Baffled at a Bookcase
Alan
Bennett returns to the library
I have always
been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there. A
scene that seems to crop up regularly in plays that I have written has a
character, often a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled.
He – and occasionally she – is overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that has been
written and the ground to be covered. ‘All these books. I’ll never catch up,’
wails the young Joe Orton in the film script of Prick Up Your Ears, and in The Old Country another young man reacts more dramatically, by hurling half the books to
the floor. In Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf someone else gives vent to their frustration with literature by drawing
breasts on a photograph of Virginia Woolf and kitting out E.M. Forster with a
big cigar. Orton himself notoriously defaced library books before starting to
write books himself. This resentment, which was, I suppose, somewhere mine, had
to do with feeling shut out. A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail
party with everybody standing with their back to me; I could not find a way in.
The first library I did
find my way into was the Armley Public Library in Leeds where a reader’s ticket
cost tuppence in 1940; not tuppence a time or even tuppence a year but just
tuppence; that was all you ever had to pay. It was rather a distinguished
building, put up in 1901, the architect Percy Robinson, and amazingly for
Leeds, which is and always has been demolition crazy, it survives and is still
used as a library, though whether it will survive the present troubles I don’t
like to think.
We would be there as a
family, my mother and father, my brother and me, and it would be one of our
regular weekly visits. I had learned to read quite early when I was five or six
by dint, it seemed to me then, of watching my brother read. We both of us read
comics but whereas I was still on picture-based comics like the Dandy and the Beano, my brother, who was three
years older, had graduated to the more text-based Hotspurand Wizard. Having finished my Dandy I would lie down on the carpet beside him and gaze at what he was
reading, asking him questions about it and generally making a nuisance of
myself. Then – and it seemed as instantaneous as this – one day his comic made
sense and I could read. I’m sure it must have been more painstaking than this
but not much more.
Having learned to read,
other than comics, there was nothing in the house on which to practise my newly
acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of
ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild
adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island sanctuary, with both
of them fans of the naturalist R.M. Lockley. There were a few volumes of
self-help in the house but the only non-library book of autobiography was I Haven’t Unpacked by William Holt, who had got away from the dark, satanic mills by
buying a horse and riding through England.
The Armley library was at
the bottom of Wesley Road, the entrance up a flight of marble steps under open
arches, through brass-railed swing doors panelled in stained glass which by
1941 was just beginning to buckle. Ahead was the Adults’ Library, lofty, airy
and inviting; to the right was the Junior Library, a low dark room made darker
by the books which, regardless of their contents, had been bound in heavy
boards of black, brown or maroon embossed with the stamp of Leeds Public
Libraries. This grim packaging was discouraging to a small boy who had just
begun to read, though more discouraging still was the huge and ill-tempered,
walrus-moustached British Legion commissionaire who was permanently installed
there. The image of General Hindenburg, who was pictured on the stamps in my
brother’s album, he had lost one or other of his limbs in the trenches, but
since he seldom moved from his chair and just shouted it was difficult to tell
which.
Such veterans of the First
War were much in evidence well into the 1950s. As a child one encountered them
in parks, sitting on benches and in shelters playing dominoes, generally grumpy
and with reason to be, the war having robbed them of their youth and often
their health. The luckier and less disabled ones manned lifts or were posted at
the doors of public buildings, a uniformed and bemedalled conciergerie who were
more often than not unhelpful, making the most of whatever petty authority they
were invested with. And so it was here, the commissionaire’s only concern to
maintain absolute silence, and not at all the companion and friend novice
readers needed on this, the threshold of literature.
Of the books themselves I
remember little. Henty was well represented and Captain Marryat, books which
whenever I did manage to get into them only brought home to me that I was not
an entirely satisfactory version of the genus boy. I suppose there must
somewhere have been Enid Blyton, but since she too would have been backed in
the same funereal but immensely serviceable boards she passed me by. As it was,
the books I best remember reading there were the Dr Dolittle stories of Hugh
Lofting, which were well represented and (an important consideration) of which
there were always more. I think I knew even at six years old that a doctor who
could talk to animals was fiction but at the same time I thought the setting of
the stories, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, was a real place set in historical time
with the doctor (and Lofting’s own illustrations of the doctor) having some
foundation in fact. Shreds of this belief clung on because when, years later,
having recorded some of Lofting’s stories for the BBC, I met his son, I found I
still had the feeling that his father had been not quite an ordinary mortal.
