LISTENING TO THAT excellent woman Deborah Moggach talking about the mixed media future for public libraries on the
Today programme yesterday I was reminded of a planning meeting in Brighton a few years ago, when three architects proudly showed us models (with bits of green sponge on sticks representing trees, etc) for that large, bright, wonderful new library in the middle of town that I dearly hope I shall live to see completed.
Brighton has been, in effect, without a public library for the past few years, ever since the books were removed from the old museum during the redevelopment of the Victorian Brighton Dome. Other residents assure me that the library’s temporary home in a grey, brutalist tower block is quite OK inside, but I have refused to test this. Every time I drive past that unsuitable building, I expect to see children’s encyclopaedias flinging themselves from 12th-floor windows, briefly gliding on air, and then plummeting to break their lovely spines on the cruel pavement below.
Anyway, this meeting was quite interesting. The schemes were presented very professionally in a darkened room — the architects keen to explain everything, the lighting dramatic, and the little bits of green sponge clinging stolidly to the little sticks. Each had its selling point.
One would have a nice number of bijou shop-ettes on the ground floor, for example. One looked a bit like a slightly flattened baked bean tin (without the label) lying on its side, which in terms of public architecture isn’t something you see every day. One provided for the diurnal transits of natural sunlight, and had devised a clever system of window-blinds for the top floor.
Having studied all three, and illicitly patted the little trees when no one was looking, I was quite torn about which to vote for, but couldn’t quite think what was missing from all of them. Suddenly I realised what it was. “How many books will this one hold?" I asked the first architect. And guess what? He didn’t know. Neither of the others could answer that question. One of them looked quite panicky. I think he had neglected to allow for books at all.
I won’t bang on too much about my nerdy youth spent in the little local library at Ham (near Richmond) which smelt of polish and had a complete run of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, because it will make me cry. But if I went into that library now, I know I could find blindfold the exact place where the Milly-Molly-Mandy section used to be; also the John Wyndhams, Daphne du Mauriers, Ronald Searles, mythology, travel and poetry. When I was a child, Enid Blyton’s books were banned from public libraries, of course; a fact which one simply accepted without question.
Every so often I pass that little library, but I don’t dare go in. What if the smell of the polish is still the same? Or, worse, what if it isn’t? What if that sacred place is now full of noisy children and mothers having sandwiches, where once the only sound was of catalogue drawers sliding on oiled metal rods, the occasional echoing bang of a dropped book, the squeak of shoe leather on lino, and the smart click-clunk of the date-stamp at the issue desk?
Pulping our past
CLEARLY, GIVEN all this misty-eyed reminiscence, I’m not the sort of person who really welcomes the idea of libraries as sociable places with play areas, lots of computers, or even state-of-the-art intelligent sunlight control. First, I don’t see anything wrong with being quiet in the presence of books, since it’s a known fact that it’s quite difficult to read and absorb any printed page while running around yelling at the same time. And secondly, the books being barbarically chucked away are undoubtedly books that have no other home at all — being out of print or otherwise forgotten.
Recently I took part in a Radio 4 feature about that underrated writer Patrick Hamilton (1904-62), which goes out next Thursday. Unsurpassed as a recorder of lonely urban existence in the mid-20th century, Hamilton is a literary local hero in Brighton who is getting a whole day of the next Brighton Festival devoted to his centenary, starting with a lecture from Doris Lessing. Discovering that nearly all his novels were out of print, the producer hurried along to the library and, of course, not only were there no books of his, but nobody had heard of him.
The secret to happiness
RELATIVE OBSCURITY is much on my mind as I have been adapting a little-known novel for radio — Westwood, or The Gentle Powers, by Stella Gibbons, published in 1946. This has been a joyous experience for three reasons.
First, the book is funny and perfectly achieved, with wonderful dialogue for me to lift wholesale from the page; secondly, it is a novel of its own time, yet surprisingly modern in pointing to female self-reliance; and thirdly, nobody has heard of it. Unluckily for her, Gibbons is remembered for Cold Comfort Farm and nothing else, although she actually wrote another 23 novels before her death in 1989, and the ones I’ve read all show the same supple wit applied to the eternal tussle between romanticism and common sense. Westwood is almost the inverse of Cold Comfort Farm, in which a cheerful, commonsense heroine makes short work of the preposterous rural maunderings of her distant relations. In Westwood, the heroine is an impressionable young woman drawn to — and exploited by — the ghastly, unfeeling family of a grandiose playwright who writes lofty, sonorous lines such as, “suffering is the anvil on which the crystal sword of integrity is hammered”.
But the message is the same in both books. “Jane Austen solved the problem of happiness rather than conquered it by her pleasure in the small, pleasant things of life,” Gibbons once wrote, and this sensible attitude to life was evidently one she approved of. The rather lovely message of Westwood is that turmoil and emotional drama are all very well, but being hammered perpetually on the anvil of suffering can really wear you out, so why not try to avoid it? I’ve started telling people that Stella Gibbons is the Jane Austen of the 20th century, by the way. I think I have found a new cause.
Join the Debate on this article at comment@thetimes.co.uk
