Public Library and Other Stories (6 page)

Imagine the ashes of Lawrence shaken into the air, dissolving in the ocean.

‘Fish, oh Fish, / So little matters!'

That's from the poem called Fish. In another poem he calls the mosquito he's hunting ‘Monsieur', then ‘Winged Victory'. ‘Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?' In another he declares that for his part he prefers his heart to be broken, cracked open like a pomegranate spilling its red seeds. In one of his most famous, he watches a snake drink at a waterhole then throws a log at it to show it who's boss. The moment he does this he understands his own pettiness; he knows he's cheated himself.

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 because of him. Literary merit went to court and won because of him. Class in the English novel radically shifted because of him. His mother, poor, ruined by work, dirt and poverty, could be delighted by a tuppenny bunch of spring flowers; at least that's what Frieda says in an article she wrote in 1955 for the New Statesman, where she's responding to a newly published 1950s biography of Lawrence which, according to her, is full of laughable untruths and inaccuracies. ‘There is nothing to save, now all is lost, / but a tiny core of stillness in the heart / like the eye of a violet.' That's from a poem called Nothing to Save. ‘High in the sky a star seemed to be walking. It was an aeroplane with a light. Its buzz rattled above. Not a space, not a speck of this country that wasn't humanized, occupied by the human claim. Not even the sky.' That's from St Mawr, a novel about how human beings will never be able to be fully natural or free while they give in to civilization's pressures and expectations, also about how women and stallions will never understand each other, especially when the woman is handicapped by being clever.

His clever friend Katherine Mansfield suggested to him that he call the cottage he was living in The Phallus. Her letters and notebooks are full of her anger and frustration at him. At the same time she typically writes this kind of thing in her letters to friends. ‘He is the only writer living whom I really
profoundly care for. It seems to me whatever he writes, no matter how much one may “disagree” is important. And after all even what one objects to is a
sign of life
in him.' And: ‘what makes Lawrence a
real
writer is his passion. Without passion one writes in the air or on the sands of the seashore.'

He himself wrote this in a letter in 1927 to Gertie Cooper, a friend and neighbour from his home in the north of England who was about to start treatment for tuberculosis, from which he also suffered and which killed him in the end: ‘while we live we must be game. And when we come to die, we'll die game too.' There's a fury, a burning energy associated with TB suffering. Some see it as one of the driving forces of Lawrence's temperament and his writing. The same could be said for a writer like Mansfield, who also died far too young of the same condition, a condition completely curable so few years later.

Meanwhile, a little less than a hundred years later, I was sitting at my desk on the one hand pondering hopeless fury and in the other literally holding my latest letter from Barclaycard.

According to Barclaycard, Lufthansa claimed that I
had
reserved a ticket with them and that they had issued me this ticket, as yet unused, on 21 December last year. So, did I agree with the merchant (Lufthansa) that I had bought this ticket? If I didn't, I was to write back and tell Barclaycard
and I was to do this within ten days of the date at the top of this letter.

The letter had taken eight days to arrive. I had two days left to reply and one of them was a Sunday.

Phish, oh phish. So little matters! Was there even any connection here, between the life, death and dissemination of Lawrence and me battling a fraudulent claim on a credit card statement? All I knew was, it cheered me up to think of Lawrence, whose individualism meant he'd fight anyone with both hands tied behind his back and whose magnetic pull always towards some kind of sympathy meant he'd grant a mosquito formal address in French and even compare it to an ancient work of art in the Louvre before he swatted it.

Imagine Lawrence in the virtual world. The very thought of him railing at an internet porn site, yelling at the net and all its computer games for not being nearly gamey enough, meant I forgot for a moment the letter in my hand from Barclaycard.

But back to Google Earth. I googled the address for the Lufthansa Office in London. I was thinking I could maybe go in, in person, and explain to them personally that it hadn't been me who'd bought or reserved any ticket with them, used or unused, on 21 December or ever. Google told me that the London office is in Bath Road, at the postcode UB7 0DQ. I looked it up on Google Maps. It's near Heathrow; Google Street View indicates it's a huge
warehouse or hangar at the back of the airport, off the kinds of street that are practically motorway, the kinds almost nobody walks along.

