A Passion for Books Page 13

  The strain of keeping house under these circumstances, constantly persecuted by bailiffs and writ-servers and with no sympathy from her bibliomaniac husband, became too much for Lady Phillipps. She lost her spirits, took to drugs, and died at the age of thirty-seven. Immediately after the funeral Phillipps began a search for her replacement. What he needed in a wife was money, nothing else. All his affections were given to books. “I am for sale at £50,000,” he wrote to a friend. But it was not easy to find a docile bride with that size of dowry. It was ten years before Phillipps married again, and in that period he was continually active in negotiations with fathers of unmarried ladies. Munby reckons that he made seventeen serious bids before he finally closed a deal. His approaches were crude and pecuniary. One prospective father-in-law accused him, justly, of behaving like a Smithfield cattle dealer. Finally, after much haggling, he struck a bargain for a clergyman’s daughter with £3,000 a year. She was stout and amiable, and the marriage went happily until in his last years Phillipps’s eccentricities became intolerable.

  He also offered his daughters on the marriage market, beginning when the eldest was twelve by proposing her to his old friend, Charles Madden, who had charge of manuscripts at the British Museum. But Henrietta Phillipps had ideas of her own. One of her father’s agreeable habits was of hospitality to scholars. He enjoyed the company of the many visitors to Middle Hill who came to consult his manuscripts, although he was often unable to locate a particular document among the boxes and unopened crates of his collection. The fateful visitor was James Orchard Halliwell, a brilliant young scholar from Cambridge and one of the most enigmatic figures of nineteenth-century literature. He was a dandified youth of obscure birth whose manuscript studies had procured him the highest academic honours and election as Fellow of the Royal Society before his nineteenth birthday. Later he became the leading collector of Shakespearean documents and rarities and author of the acknowledged best Life of Shakespeare. He had the greatest influence in forming the modern Shakespeare cult at Stratford-on-Avon. He was also one of the few people ever to get the better of Sir Thomas Phillipps.

  Phillipps had corresponded with Halliwell about manuscripts before inviting him to Middle Hill. The young man was ingratiating and presented himself as Phillipps’s eager disciple. Once in the house he began courting Henrietta—and promptly asked for her hand in marriage. Her father in his usual way turned the subject to money. Halliwell had little to show in the way of income or prospects, which were what Phillipps most required of a son-in-law. And there was another objection: some nasty rumours were going around about Halliwell’s character and reputation. It was even said that he was that most dreaded enemy of the bibliomaniac—a sly book thief. Phillipps withheld his consent to the marriage and, when the couple married without it, was relentless throughout the rest of his life in persecuting them.

  His first opportunity for revenge on his son-in-law came soon after the wedding. Halliwell was accused of stealing manuscripts from Trinity College, Cambridge, and then selling them. The evidence was black against him, but he defended himself vigorously, speaking at public meetings and issuing an explanatory pamphlet. Somehow the matter never came to court. Phillipps, who had been urging on the prosecution, was dismayed, and he became even more so when he realized that his estates, which were entailed upon his heir, would eventually pass to the Halliwells. Lawyers advised him that there was no way of preventing James Halliwell, through his wife, from inheriting Middle Hill. That being the case, Phillipps decided on a scorched-earth policy. Halliwell would succeed to a wilderness. Ignoring all protests from his heirs and trustees, he cut down the fine avenues and copses on the estate, ruining its appearance and value. With the money raised by the timber he bought an enormous mansion in Cheltenham, Thirlestaine House, and in 1863 began moving his library there from Middle Hill. This vast operation took more than eight months to complete. A fleet of over a hundred wagons, drawn by 230 carthorses, groaned and sometimes collapsed under the weight of the Phillipps Library on its journey over the Cotswolds. Thirlestaine House, with its central block and two wings, was so large that Phillipps moved about it on horseback while supervising the disposal there of his books and pictures. Middle Hill was left empty and derelict and allowed, even encouraged by Phillipps, to fall into ruin. Cattle roamed its gardens and ground-floor rooms, and nothing was done to prevent the local vandals from smashing its windows and remaining fittings—most of which Phillipps had himself removed so as to make the house useless to his heirs.

