Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (15 page)

Myopia is a human disability; there are no myopic animals, except for some instances in domesticated dogs. And this makes perfect sense; natural selection would account for that – a short-sighted bird of prey wouldn’t last long. So is a myopic hunter-gatherer conceivable? Common sense suggests not – the tendency would have been bred out, if it appeared. And this seems to be right; myopia is indeed a relatively modern condition. If so, why? Was my grandmother on the case, with her suspicion of reading?

Opinion is against her, it seems. A classic study of a hunter-gatherer society – an Inuit group – found a very low level of myopia among older members who had lived the traditional isolated lifestyle but a far higher level among their children who had grown up in a Westernized community and had received schooling. At first the finger was pointed at books, until it was realized that the older Inuit group had always done close work in ill-lit igloos – the making and repair of clothes and weapons. Other studies of hunter-gatherer communities have confirmed this onset of myopia with the advent of Western dietary habits, and this is now thought by some to be the explanation: carbohydrates. The cereals and sugars that are the basis of modern diet but unfamiliar to those accustomed to high levels of proteins and fats. An excess of carbohydrates can affect the development of the eyeball, causing myopia. As for those myopic domesticated dogs: dog biscuits?

So myopia is not genetic? I look around my own family, in which specs and contact lenses are rife, and doubts creep in. Surely there is something going on here? Patrick Trevor-Roper certainly thought there was, in his study, homing in on the Medicis; one Medici pope is on record in a portrait holding a concave lens, an early form of glasses, while other Medicis are referred to as having bad sight, and “beautiful large eyes”; the myopic eyeball is large. Also, their dynastic success was based not on soldiery but on banking, scholarship and the encouragement of art – a nice display of the myopic personality. But it seems that there is as yet no identification of a specific gene responsible for the short-sightedness that appears to be endemic in some families; the favored conclusion at the moment is that a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental factors stimulates the development of myopia. Your parentage may well have something to do with your life behind specs; equally, your circumstances – if you grew up with the emphasis on study rather than long-distance running. Reading may play a role, but is far from being the whole story. Myopia is a modern trend, but owed probably more to the availability of sugars and cereals than to universal education. Books are excused – for the moment, and up to a point.

But books and specs go together, no question. At the dire boarding school to which I went, where one of the punishments was to spend an hour in the library, reading (there wasn’t anything much in the library, except for some battered reference books), the myopic amongst us were labelled “brainy,” a term of abuse. And we were probably bad at games too, a further social solecism. Ah! The myopic personality. Reading was seen as something you did only when you had to, an attitude connived at by the staff. My copy of
The Oxford Book of English Verse
was confiscated from my locker: “You are here to be taught that sort of thing, Penelope. And your lacrosse performance is abysmal.”

I broke out into the clear blue air of higher education, eventually, and a lifetime of unfettered reading. And yes, my sight is pretty dodgy – cataracts and macular degeneration – but the splendid specialist who will do his best to ensure that I don’t lose it further exonerates the books: I would have headed that way in any case.

*

Reading, for all of us, is fettered only by obvious restrictions. You can’t own all that you want or need to read. There are, then, two kinds of books – yours, and the contents of libraries. There is the actual, personal library, your own shelves, which mark out reading inclinations, decade by decade, and the virtual library in the head – the floating assemblage of fragments and images and impressions and information half-remembered that forms the climate of the mind, the distillation of reading experiences that makes each of us what we are.

Let’s look first at the actual library – the real, tangible books. My two thousand plus, which is nothing very much in personal library terms and requires no cataloging system beyond crude subject allocations: fiction in the kitchen, poetry in the television room, some history upstairs, other history down. Alberto Manguel, in his lovely book
The Library at Night
, says: “Every library is autobiographical . . . our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and what we have been . . . What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not merely the choice of titles themselves, but the mesh of associations implied in the choice.” His own library sounds awesome: many thousands of books in a converted barn somewhere in France, the amazing accretion that is the fruit of his tastes, his eclectic reading, his generous interest, his voracious curiosity. And his book is a homage to the very concept of the library.

