TLS: Freelance

by Michael Greenberg

Lately I've become self-conscious about the books crammed into my apartment.
Many are simply ones I didn't like enough to give away. I have Celine's novel North, for instance, but not Death on the Instalment Plan or Journey to the End of the Night. Other books I've hung on to because I haven't read them yet, but do I really intend to crack Iris Murdoch's A Message to the Planet? If one's personal library is a self-portrait, then mine is distinguished by what isn't there, like the neighbourhood library of my childhood whose shelves, due to censorship and theft, were half empty. Filled with down-at-heel types trying to cop a nap, the message coming from the Rockaway branch of the New York Public Library was that reading is a waste of time, an occupation for the powerless and unemployed.
Part of the librarian's job was to shake them awake. "If you don't read, I'm afraid you'll have to leave." At which the poor slacker would open some enormous encyclopedia and stare miserably at the page. Encyclopedias captured my attention as well, because they encouraged one to ingest information like a tourist. In his recent book The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel points out that, taken to an extreme, they present an impossible notion of order. China's Great Illustrated Imperial Encyclopedia of Past and Present Times, published in 1726, is divided into more than 10,000 sections. "The section on Human Relations lists the biographies of people according to their position in society, including slaves, sages, playboys, tyrants, supernatural beings, great drinkers, notable archers and widows who did not marry again."
Intrigued by the story of Manguel's library, I telephoned him at his house in the small town of Mondion, western France. He speaks a careful, soothing, mysteriously accented English, learned, he tells me, from a governess in Tel Aviv where the family lived while his father was Argentina's ambassador to Israel. "When I was seven, we returned to Buenos Aires, and I picked up Spanish at school." I imagined him, aged sixteen, reading Kipling to Jorge Luis Borges in Borges's modest sitting room "behind a curtained doorway" in his apartment.
Borges had plucked Manguel from a bookstore he frequented where Manguel worked as a clerk. "He asked me if I was busy in the evenings because he needed -he said this very apologetically -someone to read to him, since his mother now tired easily." Manguel soon realized he was one of many who fulfilled this service. "Borges used people as his notepads, which was fine with me. He wasn't one to encourage intimacy. Do you remember the story in which he describes 'one of those English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and end with no need for conversation'?"
Borges's interactive life as a reader, his vision of "paradise in the shape of a library", and of the universe itself as a single infinite text, chimed with Manguel's earliest sensations with his books. "Experience came to me first through books", he writes in A History of Reading. "When later in life, I came across a circumstance similar to one I had read about, it usually had the slightly disappointing feeling of deja vu." He couldn't bear to throw away any of his books, "not even the bad ones", and after fifty years his library swelled to more than 30,000 volumes. To house them, he rebuilt the crumbling fifteenth-century barn on his property in Mondion. But how to impose order on this reflection of himself? "Organizing my books was like writing an autobiography", he says, an anxiety compensated, perhaps, by the satisfaction of putting things in their proper place. This too comes with a dose of ambivalence: unpacking his books, Walter Benjamin regretted "the mild boredom of order" that would be forced on them once they were on their shelves.
For Manguel, order begets its own chaos; no category is final or self enclosed.
"Among the subject headings in the Library of Congress are banana research, boots and shoes in art, chickens in folklore . . . . It's as if the contents of the books have taken a back seat to the library's invention of thematic anthologies."
Ultimately, he decided to organize his books by language, then immediately set out to "restore chaos", filing them according to his private understanding of the world. "Why stash the works of Saint Augustine in the Christianity section rather than under Literature in Latin or Early Medieval Civilizations? Why place Carlyle's French Revolution in Literature in English rather than in European History, and not Simon Schama's Citizens?"
A few days after our telephone conversation, I met Manguel in the Trustees room at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, with its Beaux-Arts fireplace, golden Flemish tapestries and blooming chandelier. Paul Holdengraber, who presides over what has become the most engrossing series of literary events in New York, "Live at the NYPL", had invited him to take part in one of his conversations. "We come into the world as readers", Manguel said, "with the impulse to decipher, to find narratives.
Stupidity is something that has to be learned." He is perfectly groomed, bespectacled and bearded, with a faintly nostalgic air. Comparing the Library of Alexandria to the World Wide Web, he says, "one aspired to include everything, the other will include anything, without context, a constant present, which for Medieval scholars was a definition of hell". For readers, he pointed out, the computer is a technological step backwards, since it replaces the codex with the scroll. "The time has come to refuse to buy from book chains or giant online outlets." Later, Holdengraber tells me that to have copies of Manguel's book on hand for signing, he had to shop at Amazon Canada, since The Library at Night has not yet found a US publisher.
Afterwards, Manguel and I exchanged memories of Borges, whom I met briefly while living in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. "His personal library was quite small", Manguel said. "He kept none of his own books. My passion for collecting amused him." Manguel invited me to come to France to see his magnificent barn library for myself. "Come when the weather's mild. We'll sit outside in the garden. The books have a way of making visitors go silent."