Filling Bookshelves for a Lifetime

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.

—Alan Bennett, "Baffled at a Bookcase"

I cannot live without books.

—Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1815

1954 was my Wander Year. I abandoned a trunk in Florence, a knapsack in Cairo. By the time I went by Jeep over snow-covered mountains to Petra, everything I possessed was in a paper bag. Four books, all of them small, survived to reach home with me: my journal, a King James Bible, The Duchess of Malfi, and a Penguin translation of plays by Sophocles.

The Bible was a library in itself, of course; but the 1024 pages, in double columns, in Collins's clear-type, defeated me. I was hardly the first or last to discover that the Book of Genesis is one beautifully crafted short story after another. I reread the New Testament between Byblos and Bethlehem. I read The Duchess of Malfi enough times to convince myself that Webster's Bosola was my favorite character after Shakespeare's Enobarbus. The small Dent edition I was reading has proved more faithful to the original of 1623 than any I have read since.

But it was Watling's translation of Sophocles that brought about the perfect match between what I was reading and what was going on about me. We were on board the Semiramis, soon to land at Piraeus. The covered main hatch where I had spent a cold night made a stage with the running sea behind it. When I looked up from my book because of a sudden quiet, I found a chorus of women in black between me and four policemen and nervous recruits. The doctor from second class stepped away from the man on a stretcher. A political prisoner, he had been brought on board the afternoon before at Corfu, chained to the stretcher, shivering and raving. Everyone was hurrying now to be ready to leave the ship. Knowing the man was dead, I had no more to do than recover my coat.

Women of Trachis, you have leave to go.You have seen strange things,The awful hand of death, new shapes of woe,Uncounted sufferings, And all that you have seenIs God.

During 1955 I wrote, read, and painted in a cottage in Cornwall, keeping my expenses below a pound a week. I took my paintings by train to St. Ives, where I sold several at the Penwith Gallery for ten or twelve pounds each. On the return trip the train stopped at Bodmin Road station, and I had a twenty-mile night walk to the cottage. My funds ran out. I hitchhiked to London. There, in the spring of 1956, I accepted a salary of seven hundred and fifty pounds a year to edit a trade journal, Air Freight. Three hundred pounds a year paid the rent (including utilities) of the top two floors of No. 10 Wilfred Street. I would arrive at the office at ten, having walked across St. James's Park. At six or six-thirty I would begin my walk back after buying a Bath Chaps or country sausages for my supper from Paxton's in Jermyn Street.

With the flat came a set of bookshelves. These were built into the wall where stairs led from a minuscule hallway, two slightly larger bedrooms, and a bathroom on the same Lilliputian scale, to my living room with views over the chimney pots of London and a one-cook kitchen. The kitchen had a ship's ladder you pulled down from the ceiling in order to reach the roof garden. From here you could watch the firework displays in the grounds of Buckingham Palace or the old Stag Brewery's being demolished. Such things required sobriety and a head for heights. I found it safer and pleasanter to sit on the stairs. In the scale of things my near-empty shelves took up a good deal of space, and I could use the stairs as library steps.

The stairs...