The Courtship Dance: On Giving and Getting
Books
It was some time ago, when I was still a young student in college,
that I learned that books make subtle and indeed erotic presents. One
day a female friend to whom I was devoted presented me with a first edition of
D. H. Lawrence's short-story collection ''The Woman Who Rode Away'' - the first
direct, affectionate gift of a book I ever received. It was a brown-bound,
beautiful thing, expensive even then, very valuable now. It was also perfectly
chosen because, like all young provincial British males at the time, I was an
obsessive admirer of Lawrence. I took the book away and spent days reading and
rereading it with delight. I even started to write a critical essay about it,
all about Lawrence, love and life.
When I looked out at love and life again, I discovered the
female friend had gone. She had left town completely, and all that remained in
her apartment was a stale whiff of perfume and a copy of ''A Farewell to
Arms.'' The bitter lessons began to sink in. She was the woman who was riding
away; the book was to give me my last chance to follow. I never saw her again;
no pleading letters, no soliciting gifts of ''Look Homeward, Angel'' and ''Come
Back, Little Sheba'' could change the situation. She had gone for good; the
book remains. It sits up there on my heavily laden shelves, still giving its
lasting pleasure and radiating its solemn warning.
What it tells me is that, bookish as I was in those days, I
had still not begun to understand the nature of books, the getting and giving
of them, or the strange messages they can convey - messages far more complex
than those written in them by their author. I may have had literary passions,
but the truth was I had come into the world of letters an innocent outsider.
Like some foolish literary critic who has never even been to Yale or heard the
word ''deconstruction,'' I assumed that the meaning of a book lay simply in the
words inside the covers.
I had every reason to be innocent, since I came from a home
that possessed only the statutory minimum in household libraries. Our one
bookshelf held, I recall, the Bible and ''The Pilgrim's Progress.'' There was
also one railway timetable; a very anxious book on etiquette, explaining how to
address correctly the dukes and bishops we somehow never seemed to meet; a work
on how to deal promptly with scalds and fractures; a volume on making small
home improvements and erecting wooden sheds. My parents read; they read a good
deal. But they knew that ordinary books came from the public library. Books
were to be borrowed, and returned by the date stamped inside the cover in
exactly the condition in which they had been received.
And one thing was certain: books were not presents. Presents
were soap, handkerchiefs, socks, bath salts, penknives with useful attachments.
When books were given, they were formally presented, as prizes for work and
behavior. Any young fellow with a good personal library could clearly lay claim
to a history of remarkable moral triumphs. I was one of them myself, as my own
bookshelves make clear. Here is a copy of ''Robinson Crusoe,'' presented to me
at the age of 10, with an elegant engraved plate inside. It tells me the volume
is a Good Conduct Prize awarded on Primitive Methodist Sunday School Prize Day
to M. S. Bradbury for his moral courage in signing the Temperance Pledge and
forswearing the Demon Drink forever. Did I really? I think we should drink a
hearty toast to that.
Next to it is ''The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,''
with the crest of my totally unknown school embossed on the cover. The school
had terrible toilets, but a great crest. This book, I see, was awarded for
Steady Application Throughout the Year, though just
what I applied, and to whom, it does not say. But evidently I was very good at
Good Conduct in those days, as 10 or so other volumes make plain. What
distinguishes all these books is that none of them were ever really mine. They
were not my choice, not even my taste. They were selected not by me but by
others - crabbed headmasters, Sunday school governors, scout troop leaders, all
of them experts in Exemplary Performance and Considerable Promise.
I am afraid my era of Good Conduct came to a Bad End. By the
close of my school days, I was a spotted literary youth who wore eccentric
brown pants and longed to be a writer. I proudly edited the school literary
magazine, and I clearly merited the School Prize for Literary Appreciation. For
once I was invited to go and choose the prize for myself, spending no more than
$:5. What made me go and select, from a bookstore crammed with the classics,
Raymond Chandler's ''Farewell, My Lovely'' is not clear to me. It was even less
clear to my headmaster, who refused even to present this evidence of misapplied
literary appreciation to me in front of the assembled school. I suspect what
happened was that, with a shelf of books declaring my Good Conduct, I wanted
public recognition that I was capable of conduct of another kind. We all know
that practicing Good Conduct and Steady Application is
no way to become a writer.
