A Writer's House in Wales (9 page)

The association copies in my library repeatedly connect me, as a library should, with distant places and old events. In 1953 Mount Everest was climbed for the very first time, by a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt and including Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first two men to stand on the summit of the world. I was there as the expedition's reporter, and I took with me a proof copy of a book, not yet published, about all the previous attempts on the mountain. During the expedition I lent this document to every member of the team, and they all read it, one by one, in tents on the mountain or at base camp on the glacier below. When Hillary and Norgay achieved their triumph, there and then I asked everyone to sign it for me as a souvenir.

Here it is now, grubby with tea stains and thumb marks, and there are all their signatures: from Hunt's calm and gentlemanly script to the stylish hand of Norgay, who at that time could write nothing but his own name, but who was presently to prove himself one of mankind's natural-born princes. A little air of Everest returns to me, whenever I take it from its shelf.

 

I also like grangerized copies—books that have private photographs, diary pages or souvenirs bound into them. In 1891 Edward and Marianna Heren-Allen went for their honeymoon to Venice, taking with them August Hare's new guide to that city. I had never heard of Heren-Allen when seventy years later I bought their copy of the book (fifteen shillings in pre-metric Brighton), but when I happened to mention my acquisition in a published magazine essay I was flooded with letters about him. He was a well-known maker of violins, the author of a classic book on the subject, besides being a practicing lawyer and an eminent amateur palmist, geologist, astrologer and meteorologist. He published his own translation of the
Rubaiyat,
and later in life he wrote science-fiction novels, of which the most exciting sounds
The Strange Papers of Doctor Blayre,
about the offspring of a prostitute and a cheetah.

His young bride was an artist's daughter, and during their honeymoon the two of them explored Venice with cultivated purpose, visiting every church and making the acquaintance of distinguished fellow visitors. When they got home they took old Hare's book to pieces, and rebound it handsomely in leather to include the snapshots they had taken with their Kodak Portable Collapsible Camera—brownish pictures of back streets, fanes and street life, affectionate pictures of each other posed beside wellheads or feeding pigeons in the piazza, portraits of people they had met. They stuck in a couple of four-leafed shamrocks, too, and I am sure they treasured the book for the rest of their lives together. All unwittingly, long after they had gone to their graves, they bequeathed it to me, and I treasure it too, having had much pleasure from reliving their honeymoon with them, besides profiting from their idyll by selling that essay about their wedding souvenir.

For writers, being habitually impecunious, have to make every use of their books they can. Rupert Hart-Davies the publisher, faced with the all-too-familiar question “Have you read all these books?” used to reply that he hadn't read them all, but he had
used
them all. I have certainly used all of mine. I have used them for plain enjoyment, of course. I have plundered them for my own work. I have used them as reference books. As you see, I have used one or two of them, notably the enormous
Death in Spanish Painting
which is propping up the table in the corner, to support wobbly furniture. (The
Gazetteer of Sikhim,
though, which appears to be sustaining the end of one of the beams, and thus saving the entire ceiling from collapse, is doing nothing of the sort, but is an illusion I devised to give my visitors an entertaining frisson; just as that oil painting by James Holland of the Rialto Bridge, which seems to be magically suspended in space, is in fact held up there by hidden hooks and wires. Such are the idle fancies of a writer between paragraphs!)

I have also used my books as a record of my own travels. I have never kept a diary, but as a substitute I long ago took to writing inside books the place and dates of their acquisition. This habit has proved invaluable as an aide-mémoire. If I need to know, for example, when I was in Ethiopia, I have only to look along the line of relevant books to find that I bought Björn von Rosen's
Game Animals of Ethiopia
in Addis Ababa in 1961.
Det Store Norges-Atlas?
Tromsø, in 1994.
The Art and Architecture of Russia?
Improbable though it seems, Darwin, Northern Territories, 1962.
The Travels of Ibn Jubair?
Juba, 1955. Let's have a look at that little yellow selection of the works of James Joyce, edited by T. S. Eliot. Yes, here we are, in my minuscule script of the time I see I bought it at Bristol in 1942, out of my meagre salary as a cub reporter for the
Western Daily Press.
And if ever the Inland Revenue demands to know why I set my expenses against tax for a trip to Holland in 1958, why on earth would I have bought a book about drainage systems in the Dutch polders if I was in Amsterdam just for pleasure?

