Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

3: Finally did you know that it is now possible to fly from Auckland to Sydney in your ex-wife? There is a new generation Boeing 737 that Qantas use whose features include a 12 seat business class and 156 seat economy, with individual state of the art Panasonic in-flight entertainment-on-demand systems in both business and economy, ergonomic cushions and adjustable headrests and a choice on board of New Zealand or Australian wines. The plane is called The Katherine Mansfield.

It all really makes me think of the thing she says where she says: ‘Your wife won’t have a tomb — she’ll have at most a butterfly fanning its wings on her grave and then off.’

You might say I have been thinking of you a bit.

I very much hope you are well.

*

I didn’t send that flight email in the end. I looked at my language and couldn’t. I knew I’d got punctuation and things wrong, and was embarrassed at the words I’d used when I looked back at it later after a glass of wine, which is usually when embarrassment disappears and it’s easier to press send. Those are some of the reasons I didn’t send it.

The main one, though, was that I didn’t want you to think I was trying to know more about something you knew about than you did. Also, I was worried that maybe you really wouldn’t know these things. I realized I really didn’t want to know more about what you knew about than you.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying I didn’t want to trespass on what was yours.

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.

So suffering must become love.

That is the mystery.

In the end what I did was this. The next time I was in London, I went to find the house your ex-wife had lived in for, well I didn’t know if it was for longest, but I knew it was for happiest.

I stood outside it and I thought about how close it was to the Heath, and how much that must have pleased her cats. I worried about what an uphill climb it must have been to get to the house from the nearest Tube, for somebody not very well. I thought about how she wrote to this address from a cold house in Italy. She wrote imagining coming home and kissing its gate and door, and about how she imagined the cat going up the stairs, it was how she pictured home, and I think the word she used is lopping, Wing come lopping up . There’s a big locked gate on it, too high to see over and you can’t see in, though there is a blue plaque on it saying it is your ex-wife’s house and that her husband lived there too. (The plaque doesn’t mention the Mountain.) But I took a photo of the outside of it on my phone, and then I took a close-up of the brick of the whitewashed wall of it, where ivy or some plant with tiny splayed-out roots has grown over the place and someone has repeatedly stripped it back. Some of it, delicate, is preserved forever under the whitewash, and some of it has kept on growing new roots on top of the whitewash.

When I got home that night I keyed in your address above an email and sent you that photo of the wall and the plantlife without saying where it was of, or telling you anything about it.

Then I put the books I had stolen from you back on the shelf you’d kept them on in the study, and I shut the door. And then I went and got on with it, the rest of my life.

Here’s a stanza from a poem by Jackie Kay called ‘Dear Library’, and this part I’m quoting is based on what her father, John Kay, said when she asked him what he thought about the public library system:

I treasure your lively silence; your very pleasant librarians.

They represent what a public service is truly, libertarian.

Impossible, did I say that already, to put a price on that. Again,

Stop me if I am repeating myself, your staff will tell

Me of a Saramago Street in a nearby town.

Browse, borrow, request, renew — lovely words to me.

A library card in your hand is your democracy.

Anna Ridley sent me this:

The local library of the Cumbrian market town where I lived provided plenty to satisfy my curiosity when I was growing up, with well-stocked children’s and young adult sections. As I became a teenager, though, I needed more. Having experimented with Nietzsche, I got it into my mind I wanted to read the Marquis de Sade. I think I had read an interview with a musician in the NME who namechecked him or something. Finding nothing on the shelf, the kindly librarian, who had known me since I was born, checked the database. The only book that came up was Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised , which wasn’t stocked in any of the local libraries, or even the city library — in fact there was only one copy in the whole county, and it was nearly ninety miles away. We filled out the request card and I waited. When the book arrived a few weeks later, it was a large hardback. I was alarmed as soon as I saw it — I can’t remember exactly what was on the jacket, but I do remember it worried me enough that I bundled it straight into my school bag, and once I got home I removed the dust jacket and hid it behind my wardrobe. And having skimmed through the book and got the gist of it, even now it looked unassuming without its jacket, I hid it in a pile of books under my bed. I’m not sure what horrified me the most — the thought of my mum finding it, or the idea that the librarian had known all along what she was letting me in for! I’d like to say that age thirteen I’d read it, but actually after a few furtive encounters I kept it hidden under my bed until I came up with a cowardly plan to return it to the anonymous book drop in the bigger city library ten miles away. It amuses me to think of the miles that well-thumbed book had travelled, satisfying the curiosity of readers around the county, enabled by the library system. Not long afterwards, I got a Saturday job in a brilliant second-hand bookshop, from which I could borrow whatever I liked, and was able to pursue my reading curiosity a bit less publicly.

This is what Clare Jennings told me:

For me libraries represent a serendipity of learning. It’s as if some internal compass draws you to areas which you never imagined visiting. At eighteen I started a degree in chemistry but didn’t feel entirely at home in the subject and found myself repeatedly gravitating towards the small philosophy section in the library. Before the first year was out I’d left to study philosophy instead. I really enjoyed studying philosophy and while there found myself drawn to the art section of the library and later completed a second degree in illustration. Libraries can definitely lead you astray in the best possible way.

Emma Wilson sent me this:

In Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Céline and Julie Go Boating, Dominique Labourier plays a librarian. She has glasses as well as sexy shoes. This is a French library. You can smoke (discreetly). The librarians read the Tarot cards behind the desk with its stacked, ordered card index system. Juliet Berto, a magician, sits hiding behind a large size Bécassine picture book. The film plays in a Surrealist arcane. Its signs and titles point out to the streets of Montmartre.

In my local library in England when I was a child one of the librarians was French. I loved her. She made me feel she was intent just on me. Choosing books each week was like laying out the dreams I could have. I remember that beautiful moment of transition to borrowing from the adult section, the wider fan of cards, the longer shelves, a stretch of titles. And in that local library then, here in England, in the 1970s, there were books in French, lots of them, a whole case. I remember seeing the white and cream spines, the foreign words, lavish sentences, Colette, Duras.