Outside of a Dog (2 page)

The books were not of any interest to her. They were mine, they were archaeologically mine. If you dug through and into them, layers of my life were progressively uncovered. What hurt the worst
was the loss of my Graham Greenes, which had been Bertie’s bottle books. Though Barbara had breast-fed our first child, Anna, by the time baby Bertie was born, some six years later, she had
decided that anyone who goes through childbirth deserves a rest. I rather agreed, and was happy to give him his middle-of-the-night feed with a bottle. He would beam up at me, his silver-gold hair
radiant as spun moonlight, and slurp away happily. I developed rather a neat posture in which I could tuck him into the crook of my left arm, place the bottle delicately in his mouth, and keep open
a paperback Graham Greene in my right hand. I read fifteen of them before Bertie started to sleep through the night.

I later bought, from Greene himself, a set of his
Collected Works
, each of the twenty volumes signed by him, which he’d formerly kept in his flat in Paris. I associated them,
naturally enough, with Bertie. They were gone as well.

My books were gone. The effect was tremendous, unexpected, physically distressing. I felt dizzy and nauseous, I kept having to sit down to regain my equilibrium. My books were gone. It prompted
the questions, at once psychological and metaphysical: Was I still me?
Who am I, with no books?

You may think this was an overreaction. It was. Nobody died, yet what I experienced was a form of grief. After the initial pain and disbelief there was an aching sense of loss. If there was
something clownishly self-indulgent about this response, the intensity of my reaction was fuelled from other sources, from the accumulated frustration, anger and hurt that the loss of love
entails.

But as time passed – we’re only talking six months here – what I increasingly and surprisingly felt was no longer a sense of loss, but one of release. All those books, all that
dust, all those metres of shelf space crammed higgledy-piggledy with paperbacks with their spines coming off, assorted hardbacks with torn or missing dust wrappers, maps and guidebooks stuffed into
corners, bits of stuff and guff and fluff. For a rare book dealer I treat my personal books with shocking disregard. I cram them into shelves, dog-ear pages as I read, remove dust wrappers and then
lose them. I suppose I still regard most books, as academics do, as mere objects of utility.

Though there may be comfort in large numbers of books, there’s very little beauty. The art dealer Anthony d’Offay, who began his career as a rare book dealer, once told me that of
all the serious art collectors he knew ‘only two’ have large numbers of books anywhere in the house. His point was not that big-hitting art collectors are semi-literate, but that almost
all of them regard large assemblages of books as
ugly
. Viewed in this way (you have to skew your head to the side and look carefully) what you see when you look at a lot of books is paper in
various stages of decay. Over time it progressively becomes yellowed with age, musty, acidic, bowed or brittle, ready for decomposition. It takes longer for paper than for humans, but the process
is the same, and the results similar.

I like to think that when Philip Larkin memorably said ‘books are a load of crap’, he was not trying simply to shock. Perhaps he was also observing something about books as physical
objects, and about the properties – the genesis and eventual decline – of paper? Paper begins when trees are reduced to vatfuls of yucky mulch; the books that are one of the results of
this process can fertilize and nourish, to be sure, but there is something ineluctably physical, something that suggests decay and death, something disgusting about them.

And the curious feeling that was gradually unfolding in me, I recognized, was relief. Books, if not exactly crap, were certainly a burden. It felt free to live in a space that wasn’t
shelved on all sides, surrounded and defined by books. Large numbers of books seem to consume the very air. There’s something insistently aggressive about them, something clamorous:
‘
Look at me! Read me! Remember me! Refer to me! Cite me! Dust me! Rearrange me!’
Perhaps this is why working in libraries has always made me feel anxious. Academic friends
reminisce with delight about hours spent in Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room at Bodley, the Beinecke at Yale, the Ransom Center at Texas, the old Reading Room at the British Library. I’ve
spent my time in each of them, anxiously plotting an escape.

Too much unread, too much unknown, too poignant the sense of the futility of writing books. The British Library has millions of the damn things. Looking at the stacks I am often struck, not by
the range and determination of man’s quest for knowledge, but by the utter fatuousness of it all, the vanity.

Samuel Johnson – himself heavily represented in libraries – makes the point with characteristic zest:

My books were gone? What a relief: they’d done their work, and I’d done mine. All of a sudden there was a new sense of lightness. This didn’t merely consist of more space in
which to hang pictures, it meant that I felt less surrounded by my own history. I was a bookish person. I still am, only without many books. It was a giddy sensation. I felt deracinated,
disassociated. And free.

I suppose you need to be a certain age (I was fifty-five) to feel thus unencumbered; I would have taken it worse twenty years before, when I needed the books not merely as working tools, but as
objects of self-definition. But now? Now they had become
memento mori
, and I was glad to take my eyes from them. I came to feel that if Barbara hadn’t initiated the process, I would
(or at least should) have done it myself. I began, even, to feel grateful to her, for releasing me from these fusty appurtenances. She’d always had an acute sense of the fatuousness of
academic life. Well, now all those books were
her
problem.

After all,
reading
is what matters, and has always mattered to me. I can’t not do it, any more than I can stop eating or breathing. Left on my own for the briefest of moments
– on a bus, in the toilet, waiting for the dentist – I am acutely uncomfortable without something, anything, to read. In extremis I take my wallet out and read my credit cards. (One of
them has five sevens in the number!) I can’t stop reading without feeling anxious, and extinguished: I read, therefore I am.

We are accustomed to talking of things and events ‘influencing’ our ‘development’: of the formative power of parental support or abuse, gifted or sadistic schoolteachers,
changes of faces and venues, disappointment and delight in the pursuit of love, successes and failures in search of some goal or other. When we think of such experiences we too often neglect the
way in which reading, too, has made us. Who would I be abstracted from what I have read, how would I have been formed? If I try to extract some sense of myself now, at the age of sixty-four, which
is in some way independent of the myriad effects of my reading, there is only puzzlement. The same sort of bemusement that occurs when I wonder what it would have been like to have been an
astronaut or a lion, grown up in Bangladesh or Peru, met an angel or been abducted by aliens.