 

Talking of signatures, while you're here, put yours in the Trefan Morys visitors' book, would you? It's volume three, not because we have heaps of visitors, but because I like to have just a single signature on each page, so that later on, when I have the time and the energy, I can draw pictures all around it, or stick in relevant photographs, or generally grangerize it. Just your name, that's all, large as you like. You'd be amazed how hard it is to make people sign their names big and bold, so as to make a proper page of it, and it's almost as hard to prevent them adding some fulsome phrase of gratitude or commendation.
“Non, non, non, pas des pensées, M. Proust!”
is how Parisian hostesses are said hastily to have stopped Marcel, unscrewing his fountain pen before getting into the full flight of his prose, and I too sometimes have to interject, as my departing guests prepare their ballpoints for action, “No, no, no, I beg you, no testimonials!”

I am fond of graffiti of every kind, from illiterate and obscene scrawls in railway stations to the exquisite carvings of poets on Grecian monuments. I like to think of them as the signatures of time. I would love to have people cut their initials on our tables and chairs, but Elizabeth is inexplicably of another opinion, so I have to make do with the visitors' book. And our visitors, as you see, have been a curious bag. Some of them have been downright unpleasant—an imposter or two, intrusive interviewers, self-important know-alls—but I get them all to sign the book anyway. On the other hand I have insisted that nobody sign twice, however often they come, to avoid the embarrassing repetition of grateful friends and relatives
(“Again!!! You must be sick to death of us!”)
that one often sees in such contexts. The only exceptions are children, because I like to observe how their signatures mature over the years, from the incoherent scrawls of infancy to the self-consciously sophisticated signatures of adolescence. Sometimes they have drawn small pictures on the pages too, and to an elementary limner like me it can be salutary to see how swiftly people of real talent progress from endearing kiddy-stuff to exquisite draftsmanship.

The book includes some esoteric surprises. Kilroy was never here, but the author of the standard history of the British cavalry was, and so was the author of the standard work of British naval history at the turn of the twentieth century, and the first Welsh nationalist member of Parliament at Westminster, and the oldest practicing lawyer in Britain (he was a hundred years old at the time). Five Sherpas have signed one page (and I have drawn a picture of their village), a physician from the Yukon another. A sheep rancher from Queensland hugely signed, and simultaneously presented me with an opal from his vast Outback estate. A composer from Scotland wrote my name in musical notation, from the 1-25 chromatic alphabetical scale; it seems to make a curious tune, but he has generously marked it
Allegro Maestoso,
and it rises in crescendo to a final fortissimo. The brothers who first adapted Trefan Morys to my use are in the book, the men who made my weather vane, the plumber who put the taps on back to front, the VAT inspectors who come to inspect our accounts now and then, all our neighbors of course, a few visiting writers, several television crews, some total strangers who have been lured into the house by the offer of a glass of wine, lots of Americans, a few Indians, a variety of Europeans, the Welsh Islamic wife of the Omani Defense Minister, an Australian who came to offer me a job, at least two Chaired Bards of the Welsh National Eisteddfod, sundry Everest climbers, a Bishop of Hereford, an actor or two, a couple of cops (investigating anonymous letters), a designer of Welsh postage stamps (who has drawn a rough of one in the book), somebody who wrote a long message in Breton, my old colonel in the Ninth Queen's Royal Lancers, members of the North Wales Association of Assistant Librarians, cats who have contributed their paw prints to Christmas gatherings—all are remembered in my visitors' book, and eventually commemorated with more or less apposite illustrations. These books are another way of recording the effects of the years, because I save an annual page, free of signatures, to draw pictures of the places I have visited during the year: It is sad to see how, down the decades, my drawing skills have faded, my application too, until in recent years I have been reduced to sticking in scribbles from my sketchbooks, really hardly worth preserving…