My granddaughter Rachel, at the age of ten, was made library monitor for her form at school. She had all the proper librarian instincts; under her aegis, the form-room books were arranged by subject matter, and, within that, in alphabetical order. She was away ill for a week and came back to find that some interfering ignoramus had reshelved everything in height order; Rachel was outraged, quite rightly.

Had she known of it, she would have no doubt attempted an embryonic Dewey system. So would I – had I the time and the energy and rather more books than I have. When I was first raiding the public library system, I didn’t know what those cryptic numbers on the spines meant, and was entranced when at last enlightened – the elegant simplicity of the Decimal Classification system whereby the field of human knowledge is divided, and then subdivided – theoretically ad infinitum. Dewey is under fire these days, it seems, but I still like the elegance.

Alberto Manguel does not use Dewey, it would seem; his library has “no authoritarian catalogue” and the title of his book –
The Library at Night
– is intended to evoke that random, disordered quality that he feels so crucial to a library, that power to make connections, create echoes, cross cultures. A majestic collection such as his would do precisely that; it has the discipline of groupings, in some form, and further groupings within these, but its essential feature is that it is a private not a public library. The shelving system of a public library must be apparent to all users; a private library is
sui generis
– it has been assembled in response to the pursuits of a particular mind, a particular reading life, and is colored by all the associations and connections of that particular reading narrative. It is not trying to be comprehensive; it is relishing selection. It is about time and space; it tells you where this person has been, in every sense. Manguel records his pleasure, when unpacking his books and starting to arrange them in their French barn, at the coded references he found among the pages: the tram ticket reminding him of Buenos Aires, the paper napkin from the Café de Flore, the name and phone number scribbled on a flyleaf.

Exactly so. For any of us, with our humbler collections, the books have this archival aspect; they are themselves, but they also speak for us, for this owner, for you, for me. My books spill train tickets, invoices, pages of notes, the occasional underlining or swipe with the highlighter (though I don’t approve of defacing books). A little copy of
Silas Marner
in a slipcase has my name in childish handwriting – Penelope Low – and a year, 1945. And there too is the printed sticker of the bookseller: Librairie Cité du Livre, 2 rue Fouad, Alexandrie. So I acquired it at the age of twelve, in wartime Alexandria. And it has followed me from there, and then.

Perhaps my most treasured shelves are those with the old blue Pelicans, over fifty paperbacks, including some seminal titles: F. R. Leavis’s
The Great Tradition
, Margaret Mead’s
Growing Up in New Guinea
, Richard Hoggart’s
The Uses of Literacy
, Richard Titmuss’s
The Gift Relationship
. And John Bowlby’s
Child Care and the Growth of Love
, which had us young mothers of the midcentury in a fever of guilt if we handed our young children over to someone else for longer than an hour or so lest we risked raising a social psychopath – even the father was considered an inadequate stand-in. Pelicans were the thinking person’s library – for 3 shillings and 6 pence you opened the mind a little further. And Penguin had of course their own flamboyant Dewey system – the splendid color-coding: orange for fiction, green for crime, dark blue for biography, cherry red for travel.

I don’t have enough old Penguins. The Pelicans have survived, but the rest have mostly disappeared – read until in bits, perhaps, or left on beaches or in trains or loaned and not returned. And long gone are the days when a paperback meant a Penguin, pure and simple, let alone when a paperback publisher could confidently market a product with no image at all on the cover – just the title and the author’s name, emphatically lettered. Beautiful.

Biography and autobiography and memoir are alphabetical by subject, for me, and I rather relish the strange juxtapositions – Edith Sitwell and Wole Soyinka, Kipling and Werner Heisenberg. Like a game of Consequences: He Said To Her . . . And The Consequence Was . . . This is Manguel’s library at night – the library of thoughts and voices and associations. I was once taken on a tour of the stack at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, where the long shelves of that great literary archive reach away into shadowy distances, each run of boxes labeled – Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf – and one imagined it when the archivists were gone, a silent colloquy of all those voices.

