Leith on life: literary time machines

“They do furnish a—”

“Don’t say it!”

“But they do!” My wife, who is keen for me to declutter my shelves, has by now become heartily sick of me quoting Anthony Powell at her. Every marriage contains asymmetries of the Jack Sprat sort: ours is that I believe there is no room that isn’t improved both morally and decoratively by being entirely lined with bookshelves. My wife thinks that there is something to be said for pictures and occasional tables and windows and such like.

Before we moved house last year I was prevailed on to hoof about a third of my books into the charity shop but I still have too many. The shelves in my study are double- stacked; the floor sprouts literary stalagmites. This is the sort of complaint that often disguises a boast, but this clutter isn’t the result of my erudition so much as of the way I make my living. I’m a literary journalist. Publishers send me books. Most go to the charity shop, but if I like the look of them I find it hard to throw them out.

Roger Penrose’s huge book The Road To Reality, for instance, remains on my shelf because even if I can’t understand a word of it, it feels reassuring to know that my house contains a summary of everything humankind knows about the nature of the universe. Or, to be accurate, knew in 2004 when the book was published; it’s pre-Higgs so perhaps now completely worthless, though since I can’t understand it (don’t have the maths, you see) I couldn’t tell you. Still, I hang onto it just in case.

You see my wife’s problem. And now I’ve been empanelled—I like the suggestion in that of being boarded up in a wall—as a judge of this year’s Man Booker Prize, the situation will become worse. Last year’s judges read 154 books. That’s insane. We’re hoping to hold it down to something manageable, like 150. In they will come, and because they will be mementoes of the process I will find them hard to throw away.

That, I think, is it: books are memory. The Borgesian fantasy of a library containing every book is a fantasy of recall: everything humankind has learned, or felt, or imagined, laid up on shelves. But as well as tribal memory, they are personal memory: every book you’ve read not only contributed to the furniture of your own mind, but its weight in the hands, its marginalia, the feel of the jacket under the thumb: these return you to the self who read them. They are time machines.

The two volumes of Saki—The Chronicles of Clovis and The Square Egg—that were my grandmother’s; the Summoned by Bells inscribed to me by John Betjeman when I was a few days old; the Thom Gunn volume, The Man With Night Sweats, I bought as a teenage fan on the day it came out; the Thom Gunn: Collected Poems signed when I interviewed him in a Soho restaurant 11 years later. The books that aren’t there are present too. My first proper girlfriend made off with my Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems: the old greyish Faber edition, the one with the matt cover. I can still bring exactly to mind the scar where the front cover was accidentally folded back on itself. That was 22 years ago.

All these books feel like transactive memory. The melancholy fantasy—melancholy because it announces itself as a fantasy—is that to read them over would be to recapture myself; to be, as Corinthians puts it, “fully known.” In “Reading Myself,” Robert Lowell wrote of his body of poetry: “No honeycomb is built without a bee/ adding circle to circle, cell to cell,/ the wax and honey of a mausoleum.” Don’t we do something the same when we read as when we write? I want to say to my children: if you want to know who I was, this is where you must look. But they will be busy building their own libraries. I’ll be illegible; a closed book. Still, they do furnish a room.