Phantoms on the Bookshelves (8 page)

One final curiosity: lists. I have spent a good deal of my time drawing up lists of books to read or re-read, or of the few indispensable books I would take to a desert island. I am not of course alone in this. Raymond Queneau once edited a book consisting of nothing but booklists,
Pour une bibliothèque idéale
(The ideal library), in which about sixty individuals, writers and others, named their favorite books. Those consulted were arranged alphabetically, from Raymond Abellio to Edmond Vermeil, by way of Gaston Bachelard, Paul Claudel, Georges Dumézil, Michel Leiris and Jean Rostand; the book ended with the hundred most mentioned titles. Well, I conscientiously put a line through the ones I had read (I can't remember when I did this), marking with a star those that were in my personal pantheon. There are nine titles there which appear not to have been read at all: the plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes (read since);
Discourse on Method
by Descartes; the
plays of Marivaux, Tacitus's
Annals
and
Histories
, Marx's
Das Kapital
, Voltaire's
Correspondence
; the
Thousand and One Nights
; and
The Dark Night of the Soul
by St John of the Cross. I'm not sure I will ever get round to reading these.

Henry Miller ended
The Books in My Life
(I read this in the French edition,
Livres de ma vie
, published by Gallimard, 1957) with a list of “books read”—though how can one be sure? On the list of “books I still intend to read,” he lists exactly thirty-four, which is not a great many for a man who was only sixty-six at the time, but then he does add a dozen authors whose complete works he means to read: Jean-Paul Richter, Novalis, Croce, Toynbee, Léon Bloy, and so on, which gave him more scope. Finally came a list of “friends whom I acquired through books” (there are 117 of these, accompanied by the name of the town and country where they were living at the time).

Talk about lists and you think of collections. I am really neither a collector nor a bibliophile, but I do have one pathological habit: I hate having incomplete series. The itch starts if I happen to have acquired a few books in a certain collection: let's say the Cahiers de l'Herne, starting with a one-volume reprint of titles by Céline in 1972; the photographic albums accompanying Pléiade editions, which I have collected since I bought the one on Apollinaire published in 1971; a few books from “A la promenade” (Stock, 1927 for the first series and 1946 for the second, edited by Marcel Arland), a foray suggested to me by André Mauge, the delicious translator into French of the works of Primo Levi; the
series
Peintres vus par eux-mêmes et leurs contemporains
(Painters as seen by themselves and their contemporaries) published by Pierre Cailler; and there are others. Then what happens is that I feel impelled to buy more from the collection, until there remain only a few titles to make the series complete. But the search for these titles can take years and raise false hopes (a book appears in a second-hand catalog, but when you chase it up, it has just been sold). In some rare cases, you draw a complete blank. After fruitless attempts over the years to obtain volume one of the
Van Gogh
in the Pierre Cailler series, since I already owned volume two, it turned out that it had never existed! The opposite is more likely; so the second volume of George Painter's biography of Chateaubriand—of which the first,
Les orages désirés
(
The Longed-for Tempests
), was published by Gallimard in a translation by Suzanne Nétillard, in 1979—never appeared either, but that was not particularly regretted. The first volume was no more than a redundant paraphrase of Chateaubriand's
Mémoires d'outre-tombe (The Memoirs of Chateaubriand
) and must have failed to sell many copies, so the publisher was not inclined to take it any further.

The weirdest thing that can happen is that at the end of this kind of long search, a few weeks after finally tracking down the volume you were after, you come across another copy of the longed-for book—and at a better price, of course! This happened to me with the
Art of Chinese Landscape Painting
by Anil de Silva, the French edition of which was the last in the series of fifty books on “L'art dans le monde” (Art in the world) published by Albin Michel
between 1960 and 1977. It is very tempting on such occasions to buy the additional copy, although you no longer have any use for it, in homage to the years of the chase.

Libraries, like museums, are a refuge from old age, sickness and death.