The photos on Google Street View had been taken in the early summer; the trees were leafy and the may was in bloom on the low dual carriageway bushes outside the Holiday Inn. At one point you could see right inside people's cars. Google Street View had protected privacy by pixellating the numberplates of the cars. But at one point two cars were level at a junction and a man was in one, a woman in the other, and a lone pedestrian was waiting behind them at a bus stop. It was good to see some people coinciding, even unknowingly, just going somewhere one day, caught by a surveillance car and immortalized online (well, until Google Street View updated itself). Seeing them made me wonder briefly what was happening in their lives on the day this picture was taken. I wondered what had happened to them since. I hoped they'd been okay in the recession. I hoped they'd arrived safely wherever they were going.

Then I wondered if any of them was going to Lufthansa to complain about being charged for a ticket he or she hadn't bought.

Of course in the end I wasn't going to go there and explain anything. Of course it would make no difference. Of course it was impossible anyway to see anything of Lufthansa's London Office on Google
Street View since it was on a bit of the map to which the little virtual person couldn't be dragged.

So instead I skimmed along Bath Road for a bit, first one way, then the other, until at one point the address label at the top of the photograph told me that though I was still on Bath Road I was no longer in West Drayton and that I was now in Harmondsworth.

Harmondsworth. Something inside me chimed a kind of harmony. It took me a moment, then I remembered why: Harmondsworth is the place all the old Penguin paperbacks declare their place of issue. It was where the original Penguin copies of, for instance, Lady Chatterley's Lover, which caused all the excitement and led to the obscenity trial, will have issued from in 1960, the place where the thousands of copies sold after the trial will have been issued too. And all the other Penguin Lawrences. I looked across at where L was, on my shelves. Almost all my Lawrence books were Penguin books. Pretty much all the Lawrence I'd ever read had come, one way or another, from this very place I happened to be looking at.

I stood up, pushed back my chair. I got my old copy of St Mawr / The Virgin and the Gypsy off the shelf. Oral French. I turned the page. Harmondsworth.

It was a ridiculous, glorious connection, and one that somehow made me bigger and truer than any
false claim being made against me. It also made me laugh. I laughed out loud. I did a little dance round the room.

When I'd stopped, I closed the book and put it back in its place on the shelf. I stood at my desk for a moment. I reread the letter. I girded my loins. I sat down to reply.

Dear Barclaycard,

This is just to thank you and Lufthansa for the reminder that nothing in life is ever secure.

Thank you also for allowing me to find out how easy it is to be made to seem like a liar when you aren't one.

Thank you, too, for introducing me to a whole new kind of anxiety, a burning and impotent fury which I truly believe has helped me understand, just for a moment, a sliver of what it must have felt like for a couple of writers I like very much from the first half of the twentieth century to have suffered from consumption. The experience has certainly brought a new layering of meaning to the word consumer for me.

Yours faithfully,

A. Smith.

PS
. If Lufthansa ever tell you where that ticket I didn't buy was for, just out of natural curiosity, I'd love to know.

It felt good when I wrote it.

When I read it half an hour later I knew it was too anal, like an awful comedy letter someone would send in to a consumer rights programme on Radio 4.

I deleted it.

I wrote the kind of letter I was supposed to write, in which I simply denied knowledge of the transaction Lufthansa claimed I'd made. I sealed the envelope and I put it on the hall table for recorded delivery tomorrow.

Then I went to bed, put the light out, slept.

Meanwhile, in my sleep, the freed-up me's went wild.

They spraypainted the doors and windows of the banks, urinated daintily on the little mirror-cameras on the cash machines. They emptied the machines, threw the money on to the pavements. They stole the fattened horses out of the abattoir fields and galloped them down the high streets of all the small towns. They ignored traffic lights. They waved to surveillance. They broke into all the call centres. They sneaked up and down the liftshafts, slipped into the systems. They randomly wiped people's debts for fun. They replaced the automaton messages with birdsong. They whispered dissent, comfort, hilarity, love, sparkling fresh unscripted human responses into the ears of the people working for a pittance answering phones
for businesses whose CEOs earned thousands of times more than their workforce. They flew inside aircraft fuselages and caused turbulence on every flight taken by everyone who ever ripped anyone else off. They replaced every music track on every fraudster's phone, iPad or iPod with Sheena Easton singing Modern Girl. They marauded into porn shoots and made the girls and women laugh. They were tough and delicate. They were winged like the seeds of sycamores. There were hundreds of them. Soon there would be thousands. They spread like mushrooms. They spread like spores. There would be no stopping them.