  The last years at Thirlestaine House saw the culmination of Sir Thomas Phillipps’s mania. Without ceasing to acquire more manuscripts he began a new collection of printed books. Thousands of volumes, both cheap and rare, were poured into his library. He bought indiscriminately, gripped by a terrible new ambition. “I wish to have one copy of every book in the world!!!!!” he wrote to a friend. What with ordering books, unpacking, arranging, and cataloguing them, and corresponding with or receiving visits from scholars, he had no time for ordinary domestic life. He ate and slept among his books. His only diversions were printing learned texts and conducting his propaganda war against Roman Catholics. Catholic scholars were barred from his library.

  The second Lady Phillipps detested Thirlestaine House. The parts not stuffed with books, she complained, were infested with rats, and the kitchen was in a separate wing on the other side of a road from the house, so dinners always arrived cold. She had a breakdown and was sent off to a cheap boarding-house in Torquay, where her husband kept her in embarrassing debt and sent angry letters in response to her pleas for money.

  Phillipps’s campaign of spite against his heirs was ultimately unsuccessful. When the old bibliomaniac died, aged eighty, Halliwell was energetic in repairing the roof of Middle Hill, finding a buyer for it, and breaking the entail on the estate. For the rest of his life he was a rich man. His wife, Henrietta, died a few years after her father, and Mr. J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps (as he now called himself ) went on to make his name as the first authority on the life and times of Shakespeare. Despite their quarrel he had always admired his father-in-law, and he imitated him in printing small editions of manuscript texts of literary, topographical, or folklore interest. His particular form of bibliomania was love of rarities, so he would often buy back his own productions in order to destroy them, leaving just one or two copies in existence and thus defeating the main purpose of publishing in the first place. All his life he had collected and dealt in literary and other relics of Shakespeare, beginning with those he stole (including a Hamlet quarto of 1603 which he abstracted from Phillipps’s library and mutilated to conceal its provenance). Early disgraces were in time forgotten, and he became a revered figure of scholarship. His remarkable Shakespeare collection was housed in a strange bungalow complex, to which he kept adding new buildings, at Hollingbury Copse near Brighton. He referred to it as “that quaint wigwam on the Sussex Downs which had the honour of sheltering more record and artistic evidences connected with the personal history of the great dramatist than are to be found in any other of the world’s libraries.”

  The most generous obituary on the death of Sir Thomas Phillipps was written by Halliwell, who praised him for his great learning. Madden of the British Museum crossly disagreed. He was an old rival of Phillipps, who had consistently topped his bids on behalf of the national collection at sales of precious manuscripts. He referred to him as the Monopolizing Bugbear. In reply to Halliwell he declared that Sir Thomas had no degree of learning or scholarship and that his publications were worthless because they contained so many errors. Phillipps had at some time picked a quarrel with almost every one of his friends, but many of them wrote kindly about him, remembering the more benevolent aspects of his bibliomania, his kindness to young scholars, and his willingness to open his library to those capable of appreciating it. The monstrous form of his madness was so apparent that people made allowances for it, and he somehow retained the affections even of those he had most wronged or persecuted,
such as his own family.

  Disposing of the Phillipps Library was far beyond the powers of his heirs for several generations. Sales of its now incredibly valuable contents have been going on from the nineteenth century to the present. In sifting through the manuscripts, writes Munby, great treasures have come to light, items of unique worth which for a hundred years had lain buried within the Phillipps hoard. “We may hope,” he adds, “that Bibliotheca Phillippica has not yielded up all its secrets yet.”

  A man’s library is a sort of harem.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, THE CONDUCT OF LIFE (1860), “IN PRAISE OF BOOKS”

  They Don’t Call It a Mania for Nothing

  BY HAROLD RABINOWITZ

  “A Communist!”

  “What?!”

