Today is my sixtieth birthday and instead of writing mawkish (or even morbid) thoughts about what the years have taught me, or about how much I love my family and friends, or how I fear Brexit will wreak terrible damage on poor old Britain, I thought I’d attempt something very different: a celebration of my library, and what it means to me.
I own several thousand books. I’ve been collecting them since I was about 16 and I sometimes think that my brain has three distinct compartments: my family, my work, and whatever it is that I’m reading. Without a doubt, my library is my most treasured material possession. It starts in the dining room and runs chronologically, from the beginning right up to 1900. It kicks off, inevitably, with Homer and the Bible, soon followed by the Greek tragedies, and then Ovid, Tacitus, Pliny, Seneca, Livy, Plutarch and, of course, Virgil. They quickly rub shoulders with Dante and Boccaccio, Villon and Montaigne, Lope de Vega, Calderon and Cervantes, before we arrive in Britain with Beowulf, Gawain and Anglo-Saxon poetry, the medieval Mystery Cycles, and wonderful, sublime Chaucer. You’re then confronted by four big shelves full of Shakespeare, a living monument in his own right, but surrounded by lesser volumes of Marlowe, Donne, Middleton, Webster, J0hnson, Dekker, Ford and so on. And, after Paradise Lost, come the dramatists of the Restoration—Wycherley, Farquhar, Congreve and Vanbrugh—standing alongside thick single volumes of Pope and Dryden, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Keats, as well as translations of Goethe, Schiller and Kleist, Corneille, Racine and Molière, as well as Beaumarchais, Marivaux and Madame Lafayette. After that, of course, are the long uniform lines of Balzac and Dickens, Flaubert and Zola, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontës. Squeezed in between them are Turgenev and Edith Wharton, Benito Perez Galdos, Leopoldo Alas and Alessandro Manzoni, as well as Theodor Fontane, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and so many others. And finally, at the bottom, there’s a shelf packed with translations and studies of Ibsen and Chekhov.
For reasons I can’t quite justify, but which make me smile and others laugh, in the living room twentieth and twenty-first fiction is organised alphabetically. The vast majority is European, and much of it is in translation: there’s Zweig and Roth, Moravia and Morante, Malaparte and Thomas Mann, Grossman and Bulgakov, along with Victor Serge and Georges Simenon and Erich Maria Remarque. There’s a whole shelf of Brecht and Benjamin, but another of Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan and Somerset Maugham. There’s everything I could lay hands on by John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow as well as JM Coetzee, EL Doctorow, Alice Munro, Nadine Gordimer, Jiří Weil, Primo Levi, Patrick Hamilton, Arthur Miller, Heinrich Böll, WG Sebald and Günter Grass. And, of course, you can’t ignore several fat and forbidding slices of Joyce and Proust and Beckett and Strindberg and Schnitzler.
I use an antique glass-fronted bookcase (brought from Hamburg by my mother’s family in 1933) for my slightly random collection of history books, and I see to my despair that there are growing piles of unfiled books on an unused patch of floor. There’s also a wooden table groaning with new books which I’m yet to read. There are a further six or seven shelves for musical scores, literary criticism, photography, philosophy, psychiatry and collected essays. And if you go into my office at the back of the flat you’ll see a long wall of play texts, biographies, books about drama, and so. There’s another floor-to-ceiling bookcase consisting of random books that don’t seem to belong anywhere. And I should mention a midsize bookcase full of outdated reference books and the astonishing collection of German books that Klaus Schiller’s family took with them from Nazi Vienna in 1938, to which I happily give houseroom.
I live with these books every day of my life, and I love their smell, their calm, their heft. The colours of the spines of many of the old paperbacks have faded in the sunlight, sometimes almost completely, and it’s amazing to see the difference between them and the still brightly coloured covers. Then there are the ones which are all cracked, with the glue dried up and the pages come loose. And when I open them I see the faint pencil marks in the margins—sometimes an illegible word, or an exclamation mark—and notice the dollar bill acting as a bookmark in The Mill on the Floss, the bus ticket in Run Rabbit Run, the Turkish sand that falls out when I open Eugénie Grandet, or the battered and much scribbled over copy of Measure for Measure which I used when I directed it in the early 1980s. I love seeing how this library has been assembled in such peculiar bursts of fascination and interest, with old editions rubbing up against brand new ones, random acquisitions standing beside determined completism. I’m still half-way through my commitment to read all of Dickens: I’ve managed a good eight of them, and there they stand, battered but loved, while the others wait their turn silently, their shiny black spines ready to be broken. Or I recall that year I got so fascinated by the Spanish nineteenth-century novel that I gobbled up five of them in a row. But, meanwhile, other corners of the library lie forgotten—I’ve not read a word of Conrad for years, but I still have all the novels (yes, even The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’) and maybe in old age I’ll fall back in love with him and raise him from his slumbers.
