Then

Where did I put that volume of Mandelstam? Not the Penguin classic edition, but the other Penguin one – where did I put it? I think it’s boxed up in the Bela Tarr office. Boxed up with the other books, or piled up somewhere, behind the desk. I haven’t looked at it in years. Not a glance. But the spine of the book is enough. Just seeing that cool cream spine calms me. Alongside Malte Laurrids Brigge, in the Hogarth edition. And Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, in Quartet Encounters.

Stranded in Exeter a few weeks ago I experienced the same thing: the sense that in the books I opened – and this was a rare Waterstones, that placed books in translation where they usually have those 3 for 2 offers, and where the literary classics section included old Calder editions and out-of-print Bernhards and Handkes: that I’d opened, too, a doorway to the side of my life.

That something unexpected had let itself be found. That came drifting along, then, just then, when I was ready; when I’d already read half of Mrs Dalloway as I lay on the grass beside the cathedral, when I’d already eaten two small salad tubs from Marks and Spencers. Then: a little volume of Tabucchi’s, Dreams of Dreams, which includes ‘The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa’, where the heteronyms visit him in turn. And the first section, dreams of Rimbaud and Debussy, of Mayakovsky and Freud, as fantasised by Tabucchi.

Yes, that book is exactly right, I thought. Right for now, today. I found other books, too, seen before but never owned. Lars Gustafsson’s The Death of a Beekeeper, once reviewed alongside Blanchot’s Death Sentence by John Updike (which is why you get that wierd quote on his blurb for Blanchot’s novel, which mentions, incongruously ‘the beekeepers defiant courage in the face of pain’). A book made of journal fragments, not real ones, but a fiction. Of a man with not long to live, and writing. Writing in that space stretching open in the time left to him, and a fiction.

What would it reveal?, I asked myself, and an imaginary Sweden opened before me, rather like the one on the cover. Of the skerries, rocky islands like in Bergman films. Sweden where Bergman is still alive, I thought, and how old is he now? And worked it out. 88 – or 89, I thought. Does he still live alone? Alone on the island?

And a treat – did I really need it? and in hardback? and at that price? – Handke’s Once More For Thucydides. A small book of pen portraits of places at particular times; haecetties. Worth it for Handke’s prose? Worth it for its grey spine which lies on top of other books by my bed. I have a Handke in reserve, I tell myself. An emergency Handke.

Frost arrived today, Bernhard’s Frost, so I have an emergency Bernhard, too. I usually have one in reserve. Until recently, it was The Loser, the funniest of all the novels. And a little after that, Wittgenstein’s Nephew. And until today, nothing at all. But now I have the dreamy blue spine of Frost laid horizontally opposite from me. And I know its pages are rough along its edges, that they do not present an immaculately smooth white cliff. Rough pages. Like a book in French. Like my Les Editions de Minuit of Marguerite Duras. L’homme Atlantique, tiny and ragged-edged.

And I bought a nice edition Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks, too. Did I need it, when its contents are held, in their entirety, by another familiar Kafka edition? Ah but I could have bought – and didn’t – the hardback edition of the aphorisms, much more lovely. The same aphorisms printed in a tiny font at the end of the notebooks. So, in a sense, I’d saved myself money. I’d been frugal …

I photocopied it once, that larger edition, in my lunch hour when I worked as a temp at Hewlett Packard. I still have it, I think, two hundred pages joined together by treasury clips. The whole thing, and in Hewlett Packard! As though I was salvaging something, and perhaps myself. Taking time back. Or letting time lap to me from another direction, then, just then.

And I reread The Sea of Fertility there too, twelve years ago, a lifetime ago. There to assist an employee who’d been off with a stroke. There for one week, with nothing to do. So I read it again, The Sea of Fertility. And I think I had Hollier’s Against Architecture there, too. I think I read it and abandoned it in anger. Having photocopied it when I was on the dole. Photocopied the whole thing, as I would later do Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Internal Time Consciousness in one of my first teaching jobs.

But those books, Husserl’s were never necessary to me in the way Rilke was, or Mandelstam, or Tsvetayeva. Tsvetayeva to whom I felt obscurely protective, and whose work I knew from the letters quoted in someone else’s book. Those letters, quoted, were enough. I’ve carried some of the these books with me, though I sold many others. Some of them are left, boxed now, or piled up where I can’t see them behind the desk.