Other mysteries persisted.
What, for instance, was a cat’s meat man? I had never come across one. Was the
meat of cats or for cats? We didn’t have a cat and even if we had with Dad being a
Co-op butcher it would have been well catered for. And again it was when I was
reading the stories on the radio and happened to mention this mysterious
personage in my diary in the LRB that the small
mystery was solved. A cat’s meat man toured the streets (though not our street)
with strips of meat suspended from a stick to be sold as pet food. One
correspondent, her mother being out, remembered the stick of meat being put
through the letterbox where she retrieved it from the doormat and, it being
wartime, scoffed the lot.
In 1944, believing, as
people in Leeds tended to do, that flying bombs or no flying bombs, things were
better Down South, Dad threw up his job with the Co-op and we migrated to
Guildford. It was a short-lived experiment and I don’t remember ever finding
the public library, but this was because a few doors down from the butcher’s
shop where Dad worked there was a little private library, costing 6d a week,
which in the children’s section had a whole run of Richmal Crompton’s William
books. I devoured them, reading practically one a day, happy in the knowledge that
there would always be more. Years later when I first read Evelyn Waugh I had
the same sense of discovery: here was a trove of books that was going to last.
I wish I could say I felt the same about Dickens or Trollope or Proust even,
but they seemed more of a labour than a prospect of delight.
The butcher for whom my dad
worked also ran a horsemeat business, the meat strictly for non-human
consumption and accordingly painted bright green. In his cattle truck Mr Banks
would go out into the Surrey countryside to collect carcasses and sometimes, by
dint of hanging around the lorry, I got to go with him. I would watch as the
bloated cow or horse was winched on board and then we would drive to the
slaughterhouse in Walnut Tree Close just by Guildford Station. While the
carcass was dismembered I would sit in the corner absorbed in my latest William
book. Richmal Crompton can seldom have been read in such grisly and uncongenial
circumstances.
It wasn’t long, though,
before we ended up going back to Leeds where we now lived in Headingley, with
the local public library on North Lane, a visit to which could be combined with
seeing the film at the Lounge cinema opposite. I went to Leeds Modern School, a
state school at Lawnswood (and now called Lawnswood). I spoke there a few
months ago and, unlike Ofsted, was much impressed by it, its current disfavour
a presumed punishment for its admirable headmistress, who is still managing to
resist the siren charms of academy status and the wiles of Mr Gove. In those
circumstances I am happy to boast that the school library has been named after
me.
When I was in the sixth
form at the Modern School I used to do my homework in the Leeds Central Library
in the Headrow. At that time the municipal buildings housed not only the
lending library and the reference library but also the education offices and
the police department, which I suppose was handy for the courts, still
functioning across the road in the town hall with the whole complex – town
hall, library, courts – an expression of the confidence of the city and its
belief in the value of reading and education, and where you might end up if
they were neglected. It’s a High Victorian building done throughout in polished
Burmantofts brick, extravagantly tiled, the staircases of polished marble
topped with brass rails, and carved at the head of each stair a slavering dog
looking as if it’s trying to stop itself sliding backwards down the banister.
Armley Public
Library
The reference
library itself proclaimed the substance of the city with its solid elbow chairs
and long mahogany tables, grooved along the edge to hold a pen, and in the
centre of each table a massive pewter inkwell. Arched and galleried and lined
from floor to ceiling with books the reference library was grand yet unintimidating.
Half the tables were filled with sixth-formers like myself, just doing their
homework or studying for a scholarship; but there would also be university
students home for the vacation, the Leeds students tending to work up the road
in their own Brotherton Library. There were, too, the usual quota of eccentrics
that haunt any reading room that is warm and handy and has somewhere to sit
down. Old men would doze for hours over a magazine taken from the rack, though
if they were caught nodding off an assistant would trip over from the counter
and hiss, ‘No sleeping!’
