Books did furnish a room . . .

{Photos by rocketlass.}

From The Library at Night (2006), by Alberto Manguel

Like Machiavelli, I often sit among my books at night. While I prefer to write in the morning, at night I enjoy reading in the thick silence, when triangles of light from the reading lamps split my library shelves in two. Above, the high rows of books vanish into darkness; below sits the privileged section of the illuminated titles. This arbitrary division, which grants certain books a glowing presence and relegates others to the shadows, is superseded by another order, which owes its existence merely to what I can remember. My library has no catalogue; having placed the books on the shelves myself, I generally know their position by recalling the library's layout, and areas of light or darkness make little difference to my exploring. The remembered order follows a pattern in my mind, the shape and division of the library, rather as a stargazer connects in narrative patterns the pinpoints of the stars; but the library in turn reflects the configuration of my mind, its distant astrologer. The deliberate yet random order of the shelves, the choice of subject matters, the intimate history of each book's survival, the traces of certain times and certain places left between the pages, all point to a particular reader. A keen observer might be able to tell who I am from a tattered copy of the poems of Blas de Otero, the number of volumes by Robert Louis Stevenson, the large section devoted to detective stories, the minuscule section devoted to literary theory, the fact that there is much Plato and very little Aristotle on my shelves. Every library is autobiographical.

At the urging of our sympathetic but insistent realtor, rocketlass and I have spent the past week packing up and storing away nearly all of our books. Back in the autumn, when we first put the condominium in which we've lived for ten years on the market, we packed away a couple of bookcases worth of books that had been kept in one of the bedrooms, but we had hoped that we would sell before having to give up the rest.

Alas, four months and seventy boxes later, we now have a home that is, by our standards, denuded of books. Our living room is bare, and our realtor was right: it does look much larger. It also looks significantly less like home--which I suppose is the idea, after all: the less it looks like our home, the sooner it will no longer be, and the sooner we'll be able to re-establish our library in what we both hope, the gods willing, will be its final destination.

Of course, compared to our neighbors, for whom reading is an occasional way to pass the time rather than one of life's central activities, we still have a lot of books in our small apartment: one seven-shelf case, tucked away in a bedroom. It's a desert island case, I suppose, though not exactly, its holdings an atypical distillation of our vanished collection, a mix of the unread, the forever re-read, and the inexhaustible--from all of Anthony Powell to the letters of Byron to The Anatomy of Melancholy to Boswell's Johnson to Sherlock Holmes and the latest from Hard Case Crime. There's no reason it shouldn't be enough to get us through the next few months, though I'm already dreading the first time I need to look something up in a book that's been consigned to storage.

I take heart, however, from a passage found elsewhere in The Library at Night, a reminder that things could be much, much worse:

On one of the early days of October of the year 1659, Robinson Crusoe returned to the mangled remains of his craft and managed to bring ashore a number of tools and various kinds of food, as well as "several things of less value," such as pens, ink, paper and a small collection of books. Of these books, a few were in Portuguese, a couple were "Popish prayer-books" and three were "very good Bibles." His "dreadful deliverance" had left him terrified of death through starvation, but once the tools and the food had met his material needs he was ready to seek entertainment from the ship's meagre store of books. Robinson Crusoe was the founder--if a reluctant founder--of a new society. And Daniel Defoe, his author, thought it necessary that at the beginning of a new society there should be books.

Manguel's book resides in our remaining bookcase; Defoe's, readily available elsewhere, has been relegated to the ship's hold. (Did I mention that for all my carping in this post, we live half a block from an actual library? Okay, I'll admit it's not exactly the salt mines here . . . )

Three things that you might reasonably assume that we know . . .

. . . yet which recent reading has revealed to me that we don't.

1
The location of the Rubicon

Adrian Goldsworthy, in his Caesar: Life of a Colossus (2006) explains,

On the road from Ravenna to Ariminum (modern Rimini) the boundary between the province and Italy itself was marked by the Rubicon, a small river that to this day has not been positively identified.

Tom Holland, who named his Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (2003) after the fateful river, points out that not only is our knowledge of the river limited mostly to the fact that it was "narrow and obscure," but we're not even sure when it was crossed. The consensus is that it was on the night of January 10th, 49 BCE, but that's by no means certain:

One source tells us that the Rubicon was forded after sunrise. Others imply that the advance guard had already passed into Italy by the time that Caesar himself arrived on the river's bank. Even the date can only be deduced from extraneous events. A scholarly consenss has formed around 10 January, but any date between then and the 14th has been argued for--and besides, thanks to the vagaries of the pre-Julian calendar, what the Romans called January was in fact our November.

