Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

1960s: moves from house to uneasy house, renting in Inverness, Capital of the Highlands, sixteen miles from Nairn. Hospitalized again. Seen in grounds of Craig Dunain, Inverness mental hospital, wandering about holding beaten-up typewriter. Moves back to Aberdeen, this time to Cornhill Hospital. Percipient woman doctor thinks schizophrenia might be misdiagnosis and medicates for hypothyroidism, myxoedema. As if by disenchantment herself again.

Sunlight. Three wonderful years of good health.

Cancer. Two operations. Dies in December 1977. Penniless at time of death. Friends gather in snow for funeral that never takes place: bad weather, mishap, misinformation, accident.

Winner, over the years, of twenty-two literary prizes and two gold medals. Very little work published. When I send a poem to a publisher with ‘Royal Mental Hospital’ at the top …

I have forgotten how to be / A bird upon a dawn-lit tree, / A happy bird that has no care / Beyond the leaf, the golden air. / I have forgotten moon and sun, / And songs concluded and undone, / And hope and ruth and all things save / The broken wit, the waiting grave.

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In her gold medal-winning early poem, The Vikings, the dead are simultaneously ancient and young, younger than death and life . The poem’s narrator asks them how it’s possible that they’re so very beautiful:

O we are loved among the living still,

We are forgiven among the dead. We plough

In the old narrows of the spirit. We

Have woven our wealth into your mystery.

Here are three of her poems, the first from 1943, the second circa 1954, the third 1971.

THE PILGRIM

I have no heart to give thee, for I

Am only groundmists and a thing of wind,

And the stone echoes under bridges and the kind

Lights of high farms, the weary watchdog’s cry.

I have no desire for thy dreams, for my own

Are no dreams, but realities which are

The blind man’s sight, the sick man’s heavenly star

Fire of the homeless, to no other known.

THE POET (III)

Go to bed, my soul,

When the light is done.

Sleep from enemies

Blanketed in bone.

Let thy blood grow cold

As a mouldering stone

On a martyr’s tomb,

Known to God alone.

On the stair of truth

Down and up are one.

Bless the cobbled street

When the light is gone.

When the light is past

When the flower is shown

Let the poet be

Common earth and stone.

THE UNWANTED CHILD

I was the wrong music

The wrong guest for you

When I came through the tundras

And thro’ the dew.

Summon’d, tho’ unwanted,

Hated, tho’ true

I came by golden mountains

To dwell with you.

I took strange Algol with me

And Betelgeuse, but you

Wanted a purse of gold

And interest to accrue.

You could have had them all,

The dust, the glories too,

But I was the wrong music

And why I never knew.

The story about her finding the music in the spines of the books is made up by me.

But that 1871 edition of Scott, like many books over the centuries, bound with recycled old paper stock, really is lined and pasted with staved manuscript at the back of the pages, at least, the ones I’ve got on my desk are. And she really could, as a girl, hang from the parapet of a Nairn bridge by her arms, and pretty much everything else here can be found and is sourced in the collections of her poems which her good friend from her university years in Aberdeen and Cambridge, the Medieval and Renaissance academic Helena Mennie Shire, edited after Olive Fraser’s death, The Pure Account (Aberdeen University Press, 1981) and The Wrong Music (Canongate, 1989).

Think of the Waverley collection on the shelves, the full twenty-five novels, their spines sliced back and open and the music inside them visible.

In a poem pamphlet by Sophie Mayer called TV GIRLS, full of poems about contemporary TV heroines, Mayer lists the weapons that Buffy the Vampire Slayer uses throughout the show’s seven TV seasons to keep the vampires, demons and various forces of evil at bay. On her list, in among the stakes and swords and sunlight, is ‘library card’.

I wrote and asked her about the library card as weapon. This is what she replied:

Libraries save the world, a lot, but outside the narrative mode of heroism: through contemplative action, anonymously and collectively. For me, the public library is the ideal model of society, the best possible shared space, a community of consent — an anarcho-syndicalist collective where each person is pursuing their own aim (education, entertainment, affect, rest) with respect to others, through the best possible medium of the transmission of ideas, feelings and knowledge: the book.

I believe that within every library is a door that opens to every other library in time and space: that door is the book. The library is what Michel Foucault called a ‘heterotopia’, an ideal yet real and historically delimited place that allows us to step into ritual time (like the cinema and the garden). It is a site of possibility and connection (and possibility in connection).

Without public libraries, I would not have known there was a world outside the conservative religious community in which I grew up (and of which I would probably still be a part without the heroic librarians in our small suburban library who faced out work by Jane Rule and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Leslie Feinberg even after the passage of Section 28). I believe libraries are essential for informed and participatory democracy, and that there is therefore an ideological war on them via cuts and closures, depriving individuals and communities of their right to knowledge and becoming on their own terms.

I had been planning to write this story about the ashes of DH Lawrence. I hadn’t known what had happened to him after he was dead. Now that I did — at least, if what the biography I’d been reading claimed was true — I couldn’t get it out of my head. On the train home that night, even though it was a couple of months since I’d finished reading it, I’d got my notebook out of my bag and made some notes about it and about some other things too that the biography said had happened to him.

For instance, he’d be walking past a theatre or picturehouse in London in the First World War and the crowd would jeer at his beard, which marked him out, made him a visible slacker, a refuser, not enlisted, maybe even a conscientious objector. Then, the cottage he’d taken for some of the war years had been raided by the Home Office or the military authorities who’d confiscated not just some letters in German (his wife, Frieda, was related to the German military) but also a copy of a Hebridean song, because they thought it was secret code, and some drawings Lawrence had made of the stems of plants which, the biographer said, they’d decided were secret maps.

I’d thought I knew quite a lot about Lawrence’s actual life. I’ve been reading him since I was sixteen, when I chose a dual copy of St Mawr / The Virgin and the Gypsy for a school prize, mostly because I knew it would discomfit the Provost and his wife, who annually gave out the prizes; Lawrence was still reasonably notorious in Inverness in the 1970s. (It makes me laugh even now that the prize sticker inside my paperback says I’m being awarded for Oral French.) Now I was six years older than he’d been when he died. I’d felt for him all through reading this fine and thoughtful biography. Sitting on the train weeks later I was still preoccupied with him, his little red beard jutting in fury at all the patriotic clichés. All these weeks later it still made me laugh with real satisfaction that the authorities had been stupid enough to think Gaelic was some kind of secret code.