Meanwhile, that snake that Lawrence threw the log at disappeared long long ago into its hole unhurt, went freely about its ways, left the poem behind it.

Meanwhile, right now, the ashes of DH Lawrence could be anywhere.

Local councils, under the pressure of draconian and politically expedient cuts, don't like to say that the libraries they're closing are closing. They say they're ‘divesting'. They now call what used to be public libraries ‘community libraries'. This is an ameliorating way of saying volunteer-run and volunteer-funded.

Just in the few weeks that I've been ordering and re-editing these twelve stories for this book, twenty-eight libraries across the
UK
have come under threat of closure or passing to volunteers. Fifteen mobile libraries have also come under this same threat. That makes forty-three – in a matter of weeks.

Over the past few years, just in the time it's taken me to write these stories, library culture has suffered unimaginably. The statistics suggest that by the time this book is published there will be one thousand fewer libraries in the
UK
than there were at the time I began writing the first of the stories.

This is what Lesley Bryce told me when I asked her about libraries:

The Corstorphine public library was a holy place to me. It was an old building, hushed and dim, like a church, with high windows filtering dusty light on to the massive shelves of books below. And the library had its own rituals: the precious cards (only three each), the agony of choosing, and the stamping of dates. The librarians themselves were fearsome, yet kind, allowing the child me to take out adult books, though not without raised eyebrows. My parents were readers, but we did not have many books in the house, so the library was a gateway to a wider world, a lifeline, an essential resource, a cave of wonder. Without access to the public library as a child, my world would have been smaller, and infinitely less rich. All those riches, freely available, to everyone and anyone with a library card. All children should be so lucky.

There's a great kids' library at the end of our street now where we live, in Notting Hill, soon to be sold, along with the adult one, though they claim to be rehousing it nearby.

At first I thought it was just that you really liked books, just that you were someone who really loved your work. I thought it was just more evidence of your passionate and sensitive nature.

At first I was quite charmed by it. It was charming. She was charming.

But here are three instances of what it was like for me.

1: I'd be deep asleep, in the place where all the healing happens, the place all the serious newspapers talk about in their health pages as crucial because that's where the things that fray or need patched in our daily lives get physically and mentally attended to and if we don't attend to them something irreparable will happen. Then something would wake me. It'd be you, suddenly sitting straight up in the bed so all the covers would be off
both of us, then it'd be you not there, I mean I'd come to myself and the covers would be off me, I'd open my eyes into a blur of dark, put my hand out and feel the place going cold where you should be. Then a light would come on somewhere in the house. Then a small noise would be happening. I'd get up. I'd blur my way downstairs, one hand on the wall. I'd blur into the front room, or the kitchen, or the study. You'd be sitting at the table. There'd be a too-high pile of books on it. Even in the blur I'd be able to see that that pile was going to topple any moment. You'd be sitting beyond it, looking through a book. Your eyes would be distant, as if closed and open at the same time. I'd stand there for a bit. You'd not look up. What's going on? I'd say. It'd come out sounding blurry. Nothing, you'd say, I just need to know whether Wing was actually the original kitten of Charlie Chaplin. To know what? I'd say. In a letter to Woolf somewhere, you'd say. There's a kind of family tree, and I know Athenaeum is one of the kittens that Charlie Chaplin gave birth to. But there's another one and I'm pretty sure it's not Wing or at least not called Wing in this particular reference and I need to know what its name is and whether it's another name for Wing, or whether Wing was actually another cat altogether or maybe even another name for Charlie Chaplin. You're looking up her cats now? I'd say. Now? What the fuck time is it? I need
to know, you'd say. Why exactly do you need to know this? I'd say. Because I realized I don't know it, you'd say. In what context could it possibly be useful? I'd say. I'll just be another minute, you'd say. I know pretty much where to look, it'll just take a minute. You'd pull another book out of the pile and catch the pile, shunt it back together with your elbow, wait till it was definitely not going to fall, and open the book at the index at the back. I'd go up to bed. I'd lie there unable to sleep. When you'd come up again two and a half hours later I'd be pretending not to be awake. You'd sigh back into bed and lie down next to me. Immediately you'd be asleep. But for me the windowblind would be edged with something far too bright. What would that noise be now? Birds.