2
What the Library of Alexandria looked like

This one I'll leave to Alberto Manguel, who writes of the Library of Alexandria in the first chapter of his lovely new book The Library at Night (2008):

It is infuriating not to be able to tell what the Library of Alexandria looked like. With understandable hubris, every one of its chroniclers (all those whose testimony has reached us) seems to have thought its description superfluous. The Greek geographer Strabo, a contemporary of Diodorus, described the city of Alexandria in detail but, mysteriously, failed to mention the Library. "The Museion too forms part of the royal buildings and comprises a peripatos [deambulatory], an exedra with seats, and a large building housing the common room where scholars who are members of the Museion take their meals," is all he tells us. "Why need I even speak of it, since it is imperishably held in the memory of all men?" wrote Athenaeus of Naucratis, barely a century and a half after its destruction. The Library that wanted to be the storehouse for the memory of the world was not able to secure for us the memory of itself.

I am particularly impressed by the misplaced confidence of Athenaeus of Naucratis: no matter how well-remembered a place was, after a century and a half, wouldn't you think at least a thumbnail description might be in order?

3
Which of Byron's feet was lame

This one, I'll admit, is less world-historically important than the other two. That's somewhat balanced, though, by the fact that it concerns a person who lived relatively recently, and who was an object of intense fascination even in his lifetime, making the uncertainty all the more surprising.

Fiona MacCarthy examines the question in her Byron: Life and Legend (2003):

Which was Byron's lame leg? So much mystery has shrouded the subject, some of it created by Byron himself in his attempts to draw attention away from his deformity, that Thomas Moore, collecting information for his biography of Byron only a few years after Byron's death, could not arrive at a consensus of opinion. Elizabeth Pigot, Byron's old friend from Southwell, Augusta Leigh, his half-sister and lover, and the old Nottinghamshire cobbler who made young Byron's special shoes for him, all said it was the right leg. Leigh Hunt and Mary Shelley maintained it was the left leg, as did Jackson the pugilist, drawing on his memories of Byron's stance when sparring, and Millingen the surgeon who attended Byron in his final illness. The notoriously inaccurate Edward Trelawny, in a high-flown description of his visit to "the embalmed body of the Pilgrim," claimed to have discovered that both Byron's feet were clubbed. However, we can safely take his mother's word for it. As she told her sister-in-law, Mrs Frances Leigh, "George's foot turns inward, and it is the right foot; he walks quite on the side of his foot."

It does seem as if the more reliable sources agree on the right foot, but I'm still impressed at how much uncertainty there is, especially because of the role that Byron's lameness has long been presumed--even by his friends--to have played in the formation of his character. Edward John Trelawny--who on his visit to Byron's body waited until Byron's valet William Fletcher left the room, then sneakily uncovered his dead friend's feet--spoke for more than just himself when he wrote, in Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1858,

His deformity was always uppermost in his thoughts, and influenced every act of his life, spurred him on to poetry, as that was one of hte few paths to fame open to him--and as if to be revenged on Nature for sending him into the world "scarce half made up," he scoffed at her works and traditions with the pride of Lucifer.

But don't worry, folks: future readers won't suffer under unanswered questions like these--anything any descendants of ours could conceivably want to know will surely be somewhere in the Twitter archives, right?

Trollope goes digital, Borges goes ghostly, Donne goes on a peace mission

Not a lot of time tonight, so all I've got for you is a collection of odds and ends.

1 In all the writing about Trollope I've been doing this summer, I've neglected to mention Penguin's great new Trollope site, created with the help of the Trollope Society. It's everything such a site should be--especially for a writer as prolific as Trollope--giving a brief synopsis of each novel and major character, information about his Barset and Palliser sequences, and biographical information about Trollope. A particularly nice touch are the eye-catching (though slightly too contemporary?) cartoon renderings of Trollope's characters. But surely Phineas Finn didn't really look as horrid as this?

I also learned from the site that Trollope thought that the ending of Phineas Finn was a bit abrupt and unsatisfying, as did I. In his Autobiography, Trollope admitted:

It is all fairly good except the ending,--as to which till I got to it I had made no provision. As I fully intended to bring my hero again into the world, I was wrong to marry him to a simple pretty Irish girl, who could only be felt as an encumbrance on such return.

If I may be allowed to absurdly mix eras and forms: the ending reminded me of the end of Don Knotts's great comedy The Love God?, wherein Knotts's character ends up not with the vivacious career woman (and bombshell) he's been seeing, but with the lovely young lady from his hometown who has been patiently waiting--and who is as dull as paste. It makes sense for the ethical arc of the story, but it's impossible to believe and makes no damn sense on any other level.