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel has an apparently malevolent Deity creating a confusion of languages in order to foil attempts at the unity of mankind, the term Babel thus becoming a synonym for linguistic chaos. A library is indeed a Tower of Babel – multilingual, multicultural. Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian as well as a writer, a dual commitment which presumably accounts for that enigmatic story “The Library of Babel” in which he proposes a library that is composed of infinite hexagonal galleries, in which each book is of uniform format – four hundred and ten pages – and among which librarians wander in interminable pursuit of some final truth, the book that will explain all books, many of whom have strangled one another, succumbed to disease, or committed suicide. It sounds more like life as lived than the ambience of the British Library, the Library of Congress or the Bibliothèque Nationale and indeed the story can be read as some sort of fable or allegory with the library as the universe: “unlimited and cyclical.” But the image is a powerful one: the multiplicity of a library, the cacophony of voices, its impenetrability, unless you can read the codes. When I worked in the Round Reading Room at the British Museum, before the British Library moved to St. Pancras, I used to have a fantasy – a short story that I never wrote – in which humanity has disappeared, all systems are down, forever, and members of an alien race pad into the Reading Room, taking down the catalog with their long green fingers, crack teams of scholars who have been set to work to penetrate the mysteries of this inexplicable archive, in which, now, all material is of equal significance: the Lindisfarne Gospels and
Beekeeping for Beginners
, the Koran and the
Guinness Book of Records
,
Hamlet
and
Asterix
. A great library is anything and everything. It is not for its current custodians to judge what the future will find to be of importance, and it is this eclecticism that gives it the mystique, that is the wonder of it. A private collection is another matter entirely: you or I have accumulated what we feel to be of significance to us, the books speak for what we have responded to or wanted to know about or got interested in and may include many acquisitions that have sneaked in for no good reason, like – in my case – that fat hardback
Collected Works
of Jane Bowles, whose work I do not care for, and plenty of other titles toward which I am indifferent but that I might need to check out at some point.

There has been plenty of checking out in the service of these pages. That is the other function of a private library – reference. Today we have the Internet, and very wonderful it is, and I am getting better at Googling, but an atavistic urge still has me reaching for the Shorter Oxford, or Chambers, or
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
, or
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
, those reliable companions over the decades.

My first engagement with a great library was as a student. A vague memory of induction to the Bodleian is that it involved making some kind of ritual declaration in Latin – presumably that you wouldn’t steal or abuse the books – and of the inimitable smell of Duke Humfrey’s Library, the rich aroma of old book – very old book, in that case. I doubt if I ever went into it again. The Radcliffe Camera was the place for history undergraduates; you got to know it all too well, homing in on favorite desks, from which you could look around and see who else was there, the hunt along the shelves for the book you needed and the frustration when you found it was already taken, which meant a search for the reader and a negotiation about how long he or she would be wanting it. One man always achieved the book I was after before I could get to it by dint of arriving at the library the moment it opened, which I never managed to do. Years later I came across him again, by which time he was the distinguished historian Theodore Zeldin; it was somehow gratifying to know that he had put the books to better use than I had – one forgave that pre-emptive early rising.

In 1993 I was invited to serve on the Board of the British Library, and did so for six years, only too glad to give up some time and energy to an institution from which I had had so much. And what can be more important than the national archive? Here is the record of pretty much everything that has been thought, and said, and done over the centuries, not just in these islands but the world over – the Library thinks multicultural, it reaches out in space as well as time. As a reader, I was awed by the sense of that vasty deep from which you could conjure up not spirits, but the precise work you had noted in the catalog, the sense of infinity of choice but also of order imposed, the idea of an immeasurable resource, a grand ideal, made available to individual inquiry. As a Board member, I was immersed, involved, sometimes baffled, occasionally panic-stricken.