Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (16 page)

The most private of all readings, of course, are performed by lovers. I remember sharing my college boyfriend’s narrow bed one afternoon, lying head-to-toe in order to postpone temptation until the end of the study session, handing a huge maroon edition of
The Romantic Poets
back and forth while we took turns reading from Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” We didn’t get far. Seven hundred years earlier, Paolo and his sister-in-law Francesca had run into trouble doing something along the same lines:

Time and again our eyes were brought together by the book we read; our faces flushed and paled.

They were reading
Lancelot du Lac
to each other, and when they reached Guinevere’s forbidden kiss, their own fate was sealed. As Francesca discreetly put it in canto V of Dante’s
Inferno
, “That day we read no further.”

And where did Paolo and Francesca end up? In the second circle of Hell, the final resting place for carnal lovers, where they were tossed about eternally by a gale-force wind. Which just goes to show that like most things worth doing, reading aloud can be dangerous. In fact, just
hearing
Francesca’s story was enough to make Dante pass out on the floor of Hell.

George and I, too, often pass out when we read to each other, but like most couples with small children, we are overtaken by sleep more frequently than by anything likely to land us in Dante’s second circle. Choosing the right book for the marital bed is not a task to be taken lightly. Randolph Churchill insisted on reading
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
to his wife Pamela, and look what happened to them. George and I tried
The Old Curiosity-Shop
, but I called a halt after chapter 3 when I began to suspect what Dickens had in store for Little Nell. Then we tried
Middlemarch
, but we stalled on page 2 after George fell asleep three nights in a row during the prologue about Saint Theresa. Finally we hit upon Robert Fagles’s translation of the
Odyssey
. So far, so good. We’re in the middle of book 5, and we haven’t missed a night.

It was lovely to hear George read the lines I used to read in Greek, lines that had faded from my memory along with most of my knowledge of the language:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.

But our journey is so slow! Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase. At the rate we’re going, it “will take us six months to get Odysseus home to Ithaca—which isn’t so bad if you consider that it took him ten years. In fact, our leisurely pace may prove to have some advantages. The poem will unfold gradually, its velocity geared to Ionians of the eighth century
B.C.
rather than to harried modern New Yorkers, and as it progresses, it will slow us down, too. When we started, I felt we were too busy to read Homer. Now I feel
we
are too busy not to read him.

Our only problem is staying awake. When George catches me nodding off, he keeps me on my toes with a little judicious emendation. For instance, Telemachus may tell his old housekeeper Eurycleia:

Come, nurse,

draw me off some wine in smaller traveling jars,
mellow, the finest vintage you’ve been keeping,
Perhaps something in a Mouton Cadet

As I descend still further into the Land of the Lotus-Eaters, my critical faculties descend with me. “Those suitors,” I murmur languorously. “They remind me of the Cat in the Hat.”

“They do?” says George.

“You know how he barges in, raids the refrigerator, eats a cake, leaves a big pink bathtub ring …”

“Yes,” says George sleepily. “I know just what you mean.”

As he leans over to kiss me good night, I do not regret having graduated from the amorous sprints of our youths. Marriage is a long-distance course, and reading aloud is a kind of romantic Gatorade formulated to invigorate the occasionally exhausted racers.

One of the obituaries I read my father three years ago was that of the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller. Toward the end of his life, when his memory was failing, he and his wife, Shirley Hazzard, read aloud every day after breakfast.
The New York Times
reported: “The day before his death, Ms. Hazzard said, the couple had just finished reading Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ to each other ‘for the umpteenth time,’ surrounded by the potted geraniums he loved to tend on their terrace over the Bay of Naples.”

I hope George and I will be as lucky.

 T
H E
 P . M . ‘
S
 E
M P I R E   O F
 B
O O K S
 

A
few years ago I bought a secondhand book titled
On Books and the Housing of Them
. Actually, to call it a book is to stretch—or compress—the meaning of the word, since, although it was hardbound, it was only twenty-nine pages long. I dimly registered that it was written by someone named Gladstone, but it did not occur to me that he could be
that
Gladstone. What loosened my pursestrings (to the tune of eight dollars, an extortionate twenty-eight cents a page) was the topic. I have never been able to resist a book about books.

Then I lost the little volume. Or rather, it lost itself. Too slender to bear a title on its vermilion spine,
On Books and the Housing of Them
was invisibly squashed between two obese shelf-neighbors, much as a flimsy blouse on a wire hanger can disappear for months in an overstuffed closet. Then, last summer, when I pried out one of the adjacent books—the shelf was so crowded that a crowbar would have aided the operation—out tumbled the vanished ectomorph. This time I looked at it more carefully. It had been published in May of 1898, in a limited edition of five hundred, which made the eight dollars seem more conscionable. The frontispiece was a sepia portrait of an old man. His hair was white and his cheeks subsided comfortably into his jowls, but his gaze was as fierce as a raptor’s. The caption read, “William Ewart Gladstone, 1809-98.”

