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Chapter VI

“So, I was able to tear you away from your machines, and your girlfriend, who must be cursing me! Her tone of voice . . . It does you good, however, to get out, get some air! I trust you came on foot . . . No more buses, ever! And taxis, you can’t afford them yet . . .” Taxis were as much against my principles as buses were against his. “No protesting. I can imagine how much an unskilled laborer makes, working half-time or part-time, as a handyman—just enough to pay for your materials and some scanty education.” My situation, however, could be changing for the better. That proposal of his, which he’d mentioned the first time we met and which he still hadn’t really spelled out for me . . . He’d thought it over. The persistence with which I was developing my knowledge, my methodical mind, had appealed to him. Well, anyhow . . . could be of use to him. I would become a kind of secretary, to manage his memory. Part of it anyhow. Because I wouldn’t be allowed to touch his private library; that would have been sacrilege!

“You remember my opinion about public libraries . . . Same as prostitutes . . . Crowds at the turnstile! So-called professional scholars . . .old men congested with erudition, pallid students preparing their theses, plenty of snobs too, people come just to be seen in the high institutes of scriptural knowledge, the faithful flashing their membership cards. They’re all persuaded that they are linked, bound together by knowledge, by this catalogue raisonné of the printed page. Entire lives spent in the sad shadow of this masquerade. Credo! Credo! And the Mass goes on, soon there’ll come the Gloria. Because they believe in it, want to believe in it. Except for the librarians, of course, for the very good reason that they hate books! The demons behind the scenes, they control the game. Not one of them will admit it, but that’s the prerequisite for the job. You’re made to choose either the book itself or the task of forking books over! They’ve chosen to fork it over and any method of distribution is fine by them, an accelerated form of prostitution to pacify the waiting lines. It won’t be long before they set up an ATM to access the international bank of texts, or, better yet, an ATM for an international bank of everything. To your keyboards! A pound of Stendhal, a pound of caviar, and another of Racine! Books and delicatessen interchangeable, merchandise quantified, leveled. And a few francs’ worth of bread, two yens’ worth of Boulez, a few dollars’ worth of dollars, not to mention the pound sterling, the Italian lira! We’re all set for global confusion. But this current, unbridled, even galloping consumption forgets the delicate transaction of which the true appropriation of a book consists: slowly adding an enduring layer of self to one’s experience, like a thin film of life that differentiates it from others, giving it something extra.”

He invited me to follow him into a huge living room adjacent to the one I’d been in the first time; here the only furniture consisted of a large, round, walnut table, a few mismatched chairs, and an elegant wing chair covered in burgundy-red damask. Hundreds of books, some of them in double rows, covered every inch of the walls. The soft light of a floor lamp, its flimsy stand crowned with an alabaster half-moon, lit the whole room, but a heavy odor seemed to sully the light. There was that same foul smell clinging to everything, even his body; it was inescapable. Robert hesitated, observed me surreptitiously out of the corner of his eye, then got started, a few brief sentences, a few silences, as we went around the room.

How could one organize a library without making it vulgarly accessible? For a long time he’d tried to find a solution, the first requirement of which was that the collection all had to fit into a single room. At first the books had been grouped together by the material of their covers: the dull or shiny leatherbounds, the matte or glossy covers for paper; then according to their bindings: flatback, rounded, or on raised cords. Uniform or subtly nuanced zones were formed and then combined into a harmonious whole on a given wall. However, the arrival of a new publishing house, some collection just beginning, even the least design change would mess up the whole picture he’d so patiently composed. He could have had the books rebound, the newcomers that is, could have misrepresented them. He could also imagine buying huge numbers of copies of a single book just to create a homogeneous stretch, one easier to integrate. But how to select which title? “I ended up not buying certain books and, therefore, not reading them, just because I was afraid I couldn’t find a place for them in the collection, or that I’d have to sacrifice a particular bit of my picture that I was especially fond of . . .”

