THE FIRST LIBRARY I KNEW was my father’s bookshop in the then cosmopolitan
community of Cairo; it was burnt down in l952, in the first significant
insurgency of Arab nationalists under the future president Nasser, during
the last complacent period of the British Empire.
In my bookworm childhood, I would sit crosslegged on the floor of my father’s
various shops – after Cairo came one in Brussels and another in Cambridge –
and read while he dealt with customers. I worked my way through the bottom
shelf of a certain part of the store, where a list of green-jacketed
abridgements were on sale – I think they must have been primers for
English-language students. I am a bit ashamed that I first encountered so
many classics in this form.
I didn’t connect the worlds in the books with anything real – Rider Haggard’s
Africa, Conan Doyle’s Lost World, Thackeray and Dickens’s London or, indeed,
the Brontës’ Yorkshire were all fairytale in character, since the reality of
Cairo and of 1950s Belgium had not made its way inside any book I had yet
found.
I first discovered that books and world were connected when flying back to
Rome with my mother. Below us a small black rock broke the hammered metal
surface of the sea and she told me it was the island of Monte Cristo. I had
encountered this terrifying prison in the book by Dumas.
So I would say now that I find in books, even those with the most bizarre and
fantastical settings and fairytale plots, the most trusted picture of the
world and us as we are . . . For Jorge Luis Borges, one of my favourite
writers, the world is a library and vice versa; books are the dramatis
personae, angels, engines and agents, because imaginings and reality flow
along the superconductors of stories, charging and recharging one another in
the making of history.
When I was living in Washington, the Library of Congress became crucial to my
work. In those days, readers who wanted to use it on a daily basis were
given a carrel in the dome: this was one of the most astonishing interiors I
have known: attics around a sphere entirely scaffolded with shelving and
interspersed among this Piranesi-like colonnade, battered wooden tables and
chairs facing a small bookcase all of one’s own on which 100 titles could be
kept.
We were cellular – larval – creatures up there in the shadowy, mote-filled
light; close to the vertiginous multitude of the books as the shelves bent
away round the curving space. Every book has its own smell, its grain, its
weight under the fingers, its creep and gait of printed characters, its air
and speech and style of rustle. In the dome, I came to know the life of
books as beings animate through time, acquiring unmistakable individuality.
One day, I ordered a book about virginity: I was researching Alone of All Her
Sex, my study of the cult of the Virgin Mary, and I received a note from a
librarian saying that this item could not be delivered to my desk because it
was an incunabulum.I must present myself in the rare books room. I didn’t
know what incunabulum meant, so I went downstairs to a green-carpeted,
mahogany, hushed chamber and the book was delivered to me where I sat at a
vast polished desk, under the gaze of the librarian.
I had been reading many early Christian and medieval writings by desert
hermits who were visited by fabulous bevies of girls who tempted them with
their terrible eyes and lips and glistening limbs. I had found the
strictures of Tertullian and Ambrose against such girly wiles as lipstick,
their horror of contraception and wild parties very familiar.
Nearly 2,000 years hadn’t altered instructions on virtue to young women. But I
was trying to understand the value placed on virginity by the Church fathers
and nuns. This new book, this precious and strange thing – this incunabulum
on Virginity – held the key to understanding more.
I opened it: but I could not reach beyond the title page. I was to be the
first reader, I realised, since the pages were uncut. Excited, I ran with it
to the supervising librarian and asked for a paper knife . . . I will leave
you to imagine the rest, but I’ll just say that the book has remained virgin
to this day and continues to rest in the Library of Congress, intacta. And I
do understand that it should be so.
I have found a depth of pleasure reading in the British Library. Just a quick
sample of the riches I have touched there. I was working on the Caribbean in
the early colonial period for my novel Indigo: the British Library is
incomparably rich in l7th and l8th-century works on the area – proslavery
plantocrats, antislavery abolitionists, botanical, zoological,
cartographical, autobiographical. To my surprise, a great trolley was
trundled up laden with sumptuous, leather-bound, richly illustrated volumes.
In the first I found on the fly leaf in flowing script the signature “Jos.
Banks” – the British Library had this incomparable hoard because the
traveller, explorer and polymath Joseph Banks and the governor of Jamaica,
Hans Sloane, were founders and bequeathed it their books.
This is a very special frisson to read books that belonged to makers of
history: this is the living hand that Keats invokes, stretching out to grasp
ours from the page.
