The Meaning of Recognition (37 page)

What had happened to Russia happened to Germany when the Nazis came in, and this time the world found out straight away, because the Nazis took pictures: moving pictures. The burning of the
books in the Operplatz in Berlin is one of the abiding images of the twentieth century. The sole virtue of the Nazis was that they infallibly discredited their own ideas from the moment they put
them into action, and made sure the world realized it by boasting about their atrocities as if they were accomplishments. Immediately it became obvious that Heinrich Heine had been right when he
predicted that any regime that burned books would soon burn people. Some of the people scheduled to be burned managed to leave early and take their books with them, thus removing many of the best
private libraries from the purview of the Gestapo, who were great readers in their way, although they were always great hunters first. As Victor Klemperer tells us in his marvellous two-volume
diary, the Gestapo were always very interested in what books you had on your shelves. The result was a house-cleaning, but here already the anomaly comes in that we noticed in the case of Tiberius.
Not even the Nazis succeeded in destroying everything. Admittedly they were short of time. The Thousand-Year Reich was fated to last only twelve years. But they didn’t realize that. And we
are forced to conclude that the main reason they didn’t obliterate every book that they hadn’t written themselves was because they had a weird urge to preserve the printed evidence that
the culture they were busy annihilating had once existed. In Poland in 1942, in the ghetto of the town called Drohobycz, the great writer Bruno Schulz met his death when a Gestapo officer called
Karl Günther shot him in the head. But until that moment Schulz had been employed in the category of Necessary Jew, because he knew something about books, and the Nazis were busy cataloguing
their literary loot before sending it back to Germany to be incorporated into some weird and wonderful library of superseded, decadent cultures. Adolf Eichmann himself, who took pride in his
expertise on the Jewish culture whose living representatives he had been deputed to annihilate, was some kind of collector of Jewish manuscripts, which he enjoyed pottering about with almost as
much as he enjoyed rewriting the timetables so that all the trains ran to Auschwitz.

Goebbels, who had a literary background and some pretensions as a novelist, kept an important private library. After the war, Goebbels’s personal assistant, an ex-journalist called Wilfred
von Oven, got away safely to Argentina, where he published, in two volumes, an unintentionally comic masterpiece called
Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende
– With Goebbels to the End. In the
year 2000 I found a copy in Henschel’s great second-hand bookshop in Buenos Aires. When I sat down in a café in the Avenida Corrientes to begin reading my new treasure, fascinating
facts leaped from the yellowed pages. Did you know that Goebbels gave up smoking the day after D-Day? Neither did I. Apparently he had figured out that the time to give up smoking is when you are
on a psychological high, and he was feeling good because he sincerely thought that with the Allied armies actually present in Europe it would be easier to reach a political arrangement with them,
presumably because they were closer to hand. Whatever the wisdom of that, he took up smoking again twelve days later. But another fact is even more fascinating. He also, says von Oven, started
reordering his library. As the end approached and the Russians were almost within shelling distance of the Operplatz where his sinister team of student myrmidons had once scornfully read passages
aloud from the books he had ordered to be burned, the Reichsminister decided that his library of classic German literature should be cleansed of Nazi texts. The book-burner started burning his own
stuff, but only so that the stuff he had secretly known to be better all along could keep its own company undisturbed by ideological junk. And even the Great Helmsman Chairman Mao, the biggest
enemy of Chinese written culture since the mad First Emperor of the Ch’in burned the classical texts; even Chairman Mao, who encouraged the notion that his own Little Red Book of platitudes
was the only book that a Red Guard in a peaked cap need ever read; even Chairman Mao kept a personal collection of classic poetry in his library in Beijing.