2: We'd be talking about something really important, well, important to me at least. We'd be talking, for instance, about what happened to me at work, how everybody's running really scared about the cuts. I'd tell you what had happened in the office that day. And you'd say, God, you know that's exactly like in psychology. And I'd say, what in psychology, like manic depression or passive aggression? And you'd say, no, not psychology, I don't mean psychology, I mean pictures, it's exactly like in pictures, and I'd say, pictures of what? and you'd say, well, what happens is, this woman, she's a bit past it though she used to be a good singer, she
got a medal for it, but now she's more middle-aged and she's trying to get a job as an extra in films so she can pay her rent, and the first thing Mansfield does is, like, the story opens and this woman is lying in bed in a rented room and she's got no rent. Oh, right, Mansfield, I'd say. Yeah, you'd say, and she wakes up and she's cold and she thinks it's maybe because she hasn't eaten properly, so then it's like a pageant of images crosses the ceiling in front of her, pictures of hot dinners sort of marching over the ceiling, and then she thinks she'd like some breakfast and then on the ceiling it's a pageant of images of big breakfasts, it's brilliant really when you consider what it's doing, it's a story about the fantasy of nourishment and what happens when that fantasy hits, like, reality, she even uses the word nourishing at one point I think. It's a fantastic critique of cinema actually. Yeah, I'd say, but I'm struggling to make the link between you telling me the plot of a short story and Johnston email-bullying me at work. Are you saying I'm a bit past it? No, you'd say, listen, if you read it you'd see, it's obvious, I'll go and get it for you. No, don't, I'd say. It's okay, really. I can sort it out for myself. I don't need to talk about it to anybody. But you'd be on your way to the shelf, and it's got this really lovely little throwaway phrase, you'd be saying, I can't remember it exactly but it kind of goes, something
fell, sepulchral
, she's so brilliant, that so-simple
word fell with the word sepulchral after it, wait, it's here somewhere, I'll look it up. Look up the word sepulchral for me while you're at it, would you? I'd say. You know what sepulchral means, you'd say. Yeah, obviously, I'd say, everyone knows what sepulchral means. Well, everyone will one day, you'd say. Ha ha, yes, I'd say. Too true. And I'd have to tell myself to remember to look up what it meant later. I myself am not very interested in books, or words. When we were first together you used to tell me it was a relief, to be with me, because I wasn't.

3: There was the day I came home from work and I found you sitting holding a glossy book, and the cardboard envelope from Amazon still on the floor. The book was open on your knee, one page black, one page white. On the black page there was a picture of a twined thick piece of hair. On the white page there was another picture of a coiled palmful of hair, darker, and a black and white picture of a woman, a girl. You were crying, and it was about the most ridiculous thing I could think of, in the real world with all its awful things to really cry about. The thing is, I never imagined her in colour before, you said. The book you were holding was called Traces of a Writer. It was full of pictures of what was left of your favourite writer after she died, pictures of a brooch, a little knife, bits of fabric, a little pair of scissors, a chess set, things like that. This was the day I first called her
your ex-wife. I said, it's like living with an extra person in our relationship. It's like there's always someone else. I meant it as a joke. But you were off on to the next page. You said, look, look, what's this little leather thing? It's called the fairy purse. Look. It's a purse, for a sovereign. She gave it to her friend when they were schoolgirls, her friend that stayed with her all through her life, you know. It's a bit weird, though, looking at this private stuff, isn't it? I said. You'd stopped crying. It's a bit necro, no? I said. You wiped at the sides of your eyes. It says here there's a message inside it, a note, you said. It says here it's never been taken out because it's too fragile, but that it says on it, ‘Katie and Ida's fairy purse'. How do they know it says that, if they haven't ever taken it out? I said. And what if your ex-wife doesn't want people looking at her private stuff? I don't know that I'd want the general public always to be reading my letters or looking at my private writings, even if they did have research grant money to do it and they could give looking at old bits of rubbish left behind by a dead person a grandiose name like The Memory Meme And Materiology In Katherine Mansfield's Metaphorical Landscape. Stop pretending you're stupid, you said, why do you always pretend you're stupid, why do you always pretend to be less than you are, and why do you always use my passion for what I'm working on against me to duck responsibility in our
relationship? Ha! I said, I do know some stuff, actually. I can read Wikipedia as well as the next person, actually, and if she's your ex-wife, then which does that make you, the vain incompetent who was always letting her down and who sold everything after she was dead and made a fortune out of it, or that poor woman she kept calling the Mountain? Because whichever one of those you are, that makes me the other, and I'm not playing that kind of weirdo role-play thank you very much. She was cruel, your ex-wife. She was a piece of work, all right. It was shortly after that that you threw the glossy book at the shelf and four of the little cups we'd bought in Mexico broke. Then I went over to the shelf, took the fifth cup, held it up above the fireplace and dropped it, and we both watched it break. It wasn't long after that particular day that you and I split up.