What is now evident to me is that, up to that moment, I had
never been truly intimate with a book. I loved books, but too purely - for
their moral virtue, their decency, their sermonizing spirit, their
straight-arrow way with the truth. Books and I had a platonic, distant,
hands-off relationship. I had not noticed the touch, the feel, the scent and
smell of them. I had not noticed that they could deceive, tempt and seduce.
Today I realize that I have to thank my female friend in
college for a good deal more than a happy half-year and a fine copy of
Lawrence. She taught me about the cryptic code of books, and that is probably
what made me a writer. I soon learned to explore the inner world of fictional
seduction at first hand. Writing is teasing, exciting, a chase through the
mysteries of narrative, filled with deception, delays, reticence and
revelation, rising expectation and sudden fulfillment.
The means of seduction is the book itself, that intricate
object, with its great fan of pages far more complex in its messages than the
most advanced word processor. Designers design it - the right cover, the right
typeface, the right style. Then the booksellers take over. I am not sure what
your bookstores in the States are like these days, but here in Europe they grow
more exotic by the week. The lighting is low, coffee is served, evening
readings and lunchtime signings tempt you to some literary assignation. You
taste, you sniff, at last you buy. And then, as Italo Calvino tells us in that most seductive of recent
novels, ''If on a Winter's Night a Traveler,'' you
return home to settle down for ''the consummation of the act, the reading of
the book.''
I'm an old writing hand now, with a large and noisy library
that surrounds me as I write. Up on the shelves, my books have learned to talk
to one another. As the modern critics like to say, they have intertextualized, and so have bred new books. I have
written in my books, and written on my books in critical essays and works of
interpretation. Above all, from these old books I have conceived my own new
ones, exchanging pleasure for pleasure. Most writers are constantly giving
books back to books. Joyce gave a modern ''Odyssey'' back to Homer, and Anthony
Burgess is constantly giving Joyce back to Joyce.
Books are full of gettings and givings. That is why they are so often filled with
dedications, acknowledgments, quotations and footnotes. This writer thanks the
Rockefeller Foundation for the loan of the Villa Serbelloni
on Lago di Como, which made
writing it such a delight. That one thanks Mimi, who will know just what I mean
when I say. . . . That one thanks an editor for plying him with Perrier at the
Four Seasons and getting this project started. Another
thanks Wordstar.
All books are complex tomes of relationship, connection and
seduction, and this is the world we enter when we give and get them ourselves.
It is because books contain these erotic complexities that they are such a
pleasure to receive. My greatest pleasure lately was the receipt of a box
containing 20 volumes. One is called ''Dvandra Follis,'' which I idly imagine as the story of a girl who,
growing up wild on Exmoor, is borne off by a handsome highwayman. Another, ''Creel Duzpere,'' could be a late novel by Flaubert. Or maybe not,
because these are Volumes Five and Four of the new second edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary, the best gift for a writer that money, a lot of money, can
buy.
It is because books are erotic and complex treasures that they
are also such a pleasure to give. Just now I have been contemplating my own
gift list for this year, and they are not awards for good conduct. Maybe ''A
Farewell to Arms'' should go this season to Mr. Gorbachev, whose conduct in
fact has not been at all bad. Mrs. Thatcher, I think, will like ''One Hundred
Years of Solitude,'' and I fancy Egon Krenz should get ''The Man Without
Qualities.'' Dan Quayle, if he reads, will probably enjoy ''Little Big Man,''
or perhaps ''Great Expectations.'' And George Bush should have a happy Yuletide
with ''A Good Man Is Hard to Find.''
The getting and the giving of books is
just as complicated a matter as the writing and the reading of them. That, as
my female friend taught me, is because there is so much that can be hidden in
the cover and the pages of a literary work. Always, to the messages already
present, we can add our own. By liking and loving a book, we can supplement its
story with a new story, the story of ourselves. And when we have done that, we
can always hand it on, in the great book-lined circle of getting and giving
that keeps the world, and the word, going round.
Published in December 3, 1989
By Malcolm Bradbury
On The New York Times On The Web
Copyright
1998 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/specials/bradbury-coursthip.html
Other interesting
articles written by Bradbury: [Next] [1] [2]
[3]
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