It
was
that Gladstone: four times British Prime Minister, grand old man of the Liberal Party, scholar, financier, theologian, orator, humanitarian, and thorn in the side of Benjamin Disraeli, who, when asked to define the difference between a misfortune and a calamity, replied, “If Mr. Gladstone were to fall into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, it would be a calamity.”

I later learned that
On Books and the Housing of Them
was originally published in 1890 in a British journal called
The Nineteenth Century
. M. F. Mansfield, a New York publisher, esteemed it highly enough to reprint the essay in what I now realize was a memorial edition. Gladstone died on May 19, 1898; my little volume was rushed into print before the end of the month. (Boot up your computers and match that, Random House.) And then the book quickly sank into an obscurity so profound that it was not even mentioned in
Gladstone
, Roy Jenkins’s recent 698-page biography.

It should have been. If you wish to understand the character of both W. E. Gladstone and Victorian England, everything you need to know is contained within the small compass of
On Books and the Housing of Them
. In the index of the Jenkins biography, under “Gladstone, William Ewart, Characteristics,” we find: Energy. Priggishness. Disciplined nature and control. Conceit. Probity. Neatness and passion for order. Authoritarianism. Singlemindedness. These quintessentially Victorian traits suffuse every page of Gladstone’s book. The well-regulated efficiency that he desired so keenly, but often so vainly, for the British Empire, he desired equally—and achieved—within the miniature empire of his own library.

The theme of
On Books and the Housing of Them
was simple: too many books, too little space. The problem, said Gladstone, could be solved by a shelving system that might “prevent the population of Great Britain from being extruded some centuries hence into the surrounding waters by the exorbitant dimensions of their own libraries.” This observation was simultaneously facetious and earnest. Gladstone had a Scotsman’s natural parsimony. His diary, which he began at fifteen and abandoned at eighty-five after he was blinded by cataracts, often detailed his days down to fifteen-minute intervals: it was, in his words, “an account-book of the all-precious gift of Time.” Just as his father, a canny businessman, never squandered a penny, so Gladstone never squandered a minute. James Graham, who served in the cabinet with Gladstone in the 1840s, marveled that he “could do in four hours what it took any other man sixteen to do and … he worked sixteen hours a day.” If he stuffed into a day what would take another man a week, it was only reasonable that he should wish to stuff into a single room enough books to fill another man’s house.

Here was the plan: “First, the shelves must, as a rule, be fixed; secondly, the cases, or a large part of them, should have their side against the wall, and thus, projecting into the room for a convenient distance, they should be of twice the depth needed for a single line of books, and should hold two lines, one facing each way.” This was just a warm-up. It took several thousand more words to fill in the details. Gladstone’s parsimony did not extend to his verbiage. As a parliamentary orator, he was, according to Disraeli, “inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity,” and as a writer, he may be the only man in history to have written a long-winded twenty-nine-page book. The bookshelves that projected at right angles into the library, he declared, “should each have attached to them what I rudely term an endpiece (for want of a better name), that is, a shallow and extremely light adhering bookcase (light by reason of the shortness of the shelves), which both increases the accommodation, and makes one short side as well as the two long ones of the parallelepiped to present simply a face of books with the lines of shelf, like threads, running between the rows.”

One can see why, during an 1884 cabinet meeting, Joseph Chamberlain, the president of the Board of Trade, composed this premature epitaph for the world’s most analretentive statesman and handed it across the table to another cabinet member:

Here lies Mr. G., who has left us repining,
While he is, no doubt, still engaged in refining;
And explaining distinctions to Peter and Paul,
Who faintly protest that distinctions so small
Were never submitted to saints to perplex them,
Until the Prime Minister came up to vex them.

Mr. G. calculated that a library twenty by forty feet, with projecting bookcases three feet long, twelve inches deep, and nine feet high (“so that the upper shelf can be reached by the aid of a wooden stool of two steps not more than twenty inches high”), would accommodate between eighteen thousand and twenty thousand volumes. I trust his arithmetic. He had, after all, been Chancellor of the Exchequer. This shelving plan would suffice for the home of an ordinary gentleman, but for cases of extreme book-crowding, he proposed a more radical scheme in which “nearly two-thirds, or say three-fifths, of the whole cubic contents of a properly constructed apartment may be made a nearly solid mass of books.” It was detailed in a footnote so extraordinary it bears quoting nearly in full:

Let us suppose a room 28 feet by 10, and a little over 9 feet high. Divide this longitudinally for a passage 4 feet wide. Let the passage project 12 to 18 inches at each end beyond the line of the wall. Let the passage ends be entirely given to either window or glass door. Twenty-four pairs of trams run across the room. On them are placed 56 bookcases, divided by the passage, reaching to the ceiling, each 5 feet broad, 12 inches deep, and separated from its neighbors by an interval of 2 inches, and set on small wheels, pulleys, or rollers, to work along the trams. Strong handles on the inner side of each bookcase to draw it out into the passage. Each of these bookcases would hold 500 octavos; and a room of 28 feet by 10 would receive 25,000 volumes. A room of 40 feet by 20 (no great size) would receive 60,000.