Mao’s personal library was called the Library of Chrysanthemum Fragrance and I often think of it while sitting in my own library, the Library of Cheap Cigar Fragrance. I think of it
because of the supreme evidence it provides that even a beast can have a feeling for books, and that the feeling must come from somewhere very deep in the psyche. The apparently self-contradictory
phenomenon of the barbarian bookworm had a precedent not just in Tiberius but in the long history of the Christian theocracies, whose virulence we ought to remember, now that we are worried about
another kind of theocracy, and wondering what to do about it. Not just the Catholic church but the Protestant churches that later competed against it had a solid tradition of burning both books and
people. You can’t fault either wing on that one: Calvin was as lethal as Torquemada, a fact I once got into trouble for pointing out to the minister of Kogarah Presbyterian church when he
carpeted me for giving my Sunday School class a lecture on free love. But there was something about our theocracies – let us call them ours out of an acknowledgment of the past, if not out of
pride – that demanded a special library be kept of the books on the
index expurgatorium
, even if only the most thoroughly accredited theological adepts were issued with a library
card. Tamburlaine, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, all of whom simply destroyed everything, were not running theocracies. They didn’t think they were creating anything except destruction.
They had their descendants in the twentieth century, and especially in the late twentieth century. Pol Pot wanted everything to do with the mind destroyed. At the peak of his cold-blooded dementia
he required the persecution, torture and death of anyone who wore glasses. But he was not an ideologist in the sense that Stalin and Hitler were. Though both godless men, they were also theocrats:
they had ideas in their heads. The ideas were totalitarian ideas, but one of them was the idea that some sort of memory should be maintained of the liberal ideas that had been superseded.

This quirk on the part of the great hunters, the man hunters, can only be explained with reference to a deep instinct in which some sort of scholarly pretension is bound up with the urge to pure
action. One important consequence, in the case of the Soviet Union, was that the KGB kept a copy of its number-one enemy book, George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. When Yuri
Andropov was head of the KGB he had the copy copied and circulated to his top echelon of staff, and the results were part of what seems unlikely even in retrospect: the elite of the oppressors
somehow allowed the transformation of the regime that they had previously preserved by exterminating, without hesitation, everyone who showed signs of opposing it. The oppressors retained the power
to go on doing so, but they had lost the desire; and that deep instinct to become informed about actions, instead of merely to perform them, had somehow helped them to lose it.

With these considerations in mind, it is time to go back fifty years again to the young would-be swimming champion and tennis ace, and talk about
his
deep instincts. Another of my
athletic ambitions was for running. Heavily under the influence of a classic photograph of the great Australian sprinter Hector Hogan leaving the starting blocks in Helsinki, I would practise my
start on the strip of lawn in front of our house. One of the secrets of Hogan’s electrifying speed out of the blocks was the way he kept his head down until he was upright. I would practise
keeping my head down. It was probably the main reason I ran at full speed into the lower branch of our box-gum tree. The branch caught me across the forehead and practically ended my future
literary career right there. The impact was probably the main reason why some of my metaphors still come out mixed. It didn’t do my sprinting career much good either, but that would have been
threatened anyway by my attendance at Sydney Technical High School, where quite a few of the boys could run faster than I could. One of them, the future international rugby star Reg Gasnier, could
run twice as fast as I could while he was carrying a football, and probably could have done so while carrying a refrigerator. But I was fast enough on my feet to get to Kogarah’s little
lending library in a matter of minutes so that I could take out yet another armful of detective novels by Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner.

Once a week in the early evening I scooted up the hill to the library to change my maximum allowed number of books for the same number of new ones, or sometimes the same ones if I wanted to read
them again. Walking slowly home in the reverse trajectory, I would already be deep into the first book of the batch before I got to the front gate, which I would open without looking, sometimes
surprising myself when I encountered Mrs Thorpe setting out the empty milk bottles. I had no method for surreptitiously marking the books I had already read, so there was always a chance of getting
the same book again anyway, and not realizing until I had started to read it. Later on in London I worked briefly and disastrously at the front desk of one of the Lambeth lending libraries and I
encountered little old ladies who solved this problem by making a personal mark in each book they had read. There were always a few little old ladies who tremulously asked the classic question
‘Have I read this one?’ but the rest of them had skills of encipherment that they might previously have employed at Bletchley Park. One woman drew a little square at the bottom of page
98 of any book she had finished reading. Another drew a little circle in the right-hand margin of page 123. I was a bit worried about the woman who made her mark on the back right-hand endpaper.
Her mark was a swastika. But on the whole the little old ladies were smarter than I had been back in Kogarah. I just took pot luck.