JEAN GRENIER

In my study, the bookshelves are all devoted to art history. On my right, when I am sitting at my desk, are normal-sized books in alphabetical order of author, from Laurie Schneider Adams,
The Methodologies of Art
(and this may be an example of a category mistake since Schneider is, on reflection, more likely to be the first part of a double surname, not a second first name, but it's too late now) to Ludovico Zorzi (
Représentation picturale et représentation théatrale
(Pictorial and theatrical representation). On my left are the big art books. They have ended up invading every wall, pushing out any posters, engravings or pictures, and have spilled over into the room next door, where I keep catalogs and thematic studies, as well as works on architecture, photography and all kinds of coffee-table books. Monographs are classified in alphabetical order and by school (French, Italian, German, and so on), to make it easier to find them. Thematic works are grouped according to links which are sometimes a bit wayward. So
Metropolitan Cats
by John P.
O'Neill and
Le Chat et la palette
(
The Painted Cat
) by Elisabeth Foucart-Walter and Pierre Rosenberg rub shoulders quite amicably with
Le Chien dans l'art
(
The Dog in Art
) by Robert Rosenblum. Books on Saint Sebastian or Mary Magdalen sit alongside a Rath Museum catalog of an exhibition on Cleopatra and
La Calomnie d'Apelle
(The calumny of Apelles) by Jean-Michel Massing. But the location of
L'Art et le temps, regards sur la quatrième dimension
(Art and time: views of the fourth dimension), a collective work edited by Michel Baudson, or
Le Monde à l'envers
(The world upside down) by Frédéric Tristan could only be the result of an arbitrary decision. Not to mention learned journals, in a field where recent research is often communicated in a short article of a few pages. If I have a whole run of a periodical title, like the 158 numbers of
La Revue de l'art
(Art Review) that's straightforward enough, but what am I to do with one-off issues of the occasional journal like the number 5–6 of
Macula
or the three issues I happen to own of
La Part de l'oeil
(The eye's share)?

The art books are in my study for purely practical reasons in the first instance: it's the only room in the house that is not affected by damp, whatever the season. But there's another aspect: the visual pleasure to be found when working alone. These books often have an illustration on the spine, and the titles instantly bring other images to mind. So when I am sitting in front of my computer, I can read titles like
Mantegna and the Bridal Chamber, The strange case of Félix Vallotton, King René and his age, Oudry's Animals
or
De Staël: from line to color
. I have only to see the name of an
artist (Georges Seurat say, or Jacapo da Pontormo) to see a flow of images which spring to mind as soon as I read the few syllables making up the title: the name of an artist is pregnant with all his or her works. Books which are text-only do not always conjure up images, because words make the images more fleeting. Reading the title
Madame Bovary
, given the reader's freedom of imagination and the many extraordinary scenes in the novel, somehow does not offer the same wealth of visual image.

Anyone interested in art and who has collected books about it immediately encounters two problems. The first is financial. Art books cost on average three or four times as much as other books—sometimes far more. And they never come out in cheap paperback form. Then once they are out of print, it is unusual for them to be reprinted. So their price on the second-hand market can shoot up. You therefore regret not having bought them at the time, which encourages you not to make the same mistake again; consequently you end up buying a great many books, so as not to feel later that you missed the boat. There's no end to it. As for exhibition catalogs, by definition, they are practically never reprinted once the exhibition has closed. So just to give one example, I don't possess, for some long-forgotten reason, the catalog of the exhibition
Paris-New York
which was in the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1977. Yes, I do own an edition which Gallimard published in 1991, but that only makes things worse, because it's in a smaller format and the cover is plastic, so it spoils my set of this series of exhibitions (
Paris-Berlin, Paris-Moscow, Paris-Paris
). The
trouble is that the original would now cost me at least 450 euros (the equivalent of 2,950 francs!): in other words, ten or twelve times the 250 or 300 francs it would have cost when it came out. So now, when an interesting exhibition opens, how can I hesitate about buying the catalog? It could even be considered money-saving! The taste for art books requires the income of a bibliophile, whereas the true lovers of these books are often short of money.

