With the recent news that Kindle and other e-readers are automatically updating Roald Dahl’s books to sanitised versions, an entire era has come to an end for readers like me. Who in future will feel safe buying an electronic copy of anything?
Publishers’ plans here may be modest, but the point about the puritan is that their work is never done. Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Charles Dickens – any one of them feels vulnerable now. If in copyright, the author and their estate can be strong-armed by the publishers; if out of copyright, laying your hands on the right edition will be a minefield. Nor does it seem clear that publishers’ revisions are being done by skilled writers. In a ‘sensitive’ update of Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die, the original description of a Harlem strip club, ‘Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough’ becomes ‘Bond could sense the electric tension in the room’ – not necessarily a cliche that would have passed muster with Fleming, or should with us.
So goodbye, Kindle. Buying my first was in any case a betrayal of my earliest, analogue dreams. As a young man in the 1990s I would watch arts-documentaries such as Arena and The South Bank Show and salivate over the crammed bookcases their subjects always seemed to have (characters in Woody Allen films, another early passion, seemed to have the same). The image I had then of a golden future was a book-lined sitting-room with an old, unused piano and a fire crackling away in the grate. Cats (one had to be ginger) would saunter from room to room and there would occasionally be hints of some Elizabeth David-style French casserole wafting in from a distant kitchen. But the books – covering every available surface – were the main thing: proof (at least it seemed then) of a life well spent.
The composer Shostakovich said when it came to literature you should know less but know it back to front
Later, after leaving drama school, I got a part-time job in a second-hand bookshop round the corner. For a bookworm this wasn’t an unqualified pleasure. It’s a truism – do anything you love for a living and you will love it that bit less. Working in a bookshop, seeing all those titles, breathing in the foxed paper, handling the first editions, above all realising how much reading there was to do in life and how little time you had for it was troubling. You’d be tormented by the stylishness of a book’s 1950s cover or the dinkiness of an Everyman pocket edition into buying it, then have it sit spitefully on your shelves along with armies of other unread beauties all clamouring for your attention: ‘Why haven’t you called [on] me today?’
This is mostly a young person’s problem. I was at that age of being over-attuned to the books-you-had-to-have-read-in-life, and where to start? Whichever you chose, you always wished you were reading another. It was a bit like being a serial monogamist at an orgy – with devastatingly attractive if sometimes impenetrable sexual partners – and the very thing that should have brought you peace and enjoyment only agitated instead. I ended up renting a storage space in Battersea for my books, a lockable cupboard in a funereal building of concrete passageways, just to get away from them. It made perfect sense at the time.
It was dawning on me that owning books wasn’t – if you hadn’t read them all – an unmitigated pleasure. I didn’t know Winston Churchill’s maxim, about familiarising yourself with the books you owned but would probably never read – opening them at odd places, flipping through them, effectively (in my terms) defusing them. I didn’t know either that there was no book you had to have read. An elderly writer, Peter Vansittart, told me one of the unexpected pleasures of old age was realising you’d survived without reading Don Quixote or Moby Dick.
‘After all,’ he said in his donnish voice, ‘There are plenty of books you don’t need to read at all. Take Kafka – culture’s already digested him for you: you know very well what the term “Kafkaesque” means.’ Attempting The Trial, years later, I wish I’d listened to him. ‘Kafkaesque’, I found, was much more fun than Kafka.
The fact I was trying Kafka at all was a sign of progress. By now I was specialising – Russia and Eastern Europe seemed to be my lot – and my reading (and book-buying) got a lot easier. I no longer had to beat myself up for not reading Michael Foot’s two-part biography of Nye Bevan, or Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, or Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. Now the problem was volume – I lived in rented accommodation, and every two years or so would migrate to a new area. This required alphabetised rubble sacks, cardboard boxes, removal vans for my books and bookcases. When the Kindle was invented, it wasn’t so much as a lightbulb which switched on over my head as a vast VDU screen. A device smaller than many paperbacks which could hold hundreds, even thousands of titles? Yes. Oh yes. Oh yes please.
Many readers, I knew, cavilled at this invention, which at a stroke seemed to take away all the aesthetic delight of books as objects and replace them with something soulless and intangible. I didn’t agree. I knew there were people who were reverent about paper books, who gently worked the spine, sniffed the pages, had colour-coded bookmarks and were museum curators in their own houses, but I wasn’t one of them. Provided I got the contents of a book I was by now quite happy. There were about two or three hundred books that I needed to own, own as objects and a kind of autobiography: the books that had influenced my life or summed up a phase of it. Orwell, Milan Kundera, Philip Larkin’s poems, Kenneth Tynan’s theatre writings, Martha Gellhorn’s war-reporting, Colin Thubron’s books on Russia, and so on. As I’ve narrowed my collection down to one large book-case finally I can see these titles clearly again. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich (whose biography I’ve kept) said when it came to literature you should know less but know it back to front. Shostakovich, I think, was right.
I seem – finally – to have solved my Kindle problem too, or rather made it irrelevant. Recently, while abroad, I found a site called archive.org, a free online library with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of scanned, unalterable titles. Only once or twice have I failed to find a book (usually a newly published one) that I wanted. The site is free but runs on donations, and only a philistine – a non-reader, or at least a bad one – would carp at making one.
Of course, that book-lined room with the crackling fireplace and unused old piano will never happen now. I’ll just have to Google photos of it and, in my bare-walled, piano-less room enjoy it vicariously – something every reader, of Kindles or otherwise, luckily knows how to do.
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