Phantoms on the Bookshelves (13 page)

The prince loved nothing so much as reading and writing and he would devote himself to his passion every evening, on dismounting from his horse. He was a talented poet. When he died suddenly, his wife, also a princess from the reigning dynasty, ordered his slaves to collect all Mahmud's books in the courtyard inside the palace. And there she chanted a funeral dirge, as she slowly threw into the great fountain, one after another, all the books which had deprived her of his love.

There are other phantoms too. Diderot had the double good fortune to live to see Catherine the Great of Russia buying his entire library, while allowing him the run of it, and also receiving 1000 livres a year for “the trouble and care he will give to shape this library.” And still in Russia, Varlam Shalamov, who spent much of his life in Stalin's labor camps, starts his little book of which the French title is
Mes Bibliothèques
(My libraries): “At three years old, the earliest I can remember, I owned the first and last library I
have ever had: it consisted of two books
Ah-ee, Du-du!
and Tolstoy's
Alphabet.
” He ends the book, which is in fact an account of the rare and precious occasions when he was able to read during his twenty or so years in the Gulag, with a sentence as simple as it is heavy with sadness: “To my regret, I have never owned a library of my own.”

There are some accidental librarians—they succeeded where Pessoa failed. Marcel Duchamp was employed at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris for the two years before his departure for the United States in 1915, and for four years in the early 1920s, André Breton was a part-time librarian—at a salary of 500 francs a month—for Jacques Doucet. And I cannot resist the anecdote, also in the twentieth century, of Henri Matisse, who, having run out of money in 1903, applied for the post of “controller of the law on the poor” because he was intrigued by the job title. It would have brought him 1200 francs a year if he had been successful—but only three of the one hundred candidates were chosen; and despite having a number of people put in a word for him, he was not one of them. Thus does our destiny hang by a thread—one of the great artists of the twentieth century might have become a Sunday painter.

In June 1784, at a dinner given by Sebastiano Foscarini, Venetian ambassador to Vienna, Giacomo Casanova made the acquaintance of Count Joseph Charles Waldstein, the emperor's chamberlain. Won over by the brilliant conversation of the adventurer, who was like himself a freemason, Waldstein proposed that
he take the post of librarian of the 40,000 volumes in his castle at Dux in Bohemia (today Duchkov in the Czech Republic). Casanova, who had just been taken on by Foscarini to “write dispatches,” and who was—as usual—deep in amorous intrigues, did not take up the offer. But, the following year the ambassador died and Casanova, having failed to find suitable employment, went to Töplitz, as others might to Canossa, to meet the chamberlain, who offered him the job again, at a salary of 1000 florins a year (about 30,000 Euros in today's money). In the event, Casanova did not find it easy to live in the lugubrious castle, so far from his past exploits. Despite various attempts to flee, he ended up spending the last thirteen years of his life there. Was he disagreeable to the rest of the staff, as the Prince of Ligne, Waldstein's uncle suggests? “Not a day went past when there wasn't some uproar in the household over his coffee, or his milk, or the dish of macaroni he insisted on.” Or did he just become a scapegoat for his fellow employees? Both, probably. Casanova in decline must have been odious, and the count's household staff were no doubt on the rustic side. It was boredom that drove him to write his
Story of My Life
; boredom and the hope of escape in imagination from loneliness and old age, to relive through the pen the amorous adventures, now no longer possible in reality. (“My memories are more exciting than the life I am leading now, madam,” he wrote to a correspondent.) Casanova does not appear to have made much use of the castle library, which would have enabled him to ornament his preface with impressive quotations
from such as Cicero, Petrarch, Virgil, Horace, Pliny, Martial or Cornelius Nepos. A life made up of dalliance, worldly pleasures and trivialities was in those days no obstacle to showing off one's learning—on the contrary. He died at Dux on June 4, 1798, and was buried in St Barbara's churchyard. A few years earlier, Lessing, the author of
Laokoon
, had been obliged, in order to survive, to take a post as librarian for the duke of Brunswick at Wolfenbüttel. His eight-year stay there was extremely troubled. He lost his wife in childbirth and the baby died too; but here it was that he also wrote his most famous play,
Emilia Galotti.