The second problem is their size and shape—generally irregular—and it means you have to shelve them in rather haphazard fashion, which complicates any thematic arrangement. So my copy of the French version of
The Age of the Grand Tour
by Anthony Burgess and Francis Haskell is problematic, not only because it has two authors and because of its subject, but also because of its format which is, Italian-style, 34 centimeters by 48.5. Consequently, I am the only person who knows where to find it—on the bookcase reserved for odd formats, which therefore holds a completely heterogeneous selection of titles—and more importantly,
why
it will be there.

Why do I have all these picture books? The first explanation is personal and anecdotal, but deeper than it might first appear. When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I was treated to the ritual visit to Paris for a boy from the provinces. I conscientiously visited Napoleon's tomb in the Invalides, and the Place du Tertre in Montmartre, and climbed to the second story of the Eiffel Tower—on foot to save the price of the lift (the worst bit was going down again!). I marveled at the fountains in Versailles, and spent half a
day in the Louvre. When I got home, all I had retained from the hours spent in the museum was the memory of one picture: the
Mona Lisa
. Mortified, I understood that without preparation, without apprenticeship, without reading, you don't see anything when you visit an art gallery. I discovered after that that if you read certain art historians, they would shed as much light on the past, with as much ingenuity, as much subtlety and color as historians in other fields. I still thrill to remember the way Panofsky showed me the links between scholasticism and Gothic architecture, or Millard Meiss explained the influence of the Black Death of 1348 on painting in Florence and Siena. And if I turned to the artists, once I had overcome the difficulty of getting to see their works, there was as much enlightenment to be found about their lives and their deepest emotions as from writers. One had to
learn
how to read images—just as I had had to learn how to read words—to be able to gain profit from them. (“Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands of people can think for one who can see”—John Ruskin.) After that it was simply a matter of traveling, talking to people, joining in conversations, and reading books.

All these books have several functions. The images may accompany a theoretical or historical text—a period in art history, an individual artist, studies by Jakob Burckhardt, Heinrich Wölfflin, Elie Faure, Charles Sterling, Henri Focillon or Francis Haskell. Or they may be the main reason for having the book: to be able to discover or rediscover a work of art without leaving home. Of course, the images don't really speak unless you have physically
seen the original—an exhibition catalog only truly comes to life when you have been in the presence of the works. But they also bring you all the images that are too far away or inaccessible, the ones you will never see, and for which the reproduction is the only way you can grasp them.

The problem is that here too there are no limits to one's curiosity. Images send you on to other images, artists to other artists, periods come one after another or echo each other, all with their cargo of art works. From prehistoric art to Land Art by way of Praxiteles, Roman wall paintings, the portraits of Fayoum, Romanesque frescoes, Fontainebleau School engravings, baroque ceilings, ukiyo-e woodcuts, the churches of Minas Gerais, nineteenth-century American still lifes, not to speak of all the most obvious and unavoidable schools, the universe of forms is infinite. And historical approaches are always being modified by new discoveries (through archaeology, or documents, or even the reappearance of works once believed lost). As for interpretations, however brilliant and convincing, they seem inevitably to be disputed sooner or later. Panofsky's brilliant reading (
Studies in Iconology
) of the mysterious
Venus and Cupid
in the National Gallery in London has been contested by Maurice Brock, and that reading will no doubt be demolished in its turn. But no matter! In art history, the interest of all these interpretations and theories is not that they should be definitive, but that they should be coherent and relevant enough to make us really look at a work, and by so doing, to have some chance of appropriating it for ourselves.

I cannot leave out the memory of those magical places which have sent shivers down my spine. Just to mention a few, purely autobiographical experiences, not the most famous, and confined to France: seeing
The Descent from the Cross
in the crypt of the church in Chaource; the Isenheim altarpiece in Colmar; the priory of Serrabone in the Pyrenees; the Romanesque frescoes of Tavant; the Apocalypse tapestry in Angers; Fouquet's
Pietà
in Nouans; the Gallic ex-votos in the Bargoin museum in Clermont-Ferrand;
Irene Tending St Sebastian
by Trophime Bigot in the museum in Bordeaux; Puy-en-Velay cathedral, one summer's day when the lower doors were open and the steps up to the nave became a well of light. The emotions I might have felt then naturally call for their extension through a presence of some kind in my library, and perhaps require to be better understood by acquiring a scholarly commentary.