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At about three o’clock he had picked up Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, a book he recognised and thought he might already own.
“Secret truths,” you said, “are the lifeblood of a writer. Your memories and your secrets. Forget plot, character, structure; if you’re going to call yourself a writer, you need to stick your hand in the mire up to the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder, and drag out your darkest, most private truth.”
I put the first letter I wrote to you inside The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. Appropriate, for all sorts of reasons. I’ve been thinking that I’ll leave all my letters in your books. Perhaps you’ll never find them—maybe they’ll never be read. I can live with that.
Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.
“A book becomes a living thing only when it interacts with a reader. What do you think happens in the gaps—the unsaid things, everything you don’t write? The reader fills them from their own imagination. But does each reader fill them how you want, or in the same way? Of course not.
This book”—you snatched Elizabeth’s copy from her lap and flapped it in the air—“and all books are created by the reader.
[Placed in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson, 1962.]
I reread the letter and felt again the presumptuousness that you could write about love when we hadn’t declared it, the absurdity of mapping out our whole lives when we’d only just met, the shock of you mentioning ageing when I wasn’t ever going to grow old, and laughing at how wrong you were about children. And I remembered too my secret pleasure that you’d chosen me. I was twenty then, a different woman from the one I am now. I read that letter so many times, wondering what you hoped your reader’s reaction would be. Rereading it yesterday made me cry for when we were starting out, before I’d
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If I could, I would turn our love on its head: we would get the anger, the guilt, the blame, the disappointment, the irritation, the workaday, and the humdrum over and done with first. We would have everything to look forward to.
I joined my nearest public library, but the only books I borrowed were the two you’d written. I sat on a bench in St. George’s Gardens and consumed them both in a day, trying to tease the author out from the words on the page like a winkle from its shell. I’ve never told you that I loved them. I loved them.
[Placed in The Cocktail Party, by T. S. Eliot, 1950.]
Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and The Missing Muse and Other Essays by Philip Guedalla.
She stared at the paperbacks squashed under the coffee table—The Pursuit of Love, Valerientje aan Zee, Room at the Top, The Cocktail Party—until the titles blurred and she heard Nan return.
“Promise you won’t die before me,” you said, your face pressed into my hair. “I couldn’t live without you.”
We picked up paperbacks and read to each other: a chapter from Barbara Comyns, a paragraph or two from As I Lay Dying, a line from Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
[Placed in Small Dreams of a Scorpion, by Spike Milligan, 1972.]
He pressed the book against his chest so he could open it one-handed, and Flora saw the cover: Queer Fish by E. G. Boulenger.
“Forget that first-edition, signed-by-the-author nonsense. Fiction is about readers. Without readers there is no point in books, and therefore they are as important as the author, perhaps more important. But often the only way to see what a reader thought, how they lived when they were reading, is to examine what they left behind.
It’s taken me a long time to realise, but I don’t think it’s good to have an imagination that is more vivid, wilder, than real life.”
What shall I tell her, Gil? And what do I say to Nan when she raises her eyebrows again with that knowing look? That I’m tired of forgiving you? That I’m not sure I want you back this time?
“But I should have shown myself, should have waded in, a lumbering old fool, to tell her I loved her. Too late now.”
[Placed in We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against, by Nicholas von Hoffman, 1988.]
“But maybe they’ll be hoping forever,” Jonathan said. “What kind of life would that be? You can’t exist like that, with not knowing.” “It’s about believing two opposing ideas in your head at the same time: hope and grief. Human beings do it all the time with religion—the flesh and the spirit—you know that. Imagination and reality.”
[Placed in Money, by Martin Amis, 1984.]
Leaving was too momentous, too frightening, something I only thought about in the abstract.
“It was Kathy that I first read A Man of Pleasure with, under the bedcovers, shining a torch on the rude bits. I think one of her uncles owned a copy. Most of it went over our heads, of course. It was later I realised the significance of those words at the beginning, and even then I didn’t fully understand.”
‘Where they burn the books, so too, in the end, will they burn the people.’
Isn’t it ironic that the publicity focused so much on the book’s author? No one, not even you, was interested in its readers.
[Placed in Brilliant Creatures, by Clive James, 1983.]
Flora would have liked to ask her parents why the words “to father” have such a different meaning from the words “to mother.”
[Placed in The Swiss Family Robinson, by Johann David Wyss, 1812.]
[Placed in Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, by Barbara Comyns, 1954.]
“May your bones be washed by the salt water, your spirit return to the sand, and the love we have for you be forever around us.”