Another sad fate was that of Herman Melville. In 1853, after the failure of his novel
Pierre,
he tried to find a consular posting (Honolulu, Florence, Antwerp, Glasgow). To no avail. Not even with the support of his father-in-law, Judge Shaw, of Richard Dana, author of the successful book
Two Years Before the Mast
, of his uncle Pierre Gansevoort, and of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had himself been appointed American consul in Liverpool the year before. To cap it all, a fire at his publishers, Harper's, destroyed the plates of his books and virtually all the copies they had in stock. He tried again for the Florence post in 1860 and once more had political backing. He was received at the White House by Lincoln, who had just been elected, but he failed that time too. “A job, who will give me a job?” Not until 1866 did he manage to get the humblest of “grace and favor” posts as a customs inspector. For twenty years or so, he paced the quaysides in New York and watched pulling in and out of harbor the ships on which he had begun his sailing
and writing career. One might mention his strange relationship with Hawthorne, fifteen years his elder, to whom he dedicated
Moby-Dick
and whom he visited in Liverpool in 1856, both on the way to the Holy Land and on the way back. One might go on to wonder at the unusual work,
Hawthorne,
published by Henry James in 1879, fifteen years after Hawthorne's death, in the series
English Men of Letters
. This is ostensibly a homage, but on closer inspection it turns out to be a subtle and smiling execution of the writer who had imprudently preceded the first truly European American author: Henry James himself.

To return to Portugal, in the month of November 1983, where I began this book, I had gone to Cintra on the track of the love affair between Carlos Eduardo da Maia and Maria Eduarda, the tragic lovers created by Eça de Queiros. And in Coimbra, I decided not to make use of a telephone number, which I had in my pocket: it was that of Miguel Torga, whose books
Arche
and
En franchise intérieure, pages de journal 1933–1977
(Intimate frankness, pages from my journal) I had just read with pleasure. People had told me that he was very approachable and spoke French (his wife was Belgian) but I felt too strongly the fear of creating an artificial situation by bothering someone because one admires his books, and of the inevitable conversation that would follow. So I did nothing about it. I still don't regret it. In Buçaco, up above Coimbra, I had a strange “Valery Larbaud” moment. And when I got back to France I realized that the text I had irresistibly been reminded of there,
200 chambres, 200 salles de bains
(200 bedrooms, 200 bathrooms),
which Valery Larbaud had dedicated to Jean Paulhan in 1926, had indeed been written in this former hunting-lodge of the kings of Portugal, nowadays the Palace Hotel, remarkably placed as it is in the middle of a forest fragrant with rare essences.

I still have a little dictionary of conversational Portuguese, which I found in a second-hand shop in the Baixa district of Lisbon. This
Guia da conversaçao Portuguez-Francez para uso dos viantes et dos estudiantes
(Portuguese-French conversational guide for travelers and students) by J. I. Roquette, was published, the imprint tells us, by “Ch. Fouraut & son, having acquired the international bookshop of Ch. Hingray, 47 rue Saint-André des Arts in Paris,” though
when
I don't know, since it carries no publication date. But it must have been before 1888, when a certain Mlle Julietta de Campos Vidal wrote her name all over the title page. This is a handy-size little book containing a vocabulary (beginning as is only proper with God, the Creator and Christ:
Deos / Dieu, O Creador / Le Créateur / OCristo / Le Christ
). That is followed by several hundred pages of improbable conversations arranged by situation. So on p. 267, in a paragraph purported to be taking place in a garden (
Um jardin / Un jardin
) are elements of a conversation that only the most extraordinary circumstances could have made possible:

Allow me to make a bouquet of flowers / Willingly and I will help you / Let's start with roses / Put in some double violets / Don't forget the geranium which smells so good /
Although without a scent, the dahlia is pleasing to the eye / I have some of every colour / Do you like carnations?/Yes, I like to see them, but I don't like the smell / Here's a charming bouquet / All that's missing is some mock orange-blossom.

