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Literary Review
ENDPAPER
`Marrying libraries'
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
NETRA SHYAM
FOR as long as I can remember I've wanted my soul mate to have read the same books and liked the same writers, but only lately have I begun to see the problem it might pose: once the two of us move in and begin house what are we do with our books — they are bound to be the same! What is one to do with the duplicates? Which ones to keep and which ones to give away? Like a bookish agony aunt that I had been looking for, Anne Fadiman had the answer in Ex-Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, a slender, elegant volume of 18 personal essays that recount a life-long love affair with books. "A few months ago my husband and I decided to mix our books together," she writes in the first chapter, "Marrying Libraries", "by far the hardest task came at the end of the week, when we sorted through our duplicates and decided whose to keep. I realised we had been hoarding redundant copies of our favourite books `just in case' we ever split up. If George got rid of his beat-up copy of To The Lighthouse and I said goodbye to my genital-pink paperback of Couples, read so often in my teens — well, then we would clearly have to stick together for good. Our bridges would be burned. We each owned copies of about fifty books in common. We decided that hardbacks would prevail over paperbacks unless the paperbacks contained marginalia."
When she was 18, Fadiman wrote in her paperback copy of Middlemarch such marginal advice to the heroine as "Don't marry that creep Casaubon". This may not be of value to anyone else but reminds her of the kind of person she once was. For Fadiman making these margin-jottings is a form of conversation, turning monologue into dialogue. "We kept my Middlemarch", she writes, "in which were registered my nascent attempts at literary criticism (page 37: "Grrr"; page 261: "Bull shit"; page 294: "Yccch"). We kept George's The Magic Mountain and my War And Peace. Women in Love generated the most agonising discussion. George had read it at 16. He insisted that whenever he reread it, no edition other than his original Bantam paperback would possibly do. I had read it at 18, I kept a diary that year, but I had no need of one to remind me for that was the year I lost my virginity. It was all too apparent from the comments I wrote in my Viking edition. What could we do but throw in the towel and keep both copies?"
Fadiman didn't even feel truly married until she and her husband merged their books — a profound act of intimacy for her. "A couple of weeks ago when George was out of town, I decided to reread Travels with Charley. I got into bed with the copy I had first read the summer I turned seventeen. I was settling into the familiar feel of my crumbly old paperback, the one with Steinbeck sitting cross-legged next to his poodle on the cover, when I reached page 192. There, next to a passage about the dwindling redwood forests of California, in a younger version of my husband's handwriting — I'd recognise it anywhere — was the plaintive comment: `Why do we destroy the environment?' We must have had identical copies, and we'd kept George's. My books and his books had become our books. We were really married."
She writes of her addiction wittily, commonsensicaly, joyously. In "Never To That To a Book" she makes a case for the "carnal book lover" as opposed to the "courtly book lover". The courtly book lover is obsessed with keeping, maintaining and preserving a book in good condition. She gives the example of the parents of critic Diana Trilling who would allow her to handle their glass-fronted copies of Balzac and Twain only after she washed her hands. She cites the example of Charles Lamb who would lend books to his best friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they would come back with annotations as long as the text and for Lamb this "tripled the value". For the courtly book lover there is only one use for a book: to be read. For the carnal book lover like herself, words are holy — not the paper, cloth, cardboard, ink etc. that contain them. And so the carnal lover wantonly writes in margins and fly-leafs, underlines passages, dog-ears pages and keeps books spread-eagled/ face down, straining the spine. Her father, the famous literary critic, Clifton Fadiman, would, in order to reduce the weight of the paperback he read on airplanes, tear off chapters he had completed and throw them in the trash. It's the courtly lovers, however, who make the best book collectors: her rich investment analyst friend owns 8,000 books and "he buys at least two copies of his favourite books, so that only one need be subjected to the stress of having its pages turned."
Perhaps the only disappointing thing about the book is that not all the chapters are really about the love of books, the pleasures of reading and book collecting. Eight of them are only obliquely about books — like asides. "You are There", for instance, is about the practice of reading travel books in the places they describe; "His'er Problem" is about exactly that, "The Joy of Sesquipedalians" is about big words and "The Literary Glutton" is not about literary gluttons but about books on food. But the others are delightfully bang on target. "Secondhand Prose" is, of course, about second-hand bookshops but perhaps best of all is the one about inscriptions called "Words on a Flyleaf". She ends this chapter with quoting the best inscription she's ever got. On the title page of The Enigma of Suicide by George Howe Colt, her husband, was inscribed: "To my beloved wife. This is your book, too. As my life, too, is yours." In the relatively new, rare and welcome genre of Books about Books, Ex Libris is a find. Fadiman's book-haunted voice should speak for book lovers everywhere.
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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