  “Absolute. A Communist.”

  I was dumbfounded. It took me a few moments to think of what to say. Arguing was out of the question. Chaim looked at me with an air of certainty, almost challenging me to deny it, practically looking at me with an accusatory squint as if he believed I was a Communist—or as if defending the accused would cast some doubts on me. I laughed and looked away, but Chaim was firm. His expression didn’t change. The man was a Communist.

  We had just spent a bleak winter’s afternoon in Chaim’s living room, watching a movie on afternoon television—Planet of the Apes—and several times I thought a movie of us watching the movie would be far more entertaining.

  Chaim and his wife lived in a cozy two-bedroom apartment up in the Bronx just off Van Cortlandt Park, a neighborhood, I had discovered, that had two claims to fame: the first Son of Sam shooting took place down the street, and the neighborhood boasted a large immigrant Russian Jewish community. Chaim was a famous person in the community: a famous Yiddish writer whose work had appeared regularly in the Jewish Daily Forward when that paper thrived in the fifties. When Chaim took his daily constitutional in the neighborhood, he invariably encountered people (almost always men) who would argue with him about some point in the plot of an installment—that had appeared in the paper thirty years before! Chaim didn’t dismiss them, though. I always thought he invited them just so he could argue. (One of the saddest things Chaim could say about an old friend was that “he had no one to argue with anymore.”) And since I walked with him, and we seemed to get along, I guess I also felt something of an honored son of the community (though no one ever stopped me).

  That particular afternoon was the end of a long period of time in the confluence of our lives, a period that had begun some two years earlier when a chance meeting in a lobby of a motel in Brookline, Massachusetts, led to my translating a work of Chaim’s from the Yiddish and its being published by Alfred Knopf. There was always a sense of urgency as we worked on the translation. I would drop off a few chapters and go over the last few that had been reviewed by Chaim and his wife. It was a particularly chaotic time in my life, and I was glad to find refuge in their home. Chaim and I were bound by a few things that sometimes blurred the borders between us, the way married people begin to look like one another, or people look like their pets: we were both lapsed yeshiva students, fallen far from the faith but still respectful of the tradition because it was a tradition (and what else is there to be respectful of?); we were both uprooted—he from a war-ravaged home in Vilna, me from the more benign persecutions of a New England divorce; we were both devotees of the written word—we argued for hours on how to render a sentence or a phrase just right, and only after a few months of this was Chaim convinced that it was not my simple rebelliousness or the hurt of a miserable existence talking (and it took me no less time to think that about him); we were both admirers of intelligent women; we both mourned the fact that Chaim had had the Nobel Prize snatched from under his nose by “Bashevis’n,” though Chaim begrudgingly admired the cunning with which his adversary had solicited the support of The New York Times and how he had campaigned for the prize with the help of the New York intelligentsia (and how—this Chaim really admired, possibly because it was the move he would have made—how he had, in his acceptance speech, made it virtually impossible for any other Yiddish writer to ever win a Nobel Prize); we both were mystified by poetry, though he had more of a right to be, having written seven or eight volumes of it, all of it great, some of it immortal; we both hated his wife’s cooking, especially her coffee—even greater than the mystery of poetry was the mystery of what a person could do to a cup of coffee to make it taste that bad. And we both loved books.

  No, we were both crazy about books. Chaim’s apartment in the Bronx was what my apartment back in Brookline was going to become in twenty or thirty years. The front door could not be completely opened because there was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind it (and all bookcases were floor to ceiling; anything less was wantonly wasteful). All the hallways of the apartment were lined on both sides with books; Chaim was a portly person, but even a thin person had to walk sideways through the connecting hallways of the apartment. And don’t forget the area above the doorways—every one of them had shelving loaded, creaking menacingly under the two and three layers of books in each shelf of the bookcase, with books placed sideways on top of the rows. Chaim and I had discussed the merits of putting books in front of books on shelves the way artisans might compare notes on some craft like leather tanning. (And Chaim was envious that most of my books were in single rows on the shelves, just as I knew that inevitably I’d have to resort to doubling up, a milestone in any book collector’s life.)