The very first visitor to sign my book was Clough Williams-Ellis the architect, a dear friend who lived a few miles away along the coast. Clough (as everyone in Wales called him) often liked to consult my
Dictionary of National Biography,
then in its old sixteen-volume form, and we made a pact one day that when he died and entered the afterlife, if he needed to use the D.N.B. again he would deliberately disarrange its volumes when he was through with them. Whenever I came home, for years after his death, I went straight to the reference shelves to see if he had been; but perhaps they have another copy in Paradise, for the books were never disarranged. On one of his visits to the house Clough stumbled on the stone staircase outside. Soon afterward he died, and since he was in his nineties at the time, his name on the opening page of the visitors' book always gives me a pang, in case that last visit contributed to his demise. I did visit him later on his deathbed, before he left for Paradise, and he made no complaint; and perhaps I made some amends anyway by writing his particularly laudatory and affectionate obituary for the London
Times.

And of course in any writer's library there is no more telling memento mori than the shelf of one's own books. I have completed some thirty books at Trefan, about Wales, about the British Empire, about Manhattan and Oxford and Spain and Venice and Canada and Sydney and Hong Kong and Europe, books of fiction, books of essays, two autobiographical books, a couple of biographies, and now a little book about Trefan Morys itself. Whether they are good or bad, flops or successes, I have had them all expensively bound for the benefit of my great-great-grandchildren; but the ones that mean most to me are the original editions, still in the paper jackets of long ago. They make a long line now, because I have childishly kept copies of every single version of every single book, even down to a pirated and politically bowdlerized edition, in Arabic, of an account I wrote in 1956 about a journey across Arabia. How old-fashioned the early ones are beginning to look! Their very typefaces, as often as not, date both them and me, and some of the American ones are by now so old that they smell of that fragrant printer's ink of long ago. Often their papers, too, are faintly reminiscent of the Utility Paper that reflected the embattled austerity of World War II, and so each successive book, in its design as in its subject matter, stands there as an inescapable reminder of the passing of the years.

 

Worst of all are the intimations of mortality that I discover if ever I start to
read
one of the books of my youth: For not all the advantages of experience, neither range of knowledge nor maturity of expression, can make up for the fresh exuberance and chutzpah that all writers recognize with a pang, I feel sure, when they read their work of half a century before. Trefan Morys is a house of deep resilience, but life comes and goes through it, as through everything else. The owls have played their part, and left; the stablemen have gone; the bees that used to swarm here seem to have assembled somewhere else. On an outside wall of the house there is an inscribed stone which it amuses me to think may puzzle archaeologists of a thousand years hence. Twm and I collaborated on a book, some years ago, which imagined the condition of a Welsh town in the past, the present and the future. For its jacket the publishers had lettering carved in a sandstone slab, and then photographed, and when it was done they gave the slab to me. I had it fixed to the wall, and there it stands enigmatically now, with the words
A MACHYNLLETH TRIAD
and our two names upon it. It has a faintly sacerdotal look. What rite was this? those scholars of another millennium may ask. Who were these priests, and what signified this lettering from the primitive past?

Has death ever visited Trefan Morys? Mice, rats, bats and multitudinous insects have certainly died here, and perhaps now and then a horse cheated the knacker's yard by collapsing in its stall. But did ever a stableman breathe his last on a straw pallet above my library? Perhaps, long ago, and no doubt one day death will come calling here again, to leave his invisible thumbprint in my visitors' book. When years ago we were changing the purpose of the house, from a place to house animals to a place to house us, we found among the loose-boxes a slab of wood with a very distinct impression of a hoof mark on it—the imprint of some sturdy Welsh cob long gone to his honorable rest. We used it as a windowsill upstairs, and the hoof mark was for years a reminder to me of the constancy of things. Lately, though, it has inexplicably faded and disappeared, and now I think of it instead as a sign of universal transience.