Several years later, when I began work on the question of spirit beliefs,
modern science, and haunted technologies, for the book that became Phantasmagoria,
I found that the library had begun archiving online its rich collection of
photographs of ghosts made by an assiduous believer.
But the most dramatic episode in connection with my quest for spirits involves
the Archive of the Society for Psychical Research, in Cambridge University
Library. The scrappy type-written list of the SPR includes the entry:
“Sample of ectoplasm – captured from the medium Helen Duncan, during the
course of a seance in l931”. I bounced up to the desk in the Rare Books room
and requested the ectoplasm. The librarian looked at me dubiously. “Do you
really want to see it?” he asked.
“Why not?” I replied. To which he said, quietly and slowly: “It’s very nasty.”
“Would you like me to look at it somewhere else?” I said, looking worriedly at
the austere heads lowered over their irreproachable volumes.
“No,” he said, “There is nowhere else. But please be discreet.”
The sample arrived in its grey acid-free box and tissue paper. I opened it –
discreetly. Inside was a folded length of yellowing satin, a little like the
wedding dresses you see hung in the shrines of southern European churches.
But the fabric, when I pulled it out, still trying to be as discreet as
possible, turned out to be cheap lining material, unhemmed and unshaped, and
though it had been washed and ironed, it bore the traces of crushing and
crumpling, for Helen Duncan had concealed it somewhere on her person.
I found other strange things there – the thumbprints of revenants in strangely
odorous dental wax or the bound slates with ghosts’ messages written in
chalk. There is no limit to what a library might contain.
I was asked recently to write an afterword to a study of recognition in
literature – the principle that governs those unforgettable burning-glass
moments, such as Jocasta seeing her own story in the shepherd’s report so
that she quits the stage to hang herself, or moments that are ecstatic in
their illumination, as when Pericles discovers his lost daughter, in the
brothel in Mytilene.
I wrote about the self-recognition that a reader can experience in
communication with a book. There is a printer’s emblem that shows a fool in
cap and bells who mischievously holds up a mirror to a donkey with the
legend “Know Yourself”. It appears on the title page of books that deal
in human folly and dares you to recognise yourself in the contents.
Some time ago, I was at a literary dinner to which several writers were
invited. We were named and our work briefly described. I had been sitting
next to the footballer Jimmy Greaves, who had written an early example of
the addiction trauma story, This One’s On Me. We had been getting on
happily, but when it came to my turn and the speaker mentioned my books on
the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc, he lent in close to my ear and with a big
grin whispered: “Now, she’s really got a problem.”
I had to point to myself and say: “That’s me.” But he was right in a way. And
whatever the problems are, I’ve gone to books to help.
A piece of writing can spring a trap of self-knowledge on the reader and move
something in history.
A cunning vizier tells his tyrannical sultan that he has been taught by a
dervish how to understand the speech of birds. They spot a pair of owls and
the sultan challenges his vizier to listen in on what they are saying. But
when the vizier returns, he says that he daren’t tell his master what he
heard.
The sultan insists and with great reluctance, the vizier tells him that the
owls are discussing the marriage of their son and daughter, and are
bargaining over the dowry. The father of the groom demands 50 ruined
villages. The father of the bride laughs – does the groom’s father think him
a skinflint? Fifty ruined villages are a mere trifle; he will lavish on his
daughter 500. And the owl blesses the sultan: “Long Life to Sultan Mah-moud!
While he reigns over us we shall never want for ruined villages.” The Sultan
is ashamed and ceases to ravage his people.
It has often been said that if politicians read more literature, they might
understand more. This is not certain at all, but it is a sign of a great
novel or story that it can make you see something about yourself and your
relation to others. Maybe then, like the Sultan, you might turn from your
path and desist.
There are always threats to libraries of every kind – in the world and in this
country. Different circumstances impinge. The British School in Rome is
attracting increasing numbers of readers because both the American Academy
and German Institute have closed their libraries. Mergers, cuts, priorities
and false consciousness about popular democracy mean that the struggle to
defend libraries – from the British Library to the smaller ones – never
stops being crucial. So I want to cry out, with Lear: “Oh, reason not the
need!”
This is an edited version of a speech that Marina Warner gave to the British
Library’s annual dinner
Lovely and inspiring memoirs :-)
Flemming Ravn Neft, Vejle, Denmark