2 I learned about the Trollope site through the ReadySteadyBook blog, where I was involved in the following exchange after blogger Mark Thwaite ended his post by asking if he should give Trollope a try:

Stephen Mitchelmore: No!

Mark Thwaite: Sage, succinct advice as ever, sir!

Levi Stahl: I totally disagree with Stephen Mitchelmore: Yes!

The Palliser novels provide insight into politics, strongly drawn characters--including several fully realized, sympathetic portrayals of strong-willed women--and a drawn-out, sensitive depiction of a marriage of two very different partners who despite their differences (and the strictures placed on them by society) are essentially equals.

Trollope doesn't have the humor of Dickens, the godlike sympathy and understanding of Tolstoy, the fire of Dostoevsky, or the piercing aphoristic insight of George Eliot, but his attention to his characters and the realities of their world make him well worth reading.

Stephen Mitchelmore: But Levi, we do share the same reasons!

3 In With Borges, which I wrote about the other day, Alberto Manguel mentions that he's just one of many people who, over the years, served as readers for the blind master. I imagine them reuniting once a year in a secret library, an invisible college of readers conjuring the Borges who is not in the library, the lost Borges, the one who, in "Borges and I," writes:

It's Borges, the other one, that things happen to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause--mechanically now, perhaps--to gaze at the arch of an entryway and its inner door; news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile--I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification.

At the end of a long evening of wine and talk, during which they've tricked him into lowering his guard, the Borges they conjure is swiftly trapped between two covers and filed away in an obscure, rarely visited section of this already obscure library.

As the years mount, and death slowly winnows the circle of readers, the Borges they conjure becomes less solid; what was at their first meeting a gargantuan reference book becomes, by their last, perhaps a single line of poetry.

4 After writing about Borges's admonition to his nephew ("If you behave, I'll give you permission to think of a bear."), I thought that Borges might have enjoyed my favorite Victor Borge joke, which I heard him deliver to a young whippersnapper on the Jack Benny Show:

Borge: How old are you?

Whippersnapper: I'm six!

Borge: Shame on you! When I was your age, I was twice that old!

5 Having written recently about the Thirty Years War, I was surprised to learn yesterday from John Stubbs's John Donne: The Reformed Soul (2007) that Donne served as chaplain to the delegation that King James sent to Frederick and Ferdinand, the chief warring parties, in 1619. The mission, however, was doomed from the start, as it had been

entirely seeded and nurtured by a Spanish subterfuge. Spain's great aim in the Bohemian crisis was to keep England from sending military and financial aid to the Protestant rebels: the neutrality desired by the Spanish was assured by massaging King James's diplomatic ego. The great Machiavellian Spanish ambassador, the Count of Gondomar, reassured his masters that "the vanity of the present King of England is so great that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be obtained by his means, so that his authority may be increased."

Actually that's the sense I get of the whole war: if you were involved, you were probably being double-crossed.

For his part, Donne in the years to come would be a strong voice against English involvement in the war, despite anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish public sentiment. Donne surely took up that position at least in part because it was the position of the King, in whose good graces Donne needed to stay--but it's also not hard to trace that preference to Donne's youthful memories of the horrors of war and his seeming general distaste for sectarianism and the violence it often entailed.

6 Finally, it seems fitting to follow Donne, the poet of love in secular and religious guises, to a couple of fun throwaway lines from Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game (1961):

I lighted her cigarette. She was poised and cool but not at all subtle. She leaned forward to take the light and to give me a look at large breasts harnessed by a lacy black bra. Eve learned that one the day they got dressed and moved out of Eden. It has been just as effective ever since.

Borges's memory, memories of Borges

{Henri Rousseau, Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!), 1891}

On a night in the mid-1960s, as a young Alberto Manguel read aloud to Jorge Luis Borges from Kipling's stories, Borges lamented,

What a pity not to have been born a tiger.

I think we can be pardoned for being glad that he didn't get his wish.


{Borges in the Hotel Beaux, Paris, 1969}

As a sixteen-year-old in 1964, Manguel became another in a long line of readers who supplied Borges with his necessary daily allowance of those words he could no longer see, and he's gathered his memories of those evenings into a slim book, With Borges (2006). Simultaneously a book of anecdotes and a meditation on Borges and his work, it's a charming, pleasant little book--the sort of book I wish were available for every writer I love. (Just how unobtrusive was Anthony Powell as he watched his contemporaries at parties? What did Haruki Murakami talk about with his patrons and his fellow clerks when he worked in a record store? How irritating--or frustrating--was Casanova for his male friends?)

