The great Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero surely
got it right:
If you have a garden and a library, you have
everything you need.
I am currently ensconced in my
home-library in Athens, surrounded by my most cherished books, which speak to
me, some in a vociferously learned fashion, others in a light chatter of
good-humoured fun. I love them all for the life-enhancing enchantment they generate.
Heroic Cicero
I shall concentrate on libraries, as gardening was never my strong suit.
I greatly admire a well-kept and appropriately-planted garden. Our home garden
is too small but our delightful next-door neighbours, possessors of skilled
green fingers, have an exquisitely beautiful English garden, an oasis of calm
tranquillity, the venue of many an unforgettable barbecue. In truth gardens
confer enormous pleasure.
My experience of libraries first dates from school. My Mearns
prep-school had been donated volumes of the Times History of the Great War,
lavishly illustrated. Other donations included Mein Kampf, less suitable
for young minds and thankfully rambling and unreadable. There were strong
sections of highly readable John Buchan and Edgar Allan Poe and much Arthur
Ransome, which was not to my taste. We read the Famous Five books until
they disintegrated. My Edinburgh public school library was more serious in tone
and I devoured the volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and other
histories.
My mother read and was a member
of a book club, whose monthly fiction offering was often something by A J
Cronin or such-like. Her passion was Freud, Jung and Adler, and she loved to
psycho-analyse family and friends, so she built up a library of her own. My
father read less but he was presented at Christmas with beautifully bound
almanacs, reference books and guides from commercial partners, all adding to
the home library. I would be sent down to the Aberdeen main Boots store which
had a very active lending library. The fare there was quite light – thrillers
and show-biz biographies abounded – but there was much to amuse.
I was briefly a language student of French in Paris in 1961 and I pay
homage to the British Council library there in the Quartier Latin. I was
exiting a religious phase, but I recall enjoying Donne’s eloquent Sermons
and even embarked on Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. The
call went unheeded and instead I read Sophocles’ incomparable Plays.
At Oxford University, I did most of my academic reading at the austere New
Bodleian, but for some history and politics the sources were found at the
glorious Radcliffe Camera, masterpiece of Scots, nay, Aberdonian
architect, James Gibbs. Gibbs is also remembered for his St Martins in the
Fields in London’s Trafalgar Square, so much imitated in America,
especially in Protestant New England.
Gibbs’s Radcliffe Camera, Oxford
Britain never did build the ecclesiastically dominated libraries seen
widely in Baroque and Rococo Europe yet they were often intellectually mean and
monkish places attached to reactionary monasteries. Britain knew that libraries
were nothing if they were not beacons of enlightenment and the search for truth,
and built accordingly, beside universities and civic centres, in an inclusive
spirit.
My library is quite modest but to me it is full of goodies. Ancient
history features Thucydides, Plutarch, Suetonius, Gibbon et al while
Byzantium has a good showing with John Julius Norwich, Runciman and Ostrogorsky.
Political biographies abound with fine volumes on Wellington, Disraeli, Asquith,
Macmillan and Churchill and a fatally dated Van Loon’s Lives. Rather too
much is from the bland and often uncritical Roy Jenkins. Memoirs, always to be
approached with caution, include de Gaulle’s, Thatcher’s, Nigel Lawson’s and
Harold Wilson’s (not to forget pariah Oswald Mosley’s) rewriting history to
fortify their personal myth.
I love reading diaries and the Journals of James Boswell, the debauched
Scotsman on the make, early inspired me. Apart from Boswell (and the only poncy
thing about observant Pepys is his name) and maybe Alan Clark, it clearly helps
to be gay to be a great diarist. They perhaps bear grudges more readily and
have a feline characteristic like arch-snob James Lees-Milne, Chips Channon,
Cecil Beaton, Noel Coward and Alan Bennett, but they give huge pleasure.
Lees-Milne in state
Of course, I have plenty classic novels, Dickens, Trollope and
Dostoyevsky to the fore. Dotted about are unclassifiables like Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s
travel volumes, anthologies or Betjeman on poetry or architecture. I do like
controversialists, so H.L Mencken has a place of honour beside Christopher
Hitchens, Tom Wolff, A. A. Gill and even our Boris.
I like to laugh and as I sit poolside next week, I will choose between
the plot complexities and mad-cap schemes of P G Wodehouse or the wild
imaginative leaps of Arthur Marshall. I will titter uncontrollably to the
mystification of my Balkan fellow-tourists, frozen in my essential frivolity.
SMD
21.08.22
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2022
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