Books as Baggage

“Books do furnish a room,” a character in one of Anthony Powell’s musty and marvelous novels is rumored to have said as he advanced, stark naked, toward the object of his seduction. But they do more than that: they furnish our minds also, or at least provide our mind’s picture of how it would like to be seen by others.

Beginning with my own college days, when books, aside from a mattress and dresser, were the only furniture I possessed, the function of my little library was, I suppose, as a trophy, just as other boys (and me too, briefly) used to string the pop tabs from beer cans into chains. In time, my books became the living version of my personal picture of Dorian Gray: As I shuffled about campus ignorant, disheveled and confused, they remained orderly and confident in their knowledge of the world. It’s no coincidence, therefore, those were the years I most longed to possess the authoritative stamp of collections such as the Modern Library, The Great Ideas of the Western World and Harvard Classics, but was too broke to afford a set, and too disorganized to collect more than a volume here or there. I remember with shame once lugging a complete set of “Remembrance of Things Past” all across Europe. It wasn’t that I hadn’t read it--I just wanted people to know I had.

Even now, I have a friend who, no sooner than he has entered a stranger’s house, will walk straight to the book shelves, deciding, I always imagine, whether or not the stranger is worth speaking to. Alas for me, I don’t know that these days I could pass that test. When my former wife and I divorced (and how many relationships’ sad last day is spent dividing the books into piles of his and hers) I got the fishing books; she got the ones on critical thinking.

Or maybe that just proves the point: books are our image of who we are, and who we ought to be. At a recent dinner another friend confessed she owned over 400 cookbooks. “That’s wonderful,” I said. “You must really do a lot of cooking.”

She laughed. “Oh no. I’m much too busy. I read them before I go to sleep.”

Can it be that’s why yard sales are so melancholy? All those “condensed” books, romances and ancient chemistry texts--fragments of identities too fragile to make it through a move or last out a lifetime, as doomed as runts in a litter.

Maybe too, that’s why coffee table books are so appalling in their way, the literary versions of a Lexus or Mercedes parked in the driveway for all to see how far we’ve come, like airbrushed photos of our minds. And of course that’s exactly what they are, no matter. If your idea of impressing someone is, say, “Chicks in Leather,” the fact of what you value speaks for itself. Which reminds me of one other friend whose proposal for a glossy coffee table book on the history of cannibalism (“From Donner to Dahmer”) was turned down by every publisher he offered it to, claiming they couldn’t be sure of its market.

Does this need for such display never end? Well, part of it, perhaps. My own coffee table is empty and half my books are still packed in the garage, cagily awaiting another move. I recall a literary acquaintance who, in the last years of his life had reduced a library which numbered thousands to a single shelf. “And when I’m gone,” he sniffed, “there’ll be a cold stone slab with just one line: my name, and then a date.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “I have to go,” and then hurried off to buy a few more books.