One regular,
always with a pile of art books at his elbow, was the painter Jacob Kramer,
some of whose paintings, with their Vorticist slant, hung in the art gallery
next door. Dirty and half-tight there wasn’t much to distinguish him from the
other tramps whiling away their time before trailing along Victoria Street to
spend the night in the refuge in the basement of St George’s Church, where
occasionally I would do night duty myself, sleeping on a camp bed in a room
full of these sad, defeated, utterly unthreatening creatures.
With its
mixture of readers and its excellent facilities (it was a first-rate library)
and the knowledge that there would always be someone working there whom I knew
and who would come out for coffee, I found some of the pleasure going to the
reference library that, had I been less studious, I could have found in a pub.
Over the next ten years while I still thought I might turn into a medieval
historian I became something of a connoisseur of libraries, but the reference
library in Leeds always seemed to me one of the most congenial. It was there,
on leave from the army, that I discovered they held a run of Horizon, the literary
magazine started by Cyril Connolly in 1940, and that I eventually did get a
scholarship to Oxford I put down to the smattering of culture I gleaned from
its pages.
In my day, it
was a predominantly male institution with the main tables dividing themselves
almost on religious or ethnic lines. There was a Catholic table, patronised by
boys from St Michael’s College, the leading Catholic school, with blazers in
bright Mary blue; there was a Jewish table where the boys came from Roundhay or
the Grammar School, the Jewish boys even when they were not at the same school
often knowing each other from the synagogue or other extra-curricular
activities. If, like me, you were at the Modern School – and there were about
half a dozen of us who were there regularly – you had no particular religious
or racial affinities and indeed were not thought perhaps quite as clever, the
school certainly not as good as Roundhay or the Grammar School. The few girls
who braved this male citadel disrupted the formal division, leavened it, I’m
sure for the better. And they worked harder than the boys and were seldom to be
found on the landing outside where one adjourned for a smoke.
It had glamour,
too, for me and getting in first at nine one morning I felt, opening my books,
as I had when a small boy at Armley Baths and I had been first in there, the
one to whom it fell to break the immaculate stillness of the water, shatter the
straight lines tiled on the bottom of the bath and set the day on its way.
Of the boys who
worked in the reference library a surprising number must have turned out to be
lawyers, and I can count at least eight of my contemporaries who sat at those
tables in the 1950s who became judges. A school – and certainly a state or
provincial school – would consider that something to boast about, but libraries
are facilities; a library has no honours board and takes no credit for what its
readers go on to do but, remembering myself at 19, on leave from the army and
calling up the copies of Horizonto get me through the general paper in the Oxford
scholarship, I feel as much a debt to that library as I do to my school. It was
a good library and though like everywhere else busier now than it was in my
day, remains, unlike so much of Leeds, largely unaltered.
The library
closed at nine and coming down in the lift (bevelled mirrors, mahogany
panelling, little bench) the attendant, another British Legion figure, would
stop and draw the gates at the floor below and in would get a covey of
policemen and even the occasional miscreant en route for the cells. One of the
policemen might be my cousin Arnold, who belonged to what my mother always felt
was the slightly common wing of the Bennett family. Loud, burly and wonderfully
genial, Arnold was a police photographer and he would regale me with the
details of the latest murder he had been called on to snap: ‘By, Alan, I’ve
seen some stuff.’ The stuff he’d seen included the corpse of the stripper Mary
Millington, who had committed suicide. ‘I can’t understand why she committed
suicide. She had a lovely body.’
To someone as
prone to embarrassment as I was, these encounters, particularly in the presence
of my schoolfriends, ought to have been shaming. That they never were was, I
suppose, because Cousin Arnold was looked on as a creature from the real world,
the world of prostitutes found dead on waste ground, corpses in copses and cars
burned out down Lovers’ Lane. This was Life where I knew even then that I was
not likely to be headed or ever to have much to do with.
There is no
shortage of libraries in Oxford, some of them, of course, of great grandeur and
beauty. The Radcliffe Camera seems to me one of the handsomest buildings in
England and the square in which it stands a superb combination of styles.