  The breakfront in the living room had certainly once held their china in the display case and silverware in the drawers; all of that was packed solid with books. (You may think you get the idea, but wait, I’m not finished.) There were, of course, bookshelves covering every square inch of wall space in the living room, but there were also stacks of books under the sofa, and there were books neatly but compactly stacked under the end tables on either side of the sofa—from the floor to the shelf midway up the length of the tables, and then from that shelf to the top, and then some books on top of the tables on which the lamps that illuminated the room stood. (The legs of those tables curved and the edge of the books followed the curves in and out up the length of the table.) The same was true of the coffee table in front of the sofa—and the same was true of the sofa itself: books filled the space between the top of the back of the sofa and the shelves over the sofa (in front of which a large painting hung—covering the books behind it—of a woman I later discovered was Chaim’s mother-in-law). There were several small card tables in the living room, and each of them had books stacked under them—but with enough room for someone to sit at the table, perhaps a bit sideways if one was not as short-legged as Chaim. And there were shelves in the recessed windows, and those shelves were packed with books, allowing only a tiny spot of light to peek through from the outside. I had asked Chaim early on why he didn’t simply have the bookcase that covered all of that wall and snaked over, around, and under the window built straight across the hall (some carpenter or handyman had certainly put a child through college on Chaim), and he said he didn’t want to block the windows entirely—but I knew the real reason: he’ll get around to that soon enough; meanwhile why waste such good space?

  The space under the tables; the corners of every room (who goes there?), including the kitchen next to the sink and the bathroom behind the toilet; the bottom half of the laundry hamper (yes, I looked); and the rear of the kitchen cabinets—the front half was room enough for the few dishes and foods a couple used—all were packed with neatly stacked books. One night, while Chaim and I were eating some of his wife’s broiled flounder (just a guess), he asked me if I knew what the effect of extreme cold was on books, and I could feel the woman in the kitchen tense up until I assured him that it would ruin the binding and warp the paper. The refrigerator was safe (for the time being).

  This was all just a warm-up for Chaim’s study. Chaim had actually divided the study lengthwise with a bookcase that had obviously been added to over the years to the point tha
t it now went nearly the entire length of the room. The bookcases were packed with books, two or three deep, and on both sides—only the most narrow passage behind this construction with books on both sides. At the end of the room was barely enough room for a chair and a small typing table on which was a Yiddish Olivetti portable typewriter on which Chaim created his novels, his poetry, his essays. To get behind those room-dividing bookcases, the typing table had to be moved in, and anyway the space back there was too narrow for Chaim to get into; he had to send me crawling in there, to look for a book on the bottom shelf, and able to see anything only because he had run an extension cord there and rigged a construction lamp with a hook on the end. (I was only sent there twice: once to find a book that would settle an argument about Gogol; another time to get a volume of the old Jewish Encyclopedia. Both times I came out like someone rescued after being lost for a week in underground caverns.) Every closet in the apartment—and they were spacious closets—was packed solid with books, and that meant when one opened the closet door, one was confronted with a wall of books, floor to ceiling, with every available space filled and with the top book in each stack wedged forcibly in place.

  Not the floor of the apartment; not the building—the Bronx listed under the weight of Chaim’s books.

  In the two years I had been coming there, maybe two or three hundred days spent in that apartment from morning till night, I never saw anyone else there—no visitor, no delivery person, no handyman—no one. I asked Chaim about this on one of our walks (I later understood that great Yiddish writers simply do not have or permit visitors; then again, maybe it was the threat of coffee that kept everyone away), and he said something about not wanting people to think him strange for having so many books. I thought he was talking about the annoying line all book collectors endure: Have you read all of these books? I told him about Dr. Johnson’s stock response: Yes, and some of them twice! Chaim stopped walking and looked at me disdainfully. “If anyone asks you if you’ve read all those books,” he said, “it means you don’t have enough books.”