Not long after that, I remembered, and looked up the meaning. Something fell. Sepulchral.

*

I was walking through the park, through the bit where the fountains and the bushes are all laid out neatly. It was dusk and I was coming home from a meeting. It had been quite a tough meeting. I had had to lay off three people, most of a whole team, and we'd been told that Google Translate was basically going to be used to replace our report
copywriting in all the sub-Saharan countries. I was a bit fed up. On top of this, I'd gone into the park to get a bit of space from the traffic and the people on the pavements, but I was still feeling crowded even here in the park, as if someone was walking a little too close to me. Someone
was
walking a little too close to me. There was a definite feeling of boundary-trespass in it. Then this voice, close to my ear, said:
To think one can speak with someone who really knew Tchekhov
.

I stepped to the side, turned like you do when you want to signal to people to back off.

I've no change, I said, I've no money at all to spare and there's no point in asking me.

Indecent
, she said and shook her head.
We must never speak of ourselves to
anybody
: they come crashing in like cows into a garden.

Look, I said –

How did Dostoievsky know
, she interrupted me,
about that extraordinary vindictiveness, that relish for bitter laughter that comes over women in pain?

What? I said because she had stopped me in my tracks, was standing right in front of me now blocking my way, and because it was the first time I had realized quite how in pain I was. I was actually in physical pain, walking through the park, without you.

Supposing
, she said,
ones bones were not bone but liquid light
.

It was a dead person stopping me on my path, young and wiry and alarmingly lively, alarmingly bright at the eyes.

Back off, I said. I mean it. I don't know who you are, but I know who you are.

She laughed. She turned on her heel in a little dance, like I was the dead person, compared to her.

I shall be obliged
, she said,
if the contents of this book are regarded as my private property
.

Then she threw me a little look.

Yes! I said. Yes exactly! Because that's what I was always saying!

I am thinking over my philosophy
, she said.
The defeat of the personal. And let us be honest. How much do we know of Tchekhov from his letters. Was that all? Of course not. Don't you suppose he had a whole longing life of which there is hardly a word?

That's what I told her, over and over! I said.

This is the moment which, after all, we live for
, she said,
the moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal
.

You've no idea, I said. I mean, one night it was even the genealogy of your cats, for God sake.

She flung her arms into the air and shouted at the sky.

Robert Louis Stevenson is a literary vagrant!
she shouted.

Then she burst out laughing. I joined in.
Whatever it was she was laughing about, it was contagious.

Fiction
, she said when she'd stopped laughing,
is impossible but enables us to reach what is relatively truth.

Okay, I said, yeah, I think that's fair, I mean, if people are reading your stories and enjoying or understanding and analysing them as stories and everything. That's different. But people who were born, like, decades after you died, writing about pictures of your scissors.

I sat down on a bench. She sat down next to me with a thump and huffed a breath out loud like a teenage girl. She turned towards me nodding, confidential, like we were such friends.

What the writer does is not so much to
solve
the question, but to
put
the question. There must be the question put. That seems to me a very nice dividing line between the true and the false writer.

Then she stood up on the bench. She laughed, then got her balance. She spoke generally, to the trees in the park.

As I see it,
she said,
the whole stream of English literature is trickling out in little innumerable marsh trickles. There is no gathering together, no fire, no impetus, absolutely no passion!