A Writer's House in Wales (8 page)

I always think of music as a means of communication across the continents and the ages. Try though I may, I am unable to appreciate rock music, and I have always hated the mournful dirges of medieval devotion and festivity, but almost any other kind is grist for my mill. The stacks of CDs by the door, the clutter of tapes and the tattered pile of old records represent another highway to the world at large. Some music transports me immediately to a particular place or time—
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg,
for example, I first got to know during the final days of British Hong Kong, when the colony was handed over to the Chinese in 1997, and whenever I listen to it I am whisked back to those raindrenched farewell ceremonials beside the harbor, with fireworks exploding, and bands bravely playing, dignitaries wreathed in false smiles and the royal yacht
Britannia
sailing into the night with the heir to the British throne. Prokofiev first impinged upon my consciousness in the 1960s, when we played him over and over again upon our houseboat on the Nile in Cairo, and so did Frank Sinatra. Mozart's 21st Piano Concerto instantly takes me back to the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, before the breakup of Yugoslavia, where I loved to play it on my BMW of the day racing exhilaratingly down the grand corniche to Montenegro. Music also seems to me one of life's great reconcilers, an instrument of universal good, which is why when I am not at home I like to leave the record player on, soaking Mozart into the very being of Trefan Morys. I want his music to be always lingering in this house, drifting down the hours and years even when it's empty—there, can't you hear a melody now, not in your ears, but somewhere at the back of your mind?

I have never gone in for souvenirs—if from every journey I made I brought back a Benares brass tray, a Russian doll, some Torcello lace or a mask from Benin—if I had brought home loot from all my travels the place would look like a junk shop! It looks a bit like one anyway, but at least its foreign souvenirs are austerely selective. There are two or three Persian and Afghan rugs on the floor. There is a small model house from Chiang Mai in Thailand. There is a deep blue and yellow vase, with leaping deer upon it, from the Armenian pottery in Jerusalem, and some old silver Ethiopian keys from
ksum. There is the wooden duck with which, in 1981, Mr. Carl Danos of Louisiana won second prize in a World Decoy Duck competition. Oh, and what's this, on a table beside the stairs? It is that wicker goat, which I bought in China long ago; it has a lid in its back, and if you remove this its enameled interior smells so deliciously of adhesive that I used to offer children a sniff, before it was pointed out to me that glue sniffing was proving alarmingly addictive in Welsh schools.

Hanging on a wall is the foreign trophy I am most fond of. In the 1980s I was writing about the State of Vermont, and in the course of the job I visited the original breeding place of the Morgan Horse. This is a breed I romantically admire partly because it seems to have Welsh connections, and partly because it looks remarkably like the Golden Horses of St. Mark which the Venetians stole from Constantinople in the thirteenth century, and mounted upon the facade of St. Mark's Basilica. When I left the Vermont horse farm my host there, sensing my altogether un-equestrian enthusiasm, did not offer me a list of show prizes, or a souvenir rosette from the Vermont State Fair, but instead gave me a small piece of lead piping. It was, he said, part of the pipe through which the very first of all pedigree Morgan horses, Justin Morgan, was watered back in the 1790s. I had it mounted in a frame, together with a contemporary poster announcing that Justin Morgan was available to mares at the farm
(Terms Six Dollars, To Insure Foal),
and there it hangs now, for my tastes a truly exotic commemoration of travel.

 

But this is chiefly a library, this tandem of rooms one above the other, and books too are like chords or tendons linking us with other minds, times and places—foretastes of virtual reality, or time travel. Traditionally books have been greatly prized in Wales. Today the old hunger for education has declined, and the pride of books with it; but however barren the living rooms of English-speaking Wales, their furniture grouped so pointedly around the TV, many a house of the Cymry Cymraeg still has its shelves of literature, usually based upon the outpouring of Welsh theological thought that occurred in the century before last, but often enterprising in contemporary writing too. The Welsh-language culture is still a culture of readers. A poet in the Welsh language can still, on average, expect to reach a bigger audience than a poet in English. When a serious book is published both in Welsh and in English, it often does better in Welsh.

I was taken once to the home of the archetypal Welsh bibliophile, a learned self-educated scholar, by profession a quarryman, who lived in the village of Croesor a few miles from here. He is dead now, but by no means forgotten. He was a small shy man, respectably dressed, who was born in a nearby house called Twll Wenci, Weasel's Hole, and in his youth was known to everyone as Bob Owen Twll Wenci. By the time he reached middle age, books had taken over his life. His house was jampacked, swollen, bursting with an immense multitude of books, manuscripts and pamphlets, so overwhelming that you could hardly manoeuvre your way from one room to the next. There were said to be some 47,000 in all, and he never stopped acquiring more until the day he died. Bob Owen Croesor was much celebrated as a genealogist, often lectured and broadcast and was honored with an honorary degree from the University of Wales; but well into old age he walked every day, out of his ever proliferating library, up to his clerk's office at the slate quarry above the village, where he had been for thirty years responsible for the distribution of wages.

