The House of Twenty Thousand Books (2 page)

Coming separately – to be delivered personally by my mother the next time she visited me – was an 1841 fourth edition of de Tocqueville’s classic text
Democracy in America
, published in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, the original tracing paper map of his American journeys bound into the volume as accompaniment to the thick, rough-hewn, water-damaged printed pages. The spine of the thick black binding was missing, and the inside of the binding that remained was stained brown, the shadow of a
now-missing
library-borrowing list, perhaps. The exquisitely thin map folded up next to the title page showed the United States when the states ended at Missouri and Arkansas, and much of the
south-west
on the map was dyed yellow, indicating that it belonged to Mexico. The land of Alaska was coloured pink and listed simply as ‘Russian America’. There is no California in this world, no Nebraska, or Arizona. Texas’s population is listed on the map as twenty thousand.

Also delivered by my mother: an early edition of
The Working-Class Movement in America
, co-authored by Marx’s daughter Eleanor and her common-law husband Edward Aveling, which had been owned by Herbert Gladstone, son of the British Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. And a little red Workers’ Library book,
Memories of Lenin
, by the revolutionary leader’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya.

Fifty volumes, maybe one hundred, out of the thousands in that house. Mere fragments. But those fragments told a story, they delineated a set of core beliefs – philosophical schools of thought, explorations of democracy and of revolution – ways of understanding human behaviour and human society. They were Chimen’s guides through life, his search for meaning, for purpose, for structure in human existence. They were like a seed bank out
of which his world could be resurrected, or shards from an archaeological dig – the older layers buried underneath newer, fresher levels – allowing vanished histories to come back to life.

‘Whatsoever moved Saint Jerome to call the journeys of the Israelites in the wilderness, mansions’, wrote the metaphysical poet John Donne in his eerie sermon, ‘Death’s Duel’, written shortly before his death in 1631, ‘the word…signifies but a journey, but a peregrination’. For Chimen, too, his mansion of ideas, his House of Books, was more a journey, a never-ending voyage of discovery, than a physical abode. Perhaps that was why he cared so little for its creature comforts, living with hopelessly outdated plumbing, a leaky roof, flaking window frames, and floorboards, hidden under fraying rugs, that were more coarse planks than carefully carpentered, tightly fitted, floor slats. His home was to be experienced like a journey to far-off lands – difficult, challenging, unpredictable – rather than to be revelled in like a luxurious penthouse flat.

Over the course of decades Chimen had become so addicted to the printed page, to the texture of his books, to the feel of old manuscripts and to the material contained within his written correspondence, that he ended up literally surrounding himself with walls of words. They provided protection from the madness of the world outside – or, at the very least, a road map for navigating the chaos.

By the end of his life, every single room in the house, except the bathroom and kitchen, was lined from floor to ceiling with shelves double-stacked with books, with just a few bare spots left in which paintings and photographs hung. If you pulled a few bricks out of the wall of books, you found a second, hidden wall behind it. And, when the shelves were filled, first the floors and
then the tables succumbed to great, twisting piles of tomes. In a home which remained largely unrenovated during the sixty-six years that Chimen inhabited it, which became progressively more dilapidated with each passing year, ideas were the mortar holding Chimen’s biblio-bricks together: notions of progress, understanding of civility and culture, explanations of how and why great cultures and civilisations decline, theories of history.

As the House of Books rose, volume by volume, shelf by shelf, room by room, so the connections became more complex. Adam Smith’s free market ideas segued into the economic theories of Marx’s
Das Kapital
. Macaulay’s and Carlyle’s theories of history stood alongside Hegel’s dialectic, Marx’s notions of structure and superstructure with Frantz Fanon’s rants about the cleansing role of blood-letting. The conservative late-eighteenth century historian and parliamentarian Edmund Burke paved the way for the anti-Revolutionary French cleric Joseph de Maistre, whose dark views on the human condition in turn led to an intellectual movement that eventually culminated in Fascism and the maniacal theories embodied in Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
. Nineteenth-century working men in England protesting against harsh conditions in the factories of the Midlands shared a shelf with
fellow-nineteenth
-century Russian anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin. Above them would be perched twentieth-century Russian Bolsheviks. Plato could serve as the foundation for the medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides, who found echoes centuries later in Spinoza; and Spinoza’s
Ethics
helped hold up secular liberal theorists such as John Locke, Montesquieu and Tom Paine. Eighteenth-century Jewish mystics shared a wall with
nineteenth-century
English utopian socialists. And so on.