Crossing it on a moonlit winter’s night lifted the heart, though that was often
the trouble with Oxford – the architecture out-soared one’s feelings, the
sublime not always easy to match. There are in that one square three libraries,
the Bodleian on the north side, on the east the Codrington, part of Hawksmoor’s
All Souls, and James Gibbs’s Camera in the middle. There is actually another
more modest library, neo-Gothic in style, and built by George Gilbert Scott in
1856. It’s over Exeter’s garden wall in the north-west corner of Radcliffe
Square, but you can’t quite see that. This was where I worked, though it was
possible if one was so inclined to get to study in the much more exclusive and
architecturally splendid surroundings of the Codrington, and a few
undergraduates did so. They tended, though, to set less store on what they were
writing than on where they were writing it and I, with my narrow sympathies but
who was just as foolish, despised them for it.
Staying on at
Oxford after I’d taken my degree I did research in medieval history, the
subject of my research Richard II’s retinue in the last ten years of his reign.
This took me twice a week to the Public Record Office then still in Chancery
Lane and in particular to the Round Room, galleried, lined with books, a
humbler version of the much grander Round Room in the British Museum. Presiding
over the BM Round Room in his early days was Angus Wilson whereas at the PRO it
was Noel Blakiston, friend of Cyril Connolly, hair as white as Wilson’s and
possibly the most distinguished-looking man I’ve ever seen.
Though I made
copious notes on the manuscripts I studied (which were chiefly records of the
medieval exchequer) I would have found it hard to say what it was I was looking
for – imagining, I think, that having amassed sufficient material it would all
suddenly fall into place and become clear. Failing that, I hoped to come upon
some startling and unexpected fact, a very silly notion. Had it been Richard
III I was researching rather than Richard II, it might have been something as
relatively unambiguous as a note in the monarch’s own hand saying: ‘It was me
that killed ye Princes in ye Tower, hee hee.’ Historical research nowadays is a
dull business: had I any sense I would have been collating the tax returns of
the knights I was studying or the amount they borrowed or were owed, or sifting
through material other historians had ignored or discarded; it is seldom at the
frontier that discoveries are made but more often in the dustbin.
The Memoranda
Rolls on which I spent much of my time were long thin swatches of parchment
about five feet long and one foot wide and written on both sides. Thus to turn
the page required the co-operation and forbearance of most of the other readers
at the table, and what would sometimes look like the cast of the Mad Hatter’s
tea party struggling to put wallpaper up was just me trying to turn over. A
side effect of reading these unwieldy documents was that one was straightaway
propelled into quite an intimate relationship with readers alongside and among
those I got to know in this way was the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith.
The author of The Great Hunger, an account of
the Irish Famine, and The Reason Why, about the events leading up to the Charge of the
Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny bird-like skull, looking
more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus
her sheet metal earrings). Irish, she had a Firbankian wit and a lovely turn of
phrase. ‘Do you know the Atlantic at all?’ she once asked me and I put the line
into Habeas Corpus and got a big laugh on it. From a grand Irish family she was quite
snobbish; talking of someone she said: ‘Then he married a Mitford … but that’s
a stage everybody goes through.’ Even the most ordinary remark would be given
her own particular twist and she could be quite camp. Conversation had once
turned, as conversations will, to fork-lift trucks. Feeling that industrial
machinery might be remote from Cecil’s sphere of interest I said: ‘Do you know
what a fork-lift truck is?’ She looked at me in her best Annie Walker manner.
‘I do. To my cost.’
Books and
bookcases cropping up in stuff that I’ve written means that they have to be
reproduced on stage or on film. This isn’t as straightforward as it might seem.
A designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt-tooled library
sets, the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor, or he or
she will send out for some junk books from the nearest second-hand bookshop and
think that those will do. Another short cut is to order in a cargo of
remaindered books so that you end up with a shelf so garish and lacking in
character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan
site does to architecture. A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his
or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped
by the foot.
That someone’s
working library has a particular tone, with some shelves more heterogeneous
than others, for example, or (in the case of an art historian) filled with
offprints and monographs or (with an old-fashioned literary figure for
instance) lined with the faded covers and jackets of distinctive Faber or Cape
editions, does not seem to occur to a designer. On several occasions I’ve had
to bring my own books down to the theatre to give the right worn tone to the
shelves.