I have never counted the books of my own library, but I would guess there are seven or eight thousand here, packed tight in their long white bookshelves, upstairs and down. I love them all, whatever their subject, whatever their condition, whatever their size. I love walking among them, stroking their spines. I love sitting on a sofa amongst them, contemplating them. I love the feel of them between my fingers, and I love the smell of them—most of all the smell of elderly American books, treasured since my youth, printed in a now obsolete ink whose fragrance can transport me instantly back to the America of the 1950s.

My books are as carefully ranked as I can manage, fiction by authors upstairs, nonfiction by subject below, and the bookcases are intricately adapted to the rooms, sometimes for example socketed to make way for an irremovable roof beam, and stepped out from the wall, like the bookcases of the Vatican library, to allow side stacks too. I am only stymied in my methodical ordering of this library by the matter of size. Books can be maddeningly un-uniform, meaning that some volumes on a given subject, which should be side by side with their fellows, are too tall to get on the proper shelves. The book tower is where many of them end up—an unsteady pile of books, reaching almost to the ceiling, which stands at one end of the library room. Imagine the cursing, when I find that my urgently needed reference book about gray seals lies beneath forty or fifty substantial volumes at the very bottom of the tower!

A philosopher living along the road here (no, not Bertrand Russell, although he lived nearby too) once suggested that I should stack all my books vertically rather than horizontally. Most of the bookcases have taller shelves at the bottom, so that if the books were ranked from top to bottom, rather than from side to side, volumes of all sizes could be vertically adjacent.
The Encyclopedia of Sea-Mammals
would no longer be isolated and inaccessible at the foot of the tower, but could stand comfortably on a shelf with its natural partner,
British Newts, Frogs and Tadpoles!
But logic is not my forte, I cannot face the task of reorganizing the whole collection, and I rather like the book tower.

I hate the word “collection,” anyway. This is not a collector's library, but a writer's working resource. I care not for first editions or rare printings. It is the text that counts, and Trefan Morys offers its owner a most satisfying range of reading and reference matter. The Internet is no substitute. Is there another private library in Wales, or a website anywhere on earth, where one could, in a few moments, discover the Hawaiian word for insult
(k
amuamu),
check the tonnage of the Austro-Hungarian battleship
Viribus Unitis
(22,000 tons), find how much it would cost to rent a carriage with two horses in Bombay in 1896 (ten rupees), confirm the date of the first performance of Benjamin Godard's opera
Jocelyn
(1888) or verify a favorite quotation from Melville (“the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales”)?

Most of classical English literature is upstairs in my library, with many American masterpieces too, and most of the work of the supreme Europeans is represented in translation—the Tolstoys and the Turgenevs, the Flauberts and the Balzacs and the Prousts, Cervantes, Musil, Thomas Mann. Downstairs there is heaps of history, and lots of books about places, and ship books, and animal books, and books about Wales in both our languages, and a whole stack of books about the British Empire, and books about religion, and books about art and architecture, and thirty-five dictionaries of foreign languages, from Afrikaans to Romanian by way of Fijian, Latvian and Manx. The bulkier modern reference works, encyclopedias or biographical dictionaries, have mostly been transferred to the computer, to save space, but two old friends in venerable versions still occupy far too much shelf space because I haven't the heart to discard them: the eleventh edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
1910, and a middle-aged edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary,
with supplements—forty-seven large volumes, between the two of them, and I cannot count the times in which one or another has been brought to the dinner table in the kitchen to pursue a family fancy, or conclude an argument.

 

Some of my books have particular associations—I don't care about first editions, but I am fond of association copies, as booksellers call them. I am a sucker for signed volumes, relishing the fact that a book has actually been in the hands of its creator. John Ruskin did not know, when long ago he meticulously signed a copy of his
Stones of Venice,
that one day my own book on the city would impertinently stand next door to his. Harold Nicolson could not have guessed that when in 1968 he gave signed copies of his diaries to his cook “with affectionate thanks for forty-two years of service and friendship,” they would improbably gravitate to this servantless corner of Wales. In 1926, the year he died, Charles Doughty signed a copy of his book of Arabian travels, in Arabic and in English, for a lady “with affectionate esteem of her ancient friend”; it is now in my library, alongside a copy of the same masterpiece that I bought in Jerusalem in 1947.

Sit down, take a look at this. This is a curiosity. In 1917, when Lloyd George from Llanystumdwy was the Prime Minister of Great Britain, armies under his control invaded Palestine out of Egypt, under the command of General Edmund Allenby. Lloyd George, brought up a chapel man, sent Allenby a copy of George Adam Smith's
Historical Atlas of the Holy Land,
believing it would be more useful as a campaign guide, he said, than any War Office battle maps. He kept another copy for himself, and in it he followed the course of the triumphant campaign that culminated in Allenby's entry into Jerusalem—the first Christian conqueror to enter the Holy City since the Crusades, and doubtless the last. I don't know what became of Allenby's copy of the atlas, but Lloyd George kept his for the rest of his life, and when some of his books turned up at a local auction scale, I bought it. Here it is, still as good as new, you see, although sadly dated by history and faltering conviction, with the Prime Minister's victorious signature discreetly on its flyleaf. (I also bought some volumes by Lloyd George's favorite novelist, P. G. Wodehouse, with his bookplate in them: It shows our little river Dwyfor fancifully winding its way, carrying the ambitious young politician with it, far away downstream toward the distant powers and splendors of his apogee.)