Hillway held two libraries. The first was Chimen’s socialist collection; the second his Judaica volumes. The Judaica collection, even after five thousand books and two thousand offprints had, in the 1980s, been removed to join other volumes in a specially endowed section of the library in the imposing nineteenth-century buildings at University College London, was utterly comprehensive, detailing every conceivable aspect of Jewish life over the centuries. Of the seven thousand items purchased by the university, his colleague Mark Geller, in internal correspondence with the university’s Provost, wrote that they made up ‘probably the best Jewish History library in Europe’. The socialist collection was in all likelihood the most complete privately-owned collection of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialist literature anywhere in the world. Certainly it was the most complete collection of its kind in Britain.

Taken as a whole, these two separate, but interconnected, libraries were of vast range, the fruit of a collector’s obsession nurtured in the late 1940s by Chimen’s friendship with the rare book dealer Heinrich Eisemann. A German Jew, Eisemann had learned the mysteries of his trade at the hands of
fin de siècle
experts in Frankfurt, Paris and Rome, and had been the novelist Thomas Mann’s book-dealer. He had left Germany prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, settling first in the East End of London and later moving to the more affluent St. John’s Wood neighbourhood. The German refugee knew so much about his trade that, Chimen recalled in a conversation with Eisemann’s grandson sixty years later, when he walked into a Sotheby’s auction room all the top buyers would stand up out of respect.

Under Eisemann’s tutelage, Chimen made connections with dealers in England, including a number of specialists along the Farringdon Road, and Maggs Bros. Ltd, dealers in ‘rare books, autographs, manuscripts, engravings’, who boasted a fashionable Berkeley Square address and counted royalty in England, Spain
and Portugal among their clients. He established relations, too, with dealers in Israel, Denmark, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Holland and the United States. He would order books by mail, and, in a somewhat chaotic manner, kept all of the receipts and invoices. In bureaux in his house, in random folders at his university office, he would stuff all of his correspondence with these dealers. Requests for payment; disputes over lost cheques; notes informing Chimen of rare books that had just gone on the market. So important were these book-dealing connections that, over the years, he filled in several address books just with their contact information. When Chimen travelled to America in 1948, Eisemann also happened to be there. One evening, he called Chimen to his hotel room in New York to show him something. There, in the room, was a hand-written manuscript, a complete movement from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, just purchased by Eisemann on behalf of an American collector. ‘The greatest symphony ever written’, Chimen remembered near the end of his life, his reedy, ancient voice still conveying the awe he felt at that moment. ‘It was something exceptional’.

Well into the 1950s, Chimen regarded himself as Eisemann’s apprentice, acting as his literary procurer. In one typical transaction, using £500 put up by Eisemann and an anonymous investor, Chimen bought five letters by Karl Marx, and one from Marx’s wife, Jenny, in 1951. The conditions were as follows: if Eisemann could not re-sell the letters, Chimen would refund him half of the money that he had put up; but, if they sold for a profit, Chimen agreed that the profit would ‘be equally shared between the anonymous person who lent for the purpose of the letters two hundred and fifty pounds, yourself, and myself’. At some point, however, Chimen gained both the knowledge and the confidence to strike out on his own. He would, on occasion, still act on Eisemann’s behalf – such as when he travelled to Stuttgart in 1957, to evaluate and purchase a rare Hebrew Bible (Eisemann, who
had lost many relatives in the Holocaust, refused to set foot in Germany after the Second World War) – but as the years progressed he expected more of a share in the profits. Eventually, Eisemann slid into senescence, recognising neither Chimen nor the treasures that, together, they had bought and sold; Chimen was left to succeed without his mentor. He did so with a passion.