Then came a second stage in which he was driven to group books together by both genres and centuries. Something like what I was doing for my memory. But, in no time at all, for centuries he’d substituted periods; they were subtler and more versatile, allowing for a more nuanced parsing. In spite of this, there were still numerous isolated cases, whether these resulted from a period that just happened to have fewer representatives, or else those so innovative as to have more relevance shelved next to their successors than their contemporaries. As for genres, he wouldn’t even discuss the question; even the most glancing attribution made him feel party to a hostile takeover or betrayal; most texts were beyond the scope of such models: classifying them gave rise to a certain anxiety, something recent centuries, ours in particular, have made even more obvious.

Robert was bustling around by this point, totally immersed in what he was saying. He examined various sections of the library, pointed out others, took down a few volumes for the sake of illustration, dove into them, half forgetting I was there, then smiled and set off again, nodding his head. “My resorting to absolutely arbitrary criteria then led to various and increasingly absurd methods of organization. I spent years redoing them constantly, making improvements.” In the beginning, the variations were mostly alphabetical. For example, groupings organized by publishing house, the result of which was to reveal an incredible number of incongruities. Or strictly by authors’ first names, with all periods mixed together. But the names their parents gave them and even the pseudonyms they occasionally used were completely unimaginative. It seemed that just providing themselves a last name had taxed their very limited vocabulary. When it came to onomastics, patronyms had consumed all his energy. How many Alains, Andrés, Claudes, Michels, Pierres, were there for just one Donatien Alphonse François? That about summed up the whole enterprise: Sade amid the sad sacks! He laughed. “No matter what the criteria, in the final analysis it’s all about masses. The names are all the same! Herd mentality. And then there’s the paper. Why is it always so ordinary? Lombardy or bombycin, Whatman or vellum; paper that’s laid, gilded; Indian or from China; from Japan or Holland. And then what about all the sizes? There was Royal, Petit Soleil, and Grand Aigle, Grand Cornet, Double Cloche! But starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, things go sour, wood pulp paper is introduced, paper meant to disappear, death crept into the pages, death as the medium for a text! Tinted, wove paper became dominant, then Bouffant, which was dreadful, insatiable, it lived up to its name, a polymorphous monster: Condat 482, Skoura, or Odéon; natural, white, or ivory; but always Bouffant, enough to give you indigestion!”

And the typefaces? Not much better! Although you can’t beat those names . . . Diamond and Pearl, Peerless, Parangon. And darling Mignonne, and bold Gaillard. Small Roman, Cicero, Saint Augustine. Not to mention the magnificent Double Trismegistus, and especially—those were admirable times—the caractères de civilité that so closely approximated handwriting, elegant and flowing. But there too modern arrogance took over the market and destroyed anything imaginative and refined.

Over time Robert had become obsessed as well with keeping his principle of classification obscure, inscrutable, the better to differentiate his system completely from any rooted in notions of sharing or even the temptation to share. The number of words in a title, the number of letters in a word, had inspired him to make who knew how many charts, sketched out on paper, clarified, improved, abandoned more often than not. His imagination never ran dry of new innovations and combinations, each one more sophisticated than the last. For one entire summer, it was ten years ago, he’d lived like a happy stowaway in this cool, dark room, completing a twofold partitioning: first the books were classified by the number of chapters in them and then they were organized from fewest chapters to most. Next, each section was organized alphabetically, according to the first letter of the penultimate (or the first and last, if there were only one) chapter. Magnificent! Undecipherable! At first he was as excited as a mischievous child when he inserted each new acquisition, relying as he was on a self-evident principle that only he could see. But what made the system so reassuring, the charm of being arbitrary, was also a reflection of its limitation: it was sterile and automatic, not rooted in any profound meaning. “A machine could have done it, one of your computers, for example. Just the thought was enough to kill my euphoria instantly. What my system lacked was soul, that special something that matters to me so much. I still hadn’t achieved it.”