There are some odd things. Thus, there are hundreds of (mostly German, but also Russian and Italian) books in response to the great twentieth century catastrophes, which is perhaps unsurprising from the son of a German Jewish refugee, but still notable. And, while there are many English writers from before 1945, most of my post-war novels are American. There are a handful of African writers—Chinua Achebe, above all—but not many, only the most iconic of Latin American novels and an almost complete absence of writers from that magnificent group of civilisations lying beyond the Urals. Most shameful of all is the fact that the vast majority (maybe as many as 90%) of my books were written by men, and for that I will rightly and inevitably be chastised. In my defence, you should consider that for the third year running I’ve been given a subscription to the New York Review Books utterly amazing ‘book club’, and every month I get sent a new book, so often by a writer I’ve never heard of, many of whom are women, and so, month by month, book by book, the horizons of my library are broadening.
The truth is that when I lie on my sofa and look at the groaning shelves, with their serried ranks of mostly paperback volumes, I see a whole set of friends, reminders of different times in my life, changing interests, evolving tastes. I will, of course, be accused of being canonical, and, to an extent, I take that, but I don’t deliberately exclude anything or refuse to acknowledge the existence or value of difference. I’m acutely aware that my interests (like anyone’s) are the product of my time and place, but what has been assembled here is the result of almost fifty years of enthusiasm and curiosity, not exclusion or snobbery. What intrigues me is the way that one area of interest suddenly inspires another, jumping across languages and cultures, but also upwards and downwards through the centuries. I regard my library as a living, breathing thing: it keeps growing, continuously overflowing its apparently tidy categories, with new recruits rested horizontally on top of the tightly packed upright soldiers, waiting one day for a new home. Not a week goes by when a book doesn’t get introduced, and I keep failing to do the long-promised purge, partly because so few would get the chop. And it’s this sensation of the never-ending pursuit that I find so addictive, so rewarding. I’ll never have read enough books; it’s impossible to read enough books. You’d need five lifetimes for that. But I’ll keep going
I’ve often detected a hint of gentle (and, no doubt, deserved) mockery at my devotion to my library; but, frankly, at the grand old age of 60 I’ve decided to ignore that and declare that it’s fundamental to who I am: a well-educated, well-read and well-cultured European, committed to doing whatever he can do to protect and preserve those endless golden threads of creativity, understanding and love that link us together, across the generations and cultures, right back to the beginning, and onwards to God knows when. My library is a tiny gesture of defiance against those who deny others a literary education or dismiss our extraordinary inheritance as elitist. It’s living proof that the world is bigger and more complex than the shallow certainties of so much political and cultural discourse. Silently it insists that there’s a world elsewhere, not just one written in foreign languages and alien cultures, but in the endless and mysterious vistas of the past.
Populists and demagogues on both sides despise the complexities and contradictions that such a library demands: they want us to be conformist consumers enraptured by the same products and ideas, untroubled by the grit in the oyster, the stubborn voice that refuses to fit in, the different and the strange. But the two volumes of astonishing Weimar diaries of Count Harry Kessler, let along the magisterial journals of the Goncourt Brothers of Belle Epoque Paris, quickly put paid to such simplicities. Life exists in an infinity of nooks and crannies, sometimes far from the great currents of the world, frequently challenging, often uncomfortable, usually inspiring, and decent books taken in large quantities consistently remind us of that essential fact.
But the thing I really want to say on my birthday is that the books in my library make me happy. They calm me down when the world feels cruel or absurd. They remind me that human beings have always faced complicated, frequently dark times and that those in power, with their mostly terrible ideas, come and go like the weather (however much damage they’ve left behind); that ingenuity, creativity and love eventually find a way of reasserting the value of human beings in all their fragility, and that satisfying the deep need in human beings for connection, affection and meaning is the best possible antidote to misery, whatever causes it. And this is something I want to celebrate as I mark the not terribly remarkable achievement of having survived sixty years on this battered but still beautiful planet of ours.