In The Old Country (1977) the books (Auden, Spender, MacNeice) are of central importance to
the plot. I wanted their faded buffs and blues and yellows bleached into a
unity of tone that suggested long sunlit Cambridge afternoons, the kind of
books you might find lining Dadie Rylands’s rooms, for instance. Anthony
Blunt’s bookshelves were crucial in Single Spies, the look of an art historian’s bookshelves
significantly different from those of a literary critic say. All this tends to
pass the designer by. One knows that designers seldom read, but they don’t have
much knowledge of Inca civilisation either or the Puritan settlement of New
England and yet they seem to cope perfectly well reproducing them. An
agglomeration of books as illustrating the character of their owner seems to
defeat them.
When I first
bought books for myself in the late 1940s they were still thought to be quite
precious and in poor homes books might often be backed in brown paper. Paper
itself was in short supply and such new books as there were often bore the
imprint ‘Produced in conformity with the Authorised Economy Standard’. The
paper was mealy, slightly freckled and looked not unlike the texture of the ice
cream of the period. It was, though, a notable period in book design and
perhaps because they were among the first books I ever bought (one was C.V.
Wedgwood’s William the Silent) the books of that time have always seemed to me
all that was necessary or desirable – simple, unfussy, wholesome and well
designed.
They were not,
though, to be left about at home. ‘Books Do Furnish a Room’, wrote Anthony
Powell, but my mother never thought so and she’d always put them out of the way
in the sideboard when you weren’t looking. Books untidy, books upset, more her
view. Though once a keen reader herself, particularly when she was younger, she
always thought of library books as grubby and with a potential for infection –
not intellectual infection either. Lurking among the municipally owned pages
might be the germs of TB or scarlet fever, so one must never be seen to peer at
a library book too closely or lick your finger before turning over still less
read such a book in bed.
There were
other perils to reading, but it was only when I hit middle age that I became
aware of them. Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a television play written in 1978 and though it doesn’t contain my
usual scene of someone baffled at a bookcase the sense of being outfaced by
books is a good description of what the play is about. ‘Hopkins,’ I wrote of
the middle-aged lecturer who is the hero, ‘Hopkins was never without a book. It
wasn’t that he was particularly fond of reading; he just liked to have
somewhere to look. A book makes you safe. Shows you’re not out to pick anybody
up. Try it on. With a book you’re harmless. Though Hopkins was harmless without
a book.’ Books as badges, books as shields; one doesn’t think of libraries as
perilous places where you can come to harm. Still, they do carry their own
risks.
I have been
discussing libraries as places and in the current struggle to preserve public
libraries not enough stress has been laid on the library as a place not just a
facility. To a child living in high flats, say, where space is at a premium and
peace and quiet not always easy to find, a library is a haven. But, saying
that, a library needs to be handy and local; it shouldn’t require an
expedition. Municipal authorities of all parties point to splendid new and
scheduled central libraries as if this discharges them of their obligations. It
doesn’t. For a child a library needs to be round the corner. And if we lose
local libraries it is children who will suffer. Of the libraries I have
mentioned the most important for me was that first one, the dark and
unprepossessing Armley Junior Library. I had just learned to read. I needed
books. Add computers to that requirement maybe but a child from a poor family
is today in exactly the same boat.
The business of
closing libraries isn’t a straightforward political fight. The local
authorities shelter behind the demands of central government which in its turn
pretends that local councils have a choice. It’s shaming that, regardless of
the party’s proud tradition of popular education, Labour municipalities are not
making more of a stand. For the Tories privatising the libraries has been on
the agenda for far longer than they would currently like to admit. This is an extract from my diary:
22 February Switch on Newsnight to find some bright spark from, guess where,
the Adam Smith Institute, proposing the privatisation of the public libraries.
His name is Eamonn Butler and it’s to be hoped he’s no relation of the 1944
Education Act Butler. Smirking and pleased with himself as they generally are
from that stable, he’s pitted against a well-meaning but flustered woman who’s
an authority on children’s books. Paxman looks on undissenting as this odious
figure dismisses any defence of the tradition of free public libraries as ‘the
usual bleating of the middle classes’. I go to bed depressed only to wake and
find Madsen Pirie, also from the Adam Smith Institute for the Criminally
Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a
sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems
unthinkable.
That was
written in 1996. It’s hard not to think that like other Tory policies
privatising the libraries has been lying dormant for 15 years, just waiting for
a convenient crisis to smuggle it through. Libraries are, after all, as another
think tank clown opined a few weeks ago, ‘a valuable retail outlet’.
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