That passion produced something extraordinary: an architecture to the House of Books that was infinitely complex, its crystalline structure largely obscured to the untrained eye. When an estate agent came around to evaluate the property shortly after Chimen’s death, he looked at all the books, laughed, and said that my father and aunt should consider selling the whole lot to one of those dealers who take stuff in bulk, sight unseen.
You never know, all that old paper might be worth a few bob
, was the clear implication.
But you had better clean it out quickly so that
prospective buyers can get a glimpse of the size of the place
. With some knowledge of the subject, however, with a bit of deductive effort one could actually work out, through the architecture of the library, how Chimen’s interests had evolved. Moving from room to room at 5 Hillway, one could travel through hundreds of years of European political history, and thousands of years of philosophy and of Jewish history; one could see which individuals and which events particularly enthralled Chimen; which artists and poets inspired him; which languages he understood; and which cities and their publishing houses especially intrigued him. And, as one came to understand
when
each room was populated with books, so one could get a sense of how Chimen’s interests and priorities had changed over the decades.

Some of Hillway’s rooms had, by the time my generation came on the scene, ceased to have any functional purpose; the bibliographic flora had simply run rampant. In the diabolically cluttered little upstairs ‘office’ or ‘study’ – a room that Mimi’s mother, Bellafeigel, had inhabited in the 1950s for the last four
years of her life – spirals of reference books, Jewish art volumes and bound collections of newspapers reached up toward the ceiling, surrounded by mountains of miscellaneous papers and handwritten correspondence. At some point, the room had become simply unusable; Chimen’s response had been to lock it from the outside and hide it away from view. It was, he mischievously told his friend David Mazower (the great-grandson of the Yiddish playwright and novelist Scholem Asch, whom Chimen had known in London decades earlier) when diving into one of the piles to find a bound volume of rare Yiddish newspapers, and into another to retrieve an armful of extraordinarily precious Bundist pamphlets, printed in late-Tsarist Russia on onion-skin paper, ‘the jungle room’. He always carried little black leather pouches full of numerous keys – to safes, to hidden rooms, to filing cabinets. Only he knew which keys opened which locks, so it was a sure bet that no one would trespass into his deathtrap of an office accidentally. That said, when one of my cousins
did
sneak in behind him on one occasion, she saw him disappear into a tunnel through the piles that, she swore later, was literally carved out just to fit his body. In that room, after his death, buried under the stacks of papers, was found old Russian folk art, as well as a small eighteenth-century Armenian Bible, perhaps four or five inches high and almost as thick, posted to Chimen decades earlier, the envelope in which it was contained never opened.

Elsewhere, order still seemed to reign. In the smaller bedroom to the rear of the house – the room that had once belonged to Jenny, my Dad’s younger sister, and which was, as a result, not vacated until the late 1960s – were the catalogues and other tools of the trade that Chimen needed to consult when working for the auction house Sotheby’s in the last decades of his career. That was the room I slept in when I was a child spending the weekend with my grandparents. On a wall opposite the bed hung a copy of a
Marc Chagall painting; it showed a whimsical scene of a circus, the clowns in pointed hats floating through their magical landscape. Next to it was another Chagall, this one portraying a beautiful woman holding what looked like an urn filled with water in her right hand, her left hand raised skyward, towards an orb, just out of reach. She was surrounded by other women, each of them with their own unexplained circles to carry. In the corners of the painting were what appeared to be olive branches. In the top left, a dove fluttered its wings. Years later, leafing through a Liberal Haggadah one Seder night, I came across a reproduction of that same painting. It was titled
Miriam the Prophet at the Red Sea
.

As the number of books expanded, ultimately the order became more tenuous, more precarious. In the airing closets, cupboards and wardrobes around the house, more random heaps of books were stored. And on the dining room and living room floors unstable mounds of additional volumes were gathered.