Or again on p. 199 in a chapter on restaurants (
Uma Casa de pasto/Un restaurateur
):

These sweetbreads are too salty / Make us a lettuce salad / And put in some nasturtiums and hard-boiled eggs / This vinegar is worthless / This oil has a very strong smell / But gentlemen, it comes from Italy / Quite possibly, but it must have left its native land a long time ago.

With that last exchange, one senses the pedagogue's temptation to dramatize the conversations, deviating from his primary task. Throughout the text, little penciled crosses at regular intervals must mark the stages, no doubt daily, by which young Mlle de Campos Vidal learned what “real” French conversation was like.

The books one buys in second-hand stores, because they have long gone out of print, encourage this kind of discovery. So to take one example, a recent assignment obliged me to re-read a copy of Degas's
Letters
(Grasset edition, 1931) in which I found that one of its previous owners had nit-picking tendencies. On the title page,
he or she has written in the date of printing, which in French books is always at the end of the volume; then on p. 61 has crossed out “2500 francs” and replaced it with 3000; has noted on p. 72, after Letter No. XLV, that in fact Letter XCV should have come there; has corrected “Hellen” to “‘Helleu” on p. 141; has re-labeled a portrait of Manzi by Degas as “pastel” instead of “oils”; and on p. 229 has judiciously corrected Madame to Mademoiselle, referring to Delphine Tasset, the daughter of the man who supplied the painter's photographical equipment—all of which suggests a certain knowledge of the subject. As for the previous owner of
Mr Degas, bourgeois de Paris
by Georges Rivière, he had a habit of drawing, and could not resist on three occasions reproducing in pencil on the margins or on the back of plates details from a Degas illustration opposite—always with a discreet and fairly sure hand.

The books in my library are like old houses, breathing the presence of the men and women who have lived there in the past, with their sufferings, their loves, their hates, their surprises and disappointments, their hopes and their resignation. On reflection, I have always lived in old buildings myself …

Several members of the “bookworm confraternity” have wasted time, which they might have devoted to healthier activities, reading through some of the above or checking details for me. For this and everything else over long years, I thank: Jean-François Barrielle, Pierre Boncenne, Jorge Coli, Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, René Hess, Gilles Lapouge, Michel Nadel and Jean-Jacques Terrin.

This book might seem a little unjust about libraries and their staff, who have at different times of my life gone out of their way to be courteous and helpful to me. So I would like to mention as fully as possible those which have provided me with books, and to whom I remain indebted: The Méjanes Library in Aix-en-Provence and the French National Library, as it used to be long ago, in the rue de Richelieu; the Doucet art library in the past, and the ever-welcoming municipal library in La Châtre (Indre) at present.

[Originals in English or English-language translations of French and other foreign language titles are cited in preference; where no English edition is readily available, the French edition is cited [translated title in brackets]; where possible, the most easily obtainable edition is cited.]

Adams, Laurie Schneider,
The Methodologies of Art
(Westview Press, 1996)

Alpers, Svetlana,
The Art of Describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century
(John Murray, 1983; Penguin, 1989)

Andri
č
, Ivo,
Conversation—Goya—Signs
, trans. Celia Hawkesworth and Andrew Harvey (Menard Press/SEES, 1993) [note: the publications in French translation by this author mentioned in the text may cover a somewhat different selection of stories]

Andri
č
, Ivo, ed. Radmila Gorup,
The Slave Girl and other stories about women
(Central European Press Classics, 2009)

Andric
č
, Ivo,
Signes au bord du Chemin
[Signs along the road] (L'Age d'homme, 1997)

Andri
č
, Ivo,
Contes au fil du temps
[Tales down the years] (Le Serpent à Plumes, 2005)

Anon.,
The Lascivious Monk
[L'Histoire de Dom B.] (W. H. Allen, 1988) Ashbee, Henry Spencer, see “Walter”

Auerbach, Erich,
Mimesis
, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 2003)

Balzac, Honoré de,
Père Goriot
, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Oxford University Press, 1999, and other editions)

Balzac,
La Théorie de la démarche
[Theory of walking] (Pandora éditeur, 1978)