of Toby jugs. Transmission did not
start until teatime, and there was a break, during which the screen went dark,
so housewives could get the dinner on. Mostly you had to rely on the wireless
for in-house entertainment.