I was more careful about the books I bought rather than borrowed. Each of them, I believed, was an individual work of art in every aspect, and especially in regard to its cover. I collected
every book by Leslie Charteris featuring his greatest creation, the Saint. I preferred the Pan paperbacks to those published by Hodder and Stoughton, because the Pan cover paintings were glossier,
often showing the Saint in black tie supported on either side by a glamorous female with a shrink-wrapped décolletage: a foretaste of the James Bond film posters in later times. On the floor
of my room I would arrange side by side my complete set of Biggles books in the green dustcovers that showed the aeronautical hero posed in his flying suit against a green sky. The effect, I now
realize, presaged the methods of Andy Warhol by twenty years, although my mother was less impressed on the aesthetic level than I was. Nevertheless I am sure it was not deliberately that she trod
on my precious copy of
Biggles Flies East
, irreparably coarsening the hero’s fine-drawn features. She just forgot to look down when she came in to make my bed, a task I had excused
myself from on the grounds of my intellectual commitments. Previously I had excused myself on the grounds of my sporting commitments: swimming training, etc. One instinct had transcended another.
Books had started to become my life: not out of a reasonable assessment of what life should be, but out of an unquestioned impulse. It was just another kind of love: I doted on a book as if it were
the contents of a girl’s Speedo. As I brushed a linen spine with my fingertips, there was undoubtedly a libidinous element, and Freud would not be surprised to hear that it still haunts me.
Even today I find a woman reading a book an arousing spectacle, especially if I wrote it. At my age there isn’t much left to be aroused by, but there it is: or rather, there it isn’t.
Alison, by the way, was a bit of a reader. Admittedly it took her all summer to read a single issue of
Women’s Weekly
, but that made her all the more satisfactory to look at, because
her lips moved when she read. I accumulated books with the assiduity of Don Giovanni accumulating conquests, with the difference that I did not discard them. My room turned into the germ of the
personal library I own today, the one preparing itself for the descent into the car-park.

*

At any size, however, the personal library has a drawback inseparable from its advantage. What goes into it is all to your taste, and there is a tendency to be disdainful of
what stays out. For this reason, all the personal libraries in the world can provide no adequate substitute for a public library that takes everything. But I didn’t know that at the time, and
I conceived early on a suspicion of big public libraries that in some respects lingers to this day. At Sydney University I would visit Fisher Library only because my girlfriend was a librarian
working in the basement, and when my second-year History essay on the first Lord Halifax necessitated research in the Mitchell Library downtown, I took one look at the thousands of books on display
in the reading room and retreated immediately to the Botanical Gardens for a smoke. Rothman’s king size in a flip-top box had just arrived in Australia and I developed an elaborately casual
way of flipping the top to extract the contents one by one. My bronchial cough deepened on every visit to the Mitchell. When I consulted the catalogue, there was something about the Dewey Decimal
system that scared me into paralysis, and in the rare case when I had an actual book by or about Lord Halifax in my hands the absence of a dustcover somehow sealed it shut. No picture of Biggles or
the Saint, just a standard binding disfigured by numbers on the spine. Glumly I would enter the title in my bibliography, as if noting the title were somehow the same as having read the book. It
was presumptuous of me to be disappointed when I read the marker’s comment written at the end of my essay. ‘You express yourself quite well, but your trouble in this case is that you
have nothing to express, a deficiency you might have repaired if you had actually consulted the books listed in your surprisingly full bibliography. The three marks I am giving you out of the
possible ten are for your style.’ I quote the marker’s comment from memory, but I am pretty sure I’ve got it right. My three out of ten for a history essay stuck with me like a
scar.