I am inconceivable without my books. You can’t take them away, they are inside me, they are what I am. Yet when the relations between reading and living are considered, it is often in
passing, and frequently results in a formulation similar to that once made by Angela Carter: ‘You bring to a novel, anything you have read, all your experience of the world.’
That’s an unremarkable thing to say. What else would you ‘bring’ to a novel? A prawn cocktail? But if you reverse Carter’s formulation, and also claim that you bring to
life
everything that you have read in
novels
– some version of the Emma Bovary thesis – you get a much more interesting, and less studied, topic.

How do books make us? I don’t know. Putting the question at this level of abstraction suggests a topic for a psychologist or sociologist, and I have no taste for such generalities. What I
want to know is how my books have made me. To recall, to reread and to re-encounter the books that filled my mahogany bookcase, and continue to fill my present self.

What fun to pursue such a train of thought. To go into my (sparsely) book-lined study, turn that reading lamp inwards, and to reflect. To look at those (few) books in the dawning recognition
that what they furnish is not a room, but a self.

1

I like things big. I adore Palladian villas, monumental Mark Rothkos, vases of gladioli, eagles, sixteen-ounce T-bone steaks. I can grasp the attractiveness of cottages, Indian
miniatures, lilies of the valley, guinea pigs and roast quail. But it seems to me that, with a little more effort, any of these might make more of itself.

It is of course typically American to equate mere largeness with abundance and generosity. The country has vast spaces and majestic vistas, but that doesn’t explain it. So does Tibet, and
Tibetans rarely drive Hummers. When I grew up in the 1950s, size was an index of post-war prosperity: developments of four-bedroomed tract houses flourished like (large) mushrooms, cars sprouted
fins and expanded in all directions, people gorged on the abundant food, and expanded to inhabit the capaciousness of their domiciles and transport.

I suffer from some of this. But I rather suspect that in my case this predisposition to the outsized is also caused by that admirable pachyderm, Dr Seuss’s Horton the Elephant, to whom I
was exposed at the impressionable age of four. (Elephants figure in the American imagination in a way that they don’t in the European: consider that American attempt to render the small and
cute – Dumbo the baby flying elephant.) Horton is himself a symptom of this culture of largeness, but in me he is its cause.

I adored
Horton Hatches the Egg
, one of the lesser known Seuss books, but my favourite by far. The reason for this doesn’t entirely reside in the text, which is unforgettably
delightful, though hardly more so than many other of the Seuss books. I wonder, all these years later, whether I didn’t have, at that time, some obscure recognition that this particular story
applied to me?

The poem concerns a charming and winsome, but flighty, bird called Mayzie who, bored by the longeurs of egg-sitting, wishes instead to go on an extended holiday to Palm Beach. She flirtatiously
prevails upon the kindly elephant Horton to take her place up in the tiny tree, in spite of his considerable misgivings:

He gives in, of course, flattered by her eyelash batting, and reassured by the promise that she will hurry right back. Which of course she doesn’t, she’s having too much fun.

Stuck up his tree for months, covered by snow and buffeted by wind – you quite understand why Mayzie didn’t fancy it – Horton is mocked by his fellow creatures, and eventually
towed away, still sitting on his nest, to become the star turn of a travelling circus:
Look at this unnatural, laughable fellow! He thinks he’s a bird! He’s so fat he must be
pregnant!

The egg, when it eventually hatches under the immeasurable placidity of Horton, reveals a hybrid creature, representative of both earth and air: a baby elephant with wings. Although Mayzie,
visiting the circus when it arrives near Palm Beach, wishes to claim her chick, the baby (complete with tiny trunk – like Mayzie with a penis) flies directly into the arms of the estimable
Horton, whom it recognizes as its androgynous progenitor:

I’d beg
: Again! Read it again!
And if it was too late, or I’d asked too often, I’d snuggle up under the covers repeating to myself that final, immensely comforting
verse: ‘Because Horton was faithful he sat and he sat . . .’ I loved this line so passionately, I suspect, because that was how my father, Bernie, was. He loved being at home, was
happiest with a book, and an opera in the air. My mother, Edie, was in spirit a Mayzie: she hated sitting around, liked a drink, a fag and a party, loved travelling and seeing the world, had a rage
for company and good talk. She didn’t so much dislike children as ignore them – they weren’t much fun – though she got on better with hers as they became more reasonable and
responsive. But motherhood was never, she was happy to acknowledge, entirely her thing.

‘Babies? Ugh!’ she’d say.

‘How do you think that makes me feel, mom?’ I would ask.

‘You’re not a baby now, I can talk to you. I like children when you can talk to them.’

She’d suffered badly from post-natal depression, and my father liked to claim, ruefully but proudly, that he had done much of my mothering: feeding, changing, bathing and putting me to bed
and reading at night. My father was that sort of elephant, and my mother that sort of bird. It was a compelling contrast, and if at first glance the dice seem loaded in favour of Hortons,
there’s a lot to be said for Mayzies. Mine was full of laughter, a great talker and a good listener, engaged, vibrant, attractive. On a good day. But like many Mayzies she was also
self-absorbed, suffered violent mood swings, and could be as cruel and critical as she was kind and supportive. And the problem was: you never knew which side of her you were going to meet. She
might light on the branch with you and chirp away or, for no obvious reason, peck you in the eye and fly off in a huff. And so childhood, with such a mother, consisted of a constant oscillation
between connection and disconnection, elation and despair.