The Borges that Manguel presents is not unfamiliar or surprising. We encounter yet again his odd reading tastes--in some sense arrested in a precocious adolescence--the Kipling, Chesterton, Homer, Dante, Stevenson, Cervantes that he read over and over again. We are reminded of his unusual reading prejudices:

One could construct a perfectly acceptable history of literature consisting only of the authors Borges rejected: Goethe, Rabelais, Flaubert (except the first chapter of Bouvard et Pechuchet), Calderon, Stendhal, Zweig, Maupassant, Boccaccio, Proust, Zola, Balzac, Galdos, Lovecraft, Edith Wharton, Neruda, Alejo Carpentier, Thomas Mann, Garcia Marquez, Amado, Tolstoi, Lope de Vega, Lorca, Pirandello.

Even after Tolstoy, there are half a dozen or so of my favorites there (and then there's the one that's most surprising to me, Maupassant, whose style and subjects I would have expected to resonate with Borges). But it was a matter, he explained in an interview, of simply reading what he liked:

I am a pleasure-seeking reader: I've never allowed my sense of duty to have a hand in such a personal matter as that of buying books.

I think Borges is being somewhat disingenuous there: his reading carried with it a whiff of the obsessional as well, and obsessions, though they may begin in pleasure, rarely end there. Yet it's hard to criticize Borges's choices: as readers we are all riddled with holes, gaps intentional or unintentional, and almost no one has drawn on his reading as fruitfully as Borges, reading and rereading and interpreting and distilling books until they became something totally new.

What Manguel gives us instead of a new view of Borges is a more intimate view--still focused on books, because books were Borges, it seems--a fascinating glimpse of his conversation and passing comments. We learn that he was never satisfied with his story "Shakespeare's Memory," one of my favorites, and that he felt he had never quite honored its inspiration, which was an overheard line in a dream: "I will sell you the memory of Shakespeare." After revealing that Borges asserted the questionable proposition that a writer should not be so impolite as to surprise the reader, Manguel points out, rightly, that Borges, instead, sought conclusions

that were astonishing but obvious. Recalling that Ulysses, tired of prodigies, wept for love at the sight of his green Ithaca, he concluded: "Art should be like that Ithaca--of green eternity, not of prodigies."

Following a discussion of the lost Library of Alexandria--a loss which one would expect a librarian and bibliophile to include among eternity's great laments--Borges explained that

The number of themes, of words, of texts, is limited. Therefore nothing is ever lost. If a book is lost, then someone will write it again, eventually. That should be enough immortality for anyone.

Presumably the Library at Alexandria didn't serve double duty the way that we learn Borges's personal library did: when he found himself with currency, he would tuck it into various books; when he needed money, he would pluck books from the shelves until he found some. {Side note: the book collection as bank, an organizational schema I failed to consider.} Perhaps that was simply another aspect of the playful side of Borges, which appears again and again, as when Manguel reports that Borges

once recited the "Our Father" in Old English, in a crumbling Saxon chapel near Dr. Johnson's Lichfield, "to give God a little surprise."

I suppose it's okay to surprise God--after all, such opportunities are surely rare, and thus such a surprise wouldn't be the cheap shot that surprising one's readers would be.

But the best of playful Borges, and probably my favorite moment in the book, the one I'll recall the other anecdotes and opinions have been forgotten, is an admonition by Borges to his five- or six-year-old nephew:

If you behave, I'll give you permission to think of a bear.

It's Borges at his cleverest and lightest--and yet that line also hints at the essence of his art. Thought is all, subjectivity is can nearly create its own realities--and even the simplest statement can be momentarily dislocating. It reminds me of his "Argumentum Ornithologicaum," collected in Dreamtigers (1964):

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second or perhaps less; I don't know how many birds I saw. Were they a definite or an indefinite number? This problem involves the question of the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because how many birds I saw is known to God. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because nobody was able to take count. In this case, I saw fewer than ten birds (let's say) and more than one; but I did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, but not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That number, as a whole number, is inconceivable; ergo, God exists.

{Photo by rocketlass}

Sometimes, just as an elephant cannot not be thought of, one may actually need permission to think of a bear.

I'll close with Manguel's account of what could be taken as Borges's ethos:

He believed, against all odds, that our moral duty was to be happy, and he believed that happiness could be found in books, even though he was unable to explain why this was so. "I don't know exactly why I believe that a book brings us the possibility of happiness," he said, "but I am truly grateful for that modest miracle."

Its intentionally limited compass could certainly be argued with--in my morally healthiest moments, I'd replace happiness there with justice--but at the end of a night of passing happily from one book to another book to another book as thunderstorms rumble in the background, I'll gladly adopt it, however temporarily, as my own.