How many thousands of books have I bought! And how many thousands sold! Because I also dislike to hoard, and dislike hoarders. Those who keep books unread in great cliffs, all up the wall. Didn’t I deserve them, when I was young and poor? And perhaps that is the joy of buying books now: to have what I wanted then. To get it at last.

I was moved to see Bonnefoy’s edition of Giacometti reproductions in that same Waterstones. In paperback at last, though over £40. In paperback, when I used to eye up the edition in Manchester, upstairs at Waterstones. And I vowed again to give my books away. To give them to who wanted them, to whom the books would open a doorway, unexpected, to the side of their life.

As I went to pay, I saw the new big book of Cy Twombly’s behind the counter, shrinkwrapped. I asked to see it. I wanted it, right then. £50, I think. A huge book, a slab of a book. And a lot to read. I remembered the Twombly’s at the Tate, from a year before. They’d stood out at the Tate, we agreed. And after that, the name would come to me every now and then: Twombly. As I knew it had been destined for me to see his paintings then.

Then – that time when you should meet a book. When a book is right for you – or a painting. I used to spend hours wandering the bookshops in Manchester. Feeling the creamy cover of Finnegan’s Wake, wandering whether I should have it. Coming across Cage’s Silence by chance …

In the old student union bookshop, you could arrange to sell your books, the shop keeping a share – only 10 or 15%. They closed it in the end, of course. As everything good is closed. But for a time, I sold books there, and bought them, and the shop assistants – two of them, imagine that: two – called me Mr —-. I liked that very much. To be called Mr —-, and then when I felt unimportant.

What did I buy? What did I sell? Fire-damaged books from Hatchards. Thoreau and Emerson, in the American Penguin Pocket editions. Whitman’s Specimen Days.  Old cheap Penguins. Science fiction for 35p a pop, which I bought to complete my collection of all the three and four-starred books in David Pringle’s Ultimate Guide …

Another time, years later, studying for a teaching qualification in Guildford, I used to pass an edition of Beckett’s Complete Plays in a shopping mall bookshelf. And experience the then then, though I had no money. It was £8, I think. I passed it for thirty days, and then – bought it, as I still have it. Boxed up, piled up in the office.

I visit bookshops rarely now. It is part of my dislike of open time, of empty hours. I never wander. I think it’s only once I went out wandering in this city. Once, and I didn’t like it, I’d strayed too far, I felt like a cosmonaut of the afternoon. Get back to the office, I thought. Work, I thought, draw work around you. You should be out on a day like this, I thought.

No more ‘thens’ in the street. ‘Then’s come by post. Frost from the Book Depository yesterday morning. The big box of Jandek CDs from Corwood. That’s where they’ll meet you, summoned by you. Where the post is kept. Or, if I do not get there first, waiting for me on my office desk. That’s how they come, books, from afar. I bring them to me. I bring the ‘then’, I call it. I don’t go out to find books. They come to me.

You can only go out wandering when you’re young, I told myself. When you’ve nothing in particular ahead of you, a whole life, but directed nowhere in particular. Only then can you wander, I thought to myself. When you’re older, there’s no point, everything’s been decided.

There must be no slackening of time. Time must be accounted for. Work must shape your hours. Work and projects, for time is getting short. Soon, it will be impossible, but for now, today: work. Rise early and work. Go to bed early, tired from work. Burn out your eyes with computer screens and pages in spotlights.

Then. How do they reach me today, these books I bought? Tabucchi and Gustafsson? Kafka? I think they stand around me as books did when I was young. That it is someone young in me who wants them. That it is my youth that calls them, and needs them to stand around like a host of angels. Books. Then and now – today.

But nothing worse than the bourgeios with his books. Great cliffs piled up, unread, hardly necessary. Better scattered books without order. Books half-lost, just as I’ve already lost Mrs Dalloway (and I was halfway through it, wandering through London streets …) Books piled casually and neglectfully. And books to be given away, piles of books pressed into willing arms. Here, take these. Take this, it’ll mean more to you than me. For imagine it, what a gift, to be given Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems! What a gift to find Handke’s Across in your hand!

And imagine it – the joy of reading Bernhard for the first time! Or Henry Green! The perpetual surprise of Henry Green, of Concluding, or of Caught. Then. Then, you will be ready, the one to whom I will give a gift. I will make you a ‘then’, hollow it out. I’ll have made a ‘then’ you might carry like the ark in the tabernacle of your life.