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] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]

 

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